Overdue

I have seriously neglected my blog over the last several months. I just don't have much free time...or perhaps I should say that I don't have much uninterrupted free time. Also, the last six months have been extremely difficult on the parenting front. While I don't try to paint a false picture of our lives, I do mainly try to concentrate on the positive, memorable, and funny slices of our lives, as I suspect that I'll have no problem remembering the negative things someday. Recently, there have been an overabundance of negative issues, and not many positive things to post about. We have been dealing with an unending stream of sassiness, one of the downsides of having two highly verbal children. Benjy and I have come to the conclusion that having a two year old and three year old at the same time is much harder than having two babies at once (Mercy and Judah are just 16 months apart.) Mercy is a little negotiater. She is always one step ahead and has an answer for everything, not an endearing quality in a toddler. Judah is a mimic and has a huge vocabulary, but that often sounds obnoxious when spouted with terrible two-year-old angst ("You a scoundrel, Mommy.") He disagrees with everyone, even himself. Here are some examples of recent conversations in our house:

Judah: "Mommy, look!! Clouds!)
Me: "Yes, baby, I see all the clouds.
Judah: "NO. They NOT clouds."

Judah, talking to himself: "I will praise the Lord!"
Judah, again, talking BACK to himself: "NO! I WON'T praise the Lord!"

Me (for the 43rd time): "Judah, pick up the Mega Blocks and put them in the box.
Judah, to himself as he wanders about the room aimlessly: "I not see me picking up."

Me: "Judah, say 'Yes, Mommy."
Judah: "No, I NOT say 'Yes, Mommy.'"

Judah: "My (may I) have a 'nack?"
Me: "No sweetie. Mommy's fixing supper."
Judah: "No. You NOT fixing supper."

Those are just a few examples. This is ALL. DAY. LONG. I am absolutely weary of it. We have exhausted every discipline tactic we can think of short of just putting a piece of tape over his mouth, and though I've felt like it a few times...oh, okay, a few times every day...we don't want to venture over to the dark side. We are desperately hoping this phase passes quickly and in the meantime correcting him every single time he argues, contradicts, and backtalks. It does absolutely no good, but at least we're being consistent. For Mercy, age three was much, much worse than two. If Judah's third year is going to be worse than his second, I'll be on meds.

In other news, Zion had some serious health problems starting at 9 months. He was fine one day, started coughing the next, and within about 36 hours was fighting to breathe. We took him to urgent care before he became critically ill, but the moronic doctor we saw who diagnosed him with RSV, bronchiolitis, and pneumonia put him on a totally innapropriate antibiotic. The next day as he continued his downward spiral, with a fever of 104, vomitting, refusing to nurse, and retracting when he breathed, I took him to the emergency room. The triage nurse almost immediately said we would be admitted. He was loaded with massive doses of steroids, antibiotics, and three back-to-back breathing treatments. Within about three hours, Zion was no longer listless, was breathing much more easily, and wanted to play. Because Zion had made such a dramatic turn around (and probably because Benjy is a nurse), the ER doctor let us come home with a grave warning that he was still very ill, and to continue breathing treatments every two hours around the clock, and bring him back immediately if he worsened. It took nearly two weeks, but his lungs finally cleared. Just a week later, he had pneumonia again. Two weeks after that, bronchiolitis. He had a total of four respiratory infections in about 10 weeks. During one of his xrays, the radiologist spotted a chest-wall deformity where the sternum points back toward the lungs. This is a frequent sign of Marfan's Syndrome, a genetic disease that is prevalent in Benjy's side of the family. Because of the cluster of illnesses and the chest-wall defect, our PCP sent us to University of Virginia in Charlottesville, to a pediatric pulmonologist and a geneticist. We just had those appointments in the last week. The pulmonologist thinks Zion has asthma. The genetics appointment was inconclusive, as we have to have tests run on Benjy. We have a treatment plan for the asthma and are hopeful that he grows out of it, as many children his age do.

There have been many other things going on, but I won't try to write about them all in one post (snore). I am going to try to back-post pictures from the holidays and birthdays we've had over the last few months, so keep looking for those.