I had surgery. Wear sunglasses.

 So I had my first real medical intervention last week. I went in for an eye exam a few months ago, and they identified that the weird-looking skin on the inner margin of my eyelid (right up against my eye), which I had thought vaguely was some kind of combination of blepharitis, generally crappy skin, and just becoming an old lady,* was definitely not normal. The doctor did a biopsy on the spot, and that was very unpleasant - the local anesthetic hurt so much I actually shuddered involuntarily, and it turns out that having somebody cutting right next to your wide-open eye is psychologically pretty terrible. (Foreshadowing!) The biopsy indicated basal carcinoma, which is the "good" kind of skin cancer, but its location meant that I needed relatively complicated surgery. 

On Thursday I went in for the removal, having followed the instructions to wear comfortable clothes and pack a lunch. This was Mohs surgery, which is used I guess in situations where they want to take the absolute smallest amount of tissue possible. They give you local anesthetic, cut the thing out, and cauterize the wound, and then send you back out to the waiting room to wait two hours until they get a chance to analyze the tissue and see if they got everything. If they didn't, they bring you back in, and repeat the whole process. This can be repeated multiple times, though 2-3 is the standard. I expected it would be pretty awful, but I hadn't realized how bad I would feel. A friend later identified the emotional awfulness of this sort of thing as your brain forcing your body to do something your body thinks is a terrible idea. This feels right to me - every bit of the surgery felt like danger, and my poor body wanted to run away all day. They put in numbing drops that felt like poison - bleach or something that should NOT go in your eye - and then stabbed me with about a pint's worth of lidocaine, and then they put a black plastic contact in my eye to protect it, and then they did a lot of cutting and snipping and tugging around my eye, and then they cauterized my eyelid, which makes a sizzling sound, and a terrible smell, and the whole time I practiced square breathing with all my might. And then they put an enormous bandage on my eye, and I propped my glasses over it as best I could, which meant I could see only mediocrely at best, and escorted me to the waiting room, where I sat and tried not to cry. 

Cook was planning to come get me when I was done - he had offered to come wait with me, but I thought it would be silly for him to waste the workday that way, and it's not like he could help me with anything. I think of myself as a fairly resilient person with pretty good coping skills under duress, and I figured that I could manage this. Which I guess I could have, but I realized pretty quickly that I really didn't want to try- I felt so wobbly and vulnerable and miserably uncomfortable. (This was not improved by the elderly man with whom I was alone in this room. He very much wanted to talk at me about his opinions, many of which were stupid and some of which were racist in a crappy all-lives-matter kind of way and I felt filthy just from being in the same room. When they paged me back in for the second round of nightmare surgery, I actually felt relieved to escape him.) The second round of surgery - on my already-beaten-up eye - was even worse, and when I got back to the waiting room and Cook was there, I felt the most enormous wave of relief and safety. And then they paged me again, and I shuffled off to what I assumed would be a third round of cutting, but it wasn't - the second surgery had done the trick, and I could go home.  So I went home, missing much of my lower eyelid, with antibiotics in hand, my eye bandaged shut and strict instructions to keep my head above my heart, to not do anything that raised my heart rate, to not bend over, to not lift anything, to not sleep flat. 

The next day I had to go in for the plastic surgery to actually repair my eyelid. This was my first ever actual surgery*** - the kind where they make you take your clothes off and wear a gown (the nurse said I should probably take everything off, because "when you get really relaxed sometimes your bladder relaxes too, and it's a mess") and a comical hat for your hair, and you can't eat or drink anything after midnight the day before. I talked to a lot of medical staff, who were various combinations of extremely nice to me and extremely condescending.*** They gave me Versed, a sedative that immediately made me feel drunk, and wheeled me off to the operating room, where they shot me up with another pint of lidocaine and I spent an hour listening to 90s hip-hop and staring up at bright lights, watching them cut and tug and sew my eyelids. (Nightmare part 2 - I could not close that eye, even if I wanted to, I could only stare.) While the sedative (and the bed that actually had room for my arms, and the warmed blankets) made me feel somewhat more relaxed about this than the day before (though sadly not relaxed enough to pee myself), and it was physically less painful, it was a very emotionally draining morning. And then they took me off to recovery for a bit, and then I got to put my clothes on and go home, with the same strict instructions. I spent a lot of the afternoon napping, propped up on my bed. I'm not a napper, usually - it makes me groggy and nauseated - but I felt so tired and heavy, from some combination of exhaustion and sedative. Every time I moved my open eye, my other eye moved too, which tugged painfully on the stitches. 

I've spent the weekend in a weird useless state, napping and sitting and listening to podcasts, feeling uncomfortable and nauseated. Occasionally I get up and wander around, but moving around too much feels bad and woozy. My vision is weird, too - my right eye is struggling to figure out what its job is now, and what I'm seeing with that eye right now is like grey static on an old TV, which then underlies my left eye's view of the actual world, so that everything I look at is weirdly static-y looking, alarmingly similar to the way my vision darkens and fragments when I pass out. And it's oddly difficult to understand that for my right eye, there's no difference between closed and open. When I blink my left eye, my right eye sort of squeezes too, and it hurts. 

