Bedtime is for pill-taking

Dada's 37th birthday, I think, hit him a little harder than most. The past year has been so momentous for him, and really, for our whole family. We had another baby. We bought a house for the first time. Dada has taught classes every semester, worked full-time over the summer, remodeled our kitchen, supervised his first 3 grad students (and is expecting 3 more), and has been away from us doing field work usually twice a month to various locales. Though he does put in his QT with the monkeys when he's home, he has been a busy feller. We love that he is so extremely excellent at his job, but we do wish he could just sit and take a breath more than once in a great while. Alas, he is built only to run proverbial marathons.

The insane pace finally caught up with him last month when he started feeling really weird, and, using the handy-dandy blood-pressure checking stations at Walmart and BJs, we were able to correlate it to some moderately elevated blood pressure. He went to see his new doctor, Dr. S, and had an EKG, like a pint of blood drawn for tests, and even a chest x-ray, all in the sake of thoroughness. In the end Dr. S said his blood pressure was really okay, and his heart was likened to that of an 18-year-old, which was really no surprise to anyone but Dada. I mean, come on. He walks 20 minutes to work most days, "hikes" (read: RUNS) 15 miles up into the mountains while barely breaking a sweat, and regularly lifts 80-lb sheets of drywall over his head with only minimal grunting. Dude is in fantastic shape. And of course it helps that he has a hot 27-year-old wife to keep him feeling young.

So everything was fine with Dada, except for his triglycerides, which are apparently abnormally high for someone who makes a habit of exercising and eating more salad than a mutated rabbit. Dr. S put him on the lowest dose of Advicor, a combination of extended-release niacin and a statin, to bring it down as a preventative measure. The word from Dr. S is that treating this now basically means that heart disease (in this form, anyway) is stricken from possible causes of death in the distant future. Dada said he would prefer death by bear mauling anyway.

So Dada got to greet his birthday by beginning to pop a prescription that he will likely be taking the rest of his life. What a way to feel the weight of your oldness. The medication itself is hilarious. The liner notes on his prescription make a habit of screaming at you. "DO NOT EAT GRAPEFRUIT WHILE ON THIS MEDICATION," they forcefully suggest. "WOMEN OF CHILDBEARING AGE SHOULD NOT TAKE THIS MEDICATION AT RISK OF CAUSING FETAL HARM." My favorite part is that, due to a fun side-effect high-dose niacin causes in many people, one should limit ones intake of caffeinated and alcoholic drinks. Those who know Dada have fallen off their chairs laughing right now, because they know as I do that I am not exaggerating when I say that Dada does not function on less than two pots of coffee a day. Not cups, people. POTS. But apparently, as long as he limits his caffeine consumption near bedtime (AKA pill-popping time), all is well.

After about a week on his pill with no adverse effects, an itchy, burning, lobster-red Dada woke me up at 2:30 two nights ago, scared to death that he should head to the hospital. This of course was after I had awakened to nurse the Jakester back to sleep and, after that, to put an Isaac back to sleep post-nightmare. Poor Dada in his extreme medical hubris had consumed a Starbucks drip and then two beers within 3 hours of taking his medicine and was suffering from a seriously annoying and painful attack of flushing, the aforementioned fun side-effect that is almost guaranteed during the first month of your prescription. Being the good little wifey I was, I stayed up with him and asked Dr. Google what we could do about it while we watched Futurama reruns together and he wrapped himself in a loosely woven blanket like a leper. A half-hour after I gave him some Advil to dumb down the inflammation, he started feeling much better and sent me back to bed. The good thing about flushing is that it goes away and doesn't cause permanent harm, but is obviously no fun.

Poor guy, that he is now a codger who can't enjoy a good nightcap before bed. While secretly feeling guilty, I will be laughing at him and his extreme oldness as I drink his beer and slurp my delicious post-dinner coffee. Laughing until I contract type 2 diabetes like everyone else in my family, and then we can spend our evenings for the rest of our years watching Matlock together instead of drinking anything.

Yada!

With Jacob, as with his brother before him, I have spent weeks of intensive first-word coaching. "DA-DA, Jake! Where's Dada?" or "MAH-MAH. Can you say Mama?" or "BUH-BUH! There's Bubba Isaac!" And he looks for Dada or at Mama or at Isaac, but also turns his head coyly and smiles big at me like, "What, you want me to do something here, lady?"

This morning while making his morning laps around the coffee table, the Jakester realized that, when on the far side of the table, he faced the couch-lying Dada. After squealing and making various other irresistible noises to get Dada's attention, Jake himself initiated a game of peekaboo. Standing at the table, he'd lower his head so it rested on his hands, thus "hiding." A bit later, he'd raise his head to look at the waiting Dada. As if this wasn't cute enough, when he "found" Dada, he'd scream "YADA!"

