Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Tired

We're currently in Albuquerque for Thanksgiving and Ryan's sister's wedding. It's been a rather tiring trip thus far, in all honesty. We were up early to get to the airport for our flight. Usually I plan to get to the airport about an hour before my flight when it's just me. So I figured planning to get there 1.5 hours early would be plenty with the kids in tow. Next time we'll plan to get there at least 2 hours early because we got to our gate toward the tail end of boarding.

Mal did surprisingly well during take off. He has a cold, so I was very nervous. And he'd told me emphatically a few days before that he didn't want to go up in the clouds. But he seemed fine and was settling in, excited about the plane and the window and munching on apples. About ten minutes into the flight he let out a shriek and started flailing. This happened repeatedly for the next several minutes until he made clear he wanted me to put my hand on his ear to "close" it. He held my hand to his ear and buried his face in my lap, intermittently screeching and squirming when the pain intensified until he cried himself to sleep. He slept clenching my hand to his ear for the rest of the flight.

We had a nice long layover in Salt Lake, allowing us to get some lunch and hang out at our gate. Mal did much better on the second flight, though I have no idea why. He managed to entertain himself without me having to pull out any of the new items I bought to bribe him into good behavior. Upon arriving in Albuquerque we quickly grabbed our bags and headed to the rental car place and drove to my in-laws.

The first night here Ryan came and found me and asked if I'd noticed Gareth twitching his head. I checked it out, and sure enough his head was twitching involuntarily back toward his shoulder, sometimes rapidly. He's had a couple of tics for a while - blinking his eyes and clearing his throat. But his doctor thought the blinking was gone at our last visit. Then around the time school started this year his throat clearing shifted to a vocalization, almost like he was trying not to clear his throat. And a month or so later he started making an odd face every few seconds. I haven't noticed that one for a while. But now he's doing the head twitch and the blinking is definitely present as well. So I called his doctor the day after we got here and set up an appointment for when we get back to figure out what's going on.

Malcolm started refusing to eat anything except fruit and cookies as soon as we arrived. This has led to many tears and much screaming on his part, and frustration/annoyance on my part. Today I finally asked Ryan to go out and buy a whole bunch of yogurt because it's something he'll almost always eat and has lots of protein and will help get him through the day a little easier. I already know he'll reject everything at Thanksgiving dinner (except pie), so I guess it'll be a yogurt Thanksgiving for him.

And that's kind of how things are going thus far, in addition to the typical upsets between Gareth and Mal causing various emotional meltdowns. Gareth got the wind knocked out of him while playing on a swing and Mal got a small cut on his hand when it hit a recliner while playing. There's constantly something going wrong with one of them. At least Ryan and I get to go out a few times because we have plenty of willing babysitters around. But after today I'm tempted to put a moratorium on long trips far away from home until Mal is old enough to stop throwing tantrums.

2 comments:

Nancy said...

Phew! I feel ya! Going out of town with kids is just as much (if not more) work than staying at home--nothing relaxing about it. But it's nice to see family/friends/places, too, so we still do it in spite of all the craziness. :)

Alanna said...

Traveling with kids is the worst! You have my sympathy! Hopefully people on the plane were nice and understanding at least? My sister had one woman insist that the way to soothe a crying baby (baby, mind you) was to give them ice cubes to suck on. This woman, she was not surprised to learn, did not have kids. And that is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard...

Good luck with the return trip!