Last year, when I cut the end off my finger, we experienced the very best side of the Australian public hospital system. This weekend we had a less positive experience.
Jeyanth had a slightly elevated temperature for a couple of days, but as he was still eating and playing happily, we were quite content to let him get over whatever minor bug he'd picked up. But on friday he was much more out-of-sorts, and his temperature went up, so Sureka took him to see our family doctor. The diagnosis was severe tonsillitis (probably a strep. infection), and possible urinary tract infection. They were sent home with a prescription for antibiotics, and a couple of little bags for getting a urine sample.
By late afternoon, Jeyanth's temperature was up near 40C, and wasn't coming down very much with Panadol, so we phone the doctor again, and were advised to take him into Emergency. So shortly after 7pm we turned up at Blacktown hospital....
To cut a very, very, long story short, we finally left the hospital at half past one, with a diagnosis of tonsillitis (probably a strep. infection), another antibiotic prescription, and a committment to travel the extra distance to Westmead Children's Hospital if we ever need to do this again. For disturbing Jeyanth's sleep for six and a half hours, all we gained was an all-clear on his urine, and conflicting antibiotic prescriptions.
The main problem at Blacktown seemed to be that there was only one Pediatrician - and several genuine emergency cases. Our confidence in the doctor we finally saw is probably best summed up by the fact that the antiobiotics he provided us with remain unused in our fridge (a little research, combined with our much greater confidence in Dr Tan, led us to use the original prescription instead).
By the time we got home, Jeyanth's temperature had returned to mild fever levels, and by Sunday morning (after a very gentle day at home on Saturday) it was back to normal. This morning he was well enough to be packed off to CSIROCARE as usual....
Over the last fortnight we've been working on getting Jeyanth to say 'please' and 'thank-you' at appropriate times.
The 'please' part was actually quite easy, as we pretty much refused to give him whatever he was asking for before he said 'please' ("pees"). 'Thank-you' was a bit harder, but eventually, over the last week, we can pretty much elicit one on request. He still doesn't do it spontaneously, but can be relied upon to comply with a 'say 'thank-you' Jeyanth' request with "Thunk-ouk"
I guess this is one of Jeyanth's first experience of the goalpost moving as part of growing up. Parents who were falling over themselves to praise and reward a child who managed to say 'water' to articulate his request bare weeks ago, are now holding out for more.
Two days ago, Jeyanth and I were putting away his toy animals. I had the toybox, and I held out my hand for the ones he had in his hand. He pulled back his fistful, looked me in the eye, and said "pees?". So I meekly said 'please' and got given the animals to put away.
Jeyanth is currently going through the really exciting explosion in his use of language - both in terms of how much he uses it (the CSIROCARE staff commented that he is 'talking all the time' now), and in terms of the sort of things he says.
Recent noteworthy developments have been "Amen" at the end of grace before meals, joining in with a few bits of songs (mostly echoing words he recognises - "round", "car", "swish", "beep"), "please" and (less often) "thank you", "hug" and "cuddle".
But top of the list for me - Jeyanth can now say the "y" at the end of words like "Teddy". So as of last week, I have become "Daddy" instead of "Dada". A particually pleasing development when combined with "hug"....
I know that those of you who are already aware of my fastidious atitude to what Jeyanth eats are already raising your eyebrows, but I've been warming up to this rant for a while, so I'm going to have it out!
We take most of our toddler-rearing advice from the good Dr Eisenberg's "What to Expect..." book. And she advocates two pretty sensible principles which we try to follow. These are:
(1) Children should be given the opportunity to eat, but never pressured to eat or distracted/entertained etc into eating. The point here is that children should learn to associate food with hunger and not be trained to eat out of habit or rule.
(2) It does not matter how much they eat, but only what they eat. I think there are two points here; first that kids will eat as much as they need, as long as we're not filling them up with high calory low nutrition stuff, and the second, that toddler diets are just as much about forming good long term habits and tastes as it is about day to day nutrition.
Given the widely varying and unpredictable apetites of toddler, I find these principles useful - since they absolve me from worrying about what I can't control (his apetite), but instruct me on what I can control (what I put on offer).
So, where's the rant, I hear you ask....
The rant is about the absolute dirth of supermarket available food that actually stands up to nutritional scrutiny.