So there you go. At 9-1/2 months, we're thinking this counts as his first word.

Jacob's "9-month" appointment

Continuing in our belated-appointment tradition, today was Jacob's 9-month check-up. He continues to be Mr. Fatty Fat Fat, but I am disappointed to report that he is no longer a chart-buster. He weighs in at 22 lbs 13 oz (80th percentile); he's 29-3/4" tall (at the 90th percentile); and his constantly bruised-up knot is 18-1/8" around (85th percentile).

Though obviously he is growing, that he dropped in percentiles in both height and weight makes me feel terrible. Feeding time is exceedingly difficult for both he and his big brother. Hardly ever do either of them wish to eat what I make for them. Jacob almost always now refuses to eat his jar food, which means that his vegetable intake is seriously lacking. He won't eat cheese, and he'll only eat a few spoonfuls of yogurt before he changes his mind. Basically the only food I can guarantee he'll eat is a whole apple, which, if I take a bite out of it to start him off, he will gnaw at for 20 minutes. I know it seems I blog about this at least once a month, but I really wish it felt like I could feed them more than scrambled eggs, Eggos, and grilled cheese. Sigh.

This food-madness is entirely invented by me, however, as the doctor could care less about his eating problems. She says he's as healthy as a horse, and that his "drop" was nothing to be concerned about because he looks great and is still growing and proportional.

Then came the comical portion of the doctor's visit, the one where she asked if he was crawling yet. I replied that he was standing. "Oh, he's pulling himself up to stand?" Um, no.



While Jacob has been letting go of furniture while standing for about a month, he now has a fun trick where you can pick him up and set him down on his feet within arms' reach of an interesting prop (like the black lamppost in the bush in the picture), and he'll stand by himself for up to a minute and a half before oh-so-casually reaching out to grab said prop. Not that he demonstrated for Dr. M, but she was duly impressed. "And is he cruising yet?" she further inquired. I told her one of Jacob's favorite pasttimes is doing laps around the coffee table. Seriously, over and over. You would think it would get boring. Perhaps he has a future as a track star, or NASCAR driver. Anyway, Dada and I are convinced that Jacob will learn to walk while we're home for the holidays, if only because it seems to be his m.o. to accomplish some major developmental milestone in front of his grandparents.

When everything checked out and Jacob got a flu booster shot (his only shot of the day), we made an appointment for his next visit -- at ONE YEAR. What?? Where did that whole year of our lives go? Is his cuteness so powerful that it can warp time?

From hippie to Dapper Dan

We here at the O'Neal estates are totally shaggy-fied, all of us. Dada, who used to be a pretty regular once-a-month-haircut guy, can't remember the last time he had a trim, and, while he is still hawt, he could easily pass for a Beatle. I haven't had a trim since June, and nary a real cut since last October. My hair is so long I have considered off-and-on chopping it all off and donating it to Locks of Love as my nieces did with their hair this year. What stops me is that, while my hair is way too long, I would literally have to cut it all off to get the 10 inches the charity requires, and experience has taught me that a Claire with short hair looks like a dude. We can't have that.

In the meantime, the boys have also gone to shag under the watchful negligence of their mama. When Poppop and Meemaw came to visit in August, Poppop helped me take Isaac to the local kids' hair cuttery, where I had them hack away at his precious blond head till he was almost bald, knowing that it would be forever before we would be back. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and finally decided it massive hippie locks could not, in fact, stay until we saw our family expert hair person, Isaac's Mamaw, in a week and a half. With the timing of our upcoming Indy visit, it actually works out that Isaac could get a proper haircut today and then, if we remember, get another proper haircut from Mamaw in a month, and so stick to a (gasp!) normal schedule of grooming.

Here's my little hippie angel before his haircut. In this picture, I think he's telling me how the man is keeping him down.


A few screams but mostly contented staring at PBS Kids later, he emerged so stinkin' handsome. That boy can really work a haircut.



Now, his baby brother has never had a haircut, and also appears as though he's getting ready to audition for a boy band.

But we figured Mamaw would actually be mad at us if she didn't get to cut his hair, so shaggy he will remain. Poor Mamaw. We're not even home yet, and we already have her holidays planned out for her.

Thirty-seven

Today was our Dada's birthday. We helped him do it up right. The boys and I started the day by driving to Starbucks to fetch Dada his favorite cup of joe before he got out of bed. When we got back, we all got to eat breakfast and sip our respective morning beverages while watching the original Grinch cartoon with Boris Karloff, which TiVo had recorded for us, bless its cold little microprocessing heart. The boys gave Dada his present from them -- Rock'em Sock'em Robots -- and Isaac and Dada enjoyed pretending to knock each other's blocks off for a bit before Dada had to finally go to work.

