Let it be known...

Let it be known to all kindred, tongues and people that Monty pooped IN the toilet last night....

Just an update...

Just thought i give a quick fill in on the Big Problems Of Our Life...

1. Immigration problem in Belgium. Resolved for the moment. After I wrote a somewhat frantic email to my boss at work I had the year contract within 24 hours. Didn't become effective till April 1st, but it was good enough for the immigration office here in the big cosmopolitan town we live in. That is, they extended my temporary residency for another month, so they have a month to pull a blue card out of a drawer, type my name on it and put an official looking stamp on it. That blue card should make me good in Belgium for another five years, and with me, the boys and Leland
2. Monty's Constipation problem. Feel free to skip if you could care less about these details. Well, the laxatives work. Usually it takes a day or two, then he produces a couple of brick like poops (in size and consistency) and then we get a lot of Very Sticky, Extremely Messy Poops for several days. After which we stop giving him the laxative, after which he gets constipated again and so perpetum mobile. Right now we are in the Very Sticky, Extremely Messy phase.
   
3. No puking on the part of the kids this week. It's almost funny. Often when i get to work my co workers ask: How are you? and the second question is: no puking kids today? Week 14 has been a good one on the puking front. Now we'll see what week 15 brings.
4. Sticking with the health issues though: Stoney seems extremely tired lately. Kind of strange for a child who just had two weeks of easter vacation. And the problem is that when he gets tired, he get EXTREMELY whiny and starts talking like a baby. "Me have... me want..." And this is not a language barriere problem from him learning Dutch. He is perfectly capable of saying "Monty won't cooperate", in both languages when he is not tired. Being a mom (that is I assume that all mom's are like this) i immediately start worrying that he has some terrible and life threatening disease when he starts being tired all the time like he is now. But i also remember that he has had spells like this before, when he just was really tired for a couple of weeks and he has always resurfaced healthy as a horse a month later. Maybe he just has low iron.
5. Still on the health front: Leland has been hit by some nasty cold virus. He first thought that he had bronchitis, but the doctor said it wasn't. His lungs are hurting an awful lot when he coughs and he has been running a fever on and off for the past week. Not very well timed since he had baby-sitting duty all week long. Strangest symptom to him is that he has no apatite. That has never happened before, he laments, except when i had kidney stones. Hopefully he will recover soon and hopefully none of the rest of us will get it.
6. We have been driving a borrowed car for about 6 months now and it has been great, but it has been dying on us lately. Sometimes it wills start and sometimes it won't. It's not the battery, it is the starter. It makes it very unreliable. And since it is a borrowed car, we can't really go to the owner and ask him to fix it, since he never drives it wants to get rid of it in the first place. But are hesitant to spend money fixing it since it is not our car, and we would rather get a car of our own. We'll have to see. To tie this point to point 1: when we went the city hall to take care of my immigration mess the car wouldn't start again after we left the city hall. And this is in the middle of nowhere, mind you. We pushed it down the parking lot a couple of times hoping that would start it, which it didn't. All this was not beneficial to Leland's lung situation which was mentioned in point 5. Luckily some guys working on a building near by came to our rescue and help push it some more and it finally started.
   

On a completely separate note and not in the 'problems category' but rather in the 'Small Joys in Life' category: we have some hyacinths in our living room that smell just splendidly!