Our Little Adult

This has been a slightly odd week with Aiden. My normally night owl of a six year old has been waking up between 6 and 6:30am, perky and ready for the day. This is very different from our typical morning routine of struggling to get him awake and dressed in time for school. Instead, he's been waking ME up. On Tuesday, he woke me up by shouting, "I'm going to be late for school!!". Of course, I woke up in a panic only to find that it was 6am. School starts around 8am.

This has been happening all week. He'll wake up, comb his hair (he usually hates combing his hair), get himself dressed, get himself breakfast (he usually doesn't eat breakfast, just like his mommy), and if he's got time to spare, he'll watch some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or play with Legos. It's honestly made our mornings a lot easier, but I'm anticipating a switch back to our normal routine after the time change this weekend.

Whatever is going on with him, he's been thinking a lot about growing up over the past week. We had a very emotional time last night when he burst into tears and announced that he was afraid to grow up. He begged me to tell him how to keep from growing up and was devastated when I told him that there was no way to stop it. He said he was afraid that he wouldn't know what to do or how to behave as a grown up. Well kid, I'm 28 and I still have no idea what I'm doing half the time. While I hugged him, we had a nice talk about growing up. He's still not convinced that he wants to grow up, but it at least opened up some communication about his fears.

I think I'm discovering that parenting an older child might be more difficult than parenting a younger one.

Saving

As some of you may know, Aiden has been working at saving money to purchase an ipad since last September. He has wanted an ipad since my dad bought one and brought it with him on visit. There are amazing educational applications for it and it's so very in line with Aiden's interests. But, they are expensive and we told him that we couldn't just buy one for him. He was sad, but not long after that, he saw an article about this 8 year old boy who saved money to buy an ipad. He was insistent that he had to do the same. We weren't sure how long a kid Aiden's age would stick with saving money. Would he be able to be patient while he saved? It was worth a try.

Between allowance, doing additional tasks around the house, and some gift money from his birthday and Christmas, he has now saved $100 for his ipad. While he has a way to go yet, we are so impressed that he is willing to wait it out and save. Every time he gets money, he immediately says, "Put it in the ipad fund!". Since John and I know that saving $500-$600 would take a few years, we have decided (without telling Aiden) that once he reaches a certain point - probably around half way - we will match what he has saved, potentially as a gift if it happens to fall around his birthday or Christmas. While it would be fun to see his face as he opens a present to find an ipad, there's also a part of us that thinks he would love to be able to walk into the Apple store with his money that he saved, and have the pride of purchasing the ipad himself.  We'll see how it works out once it gets closer.

I had a hard time believing that he would stick with saving this long, but he's done it. And now that he sees that he's into triple digits, he is even more eager to keep saving. We are very proud of him and it's been fun to watch him learn how to earn money and then put it away for something that he wants.

Breakfast!

I don't usually post recipes here, but we've been trying out all sorts of new yummy creations lately. I have many to share, but I haven't taken the photos off of my camera yet, so those will be in another post. But I couldn't wait on this one. This is what we had for breakfast this morning:

Photo credit: Sugarcrafter.net

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Nutella Swirl Coffee Cake. If you happen to not be familiar with Nutella, it's the yummy stuff inside the Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Jars of Nutella are a tad pricey, but it's something that lasts for a while and we like to have it on hand. Once I saw the recipe for this on Sugarcrafter, I knew I had to try it. That blog is quickly becoming my first go-to place when I'm looking for something sweet to bake.

I would highly recommend this recipe and you can find it here: Nutella Swirl Coffee Cake. I was out of plain yogurt, so I used a mix of sour cream and cream cheese instead (I would used all sour cream, but I was 2 oz short, so I threw in the rest of our cream cheese to get it up to the required amount). It tasted awesome. Sure, it probably made it about 6 times more fattening than it would have been otherwise, but I wasn't going for diet food here. Seriously, a warm slice of this coffee cake along with a freshly brewed cup of coffee was one of the most decadent breakfasts I've had in quite a while. And the kids love it!

The Plan

Someone had a plan for me today. I called the doctor around noon to schedule an appointment for my arm/shoulder since the pain was constant and unbearable. As I was speaking to the receptionist, I took a few minutes to discuss options for changing who my primary doctor was within the practice (note to anyone: If your main doctor constantly treats you like you're a waste of time and space, find someone else). After deciding on a doctor, we started looking at scheduling again. The receptionist says, "We JUST got a cancellation for 3pm. Do you want it?". YES! If I hadn't taken a few minutes to decide on a new doctor, I would have already gotten scheduled for sometime next week and missed this last minute opening.

So off I went with kids in tow (the downside of a last minute appointment is that last minute babysitters are almost non-existent). However. Aiden was excited to see what the doctor was going to do with my arm. The doctor looked, and felt, and discussed, and put in a request for insurance approval for an MRI. That will hopefully be scheduled for Monday so we can find out if there's a tear or not. Once she did that, she said she wanted me to do six weeks of physical therapy, starting out with just pain management. I was sent downstairs to the physical therapy and rehabilitation office to get scheduled. They were booked out for two weeks. Not ideal, but what can you do? As we were scheduling me for two weeks out, someone called and canceled their appointment that was scheduled to start in 15 minutes. Guess who got a surprise hour-long physical therapy session?

Yes, I had the boys in with me but the therapist dug up some crayons and coloring pages so they were occupied. It was nice to get massaged a little around my shoulder, but we soon figured out that those muscles are massively irritated from my injury. Plus, she had to test my range of motion, which is around 35% right now. My shoulder is not pleased. I know it will help in the long run, but I did not expect to be in so much pain   from a pain management appointment. As I was leaving, the receptionist was printing out a copy of my scheduled appointments. There was going a two week gap since they had been booked, but can you guess what happened? Someone called and canceled for an evening appointment for the following week. Everything was perfectly lined up!

What a strange day. Hopefully things will work out just as quickly with getting the MRI scheduled. I'm ready to know what's going on with my shoulder and work on getting it healed. And here's hoping that the next pain management therapy appointment isn't quite so.....painful.