I had this awesome birthday surprise planned for Dada -- that of a real date, the two of us, out of the house, alone together. I set up reservations for us and called the sitter. This was major. We've not been out of the house alone for more than an hour since Jacob was born, and I thought Dada would love it. I was going to spring it on him when he got home from work and whisk him away on a magical, romantic night. Luckily for me, I couldn't wait, and told him this morning before he left for work. That Dada, he's such a loser -- he told me he really didn't want to go out, that more than anything he wanted to spend his birthday with his boys. What a turkey. But it was the turkey's birthday, and one should have everything one's heart desires on one's birthday. Because I am a genius anyway, I had a great backup plan. Yesterday the boys and I made our first visit to the only full-service butcher shop in town and picked up a seriously lovely 3-1/2 lb pot roast. So instead of traipsing out in the freezing cold by ourselves, we got to cozy up with our boys to the most tender, juicy roast I have ever had, ever. I swear Dada himself ate 2 pounds of it.

After the pot roast came the grand finale, a made-from-scratch carrot cake, topped with a Lightning McQueen candle hand-picked by Isaac. Isaac had been training hard for the cake moment, and I think he made Dada's day.



Now Dada and I are curled up on the couch downstairs, glutted and falling asleep watching TV.

Happy birthday, sweetie! Hope your day was as awesome as you deserved.

Running when we should be sitting down

With the two little people, I must admit we stay in a lot, or we (used to) go in the backyard and play when it's nice. To combat insanity I try to get us out of the house most days. Usually it's drain away Dada's paycheck at the grocery store or to meet up with buddies for a playdate. But almost always I limit our adventures to one destination per daylight hours. To venture out more invites complications and unwanted baggage like extra snacks/diapers/blankets/sippy cups, and I have only so many hands to take these things out to the car. It's sort of embarrassing how often I get stopped in public and asked if I need some help. Do I make it look that bad, really?

Today was quite possibly the busiest I've allowed myself to be since Jacob was born. We went ran three errands, all before lunch. First we headed out to Old Navy to get Isaac a winter coat, since it is suddenly freezing cold here and he doesn't have one. We got there early enough that the store was almost empty and I let the boys chase each other around the toddler section while I tried to wrap my poor, slow brain around the fact that Isaac no longer fits in a 2T. We got this one, on sale for $17.50. Can't beat that, though I was slightly disappointed that we had to settle for a camo green color and not something more visible or trendy like red. Note to self: do not take boy deer hunting.

After that, I had resolved to take the boys to a local Christmas tree farm (with live reindeer!), not to buy a tree, but to artfully pose them in front of trees in hopes of getting a good snap for our family holiday card. So we drove a short way into Pennsylvania, only to find out that these losers don't open till noon. I was sad. How often do you get to meet reindeer, really?

But onward and upward, since we had one more errand to run -- visiting Dada at work to bring him his lunch. After that, it was home for us, and time for some English muffin pizzas.

I was even more proud of all the running we did given that, over the past two weeks, predating the flea explosion, something seems to be wrong with our family. Isaac and Jacob have been complete and total pills most of the time. Jacob whines and fusses almost the whole day unless he is perched on my hip; Isaac is unusually argumentative and contrary. Worse still, neither are sleeping well. Jacob has awoken (for good) before 5 AM at least 5 times in the last two weeks; several of those times Isaac woke right up with him. Today was the first day I can remember that I slept until 6:05. I'm hoping it's the lack of sleep, but I am also not doing too well -- I spent most of yesterday feeling weirdly dizzy. Nothing else -- no headaches or fever or anything -- just dizzy. I hope we're not all coming down with some secret bug just in time to head home.

He who denied it is ruled to have supplied it

(Driving past a garbage truck today)

Mommy: Woo-wee, that is stinky. It smells like poop.
Isaac: It was Jakey.

The House of Sand and Foggers

We have a sandbox in our backyard. It is basically a little slice of Isaac nirvana. Everyday he asks, "Mom, can we go play in the sandbox? Please?" Usually I comply, but we never stay out too long because I can only stand on high-alert over Jakey for so long as he attempts to shove fistful after fistful of sand into his gaping baby maw. The box is small, but they can both play in it, dive in it a little, roll around in it, and wrestle all kinds of sand into their pockets, socks, and diapers to bring inside with them and deposit in all kinds of obnoxious places.

Maybe it's the toys I'm trying to herd back into our sunroom or the big fat baby screaming from my hip, but on more than one occasion I have neglected to put the lid back on the sandbox before returning inside. Because I can't remember to do anything, ever, a few times I've even left the sandbox uncovered for several days in a row. One morning while making coffee, Dada peeked out the kitchen window to see a friendly neighborhood cat taking a big dump in our open sandbox. I got a lecture from him then, but I sifted out the poop and considered it over with, from then on making it a point of replacing the lid religiously.

