Mommy's New Office

My office moved to a new building in early August. Since I've literally been part of the City family since birth, I can say, they have talked about us moving from our location of 20 + years for a LONG time and now it's finally happened. We are in a big beautiful new building with excellent views of the great forest preserve to the north of us.

To show off the building to the employee's families and retirees, they had an open house at the end of August. It was great! It really reminded me of picnics the City used to have when I was a kid. I hope this open house tradition continues in the future years.

One of my coworkers, Chris, has a granddaughter that is just a few months younger than Charlie. Lia was with Chris at the open house and Charlie and Lia had a great time playing together.

Allergies

Back in April and May, we had Charlie at the doctor about once a week for sneezing and coughing types of symptoms. After about 6 weeks of that, he finally came down with an ear infection and 10 days later, we followed up with our normal doctor to verify it was gone. She walked in and said "why have you been here so much lately?" Now this is why we love her! Yes, doc, why have we been here so much lately??! After discussion Charlie's symptoms with her and discussing our family history of allergies, she decided to order the blood work to test for some common allergies, including food allergies.

Our little buddy came back with a moderate peanut allergy and an egg white allergy. We got an epi-pen and carry it with us now, JUST IN CASE he comes in contact with nuts. We are under strict orders not to allow him to have any nuts.

We followed up with my allergist and he was immediately concerned for Charlie's skin. Charlie has always had eczema and we thought it was just that. After asking us to with hold ANYTHING with egg in it and working on his skin with lotion and hydrocortisone, his skin cleared up instantly. Poor kid!! The eggs in foods were driving his skin crazy.

So...after that worked to clear his skin, they did some further allergy testing, mostly with food because he's too little for environmental allergy testing yet. Here's the picture of the testing. You can see Kenny in the background asking what I'm doing. Well, taking a picture, of course.

Turns out the little guy can't have eggs or anything with eggs in it either. The eggs were making his skin worse and as soon as we stop them, he clears up and is eczema free. So, on the advice or our allergist, we stay away from eggs and nuts for the long term. Eggs will probably be retested in 1 year to see if he has grown out of it yet.

Our hope is for him to grow out of both of these allergies and he has a pretty good chance of doing that with egg if we can be strict with his diet. Nuts, well, that's another story. The chances are much lower that he will grown out of it, but there is a possibility.

Orphan Car Picnic

A favorite event each summer is the Orphan Car Picnic. It's fun, lots of different cars (if you like to look at them) and it's usually pretty relaxing. This year it was moved to the Kendall County Fairgrounds and it was a great location...much further for us to travel, but very nice.

Kenny took Charlie's picture with a hemi here, as he did last summer at the Mundelein car show since Charlie IS Kenny's little hemi.

Chicago Visit

What We Do on a Saturday Morning

Charlie and I spent a Saturday morning out on the porch -- me reading a wonderful book and enjoying the summer morning...and Charlie playing with this outdoor toys.

What Fun it is Being One!!

Charlie has had a great time this summer as a one year old. There are so many fun things to do and see now. Reading books, sitting at his table, watching Elmo, swinging at "Charlie's Park" (as Grammy calls it), kissing doggies and cheering for cars and trucks. Here's a sampling of his fun times...

Reese and Charlie

In late July and early August, we got to have Reese spend sometime at our house. Reese is about 4 months older than Charlie. She was born just days before we found out that Charlie was a boy. Danielle and John and Kenny and I joked that our children could date. Well, they've had their first few dates now, supervised by Kenny and I.

Charlie is really into giving people kisses. The open mouth kind. It's really sweet and he looks so proud of himself that he's showed some love to someone. With no prompting on our part, he just decided to kiss Reese. Reese really didn't know what to think about him. She kind of looks at him like "who are you and what do you want." If only these kids could talk a little more!

These are from the next time we had Reese over. They had a lovely dinner together. See how excited Charlie is...and how "what is going on" Reese is! :) Reese was a little unsure during this visit, so we got out Charlie's couch and flipped on Elmo. I know she has her own little chair at home that she watches Elmo in, so we thought that would comfort her. It did, but Charlie really annoyed her because he wouldn't sit still. And that picture of Charlie laying on Reese's lap -- he just did that. You can't make up stuff this good!