The baby’s pretty much over it already. He’s had a very mild, brief case. The pediatrician says that is probably because I had it before him and was giving him antibodies in my milk before he even contracted it. So I’m actually giving Ri (ds7) my breastmilk, too, to try and help him fight it, though he doesn’t know it. I’m just mixing it half-and-half with his normal whole milk in a cup.

We all have it here. Symptoms have been unpleasant but manageable. We thought that ds7 didn't catch it, or at least so mildly that he wasn't symptomatic, but found out yesterday that he is neutropenic and has it too, but that his white blood counts are so low that his immune system isn't producing symptoms. We're having to pause his chemo until his blood counts improve.

-#1 is physical health. Ds7 is 10 months into his 27 month chemo protocol, so as long as that is going well he will continue on chemo this whole year. He is doing well enough that several of the specialists are spacing out his visits more, so that will free up some of our time for other things. We are also trying doing his pt only once a week. I am really hoping this will allow us to get the kids back into some physical activities. (I wanted to last semester, but it just didn't work out.) -#2 is emotional health. We have been working on this. Dd12 has been so stressed with worry and I have been working on managing my anxiety, with a lot of progress since the baby came. -#3 is better family & home management. I am catching up in many areas bit by bit. My kids are capable helpers. I think some organization and having better systems in place would do a lot to helping us maintain a calmer environment in our home. -#4 academic--This is still very vague. It has never been so low in my priorities before. The last two years have taken a lot out of us. My kids' acceleration has given us some flexibility in taking time as needed to address various crises. Dd12 may or may not go to school in the Fall for 8th grade. We will most likely send her in high school, and dh thinks she should go and adjust to the change sooner. She is currently taking a break from math classes and is just spending some time each school day bringing alcumus sections up from green to blue. She completed Intro to Counting & Probability last semester and is interested in going on to Intro to Algebra B, but we need to get a handle on her stress and insomnia first. For the most part she is doing great with the academics of her classes but needs more practice at managing her workload without falling behind and then playing catchup. We also need to put more time into Science. Really that goes for all four. Dd11 is doing much better with her attitude about schoolwork (most of the time). We have been working on spelling. She is my dyslexic girl, and she has made progress with AAS, but it is such a slow slog. For English, once we finish with our poetry unit in about a month she and ds9 will be focusing on essay writing. Around the same time she will finish Math-U-See Prealgebra and start their Algebra. That has been so simple. The concepts are way easier than Beast Academy. But she really needed to focus on accuracy, paying attention to what she is doing, following directions, writing down her work so she doesn't lose track of what she's doing, etc., and she's made a lot of progress with that. I don't know what program we will use after MUS Algebra, or even whether we will jump back in with another prealgebra or algebra. Any suggestions? Ds9 does great with all his work. He could use some more challenge, or another subject to branch into, or I don't know--something more. Maybe getting back into Spanish lessons would do it. (We dropped all three younger kids' foreign languages this year to lighten the load.) He hit some topics in math that slowed him down for a few months. I expect he'll be ready to move on to prealgebra sometime this semester, and we will probably have an adjustment period when the level of work steps up. Ds7 is academically way beyond what I would have expected, given how much school time he's missed between appointments and his crummy days. He's halfway through BA4 and nearly done with MCT Island. Planning on detouring to Treasured Conversations before the next level of MCT. We will mostly continue to just let him do whatever he feels up to whenever he feels up to it, though I am trying to be consistent at getting in short lessons on his areas of weakness (spelling and handwriting) on every good school day. -#5 socially, we are in a pretty good place. The girls have some buddies who live down the street, some of whom are homeschooling now. They are also having a wonderful time in the church youth group. All the kids love having the foster sisters over to play regularly, and also see them at church. The boys don't have any good friends outside the family. The two of them are best friends and don't seem to feel the lack, but I would like to help them find some more social connections this year.

Things are going very well. Ri's MRIs came back looking good. We don't know the cause of his sensation loss in his legs, but it wasn't tumor growth, and he has regained about half of the loss, so it will hopefully continue to come back. Chemo drugs can cause peripheral nerve issues, but that is not common with the trial drug he is on. Ephraim is gaining well with lots of supplementing with pumped milk (no longer fortified), but he is also making gradual progress on getting more through nursing. And Ri has also finally gained some weight, and is 1.5 lbs above his pre-surgery weight from 14 months ago. They are talking about spacing out his oncology visits more in a few months, as he has remained stable for 9 months on this medication without severe side effects. We are all excited for the holiday, and baby is going 5 to 6 hours between feedings during the night. I am feeling great, as the insomnia and nightmares I have struggled with since Ri's diagnosis are gone. Four hours of deep, restful sleep between feedings feels amazing after going on little or very broken sleep for a year. I hope you are doing well. Merry Christmas!

