Wednesday when I picked S up at after-school, she looked kind of glazed and her cheeks were VERY rosy.  One look at her and I knew she had a fever.  (This was not entirely unexpected, as M has been battling a very tenacious virus since Thanksgiving – in his case it has decided to turn into bronchitis & an ear infection.)  Her temp when we got home was 100.7.  She also had a runny nose (which, let’s be frank, she’s had to some degree since school started) and a slight cough.

She stayed home Thursday, making lots of art and taking a 2 1/2 hour nap.  The fever never returned so we sent her to school on Friday and she was fine.

Yesterday she and I went to an SCA event.  We got there around 10:30, maybe 11 and at about 12:15 she climbed into my lap, saying she was tired.  I thought she might be hungry but she was also REALLY hot, so home we came.  We had some lunch and then she and I headed out to the after hours clinic.  By the time they got us in to see the doctor, her temp was 103.

But she shows no signs of anything bacterial – her lungs were “clear as a bell”, her ears and throat are fine.  So… it’s just a virus.  We came home & doped her up on Motrin and she and M lounged in bed watching ice dancing on tv while I cooked dinner.

This morning, she bounced into our room at 6:35, cool as a cucumber.

This custom deck in Baltimore is 16′ x 14′ and features Trex Escapes Sahara decking, black aluminum railing, and white trim.

Yesterday at dinner Shoshanna was merrily telling us about going to the school library and checking out a book (Ezra Jack Keats’ The Trip, for those playing along at home) when suddenly, her face fell.  She completely crumbled.  As enormous tears started rolling, she managed to choke out, “I forgot to get it scanned!”

We attempted to reassure her, to tell her that she wasn’t going to be in trouble.  We told her that she should just tell Mrs. S. what had happened in the morning and that they would get it all sorted out.  We told her that she wasn’t going to be in trouble, that this sort of thing happens all the time.

She simply would not be consoled; nothing helped.  Hugs from Matthew.  Hugs from me.  Offers of eating her dinner while sitting in someone’s lap.

We finally hit on a solution.  I penned a note to her teacher which read as follows

Dear Mrs. S,

During dinner this evening, Shoshanna realized that she forgot to have her library book scanned.  She is very upset about this and would like to fix the situation as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Sarah

That seemed to solve it; the note came back this afternoon with a “no problem” in Mrs. S’s handwriting; Shoshanna reported that Mrs. S just took the book to the library to get it scanned.

… and now she’s reading us Magic School Bus chapter books.

In addition to being compatible with Tiger Claw TC-G and the TimberTech CONCEALoc, the Tiger Claw Installation Gun is now compatible with the Trex Hideaway hidden deck fastener thanks to a new double sided installation head.   One side of the head is compatible with the TC-G and CONCEALoc, while the other side is compatible with the Hideaway.

If you are a contractor and are installing hidden fasteners into slotted decking, the Tiger Claw installation gun is a must have.    You can learn about the gun here.

As of today (11/19/09), the information and imagery on our website has not been updated so don’t be confused when it describes only being compatible with the TC-G and CONCEALoc.

Here is a picture of the new double sided installation head. The Hideaway fits on the left side, while the TC-G and CONCEALoc fit on the right side.

Tiger Claw Gun Nose

And here’s a picture of the gun. The original Tiger Claw gun was orange in color. The new guns, with the double sided nose, are gray.

Tiger Claw Installation Gun

You can purchase the Tiger Claw Installation Gun here

November is prematurity awareness month, and November 17th is Unite: Fight for Preemies.

On November 17th, 2004, Shoshanna should have been seven weeks from being born; instead, she was 23 days old.  She was pushing three pounds, and, according to what I wrote at the time, starting to put on enough chub that sometimes she actually got warm rather than cold.

Fast forward five years… to the kindergartner who can read fluently, who can add and subtract like nobody’s business, who is fascinated by robots and wants to be a football player when she grows up.  I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again: it is shocking how lucky we have gotten.  SHOCKING.  Every time someone asks me, “But she’s ok now, right?”* and I can honestly answer, “yes, she’s more than ok,” I think about how lucky we are.  Every time she shows me how high she can jump, every time I ask her what she did at school and she says, with a resigned sigh, “I can’t muh-member”, every night when I go in to check on her before I go to bed, I remember how lucky we are.

