Today was a warm day and so the kids and I went outside to burn off some much needed energy.
Greyson wanted to play football. "Playing football" in our house is a big ordeal. Before you can actually play you have to announce the players - which is Greyson running from the side of our house while the fans (ie Quinn and I) cheer loudly and yell "Go Titans". Normally after this we run all around the yard and fall down and tackle at various times based on Greyson's commands. Today however he added a new twist after the players were announced...
"OK, Mommy you have to be the singing lady, now."
"The singing lady???"
"Yes, the lady that sings before the games. The singing lady"
(The light bulb goes off). "Oh, you want me to sing the National Anthem?"
"No Mommy I don't like that song. You should sing Frosty instead."
Monday, December 14, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
What does your Santa look like?
This weekend each member of the Erim family painted their own interpretation of Ole St. Nick. I will leave it up to you to figure out who painted who....
Saturday, December 12, 2009
One Hell of a Day
So some of you know the whole story and some of you know some and some of you know none of what happened last Wednesday so I will try to be brief but get it all down.
It started out like any typical day - Greyson was a bit clingy but I attributed that to the fact that Raif was out of town. I asked him if he felt OK and he said he felt fine so off we went to school. I got a call about 10:30 that he was running a fever and to come get him. I arrived at school, picked him up (literally and figuratively) and walked outside to put him in the car. He was in my arms as I was putting him in the car seat when I felt something warm run down my chest - he had peed on me then he arched his back, his eyes rolled back into his head and he began to have a seizure.
I ran back into school and screamed for help. Greyson's and Quinn's preschool is an integrated school - both typically developing and special needs children attend - so the staff has dealt with their fair share of seizures and it showed. Mr. Shaune grabbed Greyson put him on the ground, rolled him on his side, cleared his throat in a matter of seconds. They called 911 and swept a poor confused and scared Quinn back into her classroom. They were incredible. I was a terrified mess. Minutes later, with a still seizing Greyson, the ambulance arrived and off Greyson and I went on our second ambulance ride of our 4 years together.
To complicate matters even further my darling husband was in Tyler TX giving a final presentation of a project he had been working on for 5 months. I was on the phone with him telling him what was going on. I don't know who had it worse - me being there and watching it all happen or Raif being 500 miles away and completely helpless.
By the time we got to the hospital Greyson had stopped seizing but was still unconscious for another good 30 minutes. It took another hour before he would respond and sometime after that before he spoke but slowly my little boy came back to me and the first time he said "Mommy" I wept like a baby.
The doctors think he had a febrile seizure which is a seizure brought on by a rapid rise in temperature. It is apparently somewhat common in children - about 1 in 25 get them. In the medical community they are really non-events. The ER doctor told us that if he has another one that we shouldn't even call 911 unless it lasts more than 5 minutes (yeah right). Apparently they have no lasting effects and most of the time only occur once (only 10% of children who have one have another) and kids usually grow out of them by the time they are 5 or 6.
He has no memory of what happened and the only injury sustained was that he bit through the side of his tongue and that is pretty sore. Otherwise he is no worse for wear. I think the seizure did more damage to me than him.
We went to get him checked out by his pediatrician yesterday who gave him a clean bill of health. Due to his past history however, on a precautionary note, his doctor has ordered an EEG. The best part of this is that it is a sleep deprived EEG. The night before the test we are only allowed to let him sleep 4 hours. How the hell I am going to keep a boy that sleeps a good solid 12 hours a night up for 8 of those is beyond me.
So there you have it - another chapter in the life of Greyson. Oh the stories I have to tell him when he finally has children.
It started out like any typical day - Greyson was a bit clingy but I attributed that to the fact that Raif was out of town. I asked him if he felt OK and he said he felt fine so off we went to school. I got a call about 10:30 that he was running a fever and to come get him. I arrived at school, picked him up (literally and figuratively) and walked outside to put him in the car. He was in my arms as I was putting him in the car seat when I felt something warm run down my chest - he had peed on me then he arched his back, his eyes rolled back into his head and he began to have a seizure.
