bflynn

Thane at 15 months

Thane had his 15 month checkup today. First, the stats.

His right ear actually looks pretty ok, which is a little frustrating given that he’s headed in for surgery next week. At least his left ear looks bad, still.

Weight: 15lbs 5oz (60th percentile) — this shocks me. I could’ve sworn he was over 30. Dude is heavy.
Height: 32 inches (75th percentile)
Noggin: 19 inches (80th percentile)

He seems developmentally right on target, in social, verbal, gross motor and fine motor skills. He got three shots (H1N1, MMR, Dtap/Hib).

Thus, the nitty gritty. But when it comes to the larger question, “Who is Thane”, I’m still in the course of discovery.

Thane is determined. His attention span is breathtaking for a 15 month old. When there is an object of his desire, it is very difficult to distract him or dissuade him. He will crack out his increasing verbal skills, as well as his super-expressive body language to get his point across. Tchz. Tchz. TCHZ! (Cheese)

Words are entering into his world. He will (sometimes) follow simple instructions. For example, if he’s clinging to my leg I can sometimes rescue myself by saying “Car!” or “Ball!” and pointing. And off he goes to get the car or ball, before returning to cling to my leg. He seems to understand many simple instructions, although I always forget he can and don’t use them enough. Regular residents in his vocabulary include: car (he says this ALL THE TIME), book, ball, milk, cheese, cookie (it only takes once….), yogurt, Grey, mama, dada, dinosaur, vroom, up, down, puppy, woof woof. Other periodically expressed words are: blue, noodles, one, two, three, various letter names, leche and agua. He’s getting much better about repeating words back to me. I think he’s hearing much better right now, and I really think he wasn’t hearing well before.

Physically, Thane is the little engine that could. It’s almost impossible to change his diaper. He turns and thrashes and kicks. Not my favorite part. He climbs the stairs. He climbs chairs. He LOVES being up high, and will often demand to be put up on the couch. Then he’ll get down. Up up! Down. Up!!!! He stacks blocks beautifully, and will spend several hours carting around between 2 – 4 little Matchbox cars, carefully passing them from hand to hand, and holding them against his chest. He’s distraught if he loses one of them, and remembers. He loves using (or attempting to use) spoons and forks when I’m feeling courageous enough to let him have them. He eats whatever the rest of us are eating. He loves loves loves playing with water, and will often experiment with the milk served at dinner, to my chagrin. The bathtub is a haven of joy. He is much more patient in the car than Grey ever was, often just clinging to his beloved cars.

The brotherhood of Grey and Thane is an increasing delight to me. Grey plays really beautifully with Thane. Today Grey was blowing on his belly, making him laugh. Then he was playing peek-a-boo with Thane’s socks. Grey often plays much rougher with Thane than I would, but Thane always just laughs and laughs. I’m really struggling, with Thane, to see him as a small person instead of a baby. Grey is way ahead of us in treating Thane as an autonomous person. Last night, Grey decided Thane was hungry, got a cheese stick out of the fridge, unwrapped it and gave it to his brother (after asking me for permission). I mean, how awesome and useful is that? The boys love chasing each other around the house, although there are also the inevitable conflicts when Boy 1 has a toy that suddenly looks fun to Boy 2.

The other night, Grey decided he was a puppy (hardly an unheard of event). As “Puppy” helped me brush Thane’s teeth, Thane started saying “puppy” too, and then “woo(f) woo” just like Grey’s little barks. For a couple minutes, I had two little puppy-boys cavorting around my feet. It was awesome.

As I got dinner ready, Thane was looking particularly cute so I grabbed my cell phone to take a quick Grandma-picture. As I lined it up, Grey came around the side of the high chair and give his brother a quick, sincere hug. I couldn’t wish for a more fun family.

Old miscarriages, years later

I have this mental list of topics that I will write about here someday. You know, that day when I don’t have anything else to say, when I have time to write and think, and when I’m feeling particularly emotionally strong. Shockingly, that particular combination of events comes up less often than you’d think (although the “don’t have much to say” is a less unusual phenomenon).

Probably top on my list of things I think about but don’t discuss are the two miscarriages I had between the boys. I thought about them and — unusually — talked about them at the time. But then as soon as I was out of the throes of emotional convulsion, it didn’t seem like quite the thing to talk about anymore. Really, nothing kills a conversation like the following:

Me) Yeah, that week my husband got a new job, we placed an offer on a house, the Sox clinched a World Series berth and I found out I was pregnant! It was crazy!
Them) Really? I thought Thane was only ____ old!
Me) Yeah, the house, job and World Series worked out, but the pregnancy? Not so much.

