The Little guy

He is a bundle of energy, and incredibly headstrong. He seems to not even realize that he's thirsty at times. He takes a 25 ug pill of throxin, and we mix it into his milk or juice. He loves salty things, chips, and chicken; so, to kind of get him to drink his juice or his milk, I give him chips, so he gets thirsty. When he gets thirsty enough, he drinks the fluid with his medicine. Sometimes, though, he gets thirsty, and I think it must hurt him, because he starts to scream, and he seems to forget that the solution is to drink the fluid. If I try to stick the bottle into his mouth, he resists, and sometimes even tosses the bottle. If I tease him with the bottle, I often have a better shot at getting him to drink, because at some point he realizes that he is thirsty and he grabs the bottle. Lately, he has taken to rearranging our kitchen to the chagrin of my wife (and me). When we aren't looking, he will push a chair towards the kitchen counters, climbs on them to reach the cupboards, then he goes to great lengths to move the plates and things in the cupboards from one shelf to another. He is very careful, almost nothing gets dropped (in the last three weeks of this behavior he dropped exactly one coffee mug, and the handle broke, it just happened to be my wife's favorite, I just ordered two coffee mugs to replace it). He has a play school, and a farm with little people and animal toys. The toys came with a dvd which had them animated. He will sit quietly and watch this dvd for up to about half an hour. Well, since he was about ten months old, I have been playing abc songs and counting songs to him, there is wealth of them on You Tube, and lately he finds these tiresome. So, we have progressed, his interest seems to be in combined sounds and letters and in activities and actions of cartoon characters. I tried some of the Gumby cartoons which are on You Tube, he seems to like these too. The way I define like, is he will sit and focus on the material. Marginal liking is when he will not sit still, but will periodically return to see what is going on, and no longer liking is when he leaves and does not return to see what is happening. We have a video, which did the abcs phonetically, he listened to that for about half a year, and now when it comes on, if he doesn't leave he has a tantrum (lies on the floor kicking the floor). He seems to know his letters, he says them on sight for me and his mother. So, as I said, we are up to letter sounds and combining them on sight. He seemed to stay focused the last time we tried it, which was yesterday. More will come today, I hope. It's kind of amazing, he is almost 27 months, he doesn't exactly talk yet, but he almost seems ready to read. Today, his mom, him and I will go to the zoo. The petting zoo is a great thing, you buy these food pellets for half a buck, and they have these miniature goats, who want the food, so I sprinkle the pellets around him, and the little goats mob him. He is not afraid of them, and he seems to enjoy their attention. When he gets a little restive with the experience, we leave. This zoo has a small mammal exhibit, in which the second or third enclosure, is mercats behind a glass. When the little guy sees these animals, he tries to pet them through the glass, and he talks to them too. Those are all the small mammals he wants to see, he isn't particularly interested in monkeys or rats or squirrels. This zoo has an extensive aquarium, and the little guy likes to walk through that, he likes the area of the penguins, but not when they are in the water. My purpose at the zoo, is to motivate him to stay active and walking, after about an hour, he is usually done. We tried a merry-go-round, on the fourth spin, he had had enough. The operator was very gracious, and allowed us to get off. Every day is an adventure with the little guy.

A congenital sleep disturbance

I don't sleep much, haven't since college. Maybe due to how drinking might have affected my sleep center in my brain, perhaps because of being an athlete, and when I didn't work out, I just didn't feel like sleeping. I have enjoyed my extra time awake, I get to write, study and whatever else grabs me when I am awake that extra time, when no one else is available. In medical school, I had a painful abcess in my mouth, which kept me awake at times, and it enabled me to stay focused on my studies for more hours. And more is always better when you have so little time to learn so much. I finally went to the dentist, who pulled out a few rotten teeth, and then I was in my internship, we worked somewhere between 75 and 105 hours per week; after a call (when we worked for essentially two days, something we did in my hospital, every three days)I went to the gym, worked out for an hour, then went out dancing. Then slept a few hours, and went back to work. A day of call started normal time (usually about 7 am in the morning, when you went on morning rounds, that was when you told the resident supervising you about the patients you were following, and he told you what you had to get done that day for them). The call ended the next day, you were supposed to be allowed to go home early, but a typical day required you to go home at around five pm because you really had to get all your normal days work done before you signed out to the next intern on call. The reason you had to do all of your work, is because if you didn't, you ended up getting a similar extended list when you got back the next day, and your coworkers would dump on you, so you did your work as quickly as you could, and you made every effort to finish, and you did it as correctly as you could, because you would get reamed at morning rounds if anything was incorrectly done. The system worked to teach doctors to be thourough and quick, but it killed any regular sleep system you might have had. On call you might go to your call room and try to doze, but a nurse working the night shift might call you any time because she might need a signature or a doctor to figure out how to help a patient in distress. You were lucky to sleep two hours on a normal call, but you really couldn't complain, because it really helped you to become a doctor, it helped to drum in the language of medicine so you could speak it and think it no matter how tired you were. It was quite an interesting process. But the sleep part of it, well, I still don't sleep much, I sleep about three to five hours most nights, and I don't seem to miss the sleep that much. However, Jason seems to be aware of when I wake, and sometimes he anticipates it, and he is awake already. He wants me to do stuff with him at two and three in the morning. I don't want to, not because I'm not awake, but because I'm a little selfish, and I want to write, or read email, of just goof off. Lately, though, I have decided to play games with him on the computer, or watch educational videos with him or sing songs. This usually lasts about an hour to two hours, eventually he goes back to sleep, but not without some serious protesting, then he sleeps later, and I usually can get my jogging in. I fear he's kind of learning my erratic sleep habits. But, I think sleeping is over rated anyway.