Toddler Dance

Yes, that's John, dancing in the dog dish. He was having rather a good time with it and then realized that he could drag it all around the kitchen. Is the dog offended, well, I don't know, she's still hiding under the table pretending she's not here.



This picture is for Uncle Paul, all that noise and carrying on of little boy that he heard on the phone yesterday, this is what was going on here. Every so often John would turn and give Mark this serious look, like, 'what'd you say' and then go on with his throwing of blocks and making of messes.

Recipes and stuff

In talking with my sil today she reminded me that I need to send her the recipe for Mark's mom's cheesecake - oh it's yummy. I've been toying with a blog just for food stuff and so put it there. From time to time I'll add stuff there, keeping this blog mostly about a life with our silly pants boy, so don't worry, you won't miss out on any of John's antics by not checking over there.

Speaking of, John's new trick for the day, he can now pull his shirt over his head, of course he still has his arms stuck in it and that renders him rather goofy looking, but hey he was proud of it.

Hoglet?

Well okay, I'm sure that most little boys who will be 4 years old on Thursday weigh a lot more, but today our little piglet is 28.6 pounds, .4 pounds shy of having gained 10 pounds since August - he looks like a hoglet to me!

His cold is getting better and he's getting wilder and more fun each day. His new favorite trick when he's sitting in his chair is to reach out as far as he can, grab on to whatever he can get and pull, this is made much more fun if it means that he's getting closer to the computer or better yet pulling on your clothes and 'following' you around the kitchen. I noticed today while he was riding in the basket at HyVee that he no longer sits still either, he was patting his hands on the handle, bopping his feet around and generally just being wiggly, all pleasant things to see.

We didn't go to Omaha for our clinic visit today because of the weather, and sure enough a little boy is settled in his bed and the freezing rain is laying it's icy fingers across our world, sure is nice to be snug and safe at home.

Get Daddy, Tree, Get Daddy

We've had rather a quiet day around here. John's cold is still raging, but he's not meeting any of the criteria for taking him to the hospital: 1. febrile, 2. dehydrated, 3. not breathing well, and so we continue to stay home and wipe snot. The weather here is cold, in the 20's and there is a fine film of ice on everything, including the church parking lot of the in town congregation so confirmation and church were called off there for this evening and tomorrow morning leaving us with a full day to hang out together and maybe get the Christmas tree up.

Our Christmas tree is pretty enormous, it was bought pre-child and when we lived in a much larger house, and so it takes quite a bit to put it up. John was sitting in the floor enjoying helping daddy with branches and I was in the kitchen cooking supper when I heard John start screaming and crying like he was frightened and hurt all at the same time. Since Mark wasn't saying anything, there had been no big thuds, and there was no fussing or hollering coming out of the living room I didn't figure too much was up but when I came around the corner to see what was wrong Mark was under the tree, just his feet and legs sticking out working on lights and John was sitting on the floor frantically signing 'get daddy, get daddy, tree, get daddy'. I couldn't help but laugh as I picked him up and held him, and started to reassure him that daddy was fine, but of course he was not having any of it until dad was spit out by the killer tree and came to talk to him and console him too.

Until today Christmas trees has been one of John's all time favorite things, each morning he asks to go and see the Christmas tree, the one that the neighbors have lit in their front yard. I'm hoping tomorrow he will be happy to see that ours is all together. Maybe making and hanging some ornaments on it will help, but surely we won't be having Mark crawl under it and hide :)

Big Helper

John loves to help. Lol, that expression on his face is determination that he get them in, it was quickly followed by a huge smile that I missed with the camera of course. John's every morning job is putting away the silverware, and the measuring spoons and cups. Some mornings, like today, he does a very fast job, and other mornings we are treated to lots of banging and giggling. Thankfully he has realized that he didn't need to lick every spoon before it was put away - good boy!

John's other job that he loves to help with is pushing the laundry baskets down the basement stairs. He does this in his gait trainer, and since the first time that he watched the baskets go bumping down the stairs and flipping over at the bottom he's not quite so eager to run right up to the lip of the stair. Will this work to keep him from running down the stairwell if the door is ever accidentally left open again, who knows, but for now at least he loves helping, and what mommy could ask for more.

Bad Advice Column?

Okay, this is a rant about Lutheran stuff, there is no news of anything to do with John or us really in here, I just came across this article and it's irritating me. So, if you're not interested in LCMS stuff, just skip this one and I'll get to a cute piglet picture tomorrow.

I will admit up front that I'm not a huge fan of the LCMS, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about a 'church' body but a bureaucracy that has run amok. I'm also not a big fan of the 'official' paper of the LCMS, the Lutheran Witness, but there are times when an article or two, or a letter in the front is sufficiently interesting enough to make me page through most of the issue.

This time as I was paging through I came across the headline with the Family Counselor column. I don't usually read this column in particular as I find it is generally remiss in dealing with spiritual issues in a spiritual rather than psycho-babble way. This time though the headline was "Dealing with a complicated medical history" and since that is largely where we live as a family I wanted to see what was said.

