Yargh!

My kids are so amazingly lucky they are cute because after today ugly kids would have been sold off to the gypsies.

One of the highlights of the days was Harry attempting to clean up his own poopy underwear. I was taking a nap since my husband got home a little early from work and woke up to a lot of yelling and sobbing. My husband was trying to get Harry to tell him where he had put his underwear out of fear that he had flushed it down the toilet in an attempt to clean up. Poop was everywhere in the bathroom, on Harry and some even made it downstairs. I calmed Harry down enough to get him to tell where the undies were and then realized that he had poop all over his shirt and on his hands. Nice huh?

This is the second time this week that Harry has tried to clean up after an accident and it went just as well the first time around. He hopefully knows now that he gets help from mommy and daddy next time he has an accident. I think I may stop giving him any fiber containing food just to cut down on the mess. Other than the poop potty training is going tolerably well. He has finally realized that he can't just pee any old time he wanted like he did in a diaper and is able to go longer between reminders. We are still having accidents but not nearly as many.

Evan is still playing up his "injury" even though his physical therapist gave him a through evaluation and could not find a blessed thing wrong with him. There is no reason he should be refusing to weight bear on his left foot other than the attention he gets from being hurt. I almost bumped into him with out actually touching him and you would have thought that I had gravely injured him the way he was carrying on. It is getting irritating and I am having a hard time getting him to realize that he is more likely to get a real injury if he carries on like this. I am trying to give him more attention at other times in the hopes that this will snap him out of it.

Both kids are suffering severely from selective deafness. They are only hearing me when they really want to and if it is something that they don't like they think that whining and crying about it will change my mind. Sadly all it does is earn them trips to their bedrooms (mostly so I can calm down and stop feeling like I want to smack them). I wish they had not hit this naughty stage simultaneously. I think I could handle it a bit better if they had just gone through this phase one at a time. Thank goodness it is the weekend!

This make me want to squee!

Oy!

It has been one heck of a week. Cranky kids (thanks to colds) and a cranky mommy (thanks to a mild cold and cranky kids) do not mix well. I though it would be a snap week since my husband had two extra days off. Ha! That is what I get for thinking.

Evan injured his foot but since there was no actual sign of swelling or other injury we were baffled as to the true nature of the injury. All we knew is that he was refusing to weigh bear on it. Of course this happened on a day when I absolutely had to be somewhere so I ended up dusting off our stroller to cart him around in. The foot is better and he has been hamming up the pain for attention's sake. When he is at home he can walk almost normally but when someone else is around the pain is almost unbearable. Sigh.

Evan also got a nasty bloody nose thanks to his inability to keep his $%@$##ing finger out of his nose. He is still doing it and it is frustrating the heck out of me. Luckily it did not take too long to stop the bleeding but there was a lovely blood trail for my husband to clean up with the carpet cleaner.

Harry is having mixed results with potty training. I have a time set for every half hour to remind him but he is not showing much initiative to go on his own unless he is bored. When he is bored he would spend hours on the potty if he could. He loves flushing the toilet so much that it clogged last night and overflowed. I was rather irate about that one. I am not sure but I think he is pooping in the potty which is a very good sign. I have not seen any logs in the toilet since he loves flushing but he has also not been going in his undies. He is either constipated or actually using the toilet.

The baby is still a boy (nothing has fallen off in utero) and developing fine. He would not hold still so they were not able to get very good pics of his heart. I am going back for yet another scan in a month thanks to my gestational diabetes. They want to make sure that he is not growing into a monster baby.

I did my oh so delightful 24 hour urine test (my mental voice is dripping with sarcasam as I type that line) only to find out when I dropped my jub off that my orders were lost. I was about ready to loose it when I heard that. It was humiliating enough to have to do the supid test in the first place and the possibility that I might have to repeate it was stress inducing. Luckily I had a lovely tech that took the my jug and also a blood sample (to cover all bases) and called the doctor to get everything figured out.

