Week 258: Angry carrot

I met with Lemon's future kindergarten teacher earlier this week. We had a really nice hour-long conversation at a coffee shop, and in summary, I think Lemon is in really good hands. His teacher had some pretty serious health issues herself as a child, and has a lot of empathy for Lemon as a result. She was totally on board with my number one goal, which is to make Lemon's school experience as normal as possible. She was thrilled to hear that Lemon can swallow pills, and is going to advocate to be able to keep a supply in the classroom so that Lemon doesn't have to go to the nurse's office every time he's going to eat. She's already totally up on using water bottles instead of the shared water fountain, and is well versed in the ways of hand sanitizer. Although there are still some details to be worked out, and our planned 504 meeting in October, I definitely feel like we're laying the groundwork for success.

Speaking of pill swallowing, Lemon had been requesting to switch from his chewable vitamin (which tastes like orange foulness) to one he could swallow. Of course, the swallow-able version is not designed for a 5-year-old. It is so big, in fact, that he is only supposed to take it every other day, instead of every day, so that he doesn't OD on vitamin E. He approached it without the slightest hesitation, and down the hatch it went. He can now also swallow the Creon 36,000's, which is way more convenient than 3 Creon 12,000's. I am still kind of in shock.





All this, plus Lemon's new ability to throw back an entire glass of milk at once, has given me ideas. My idea is to get to the point where we eliminate the need to use his feeding tube at all in the mornings. This would mean doing 2 or 3 medications as pills, plus a breakfast drink/food every day. The amount of time and hassle it would save us would be really significant, since right now each morning involves one of the grown-ups (usually Papa Bear) loading up 6 different syringes full of stuff, prepping the extension, delivering everything, and washing all the syringes and extension again after. Feh. Washing syringes gets old REALLY fast. One issue might be the fact that there aren't a lot of pills made in doses small enough for a nearly 5-year-old, so I will have to check in with the clinic and see what they can suggest.

Other than that, summer continues to roll along. It's hard to believe there are only 3 weeks of summer camp left, then a couple weeks of family visits and other fun and excitement, and then the start of school. Lime has his 3-year-old check-up later this week so it will be interesting to see if he's managed to climb out of the 5th percentile yet. I have to say, he is starting to look pretty minuscule compared to his big brother, who seems to be getting bigger by the minute!