My dh is an extremely heavy sleeper. It is unlikely that he could set an alarm that would wake him up without me waking up first.

We're still struggling with weight gain here. I took Ephraim in for a weight check on Friday, and he had dropped three ounces of what he had gained back again. I think part of the issue is that I started turning off my alarm in my sleep. I have tried hiding it from myself under things across the room, and I am still finding it and turning it off without waking up enough to remember doing so. I wake up when the baby makes a noise, but he's going 4 or 5 hours between waking at night. (Which would be wonderful, if he weren't dropping weight!) The other part is that we got some bad news regarding Ri on Wednesday, and are waiting for them to get him in for moved-up MRIs to check for new tumor growth, and the pediatrician thinks that the calorie content of my milk is probably down from stress. So on Friday they had me start adding formula to the pumped milk I'm supplementing with to get more calories into the baby. But yesterday we had his two-week checkup, and he had gained almost nothing over the weekend. He's still down almost 14 oz from his birth weight. So at this point I'm waking him up to try to feed him every couple of hours during the day, and limiting nursing time to 10 minutes a side so he's not expending too much energy suckling inefficiently, and then he's taking somewhere between about 15 to 35 mL of fortified milk from a syringe afterwards. He's such a snuggly, content baby. He doesn't act like he's hungry. He sleeps most of the time, but he's not just lethargic all the time. He does have some alert periods.

I'm not really sure. My kids have a grandma who was born and raised in Mexico, but was of Scottish/American origin, and while her family loved Mexico, spoke Spanish, and had acquired many elements of Chicano culture, they didn't consider themselves ethnically Latino. However, my kids are Hispanic because of her husband, who was an immigrant from Cuba of Spanish european ancestry. That side of the family is very clear that Latino and Hispanic are not synonymous; Latino means ancestry from a Latin American country (not Spain) and Hispanic means ancestry from a heavily Spanish-influenced culture (not Brazil).

-Baby's 2-week appointment -Pest Control service coming by -get some laundry done -homeschool older 4 -ds7's physical therapy -call other PT for appointment -Drop off thank-you card/gift -Dinner

Very, very tired, but doing alright. A check-in with the pediatrician on Friday showed that Ephraim had dropped a lot of weight and was down to 6 lbs. 7 oz., and he was also jaundiced. So I went to feeding him every three hours or sooner, and supplementing with pumped milk by syringe after breastfeeding, and we got a bili blanket to help with the jaundice. He has gained back 6 oz. since then and the jaundice is getting better. Between nursing and pumping I am not getting much time for sleep. My blood pressure is still high but under control with medication. All in all, while I am nervous about managing once my mom goes home after this week, we are doing well.

Once he was out of the NICU and off all the monitors, we were able to wash his hair. He has my cowlick.

My blood pressure jumped up this morning, with nausea, headache, and flashing lights, so they gave me labetalol and started a magnesium IV. It's stayed in an okay range since then. I'm just kind of headachey and gross from the magnesium. Ephraim is out of the NICU and back with me. His breathing is looking good and he is doing pretty well with starting to breastfeed.

Trying to add pictures, but the technology is having issues.

After 23 hours of labor, Ephraim was born just before 7:00 am this morning, at 37 weeks 6 days. He weighs 7 lbs. 8 oz. They took him to the NICU very quickly for respiratory distress, and he is still there, but he is making good progress as they gradually remove the supports and see how he handles it. He had a chest x-ray shortly after birth that showed fluid in his lungs and was on a cpap for about 8 hours, but his breathing is much better now and they have taken him off that. They were also able to turn of the heat light a couple of hours ago and he has maintained his body temperature since then. They are going to let me try breastfeeding in a little while. We are hopeful that he will only have to stay in the NICU for a day or two.

