Nathan has passed

Little Nathan has passed.

Please join us in praying for his parents and his siblings. There is a family tonight beginning a new leg of a journey they never invited or imagined.

Blueberry

~N~ is improving drastically. He spent the entirety of yesterday looking and acting normally. The rapport between the children continued until the evening, when he started being really annoying to his sister, and she finally started screaming back. I noticed then (around supper time) that few hives were returning and his eye was red again. I dosed him with benadryl, and proof positive that the reaction is abating in total, he went to sleep quickly. I have noticed in massive reactions like this, the benadryl doesn’t help them sleep if it’s so busy fighting the hives.

Speaking of ~N~, who I call “Blueberry” after his pretty eyes, we spent some time yesterday at the Blueberry farm. It made for an odd Lunch-with-friends because we neither lunched nor spent much time with them, but we saw TheGreenMama and B and barely missed Mackattack. Blueberries rock, man. We all decided we had to stock for the winter, like NOW. As far as I know we all plan to go back as well. (I am musing now whether I should just pack the car while the children sleep so we can get it out of the way.)

The children were extremely excited to go berry picking, and they refused to believe I meant another farm besides Terry’s. We would have left an hour earlier had they not been making arts and crafts projects to give their favorite farmer. Unfortunately as we entered Puyallup, they both realized they’d left them.

After the farm, where we picked 6 pounds of blueberries together, G spent the afternoon making bendie people for their castle and treehouse. They took this class from the Freelance Mama one year ago on an MDC campout–One YEAR!– and have shown little interest in it since. Now G cranked out 7 of them in three hours, very specific to the pattern FM showed them. Kids and their minds amaze me. She made an entire cast of little people based on a story she had written in her head about a farmer and his son who turned out to be a uper hero. She then had to create a supervillain, of course.

Answers to Allergy

It’s like nothing every happened, almost. This morning the kids are actively happy and engaged, building their own houses with chairs and stuffed animals and sheer energy. We’re leaving to go blueberry picking in a few minutes.

The big kids slept in a play tent in the living room last night together. G wouldn’t leave N’s side all day and last night, she insisted she be the one giving him the full body wipe-down with hydrocortisone. The green goo– THE GREEN GOO, people!– wasn’t even fast enough for him. She wiped out the bathtub last night from his oatmeal bath. I haven’t seen G this attentive to N’s needs since he was “the baby.” That alone has been a huge, shining silver lining in this week’s cloud.

To answer my friends:

Nick has already had IgE allergy testing, and the only thing he registers as allergic to is milk. He was not tested for pomegranate, so I think that is a safe bet. He is not allergic to milk in challenging, and we will stave off testing for now.

When I looked it up, the pomegranate allergy is strongly co-morbid with pollen allergies, and that we know he reacts harshly to those. (remember his reaction in April?)

Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction involving more than one system of the body. Full body hives + vomiting + diarrhea = anaphylaxis . He did NOT however, have a drop in blood pressure or in his O2 sats. That means he was not in anaphylactic shock, I saw the numbers myself, he wasn’t even close. He was just miserable as all hell. For now, we have a new Epipen prescription, this time in Nick’s name.

I will admit to having a whiny lump in my throat just writing that. I have worked and prayed towards our children going into a safety place, not anticipating them to develop new problems. I know this is not the worst problem we could have. I am grateful, truly, for the issues we have to be just and only what they are. We handled it well and efficiently with OTC meds, and he was never in danger. But the might-have-beens are terrifying to me, and I am still reeling that “it’s the wrong child.”

Exhausted. EXHAUSTED. Or, B-O-Y-B-O-Y-B-O-Y

Yesterday it began with a delicious new flavor of berry cooler: pomegranate blueberry fizz, at Harbor Greens. We all enjoyed it. Within an hour, ~N~ had hives so bad I was damning myself for trying a different laundry soap. His back and trunk were livid from the waist line up with huge, welting hives. Gave him benadryl, gave him a bath, all was well.

I went to bed at 12.30.

This morning at 3 AM, he woke up puking and voiding the other end. Hives were back. I gave him benadryl again and sat with him on the couch until he fell back asleep.

5AM. Boy Jr wakes up wailing. Settle him back to sleep by 5.30.

7 AM. N pukes again, hives are BAD. On his knees, on his shoulder, on his ears, on his eyelids. Everywhere. Give him benadryl, he keeps it down.

Eats 4 eggs for late breakfast. Keeps it down.

Noon, hives start peeking out again and the itchies start. He starts to cry as his hands swell so fast it hurts. I give him benadryl at 12.45 and put him in an oatmeal bath. He starts to scream as his lips and eyelids swell. He shows me on his hand where he was stung by a bee yesterday Now, I don’t know whether to attribute this to beesting or pomegranate. Call the pede.

“Go to the ER,” they say. “Keep the epipen close,” they say.

By the time we meet TheGreenMama at the (new! local!) ER, he has mellowed out from the pain, but now his feet and hands are swelling, along with his ears. His eye whites are red. On full adult doses of benadryl, he had hives from his scalp to his eyelids to the soles of his feet.

N-boy, do you have to do this to us quarterly?

The Doc– incidentally the same doc who saw Nick for his last emergency, in 2005– is putting his money on the pomegranate juice. So random. So random.

I am so tired.

Sitemeter Guilt

Sometimes I feel like I have nothing about which to blog. Then there are weeks like this past one, where if I even tried to abbreviate my life into a few blog entries, I’d be chained to the messy computer desk. People keep checking for updates though, and I feel guilty. Shah.

