How High?

You tell him to jump and he asks, "How high?"

A couple weeks ago Evan and I were killing time in Woodland, waiting for Daddy to get off work so we could do the child-swap thing between both of our jobs. We spontaneously decided to go to Jack Slaven park to play in the splash pad. I hadn't really thought through how to handle the situation--child who wants to play in the water/no swimsuit/no towel/cement splash pad/child who cannot walk--we just dove right in. I opted to keep him in his jeans to protect his knees on the hard ground, even though he looked a little funny among the other children running around in their swimsuits. But he loved splashing and quickly ended up soaking wet with torn up jeans and a little bleeding toe.

Daddy met up with us, took Evan home, and I left for work and young women's. That evening Isaiah said Evan threw up and wasn't acting normal. The next day he had a fever of 101.9 and was extremely lethargic. As his fever rose through the day we became increasingly nervous.

As a parent of a child with a shunt, I've been trained to watch for signs of shunt infection or failure, including fever and lethargy. And come to think of it, he did have a fall earlier in the day that also made him throw up. I decided if the fever went above 103 then I'd take him into the doctor. That night it hit 103.1 so Isaiah and I took him to the emergency room. It felt unnecessarily dramatic to go to the ER but it was after hours at the doctor's office so we went.

The first doctor brought us back and took Evan's temperature. Nothing.

Nothing?! Are you nuts? First of all, the child is radiating heat all over his body. Secondly, there's no way our thermometer was 5 degrees off or that his fever went down 5 degrees on the drive here. Nothing?!

He seemed to not take us too seriously and sent us back to a nurse. The nurse took a rectal temperature and got 103.1. Phew, I'm not a crazy-paranoid-first-time-mom. To make a long story short, it was an ear infection. Of course, he was playing in the water. Why didn't I think of that? Antibiotics for 10 days and he's healed.

We bought him some baby knee pads for future park adventures. He also just got his new braces. They're called "Turbos." Sweet, huh? They're SMOs (Supra Malleolar Orthosis) inside of AFOs (Ankle Foot Orthosis). In other words it's a little foot brace inside of an ankle-supportive brace. So far they've stayed on through lots of crawling and LOTS of walking, which is a vast improvement from his last pair. This morning I took him outside with his Elmo walker in our pajamas and bed-heads and he WALKED to and from the mailbox ON HIS OWN! (Which is no small feat--the mailbox is 5 houses down the street!!) I guided the walker from falling into the grass and I pushed it over some of the bigger cracks in the sidewalk, but he walked all on his own...including down and back UP the driveway. (Well, halfway up the driveway he tuckered out and decided to crawl the rest of the way.) This kid is incredible! I wish I could video and encourage and push the walker all at the same time. Instead I took a picture of the celebratory drink: