Passed our 3 year/30,000 Smile warranty :)

I said in the previous post that we had a crazy week and this is why - it seems Connor has passed his 3 year/30000 Smile warranty period and now is falling apart :) He has a hydrocele and we found out this week that he has to have surgery to repair it. It's fairly common and I guess the surgery is routine but he's still only three and still my baby! I feel much better about it today than I did a couple days ago, though, thanks to our great friends and family! I do have a bit of a rant about it, though...ready?
So we couldn't schedule the surgery right when we had our appointment with the Children's Hospital Urologist (Dr. Furness, his first name is fittingly Peter - haha - trying to find the light side of this situation anywhere I can!). We had to call the next day so I called in the morning, went through the whole automated system - press 1 for English, press 1 to make an appointment, press 2 to schedule surgery - and got Wendy the Surgery scheduler's voice mail and her mailbox was full - couldn't leave a message. I called later that day, got her voice mail again and was able to leave a message this time. The next day I tried again and got her voice mail and again the mailbox was full. I went back through the automated system but instead of choosing 2 to schedule surgery I chose 1 to schedule a clinic appointment, hoping to talk to some warm body. A woman answered and explained that she couldn't help me because Wendy is in another building so she couldn't take a "real" message for me and hand deliver it. Ugh. The next day I went through the whole process one more time but this time got a nice clinic appointment scheduler. She said "Sorry, Wendy works in another building but I can transfer you to Lorraine. She sits next to her so she can at least knock Wendy off her chair for ya!" Woo hoo! That's exactly what I wanted! See, by this point I was getting a bit testy about the whole thing...pun intended :) So I get to talk to Lorraine! I tell her I need to schedule surgery for my 3 year old and explain that I've left multiple messages for Wendy but that I don't think she really exists. She sort of apologizes by saying that with all the snow we've had they've been really busy. Whatever... :) Anyway, she takes all my info and asks which day I'd like to schedule it for. I explain that Dr. Furness recommended a Thursday or a Friday so that Connor could go back to preschool on Monday. She laughs a bit and says that he schedules out way in advance for those days (he must recommend that often!) and that we'd likely get a much earlier date by looking at other days of the week, but she goes ahead and looks at the schedule for one of those days. The first date she find is Friday, April 6th! April?!?! Um, ok. She offers to look for an earlier date on another day of the week and I agree - waiting until April seems crazy. So she's quiet for a minute as she searches through the dates and then finally says "Oh, here's a Wednesday. How's Wednesday, April 4th?" Hahahaha! TWO WHOLE DAYS earlier?? You've got to be kidding me...
So then I ask her if she has any recommendations of how to prepare Connor for this surgery, thinking that she probably gets this question frequently since she does schedule surgeries for Children's Hospital. Her first response is "well, you might try searching on the internet." Yeah, hadn't thought of that one before. Then she explains that we'll get a packet of information two or three weeks before the surgery giving us directions to the hospital, information on tours and she thinks there might be a list of books in there that we could read to him. Oh...but the tours fill up quickly so I should probably schedule it before I get the packet. Huh? If I hadn't asked how to prepare him and had waited for the packet there wouldn't be time for a tour? I did find this page on their website which was helpful and also bought this book at Borders to read when we get closer to April. I think he'll handle it just fine - and certainly better than me :)

On top of all that, Connor's preschool teacher recommended that he have a speech evaluation because he's having some problems with pronunciation of certain consonants, especially double consonants in the beginning of words like truck (he says kuck) or stop (he says top). So this Wednesday we're going in for a Childfind evaluation which will test his hearing, vision, gross and fine motor skills, socials skills as well as speech and language abilities. I'll let you know how it goes...

So after those two things I was thinking that he was falling apart but then Saturday morning arrived and brought with it what I like to refer to as Barf Fest 2007. After we had breakfast with Grandma and Grandpa, Connor said that his tummy hurt. He came over to me to give me a hug and then threw up all over me and himself. It was lovely. He vomited three or four more times yesterday (at one point getting upset and saying "Hey! My juice!" when he saw what had once been his red pedialyte being flushed away). He seems better today but then again he hasn't eaten much in the last 24 hours - a lot of pedialyte and a little applesauce is all he's tried today. Good thing school is closed tomorrow for Martin Luther King Jr Day! :) Sigh...the joys of being a parent...