Month: March 2012

I went to Boston this past weekend to surprise one of my best friends from high school – Lana – on her 40th.  She and Vince share the same birthday – just 30 years apart. She was very surprised and I was very happy to be there to celebrate with her and meet many of her wonderful friends.  One of her very best friends who brought the birthday cake to the party is named Jovi and when I came home and mentioned him to Jeremy – Jeremy immediately said that he knew him!    Apparently Jeremy and Jovi were pretty good pals in college.  Jovi has even met my father-in-law before.  Small world indeed.

One of Lana’s good friends opened a restaurant called Casa B in Somerville – we ate there as honored guests and the food was delicious.

About a week ago, we were all in the car going somewhere really exciting (like Target), when Vince pipes up and asks, “What’s a hooker?”  As a parent, one wants your child to ask you all sorts of questions like, “What is Avogadro’s number?”, “Do you think there will be peace in the Middle East?”, and “What do you think of the Oxford comma?”, one often doesn’t think about answering questions about hookers (isn’t that what friends are for? really.).

But not wanting to embarrass him or to squash his curiosity, we told him a hooker is a person who sells sex for money to which he answers “huh.”  Jeremy steps out of the car to pick-up Chinese food (not at the Target, but maybe on the way home from Target) and I ask if Vince knows what sex is.  He answers in the affirmative.  I am not surprised but I do not really believe that he knows what sex is.  So I proceed to launch into a very clinical, but concise description of what sex is (basically the 30 second version) and I get the expected “ewwwwwww…… gross…..  STOP TALKING ABOUT IT, please!”  Edda remains unperturbed.  By the time Jeremy is back in the car with the Kung Pao chicken, the birds and the bees talk is all over.

Fast forward to tonight, we are watching Dirty Jobs, which is our favorite family night TV show (because it is the only thing we can agree on from the 10,000 things available on Netflix) and we are watching an episode about pig farming.  (It really reminds me that we should all become vegetarian).  Part of the pig farming farming episode is about artificial insemination.  It’s pretty graphic (except that the pigs do not actually have any sex) and there are still unanswered questions like – “Is that pee?”  Ummm, the answer to that would be NO.  Vince had to hide behind the couch until the whole thing was done.

Yeah – it’s exciting around here.

I do not like the unknown. I like things well defined and easily categorized. Of course, all of life is unknown and unknowable, so I have struggled with control issues for most of my life. I think if you ask most of my friends, they will tell you that I am warm, generous and relaxed – but it’s because I’ve spent a lifetime squashing these aloof, selfish and controlling tendencies into the bottom of my feet.

So to add to a list of yet another thing I can not control is Edda’s platelet levels. We took her off the most likely causitive drug, the Trieptal, and not only did the numbers not rebound, they went down (PLT, 53). So if you are keeping track, that’s 77 around Xmas, 64 around the beginning of Feb and 53 at the beginning of March. So that if one extrapolates – that would be no platelets right around August. (Regular range 100-400). So we have no idea what is causing this and also no idea what to do about it. It makes me sad and anxious. Although Edda seems no worse for having low platelet levels which I suppose is good.

Vince turned 10 on Friday and in the exuberance of it all, Jeremy and I momentarily lost our minds and let Vince plan a four-hour house party for 20 of his closest friends after school on Friday. How did we lose our minds and promise Vince this absolutely crazy plan? You know, he places his hand on my hand and give a little squeeze and then looks into my eyes and says, “You are the best mom ever!” and gives me a hug which may have included an Eskimo kiss. Well. I am absolutely besotted with the attention and Jeremy (as is his modus operandi) is just always agreeing to adventure without really thinking of the consequences.

I would like to say (now that the party is well over) that it went well.  Which means that we did successfully account for all the children and return them unharmed to their parents.  There may or may not have been arguments, crying, time outs, dry heaving on the verge of puking and wrestling, but now that the party is behind us, we will just say that it was a resounding success and also NEVER AGAIN.

Poor Edda, as she could have easily been a casualty in the melee, because of her unpredictable walking patterns, we needed to strap her to a chair for the duration of the party. As Jeremy said “lash her to the mast” a la Odysseus for her own protection!

The next morning, we donned some of the party favors and cleaned up the remnants of the pizza, chips and soda.

