David Weekly, #41

David is my personal trainer. The reason I say this is because today, all day long, he's been wanting to go outside and run nonstop! And I keep telling him I'm tired, and he yells, "RUN!" or "CHASE ME!" at the top of his lungs. And he doesn't really give me the chance to say no...so I've been running all day, and I'm tired! But we made Christmas bread special. This is a tradition that my mother unwittingly started and I have since picked up. Usually I'll make it on Christmas Eve, but because David won't be with me on Christmas Eve, we made it tonight. He got to measure things, and mix things, and knead the dough, and twist up the dough and put it on the cookie sheet. It was a lot of fun, and we made a mess. :-)

We're still on the potty training thing...he's sleeping without diapers on tonight, since I've been realizing that his diaper is dry when he wakes up every morning. He's not happy about making this change at all. It's just something he fights and fights and fights. One morning, though, he said something so funny..."YAY! The water changed color!" This is after a toilet flush. Blew me away. He says all kinds of interesting things. As I was changing his diaper at one point I was talking to him about how he needs to use the potty, and he says that when he gets bigger he won't wear one anymore, but when I get smaller, I will wear one...or at the grocery store today the cashier and I were teasing him about working at the store, because he was standing in the spot the cashier normally stands in the next lane, and he says he can't work there yet because he's "still growing." The cashier was impressed with that, saying how smart he is.

And still problems with sleeping in my bed at night. One night, he actually had a nightmare. He had a dream about standing on some kind of a box that was melting in the rain. He was really scared! Of falling, or the rain, or what, I'm not too sure. But it was very unhappy for him. Fortunately I was still awake for him to come tell me about it. I told him it was just a dream, and he's awake now, and it's okay. He went back to sleep after a little while...other nights, though, he'll come in there and just lay up against me...one morning at about 5 AM or so, he stretches and says, "I'm so tired, I'm going sleep for hours!" I heard this and just roared with laughter, completely out of my half asleep-ness. I was wide awake at that point, and so was he. The child still hates it when I sleep, so I didn't get much more shuteye after that. I talked to him about letting me sleep in the morning, and it's interesting to hear him repeat to me what he heard. Sometimes, though, he'll tell me a plan of what he wants, or how somethings going to go, "Awright?" And I say, "What am I agreeing to?" And he just says, "Awright?" again, more impatiently...so I just say yes. I frequently have no idea what I agree to.

Last week I talked about his emotional awareness, so this week he's added another one: "Are you happy, or sad, or angry?"

Tuesday, it was a cold but beautiful sunny day, so David and I went to the park. And had a blast. He had me running again, down the boardwalk. But when he was done running, he developed a horrible cough, worse than I'd ever seen. To the point that I was scared for him. We went home directly, and fast, and immediately got the nebulizer out and gave him a treatment. This did the trick, but only in slowing the cough down, rather than curing it entirely. So a dose of cough medicine did the trick. I'm noticing that as he's more active, it's more of a problem for him to breathe, and he coughs, regardless of the weather. When I start hearing that cough, we slow down until he can recover, rather than me letting him continue and giving him a treatment.

After we had our Thanksgiving meal last week, my mother asked me a question, which I had never really asked myself before: what exactly is the condition with David's hand? It's called "Ectrodactyly." I did some research on it on the internet to get a better idea what that means. It's a genetic mutation, happening in approximately 1 in 90,000 births, so it's "rare." Because there's no history of it before David, he didn't inheret it from either side of the family, as far as I can tell. But he has a 50/50 change of passing it down to any children he has, because the mutation is on a dominant gene...here's a couple of links I found through Google (where else would you search?)

Wikipedia entry
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2832319&page=1
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-ectrodactyly.htm

I am concerned, though, that not one doctor ever mentioned this to me, nor is it listed on the reports that I got from the Shriners. I do remember, vaguely, asking how he got like that, and no one was really able to answer...something about "amniotic banding" which now I think was a bad answer...We were given the chance to terminate the pregnancy when we saw his hand in the ultrasound, but I'm so glad we have this wonderful little boy in our lives.

David can say his ABCs all the way through, so I've taken the opportunity to say them with him and then sign-language/finger spell each letter as he goes. And now he can tell me the letters (not all of them, but many of them) at random. So I'm beginning to finger spell some things, like his name. It's amazing to me how smart he is, and how quickly he's learned the sign letters. I'm thinking I should take a sign language class with him, or maybe me take it, and then just share it with him. He's picked it up so much more quickly than the French that I'm trying with him, though he was actually showing off that he knows the colors in French to my neighbor.

And speaking of colors, I put up Christmas lights on my house last Saturday night. David got soo excited about them! And when we were doing the tree last Friday, David got a hold of my camera, and took lots of close up pictures of the tree, and the ornaments. I also bought an advent calendar from the drug store. It's got a picture of Santa Clause on it. I'd like to know where I can find one with a religious theme, and with the numbers in order, like on a calendar.

Monday we got back to our routine of going to school, and coming home for 2 hours, and playing, and then going to Dot's...he actually missed the routine, I could tell.

Have a good week.