Now the letter itself is rather heart-breaking, and makes me wish that I could sit and console this woman with God's Word, make her a pie and volunteer to do a few jobs to give her husband a bit of a break. The answer to this letter makes me angry.

John has a complicated medical history and we have faced questions of surgery/not-surgery before and that is not easy as a parent, and it certainly can't be easy to make that decision for yourself either. But the counselor who answered this woman's question first congratulates her on talking of death when so many others can't, well how patronizing is that. Then goes on to exhort her to educate herself, get a second opinion, and get her husband and maybe even herself some help from the social worker and hospital chaplain, this is downright insulting. Anyone with a long term complicated medical history has more of a medical education than most normal people would believe. Finally the counselor suggests that she might talk to her pastor, well duh, that would have been number one. Lastly she throws a little Jesus at the problem, with a verse which while true, comes across as trite and slightly less spiritual than a WWJD backpack or a Faith Aflame tote bag.

I have sat in the hospital with many people who go through hell on earth because of the brokenness of creation, the advice given to this woman is not only reprehensible but I hope and pray that she somehow misses the issue and gets some real help from a faithful pastor. In my experience a social worker can do great things for you in navigating red tape and a generically protestant hospital chaplain is about as useful as a generically protestant self-help book, more full of platitudes and theology of glory than a Purpose Driven manual. On the other hand even a brief visit from a faithful pastor can give you the strength to carry on and make decisions, no matter how hard, in ways that bring peace to troubled minds and rest to hurting souls.

My other hope and prayer in this is that this particular issue of the Lutheran Witness is not found in hospital waiting rooms or at the bedside of struggling believers because no matter what good the rest of the magazine might do someone, this article is sure to destroy any good that was done.

A Million Little Things

Well, okay, maybe not a million, but since it's been forever since I've updated this there are quite a few. I'll try to put titles in here so you can skip the stuff you'd rather not know :)

About John

John's clinic appointment in Omaha went great! He was 27 pounds 7 ounces and has grown a little taller too, putting him right at 34 inches, finally for real this time. His labs all looked good and they cut his TPN from 14 hours to 12. He cried when we told him that he had to go to the hospital, but then when we pulled up at Charity's, our friends outside Omaha, he did the happy dance and was all excited. Getting to stay with friends actually made the trip more like a mini-vacation than a clinic visit and that we got to see the Sipes, wow their kids are growing, and meet with some other Looper families was a bonus that made up for John having to go into clinic where he cried because they made him go in a room. I've not yet told him that he is headed back there again on Monday, I think we'll tell him when it's time to go. Besides, he'll love knowing that we are headed back to the Baker B&B. You can see a picture of John with the Baker gang here!

At home John has been doing great. As you can see he loves the new computer desk...



...little stinker, so far he's not done anything to the computer that I've not been able to undo, but we'll see how long that lasts. He has gotten sneakier, and now when he hears us coming into the room, or sees that my attention is no longer being held by what I'm doing at the sink he pops around the end of the bar and gives me this look...



...yep, he has innocent down pat!

John's other news is that we had him reevaluated for speech therapy. Amy, John's therapist is wonderful, she is much more in tune to the needs of the child, instead of just foisting the philosophy of the school upon them. We knew that we could trust her with our most important question - Does John need to continue with speech therapy, or would he be better off going fully into sign and stopping speech altogether? If you know nothing of the issues of being deaf there are two basic camps, the deaf is a blessing camp who is offended by any hearing aid/implant to use the child's residual hearing or any attempt at oral communication. The other camp is the oral camp and they are pro hearing aid/implants and almost exclusively strongly anti-sign. Because Mark and I are both hearing parents the oral camp sure seemed like where we would like to live, after all John being able to talk as opposed to sign would just make things much more normal, but alas we have come to realize over the past year that this wasn't going to work. Now Amy did some testing for us on Monday, John is so smart, he has had no official intervention, ie therapy, in months and he has not only not gone backwards he's still progressing forwards in his language development. On the tests there are things that he should have been able to do at 2 that he still doesn't quite get and stuff that he's not supposed to be able to do until he's 5 that he breezes right through. That is one of the things that makes determining what is best in a school model very hard for him because he rarely fits in any of the normal models - but then I don't think many kids do, but that's another topic. Anyway, the answer to the question is, stop speech entirely and dive into sign with both feet to give John the best language education that he can get. Will he ever talk verbally, no one knows of course, but for now sign is the way of life. Mark and I have talked about this day coming, thought of it and such, but finally the day is here and there are no other roads, so we are traveling down the middle somewhere between the two camps of the deaf world. John will be taught sign, mom and dad will be learning it, and yet he will still have his hearing aids and we will still verbally talk to him too. Why shut a door that doesn't have to be closed?

Well never mind the titles I'll get to the other crazy stuff that's been going through my head in another blog update, John is waking up, the pizza must be put in the oven and the two of us dressed for church. Tonight is the first Advent midweek service and I'm excited that we are getting to go.