David Weekly, #47

On Super Bowl Sunday, David woke up with a cough. A terrible cough. Which got worse as the day went by. We went to my mom's in the morning for a little while, where David's cough got so bad that he actually threw up. After recovering a bit from this, he just got up and walked out of mimi's house and straight to the car without even saying good bye to mimi or anything! He even opened up the door and sat himself in the car. He was ready to go! So we got home, and by about 4 PM I had him lay down for a nap, with the vaporizer on, and the door closed. His coughing finally was under control. I had given him Zyrtec, cough medicine, the nebulizer, and chest rub...but the vaporizer was what saved the day. And then he slept for 8 hours! At about 11:30 he woke up, and was fully awake...he totally missed the Super Bowl, though. He clearly needed the sleep. He went back to sleep a little while later, and slept through the rest of the night. Monday morning the cough was mostly gone, except for an occasional **cough**, but it was more of a "productive" type cough, which was 100 times better than the dry cough he'd had the day before. I'm happy to report that even though he's fully over it, David reports that he's "a little bit sick" when I ask him how he feels.

I'm finding that as he gets older, the pace of David's changes seems to be slowing down a bit. This means that it's more difficult to find things to comment on, since daily life is more about routine, than having something new happening all the time. So I may begin to focus on larger themes, rather than individual, single events, for each week. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but we'll see how it goes.

I'd like to hear some feedback from you, about anything that you read, or anything that I can relay to David, since he's got a better idea of the world around him. He talks about different (and somewhat random) things relating to Missouri, but so far I have not been keeping track. He sounds like he's trying to incorporate the two different households into one in his mind, and yet make a distinction between the two. Actually, it's very difficult to keep track of his Missouri references, because they happen so often, and out of context. He said something today about his sissy, and mommy, and Tait. I wish I could remember what it was.

David now can go potty completely by himself, with no help from anyone...he does need help wiping, so I've got to make sure that happens...

We went to the zoo, like usual, but this time he did two new things: first, there was the back-tracking. We normally have a path that we follow, and it's always the same. This time when we went through the aquarium part, David saw the manatees. Now, there's two big windows were you can see the manatees in the water, and they are floor to ceiling. There's some benches to sit on so you can watch, and behind the benches are displays that talk about the manatee, and the other sea life in the aquarium. So we were at the second set of benches, and David wanted more information about the manatee, so he went looking for the display, but it wasn't behind the benches we were at, so he backtracked back to the other display. This is unusual since he never goes backwards, only forwards, basically in one direction. He also went to see the birds as the first thing we did in park, but he wanted the birds to be the last thing, too. So that's a new part of our itinerary through the zoo.

I think I mentioned this before, but David is having me spell all the words he sees, or he is spelling them for himself. Sometimes he's spelling them backwards, which confuses me, because I don't recognize the order of the letters. While we were at the zoo, he saw a man-hole cover, with the word "storm" written on it. And he says the letters, then asks me what the word is, and I tell him "storm." And immediate recognition crosses through his expression, in an epiphany: "Storm! Like a rainstorm!" he yells; he's so excited. And then he tells me about the itsy-bitsy spider, and the waterspout, complete with hand motions. And speaking of spiders, he has me looking around the house for spiders, but I have no idea why. He has me turn off all the lights, and then we get out the flashlight and look all around the house. He even makes me "creep" around with him, like cartoon characters that are sneaking quietly so that whatever-it-is doesn't find them, or hear them.

And it was very cold again this week, on two different nights, but we managed to stay warm. I hope you're keeping warm on these cold days and nights.

Rusty