I have another surgery scheduled a month away to "open up the eye." (As best I can tell, the surgeon took the inner layer of my upper eyelid, flapped it down over the hole in my lower eyelid, and stitched everything up. The stitches will dissolve in a few weeks, leaving me with a fused-shut eyelid. In July, he'll more or less just cut across the flap. This seems like magic, and I'm very dubious about it - how does the cut surface figure out that it's a mucus membrane now? - but apparently surgeons have been doing it for a hundred years.)

I took off the bandage today to reveal my sad swollen shut eyelids. I have a couple of piratical patches to cover, for use in public and on work video calls, but for now, the stitches are covered by my upper eyelashes, and the eye just looks closed, like I'm constantly winking. (Cook occasionally does finger guns at me and winks back.)

This has been a really difficult experience to calibrate. On the one hand, it is a tiny bit of skin, and the prognosis is very good - the carcinoma is very unlikely to recur, and the repaired eyelid should be entirely functional (if eyelash-less). Really not a big deal at all. On the other hand, the physical, emotional and logistical impacts of it are substantial, and it all has kind of a horror movie feeling, so it feels like a big deal. I suspect it'll feel like much less of a big deal in a week or so.

Anyway, two takeaways: 

1) I really appreciate my family, especially Cook, who is taking care of all of his usual housework plus all of mine, taking care of me, and handling most of the parenting (including navigating Skipper's panic about all her end-of-year schoolwork). The kids are stepping up to pick up some of my housework and to bring me things and read to me. (Skipper is reading me an Agatha Christie book, and has taken a strong position that the British spelling of "moustache" must be pronounced "MOOstash" which makes me giggle every time.) I am really lucky to have a family that can hold me up at home, and also bring a feeling of home to me when I need it.

2) The doctor told me this kind of eyelid cancer is likely the result of childhood sun exposure. Wear sunglasses. Put sunglasses on your kids. 

*In retrospect this seems crazy - obviously irregular skin is something to worry about. But every previous time I thought something was wrong with me, it turns out to be either a) me getting old or b) me being anxious. I've never thought something was wrong with me and had it actually turn out to be something that was both wrong and actually fixable. 

**I mean, I gave birth in a hospital once, but that was a fairly high-speed event, and I was too busy to pay much attention to things like wearing a hat (or, say, shucking  off all my clothes in a room crowded with, I think, about a hundred people).

*** My surgeon has the classic surgeon's bedside manner. When I had my pre-op meeting with him, he told me brusquely that I'd probably have my eyelids sewn shut for a month and that I would never have eyelashes on my lower eyelid again. This was all news to me, and I said cautiously "I'll never have eyelashes?" and he said "Well, would you rather have eyelashes OR WOULD YOU RATHER NOT HAVE SKIN CANCER?!" And when he came to see me right before the operation, he didn't greet me at all, just walked up to me and said "You're going to have your eyelids sewn shut for a month" and I said "Hi."

Hiccups

Last week, Duchess went to do her daily chore of sweeping up all the poop in the guinea pig cage (this needs to be done twice a day, because guinea pigs are prodigious poopers) and was very alarmed to find it smeared copiously with blood. Turned out Snufkin had injured his back - the fur on his back was matted with blood. Cook spent most of Tuesday driving Snufkin to the vet (all the way across town), watching the vet pull away the matted fur and then be sprayed with arterial blood, leaving Snufkin and $300 there for surgery, driving home again, and then driving back later to retrieve Snufkin after surgery. The vet declared Snufkin's problem to be "weird - really weird" ; the bleeding was because he had somehow ruptured a growth that he had had on his back (which we were ignoring because it was small, not changing, and didn't seem to hurt or bother him in any way) which was somehow involved with blood vessels, AND was somehow associated with an old injury (childhood trauma probably incurred in the garage where he spent his youth with a LOT of other pigs) that had left a huge scar down his whole spine. Snufkin seems fine, indifferent to his comical shaved patch and stitches, though he really hates the probiotic and antibiotic he has to ingest twice a day. His whole "fuck you, don't touch me, just give me food" attitude somehow seems more nuanced now that we know his previous life literally left him scarred. Like he's a tough, damaged loner who's secretly tender-hearted and vulnerable under all the tattoos and intimidating glares. (Also, because the money we spent on repairing a rodent who literally spends all his time eating, pooping, and running away from us in terror is now spent, and I have to emotionally justify it by making a connection with the rodent.)

Also, this week we have sounded the alarm on Duchess's health. She's generally fine, but she's missed quite a bit of school and activities lately because she intermittently feels tired and dizzy and vaguely sick. I have been annoyed by this; she's a responsible person (except at home) and doesn't really like missing school, but she's also kind of whiny and inclined to laziness (she gets this from me!), and it I have been feeling like she should Just Toughen Up And Stop Malingering.  However, it's starting to feel like an actual thing, so we finally called the Kaiser advice line, which suggested that it could be anemia, a potential diagnosis strongly supported by our subsequent googling. She is not enthusiastic about eating liver, so we'll have to find another way to iron her up. She'll need her strength for all the rowing.

On Friday, I had to go (along with all my coworkers) to a 5-hour training on how to interrupt microaggressions, which put me even further behind on all my work tasks that keep piling up. So I would say it's been a First World Problems kind of week.

broken

Duchess broke her finger last weekend. (She doesn't know how; she was playing in the Blonds' fun backyard, full of climbing adventure equipment.) She managed to break it at the base, and compromise the growth plate, so it apparently requires an amusingly and surprisingly large amount of stabilization. She will get a cast on Monday, but here is a low-quality picture of her, featuring her enormous interim splint.

