My oldest nephew turned 16 last week. 16!! How does that happen so quickly? Let me reflect for a few minutes and tell you about Tyler and my relationship with him.
My oldest brother and his girlfriend had been dating. I didn't like her all that much because up until that time I was very close to my brother and I kind of felt like she was taking part of him away from me. In 1990 she became pregnant with her first baby and on September 19, 1990 my first nephew, Tyler, was born. It was several days before I first got to see him but when I finally did it was love at first sight. It was at that moment that my relationship with my sister in law, Sue, changed, too. I immediately had a newfound respect and love for her as the Mother of my beautiful new nephew. From that day on she and I became very close and I considered her to be the sister that I never had.
While attending school at the University of Florida I would drive to Orlando just to spend time with Tyler. He was the light of my life. A year later I was living in Orlando and it made me so happy to be able to spend a lot of time with him. One of the things that I always loved to do with Tyler was go to the park. I would pick him up in my little Honda Civic hatchback, buckle him in his car seat and off we would go. Just the two of us. Tyler loved the ducks. He would run after them with the biggest grin on his face. He always had the cutest smile and his giggle was contagious. I would spend hours at the park with him and then we would usually go to McDonalds to get a cheeseburger before I took him home. I'm so thankful for the time that I lived there in Orlando so that I could be there with him while he was little. My relationship with him was priceless and I was so proud to be his Aunt. I dreamt that my children would some day be as loving as he was.
Tyler had a very special name for me. He couldn't quite say Michelle so it came out sounding like "lerl". I loved it and I would sometimes ask him who I was just to hear him say it. I can still hear him saying it as vividly as he did back then.
So now he's 16. He's legal to drive. So maybe now if I could be with him he could drive me to go somewhere instead of me driving him. I wish we could. I would do anything to be able to spend time with Tyler the way we used to be able to do.
It was because of Tyler that Sue and I became close. To this day I adore her and now that we live so far away from one another I miss her terribly. They live in Oregon.
So, happy belated birthday to my first nephew. This little spot in my heart will always be yours.
"Lerl"
There's no doubt about it. She may want to play in the dirt with the neighbor boys or throw a baseball or football with her brothers and her Daddy but when it all comes right down to it she is all girl. Give her the shiniest, frilliest clothes, "fancy" shoes, dangly earrings, make-up...you name it...and she's happy. She is, after all, the princess of this house!
Using this device and expanding Sean's jaw is not fun. I felt bad doing it to him and I could tell that it was hurting him despite the fact that he didn't say anything. He just let me do it, took his Advil and went straight to bed. Poor kid. 29 more days to do this before that thing is removed. I can't wait.
Both are still having a hard time eating. Today Brendan had a frozen yogurt from Costco, a cup of applesauce and a serving of macaroni and cheese. Sean had frozen yogurt, chocolate pudding and a few bites of lasagna that we made for dinner but he couldn't eat much of it. I know they are hungry and they drink a lot of milk to compensate for the lack of food. I feel for them.
This is what the device is called that was placed in Sean's mouth today. This device is mounted on the roof of his mouth. Once each day I have to use this small screwdriver looking mechanism to expand the "palatal expansion appliance". What does this mean? Slowly but surely we are breaking his upper jaw to become wider than it is so that it can accomodate all of his teeth properly. They are severely crowded and are in rows in some places. On the bottom he has a metal spacer that is expanding his lower jaw but doesn't require any adjusting and will just slowly do it's job on it's own. Brendan has the spacer on the top and bottom and doesn't require the palatal device that Sean has. Thank God. Neither of the boys can talk (at least not well enough that you can understand much of what they are saying) and they haven't been able to eat a single bit of food all day. Not even the fettuccini alfredo that we had for dinner. I ended up taking them to Steak & Shake to get a milkshake for dinner just so that they would have something in their stomachs. I feel badly for them but I know that in another day or two the pain will subside enough that they will be able to eat and talk. The good part about all of this is that since they aren't able to talk they are also not able to argue with one another! It'll be a nice break for a couple of days.
Baseball practice resumes tomorrow for both boys. It was supposed to start two weeks ago but with the amount of rain that we've had the fields have been flooded and the practices and games have been postponed. So there's a lot of catching up to do.
