I check everyone’s blogs as frequently as I can because I’m dying for the latest update on how kids are doing, etc.  I just haven’t had time to work on my own.  When I checked it and realized that the last time I posted was when Titus had the stomach virus, I decided I needed to write, even if just for a minute.

Things are going ok in the Nichols house.  Liana is currently having some jealousy issues with Titus and needing lots of extra attention.  That would be fine except that her expression of that tends to be in whineing or goading Titus into hitting her or pulling her hair.  Or telling me she wants to go somewhere.  Or asking who’s coming over.  The list goes on.  Boy do I wish she was going to school this year.  It really seems like she might be ready - she just wants stimulation constantly.  On the positive side though, she’s working hard to learn to swim and is a real joy most of the time.

Titus is always Titus.  On the plus side, he continues to blow us away with the amount of learning that he is driven to do.  He knows the entire alphabet, can count to 10 most of the time, recognize the numbers written and came home counting to 5 in spanish the other day.  He’s just as cute and sweet as most 2 year olds are and can throw a fit to compete with the best of them.  He’s seriously so cute that it’s one of the reasons Liana is having so much trouble being jealous.  His eating is a different story.  He’s back ot eating almost no solid food at all.  I can still get him to eat french fries and he’s eating his non-dairy chicken nuggets from time to time.  He’ll lick syrup with the best of them, but that’s about it.  Part of the problem I think is that his 2 year molars are STILL coming in.  Otherwise, it’s just frustrating because he’s over 2 and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.  Out of desperation, we’ve almost transitioned him over to soy formula because sustaining a 30 pound 2 year old on Elecare is just astronomically expensive.  The soy formula isn’t cheap either though.  THere’s a possibility that we might be able to get help from insurance on a product from Bright Beginnings that’s basically pediasure but soy-based.  It’s a perfect product for us (potentially) because we’ll be confident that he’s getting nutriontally what he needs while he’s still working to eat solid food.  The only problem is that none of the pharmacies in town can get it.  So I’m waiting to talk to the referral specialist at our pediatrician’s office to find out what the next step is.  So we’ll see……….

Otherwise we’ve had a pretty good summer.  Getting back to Sports & Wellness has been great - we’ve had the kids at the pool every chance that we get and it’s been fun for everybody.

We were looking forward to a great weekend this weekend.  My dear friend Joyce was having a pool party with some people at work, mostly to see our kids and have fun in the pool.  We were sad we weren’t going to Colorado for Quincy and AJ’s birthday parties, but at the same time, I knew I wasn’t up for it - things have just been crazy lately and I’ve been pretty tired.  So, when Kathy called at 4:30 and said that Titus threw up all over the place, my only response was “you’ve GOT to be kidding.”  She definitely wasn’t.

I had Titus at the pediatric urgent care by 7pm Friday night.  Even though he wasn’t completely dehydrated yet, he couldn’t go more than 20 minutes without dry heaving his poor little stomach inside out.  So, the doctor went ahead and ordered an IV for him so that we wouldn’t get stuck admitting him by morning.  Admitting him?  Seriously?  So, poor little Titus had to have people poking him 4 times to try and get an IV going.  We were home by 9pm and hoping for better luck on Sat.

Sat. was pretty horrible just because he was so sick.  Todd was REALLY generous and offered to stay home while Liana & I went to the party.  The bad part was that Titus slept for almost 4 hours that afternoon and Todd had a really hard time rousing him to do anything besides sit in his lap.  So, Liana and I shot home and I called the doctor again.  A huge blessing was that one of the doctors that we know well was on call all weekend and working at the urgent care.  She said that we should probably bring him in again for more fluids because he still wasn’t holding anything down.  So, we got there, expecting that we’d just do the same thing over again and they wanted to do a fluid challenge first.  Well, that failed miserably.  So, they decided they needed to do an IV after all.  Since they’d blown the veins in both hands the night before, they had a big challenge getting an IV again.  After trying 4 times with different nurses, everyone was frustrated.  THey decided that they had to call someone down from the PICU since they were usually more skilled with hard cases or we were going to have to admit TItus to the hospital and do an NG tube instead of an IV.  That wouldn’t be a huge deal except that with Titus’ oral aversions, the tube could put him back a LONG way because things are so sensitive after they have them in.  Luckily, the guy from the PICU was really good.  He only had to try twice and finally got one in.  Unfortunately, it was so late by that time, that they had to transfer us to the ER to go through the fluids.  I was relaly dreading that because we’ve spent more than our share of nights in the ER, usually just waiting and no one doing anything.  This was definitely a much different experience than that.  I guess when you go into the ER with a 2 year old already hooked up to an IV, that you get a little more attention.  The doctor was really cool and very concerned that they were just pumping TItus full of fluids instead of really trying to determine whether something else was going on.  So, they did some bloodwork - bless the nurse who was able to get it through his IV instead of poking a new hole!!! - and was sat waiting for the fluids to get in.  The bloodwork was ok except that he was really dehydrated and his blood sugar was really low.  So, they finally gave him a medication for nausea (woo hoo!!!) and said that he had to hold down some apple juice to get his sugar back up before we went home.  He did hold it down, so she said we could go home but that if he threw up even once that we had to bring him back and admit him.  So, about 2:30am, we drove home.

