The 2nd day in Denver we headed out to the
zoo.
I called my brother, who currently
lives in Pueblo, around 8am to see if he had plans for coming up to Denver for
the weekend.
He said he did and the zoo
was just the kind of activity he wanted to do with his nephews so he jumped in
the car for a quick 2 hour drive.
Our
friend Dan from college, who also lives in Pueblo, also came up to see us (for some reason we have no pictures of Dan though I remeber taking some - must have been with his camera not ours). Turns out it takes the same amount of time to
get 2 boys dressed, fed and to the zoo (about 20 mins away for us) as it does
to drive from Pueblo so we all arrived at the entrance within about 15 minutes
of each other.
We spent the morning
looking at the animals and trying to keep Jaydon from realizing how tired he
was, Tylor was just happy not to be in the car...
By lunch time Jaydon had had enough and
we headed home for a nice long nap because we had a fun filled evening planned
ahead (or so we thought). We were going
to meet up with Nate and his family at Casa Bonita to join their son’s birthday
party. We arrived about 2 hours late
(Jaydon was not civilized the first time he woke up from his nap so we let him
get another few hours of rest before heading out).
For those who haven’t experienced Casa Bonita it's a kid centric Mexican themed
restaurant with a waterfall stage for silly skits and high divers.
When we showed up the line to get in was
fairly long and it was loud – too loud for an overtired Jaydon. I think we had 3 melt downs before even
getting our food (it’s kind of cafeteria style). When we were getting seated we asked to join
the birthday party (they had several going on) but we didn’t recognize any of
the names listed. The hostess brought us around
the entire restaurant to look in on every party and we didn’t recognize any of
them. Steve was also trying to call,
text, and e-mail Nate to figure out what was going on. We finally gave up and got seated by ourselves; Jaydon had
no interest in eating so Uncle Mike took it upon himself to entertain Jaydon
while his very tired parents tried to eat.
Jaydon learned in Barcelona that riding Uncle Mike’s shoulders is a
great way to see everything (he’s like 6’5” or something).
A few, more melt downs later we decided to
call it a night. We learned later that
we had the wrong night, party was on Sunday not Saturday but we decided not to
try the adventure again the next night.
I don’t think Jaydon had quit the thrilling experience that Cartman did
for all you SouthPark watchers.
I’ve decided we will call this his anti-birthday because rather than having fun things like ice cream or cake Tylor gets to have antibiotics, antivirals, antihistamines and antifever medicine... 
So 2 weeks after Jaydon had Chicken Pox, Tylor got them - as expected it was a very mild case that hardly bothered him. Jaydon had been well for 1 week when he came down with a throat infection that starting his coughing fits up again. He went on antibiotics and 3 days later he was worse than ever, waking up every hour in coughing fits so hard they made him throw-up and spending most of the day crying saying no-no-no. 
I brought him back to the doctor and he had to have a chest x-ray that confirmed a bad case of bronchitis that required him to be hospitalized since he wasn’t responding to antibiotics. Since Tylor’s immune system was already in full gear with the chicken pox he also came down with a cough and the same day that Jaydon went into the hospital, Tylor started sneezing out yellow mucus. Since we weren’t sure what had made Jaydon so sick the pediatrician wanted to be cautious and put Tylor on 4 different medicines. Jaydons bronchitis was a viral one (which is why the antibiotics didn’t help) and after 2 days of IV fluids and some oxygen nebulization in the hospital he was ready to go home and spend the next week taking it easy. 
He lost over a kilo through this but fortunately Tylor made it through much better. All the medicine made Tylor sleep like a champ, he started going for 4-5 hour stints at night which was well needed since we were still up with Jaydon quite frequently to give him medicine and coax him back to sleep from coughing fits. Also, Tylor had reflux that made me feel like every time I was feeding him I was really just re-supplying the milk fountain that was soon to come but the medicine seemed to help him keep the milk in his stomach but it also caused him to be constipated which required more medicine (suppositories – fun!). 
I have a feeling it was all that sugar they put in medicines. Between Jaydon, Tylor and don’t forget Athena (see previous post)I was a regular pharmacist dispensing medicine on so many different intervals (6, 8, 12 hours) and so many different requirements (before/after/with food, before bed, as needed, when standing on your head – well you get the idea) that I had to keep track of it all on paper. And just to finish off July, we learned that Jaydon’s warts on his shoulders which had starting spreading quite badly were contagious and needed to be removed immediately so the first day of him going back to school (with what I thought would be a quick trip to the dermatologist before school) turned into a full body wart removal session with Jaydon coming home covered in band-aids and back on antibiotics again. It’s a good thing he’s such a trooper and that Tylor is to small to know any better… 
This was the only picture I got where both Jaydon and Steve were looking at the camera at the same time and Tylor sneezed :)
Well with Tylor, Mav has taken a whole different approach and has decided that there’s a lot more warm laps around that are (partially) available to him. 
