Darr Family Blog

Good News Flash: Paul is back to work and it looks like he’s getting paid. Now we’re just keeping our fingers crossed that he’ll get back-pay for the time that he was furloughed. Also good news: they are finally building a house next door! That means that we’ll have houses on both sides and hopefully not as many creepy-crawlies creeping into our house (once the house is done. I know we’ll have more while the house is going up.)

What We Did This Week: Not much, lol. I practiced music for Messiah (so that I could help the sopranos learn their parts as well as practicing for the Youth and Children’s Choir numbers). We played at the park a few times, had a couple of play-dates, etc. The highlight of Joseph’s week was probably when we took him to Barnes & Nobel to play with the big train table that they have there. Not only were they trains, but they were specifically Thomas trains. He kind of pitched a mini-fit when we left (even though we tried to warn him ahead of time. Each time I’d say 5 minutes…3 minutes, etc., he’d just say, “No!”) We’re working on that. 🙂 Oh, and the other highlight of Joseph’s week was when he found out that a friend of mine was willing to let him take home the toy stroller that he played with the entire time we were at her house (she had two, and her kids are a bit older and not into them anymore, so when she saw that Joseph liked it so much, she told us to take it home). He’s been playing with it almost non-stop since. 🙂

Cute Joseph-isms:

1)Playing with his plush giraffe: He said, “Yee-haw!”, put it on the ground, and proceeded to try to sit on it to ride it. The only problem with that was that it’s not very big, so he couldn’t really ride it. He just kind of sat down on it.

2) Joseph’s favorite book this week was “Where the Wild Things Are”. I read it to him at least once a day for a couple of days straight. One day, he was looking at it while I was changing his diaper, and I caught him “reading” to himself, “Roar the roars, gnashy teeth.” Apparently his favorite part is when the wild things “roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth […]”. 🙂

3) Joseph was watching a piece of construction equipment dig some dirt out so that they could lay pipes for the house next door. He said, “Truck digging…hooray digging truck!” He was very sad to see the “truck” leave. He loves watching the stuff going on next door.

4) He decided that he needed to put something into his new stroller to push around, so he picked one of his bears. He put it in, pushed it around for a bit, stopped, very carefully picked up the bear by the shoulders, gave it a hug (while saying, “Awwwww”), put it back in the stroller, and continued on his way. I love his tender heart!

5) He decided that different toys needed to ride in the stroller. Some of the more interesting ones were his knight (who’s about 3 inches tall…he put the knight in the stroller and then pretended to snore, as if the knight was sleeping) and his slinky.

6) I was reading him “Mr. Brown Can Moo” and he kept calling the cow “Clara-belle”. Can you tell he watches a lot of Mickey Mouse? lol

7) Two of his most-used phrases this week: “‘Scuse-me” and “Thank you, Mommy!”

This Week in Pictures:

This week started out promising, but then we had another adventure in parenting, followed by a relapse of an illness. Luckily, the week ended a bit better than it started!

Adventure in Parenting: On Monday, shortly before lunch/nap time, I stepped out of the house really quickly to check on something outside. Joseph took the opportunity (lasting one, maybe two minutes), to lock the storm door behind me. Luckily he left the front door open, so I could see him. He did not have malicious thoughts when he locked the door, he was simply playing with the lock (a knob that seems like it needs to be twisted around a million times before it either locks or unlocks the door). I spent about 20 minutes trying to coax/coach him into being able to unlock the door, but no luck. He almost had it a few times, but he would invariably not turn it enough times or end up turning it the wrong way. I ran across the street to ask my neighbor if I could borrow her phone to call Paul (my cell phone was in the house). While waiting for him to call back (which he wouldn’t be able to do until he was able to check his voice-mail on his lunch break, 20 minutes later), my neighbor and I tried to get him to unlock the door. He was not traumatized a bit. He would switch between trying to unlock the door, sitting on the couch watching TV, and playing with his toys. When Paul called me back, I asked him to come home, which he did. By the time Paul got home, Joseph was tired of it all (he was hungry and tired…it was an hour and a half past his normal lunch/nap time) and was very grateful when Paul unlocked the door. Needless to say, we went out that evening and got a spare set of keys made and have come up with a solution so that it won’t happen again (plus, I made a new vow to always keep my keys with me if I am out of the house and Joseph is in…even if it’s just to run out to the garage to toss trash). Yeesh!

After Monday’s craziness, I was more than ready to return back to normal life. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t in the cards. Tuesday brought Paul getting sent home from work because of the government shut down (He was home this past Tue-Fri. He was told to go back to work tomorrow, but the government isn’t sure if and when he’ll get paid for this past week or any work that he’ll be doing during the shut down. Ugh.) and it brought a relapse of Joseph’s strep. We took him back to Urgent Care (I hadn’t made a follow-up appointment with his doctor because he’d finished his antibiotics and had seemed to be almost better when his temperature shot back up…after the office was closed for the day, of course) and got more antibiotics for him. Hopefully this time it’ll lick it completely!

