You may have read some of my references to our “monthly ER trips” in previous posts.  Well, the trip, or should I say trips, that got the most “attention” was the ones we had to make for Audrey over Memorial Day weekend.  We had been invited over to a friend’s house for dinner and the night started off great.  I should also note that just 4 days prior, we had made a trip to the hospital (we were lucky enough to get an “immediate appointment”) for Luke. 

He had tumbled off one of those little sit and scoot things at the RAC and some how face-planted and bit through his lip.  I wasn’t there, but knowing how mouths bleed and hearing Ann’s description of the events, it was pretty amazing with regard to the apathy people and workers at the RAC displayed.  Picture this, kid hysterically screaming, blood all over his face (rubbing hands in mouth and smearing on face), blood all over his shirt, blood all over Ann’s shirt and face, I mean it probably looked like Freddy Kruger got a hold of them.  Still, as Ann was frantically trying to get a clean wet rag and some ice, workers kind of nonchalantly hinted that she could “probably go buy a bottle of pop up in the restaurant if she needed something cold.”  So of course, Ann scrambles up to the café and while still having blood all over and a screaming baby, two ladies in line proceeded to ignore them and instead hold their place in line and made their order…asking for little sample of soup here, description of entre there…by this point Ann was so beside herself with astonishment, she just bit her tongue (pun intended) and waited.

Well, to make a long story short, I was called home to take Luke to the hospital just to make sure they didn’t want to do any stitches.  To the naïve eye (read, mine), it looked pretty bad.  I’m still “wondering” why I got sent to the hospital with the ‘beat up kid’…but I digress.  The doctor asks, “So how did he do it?”…”He fell off this bike type thing”…”Did he have a helmet on?”…as I hesitated envisioning Luke on a sit scooter about 7” high rolling around on a carpeted floor, contemplating how good the idea of permanently suiting up Luke with a helmet sounded…the doctor took my hesitation as “no” and proceeded to scold…”He really should have one on you know!”  I explained the situation and she seemed to buy it.  Good news was that there was no stitches.  So that was trip one.

Back to Memorial Day…Audrey and Josh were playing on a Rainbow play system with their friends (ironic part about that is that we had just purchased one and it was going to be installed 2 days later).  I had stepped inside to help out with Luke and anything else when Audrey is carried in by our friend balling hysterically.  At first site, this didn’t alarm me too much.  I’ve seen Audrey turn on the theatrics before.   Well, we were informed that Audrey had attempted to jump off the landing in the play system (probably 5+ feet up) and in doing so clipped her foot on the ladder and basically swan dived into the ground, putting her hands out to stop herself.  OK, I was a bit more concerned now.  After Audrey couldn’t settle down for a while, we decided to have Ann take her in (hey, we have to mix it up) to find out she broke her arm (note the singular).  She came home casted up in a purple cast and was in pretty good spirits.

So, what does the title of the post mean?  The next day, during toy pick up time, Audrey’s wheels start turning.  “Just so you know, I don’t think I can really pick up toys since I have a broken arm.”  She’s always getting out of picking up toys some how and most times it revolves around some sort of “injury” that happens when picking up (i.e. stub toe, stepped on toy, bumped knee, etc.).  Ann was quick to reply, “Well, you still have one good arm, so I think you’ll be all right,” then continued to pick up toys, heading back to Audrey’s room.  Audrey was determined to get around this “one good arm” loop hole though!  Of course, with Ann out of sight Audrey’s version of “picking up” is really just picking up the toy she wants to play with and then starts playing.  Well, the toy she wanted to play with at the moment was the kitchen set’s coffee pot.  And she wanted to put it into the microwave.  So she proceeded to stand on the step stool to put it in the microwave and somehow lost her balance and fell (just in case social services is monitoring this blog – it was an 8” step stool onto a carpeted living room).  Long story short, she was hysterical, Ann took her to ER again and came home with a brand new pink cast.  Déjà vu.

