McCall 2012

Well that was a vacation! 

Ben and Noa chillin' on the old glider in front of Moxie Java in McCall.

As always, I have a fantasy that I'll get around to posting from McCall, but as always that did not happen. We don't have internet at the house - which so we're dependent on trips into town and time at the coffee shop. Once Ben and I finished all our business emails, there wasn't time for much else: there were too many vacation things to do!

I'm posting a handful of photos and videos (in following posts) now, but will have to get them up over the course of few days. There is just too much stuff and too many stories!

Overall, we had a great time. Noa and Ben joined me in Idaho (I'd been there a month already for Seven Devils) after Noa's school year finished up and we spent a wonderful few weeks chillin' in beautiful McCall. We stayed pretty close to home on this trip - and unfortunately (why not start with the unfortunately and get it out of the way) spent way too much time having to focus on Noa and her bowels. McCall is at 5,000 feet; it's dry and when it's hot it's even more dry and little Miss Noa arrived in McCall and promptly decided she did not like the water. This makes for two problems - dehydration (which we solved with a diet of unthickened stage 2 baby food) and constipation (which was the most troublesome issue.





Chillin' at Bistro45 by the Bacci Courts



This yard sale find turned out to be the perfect tub.



Noa enjoys windows down driving!



Noa went over a week without any... well, you can guess and if you can't guess then congrats because who wants to think of such things. Finally we tried an enema which had only limited success and laxatives which seemed to produce no results at all. A day later (4th of July) another enema. We were sure with the addition of the laxatives (and the inspiration of Indepedence Day) that we'd get some results... but no.

Finally we ended up seeing a doctor at the clinic in McCall (there were no apts available for weeks, but if we called at 8am there were a limited number of "same day" apts - so Ben and I took to our cell phones at 8am like we were calling in to a radio station to win concert tickets and managed to get one of the coveted spots). The doctor's theory was that the... blockage... was further up in her system and she gave us a recipe for change that included a double dose of ex-lax AND Miralx twice a day! This worked, but we were amazed that it actually took a couple of days to have effect.

Along the way we finally convinced Noa she should drink some Pediasure and would literally celebrate anytime she had more than three sips in a day. I should also note that in addition to not drinking liquids, Noa's immobility is another part of the issue. Walking and moving gets things... moving. I spent A LOT of time rocking Noa and trying to tease her into different positions, especially bending and twisting moves, just to get things moving.

In addition to Noa just being uncomfortable sometimes, and a bit out of sorts, it was a drag because I'd been hoping to use a big chunk of our Idaho time to working on feeding therapy. Much to our disappointment, the school has decided to stop Noa's feeding therapy because she's not making any progress figuring out how to chew (or wanting to figure it out). She is self feeding, and so they feel they've been successful with that (they have), but don't think they can make more progress with the texture/chewing issue. Since we had to keep the food very watery I wasn't able to work on this much.

BUT as you can see, Noa still had a great time (and so did we) overall. She took it all very well, really and we still did lots of biking and swimming and walking and hanging out playing and driving the windows down. Noa loves being in Idaho - but more of that in posts to come. Just figured I'd get that part of the story out of the way first. And the good news is that Noa got back to drinking once we got back to NYC. Hey, NYC has got great water.

Enjoy the videos below - more to come soon soon!

Noa sitting on her wee-hoo bike trailer - attached to the yard sale bike Ben got (I got one too)!