Over on DadBloggers I wrote about our experience at the eye specialist Tuesday morning. We have been putting a patch on our daughter for two years, one of the toughest things we’ve had to do as parents, and we are finally seeing some rewards for it.

“Jordyn, can you see this? What animals do you see?” the eye specialist asked my little girl yesterday morning.

A pause. I was holding my breath. I’d bet money Gem was, too.

“A cat!” and the doctor looked at us both as if he had performed a magic trick.

Maybe not a magic trick.

More like a miracle.

My wife and I have been fighting one of the most important battles in our parenting lives; the fight to save our daughter’s sight. We will take any magic tricks or miracles that help her.

I hope you’ll take a few moments and check out Jordyn’s Three-Dimensional Miracle.

As an aside, if you or anyone you know has to deal with patching the eye of a child (particularly if they also have to wear glasses), please tell them about Patch Pals. We found that the band-aid patch, or what we call Sticky Patches, were torture for Jordyn, and us. These patches fit over the frame of the glasses, have adorable designs on them and changed our lives. If another child, and their parents, can be saved from the challenge of sticky patches, so much the better.

The other night Jordyn was sitting on the potty and we were working on my Okapis favorite thing right now…Highlights’ Hidden Pictures magazines. They are magazines full of pictures/drawings where you have to find a series of objects inside the pictures…because they are hidden. They have been captivated by these for several weeks now and they have gotten pretty good at them.

One of their two favorite pages is a drawing of a very complex image and the objects they need to find are actually stickers. So once they find the object they can place the sticker on the actual image in the larger drawing (I hope that made some sense).

The only problem is when they first got these magazines, they would rip out the page with the stickers on it and leave them on the floor. This kind of thing bothers both of us – especially Gem. It got so bad that we started giving them time-outs when they would rip it out without our permission.

So Jordyn and I are working on finding all of the objects so she can put the stickers in the correct place. However, the sticker page is really a half page and if you leave it in the magazine, it blocks half of the picture, making it much more difficult to find everything.

“You know what, Jordyn? I think we’re going to find all of the stickers tonight, so we can rip it out.”

“Really?”

We ripped it out and it made it much easier for her to find the remaining objects in the picture. When Gem came back into the room, I joked with Jordyn that we can’t tell Mommy because we’ll get a time-out.

“No, Daddy. You ripped it out. You’ll get a time-out.”

Nothing like a daughter who takes no crap from her Daddy. Sure, that will grow old in a year or two – not too mention in adolescence, but for now, I actually felt a sense of pride and enjoyed a good laugh.

“You wanna go to Friendly’s?” It was Gem. It was a rhetorical question. Asking me if I want to go to Friendly’s is like asking a drunk if he wants to get a drink at a bar. Monday was such a terrible day for both of us and I needed a drink – except my preferred drink is an ice-cream sundae. (more…)

Before our Okapis were born, Gem and I had spent 10 out of 12 Thanksgivings at her parents’ house. We had never spent Thanksgiving with my family together. Once the Okapis were born we decided we didn’t want it to be like that anymore – we wanted our Okapis to have the chance to spend Thanksgiving with both sets of grandparents. When we moved into our house, we invited everyone to our house for the holiday and have done so ever since. (more…)

Our offer on the house from the weekend wasn’t accepted; they did counter, however - though considering what we offered was more than we could afford, what they want is obviously higher than that. Then Gem saw another house this morning that she may think is the one and we arranged for me to see it with her tonight. She says it is the best house she has seen - and this is after spending all weekend talking about how we could turn the house we made the offer on into our house. Where we would put our Okapis, etc.

Then I got another phone call. Our lawyer. The fucking bastard who signed the contract with us, who basically wanted to sell us a house so he could buy our house (or maybe he just wanted to sell us a house), faxed a letter saying he was withdrawing his offer to buy our home.

The house we fell in love with on Friday, and all weekend, gone.

The possibility of this house tonight, gone.

Every single day our house is on the market is less money we’ll be able to get for it, less money for our next down payment and the more likely it means we’ll be paying an 80% increase in our current mortgage when the adjustable rate expires in March.

Now it means every weekend will once again be consumed with open houses, with the cleaning and preparing, with not being with the Okapis, with inviting strangers into our home and hoping against hope one of them will fall in love with it enough to want it for themselves.

The worst part, possibly, is we really thought we were so close to being done with this whole thing. Had a signed contract, offer on our next house…now back to square one.

For the second fucking time.

I hate this fucking process.

A new Okapi was born in the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois. Upon reading more about it, this little Okapi, while much bigger than mine, is studied almost as closely.
When Semliki Okapi gave birth to her first calf at Brookfield Zoo, it was time to charge up the palm pilots, call in the night crew, and get ready to monitor every developmental “first” for this new forest creature. Now, day and night keepers continue to watch over Semliki and the calf using EthoTrak systems—handheld computer technology developed by the Chicago Zoological Society (CZS) to record and share behavioral data.

Thanks to the kind Two Okapis reader who sent me the news article on this adorable new Okapi.