Obviously, we can read between the lines here and it seems clear to me she broke both on Memorial Day and just didn’t complain about her right arm on the first trip in…that and we just like to double up on ER payments for the fun of it.  In all seriousness, it was pretty hard for Audrey…every night for the first week or two she was waking up in pain and in a tired state, was pretty much inconsolable.  Needless to say, Audrey was pretty pumped when she had her casts taken off (video below).  Although, to the medically challenged, I was a bit surprised they took the casts off.  The before and after x-rays virtually looked identical, and the doctor basically said as much, but insisted that she should heal up just fine, barring any falls in the next month or so.  Note to Ann…let’s just skip Audrey picking up toys for a month or so.  Let’s just hope that she’ll find less traumatic ways to get out of picking up toys in the future!

So Luke’s new favorite saying is I’m stuck!  He basically uses it whenever something isn’t going quite right.  If he wants the childproof gate open to go somewhere, he starts yelling, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”. ..when he wants out of his crib after nap, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” …when Audrey is lovin’ all over him (i.e. pig piling on top of him), “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”…when he can’t reach the cookies in the pantry, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck! Cuckoo for cookie!”…you get the idea.

Well, the other night we almost had to make our monthly ER trip.  One of these days, I’m going to end up in jail walking into that place.  I don’t know how many more of the ‘stories’ they are going to buy from us .  I guess I’ll have to start sending Ann down there every time…I don’t want to spend a night in the clink.  Anyway, I was filling up the dishwasher after dinner and Luke was ‘helping’ (you can imagine what that means).  Josh, Audrey and Ann were in our room picking up something or other.  Luke grabbed a sippy cup from the draw and high tailed it towards the bathroom.  One of Luke’s favorite past times is standing on a step stool, turning on a bathroom sink and playing in the water with a cup.  For the most part he does a pretty good job of keeping water in the sink, but he does have one move that gets water all over (too hard to explain and doesn’t add to story).  When he does this move he gets removed from the bathroom and the door is closed.  This makes Luke mad, to say the least.  Well, Luke being the creative one of the bunch came up with a brilliant idea to stop Mom and Dad from seeing him pull off his move.  He runs into the bathroom and closes the door - laughing while he does it as if he’s dealing with a couple of idiots who’ll never know what he’s doing now.

Back to the night in question.  Luke’s sprinting towards the bathroom, laughing before he even gets there…runs in and slams the door (real subtle like).  I had a few more dishes to put away, so I thought I’d let Luke enjoy himself, regardless of how much he destroyed the bathroom.  No worries here…nothing a towel can’t clean up.  A minute later, I hear the famous (maybe not infamous), “I’m stuck!  I’m stuck!”.  Again, the boy who cried wolf was probably just having a hard time reaching the water to turn it on.  As I finished up the last few dishes, I casually walked to the door.  I quickly realized just how stuck he was.

The door started to open, and immediately hit an open drawer preventing the door from opening more than a couple centimeters.  OK, I’ve dealt with worse, and even more worse!  I’ve just got to talk Luke through closing the drawer so I can open the door.  Again I hear, “I’m stuck!  I’m stuck!”  I put my head to the door to peek into the reflection of the mirror, “Luke…” and get an immediate response “Hi!”  Problem is, his nose is almost touching my nose.  He has crawled up from the step stool INTO the drawer and is sitting in there playing.  Brushing his teeth…turning the light on and off…pushing the door closed and locking it (luckily he’d immediately unlock it as well…

How does this stuff happen to me?!  Well, the whole family joined in on the rescue efforts. 

Josh (having recollections of the shattered window rescue): “Let’s break down the door!”
Audrey (mother hen): “Luk-ie honey, climb out of the drawer please…and don’t break your arms…” (yeah, she’s the last one I want offering advice on personal safety)
Dad (brain fart…nothing coming to mind…bordering on insanity): “I’m going back to finish kitchen.  I don’t know what to do…I’ll just wait for him to figure something out.”
Mom: Gets Reese’s Pieces and throws them onto the counter, hoping to get Luke to climb there, quickly close drawer, quickly open door, and grab Luke.  Even though this all sounded good in theory, the first problem was we wouldn’t have been able to close the drawer even with Luke out of it – proof to come.  Second, Luke just got on his knees in the drawer, reached the Reese’s, ate it, “MMMMMM!!!!!!”

