So for most people, the holidays fill them with scale dread. But last night proved that I had no such worries in store. There is almost nothing at a Thanksgiving Dinner without some sort of dairy in it - butter, condensed milk, whip cream, you name it, it all comes from a cow. Last night I was able to eat turkey, cranberry sauce, and some hummus that I brought. That's it. Oh, and an apple pie that I made with margarine instead of butter in the crust, which was pretty freakin' good, if I do say so myself. So this morning I jumped on the scale and I've lost another couple pounds thanks to hockey practice. Silver linings, right? Sort of. Any more and I'm going to be jeans shopping again. I wonder if Levi's had a frequent shopper discount?
Normally, I might have treated myself to a night off from this dairy/beef-free diet, but Thea hasn't been doing so well with the allergy thing lately. I think there is a new allergy in the mix, or else I ate something inadvertently that had dairy in it and she's just really that sensitive. Anyway, she has rash all over her stomach and in some other areas, too. And let's not even talk about the diaper issues she's had of late. I'm pretty sure she has a reaction to tomatoes, but she also had real problems with an exposure to some jimmy dean turkey sausage, so it could be an additive thing. Hard to tell. Harder to cope with since we can't take her to the doctor until we have insurance again for the month of January thanks to a 4-day forestry class. Those tests aren't cheap, even locally. If she were acting like it was bothering her more, we would just do it, but she's pretty cheerful and seems to be developing OK, so we'll just wait and keep trying to figure it out on our own. But it is hard.
Thea has her first word. Doh - which translates into dog. And cat. And a few other things she points at randomly. But always dog, so that's a word in my book. Liam's was Cah for cat. Different strokes. She's still not walking, though she could. She prefers to trail after you with a firm pant-leg grasp. I had a dream yesterday night that she started walking when I was in pursuit of her somewhere - she just let go and started running away. Let's nope it's not a preview.
The other BIG thing that is happening this week is Liam is learning to read. Every six months or so, I've tried working with him on reading, and he would always get discouraged and lose interest. Not this time. He's doing it. He's really getting it - though he occasionally tries guessing instead of sounding things out phonetically. But he's getting a lot of words through memorization, as I predicted he would. "The" for example, is solidly in there. He has a tough time with vowels and J vs G, but he's excited about it, and so am I. I think it will be a fast learning curve. I bet he's reading small books by Hawaii at this rate.
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