Elijah cures my ickies

I felt pretty uneasy and anxious all day today for a few reasons..

- The awful, fatal traffic accident that occurred last night on the freeway I drive home on every day. It happened just before I would have been driving that same stretch of road. Someone from the northbound lane drove right across the grass median at 70 mph and into a car in the southbound lane.

- I found out today that my friend's mom died on May 11th (So sorry for your loss, Pammy. I love you.) and I feel like a horrible friend for not knowing this sooner.

- Elijah was back at daycare after many days of being sick and at home. I was a little bit extra anxious having him out of our care for the first time in a while. (I wonder if his dc provider was annoyed by all the emails?)

- This story, that I read over the weekend, has been constantly on my heart this week.


The look on my little boy's face when I picked him up from daycare wiped it all away, though. Could someone really be that excited to see me? Sometime I will record video of Elijah when he first sees me after I have been at work all day. Actually, I will have Dan record both of us. We act like we are being reunited after being apart for 50 years, kissing (both), squeezing (me), squealing (both), arm flapping (him), leg kicking (him), laughing (both). I love it. I love him.

Elijah has been extra clingy lately, which is probably a result of his recent nasty neverending sickness coupled with fact that he is naturally a pretty clingy kid. If he could have his way, he would be right next to one of us at all times, preferably making some sort of body contact. Sometimes this is tough, like when we need to do things that don't involve holding a 27-lb toddler, but most of the time I eat it up. He likes to crawl over to us and say UP, UP. We have learned that UP, UP has a very specific meaning. It means that he has to be sitting on one of our laps (with us sitting cross-legged) facing out, with our arms wrapped around his belly or maybe our hands holding onto his arms, as we watch a show or read books or play with toys. He most definitely loves closeness and feeling secured by a safe person, or sometimes an object. We often see him surrounding himself with blankets, chairs, toys, pillows, anything really. I think he has the opposite fear of claustrophobia. Would that be agoraphobia?

As I have mentioned, he is starting to say many new words. We have recently noticed how much he uses his nasal passage to say a lot of these words. Many things he says don't come out of his mouth. For example, when he says TWO and THREE, he moves his lips appropriately but he blocks the back of his mouth off with his tongue and is really just saying OO and EE very nasally. He does this with a lot of his sounds. We have started having him blow into a kazoo to get used to blowing air through his mouth, so hopefully that will help. Have any of you dealt with anything like this? We have speech therapy tomorrow night, so hopefully we will get some ideas there, too.

The sweet, still-coughing boy is asleep and I am headed to the couch to plant my bum there for a while. I hope you are having a nice week!

p.s. So yes, progress is being made with The Sickness Of The Year. Cough, still present (didn't he get this message?). Eyes, all better but still doing drops (which he still giggles through). Ears, still some grabbing but we have another round of antibiotics to get through. Fever, gone. Appetite, slowly improving.