And we have good insurance

SMASH! CRASH! KABOOM!

The potty seat flew about three feet up in the air before it cartwheeled down a flight of stairs and clattered onto the tiles of the entry way. I slowly peeked around the corner and there was E, standing at the top of the stairs in nothing but a shirt and socks. He'd peed in the potty four times and gotten four jelly beans as reward. But pooping - pooping gets you two jelly beans and the kid is going to give himself a hemorrhoid he's trying so hard. E was trying to back that ass up onto his potty seat and the seat kept slipping out from underneath him. I kept offering to help, to pick him up onto the seat or to hold the seat while he got on it by himself, but no, he wants independence...for now.

We'd taken a break from potty learning with all the hospital stuff going on, but while killing time at Target today, we saw a 6 pack of underroos, two of which would effectively put his bottom in the loving embrace of Tuck and Ming-Ming, and so we had. to. have. them. And then we picked up a bag of jelly beans and jumped feet first into this whole potty training thing.

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We have decided not to subject E to the endoscopy and colonoscopy. At least not yet. I was supposed to hear back from Stephanie, the GI doc, last Monday. She asked me to call her and leave a message and I did, but when I hadn't heard back from her by Tuesday afternoon, I was calling the lab to see if our results had come in before calling Stephanie again (there's a fine line between being an actively concerned mom and being a crazy mom, and I'm ok with walking on the line but I like to avoid crossing it if possible.) The results had long been in but they were getting lost somewhere in the system and the GIs couldn't see them, but the lab could. So the very nice mom lab tech literally walked upstairs and gave the GI nurse our lab results so that they could call me and tell me why the face. Stephanie called and was apologetic, but gave us good news. All the lab results to date were normal. Which led us to the bad news - if we were going to find something wrong with him, we were going to have to literally pull it out of him. And since knowing is half the battle, I asked a litany of questions and whoa. Basically, E's problem could very well be a food allergy. But the GI department doesn't do allergy testing and so that's why Stephanie hadn't suggested we do it. But yes, there's a very, very good chance that what he has is an allergy that would be quickly and easily (but not completely painlessly) tested for. And yes, there's a really good chance that the endo/colo will come back with nothing because we'd only be looking for two things, one of which would be unlikley to be the problem based on the lab results. So wait...why are you suggesting we starve our two year old and give him liquid drain-o for 36 hours before putting him under general anesthesia, shoving a tube down his throat and up his butt and doing biopsies of his insides? Oh, because your department can't bill for allergy tests. Thanks.

So once we got to this point, Stephanie very kindly suggested a really good pediatric allergist and then mentioned that if that turned out to be a dead-end, we also had the option of giving E a high-strength antibiotic and following it with lots and lots of probiotics in case the problem was that he had an imbalance of healthy intestinal flora. Huh. And then if that didn't work, then we could do the procedure. Thanks.

The allergist she suggested is booked till end of May so we're seeing a woman who was a resident under him, and for her we only have to wait till mid-March. We went ahead and cut out dairy sometime last week and he's already sleeping better. But that could also be because when I realized that I had taken the good news conversation upstairs and out of earshot, I staged a conversation that I made sure E overheard, very loudly exclaiming that I was so happy that everything was ok and that the blood results were all good and that everyone was sooo healthy and wow, now I can sleep better because I was really worried but now that I know that everyone is ok...just in case he was losing sleep over all that was going on.