Bear from Daddy

The USO has a program where you can go online and send little bears back to your kids/family for free while you are deployed. Colin got his package in the mail the other day and was excited to have mail from Daddy to open.

Wordless Wednesday

OK Perhaps I should explain...Colin has been going to daycare with a little girl now, she wears earrings, Colin is in love. On the way home from the sitter one day he was playing with his dinosaur sticker page and moving the stickers around on the mat. He got real quiet in the back for a while and then proudly shouted "Colin have pretties!" I turned around to see every sticker on the page piled on top of one another and covering his ears to look like earrings. It was hilarious. I had to take pictures before he took them off.

Up-chuck

The last thing anyone wants to hear on the baby monitor at 1:30 am is "uh oh, Mommy come look!" I came and looked and found puke all over the bed and the kid. I got it all cleaned up, new sheets on the bed, Colin cleaned up and pj's changed, and I was just about to tuck him back into bed when.....yep, puke again. Fantastic! That kicked off the barfing marathon and the poor little guy was throwing up or dry heaving every 20-30 minutes from 1:30am until 9:30am. He got to the point where he would feel he was about to be sick and just start crying and saying "no want it, no want it!" I felt so horrible for him. He couldn't get his tummy to settle, but at least he was attempting to drink some Pedialyte for me in between pukes.

My computer with all the movies on it has been in the shop for over a week so I am limited to what I actually have on DVD here at the house, and that isn't a whole lot when it comes to kid movies. There are 10-15 in the drawer and we've seen all those in the last week while the computer has been out. We watched three movies before the sun even came up this morning, and if I was going to make it through this day on three hours sleep I was not going to be watching the same movies over and over.

I called a friend who ran over a basket full of DVDs for us to watch and some medicine called Vomex you can get from the German pharmacy here over the counter. It is supposed to ease nausea. I waited for Colin to throw up and then right away gave him the meds hoping that would give it the max absorption time before it got tossed. To my surprise he actually kept it down, along with some drink and fell asleep on the couch for 3.5 hours. YAY! I was right next to him sleeping on the couch trying to take advantage of the opportunity myself. When he woke up he ate a little and drank some, and it all stayed down, but you could tell he wasn't feeling back to normal.

This is the first time he's ever been puke-y sick. I hope we can make it another two and a half years before he gets puke sick again, this sucks! Tonight when I put him to bed he had a 102 fever, so it's not over yet. I will have to call out of work again tomorrow to stay with him. I will be SO ready to go back to work on Friday. I am praying I don't catch it, but it does not look good. Kids have been puking all over the school for the last couple of days, friends I know all have sick kids, Colin's babysitter caught it this morning too and has been trying not to die all day herself. I got the stupid flu shot I was required to get for work, so maybe, just maybe I can sneak out of this one. We shall see....

Wordless Wednesday

Another Day, Another Bump

I swear I either need to bubble wrap the kid or keep him in a cage! He is on a roll this weekend. Today started off nice, we blew bubbles outside and played on the swingset for a long time. It was damp outside because it had been raining off and on all morning, so the bubbles were sticking to the ground and not bursting when they hit it.

Colin found this fascinating and would blow some bubbles, then go around and pick them all up on his wand and blow them around again. Then he decided to blow them just to stomp on them, because he could.


After blowing bubbles Colin wanted to draw with the sidewalk chalk. Then he wanted me to draw with the chalk. He made very specific requests and there were a lot of Mommy and Baby dinosaurs and Mommy and Baby snakes.

We wrote messages to Daddy and traced our bodies, which Colin thought was hysterical.

Then we came inside for lunch. Colin doesn't like his high chair but cannot sit still on the couch long enough to eat. Today he was bouncing around on the couch and playing while eating his food. Sure enough he finally got too big for his britches and fell into the table while bouncing around. We have a coffee table that the top raises up and the top was up so we could eat on it. Well he fell into it and the top went down and then he went down onto the corner of the table face first. He hit HARD and I was waiting for the blood. Thankfully it just bruised the crap out of him and barely broke the skin, more of an indentation that anything. He got a huge goose egg, the pictures don't do it justice, they were taken too soon after before it really popped out and turned color.

Poor kiddo looks like a mess. Between the busted up eye and the knot on his head...good thing I wasn't trying to have pictures taken anytime soon. The child has a death wish and he's gonna give me a heart attack!