As lucky as we are, as amazing as Shoshanna is, we are reminded every day of where we came from.  Every morning when we give her her meds as soon as we all wake up, later on when we muscle her feet into her SureSteps, whenever we notice the scars on the backs of her hands.  She’s ok now, but our brand of “OK” just happens to include hypotonia, gross motor delays, and continuing GERD.  Our brand of “OK” has physical therapy twice a week and is being watched for fine motor stamina issues.  Despite all this, ours is the best possible “OK” we could have imagined on November 17, 2004.  In so many cases, a preemie family’s version of “OK” includes millions more challenges than the ones we have.

So what do we do?  We tell our story, we work with the March of Dimes.  We try to educate people both about the challenges that preemies face and about how to avoid having a preemie of their own.  We worry, about Shoshanna and how many more shoes there may be hanging over her head waiting to drop, and every time someone we are close to gets pregnant.  We refuse to buy presents for babies-on-the-way before 36 weeks gestational age, and we calculate gestational ages and odds and potential problems in our heads every time we talk to a pregnant friend or acquaintance.  This, too, is part of our “OK”.

Today is prematurity awareness day, but for everyone who’s living the preemie experience, it’s just another day living that redefined version of “OK”.

*It should be noted that the only “acceptable” answer to this question is yes.  As many of my fellow preemie parents have observed over and over again, nobody wants to hear about the problems of the older preemie, no matter how life-altering those problems may be, and especially if the child shows no physical indications of ongoing challenges.

 

On our way home now.

Originally uploaded by sarahmichelef.

Shoshanna was a champ for her upper endoscopy today. We got to the hospital at 10 and went through all the history, etc. With shoes and abi, she weighs 20.2 kilos (44.4 pounds) and is 43″ tall. Her runny nose is just that – a runny nose; she has no congestion in her chest at all (which actually saves us a trip to the ped to address the situation). So she was all cleared to get her belly looked at.

The number of people who traipsed into and out of our room were very overwhelming to Shoshanna. We got lucky and the time between when they made sure she was healthy enough for the procedure and when anesthesia came in to talk to us was exactly the length of They Might Be Giants’ “Here Comes Science” DVD.

The process was as follows:
1) Laughing gas. The anesthesiologist gave her the choice of grape, strawberry, or watermelon and she chose grape. I commented that the mask had purple smeared on it and the response was, “That’s ’cause I use flavored chapstick for the smell!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Dr. Nicole is cut out for pediatric anesthesia.
2) Anesthesia, in gas form. She goes out about as fast as I do, and just as they were warning us that some kids thrash and fight the mask, she did, but that only lasted a couple of seconds and they ushered us out in what Matthew called “The politest ‘get out of here’ ever.”

After we were out of the room they placed an IV and intubated her so as to better protect her airway. I told them it was fine as long as I didn’t have to SEE her intubated. Then they did the actual procedure.

About 20 minutes after we left the room, the GI fellow came in to show us the pictures of her gut – which looks perfect; there’s no scarring or anything from the reflux. We’ll get the results of the biopsies they took in about 10 days.

They came and called us in to the recovery room 5, maybe 10 minutes after we talked to the GIs. Shoshanna came out from the anesthetic really quickly, and we were out of the hospital about half an hour after she woke up. Within an hour and a half she was back to behaving completely normally. She ate a decent-sized lunch of chicken soup, apple sauce, and ice cream and now we’re watching Sleeping Beauty. I think we’ll drag her outside to play when the movie is over; the weather is beautiful.

Shoshanna has asked me to add:  She had soft food to eat.

Edited to further add:  Shoshanna told me as she was getting ready for bed last night, “Mama, I had a good day off.”  Strange child.

Shoshanna has been seeing her new school physical therapist for a couple of weeks now.  I had the opportunity to chat with her on the phone last week.  During that conversation she informed me,

If I had to build a kid, it would be Shoshanna from the ground up.

Now, let’s leave aside the fact that she would be building a kid who needs physical therapy, etc., is it any wonder the kid thinks she’s the world’s gift to grownups?