I got my eyes looked at (yet another gestational diabetes thing) and got the "why are you even here?" vibe from the doctor. He said that unless I had been diabetic before my pregnancy that the likelyhood of me having eye damage was quite low. I had a blast having various lights shined into my eyes and various eye drops put in them. My eyes were also dialated which was loads of fun and even with the sunglasses they gave me I ended up with a headache.

I am hoping that we can do some fun stuff next week so that I don't have to keep complaining in my blog. Evan's birthday is coming up and I have to start planning it now.

Potty training or bust!

Harry is a boy on a mission. He wants to wear underwear in the worst way. Sadly he is not able to keep said underwear dry, but hey that is just details right?

Harry started flirting with potty training a few weeks before Evan's surgery. It was not a really good time to have this happen since I really did not have the distraction free time to devote to making sure that he was going on the potty regularly and keeping dry. I have been stringing him along a bit by letting him go when he asks (which is generally after he should go, again details) but now he is stepping up the pressure. On Saturday he took off his diaper and put his pants back on minus the diaper. Of course since he is still not getting that you just can't go on demand and have to go when your bladder is full an accident resulted.

I gave in to his demands even though I was hoping to put it off until the weather was warmer and tried to start the half nekkid training that I did with Evan. Harry was having none of that and would not settle for less than pants and undies. I think that I am going to have to try a new technique on him so that we can stop the accidents. I ask him a million times if he needs to go when he is wearing the underwear but he always says no and then of course an accident happens. I may try a timer or something. It is a bit exciting to think that there may be a small time period where I have no kids in diapers.

This whole potty training battle also illustrates the vast personality differences between the boys. I think that had I not forced the issue Evan would still be in diapers and happily crapping his pants. Peer pressure did not phase him a bit, he was happy to do his own thing. Harry on the other hand sees everyone else around him using the potty and therefor he must use it too so he can be like us. We all wear underwear, so he must also wear underwear. Let me tell you Harry is a force to be reconed with once he gets an idea in his head. The Terrible Twos have nothing on the Terrible Threes.

Happy Valentine's Day

Today is also Heart Defect Awareness Day (Get it? A day about hearts and love is a day when we should remember that some hearts are born wonky.) Any way it has been one draining week for me, so I don't have a special meaningful post to put up. One of the realities of having a child with a heart defect is that there are a lot of doctor's appointments to deal with and often there is therapies as well adding to that my heavy load of appointments leads to a tired mom and this week was jam packed with appointments.

Evan finally got into occupational therapy. We were on the waiting lift forever but I hope it will be worth it. In California Evan's physical therapist was doing a ton of the things that on OT would do so we were able to have only one person taking care of both therapies. At the center he goes to for his PT things are a bit more rigid. I wanted to get in at this center though because they also work at the school district that Evan will be attending Kindergarten (gasp can he really be that old?). I wanted there to be some continuity of care with his therapy.

The crazy thing with the evaluation was that the woman doing it was able to get Evan to do a lot of things that I have been trying to get him to do for months now. He happily tried to trace letters for this woman. If I had tried to get him to do it he would have looked up at me angelically and told me "Mommy you do it." He even did well with cutting a shape out of a piece of paper considering that I have never purposely let him touch scissors fearing all the damage he could inflict on the house with them. I was never worried about him doing too well since he had the obvious handicap of only doing all these things with one hand. It does prove that he is a slacker at home when he thinks he can get me to do stuff for him.

I had an OB appointment today and the baby is still in there. He kicked up a storm when they were getting his heart rate. I get to go to an ophthalmologist to have my eyes checked out since I have gestational diabetes and they want to make sure that I am not loosing my eyesight thanks to that. I also get to collect my urine for 24 hours so that they can see how well my kidneys are functioning. I am oh so thrilled that I get to go to yet another appointment and get to store my pee in the fridge for a day (the things you do when pregnant). Now that I am heading into the home stretch for my pregnancy I have bimonthly appointments to add to the mix.

