happy mother’s day! today is all the more happier for all of us since odin is free from the chickenpox!
odin made his mother very sweet card.
he’s still enjoying the heart pop-up card he made for valentine’s day cards so he went with that style for mother’s day.
i love the inscription he came up with all on his own.
about a week into Odin’s Rather Mundane Adventures with Chickenpox, around dinner time he suddenly and very unexpectedly complained of A Very Bad Headache which is Very Unusual for a boy who never gets headaches but not, perhaps so unusual for a boy with chickenpox. but the headache quickly turned from bad to worse and we were left perplexed at the sight of him curled up in a ball on the couch rocking back and forth in pain.
hmmmmm. probably, maybe dehydration, we thought.
we gave him a cool cloth to put on his head and some acetaminophen and then made the mistake of googling “severe headache and chickenpox”. OH MY GOD IT MIGHT BE ENCEPHALITIS. or maybe it’s just a headache. some sites say to look for other unusual behaviors. ok. while we’re looking for other unusual behaviors, he starts nodding off. and not just a little drowsy kind-of nodding off. like, suddenly asleep so hard we have a hard time waking him up. and when we do wake him up he seems a bit disoriented.
weird. and even knowing that it was probably nothing we decided it was worth a quick trip to the emergency clinic at the hospital juuuuuust to make sure we weren’t missing something.
turns out, while the clinic staff was nice, they really were not particularly enthused about seeing A Very Contagious Boy and made him wear a mask and asked that he be very conscientious about what he touched while we waited to see a doctor.
we waited just long enough to play a game of I spy which also was just long enough for the acetaminophen to kick in which made the headache go away which combined with the adrenalin from the hospital visit meant he was pretty much back to normal. no more sleepy, sleepy!
but the doctor poked here and there and asked him a few questions and listened to his heart. “well, he’s dehydrated. his resting heart-rate is almost a 100bpm which means i could almost diagnose him with tachycardia from the dehydration. and he’s probably really overtired if he’s been getting a few hours less sleep than normal over the past week. parents often underestimate just how much more fluid and electrolytes a child needs when they’re sick over a long period of time. quite a healthy boy all things considered! drink lots of more fluid, get lots more sleep. even if he doesn’t seem sick, he’s sick and his body is working extra hard to get better!”
sigh. we felt a little foolish but, hey, better safe than sorry. and it was good reminder that even seasoned pros who spent 96 days in intensive care can be knocked off their game whole googling symptoms 🙂
while i fiddle around on the deck, odin lounges about with the chickenpox, swinging in a hammock imagining all the Super Awesome things we might be able to design into The World’s Most Awesome Treehouse(s).
maybe a slide ( or water slide?! ) that take a steep dive off the deck and a few twists and turns on the way down. or maybe a climbing wall up one side with monkey bars along the bottom of the deck to a fireman’s pole that you slide down. certainly a hammock 15 feet up on the trees is necessary!
i have no idea how many of his crazy ideas we’ll build but i do love that he has crazy ideas and usually has a credible plan in his mind for how to build them.
the chickenpox was going around odin’s school and after a few days of wondering why he had a slight heat rash that wouldn’t go away ( in hindsight denial is amazingly powerful ), it turns out he got it. which is actually sort-of good since we were going to vaccinate him if he didn’t come down with it this year since the risk of complications from chickenpox goes up with age.
of course, it’s a natural to ask why we didn’t get him vaccinated to begin with. we’re not anti-vaccines and he’s up-to-date on all his other vaccinations but we passed on chickenpox because it doesn’t present a realistic danger to an otherwise healthy child kid. partly it’s because we tend to balk at unnecessary interventions that merely prevent an inconvenience. and partly we believe that immune systems are complicated and have evolved to get activated in certain ways at certain times and it’s possible that not getting something like the chickenpox can have unintended consequences. for example clinically observed chickenpox is associated with a lower risk of childhood-onset multiple schlerosis. i’m certainly not saying if you choose to get your kid vaccinated that she’s going to get MS, but i do think exposure to a broad range of non-lethal and relatively low-risk things is likely, given how humans evolved, an important part of building a strong and resiliant immune system. this is an offshoot of the thinking that maybe we’ve scrubbed ourselved and our environments a little too clean:
“Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us.”
thankfully, odin appears to have relatively mild symptoms. no substantial fever, no puking, no headaches, no pain.
just a bit of itching and a lot of red spots – nothing an oatmeal bath can’t cure!
oh the modern convenience of an ipad with netflix to go along with a homemade chocolate shake while riding out chickenpox. i don’t think i could have dreamed of such luxuries when i had it 35 years ago!
i think it’s pretty neat that odin will sometimes voluntarily choose to while away the time with little knitted felting projects. like today, i walk by and ask what he’s working on. “oh, something that reminds me of spring.”
a spring scene, indeed! if you look carefully you can see he’s felted together different shades of blue to give the sky some depth.
ever since odin had a yard sale to earn the money to buy a bicycle, each spring when our town has a city yard sale day, he’s eager to part with some of his stuff in exchange for a little money. it’s fun to watch him figure out what he’s willing to part with, decide on prices and then learn if other people think his stuff is what he thinks its worth and even haggle with prospects a little bit over prices 🙂
i’m pretty sure when i was eight the last thing i wanted to do was sell my stuff to strangers even if it meant putting a little cash in my pocket.
this time around he earned $63! some of it, he gets to put in his pocket and some of it is going in the bank.
since he saw this video he’s now more convinced than ever that he wants to save up for a drone?!
while we’re Beginning of The Neverending Hockey Season in the big city of onalaska, wisconsin, our community ice arena is closing down for the season in our little town of viroqua which means The Last Open Skate of The Season is upon us.
what will we do from 6-8pm on saturdays and sundays?!
i thought it’d be fun to see if i can still shoot clumsy video and skate at the same time while attempting to avoid the rink rats. is it just me or does odin appear to take out a kid on the ice as he races around the rink? whoops!
after skating around for an hour with his poppi ( yes, he still tolerates me skating with him for awhile before ditching me for his buddies ), it’s time for The Races!
and yes, he won again. but next year he’ll migrate to the next age group and have to skate against the 9 and 10 year olds. so this might be his last win for awhile. but maybe not, he’s pretty fast.
want to know what motivates a eight year old to win every race? the prize is rink concession food that he most certainly mostly doesn’t get at home 🙂
and so The Last Open Skate of The Season ends, with The Prized Nacho with Weird Cheese Food in hand and maybe just a bit of an attitude about his poppi taking his picture.