Poor little guy

Here's what I do when my poor little guy gets sick.  

We let the fever do it's job fighting off the sickness and tried to just keep him cool and comfortable.  Treating his cough is harder. 

He slept and slept and slept all night and most of the morning and when he woke up he was dehydrated and hungry.   I made him some hot brown rice with Chia seeds,apples and strawberries and hemp milk.  He's eaten three bowls and he wants to feed himself but his poor little hand is shaking from weakness.  

Then he gets some of his Nutrivene-D multivitamin in applesauce and then some vitamin D3, probiotics, echinacea and colloidal  silver.   

And of course some Breathe oil and Thieves.  

However, things took a turn for the worse. So we went to the pediatrician's office at 4:30 pm and they sent us to the ER so that they could do a chest x-ray and rule out pneumonia.  5 1/2 hours in the ER and he seemed to perk up after oxygen breathing treatment and then iv fluids. No pneumonia.  Blood work fine.  They sent us home.  After seeing police dragging people in to the ER and a woman screaming we were glad to go. 

He seemed better but the next day right before our follow-up appointment he spiked a pretty high fever again. So back to the hospital and after more studies and more breathing treatments determined that he had RSV.  The coughing continued and he was complaining about it hurting.  Antibiotics were started for a possible sinus infection.  We have stayed here two nights and he is breathing better.  Everyone has been really nice.  

Pedro and I have both taken a day off of work and Lupe has been staying with the grandparents and been picked up from school by friends. The kids miss each other.  

How GRATEFUL I am to have family here.  

Lupe's first grade class made pictures for Liam and sent him some toy cars to play with.  How amazing! Liam is loved in first grade.  

So sometimes hospitals and medicine are absolutely the best route. We have been struggling for so long with his on again off again congestionand raspy breathing.  It's been his only real health concern (And with Down syndrome there could have been a lot more problems)    We have tried diet changes and other things.   So when asthma was mentioned and the idea of flushing out his sinuses a lot more often and using an inhaler when we hear the wheeze, well, if this helps his overall respiratory health then we are grateful for some solutions.  But something is triggering this and that is what I'd like to find out.  

Parenting is damn hard work.  

He's better. 

Pre IEP evaluation hormonal rant

I love my family so much it hurts.  I really am grateful to be on this journey and to have become a person who has so much fucking respect for parents of children with special needs and for the truly open and caring professionals who are trying to help.  

But....

Sometimes I am just so fucking tired of it all.  I am tired of the assessments and seeing all the things that my three-year-old is not doing that others can.   I am tired of how much time it takes to learn new things.  I am tired of all the mental energy put in to researching and experimenting different things to help my child.  I am tired of the  negative thoughts I have when I hear parents complaining about the small things their typical child is or is not doing.  It is so hard to watch things that kids can learn so easily without a parents second thought when it takes so much effort on my part to teach my son to do the same thing. 

Sometimes I want to say screw all this worry I have but I can't. I can't because special needs or not I am a parent and we all do what we have to do for our children

So after the chance to do some errands by myself I took a quick hike on the way home.  Just 15 minutes.  And I went off the path and sat in the middle of a field of yellow flowers.  But I still felt gray. 

I tried to feel peaceful and look at the little ladybug hopping along the grass stems.    It helped just a little. I am feeling hormonal today and it was not the best day to watch my son being assessed and I will just have to live with that and feel what I feel. 

Little things that are BIG

Monday: Liam just said "mama help".  I have been prompting him to say "help please" for ages and he will repeat it when I have prompted him.  This was the first time he did it without any prompting from me.  What a useful thing to be able to communicate!

Tuesday: "good morning Lupe "  "mmm yummy mama". "thank you mama". unprompted

Wednesday: Liam offers me a cheerio and I say no thank you.  Then he laughs and says "Liam mouth, Boca".  My bilingual boy

Tuesday of another week:  "that one".   "Other side" 

He put a ball in my shirt and said "baby tummy".

Yesterday at the park he saw a cup on the ground and said "dirty".   This is a big one too because I don't think he has seen us picking up trash in public and throwing it away very often and he sometimes needs prompting him to throw things away.  It was a very good connection

He now brings me a book and says "read".   He had lots of favorites and says them by name.  

Liam probably has around 150 words or more that he can say.  But what I am seeing recently is him not just saying words or repeating me but actually using spoken language to communicate his needs.  THIS is important. 

Wait, and did I already mention that he says "thank you mama" spontaneously? That's just awesome for any three year old  I think.