The Lieslands

Elliot’s first tooth just broke through: bottom-right.

Speaking of Cam, his band, The Sheds, are going to be on Studio 89 tonight at 9. If you are not in the cincy area, but want to check them out, WNKU will be streaming online.

The Sheds Website, with free music

WNKU’s streaming content

We had a fun weekend. Friday night we hung out with my parents. On Saturday we got some errands done, got measured for new carpet, took some naps, and then ended the day with dinner at Cam & Eli’s. We had a great time there, as always. We even got to go for a little swim in the camp lake, which was fun. Sunday we hung out at home for a while, had Emory over, took some naps, and then headed to the Y with Simon and Rachel.

Now we are ready for a busy week . . .

We read the JAMA article DrGreene recommended, recommended it to our doctor, who read it and spoke with a urologist at Children’s. The decision: parental decision. Great.

We think we are going to take him off. He seems to feel bad when he is taking it and we are going to keep a very close eye on his temp.

After a few weeks of careful consideration, and figuring out what our remaining options were, we have registered Andrew for a program at the Homemeadow Song Farm. It is a two day program will he will get to do some pretty cool stuff, on a regular basis. We are really excited about it, and Andrew is too.

The Little Red Hen’s Early Mornings

We went to the doctor yesterday to talk about Elliot. She said go see a urologist (which we will on Sept 5), but in the meantime start taking Bactrim, a prophylactic antibiotic, to keep him from getting another UTI, which could spread to his kidneys. So we started him on a very low dose of Bactrim.

No sooner than I sat down to write this post did I get an email, from DrGreene.com, whose website I linked to in my last post about Elliot. I had never communicated with him before, and I must have popped up on his radar because I linked to his site, which sent him some traffic.

Here is what he, or someone on his website’s behalf, has to say:

if preventive antibiotics come up as a possibility, you might want to talk with your pediatrician about a major new study in JAMA in July where there was no difference between the kids who go antibiotics and those who did not in the number of subsequent UTIs — but those who got the antibiotics were much more likely to get resistant infections. Everyone here is re-weighing the benefits vs. risks.

Great.

Since Elliot had a urinary tract infection a few weeks back, it was recommended that we have some tests done to make sure that his kidneys and his bladder are working properly, so today we headed to the hospital to get some tests done. Turns out that he has a little vesicoureteral reflux, or kidney reflux. Elliot has the mildest form, grade one, and will hopefully grow out of it. Tomorrow we see our pediatrician, to see what she recommends.

Everyone else is in bed, and I just got finished carving up my first whole chicken, so I thought I would take a minute to wind down/not fall behind on the blog.

We are just wrapping up a fun weekend here in the Liesland home. We started off the weekend with the La Leche League Pot-Luck on Friday night. It was hot, and there was a lot of dessert, so it was pretty fun.

We were back out again on Saturday to enjoy the Northside Yard Sale. We didn’t make it out until 11 and it was heating up. Holly came with us and did her best at reverse-bargaining. We came out with some fun stuff, including a new bike for Andrew.

Saturday afternoon we hit the Y, and then headed to Walt’s Barbeque on Cincinnati’s West Side. I would definitely recommend it. Cool place.

Today, Sunday, started off slowly. Susan slept until 10, and then Elliot slept until 12:30. Mari went down for her nap at one, Elliot went back down at 3, and then finally everyone was awake by 3:45, just in time for us to head to Home Depot to snag some new appliances. We got a new washer, dryer, dishwasher, and stove. Don’t worry, we have 10 days to figure out where we are going to store the old stove. I just can’t bear to have it taken away by people who will dis-respect it.

Later. . .

I added a new blog to our website called ‘Rob’s Books.’

https://liesland.com/books

I forgot about the early mornings. Elliot has been getting up earlier and earlier lately. This morning was the first time in a long time that we have been up before six. I don’t mind being up early, but I do have one rule: if you are going to get me out of bed early, then you have to be happy. I am still working on this one with Elliot. He is waking up too early for some reason, and he is not ready to be awake. Could be his cold, his teeth, his bowels, could be anything really. The worst part about the whole ordeal is that when we got our house ready to put on the market we out away our stereo, which means no NPR news in the morning. I usually turn on the Channel 5 news, which is mostly a daily update on homicides, car crashes, house fires, sexual offenses, weather, traffic, and the Reds score from last night. I miss my NPR.

Things have been going OK lately. Elliot is about half-way through his latest antibiotic. He had an ear infection and luckily this antibiotic does not appear to be messing with him too much.

I am headed to the doctor this afternoon so he can drain some fluid from my eye-lid.

Elliot is headed to the doctor next Monday for some kidney tests to make sure that the urinary tract infection he had earlier this month is not a symptom of something else.

It seems we need to do this every few months – get all the kids out of the car, have them run around, and then end up in new seats.

Elliot has outgrown his car-seat (setting a new Liesland record in the process), so we had to shift everyone’s seats. This always makes Andrew happy, because it means he gets a new seat.

The exciting and sad part of the whole ordeal is that it is just another step away from infancy for Elliot. Pretty soon he is going to be starting on food, which I can hardly believe.

As a parent, sometimes the hours are slow, but the days,weeks,months seem to fly by.