Trick or Treat

Isaiah ended up making little cards last night. He got a book from the school library that showed how to draw "curiosa". It had Yoda, Dracula and other creepy beings. He was tickled pink when the kids absolutely loved them! He got rid of all the cards he made and is probably upstairs starting on a batch for next year!
Mom bought plenty of candy bars. There are 4 boxes left. I think she may have done that on purpose!
Naomi and I stayed home. It's always so chilly here on Trick or Treat night and with her cold we just stayed put. Well, it's 52 outside, which isn't bad. But in the dark it's not great! One year we saw the aurora borealis while trick or treating. That was a treat! Not usual for here!
Mom and Dad were to tickled at how excited Isaiah was! He never got this excited about going trick or treating! He is just a kid that would rather give. There's nothing wrong with that!

So here's some pics from tonight.

The sign mom made and Isaiah embellished

Last minute pumpkin decorations

Isaiah's candy stand.

cute little Wondergirl Trick or Treater. Her mom and I have been friends since I was about her age and her mom was 2

Another view of the candy stand. Isaiah drug the table off the front porch and sat on the front steps. Mom and Dad are at the end of the part of town that gives out candy so they didn't get as many as when mom goes and sits with Dougie, two houses up.

Happy Halloweener!

Tomorrow is Trick or Treat. Isaiah has decided he doesn't want to dress up and go trick or treating, he'd rather pass out candy.
Well the other night he had his colored pencils and a stack of index cards. I saw him drawing various Halloween things on the cards. Ghost, Dracula, pumpkins etc...
Then he turned them over and was writing on them. He said he was making them to pass out with the candy. I noticed in big writing "WINNER" on the card he was working on. So I checked into it a little more. He thought he'd have a contest!
"Isaiah!" I told him "You can not have a contest and promise a prize and not follow thorugh!". Well that didn't make him happy. He gathered them up and threw them away. I didn't realize it or I'd have saved a few because the were so darn cute! But the way people are now! You promise their kids something and you better follow though!
Mom's giving away full size Hershey bars this year. They seem to be what all the kids want. Usually she gives them a choice and even got Teddy Grahams last year for the little kids.
Of course Naomi won't be Trick or Treating this year. Thank goodness she's my 2nd child. I may have worried more about her missing out, or feeling like she's missing out. She'll have no clue. She'll be excited to see all the kids out. Well actually right now she has a mucus filled nose and it's green mucus too, so we may not even be outside in the cold.
At least I'm saving on costumes this year. :)

What A Wreck

I took the following photos of our car from my living room!



Isaiah needed a protractor to finish his homework so Bill offered to run to Drug Mart. Naomi still had her socks on so we put her shoes on her and he took, he NEVER takes her along! This is the first time I can remember that he alone took her to the store, he usually just runs out the door and doesn't even think about taking her!
I was talking to mom on the phone, the windows were up because it was beautiful out and call waiting beeped in. I told mom "he is so helpless, I just sent him for a protractor!" So I clicked over and Bill said "call the police" my first thought for some reason was that Naomi had a seizure and fell in the store and was hurt or something. He said "I'm right out front of the house, someone rear ended me."I opened the front door and there they were. Naomi just sitting patiently, not crying, Bill had gotten out of the car. I was already talking to the police. As soon as I got off the line with them I ran out and grabbed Naomi out of the car and brought her in the house. She seemed fine, not crying, not bothered at all.
Bill knows it's just an accident but it's just such an inconvenience and we had just checked 2 days ago to see what the pay off was. We only have about 6 more payments, and Bill had said that it was nice to know we could just pay it off anytime if we wanted.
When the cop got there he the lady kept saying "I didn't see a turn signal". Meanwhile the signal is ding ding dinging away inside the car. Bill said a semi and other cars all went around and it looked like she was trying to go around but was going too fast or realized too late that he was sitting still. He just bit his tongue, his nerves are tied in a knot!
Luckily the rear passenger side took the largest impact, Naomi was sitting behind the drivers seat. The entire bumper and whole right panel is gone. The trunk was sticking straight up and it looked like the other side was just gone. The tail lights, everything on the passenger side is just gone. The back is pushed up into the tires so it wasn't drivable.
Thankfully I called our insurance and the lady's insurance and got the ball rolling. Our insurance pushed through everything so we could pick up a rental car tonight. Naomi has a busy day tomorrow and we can't be without a vehicle. The lady's insurance is supposed to contact me tomorrow after 10 am to fill me in on what's going on. But our insurance has already had it sent to a collision repair place they use.
She said she hit her brakes and such but there are NO skid marks, nothing. No squealing of brakes, it didn't seem like she even put the brakes on.
Our insurance said to get a new car seat because once they've been in a wreck they aren't to be used again and the insurance would reimburse us.
Well, thankfully everyone is okay. Bill's neck and shoulders are stiff. He thinks because he was looking in the rear view mirror and saw her coming and stiffened up when he realized she was not going to stop. But Naomi's silly as ever!