It’s been a good week though; I remembered to go to both the Farmer’s Market and the free day at the Tacoma Art Museum. I was able to spend my 27.00 (this is ~L~nomic replacement of the weekly CSA expenditure) on a good haul of fruits and veggies. I so rarely remember that I could have spent twice that and been in fine, but I didn’t want to be wasteful. I love Farmer’s markets. I am currently eating a cheesecake with local strawberries. I am thrilled because G loves cheesecake with an unholy passion, and we can never buy the beautiful strawberry one from Costco due to the allergy issues. This one looks just like it.

This time, the kids all participated in the arts room at the TAM. By the time we left, D-baby was insane so we didn’t get too many stories in at the art library, but it was very enjoyable watching him paint and paint and paint.

Niki left us for Hawaii, so she has some interesting blog entries going on right now.

The Prof flew in yesterday from Gawgia and the first thing she said to me when she got off the plane was “It’s raining.” While she is from KY, she is a true Southerner now and I know what she’s feeling; it’s not that it’s rainy, or that it’s in the 60s. It’s just that for her, it’s a 30 degree temperature drop from her morning commute. It can be jarring. I promised her summers here were clear, because that’s been my experience. Whoops. Tomorrow it’s going to clear up for us all.

N-the-boy has an ugly full body rash, a clear reaction to something. I originally thought it was to some laundry soap but now we think it’s from the dip he had in the pool earlier. Of course, D-meister is not reacting and he swam too, so who knows.

P-Daddy has some interest in a choice position with the county. That’s giving us some serious food for thought. Gut = no movement right now.

Gardening in the rain

It’s been raining pretty well for two days. I am quite happy about that. I love rain, especially when it is not cold and I know it won’t stretch for 2 months straight.

I picked up two flag hangers yesterday for 1.74 each so I finally hung our dolphin garden flag out in the garden. We’ve had it for at least 8 years, but it has always hung inside, in the kitchen. I hung another flower flag in the back. I love garden flags but they have never seemed worth the expense. No way would I actually spend even 7 dollars for wire to hang in the garden. 2.00, I can do that.

While out to install the flags, I got distracted by the fruits in the garden. The squash are filling out, the Romano beans are at least 4 inches but thin, and the Molbaks tomato plants are going nuts. I thinned the inner branches on the tomatoes and tied some more to the higher stakes. Niki’s seedlings are starting to flower and they have thick, strong central stalks. Our zucchini, quarantined in the currently underused “winter” garden, has little baby zukes on board. It’s a good time for the garden, where everything is full of promise but nothing has gone so haywire that it’s unusable or too much work.

My assessment at this point is that we have a good kitchen garden, but it’s definitely not at replace-the-CSA level yet. It will be full complement, come August and September, but for right now all I am getting is greens and some berries. It’s nowhere near canning level at all. The blackberries will give us an incredible yield, and next year we should have a good crop of strawberries. This year, though, is already five times the crop we got last year so we are satisfied.

Next steps:

finding a place for the blueberry bed
obtaining chickens and a place to put them
building the creative greenhouse with Niki and putting it to use

I talked to a squishy baby last night who liked to smile at me.

Not a farm, but it’s ours

This is the back plot of the garden. In the background you can see the blackberry hedges. In this garden bed we have corn, onions, Romano bush beans, cauliflower, spaghetti squash varietal, jalepeno, cilantro, purple cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, swiss chard, bok choy, cucumbers, some squash I bought but don’t remember, blue lake climbing beans, and potatoes.

The blueberries, strawberries and herbs are in separate gardens not pictured here, as are the zucchini, artichokes, Brussels sprouts and sunflowers.

This is a bad picture, but a great shot. I like how the garden frames my family at play.

The Commute

The new bridge cut 35 minutes OFF P-daddy’s commute this morning. Dayum.

Blowing off the Bridge

Alas, it is an historic day for Western Washington, when The Bridge is finally completed and opened for public inspection. What “public inspection” means in lay language is that tens of thousands of people will be on the bridge throughout today, being all civic and stuff. We fully intended to be among that number, so much so that we actually drove onto the bridge yesterday during the special-people’s turn to promenade the new decks. We drove up almost to the bridge deck itself, then got out and began unbuckling children before we got shooed away by the security types. But today, we just decided “Um, no” We’d have to park at the airport or the high school and be shuttled in to be shoulder-to-shoulder with people from all over the state. The nail in the coffin was during church today when the pastor mentioned friends of his driving in from Spokane –leaving at 3 AM to get here on time for the ten AM open. So, so much: no, thank you.

So the boys have left to go clamming, the girl is at the neighbor’s and I am going to sign off now and eat a cookie before filling up the new swimming pool Niki found for cheap. Woot.

Happy Bastille Day!

July 14th is the French national holiday, la Fête du 14 juillet. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, an open act of rebellion against the monarchy that is considered a turning point of the French Revolution. Two days after the storming of the Bastille, the king officially recognized the tricolor flag–the blue, white and red said to symbolize liberty, equality and brotherhood.

After the Revolution, chefs–who had cooked for the nobility–found themselves out of work. They were forced to open public restaurants, the fine art of dining was born, and the world has never looked back.

I am actually not French, and I speak it only badly. Je suis desolee.

Here’s what I wish I had eaten today, and probably will eat tomorrow!

Crepes with Spinach, Bacon and Mushroom