Work Blues and Partly Digested Food

I haven’t gotten to spend as much time as I like with O this week, giving me a bit of the work blues. It’s my week to be responsible for my nemesis – capsule endoscopy.

It’s a nifty procedure. Just swallow a camera the size and shape of a big vitamin, wear a recorder, and 8 hours later download photos of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon. Very useful for examining the small intestine that can’t be reached with other kinds of endoscopy, but a huge pain to interpret. Each study has 8 hours of recording time, generating 57,600 images which must all be looked at. Unfortunately, there’s no helpful computer program to make the reading easier (by marking the abnormalities for me). And the software has the not-so-useful characteristic of occasionally corrupting the findings, resulting in getting to re-read the entire study. This happened to me today for the first time, but I won’t repeat the string of swear words and grumbling that erupted when I realized I would now be reading the study again. The capsule images are turned into a video, so it’s like watching a trip through the GI tract, but not as funny as when it happens on the Simpsons or Futurama, and not as cool as when it gets shown on a science show. There’s always a few people who don’t follow the prep instructions, so I get to look at their partly digested food. There’s also a bit of a seasick factor when watching the images as the capsule really bounces around in the stomach. Oh well, I finished my 8 studies for the week and now don’t have to read them again for a few months. Hmm, writing about Owen is more fun…

Standin'

Owen pulled up to standing today. He was sitting in his crib and managed to pull himself up. Then he did it with his activity table. Yesterday, he apparently spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to pull to standing. Nanny Carla described a look of very intense concentration during the effort (I suspect it’s similar to Travis’s look when he’s reading the Economist).

Toothy goodness

Owen has a tooth. I discovered this last week (or maybe the week before) because he bit me. It’s small, and razor sharp. When he wants to give something a good chew, he finds a stationary object and rubs his gums back and forth on it, like a dog shaking a chew toy. He does the same motion for toys he can pick up – moving his head rather than the toy.
In other tooth news, O is fascinated when I brush my teeth. I draw the same scrutiny and look of intense concentration that his ‘Old McDonald’s Farm’ book gets (his current favorite). Hopefully he’ll enjoy us brushing his tiny tooth – not sure when this is supposed to start, so I guess I’ll have to read up on it.

Playtime

In my January wrap-up, I failed to mention how fun and amazing it is to watch Owen play. He can take the simplest object - which includes most infant toys, designed to avoid the choking, breaking, cutting, pinching, etc - and be continually fascinated by it. He'll turn it over and over, put various parts in the mouth for a while, resume turning it over, perhaps about a different axis. It's a very different process than the excited swinging and accidental throwing of an object, and he rarely goes from one to another. Actually, as fascinated by an object as he may be, he's probably less amazed than I am by him. I call it "playing", but in an adult you'd call it "intense scrutiny". I give a fortune to know what's going on in his noggin at those times, either what he's thinking, or what tracks are being laid down in the neurons.

Someone has a case of the Mondays

This hasn't been the best day in Owen's short record book. He woke up with pink eye in his right eye, all oozy and crusted shut. (Thanks for passing that along, Dad!) Then, for the first time in weeks, he fell over while sitting, bonking his head on the bathroom floor and getting a tiny red knot over his left eye. But he was a trooper, fussing minimally as breakfast was delayed for a trip to the winter express service at the pediatrician and the pharmacy for eye drops. And now I hear him giggling his head off with Carla - after breakfast - so it looks like this case of the Mondays will not be chronic.