Thursday-Therapy day

Actually Tues and Thurs are therapy days for Naomi.


Thursday her therapist were tickled pink. Her speech therapist was sitting on the floor with her and rolling a ball to the physical therapist and Naomi caught the ball said the word "ball" then rolled it back and they were so excited. She doesn't often use words purposefully. I told her speech therapist Naomi has been standing at the front door saying what sounded like ball and I finally realized it's the pumpkins sitting on the front step.


This weekend it sounded like she was saying Bill and we thought it was funny because it was like she was yelling at her Dad. Well Tuesday when Bill got home from work Naomi was sitting eating supper and when she saw him she threw out her hand towards him and yelled "BILL!". We haven't heard Dad lately, it's just "Bill".


When I was little I was visiting my grandparents and my grandma said something about my dad and I said "Old Poopyhead?". My mom got mad at my dad and curbed her language but I still repeated it :)

Cream Goatee

Lehman's Hardware Kidron Ohio

First try at taking a photo Naomi to excited about something but she IS looking at me. OOPS next try. Now there's something in the sky exciting her!
Now she turns her head away from us when we say her name.

Last try, Isaiah is getting tired of standing there! I need a digital camera with a faster shutter!

We ran to Lehman's Hardware Saturday. It's not that far from our house and generally I try to go through the week. I'm no tourist. There's something there I want and I'd like to get in, look around a little then leave. It was packed! Lehman's specializes in nonelectric items and supplies Hollywood with lots of period items for Western and period films. I bought a Doughmaker's cookie sheet. I should have taken a picture of the wall of cookie cutters they have. Sleighs, states, leaves, just absolutely anything you could imagine. It's funny to go to a town with no traffic light to try and find some rare item you can't find anywhere else!

It just happened to be the 1st Annual Red Beet Festival. Yeah, beet! They had beet ice cream which I did NOT try!

Well I tried!

I took Naomi to the preschool where she receives itinerant services to get her picture taken. A local photography studio was there taking school pictures and I squeezed my way in to try and get hers done. My thinking was, it's a special needs preschool, surely she won't be the only kid they need to do some tricks for so they get a good shot! Wrong. Typical school photography. Sit, smile, go. She doesn't work like that.
She had me sweating before we left the house! Know what I mean! How you're trying to get something done and your kid decides now is the time to get into everything and scream and cry when they're reprimanded? Then you get so worked up from chasing and handling them you just get to sweating from pure aggravation! It's 40 degrees outside too so working up a sweat shouldn't have been so easy!
She was in the dog food, screaming, crying just ugh!!!!!!! So finally I just took her out and put her in her car seat in the warmed up car and shut the door and let her get it out of her system while I ran back inside and grabbed all I needed to. A sippy cup, my keys, my purse etc... Then I jumped in the front seat put on a Thomas the Tank Engine CD and all was better.
I worried it wasn't a far enough drive to let her nose turn back to normal color and not the bright red it had become from her fit.
We got there and one of the classrooms was already lined up and getting their photo taken one by one. I'd of liked to have asked who sent their kid in shorts and a t-shirt! That poor child! Anyway back to mine! I took her in the room, sat her down and they had something on the floor like a little step for them to get up on a little stool. Well as soon as she figured out she could tap her feet on that and make noise, it was over. She couldn't pull her attention away. I moved it and she didn't like that. The photographer did take about 4 photos and I chose the best of the worst. There was no good. No smile, she wasn't comfortable and needed time to take in this new space she'd been taken to.
This is the first time since she was 1 yr. old that I've had a picture taken of her like this. I had planned on getting them taken at 18 months and we actually went, but the guy at Olan Mills had over booked apparently and we had to wait 1 hour which sent her hunger into overdrive and she wouldn't do anything but scream bloody murder because she was so hungry. So we gave up and left and then it was only a few months later and she started Depakote then Topamax and you don't want a picture of your child when they're doped up. Plus she has never been a sit down kind of kid! We need an action shot :) Time just slipped away and here we are 2 1/2 years later finally trying to get a picture of her.
This is officially going on my list of things I absolutely will not attempt to do alone with her! This list is getting long!