So, like millions of women before me, I just don’t mention it.

I had two miscarriages, and they were both appallingly hard in their own unique ways. The first one took me completely by surprise. I got pregnant easily enough. It was a second pregnancy, so I thought I knew the drill. I was feeling a little better than I had the last time, so in my optimism I decided I was carrying a girl. She became Kitty, in my mind, after Schroedinger’s cat. (I had made a joke about how I was Schroedinger’s pregnant in that interim period when you know you might be pregnant but you don’t know if you are, and the moniker stuck. I found it highly ironic, later.) I was a low-risk pregnancy, so we didn’t do a 6 week ultrasound or any fancy-schmancy monitoring.

At about 10 weeks, I saw a tiny amount of spotting. Sure I was being paranoid over nothing, I called my midwife and went in for an “of course everything’s ok” ultrasound. I laid down, and told the tech that I wanted to see the heartbeat. She did standard ultrasoundy stuff. Then she moved the screen away so I couldn’t see it. Lying there on the ultrasound table the back of my brain processed. She was super quiet — usually the ultrasound techs are chatty and informative. Finally she said, “I need to call your doctor. Wait here.” And I knew. I knew I knew I knew. By the time my midwife was on the line with the “I’m sorry but” I was already into the shock and grief and it seemed like I’d always known. I went home and called my parents, pacing the sunny back yard. I gamed that night, and laughed and cried.

But. I was still pregnant.

They didn’t want to “take care of it” right away because there was a tiny chance (I knew there was no chance based on my home pregnancy tests) that the dates were off and it was just too early to see a heartbeat. So, we waited a week. The second ultrasound showed the same thing: no heartbeat. No growth. Nothing. My doctor told me to schedule a D&C. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted it to happen that way. Unconscious in a sterile room with people I didn’t know, having something done TO me? Did. Not. Want. I asked if I could have the chemical versions. They didn’t have experience with them or confidence in them. I put my foot down, refused the scheduled surgery time, and found a study that was investigating how the drugs work in women with missed miscarriages. I had to wait a while longer before I could get that, though. In the interim, I attended my brother’s college graduation, praying the whole time that the issue would just take care if itself. I felt like a ticking timebomb, pregnant with a child who was, to put it quite bluntly, dead. God, that was the hardest part. By the time I actually got the drugs to induce the miscarriage, I was so ready to be done. I was 12 weeks pregnant by the time it took affect.

It had, of course, a huge impact on me. It took me a few months to feel like I was ready to try again. My previous cavalier attitude vanished. There were almost two traumas — the fact that I had already crafted this child in my imagination, my Kitty, and she was gone and would never be. And then the ordeal of enduring and arranging to no longer be pregnant — to have to be so intentional! — was a second layer of hard.

Then came that weekend in late October when I found out I was pregnant again. There was no reason to believe I would have any further trouble. In fact, my problem seemed to be staying pregnant when I shouldn’t, not an inability to carry a viable pregnancy. But I’d gotten myself put in a higher risk pool. So when I showed up at my midwife’s office right after the first positive, we immediately started doing bloodwork and ultrasounds. The entire pregnancy was like a “That’s good. No that’s bad” joke. The second blood test came back with levels of hormones that were lower than they should’ve been. The ultrasound showed an embryo smaller than it should’ve been. But then the hormones would go up and the embryo would be still grow. After a week where it didn’t, I went in for the “confirming” ultrasound that I had another missed miscarriage and…. there was a heartbeat. Half the speed it should’ve been, but there was a heartbeat. I have, somewhere in a box, the CD that has pictures of that heartbeat. None of us expected it, but there it was, bright blue and red.

I miscarried the next day, on my own this time. It sucked too. I never named that one, and I actually regret it. It’s as though without a name, I didn’t acknowledge the existence, and there WAS for a flicker of a moment, a heartbeat.

There is, of course, a happy ending to my saga. Two months after that miscarriage, I got pregnant again. This pregnancy was text-book (except for some placental excitement we didn’t find out about until after a safe and healthy birth) and Thane is a thriving happy boy. I am not overwashed with sorrow for the children I did not bear. The grooves of sorrow are being washed away by the waters of time.

