Ode to the apartment we are leaving

Goodbye quirky old apartment
with your dusty-rose bathroom fixtures,
your warped parquet hardwood floors
(sloped perfectly for a baby and a very round ball placed just so),
and your must-have-been-for-milk-delivery cabinet outside the door.

I will miss you, sweet old apartment, for all the memories you hold.
Our first (and so far only) on-our-own Christmas.
So many summer nights sipping wine on the deck.
Cheering for the Canucks
with the rest of the neighbourhood
behind their equally thin walls.
Picnic dinner on the front lawn every night
during the hottest days of summer.
Those (thankfully few) sub-zero days
when the butter in cupboard
was as hard as the butter in the fridge.
Thirty hours of labour in the comfort of home
before it was clear
that what I'd planned was not to be.
Coming home too many nights without our baby,
until that oh-so-sweet day
when we three came home together.

I will not miss
your lousy, leaky, I-can't-believe-we-lived-with-it-so-long plumbing,
your moldy, mildewy, window sills,
your (probably lead-based) chipping paint,
and your paper-thin single-paned windows.

Goodbye dear apartment.
You have been just the right place at just the right time.
You have been home.

And I have been very very happy here.

I am glad we are not going far.
And I am looking forward to being able to operate
the coffee maker and the microwave simultaneously.


kb

If you were this cute...

...you might want to give yourself a kiss too.

kb

Toys?

Drew loves to play with anything he can get his chubby little hands on. Typical nine month old in that regard (yes, nine months - we've managed to keep him alive that long). However, while toys are good, they're no match for non-toy play things. Top of that list is medical paraphernalia. Top of that list is oxygen tubing and ventilator hoses, of which we offer the following example.

Dear Drew,

That is all very true, and very sweet.
It would be equally (if not more) sweet if you would sleep for more than a 2 hour stretch.

Just sayin...

Love,
Mama

Dear Mama,

I'm sorry that I woke up all night long last night. And the night before. And the night before that.

I miss you when you are at work all day, and it seems a shame that we spend so much of our time together sleeping. So I decided I wouldn't. Why should I drink milk during the day from a bottle when I can get it straight from the source at night? Plus, I have to make up for those first two months when we spent our nights apart.

You know you really do like looking at my sweet sleepy face at 3am.

Remember, Mama, this stage won't last forever. It won't even last very long in the grand scheme of things. There will come a time when you will wake up on your own and look over to see me sleeping and you will miss these days.

Until then, this is the reason they invented the double Americano.

Love,
Drew
(who is still napping at noon to make up for the sleep he missed at night)

Where have we been?

Not getting a g-tube!

Thanks all of you for your thoughts and prayers and sorry for the delay in updates.

After a week in the hospital we were released for the weekend with the plan to return the following week for g-tube surgery scheduled for Wednesday. We were both pretty sad about it but we had finally come to terms with the g-tube being the best of the options available right now. But, on Monday, David decided to try giving Drew his nasty med mixed into a bowl of sweetened yogurt, in one last ditch effort to get him to take it orally... and the kid gobbled the stuff up, opening his mouth for more. So despite the skepticism of our medical team (okay, mommy was pretty skeptical too) the g-tube evader was let off the hook again, while we give the oral route a try. It has now been 9 days of Drew taking his full dose of meds in a bowl of yogurt.
His breath holding has somewhat improved, he still has episodes once a day, but they are much shorter in duration and we continue to pray and hope that each one will be the last.

And what have the three of us been doing when we're not getting a g-tube?

Carving pumpkins, staying up late, eating yogurt, visiting with Grandma and Grandpa, drinking tea, walking the seawall, baking bread, eating muffins, welcoming a new cousin into the world, harvesting neglected green beans, wearing preppy sweater vests, enjoying pumpkin spice lattes, reading new books, planting tulip bulbs, ordering takeout, reading emails, touring the city gardens, napping in the carrier, looking for bigger apartments, catching fall leaves, shopping at Granville island, dressing up like a mouse, loading the stroller full of groceries, savoring pumpkin beer, waking up all night long, Christmas shopping online, trick or treating for the first time, wearing double hoodies when we go out, trying so hard to crawl, posing for pictures, and eating skittles, to start.






**We had tried mixing it with food before, but that was back when Drew only ate one or two spoonfuls at a time, and at that concentration the stuff was so nasty it would turn him off of eating solids entirely. Now that he reliably eats a small bowl full, I guess the concentration is dilute enough that he finds it acceptable. Nevermind that sickly sweet yogurt is pretty much the only solid he eats.

*** the great pictures in this post are mostly taken by Grandma