Eoster: behold the power of a candy filled egg accompanied by plastic tat in large quantities

It may have begun as a Pagan celebration. Bells might fly from Rome to give French kids chocolate. I will possibly go to hell for giving out Easter cards with a cartoon style drawn bunny handing Christ on the cross a decorated oeuf saying "have an egg, you'll feel better." I suspected the Peeps and Hallmark folks had a hand in blowing this whole thing out of proportion. I don't know why I fell for it for all those years before I had kids but now I know: Easter was created by occupational therapists.

Day three and counting

House date (I hate star dates, space bores me silly, except in Galaxy Quest): January 25, 2011

Today is day three of Hannah's third illness in two and a half weeks.  We started a few weeks ago with the delightful virus with a gastro bonus feature, had five days of normal eating and living, then Hannah's first bout with strep throat, probably courtesy of big sister who gets strep if someone talks about it, and after six days on antibiotics she got sick AGAIN.  Like God, she was supposed to rest on the seventh day but maybe because she can't read yet, she did not get the memo.  This would be your basic streaming nose and eyes, coughing (OK, hacking), high fever kind of virus.  Bonus feature add on: hands, lips, and nose turning blue when she either is cold or feels cold despite actually being 105 degrees.  Lest you think I am a crappy mother, I will tell you I asked Metabolics about the blue hands the first time it happened, when she was not actually even sick, and they sent me to Neurology, who said it was not CP related since it hit more than her affected side and so it must be metabolic, who again denied coverage.  My regular old garden variety pediatrician says it is vascular and inexplicable and not to fret.  A win for the GP!  Inexplicable!  Woo-hoo! But I digress . . . The strep was sort of anticlimactic, Hannah had a fever but never considered reducing her food, she was too busy catching up from the previous weekend.  Strep was small potatoes in her mind.  We were concerned she could get sick again without having even finished the pink stuff but a check yesterday says no UTI, no ear infection, just a suspected bone chilling, lung shattering, neck baking, snot making virus.  On the upside, the only body fluid currently distributed about my face and shirt are all snot or spit/snot related.  Hannah is napping right now, and just coughed so hard she said "Owie!" in her sleep, which is cute but distressing.  So far, in order to get her to consume enough calories to fuel this fever I have used the following: Polycose added to milk or in juice (a blend of secret not sweet sugars that have both quick and longer acting molecules to add calories) which is new to us, I have served almost all of her most favorite foods (many of which elicited no response at all, including pot stickers) I have squirted syringes of liquid in her mouth while sleeping as well as inserted bottles of milk until she remembers she doesn't want it, I gave her home-made buttercream frosting (hardly painful for me at all) and tonight I will try The Soup of Healing and the Rice of Togetherness (egg drop soup from my favorite Chinese place, which I swear really does have healing properties, and we need the rice of togetherness because if Lord Honey fails once more to understand my dosing instructions about Hannah and fever reducing medicines this family will have a reduction in force, effective immediately).  I just remembered marshmallows, and that I could perhaps offer her two big fat ones right before bed so I could feel I could safely sleep though the night.  I might make some brownies and frost them with buttercream frosting.  For lunch I made tea sandwiches (she wolfed them down the last time I made them for a party) and she managed to eat one third of the triangle which was 1/4 of a full sized sandwich minus crusts.  Success!  But I will please Claire with my tea sandwich efforts, and that is worth something. 

So a colleague in my office emailed me to ask how Hannah was and I gave her the update.  She wrote back how the coughing could make a parent feel so helpless.  I told her how empowered I felt when I got the child to eat nearly 1/12th of a sandwich.  She thought it sounded like I'd have Hannah mended soon.  I pondered whether I knew anything at all about any of this.  I decided I felt more like a fat old Idaho salmon, trying to get upstream to do my duty but not having a fucking clue how to work fish ladders when I don't have hands or feet. 

After trying to draw you out of your shells I had planned to be bitingly funny, poignant, witty, maybe even worth forwarding.  Oops!  Someone is calling "Mooooommmmyyyyy" so I must fly.

Edited: updating with the news that she can now cough enough to lose her lunch.  Lovely!

