Ollie Update

Ice Skaters

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie and I have been ice skating up a storm lately. She got skates of her own from St. Nicholas this year and, since the rink a few blocks from us is run by the parks district, it is free to skate if you don’t need to rent skates. This means it’s very easy for us to drop in whenever we feel like it, even if it’s just for 30 minutes.

All the extra practice time in the past few weeks has been paying dividends like crazy. The first time out my arms ached afterwards from holding her up and having her cling so tight. Fast forward to the last time we went, and she’s either lightly holding on to my hand and telling me to skate as fast as I can, or outright skating by herself.

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She’s not skating like she was born to it just yet, but it’s obviously only a matter of time at this point. The more she goes, the more confident she gets, and the more confident she is, the better she skates.

Ollie has been extremely jealous about Evie’s ice skating exploits. He has been begging and begging to be able to go. Finally we found a time for us to all go as a family, and he got his chance.

If the skates gave him that much trouble on dry land, you can imagine what he was like on the ice.

I guess I kind of forgot how hard it is to ice skate the first time out, even though it wasn’t that long ago for Evie. It was extremely difficult to take him around. He couldn’t support any weight on his skates at all and had no idea how to keep his skates together. Because he’s so short, I had to bend over double and sort of drag him by the armpits. Half way around on our first trip, my back and arms were hurting so bad I had to stop and take a rest. It was a lot more difficult than I expected.

Ollie did a great job though, and by the second time around he was already keeping his skates together and starting to put a little weight on them. He even did a little walking on his own while holding on to Sara and my hands. That’s the thing I really noticed with Evie; every minute spent on the ice resulted in an exponential increase in ability.

At the end of it all, he was happy, but *exhausted*.

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Got to get those crumbs out…

/ Shane / Leave a comment

This week we’re just relaxing and enjoying vacation (mostly by ice skating). Not much to say today, other than this public service announcement by Ollie: with all of those Christmas sweets, remember to floss your teeth!

The Door Incident

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie and Ollie were fighting as per usual, however, this time it ended with Ollie’s hand getting stuck in the hinge side of a closed door. I was close by and I swooped in when I heard the screaming. It looked bad at first, but luckily he didn’t sustain any permanent damage.

This is something that is of particular concern for me. When I was in college, I saw a man’s finger get cut off when the wind swept through the dorm and slammed the door while his finger was resting on the hinge side. It was a relatively traumatic experience for me (probably for him too), and something that I’m sure I’ll never forget.

As you can imagine, this was running through my mind during the whole incident, and I felt the need to impress upon the two of them how dangerous playing with doors could be. Evie felt really bad about the whole thing and made a series of signs to hang on every door in the house.

All of the signs indicate that you should not put your hands in doors, but this was my favorite of them. Notice the severed finger falling to the floor, and the little finger stump left on the hand. Even Ollie aught to know better than to put his hand in a door with a warning like that.

Huh? What?

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Unfortunately, my daughter’s hearing is deteriorating rapidly.

If you’ve spoken to her in the last two weeks, you’ve probably noticed this. It would be really, really hard not to notice. If you are talking to her at a normal tone of voice, she usually can’t hear you well enough to even know you are speaking to her, much less does she actually understand what you are saying. This is absolutely not her fault, but it is very hard not to get frustrated with her. Then something happens to remind you that she is the victim in all of this, like when you say, “Evie! I told you three times to pick this up!” and she says, “Huh?” in such a way that you realize that she never heard you the three times you told her, and then you just feel bad all over again.

It’s not all bad, though, it has led to some funny misunderstandings.

Kid: “I went to a birthday party, and we jumped into a pit of foam.”
Evie, horrified: “A pit of bones??”

I got so used to speaking loudly around her, that I find myself talking loudly to everybody. Several times I found myself shouting to Sara when it was just the two of us alone in the kitchen.

I never really realized how isolating it is to not be able to hear, and how much you miss out on. Oftentimes when she doesn’t hear something, she just lets it go. I don’t know if it’s being a kid, being embarrassed about not hearing, something about her personality, or just the fact that you get tired of asking everybody to repeat everything all the time. I’m very thankful that she’s only in preschool, and thus is not really having instruction per say at school. I can clearly see how quickly one would fall behind academically.

Anyway, we could clearly see that she was experiencing some hearing loss, but we had her tested anyway. Her hearing showed normal to mild loss in one year, and mild to moderate loss in the other. It seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.

The doctors believe that it is temporary, and due to a large build up of fluid in her ears that doesn’t seem to drain, so they’ve recommended a third round of ear tubes (you can read about round 1 and round 2). The idea is that the fluid would be able to drain through the tubes, and her hearing would go back to normal. Long term, the hope is always that she will grow enough that her ears will begin to drain normally on their own, without requiring help. It hasn’t worked so far, but then again, third time was a charm with me and ear tubes when I was little.

So hopefully everything goes well and she will be able to re-join the conversation (side note, not being able to hear apparently doesn’t impede your ability to talk).

At least Ollie’s ears are okay, right? Wrong.

We always assumed that Ollie had no problems with his ears, because he had never had any ear infections. However, you only know your child has ear infections if he says he has ear infections, and if he happens to have the pain tolerance of a UFC fighter on PCP, then he probably just doesn’t mention it. Imagine our surprise, then, when he did finally complain about an ear ache, and the doctor found evidence of “chronic ear infections”.

Perhaps he inherited daddy’s ears after all, but just forgot to mention it.

It must be nice to wake up with that kind of energy

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The bedroom door slammed open like it was kicked, and light spilled across my face, blinding me. “The fairies were here last night, I think they ate my grape!” said a small voice. I squinted at the clock and tried to make sense of what was going on. It was 12:34 a.m.

“Tomorrow I’m going to try leaving them a pistachio,” babbled Evie conversationally. Was something the matter? Was she having a dream? Why did she sound so chipper?

“Evie, what are you doing?” I asked. She faltered a little bit. “Getting up. It’s time to get up. The light came on.”

It turns out that Oliver had been messing around with the ghost lights the day before, and had accidentally re-programmed them to come on at 12:34 a.m. Evie, accustomed to it being dark now when she wakes up, and trained so thoroughly by the ghost light system, never questioned for a minute that it wasn’t time to wake up. How is that possible though? I was so tired I couldn’t even remember where I was, and here she is bouncing out of bed and chattering away. Wouldn’t you just know internally that something didn’t seem right? It wasn’t like it was anywhere close to waking-up time.

By the time I got into the bedroom, Oliver was already climbing out of his crib, ready to join his sister. So I had to get them settled back into their cribs, assure them it was, in fact, NOT time to get up, and turn off the lights. And the irony? With no lights to wake them up in the morning, they slept all the way until 7! So they were obviously tired.

I don’t know. It must be nice to be young, and just spring out of your bed at any hour of the day, ready to take on the world. I swear I was never like that, even when I was 5.