Cute/Funny for the week: 1) Joseph was playing with his cars and other toys that we have downstairs and I could hear him singing to himself. All I could make out was, “at home, at school, at play!” I love the fact that apparently Primary songs are going through his head while he plays. 2) While playing with his maraca, I could hear Joseph singing, “Marching, marching!” repeatedly. At music playtime, they sing a song and march around the room with different instruments. After realizing what he was doing (especially since he was marching around the living room while doing it), I made a mental note to be sure to hit up music playtime, since apparently it’s sinking in more than I thought. 3) While at music playtime, we were singing a song about dinosaurs. We got to the part in the song where the dinosaurs lay down to rest. Joseph laid down and began to snore…quite loudly. It was pretty entertaining for a lot of people. 🙂

This week in pictures:

Here’s to hoping that this next week will be back to normal!

This week started off great. I took Joseph walking with me on Monday, Tuesday we met up at the park with friends in the morning, and then in the afternoon, disaster struck in the form of a fever for Joseph. My first indication that he might not be feeling well was that he didn’t really want to eat his breakfast that morning. I was able to convince him to eat, and then when we went to the park. While at the park, he seemed fine, so I figured it was just a fluke that he hadn’t wanted breakfast. We got home and I changed his diaper (which is when the ick began) and I noticed he was really warm. He also refused to eat his lunch. I took his temperature (99.5) and decided to see if he would sleep it off. He woke up even hotter (101.3) so I gave him some Ibuprofin. It brought the fever down for a bit, but then it went back up. Paul picked up dinner on his way home from work and we decided to see if we could get Joseph to eat some french fries (one of his favorite foods). He refused (which is when we realized something was really up), so we took his temperature again, and it was 103.5! We tried giving him a luke-warm bath to bring it down, but that didn’t do anything, so we took him in to urgent care. At urgent care, his temp read 103.9. The doctor took one look in his mouth and said that it was strep throat. Poor guy. 🙁 They gave him some Tylenol and a steroid (since his lymph nodes were really swollen) and prescribed an antibiotic as well as the same steroid to give to him for a week. Paul took a sick-day Wednesday since all of us got home pretty late on Tuesday, and I felt like I needed just a bit more help with Joseph. Joseph was a trooper taking his medicine, but the side effects (yucky diapers) were not fun for any of us. He’d get really upset when he knew he needed a change and he got (and still has) a bad rash. We’ve been giving him baths with baking soda in the water for the past two days, and that seems to have helped a bit. Plus, he’s now done with his antibiotic and his steroid, so the icky diapers should be done soon, too.

Cute story for the week: We were kind of home-bodies because of the sick baby, so we read a lot of books and watched a lot of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (MMC). Joseph still loves to dance to the songs that play at the beginning and end of MMC, and he’s always willing to be read to. We have a book that is called “Spooky Bus” which is about a bus that takes a bunch of ghosts, gouls, witches, skeletons, etc. to a haunted house. It has a button where if you push it, it does a creepy laugh. The first time Joseph pushed the button, he didn’t want to touch it again, and it took a good week and a half before I could get him to even touch the book again, let alone push the button (he’d see the book and say “No, no!”). After a little bit of time passed, I was able to read it to him (withOUT pushing the button). Then one day early this week, I pushed the button and explained that it was just a laugh, and I did a sillier version of the spooky laugh. He seemed okay with that, so the next time, I had him push it. He did, and then looked at me and said, “It’s okay” (to reassure himself, I think). I told him it was okay. Today, he kept saying, “Skoopy Bus, Skoopy Bus”. It took me a bit to realize he wanted me to read him Spooky Bus, lol. After I read it to him, he pushed the button a few times and laughed, so he’s no longer scared of it!

The other two notable things this week: 1) We had another one of our crazy thunderstorms last night, at about 12:30. Joseph slept through the entire thing (thankfully), but Paul and I didn’t. The thunder was so loud at times that it shook our windows. I’m glad for the rain, but it was hard not getting a very good night’s sleep. 2) I went to my first rehearsal for helping with the stake Messiah concert. I learned that it’s not just people from our stake, but anyone who wants to sing, no matter what their faith. I thought that was pretty cool. I didn’t mess up too many times (since I was just helping the sopranos with their parts, I didn’t have to play the accompaniment), lol. I have to help them one more rehearsal, and then I help out the youth and children’s choirs with a couple of pieces. Those will be pieces that I will be accompanying them for the performance, so I need to have those “concert ready” by the beginning of December. Whew!

Here’s this week in pictures:

 

Our lucky moment of the week: when Paul was walking the wiggles out of Joseph this morning at church, they came across a small anthill. Joseph decided (before Paul could stop him) to stomp on it. Luckily, they were regular black ants and not fire ants! We’re going to have to teach that kid about bugs!