On Father’s Day we went to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom with the Bs. We had a wonderful time. Lucas was brave and well-behaved. Asher suffered the heat well. Thanks, Bs!

Edit 6/28/07: Didn’t have much time to write about this yesterday. I actually managed to post that little bit and the photos while on a conference call for work. Tee hee.

Perhaps I’ll post more of Ian’s butterfly pictures another time. He got some lovely shots with our new(ish) lens.

A friend I used to work with writes:

“Everyone loves the story [of Asher’s birth]. Someday your son will love it too. He’ll forget to close the door and his friends will say, “Were you born in a barn?!” And he’ll say, “No, a shower.”

I’m making an effort to find fun and interesting things to do this summer, so that Lucas will be entertained in between all the baby naps, diaper changes, and nursing sessions. (For the most part, Lucas is patient with the amount of time it takes to care for Asher, so that’s good. He’s gotten into the habit of lowering his voice when Asher is sleeping and playing quietly in the other room. He still comes in to whisper at me a lot, but hey–at least he whispers.)

This morning I saw a hummingbird visit our yard. They do so fairly often, probably because we have a lot of flowers. This particular hummingbird visited the red plastic rim of Lucas’s basketball hoop. It gave me an idea.

We packed up our stuff and went to the Wild Birds and Gardens (http://www.wildbirdsandgardens.com/index.html) shop at Madison and Sunrise (I think Kimkimkaree used to work there at one time). We announced our intetion of buying a bird feeder and were soon set up with a feeder, nectar mix, and a recipe for making our own nectar later on. We came home and Lucas cleaned our new feeder with sudsy water. We mixed up the nectar, filled the feeder, and hung it on our tree in the backyard. It was fun. I’m hopeful that the birds will visit and find the feeder soon. It seems likely. I told the store lady that we needed the kind of bird watching that was going to be super rewarding, otherwise the five-year-old would give up on it. She said a hummingbird feeder was the way to go for beginners.

My grandma RoRo is now 88 years old. She was born Rose Anne, I suppose. Every time I’ve asked her about her name, she dissembles. But she goes by Anne. The very first “grandchild” [Not so. I am the first grandchild] called her RoRo. It stuck.

It’s been a very tough year for her so far. I got very sick. Then she fell and broke her hip/leg, had surgery, did physical therapy, etc. Now she has a torn meniscus. Her sister Mary died less than a month ago. Her other sister’s Alzheimer’s disease is very frustrating for Ro. Family MONEY SHIT is now GOING DOWN. The evil side of the family is making a play for the family fortune. Lawyers. The whole shebang. This is and will continue to be a very painful thing for RoRo to endure.

RoRo is one of those women who never allowed the apron strings to be cut. She has two sons and has managed to maintain her position in the center of her sons’ worlds all this time, to the chagrin of their wives. She can be vain, selfish, manipulative, and self-pitying. She is also one of the most generous people I’ve ever known. Over the years she has given me fantastic gifts, including fine jewelery and a new car when I was 18. (I have come to realize that her “love language” is gift giving.) When I was a girl, she indulged my love of pink things–until I told her I was over pink. She let me have birthday parties in her swimming pool. She took me to Gunther’s ice cream. She attended all my high school plays. She bought Christmas gifts for my boyfriends so they wouldn’t feel left out during the holidays. She wrote me letters (and sent money) all the years I was away at college, and I believe she is not inherently a letter writer. She shares my love of plants and flowers and looks forward to the next time we can go to the nursery together. She recently proudly showed me an orchid plant in full bloom that I gave to her four years ago. She dotes on my sons, and would dearly love it if Lucas would pay a little more attention to her and if Asher would lay quietly like a little newborn so she could gaze into his face.

Tonight we are going out to Frank Fats for dinner to celebrate her birth. I love her to pieces, for all her quirks.

Yes. Lucas has pinkeye. Probably from the gym pool, but who knows? At first it was only in one eye, but he’s five–yes, you guessed it: Place finger in infected eye, next, place same finger in uninfected eye. Repeat a hundred thousand times. Voila.