Agency

I am still alive! Everything is fine. No big news. I've been busy, and distracted by other forms of navel-gazing.

First, news of the kids:

• Skipper can read. 
• Duchess is currently pretty much delighted all the time (except for breaks for door-slamming tantrums) right now. She's got a potpourri of good stuff going on.
• Her "Battle of the Books" team is doing very well and providing a lot of really joyful socializing (which was very timely, as she had been very sad for a few weeks about her lack of friends) at her team's "practices." 
• She has been hanging out more with her best kung fu friend, which makes her also feel much better about her social life in general.
• She and her best kung fu friend are officially starting to prepare for their next big promotion.
• She's been getting more playdate invitations lately, from unexpected quarters, mostly from boys. I think she may be the practice Girl for many of the boys in her grade, as her temperament (flexible, enthusiastic) and her activity choices (electronics, frisbee, basketball, running club) have made her the girl that most of them know the best, and as they look ahead and realize that they are going to have to start having actual human relationships with the girls they know, Duchess seems like the easiest entree. I am crossing my fingers that being the practice Girl will turn out well for her. 
• Skipper is angry a lot lately, and blames everything on everybody else. We're weighing whether we want to try to figure out a therapy route or just wait and see how it goes. Being a rage monster seems like a bad strategy for life, but therapy seems like a big, time-and-money-consuming step that may or may not be helpful. 
• We've all been sick this week, with some kind of cold/flu thing.
• We busted out the extra twin bed, so now the girls have three beds in their room. Duchess sleeps in the twin bed (which she fills alarmingly full - it won't be long before we have to invest in an extra-long bed) and Skipper has moved to the upper bunk of the bunk bed. This means that Skipper no longer gets a parent lying down with her at bedtime, which is kind of a big change. It has gone very smoothly, and she is very pleased with her new sophistication. Duchess is also pleased with what she feels is her new sophistication (a bed of her OWN!), and they're both excited to host sleepover guests in the empty bottom bunk.

News of the adults:

• Cook decided he needed a project, and is accumulating the parts he needs to build himself a bike, which is pretty cool. 
• I've made self-improvement my project, and have added a daily half hour of exercise to my life, which is also cool. The main reason I kicked off my project is that lately I've been feeling like I had a little more agency in my life, and this seemed like an important way to deploy that agency.

Talking to a friend last fall about the experience of being unemployed, under-employed, and tenuously-employed  (not to mention employed with an abusive boss who considered me to be useless), I realized fully for the first time how destructive that has been for me. It left me feeling like I could not change anything about myself or my environment, like I was an inert, useless person to whom things just happen willy-nilly.*

Having now been employed for nine months at work at which I am successful and where I am appreciated and welcomed by people I respect, I think that I have been slowly rebuilding my feeling that I am NOT actually a useless failure of a person. I'm at the point now where I feel like maybe I can make small gestures at changing things in my life that aren't working well.**

I'm not going to write about my exercise program here, because I am well aware of how incredibly tedious that is.*** I will say, though, that starting an exercise program at my current advanced age is really different, and much less rewarding than starting an exercise program 14 years ago, so it's requiring every bit of that feeling of agency. Further behavior change will have to wait until my confidence is bolstered more.


*Weirdly, the symbolic representation of this helplessness for me is my teeth. The last year has been an ongoing misery of fillings for me, along with dire warnings of future misery to come. I have tried to do everything I have been told might help, but the cavities keep coming, and I don't see a way to make them stop.

**Even more weirdly, the symbolic representation that started making me feel like maybe I can change things is that I've been doing self-care for blepharitis.  This involves putting a warm washcloth on my eyelids, and then wiping my eyelashes, so it's not exactly the most empowering or exciting lifestyle change, but it is a thing I can do that actually improves something about my moment-to-moment life. That's kind of powerful.

*** Yes, even more tedious than keeping an unremarkable blog about one's unremarkable parenting of unremarkable (but much-loved) children. 

Growth

We have had a hectic few days. There has been baking, parties, gymnastics, roller skating, visiting relatives, restaurants, ice cream, and much more. It's been wonderful and dizzying.

On Sunday, I took Duchess to get her ears pierced. This was her request for a 10th birthday present, but her swimming schedule required a delay. This seemed like a good time to get it done, so on Sunday evening she and I biked over to a local piercing/tattoo place, a place that regularly handles much more sensitive and complicated piercings than easy-peasy earlobes, and has rave reviews online. She got her ears pierced by a guy with a lot of tattoos who was really great with her. She was thrilled by the experience, and LOVES her new earrings and clearly feels 100% more sophisticated.















































(Though she was mad at me when I took these photos, and thus looks kind of pissy.)

This morning, we went to a well-child checkup. Duchess asked me and Skipper to let her do the appointment herself, so we waited in the waiting room. When they called us in, Duchess's doctor told me that Duchess is "perfectly normal. Except that she's super-tall!"

