The Small Family     

Busy week here in the Small household! For those of you awaiting the latest installment of the Colon Chronicles, let’s lead off with that. (What better way to start the week??) Monday, Mom and I went for her surgical consult, and she’s scheduled for surgery this coming Friday. To sum it up in a few sentences, she has pretty extensive diverticulosis, so they’ll be removing the left half of her colon and then reconnecting the two ends. It’s a fairly extensive surgery, but the prognosis is good, and they don’t expect complications. (There are possible complications as with any surgery, but they are fairly rare.) She will probably be in the hospital for five days, then will recover at home. Full recovery takes six to eight weeks.

We thought she might’ve hit a speed bump on Saturday (that is, yesterday), as her blood pressure was frighteningly high. But, I took her into the ER at the advice nurse’s request, and they discovered that she simply has high blood pressure. She’s always been borderline, and apparently the last four months have been enough to send her into the range of high blood pressure. So now she’s on blood-pressure medication, and everything is still on for Friday. Send good thoughts her way for a speedy recovery!

But on to things more fun than colons and emergency rooms… We had our annual birthday lunch with my sister on Tuesday. Lynnie’s and my birthdays are just four days apart, so every year my Mom and I try to get together with my sister for a birthday lunch. This year, Theo came (of course), but so did cousins Sam and Stevie, so that was a lot of fun. And my sister got me the game Apples to Apples, which I hear is a lot of fun--I’m looking forward to finding a few people to play it with me!

Our weather has been very foggy and damp, so I decided this would be a good week to take Theo to Wacky Tacky, a big indoor play area we’ve been to a couple times. We went on Thursday, and he was so excited! In fact, I didn’t tell him I was planning to take him, but I asked him that morning, “What fun thing shall we do today?” and he immediately said, “Wacky Tacky!” When I said, “Okay, let’s go there,” his face lit up, and he chattered at me the whole way over about how he was going to play in the ball pit, climb the stairs, go down the slide, and play with the kids. (And, oddly enough, he knew what direction we ought to go to get there. Wacky Tacky is in an industrial part of Roseville that we only ever go to for two reasons--to go to Wacky Tacky or to the dog kennel. So Theo has been there maybe four times…and not at all within the past few weeks. But yet somehow, Mr. Backseat Driver was able to tell me where to go. I think he has inherited my sense of direction.)

I never get tired of seeing how happy Theo is to play with other children. When we go out front or to the park or to Wacky Tacky, his face will light up when he sees other children, and he’ll say, “Kids! Feo play kids!” Thinking back to two years ago, when he was a rather aloof baby who wasn’t much for socializing, it really does my heart good to see what a friendly, sociable little boy he has become. I guess because Chris and I were both shy children, I really admire the obvious delight Theo takes in playing with other children.

Our weekend turned out a little different from what we had planned. Theo had been talking about wanting to see snow, so we had thought we might take him up near Tahoe--maybe go sledding, build a snowman, etc. This weekend didn’t have any new snow forecast and the weather was going to be fairly warm in the Sierras, so it seemed like a good time to try it. But Saturday morning was the day I took my Mom into the ER, so we decided to put it off until Sunday. And then by Saturday afternoon, I realized I was getting sick again. I’ve actually been somewhat sick since about Thanksgiving--I had a cold for a few days, and then the cough has hung on for about six weeks. It was nearly gone…and then I got sick again. So I spent Saturday evening being a whiny lump on the couch. (Kudos to Chris--I am not usually a whiny sick person, but I was this weekend. I ached like crazy, and all I wanted to do was lie down. And Chris, who had watched Theo all morning while I was at the hospital, graciously did most of the Theo duty in the evening and cooked dinner while I whined.) I felt a fair bit better Sunday morning, but not well enough to deal with snow and cold temps. So, we scrapped those plans and instead headed to Walnut Creek, so the Lindsay Wildlife Center. This is yet another museum that we get access to free with our Sacramento Discovery Center membership, which has paid for itself already! This wildlife center was a great find, too. It’s about a 90-minute drive from where we live, but the exhibits were great, and they had two excellent playgrounds in the park behind the wildlife center, too.

I think the highlight of the wildlife center for Theo may have been when he got to pet a rat--or maybe that was the highlight for me! He also got to see a number of hawks and other birds of prey that have nests above some of the other exhibits--about seven feet up so that children can see them but not reach them. Very cool how they have it set up--you don’t have to look through bars or glass to see the birds, but they’re kept safe from curious children. They also had a few reptiles, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc., plus a neat hands-on room that Theo enjoyed. We’ll definitely visit again!

I’ll wrap this up with two Theo stories. First is just a neat observation. Theo brought me his Where’s Spot? book to read, and as he settled in my lap, he pointed to the W in Where and said, “That W. Like Winco.” I said, “Yes, Winco starts with W.” (Winco is our local discount supermarket.) He thought for a minute and said, “And Whole Foods!” And I was surprised because the W in Whole Foods obviously makes an /h/ sound, not a /w/ sound. But then I realized he must be a visual learner in that sense--he has seen that both words start with W, so he puts it together that way. Interesting. I, too, am a visual learner. Maybe everyone is for letters/reading--I really couldn’t say. But I just thought it was interesting to see….

Second story is more amusing, and a good way to wrap up the week. We’ve recently had a situation where Theo often holds his poop all day until his nap, and then poops in his Pull-Up during his nap. Now, he’s perfectly capable of doing it in the toilet and has been doing so since July, but for some reason he decided a couple weeks ago that he’d prefer to do it in his Pull-Up. We weren’t too concerned, as it’s not like he’s pooping his underwear--he only ever does it in a Pull-Up. Still, since the goal is to eventually get him wearing underwear during his nap as well (and because cleaning up a poopy Pull-Up isn’t particularly fun), we decided we ought to nip that in the bud. So, I set up a sticker chart where he would earn one sticker each time he woke up from a nap without having pooped in his Pull-Up--and when he got to ten stickers, he would get a trip to the much-loved frozen yogurt store.

This seemed to be working quite well, and Mr. Theo had earned six stickers by yesterday’s naptime. And then, as I said, I spent the late afternoon/evening lying on the couch feeling rather miserable. At one point, Theo kept bringing a pad of stickers up to me and asking me to get them off. I’d get one off, and he’d run away and then come back. I didn’t think much of it, as he often likes to put a sticker or two on his shirt to wear around and show people. But then I realized there were no stickers on his shirt. And I brought this to Chris’s attention. And Chris investigated and found--yes, you guessed it--that Theo had filled in his sticker chart! Cheater!!! I can’t help but admire his problem-solving there…though of course, I did tell him those stickers didn’t count!

I’m laughing because my brother apparently did the same thing with a book chart in kindergarten--he didn’t care for the books they had to read to earn stickers on their charts, so he went into the teacher’s desk, got the stickers, and filled in his entire chart. (And yes, he got in trouble for going into the teacher’s desk, even though my Mom now laughs about this!) But he was five at the time…Theo is not yet three. And so, I give a big grin for my ingenious little monkey--even though he will not be getting a trip to the fro-yo store until he legitimately earns those last four stickers!!