Updates on Patrick

Building a bridge for his dinosaurs to fight under.

In general, Patrick is good - just an awesome 2 1/2-year old who surprises me every day. He's not good at the moment, though; he picked up hand/foot/mouth disease and has had the WORST TIME of it. It gives kiddos rashes on their hands and feet and possibly bum, then sores in their mouthes. Both boys got it, both had mild fevers, both had mild rashes, but while Eli got over it, Patrick has the sorriest looking mouth you've ever seen - he won't stick out his tongue to show Joe, but I've seen at least 3 horrendously large, white, broken clisters on the bottom of his tongue, and I'm assuming he has others around his cheeks/gums/etc. We heard it was pretty mild, Tylenol should get him through the trauma of eating, but NOT SO. It's been 72 hours since he had any solid food, poor guy, though he keeps asking for it and then BAWLING as soon as he puts it in his mouth. Day 1 we figured this would be quick, so we stuck with milk and gatorade. Day 2, still no go on anything but liquids, so we added fruit & yogurt smoothies to the mix. Day 3 we realized we could be in it for the long haul, so breakfast yesterday morning was a smoothie with a banana, peanut butter, milk, and 1/2 cup cooked oatmeal - breakfast from the blender! He drank it all down, but hasn't had anything since. We read it generally lasts about a week, but COULD last 2-3 weeks... this morning he woke up in good spirits and hasn't taken medicine in over a day, so I hope we're on the downhill slope! I am already dreading that this may be a long winter with lots of illness unless I quarantine our family until May of 2011, which brings its own set of things to dread, like cabin fever a la "The Shining."



But whether it's 2 more days or 2 more weeks I know he WILL get over this eventually, so up until now, and after this bout, here's what Patrick has been up to: spending lots of time on his own. Every day he is allowed to watch a movie while Eli takes a nap. Since he stopped napping movies have been his "down time" and generally stave off evening tantrums, with the added benefit that I get to take my own nap during this time. He initially woke me up numerous times for his needs but has become completely independant lately, which is AWESOME - he can go potty without any assistance whatsoever, he has one glass of juice and knows he won't get another snack til I wake up, and when his movie is done he takes it out of the DVD player and puts it on top of the TV (which he turns off) and then goes and plays by himself until I get up. It's CRAZY, and I like to think he is exceptionally self-sufficient for a 2-year-old. Am I right? He plays trains, reads himself books, digs in the sandbox, gets out all his dinosaurs for a dino-brawl... I've said before that my house is not baby-proof, it's Patrick-proof, and this is just an example of that. Let any other 2-year-old loose in my house without supervision and it would be destroyed, I'm sure.

Outside of my nap time and his play time, he is currently obsessed with dinosaurs. We get the $1 dinos from WalMart, which have the names on their tails, and he is incredible at remembering and pronouncing their names - not just T Rex, but Pachycepholasaurus and Parasauralophus and ankylosaurus... and he corrects me when I misname one! Heaven forbid! So we read lots of dinosaur books and got him a dino costume for Halloween, I figure it's a good love to encourage! Certainly I can think of much more annoying things that kids falls in love with... He is still the world's sweetest boy and LOVES to snuggle and read books, indicating how many he'd like to read by holding up that number of fingers - sometimes ten, sometimes two, depending on how long he's trying to put off bedtime. No matter how many books we read, though, he still wants "four minutes 'fore bedtime," silly boy. He pets my face and smiles and tells me "you happy to see me!" to which I am required to answer "I'm always happy to see you." If he gets in trouble his defense is "you happy to see me!" with a sob in his throat and a tear in his eye, or if I'm yelling at him he yells at me, "you happy to see me!" so because I'm happy to see him (aka I love him) I can't yell or get him in trouble, I guess. I've been working on explaining the difference between me loving him and me NOT loving that he just hit Eli :) He likes to look at pictures, and my scrapbooks have made a handy reference to how babies grow and his family on both sides, but he often requests pictures we don't have, like "daddy and Fafa on an airplane." Sorry, bud, I don't have pictures of EVERYTHING! Hmmmm... there are 10 bajillion things to write, but I think this is quite long enough!