Visit With My Son Today (Very Good!)

The visit with my son today was very, very, good. He was very happy and talkative and even the monitor knew something was different. She commented too, that he must have been sick before because he was SO markedly different today.

He was so HAPPY and eating again, and just seemed cared for and healthy. Skinny still, but like he's putting it back on.

Both I and the monitor were very suprised. But if he'd had 104+ fever before, that would explain a lot. He seemed emotionally not very well last visit though, like something was wrong, and this time, he was just totally different.

I will have to detail the visit, but I mean, it was like a new kid. He was confident, polite, happy, talkative, affectionate, speaking well, and while it seemed he had or was getting a little stuffed up with a small cold, he was just totally renewed.

Part of it, too, could have been that he seemed to have really enjoyed the party yesterday, last night, and he talked about the cake and how he got to play with his best friend Danny. I could tell he'd had a lot of fun and felt loved or better health-wise too. No marks out of the ordinary either.

I had asked Pablo and Holly, least time I talked to them, if they played with him hands on instead of just putting on t.v. and Pablo said yes, but really, he acted like a brand new boy. I think it must have been a really horrible illness or flu he was fighting before but it's gone now.

He talked about SO many things, and I'll write about all of it in detail. It was really cute.

I feel really strong today, and good. Last night, something wasn't right for a little while, I felt this different energy, but since this morning, I feel great and my son was great. I mean, this morning I was upset to find another item of clothing was gone, but I am okay about it. I just feel 100% strong again. It's the strangest thing. It feels like all the prayers of the world in a way, or just a feeling of being whole or something. It's hard to describe. Something is right even if many things are wrong, something is right. But I don't want anyone interpreting this to mean it's about anyonein particular or anything. It is mainly, I think, about a general sense of what might be going on in the world or that people somewhere or someone, is directing good thoughts or prayers my way.

I also got the results from the psych eval, which I haven't opened up or read. I'm not going to freak out. If it's something really "out there", I will just get another eval. If it's something that I don't agree with but I can somehow tolerate, even if I totally disagree and KNOW it's not true, I'll just go along. I mean, I'll just go along for the sake of getting my son back. If it's totally nutso, where I couldn't possibly get him back because I sound like such a nut, I will have to get a different eval. But I'll go with the flow. I just want my son.

I don't think I'll cry or anything. I'll probably start laughing. But it doesn't matter. If it's halfway tolerable in following a "plan of remedy" I'll do it. Even if, on the side, I might document how it's not true and start videotaping myself to show what I'm "really" like.

My son got really wide eyes and was really happy today when I said we might get to see eachother more pretty soon. I was teling him it might just be a little bit more, a few weeks, and then we would. He was really happy about this and when he left, I let him go without a hug and kiss because he was already out the door and being led along. He stopped and turned around and walked back to the door and said, "I forgot your hug and kiss" and came back to me and gave me a big hug and kiss. HE remembered and didn't want to leave without it.

I'm going to get coffee (courtesy the kind folks at Jiffy Lube, haha) and then write about our visit and things he said. It was wonderful.
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So I saw him when he walked in and he hid his face in a blanket after getting a big grin on his face. This is his routine, like he's shy. Then he went to the office with his face in the blanket and I stayed outside so he could find me through the glass, as he did, and had a huge grin on his face. Huge. Then I went in and he was still doing his routine of being shy, and then I said, "Do you want to see what I've got?" and his curiosity always helps him to get going. So we went to the other room and he seemed, right away, much healthier, even if he was still so thin.

Then we were in the room and I showed him I had the makings for steak tacos. So he took a tortilla and was eating it plain and then I asked him if he wanted to cut the cheese for me, and I gave him a butterknife. He felt the end and said "It's not very sharp!" and I said, "No, but if you use a knife you always need a grown-up with you, okay?" and I helped him cut pieces. So then he decided he didn't like the cheese (hard cheddar) and wanted steak. I cut it and he enjoyed squeezing the lime over it and then, it was hilarious, because it wasn't sirloin and was flavorful but sort of chewy and he made back-of-the-throat gagging noises. I said, "Do you need some juuice?" and he nodded. Then he said, "It's stuck in my teeth" and was trying to pick out bits of steak from his teeth. I don't know why it's funny except that it's true, and then coming from a 3 year old, sounds really funny. He liked it though.

He was also proud to show me his pizza and the other things his aunt had packed for him.

Then, he wanted to play Hi-Ho Cherry-O and we did. He pretended we were eating the cherries and tried to "pick" the stem from the cherry. He then wanted to play Scrabble but that was short-lived, and then we played with a puzzle and the animal noises. Oh, he picked all the sticker stars off of the board. Finally, he wanted to read books and made all the sounds to "Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?" and he knew the words of the book ahead of time. Then I read some "What Violet Sees" baby einstein books about birds and he said he wanted to read more books about birds. There were not any other books about birds.