Running with Sticks

Running with Sticks

Today was just not my day. I stayed up late watching TV and talking with Shelby online thinking Colin would sleep in a little bit. I should have known I was jinxing myself right from the start. He was up at 6:45 and I was tired all day. My plan for the morning was to pop in a movie for Colin and clean as fast as I could for the 90 minutes the movie bought me. Of course any other time my kid would be begging to watch a movie and glued to the TV...not today. He was up my butt the entire morning and didn't watch 10 minutes of the movie. A 30-40 minute cleaning job of the upstairs bathrooms took about 2 hours with a "little helper" in the way. Toilet brush as a toy, my coffee spilled all over the place, spraying cleaner on everything in sight...oye. Then we hit the downstairs and picked up and swept the floors. It was sunny and 48 outside this morning so I was dying to get outside and let Colin play and check out the yard. Finally all the cleaning was done and I went upstairs to get changed so we could go outside. When I came back down I discovered Colin had played with the rabbit and dumped half the contents of the rabbit cage all over the clean floor. So it was back to cleaning and dragging out the vacuum, again. Sigh.

Eventually we did make it outside, right before lunch time. We blew bubbles and filled the bird feeders and played some. The ground has been thawed for a week or two now and with the temps in the 40's it is tricking the plants into thinking it's spring. Many of my bulbs in my flower beds are beginning to sprout up through the soil and my yard full of crocus is beginning to grow back. Colin was very interested in watching the bees travel from flower to flower in the yard and spent a lot of time squatting in the yard keeping an eye on them.

We hadn't been outside very long when Colin tripped and fell on one of the two bamboo plant stakes he was carrying around. I saw the whole thing happen and rushed over to check out his face, when I realized the stick hit him in the eye. Then the blood started running. I tried not to freak out as I threw him on the hood of my car to assess the cut. Too much blood so I had to run inside and clean some off. Blood now coming from his nose is scaring the shit out of me. Eye is swelling, but from what I can tell it is only a nice gash to the eyelid centimeters above his eye, and no damage to his actual eyeball. The bleeding slows down to almost nothing and he is not crying anymore, but it still looks pretty wide and I am worried it needs a stitch or two. I have had only a cup...scratch that, half a cup courtesy of helper Colin...of coffee all day, no food at all and the sight of my kid in pain is making me sick. I put Colin in front of the computer to show Shelby his eye on Skype and see what he thinks. He can't tell how bad it is, but he talks to Colin and entertains him long enough for me to go toss the minimal contents of my stomach into the kitchen sink. I can do blood and guts, just not the blood and guts of my baby.

I decided we probably should have it looked at, so we loaded up and headed to the ER. By the time we got there he was pretty much fine aside from dried blood. He was running around the waiting area like a nut and people were probably thinking "no wonder he busted his eye open!" If they only knew that I was thinking "I can't believe we made it to two and a half before needing stitches!" Forty minutes after signing in we got called back to triage and the nurse confirmed my fear, stitches necessary. I was so hoping I was just overreacting and they would slap some bacitracin and a bandaid on it and send me home. Wishful thinking...Colin did fantastic though. He didn't cry a bit, he cooperated for the doc and let him do everything he needed to. I also learned this nifty little trick of wrapping him up in a sheet to restrain his arms...yea this might come in handy during those nightly wrestling matches over teeth brushing. Teeth brushing is a two v. Colin job and with Daddy gone, Mommy has been getting her butt kicked. This just might have leveled the playing field, score one for Mommy! Colin really did amazing, he didn't even so much as whimper and all it took was two lollipops. One during the cleaning/assessing of the wound and one for the actual sutures part. One teeny tiny stitch was all it took.

Later on after Colin's bath he was playing with his dinosaurs on Skype in front of Shelby. He would have the dinosaurs roar and fight and then one would fall over and he would tell me that the dinosaur was hurt and needed to go to the doctor. It was pretty funny. He seems not to mind the stitch and has been leaving it alone so far. We get to go back and have it removed in 7 days, hopefully he can do as well removing it as he did getting it put in. Moral of the story: listen to your mother. She knew what she was talking about when she told you not to run with sticks/scissors/sharp objects, you really can poke your eye out!

Wordless Wednesday

Stinkin sense of humor

The kid sure can crack me up. Today he and I were playing in our hideaway fort built of chairs and a big blanket. While inside playing the tent began to stink. Very. Very. Bad. I looked at Colin and began to sniff loudly and before I could get the words out of my mouth to ask him if he had pooped, he cut me off. He looks at me, head cocked with a funny face and starts sniffing loudly back at me. Then he proceeded to push me over, put his nose to my butt, sniff and then looked at me and shouted "P.U. Mommy make stinky poopie!" Just as serious as could be. Trying to fight back laughter I looked at him and said "Mommy made poopie? I think Colin made poop!" He started laughing and said "No, no, no Colin nooooo make poopie!" Yea mmm hmmmm, nice try Colin!

Wordless Wednesday