Abigail has been making lots of new developments lately! She’s finally interested in wearing underwear, even though she’s been using the toilet for quite some time - she would previously insist on still having a nappy or a pull-up. The new underwear interest may have something to do with the fact that she’s got a chart and when she’s been wearing underwear for 10 days she gets to have a Play-Doh toy as a reward. (I think this is a pretty good deal myself. It doesn’t even stipulate that the underwear wearing has to be accident free. Of course, she pretty much IS accident free anyway..)
This week she’s also moved up into the Kindy Room, from the Junior Kindy Room. She’s a little bit sad about not being with Jane anymore, who is the “teacher” in the Junior Kindy, but we have been reminding her how big she is and how clever and how good it is that she is now with lots of her friends who had already moved up. The rooms are not vastly different, but there are more children in the Kindy Room and they have a bit more guided thoughtful discussion about the topics that they get interested in rather than the much more relaxed chatting that is in the Junior Kindy with the younger kids. The children also have an assigned “News” day when they can bring something to show or tell the group about something interesting. I suspect Abigail will need to be strongly encouraged for this as she’s not big on addressing groups. Of course, that is the point of it, to help them get used to talking to a group of people and it’s much more relaxed than if they first had this kind of thing happen when they get to school. She’s brought things to show a couple of times in the Junior Kindy so I think she’ll be ok with doing it sometimes, but I can’t imagine she’ll want to do it every week. 
And the most impressive, I think, is that it has just clicked for her how to use a mouse. Pun intended, of course. She’s moved the mouse around before and just indiscriminately clicked the buttons but never really seemed to register that when you move it to certain places and click it then it makes things happen. She’s obviously been watching though. The kids often “chat” to my mum on MSN, and the chat window was left active on the computer but it wasn’t connected. I heard the outgoing call sound and turned around and she announced “I did it. I put Nanna on.” She did it again a little later when they’d been disconnected and was doing winks and nudges too, and figured out how to replay the winks, much to her and Kristian’s amusement. They stood there giggling like maniacs as she kept replaying the breakdancing boy and the smacking lips kiss. They danced along with the music for the dancing boy and for some reason Kristian screamed at the kiss which made her shriek and laugh uncontrollably, which made him laugh, which made her laugh more … Then Stephanie decided to join in and that was when my ears exploded. Later on she decided she was finished with Nanna and wanted a digger instead, so I showed her how to navigate previous and next pictures on flickr and how to make the video play again.
Here are a few of the recent pictures she’s taken, too.
Abigail has had a bit of an adventure this week. After enjoying a lovely Midsummer feast on Saturday, she got to sleep over at Nanna and Grumps’ house all by herself, since she’d never done so before. However, on Sunday morning she was a bit too drowsy still. Even up to about 10am she just laid in bed with Nanna, and when I arrived she barely fluttered her eyes open to see me before drifting off again. We asked if she wanted breakfast, which she sleepily agreed that she did, and so we got her up and bought her out to the lounge. When I gave her the breakfast, she couldn’t wake up enough to eat it. She fell asleep with the toast halfway to her mouth. Her hand trembled as she was holding it.
We took her to the doctor who advised us to take her to the Children’s Hospital. So off we went there. We didn’t have to wait very long for her to be seen because the doctor had written us a letter and said that he thought there was a possibility she had diabetes. The doctor that we saw at the hospital didn’t seem to know what was wrong with her, I think he thought maybe she had a virus or something like that. Then she wanted a drink. So we passed her drink bottle to her and she drank. And drank. And drank. It was nothing new to us but the doctor’s eyes just about popped out of his head. He asked some more questions about that and then said he wanted some urine and blood. He was going to get one of those urine bag things but my mum said well she will go on a potty, can’t you use that and it would be less traumatic for all? So the dickhead brings back a little urine sample cup. No, we said a potty. Not balance her on a full sized toilet while trying to hold a cup under her. She hated it, of course, so we had to stick the bag on anyway. Since we were sitting in the ER waiting room and holding her, the bag filled up fairly easily once she peed. After a little while they took us to a procedure room to put a cannula in and take some blood. That was not nice. But she obviously still felt out of it because while she cried she didn’t really struggle or fight against it at all. (Or she may have been scared into stillness by the scary Santa Claus toy thing they had hanging above the bed. It played music but the nurse said he was only allowed to do one song at a time or else he got too annoying. Since Abigail isn’t a fan of Mr Claus, I doubt she appreciated the demonstration.) From there we went to the short stay ward where we were for a couple of hours. They gave her some saline in a drip, I think 200mL. She slept on the bed for a bit and on me for a bit. And then the drink she’d had and the drip liquid caught up with her and .. whoosh. She peed right through the relatively new nappy (that only went on when the urine bag came off just before the cannula went in), soaked her own shorts, moderately soaked my shorts, made a big wet patch on the chair and even left a large puddle on the floor.
The doctor came back after a time and pulled the curtain closed around her little bed area. He went to get a box of tissues because I was crying a bit because she was so unlike herself and she had this big thing on her arm and it was worrying and sad. I said to my mum that he was going to tell us something bad, otherwise he wouldn’t have pulled the curtains shut. What he said was that they suspected a condition called diabetes insipidus. (It is nothing at all to do with the more familiar condition that we generally call diabetes. The ‘diabetes’ part of the names is derived from a greek word and depending on the translation, roughly means ‘to pass through’ or even ‘to siphon’ and is in reference to the increased urine output that is common in both conditions.) Basically it means her kidneys don’t absorb and retain water properly, and most of what comes in is lost again straight away through the urine. They do everything else properly, removing the waste and stuff, they just can’t concentrate it like urine usually is, which is why Abigail wees a lot and it’s really weak.
Because Abigail is very shy and very attached to her own processes of doing things she wasn’t doing well at being in the hospital. She wasn’t having any immediate treatment done, all that they were doing was asking me to tell them how much she was drinking and then weighing her nappies to determine how much she was peeing. (They weighed a bunch of nappies and wrote the weight of each one on the front before they gave it to me so that when they weighed the wet nappy afterwards they knew how much to subtract for the nappy weight. Luckily she is used to having things written on her nappies because we have to write her name on them when she goes to kinder.) On the Tuesday they tried to do a first morning urine collection and get blood as well, which was only eventually moderately successful and resulted in Abigail having three holes in her arms. We don’t know what those tests showed as we requested to be transferred into the outpatients clinic so that we wouldn’t have to stay in hospital. So we need to wait until they send us an appointment time to go there to see what the tests said and what the next course of action should be. It may be starting treatment or might be more tests. Depending on the results, we might also need to have Stephanie and Kristian tested as well, because some causes of diabetes insipidus are genetic.
So she’s back to normal now and for the time being all we need to do is be aware of the situation and ensure she has plenty available to drink, because she is more prone to dehydration than other people. That’s probably what happened on Sunday, she got mildly dehydrated after having a big day on Saturday and spending the night in an air-conditioned bedroom.
As you can see, the site is having somewhat of a makeover. I decided I really should do something useful with them so I’m setting up Wordpress for each of them and automagically bringing in the photos from flickr. I haven’t done wordpress before so the formatting is taking some time to tweak to my satisfaction. I have only been doing Abigail’s site so far; once I get it all right, I’ll just copy the whole lot over to Stephanie’s and Kristian’s and change the relevant bits and give them each a unique colour scheme.
I plan on posting videos of the kids and perhaps little interviewy things too, to get them to share with the world their insight on various topics. Once Stephanie sees her blog up and running I expect she might even want to write entries herself. (That will of course depend on me fixing their computer, which requires the old ‘format and reinstall’.)
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