A few days later I started to notice maybe 5 or 6 small red spots on the Jakester. I was a little worried he was coming down with chicken pox or something, since he hasn't had that shot yet, but they didn't really look like the pox-spots Dr. Google showed me. The next day I saw a few spots on Isaac. I didn't think much of them at the time. There are lots of mosquitoes and other flying annoyances that like to attack us at the sandbox, so I chalked the spots up to that. We stayed away from the sandbox for a few days, but inevitably there was begging from Isaac and conceding from the mommy and we returned. More red spots came and went, but never so many that I was really concerned. They were just getting bitten by bugs, I thought, not much I can do about that.

Around the same time, Cat-brother started freaking out. He is usually noisy and obnoxious, but he took his noise and obnoxiousness to a new level, howling as if in mortal pain or peril several times during the day. I checked his food and water all the time and everything was just fine. He himself appeared perfectly okay, aside from the enormous number of hairballs he was coughing up. I thought perhaps I'd forgotten to give him his special-kitty anti-hairball food, but no.

Cat-brother has been an indoor cat all his life, so you have to forgive my ignorance. It wasn't until I actually saw a flea crawling through Isaac's scalp in the bathtub that I put two and two together.

Last Monday we bought Cat-brother a flea collar; Wednesday we ditched the collar and bought anti-flea drops for the back of his neck. He was visibly grateful. We were not. Now that their cat-house was poisoned, the fleas decided they should jump all over my little boys. We read up on flea control online and decided we would be cheap and just vacuum more, which was really quite laughable given the nearly complete lack of vacuuming that was going on before the fleas set in. I asked Dada to help me vacuum more. Really, I can't vacuum the whole house by myself. Jacob won't be happy in his crib that long and Isaac will be into things he should not if I am not watching him. But we forgot in the evenings, and Dada had an awful, hard week and would fall asleep on the couch too early to get anything done around the house.

The last straw for me came on Friday morning as we accompanied Dada to the doctor. Sitting in the waiting room, I saw a flea on Isaac's neck. 10 minutes later, I saw a flea on Jacob's neck. Seeing that we were potentially taking our flea infestation with us around town, I flipped.

Dada took Friday afternoon off work and bought four canisters at a pet store to fog the house. It took 2-1/2 hours to pack up the food and essential items (including Cat-brother) and barricade them in the garage, sealing it off with duct tape. I started to pack up the boys' toys to avoid a hellacious cleaning effort later, but I stopped when I was a few toys into Isaac's first toybox and was getting eaten alive by fleas. Apparently Cat-brother had been roosting in the basement underneath Isaac's heat register and the fleas had made a haven for themselves in Isaac's toyboxes, feasting on little boy flesh as it suited them.

Don't you so want to come over to my house now?

We had to leave the premises for 2 hours while the poison cloud floated around the house, then come back, open a window, and stay away for yet another hour. After a leisurely stint at the mall and then a purposeful stint at BJs, our poison had worked its bug-killing magic and we came back to a house to find a messy-person's nightmare, where every surface, article of clothing, sheet, towel, toy, dish, etc etc had to be thoroughly washed. But within a day, we started finding more fleas than we had ever before, and they were all either dead or doing sickly-looking things like trying to walk while lying on their sides. The poison doesn't claim to kill the adult fleas outright, but rather prevents eggs from hatching and baby fleas from laying eggs, so we'll likely continue to be bitten until the adults die. But it's two days later and the boys have only had two new bites between them today, whereas yesterday, they each had 4 or 5. And, two days later, we are also still doing laundry and dishes.

This has possibly been the worst weekend I have had since becoming a parent. I would not wish a flea infestation on anybody, ever. It was just disgusting to realize that my babies were getting bitten, and it is worse to have to worry that every surface my crawling, orally fixated baby touches is covered in flea poison. But it is all the worse because I feel it is entirely my fault that we are in this situation. I left the sandbox uncovered and, perhaps more importantly, I keep the messiest house in the universe, one ideal for flea-breeding. I have no idea what we are going to do with the sandbox, aside from dumping the sand. But I now realize that my inability, no, refusal to keep a clean house is detrimental to my family and must stop.

Because Dada loves me so, he gave me what is possibly the greatest Christmas present in the world for a messy person like me, one who is disgusted by her lackluster efforts as a housekeeper and yet feels like a horrible mother if she didn't spend 50 gazillion hours a day playing with her boys. Dada got me a Roomba.

Without further adieu, meet our new robot child, Sonny. Straight out the box, Sonny cleaned the floors of the living room, the kitchen, the dining room (including Jakey's dinner mess, a feat in and of itself), and part of Isaac's room before he ran out of energy and needed to nap in his charger. On a full charge, Sonny can run for three hours. Sonny at first looks a little drunk and/or confused, but he is actually running routines to clean in a modified spiral pattern while assessing the size and shape of the room. As you might imagine, Sonny is also highly entertaining to toddlers and babies.