When Monkey has seizures for more than a day or two at regular intervals, we give him an additional medicine to try to help break up his seizure clusters. That’s how they come, in clusters. Whereas some folks with epilepsy have Grad Mal seizures (see the folks at Mayo again, here for definition) Monkey has Complex Partial seizures. Once he gets going on some kind of regular rhythm, he sticks to it pretty close to the minute. Every two hours, three hours, two and half hours… you get the idea.

The additional medicine is supposed to help break up the pattern. It also happens to effect the smooth muscles in his body. It relaxes them. There are smooth muscles all down your esophagus and your intestines. As you might imagine, in addition to the side effects of the seizures, chewing, swallowing, and digestion all become less productive. So when you think about your four year old who doesn’t want to eat dinner, mix that in with a little physiological inability. Dinner time can take a while. If this happens to last for several days (clusters, medicine, etc) Monkey begins to lose energy and weight. Neither are very good.

When he loses energy he loses muscle tone for lack of use. When he looses weight it can potentially effect dosing of his regular medication. We had one such instance of the cluster, medicine rotation earlier last week as Monkey recovered from a cold. We don’t like colds, for Monkey, they’re bad news. Anything that taxes his immune system lowers his seizure threshold and he’ll have some.

No segue here folks. Sorry.

We have a third child.

Caught you with your jaw down didn’t I?

She is 17. She is also my youngest sister-in-law Jordan. She was five when Morgan and I started dating in college. We would take her places and people would assume she was ours. Sometimes we would kindly correct folks and tell them that we would have been 13 at her birth. While not impossible, no. Most of the time, since she looks like Morgan’s copy, we would just smile and move along. Not much has changed. On to the point.

She is a senior!!!!!!!!! We have been doing college applications and talking about careers. We threatened to put up banners at school welcoming her to her first day back to school. We didn’t so instead, this is what she gets!! 🙂 Enjoy your senior year squirt!

And again no segue. I’m not feeling very literary tonight and quite scattered.

We have been watching a lot of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at our house this summer. Princess has some Charlie Brown PJ’s and we forgot to put them away with the winter clothes. She found them in her drawer a couple months ago and then stumbled onto our DVD copy of the special. It has been in the DVD player since and is watched at least five times a week. Nothing wrong with hearing Linus’ speech five times a week to remind you of the amazing gift of our messiah come to be human. Doesn’t get any better than that.

Monkey smiled this week. A lot. It was fantastic. Open mouth with teeth smile on occasion. Sorry we were too enamored to take any pictures of the really great ones, so this one will have to do.

Lastly, I work during the summer. But as days get shorter again and cool air makes for evening dew on the grass, I still get sad about school going back. I also get excited about fall. There is just something spectacular about the changing of seasons around summer that makes me feel like I’m seven again and the only thing on my mind is how long I get to play outside.