Someone has a date tonight!

I’ll admit – I cannot wait! As soon as I get off work, I am racing home, changing, and going for a run!  What – you thought maybe I led an exciting life with men and roses and dinners? Pffffft. You so silly.

Last Thursday at my follow-up, I was finally cleared by Dr. MIT to start running without the risk of a kidney bruise. Sunday morning while the girls were at church with Grandma, I dug out my running clothes, dusted off my Asics and hit the pavement. No, no – that’s a lie. I have to confess: I was already in my running clothes when Papa showed up to collect Gracie and Bee. I all but pushed them out the door.

Another confession: I haven’t felt so frickin’ good in I don’t know how long. Sure, I only made one lap around the neighborhood (.6 miles) and it took me 7 minutes, but at least my turtle-like pace hasn’t degraded to downright glacial. And running to some good tunes on my iPod – those tunes I ran to three or four nights a week for over a year? – music has never sounded so kickass.

Of course, by the time I got back to the house and showered and after my muscles had time to cool down, everything started to hurt. Leg muscles, tendons, my arms, my back… I was pitiful. So instead of pushing it and hitting the streets again on Monday, I gave myself the night off so I wouldn’t set myself back – and besides, I could hardly walk, let alone run. I told you I was pitiful.

But! Today I am more than ready to kiss my running shoes for good luck and have some fun! It might take me just about forever to get back to the level I was at pre-kidney-stone, but I will get there. And by golly, I will run (and wiiDance) these extra eight pounds right off of me.

Quote of the Day

On Sunday mornings, the girls go to church with Grandma and Papa. It’s hard to say who loves these excursions more: Grandma or the girls. So much so, in fact, that I tolerate all of the God and Jesus talk that are slightly too obsessed with these days. But whatever. I make sure they are churchy and open-minded, at least. If that means I have to put up with Jesus being one of their pretend friends on car rides, so be it.

In any case, last Sunday Gracie came home and happily announced, “Guess what we ate today?” I guessed cookies, candy and soda – that Papa sure likes to spoil his grandkids and tease the grown-ups by sugaring them up before letting them go. Goof. But no, it wasn’t junk food.

“We drank Jesus’s blood!” Gracie exclaimed, like it was the greatest, funniest, wackiest thing she had ever heard. I was slightly alarmed that the girls were taking communion without having run it past me, but I didn’t say anything. “Yeah, it was a Capri Sun.” Whew.

“And then we ate Jesus’s skin!”

I laughed over that all weekend until her dad corrected her last night and told her the nilla wafer was supposed to be called the body of Christ. Not just his exfoliated bits. But at least I got a lot of mileage out of it first.

Whispering the Hallelujah Chorus

(I feel like an idiot for not thinking of this sooner, but Thursday night I got it into my head to try to give Bee some Zyrtec to see if having a continuous amount of allergy meds in her blood stream would be more effective than something like Benadryl that peaks after two hours and wears off every 4. And then I tried to give her some, and realized why I might have stuffed that idea way down at the bottom of my unconscious, under that dirty, mismatched sock.)

(Bee – she don’t like no pills. No way, no how, uh-UH she is not taking that pill. It has to do with what I affectionately call her alien gag reflex. It took that kid months longer to learn to eat baby food because any sort of texture made her gag. She couldn’t eat spaghetti until she was four. Any time she has a hair in her mouth, I’ve learned to just believe her and give her some water to drink to flush it out. If I don’t believe it, I usually end up washing the throw-up off the floor and giving her water anyways.)

(Pills trigger the same gag reflex it turns out. But! Bee hadn’t tried swallowing one in almost a year and she’s grown up so much this year. So Thursday night I gave her half a Zyrtec and asked her to try. I gave her half a cup of orange soda to do the dirty deed and bribed her with chocolate if she succeeded. After negotiating the number of chocolates, she gagged once, twice, three times and she was done. And most of her orange soda had been spewed all over my kitchen floor. I threw the soggy, slimy pill away, gave her a hug, and cleaned the floor. Then I had a brilliant idea: I could crush the pill! I poured more soda, dumped in the powdered Zyrtec and told her she had to drink the entire thing. A few slurps later…she dropped her glass on the floor I had just washed. Soda was everywhere. “At least the glass didn’t break, Mom!” Gracie piped up. Indeed. And that was the end of the Zyrtec experiment for that night.)

