We took advantage of Brooke’s three-week summer vacation by doing swimming lessons almost every morning. Brooke and Caroline had lessons that were conveniently close to my mom’s house so I’d drop Spencer off there while the girls swam. It was a great plan (in my book, anyway!).
Brooke LOVED swimming, especially when I got her goggles. She hadn’t really put her face underwater much before that but the goggles changed everything and she was underwater more than she was above it!
True to her nature, Caroline was a little more cautious. She would tell her teacher every day that she didn’t want to go “underground.”
Brooke’s reaction to swim lessons:
And Caroline’s:
Unfortunately I ended up taking pictures on the last day which was Caroline’s grumpiest day. Can’t win them all. For the next couple of weeks after swim lessons ended Caroline would wake up every morning and ask, “Mom, am I off track for swim lessons?”
Yes, dear. The torture will resume in one year. Enjoy your break.
Yesterday was Brooke’s first day of first grade! I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she’s already back in school. It’s kind of nice though because it’s been so hot around here anyway that we haven’t wanted to do anything, so I guess she might as well be in school. She has a break in September and we plan to live it up big at that time!
I wasn’t anticipating the transition from kindergarten to first grade to be so drastic, but it is! She goes all day! She eats lunch in the cafeteria! She has three recesses! This is all very good and exciting, but I feel like I’m hardly ever going to see her anymore! I’m assured by other moms that I’ll get used to this plenty fast, but until then, I’m mourning the loss of our mornings together. It’s so strange to only have Caroline and Spencer. Our mornings are so…quiet. At lunch I look around wondering where the third mouth is to feed. This is strange territory.
I think Brooke is liking school well enough. She doesn’t say much about it so it’s hard to know for sure. She has two teachers – an English teacher and a French teacher. Her French teacher only speaks French to them (and around them. We had a short parent meeting on the first day and the French teacher only spoke French when orienting us, the parents!)
Brooke seems to have completely recovered from her sickness (though she is still on medication). I’m glad she was feeling well enough to start school.
I am writing this in a hospital room. This is not exactly how I had planned to spend our 24th of July.
It all started a few days ago. Brooke kept mentioning her neck hurt. Dallas and I kept brushing her off thinking she had just slept wrong or pulled a muscle or something. Her neck started bothering her more and more so by Monday night she didn’t want to go to sleep because it hurt her to sleep. She woke up that night in pain. The next day she would hardly move her neck and didn’t want to eat because her throat was hurting now, too.
My sister and I had arranged to meet at a park to play that morning. It was a park that looked like a castle, and I knew the kids would love it. We got there and I noticed that Brooke just wasn’t herself. She couldn’t play very well since she couldn’t move her neck, so she ended up sitting in the shade looking miserable.
I decided to take her to the doctor to see what they thought. I was nervous she had meningitis, but the doctor looked her over and said he was sure she had an abscess somewhere in her neck saying that nearly always when kids come with stiff necks this was the case. He couldn’t feel an abscess, but he said it could be in the back of her throat or behind a tonsil where he wouldn’t be able to feel it. He looked at her quietly for a little while and said, “You know, I’m going to send you to Primary Children’s right now for a CT scan.”
I was completely shocked. Going to the hospital was not even a notion in my mind. Then he said that if they found an abscess she’d be admitted and would have surgery right away.
Almost as an afterthought he said, “We should do a strep test also.” Again I was shocked when we found out the test was positive. Strep? She has strep?! I had no idea. The doctor was still worried about her neck stiffness saying that strep wouldn’t cause that so he thought she had more infection somewhere. I asked if we could just start giving her the antibiotics for strep and wait and see how she does. He said, “Oh no. I wouldn’t do that. With this affecting her neck we don’t want the inflammation to get so bad it starts restricting her air supply.”
So away we went to Primary Children’s. Luckily my mom was home and was able to rearrange her life to accommodate watching Caroline and Spencer indefinitely. Dallas was able to get off work to go with us and my dad was able to stop by and help Dallas give Brooke a blessing before we headed off.
