Camp has begun! Here is an amazing thing that happens now that the kids are in camp: we drop them off at camp at 8am, and they stay there until we pick them up around 4:30. No mid-day pickups. No people roaming around the house while I'm trying to work. It is astonishing. I think after almost 6 years of dealing with child care throughout the day, I had stopped noticing how disruptive it was. Holy cow. We still have one more year ahead of us with a kid at home during the afternoons, but after that, we get this all the time? Sign. Me. Up.
Things seem to be going well at camp so far. I went a day early for orientation, to drop off Lemon's enzymes. The teacher I handed them to looked at the size of the pills in the bottle in shock, and asked "So, he really just swallows these?" Um, yup. she said her son has to take medication right now that she has to crush into yogurt. Ah yes, we have been there. And are there no more. It does feel good to have made progress, and to have things be easier for Lemon wherever he goes. They are keeping the enzymes in the school office, so he goes there before snacks and lunch to take them. But, thanks to the fact that they are pills it is very quick and not disruptive. He's also learning to advocate for himself and remind his teachers when they seem to forget. He had one episode towards the end of the school year where he didn't get enzymes, and as he put it, his poop was all weird. Once I told him about the connection between missing enzymes and weird poop, he seemed very motivated to remember.
Lemon has had another little series of episodes of being discontent with doing the pump and formula recently. Papa Bear and I have both talked to him about it, and about how much it helps his health. We have both told him about how if he wants to do less formula, he would have to eat more. His current line is that maybe when he is in high school or college he will be ready to try that approach.
In other good news, we got the results of the liver ultrasound and elastography back, both normal! I think that's it for medical events for us (fingers crossed!!!) until the onslaught of pediatrician visits and whatnot that precede the start of the school year. In the mean time, we are gearing up for our summer vacation, which of course means me mentally making lists of all the equipment that we need to bring with us. We will be bringing the vest this time, per Lemon's request, so that is yet one more big piece of equipment that we will need to haul. He keeps claiming he wants his own wheelie bag, so having him haul a $10,000 medical device through a couple of major airports should be a good test to see whether he's ready to handle that responsibility, right?
