Yuck

[Ed. note - Today was so incredibly awesome that we both felt the need to write posts about it independently...]

For about a month now, the J-man has had an off-and-on cough. It would go away for a bit, then come back, usually with no real other symptoms. Sunday night though, that cough wouldn’t stop. He coughed pretty much all night. It meant he didn’t rest, and neither did we, because we could hear him.

We already run a humidifier in his room at night, and we had the Vicks “waterless” vaporizer going too.

Still… when he got up this morning, we immediately saw he wasn’t going to school. The cough was getting worse and starting to sound distinctly seal-barky.

Tim took the J-man to the doctor, who confirmed our thoughts that it was croup. Great. He’s had croup before, once when he was little-bitty, and once when he was a little less than 2. This time, it seems harder to get him to be calm, but excitement/movement makes him cough more.

There was a lot of Signing Time in the house today. That, and the theme music from The West Wing - when it plays, the J-man will stand stock-still and watch the TV intently. Or, he’ll climb up on the couch, settle in beside me for the duration of the theme song, and then be on his way.

He’s a smart kid. Knows good TV when he hears it!

So we now are running a humidifier downstairs, have cranked up the one in his room and are going to lower the house temperature tonight… all in the hopes that the coughing will stop. No school tomorrow anyway because of Veterans Day.

And… Happy Birthday to my dad. He was born on Veterans Day. He’s one of the best dads around!

The Croup has landed on the Flashlight house. Man I was starting to feel bored, lazy, and complacent so it’s a good thing this happened! Feel the sarcasm oozing from every pore!

And even better is that there really isn’t a dang thing you can do about croup except maybe crank up some humidifiers. And at this point if it could possibly work, we’re all about it. We obviously need a bigger humidifier for the downstairs so he can be more comfortable during the day. So we may be off to Bed, Bath, and Boogaloo tomorrow with our fistful of 20% off coupons to buy more. Given all the coupons they send us, we should get a humidifier for 246% off.

What was amusing is that in the midst of all this misery, J-Man actually had a really good speech day. In the doctor’s office, we sang the ABC song, and he did a great job getting most of the letters out pretty clearly, even while talking through a snotty nose.

In more talking news, I’m still diggin’ that he calls me Daddy consistently now. It never gets old after over three years without the ‘d’ sound in the house. He says it in a few ways with “dah-dee” or “duh-dee” being the most common, and with the last “dee” becoming “die” on occasion. Sometimes it comes out “dah-zee”, I think because the ’s’ and ‘z’ sounds just showed up recently, and he seems to be enjoying trying them out.

Of course today being what it was, a couple of times what I assume was “Daddy” came out as “die-die”, which was a pretty fitting description of the day.

We took today off from school and had a day of rest, though I personally could have rested better on my own. We also have tomorrow off because of Veterans Day. I hope to God he’s better by Wednesday. Missing too much school throws everybody off, including the students in the class who seem very aware when one of their number is gone a while. The Autistic Gang of Five that make up his class are getting thick as thieves, so being down a man or two definitely impacts the havoc they can wreak!

If somebody knows of some spell - like from Harry Potter - that will automagically cut a terrified, frantic kid’s hair, we’d love to hear it.

We’ve long since given up going to the local kid haircut place since J-Man just screamed bloody murder, scared every kid in there, and required six people practically sitting on him to get through it. They were GREAT sports about it, and we’d recommend that haircut place to anyone, but we figured we could pull out our own clippers and just have him scream bloody murder in the comfort of our own home.

We now buzz his hair really short so we can go many weeks until we have to go through this again. He was just so scraggly that we couldn’t wait any longer.

It kills us to see him that frantic and upset…

That’s how we spent our evening. Yay.

Many of you with toddler and up-aged autistic kids know that they can be physically challenging - to say the least - to get to cooperate or transition from activity to activity. You also know that when they decide they want to do something, they’re going, and they will use all of their formidable strength to do it. You also also know that when a behavioral problem gets acted out in a some very serious way, you often have to throw your body into the fray to prevent something worse from happening.

