Candy from strangers

Today was a long day. Bubs is still recovering from his strep throat, and I myself am recovering from his strep throat as well (and I have an ear infection to boot!). We are having some serious serious issues with getting bubs to take the medicine. He is usually pretty cooperative. He told me that it 'tastes really bad'. I called the doc and they were nice enough to change his rx from a liquid to a chewable but unfortunately for all of us, those are equally as unpalatable to bubs. I have resorted to plain old forcing him to take it, which totally kills me. My heart aches for parents who have to give their children serious meds on a daily basis. I feel bad even complaining about this. It just makes me so uncomfortable and it happens three times a day for the next week. Ugh.
We did manage to go trick or treating. Bubs seemed to enjoy it and he wore his costume for the entire time. Last year he took off his elmo getup after the first house and he just went as a 'three year old boy'. His candy bag had ripped and basically I just felt as though we were begging random strangers for candy. This year I came prepared with two bags, I was ready, and I dressed up as well. I was a plus sized witch. I got the costume at walmart. It was black stretchy velvet with spider web lace sleeves. A lot like some of the getups I used to wear 'clubbing' back in the day. All I was missing was the combat boots and some cure songs. I was somewhat shocked at some of the costumes the tweenie girls had on. A lot of french maids and prisoners with fishnet stockings. Good god, my parents would never have let me out of the house in that, some of them weren't more than 11 years old. At any rate, bubs seemed into the whole deal. He would get a piece of candy from each house, inspect it and eat it on the way to the next house. He gave the rejects to my husband, who was more than willing to accept them.
Bubs was also more than happy to dole out treats back at home. That was a refreshing change from last year when he screamed bloody murder every time I tried to hand out some treats to the kids at my door. He just couldn't wrap his head around the concept that we actually gave candy away. How preposterous- he would scream at the poor kids and slam the door. This year he was scooping it out by the handful along with the complements- "I like your costume." It was really nice to see.

Speechless

This morning I was getting some juice for bubs out of the fridge. We have a picture on the fridge of his preschool class, three days a week bub leaves his center based school to go to a 'typical' preschool in the afternoon. He goes with a shadow and she fills me in on all the days shenanigans. So we have a class picture on the fridge and he periodically points out the kids and gives me a little interesting tidbit about them. Today he points at a picture of 'johnny' (don't ask me why, but I am changing his name) and says, 'that's 'johnny', he doesn't talk. He can't.' I was positively floored by that observation. Last week when I picked up bubs, his shadow told me that 'johnny's' mom came in to speak with the teachers, they thought he had selective mutism. I just couldn't believe that my son picked up on it. Amazing.

Licence to Ill

We have broken our two year plus change record on no antibiotics. Poor bubs has strep throat. I knew something wasn't right with him because he didn't eat any of his highly coveted pizza bites (oh and they are soy pizza bites, with whole wheat 'crust' and they are really expensive, so in essence they are health food, right?). There has been mass hysteria here over MRSA, an antibiotic resistant form of strep that manifests itself as boils. I noticed a little bump on bubs' back yesterday and of course that set me into defcon 1. I had already decided last night that I was taking him in today. It took me forever to get through to the peds office this morning. I kept getting the service even though it was after nine. I was steamed. Don't these people know my son might have flesh eating strep bacteria????? It turns out the computers on their phone systems thought daylight savings started this weekend so everything was screwed up by an hour. OK, I think I will reserve how I feel about daylight savings time for another post. So we get to the docs office and she said he looked OK. She said to 'keep an eye' on the mark on his back. Is she kidding, there will be two very neurotic eyes pasted on that thing for the next few weeks. It really looks like the tag from one of his shirts irritated him. She said that his ears looked good, his throat was clear, but to give him the throat culture for the 'hell of it'. Imagine our surprise when it was positive. Poor bubs. I used to panic when it came to antibiotics (See my yeast rant) but strep is a whole other ball game. Let er roll, I say,bring on the big guns. I haven't been feeling too well myself lately- my sinus problems have been bad, and now I have a sore throat. I begged my hubs to ditch one of his many jobs and come home so I can go sit in the walk in doctors office for a few hours. I have of course convinced myself that I too have strep.
Bubs is sleeping on the couch, poor little guy. I hope he feels better soon!

The elusive butterfly of yeast-part 1

I am a biomedical slacker. I didn't always used to be, I used to be really neurotic about it. I got kind of burnt out on the whole magilla, but somehow after reading Jenny McCarthy's book,I kind of got sucked into the vortex. But only halfway this time. I promise.
When bubs first got dx, or even before, I was online constantly looking up everything. In my attempt to convince myself that I had control over the situation I stumbled upon the D.A.N.!protocol. Don't even think about leaving off that exclamation point! So I dragged my son to the closest D.A.N.! doc I could find (we shall call him Dr.Well from now on). I plunked down enormous sums of cash and I agreed to do whatever he told me to do. We went casein free first, we went gluten free shortly after. It was relatively easy though given that bubs was 18 mo and didn't talk. He wasn't that much of a fan of solid foods at that point either. I had to go to dr. well every two weeks. It seemed like every time I went, he added another task to my list, the pressure just built each time I went there. I remember one time bubs had an ear infection and I almost went into apoplexy at the pediatricians office when they wrote out a rx for antibiotics. Dr.Well told me not to. I was torn. I didn't want bubs to be in pain, and I didn't want to screw up his gut. So I dragged my poor bubs to the other end of the island for a quick hocus pocus session with dr.well. It was a huge huge leap of faith, but whatever the hell he did, it seemed to help bubs and he survived, miraculously, so did I. Ok, I am veering off course here. The reason I am a biomed slacker is because it all just got way too much for my fragile neurotic mind to handle. Every time my son spinned a wheel or looked at something funny, I blamed myself. It was the lollipop he ate two days ago-yeast! Or that I couldn't follow the virtual caveman diet they told me to follow, basically nuts and twigs and boiled chicken. I just couldn't do it well enough. I couldn't make the young coconut kefir (even though I tried about 6 times). My son wouldn't eat broccoli. Oh, if he would only eat some fresh cultured veggies (sour kraut times ten!) then he would talk. I felt like no matter what I did, I wasn't doing it well enough. I did it for over two years. We schlepped coolers of food wherever we went, I made my own chicken nuggets, and crazy concoctions that my sister made fun of.