(Friday was a bit of A Morning and so I didn’t mess with it. Saturday morning, I crushed up another Zyrtec, dumped it in some orange soda [I absolutely forbid you from judging me 17 days into Hivesapalooza and after the week I'd had. She had half a cup of soda for breakfast - deal] and fed it to her. She drank the whole thing.)

(Not a single hive all. day. long.)

(She didn’t break out mid-morning when her Benadryl wore off, or that afternoon when she pitched a fit and got overheated, or that evening when she spent two hours outside at her friend’s party, jumping in the bounce house. I did find three teeny tiny stray hives at 7p, so I dosed her with Benadryl before she went to bed because night time is always the worse. She gets hundreds of hives on the side where she’s laying – something about the heat draws them out. But wouldn’t you know – not a single hive popped out all night. I was so happy I almost wept.)

(Sunday came and she stayed hive-free all day again. So I did a quiet little happy dance in my head – where the hives couldn’t see, you understand – and just watched her all day. I made the mistake of not dosing her with Benadryl last night and she had some hivies on her leg when I woke her up for a potty run at midnight. But still – that’s far fewer than she would normally have. I dosed her with Benadryl and sent her back to bed. This morning she had one or two teeny tiny hives and that was it. I gave her some Zyrtec and sent her off to school.)

(I think maybe…possibly…that Bee’s hives might be gone. HOORAY! Now shoooosh – I don’t want the hives to hear from whatever rock they crawled under and come back to the party.)

Thanks, but no thanks.

Note made to one’s self while cleaning out pockets before doing laundry: beat into Bee’s head that while she is the sweetest little almost-five-year-old I have ever known, she really doesn’t have to share with me alllll the time.

A few weeks ago, Bee announced when we came home that she had saved part of her snack for me. Goldfish! With not a little trepidation, I asked her where they were. “In my pocket!” she happily announced. My face must have fallen because she continued. “I wrapped them up in a paper towel so you would haf a napkin. Sometimes they’re messy, Mom.” Yes, yes they are. Like, say, when they’ve been stuffed in the jeans pockets of an active pre-schooler. Sigh. I thanked her profusely, told her they were probably very crumbly, and threw them out when she wasn’t looking. (Hey, she says she understands, but when she sees Mom throw out her offering, I’m pretty sure not so much understanding is really gonna be going on.)

Fast-forward to this morning. Emptying pockets. And as I put my hand into one of Bee’s pockets, I felt a suspicious pile of crumbs. I gingerly removed my fingers and then emptied it over a trash-bag. Goldfish remains. Sigh. God, I love that girl, but sometimes you really can share too much.

It’s Friday – blasts must be had.

Today is Friday. On one hand, thank god! On the other, ohgoodgracious is it Friday already? Like…where did the rest of the week go? Seems to me it was one parenting reaction after another and all of a sudden Hello Weekend! But, having established the fact that it is the weekend, let’s enjoy the fact. The weather is sunshiney and beautiful, a balmy 82 degrees outside all weekend. I will enjoy this weekend!

Let me repeat: I will enjoy this weekend!

I will not linger over the fact that Bee’s hives have come back after teasing me with a 10-hour respite.

I will not hold against Bee-baby her mighty hissy fit over putting on her shoes, or remember how her face fell when she realized she missed breakfast yesterday.

I will not remember that when Bee finally did put on shoes yesterday, the reason one boot kept falling off was because it was her sister’s boot – identical except that it’s two (yep, one, two) sizes bigger. And also the wrong foot.

I will not be mad at myself for forgetting Bee’s medicine for the first time in two weeks – even though it meant I had to drive all the way back home and then all the way to daycare. After all, it was also yesterday and that meant I could grab Bee’s boot and not have to decide whether to let her wear her sister’s wrong-foot shoe all day. AND I made it to work only two minutes late. Go me!

I will not be mad at Bee for throwing up orange soda all over the kitchen floor when I tried to get her to swallow half a zyrtec to see if that would help her hives.

Neither will I sigh too loudly over the fact that as soon as I had mopped up the first mess, Bee dropped her glass of soda all over the same floor. Instead, I will be happy the glass didn’t break and remind myself that mopping builds arm muscles.