We got to Primary Children’s and Brooke was pretty nervous. She’s very wary of doctors because she knows they often give shots and that idea doesn’t agree with her very well. I assured her a CT scan was easy and she just had to lie on the table while they took pictures of her neck. Then we got there and I realized they needed “contrast” for the pictures which would mean an injection.
Poor Brooke was lying on the huge table already pretty nervous when we had to break the news about the shot. Her lip started quivering and she tried to get up and run. After some reassuring words she got the injection and had the scan done. We usually don’t see much of her big eyes anymore, but they were out in full force as she was nervously trying to take everything in.
After the scan we waited for word. The technician told us the pediatrician got the results and was consulting with other doctors to determine a course of action. After a while the pediatrician called and said there was inflammation and infection in her neck, so he had already made the arrangements to have her admitted and “after a couple of days of IV antibiotics, she should be good to go!”
A couple of days?!
I tend to overreact (especially concerning medical things), but even I thought this seemed like an overreaction.
Nevertheless, we checked her in and waited for a doctor to come and tell us more. From what I understood, the infection had started spreading beyond her throat into her neck tissue. They were worried that an abscess could form or the inflammation could close off her airway. Also, he pointed out that the abnormal part of her CT scan was close to her brain and spinal cord so they didn’t want to see things get worse since those are obviously sensitive areas. Dallas asked if this treatment was overkill and the doctor basically said it was a pretty aggressive way to treat this and oral antibiotics would probably have been just fine. Luckily he also said we likely wouldn’t need to be staying several days and could probably leave the next day if all went well.
Brooke got settled in her bed. She was still scared of every doctor and nurse (and resident and med student and nurse-in-training) and would hardly talk. I think it hurt her to move her mouth much so she just mumbled out monosyllables and did her best to ignore all the poking and prodding.
She felt a little better when we got her bear and blanket and let her watch My Little Pony episodes on the iPad:
I spent the night with her and it was a miserable night. Sleeping in hospitals is the worst. The next morning the doctor came in (waking Brooke up) and she sat right up, moved her neck, started smiling and giggling, and answered his questions using full sentences. I couldn’t believe how much perkier she was. It’s always such a relief when your normal child returns to you after being caught in the clutches of sickness.
We are luckily moments away from being discharged. Hooray! I’m so grateful that Brooke’s sickness wasn’t very bad and that she was able to feel better so quickly.
Tomorrow Brooke will be six. We decided to let her have a party with a few friends this year. She requested a My Little Pony party, so that’s what we did.
The invitation:
For those of you out there who aren’t bronies*, there are two things you need to know in order to fully appreciate the invitation:
1) Pinkie Pie is the pony in charge of parties, so that’s why it says she’s the one throwing the party.
2) The pink lettering is the actual My Little Pony font that I downloaded.
Armed with that knowledge, the invitation is at least twice as cute, right?
(*While we’re on the subject of knowing a lot about My Little Pony, did you know there’s a My Little Pony culture out there? There are quite a few teenage and adult women and men who follow My Little Pony so closely that there are websites, chat rooms, forums, and conventions dedicated to analyzing the intricacies of the series. They call themselves bronies (as in bro + pony). I find that baffling, slightly unsettling, a little creepy, and kind of amusing. Especially when I stumbled upon this “conversation” meant to illustrate the bond that exists in this pony world:
Brony 1: What’s your favorite pony? Brony 2: Fluttershy, cause she’s just so cute! Brony 3: Hey man, those are fighting words. Rarity is obviously the best pony! Brony 2: What are you going to do? Brony 3: I’m gonna love and tolerate the crap out of you. *hugs*
Bronies can also “brohoof” which is similar to a high five. And now that you are all a little closer to being bronies yourselves, we will continue.)
Here’s our birthday girl:
These are the only decorations you will see. I’m adamantly opposed to killing myself over decorations when kids probably don’t care about that kind of thing anyway.
Question: what do you guys do to entertain the kids at a birthday party? I thought it was surprisingly difficult to find fun party games to play. I mean, a quick glance at Pinterest will show you dozens of different ways to utilize mason jars in the best possible way at your party, but hardly any actual games can be found. Unless I’m just a horrible Pinterester which I know is the case since I refuse to get an account and immerse myself in the world of impossible crafts, vinyl quotes, dream mansions, and chevron.
