Projects take awhile for me to complete, finally here is a pic of my first attempt at appliqué. Looking at it now there are some things that I would change in the layout, but overall I am happy with it. Many thanks to QuiltPixie for the lesson in appliqué.
Many of you know that I’ve spent the past month and a half stressing out about a paper I’ve been trying to write. The goal was to get it written in time to submit April 18th, but it didn’t happen. Contrary to some of the worries I had about this when I started working on the paper, my failure to submit it on the 18th will not end my graduate school career. Phew! Several conversations I’ve had with my advisers have assured me of this. But even though I missed the submission deadline, I still put in long hours last week. I wanted to get a draft of the paper to one of my advisers so that I could get some feedback on it and so that I could take care of some other business I need to look after before the semester ended in May. Finally, after staying up till 4AM on Friday, I finished the draft, attached the paper to an email, and sent it to my adviser.
I celebrated the finished draft by taking the weekend off–sort of. On a mere 4 hours of sleep, I joined a quartet of singers from church to sight-read some madrigals and perform them at a birthday party for one of the parishioners. Then I spent some quality time with Pam and L in the mall. Pam and I each needed to buy a pair of sandals for the summer. We also wanted to buy something to treat ourselves with, so we bought the ice cream maker attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer. (After the bowl spent the night in the freezer, we made some raspberry ice cream with it. Wow! Can’t wait to try some of the other recipes.) On Sunday afternoon, I sang in the second of the three concerts I’ll perform with Novi Cantori. We got a sitter so Pam could come to it. It was L’s first time with a sitter, and he was a very good boy.
I’m looking forward to a slower pace over the next few weeks. This will make it possible to see my family again. Woohoo!
L is nearly is old self. However, he still has to follow the doctor’s orders. A few times a day, he has to wear the “elephant” mask. Some medication (ventolin) is vaporized with some pressurized air and fed into the mask. L still associates the elephant with everything bad he experienced over the last few days at the hospital–poor kid–so he does his level best to find something else to do whenever it makes an appearance.
Otherwise, life is slowly returning to normal. Pam caught a cold in the midst of the excitement last week and is busy fighting it off. The paper I was trying desperately to finish by the weekend didn’t get done–some things are more important than others–so I’ll be working to finish it over the next few days. Maybe when I finish the paper I can take advantage of the nice weather we’ve been having and try out the golf clubs I got for Christmas at a local driving range.
L (and Pam) slept much better last night. L didn’t need any oxygen and he didn’t have to labor to breath, so this morning L was able to say ‘Bye, Bye’ to the nurses (tormentors) at the hospital in a more permanent fashion. We are all home now. L is still not 100%, but he is close to being the kid he was before the micro-organisms got to him on Tuesday.
So it is definite that L has pneumonia. The flu and RSV swabs both came back negative and his ears look fine. L was doing much better today; trying his best to jump around and use the bed as a slide. We will spend another night in the hospital just because when L settles down to sleep he doesn’t breathe as deeply therefore requires oxygen. It might turn out that he won’t need the oxygen tonight, but then everyone at least feels comfortable sending him home, knowing that he will be fine. L’s 2 favourite words now are “bye bye” as he convinces the hospital staff that they should indeed go bye bye and “done done” that whatever the staff was thinking of doing L has declared that they are now finished it.
The bug L caught two days ago has turned out to be a nasty one. Yesterday evening he came down with a fever. He got some sleep overnight, but not a lot. This morning, at his follow-up appointment, the doctor sent us to the hospital so that L could get his chest x-rayed. Turns out L has pneumonia. He’s been admitted to the hospital–they want to give him some antibiotics intravenously–and he will likely spend the night there.
RSV has decided to pay L a visit, bringing along bilateral ear infection just for kicks.
Yesterday we had a regular day, happily enjoying the warm sunshine while we waited for Daddy to get home. Then at bedtime I noticed that L’s voice was getting hoarser as he chatted himself to sleep, followed by a few episodes of coughing after he was asleep. Two hours later as we were getting ready for bed Dad found L struggling for breath. His colour was good and he recovered after a minute or so, but remained wheezy. I may be a nurse, but I am not a pediatric nurse, and further more in this situation I am the mom. So it took a bit for my clear headed assessment skills to click in. After a phone call to Urgent Care it was decided that we would remain at home until morning unless he had another episode or if his colour worsened. So L and I spent the night sitting up on the couch and Dad checked in on us periodically.
Sure enough L’s oxygenation was a little low requiring two ventolin inhalation treatments before they improved. We were sent home with syrup ventolin to open his bronchials and prednisone to reduce the swelling. On top of it he has an ear infection so we brought home antibiotics for that as well. He wasn’t exhibiting any signs of the ear infection bothering him, but we won’t argue with the antibiotic prescription in this situation.
After we got home L seemed to have recovered remarkably well, slightly less energetic then usual, but bouncing back very well. This afternoon the fever arrived knocking him right out.
He is sleeping now so hopefully he will be able to sleep without a repeat of last night.
I never enjoyed Dr Suess as a kid, maybe because I was too old to enjoy the rhyme and not old enough to appreciate pure silliness when I was introduced to them. L on the other hand loves Dr Suess, we have made our way through “Mr Brown can Moo”, “ABC” and are currently enjoying “One fish two fish red fish blue fish”. With this much Dr Seuss in my life it was inevitable that at some time he would show up on the blog. So this week when Daddy is so stressed trying to get his last starred paper finished here is a little taste of Dr Suess.
Grandpa F commented once on how exciting it must be for a child because everything is new. For example one of the days that L and I were outside last week L discovered that a stick could be used for digging. Pretty soon he was having a great time digging a hole in the dirt. So learn a lesson from Dr Suess, try something new and remember to keep your eyes open for the funny things in life.
The temperature has been in the ‘teens the last couple of days; spring has finally arrived. There is a playground not too far away and L has discovered the joy of slides. I thought that L wasn’t a risk taker, but he is not afraid of the slide at all. The bigger the slide the better, in fact mom was more afraid of L going down the big slide then L was.
Quick, what do Britney Spears and Luciano Pavarotti have in common? Haven’t been following the news? It’s lip-synching–you know, where a singer gets up on stage, acts as though he or she is singing a song, the people in the audience think the singer is actually singing the song, but really, the singer is moving his or her lips in synch with some recorded music, which is being piped through the sound system.
Spear’s lip-synching shenanigans have been well-documented, but Pavarotti’s lip-synching made the news only recently. It’s just come out that Pavarotti lip-synched his performance of Nessun Dorma for the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin. Although he now has something in common with Spears, the similarities between Pavarotti and Spears don’t run very deep. For one, Pavarotti lip-synched his performance because he was 70 years old and ill–he died about a year later from pancreatic cancer. There are only a few men in the world who can even sing the high notes Pavarotti could sing, much less sing them in the way he could sing them. If I understand the story correctly, Pavarotti recorded the aria he lip-synched at the opening ceremonies a few weeks before he “performed” it. The fact that a 70-year-old could even sing the aria well enough to record it is amazing in itself. Spears lip-synched her performance because, to put it kindly, she’s had trouble managing her fame. I’m sure it’s hard to put in meaningful practice time and be at the top of your game when you’re busy engaging in various sorts of self-destructive behavior.
Anyway, I was amused when I saw the Pavarotti story and made the connection with Spears. I thought I would pass it on.