Yep. It was a day yesterday. But I choose Friday over being mopey. I choose being a few minutes behind schedule so I could find the Grease soundtrack for the girls. New shiny happy music on a Friday morning? It fixes everything.

Summer lovin’…
having a blast…

It’s Friday. It’s gorgeous outside. Blasts will be made, fun will be had, and damnit – we’re all going to smile or else!

 

Even if we should pity her because it’s snowing, Auntie Kim still gets the blame for this one.

Oh yes she does. And when she reads why, she will laugh and agree with me, that’s what. See, when Auntie Kim was here last time – you remember the Snowtorious I.C.E event, no? – she and Gracie (and Bee, too) spent a lot of time talking about scientific exploration. They talked about experiments and discovery and I would frequently hear Auntie Kim ask, “What’s your proof?”

I think I was as delighted as Gracie was. I loved that Gracie was being stimulated in an entirely different way. Gracie loved that she was being asked to stand on her own two feet and that her word could be gospel if she could only find strong enough reasons why. For my little negotiator with a penchant for science and math, it was pretty much heaven.

And then last night I broke up with all those happy memories because guess what happened? They turned against me. I realized it right around the time when I was waiting for the girls to finish dinner, while I emptied Gracie’s backpack at the kitchen island. Amid the piles of papers I pulled out, I saw that Gracie had moved up a level in Rocket Math. “Gracie! Level J! That’s awesome!,” I exclaimed. The kid can’t wait until she gets through the entire alphabet, so I know she loves showing off when she jumps ahead.

I moved her worksheet onto the fridge and continued sifting through the small mountain of homework and archeological finds. “Mom, you’re not proud of me,” I heard from the table. Wha-huh?

“Why would you say that?” I asked, a bit in disbelief. “I just congratulated you!”

“But you’re going through homework again,” she countered. And then the little stinker followed up with the reason we’re going to blame Auntie Kim: “What’s your proof, Mom? Your behavior hasn’t changed.”

I’m pretty sure my jaw unhinged a wee little bit. My proof? A WEEK AFTER I SPENT AN ENTIRE NIGHT AND HALF OF HER FUTURE THERAPY FUND AT THE HOSPITAL AND DIDN’T EVEN SCOLD HER? Instead I went for light laughter and told her, “I told you that you did a great job and I put your paper up on the fridge. I don’t usually put homework up there. That’s my proof.” I might even have been a little smug that I came up with some good evidence. My behavior hasn’t changed, indeed. Can someone please remind this kid she’s seven?

Gracie kind of smiled, realized she had been beaten and went back to her dinner, happy that I had played (what was apparently) her fun little exercise. I might have started mumbling and grumbling about scientific discovery and giving mamas gray hairs while I finished sorting papers.

And I almost made it through the rest of dinner unscathed, but then I had to yell at the girls to stop picking on each other and Bee burst into tears. “You’re not pwoud of meeeeeeee!” Oh for heaven’s sake. I told her I was proud of her all the time and that I was proud that she didn’t have any hives right at that moment (quick! stop crying kid before they come back!) and that she had remembered to cover her cough with her hand.

But for pete’s sake, guys. If this doesn’t quit soon, I’m going to make them type of reports – double-spaced, Courier font – and submit them for review before leveling such sweeping charges of insufficient proof. And make Auntie Kim in charge of reviewing said material! Ha!

Slow down!

Because sometimes you need to just forget about everything going on, everything going wrong. No one has stitches or busted heads. No one has never-ending hives.

Sometimes you need to just start pouring glass of wine in the middle of the afternoon.

Throw open the windows and enjoy the sunshine.

A long, leisurely nap.

Going for a drive in the “good” car, stopping for an early dinner (or a really late lunch!).

Eating on the patio, warm sunshine, 85 degrees!, beautiful breezes, happy music, mussels and crab with butter and garlic.

Accidentally letting the bread soak too long in the garlic sauce, then having to eat it with a spoon.

One – no, two – malibu spiked pink somethings in mason jars.

More wine and concerts in the park.

Sometimes, with everything going on, you just need to sloooooow things down and just enjoy your afternoon. Because, oh happy sigh, it works. So, so well.

My little entrepreneur.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job not worrying my way through this whole, “Ma, I’ve split my head open,” thing. But I just might start.