Sunday started out about the same, except with less sleep.  Titus was so lethargic that we couldn’t get him off our laps at all.  We were trying to feed him juice or anything he would take (except water - they said we had to give him something with sugar).  By the time he went down for a nap at noon, I was resorting to putting gatorade in a syringe and feeding it to him.  I called the doctor again because I knew he wasn’t getting better and we were going the wrong direction.  She said to try an icee or something like that and if he wouldn’t take it, then we had to bring him in and admit him.  When he got up, we tried the icee and I might as well have been trying to pour acid into his throat.  I figured I’d get up and start packing a bag.  He started asking for a bottle and I thought well, we have nothing to lose.  Either he throws up the bottle and we get admitted or he doesn’t drink anything and we get admitted.  I made him a 1/2 strength 3 oz bottle and let him drink the whole thing.  He urped a few times, but kept it down and in about 5 or 10 minutes he actually got up out of my lap and started perking up.  So a few hours later, I gave him another small bottle and he did well.  Success!!!  We made it!

Unfortunately, about that time Todd started getting sick.  And I mean SICK.  He got what Titus had in spades.  I was still hopeful I’d escaped the germ, but it was not to be.  I got sick too around midnight and suffered all night long.  By morning, Todd & I realized that neither of us was capable of taking care of Titus (I’d planned to keep him home on Monday) so we sent him to Kathy’s anyway.   So, our weekend was a new definition of sucky.  Sometimes we really feel like we just don’t get a break.  Titus got exposed to milk again on Monday, so he had another reaction.  It’s hard because we can’t force her to use sippy cups, but come on!!!  Every time he’s exposed we get set back in terms of him growing out of the allergy.  We really can’t afford to keep him home in any way, but goodness it’s frustrating.

Enough gripeing.  We’re so grateful for our family, so grateful for my parent’s support (who have the kids tonight) and so grateful that God got us through the weekend without getting admitted to the hospital.  I was personally so grateful that God kept me well until Titus was past the crisis stage.  So, hopefully I’ll write more cheerful posts soon and have a few good pictures to post. 

Yesterday afternoon we had a discouraging episode.  I got to Kathy’s to pick up Titus and as he walked around the corner, my mouth dropped and the only thing I could say was “what happened to you?!?”  As I looked closer, I realized that Titus was having a major allergic reaction to something.  From the neck up all of his skin pores were turning into little blisters or hives.  They surrounded his eyes, down his hairline all over the back of his neck and on his nose and starting around his mouth.  At that point I just looked at Kathy and asked her where the Benadryl was.  I was seriously freaked out and scared because this was a way different reaction than I’ve ever seen him have.  We dosed him with Benadryl immediately and I started asking what he could have eaten.  The weird part at that point was that he didn’t have ANY hives on his trunk at all.  When he’s ingested milk, his whole trunk has the same reaction as his face did.  Kathy finally remembered that about 10 minutes earlier, he’d grabbed a cup of milk from one of the kids and had spilled it on his stomach when Kathy was changing his diaper.  She didn’t worry about it too much because he didn’t get any in his mouth.  I’m going to call the allergist this morning, but I’m 100% sure that’s why he reacted.  What I don’t understand is why there were no sores at all where the milk spilled on him, but his head was covered with them.

I was freaked out enough that I threw the kids in the car and went straight to Walgreen’s to pick up Titus’ Epi pen refill that I hadn’t gotten yet.  Kathy said she’d be a lot more comfortable with one at the house.  We’d never worried about it before because his reactions weren’t ever severe.  They’re getting worse, which is worrisome to me.  So, I took the Epi pen and a trainer to her this morning and showed her how to use it.  Last night Todd and I practiced with the trainer too just because that reaction really snapped us out of our own little delusion that Titus didn’t have “that” kind of allergies.  I’m praying it’s just milk.  But sitting on Kathy’s couch yesterday, I really felt like if it’s this bad, the chances of his out-growing it aren’t very good.  She agreed with me.  I don’t know if there’s any medical merit to that hunch or not, but it’s a scary thing to watch.  Afterwards I wished I’d had pictures of the reaction for reference for his doctors, but at the time all I wanted to do was throw Benadryl down his throat.  And praise God for it!! That stuff is amazing.  It stopped the reaction and started taking the hives down pretty quickly.  I had to dose him again before bed because the hives started reappearing and again this morning because his eyes were still pretty swollen, but hopefully by the end of today he’ll be back to normal. 