36 weeks 5 days today. Almost there. One way or another, I'm having this baby within a week. (They will induce me next Sunday if my bp doesn't require it sooner.) I spent several hours in L&D again on Thursday. I was having sharp pains just under my ribs on the right side of my abdomen and nausea, and my bp was up at my appointment with some of the floating lights in my vision. Also I gained as much weight last week as I had my entire pregnancy up to that point. My blood pressure came down in L&D and the lights went away. We were very concerned about liver problems, but my lab work came back fine on that, so the doctor's theory is that the pain is from baby's growth putting strain on scar tissue from my gall bladder removal surgery a few years ago. I had some protein in my urine, but again not enough to call preeclampsia. My platelets were at the bottom of the normal range. So they sent me home again, and my mom is back again to stay until Thanksgiving. It is a huge weight off to have her here. The last few days my bd readings have consistently been up but not to the point where they said I needed to go in. (That is if I sit breathing deeply for 5 minutes beforehand, like I am supposed to.) But I am having more bp symptoms whenever I am up and doing things for any length of time. The constant lower-level headache starts to ramp up to a real pressure headache and I get those firefly lights, and yesterday I started seeing moving shadows in my peripheral vision. So mostly I am just being a lump and lying down on the couch all day long to keep the bp down. As long as lying down works, I figure we can wait a little longer.

That time you have home is a great time to try, but whether or not it will actually happen in that time is really dependent on the individual kid's personality. There is not one method that works for every type of kid. I used to be an early preschool teacher (2-year-olds) before I had my own kids, and I saw some parents who'd been through it several times with older siblings tell other parents "This is the way that works every time!" because it worked for all of their kids, and then the other parents had horrible experiences with it.

About as tall as a lab, but thinner. Fifty pounds ish, I think. Maybe that is it.

Golden Lab mix

It was terrible. I heard her cry/scream and ran out to lift her up and take her weight off the leg, but couldn’t get her free. I had to get the girls to bring tools out and work together to pry two fence panels apart to free her while I held her up. I was amazed the leg wasn’t broken. (This happened while I was supposed to be on semi-bed rest.) I’ve never known of a dog who could climb like her before, or slip out of a fitted harness and collar that have been hooked together.

Also, we spent way too much money over the last few months trying to contain our escape artist dog in our yard. Even catching her foot in a fence she climbed, leaving herself hanging from the top of the fence by a hind leg in terrible pain did not deter her. But it looks like we finally have a solution that works, an aerial dog run and special escape-proof harness that give her almost the full length of the yard without quite letting her reach any fences to climb.

I sold a little cello I bought from goodwill months ago and cleaned and set up for that purpose. I still have several little violins sitting around for the same reason, but glad to have the bigger one gone. Invested the net profit. I discovered that we had $300 sitting in venmo from others’ contributions to a shared gift months ago. I can’t recall if I already said this on last month’s thread, but the dentist said that neither of the girls will need braces! (I was really hoping so. I was the only one of five kids in my family who didn’t.) I spent a lot of time yesterday organizing medical bills and receipts to get reimbursed by dh’s work. He absolutely hates asking them for reimbursement, even though it’s just another one of his employment benefits like medical insurance. But he has brought them a lot of additional income with extra work and new private clients lately, so he is not feeling as uncomfortable with it as previously and I am striking while the iron is hot. Dh also wrapped up some work for a big client faster than expected, which will mean getting paid for it next month instead of next year! I am hoping it comes out to enough to make up the shortfall in our goal to fill the IRA for the year, as we have fallen behind on that as prices have risen. On the non-frugal side I gave up on my efforts to fight the war against mice ourselves or with one-time pest control visits and signed up for a regular service. With everything we did before, it just seemed to be getting worse, and I had to get rid of them before the baby is born. Also had to have a plumber out which was not cheap, but she fixed the pressure/valve problem and we now have a working dishwasher again too, finally!

I have a grocery/household goods account and an everything else account. It makes the budget tracking much simpler. I still have to sort through the everything else account to track our outflow, but since we make more household purchases than anything else, it makes the job shorter to have those presorted.

This doesn’t sound like a person who doesn’t care about COVID risk. Maybe there’s a medical contraindication for the vaccine for her.

My son’s monthly blood work usually takes less than an hour to come back, with the ck results always taking a few hours longer than everything else.

Groceries and gas. With groceries, I can lean on more cheap meals for the family, more things that require cooking from scratch instead of convenience items. We were lucky enough to be given a whole lamb by a sheep farmer we know earlier this year, and I have been making meals that stretch the meat so we don’t need to buy meat very often. Gas is more of an issue. There is no way to avoid the impact. Most of our driving back and forth is for medical appointments. Dh and I switch off cars so that whoever is going further that day has the more gas-efficient vehicle, but we were doing that before inflation hit. We have had to lower the amount we are putting towards the IRA each month. Dh has done a ton of extra work for some new clients this past month, and I am hoping the payment for that comes through before the end of the year so we can still fill the IRA for the year, but there’s a good chance it won’t.