I think I mentioned that the extremely awesome ER doctor let Gracie take home the instruments from her suture kit, since he was going to have to throw them away and Gracie was asking every question she could think of.  Dr. Awesome had explained earlier that one of the reasons he became a doctor was because he had stitches frequently when he was young and he got hooked on the idea of fixing people up; he thought Gracie might be headed in the same direction if her enthusiasm was any gauge. So he gave her some parting gifts and it was good.

Well, yesterday when we were driving home from work and daycare, Gracie asked if she could play with her doctor kit. A minute later she stated, “Mom, I want to start a business.”

“Okay, what kind?” I asked, interested.

“I want to sell my doctor stuff,” she explained, confident that she would soon have $100.

It was a very simple plan, but if her devious plan is to land herself in the ER to get some “hot goods” to sell on the sidewalk, I think I’m going to need to be made of stronger stuff! Quick – someone teach my kid how to sell a bridge in Brooklyn. It might be easier on her poor mama’s heart.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

I actually remembered to wear green this year.

This Boston girl has the luck of the Irish to be thankful for. The lucky break that was just a break, and didn’t involve bleeding on the brain for one lil Gracie. With any luck, Bee’s hives will melt away (please! finally!) and even if they don’t, hey – they’re just hives. The luck and good fortune that all I care for are (relatively) healthy and accounted for. The luck of living in a safe neighborhood that, while it isn’t anywhere near the New England home where I’d like to be living, is at least far, far away from poor, heart-breaking eastern Japan. Yes, there is a lot of luck to be thankful for this year!

Guess I forgot to call ‘No ER visits!’

Oh this week. I’m laughing, because – really? REALLY? What else can I do?

See, I thought my biggest problem with yesterday was trying to get daycare to remember simple instructions about Bee’s never-ending hives. [Hives! HIVES! hahaha! Okay, sorry. Apparently I'm a little hysterical.] I had dropped the girls off at 7a.m. like usual, showed the director Bee’s hives – which were much better than she saw them last time on Friday – and filled out the center’s medication permission slip. I even went over the letter I had written with the exact times Bee needed her medicine – 8 a.m., 12 noon, and 4 p.m. Then I showed Miss Director where I had marked on the medicine cup the line at 1 1/2 teaspoons so they wouldn’t mess up the dosage. It was a big production, in other words.

At 11:30 I called to check on Bee. Her hives hadn’t come back and she wasn’t itchy. Score! I reminded Miss Director that Bee would still need her medicine at noon…and that’s when the director told me she had forgotten to give Bee her medicine at 8 a.m. Everyone throw your hands up in frustration! It wasn’t even an hour after my big production about the medication schedule! And it’s spring break this week, so it’s not like she had busloads of children being distributed every which way at 8 a.m. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think yelling at her would get me anywhere. It was just yesterday’s crisis…or so I thought.

Just after I got back from lunch, my cell phone went off. Daycare! I thought they were calling with questions – or another confession – about Bee’s medication. Instead I heard, “Well, it’s not an emergency…but it…well, I guess…yes, it is sort of an emergency, but she’s okay…sort of.” She finally blurted out that Gracie had fallen off of some playground equipment and banged her head. She said that Gracie might need stitches and then said something that made it perfectly unclear whether her head wouldn’t stop gushing blood or not. My favorite part was when she asked me if she needed to call 911 or not. I very clearly and calmly asked her, “Do you think you need to call 911?” Because hello! I was not there and sadly, had forgotten my powers of omniscience at home. She said she thought they could get the bleeding under control, but wanted to check what I wanted to do. So I told her I was on my way, but if the bleeding got worse, or she thought they should call 911, to just go ahead and do it and to call to tell me. Yes, I really had to spell it out for her.

Yesterday afternoon, let me tell you, I found out that with a few well-timed green lights, I can get from work to daycare in just under 15 minutes. (We won’t even discuss how long it takes normally.) I tore into the front office and stopped short when I saw Gracie calmly sitting on the bench, not crying, not looking upset, not even holding a towel to her head. Guess they got it to stop bleeding. Of course, her chin got awfully wobbly when she saw me. Poor thing. I checked out the gash on her head and agreed – it was going to need stitches. It was ragged and oozing blood and gross and totally cool all at once. You know, if you weren’t her mom. Ahem.

