So, today Liam had to go get an MRE, which is not, in this case, a meal ready to eat, but rather like an MRI, but specifically looking at parts of his digestive tract.

So that was fun for everybody.

Your Daily Lex.

In the past couple weeks, Liam got his Crohn’s disease diagnosis, and he’s going to start doing a shot a couple times a month for that, what we do at home, just like I do with my headache pen.

And so, of course, he’s super looking forward to that.

But the doctor wanted to get this closer look at his small intestine.

And so the procedure involved getting to the facility at 9 a.m.

for a 1030 appointment so that Liam would have time to drink, I guess, one and a half liters of stuff, dye, basically, so that when they did this test, they would be able to see more through his intestine.

And we all knew going in that Liam wasn’t going to like drinking this stuff.

I think that really nobody does.

Mercifully, it wasn’t carbonated, because carbonation can be a problem for Liam.

He hates it.

It was a lemon-lime flavored thing, and he said he doesn’t want anything lemon-lime for a long time.

But he was a champ.

He drank all three of these bottles that the stuff came in.

And then eventually they take him into the giant MRI machine, and I’m the parent who gets to go with him for this.

And, of course, they’re confirming that he has no metal on his person beyond his braces, which he did indeed have.

Luckily, those did not rip off his teeth.

But so, you know, he knows going in it’s going to be loud.

They give him earplugs.

They give him headphones.

He gets to pick whatever music he wants.

And, of course, he picks Pink Floyd.

They give me earplugs.

I don’t get Pink Floyd.

I’d rather hear the noise than Pink Floyd.

And we knew it was going to be loud.

We were familiar with MRI machines.

He and I talked about it.

We know.

But there was some comedy in it, because it would make, like, insane sounds.

Like, well, that’s got to be the craziest, most insane sound it can make.

And then it would just get louder or make more insane sounds.

You know, he was in there for about 45 minutes while he did various things.

And the recorded woman’s voice that he would hear sometimes would tell him, you know, hold your breath or take a deep breath.

And now don’t move or whatever.

And now relax.

And I could see little clocks that he couldn’t see that showed how long each thing was going to be.

And sometimes he’d be like, OK.

Now he would say, hold your breath.

And the timer would be about 18 seconds.

Oh, my God.

They’re going to make him hold his breath for 18 seconds.

So I was holding my breath along with him.

Well, like I said, he did great.

But really, it was hilariously loud and would just keep making more and more ridiculous sounds.

And one of the things when I was talking to him about it, he’s like, well, what I appreciated was they were all real notes.

He doesn’t like it if a machine makes a note that’s not one of the tones in the, you know, the Western scales that we use.

If he can’t if he can’t play the note, I’m going to like it as much.

So he’s like he was grateful that the E-flat was a true E-flat or whatever.

And then we talk about lunch afterwards because, you know, you go through all that and he hadn’t been allowed to eat breakfast.

So you celebrate that by getting lunch, which indeed we did.

And then I think we actually already have the results on CD, but I don’t have any easily accessible device to look at that CD on, nor do I really know what to look at in somebody’s intestines.

And they already gave him a diagnosis.

So I kind of don’t know why we’re doing this at all, but we did anyway.

Tonight we have Elf dress rehearsal and it is an invited dress where there’ll be some people there to watch us do this dress rehearsal.

We have never done the show without stopping.

We have never done both acts back to back.

We’ve always done all of our rehearsals have been one act or the other, which is how this production team likes to do it.

And every time we’ve run an act, they have stopped it for something.

And so I really hope that tonight we get to run it uninterrupted because that’s how it’s going to be.

I sincerely hope we’re actually doing the show, which begins Saturday.

We open Saturday with two shows, a matinee and a nighttime show, and then there’s a Sunday matinee.

And then for the next two weekends, it’s Friday night to Saturday and Sunday.

11 shows by the time we’re all said and done.

So hopefully by the 11th, I’ll have really figured it out.

At any rate, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Welcome to December and we’ll talk soon.

RELAX.