Athena (our dog) stopped eating when we brought Tylor home. It took a few days to realize this in the chaos of bringing home a new baby but after 5 days of no food and Athena drinking tons of water I raced her to the vet in between Tylor feedings. At first they thought it was an issue with her liver, the cause unknown but could be anything from poisoning to cancer. After a few weeks of medications her blood work looked much better but her lymphoids were still very swollen. We finally decided to get a biopsy done to confirm the cancer suspicion since she wasn’t making any noticeable improvement on medication and it turns out that’s the culprit – lymphoma cancer. Apparently it’s very common in dogs and unfortunately the prognosis is not good. Most literature says average survival after detection is 2 months. There are some treatment options including chemotherapy but with 2 young kids in the house we’re not inclined to go that route and have decided that our priority will be quality of life rather than duration for Athena. She’s on cortisone treatments now and is responding well so far. Today, I realized how often I go to the vet because my autopilot has now been re-programmed for that route. I was supposed to be going to the toy store and had to take the long way because I went to the vet instead.
Tylor is finally a fully registered and documented citizen of the United States and now has his passport to prove it. 
We often get asked about Tylor’s citizenship since he was born in Qatar, well since both Steve and I are US citizens he is automatically a US citizen and we just have to fill out a few stacks of papers and coordinate a few meetings with the embassy to get all the documents in order. 
Tylor does not have Qatari citizenship, which is reserved for only the children of Qatari fathers (and a few sports professionals that the country wants on their team). 
Jaydon’s language skills have also advanced to the point where he can now say things, unknowingly of course, that can get us into trouble. The latest instance was in the grocery store. Jaydon piped up saying, “Mommy, that lady looks like a man.” Before my brain could process fully what he said I had already responded with a “what did you say” which of course meant that Jaydon repeated his statement, a little louder this time so I was sure to hear him. 
By this time I had realized what I’d done and been able to assess the man/lady of interest to Jaydon and decided that A – he was absolutely right (in the US you’d probably assume is was some weirdo putting on a skirt and earrings to get his shopping done but that stuff doesn’t happened here) and B – this was a good time to ignore Jaydon’s comment and become very engrossed in deciding whether to by the strip lions from the US, Australia or Brazil…
The sweltering weather and Jaydon’s chicken pox didn’t allow for us to do much. In his 10 day stay I think he left the compound only to visit the pediatrician and to find a new rug to add to his collection. He did spend lots of time snuggling with Tylor. 
He also introduced Jaydon to many of his fun gadgets like the i-pad. It has a feature where it will take the video feed and make it look like a thermal image – Jaydon thought it was great fun and spent many meals making faces and playing with ‘colorful’ Jaydon as he called it. 
Jaydon has also turned into a little comedian. When Tylor starts to get fussy I usually say, “time to swaddle Tylor” and Jaydon would usually respond with “don’t eat my babybrother!” 
The first few times he said this I assumed Jaydon was telling me not to feed Tylor since that was likely to be the next thing I did to calm Tylor down if swaddling didn’t immediately help. 
I finally realized that Jaydon thought I was saying swallow not swaddle so his response of ‘don’t eat my baby brother’ made so much more sense and was pretty funny too...
Yep, some Chicken Pox. A few weeks back there was a sign at his daycare informing all parents of a confirmed case in his class. Incubation period for Chicken Pox is 10-14 days and right on schedule Jaydon came out seeing spots. 
The pox stayed mostly on the trunk of his body and the worst ones were on is back and scalp. He also had a few on his lips that made eating tough for a couple days. He had a mild fever but the part that agitated him the most was not being able to see other kids. By the end of the week word had gotten around and even when he wasn’t contagious anymore the other nannies would hurry their kids out of the park when they saw Jaydon coming. He would come home all pouty saying he was sad because he had no friends. 
And yes, 2 weeks after Jaydon got the Chicken Pox, Tylor got them but that’s a whole other story. 
The Calamine lotion really helped but after the first day Jaydon wasn’t willing to sit still to let us apply it so I got him one of my old makeup brushes and let him ‘paint’ himself with the lotion. His chest got a thorough covering every night and it also healed the fastest and the scars are the least pronounced there. Steve even let Jaydon paint him one evening just to add to the fun of it all. 
Jaydon also really enjoyed the oatmeal baths (not the kind you eat - special Aveeno oatmeal stuff), what he actually liked was the idea of bathing in oatmeal then pouring the package into the water, squishing the chunks up (kinda like playing in the mud), then getting to use the showerhead attachment all by himself to rinse the tub afterwards. Now he expects it at every bath even though the Pox are gone. I’m not sure what we’re going to do to get him into the bathe once all our oatmeal stuff is gone…
