Gah

One more week of work, and since I'm part-time now, that means three more days. Apparently this quitting work plan came along a week too late, Sierra is on spring break this week, so we've had to work-in child care---she's spending monday and wednesday with me, tuesday with veronica, thursday with brandie and friday with josh. Today she made it until about 9:30 before she came up to me (I had let her sit down to watch shrek while I put Sedona down for a nap) and said, "momma, can we do work at home? numbers work?" At school they call their activities "work", so what she really meant was she wanted to do school stuff. Last week we went to barnes and noble and we let her pick out a book, then on the way out the door she saw the rack of workbooks and got ALL excited and practically shouted, "workbooks! we can get workbooks!!" She is definitely my child. I remember begging for workbooks. Her other new thing is puzzles. She did her first (24 piece) one thursday night and finished a 100 piece one tonight with just a little help. Wonder if they have puzzles at the library?

We heard back from Sedona's extended metabolic screen and it was all negative, so that's good news. Her digestive issues are also better--no more blood in her stool and no more constipation issues (that started when she started solids), though she has to eat a jar of prunes and a jar of peaches each day to keep that up. Her weight gain is still very mediocre. She's on another losing streak lately and if you look back over several months she's averaging 6 oz of gain per month. That's not enough to maintain a growth curve, so she just keeps on tracking down. She's getting close to the 25th now, when we started all this, she was at the 90th. The 25th would be just fine and fit in well with our family (genetically speaking), if she maintained it. I keep waiting for her to level out and start following a curve, but it's been 5 months and isn't happening. Since the blood has stopped though, we're back in the big gray area of weighing benefits vs. risks of more tests. The GI backed off doing a scope b/c right now the benefits don't out weigh the risks. If everything else holds steady, we won't be doing anything else until she's closer to the 5th percentile (which will be around her 1st birthday if she keeps gaining 6 oz/month). Her next GI appointment is in April.

As an FYI, powdered buttermilk works great for biscuits, but you do it a little different---mix the powder in with the dry ingredients, cut your shortening in, then just add the appropriate amount of water. And when you sew a bunch of flannel and fleece stuff, clean your sewing machine. My MIL told me that when she gave me the machine and I did clean, or so I thought. The weird noises tonight and repeated tension problems (to the point of snapping needles in half fairly regularly) forced me to dig out the owners manual--I learned to take off the stitch plate and....oops. Way too much fleece lint jam packed in there. Ugh. Lesson learned, now I know better.