This means that injuries are an inevitable part of our parenting life. It’s not like our kids mean to harm us; it just happens. That certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be working hard to remedy those behaviors, but that can be a long, hard journey. In the meantime, you’re going to absorb some punishment to your body.

At any given time, I’d be a lock to be on an NFL team’s injury report as “Questionable”, probably in more ways than one. At the moment, I have what looks like a sprained thumb joint, definitely a sore wrist, and what feels like a borderline bone bruise on my shin. The former two are mostly from J-Man flopping or going rigid when he’s supposed to transition to something else, which tends to wrench my wrist. The latter is because he flopped down on my leg last night - knee first - when I was trying to get his diaper on. And at 35, these things don’t up and heal overnight. But It’s just life; you play hurt, and you play hard.

So, to commemorate this latest set of injuries, I’m going to participate in the Autism Ribbon Run 5K in the morning. Our state Autism Society holds this as one of its big fundraisers, and I hear it’s quite the social event too with parents of autistic kids getting a chance to get together and hang out for a while.

This has one weird component for me, though. I used to run road races a lot and was reasonably good at it, but it’s been years since I’ve done this. Trying to get my very sorry, out-of-shape butt fit enough to even go three miles has been no small effort. I used to be able to go out on no training at all and run three miles in about 20-21 minutes; my 5K personal best is around 19 minutes. Not any more. Even 30 minutes would be a big feat at the moment even without the injuries. I realized during all this that I’m feeling my age and some wear and tear on my body. It’s been rather disheartening. The good news is that the non-injured parts of me feel better for the exercise, so that’s something to build on. And for reasons I can’t explain, it felt good to be on the road running again.

But I really wanted to do this and I wanted to do it in a special way - I wanted to do it together with the J-Man. So I decided from the outset that I was going to push him in the stroller for the 3.1 miles. We tried this the other day and I realized that going three miles pushing 60+ pounds of kid and stroller is HARD. But we’re going to do it anyway.

And if he cooperates, he and I are going to leave the stroller with grandma and walk the last handful of feet across the finish line together. This is really important to me, so we’ll get there one way or the other.

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So, this getting old stuff? It sucks.

After our super-awesome trip to WV (7 hours each way in the car, PLUS nobody lives less than 40 minutes from each other!), I was pretty tired. Let’s say very tired.

Let’s say… I went to the doctor on Tuesday morning because I couldn’t catch my breath doing simple stuff, and it felt like I couldn’t get air all the way down in my lungs, and it felt like there was a weight on my chest.

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[The original post is here. If you haven't read it, go read it first. You definitely won't want to miss The Rest of the Story.]

This was so utterly bizarre that it deserves its own post.

So after the Great Sleeper Escape the other day, we just pitched the sleeper into the laundry not knowing - or wanting to know - what foulness lived in its fabric. When it came time to fold the laundry, we noticed something absolutely astounding. The Great Sleeper Escape turned out to be a complete understatement. You have to see this to believe it.

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[Bewildering update to this post available here.]

This has been the roller-coaster week from Helena, and this morning got off to a rip-roaring start, as if we needed that.

You may remember from the Houdini post that J-Man is the David Blaine of sleep clothes. One minute he’s clothed and then you blink and everything he’s wearing is piled on the floor and he’s jumping up and down in the bed butt nekkid. Thankfully, David Blaine hasn’t tried that on prime time TV yet.

So we had given up on two-piece pajamas for a while and have been cramming him back into sleepers again. The stress of having to run into his room the second he woke up in the morning to prevent endless sheet washing just got old. His sleepers are zippered and snapped and fit him so snugly that it’s hard for him even to completely straighten out. He’s chewed on the neck area of them a lot, but they’ve stayed on and always zippered up, which has thankfully thwarted any more ecstatic fits of aerobic urination in the bed.

Well, at least until this morning.

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Sick. Sick. Sick. Sick. Sick.

That was me last week. I don’t know that I’ve ever taken off pretty much a full week for being sick before. This was worse than the Norovirus. It was worse than, well, any sickness I’ve ever felt before. And it wouldn’t go AWAY!

The weekend before: hmmm… I don’t feel great. I’m going to try to get some sleep.

Monday: oh my FSM I am sick. Dear FSM in heaven I am sick. I may die right now.
Me (pitiful voice): honey, can you get me some Gatorade? Icy, icy cold Gatorade?
Tim: I’ll bring it up to you.
Me: thanks babe… *blurgh* *wets pants from ralphing so hard*
repeat ad nauseum (heh)

Tuesday: sick. can’t sleep. had to get up in the middle of the night to throw up.
Me (pitiful voice): honey, can you get me some Gatorade? Icy, icy cold Gatorade?
Tim: I’ll bring it up to you.
Me: thanks babe… *blurgh* *wets pants from ralphing so hard*
repeat ad nauseum
Me: should I try to eat dry toast?
Tim: you could try it
Me: could you bring me some? and some Gatorade?
Tim: OK ba…
Me (interrupting): *blurgh* *more wet pants*

Wednesday: at the doctor’s office.
Me (holding my head up with my hand, arm propped on desk): I’m not leaving until you give me something to stop this.
Tim: I’ve never seen her this sick
PA: um, there’s a bathroom right outside if you need to throw up again. Oh my, I didn’t think you could get any paler, but you have.
Me: give me DRUGS!
PA: yes ma’am. Right away, ma’am!

Thursday: still very tired, but anti-nausea drugs are sort-of working. Can only eat dry toast and saltines. Can only drink Gatorade and ginger ale. Try to work. Make it 1 1/2 hours before going back to bed. Sleep a lot.

Friday: worked a total of 4 hours this week. Yeah, this is great. Feeling less like I’m going to die, but still tired. Try other food than dry toast and saltines, like toast with peanut butter. Bad idea. Sleep more. Fold lots of pairs of shorts and underwear from Monday and Tuesday’s escapades.

This is why I haven’t blogged.

[Ed. note - FSM = Flying Spaghetti Monster]

As a kid, I was always amazed by those escape artist type magicians. I couldn’t believe they could get all the stuff off, while underwater, while a hungry hungry hippo was coming towards them. (Hippos… one of the deadliest animals on earth. No seriously. This factoid brought to you by the letter P, and the number 1.)

I am no longer enamored by escape artists. Their twisty ways, their ability to shuck off chains, their double jointedness. Not cool at all.

The reason is this:

Recently the J-man started wearing 2 piece pajamas to bed, because we couldn’t in good conscience stuff him into the sleepers anymore. You will remember the Hulk. Now though, he has learned that it is VERY easy to take those pajamas off, especially the bottom part. From there, it’s a quick journey to taking off the diaper/pull-up, and throwing both onto the floor. This usually ends (heh, ends) badly - Mama and Daddy have to wash all the sheets, the pajamas, and the J-man because of the gallon of urine all over everything.

Yesterday after non-nap we had to change the sheets. This morning, J-man had managed to take off the pajamas sometime between the last time I checked on him last night, and before he woke this morning… so the pull-up and pajama pants were still completely dry, while the pajama top, sheets, last vestige of the bumper pad, mattress? soaked. I had two sets of sheets (we do sheet/mattress cover/sheet, although that will change since he can soak through all 3 at this point), a blanket that had been almost under the crib, but not enough that it was missed when he peed off the side, and pajamas. I washed them all, washed down the mattress and re-made the bed. I also gave the J-man a bath (completely confused him) which he was not happy about - so he peed on the floor of the bathroom while I was running the water!

When naptime came, I remembered those blanket sleepers we had - they are slightly bigger than the old lightweight sleepers, so we put him in one of those. Ha! Let’s see what you do now!

Here’s what he did: he somehow managed to un-tape the diaper on one side, then slide it completely down the other leg and wedge it into the foot of the sleeper. He did actually nap. He woke up in a puddle, with a soaking wet sleeper (except of course for the footie part where the dry diaper was!). David Copperfield has nothing on my kid.

2 sheet changes in one day is too many. Tonight, he’s stuffed into one of the old sleepers. We’ll see if it works.