sara skates

– aside from the fact that they provide fluff to spin and knit.  Pardon the medical obsession for the day – feel free to skip this post and check in later.

I occasionally suffer from having a cold sore – about once a year.  In me, it generally shows up on my face – not on my lips or mouth so much, as on the surrounding area of my chin (and occasionally inside my nostril – that’s fun).  I’ve had them long enough to usually know when one is coming on, and to treat it quickly with Abreva – which in my experience actually does shorten the lifecycle of the outbreak of the virus. 

Last weekend, Toby had a short-lasting but dramatic stomach virus.  I suspected the rest of the household wasn’t far behind – 3 days later, we all succumbed.  On that morning, I looked in the mirror and saw one tiny cold sore blister – without the precursor "tingling".  I started using the Abreva immediately.  That afternoon, a whole crop of blisters broke out.  The next morning, a few extra broke out – it ended up being a sizable sore, on the side of my chin and cheek.  I used the Abreva cream a lot – and by day 3, it started drying out and crusting over.

The cream doesn’t do a lot at this point – the virus has mostly run it’s course, and the healing process is left.  But the sore hurts a lot and itches like mad.  Especially on the face – where you have a lot of fine-tuned muscles – every time one twitches, it breaks open the crust… (lovely eh?) and bleeds a lot. 

I was looking in the medicine cabinet for something that might help  Regular facial lotion works briefly, but doesn’t last long.  I spied an old tube of Lansinoh – pure medical=grade lanolin that breastfeeding moms use if they get chapped and/or cracked…tender parts.  You can also use it on chapped lips.  It’s really *thick* stuff – if you put a dab on your fingertip, it will melt with your body heat and you can spread it on an abrasion.  And yes, it’s 100% lanolin – if you’ve ever felt a not-yet-scoured fleece fresh off of a greasy sheep (e.g., Merino; Cormo) – that’s what it feels like.  Thick and greasy – it’s sticky when cold, and it glides when warm.

I put some onto the cold sore area – and instantly the pain and itching went away.  It stayed on pretty much all day too.  And sluffed off the dried skin that was ready to sluff off – without hurting the skin that still needed to be attached.

AND mostly?  It has drastically sped up the healing process of the sore itself.  I am at the pink-skin phase already, with only a minor sore left to heal.  In sum – the Abreva is great for speeding the process of getting rid of the active virus; and lanolin is great for the healing part of the process.  While I still feel oh-so-attractive (yeah, not so much) it is healing fairly quickly.

Thank you sheepies – for all you give

This is a placeholder post – I couldn’t figure out how to get a website with a bunch of charts linked somewhere sensible on Ravelry.

I have some Kauni Effekt yarn just waiting for a project.  Jessica Tromp has an awesome site with a load of charts for inspiration.  The site is in Dutch, but there’s a button to click on for an English version.  There are a slew of charts pages like here.

There are moments of parenting that bowl me over.

Advocating for our kids’ needs is at times a much busier job than others.  This year, both kids have moved up to new schools (middle school for Hannah, and upper elementary for Toby).  Hannah has adapted well to the relative chaos of middle school – she has called home with requests to drop off forgotten items about three days out of five and my tolerance for that is running a bit thin – so we’ve instituted some new "get things ready at night" plans and so far so good.  And I have warned her that she may have to deal with me saying "no" to dropping off forgotten items.  In the grand scheme of things, not having a binder at school for a day is pretty small potatoes.

Toby has had more challenging things.  Since kindergarten, he has been on a bus that includes an extra monitor – to help him get on and off the bus, and to put his equipment on the bus.  This year, a child was added to the bus who is non-verbal and who screams a lot.  After day 1, Toby was visibly upset at the bus ride – he was one of the first kids picked up in the am, and one of the last off the bus in the afternoon; he’s noise-sensitive to begin with, and the 45 minutes with screaming was just too stressful for him.  To boot, this year’s monitor and bus driver seem rather hands-off about behavior control on the bus, so all the other kids were louder than necessary…enough said. 

We called in the troops to see what we could do pretty quickly – and while it took until yesterday to implement a plan, fairly early the school was proactive at sorting out a solution.  The solution is to put him on the "neighborhood" bus – a regular bus with no monitor – and we agree to being there to put him on the bus in the morning, get him off in the afternoon – and his aide at school will help on that end.  We already did that as did the school aide – so really – no skin off our backs.  While I have some concern about what happens if there’s an emergency (where the extra adult on the bus could come in handy) – really, there are 30-plus kids on the bus and the monitor isn’t "Toby’s personal" monitor, Toby can crawl off if he needs, and in this case – we’re opting for the better social experience for him.

He came home on the new bus yesterday, and I put him on this morning.  Our interim solution while we sorted this out was to send him on the bus with an MP3 player – which he quite liked, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to go without on this new bus   But, I’d rather have him socializing with other kids for the bus ride…so I convinced him to try without the MP3 player this morning.  He got on with my help, and immediately started chatting with everyone and anyone – he was happy as a clam telling the bus driver and other kids all about anything.

For me, it means yet another step on the way to a more normalized experience for Toby.  I don’t resist the supports and help Toby needs.  I do utterly cherish when solutions come to us that move him closer to the regular end of things instead of adding more "special" aide and adaptation. 

What I’m finding is that moments like this come up with both kids – but with Hannah, it’s more at regular "life change" moments – the start of school or a new school – etc. – moments when you realize the poignancy of how your kid is growing up.  With Toby – all those moments happen too – in addition, there are the added unexpected "life change" times like this bus switch.  I didn’t know this moment was coming – but sending him off this morning?  It’s really rather overwhelming.

In a very good way.