Lucas Camilo

First – thank you to everyone who read through our last post and offered support for our journey of fighting with health insurance to get Lucas’s needs met.  The good news is that we’ve won a critical battle — Lucas’s second private insurance plan has agreed to pay for his nursing care.  It’s approved only through August, but it’s likely to get re-approved fairly easily every few months.  We spent the week breathing many a sigh of relief.  We knew we’d get coverage eventually, but it’s nice not to have devote any more time and energy to the battle for now.

We’re remiss in posting here because we went from feeling fairly hunkered down and far from friends to having them all sleeping in our house.  Krista’s friend Kathy from the Bay Area was here for a couple days in the end of April.  Then – all in one week – we had visits from not one, not two, but six friends visit from DC and Philly.  (It was awesome to see you Dan, Dana, Carol, Annie, Max, and Jess!!!)  It was especially fun for Lucas to get to show off the new books he’s memorized, and exciting to show our guests around town.  The weather’s made a dramatic turn toward spring, so we took people on walks to the lake, and Lucas got to show Max and Jess around the Seattle aquarium.

Maybe not coincidentally, Lucas has recently discovered the word “awesome.”  So one of our favorite new games around here is “what else is awesome?”  Lucas loves words that get extra stress, emotion, or oomph behind them, so when he tells us that clownfish are awesome, he says it with feeling.  “Clownfish are aaaaaawwwwe-sooooommme.”  And then we ask him “what else is awesome?”  And he names another species of animal, like “ruby-throated hummingbird is awesome” or “macaroni penguin is awesome.”  And then he goes through his favorite books, starting with “Ridiculous is awesome.”  He’s started asking us to chime in too, by saying “mommy do it,” or “daddy do it.”  Having your two-year-old lead you through an exercise in gratitude is indeed awesome – semi-religious and totally hilarious.

Another highlight of the past couple weeks have been our first two NW hiking adventures with Lucas.  On Saturday we went back to Seward Park, this time for kids activities related to international migratory bird day.  We arrived just in time for the hike up to see the bald eagles nesting.  We were really excited to find out that the park had paved trails all the way up, so we joined the other families.  At the top of the hill we indeed got to see a bald eagle pair, with the mother sitting on eggs in her two-ton nest while the father flew around the surrounding trees.  Lucas gave a small grunt to acknowledge the eagles, but he mostly asked for hummingbirds.  So at the end of the hike, having spotted exactly zero hummingbirds, we bought him a new hummingbird feeder.  And he was thrilled.

And finally – your bonus for having read this far – we bring you Lucas’s first hike in the foothills of the North Cascades.  We’re getting pretty adept at packing for a medically complex kid.  We bring vials, tubes, catheters and syringes of sterile water.  But when a major poop incident struck, we were ill prepared – no back-up pants!  Lucas, fortunately, is still too young to notice how hilarious the whole thing was.  (For the record, we did eventually put Krista’s jacket over his legs.)