I panicked last week when I realized we hadn’t gone pumpkin picking this fall. With Annie’s standard 6 therapies a week, plus 2-4 evaluations this week getting her ready to transition to new service providers at age 3, plus just all the other kid activities, fun things like field trips have been on the back burner. But the Lynns are getting ready to rent out their house, so the big kids and I grabbed the time to get one more play date in with them and do our traditional Underwood Farms fall trip!
This one is recreating a memory from five years ago to the day:This morning, after the memory showed up on my phone, I briefly thought about trying to coordinate clothes like I did in 2014. Nope, can’t handle that kind of pressure these days. Proving that I was there, too!
Here are a few of the pictures I’ve been posting on Instagram lately…
Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by Pharaoh MenesHard at work at grammarModel of the heart (with straws I had to drive all the way to TO to acquire, because it’s illegal to even sell plastic straws at the grocery store in Malibu!)This toddler just wants to walk, walk, walk with her walker!The White kids were here last week. And Annie was in the middle of the action all evening!
We’re doing human anatomy for science this year, starting with the brain. The kids really got into it the other day when we played a parts of the brain game while wearing our brain caps!
On Wednesday, we met up with some of our CVH friends at the ice rink! I hadn’t even put my skates on since just after Janie was born, and they feel a lot smaller than they did 20 years ago. Simi Iceoplex is probably the world’s coldest ice rink, and we were completely underdressed in just our sweats, but the kids still did really well, and Susie even learned how to do a two foot spin! I promised Janie that I’ll bundle her into a winter coat next time we skate.
Afterwards, the kids were so cold that we sat in the sun outside Costco and ate an entire cheese pizza, just to warm up and regain our strength.
We played so many games and just loved how much all the kids had in common! Shouldn’t be a surprise that nearly two decades into our friendship, we’re still kindred spirits raising kindred spirits!
This week we were blessed with a visit from the Simpsons–all ten of them! Susan, Kate, Jane, Mary, and Clara bunked down with our big girls. We moved into Tommy’s room, and Dan and Lisa had William, Rose, and Peter with them up in our room. Everyone slept!
As always, Hillsdale kids have this immediate bond, and we had so much fun playing games, taking them to the beach (where all of us but Annie and Peter boogie boarded), and talking into the wee hours. We can’t wait to visit their new home when we get to the midwest this winter!
So last week, Annie got permission to move to a homemade blended food formula. My friend Jane let me use her costco # to order a new Vitamix (anything else can’t blend food small enough to go through her g-tube), and we are now the proud owners of a $400 blender. If anyone is looking for a really good condition preowned Ninja blender, we have one for sale… The formula the dietician gave me includes pea protein milk, chicken, spinach, apple juice, rice, chicken broth, olive oil, and lots of other goodies. It looks very green and smells unique. Annie hasn’t thrown any up yet, so I don’t know what she thinks of the flavor.
And Annie is a big fan of her new AFO braces. But they’re actually so big for her (despite being “custom made”) that her feet slip right out of them, but fortunately Dna, our PT, figured out that her old orthotics actually fit inside of them. So she’s double bracing it until we get back to the orthotist to have him fix them for her. She is definitely sturdier up on her feet when she walks with her walker or scoots with her scooter! (And yes, this poor little scooter has seen better days after heavy use for 12 years and four kids, so it actually doesn’t even turn with the handlebars anymore…we’re putting a new one on her birthday list!)
Today started at 4:50 am, when I woke up thinking about all the appointments we had today, all the things I needed to do, and all the appointments I needed to schedule. So I got up and made muffins so that the kids would actually eat something for breakfast (also because baking soothes me), quickly wrote out assignments for the four big kids in their planners that they could do with Daddy, and headed out the door at 8 am with Annie. The 101 at rush hour is a really special experience.
At 9, we got to Reseda to pick up her new leg braces. The shoes I had brought didn’t fit.
