Cuffed

UPDATE 3/1: I am headed to the doctor at 3pm because they had a surprise cancellation today and wanted me to take it so I didn't have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully some imaging will be done and I can get some answers.
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I am three and a half weeks into a rotator cuff injury, which I've been told usually takes around six weeks to heal. It was actually going very well and I was feeling good after the first week of nearly debilitating pain. I was even able to stop wearing my sling. Then, on Monday night, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp tearing pain shooting through my shoulder and down my entire arm. Ever since then, I am unable to move my arm even the slightest bit without horrible pain. I am back in my sling and plan on giving it another day to hopefully start feeling better before calling the doctor. Obviously I'd prefer that it just heals like it's supposed to, but if this kind of pain keeps up, we need to make sure that it hasn't turned into a severe tear. I'd really appreciate some prayer and good thoughts for healing.

Meow

If you happen to be following along with me at my Simplicity blog, you know that we're slowly but surely working on changing our way of life. Eliminating/modifying the things that cause us stress and learning to have less in order to live full lives with as little distraction as possible.

Well, part of eliminating stresses in our life was changing our pet situation. We started small and passed on the guinea pigs to a family with four girls who really wanted to add more guinea pigs to their family. Sometimes we miss hearing the little "wheet!" sounds whenever we walk into the garage, but we eliminated a $30 per month cost and I don't have to worry about having a cage cleaning on my weekly housecleaning schedule. Aiden was too small to clean out the cage and I was losing my desire to tend to the pigs. When it came down to it, they were causing more stress than joy. Per an agreement that we had made with Aiden months ago, we did get a betta fish after getting rid of the guinea pigs. The cost is almost non-existent and Aiden is able to clean out the fish tank with a little help from me. We have a story about our fish, but I'll put that in another post.

The next step was to address the stress that the cats were causing. No matter how often we cleaned, our laundry room was being coated with cat litter, Izzy knocked over the water bowl at least once per day, the carpet was being ripped to pieces, one of the cats (we never figured out which one) was urinating all over bath mats and under the boys' bunk beds. I was being awoken at least six times per night by the cats attempting to tear up the carpet. Obviously, things were NOT ok. However, we love our cats (although I was beginning to hate them), so we didn't want to just get rid of them. We decided to transition them outside. After a couple of successful days of putting them out on the back deck for a few hours, we decided it was time to make the big move. We moved all of their cat belongings to a corner of the garage and set up a bed area for them. We took a tip from our cat lady neighbor and left our garage door open a bit at the bottom so the cats could go in and out when they needed. (I might add that I attempted to put the cats out by myself earlier in the week and had my torso ripped to shreds by Izzy - I am healing nicely and it doesn't appear that anything will scar)

So this weekend was the weekend it was going to happen! And it did happen. Izzy attempted to bite one of John's fingers off in the process. I'm not joking - you should have heard the sound she made and then she purposely went for his hand. She bit down to the bone and John's finger is swollen, but we don't think it needs medical attention. After about eight hours, all three cats were outside. Unfortunately for the cats, John and I neglected to check the weather report and it was 26 degrees last night. We hoped that they would cuddle up together in their bed area in the garage and slowly get over their anger at us. It's been a little over twelve hours now and all three cats seem to be missing. I put some cat food outside for them and I'm hoping that they're just mad and will come around when they get hungry. I highly doubt they would have went wandering off on their first night, so they're probably just hiding in a bush. Needless to say, we'll all be very sad if all three of them disappear forever. We didn't want them gone; we just needed space. But we knew this was a risk and we've been debating the risk since last September. It wasn't an easy decision, but we felt that we made the right one.

Hopefully I'll have good news to report regarding the cats in a few days.

Tidbits

There's been so much going on around here, it's just nuts. We've had cold after cold, a long bout with pink eye, and I'm nursing an injured rotator cuff. The rotator cuff is slowly getting better, but I'm doing a terrible job at being consistent with wearing my sling, so it's taking a little longer than expected and really limiting what I can do.  Aiden brought pink eye home from school and that sucker did NOT want to go away. We all had it, although the boys had really bad cases. It is not fun to have to put warm washcloths on your kids eyes multiple times per night because their eyes are glued shut.

I'm just over halfway done with my first term and today I registered for the spring term, which includes taking my first library course! I'm so very excited and had to refrain myself from signing up for two library courses. That would have made three classes for the term (I'm also registered for my next math course) and I just don't think I'm able to make more than two classes work quite yet. It also looks like I'll be attempting a ballet class once per week after spring break, provided my shoulder can heal and I don't screw up any other part of my body in the meantime.

Aiden completed five weeks of karate and has decided that he'd like to try something else. We're fine with that. As long as he's doing some extracurricular activity, we don't mind signing him up for different things every few weeks. It looks like he'll be taking a recreational bowling class next! He's also registered for a week-long science and invention camp in June through the US Patent Office.

Nathan finished his dance class and did regularly participate despite just standing in one spot for his first class. He has requested to take piano lessons next.

There's much more to say, but I'll cover it all in separate posts.

From Aiden

Hello. This is Aiden and I am selling chocolate for my school. My teacher Mrs Prichard says that we should ask our family if they want to buy it. The money from selling chocolate will pay for activities at my school. If you want chocolate please tell my mommy. Thank you. From Aiden.

That was Aiden's idea. He came home with his fundraising materials and said that he wanted to write a letter to all of the family members to let them know that his school is selling chocolate as a fundraiser. So, in case any of you are looking for some yummy chocolate to fill your Easter baskets with, we've got it!  They've also added a new solid milk chocolate bunny to the list for this year, which we will definitely be using for Easter treats. Every item is $6 and the money is supposed to be in by Monday, Feb 27 with orders being delivered on March 22. If you're interested, send me an email at carrie.mint AT yahoo DOT com and I'll email you the list of chocolates that they're selling.  We bought some from a neighborhood girl last year and they are oh so delicious! Thanks for reading Aiden's sales pitch!

