November 26, 2004
Of Santa, allergies, and sleeping in your own damn bed!
This past Sunday Kadin and I had a day to ourselves which we spent downtown at the 1st annual Santa Clause Parade. While it is extremely difficult to keep a 14 month old child interested in a milling crowd for 1.5 hours, once the action started he just sat quietly on my shoulders and drooled on my head. You know, as opposed to squirming on my shoulders and drooling on my head.
Kadin was especially fascinated by the bagpipes and firefighters marching band. I thought at first Ronald McDonald would be a sure winner, but the guy sounded like he was a homeless guy in clown make-up "HEY KIDS, WHO LOVES CHEESEBURGERS?!?!". Maybe you just had to be there...
Since the parade didn't start until 11:30, we only watched for about an hour until we absolutely had to find a fine dining location for him to get a nutritious lunch; Denny's!
While sharing some chicken nuggets and nacho's with Kadin, we witnessed the charming young family at the next table go from "Do you want me to order you a coffee, sweety?" to the father kicking the table and demanding the mother not ever do what she was doing. It appeared she was leaning over the seat to pick up a toy from one of their two sons, so I'm still not sure what happened.
In any event, without Tonia there to stop us, Kadin and I stared with absolutely no shame whatsoever and enjoyed the lunch-time theatre playing out right in front of us!
Skip ahead to Tuesday...
As Kadin had recently had two bad reactions for fish, we went in for his scheduled allergy test. Apparently Dr. Kim is not entirely comfortable around small children though. While we were all in the tiny waiting room, Kadin was getting understandably restless just sitting in my arms. So I asked Dr. Kim for one of the tongue depressers for him to play with. Kadin of course dropped it 20 seconds later, at which point I just scooped it up and handed it to him.
That's when Dr. Kim looked a little shocked and said "Don't you want to give him a ...sanitary one?". I just laughed and said he'd had worse in his mouth. At that point I think Dr. Kim started paging the child welfare office. I still found the whole thing quite amusing, as he was acting as if the stick fell in a pile of FECES or something, as opposed to a carpetted floor.
Oh, he didn't show any reaction to fish, but we have to book another appointment and bring cooked samples to see if those do the trick.
Skip ahead to Wednesday night...
Fed up with the situation we've created for ourselves (Kadin sleeping in our bed and one of us invariably moving to the couch so the other can get a decent nights sleep), we bit the bullet and decided to put him back in his crib that night. Well, 3952305293 stories and 2 hours later, he was lightly asleep IN HIS OWN CRIB AND NOT IN OUR ROOM! Granted, he woke up crying a few times that night, but still it was a success.
Since then he's taken all of his naps and gone to bed only in his crib. Tonia currently holds the record of 1 hour from room entry to exit. Our next target is to reduce the blood curdling screams and increase the..uh...well, really just decrease the blood curdling screams. See, Kadin isn't convinced just yet that his crib is a good place to be, but we'll get there soon enough.
Oh, my friend Marla was kind enough to send some pictures taken on Halloween. Enjoy!
