Find me sitting by myself

Life slowly returns to normal here--I took Evan to a birthday party yesterday, and today he's back at school. Mike's working, and Grady naps as I gather the laundry from every corner of the house. The sky is gray and the wind is howling, and I think maybe winter is finally coming after all.

I had both boys back at the doctor on Friday. Grady was getting his follow-up after his hospital release, and all was well with him. The doctor said his lungs were clear, and his ears almost completely healed. Evan had been complaining of ear pain himself on Thursday night, so I dragged him along too. Turns out his double ear infection of three weeks ago was raging since he'd never taken any of his antibiotics. The only other option was two painful antibiotic shots, one in each leg. Evan tearfully agreed to this, and the deed was done. He handled it well, but limped the rest of the day and spent a lot of time just laying on the couch. A recheck this morning found his ears were much improved, so I'm glad to have that taken care of.

Grady's now seven months old. He's become quite the chatterbox, sharing his opinion on nearly everything using a variety of vowel sounds and your occasional b or d thrown in for good measure. G's commando crawling with great speed now--he can make it across the room in record time. He's able to get up on all fours and rock, but he'd rather lunge forward than crawl properly for the time being. He's been getting "solid" food for nearly a month, but his illness was a setback, so he's still only had cereals (rice and oatmeal), bananas and carrots. He's not a big fan of any of it, and I think he'd rather go straight on to table food.

Evan's doing pretty well also, aside from the recent shots. He's getting retested in speech and OT so we can write new goals for the coming year, and he has his IEP meeting next week as well. There's going to be a lot of evaluating and stuff as we get ready to send him to kindergarten in the fall, so this is only the tip of the iceberg in that department. Ev's really looking forward to his birthday, at which he wants a "brown cake with white frosting and bowling candles". He also wants to go skating, and he would like lots of presents, though he won't share what he'd like the presents to be. My mom threatened to buy him underwear if he doesn't come up with something, which Evan thought was hilarious.

And that's us so far. Everyone seems to be feeling well for now, and we're all gearing up for Evan's big fifth birthday in two weeks. It's going to be an exciting January, without a doubt.