ememby

It’s been a busy week… things are wrapping up with lots of things (how’s that for a vague sentence?) and life is just busy, but that is May for you… less than two weeks until school is out for the summer and 5-6 weeks until we move. We close on our new house next week and provided all goes well and according to plan, we close on our current house two days before we take possession of the new house. So yes, we have sold our house, but I’m not ready to shout it to the world until all the inspections are behind us and the only thing we are waiting for is the closing. But I can tell you that God is good and He for SURE answers prayers and that is all for now. On to the real reason for this post…

My apologies in advance, but I was laughing at the series of photos on my phone for this week – none of them super pleasing to the eye or cute pics of my kids doing cute things… nope, just a real slice of life for what it is really like to be a parent.

Exhibit #1: swollen ankle/foot from a mosquito bite
Poor Jack. Daycare called me on Monday to let me know that Jack had been bitten by a mosquito and was having quite the allergic reaction. The pic below is after the Benedryl kicked it and had reduced the swelling quite a bit and yet you can still see how his ankle and foot are puffed up significantly more than the other leg, they were also hard, red and hot to the touch. [Not pictured: his other knee which was also bit up and swelled; bonus shot of his shorter toe from where the bone was removed to put in his thumb.] I called the pediatrician just to confirm that pain meds and Benedryl were the way to go and was advised to bring him in if the swelling did not improve the next day. In the morning Jack’s swelling had come back full force and he didn’t even want to walk on his foot because it hurt so Simon ended up taking him into the doctor, yes, for a mosquito bite. He learned there is a bad batch of mosquitoes that recently hatched but that should die out in the next week but the office had seen quite a few bad reactions that week, so at least we weren’t the only ones. Jack now has to take allergy meds every morning to help with potential reactions and wear long pants to daycare (where he seems to react the worst to the mosquitoes in their woods).

Exhibit #2: suddenly grown-in adult tooth
Liam apparently has fast-growing teeth because last week when I was doing our regular check for loose teeth (his top two have been wiggly since before spring break) the bottom ones were not lose and totally by themselves in his mouth, but on Tuesday when he got out of school he showed me that not only was the bottom one wiggly, but his adult tooth was fully grown in behind it. How does this happen? Well, I know how this happens, the same thing happened to me in kindergarten when my bottom two adult teeth came in and the baby teeth weren’t even lose so I had to have them pulled by the dentist. Thankfully Liam’s tooth is quite loose so no traumatic tooth pulling in our future (we had enough of that with Jack, thank you very much).

Exhibit #3: a tick
This is the picture that most squigs me out. Wednesday evening I noticed George had a bump on the underside, edge of his ear – but he’s had these before in the form of a non-problematic cyst and a skin tag. This looked like a skin tag since it was flesh-colored and mostly obscured by hair. Cut to Thursday night when I think again to check it out and note it seems bigger than the night before and when I take a closer look, I discover little black lines at the base of where it is attached to his ear. Um, those would be legs and my night suddenly got awful. I knew it was a tick but of course I Googled “ticks on dogs” and sadly confirmed my suspicion to be true (also, add that to the list of things not not look at Google images of – ick). I called Simon and told him that I’d have to wait for him to get home because I just could. not. remove. it. myself. He came home armed with tweezers and rubbing alcohol. It was a quick job and since it was moving around after we removed it, we were successful in removing all of it. Here it is after we asphyxiated it with a rubbing alcohol pad. Did you know that you shouldn’t flush a tick because that does not kill it and also you should keep it in case it needs to be tested? Now you know.

So that’s my week… here’s hoping those are the set of three unexpected things that happen to us and that I don’t end up with a strange picture of Simon over the weekend.