Maybe I’m just playing sour grapes. Pinterest wouldn’t want me anyway if this is the best I can do for decorations at my kid’s party.
The internet was helpful in the end, and I did get a few ideas from it starting off with our first activity – a craft. Brooke’s favorite thing in the world is projects, so the kids made a pony out of their hand, glued colorful yarn on for the mane and tail, and used popsicle sticks for a fence. It was very cute:
This is our balloon board. Princess Celestia is in the middle.
Each balloon had a paper inside with the name of a game to play:
Brooke went first and popped the balloon with Apple Jack’s Paddle Game inside.
I taped a paint stick to a paper plate and blew up red and green balloons. The balloons were apples and the girls had to use the paddles to hit the balloons into a container (you know, to gather up all the apples for Apple Jack):
I’ll go ahead and make a public apology to my neighbors for the few balloons that accidentally made it over the fence into their yards. Sorry about that!
Our next game was Rainbow Dash’s Rainbow Web game. I didn’t have high hopes for this game but it ended up being a favorite. I got some rainbow yarn and Brooke made it into a ball. We tied the yarn around the first girl’s waist. Then she threw it to someone. That person wrapped the yarn around her waist and threw it to someone else. We kept throwing it around until the girls had made a nice web. Then they had to try to get out of the web. Party game of the day right there:
Next up we had Pinkie Pie’s Pass the Parcel game. I wrapped up some glow sticks in several different layers of wrapping paper. The girls passed the present around the circle and when the music stopped they got to open a layer. This was another fun one for them:
The next game was Rarity’s Pony, Pony, Unicorn game (aka Duck, Duck, Goose):
Then we played Pin the Cutie Mark on Twilight Sparkle:
I don’t have to explain that the cutie mark is the decoration on the pony’s rump, do I?
I am probably too impressed with myself for the Twilight Sparkle I drew:
The last game was Fluttershy’s Tail Pop. I tied a balloon to string and tied the string around each girl’s waist. They had to try to pop each other’s balloon:
Then we had cake!
Brooke let everyone help her blow out the candle. The more germs, the merrier, right?
I had to get a lot of pictures of Brooke with her best friend, Ania:
We ended the party with presents:
We had about twenty minutes left before parents came which was enough time for the girls to play a little bit with some of Brooke’s toys. I was nervous about the leftover time but it ended up being the calmest part of the whole party.
After the party Brooke and Caroline talked about how the party was so fun! and the best ever! so we’ll call this birthday a success.
So maybe what happened next shouldn’t surprise me so much.
I decided to search our library for bear books. One of them ended up being a book all about how to make bears. I checked it out for Brooke because I knew she would have fun looking at the pictures of all the different kinds of bears. Never in a million years did I anticipate I would actually use the book.
However, I should have known that Brooke would fall in love with the bears pictured on the pages…and her love would cause her to beg me to make her a bear. I wasn’t sure my sewing skills were up to par, so I kept trying to brush her off hoping she’d forget about it, but it was no use.
Luckily, she took a liking to one of the easier bears to make. After studying the instructions I started to think I might actually be able to make her a bear.
So I did.
Meet Treasure Bear Ice. He’s a treasure bear because his belly is a zipper so Brooke can keep all of her treasures zipped up inside of him. He’s named Ice because I finished him the week that she was studying the letter “I” in school, and her show-and-tell needed to start with that letter. “Ice” was the only “I” name she could think of.
Luckily for me his flaws aren’t readily seen in these pictures so you will all be under the impression that I’m a great bear maker.
Brooke loves Treasure Bear Ice. She now drags him along with her other bear everywhere we go. One day she said, “I love Treasure Bear Ice more than Bear. It’s kind of like Andy when he got Buzz.” I could tell she sensed she was betraying her old friend, Bear. Then she added, “I still love Bear though.”
And thus begins Treasure Bear’s journey of getting as dingy and matted as her old bear.
