OPEN CUP SUCCESS!

I can't believe I'm writing this. Six days of Kittyboy drinking only from a cup requiring his head to be in a neutral position - and offering him a cup with no lid at least two or three times a day - and this afternoon, I didn't even stress about finding him a lid when he was thirsty. Since Sunday morning, he has taken off. He can drain 2-3 ounces without incident before he asks for a lid. It should come as no surprise that his speech has gotten a little bit clearer, and meals are starting to move a little faster - less stalling while he figures out what to do with the next bite. New muscles are getting exercised, and it is a marvelous thing.
And no cough - his sinuses are acting up, but I've sneezed a lot today, so no doubt it's just something different in bloom.
I'm just in awe. Soooooo cool.
God is so good!!!

The Adoption of Old Blue

Dear Readers,
Meet our new family member. Old Blue, as he has been named, is old enough to purchase his own alcohol if he so desired, though he prefers only gasoline (unleaded, please - his gas gauge requests).

Yes, that is a tape deck! I have a tape deck! The historical geek in me is absolutely thrilled to bits! Now I need cassette tapes! I know I have lots of Byzantine and Russian chant on cassette! Obviously, I shall be requiring more!

I drooled over these gauges the whole way home. I just love the boxy 80s look, they're so cool.
Okay, now really, we as a society are so out of touch when it comes to what constitutes luxury in a car. Luxury is not a navigational system that will happily direct you into buildings - rather, it is having plush velvet armchairs for front seats (above) and a couch in back (below).
Old Blue is an '88 Mercury Grand Marquis, a family heirloom generously passed down to us from a generous relative. I learned to drive in a 70-something Plymouth Grand Fury III jokingly named Christine (after the Stephen King novel by the same name), and fondly remember family road trips with ALL SIX of us in one car, comfortable as can be. Three in front, three in the back, and forget leg room, we children had sprawl room. Spread out a bit, have your bag with books and games or whatever in front of you, life was grand and glorious. Why, oh why, do they not make cars like that anymore? Forget having a TV screen in my car, I want plushness and comfort and sprawl room! Surely, surely you could take the interior dimensions of these ocean liners of the road and partner it with one of today's smaller, more efficient engines. Much easier to get in and out of than a minivan or an SUV.
And now, should Kittyboy happen to actually attain the roof of our house (for which he strives repeatedly, attempting to climb our backyard TV antenna that looks exactly like a ladder) and fall off of it, or do something similarly dramatic, I have a vehicle with which to go to the doctor! This is to be my "round about town" car - just around town, gentle driving, this is a car to coddle and pamper. I also think Old Blue will look quite handsome and dignified in the church parking lot. The perfect car for a leisurely Sunday morning and afternoon drive to somewhere two miles away!