Then, the most interesting thing, to me, was how he was so into "tracking". He kept talking about "the tracks" of the bird, and the boots, and the rabbit, and "tracks" and "tracking" was a big theme today. I asked him, "Would you like to be a tracker?" and he said, "Yes!" He was even talking about the "tracks" of the dripping strawberry ice-cream from a different book, a Sesame Street book, but he was really into "tracks". I just thought, "He is not going to be a hunter." Over my dead body. Wait. Umm, I think I might want to rephrase that. But seriously, I don't like hunting. Tracking, sure, and I don't know what all of that is about, but not hunting. Hunting for survival or if you live on a farm or something, and that's about it. Sure, pheasant fettucine now and then. I don't need a sink full of dead birds and animals and I am NOT going to pluck or gut anything! I don't want him to see anything get killed either. He's 3 and I know Pablo is a good marksman, from what I hear, but I don't want my son seeing anything getting killed. But, I think he would LOVE to follow some "tracks" and make finds. He would probably get a serious thrill out of learning different kinds of tracks and following a trail.

He liked having me use different voices for a Sesame Street book about Snuffles with the sniffles. It was in this book that he was talking about and pointing out how the drips of ice cream were "tracks" to the melting ice cream container on another page. I plugged my nose for Big Birds voice and he wanted to help so he plugged my noise and did it at just the right time and then would let go and allow me to continue.

Then we looked through a magazine with a mermaid and a diver on it. I told him mermaids were make believe and from our imagination but scuba divers are real. We went through the magazine and he really got into it. "What's that?" and "What's that?" he wanted to know. Sue was a big help because she knew more about aqua-marine life than I do. My SON recognized an odd angle of a turtle before I did. I thought it was a fish but he was able to look at it from a different perspective and knew before I did, what it was. I had been saying, "Hmmm, I don't know WHAT kind of fish THAT is!...Hmm...I wonder what kind, maybe this will say?" and then my son bursts out, after looking with me for over five minutes as I searched for a caption, he said, "It's a TURTLE!" and it wasn't. I had thought it was a fish face that I was seeing. He loved looking at the big mouth of the whale, and the stingray and he said, on his own, about the coral reefs, "It's beautiful!" The way he says beautiful, when it's so serious, is really cute. He recognized, on his own, the jellyfish, starfish, and seahorse. I pointed out the seahorse and said, "Do you remember what this is?" and he said, "A horse". I said, "Yes, it's a seahorse."

Then he wanted me to put tatoos on him and then wanted me to put tatoos on me. I asked him, "What do you want for a tatoo?" and he said, "My blanket". His lightening McQueen blanket. I said to him it was a good idea because people choose things for tatoos that are meaningful but then I started to draw it and he decided mommy wasn't doing a very good job and didn't want anymore work done. So he said he would give me a tatoo. He asked me what I wanted and I said I didn't know, what did he recommend? and he said, "A star" and then he drew a smiley face.

The monitor noticed how particular he is and how he really does know what he wants. There was a chair pushed in next to the table and he wanted to sit down to eat at the table but without thinking twice, he just moved the one which was already there, and exchanged it for a different one. Sue and I laughed and she said, "He knows what he wants!" The chairs were almost the same, I mean, small chairs for kids, but he didn't want the one that went with the table. He gave a lot of hugs and was sort of more like a little boy of five or six today than a toddler. He seemed very grown up today. Even the way he slung his arm around my shoulders, it was so boyish but mature.

He gave me many impromptu kisses and hugs. It was really sweet. He was putting a lot of ideas together, into words today, but I can't remember everything right now.

At the end, he wanted to take everything with him that I had brought, including the large bottle of mild green hot sauce but we convinced him I would take this home and bring it for some other time.

My aunt said there were relatives or friends from Mexico there, maybe staying? I don't know, but he seemed to be in good spirits for whatever reason, whether he just felt healthier, or got more attention, or whatever. I noticed he didn't even suck his thumb while I was reading (which I would never discourage) but it was like he was in better spirits already so just enjoyed himself instead of feeling like he needed to be comforted and was so reluctant to leave and acted depressed. He's had a good couple of days I think.

He took his calendar with him, which I drew out, and he didn't want me to fold it but wanted it all in one piece. Oh, and I asked him if he'd watched any part of "So You Think You Can Dance" on Fox and he said yes. I had called my aunt that night when it was on and asked her to turn it on so Oliver could see it if he wanted. I used to watch it all through my pregnancy and he would dance around to the music and I thought he'd enjoy seeing some "moves". I think it was just in the background, because he was playing, but it was good.