Motherhood, juxtapositonally speaking

My sister made a point to tell me Happy Day for Claire's birthday, and told me she always feels extra special on her kids' birthdays. I felt special but sort of bitchslapped too, so much so that I ended up crying at the bakery when I picked up Claire's fancy cake for the family party. I thought of how I'd brought home a cake from that bakery when Claire got home from the hospital, and how much bigger it was than her tiny wee head, and how addicted I became to that buttercream frosting, making her at least %25 butter for the next two months when I stayed home with her, trying to fatten her up.

It had already hit me some on Saturday, with her party coming up and me racing around doing party prep errands on a sunny spring day, high on my SECOND Starbucks Venti Caramel Macchiato, blaring Tom Petty in my minivan, and feeling the love. Jason had said something like "I wish I'd gotten this much when I was a kid" and I said yes you do, everyone should be so lucky to be as loved and cared for as my dear girl. It all came together in some weird "I won't forget this moment" sort of way, with the pleasure of giving her a great time and making her feel cherished and important, and the sun was shining and then came the juxtaposition of some of my old punk rock playing on the iPod, followed by Tom Petty with me screeching along with "oh baby don't it feel like heaven right now, don't it feel like something from a dream?" Yes! It is heaven! I get this lovely creature to spoil and fawn over and cradle in my arms, and then I remembered how I almost didn't get her at all. Once it hit me I couldn't let it go - how close I came to not getting to have heaven on earth. My doctors had no idea my baby was struggling, since I measured normally and the heartbeat was strong, but she is only alive because I asked for that extra test, just because I felt that I didn't feel enough movement. As soon as they slapped an ultrasound on me it was apparent the baby was not growing and needed to come out and be fed. When I asked how they could have just been willing to let me go home from the clinic that day, and what would have happened had I not sought extra testing, the doctor looked me straight in the eye and said "stillbirth."

I am normally a glass half full kind of gal. My glass has pretty well stayed on the full side except when it comes to motherhood. I should be able to just revel in the result, because the results I have are indeed astounding and glorious. Not for nothing did I make up a song like "Claire the Magnificent" to croon to her at night. Something about motherhood brings out the naked part of my soul. Any of you read the Narnia books as a child? When a character who has done wrong, really wrong, meets the Powers That Be and the all powerful Aslan rips through the extra bits right down to his soul, all naked and slippery? That is about how this motherhood gig goes. I am tooling along with just the joy, on a sunny day, in my minivan, and smack here comes the other side of it all, the fear and the worry and the oh-shit feelings. My people tell me how wonderful I am to have noticed and taken action, and saved the day for Claire, but it doesn't always look that way inside my head, through the PTSD. They tell me this too in relation to Hannah, that I noticed the signs of her CP before her doctors, before her father, and jumped on the therapy bandwagon at the first possible moment. I keep remembering how shocked I was that there was a problem for either of my kids, how inexplicable it all seemed, how close I came to not getting that first baby at all, let alone the second. I think sometimes how if I had not planned to breastfeed my second baby, despite all the motherfucking pumping and hassle with feeding Claire, in fact probably because how hard that all was I was determined to breastfeed baby number two and get it right, but if I had chosen to just formula feed, Hannah might not have CP at all, because she would never have dipped too low in calories learning how to nurse. Am I a good mother? Well, of course I am, but on the inside, I doubt, I wonder, and I feel guilty as hell. And then here comes that joy again, when I snuzzle them on the backs of their necks.

Twice this week total strangers asked me for advice about the big parts of motherhood, how to pick a day care and whether to use a day care for a medically fragile child. My name gets given out as an example of someone in the know. Fuckity, fuck, fuck I say! I don't know anything!! Of course I give advice but still, on the inside, I am full of self doubt. I keep wondering if I'll get caught faking.

Claire now has a new favorite song, because we played The Waiting for her on the way to the party. And now the poor girl at Mrs. Backer's bakery thinks I am insane since when I ask her to prepare a cake for us, I find myself telling her why I have to have a Mrs. Backer's cake on the actual birthday even though Claire would be happy with a Costco cake or even one of lesser quality, but I must have the buttercream icing that says "Claire came home" to me, and always will.