So why do I share this? Why interrupt my happy mommy blog and talk about this ancient sorrow and risk nasty comments (which will, by the way, be deleted if you make them)?

After my first miscarriage, I actually gave a sermon on the topic. I was never shy about talking about what was going on with me. And the number of women who came up to me, confessed their own past sorrows and their relief at knowing they weren’t alone, shocked me. The statistics vary, but I’ve read that one in four or five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. So every other woman you know who has two kids likely also had a miscarriage. I think that in this century of oversharing, the stigma and loneliness is diminished, but I still wanted to offer my story, and my support, to the other women out there who might be going through the same thing.

You are not alone.

Baby to boy

My weekend was fantastic. It involved talking to lots of people I like on several separate occasions. I think I sometimes forget what a rampant extrovert I am, and how much I enjoy conversation.

In between my social-butterflying, I had a quiet and joyful weekend with the boys. I took Grey to buy new sheets for his bed to celebrate nighttime dryness (which, of course, is the cue for having nighttime dryness all but disappear).

And then on Sunday after church, we took Thane to Snip-Its to have his hair cut. The start was inauspicious… he was asleep in the car. What would happen upon waking? Would he scream and pitch an epic fit? Would he squirm curiously? But the dazed “just woke up” aspect actually helped considerably. He simply groggily sat in his chair, pondering the odd sensation around his ears:

Thane's inaugural curls -- glorious but out of control

They were looking particularly weedy this Sunday

As this mohawk shows, it's still pretty long

Who took my baby and replaced him with this boy?

What having children teaches you about yourself

I’d like to show you something very revealing about my personality.

This is a small portion of my desk at work:

Notice anything? Anything spring to mind? Anything?

Why yes, I might have a pen or two. Or, more likely, around a hundred, with almost no duplicates for style/color/ink type. I have more in my desk drawer. Really. I also have a larger collection at home. Really.

I love variety, especially in color. I love having today be slightly different than yesterday. I love rainbows and bold hues. I think my general taste for adventure and a kaleidoscopic life most clearly represents itself in my love of colors, which most clearly represents itself in my love of exciting writing implements. This is not an aspect of my personality I’d thought much about. I figured that the poor sods with one or two Bics on their desk were too broke to get real pens, or were trying to show off their grownupness, or possibly developed emotional attachments to their pens. (I have certain pens I always use for certain tasks — I figured that’s similar.)

Then I met my son Grey. A while back, we bought Grey these awesome LED nightlights. They come in 8 standard colors, but there’s a setting where you can make them morph non-stop between different colors. I can tell you in a heartbeat that’s what I’d choose, because it’s like not even having to make a choice, like getting them all in constant of variety. I would’ve loved that. So OBVIOUSLY that’s what Grey was going to pick, right? Right? I mean, who wouldn’t? Or at least he’d pick a different color every night, if the movement made him quesy? So teal and then pink and then green and then yellow?

No. That’s not him. He likes the green colored lights. Not the changing, not the pink or the red. Not the white or the yellow. Just green. Every night.

OK, I reasoned, maybe he like comfort and familiarity at bedtime. That makes sense, I guess.

Now I’ve spent time watching him make art. He picks his marker. Often, it’s black, gray or brown. Then he draws with that one color, for the whole drawing. And then the next. He doesn’t color (as in make things colors) ever. He draws. Monochromatically. I can always tell what he did himself vs. what he was “helped” with. Does it have more than two colors? Someone else made him do it.

After long consideration I was forced with a realization: Grey is a different person than I am. Shocking, no? He’s made out of parts of me, was created within my own flesh, has never known a world without me in it. But yet, where my desires blossom out into an infinite appetite for color, he is content with one, the same, not lacking.

I suspect that when he is a grownup, if he has a desk, it will have one or two pens on it. They’ll likely be black, or maybe blue. It won’t be because he’s unaware that there are other colors, but because he does not desire other colors. It is, I have learned, not a universal desire.

This may not seem like a big thing, but it helps me understand just a tiny bit what it means to be human. We truly, really, do not all desire the same things. What is my chief delight may not delight you at all. This is good to hold on to, that we may understand others are not wrong, but only see the world differently.

Boy update

My sons are definitely the greatest source of change and newness in my day to day life, so it makes sense that so many of my posts are about how different they are today than yesterday. But hey! They’re so different!