At 10, we went over and did OT with Megan, our secondary occupational therapist at the medical therapy unit. Annie was not interested in trying to put on clothes, but she did try to eat the magnets. The OT and PT there insisted on me scheduling out appointments through the time we leave for Notre Dame. Guess Derek’s driving her to Reseda twice a week after her birthday, when the Santa Monica therapy expires…
At 11, we saw the pediatrician at the MTU to order Annie a walker to keep (since ours is borrowed from our great PT, DNA). The idiotic staff members there told me that Annie will be losing special vision services because she doesn’t need surgery (um, no, she has three different impaired vision diagnoses, two of which are neurological. Pretty sure she has severe special needs in the vision department, even if they’re not fixable by surgery), made me sign a waver to send a document to the DCFS office (who legally are Annie’s guardians, not me, so have more access to her medical records than I do), and generally were as incompetent as I have come to expect from this location. I was more upset at dealing with these two morons than I get shopping at Costco. And you know how much I loathe Costco…
At 11:45, we got to the park down the street where we were supposed to meet Maria, our Junior Blind vision therapist. She was running late because of traffic on the 405. There was a homeless man sleeping next to the only shaded picnic bench. I started to feed Annie there, anyway, since it was too hot in the sun, and she pulled the tube out, spilling formula all over herself. I did my best to wipe her up and change her with the six wipes left in my diaper bag. Maria ended up getting there 45 minutes late, at which point Annie was done with the swings and just wanted to get in her carseat and take a nap, which she told us repeatedly.
At 1:50, I arrived back home to try to transfer Annie to her crib. It didn’t work.
At 2, I left with Susie to go see her ENT in Thousand Oaks. (We couldn’t get in right away with Dr. Luxford down at the House Institute, so I thought we could expedite things by having Dr. Tseng order her a new hearing test.) Turns out her hearing is bad enough that she for sure needs to have another surgery, so we don’t need to bother with a hearing test and can just go back and see Dr. Luxford and schedule the surgery. Dr. Tseng was great and reassuring, but I just felt like we were both leaving in a fog. While we were in TO, we picked up Annie’s prescriptions from the pharmacy, a library summer reading program prize from the library (and searched unsuccessfully among the 50 copies of Rocket Men, the library’s big community read, for the copy that Tommy lost and I now owe $38 on), and bought a couple pairs of shoes for Annie to try with the new braces. We also went to Starbucks (this was my second latte of the day, but I had been on the go for 8 straight hours at this point) to regroup, so that all really counted as a Mommy-daughter date, right?
At 5, we got home to Derek making dinner before leaving at 6:15 to fly out to somewhere (I’ve lost track–DC, maybe?). I tried really hard not to cry and reminded myself that Rachel Jankovic says when you’re so overwhelmed you want to cry, give yourself 15 minutes of just doing your duty and see if you’re still feeling the need to cry. She had four kids under four and was nursing twins, so she should know. I had to push through two more hours of feeding Annie, trying on the orthotics some more (she can pull them off, and the shoes don’t really work, but I pulled them apart to get the orthotics in, so I can’t return them), baths, nebulizer and little girl bedtime, cleaning the messy house, dealing with laundry (Annie pulled out her tube in the high chair twice today in addition to the time at the park), before collapsing on the couch at 8 to watch a So You Think You Can Dance with the big kids. I was so tired when that was over that when we talked through our game plan for tomorrow and prayed and sent them off to bed, I didn’t have the energy to cry anymore. So I guess the push-through-your-duty advice worked.
At 9, I sat down to schedule out all of the kids’ homeschool co-op classes, French lessons, piano lessons, and hockey practices. Much budgeting of our charter funds and juggling of schedules as I texted all their teachers and glanced overwhelmed at our fall calendar. I spent two hours putting all the requests through the Inspire enrichment website.
At 11, I remembered that I needed to text Dan and Shawna the picture of Annie in her new orthotics (and hopefully give them a little push to follow through and call their lawyers and tell them to stop the appeals). I didn’t get around to lesson planning for tomorrow, but since I have to take Annie to OT in Santa Monica from 8-10:30 and have the psychologist coming here to do therapy from 11-12 and have DNA coming to do PT at 3:30, we won’t really have much time to do the science project I’d hoped for, so we’ll just stick to math and English and Latin and call it good.
Now it’s midnight, and I have to get up early and single mom it all day up to and including the big girls auditioning for Ragtime down at the music building tomorrow night, because nothing says nice start to the weekend like taking five kids down on campus at bedtime to try out for something that would involve more work for me for the whole semester, right?!
New braces! And a ratty onesie because after you’ve spilled formula on two cute outfits in a day, you’re relegated to the back up clothes at the bottom of the diaper bag.The view when I was washing dishes. Thank you, Jesus, for making this world so breathtakingly beautiful that we have to stop and give You glory and get out of our own heads.
Today the girls made a roughly-to-scale model of Noah’s ark to go along with our history timeline card. Back when Tommy did this project five years ago, it was all brown, but my girlie girls wanted some pretty color!
