Friday Five

1.  There is a bright yellow male American Goldfinch flying right up next to the window.  I'm thinking he wants to come in and have a break from the wind.  :)  We've had so many beautiful birds at our feeders this week.  We've had an Oriole pair here for about 2 weeks and for the first time in the 5 years that we've lived here we saw a Purple Martin at the feeders.  I mentioned to Andrew yesterday in the car that we should pull out our Your Backyard bird video and watch it again to become familiar with some of the bird songs.

 

2.   Andrew's had an appointment with a Lyme Literate doctor (LLMD)  in the cities yesterday and it went very well.  He has acute Lyme disease which means that it just happened (vs. someone who has chronic Lyme).  Andrew is on a double antibiotic for 6 weeks, as well as a handful of natural and herbal supplements. 

 

His treatment should be pretty straight forward and unless he develops other symptoms from co-infections or develops symptoms after his antibiotic treatment we wont need to go back to the LLMD.  Some of the challenges of the treatment for Andrew include staying out of the sun, which is very hard for a 10 year old boy after a long winter.  Thankfully it has been more overcast than sunny here in MN.  He is out in his sandbox now, which shaded most of the day.   Another challenge is making sure that he doesn't have dairy when he takes his one of his meds because it acts as a binder and binds up the medication, not allowing it to be distributed and absorbed.  While he would certainly love to have dairy, he transitioned well to a rice milk and cheese.  We are also avoiding gluten and sugar as much as possible and doing less meat to help his body have less inflammation.  The hardest thing for me is keeping track of and on time with his medications.  I set timers as reminders throughout the day.

 

Here are a few progression pictures of Andrew's rash.

 

 

 

The reason I decided to take the picture was because he had a bite previous to this one that broke out with the bullseye rash too and I wanted to document EVERYTHING!  I thought it was interesting that there was the white rash around the tick.  I have no idea how long the tick had been there since it was the back of his arm and was covered by his sleeve.  This is not a deer tick but a dog tick.

 

 

The above picture shows the site after I removed the tick and you can also see a rash that extended up his arm to the top of his shoulder.

 

 

24 hours later

 

 

 

48 hours later

 

 

72 hours later

 

I'm so glad that I took the pictures.  From day 3 to day 5 the rash stayed the same and has slowly faded and started to dry out.  I printed out all of my pictures and commentary and have them filed in a binder with info. about his meds, supplements, resources and doctor info.

 

 

3.  We are working to train our adorably stubborn Yorkie, Lizzy to potty outside rather than on pee pads.  Her pervious owners trained her to use the pads and it is proving to be quite difficult to break her of them.  I resorted to buying little doggie diapers that she wears during the day and we take her out to potty every hour when she is awake.  I've heard many people who have or are familiar with Yorkie's that they often take up to two years to train!  Thankfully she'll be two this November.  She is very smart  but stubborn like a cat.  :)

 

 

 

4.  After almost a year and a half of searching, a friend found the pattern for these embroidery towels. 

 

  

 

 

However, it is a machine embroidered pattern.  I don't know anything about machine patterns and haven't found a place to buy an iron on.  Does anyone know if the machine patterns would be traceable or what kind of format to get? 

 

5.  Andrew just brought in a bouquet of dandelions with stems well over 15 inches long!  :)