Fierce

As some of you may know, our little Peanut and Mama (Sylvia) are pretty much joined at the hip. Peanut is Mama's closest companion and biggest defender. I got a little taste of Peanut's ferocity the other day when S offered me the remainder of a salad she'd been eating (she was done with it). I took one bite and looked up to see Peanut pointing her finger at me and saying "No, Mommy! SPIT IT OUT!! Mama's salad!"

Two years old, here we come!

Five Favorites

Favorite thing overheard at the breakfast table:
"Mama, mama! Give me some dap!" (Peanut, holding her fist out to Mama for a fist bump.)

Favorite post-dinner activity:
Singing our after-dinner drumming song. When everyone is done eating we push the dishes to the middle of the table and sing a song that includes lots of banging on the table (our drum). The kids always ask, "more?"

Favorite sweet moment:
When Peanut let Little Man hold her hand during the I love you song. He looked at me with a huge smile and said "Mommy! Hand! Hand!!" (Usually Peanut pushes him away; you could tell her allowing him to hold her hand made his day.)

Favorite sound:
Little toddler giggles as Little Man and Peanut chase each other playfully.

Favorite feeling:
Little Man when he crawls up in my lap and hugs me tight with both his arms and his legs. Peanut when she comes over to me as I'm doing dishes and leans her head against my thigh.

My Brave Little Kiddos

The kiddos (and I) have had a rough go of it lately. We all had viral pneumonia a couple months back (mine just finally resolved a few weeks ago; thankfully Little Man and Peanut fared better). Then last week Peanut had a nasty stomach virus that landed her in the ER for IV fluids and a Zofran script (poor baby couldn't keep a thing down, not even a teaspoon of pedialyte!). Now this week they battled RSV that morphed into pneumonia again.

Thank goodness they are such good sports about all the medicine and things that go along with being sick. They've had a nebulizer since they were less than 6 months old, and all the prevacid for their reflux (they were on it from 10 and 15 days old to almost a year) taught them how to swallow syringe-full doses of nasty stuff without gagging.

I took this picture with my phone at the doctor's office the other day. They were on their *second* neb treatment (O2 levels weren't high enough after the first one). What little troopers!

Funny sidenote: When they were done they asked to get down off the table, and then both ran to the door of the exam room (the nurse told us to open it when they were finished to signal to the doctor it was time to come back in). They both stood at the door peeking out into the hall calling "Doctor! Where are you?!? Doctor!!"

Buggy

Last night there was a cricket in our house, which Peanut pointed out to us with great excitement ("Buggy!!"). I handed a plastic cup to Little Man and asked him to take it to Mama so she could catch the buggy and put it outside. Brave boy that he is, he walked right up to it and attempted to put the cup over it himself... at which point the cricket beat a hasty retreat under the couch. I told the kids to say, "come here, buggy, so we can catch you in a cup!" It was the most precious thing to see Peanut bending down to look under the couch, calling "come, buggy! catch cup!" over and over while Little Man squealed "outside! outside!" I'm going to miss these days *sigh*.

Love, In Two Exhibits

Exhibit A

When I walked in the door, Peanut started jumping up and down saying "Happy! Happy!" with a big smile on her face.

Exhibit B

Little Man had one hand behind my head, and the other behind S's shoulder, and kept pushing us together saying "mmmmua" like he says when he gives kisses.

Oh Happy Day

We had our annual company picnic this week at work, and since the kiddos are in daycare on campus, we decided to bring them along for the festivities. Most of our coworkers hadn't seen them since they were 6 months old, so it was lots of fun seeing their reactions to our big, walking, talking bundles of energy. The kids quickly gravitated toward the bucket that was holding cans of soda, and spent the better part of an hour splashing around in the ice water. They even recruited some other children, and everyone ended up soaking wet and giggling.

When they weren't dousing each other with freezing water, they were bopping along to the tunes spun by our resident DJ. Both of our kiddos love to dance, but Peanut is more of an in-the-living-room kind of dancer, whereas Little Man can't seem to contain himself whenever he hears music. He just has to dance!

Holy Allergic Reaction, Batman!

One sunny Sunday afternoon (two weeks ago), Little Man and Mama (Sylvia) fell asleep on the couch just minutes before we were planning to walk out the door to run some errands. Ever the go-getter on the weekends (ha!), I went ahead and took Peanut out with me to take care of our to-do list, leaving Little Man and Mama napping at home.

This was the scene when I left the house. My sweet little boy, fast asleep on Mama:

Two hours and one frantic phone call later, I arrived home to this:


The culprit? A tiny smidge of hummus Little Man had requested from Mama.

So now we're on the road to finding out what, exactly, Little Man is allergic to. We saw our pediatrician earlier this week, who said that from the pictures (thankfully I happened to have our camera with me) and how we described it, she figures he was "near anaphylaxis." She confirmed that we should have taken him to the ER instead of just dosing him with benadryl, washing him with cool water, and waiting it out (which is what we had done, per the on-call pedi's instructions). After impressing upon us how very serious his reaction was, she prescribed Little Man an epi pen and sent us home with a stack of information and a DVD that shows how to administer the epi pen.

Little Man's appointment with the allergist is next week, so Sylvia and I are combing back through our collective memory and assembling a list of all the foods Little Man has ever seemed to have a reaction to. Turns out-- as we found out when Peanut had her allergist appointment yesterday-- that they won't test for any foods the child hasn't already demonstrated an adverse reaction to. They tested Peanut for chickpeas and sesame because of Little Man's reaction to the hummus, but wouldn't test her for peanuts or anything else. We want to get the biggest bang for our blood-test buck, so we need to make sure the list for Little Man is as comprehensive as possible.

In the meantime, it's one foot in front of the other. Sylvia is still quite shaken by the events of that day, and my stoic nature is, I think, disconcerting to her. Add that to the fact that we're both processing a hefty dose of mommy guilt (her for having fed him the hummus and me for having had a carefree attitude regarding ingesting large amounts of potential allergens while pregnant and breastfeeding), and the result is two exhausted and emotional mommies.