First day of school and other adventures

This year my boys are both in school. Jacob started first grade and Trevor is going to preschool three mornings a week, which has been a love/hate relationship. Jacob has been absolutely loving it. I was wondering how the adjustment would be for him to go from 2 1/2 hours of kindergarten to six hours of all day school. He was ready for school at the end of summer. Of course we're in New York where school starts after Labor Day, which was Sept. 6th this year. Oh don't worry, school doesn't end until the third week of June. Here's pictures of all of them on the first day of school.


We've been dealing with sickness this last month. Jacob ended up with a pretty nasty case of poison ivy that took two weeks to completely heal. His body was caked with a monstrous rash that he was ferociously scratching. He eventually had to be prescribed a two week dose of steroids to get rid of it. I'm sure we'll go through that again at some point, but at least I'll know what I'm dealing with now.

Lexi had hand, foot and mouth disease. I sat down to put on her shoes one morning and saw a whole bunch of little blisters on her feet. I immediately thought that her shoes were too small, which was comical to me since her next foot size is an 8! I later realized that she had a rash when I changed her diaper and then I checked her hands which also had little pimply looking blisters. I quickly thought of how terrible hand, foot, mouth was when Jacob had it when he was 14 months old. He screamed for hours and hours in the middle of the night. We had no clue what was wrong and decided to take him for a drive in the middle of the night in hopes that he would fall asleep. After two hours he finally relented. I don't think Wayne and I could hear for two days from the constant ringing in our ears from his high pitched screaming. Thankfully Lexi just skipped out on some meals and needed some extra love and comfort. After three days it was pretty much gone.

A few days later Trevor came down with hand, foot, mouth. I thought that he would handle it fine since Lexi's didn't seem to be too bad. Boy, was I ever wrong. It was Jacob revisited. He developed a massive sore the size of a quarter on the bottom right side of his tongue. At first I thought it was a canker until it grew exponentially and looked like part of his tongue had been eaten away. He screamed and screamed. He refused to eat and drink. I could tell that he was thirsty. We tried all of his favorite drinks and were slightly successful. He ended up drinking about three glasses of liquid each day for two days. As soon as he sipped up through the straw he would cry and tell us how much it hurt. On the third day the sore had turned pure white. I didn't know what that meant, but Wayne checked it out and said that it was healing. I tried to take a picture of the nasty sore, but Trevor would have none of it. Here's a picture of him voicing his displeasure.



And lastly, Lexi and I posing after she insisted on taking a picture.