Hang in there little guy!!  We’ll get it figured out!!

I don’t have a pic yet, but I will post one tonight.  Liana met a little friend at the pool on Saturday who had swim goggles.  She of course thought they were the most awesome thing ever!  My mom, ever the attentive Nana, bought her some and brought them over on Sunday evening.  Liana of course was beside herself about the “sun gobbles.”  I thought I was going to die because I was trying so hard not to laugh!!  She starts swim lessons on Monday, so we’re doing everything we can to motivate her to get that little head in the water!!

This morning, Liana got up and came into the living room and proceeded to tell me that she was dreaming about really little mermaids.  She put her hand right above the carpet to show me just how little they were!!  She said that she’d like to be a little mermaid whose name is “ariel” (shock).  She then proceeded to tell Todd how they have tails to help them swim and she swam & swam around!  It’s not that big of a deal except that it’s the first time she’s come and told me about a dream and labeled it as a dream.  Every day is something new!!!

Well, ok, so it’s been a long week and that title is TOTALLY sarcastic.  We had a great weekend with the kids, a fun Memorial Day BBQ and then WHAM!!!  The kids both got a little cough and on Tuesday morning, Liana had a slight fever.  So, I decided I’d better stay home with her.  What happened next?  Well, I answer the phone about noon to find out that Titus projectile vomited in his sleep.  all over the babysitter’s couch.   twice.

So, I walked up there with Liana and picked him up.  We wondered if it was a fluke because Titus can projectile vomit for a large variety of reasons and it’s not all that remarkable actually. Well, within an hour, the poor little guy threw up like 4 more times and had the dry heaves something fierce.  Apparently not a fluke.  I suffered through that day and kept him home again on Wed. because I still hadn’t really fed him anything.  Liana, however, was bouncing off the walls, so I sent her back to Kathy’s at noon.  She played fine and enjoyed herself.

Until 5am this morning, when she started vomiting profusely.  sigh.  Well, at least Titus was well enough to take to daycare, so I sent him with my mom up to Kathy’s and she stayed at my house long enough for me to take a shower.  I seriously lost track of how many times Liana threw up in the morning.  And yet, right after she threw up for like the 8th time she was PISSED that I wouldn’t give her pizza.  I decided then that it was a toss-up whether a 2 year old or a verbal 4 year old was easier to convince that just because your stomach feels better NOW, doesn’t mean that a feast is a good idea.  Who was it that made up that rule that you have to wait an hour before you can offer them anything?  Someone mean, that’s for sure!!!

So, it was a long day.  HOWEVER, the joy part comes here.  While we were having to cover everything with blankets and towels for Titus, Liana has figured out the “puke bowl” concept and either made it to the bathroom or threw up in the bowl every time.  What a big girl!!  I was seriously proud of her for some bizarre reason.  Is that really such a huge right of passage?  Somehow it seemed like it was.  She’s not a baby anymore and can figure out what her body is telling her and get to somewhere reasonable to throw up.  The fact that I feel it is so momentous probably has something to do with the fact that I have hardly left the house in over 3 days and am missing more work than I can afford.  :)  But still………..joy is found in the most bizarre of circumstances. 

Just to finally follow-up on my post about Antonio, I finally was able to talk to Carlos today and they lost Antonio last week.  He said that they’re trying to put their lives back together, but it’s slow and they’re obviously devastated.  It sounds like Monica is not doing very well and they’re going to try and put Carlos Juan into daycare with Kathy up the street.  I hope that Kathy takes him, but we’ll see.  I’m just so sad for them, but can’t even begin to relate to what they’re going through and Carlos said that he obviously was incapable of putting into words how they’re feeling.

So, if God puts them on your heart, please pray for healing and comfort as they go through the grieving process. 

about the saying that God only gives us as much as we can handle?  or the one that says what won’t kill you will make you stronger?  And then you wonder that you might be going through something that might just be the last straw?   It just seems like so many hard things are happening to the wonderful people around us.  Things that dwarf our frustration with Titus and his continued resistance to eating.

