It's Saturday

Thought I'd try blue today. Green and blue are my favorite colors. I like blue better when it's with green.

Well, Alec slept til 4pm yesterday. He's been staying up later and later (they're still on Christmas vacation, they go back on Monday). So I made him take a tylenol pm and we laid down at midnight, he actually fell asleep around 1, I was really surprised. He and Sam are still sleeping. I think Monday is going to be a rude awakening. They didn't want to get up to go bowling, they love to go bowling.

Well, today I think I'll talk about Nik, my oldest. He's 20, living about 40 miles from here, working at a restaurant for the winter. He's about 6foot 1 and weighs about 140. Why is it that I have extremely thin children?? Oh yes, I used to be extremely thin myself. Arghhhh. Anywho, he went to Central Michigan University for 2 years, but we couldn't afford it this year so he's working and trying to save money for next year. He has juvenile macular degeneration, in other words, he's losing his vision. When he was younger, he was a really good baseball player, a pitcher and a really good hitter. Then when he was about 9, all of a suddent he couldn't hit the ball to save his life. We got his eyes checked and they prescribed glasses but he still couldn't hit the ball. They could never get his vision to 20/20. We took him to Childrens Hospital when he was an early teen, but they couldn't find anything wrong, other than some increased pressure and an increased cup to disc ratio (still not sure what that means). When he was 17, I took him to get his eyes checked and they optometrist said he had amblyopia, which is lazy eye and is almost always diagnosed in little kids. I was kinda pissed that no one mentioned this. So we took him to an opthamologist who said he had Stargardts, which is a form of JMD. He had some more testing done, we ended up at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and were basically given the news, he's losing his central vision, there's no way to fix it, we'll just keep an eye on it. Well, in the meantime, he can't see well enough to drive, so he is way more dependant on people than he likes. He holds books right up to his face to read, his print on his computer is really big and he has to be right in front or over something to see it. Try asking Nik to find something for you. You'll end up doing it yourself. But he, for the most part, takes it in stride.

Of course there's much more to Nik than his failing eyesight. He is funny as hell, lazy, extremely smart, (did I mention lazy?), impatient, very cute, and obnoxious. I have to take the bad with the good. Whenever he's with us, it adds a layer of humor that we're missing, but it also adds a layer of stress. Nik irritates everyone eventually except Sam. They are so close. Nik is about as liberal as someone can get. (He gets that from me). But he makes me look like George Bush in comparison. (And I don't like that at all). It's weird having a 20 year old son. When I was pregnant with Caitlin, I was in the hospital for 5 weeks, so I had to stop nursing him. He was about 2. Well, the day I got out of the hospital, my mom brought him back home and he looked at me and said, "I want num-nums". I love telling him this story. He just looks at me and walks away, shaking his head, cursing the moment I became his mother. He wants to major in political science so he can eventually piss off the whole world, not just residents of SE Michigan...Ok, I'll write more tomorrow, probably about Caitlin. That's something I have to psych myself up for.