Jammy face, Lily's ears and police cars

I was very brave yesterday and drove the car twice - I hate driving - but Isaac had his feeding clinic in the morning at the hospital and Lily had an ENT appointment in the afternoon at a hearing clinic nearby.

Isaac started playing peep-boo with the empty plastic plates they had at the clinic, then he decided to play it with one that was smeared all over with jam! He was absolutely covered, his forehead, cheeks and chin - a little even went in his mouth. The SLT thought it was so great she got the camera. We left the jam on as all the books advise (often children who don't eat have problems with sensory awareness and its good for them to be allowed to be messy) until he needed to sit up for morning tea and I thought he would make everything very sticky.
Unfortunately as we wiped the jam off it looked like it was still there - I don't know whether he was allergic to it, or whether it was the fruit acid, but his skin was very red and marked for a few hours.

We decided that Lily would pay to see the ENT surgeon privately, she has quite a lot of money saved from her benefit and it would be months if we waited on the usual hospital list now that she's an adult - in the end it was only $110 so not much more than a GP appointment.
Lily has had pain and funny noises in her ears for a few months now, which seem to be getting worse and she is noticeably deafer.
The doctor said that her middle ear looked good, so no glue ear or need for grommets, and he thought the pain might be due to grinding or clenching her teeth - he gave her permission to start swimming again, so that was good too.
But when he did the audiogram (must be a private clinic when you have the consultant doing the audiogram) it showed she was much deafer than her previous audiogram. I was watching and thought the line looked a bit low, then realised it was when he interrupted the test to say to Lily "Even if you only just hear the noise you must push the button."
Afterwards he said it shows a moderate to severe deafness in both ears and he can't quite work out why - also why she can still decipher speech so well. So Lily has to have quite a few blood tests (Paul has brought some bottles and needles home from work and Noah and J are looking forward to watching him take the blood) and go back in two weeks and may need a short course of high dose steroids.

Noah's exciting news is that he got a ride in a police car. His class had been doing the DARE project that the police come in and do (about keeping safe and avoiding drugs, although I doubt if Noah understood any of it) and at the end he was picked for a ride. He went with his special needs teacher (who seemed quite excited too!) and they were allowed to sound the siren. When they got back to the playground, all the school kids gathered round and the policewoman let Noah say Hello to everyone over the car's loudspeaker.