This is Duchess's growth chart. Those numbers at the right end of the curved lines are percentiles. Notice how far Duchess is above the 95th percentile line? Notice that she's 5'2.5" tall? Notice that her trajectory is heading toward an adult height of over 5'10"? Even if she stops growing today, she'll be taller than a quarter of the adult female population.

Our life right now, in numbers

9,998 - hours to go before I become a guitar virtuoso.* I've been increasingly bothered by the gap between the amount of time I spend on supporting my kids to do cool activities and the amount of time I spend on doing cool activities myself, so I bought a super-cheap guitar** and an online guitar course. I can now play super-simple versions of Amazing Grace, Happy Birthday, and When the Saints Go Marching In, very slowly and badly. Also, my wrists hurt. And my brain hurts.

4 - my remaining weeks of work

6 - the remaining weeks of school

89 - degrees in Fahrenheit at the hottest part of the day last Thursday.

41 - Skipper's height, in inches.

36 - Skipper's weight, in pounds.

25 - Skipper's height and weight, as a percentile of girls her age in the United States.

1 - the number of times Skipper said "Fuck!" at her appointment with her new pediatrician.


*Also, apparently I need to concentrate and get good coaching, too. But that's harder to put into numbers.
** So new that it is still offgassing solvents, and smells like the tears of abused, underpaid Chinese factory workers.

Doing things the hard way

Skipper hates preschool. Her anxiety levels, already not exactly low, are hitting new highs. Lately, she's been complaining a lot about pain, particularly stomach pain. I'm not particularly concerned about the stomach-aches themselves- her digestion seems normal, the pain is generalized, and there is a family history * of not only anxiety but also anxiety-related stomach pain - but it still makes me feel sad that she is in emotional and physical pain.**

While the regular day is stressful for her, any kind of disruption in the schedule is a source of deep dismay and worry for her - picture day, getting hot lunch instead of bringing it from home, fire drills, etc. I think a lot of her anxiety is related to her difficulty in communicating with peers and teachers. I think she feels really alone at school, like she's completely responsible for everything, and she doesn't have the right or the ability to get support. When I pick her up at the end of the day, she often has a Sadness that she's been incubating for hours and never told anybody about. Yesterday, she burst into tears when I picked her up, because she had misplaced her sweatshirt about an hour earlier, and it had an important piece of ribbon in the pocket. She hadn't told a teacher or done anything else to solve the problem, just sat on the awful feeling of loss while it grew and grew. The sweatshirt,with the precious scavenged scrap of ribbon, turned out to be lying on the floor in a corner. All that sorrow could have been quickly and easily prevented by a quick request of a teacher or peer for help. Most of her classmates wouldn't even hesitate to ask for help in that situation, but she just can't do it. There's nothing blithe about Skipper. That's hardwired in her personality, and I'm afraid that if she can't figure out some workarounds, she's going to have to tackle every challenge in her life alone, the hard way.

She's working to find ways to comfort herself. She has adopted a security blanket (literally), which is a new thing; she never had any kind of security object before. She also has a new imaginary friend who manifests only at school. His name is Murphy. Apparently, he's not invisible, but "he likes to sit where nobody can see him."

I don't know if there's a way we can substantially help her. I'm not interested in doing a Grey Gardens thing, so letting her hide at home forever isn't an option. I expect some (good) play therapy, or a really good, really small, really expensive preschool situation, or some other high-maintenance strategy would be helpful. But given our financial and emotional resources, I don't think there's an easy way to help her. In a way, she's right to feel so alone, because she is. She has to do this alone. We can support her, but it's going to be her own work that pulls her through.

I have some glimmers of hope that she is making progress, between her coping strategies, and her accruing experiences of working through anxiety. This week, she and all her classmates had to do a health screening (courtesy of the county health department), involving quick, painless ear/teeth/eye checks. The teacher told the class about it the day before, and Skipper spent the subsequent 20 hours fretting herself into a state of misery. We talked about it, Duchess told her reassuring stories about her own experience, and I warned the teacher that she was worried about it, but I'm not sure that any of that made a difference (see above, doing it alone). When I picked her up that day, Skipper reported that the screening was not scary, and that she laughed while it was going on. After telling me about it for a few minutes, she paused, and then said thoughtfully, "I guess I didn't need to worry about it so much." I hope she gets to a place where she can apply that earned wisdom, and feel less alone, less burdened.


*I wrote about Duchess's stomach pain when she was almost exactly the same age.
** And, of course, I feel worried that maybe there's something actually physically wrong.

Well Child

Skipper is well. She's smallish (33 lbs, 38 inches), but trotting steadily along the growth curves she's been on all along. As expected, I had to answer a questionnaire screening question about whether or not she could draw a person with three body parts, but the doctor said not to worry as long as she seems to have hand-eye coordination and is interested in engaging with other human beings. Which she does and is. We left with prescriptions for dealing with nasty eczema flare-ups,* and a referral to a speech therapist.**

Skipper was much more cooperative and cheerful about the whole thing than I expected, right up to the vaccinations, but it was still exhausting. I have learned over the last four years that it's very tiring thinking about your child's health and development when it isn't going textbookishly perfectly. It's always a tiny glimpse into the experience of parents of kids with real problems.

*This kid really loathes the texture of all creams and lotions, which is problematic when you're trying to keep her skin from drying out.
** For a screening, because she's hard to understand. I actually can't tell if she's speaking unclearly on purpose. I assume a speech therapist is qualified to figure that out. 