… an upper GI endoscopy with tissue biopsy.  I don’t think I mentioned it, but we concluded in early September that the Dread Pirate Reflux was back in full force.

Honestly, I’m not sure it ever really went away this time.  We took her off of meds in March and, to be honest, she had a runny nose pretty much constantly all summer.  Of course, she also had strep throat twice during that time, and it’s likely that she does have some seasonal allergies, but … in early September she started making this half-throat-clear, half-fake-cough noise that we know means, “my throat hurts ’cause it’s got stomach acid in it” and we put her back on her Prevacid right away.  And lo and behold, the runny nose and the throat-clearing quit.  Of course those are back now that we’ve had cold after cold after cold thanks to school.  But the reflux is back under control.

So on Thursday they’re going to knock her out (yes, this involves general anesthesia) and have a look to see what they can see in her GI tract; they’ll take some tissue biopsies which will tell us if the reflux is being triggered by a food allergy.

Shoshanna has gone through phases of being quite anxious about the procedure.  She knows that she will get medicine so that she’ll take a nap while they use the camera to look at her esophagus & stomach.  She knows that that medicine will be delivered via IV.  And she knows that she will not be allowed to eat breakfast that morning.  She was kind of fixated on the IV thing, because she knows that the scars on the back of her hands are from IVs in the NICU (which you can see if you look closely in the pic above).  I reassured her that I really doubt that this IV will leave a scar, and pointed out that I had two IVs when she was born and don’t have scars from them.  (Which is a lie; if you know where to look you can see where one of them was but I often have trouble finding the mark myself so I don’t think it counts.)  But I think the thing that helped the most was watching a video about IV insertion and reading articles about GERD and going to the hospital on kidshealth.org.  I told her that she can watch/read them again whenever she wants before Thursday.  And we made plans including going out to dinner on Wednesday night wherever she wants, and today we went grocery shopping for things that will be good to eat with a sore throat (double duty there – one of her homeworks this week was to write a shopping list and then go shopping with it).  This morning she told me, “I was scared about my tummy pictures but then we talked about it and now I feel better.”

So stay tuned to hear how it goes, and maybe if you’re all REALLY lucky I’ll post pictures of Shoshanna’s insides.

Dernières couvertures réalisées pour la collection polar des éditions J’ai lu

couverture du livre T-Rex

Couverture du livre La spirale

As I think I mentioned before, we postponed Shoshanna’s birthday party – the third week of school at a new school was just too crazy to contemplate.  She desperately wanted to have it at the bounce place so we booked it for today, not because of Halloween, but just because it was the most convenient day for us.

So we had about 10 kids at Leaps & Bounce for pizza, cake, and more running around than you can imagine.  You can get half an idea of how crazy the place is from this picture… at the end is the inflatable jousting arena, which is just general bouncing when there’s no one jousting.  The rainbow-striped thing next to Shoshanna and J.V. is a kind of maze that finishes in an extremely steep slide.  At the end of the room is another (less steep) slide, a “generic” bounce house, and a garden-themed on with mushrooms and a little slide and other stuff in it. And, lucky her, she got to see Jordan for the second time in 8 days. We’ve all been so busy that the girls haven’t seen nearly as much of each other as they would like.

Anyway.  Shoshanna had a blast, many of her good friends were there, and OH do her friends know her – we have so many craft projects in our future –  and she was ALMOST asleep when we got home.  She did nap, thankfully.  Because she had to get her energy up for trick or treating!!!

As usual, Evil Auntie Eilis outdid herself, with possibly the most bizarre Halloween costume request ever.  See, when our friends were here in July, Ben showed us this video.  And Shoshanna IMMEDIATELY wanted to be the purple girl. Why?  I have no idea.  But lo and behold, here we have her.

Today I conquered one of my kitchen fears.  I MADE PASTRY!!!  No, really, I’m that excited about it.  For years I have been incredibly wary about pastry because where my mother and sister have lovely pastry hands, nice and cold, I’ve always had nice warm hands.  As such I had been told that pastry and I would not get on.  Well today I can totally refute that! 

I was making a chicken and mushroom pie for dinner tonight to use up leftover roast chicken but when I went to the fridge to get the shop bought puff pastry I had planned to use it was… well, approaching sentience actually.  There was nothing for it, I was going to have to make pastry. 

