Thorazine Shuffle

Colin's issues have come to an unfortunate head. His anger has been pretty effectively channeled away from CRB and it is now directed at my carpets. As of Friday, Colin is now being doped with a thorazine medicine for dogs while we continue his behavior modification. Our plan is to only use this about 2-3 more days.

Last night we had one of our worst nights with CRB. We tried mixing some Lactose Free Sensitive formula into his regular Alimentum hypoallergenic formula at a ratio of 20%, 80%. He was awake and upset roughly every 45 minutes. It was hard for everyone and I am officially chickening out of the effort to introduce anything other than soy products to him. He does fine when he has soy cream cheese and soy cheese, but even the amount of milk in goldfish crackers causes a problem for him.

The one good thing that came from last night is I feel that I really did all I could do to breastfeed him. I gave up everything with milk for 7 weeks and his tummy did no better. I am not sure how long the milk elimination would have taken but I could not pump and dump any longer than 7 weeks. He is truly sensitive to it and I did everything I could. If later in life CRB tells me that my not breastfeeding him the recommended 12 months caused him to score 5 points less on the SAT than he would have otherwise I will remind him that formula is why he is alive and thriving.

The other crazy thing we did today is a major toy elimination for CRB and Colin. Our lives were becoming entrapped with stuff and ToolMan and I could not take it any more. CRB and Colin both play with the same things over and over. For CRB, his favorite toys are the simpliest with the least amount of batteries. I am going to continue my push to buy him very few items that need batteries. He's much more likely to babble and have fun making sounds if he's the only source for sound.

We kept plenty of toys for each of the boys to have a great rotation, and the ones that we elimated are going to stay in the shop's attic while we finalize what we really need/want and where the extras need to go. Lately I have been doing a good bit of shopping at the Salvation Army place so I have some insights into how I need to package up the toys so someone else can get some use out of them: leave the batteries in so the staff can easily tell the toy works; if the toy has parts, firmly attach the pieces with packing tape or place an item and its parts in its own clear plastic bag.