No more zombies.

Duchess is alive! We took her to the doctor today, to make sure that she wasn't dying.* She's been tragic and lethargic for five days now, not eating, barely even stirring herself to read occasionally, and she was starting to look like a doomed consumptive character in a Victorian novel, all eyes and bones and hair. It was all very unlike Duchess, except for the whining. Duchess, as it turns out, is not at all a pleasant patient, and Cook and I were both feeling very frustrated by both her crappy behavior and her failure to bounce back from the illness. When they weighed her at the medical office, she weighed 6 pounds less than she did at her checkup in November. The doctor's verdict was that she has a stomach virus, and is dehydrated. The doctor's lecture, and the anti-nausea medication she gave Duchess on the spot, inspired Duchess to drink a lot of water this evening, and eat a few raviolis, and begin her return to life. She even participated tonight in the epic ongoing Polly Pockets story that Skipper and she have been engaged in for weeks. So I think she's going to make it.


*Well, you know. More than usual.

Miscellany

Skipper is into space this week.* She has been asking lots of questions and poring over an old Click magazine issue about space. She dug up an astronaut bear stuffed animal given to her by a NASA fan a few years ago, renamed it "Davy Baby Space Bear," and given it Most Favored Animal status.** However, when Cook delivered a bedtime story (an installment in the six-year-long Pippa and the Penguin series), in which the child heroine and her avian companion were SEPARATED from the parents and accidentally caught a ride on a spaceship, Skipper freaked out and had to hide under her pillow until the family was reunited. Apparently, we will all have to come along when Skipper makes her first space mission.

Today we took the girls to an open house at a local dance/theater/music education nonprofit, where they were offering free half-hour classes. Skipper was excited in advance, but when we got there, she didn't want to participate. ("I don't like this class because you have to talk," she told me.) Duchess, however, got to participate in an improvisational theater class, which (of course) she adored. Cook and I watched the whole thing, and we were both really struck by how much any 8-year-old (or human being of any age) can benefit from some improv training. The primary rule, more or less, are that you say "yes" to any idea that is tossed your way, that you listen and respond and not "block" your teammates' ideas by changing the storyline too drastically or by refusing to go along with their ideas. Funny but irrelevant non sequiturs are discouraged. There are no mistakes. It's all about paying attention, being generous to yourself and your partners, enthusiastically diving into ideas but still keeping an eye on the big picture to make sure things aren't veering too far off course... doesn't this sound like a recipe for success in conversations, relationships, projects - just about everything? I've decided that every second-grader in Portland should have a weekly improv class.

While I'm fixing up public education, I've decided that math needs an overhaul, too. This week my curiosity overpowered my budgeting willpower, and I purchased a ridiculously expensive ($6!) math game app for my awesome tablet. Duchess has been playing it as much as she is allowed, and it appears to be more or less teaching her algebra.*** It's pretty cool, and I think the school district should have all the kids learn algebra by playing a video game for a few hours. I'll include that in my overhaul.

And, for your last item of miscellany, I took Skipper to the dentist last week, and she LET THEM DO AN X-RAY. She cried quite a bit throughout the whole experience, but the incentive of getting screen time ("Wonderpets" again) was enough to make her power through. She may be actually growing up. For a bonus, the staff lavishly praised her excellent oral hygiene, she got a sticker, and she has no cavities. Huzzah!


* Hey, NASA. I assume you're aware that Sunita Williams is a fabulous ambassador for the space program, but having her/allowing her to host a 25-minute video tour of the space station was a really great idea, particularly if you were wanting to add "astronaut" to the career wishlists of girls around the country.
** Eat your heart out, Punghy.
***Though it's not perfect, and occasionally the presence of a coach with some grasp of math is very helpful.

Thinking positive

Looking back at photos from the beginning of the summer reminded me of an update I never mentioned. Skipper's eczema was brought almost entirely under control this summer by the judicious application of hydrocortisone (short-term) and ceramide-based lotion (ongoing). I feel stupid for not having brought out the big guns earlier, because those terrible, lingering, raw sores in the crooks of her arms healed up very quickly once we did. Periodically, she'll show me her elbow and say "Look! It's like a normal person's arm!" and I remember how grateful I am that she's not dealing with that any more.It's easy for me to concentrate on what's bad now, and forget what has improved...

Self-medicating

I'm not much of a medication user for minor complaints like colds, fevers, indigestion, etc. I generally feel that  suppressing symptoms just takes away your cues about what you need to do to take care of yourself, and it's not worth the money, the waste of environmental resources, or the addition of foreign chemicals to your body. I'm not hard-line on this, but even when I do buy and use medication, I usually try to stick to things with only one active ingredient at a time. It's a general approach that Cook shares, so our medicine/first-aid kit before kids usually consisted of some elderly ibuprofen, bandaids, and maybe a few cough drops. We've beefed up the first aid side of things over the last few years,* but we still don't really have much in the way of over the counter medication.

Today, though, I bought the kind of cold medicine that has THREE active ingredients and claims it'll make you feel totally healthy. I felt a little frisson of danger, like maybe I was going to go home and cook up some meth.** I live a crazy life! Actually, at the moment I'm just kind of beyond caring about cues to take care of myself. I'm tired and under-exercised, yeah. That's not news to anybody, and I have stuff to do, and it's raining. Now dope me up!