Our dear friend Amy is being dragged through all kinds of stress & hardship with her son’s illness, yet to be diagnosed.  Her friend Alyssa just had a memorial for her daughter, Sydney, who was tragically still born last November.  Our neighbors Carlos & Monica are in Paraguay with their son who was born after an abruption at 29 weeks.  We haven’t heard any news, but by all accounts, the prospects were not good.   Our secretary’s mother just died on Saturday and her nephew is going to have open heart surgery this week.  Our daycare provider, Kathy, had a brother-in-law who had a lung removed from cancer a few months ago and was doing well and cancer free.  He began to have trouble breathing and within 2 weeks or so died on May 3. 

I don’t question God or why “bad things happen to good people.”  Is it just that we’re getting older and the more time that passes the higher the likelihood that you’ll know people who have encountered significant hardships?   I’m not sure.  But lately I’ve had a really strong urge to collect everyone I love as close as I can to keep an eye on them.  Probably a result of being the oldest.  :)  Mother hen complex or something.   It just seems like God is allowing some things that you just can’t figure out how folks get through it.  God’s strength is supreme, that’s for sure.  But still.  It just seems like a scary world out there.

This might not sound very exciting or worth celebrating to most people, but anyone with a child with sensory processing disorder will really appreciate why we had such a great day!!  We started this morning with a pseudo-garage sale.  Our neighbors were having one so we threw out a few things on the driveway.  I think we made $11.  But we got rid of things, which is many times more important.  :)  But the kids came out and played on the driveway and Liana tried to sell things to people. I’m not sure who could say no when a 4-year-old asks you “do you want to buy this light?”, but garage salers can be pretty ruthless.  It was a beautiful morning, so I just sat out on the drivway and the kids ran around outside or stayed in the house watching tv and playing.  Can I tell you that’s the FIRST time that’s every happened?  No whining, no crying, no fussing, no wanting to be held all morning.  Just a really nice morning.  Then we went and bought a new swamp cooler and came back for naps.  Both kids took a good nap and I even squeezed one in too after I dug up some day lilies for my friend Elisa. 

After naps, Liana, Titus and I went to Elisa’s house to deliver the lilies and Matthew taught Liana about cacti and the kids got to explore their yard.  Again, no fussing, no wanting up the whole time, nothing!  They just played and enjoyed themselves and I got to chat with grownups.  what a concept!    When we got back we picked Todd up and went to Spectators for dinner and to watch the Red Wings game.  Todd had the brilliant idea of sitting in a big corner booth so that when Titus got tired of coloring he walked around on the chair, ate his french fries and was generally delightful.  It’s rare that we get more than 20 minutes or so in a restaurant (which is why we never go out to eat) because he gets to agitated at being cooped up in a high chair and being around food.  It sounds completely ridiculous to let him walk on the booth seat, but it’s a sports bar type of place and everyone knows us.  Besides, he’s so darned cute that no one can get mad at him.

Anyway, it was such a nice, relaxing day with only what I’d consider “normal” periods of fussiness or issues.  He even ate a few tater tots, some soy yogurt and some french fries.  So, some improvement.  Maybe from our recent cranial sacral appt?  who knows.  I’m just so thankful that I wanted to get it down in writing so that when we have a realy bad day, I can look back and remind myself that everyone has good and bad days and more good ones are on the way!

Our nextdoor neighbors, Carlos and Monica have a son, Carlos Juan who just turned two and she’s been pregnant with their second.  Three weeks ago they had to go to Argentina because Monica’s mom died suddenly.  Carlos came back this past week and I knew Monica wasn’t with him but didn’t know why.  I thought she’d probably just extended her stay in Argentina.  I finally saw Carlos this morning and he told me that while they were there, Monica had a placental abruption at 29 weeks.  They were able to get the baby out, but apparently he’s not doing well and so Carlos was on his way back to South America today.  The worse part (if there is one) is that they were in Paraguay when it happened, so she’s in a hospital in Paraguay instead of Argentina.  I’m not sure what kind of medical care they’re getting or if there’s anyone there with her.  Carlos was talking like they didn’t expect the baby to make it and I told him we’d be lifting up prayers for them.  The baby is a boy named Antonio.  They had to have fertility treatment to get pregnant with him, so he was even more precious to them than might have been the case.

Please pray for Carlos, Monica and Antonio.  I’m praying for a miracle!!

Tonight, Liana was lying on her stomach when we were playing the Diego game and starting kicking her feet on the floor in a beat.  About the time I was getting annoyed because I’m tired, she said “Mom, I’m kicking my feet on the floor just like my heart!”  And I’ll be darned but it sounded exactly like a heartbeat!