Run With The Fishes

Allison has been trying to win her arguments lately with the following statement. “You do realize you’re arguing with a four year old don’t you?”. I’m not sure if she thinks this is a great statement because in her mind, four year olds are always right, or because she knows it is just silly to argue with someone so young.

For the past two weeks, Greg and Allison have been having a battle of wills. Every day, she tells Greg about a show called Johnny Test. Greg will try to correct her. “It’s Johnny Quest, not Test”.

“No Dad, It’s Test!”.

Eventually, each one throws up their hands. Neither admitting they are wrong and the other is correct. Both wait another day and try to convince the other the of the proper name. Today, Greg sent me this, “I thought it was Johnny Quest, without having seen it. I was presumptuous, I was confident. Silly little four year old just can’t hear the TV properly.”

It turns out that Allison was, in fact, correct. That’s what you get for arguing with a four year old.

Last week Zoey was incredibly curious about what having a broken bone was like. First she asked me if I had ever broken a bone. I told her that I hadn’t, but that her dad had once broken both arms at the same time and she should ask him what it was like.

In a weird twist of fate, as soon as I walked into the yard after work on Thursday, Nathan ran out of the door and told me that Zoey was hurt and that I needed to come take a look at her arm. From the sounds of it, she was standing in one of the swings and slipped out, landing on her elbow. One look was all it took to see that we needed to visit the emergency room. Since we live in a very, very small town we had to make the decision to drive to a bigger city with a better hospital or see if our little ER could help. We decided to give our hospital a shot. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20*.

Zoey had some X-rays taken of her arm. This was a nightmare. To get a good picture of the bones, they wanted her to straighten out her arm. Now, if you have broken your arm, either at or near the elbow, doesn’t it seem like it would be really hard/painful to straighten? It was, which impacted the events for the rest of our night dramatically.

One of the x-rays showed a small bone where it wasn’t supposed to be. It looked like a chip had started to shift around in her arm. That isn’t really a good thing and the ER doctor decided that she needed to see someone more qualified than him immediately. Fractured elbows that aren’t treated properly can hinder movement lifelong. It looked like she was going to need surgery. For the information he had, the doctor did a great job. He worked really hard to find a doctor that would see Zoey. For that I am extremely thankful. Most of them were unwilling to come in at night or something.

He asked us if we would be willing to send her to Ft. Worth to the Children’s Medical Center there (about 4 hours for us) and wanted to send her in an ambulance. While that sounded exciting, we opted out of the ambulance but not the trip. By then it was almost midnight. They put a splint on Zoey’s arm. We got all of the information about the doctor and the nurse we were supposed to see upon arrival then headed home to gather up the necessary items for our fast trip (made arrangements for LT, change of clothes and laptop) and began our drive.

When we lived in the DFW area, we took for granted the quick and efficient way we were taken care of on our few emergency room visits.The differences between our little hospital and a larger one were even more pronounced since we were coming directly from one to the other. We were quickly checked in and taken to our room. The doctor took one look at our small town x-rays and said the quality was pretty bad. After a fresh batch made on a machine from this decade, he apologized that we had driven so far for just a broken arm. After thinking that it was something major that could require surgery, we were grateful for it to be just a broken arm.

Now to find an orthopedist closer to home who will have room on their schedule the week before Christmas. Wish me luck.

Have you ever had a broken bone or a crazy trip to the emergency room?

*If we had gone to the other hospital in the slightly larger town, the chances are high that we would not have had to travel nearly as far.

Greg came into the living room and asked where Allison was.
Anna: “You mean you didn’t see her in our room? I told her if she hurried to our bed and fell asleep fast, she might get to stay there the whole night.”
Greg: “I didn’t see her, but I’ll go check again.”

What he found instead was this:

Allison decided that LT needed a bedtime story.

We woke Allison up this morning by calling her “the birthday girl” and started to sing “Happy Birthday” to her. She informed us that we had to wait. You are not allowed to sing the song until it is time for the cake. Duh.She jumped out of bed and asked if we could open our presents. Yesterday she wanted me to wait a day so that we could do our birthdays at the same time. She was so excited that of course we said yes. It is her birthday after all.

Last night Greg spent three hours putting together a little play kitchen for Allison. We left it against the wall in the living room to see how long it took for her to notice it. As soon as she did, she started hopping around. “Yes! This is just what I wanted! This is is such GREAT!” She opened up the rest of her presents (“MONNEEEEYYY!!!” when she opened Nathan’s card with four dollars) and then ran over to make us some tea. I guess we all looked thirsty.

Greg says that throughout the day, she will just randomly shout out that “This Is THE Best Birthday EVER!” Even as I write this she is walking around thanking everyone.

I know that we have been through this two times before, but it is completely different each time. It has been a great gift to watch her grow. She isn’t a baby or a toddler anymore. She’s this little person who has mostly rational thoughts and is able to express them. Someone who knows how to count, how to recognize most letters and numbers and is too clever for our own good. Happy birthday my four year old. I’m glad it is the best one ever and I hope they only get better.