So, I have Luke loving life that we’re throwing Reese’s at him.  Josh and Audrey think the whole situation is beyond hilarious - Luke pounding candy, saying “Hi” anytime someone looks in, locking/unlocking the door, turning on and off the lights saying “Peek (a-boo)”.  I’m not sure what state of mind Ann was in…I’m leaning towards panicked delirium.  As I mentioned, my mind for some reason had turned off and I was just “giving up” (maybe the thoughts of the spending a few nights big house were wearing on me).  After pulling myself together a bit, just a bit, I come up with a “sweet” idea!  I can get my fingers through the door up to the last knuckle.  I thought that I could get Luke to stand on the counter, then I’d get a grip on his shirt and kind of hold/pin him up there while Ann got the drawer closed.  So I put my master plan into action, tapping the counter and telling Luke to stand on the counter.  Well, he understood the stand part of it…problem was, he stood up in the drawer and I couldn’t get a hold of him.  As I was extending my fingers further through the door, shaving off a few layers of skin to reach further, I see the drawer start to wiggle from Luke’s weight and he’s teetering back and forth like he’s on a high wire act in 40mph winds.  It all happened pretty quick from here and I only saw glimpses of body parts (not sure if hands or feet or what) in the mirror as Luke’s took a tumble out of the drawer onto the tile floor.  I’ve no idea how he hit, but I immediately tried to push the drawer closed to get the door open.  There wasn’t nearly enough room while my fingers were in the drawer to get the door closed and I proceeded to gnaw up my fingers in the door figuring this out (thus proving that both Ann and my ideas were doomed to fail).  Luke was balling, Ann was panicking, Josh and Audrey no longer found it hilarious and my hand was stuck. 

I pulled my hand out and said I didn’t know what to do…I was contemplating slamming the door in to just shatter through the drawer, but didn’t really want to get the drawer replaced and not knowing where Luke was I didn’t really want to slam the door/drawer into him either.  As I finished saying this, Luke had already popped up, SLAMMED the drawer with a little extra oomph, opened the door, and came running out balling.  Luckily, everything turned out all right.  No broken bones or cracked skulls.

Below are a couple little less traumatic videos showing just a few moments in the life of Luk-er Boo-ks.  Hungry Eyes shows off Luke’s patented dancing move.  Whenever he hears a song that he likes, the finger comes up, head starts bobbing, and teeth start chomping. He could be 90% asleep in the car, hear a song he likes and his hand comes up ala Hulk Hogan on the 2 count.

Josh is starting the cycle of losing all his teeth.  Yesterday, he lost his third tooth overall, and his first front tooth.  Currently he has 3 other loose teeth, so he could soon be renamed to Toothless, although currently Audrey likes to call him Snaggle Tooth because one of the other loose teeth is his other front tooth.  And that thing is barely dangling in his mouth.  Every time I see him I want to give him a quick ‘shot’ to the mouth to knock it out

Couple of memorable items I wanted to jot down.  Every night, whoever puts Josh and Audrey to bed (yes they still sleep together and snuggle like an old married couple), they are sure to reminder that person to have the other parent check on them.  Of course we always say we’ll tell the other parent, but I don’t think anyone has really checked on them.  They are conveniently “asleep” when the check up occurs.  Last night, after Ann had put the kids to bed and left, Audrey had to go to bathroom, and then came into my office to cycle through her “good nights”…

“Good night Dad…”

“Good luck Dad…”

“I love you Dad…”

“I love you more…”

“I love you all the way to Walt Disney World…and back…”

You get the point.  Then she closes with,

“Can you have Mom check on us?  Unless it is late and we are sleeping and the tooth fairy is still here.  Then tell her not to check on us.  OK?”

I tell you, Audrey has every minute detail covered in all situations.  I would be half confident to leave her alone now to babysit the boys.  It is hilarious watching her be the mother-hen to them all the time.

The second thing I wanted to note down was a revelation that Josh had when he lost his second tooth earlier this year.  I’m not sure if the tooth fairy is giving too much money per tooth (definitely more generous than he was when I was little) but after Josh realized he had a mouthful of teeth and looking at the $$$ the tooth fairy had left him he came up with the ingenious idea…

“Dad, if I take a hammer and knock out all my teeth, I would be rich!”

Let’s hope he never goes through with that.