I ran back into school and screamed for help. Greyson's and Quinn's preschool is an integrated school - both typically developing and special needs children attend - so the staff has dealt with their fair share of seizures and it showed. Mr. Shaune grabbed Greyson put him on the ground, rolled him on his side, cleared his throat in a matter of seconds. They called 911 and swept a poor confused and scared Quinn back into her classroom. They were incredible. I was a terrified mess. Minutes later, with a still seizing Greyson, the ambulance arrived and off Greyson and I went on our second ambulance ride of our 4 years together.
To complicate matters even further my darling husband was in Tyler TX giving a final presentation of a project he had been working on for 5 months. I was on the phone with him telling him what was going on. I don't know who had it worse - me being there and watching it all happen or Raif being 500 miles away and completely helpless.
By the time we got to the hospital Greyson had stopped seizing but was still unconscious for another good 30 minutes. It took another hour before he would respond and sometime after that before he spoke but slowly my little boy came back to me and the first time he said "Mommy" I wept like a baby.
The doctors think he had a febrile seizure which is a seizure brought on by a rapid rise in temperature. It is apparently somewhat common in children - about 1 in 25 get them. In the medical community they are really non-events. The ER doctor told us that if he has another one that we shouldn't even call 911 unless it lasts more than 5 minutes (yeah right). Apparently they have no lasting effects and most of the time only occur once (only 10% of children who have one have another) and kids usually grow out of them by the time they are 5 or 6.
He has no memory of what happened and the only injury sustained was that he bit through the side of his tongue and that is pretty sore. Otherwise he is no worse for wear. I think the seizure did more damage to me than him.
We went to get him checked out by his pediatrician yesterday who gave him a clean bill of health. Due to his past history however, on a precautionary note, his doctor has ordered an EEG. The best part of this is that it is a sleep deprived EEG. The night before the test we are only allowed to let him sleep 4 hours. How the hell I am going to keep a boy that sleeps a good solid 12 hours a night up for 8 of those is beyond me.
So there you have it - another chapter in the life of Greyson. Oh the stories I have to tell him when he finally has children.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Christmas on the Savanna
This afternoon Greyson insisted on wearing his elephant costume to do our holiday craft of making snowmen. Because nothing says Christmastime like a pachyderm.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Tree Acrobats
Last weekend when the tree and all the decorations went up the house was teeming with activity and chaos. After all the decorations were hung on house and tree, Raif and I gave each other a high five and collapsed into the couch. A successful Christmas launch without a single disaster.
It wasn't until a day or so later my Mom was cleaning up around the tree and asked the simple question "Did you ever water the tree?" Hmmmm, I didn't but I am sure that my husband did and so I checked. Fuck. The tree was bone dry. After interrogating the whole family I realized that no one had watered the tree. Double fuck. I went online and read that a tree needs water within a few hours of cutting otherwise it develops a layer of sap on the bottom that water cannot penetrate. Considering the tree had gone without water for like 36 hours I was pretty certain that if that sap layer was going to form it was already there. But Raif and I took the positive outlook approach and watered it anyway. Surely the water level would go down and so we waited and waited. It was akin to sitting in the ICU to see whether someone was going to live or die. Every once in awhile we uttered "Check to see if it has gone down." And so we would do our precise measuring of putting our fingers in and attempting to remember how high the water was the last time. "Oh, I think it has gone down a little" we would say but after 24 hours even we realized that the tree was about to be moved from the ICU to the morgue.
So what do we do? Our first instinct was to do nothing and see if it would last until December 26th but then the thought of having a brown tree Christmas morning left a little something to be desired. The kids would notice a new tree, so that was out. So our only option was to cut the bottom of this one off.
Now how do we manage that? The easy solution was to take the ornaments off the tree, cut it and redecorate. Normally that would have worked but my children, particularly Greyson, have become very fond of their ornaments. Every afternoon after school he heads straight to that tree and points to each and every ornament he put up and tells me that he put it up and some story about it. "Mommy, do you see my Choo-choo ornament? It's on its way to Kansas."
Clearly, I would never remember where every ornament was, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. And so we took a great leap of faith....
I took the most fragile ornaments off - the ones that Raif and I had put on. We took all the dog beds from around the house and circled the tree with them. And then with ornaments on, I lifted the tree out of the stand and my darling husband hacked the bottom of it off with his saw. My shoulders ached from holding that 7 foot tree up. My backed burned from the incessant vibrations from that saw and I sweated profusely over the thought of any of my children's precious ornaments breaking.
