Timmy's Ears

Around Christmas, we noticed that Timmy was getting deaf again. He had his last (third) set of ear tubes last January, but they have fallen out already. So I did some informal tests over the last weeks and yes, we were pretty sure he was quite deaf.

So I called our family practioner yesterday and set up an appointment for today. And yes, he had fluid in both ears. She did a tympanogram and both of them were flat :-( I get so tired of this! So now we'll wait a month, see whether he still has the fluid and if so, be referred to the ENT and most likely end up with his fourth set of tubes.

Also, his weight hadn't gone up at all over the last year. So we are going to decrease his ritalin dose and see what that does. He used to be fiftieth his whole life, until he started the ritalin last year. Now he is 10th percentile, so that's quite a drop.

We have a follow up appointment on Feb 8. Let's hope that the fluid has gone away by then, although with his history, I doubt it.

We are up to six sets of ear tubes between the two boys so far.

Smoke Detectors

We spent part of the night and the very early morning being up and about, wondering why the smoke detector kept going off. Yesterday, I was baking something and I had spilled a little bit of food on a burner and that triggered it a few times. But when the muffins were ready, things went back to normal and it didn't go off any more. Yesterday, we also installed some built in shelves and hubby was stressing out over drilling into an electrical wire instead of a stud.

Then last night, at 2:30am, the smoke detector downstairs went off! The dishwasher was on, so we were wondering whether that had something to do with it. Also of course we thought the screws for the new shelves might have hit something after all. But a careful and thorough inspection of the house didn't reveal anything. The smoke detector had stopped beeping when hubby came downstairs, so after a while, we went back to bed. The moment he lay down 'BEEEEEEP' again.... Back downstairs, new inspection, still nothing seemed to be wrong. So he ended up changing the battery, seeing whether that might be the problem. This seemed to solve the problem for then and he finally came back to bed.

5am. another 'BEEEEEEP' woke me up! Another inspection of the house, still nothing. The smoke detector kept going off though. This time Sander took down this smoke detector and replaced it with another one that was still lying around. This one started beeping with the small beeps that sometimes indicate a low battery, but after a few minutes stopped doing that. After it stopped, we tested it, it worked fine and we went back to bed. We haven't heard it any more.

So I guess the old one gave false alarms, because it was getting old or so??? I don't know how old it is, it was in the house already when we bought it. I am also wondering whether it had something to do with the false alarms while baking yesterday? I had the feeling at night, that it was another false alarm, but I was not going to take that for granted! I felt better after we had installed the other one and that one did not go off. Does anybody know whether smoke alarms do need to be replaced every x years or so to prevent this? I guess there is no sure way to determine whether it is real or a false alarm when they go off? I even considered calling the fire department asking their advice about the smoke detector going off without any clear source, but was hesitant to do so at 3am. I thought that there might be something smouldering behind the new built-in shelves that we could not detect yet. I wasn't sure how to find out about that.

I am also going to buy a fire extinguisher again. We used to have one, but I am not sure where it went with all the moving around and I felt a definite need for one last night!

I am used to being woken up by kids at night, not by smoke detectors! By the way, all four kids slept through all the alarms!!!!!

Musical Beds

Tara moved out of our family bed a few months ago. She still insists on having me sleep with her though :-) Now that we moved to our new house, I have given her a queen size mattress on the floor of her room, so that there is enough room for me, and maybe later for her little sister. I nurse her there, then stay with her until she is asleep. Sometimes I fall asleep too and sleep there for the rest of the night. Otherwise, I will sneak out and go to our own bed, where my husband and Jane sleep.

If Tara wakes up at night (not every night, but still pretty regularly), I just walk over to her bed and spend the rest of the night in her bed. Jane sleeps through the night, so that's not an issue most of the time. Of course, there have been nights when she didn't and I kept changing beds all night. If they are both awake at the same time (very seldom), I sometimes take Tara to our own bed with me, but she is not too happy about that.



Not sure how this all is going to work when we add a newborn in March...

Heart Beat!

After reading a post on a mailing list today about picking up heart beat with stethoscope, I tried it today with this baby and was able to locate the heartbeat really easily. I am 28+ weeks I think. This is just a cheap stethoscope from the pharmacy. But first time to hear the heart beat for her, so it's very cool.

I was able to pick up Tara's heart beat with a stethoscope at 26 weeks, can't remember when I could with Jane.

Our Christmas

We had a nice and quiet Xmas this year. In between the moving boxes, but the Xmas tree and the computer were set up. Priorities! :-)

The kids were excited about their presents. The Rokenbok was a big hit, even the girls play with it. Other great successes were the Lego and for Cees a book about how mummies are made. He would walk into the room, read some details (like getting the brains out with a hook) and gleefully declare 'Gross, huh!?!' :-)

Hubby got a big box of insect lego and Tim couldn't wait until he would start to build it. So after the turkey was in the oven, he and the boys spent a few hours building Lego together. We had a turkey dinner and will have turkey for a lot more dinners :-) The kids didn't touch it, apart from Jane, but only a few bites. Oh well :-)

All I Want For Christmas

Cees lost a tooth today, on Christmas day! This means the tooth fairy will bring $2 instead of $1 since it is such a special occasion.

