Saturday 21 September 2013

7 Quick Takes - Mostly Kids and then a Recipe - Vol. 13

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Fridays are not good days right now. We like beginnings of the week, not ends. So if you read this and can spare a prayer for a family that’s caught up in the most stressful time they’ve ever seen, please do. Hopefully this thesis madness will be over soon and we can start getting back to something approaching normal.
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What is good is that David thought watching through all of Seinfeld would be a nice way to unwind. We’ve been really enjoying watching all the episodes in order and seeing how the little inside jokes develop. What’s most interesting is how some of the plot action is now obsolete less than 20 years later. So many times there is a major crisis because one of the characters can’t access a payphone or because the friends are separated and can’t contact each other. This is so foreign now in the age of mobile phones. It’s weird thinking about how much life has changed since we were teenagers.
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Walter had a cold two weeks ago. Then, just as he got over it, I succumbed to the lingering germs and caught it back. And then, because we are almost never separated, he caught it back from me. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be bothering him as much this time around because the rest of us were getting pretty sick of toddler tantrums.
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Walter finally had his 12 month developmental check, which was only interesting for me so far as I got his height, which at 2’7” puts him in the 91st percentile, and his weight – 24lbs! So he is a big strong toddler. The rest of the visit was a lot of questions peppered with the Health Visitor’s anxiety. She mentioned we should think about a gate for the stairs. I mentioned that since we live in an apartment, which she may have remembered since she was visiting us at home, it was unlikely that we would actually be able to gate off the communal stairwells. She was also concerned that we let him walk home from town... I was wondering if she thought we had him on some sort of forced march. The kid is pretty capable of asking to be picked up when he wants to.
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Emily also had a few minor checkups, which were just as frustrating as Walter’s. I had a question about the healing of her bellybutton. The Health Visitor thought I needed to get a cream for it, but didn’t know what it was called, so suggested I ask a midwife or a doctor. When I saw the midwife later that afternoon, I asked her my question and she gave me a long lecture about the signs of infection and how Emily didn’t have one (which I ALREADY KNEW AND WHICH WASN’T MY QUESTION), then said nothing was necessary, and then decided that Emily has a possible hernia so I should get a doctor to look at her. I get so frustrated because whenever I actually have a question about the kids’ health, I can’t get an answer from the frontline professional and they end up saying “go see a doctor”. So it would actually make more sense to just go see a doctor and skip the front line. Appointment imminent.
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Emily’s brain has reached a new level of development and she has increased her alertness. She’s always trying to crawl/kick her way up to our faces, and usually when she reaches David’s face she tries to suck on his nose. We’ve seen a few attempts at a smile – just a twitch of the corner of her mouth. She seems mostly out of the newbie newborn phase of cry-sleep-eat-cry and can handle being awake and looking around. She is also learning stealth, along the lines of being very quiet if Walter’s attentions are getting a bit boisterous, as he then tends to forget she’s there.
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And on a non-kid note, I needed some comfort food and have been craving “cauliflower cheese” since I first had it on Induction Day at the hospital. The only tried & tested recipe I have for it is actually a pasta bake that has cauliflower and cheese in it. It’s super decadent. It’s super comforting. And it’s super, super good. So I made it for David and he loved it and I loved it and we may die of heart attacks next week but oh well: Cheesy Baked Penne with Cauliflower

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

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