Photo Tuesday

Just a few miscellaneous pictures from the past few days. Here's a cute one from Sunday morning, when Jacob woke up in the crib at my parents' house and took off his pajamas while I was getting ready. And then he made them into a "hat".

This is an igloo Jacob made at daycare. It's made out of a styrofoam cup, shaving cream, marshmallows and sugar cubes. Interesting. Even more interesting is that the shaving cream is still soft, but with a rubbery film on the outside so it doesn't get all over. I keep wondering what will happen to it if we let it sit out long enough.

The other night I made Jacob a potty chart. I decided that I'd see if stickers were enough of a lure to get him to start using the potty again. He had pretty much totally given it up at home, and I don't really want to push it for fear he'll really rebel against it. But he likes the thought of stickers, and Sunday night he earned three! Then last night he earned two! He gets one for telling us he has to go (but only if he actually goes), another for peeing, another for poop, and then one for pulling his pants on and off and another for wiping himself. Those last two will come later. I slipped the paper into a plastic sleeve and hung it up with suction cups (thanks Mom!)...easy to access and keep clean! But I think it turned out cute. If he fills in all the squares in a category, he'll get a yet-to-be-determined treat. The stickers are mostly sports-related (shocker) but eventually we'll have to dig into the cars and trucks, too...or maybe a miracle will happen and he'll get pottytrained before then! When I took the picture he had three basketballs, a baseball, a tennis ball, and a catcher's mask. Then last night he added a pool ball and another different kind of basketball. I think two poops in two days constitutes some sort of victory, but I do worry about burning out the fun of it before he's truly ready to train. With a house full of carpets I refuse to do naked training, at least until summer, and he still seems to have a mental block on why all of this matters. If he CAN poop on the potty and likes the attention and stickers that come with it, why hide in the corner to do it? Even last night I happened to catch him early in the poop when I heard grunting. He did have a rabbit turd-sized poop in his diaper when we took it off, but he put considerably more than that into the potty. So the question remains of why he refuses to use the potty more on his own, at least not consistently, when he wants to wear big boy underwear and get stickers. I do explain to him that it's hard work and he needs to earn those privileges, so hopefully like everything else, one day it will sink in. I've said for a while that I wouldn't start panicking until he was three and wasn't showing much interest, but it occurred to me this morning that he's past the two and a half mark, so three isn't that far away. Yikes!

And now for the surgery series...here's Jacob's leg pre-surgery. You can see the mole very well here.

Here he is before he went in, wearing his gown and being silly. He was trying to play baseball in this tiny space. He got his relaxation medicine and ended up stumbling backward into the wall shortly after this, at which point we tried to keep him in bed. He almost fell out right before he went in. He was all relaxed and had just watched his favorite Elmo clip on YouTube, and I got up to put away the computer and clear the rest of the miscellaneous stuff off the bed, and apparently he decided he wanted to get up. Craig caught him before he hit the floor. Thank God. Crazy kid.

Here he is being a big boy at home, sitting on the couch by himself with his juice and snack, animals at his side, watching a movie. Cute kid.

We ended up having a pretty pleasant day. We watched a couple movies (one exclusively for Jacob, the other enjoyable for all of us--"Miracle", about the 1980 US Olympic team), Jacob took a decent nap (and so did Craig and I, at different times), and we just sort of hung out, ate a couple meals at home, and played (Craig and I on our computers, and Jacob with his hockey guys and sports stuff). He only complained about his leg once, around dinner time and long after his initial pain meds would have worn off. I have continued to give him some pain medication ever since, just in case. He might say his leg isn't bothering him, but anything with kids can change in an instant. And if he's stuck at daycare all day, I'd rather prevent any issues. I have a feeling MY leg would be bothering me if I had something like that done, let alone his as he runs laps back and forth across the living room. I'll probably continue through the night tonight and stop tomorrow morning.

I'm already not looking forward to pulling the outside bandage off on Thursday, but I am quite curious to see what everything looks like under there. I'll try to post pics of the bandaging and scar at some point. Regardless of the scar, I'd have to think it will look considerably less menacing than that mole. I suppose I'm extra sensitive about moles in general, since I've been self-conscious about them. I have one between my mouth and my nose, as well as one on my wrist that I've spent the last 20 or so years covering up with a watch. I used to get a lot of questions from friends about the one on my wrist, as it is pretty large, and the one on my face has always been an issue for me--so much so that I had it airbrushed out of my high school senior pictures. However, I never got up the guts to have either of them removed. Sometimes I wonder what the point is, now that I'm past the teasing phase and have a husband who readily married me as is, but there are days that I wonder if a tiny scar would be preferable to what's currently on my face, as I sometimes think it makes me asymmetrical and can be generally distracting. But at this point in my life, would taking it off make me less "me"? Hard to say. I do wonder sometimes if I'd feel more attractive without it, though. But all that said, I'm happy Jacob's is gone since he won't have to worry about it at all, ever. That's not to say more won't show up, but for now, it's an issue he'll never have to deal with. His situation was more about health than vanity, of course, but it's a nice bonus that we won't have to look at it anymore and wonder.

And off we go on another week...and another busy weekend for Craig, though only two games this weekend instead of three and/or a road trip. Better than nothing :)