Happy April! We sure did that late winter frontwards and backwards all over again. And, then... some stuff happened and now it's spring!!! Break out the Bambi twitterpation, dust yourself with pollen, and let's get dancin to some Stravinsky!
It's kind of awesome, being both allowed back onto the playgrounds and having a mutual desire to be outside. Allan is getting out, relearning her bravery for mildly perilous playground apparati, and interacting with other kids again. Ok, sure a lot of the time her version of interaction is following the child around yelling "stay away, stay away, there's a virus. Did you know about the virus?" but we all have some crustiness to shed on the fine rules of making friends and influencing people.
And just as often, she politely stalks some little child or group of children until they relent and treat her like one of their own for an afternoon. A few weeks ago, she crashed a father-daughter soccer game and got in some good passes with the other little girl. She's joined roving gangs of children to pet dogs and dominate park areas. I've even started to learn some kids' names and parental faces. It's pretty incredibly sweet to see how she lights up to find a playmate for the day.
Me? Wicked Easter, tasty and fun Passover, Friggin' Anniversary. New Job!
I'm pretty good. The new job is definitely a stretch for my brain getting back to detail oriented planning, but it's a pleasant kind of stretch. I'm bobbing between feeling pretty awesome and pretty idiotic within the span of a few seconds. And I now know how to put a > in an .xml document without confusing it as coding! I'm a friggin' genius. I'll be a programmer in no time.
Right now I test questionnaires to be used by medical offices to track and diagnose patients. Some of that is "front end" stuff that's just answering every possible answer as a patient would and making sure it all works. Some of that is "back end" which involves creating .xml sample patients to make sure everything is logically consistent in this other testing tool I run them through. And sometimes i have zoom calls with my coworkers and accidentally turn on my video and then feel very awkward but shy about just turning it back off...
Yeah, I still go to a ton of doctors. My hobby! But honestly, most of them are fairly useless and it's annoying and a waste of time and money. I feel like you have to be wealthy to ever find medical help because you have to go through SO MANY dismissive clueless doctors to ever find one who will both listen and know what to look for.
Well sometimes I cut a chunk ouf of my finger cutting an avocado and urgent care cleans it up after it wno't stop bleeding but somehow it still gets gnarly and maybe infected so I have to dose myself with tons of "fun" pills my body isn't a huge fan of. Then it just heals like "what? I was just kidding. I'm fine." It was an interesting experience though, watching it heal. I'll spare you my detailed photo album, but I have one...
Here's what it looks like today...
Yeah, like damn, if you'd seen the earlier photos that would mean something!
Anyways. Medical stuff.
But the day to day chronic stuff, it's like some kind of inane puzzle game. You have symptoms that could be related to almost any bodily system so you have to make an appointment with every specialist and wait that out. They are minimally helpful so on to the next. Or maybe you think that specialist was missing something so you have to go to yet another of that kind of specialist. And pretty soon you've spent thousands of dollars and days of your life sitting in waiting rooms and getting shrugs and advice you could have just read off WebMD, then realizing so and so totally failed to follow the differential diagnosis for ____ xyz so who knows if *anything* was actually ruled out. I am pretty sure you have to be crazy wealthy and patient to ever see enough doctors (at $300 a visit not to mention whatever tests they throw at you) to get anything helpful.
That said, I recently connected with an immunologist who seems to know some shit and who expressed a desire to look at the full body picture in addition to dosing me up with triple antihistamines and putting me through two more days of prick testing next month. So far I've filled out requests for records from 13 providers and I know I missing some important stuff. I get the sense I could well end up full circleish back at a rheumatologist as she noted some markers of autoimmune issues, though an endocrinologist is definitely not out of the running as "professional I'm surprised I've not seen yet and probably should". We'll see. I'm ... tired.
BUT back to the family.
Allan's still remarkably vivid in all directions. She's starting to get more of a grasp on letters and sounds, largely by personifying the letters and drawing them as momma and baby letters playing and singing and dancing.
She's still drawing up a storm. Still demanding her kindle time. Getting more expert on the playground by the second. Stalking kids left and right in all kinds of complex and fascinating ways. Demanding CRAFTS and ACTIVITIES constantly in between elaborate bouts of self-enteratinment with her stuffed animals or a few pieces of paper and some glue.
Next week she starts a soccer class! She's not the most coordinated girl in the world and the way she throws is not exactly athletic, but she can kick ok (has been practicing ever since she was in my belly!). It'll be a little strange, with kids socially distanced and limited to their own balls. But it'll be fun if we can make it out of the house on time for the morning run.
And in summer, she'll be doing a few weeks of summer camps on Mercer Island with her the head of her current (Zoom preschool experience). In the meantime, she is in love with her Teacher, Abby, and loves her online classes. And she hones her child stalking skills every day
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