Week 109: Onward ho!

Somehow all of us survived my first week back at work.  I enjoyed the work, and the team seems like a very good fit for me in a cultural sense--lots of Type A PhDs with young kids.  It's definitely nice to be able to hear my family through the floorboards (my office is in our basement), to know who's awake and asleep, who's happy and who's not.  And of course there's the greatest perk of all, being able to pop upstairs and feed the baby rather than pumping, which I loathe more than any other child-care task.  That, and being able to "commute" by strolling downstairs wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt is pretty awesome.  The cats are entirely delighted by my new work arrangements.

Lemon's eating has definitely been better this week.  Our strategy of waiting him out seems to have worked.  After conducting some of his own experiments, he reached the conclusion that not eating is associated with not feeling good, and he's been eating well again for the last few days.  Certainly he doesn't eat everything that's put in front of him, but he's eating enough so that I'm no longer worried about whether he's getting enough calories.  I think he may even have put back on some of the weight that he lost during his experimental period. 

All the same, we're headed in to the clinic for a checkup on Wednesday.  I'd scheduled it during the experimental period, when I was convinced that he was actually losing weight.  Now that he's eating again, that is less of a concern but we're going anyway because he's been coughing a bit for the last couple of weeks.  I wouldn't say that he has "a cough" per se, since he only coughs a couple of times a day.  But, on the other hand, it is definitely different than his usual baseline, which is no cough.  It's confusing because he really isn't sick.  He's full of vim and vigor, in constant motion and full of life.  So, we don't know what to make of the cough.  It could be some more seasonal allergies (we're having a lot of weed pollen right now), or it could be that switching over to the vest has loosened up some junk that was stuck in his lungs.  We need to get to the bottom of it, though, and if there's something that we should be treating differently, we definitely want to know!
So much for our lofty ambition of going three whole months without a clinic visit.  But, we want to be in absolutely top form as we head into winter, and right now we're not there.

Lime continues to be a delight, at all hours of the day and night.  He is chubby in a way that Lemon never was, with fat rolls in every place that one could conceivably have a fat roll and some places that I hadn't thought of before.  He's getting pretty good with his social smile, much better than I am at being fast enough with a camera to capture it.  It's true that everything goes so much faster with a second child.  One minute you're pregnant, and the next you're nearly done with the "fourth trimester."  I'm trying to relish each little stage as long as it lasts!