Since she was relatively okay – or at least 1000% better than the director had made it seem – I went outside where the teacher on-duty was showing the director what had happened. Gracie showed us how she had been sitting on the second story of the play structure with her back to the opening. She turned to see what her friend was doing, lost her balance, and whacked her head on a metal pole behind her – one of those corkscrew type climbing pole thingies. She half caught herself and then fell to the ground, thankfully to her knees and not on her head.

Reenactment finished, I whisked her off to the hospital, asking her questions along the way to make sure she didn’t have a concussion. Really, the kid seemed fine. She knew her birthday, her name, the president, the day of the week, her school, her room number (I’m guessing she got that one right – I don’t even know it). She wasn’t even sniffling or whining. We made it to the ER and filled out paperwork and the closest Gracie came to pitching a fit was when my cell phone pic of her wound wasn’t good enough quality. Seeeeee?

We did a CT scan and the tech was amazing. She explained the process to Gracie about flying through the giant donut and even ran the machine through the entire process while Gracie watched so she could see what would happen. She draped me with my own superhero cape and let me stand next to Gracie in case she got scared or fidgeted. The most Gracie did was move her eyes around trying to take in everything at once. The tech said even grown-ups don’t stay that still. I told the tech she was lucky it wasn’t Bee. Heh.

From there we went back to the ER room, this time with a compress on the back of her head because blood was trickling through her hair again and I was a little concerned that Gracie – in all of her normal, are-you-sure-my-head’s-bashed-in? exuberance – would splatter bio-hazard droplets everywhere. The ER doctor came in and I have to say – he was the most amazing ER doctor we could have had. He explained to me why we couldn’t use glue, but staples were really the way to go. He answered zillions of Gracie’s this-is-so-cool questions. He didn’t mind that I took pics and kept leaning in closer to look when he irrigated the wound. It turns out that he has three kids of his own, including a daughter Gracie’s age. He decided Gracie was going to be a doctor one day, I think right after her 1,394th question, and gave her the rest of the suture kit, including scissors, clamps, tweezers, and a needle-less syringe. (Hey, he was going to have to throw them out anyway.) I think he was impressed that Gracie didn’t flinch once – not even when they jabbed her with the numbing needle in her freakin’ scalp.

All that was left to do was draw up her discharge papers and make sure the radiologist concurred with the doctor’s prelim assessment that her CT scan was clean. (The doctor had checked it earlier when Gracie complained of being sleepy.) Unfortunately, that’s when our night got that much complicated-er. Because! As an extra special bonus round! Gracie had fractured her skull! Oh yes. Having a wound that turned out to be too big and deep for staples wasn’t enough. Four stitches wasn’t enough. Nope! Let’s through in a fracture to make sure mama gets the most panic for her money!

Our Skull Fracture Bonus Round included twenty minutes talking to my new favorite doctor about whether to admit her to the children’s hospital downtown (our hospital doesn’t admit minors) overnight for observation, or to discharge her to me, with the proviso that I would sleep in her bed and keep a very close eye on her. I was concerned because Gracie is my child I can’t wake up during the night no matter what the circumstances. Checking her to make sure she could wake up and wasn’t concussed would be impossible. The doctor assured me that there would be other symptoms – puking in her sleep, full body seizures, etc. Still. I wasn’t sure. At one point, the doctor said that if it were him, he’d take her home. To which I quipped, “Yes, but you’re a doctor!” He started laughing, which made me love him even more.

Eventually, after consulting with our ped, we decided I would take Gracie home. Transferring her would have to be in an ambulance – a $2000 bill, at least – and Gracie was acting absolutely fine. The very nice doctor assured me we could come back any time that night if I thought she needed another scan or if I was worried. He said he wasn’t on call today, but he would be there for meetings, so if we ended up back in the hospital he said to have him paged and he would come examine Gracie and work her case. He also gave me his business card with his cell phone written on it, just in case I had any questions. Who could ask for better care than that?

Happily, Gracie and I slept fine. Miraculously, she even woke up every time I shook her awake and asked her questions. We’re still waiting to see if we need to repeat the CT scan and to see her ped, but I’m hoping the worst is behind us. Stupid Ides of March. Between my surgery, Bee’s never-ending hives, and Gracie’s busted skull, I’m hoping we’re through with this curse. I am already ready for the time when it will just be a wicked cool story for the kids to tell around the kitchen table when they’re older and have turned all my hair gray.