Week 212: On its head

To everyone's amazement, we made it through the first week of school. A big success from our first week is our new morning babysitter, who has rapidly become a favorite of the kids, taking them on all sorts of adventures in the wilds of our neighborhood before school. Predictably, this leads to some reluctance to actually leave for school, but we're working on that.

The first day of school for both kids was Wednesday. Somewhat to my surprise, Lemon was really hesitant to be dropped off, despite never having had a single difficult drop-off last year. He's been a little teary and clingy every morning so far. I was worried that Lime would actually be the harder one to drop off, being more of a Mama's boy by disposition than Lemon ever was.  And yet, on the first day, he saw his classroom, recognized it from orientation on the day before, and walked right in, leaving me standing in the hall in shock. And so it's been every morning since. I hear this is a common "second child" phenomenon, but whatever it is, I'll take it! At the end of the day, it's a bit of the reverse--Lime is exhausted and eager to come home, whereas Lemon, having found his footing, is having too much fun with his friends to leave.

Of course, every CF parent's big concern in the fall is the return to a classroom fill of disease-riddled vermin (ahem, I mean fellow scholars). We are apparently getting the school year off to a flying start, with both kids having come down with a cold after just 3 school days. Lemon was very sad on Saturday, full of congestion and general woe, but his spirits were better on Sunday and today, although he is of course coughing up a storm. We've gone up on PT and down on tube feeds in an attempt to maintain some sort of equilibrium and hopefully avoid a round of Cayston. Although, we haven't done any antibiotics at all since May, which is a great stretch for us.

At least this early cold has given us a good test case for how we will fit in 3 sessions of PT with our new weekday schedule. The answer, at least based on today's experience, is barely, but I think it's doable. Mondays are especially tricky because we now have "food school" on Mondays at 1, so fitting in PT between getting home from regular school at 12 and leaving for food school at 12:45 is tight, to say the least. It does seem like we are making progress at food school, though, so I'm committed to stick with it at least through the fall, with the hopes that maybe we could "graduate" in December (which is conveniently around the time that we will have completed the 20 visits that our insurance agreed to cover).

 I'm sure in another few weeks this schedule will feel normal and I will have forgotten about all previous schedules, but for the moment it really does feel like we turned our entire household on its head. Lemon decided to take this to a very literal level over the weekend by tripping on the sidewalk and somehow managing to land mostly on his nose and the left-hand side of his face by his eye, such that everyone I've seen with him today has been asking me what happened. At least at this point I'm used to accounting for a child with obvious facial injuries. With any luck, in the coming weeks the schedule will settle down, the cold will go away (please!!!), the scrapes will heal over, and we'll be on our way into fall.