I swear it seems like for the last few months all I have been doing all the time is going to doctors appointments. I am really hoping that Evan's appointments taper off now that his pacemaker surgery is over. Evan doesn't seem to mind a bit though and has actually asked to go see a doctor when faced with the dreary prospect of spending a morning at home. I will never see going to the doctor as a form of recreation no matter how hard I try.

Oops

I can't believe that I have been such a slacker blogger. This week has been just a boring normal week filled with rather boring normal stuff. The weather has been insanely nice for the last two day so a lot of time has been spent doing stuff that we have not been able to do all winter. My poor filthy minivan is now a lot cleaner on the outside. In fact we actually spent a lot of time today cleaning since it was our family's turn to help clean the chapel. Evan and Harry had fun running around in the church "helping" clean. We gave them dry rags and occasionally they swiped them on something. They were quite entranced by the wringer on the mop bucket and helped squich the mop. We had a lot of good clean fun.

In case you were wondering

Things are getting back to normal. Evan has decided that he really likes the flavor of the Tylenol we were giving him for pain, so he now plays up his non existent pain and then immediately asks for "tummy medicine". I figured out his con when he decided to crawl all over me while I was lying on the couch. The entire time he did not even let out a whimper yet when asked later on to go upstairs he groaned as he got up from the couch and really hammed up the pain. The "tummy medicine" is now officially gone (even though it really is not) and he will just have to suck it up if he gets a twinge now and then.

We went back to church as a family for the first time in three weeks. Harry did not have an issue with his new class the first week, but this week he objected strenuously to it (crying and sobbing very piteously). My husband had to sit with him for the first part of Primary while I taught our class. I noticed them pacing the halls later on when it was the Jr Primary's turn for classes, so I switched with my husband. Harry would not even enter the class room for my husband, but with mommy in tow he warmed up a tiny bit to his class and consented to a little bit of coloring. I am hoping that eventually he will decide that Sunbeams is not such a scary thing and that maybe he could go all by himself.

As far as my gestational diabetes goes I think we are getting an handle on it. I started the insulin while Evan was in the hospital (I felt kind of odd going into the bathroom to shoot up my drugs) but was not noticing a difference in my fasting numbers. I gave it a few more days after Evan got home before calling my OB just to make sure that stress was not throwing my numbers off. My dose and the time I took it changed and that seems to have helped a lot.

I am not very keen on the idea of injecting myself, even with the ultra tiny needle that I am using but I am sucking it up and doing it. I am questioning if I want to go through all this again if we do decide to go for a fourth child like we had planned. It does not help things that I am entering what I call the Old Lady stage of my pregnancy. I am showing a lot and starting to slow down. I get hip pain at this stage in the pregnancy and that makes walking not very fun, but if I don't walk my hip pain is worse. I can't just sit up rapidly any more and have to take it slowly in stages. Rolling over in bed at night is also starting to get difficult. A big up side is that my heart burn is not nearly as bad as it was with my other pregnancies. With Harry I had it so bad I had to take Prilosec or I could not eat. This time around it is more occasional and easily treated with Pepcid.

One fun thing we did this weekend was get the boys bunk beds. We have been looking around for a while now and a guy at my husband's work reccomended a store in a nearby town. We found a really sturdy set for a very nice price and even managed to get mattresses for a really nice price to boot. Getting everything home in our minvan was a lot of fun. We had planned on stopping to eat lunch out but since we kind of blocked the kids in the back with the cargo we ended up just eating at home. The boys love thier new beds and Harry is thrilled to be sleeping on the top. This set comes apart into seperate beds but the boys were so enamored of the idea of bunk beds that we decided to put them together for now, but if Harry gets wild with them then we will seperate them so there is less chance of injury. I will post pictures later when I actually take them.