Open Cup Trials, Day One

I realize the first three words of that subject line look totally random. "Open cup" means a cup without a lid, a Big Boy cup, a regular ol' cup like those from which most of the world consume their beverages. "Trials" as in trying something out, as in you hear of the FDA having a drug in "clinical trials".
We are trying Kittyboy, at the age of 2.5, on an open cup. No straw, no head-down positioning, just up, up and away with a totally open cup and his head aallll the way back so his airway's nice and open, so he can cough and aspirate all he wants and develop bronchitis or pneumonia in the middle of summer! What FUN!
Okay, so the majority of that last paragraph was sarcasm.
Kittyboy has drank through a straw for over a year. Prior to that, it was a bottle, thickened liquid only, with him on his side and the bottle propped at a goofy angle. He had to drink with his head down to protect his airway, because his lazy little undeveloped airway couldn't be bothered to protect itself. It would leak into his sinuses and occasionally into his lungs (not into his lungs so much after we switched from rice cereal to an actual food thickener). So when he started on actual food, his speech therapist (speech therapists address feeding issues as well as speech, since it's all the same muscles) started him on a straw cup. Head down, airway protected, all was cool, and it was a cup not a bottle. So that's what he's been using until now. He was slowly weaned off thickener, I posted last Thanksgiving about his last video swallow study showing that he was safe with thin liquids now. But he wouldn't cooperate at the time for them to test him with an open cup (a sippy cup would have been a developmental step backwards, straws are considered more advanced, so an open cup is the next step).
We tried open cups off and on, and water bottles and such, and it didn't go so well, mainly because he didn't have a halfway point between "head down" and "head all the way back", which totally opens his airway. When I got some old Tupperware sippy cups that had open spouts (not spouts with tiny holes), I decided we would just go to those cups only and see what happened. About a week after we started, he tipped his head AAALLL the way back, and totally aspirated. He had a cough that night - and the next day - and the next night - and three or four days later, he had verifiable bronchitis. The doctor's advice was that since you can't ask a disease where it came from (though he also thought the cup was the cause, more likely than not), stop the sippy/open cup trials and start again in summer, after cold and allergy season and before fall allergy season starts, so that if it happens again, we'll know for a fact it was his drinking and not something that he might have gotten anyway.
So today, July 1st, easy date to remember if we have to take him in with a cough, I pulled out one of the Tupperware cups again. He'll drink from it any time he's not in the car, because if he started gasping while in the car, I would have to park, get out, run around the car, get him out, just way more time involved than would be safe. He had a straw cup with breakfast, but his "big boy" cup at lunch.
And boy, oh boy, do I have a newfound respect for the expertise and patience of SLPs who do feeding. I'm teaching him the term "head up" (neutral position) as opposed to "head back" which is tilted definitely back, and that's going okayish, that'll improve with practice, we've only done one meal so far. He can practice head position by itself with the lid on. But mouth positioning without the lid? I'd forgotten all the body-awareness hassles when he first started drinking from a straw cup and would forget to close his mouth. Or firmly believe it WAS closed, and stare at you cluelessly as the whole mouthful poured down his chin while you said "Close-your-mouth-close-your-mouth-close-your-mouth, oh drat." Poor body awareness - he didn't know his mouth was open, or couldn't remember how to close it. We stripped him before all meals. He learned to keep his mouth closed after drinking through the straw, but now can't figure out how to close his mouth only partway for a cup. TOTALLY different skill set. And he stares at me blankly while I say, "Open more - close a little - no, don't bite the cup" while I try to MAKE his mouth do what it has to. I may get bitten one of these days. I tried kneeling next to the high chair so he could see from the side how Mommy drinks her coffee from her open cup, and that was when I saw that his tongue is totally in the way and he won't/can't keep it down. I believe we'll be starting meals with the vibrating toothbrush again, and "Tongue down and close your mouth dear" may be added to the list of things I will be saying the rest of his life, like, "Now chew and swallow before your next bite."
Fourteen years from now, we'll be hearing, "Mom, I can drive a car. Could you please, please stop telling me how to eat!"
But hey, the couple times he coughed, he recovered fine and there's no lingering cough yet. One meal down, many to go.

Parental Fears

I am watching an episode of "Ray Bradbury Theater" entitled "The Playground". It's not easy to watch if you've ever been bullied. The main character, Charles, is a single dad who keeps his son Steve from playing with other kids. Haunted by the bullies he faced as a child, he wants to save his son from ever being hurt, and so at the age of six, Steve has never gone to the playground.
Do parents everywhere see themselves in their children? I know Charles and I hold something in common - we worry about our children facing the problems we did. I don't fear bullies on the playground, Kittyboy's personality is strong enough for ten. I worry about him being misunderstood - about him misunderstanding others. That was my problem - not "getting" other kids. First or second grade, I had been to several girls' birthday parties, and so to be polite, I invited the girls to mine. Ugh. Total disaster. I didn't know how to entertain them - I didn't know what to do with them - I didn't know how to get rid of them. I kept asking my mom (quietly, discretely) when they could leave. They were perfectly nice girls. But I was accustomed to amusing myself by sitting in our pear tree all day. I just didn't "get" other girls. And I eventually realized that they didn't get me. I felt there was a disconnect between myself and other girls - they spoke a language I didn't, they had rules I didn't know and couldn't learn. In college, I found my first friends - girls who actually explained social rules and interaction to me. I also read everything accessible through a search engine about socialization. But I would still rather go to the dentist than approach women I don't know well. I still feel as if they are laughing behind my back.

