Teancom
Teancom has cut out nap times a lot of days, but it makes him intolerably grumpy and spastic for a few hours midday. It's, umm, fun. ... It's the first time in his short life that he's caused us any trouble at all. Still, he's his normal cute, squishy, addicting self except for those 2 hours of whininess and attitude.
Elijah
Elijah is addicted to video games. I let him play for a few days, as long as I can stand it, and then I take away privileges for a week or so, because he doesn't do the transition from video games to normal life very well. ... And I'm not sure it's an accomplishment, but Elijah's getting pretty good. He mostly plays on our old school Nintendo system. So he's playing the classic Legend of Zelda and Mega Man III and Mario 3.
Elijah has decided that he's a big boy and can do things like crossing the street by himself. Of course this isn't okay with us. He'll also run off when we're in public. Not that he's running off, he'll just run ahead and then I can't see him any more and he doesn't understand why that's not okay. He'll say, "I know where the car is," and stuff like that. Same with crossing the street: "I looked both ways." Ugh.
He's starting to write things on his own, which is fantastic. It'll look like gibberish until you look close and see that he's written his name or copied "Cheez It" from the box.
Which reminds me about a fun story from a few months ago. We were in the library parking lot, getting ready to leave. I was organizing the books and movies on the passenger seat when I heard Elijah say, "Mom, what does a-d-n-o-h spell?" I thought about it for a second. It doesn't spell anything, of course. But I started looking around, wondering where he saw that. Then I looked over and saw it on the tire cover of the car beside us. It's honda backwards! I don't know why, but Elijah will read and write many things backwards. It's not that he doesn't know which way to read it. He knows. He'll also write some of his letters upside down. And write from the bottom of the page up. ... It all seems very backwards to me, but I'm assuming that it's normal. Or at least normal enough.
Life
The Weekend
Rob's little brother got sealed to his beautiful wife in the Columbus, OH temple this weekend. It was low key and wonderful. I'm all about low key. The kids stayed with the W's, our good friends and the kids' surrogate grandparents.Rob and I drove straight from Columbus to M's place in Middle of Nowhere, OH. Stayed overnight. Were there Sunday morning to participate in our nephew, P's teacher ordination. It was neat, cause all the siblings were there. It was also nice to see Rob during church hours.
We drove home right after the ordination because my Dad flew into Cincinnati at 1:30. We beat him home by an hour or so, which just gave us time to clean up our travelling stuff.
We chilled with Dad for the evening and part of the next day, and he left in the afternoon for the next leg of his business trip. While he was here we ran the HS track, looked through a spectacular "picture book" of Yellowstone and talked about our trip, had a lovely dinner with R&C. And also, he bought us:
A New Lawn mower
Our old lawn mower died. I wrote about that a while back. We've been using it, half-dead, resistent to spending the money on a new one. We debated what to buy and where and for what price. We finally had decided on buying a refurbished lawnmower for about $100 at a local lawn mower fix it place. We were going to go buy it on Monday. The day before my father took me to Home Depot and helped me pick out a much nicer mower that what we would have purchased.
It's a Honda. I didn't even know Honda MADE lawn mowers.And on Monday I mowed the grass with our new mower. My favorite parts:
- I can start it myself, which means I can mow the grass during the day and Rob doesn't have to do it all the time. Rob has so little time anyways.
- It's a power mower. Our old one was a manual. I like a lot of the aspects of a manual mower, but it's nice to not have to push with everything I have to get up our steep short hills.
-It's a bagger/mulcher. Our old one was a side shoot. So no more raking for us!! That'll save us a good hour.
Thank you, Dad.
Rob's Big News
Rob has been praying and hoping for someone to give him a teaching opportunity. Well, it's happened! Rob was contacted by NKU (Northern Kentucky University) about teaching a 5-week summer class. Of course Rob said yes. The time is kinda crummy (12 - 2pm, 3 days a week), which means his schedule will be horrible for the month of June. And they don't pay him much, but Rob would have done it for free. He just needs the teaching experience.
He went down to NKU yesterday and got an official badge. I'll have to scan it in, cause he looks just like a middle-aged professor. Balding. A little extra weight. Cute glasses. Aw, the adorable Dr. Thacker.
So, hurray for Rob! And pray for us to survive June!
Bad Balance
This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought I'd report on it. I have experienced vertigo off and on for years now. The worst of it was right after Teancom was born, so 2 years ago. Anyways, we finally have good insurance, so I asked my doctor about it. He sent me to an ENT to check it out, cause it sounded like it could be Meniere's Disease. I don't know much about Meniere's, but I dislike the idea of having something with Disease in the title.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing or function, that the ENT could tell (though I found out that my left ear has slightly better hearing than my right). So he sent me for a balance test (turned out to be a $1,000 balance test--don't worry, I didn't pay a penny for it). It was a random test involving following lights with your eyes and strange goggles and blowing warm and cold air into your ear and making you count backwards by 2's from 100.
At one point in the test the test giver (a nurse? doctor?) seemed like the results I reported were slightly abnormal. They blew the warm air into my right ear for a minute and then I felt a little dizzy. Not bad, but a little. Then they did the same thing with my left ear and I wanted to puke or pass out or just go to sleep. It was really bad. They did the same minute-long exposure, one ear at a time, with the cold air, and I hardly reacted to that at all. The test giver made it seem like I should have roughly the same reaction for each ear.
So the ENT called me back a little over a week later and said that my test results were not normal. He didn't say they were horrible, though. He said that they'll see "these kinds of results" from a viral ear infection and those effects can last from 6 months to a year. I think this is unlikely, since the vertigo was the worst over 2 years ago, it started being noticably bad 3 years ago, and I still experience it every few months. He said, alternately, I could just have bad balance. "Some people are born with bad vision, some bad hearing. You could just have bad balance." I think that's the more likely explanation. He didn't diagnose me with Miniere's or anything, and he said he'd like me to repeat the balance test next year.
But, bad balance? I have GREAT balance! I play sports. I rarely get off balance. I can trip but not fall (and that's pretty impressive, I think). ... So I think there must be some other aspect to balance that he's talking about. ... Anyways, that's my balance assessment. Because you obviously cared.
Other than that, we're getting excited for summer. I wish it was already here (Miciah's in school until June 12th). I'm ready for some lazy long days. Not that we'll get many before we head out to Yellowstone, Utah, California, and then all the way back. But we'll take as many lazy summer days as come our way. I'm excited to spend at least one lazy summer day on the beach, and another in a Yellowstone meadow!!
1 comment:
Vertigo stinks! I have had it only a couple of times.It is the worst. I can't wait to see you guys this summer!!!
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