This past weekend was a hurricane weekend, quite literally. On Saturday afternoon, we watched Hurricane Irene trudge up the East Coast and our Pennsylvania sky darken with the impending storm. The rain eventually came in, as did the wind. Everything seemed a bit tame—as far as hurricanes go—but as I was putting the kids to bed, the lights went out.

The electricity didn’t come back until Monday morning, so our Sunday was a bit frazzled, though everyone was able to take a nap or two.

We did end up throwing a few things from the fridge because we weren’t overly prepared with frozen water jugs or a colder-than-usual fridge, so we now know what we need to do if we ever go through a hurricane again.

Things since then have become more normal, at least for me. When we got back from the vacation, I was just so overwhelmed with the kids that I could barely do anything else. I’m now helping out with dinner and the dishes, but I’m still finding it difficult to get all the toys put away at the end of the day. I try putting them away around 5 or 6, because that’s when everyone starts coming home from work, but there must be something in children’s minds that say to them, “Get those toys out of that box! They mustn’t be put away!” Then when that deed is done, they find something else to do that involves none of the toys they just took out.

As far as how the children are, I think both Liliana and Damien are doing well. Liliana should be seeing her GI doctor today where (hopefully) we’ll see that she’s gained some weight. Her stomach is filling out some more and I think it might be time to change the size of her G-tube button. In any case, she’s back on her periactin (the pharmacy didn’t have it for us before our vacation), which did help for a couple of days. After that, I think her omeprazole stopped working because it started breaking down (it’s compounded and is good for only 30 days).

I mentioned this to Liliana’s speech therapist, and she said that some people get the pharmacy to compound 2 weeks worth of medicine at a time because of the medicine breaking down early. This is definitely something I’ll bring up today at the GI appointment.

Damien is shakily cruising these days, and is also putting anything he can find into his mouth. So fun to go fishing in his mouth for anything he’s not supposed to have in there! He’s also turning all the way over when I’m trying to change his dirty diapers. The Huggies Little Movers Slip-On Diapers would sure be useful for him! They’re too expensive for my budget, though.

Okay, I should go check on Liliana and clean the car so we can go out later. Bye!