We’ve posted in the past that Luke has a sensitive nose, and that we’ve experienced times where he’s reacted when the kids were having low blood sugars. We’ve since been trying to work with Luke and the kids to help him train his nose. A favorite game of the kids (and the dog) is the give one of the kids a treat and have them hide. Luke is then given the task to find a specific kid. Luke has recently gotten pretty good at it and has been able to help us find mischievous toddlers that occasionally like to play hide and go seek with out letting us know first. So tonight we decided to give Luke a real challenge.

For the 4th our family went to the city park to watch fireworks and let the kids run around. We took some treats with us and then split up for a little bit making sure that Luke was distracted while the older boys went and played. The park was very crowded and there was numerous fireworks going off in the parking lot keeping Luke a little on edge. I have to admit that I was skeptical that our pooch would be up for a challenge like this let alone be willing to even respond to the command with all the extra smells and noises that were a part of the course. He responded. My wife gave Luke the command to find Mark. He immediately focused and worked his way through the crowd following the winding and confusing path that Mark, Ethan and I took to get to the other side of the park and in a short amount of time found Mark. I was amazed.

Though Luke has come along with some extra challenges, I find the benefit of having a disciplined animal with a keen senses and a real attachment to the  kids a true blessing, and I am less and less worried about him being able to help us with eventually being on alert at all times for low blood sugars.

Now if we can just get him to never have an accident in the house again… I might actually learn to love the thing.

So far this season we’ve dealt with two good size episodes of different sicknesses. The first being a mean cold that took each one of us down one by one presented the first challenge and the feeding pump rotating from kid to kid. Then as to go out with a bang the nasty germ settled in on my wife and I so that we had to take care of the kids(who were now running around and healthy) in a pitifully sickened state. This time is always a great taste of patience endurance and humility. Unfortunately, I seem to fail on all three at some point or the other.

The second bout was some type of stomach bug that hit us following the same pattern as the first, by hitting each kid individually then finishing off with the parents. This one was particularly nasty; having us deal with countless vomit and poop messes. The Glycogen Storage Disease side of things unfortunatly requires that at home we keep funneling an ample supply of formula / ammunition for the germ to launch at will and the poop messes are less than to be desired, but by the grace of God we have been able to keep blood sugars stable and all the kids out of the hospital.

As a special treat this year, Ethan needed to go in for eye surgery smack dab in the middle of dealing with both sickness challenges. We were pleased however, that things went well and the doctor and hospital did a stellar job on keeping Ethan’s blood sugars up. A bit of a break afterwards would have been nice though. It seemed that as soon as he got home Mark’s stomach bug started to churn.

This all of course takes a toll on church, school, therapy and family activities, and wears us out more than we previously thought was possible.

So, I don’t wish to sound too down hearted about the holiday season. Our kids are eagerly anticipating Christmas and had a blast at Thanksgiving and eating mom’s special GSD friendly pumpkin pie. There are plenty of good things going on to balance out the bad.

Having such a large support of people has been the one thing that has kept us going. Family, friends from church, and home health aids have shown up at the right time to help cheer up a kid, or take a healthy one with them for a little while to have a chance to get out of the house and give my wife and I some chance at respite.

The most humbling of all is that we seem to find ourselves contributing to this season of giving by simply offering plenty of opportunity for others to give. So this year in our quest to keep kids healthy we’ll also be seeing what ways we can help our kids help others. Wish us luck.