A Four Letter Word

It's that time of year but I'm not ready for the word snow to be said during a local forecast. The five day forecast says today will be the warmest, 51! UGH!
Very cold nights and this weekend a "wintry mix" is possible.
It just feels like 2 weeks ago I looked around and noticed how fall like it was becoming. Now, before we've even begun to rake leaves her comes the white stuff!
I love the change of seasons. But it just seems like the parts of each season I enjoy just fly by!

More X-rays

Today for no apparent reason Naomi was limping bad on her right leg. Since it was Friday and 4:00 I called the pediatrician to see if they could get us in. The lovely lady from Australia answered and said how about 4:10.
TAKE IT!
We live close enough we weren't even late.
The nurse practitioner saw her. Saw she was limping and felt around. There's nothing obvious. I thought it had just fallen asleep but after more than an hour it should have been better. We got our marching orders and went to the hospital for x-rays and checked in at 4:45. They had to take someone from ER before us so we had to wait until 5:20 ish. It's awful waiting with a toddler!
Of course the radiologist isn't even there to read the x-ray, but I'm sure if there was something obviously wrong the techs would call the pediatricians office. So we have x-rays, but no one official to look at them until Monday.
The good news is she's pretty much walking normally now! So I doubt anything will show up. But I did not want to have to take her to the ER on a weekend. That is hell on Earth!

Told you I was paraniod!

Last night Naomi was sleeping with me and I woke and thought
"Oh my God she's shaking! Is it some sort of weird epileptic tremor??"
I should say shaking SLIGHTLY
Guess what was wrong???
Thank gosh I'm not a real panicky person, and am too lazy to get out of a warm bed. How embarrassed I'd have been to have called 911 only to figure out what was wrong...... she'd kicked the covers off and was cold.
She had woken at midnight and was screaming. Nothing so wrong that a Thomas the Tank Engine movie couldn't cure it. I had taken off her pajama pants and changed her diaper and we both passed out sometime before 1:30. So at some point she kicked the covers off. Maybe she never had them on her. I was so out of it who knows!
But pulling the comforter over her and warming up her legs cured her tremor.
What an idiot I am!

Naomi today

Naomi's babbling like crazy. Well, not really babbling, she is saying something. She just says it over and over. For instance "mom mom mom mom mom mom" or my favorite"bad bad bad bad bad dad". Last night she was staying close to Isaiah and she kept saying "bub bub bub bub" and that's what she used to call him, bub or bubby. I was worried it was the increase of ketones that was helping her speech but hurting her seizures. She was falling like a tree and stiffening up and staying that way for 5-7 seconds like it was stretching her to a certain point then would let go. On Friday when I learned that her BHB was 7.37, over a full point more than it had ever been, the dietitian and I decided to lower her ratio. Not only was her BHB high, her glucose was 51, which is less than 3 mmol/l. We want it over 3. The "okay" range is something like 50-65 so she was pretty close to the bottom. She was waking up crying and wouldn't eat or drink anything. I had read about carnitine on matthewsfriends.org and it said if after the addition of carnitine the ketones trend up and the glucose down that it can make some kids too ketonic and the 1st step would be to drop ratio. I was happy when the dietitian offered that and made all changes on Friday.