*Especially recently, after Cook sliced off the very tip of his finger and we discovered the value of non-stick dressings.
** Though apparently that's not possible any more. 

I feel like all MY blood was drained out.

Today I took Skipper to her well-child appointment. I knew it would suck. Skipper is not at all invested in pleasing people in authority, and is substantially more oppositional than her sister ever was. She hates medical appointments, and has never been compliant for anything at a check up. I was pretty much willing to do anything to make this appointment go better, because I'm weak, so I took her to the toy store and had her pick out a substantial toy ($20!) to be her Big Bribe. I promised her that if she was compliant for everything, she could have the Big Bribe. If she was mostly compliant, she could have a Small Bribe. I really didn't think she would be able to earn the Big Bribe, but damned if she didn't make it through the appointment. She was miserable, and she refused to look at or talk to the doctor, but she permitted all sorts of indignities* to be visited on her without fighting back or screaming. She fought the shots, yes, but I was still impressed. But then the doctor said she was concerned enough about the eczema to recommend testing for food allergies.**

(The Eczema: Skipper's eczema has become, over the last three months, more localized and more intense, and she scratches the bad spots in her sleep, to the point where she's maintaining them as open wounds. She won't allow us to put on lotion. It's not a good scene. I have been feeling really crappy about it for a while, because I feel so helpless to fix it and I'm worried it'll get seriously infected. Skipper has taken to hiding her wounds from us - she has sores in the crooks of both elbows, and when she takes off her shirt she says "Don't look at my arms!" and she won't wear shorts or short sleeves.***)


Because I'm compliant, I said "Okay." And then we went to the lab. It took me and three Kaiser staff maybe 45 minutes to extract maybe a teaspoonful of blood total from three different places on Skipper, because she's small and her veins are elusive, and she was fighting like a miniature Incredible Hulk.*** Skipper's narrative went more or less like this: "I don't want to be here! DADDDDDDDEEEEEEE!!! I want my daddy! I want to go home! Ouchy ouchy ouchy ouchy! Stop! NOOOOO! I want to be asleep! I want to go home! Ouchy! I want to go home! I want to go to bed! Stop it RIGHT NOW!" etc. She actually started to look, by the end, like she really was going to use her preferred avoidance mechanism of going to sleep, which would have been really weird but really great. Anyway. We all survived. Worse things will happen in her life and in mine, but at the moment it felt deeply awful. Skipper and I staggered out of the building, sweaty and exhausted. While we were waiting for the bus, Skipper said "That was yuck-sucky," and I said "yes." She fell asleep a few minutes later, and when she wakes up, I'm taking her straight to the toy store to collect her Big Bribe.


And in other news, Skipper has been medically confirmed as being short (15th percentile) and fat (46th percentile).


*Like standing on a scale! And having the doctor look in her ears! Horrors!
** And a course of antibiotics. Ugh. I like our doctor, who seems to have similar parenting and medical philosophies to mine, so I tend to go along with her recommendations, and when she's concerned about something, it makes me nervous. 
*** Rockstar Uncle, who had eczema, too, also refused to wear shorts when he was a kid. I have a memory (real? I don't know) of my mom writing a letter to Luke Skywalker to inquire whether he wore weather-appropriate clothing. Luke wrote back to say that he did indeed wear shorts in hot weather. I don't remember whether my brother was swayed by that.
**** I'm pretty sure they didn't get enough blood to do all the tests, but they were running out of places to puncture, and I think we were all emotionally really done with the process. 

How To Be Car-less With Kids: Sanctimonious Tedium Ahead!

Here's the question I always want to be asked, and never am: "How do you get around with kids with no car?" I want to be asked this question because I could answer it for HOURS, and I do love to talk about me. And what's a blog FOR but boring unsolicited monologues, after all? (With that said, you should all feel free to not read this post... you've all heard it all before, anyway!)

So here you go. This is how to be carless with kids, according to me. 

1) Locate yourself appropriately. Choose a home with access to bike and transit infrastructure, and a nice array of convenient destinations within walking distance. Choose all your activities, work, school, childcare, etc., based on accessibility. Don't overschedule.

2) Get yourself the right array of equipment, whatever works for you. Being car-free requires that you have options, and it's one of the great joys of escaping the car - when you walk out the door every morning, you have real choices in how to get where you're going. I love that. Here's my array.*

The Ergo. Now on its last legs, it's served us well. I now use it only when I want to take Skipper on trips involving the bus (no transit system is convenient with a stroller) and also more walking than I think she's up for. 

Trusty rusty stroller, also on its second kid. Skipper and I use this for longer home-based walking trips. Dutch, by this age, was both an excellent walker and so enormous she couldn't actually fit in the thing comfortably anymore, but Skipper is neither of those things.

Skipper's wagon, which we use for short trips or carrying large flat things home, like a bunch of tomato seedlings or a pile of wood chips we found in the street with a "free" sign on top. Notice Dutch's bike in the background. She would like me to mention that it is a very good bike. 

Our go-to Skipper-transportation mode. It fits two kids very snugly, or one very comfortably, with room for a giant package of toilet paper rolls, plus several bags of other groceries in the back. (Sometimes Cook or I take the trailer with no kid in it, if we need to fetch something really big.) Cook's bike and my bike both have trailer hitches, so we can easily switch the trailer between our bikes.