We have medication now. (Eye drops are a whole new adventure.) But because pinkeye is so contagious, Lucas has been home with me and Asher for 2.5 days now. Driving. Me. CRAZY. We’ve had to cancel two play dates with his friends. Yesterday was pretty good. Today he hasn’t left me alone for a moment all day long. I might just have to kill him. Did I mention he never stops talking? Ever. (I’m currently experimenting on him. My hypothesis is that he talks a little less if there’s music playing.)

I’m a good mom. I’m just not cut out to be a full-time mom. A little bit of daycare goes a long way to keeping me sane, in addition to allowing me to earn a living.

Asher doesn’t have pinkeye. Yet. Lucas has a terrible time remembering not to touch the baby’s face, hands, feet.

My ob/gyn gave me good news on Thursday in a really crappy way. I’ll get to the crappy part in a minute.

I thought there was only one cyst on my ovary, but it turns out there were actually two: one on each side. The one on the left, which I didn’t know about, has gone away. The one on the right is smaller. This is very good. Also, the fluid they said was in my abdomen back in March is now gone completely. The blood test revealed that my levels of CA-125 are in the normal range. So, yay. It’s not ovarian cancer. Just some pesky cysts, which appear to be resolving themselves without any intervention. Good.

The crappy part is that I got a call on Wednesday afternoon saying I should come in the next day because they had a cancellation and the doctor wanted to see me. I knew it would be about the recent ultrasound and blood test results. I thought, great, the doctor wants to see me instead of calling me on the phone to tell me that I’m healthy. And it’s the doctor who wants to see me instead of her many NPs. (She has a huge and thriving practice in Roseville.)

I spent a somewhat tortured night and day waiting for my 2:45 appointment time to roll around. Asher and I then waited AN HOUR AND A HALF in the waiting room to see the ob/gyn. When she finally saw me, she pulled me into her office … with the desk … and the two chairs … and the doll collection (creepy), instead of talking with me in the exam room. Then she had to interpret the results there, as though she were looking at them for the first time. Slowly, ever so slowly, she told me the … GOOD news.

I was very happy to hear it, but could have killed her for her tenderhooks methodology.

Asher is growing into his cheeks, I think. He doesn’t look quite so fat … from the neck up. His eyes are still a sparkly blue. I think they’re a little lighter in color now. They seem lighter than Lucas’s eyes.

Asher has found his toes! Great, great fun can be had with toes.

Don’t know what he weighs at this point, but it’s time to make an appointment for another round of vaccinations. 🙁 I’ll find out then.

We have a pretty good rhythm going on most days. I am greatly looking forward to the time when he’ll give up his nighttime screaming. Instead of being between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. like it was, it’s now happening later. More like 9 p.m. We have even less emotional resources to draw from at this hour, unfortunately. Also, this blowup is cutting into Lucas’s snuggle time with me. That’s a big bummer because bedtime is sometimes the only time that Lucas slows down enough to be cuddled. Asher usually quiets down and goes to sleep when I come out of Lucas’s room to comfort him. I think the fact that he only settles down for me is frustrating for Ian. I know it’s frustrating for me sometimes.

Pottying Stuff
He’s using the potty beautifully now! Between about 3 and 9 times a day, Asher goes in his potty. It’s hard to know when he needs to pee; I’m still trying to suss out a consistent, clear signal. But I’m getting better and better at knowing his body rhythms, so I still “catch” a fair number of pees every day. He almost always poops in the potty now. Maybe one time a week he poops in his diaper, and that is often because we’re out and about and I’m not able to get him to the potty. I hope that he will soon adapt to going in a real toilet because that will greatly expand out options when we’re out in the world. So far, though, it seems that he feels physically insecure when I hold him over a real toilet. He hasn’t gone potty there yet, and kind of fusses when we try.

At night, pottying is easier. He actually wakes me up when he has to pee! He starts to squirm and kick and make little “ehn ehn” sounds. Gradually I wake up, check his diaper. If he’s dry, I take it off him and set him on the potty (which is sitting in the co-sleeper beside the bed). Usually, he pees as soon as he’s awake enough to realize he’s sitting on the potty. Then he smiles at me. I put all his clothes back on him. Usually by the time he’s suited up again, he’s fast asleep. I used to think he was waking up to nurse several times each night! Now I think that’s true maybe once per night. The other times he wakes up he needs to pee. Weird. We’ve had many nights when he wakes up in the morning wearing the same cloth diaper he went to bed wearing.