I have one cook book that I return to again and again.  The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Cook Book.  (Although I think this is the current edition.)  It was one of the first cookbooks I ever got, before I’d ever tried to cook anything other than fairy cakes.  My mum also has a copy and both are now dog eared and spilt on through many years of sterling kitchen service.  It is the first cookbook I reach for when I don’t know how to do something or just want some inspiration, the colour picture index is great for that, and it was this cookbook I reached for this evening when facing the daunting task making my very first pastry. 

I am happy to report that not only is shortcrust pastry easy, it was also quick and, for cooking, pretty low mess too!  The recipe I use for chicken and mushroom pie filling can be found here.  Instead of cooking the chicken breast I just added chunks of roast chicken stripped from Sunday’s roast.  Usually I decorate pies with a representation of what’s in them but I decided that this was going to be the prettiest pie in the world.  Usually savoury pies are seen as manly and butch where as sweet pies are more girly, nope, not this pie.  I decided that hearts and flowers were the only way to go, sorry dad!

Makes enough for 1 pie, decorations and a bit leftover*. 

225g plain flour
pinch of salt
50g butter, chilled and diced
50g Trex (white vegetable fat), chilled and diced
3-4 tbsp chilled water

- Mix together the flour and salt.
- Add the butter and Trex and rub into the flour with your fingertips until it looks like breadcrumbs. 
- Add 3 -4 tbsp cold water by sprinkling it evenly over the surface fo the mixture.  (I used 3 tbsp and a bit.)
- Using a flat bladed knife mix it together until it forms a dough. 
- Gather it together with your hands and lightly knead for a few seconds to bring it together. 
- Form the dough into a ball and wrap it in clingfilm.  Place it in the fridge for 30 minutes. 
- Lightly flour the worksurface and the rolling pin, not the pastry. 
- Turn out the dough onto the worksurface and roll it out in one direction, turning it as you go until it reaches about 3 mm thick. 
- Place your pie dish upsidedown on top of the pastry and cut a line around the dish about 1 cm out to leave room for shrinkage. 
- Cut a second line around this about 1.5 cm thick.
- Fill the pie dish with the filling. 
- Moisten the edge of your dish with a finger dipped in water then press the 1.5 cm thick strip round the outside of the dish trimming the length to fit.   
- Moisten this pastry with water again then lay the rest of the pastry over the top using the rolling pin to help lift it across. 
- Shape the edges how you want to, I used a fork pressed round the edge. 
- Add any decorations you want to on the top, moistening them with water to stick them down. 
- Brush with beaten egg or milk. 
- Bake at gas mark 7 for 45 minutes. 

*(I cut out itty bitty flowers from the last of the pastry, dabbed the tops with the spare egg wash and sprinked them with grated hard cheese then baked them for 10 minutes at Gas 6)

I served this with carrots, brocolli and neep and tattie cake, which I shall post tomorrow.

Lots of things to report, most of them school-related.

On Friday we had what I’ve been calling Shoshanna’s “not-an-IEP meeting”.  Because Shoshanna is identified as only needing physical therapy services, she doesn’t qualify for an IEP (individual education plan).  In my phone conversations with the coordinator, there had been discussion of her maybe getting services through Section 504 but it really did sound like a maybe.

This was my first such meeting; Matthew went to her IEP meeting when they started preschool services.  He’d pretty much told me what to expect.  After some hilarity with the previous meeting running long, the tape recorder refusing to work, etc. we got started.

• I gave Shoshanna’s early history (the very short version) and current issues (including the verbal report from her recent private OT evaluation – more on that later).
• Her classroom teacher gave a report on how she is in the classroom – which can be summarized as very bright but often unfocused.  She has trouble waiting her turn to talk, etc.  Mrs. S is dealing with this in part by being selective about where Shoshanna sits.  She is also, as her teacher puts it, a doodler, with possibly diminished fine motor skills (not so much skills as stamina, really).  Her work starts out neat but gets messy.  We discussed whether this was a function of personality or a function of her hand getting tired from extended writing; it’s hard to tell which at this point.  It’s something we will keep an eye on.
• The school psychology intern reported on her observations of Shoshanna in the classroom – that she’s very verbal and personable, obviously bright.  And that once while she was in the classroom she witnessed Shoshanna crawl across the table to get something she needed on the other end rather than asking someone to pass it to her or walking around the table to get it.  The actual school psychologist hadn’t seen her because there’s no concern about her academically.
• Then the coordinator read into the record the assessment of the PT who had looked at her records.  Recommendation of individual physical therapy two times per six-day “week” (her school is on a six-day schedule… it’s confusing for everyone involved) to work on skills such as stairs and gross-motor stamina.

