Medical Advice

Julia: Dad has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow?

Mom: It is a follow up with the doctor who did his knee surgery.  He is going to tell daddy that it is okay to go back to tae kwon do classes.

Julia [thinking and wrinkling her brow]: But daddy has been going to practice.

Mom: Yes I know.  It’s okay.  His physical therapist told him tae kwon do would be a good way to stretch and exercise his leg as long as he was careful.

Julia: Do I have a physical therapist?

Mom: Your physical therapist is grandma.  Daddy has a different one because he wouldn’t listen to her anyway.

Julia: Hee-hee.  I’m going to tell daddy you said that!

Piano injury

Today we had a piano related injury at the Kuhlman Farm.  You know, we warn the kids about the stove, "Hot!" and the fridge, "Never close yourself inside," but how easily we overlook the nefarious piano.

I went outside this morning to get Paul and Julia on the bus.  Nathan came out with us and he helped me bring the recycling bin back from the curb.  When we finally came around by the door I could hear Petra inside crying frantically.

I hurried inside to find her sitting at the piano bench in near panic.  She had tried to open the lid covering the keys and her thumb got pinched between the lid and the little compartment where it pops open into.  I quickly pulled her loose and let her cry in my lap and read her a story.

I don't know how long she was trapped like that.  It could have been as much as 10 minutes, and I'm sure it felt like forever.  She told me, "I was crying and I tried to take a deep breath to calm down, but I couldn't."  I don't blame her.

Her thumb wasn't broken and by lunch time she was using it normally.

Who knew such danger lurked in such a seemingly harmless place?

It is cold

When I was little I lived in the snow belt in western Pennsylvania.  When you are little, the snow is nothing but fun.  I loved the snow and my mom could always promise me that we would have at least one good snowfall by my mid-November birthday.

This year I saw a few flakes spitting around in the wind in the week before my birthday.  I thought, "Oh how nice.  Snow by my birthday." On the evening of my birthday, the skies opened up and started draping the world in 6 inches of snow.  Glorious!

And cold.  Very, very cold.  I think we are having record lows and the windchill the last couple of mornings has been 1°F.

The children are each asking for a hot water bottle before bed.  They don't really need them because we keep the house pretty warm at night, but oh, how they love them.

The hot water bottle habit started over a week ago before it got very cold.  The girls and I had just watched "Frozen" and afterward Julia started complaining about some ailment in her foot that sounded rather like she had gotten a little too wrapped up in the movie, and Elsa's icy magic had frozen her foot.  She limped around the house with all the dramatic flair of an 8 year old girl.  My treatment was to give her a hot water bottle.  It seemed to cure the problem.

Petra also got a hot water bottle, and she liked it so well that she went to sleep hugging it on top of her belly.  She has also spent a couple of nights with the hot water bottle tucked in her pillow case so that she could rest her head on it.

Eventually Paul started getting a hot water bottle for bed too, and eventually even Nathan.  I had held out on Nathan, even though he is arguably the child who needs it most, because it is kind of tricky to place a hot water bottle for a child who might wake up with his head 180° and 3 feet away from where it started in bed.  The first night I gave him one he was immensely pleased; so pleased in fact that I was afraid I had made a mistake because I wasn't sure he was going to be able to go to sleep because he was so busy loving on his hot water bottle.  As I left his room he was lying beside the bottle, patting it, and babbling softly to it.

He slept okay, I think, but when he toddled down in the morning, he was clinging to the not-so-hot water bottle and carried it around for a while.

I should have asked for a hot water bottle when I was a kid.  My parents kept the house a little colder at night and I remember waking up fairly regularly in the night in the winter with cold, achy feet, and pulling them in closer to try to warm them up.  It never occurred to me that it was the sort of problem that one could actually DO something about.

I don't mind the cold weather.  It's not that I like being cold, but I do like all the wonderful ways there are to warm up.