Update September 2, 2023

News

Saturday

Saturday morning, M11 had his tap dance cabaret. He did great. Then IL4 met with a friend from his daycare to play at the park (M11 came to the park, too). The kid’s mom said “[friend] said IL4’s real name is I, but he gets REALLY angry when you call him that. You HAVE to call him L.” 🤣😂 I had no idea he hated his first name. Though he hates being called anything but his middle name, so I should have known.

After that, M11 and I went to Oppenheimer. He’s been eager to do so since it came out. Not sure why, as it’s not his usual interest. But he didn’t understand it, so we went home two thirds of the way through.

Sunday

Sunday we packed up the car and headed out for our vacation. When we got to our camping “resort” we started by playing a very pathetic game of mini-golf. The course was so disappointing, and I was afraid the whole weekend would be awful. But then we decided to try out tubing after all.

We’d been planning on going tanking, which would have us floating down the river in a large tank, but the water level was too low. I didn’t want to take IL4 tubing, because he wouldn’t be able to stay in a tube. But they tied a life jacket to the tube so IL4 could have something to sit in. It worked really well.

IL4 slept through most of the float. He looked very peaceful. After running into low-hanging branches a few times, I got out of my tube and pulled the whole group (which was tied together) into the middle of the river whenever it got close to the edge. I didn’t realize what a workout it was until I was exhausted at the end of the day. (Probably especially when I had to swim because I couldn’t touch the bottom. I’m a fairly mediocre swimmer.) This is how I discovered that running shoes float. (We wore our shoes because we hadn’t planned on tubing, and didn’t have anything else to wear.)

Later, Aaron cooked hamburgers and bacon-wrapped asparagus, and then we had a fire.

Monday

Monday we had pancakes and sausages for breakfast. We went apple picking and where there was a petting zoo and a huge playground. We went to Perkins while in town. Then we hung out in the cabin, read, talked, and played a high stress game of Pandemic, during which IL4 wanted to move his piece all over the board willi nilli. We only cured 3 diseases before the world succumbed to plague.

Tuesday

Tuesday was back to life. We packed up and left for home at about 10am. Then I ran some errands and went to work. My friend Liz came over in the evening and we cross-stitched and watched Doctor Who. IL4 told her all about his playdate in the most verbal manner I’ve ever heard. He was able to hold a back and forth conversation without babbling half the time. D13 has now finished her bigger cat cross-stitch and is working on a rather complicated unicorn.

Wednesday

Wednesday was back to my busy life. It was the first day of school for the older kids, and teacher meet-and-greet day for preschool, so I was running around dropping off school supplies and medicine to the schools. Both D13 and I had a doctor’s appointment. Mine was to discuss the possibility that my sleeping disorder may be a blood pressure issue. So I’m going to take my blood pressure daily, as well as whenever a sleepiness attack comes.

Then I had to drop the soccer gear off. There was no time to breathe. In the evening, D13, IL4, and I made an apple crisp while M11 was doing service hours at a back-to-school event.

Thursday

Thursday was a mess. After work, I took dad to an appointment about his breathing issues. He was diagnosed with emphysema and given a daily inhaler. His breathing test was so bad that it came back as “unable to interpret,” despite dad blowing so hard into the machine that he almost fainted.

After that, IL4 had feeding therapy. It had been going well, but he just wasn’t feeling it that day. He ate nothing, and gave an “H*** no” to the apple crisp.

I had been planning on going to Feed My Starving Children with M11 and D13 in the evening, but upon returning home from feeding therapy, my dad said “you know, I think I have a concussion.”

He had left for a walk at 3 and returned home at 3:30, just as I was leaving with IL4. Apparently, on this walk, he’d tried to go down a steep dirt path (one he has to literally crawl back up on a good day). He’d tripped on a root, and remembered banging his knee. He had only one memory of his return home – leaning on a fence to catch his breath. His next memory was sitting in his chair and wondering how he got there. His memory after that was at 5:30, when he suddenly found himself in the restroom with blood on his head – no memory of having walked in there. That’s when I came home from feeding therapy.

We went to the ER. 4 hours later, we had the following diagnoses: sprained wrist, 3 broken ribs, concussion, and (unrelated) ventriculomegaly. They discovered the last during the CT scan.

Ventriculomegaly is a condition in which he has too much cerebral spinal fluid in his brain which causes a series of symptoms (including dementia and unsteady gait), all of which he has. So…now we get to see a neurologist. Probably 3-6 months down the line, of course, because it’s impossible to see specialists in a timely manner.

But at least I got a night off work. If only I didn’t have to work extra hours on a later date to make up for the lost income. 🤦‍♀️

Friday

Friday IL4 had speech therapy, and then I tried unsuccessfully to destress after yesterday. Dad is having difficulty agreeing to see a neurologist because the last one diagnosed him with mild cognitive impairment (which is full blown dementia by now, I’m pretty sure). He does not agree with that diagnosis, and therefore that neurologist is stupid. But he agreed to go as long as he didn’t see that neurologist again.

Week’s Photos

Letters Written

• 1 letter Texas
• 1 letter Pennsylvania

Reading to myself

• Zombies vs Unicorns, by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier
• Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
• Educated, by Tara Westover
• The Merry Adventures of Robinhood, by Howard Pyle
• St Augustine’s Confessions, by William R Cook & Ronald B Herzman
• Mahabharata
• Emperor of Nihon-Ja, by John Flanagan

Reading to IL4

• Super King Viking Land, by Thomas Flintham
• Happy Birthday Bad Kitty, by Nick Bruel
• Super Cheat Codes and Secret Modes, by Thomas Flintham

D13 reading

• Skandar and the Phantom Rider, by A. F. Steadman

Aaron reading

• The Dragon Republic, by R. F. Kuang

Media Completed

In this installment, Bad Kitty has an ill-conceived birthday party and we meet all of his friends. Not quite as funny as the first book, but it IL4 loved it, and I found it pretty amusing.

This children’s classic chronicles the adventures of Robinhood. It was fun.

Games Played

Weight Loss

X – 44.5