I was shocked; we were SURE that they were going to deny services because she’s able to function effectively in the classroom.  So she’ll get PT at school!  After the main meeting, I chatted with the district’s 504 coordinator and the special ed teacher who oversees 504 at the school and we put down in writing the following accommodations or her:

• Being near an adult on stairs, should be holding a handrail.
• Supervision on the playground.
• Being encouraged to not be “done” in PE class (when she gets tired, she will decide that she’s “done”).
• Keeping her &#$* SureSteps on at school (twice she has decided to take them off).

And they are going to keep an eye on the fine motor stuff to try to figure out if it’s personality/maturity or a strength/endurance issue.  I need to forward the report from her OT eval and her old PT’s contact information to the 504 coordinator so it can make it into her file.

On Friday afternoon, she brought home her five-week progress report.  She is doing very well in everything academic, but got “needs improvement” in areas like “completes work neatly”, “stays in her seat” and … there was one other related area.  Mrs. S’s comment was that “her behavior is sometimes a distraction to those around her.”  She got good reports from art, music, and PE.

Based on all of this, we have two new descriptions of our girl:

Hermione Granger with ADD*
She’ll problem-solve her way into trouble any day.

Finally, the OT report.  Tuesday of last week Ms. Helene put her through her paces particularly focusing on her left arm.  She noted diminished strength and range of motion on the left side and will be recommending a specific type of stretching and therapy as well as the use of kinesio-tape to strengthen the affected muscles.  We will be pursuing this in addition to the in-school PT.

We also went to the dentist on Thursday.  S is a great dental patient, and her teeth look good.  She wasn’t able to hold the x-ray plate in her mouth so we’ll try that again in 6 months.  The “wear” on her incisors doesn’t appear to be increasing, so we’re just watching it and assuming that her adult teeth won’t be affected.

*No, she’s not formally diagnosed, nor are we going to make any motion towards any diagnosis anytime soon.  Could she have it?  Genetics ain’t on our side in this one.  But where’s the line between being just-turned-five and having ADD?  Impossible to tell, as far as we’re concerned.

The 7 Silliest Videogame Fighter Backstories

Masukkan ini dalam kategori saya-nggak-perlu-melihat-ini: Hello Kitty Anatomy. Eww.

Kanada meluncurkan uang koin bergambar T-Rex.

Baru saja menemukan Thing a Week-nya Jonathan Coulton. Jadi dia (an obvious nerd, kalau boleh saya tambahkan) merilis lagu baru dalam format mp3 tiap minggu dalam setahun di tahun 1996. Lagu-lagunya enak. Yang pertama saya temukan You Ruined Everything: a song about having a child.

Tahukah kamu tentang sebuah Internet yang “lain”? Lebih cepat, lebih responsif, dan dipakai khusus untuk bidang ilmiah dan pendidikan.

Membahas Project Natal milik Microsoft, yang pada intinya adalah versi lebih advanced dari Nintendo Wii..

Your old pal CB has been pretty quiet lately due to a career change and the intense mourning of the 2009 Red Sox season.  But what do we do when we fall off the hoss?  We get back on the hoss.

So I’m all excited to get back into and get on the board.  I’m like JoJo the idiot circus boy with a pretty new pet as Farley would say.  Only problem is that I really have nothing to mouth off about.  Luckily I have, in my possession, a photo of Grizz from the time last month that he slipped and literally shit himself.  Turns out one of the towns people had their digi handy.

Nanner split

I’m having the shavetown lab check it for authenticity because I think it might actually be the love child of Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds) and a 1993 John Kruk.

