29 Days Later

We're four weeks and one day out from Micah's surgery, and today was another follow up with Dr. Choe.  Micah has been doing great, which in Mom-speak means that he now has two ear canals and two tympanic membranes to exercise his right to the selective hearing of the average preschooler.

Today was the day the little Silastic disk that has been sitting up against his new ear drum was removed.  First the right ear had some debris/wax cleaned out, then the little disk got pulled out - and I remembered to bring the little container of preservative that has the first disk floating in it so the second could be saved.  Right now Micah has no appreciation of those tiny pieces of silicon, but one day I want to be able to show him that sometimes the smallest of things can have enormous impact. The first disk looked like a perfect circle, the one pulled out today looked more like one that was custom-cut.

Micah spent most of the time he was having little bits of debris pulled out of his ear canals giggling because he felt a tickling sensation - and he knows that good behavior means he gets to pick something out of the toy basket.  Right now he's collected two plastic zebras (which he insists look like goats, go figure), and he said he was going for a third.  But alas, even though the basket of treats was full, no zebra.  So he selected a giraffe - which will join the other two plastic giraffes.

And back for another recheck in two weeks because this is about the time Micah's first ear canal began to show some stenosis that resulted in Dr. Choe putting sponges back in and changing his ear drops to an antibiotic and steroid combination.  He said that he made Micah's left canal a little bit bigger with that experience in mind.

Meanwhile, I called our contact in the school district to break the news that Micah will be graduating from Summit Speech School one year ahead of schedule.  Since this will be happening roughly at the same time we are moving to a new school district, after she got over her surprise (and delight, since the district will be off the financial hook either way - from Micah's graduation or our move), she got in touch with Summit and scheduled a meeting for an IEP review so that Micah will move on to the new school district with an updated IEP recommending that he be placed in an integrated preschool program for the upcoming school year.

For the summer, we are probably placing Micah in YingHua.  He is interested in learning Chinese, most likely because of Thea, and he was told if he had his second surgery he could learn Mandarin.

And I deleted the post about the new house - as usual, talking about it jinxed the process and the process of selling the house hit a snag when the first buyer pulled out during the three-day lawyer review, so I got bogged down by having to spend about 48 hours or so wishing that the male half of the couple buying the house have his prostate enlarge to the size of cantaloupe, his testes shrink to the size of raisins, that he have grief and misery from his spouse and that his daughter grow up to became a liberal arts major when she goes to college.  Somehow it is healthier for me to be very specific rather than just being mired in generic anger.  The bad thing is we knew he was a weasel, because he was pulling out of another home purchase during the three-day review to put the offer on our house.

The other bad thing is that we're back to showing the house again. . . .so we're back to trying to keep things organized and clean.  Which with two young children in the house is a major pain in the butt, especially with Micah and his seemingly limitless number of Matchbox cars, plastic animals and other toys.  Even with a good bit of the stockpile of toys in the storage space, he can still create a rather large debris field.

When everything is on solid ground, I'll put the pictures back in a post.

Micah's cute phrase of the day, "Mommy, sometimes I get grouchy when you pinch my butt."  Somehow we were on the topic of being grouchy and I said to him that he's usually not the grouchy member of the family (that would be either me or his sister vying for that honor.)