Believe it or not, we actually did it. The tree was cut and put back in place without even a minor incident (well except for the large amounts of sap that ended up on Raif. He still smells piney fresh) and the children are none the wiser. The tree started sucking up water like there was no tomorrow and was moved out of the ICU.
Now lets hope we can remember to water it for the next 3 weeks. Perhaps we should have gotten the fake tree.....
It wasn't until a day or so later my Mom was cleaning up around the tree and asked the simple question "Did you ever water the tree?" Hmmmm, I didn't but I am sure that my husband did and so I checked. Fuck. The tree was bone dry. After interrogating the whole family I realized that no one had watered the tree. Double fuck. I went online and read that a tree needs water within a few hours of cutting otherwise it develops a layer of sap on the bottom that water cannot penetrate. Considering the tree had gone without water for like 36 hours I was pretty certain that if that sap layer was going to form it was already there. But Raif and I took the positive outlook approach and watered it anyway. Surely the water level would go down and so we waited and waited. It was akin to sitting in the ICU to see whether someone was going to live or die. Every once in awhile we uttered "Check to see if it has gone down." And so we would do our precise measuring of putting our fingers in and attempting to remember how high the water was the last time. "Oh, I think it has gone down a little" we would say but after 24 hours even we realized that the tree was about to be moved from the ICU to the morgue.
So what do we do? Our first instinct was to do nothing and see if it would last until December 26th but then the thought of having a brown tree Christmas morning left a little something to be desired. The kids would notice a new tree, so that was out. So our only option was to cut the bottom of this one off.
Now how do we manage that? The easy solution was to take the ornaments off the tree, cut it and redecorate. Normally that would have worked but my children, particularly Greyson, have become very fond of their ornaments. Every afternoon after school he heads straight to that tree and points to each and every ornament he put up and tells me that he put it up and some story about it. "Mommy, do you see my Choo-choo ornament? It's on its way to Kansas."
Clearly, I would never remember where every ornament was, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. And so we took a great leap of faith....
I took the most fragile ornaments off - the ones that Raif and I had put on. We took all the dog beds from around the house and circled the tree with them. And then with ornaments on, I lifted the tree out of the stand and my darling husband hacked the bottom of it off with his saw. My shoulders ached from holding that 7 foot tree up. My backed burned from the incessant vibrations from that saw and I sweated profusely over the thought of any of my children's precious ornaments breaking.
Believe it or not, we actually did it. The tree was cut and put back in place without even a minor incident (well except for the large amounts of sap that ended up on Raif. He still smells piney fresh) and the children are none the wiser. The tree started sucking up water like there was no tomorrow and was moved out of the ICU.
Now lets hope we can remember to water it for the next 3 weeks. Perhaps we should have gotten the fake tree.....
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Christmas Memories
For our first Christmas with Greyson (right after we brought him home from the hospital) Raif gave me a beautiful set of picture ornaments with his picture in them. I have kept up the tradition and each year have gotten an ornament for each child and put my favorite picture of them from the year in it. When I am old and grey I hope that I have a tree filled with these memories.....
Thursday, December 3, 2009
It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
Normally, I am not a fan of putting up Christmas, Thanksgiving weekend. I have never really understood people who are decorating for Christmas before they have finished their last bite of turkey. It seems to me that Thanksgiving always gets the shaft, as far as holidays go. However, this year my parents were in town for Thanksgiving but won't be here for Christmas so I thought they might enjoy getting the tree and at least spending some of the Christmas season with the kids so off we went the Sunday after Turkey Day to our local Christmas Tree farm...
This is the first year that the kids have hung most of the ornaments and admittedly it was a bit nerve wracking watching them try to put our nice, shiny, highly breakable ornaments on the tree. But we survived relatively unscathed - thankfully the only ornaments that were dropped were made of wood.
Christmas here we come...
This is the first year that the kids have hung most of the ornaments and admittedly it was a bit nerve wracking watching them try to put our nice, shiny, highly breakable ornaments on the tree. But we survived relatively unscathed - thankfully the only ornaments that were dropped were made of wood.
Christmas here we come...
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