Week 220: Changing time

We have certainly come a long way from where we were a year ago. Halloween reminded us that at this time last year, we were doing home IVs, and Lemon in fact had to go trick-or-treating wearing a backpack containing his IV pump. This year, I kept alive the "trick" in trick-or-treat by bringing the kids to get their annual flu shots on Halloween morning. Both kids were very dramatic about the whole thing, wailing about the indignity and injustice of it until I said, "Hey, that lady is dressed in a pilot uniform. And she is offering you stickers." End tears, return to school.

We enjoyed a week of relative good health here before a new cold hit the dynamic duo on Friday into Saturday. Now we're back to having our house sound like some kind of sanatorium, and poor Lime has coughed himself so hoarse that he sounds like a little frog. Lemon's voice is unaffected but he too has been coughing up a storm, with all the attendant setbacks in terms of nutrition. At this point I feel like if we just hold our ground we'll be winning--the possibility of exceeding his June weight any time soon seems remote. The good news is that in spite of having this pretty bad virus both kids are in good spirits, enjoying the kittens, and generally having a good time. The bad news is that we've had to miss food school again, the third time in 6 weeks. I am really wondering whether it's even worth continuing to pursue it in the winter, or whether we'd be better served by just waiting for spring again. Winter is just not an eating season for Lemon.

We got an upsetting letter in the mail this week: as of January 1, our insurance will no longer cover the pharmacy that we have been using since we moved here (formerly Target, now CVS within Target). When you fill as many prescriptions per month as we do (see illustrative photo), the relationship with the pharmacy is an important one, and we'd invested 4 years in this one, figuring out who the good and bad pharmacists were, getting the "auto" refill system to work the way we wanted, negotiating the copay cards and specialty pharmacy and all the rest. We're switching to the pharmacy at our children's hospital, on the theory that perhaps a pharmacy affiliated with a hospital might be able to handle a complex prescription load. Well, that and the fact that they aren't Walgreens, the other choice now offered by our insurance.

Another loss this week: the cart that we've used for Lemon's vest and associated equipment since we started on the vest reached the end of its service life this week. The kids and I had a good time putting together its replacement (thank you, Amazon, for remembering exactly what we ordered last time). It's hard to believe that we are already two years into using the vest. I recently ordered Lemon the next size up on the vest itself, since he'd outgrown the old one. Being aware of his deeply conservative nature, I ordered him the exact same color, just in a bigger size. I thought he'd be excited when the new one came, but instead he refused to even try it on. He was only willing to try it on when I promised that it was just a test, and that he would still use the old one. He did not anticipate that I would be so sneaky as to swap the old one out for the indistinguishable new one when he wasn't looking. The depths that parenting pushes you to...