Kung Fu Fighting

"Hello and thank you for shopping at Target today, my name is Jordan. Can I interest you in some of our R&B collection this evening?"

Jordan has really started to take to dancing lately. It is just too cute. He has also learned to clap his hands! Of course he does everything with his own personal flair. He has already shown he is left handed so clapping means hitting his right hand with his left. He actually did it at the end of the video. He is also learning lots of other little habits. For instance, he is learning how to throw tantrums. He isn't fully there yet, but sometimes if he wants something bad enough he'll get himself all worked up and cry. If it's something small, we may give it to him, but usually we let him cry it out. Of course, me being the daddy, sometimes I let him cry it out just based on general principles. I could give him the spoon, but I don't like the way he's asking for it. That leads to the new thing we are working on - discipline. When he breaks the rules we do something that he hates. We put him in the playpen in the guest room which is always empty. He hates the playpen in general and can't stand being alone. He hasn't yet fully made the connection of why we do it, but he knows when we're about to take him there, and he'll figure it out soon. You should see how worked up he gets over being left alone for 90 seconds. I'd take a video, but being alone is part of the punishment.

Last week, we went to go see the pulmonologist again. The doctor said that his lungs appeared to be fine, but that in this economy he needs the money so we have to back in 4 months. OK, he didn't say the second part, but if his lungs are doing well, it would seem that we wouldn't need to go back in 4 months. However, we do so I'm assuming it's for the money. We also found out that Jordan is stretching out a bit. At 23 inches, he is the 25th percent of length for his birthday. However, he lost about half a pound since the last visit so he is no longer on the growth chart for weight. That's means fewer than 1 percent of kids born on his birthday weigh less than he does - 20 pounds 6 ounces. I forgot how many grams that is. The reason he is off the weight chart is half his fault and half ours. He doesn't seem to want to grow anymore teeth. He just has the two front teeth on the top and the bottom. No new teeth have come in over 4 months. The books say that preemies are sometimes delayed in teeth, but they don't say that anything can be done to fix it. The result is he can't chew a lot of things that I'm sure he'd love. No raw vegetables like carrots and few hard fruits like apples (he can gum the juice out of apples, but then he spits them out). We try meat but we have to break it into such small pieces that he doesn't care for them. We have to break chicken to the size of bacon bits which eliminates most of the flavor. The result is that his diet is about 70% fruit and 20% breads, cookies, and cereals. The doctor prescribed that pediasure for him, which we do give him, but that stuff costs about 4 bucks a day for the store brand. All of the rest of his food costs under 6 buck a day. He loves french fries, which we've started to give him to thicken him up, but after about 5 of them he realizes what great toys they are. We have spent 3 dollars for a fast food kids meal only to have him eat 6 fries. That's 50 cents per fry. It's more cost effective to get a whole banana for 70 cents and he will eat the whole thing in under 5 minutes. If you ate oatmeal and bananas for breakfast 5 days a week, you'd lose weight too.