Typhoid Ian and the Ebola Monkey

Actually, Malcolm's friend Ian has nothing to do with this post, but no story of sick little kids is complete without at least a shout-out to him, the original sick little kid (Holla back, Ian!).

It looks like our monkey is headed toward having tubes put in his ears. December was the month of the ear infection(s). Depending on how you count, it was either one long infection that came and went and came again and took four different antibiotics to cure (the third was a shot!) or it was four separate infections. And last week he came down with another (along with pink eye). So the doctor gave us the number of Children's ENT and told us to call for a consultation.

Snow Days

Malcolm and I spent the last two days snowbound.

He also has signed "water" to Scott and I, once each, while we were giving him a cup, but neither of us could get him to repeat it.

Please sir, could I have some more?

Six months of my signing away (and feeling just a little bit like an idiot) has apparently started to pay off, as last night Malcolm started to sign back! After dinner he was having a few Ritz dinosaur crackers (a favorite). When he started the whining wail that signals he wants more, I asked him, "More?" while making the sign for more (for what I think was the 1, 718th time). This time, he signed more back!

In order to test whether it was a fluke or not, I doled out crackers three at a time, so he could continue to sign more, which he did. Up until now, I've been fairly certain that he's recognized some signs (like milk), but he's never signed back clearly enough that I was sure that's what he was doing. Last night though, things seemed to click. It was a Helen Keller moment, for sure.

As for verbal communication, Malcolm's vocabulary consists of Mama, Dada, baby, Hi, kitty, woof, and Ashley (a girl at school -- I haven't heard him say this, but his teacher has) and a few other words he uses only sporadically. The other day while we were reading a counting book I think he repeated "six" and Christie swears he picked up the phone and said "phone" the other night. If he doesn't repeat it, though, it's always hard to know for sure.

Groundhog Day

Punxsutawney Phil came through this year and predicted an early spring by not seeing his shadow. Go, Phil!

Hacked!

Whew! The last two days have been stressful. On Tuesday my eBay and gmail accounts were hacked and stolen. I was able to get my Ebay account restored almost immediately (Ebay has a great system for this sort of thing -- the fact that the thief was buying thousands of dollars of computers when I've never had a transaction over a hundred bucks in five years probably helped). I never thought I'd get my email account back, but Google did an investigation and returned my account to me this morning. I was in despair over this identity theft, but now I'm just reassured that everything is getting back to normal.

Lessons I've learned: Run spyware and virus protection on the computer weekly (if not more often). Keep our firewall up to date. And most importantly, don't use the same passwords for everything. I don't know how I'm going to remember all my new passwords for everything, but being hard to remember also means being hard to guess, so I'll figure it out.