K. That’s all for now.

http://images.burningman.com/index.cgi?image=27477&results=27571,27492,27479,27478,27477,27453,27451,27401,27387,27374,26440,27358,27307,27263,27236,27224,27213,27209,27206,27205&ord=85/1817&skip=80&q_photog=&q_category=people&q_keyword=&q_year

Photo by Ken Ketchum

Thanks for pointing this out, PirateGirl.

It’s been a while since I wrote about Lucas, where he is in space/time.
The books say that 5 years old is a dream age. I now see glimpses of that in my son, almost as if he’s still settling into the age (he’s just over a month into 5 now).

Verbally, Lucas has adopted a couple of new quirks. He now says things like, “I SO want to do that, Mom.” Or, “I SO need to have a cookie right now. I’m starving.” It’s SO cute. He also seems just a tad more sophisticated. When he speaks now, I hear echoes of Tish-Tash (which is the handle her mommy gave her, I believe).

He’s growing again, too. I had to wrestle him down yesterday morning to cut his toe nails. His feet are freakin’ huge! Perhaps having Asher around as a contrast has made me realize how much Lucas has grown. His feet are kid feet now. They’re dirty and stinky. They have calluses and rough spots. His brown body is sprinkled with little white scars here and there. He’s lived long enough to acquire scars! He’s longer and leaner than ever before. Every week or two I put another shirt or pair of pants into the too-small pile to be stored for his brother to wear someday.

There is less tantruming now and instead he uses more sophisticated and subtle means of defiance. Lucas is a master at stalling, dilly-dallying, delaying. He can be coaxed along in dressing and the like, but we have to be rather tricky about it. We have races in the morning, for example: Can Lucas get dressed and ready for school before Daddy gets out of the shower?

Except sometimes there is a tantrum. If it gets to that point, he is as likely now to strike out physically as when he was two. His increased worldliness has brought him an inflated sense of his own physical prowess. Exposure to things like Ninja Turtles TV ads, a smidgeon of knowledge about karate and boxing, have turned him into a little fighter when he gets mad. It frustrates me immensely. Play boxing with Daddy seemed harmless at first (and Ian might still say it’s harmless), but in my opinion, it coincided with Lucas’s trying out fighting moves on me when he is pissed off. He boasts, “I’m stronger than you, Mom! I can box you!” We come down on him like a ton of bricks when he raises a hand to me. There can simply be no tolerance for that behavior. It won’t be too many more years before he is bigger than me. Fortunately, there aren’t reports of him fighting other children, but I don’t know that for sure.

Lucas is a motion machine. Not that I have an experienced eye, but it seems to me that he’s extremely athletic. As such, injuries abound. What in the world would we do without the boo-boo bag (cold pack) that we keep in the freezer?

Nobody can make Asher laugh the way Lucas can! Lucas enjoys clowning. He even gets jealous if someone else makes the baby smile or giggle. “Daddy! You’re getting all the smiles!” “Mommy, you always put Asher so he’s facing you!” What he means is we’re hogging HIS baby. Lucas is very gentle with Asher. He’s shown nothing but love and kindness to his little brother. We praise him for this as much as possible. We flatter him and tell him how much Asher loves him, how Asher is going to look up to him, how Asher is going to want to do everything like his big brother. Lucas is proud to show off Asher to his friends. He’s proud to be a big brother.

He’s also very excited to finally be “an older kid” in the Red Rose. Next fall, when school starts again, there will be new classmates who are younger than him.

Today we all celebrated five “pee-free” nights in a row. For the last two weeks or so, Lucas and Daddy have been working on nighttime potty training. Up to now, Lucas has been wearing pull-ups at night. We are delighted that he’s finally having success staying dry at night. (I wish I had known about EC when Lucas was a baby!) I’m hoping that he can completely master toileting this summer.

Lucas is doing pretty well with his new chores. He’s learning to fold his own clean laundry, and so far is doing it with joyful enthusiasm. Today, he revealed that he could help me fold sheets. He volunteered to help and then taught me the rhyme that they say in kindergarten when folding up sheets or big pieces of fabric. Wonderful!

Here’s Lucas playing his electric guitar and rocking out!

At 7:45 this morning, the very first day of summer vacation, Lucas announced “I’m bored.”

Yikes.