Cercetatorii britanici revin cu o noua descoperire de senzatie

Archadeck of Charlotte is going to have a large display with experts there to answer home remodeling questions. The Home Show is October 9th-11th at The Metrolina and will run all day through early evening. We will be displaying composite decking, wood decking, pergola’s, screen porches, sunrooms, paver patio’s, outdoor fireplaces, and more. You will find this a great show to get ideas for your backyard! There are custom design deck, rail, and outdoor living rooms to view that will make you really want to do something as it definitely ads to your quality of life here in Charlotte!

05-09-09
Dear Diary,

This morning I woke up with a boner and my dick ached from being so hard. Like most mornings I quickly blew one out to a picture of Meryl Streep that I had hanging on my bed post and then applied a tube of Ben Gay to the affected region. But that wasn’t really what I wanted to write about today. Something magical happened to me and I can only assume that the feeling I felt was love, since I didn’t pop a boner during the interaction as per usual. So let me start with what happened this afternoon. During work I was on break and I went to the the convenience store downstairs to get a red bull. Because red bull’s are the only thing I drink since I’m so ruthless. There’s this girl that works there at the register I’ve had some conversation with before off-and-on, just normal situational stuff. From time to time I will motion to my crotch and then give it a good firm grab. I can tell that she is impressed with my package. She looks about 14 but I am hoping she is 16 (since that’s the legal age of consent in most states). She has long pigtails, red hair, freckles on her face, pink braces on her teeth, and usually wears a yellow flower dress. So I asked her how her weekend was and addressed her by her first name. Usually I address women by their informal last name to assert dominance but this time was different… Then she asked me when I got off work-and I said 5. Which was kind of a lie because I usually like to stay later until everyone has left and smell the chair of the office secretary. She said she got off at 4. I said “lucky you” and she smirked. It looked as if my cunning linguistic skills were paying off. It ended there-there were people in line-but I see her like every day. But today was different. I felt such a connection between us! It was clear that we were already in the deep conversational level of a relationship. Something that most couples take years to develop. Was her question about her asking me when I got off work…casual conversation?…or an IOI? Clearly she is into me. I have to know! Tomorrow I think I will give her an assertive yet friendly grope and see how she responds… I just can’t stop masturbating about her, I think I’m in love!

A new self-sufficiency streak… that manifests itself as the aforementioned trying to plunge the toilet oneself, and dragging a rubbermaid tub into the bathroom to reach a cup in the medicine cabinet to water one’s spider plant with.

Turning to Jordan during Yom Kippur services and saying, “One time you didn’t want to play with me.  You should say you’re sorry.”  (We had to try REALLY HARD not to crack up.)  And then playing perfectly happily together all through break-fast.

Wanting to wear the Muppet Coat to donuts yesterday, and we explained that it was too warm for a parka.  ”Can I wear it when it gets cold?  Like when it snows?”  Yes.  ”What about hail?”  Yes, if it hails, you can wear it.  Famous last words (some higher power was having their way with me… the hail was falling literally as we were getting ready to walk out the door to go to services).

Five. Wow.

End of the day completely exhausted birthday girl

We sent Shoshanna off to school yesterday wearing her new birthday dress and with her backpack loaded down with 2 boxes of animal crackers and a jug of juice for snacktime.

Crazy Girls

We had some friends over for pizza & cupcakes last night – not a proper birthday party, that will be next month sometime once we have contact info for all her new kindergarten friends that she wants to invite.  Just five kids including Shoshanna, some time to run around outside, then dinner and hepping them up on cupcakes they decorated themselves.

Shoshanna the Cupcake Cruise Director

When just Ben and Jordan were still at the house, Shoshanna and Jordan ran upstairs to go to the bathroom.  A few minutes later I heard her bellowing for me and went upstairs to find the thing that it probably hasn’t occurred to any of you to fear:

Two five year old girls, a full toilet, and a toilet plunger.

Yeah.  Thankfully no harm was done.  They had decided the toilet wasn’t working right and were trying to fix it.  Then Shoshanna was so tired she kept trying to convince Jordan to play “sleep”.

Can you see from Shoshanna's face how completely exhausted she is?

She passed out cold when we put her to bed.