Update: 7/2/2010

So the other tooth came out (as you can see).  His name is now The Toothless Wonder.  The interesting point, well, crazy at least, is that Josh swallowed his other front tooth while playing with some friends.  How you manage to swallow your tooth is beyond me, but it was pretty traumatic for Josh.  He was pretty scared that the tooth fairy was going to skip over the house.  The book, Fluffy’s Lost Tooth was what had him nervous with everyone in the book saying “No tooth…no present!”  Anyway, we wrote the tooth fairy a note and of course he showed up and order was restored in the Aney household.

So Josh, Audrey and I always joked that we should have named Luke “Anakin” before he was born.  That way, when he was being good we’d call him by his proper name of Anakin and if he was being bad, we’d call him Vader.  If you’ve read my previous post about SW and my kids, you can imagine pretty easily how we were all loving the idea.  I still say Anakin Aney has a sweet ring to it!  Alas, we couldn’t get Mom to buy off on it…’completely’.  She agreed to go with Luke instead.  See, the Dark Side never wins!

So why am I bringing up the name change again?  In the beginning, Luke was definitely teetering on the edge of the Dark Side especially when Dad was dealing with him.  However, after a couple months, Luke has definitely turned out to be our happiest ‘baby’ yet.  He constantly smiles at anyone who looks at him, and being a ‘thumb sucker’ he can comfort himself in most cases without any intervention.  Of course there are exceptions.

Besides being a very happy baby, he also goes to bed earlier than any of our others.  He usually hits the sack at about 6pm.  However, it never fails.  The few times Ann is able to get out into the ‘adult world’ with a few of her friends after putting Luke to bed, he decides that is the night he is going to wake up at 8:30pm looking for a little nighttime snack.  Given that I want to give Ann a bit of well deserved time off, I usually ‘battle’ with Luke for an hour or two before caving in and calling Ann for backup.  Since, Audrey is quick to point out that I do not have any milk in my nipples, I have limited options in terms of comforting Luke. 

There is one fail safe way to comfort him every time though.  I simply start humming.  It’s the one go to option that Josh, Audrey and I have all mastered.  So if you are ever at our house and hear Luke starting to get frantic, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’ll hear three octaves of The Imperial March being hummed…four if Mom isn’t in the position to comfort at the moment. 

Luke’s affinity to the tune, as well as Vader images, has prompted Dad and Josh to make the change to “Anakin”…we’ll see if it sticks ;)

I wish I could say Ann did it, but unfortunately I’ve created two Star Wars Beasts and I’ve no idea how to slow down their growth!  Josh and Audrey are so obsessed with Star Wars that it is the only thing they think about 24x7.  Okay, maybe Audrey is 20x7, but Josh is definitely 24x7.  You can see evidence of this in this video.

If Josh is the one initiating a conversation (i.e. he’s not answering a direct question from us) it always starts like this, “I was wondering…”  At this point, I tune out and wait to answer “The Force.”.  Every day I get about 10 of these statements…remember I work out of the home, so I only see the kids about 3-4 hours a day, so ten different Star Wars conversations in that time span are tiring.  Here are a few examples, bear in mind these are just random thoughts from Josh at random times.

Upon being woken up, while going to the bathroom, “I’ve been wondering, you know when Luke throws the bomb into the AT-AT and then falls all the way down?  How come he didn’t get hurt?”  Me: “The Force.”

After getting in car after hockey practice, “I’ve been wondering, how come Yoda is so small and he’s like fifty hundred years old?” Me: “The Force.”

After being asked about his play date from Dad and what he learned at preschool…as soon as it was his turn to initiate, “I’ve been wondering, since Darth Vader is Luke’s Dad, why does he burn him up at the end of Star Wars 6?” Me: “The Force.”

Finally, playing up Josh’s new ‘rebel’ attitude regarding speeding in the car (especially when we are late for hockey practice), “Dad, put the pedal to the metal and I’ll watch out for cops!” (ponders for a moment) “I’ve been wondering…if we could go hyper-speed, how fast would we be going?” Me: “The Force.” Josh: “Huh?”

As you can see, the constant Star Wars bombardment from Josh and Audrey has taken its toll on me.  They’ve employed the ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ with such efficiency that they’ve even changed Mom’s opinion of Star Wars and she’s now a fan.  It’s either the Jedi Mind Trick or the brainwashing resulting from the constant humming of this all day.  The end result…Ann now likes Star Wars and now she even hums this throughout the day to Lucas…see I told you Anakin Aney had a special ring to it!