My bike. I love it. It's almost as old as me, it's this awesome shade of blue, and check out those brand-new full fenders, baby! Now I have no excuse not to bike in the rain...

This is a bonus piece of equipment. I got it super-cheap at a yard sale, and it's kind of falling apart, but excellent for kid-free walks to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk, a gallon of vinegar, ten boxes of pasta, a giant package of toilet paper, and, you know, whatever else tickles your fancy.

3) There's no 3. That's it.

We bike for most trips.We walk for trips under a mile unless speed or cargo necessitate biking. I take transit for trips downtown, trips longer than 5 to 8 miles (depending on weather and the pleasantness of the route), trips when I really can't be at all sweaty or disheveled when I arrive,**and trips when I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. Cook doesn't take transit at all unless his bike is totally out of commission or he's going somewhere with me and I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. We get a zipcar occasionally, mostly to pick somebody up at the airport. We rent cars for longer trips. We get rides from friends and coworkers sometimes.

So, car-free with kids. Is it sometimes a hassle? Yes. Does it take more time? Yes. Does it put limitations on your life? Yes. Does it require more planning? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes, totally. I used to say that I expected we'd have to buy a car eventually. But I don't say that anymore; I really hope we can get away without being forced to get another car. It feels good to be car-free as a family. It is fun, it is easy, it is convenient, it is healthy, and it enriches us both literally*** and figuratively. We live in a wonderful place, and the activities and destinations to which we're "limited" seem pretty darn varied and terrific to me.**** The extra time that it takes to get around by transit and my own physical effort is not in any way wasted. We spend it getting exercise, seeing the world around us, talking to each other, reading a book, and doing all sorts of other valuable things. All the cheesy aphorisms about travel being part of the experience (The Journey Is The Destination!) feel a lot more true when you're out of the car, and I really value sharing that with my kids.

That is the end of my sermon. Thank you.


*When we get rich, I'm going to get one of these to add to our stable. We have friends who have one, and Dutch loves getting rides on it. I think it'll solve a number of our remaining  transportation dilemmas - giving a ride to a friend, getting Dutch somewhere when she really doesn't feel like riding her own bike, giving Skipper a good option during the awkward period when she'll be too big to comfortably ride in the trailer, but still too small to ride her own bike, etc. 


** I go to a lot of job interviews, after all. 


***Living without a car for over a decade has saved us  probably somewhere between $5 and $10K per year. That's a lot of money. The entire fleet in the photos above, plus Cook's and Dutch's bikes, cost us a little under $1000 total to buy originally. I get a free monthly transit pass through my job (the only benefit I get), and Cook gets a parking-cash-out benefit for not driving to work (his employer takes an enlightened capitalist approach to employee parking), so between those things, we spend very little additional cash on our transportation.  Cook does some basic maintenance stuff himself, and keeping his bike running well costs about $400/year (and that includes investment in decent raingear, lights, panniers, etc.). He rides about 50 miles a week. I ride only about 20, and Dutch about 15, so we have cheaper gear and maintenance needs. If we had none of the employer benefits that now cover almost all of our expenses, I think we could keep our whole fleet running very well, including replacement as needed, for $1000 a year, and meet all our transit needs for $800. Can a car-dependent household get by spending less than $2000/year on transportation? I'm thinking not. 


**** The one thing that I wish we could do more easily is get out of town for day hikes and camping. When we get rich, though, we'll be happy to rent cars more often to do that!

The Gastroenteritis That WOULD NOT GO AWAY

Skipper started barfing again this morning, almost two weeks after her first barfing episode, and ten days after her last barfing episode. We are not happy campers.

*****Squeamish people, stop reading RIGHT NOW.*****

Skipper hates barfing so much that she tries desperately not to, even up to the point of actually swallowing her vomit. While this generally means less cleanup, and I don't think it's harmful to her, it's completely appalling to witness, and I'd actually prefer the cleanup. I say "It's okay, honey, just let it out," and she screams "NOOOOOOOO!!!!!" and her whole body gets stiff with the conflict between the urge to barf and the urge not to barf, and... ew.

Anyway. Cook bought some bleach (something we've never used in this household, preferring to stick with dingy clothing and household cleaning with vinegar), but I feel like a virus that lasts two weeks and causes this much misery probably demands some bigger guns. I don't know what, though. Maybe we should leave the house for a week and have it steam-cleaned.

Not Like Doctor

I took Dutch to her well-child check-up today. Skipper was extremely displeased to hear we were going to the doctor again - she said "No. Not like doctor! Skipper! Not like doctor!" - but when I managed to get the message across that she would not be the one under assault, she said "Skipper. Not like doctor. Dutch. Her turn." and she said it over and over and over again, I think just to get the confirmation she needed. During the appointment, she cowered in my lap, and if I let my arms relax too far away from her body, she said frantically "Hug! HUG!! MAMA HUG!!!!!"

Dutch is 49 inches tall and 55 pounds heavy. That would be, in case you're wondering, the 96th percentile for height and 89th percentile for weight.* She's also extravagantly healthy, and is done with vaccinations for two more years, so she was very happy when we left.

*Or, in lay-person's terms, Absolutely Gigantic.