Since lowering her ratio she has waken fine and is even finishing her #1 meal in decent time. Plus I don't have to follow her around at all! If she falls she just lands in a sitting position and jumps right back up and continues on with what she's doing unfazed. For some unknown reason, I swear, her seizures seem to make her want to climb. Or else the act of climbing causes a seizure! She gets up on the dining room chair and every time as soon as you get to her there's a seizure.
An odd thing I've noticed is, she can be playing in her bed for 1/2 an hour and I can observe her from a distance, she can't see me, and I see no seizure activity. But as soon I walk in her direction and she turns and focuses on me, Boom! there's a seizure! Bill says I'm a seizure magnet because there's been times I've ran to the store and he's been home with her and saw absolutely nothing. As soon as I walk in and she comes to the gate to see me, Boom! There's a seizure! We also notice them after she's been sitting for a while, say in the rifta chair (like a little high chair) at therapy. As soon as she stands and gets mobile she has one that's almost like a dizzy spell. Or when someone walks up to her. Every one who's around her any time at all has seen it and I notice they squat to her level before approaching her because they've noticed it too!! Lots of the ones she has now could pass as a dizzy spell. There's times she's had them at the store. She tends to want me to pick her up and as soon as I do she'll have one and even if I"m standing talking to someone the other person has no clue my kid just had a seizure.
I guess most people think a seizure looks like a grand mal. But there are so many different kinds!
A girl I went to school with posted on Facebook that her son woke her up in the middle of the night because he heard something and when he got to the hall he saw his brother, sound asleep with his pants around his ankles. He'd gotten up to use the bathroom and fell asleep in the hall on the way back. My first thought was at this point that would have freaked me out! How nice to not know the fear of a neurologically impaired kid! I would have been watching that boy like a hawk fearing he'd had a seizure and I missed it.
Isaiah spends a lot of time in his room drawing, watching TV, reading and playing Legos. He's perfectly healthy but it has ran through my mind "what if he had a seizure? He's up there all alone and I'd never know!".
Paranoia, I've got it bad!

Mom Up

Today I was thinking of the saying "man up".
It should be changed to "mom up".
There's a woman on a support group site who has 2 kids with severe epilepsy and after child #2 started having seizures her husband couldn't take it anymore and left. I don't understand that thinking. It's hard on 2, so if he leaves and put it all on her that is okay, why? I mean I definitely understand how hard it is to watch kids have seizures and their health deteriorate but their mom loves them no less than the dad. Why is it okay for him to be "sensitive"?
Then I was watching A Baby Story and the 26 year old Dad had to lay down on the couch in the delivery room because he was getting dizzy and felt like he'd pass out. I know how that works to! I thought Bill would pass out when I had Isaiah and he ended up leaving the room before I even had him because he felt so helpless and felt like he'd get sick. Meanwhile I pushed out a 10 lb 7 oz baby.
One thing I do that my husband will have no part of is give a suppository. I just count myself lucky he'll change Naomi at all. He has some severe ideas, I don't know what happened in his household growing up, but until I had Naomi he just really felt like a man shouldn't change a little girls diaper. I told him that I should have been exempt from changing any of Isaiah's if that's the line of thinking we're following. It took a while, and I think he was afraid of hearing about it the rest of his life, but he does change diapers.
Oh, well. Men have their place, they're just often not as strong as mom's in some ways.

Unsportsmanlike Conduct

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

OK, I live in an area where people hunt. Lots of people hunt! I know families where the mom, dad, kids and grandparents all get their hunting license every year. So I have no problem with hunting. There's a conservation aspect to it. If they didn't kill some of the deer the deer would starve, overpopulate and end up as constant road kill.

But this is different than sitting in a tree stand, waiting for a deer to come by and taking aim and maybe or maybe not striking the animal, depending on your skill.

I saw this story on the Today show this morning and it has bothered me. They said they set hooks out the day before. Then the 5 year old, his dad and a guide went out and found on one of the hooks this record setting gator. They used the winch to raise up the gator then the kid took his shot.

Isn't that a little like shooting a caged bear?

Picking off Tigers at the zoo?

That's exactly like leaving a fishing line laying in a pond all night then coming back in the morning and picking up the fish and shooting it! I mean that would be serious overkill, but it's the same thing! The gator was already caught! There's no aim. It's like hitting the broad side of a barn!

I know lots of folks around here would disagree with me, but 5 is too young to hunt and handle a riffle. No one could reasonably argue that a 5 year old has the decision making skills to handle a deadly weapon.
I know Daniel Boone and historical figures were hunting at a very early age, but I got news for you, we have a little something called grocery stores now. There's no need for a 5 year old to hunt. Also I bet Daniel Boone was a whole lot more grown up and had more life experience and wilderness skills than kids these days. Thankfully we have hunting laws now and limits on kill. I read Daniel Boone's biography and he killed an unbelievable amount of animals per season! He was just one man! Think of all the trappers killing that many, and it's no wonder the animals faced extinction so fast!