One Sunday, when Kittyboy first became REALLY interested in other kids, it became apparent that we had a problem. That boy knows no strangers, only friends who haven't been properly introduced. He LIKES people - boy, does he like people. And he loves "babies", by which he means anyone between the age of conception and four years old. That Sunday, he ran up to another toddler, grinning from ear to ear - and SHOVED. "Hi there, let's wrestle! This is fun!" It was not fun, however, for the other child, who cowered and ran away.
That didn't deter him, though. He thought this was all a game, and immediately shoved the next child he saw. He had to be separated from the group - he wanted to play, but couldn't be allowed to. We just couldn't get him to stop shoving, pulling, and hitting. And he did it all with the biggest grin, oblivious to the fact that he was scaring, hurting and upsetting all the other children. He didn't get it.
That was in January, and for the next few months I watched him like a hawk. No, a helicopter - I was a total helicopter parent, swooping in with "No touch! NO TOUCH!" every time he was close to another child. Therapists offered several theories - that he was reacting preemptively against a possible invasion into his space, that he was overexcited and overstimulated, that all the eye contact down on his level had something to do with it (since he didn't attack much older children), and most probably, that he wanted very much to play with them, but didn't know how, and being delayed in speech, he was also delayed in his grasp of social interaction in general. He smiled, because he liked them - he played as roughly as with a stuffed animal, because he didn't know how else to play - and he simply couldn't understand that cowering, crying, being upset, meant that they didn't like it.
Everyone - therapists, grandparents, the rest of the planet - saw a temporary problem that he would grow out of as he matured, and as his language skills increased. Even if a child has a real deficiency in empathy, that can be trained if you start very young. But just as Charles in "The Playground" saw a game of tag as a merciless hunting of one child by another because that was his experience and his perspective, I saw Kittyboy having the same problem I did. He didn't get them, and they didn't get him. I saw, in the looks of apprehension on the other childrens' faces, the "What's her problem?" look I was used to seeing on the faces of my peers. I saw it all happening all over again - but this time with a child who would care very much, and be hurt very deeply, if he were unable to have friends.
My fears are pretty much for naught, of course. He no longer assaults other children by way of saying hello. We found that out at a party on Pascha, where he played very nicely and unsupervised. It's just that that's always in the back of my mind, when I see him with other children. At least he's a boy - when boys don't like each other, they generally make it plain.
Heck, he'll probably be the charming and charismatic ring leader.
It just makes me think, though, about whether all parents do the same - react to their children as if they themselves are living childhood over again, and trying to keep things from going wrong in the same way again. You hear of parents living through their children in the sense of "I was only third string, but he's going to be captain of the football team", when the boy would rather be concertmaster in the school orchestra, but not so much of parents saying, "I just hope he doesn't make my mistakes - have my problems - grow up with my neuroses."

A Reptilian Visitor

This morning, I was walking through our very dimly lit hallway and saw something laying across the floor in a suspicious series of S-curves.
I stopped.
First thought - Why is there a snake in my house?
Second thought - It's just laying there, though. Oh duh, I'll bet it's one of those plastic ones.
Third thought - We don't have any plastic snakes.
I debated briefly about just grabbing it behind the head and carrying it outside, but from what I could see in the near-dark, this snake did not have any of those nice reassuring yellow stripes proclaiming it to be only a lowly grass snake. It was spotted. There are so many snakes with spots, and some are not the sort you want to surprise. If you grab too far back on a grass snake, you'll just get a pinch. It might be a painful pinch, but it's not dangerous. And snakes move faster than me. Did I feel like trusting my snake-wrangling skills with something potentially poisonous?
Hmmmm.... no.
I moved, and it started crossing the hallway. It didn't coil, good sign - but I still didn't know what it was. So as I am the wildlife person in the house, I called quietly for Husband (in the living room with Kittyboy) to get me a container. He went into the kitchen, got a plastic tub, and said, "This?" I said, "Uh, no..." and he asked what I needed it for.
This is the man who, in college, leaped to the top bunk of a bunk bed without a ladder, because I calmly said I might have seen a mouse. I love my husband, he is a wonderful spouse, father, provider, and all-around wonderful human being. But I am the wildlife person for a very good reason. He deals with oil splatters while frying food - I remove mice. And now snakes.
"Do you promise to remain calm and not freak?"
In an annoyed tone, he said yes.
"There is a snake in the house."
"There's a SNAKE in the HOUSE?" He was mostly calm.
He gave me an oatmeal container with a lid, MUCH better than an open tub, and to his credit, he didn't toss it gingerly from the kitchen, he brought it to me as the bottom half of the snake was slithering into the bathroom. I went in the bathroom and closed the door, but the end tip of the tail was just poking out of a broken tile under the tub, so I couldn't catch it. I did tape plastic over that tile. We have an open plumbers crawl space under the house, obviously there is a hole under the broken tile that leads there. My brother Yan said on the phone it was probably a bull snake, would bite in defense if cornered or feeling threatened, but not poisonous at all. They eat their weight in rodents - so if it busts through the plastic, it's not SUCH an unwelcome guest - but I'm not going to encourage it to come back. I, being non-herpetophobic, would look on it as I would a gecko in South America, or a mongoose in colonial India. If you can find food, Brother Snake, you are welcome to it. I am unusual in that regard, however. Husband will be fixing the tile.
But I must say, I'd rather be cautious in lifting clothing from the floor because there might be a non-poisonous rodent-hunter in it, than checking my shoes in the morning for poisonous insects. There are worse uninvited houseguests we could have.
And hey, it gave my morning a more exotic Hemingway flavor than my life generally has!

