Speech Therapy and Urologist

Alex had his typical speech therapy appointment today. The thing that made today a little more unusual was that Chris had an appointment with a urologist in Meridian a little less than an hour after Alex's speech therapy usually gets out.

In order to not be rushing the whole time, I took all the kids with me to the appointments. I really was tempted to leave Chris and Daniel at Katie's for speech therapy, then drop off Alex and pick up Chris after, but I decided it would just be easier and less stressful time-wise to just bring them with me. And it would give Katie a whole week without having to watch my kids, so a definite bonus for her.

Chris and Daniel seemed to have a pretty good time in the waiting room during Alex's speech therapy. We had brought along a few toys from home, but they mostly ignored those and played with the toys that were already in the waiting room. When Alex was done, Trisha said he had done an awesome job and gave us some 'sh' papers to work on at home for the week.

We loaded back in the van and headed to Chris's appointment and ended up with about 15 or 20 minutes to kill, so I picked us up some lunch and let the boys start eating it before we went in for the appointment. Daniel fell asleep in the van though, so he got to wait to eat any of his until after the appointment.

We handed the receptionist the paperwork they had mailed us earlier, along with a copy of Chris's insurance card (we have separate cards for each person in our family even though we're all on the same plan), then sat down to wait in the waiting area. The boys thought it was pretty cool to be able to look over the balcony to the floor below. I thought it was pretty interesting to see the shackled prison inmate come in with his 2 armed guard escorts. Yes, he got to go back immediately.

When the receptionist had entered all our information, she led us back to another waiting area, but this one had a train set to play with, so the boys were pretty excited. And when the nurse came to get us, she let them take some of the trains back with them. Of course, the trains didn't stop Daniel from opening all the drawers and cupboards in the examination room. (As an aside here, I cleaned my downstairs bathroom this morning and was all happy that I hadn't gotten any bleach from my toilet bowl cleaner on my clothes like I've been doing lately. In the examination room, Daniel knocked over a squirt bottle that was under the sink and spilled its contents. I cleaned it up as well as I could, then noticed that yes, it was a bleach product, and yes, it had gotten on the arm of my sweater. Bummer.)

After a wait of 5 or so minutes (which can sometimes seem longer when you've got 3 very active boys playing in an examination room), the doctor came in and examined Chris. He does have what is called a hydraseal (I'm not sure on the spelling). She said adults can get them, but they worry about them in kids Chris's age because they can stay and get bigger and cause pain and other problems. So like I expected, Chris will need to have surgery to take care of it. The doctor is going to give the information to her scheduler who will call us and schedule his surgery. It will likely be after the first of the year, just because so many people try to get things like this in before the end of the year and so the schedule fills up quickly.

So lucky Ben will be the only one of my kids so far who has not had surgery of any kind. I hope he doesn't decide that he wants to try surgery too.