Greg’s shoulders were bothering him so I started to rub some generic version of Icy/Hot on them. Allison asked if she could have some and I told her it was just for old people. Nathan and Zoey chimed in with questions like, “How do they determine old?”, “Who says it’s just for old people?”

I told them that it mysteriously showed up in a package on the doorstep last year when I turned 32. Kids are kind of gullible and they believed me.

Allison then proceeded to explain to us that we weren’t old, “Are you guys crazy? Old people are stooped over and walk with their legs spread apart all wobbly.” Like this:

I know the video quality isn’t fantastic, but this is her demonstration of an old man walking. I’ve been waiting for Vimeo to load up, but I don’t want to miss my daily deadline.

Some things are too cute to correct.

I was cruising along the road when Allison piped up from the back, “Go the Lemon Speed!”
Thinking maybe this is something from one of the shows she watches during the day, and not really knowing what she meant yet I decided to just play along, “Well, I guess I could try. Are you sure you don’t want banana or apple?”
“No, the LEMON speed. As fast as you are able to go!”

Yeah, we figured out that she meant Speed Limit, but really Lemon Speed sounds so much better. So, now anytime she doesn’t think we are driving fast enough she encourages us to “Go the Lemon Speed!”.

We have been getting a kick out of the speedy tips on waitless.org. The first day we watched it some of the tips, Zoey challenged Nathan to a shirt off, without him knowing that we had watched some handy time saving tips. Of course, she won. I hope we haven’t started something here and that no other boys challenge her to shirt-offs.

In order to try and knock out most of the laundry all in the same day, we wash and dry it all, putting it into huge piles in the living room, sorted by person. Then we each fold our clothes and put them away. Okay, so they don’t all get put away, but most of them do.

Greg asked me to pull up a video on how to quick fold a t-shirt. That’s when we saw another clip on youtube where a girl had put together her own t-shirt folding machine. Zoey immediately fell in love with the idea of it and quickly pieced together one for herself and a smaller version for Allison. She thought it was so cool that she took out all of the clothes from her dresser, folded them neatly, and put them all away.

If you can’t figure out how to make one yourself (I know that not everyone is as brilliant as my 9 year old) here’s a link to a video I found when I was looking up the url to the others. Now to get her to fold all of the shirts in the house and reorganize my dresser.

Halloween was a success. We got our pumpkins carved just in the nick of time. Allison thought the insides were slimy and disgusting, but cool at the same time. She also though they smelled wonderful. Putting some of the guts up to her nose and sniffing, “Aaaahh”.

We visited a house that really went all out with the decorations. They had a blowup castle that kids walked through to get to the candy. The teenagers were dressed up with spooky masks on their faces. They would sit very still and then randomly reach out to grab a leg. They also had black lights and a karaoke machine they would use to try and entice people to, “come into my castle” said in a spooky voice. Allison refused to go in without me carrying her. It didn’t matter that we knew these people and she wasn’t afraid at all of the teenagers, even laughing at them and knowing who they were without us telling her who was who. She did not want to go into that castle by herself. Of course, after we had gone to a few other houses, she decided that it was very cool and she needed to go visit the castle again.

The battle for candy won over Nathan’s desire to not dress up. He decided to go as a football player. We could tell which houses knew our kids because they would shout out our last name correctly. It doesn’t really sound like it’s spelled. At one of the houses, a little boy in Zoey’s grade said “What’s Up Nathan?”, then instead of saying “hi” to Zoey, yelled out, “Look! It’s the smartest girl in fourth grade!”. Zoey was a little embarrassed and later told us that there were a couple of other girls that might be the smartest. Then in one of those, I wish I had thought of a good comeback at the time told us that she should have said, “I don’t want to be braggy, but don’t you think I know that already?”.

The kids had so much loot that we have enough candy to last until Christmas and possibly even Easter.

Happy Halloween!

This year, Allison wanted to be Shakira, then Spidergirl, then an angel, then a cowgirl, then…. well, you get the idea. Because she wanted to be Shakira the most, and for the longest amount of time, that’s what she is. She insisted that she have an outfit like the white one in the “Hips Don’t Lie” video. While I was making it, she decided she needed a few modifications to the top. No belly showing and princess sleeves. So, I had my first experience making pants and a t-shirt like top (I traced a pattern from one of her t-shirts). It went fairly easy.

Zoey decided to be a Zombie Princess. She thought that her dress needed some crazy stitches in black thread to make it look like it had been ripped and torn, then pieced back together. She cracked herself up by putting a Z on the front (Look Mom, “Zorro attacked the Zoey Zombie”.)

I guess that Nathan is nearing the too-cool-to-dress-up for Halloween age. He dressed up as a skater who had a really bad accident on Saturday, but doesn’t want to dress up as anything tonight. Yes, even with the, “No dressing up means no trick-or-treating”, threat. He’s standing off to the right in this picture.

Are you dressing up as anything this year? I hope you have more treats than tricks.

“Mom, you know I still like you, but you are being the meanest-mom-ever”

After I would not let our almost four year old eat marshmallows for dinner.