I thought yeast was at the root of all of our problems. If I could only get rid of the yeast. If you do any delving or dabbling into the biomed world, eventually you will come across the yeast issue. There are tests for it, expensive, kind of not sure about the validity type tests. But it's safe to assume in the biomed world that any kind of stimming, sleep issues, ocd behavior, skin issues, can be blamed on that yeasty beast. To treat it? Not that easy. It involves a variety of concoctions that kill the yeast causing die off, the herxheimer effect if you really want to get scientific. Die off isn't a pretty thing, but it's supposed to be good because after a week or so of hell you are supposed to be rewarded with a new and improved child. Of course this sounds sarcastic, but there's probably a bit of rationalizing going on inside my crowded head. The truth is, I don't know what works. I don't really know. No one does. It just involves a lot of blind leaps of faith. Even though I thought I was done chasing the yeast beast, I have been slowly but surely getting sucked back into the matrix. I have my threelac, I have my probiotics, have the caprylic acid- I even have the lauricidin. I am out to hunt down and annihilate that vague yeast monster. Even though I am not sure whether or not it's out there.

I just wanted to add as a caveat (my new favorite word) that my own biomed obsessions probably have very little to do with my child. I managed to live around 37 years on this earth under the illusion that I had control over my life, silly girl that I was. When bubs was dx, I was terrified and felt like I had to do something to help him. My goal wasn't to turn him into a science experiment, or change the core of his already wonderful being. I just wanted him to talk.
I've eased up big time since then, but I think I am getting nervous for him with kindergarten looming around the corner. I hope this post isn't to verbose- it's lookin a little wordy.

Guess What?

My son has a blowhole. Yup. Or that's what he told me. This morning when I was getting him dressed he said "I have a blowhole mommy". "Wow", I said, "You do?". "Yes, I show you, it's right here." and he lifted up his shirt and pointed to his bellybutton. I was kind of hoping that was what he was going to point to. Did I mention that his favorite channel is animal planet?

I think he's going to be on the debate team

First of all, it needs to be said that I love the fact that my son is speaking. I love every part of it, when he bosses me around, when he tells me 'no', all the sweet things he says, everything. I relish every utterance (as well as count the words in them too).That said, I think I have a future lawyer on my hands. Tonight the time seemed to escape me with phone calls and dinner and trying to figure out how to work my new blue tooth (it won't work, my ghetto phone doesn't have the capability). It was kind of a half an hour before I wanted to put bubs to sleep. We already had some chatter over the bath time. For some reason my tub loving son didn't want a bath. He insisted he was already clean and that he would have a bath tomorrow. He won his case last night, so I wasn't going to give up on the tub tonight. The trick with bubs is to make him think he came up with the decision all on his own instead of forcing him to do it. It just takes a lot of my already diminishing mind power to accomplish that task. I managed to manipulate a bath out of him. Ok, so I no longer have a stinky child, he has eaten and he wants to watch a show. Not a problem except for the fact that he picks 'nick's greatest hits vol 1' which is a conglomeration of around 6 or so shows. He made it through the first Dora and then a blues clues snuck in under the radar. So I gave him fair warning that once blues clues was over we would be going to sleep. "OK mommy" was his response. Yeah sure it is. So blue's ended and I shut the DVD player off. This is when he turned it on full force. "We can't go to sleep now!" he exclaimed. "I need to watch my show, all of it.". I'll spare you my lame-o responses, suffice it to say they all began with, "NO". In a nice way though, we had a great day and I wasn't half as frazzled as I was yesterday. "But it's still light out", he says. It's pitch black out being that it was 8:00 already about a half an hour past my desired lights out time. I don't know why I engaged in the discussion but I said " it is not". "The sun is out,mommy", "no it isn't", said I. "Yes it is" as he points out a very dark window. This went on for a few rounds. Hey you have to give him credit for trying. I think even he knew he had a weak argument, at best.At this point, planned ignoring was in order so I just went upstairs and set up his bed while he carried on. Poor guy, he was pooped. He finally came up, angry as anything, screaming and yelling, and eventually settling down. I think he fell asleep in less than five minutes. I guarantee that the first words out of his mouth tomorrow morning will be (after asking me where we are going today), "I want to watch my movie, mom".

I would love to roll with them

OK, I just have to pay homage to two of my most favoritest people. Who other than Dog and Beth could turn a hardened criminal crackhead thug running from the law into a sniveling, driveling, grateful for being apprehended ,mess? It's a virtual love fest every time. I love these two. They have successfully bumped 'cops' out of the running for my most beloved tv show. I love the opening intro when Beth jumps into her suv, on her way to snag a menace, with furious intensity, taking the time to grab a giant perfume bottle off her dashboard and give herself a quick spritz before peeling out. Love it, and I love that she wants to smell good for the criminals. I love her chutzpah. I love Dog too. I won't comment on his style though, because it would end up sounding mean, and my aim is true here. I love their big pow wow in the beginning of every show and I love the group hug at the end. I love how there is always a long lost child of one of them showing up and joining the family bizness. I hope this doesn't sound smarmy or sarcastic. I really do love them.