As you may know, I participate in the message boards at the Infant Reflux Disease site. Since Jonah is transitioning to solids – I’m speaking it into existence, people – I’m reading about how other children with GERD/reflux have fared.  Here’s a quote from a recent post:

“Meal times must be with family for socialization and modeling purposes. In my feeding clinic, I offer 3-4 foods at most during a meal. If there is gagging, it is ignored. If there is vomiting, I throw a towel over it and we continue to eat. I do not blink an eye and that is what I teach my parents to do. My patients have their parents so conditioned to freak out, that they typically get their way. All they have to do is gag or vomit when a new food is introduced.”   Robynne Elkin, MOT, OTR/L, CKT

Tough love! We’ve tried from the very beginning to minimize our reaction to the gags/vomits, with varying degrees of success (when it’s the sixth time you’ve been drenched that day, sometimes it’s hard to suppress a few well-chosen words of frustration). I offer Jonah porridge from a spoon once a day and he’ll between a teaspoon and a couple of tablespoons. He gags frequently, but I keep shoving it in there anyway. It’s right before he gets a bottle, so there’s not a lot to bring up even though he tries.

Amy, from The Texture of Things, commented on my preemie clothes info the other day....she has a preemie daughter with food issues as well. You can read more about her experiences here.

One of my faithful readers has requested a Benja-Tale. Seems most of my posts the last few days have been about Jonah, little rascal that he is. Benjamin is doing headstands. On the tile floor. This is one reason why we still have a nagging concern about his brain capacity. He has also started shrieking like a stuck pig, sometimes when he’s frustrated and sometimes just for fun. Jonah doesn’t like it. Benjamin also had great fun playing with his friend Heidi last night (we won’t tell Bob what a flirt he was).

And finally, picture a diorama with a small pom-pom chick alone in a dollhouse-sized crib with the caption: “Abandoned once again in his padded bunker, Jonas plotted a swift and sweet revenge. ‘Sleep with one eye open, Mother.’” This is one of many hilarious vignettes in the book Bitter With Baggage by Sloane Tanen and Stefan Hagen. You can see excerpts here.

But who’s the more wacko? The wacko or the wacko who isn’t sure how to spell the plural of “wacko?”

A lot of people still look at Benjamin and Jonah and assume they are identical twins. You can tell they are brothers, but they look very different from each other. A couple of days ago a woman assumed they were identical and I said that actually they’re fraternal. She said, “No! They look exactly alike!” With a polite smile, I said something along the lines of: “When you look closely [HINT: GET GLASSES, YOU FREAK], they are actually quite different.” She shrugged her shoulders and said with a huff, “If you say so!” Damn straight, I say so! Good grief, woman!

Anyhoo…..Jonah is skinny, curious, and flexible. This is a dangerous combination for a crawler. He emptied his toy bin then climbed inside it. A few minutes later it tipped over and he landed smack on his head. I was holding Benjamin so it took me several seconds to get to him. He was doing that silent screaming and couldn’t actually emit a sound until I had been holding him for another several seconds. Eek – that was a bad one. A few hours later I left him alone for literally 15 seconds and I found him sitting on top of a paper ream box, happy as can be. We may have to install a climbing wall on the patio to satisfy these vertical urges.

The first night we each had a budget of $20. We played a bit of roulette, some blackjack, then more roulette. Lost everything, but learned a lot and it was fun, especially the people-watching aspect. We went back the following night with the same budget. Jonathan won back everything we lost spent both nights – and then some- in blackjack. I played roulette.

At one point I saw a young woman put down a chip in the winning number after it had already won. I was the only one at the table who noticed. I waited to see what would happen – it was clear she hadn’t meant to – and I wanted to see what she would do when she realized her mistake. The dealer saw her chip, prepared a large stack of chips, and placed them in front of her. I watched as she slowly realized what happened and she pointed out her own mistake. Veddy, veddy interesting. After that, all the dudes in suits watched her quite closely.

This picture is Jonah in the bassinet on the plane ride home from Montevideo last week. You cannot reserve the bassinet, nor are you guaranteed the plane will even have one (which it didn’t on the way down). And, unless you’re in first/business, the only row you can use it is the bulkhead.  The next picture is a very tired Jonah waiting an hour for our luggage in customs (mechanical failure of some sort, we were told).

A customs officer reprimanded me for taking photos in the customs area and was annoyed by my indifferent shrug. “Yes, officer, I am photographing my son because I forced him to swallow a bag of cocaine before we left. Also, we have several endangered parrots in our luggage because we have the time and energy to care for them as well as two 11-month-old boys on this trip.”

An aside:  someone asked me recently where we got the preemie clothes  for our boys. Knowing beforehand they would be preemies, I bid on a few lots of preemie clothing on Ebay and got seven gently-used outfits for less than $20, shipping included. But had I not known ahead of time, I would’ve gone to Wal-Mart – it offers a good selection of cute and comfortable preemie outfits. Try to look for kimono-style outfits – they are the easiest to put on and take off of any newborn, especially the tiny ones!