Month: February 2013

Yo Dinner!

Caleb loves sushi. He started eating it in Monterey when Josh and I would order it (we never ate sushi in 29 Palms — I didn’t trust the idea of raw fish in the middle of the desert) and always wanted me to buy the jumbo sushi platters from Trader Joe’s. Throw in his love of gouda and brie cheese and the kid has quite a unique palate. He discovered a new dimension to his sushi love when we went to Dubai and he saw Yo Sushi! a sushi-go-round restaurant where you pull the items you want off the conveyer belt. Ever since he found out there is one here in Bahrain, he has wanted to go. 

The different kinds of sushi are on different colored plates depending on price. Calvin is studying the menu’s pictures to see if he can identify the different rolls floating by. My favorite was probably the spicy tuna roll, followed by an inside out salmon roll, and an udon noodle soup. What I thought might be BBQ eel turned out to be deep fried salmon skin. It wasn’t my favorite. 

At the end of the meal, they tally up the different colored plates to determine the cost of our dinner. The rest of the kids will eat sushi, but they don’t get as excited about it as Caleb. Carter lives for miso soup and simple vegetarian rolls. Calvin skips the soup and goes for any roll as long as there isn’t fish on the outside — he doesn’t like the texture. Camille ate a bit of everything, including wasabi, and kept trying to push the button for the waitress (it was built into the counter in front of her). 

Sorting by color to figure out our total

A few last sips of miso soup

The end of last week (Wed/Thurs) Camille was still sick


(crashed in my lap)

So I ended up taking her to the doctor. Look at those sad, red rimmed eyes. 

Of course while we were waiting for the doctor, she perked right up and started playing with my phone. It always happens that way. 

Same kid as above, 30 minutes later. Right before the doctor came into the room. I’m the one with the tired eyes. Thankfully the doctor could hear she had crud in her chest and sinuses and since she’d already been sick for a week, gave me some antibiotics. 

3 days later (Sunday) she is begging for her bubble gum flavored medicine and happily plays with her dollhouse.

She’s trying to give Nana doll a bath

She still has a cruddy sounding cough, but is doing much better. 

What’s good for the goose is good for the gosling . . .

My adventures in animals and pharmaceuticals has continued this past week. Micah has been on an old-style antidepressant (TCA) that is approved for use in dogs, but isn’t used as often in people anymore (the newer SSRIs tend to be safer, more effective, less side effects, etc). He was doing much better on it, but was still a little twitchier than I’d like. For example, he would go in the crate and be be quiet while we were gone (HUGE improvement), but he wouldn’t eat any treats and when we’d let him out he’d go crazy with howling and vocalizing and just acting oddly in general.

From reading (God bless the internet) I found that many vets do prescribe and even recommend SSRIs over TCAs for dogs even though they haven’t been officially “approved” for use in dogs yet. (Prozac was recently relabeled for dogs and I’m sure the rest will follow eventually.) Since I’ve had great success with Zoloft, I decided to see if I could get some Zoloft for Micah. 
When we first put him on anxiety medication, we went round and round with the vet/pharmacy about a prescription. The vet ran out of the meds and was happy to write a prescription, but the US pharmacy required a prescription from a US vet. The base vet was happy to write a prescription, which I mailed in, only to have them tell me that because the vet photocopied it before adding her stamp, they wouldn’t accept it. Good grief. I just want some medicine for my crazy dog, please. When we lived in Egypt, you didn’t need a prescription for anything and could walk into any pharmacy and ask for what you wanted. The purpose of going to the doctor was so they could pull out their magic book and tell you what to ask for, since the names of the drugs over here are different. As a last ditch effort, I sent Josh to the pharmacy to see if we could get the medication without a prescription here. You might think I sent him because he speaks Arabic and can communicate with the pharmacist. That’s only partially true. Odds are the people working at the pharmacy are from India or the Philippines so while they speak English, Josh does much better with accent interpretation than I do. Combine their accent with my less than stellar hearing and they might as well be speaking Arabic. 
He came home with the drugs we needed, no prescription necessary. Happy day! When I switched Micah over, I had dreams of a perfectly relaxed dog, but for the first week it was like we took 10 steps backward. I think the one drug was leaving his system faster than the new drug was building up so it was like he was new to our house all over again. Every five seconds he was trying to chew up Camille’s toys, the boys’ shoes, Josh’s baseball glove (sorry, I didn’t tell you about that one yet — maybe we can get it fixed at the shoe repair place?), rolls of toilet paper . . . pretty much everything that didn’t belong to him. It was like he literally lost his mind (and was quickly causing me to lose mine!) But 10 days into the switch and I’m seeing good things: less freaking out when we get home, no more chewing of human toys and clothes, he’s not panicking every time we get in the car (pushing past us and refusing to get out of the back seat), and he seems generally at peace and about where he was on the old medicine. Since it usually takes 4-6 weeks for Zoloft to take full effect, I’m hoping he only gets better from here. Inshalla. 
PS: I did get sick and felt completely wrung out last night (wearing my green puffy jacket and 3 blankets when no one else in the house was cold was a big clue), but I think I’m past the worst of it. I should be better in time for another baseball double header tomorrow. Oh joy!