gimpy thumb

Spent the evening at the children's hospital with Ollie last night - he had been complaining about a sore thumb all day yesterday (which we sort of ignored - bad parents BAD PARENTS!), and when we finally looked at it at dinner time it looked funny and he couldn't extend it at all; it's sort of permanently bent. He didn't seem to be in pain at all, but it looked quite weird, so off to emergency we went. Got it X-rayed and everything, he was very excited about that, and the technician let us see the images too, pretty cool. Apparently he has a tendon that has slipped out of place, its a somewhat common condition, and he will have to have it 'fixed' by a plastic surgeon. Not quite sure what that entails, guess we will find out when we see said surgeon. Meantime, he has a crooked thumb. Doesn't seem to stop him from doing anything, he was swinging around the waiting room chairs like they were monkey bars.

Ollie is rapidly on his way to becoming a computer genius. In a moment of weakness a few weeks ago, when the boys were fighting and driving me nuts and I was trying to get something done around the house, I had a brief lapse of reason and asked Adrian to load up something for them to watch on his laptop, something harmless like the Blue's Clues website. Turns out the Blue's Clues website is linked up with all the other Nick Junior shows -Dora, Diego, Max and Ruby, Backyardigans (man, to think that only 2 or 3 years ago I didn't know any of those names!) - and they all have games. Turns out it only takes a 3 year old about 5 minutes to get comfortable with mousing and clicking and another minute or so to figure out how to navigate through a website and find the games, and even less time to master the basic games. OK, well maybe 'master' is exaggerating a bit, but there is this racing game and he knows how to start it, how to pick the car he wants to drive, how to pick the level of difficulty he wants and how many laps he wants to complete in the race. The game is clevely designed so that pretty much no matter how badly you drive you almost always win. Sam sits beside him and wathces, wide-eyed. Sometimes he lets Sam participate by getting Sam to choose the car, the number of laps etc. The peace and quiet that reigns while they play is blissful, but now Ollie is pretty well addicted. He just wants to play on the computer all the time and I feel like I have unleashed a beast.

Now that the cat is out of the bag regarding computers, my colleague recommended a really great website that encourages reading, starfall.com. It has short animated stories based around a particular sound, and as Ollie mouses over each word it shows how to sound out the word. If it continues to catch his interest as it has been I think he may just teach himself to read.