Breakfast: - I've pretty much given up buying anything made by Kellogs, since they don't seem to make anything unsweetened. However, Uncle Tobys and Sanitarium are filling in this gap (Weeties, Puffed Wheat, & the slightly-sweetened Wheat-Bix) - but I have been reduced to buying puffed rice from the "health food" section. Thankfully, Jeyanth is perfectly capable of polishing off a giant bowl of cereal in the morning without adding a trace of sugar. More variety would be nice though.
Dessert: Has anyone identified a brand of yoghurt, fromage frais or other convenient healthy desserts that are just a 'little' bit sweetened. Most flavoured yoghurts have similar amounts of sugar to ice-cream (15-17%)- even the 'junior' ones. Given that Jeyanth has recently developed an aversion to lumps in his yoghurt (he was perfectly happy with chopped fresh fruit in plain yoghurt till a month ago). I decided to compromise by buying sweet fruit flavoured yoghurt and plain unsweetend yoghurt and mixing them till they I'd reduced the sugar %. However, this got silly when I couldn't get fruit flavoured yoghurt that didn't have bits of fruit in it, so I had to strain the lumps out before I blended. Current solutions include honey sweetened yoghurt from the deli which is only 12% sugar, so it leaves out the straining, but sadly, it leaves out the fruit too. Maybe I need to start pureeing my own fruit!
Anyway - this rant is also a bit of a plea for help. If any of you out there have found any form of healthy convenience food - I would love to know. I currently cook all of J's main courses, but it would be nice to have a few options for things like breakfast, snacks and dessert that were off-the-shelf but not high-calory junk!
Having said that rain was a novelty in Sydney in my last entry, we've just had about 20mm of the good stuff dumped on us in the course of about 20min in one of the most spectacular storms I have seen. I mean, you've all seen heavy rain made virtually horizontal by gusts of wind, but there were a few minutes when buffetting rain coming over the roof of our house looked more like there were ocean waves breaking against it.
The reason this makes a blog entry is that Jeyanth and I had to be involved in a small emergency flood mitigation excercise around the house. Because I knew that there was a storm water drain next to our driveway that is often prone to getting blocked with leaf litter, I went out to check that it was draining cleanly, because otherwise the floodwater banks up against the house, and eventually gets under the garage door. However, because of the loud thunder, there was no chance of me leaving Jeyanth inside while I nipped out for a quick look. Since I could get to the drain while still sheltered by the porch, I picked him up and carried him outside to investigate. (The dogs were having kittens (in a manner of speaking) inside.)
Not only was the drain near the garage door blocked, and the water building up to be a couple of inches deep, the water level was rising to a level where it was actually starting to threaten the front door step. There is another drain, very near the front door, but that too was semi-blocked. The heavy rain had washed off fresh wood-mulch that we had spread on all the garden beds, and this stuff was piling up on the drain holes.
So, with excited toddler on one arm, and rain, hail, lightning, thunder and howling dogs in accompaniment, I spent a pretty frantic 15 min running back and forth from one storm water drain to the other, cleaning away the mulch, trying to get the water to drain away fast enough so that we didn't have a flood in our front hallway.
We managed. Actually, we appear to have been quite fortunate, since other than the near flood and one potted tree which got blown over (since uprighted without any bad damage), we didn't suffer much harm. Our neighbours lost a tree, which split down the middle and fell over, narrowly missing doing serious damage to their car. And according to the news reports all sorts of havoc appears to have been wreaked.
Yesterday I had a day off work, and so spent my first full day with Jeyanth for a few weeks. He managed to play me for a fool most of the day, but couldn't quite keep it up...
One of Jeyanth's favourite activities at the moment is taking CDs out of the drawer where they live and generally scattering them around the local vicinity. Throughout the afternoon I would ask Jeyanth to put one or more CDs back into the drawer, only to be met with a blank look of incomprehension.
Towards the end of the afternoon I decided to let Jeyanth watch a little bit of Teletubbies (we let him watch about fifteen minutes every few days now he's turned 18 months). So I told him that "We'll have some Teletubbies after we've put these CDs away". Without a moment of hesitation Jeyanth set about picking up the CDs, shoved them into the drawer (allbeit in a rather haphazard fashion), pushed it closed and turned the TV on.
Don't understand what Daddy is asking you to do, eh?