New SLP tomorrow!

Tomorrow, we start with a new speech therapist, Bree, at long last. Insurance and billing problems have been postponing this for a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to getting going with that again. Hey, at least Kittyboy's patient - he'll say the same "word" for several minutes, repeatedly, until you finally guess the right meaning. Daddy, doggie, donkey, diaper, any other word starting with D or a similar sound - all sound alike. Cracker, cookie and garbage sound alike. He TALKS all the time! But you have to run through the list of everything that could start with the first syllable of what he's saying, and wait for him to react or say "uh huh!" It's like, "Oh yay, he has another word! Wait... but that sounds exactly like this other long list of words starting with B. Oh. Great - I think." I need to draw up a list tonight of ALL the words he says, and what they mean, along with his own brand of word order, grammar, etc. Poor Bree.
I think we're down to pronunciation at this point. He loves language and is just bound and determined to communicate! He just needs a whole heck of a lot of help enunciating.

Health musings and missing Grandma

From August of '07 - the visit of Grandma Sandy (Great-Grandma to the itty-bitty little Kittyboy there). Living seven hours away as she does, it was a momentous occasion - lots of picture taking!
Grandma Sandy never looked her age - she never acted it, either. That visit, she brought me green beans from her garden, a shopping bag worth. I think I put up half a dozen pints of her fresh garden green beans with bacon. She also taught me how to make egg noodles from scratch. She loved roses, and had many rose bushes. Any time I had a gardening question, I e-mailed her. The morning of the day of her stroke, I had written on my Facebook page that I was tired, and she wrote back, "Take a nap when the baby does!"
So every time I plant more in my garden, I want to e-mail her. Every time I fret about whether my big rosebush is going to survive having been forcibly transplanted without any pruning (a huge no-no), I want to e-mail her. Every time I open Facebook, there she is. Except she isn't.
My father's family has a bad, one could say horrific, history of heart-related problems. His father died in his early fifties, and when Daddy celebrates his 55th birthday, it will be the blow-out birthday bash of the century, because he'll have outlived a significant number of his male relatives. He'll have successfully passed the early cut-off point, so to speak. Cholesterol - blood pressure - heart disease - heart attacks - strokes. And Grandma Sandy wasn't part of that history, or so I thought (her mother died in her late nineties) until now. Stroke due to hypertension at 71.
Kittyboy has an affinity for salt - he has a limited sweet tooth, but will eat chips or pretzels FOREVER. I've read that's been documented in babies born with low sodium levels, common in preemies - the body keeps on wanting salt. He will eat salt from the shaker, which is why our salt shakers are up high, and at the table, we have only pepper shakers. He can spice until the cows come home, but he doesn't get control over salt. He would render his food inedible. I like salt, and I like fried foods. Five years ago, my cholesterol was high - not "medication time" high, but it was indeed "cut down on fried foods" high.
So Daddy has been breaking the family cycle by losing some weight, eating better, excercising - the trifecta of health maintenance, so to speak. And faced with this family history and a son who loves salt (both of those facts kept running through my brain like a horror movie for the last couple weeks), we are doing the same. I, who go to a doctor only when something is wrong, went for a check-up last week and had thorough bloodwork done. Cholesterol is good. Blood pressure, EXCELLENT (I'm still doing an internal happy dance about that one).
I have nineteen tomato plants in my garden and plans for adding more - canning everything. I have decided to even make some ketchup this year, possibly. I am swearing off canned soups, except the creamed ones as occasional shortcuts, and cooked a bunch of red beans to put up in the freezer, in the hopes of breaking my canned-bean habit. We as a family are going to think more about what we eat - we don't eat THAT unhealthily now, but neither did Grandma Sandy. She was active and gardened and worked as a farmer's wife does. And we are going to create good, healthy habits now, so that Kittyboy grows up with good habits from the start.