Sorry for the blogging absence over last week. It was a DOOZY. Let’s see, where to start …

As of this upcoming Wednesday, I’ll be six weeks out from surgery. Which means I’m halfway to the next surgery! Hopefully, that is. I don’t have it officially scheduled yet. But still … I can’t believe that the time has flown this quickly. Another thing to be thankful for is our health insurance. We got the bill from Mayo for the surgery this past week. We will pay 1% of the overall bill; the rest of it is completely covered. That is awesome.

I’ve lost 15 pounds, and I’m finally feeling like me again. After all those months and months of prednisone and other meds, I wasn’t myself. It’s nice to be back to nearly my pre-Jude weight!  It’s funny, though – it’s like I keep waiting for my ulcerative colitis symptoms to return. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it won’t!

This past week was hard. Jude had come down with an ear infection and pink eye. UGH. So it was like a false start to the new year, in a way – no mother’s day out (which meant no haircut for me – rescheduled) and then no Bible Study Fellowship on Wednesday. I was really disappointed about both, but he needed to stay out; he was just too sick.

He’d been sleeping in his “big boy bed” all week, and it was just difficult. He was getting in and out of his bed all night long, on top of being sick and not sleeping well to begin with. So none of us got any good sleep. We are not a co-sleeping family by any means; it’s sweet to wake up with him, but he is a thrasher. He tosses and turns all night long, so we just don’t do well when he’s in bed with us.  Last night, he was back into his crib, and everybody was the happier for it.

To top things off, he’s knee-deep in the terrible two’s. He is trying to assert himself and I have determined that it is very similar to being in a foreign country. You are trying desperately to speak the language, but the locals just don’t understand you. So then you get angry and frustrated, and so the only way you can express yourself is to throw yourself on the ground point to what you want.

Despite the Two’s, he’s still pretty sweet. He likes to sing “Jesus loves me” and “Jingle Bells” and he is, of late, obsessed with Alvin and the Chipmunks. I took him to the movies last week to go see the sequel, and he was in complete awe. Now every morning, he says, “MOVIES! ‘MUNKS!”  He does a hilarious fake sneeze, too. Then he says, “Bless you, Momma. Bless you, Daddy.”

In a fit of parenting frustration, I went to BabiesRUs and purchased more childproofing accessories. I honestly thought those days had passed, but it seems the best/worst in babyproofing is to come. He has been into EVERYTHING lately. I’ve found him wiping my concealer all over his face, and squeezing lotion onto the rugs. At one point this week, I decided to put a special childlock on his door and I inadvertently locked myself into his room.  Hmm. Ok. Well, maybe that was the point??? I guess I proved that he couldn’t get out of his room…  So then I had to completely disassemble the door handle and childproof thing. FAIL.

I felt justified and rather validated, though, when we took a trip to Target with my parents on Saturday. This poor mother was trying to get her cart of stuff out the door along with her two daughters. I guess she had crossed the younger daughter in some way because the kid started to have the biggest tantrum ever. The entire store could hear her. As they were going out into the parking lot, the girl was screaming, “GET AWAY FROM ME! GET.A.WAY. FROM. MEEEEEEEEEE!”  Mom looked at me and said, “Honey, you are not alone. See?”

Before I had kids, I would have judged the mom. Why can’t she control her child? Now, on the other side, I just feel extreme sympathy. I’m sure she was totally mortified.

Anyway. I’m excited for a new start to the week and I’m hoping that we will now be free of earaches and pink eyes.