Married

As Aiden is getting older, we're having more and more serious conversations.  Sometimes, they're more serious for him than they are for me.  I had such a hard time keeping a straight face as I had the following conversation with him.

Aiden: My girlfriend Michelle broke up with me.
Me: Oh!  How do you feel about that?
Aiden: It's fine because Lena said she'd be my girlfriend.
Me: Well that's nice.
Aiden: But then Lena broke up with me.
Me: Oh my!
Aiden: Now Joanna is my girlfriend and I hope she doesn't break up with me because I REALLY need to find someone to marry.

I somehow successfully managed to keep from laughing or even smiling, but did have tears welling up in my eyes from holding it in.  I'm not sure why Aiden feels that kindergarten is the time to find your future spouse, but I did spend a few minutes explaining that he might not find who his future spouse while he's in kindergarten, so he doesn't need to have a girlfriend at all times.  That a lot of people don't find who they're going to marry until they're already a grown up and that's ok.  He appeared to take it under consideration, but I don't think it will make any difference.  I think he likes having a girlfriend.  Although at this rate, he's going to have "dated" all the females in his class by the end of the year.  It's funny to see how six year olds interpret being boyfriend and girlfriend.  They simply agree to be boyfriend and girlfriend and then go about their normal school activities with no change in behavior towards each other.  It's just hilarious to me that Aiden is on a spouse hunt, but I'm happy that his "break ups" didn't seem to upset him too much.

Karate and Dance

We've had a busy week.  Mostly good, although I had an alarm clock malfunction yesterday that caused us all to oversleep and Aiden was 30 minutes late for school (lesson learned: When you find a fancy, normally expensive alarm clock on clearance, ask yourself WHY it might be on clearance...).  Two of our activities this week included Aiden beginning karate and Nathan continuing his dance class.  Aiden REALLY enjoyed karate and provided the next three classes go well, I think we'll be looking into an actual karate school for him.  Nathan finally participated in his dance class.  Apparently the trick was to buy him new shoes that light up when he walks.  He was quite excited to dance and make his shoes light up.  We'll see if Nathan wants to do any other classes after this series is over.  But we did sign him up for preschool for this coming fall at the same school we were a part of for three years before.  We are looking forward to seeing the Creative Children's Center family again in September and I am looking forward to having a few hours each week to myself!

Without further ado, here's Aiden's first experience with karate:

 He's in all red, practicing his stance.  The class was supposed to be capped at 8.  The parks dept didn't cap it until 12 kids had signed up.  The teacher has a lot of kids to handle!

 Learning to block.  I was actually really impressed with what she taught them.  She even taught them the Japanese words to use with their movements.

 The kids got to practice on each other.  They all actually did very well and no one went wildly whacking at anyone else.  And the teacher did a good job with trying to match kids with other kids their own size (the ages in the class range from 5 to 9).

 Aiden loved it and was a little disappointed that it happens just once per week.  

 In Nathan's dance class, he finally participated but kept turning around to make sure I was still sitting outside the door.  Silly boy.

 Bouncing is so much fun!  He still stayed a little further back than the rest of the class, but at least he did more than just stand there.

 As you can see, it's mostly girls.  There is one other boy (named Aiden), so at least Nathan isn't the only boy in class full of frilly dresses and fairy wings.

Conga line!  They were so cute!

It's nice to see the boys enjoying themselves and being active with other kids.  I felt like we really toned our activities down during the fall just to try to adjust to a brand new school schedule.  We were all ready to be more socially active.  I was hoping to get some more mom fellowship in with other moms during the classes, but it's proving to be a little difficult.  Most of the parents in the karate class are dads or grandparents, and the moms in the dance class all have girls and appear to have formed their own clique from knowing each other previously (and my attempt at introducing myself didn't go well, as they were surprisingly standoff-ish).  The mom who has the only other boy in the class did start a conversation with me yesterday though, so we'll see how that goes.  It's times like this when I wish my college friends who have kids didn't all live in Philadelphia/Jersey/New York.  I'll expand on this fellowship subject more in a future post, as there is plenty more to say.

For now, it's just nice to get out and start doing stuff again now that we're used to kindergarten and the scheduling that comes along with it.

Check Up

At Nathan's check up today, we learned that he is just about perfect!  No real concerns and the minor things that I brought up sounded totally normal for a four year old boy in the pediatrician's opinion.  Good to know!  Having a second child - especially one of the same gender as the first - is a little difficult sometimes because I tend to compare Aiden and Nathan, when in reality they are very different boys.

Nathan is 36 lbs (49th percentile) and 40 inches (40th percentile).  My little boy!  He is right at the height limit for his convertible carseat, so we will be buying him a big boy booster seat like Aiden's!  While Aiden could switch to a seatbelt positioning booster seat, I feel more comfortable keeping him in his 5 point harness booster. Once he gets a little older, the 5 point harness can be removed and we can use it as a seatbelt positioning seat until he's ready for no more booster seat.  We'll be buying Nathan the same seat and he couldn't be more excited to be in the same seat as his big brother!

He was given a vision test during his appointment and he barely passed.  I was wondering when John's bad vision was going to show up in one of the boys.  We are interested to see how the next two years go until he gets his kindergarten vision screening through the school district.  While Nathan would look super cute in glasses, I hope we can wait a little while longer before he needs them.  It's obviously inevitable though.

Other than that, everything went fine.  He also had his 2nd dance class today and he actually danced!  I took some pictures and also have some pictures from Aiden's karate class, so I'll be getting those up here soon.  It's nice to see both boys enjoying their classes.