Pants problem

No, this isn't about the dog (Shelby, who Amy nicknamed Shelby Pants). This is about Reed. He has a problem. A pants problem.

See...sweatpants.

I will take the fall for starting this one. When he was small, I put him in nothing but elastic waist pants. Come on, they're more comfortable, and cheaper too. Lots of people dress their young sons in impossibly adorable and expensive pants and jeans...but not me. I went for comfort and low cost.

Consequently the poor child has not learned how to manage pants buttons. He's gotten a lot better at shirt buttons (on the rare occasions when he wears them), but he is flumoxed by his pants problem. His thin, reed-like (get it!) fingers just can't manage to properly manipulate the buttons without what he feels is Herculean effort.

Lack of practice combined with a lack of dexterity. What are you gonna do. I have decided to not be bothered by it - he'll figure it out sometime before he goes off to college (or else be outfitted solely in sports pants with elastic waists). Meanwhile he will either skip going to the bathroom (yikes) or, since his waist is so skinny, just pull his not-designed-to-be-pulled-down-without-unbuttoning pants down over his hips. I guess we should applaud his problem-solving skills.

One day, probably in the next two years or so, peer pressure will maybe get the better of him and he'll want to wear blue jeans like all the other boys. Or maybe not. But either way, no worries on this end – just smile!

Migraines? At 6 years old?

A week ago Friday, I got a call from one of the Daisy moms that Amy came down with a terrible headache at the Daisy meeting and wanted to go home. (Geez, I just realized that day was Friday the 13th. Ugh.)

Turns out it was more than a headache, it was her second migraine headache.

The first one happened on December 5. I picked her up from school as usual and she was fine. All four of us walked the dogs around the block and she was fine. We got back home for her to get ready for tae kwon do class (which was a fight, as it sometimes can be) and she was fine. Until she wasn't. Suddenly she said her head was really killing her. We thought we'd try making it to tae kwon do class anyway, but as I drove her there she continued to complain about her headache, and added that she felt sick to her stomach. When we parked the car, she said she didn't think she could do class, she thought she was going to throw up. We sat on the curb for a few minutes and then decided to go home. She laid on the couch for a few minutes, and threw up all over the family room not too much later. That improved her headache some, and her sick tummy feeling went away. Within an hour or two, after some Tylenol, she was feeling a lot better. She stayed home from school the next day, but was fine. We chalked it up to a really fast-acting tummy bug.

And now here we were again, same set up. She's fine, and then she's really not. When I got there to pick her up, she was sitting outside with a Mom, trash can nearby. Face as pale as a sheet, clearly in a lot of pain. We made it home fine, and again within 15 minutes or so, she'd thrown up (this time in the bowl I'd given her - yay, no vomit to clean up!). That made her tummy feel a lot better, and improved her headache some, but the headache continued for a while. Within an hour or two, she was laughing her head off at the Smurf movie we'd all settled in to watch, clearly feeling a hundred percent better.

After this happened, I did some online research to find out more about migraines. Her symptoms all fit, and of course we have the family history with my Mom suffering terribly from migraines from age 19. One of the things I read was sometimes people experience an "aura" - a visual disturbance of some kind, sometimes blurred vision, sometimes seeing colors - before a migraine starts. I asked Amy if her vision changed at all when she got this headache, did she see anything funny. She told me that when her head started hurting at lunch time at school, she'd had a bright yellow and purple/pink light in the corner of her eye that she "couldn't make go away". Sounds exactly like what I'd read.

We visited the pediatrician on Wednesday just to make sure everything was (relatively) okay. She told us what we already knew, that we should try to watch for patterns that go along with these migraines, and try to help Amy recognize when one is coming on so she can get some ibuprofen immediately and hopefully lessen the effects of the headache. So we'll be keeping an eye on things and I really hope this doesn't become a terrible problem for Amy. She's as tough as nails, so I can only imagine how terrible she was feeling in the middle of that headache - she looked so miserable. We're also going to get her eyes checked to rule out this being caused by eye strain. The school nurse told us there are lots of kids in the school who suffer from migraines. We'll see what happens - so far this has only happened twice, so maybe it will stop just as quickly as it started.

Meanwhile I'll be sending positive thoughts to keep this pain away from my baby girl.