Truckin'

No real imaginative title today; I just like trucks. Or maybe that's The Boy.

This week, as I mentioned, we had our "go be normal" meeting. Of course, a few days later, that was followed by a few hours spent at the clinic for an infusion. The Boy needs this dose and one more, in another month or so, of Pentamidine. That's the prophylactic antibiotic.

And then we still have to go back to the clinic tomorrow to recheck his counts, as his hemoglobin was pretty low. At a level 7.8 he was still running around and wanting to play all the time, so they didn't transfuse. They expect that his levels will eventually go back up on their own. Takes awhile, though.

Also, we still need to do scans and visit the renal clinic.

Not quite normal yet.

The weather was just lovely for most of the week, so we tried to spend at least a little bit of time outside. The Boy is loving his swingset and sandbox and playhouse, as is Meatball.

Even more exciting is that The Boy is loving Meatball! He is sad when he goes anywhere without his little brother and is so excited to see him, either in the car or at home.

The Boy faces forward and Meatball faces backward in the car, so they are looking right at each other.

We took a short trip to Washington, D.C. We were there for less than a day. The purpose of the trip was to see family. Added bonus: we got to have breakfast with some wonderful friends. Family lunch was a lot of fun. We just don't get to see many of these family members all that often, and it was nice to have the kids see them. Particularly since the kids were really very good!

The travel itself wasn't terrifically difficult with the kids, although getting on the road was a challenge. Musical Daddy works downtown, and the thing to do, with him working downtown, is NOT to try and pick him up from work. Instead, should we travel east again while he is working in this job, he should take the bus that he usually takes and get off at the end of the line.

The Boy enjoys "singing" along with "You've Got a Friend In Me" from Toy Story, which also amused Meatball. I put "singing" in quotes not because I'm an uppity musician who knows that my son isn't developmentally ready to carry a tune just yet but because he starts off saying the words and screeches the end of every phrase, which sends Meatball into laughing fits. He does that with the alphabet song as well.

Meatball, by the way, bolts for the stairs every chance he gets. He thoroughly enjoys the challenge of climbing the steps. He has also just started to push up on his hands and feet, meaning that standing on his own will happen before we know it. Oy.

Potty training is crawling along for The Boy. He likes his underpants, but he doesn't necessarily like to put in the work that it takes to keep them clean and dry. We have gotten one potty pee about every other day, and a proper one, where he feels that he has to go and, escorted, he goes. He knows how to pull his underpants up and down too. I have been toying with the idea of this method of intensifying the potty process and really getting The Boy focused on it, as he will only think about going when someone is on him about it. The method is supposed to take only a few hours; when my mother used it on me it took 3 days. I might have been stubborn.

It is potty bootcamp. You're supposed to kick everyone else out of the house and pretty much exclusively keep the child in one room. You give drinks and snacks, the type that you wouldn't ordinarily want the kid to have all the time, and you have frequent potty trips and pants inspections. Accidents are followed by "practice" where the child has to practice going back and forth to the potty and taking down his pants and such. But before all this, the child teaches a doll how to use the potty.

I don't know when we're going to do it, or if we're even going to do it this way, but I have picked up a few things from the book.

I decided that The Boy needed to be able to pull his underpants up and down. I showed him how multiple times, and sometimes he'd get mad and say "Mum do it!" But now he knows how.

Then, I decided to teach him to check for dry pants. Sometimes, dry pants mean jellybeans. Other times, they mean hugs and kisses. The book indicates that the focus should be on staying dry, and that using the toilet is the means by which that should happen. Except that The Boy doesn't go that often, so he really does stay dry for awhile.

But then, a newly potty trained child isn't any easier to deal with than a child in diapers, I predict. If you're out somewhere and your child has to go, you have to find the potty RIGHT AWAY. You have to change the wet clothes just like you have to change the diapers. But sooner, because they get more upset about it.

Even so, The Boy is ready. And he can hold up his pants even in underwear. Barely.