Stop it

Matthew was upstairs with Adam in the 'playroom'. He was making a lot of noise ( for a change :-) ). I yell up at him...

me: Matthew!!! What are you doing?
Matthew: nothing
me: well stop it please
Matthew: ok

and it was quiet again, and the people were happy.

Bad Night

A couple of nights ago Adam had us up at 1:30am. We brought him into our room and he probably spent an hour of tossing and turning and kicking us in the face before he drifted off again. Fortunately ( or not depending on how you look at it ) his butt was in the proximity of my nose and I quickly smelt why it took him a while to settle back down. I was very tempted just to roll over and let him stew in it until the morning but he has had bad nappy rash before so I decided he ought to be changed. I woke Margaret up and got a clean diaper (nappy). We changed him and of course he woke up again. I think it was gone 3:30am before Margaret took him back to his crib and got in with him to get him back to sleep.

If felt like I had just dropped off when I woke up to Matthew crying in his bed. So I went in there and he was sobbing because he had dropped his red train into the stream and it had 'sunk a long long way' and he couldn't get it back. So I told him not to worry and that Daddy had jumped into the river and found it for him. He then asked me if it was James and I said yes..... big mistake.... it wasn't James he had dropped into the river it was 'a red train with no face'. By then Margaret had come in from Adam's room and asked if Matthew would like Mummy to lie with him. He did, so I got up and left. I found out later that Margaret then told him that Mummy and Daddy had been fishing at the other end of the river and had caught the red train, a blue baseball bat, and various other toys and had put them into a big basket to dry in the play room. This made him happy and he went back to sleep.

Of course in the morning he was all...... so where's the big basket of toys

Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

This is a kids program about Maggie (who is a little girl) and her adventures in nowhere land with Hamilton (who is a pig) and the Ferocious Beast (who is a ferocious beast). The ferocious beast roars very loudly and in general tries to be ferocious.

We were sitting down at the dinner table having dinner (yes, we sit down at the dinner table to eat our dinner) and Matthew was being his normal loud self. After several times of asking him to quieten down and reminding him we were all sitting right next to him and did not have hearing problems he let out some god awful yell about something or other (probably asking me to pass the tomato sauce or something... that would be ketchup in American speak) and I finally yelled at him to use his 'inside voice' and to stop making so much noise. To which he replied "but Daddy, I have to be loud. I am after all the ferocious beast".
This is what the beast tells Maggie when she asks him why he is so loud..... well it was funny at the time.

Don't look now.... but there's a snake in the bed

At some ungodly hour last night Margaret and I were woken up by a scared little boy crawling into our bed. We asked him what was going on and he told us there was a snake in his bed. This has been the first time he has ever come into our bed since he got his own bedroom. He actually prefers to go to sleep in his own bed to ours. In the morning we asked him about the snake. He told us it was green with a red stripe and a snake mouth ( I was glad to hear it wasn't a mutant snake with a spider mouth ).

Matthew and I bravely went into his bedroom this morning and with him hanging back and stretching his neck I fully checked under the sheets and pillows. Then he went up on tip toes and looked at the top bunk, so I dutifully climbed onto the top bunk and checked it out for him. Then he bravely went onto his knees and checked under the bed. No snake was discovered and so we both agreed it must have been a dream. So with any luck we won't have a problem tonight.

of course, we didn't check the closet.........

it's just snot right

One day Jill, a neightbour of ours invited Matthew over to play and have lunch. She has a couple of boys, John and Ben both who are a little older than Matthew but Matthew has a really great time playing with them. John is around 10 and is the best behaved young man I have met by a country mile. Anyway, so the story goes like this....
Jill: What would you like to have for lunch Matthew? Do you like Ham?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like cheese?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like carrots?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like watermellon?
Matthew: yes
Jill: Matthew, what don't you like to eat?
Matthew: Yucky stuff
Jill: Yucky stuff? Like what Matthew?
Matthew: snot

Jill told Margaret this and Margaret had to fess up and admit that we feed our children snot for lunch.

Blisters

Firstly, I am writing this using an on-line word processor from thinkfree ( www.thinkfree.com ). I believe that the on-line office suite is the way of the future. All of your docs, presentations, spreadsheets are stored on-line and accessible from any computer you happen to be working at. There is no software to install as the app is browser based and all AJAX driven. Is see that google agree with me and are slowly pulling together ( through company acquisition ) an on-line office suite of their own. Not being a power office suite user I suspect that I am not going to miss any Microsoft Office features that are currently missing.... not that I would know they are missing as I probably don't know they exist in the first place. So, allegedly I can easily publish this doc to my blog.... we will see about that in a little while.

Matthew went for another visit to the dermatologist yesterday and she put some more of the cream on the remaining moluscums. Margaret said she was more heavy handed than normal and Matthew's skin has really blistered up ( the cream burns, I guess it is something like what you can buy for burning off warts but much more potent ). Margaret had to wash Matthew down after a few hours to remove the cream and she could barely manage it. Matthew was crying (screaming) so much he was making himself gag. Man, it is a mess and must be so painful for him. We have been wrapping him in gauze and then sticky bandage. We are changing it morning and night...so twice now.... and both times the burns have weeped into the gauze and made it stick to him so it hurts him when we peel the gauze off him. He keeps asking me to make it stop hurting.... but what can you do? We are giving him kids pain killer to try and take the edge off it and that's pretty much all we can do. I really hope that this time we manage to get rid of the majority of them and not have to go back for any more of the burn cream.


Ok, let's see how easy it is to post this!

Well, it looked easy but it kept throwing errors so I gave up and cut and paste it.... oh well, I'll try again later

Moluscums

Look it up.... we have been battling these nasty little critters for about 5 months now with Matthew. At one point he probably had over one hundred down the sides of his body and they were starting to move onto his chest. They are caused by a virus that lives on top of the skin and are clever enough to spread themselves by causing skin irritation and so the victim scratches. They can spread just by touching the surface of the moluscum, you don't even have to break the skin and then touching another part of the body.
We have ended up having the dermatologist use a cream that burns them off. It causes the skin to blister in the area it is applied. He went a second time a couple of days ago and the new ones that have come up since the first treatment, and the ones that didn't go, zapped again. Poor little guy, the sides of his body are a real mess and he wants to scratch scratch scratch. We have learnt from the first time and have been wrapping his body in bandage during day and night so he can't touch the things.... although he can still scratch then somewhat through the bandage, he can't touch them and so he can't spread them. He thought it was fun the first night being wrapped up like a mummy. Now he cries when bring the bandages out in the evening ( we leave then off for a few hrs late afternoon so his body can get some air and they dry up ).
Summer is here and the pool we belong to open this weekend. We have had to buy him a swimming top... something like a very very light weight wet suit so that he, and no one else can touch them while he is in the water.... we suspect that the pool may have been one of the possible places he picked them up from last year.