Daily care for Edda is always on my mind. Sometimes (ok, who am I kidding, it really is most of the time) I groan under the thought of finding care for Edda for the rest of her life. But sometimes I think that caring for Edda is a daily, meditative ritual which I could say brings me closer to God except that I am not a religious person so when I say closer to God, I’m not sure where I should be standing (more to the left maybe?  is that closer?). We all have our strengths, Jeremy loves food and I love to sleep, so these are the things we like to do with Edda.

Jeremy loves to cook special things for Edda. Edda has eaten oatmeal almost every morning ever since she started eating solid foods. Jeremy has figured out just the right amount of oatmeal, raisins, milk, brown sugar, heat and time to make a perfectly creamy steaming single serving of oatmeal. I have watched him do it many, many times and even though I know the amounts of each of the ingredients, it never fails that when Jeremy travels for work, my morning Edda oatmeal is just subpar. A little too grainy, a little too runny.

Just recently, Jeremy needed to start leaving the house earlier in the mornings and therefore this necessitated the transfer of the oatmeal cooking and feeding of Edda to our caregiver which in the grand scheme of things is not a big deal, but to Jeremy it seemed like he lost his primary time with Edda. I thought he was being silly, because I don’t have this feeling about feeding Edda, but I do have the same feeling about putting Edda to bed.

I should bath Edda every night – goodness knows she gets enough food, slobber, etc on herself to warrant it, but I usually aim for a full bath every third night or so. Otherwise I just make sure the important parts are clean – she is not so easy to bath anymore – she is a big girl.

After the bath, her hair is blown dry and into clean PJs, I tuck us both into bed.  I think this may be one of my favorite parts of the day – I can feel the tension in Edda’s hands relax, the teeth grinding slow down.  I can hear her breathing become more rhythmic and steady and then hear her snore just the tiniest little bit.  (I got new glasses! 25 dollars! God I’m so cheap!).

Jeremy’s home late tonight. Something about giving a talk to members of UCS. Are you not a member of UCS? You can become a member right: here and be invited to listen to Jeremy talk about things he loves like arcane policy minutiae (I think you get dinner too) all in a lovely DC locale. But even if you don’t join and you are reading this blog, it is most likely that you are related to us or are our friends so I’m pretty sure we could convince Jeremy to fire up the PowerPoint right here in our kitchen and give you the whole spiel – we could throw in a beer and some take-out pizza and it would be fun!

Things are chugging along here on the child-care-free zone here. We are managing pretty well, meaning that Jeremy is taking a lot of time off of work and I’ve moved my office to the kitchen to try and oversee the chaos and work at the same time. This results in good things like seeing each other a lot more, but it results in a lot of bad things like burning through vacation/sick time, lots of unfolded laundry and (as my office is right next to the kitchen) a lot of eating. I think I’ve eating a whole block of cheese myself in the last day and a half which has resulted feeling a little bloated and guilty.

Speaking of food treats, Jeremy loves buying Popsicles for the kids even though I find innumerable sticky wrappers all over the house, stuck to doors, carpets and shoes. All the kids in the neighborhood know where to find icy treats in the middle of winter.

So we have weaned Edda off of Trileptal because we think that the Trileptal is responsible for lowering her platelet counts – I suspect that it is not that straightforward and that the platelet count will eventually be found to have no good reason to be the way that it is – but I’m thankful we have an excuse to take her off at least one anti-convulsant. As it turns out, (surprise. surprise.) the seizures have not returned and Edda’s energy level has increased noticeably. No more reports of sleeping at school. A lot more whacking and flailing of the arms (which can be both a little dangerous and painful as one has to have the skill of a ninja to deflect the oncoming windmilling arms). A lot more teeth grinding (especially when falling asleep) and a lot more chewing of cloth (as seen in the above photo).

It was no surprise to me that the seizures did not come back. It has been Edda’s habit to cycle in and out of seizure “eras”. Lasting from 6-12 months, she would have seizures and then they would go away. It will also not surprise me that the seizures will come back. But I will take it as it is now, no seizures and a higher energy Edda.

This is going to be a very big year in terms of outlay of capital for modifying the house. We are going to *finally* get the stair lift installed in the next few months as well as eliminating the two steps off our front porch to our driveway.

Tomorrow is day 1 of having no child care. It’s going to last the whole month of March. I’m thankful that we have flexible enough work schedules that we should be able to muddle through this.