Little does she know, that Cees's accomplishment will be repeated by his brother Erik, nine years later, in 2007.

Bad Parenting Award

We did some pretty bad parenting this week! We had to unpack thousands of boxes (well maybe a few less :-) which we got out of storage last week and used the vcr extensively. The kids spent quite some time in front of the tv, although they also spent a lot of time playing with the toys they hadn't seen for 9 months. Still, I think there was too much tv and they went to bed much too late, but at least we got a lot of unpacking done (not everything though) I think Tara watched Winnie the Pooh at least six times or so....

We hope to move into our new house tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on when we will be able to move over our computer :-) The Christmas tree is all set up, that's one thing out of the way. We did sleep in the new house for a few nights already, so we could get a lot of unpacking done. I haven't found all the comforters yet, we are using sleeping bags instead.

Parenting should be flexible, right? Sometimes you do well, sometimes you have room for improvement.

How to Prepare for the Second Baby

On Sun, 13 Dec 1998 09:10:32 EST, someone wrote:

I was up all night worrying about this crazy question. K is sure a sweetheart and I worry so much that a new baby is gonna really put a damper on all this. Will he be able to understand what's going on? Is there anyway I can prepare such a young baby for yet another baby who will be getting quite a bit of my attention? For those of you who had kids this close together, do you have any advice? I mean, what do you think I should do, if anything?

Your kids will be about the same age difference as my first two were. My oldest was very verbal, so I talked and talked and talked about the new baby, telling him about it, showing him pictures of when he was a baby, telling him that the new baby wouldn't be able to sit etc, just lie down. Also, I stressed that the new baby would be nursing too and couldn't eat anything else (Cees was still nursing)

We read books about babies and pointed out babies when we saw them somewhere and visited friends with new babies.

What I also did was try to get him used to waiting a few minutes before I answered his request. For example, if he wanted something to drink, I would say. 'OK, let me finish this letter (or whatever) and then I'll get you some'. I think this helped him to accept that he sometimes had to wait a few minutes before I could attend to him and that helped when I also had to take care of the new baby (no temper tantrums about wanting a drink, while I was in the middle of a poopy diaper of the new baby :-)

It will work out! The first year was crazy for us, with kids so close together, but after that it got easier.

Placenta Brain

I definitely suffer from 'placenta brain' again this pregnancy! Here just a random example about trying to get a cup of tea this morning. I got up, made some breakfast for my 5yo (he was the only one who got up as early as I did), then put some water in the kettle to make tea. I put it on the stove, turned on the stove and went to the computer to check my email. Then I tried to log on to Bose in the Netherlands, because I was going to do some telecommuting work for them and I was successful (for the first time)! This exhilarated me so much, that I got sucked into the assignment they sent me on Monday and worked on it very concentratedly for quite a while. I was successful in solving half of their problem already and had a good feeling about it. Then I smelt something...

And yes, I had totally forgotten about the kettle with water, which has turned into a very hot kettle without water by now, which was glued to the stove.... So I turned off the stove, and decided to wait until it was cooled down before trying to solve the sticking problem.

I let it cool down and one or two hours later, it was cold and I could unstick it pretty easily and the damage wasn't as big as I expected. I decided that I still wanted tea and put on some new water. Then I went to make a phone call and of course you can guess what happened... I forgot about the water again... Stupid! But luckily this time it hadn't been cooking for quite so long and there was still some water in the kettle, so I just added some more to cook, so that I could finally make my tea.

The tea was steeping and I forgot about it again... Then I walked past it, noticed it, took the teabag out and wanted to pour it, but got interrupted by one of the kids. Fast forward a few hours. I still hadn't had my tea and just realized that. I didn't want to make new, so I just put the cold tea in a cup and stuck it in the microwave (I know, I know, it's not really the way to do it, but I was pretty desperate by then :-) Of course now I forgot about the tea in the microwave, but by the time I remembered it was still hot enough to drink.

So that was the story of how I finally got my cup of tea.... Pretty good example of my placenta brain problems :-)

Triangles and Squares

Today, I found out that Jane can sort things by triangle and square shape. We had cheese-it's, both the normal square ones and the Nacho Chees triangle ones. I had a bowl with both kinds in them. Jane came over to sit on my lap, picked out all the square ones and fed them to me, than walked off with the triangular ones to sit down somewhere and eat them all...

So, I guess she does recognize the triangle and square shape, even if she doesn't name them yet :-)