I am still here.

I seem to be running out of bloggy steam. Are you all still there?

Things are okay. My job situation is making me very tired, and the rainy season has begun. We refuse to turn the heat on until November, so we're using lots of blankets and sweaters (and slippers, thanks to Skipper's reminders). Dutch is blazing through her not-exactly-challenging academic benchmarks* and is getting much better at reading. She brings home very strange things from school - yesterday it was a photocopied picture of a crab, with a speech balloon in which Dutch had written "I am very popular!" - she explained that it had been the suggestion of the kid sitting next to her, and she had written that down instead of her own idea, which was "I am going to pinch you!"

Skipper is a HUGE pain in the ass right now, and incredibly cute, too. She and Dutch are thick as thieves about 30% of the time, and at loggerheads the rest of the time.** Cook is settling comfortably into his incredibly tedious job, and we have made all sorts of medical appointments so as to maximize his terrific benefits.

Skipper had a vaccine reaction Friday night, and was up all night with a fever, and cranky the next day. (Cook and I were cranky zombies, too.) Stupid public health.

Dutch is about to turn six. SIX. Can you believe it? I can't. I can't believe she's going to be sixteen, and twenty-six, and so on. We also just got her school photo, which is awesomely smirky...

That's all I've got for you today. I'll try to muster up some energy to write something more interesting!

*Last week she brought home the single most depressing piece of paper I had seen in her short academic career. It had a dotted outline of a rectangle for tracing, and, underneath that, the dotted outline of the word "rectangle" for tracing. That made me feel kind of broken-hearted, somehow. I know it's not a big deal, but REALLY? No child left behind in the great rectangle-tracing race with China? Couldn't they at least have asked her to try to spell the word by herself? Or even just copied the word freehand? Who learns this way? Does ANYBODY learn things by tracing them?

** They really like similes and metaphors.

Everything is fluxy.

Lots of things have happened this month. We moved. We bought a bed. I discovered a new favorite Wilson.* Skipper finally started regularly calling me "mama" and also started regularly waking up at 4:45 AM. I almost got a job. Cook DID get a job. A REAL JOB! Okay, it's only for two years, it's not terribly well-paid, and it's not exactly... well... interesting. But we don't care. (I especially don't care. I have happily consigned Cook to two years of deep tedium without a single pang of sympathy.) We will have HEALTH INSURANCE! Real, honest-to-goodness health insurance, the kind that actually pays for stuff! DENTAL insurance!!!!!

In the next three weeks, Skipper will start at a new daycare. (I'm feeling queasy about this. She hates change, our girl.) Dutch will start kindergarten.* I will start working more hours. We're on the move.


* I know. I KNOW. I can't explain it. I've always wanted to own a copy of Shanghai Noon.

*We, along with all the other families, have to supply classroom supplies such as paints and 24 glue sticks, for the whole class to use, because they have no money for supplies. Also, they're cutting all the language classes. The letter from the principal brags, however, that this year they have a FULL-TIME PE teacher! Yay! But... what the hell is a "PeeChee" folder, and why does Dutch need one?

Do you have confidence in your medical provider? I'm concerned about mine.

It' s raining (a LOT - not the usual Portland drizzle, but a steady, heavy all-day kind of rain), and Skipper is sick with a fever and a corresponding case of The Crankies. Dutch is throwing tantrums. I have a two papers and one final due this week, and also two job applications to complete today.

So I am blogging!

The scene: Yesterday. Dutch has wheedled me into playing with her. (Cook and Skipper are asleep.)

Me: Hello, doctor.
DrDutch: Hello. How can I help you today?
M: Um... My elbow hurts, and the top of my head.
DrD: Oh. Let me listen to your heart.
M: Okay.
DrD: Hm. Well, I'm sorry to tell you this... I'm worried about you. I can't hear your heart.
M: Oh, no!
DrD: Yes, well, I will have to give you some medicine. Now, do you want some ointment, or do you want a bandage?
M: Ointment, please.
DrD: Are you sure? You have to put the ointment on five times a day. You could get a shot instead. It doesn't hurt at all.
M: Okay. Give me a shot.
(pause)
DrD: By the way, I don't know how to read.

Maintenance

So I bet you've been burning to know how our "no 'poo" experiment is going... here's your answer. I'd post photos, but the camera is still broken, so you'll have to take my word on it that after 23 days with no shampoo or conditioner (baking soda and vinegar only), Dutch's hair looks fine, and Cook's hair looks fine (and his scalp is much happier). Dutch's hair, in my opinion, has a richer color now than it did before, and a little more wave, but that's pretty speculative. What I can say for sure is that their hair looks/feels/smells totally normal, not greasy at all, and they never had a greasy stage. We've actually been oiling Skipper's head after baths, because her scalp was so dry, and after an initially greasy period of a few hours (during which we style her hair into an excellent fauxhawk), it looks totally normal (presumably after the oil soaks into her bedding and our shirts and whatnot). I'm still not ready to go for it, but I've been reducing the amount of shampoo I use, and concentrating on really rubbing it on my scalp rather than lathering all the hair, and though my hair doesn't feel "clean"* when I finish the wash in the shower, it feels and looks totally fine afterward.

That's the exciting news. I promise not to write about this again for at least three months.

*You know - squeaky.