The biggest milestone moment lately comes with Grey. Those of you who aren’t parents (or wish to be) probably can just skip the entire rest of this post. Really. Because Grey has successfully gone sans-pullups for the last 4 nights without incident! (For those not in the know, incident here means “Having to change the sheets at 4 am”.) The ability to stay dry through the night is actually more a physical one than one he has much control over, but imagine! Having one child completely out of diapers!!! If he makes it to this weekend, I’ll take him to Target (home of all delights) and let him pick out the bedding set of his dreams. I’m thinking it will likely be Spongebob and made of sandpaper, but only because they don’t have Spiderman sheets made of sandpaper.

Grey has been super wonderfully snuggly lately. He wasn’t a snuggly baby or toddler, but he’s an extremely affectionate preschooler. The best part is that it’s not only directed at his father and me, it’s directed at his brother too. He plays very nicely with Thane, bringing him toys, using this hilarious voice to try to talk him into things “Daaaane LOOK! It’s a caaaaar!”, tickling his belly and playing peekaboo. Sometimes when Thane is dead-set on getting into one of Grey’s toys conflict occurs (which, to be fair, a dead-set Thane is a very difficult commodity). The other day I watched Grey sort of herd his brother with these not-quite-pushing body-checks all the way across the room away from Object Of Desire. I’ve never seen Grey do anything unprovoked to his brother, and he usually withstands a great deal of provocation before behaving inappropriately. (And hey, sometimes a guy wants to build a transformer out of blocks and not have his baby brother ruin it. I can dig that.)

On the flip side, Thane is actually pretty solicitous of Grey, when not attempting to eat his block-transformers. The other day Grey was playing with a Bakugan card and then turned and played with something else on the other side. Thane picked up the card and brought it over to Grey and gave it to him. Awwww!

So generally, the whole brother thing is going well.

Thane is driving me less nuts. I think he’s not sick at the moment, which is a great boon. He has two major passions in life right now: cars and dinosaur books. He often carries a Matchbox car in each hand. Yesterday when I took him out of the car to go to Abuela’s, I removed from him his two cars. When I picked him up, as soon as I put him in the carseat he started saying “ca! ca! ca!”. He wanted his cars back. He remembered. The dinosaur books are specifically the “How do Dinosaurs…” with his favorite being “How Do Dinosaurs Go to Bed”. He adores the page “Do dinosaurs ROAR?” and does his own little roar. He also loves the page “Do they up and demand a piggy-back ride?” and always says “Oh!” If you are not fast enough to volunteer to read dinosaur books to him, he will hit you in the head with it, then turn around and plop his heavy little butt into your lap. That, my friends, is clear communication.

His verbal skills are taking off. He can request his favorite foods. He says “Vroom” when playing with his cars. “Up” “down” “more” and “all done” are awfully helpful, but his main discourse is around those two passions of his. I’ll give a more complete update next week for his 15 month checkup!

RANDOM:

My mother-in-law bought me a reading chair for our bedroom (from afar) and here’s a picture of how it looks!

I wish I were a Mongol warlord

Last night after a crucible-like evening of thrown food, chores, decisions made on empty stomachs, and children who live in alternate universes in which they are Heat Blast (who does not, it turns out, generally like to sit at the table and eat his dinner politely) my husband turned to me and said, “I wish I were a Mongol warlord. I bet they didn’t feel guilty all the time.”

Practicing his Mongol castle attack skills, in case

I imagined him perched on his piebald horse, dripping in furs and beads with a menacing look. I looked at him, eating the split pea soup he’d made with a crusty loaf of whole wheat bread he’d made. “I bet that Mongol warlords don’t actually see their children very much,” I replied.

He glumly agreed with my analysis of the Warlord solution to parenting frustration problems, dipping his bread in his soup.

This morning on the way in, I was caught between my compulsive drive to listen to the news, and my great desire not to want to actually hear the news. Wrestling a heavy and recalcitrant 15 month old (almost) out of his carseat to drag him in to preschool to drop Grey off, I marveled at the complexity of my own life. There are so many moving parts and conflicting priorities.

On the average day my life is filled to the brim with problems minor and major. I wrestle with providing my children with all the things they need across a wide spectrum — from appropriate discipline to making sure that Thane has clean clothes at daycare. I work very intentionally to be a good partner to my husband. I try to eat well and exercise in order to keep my body in good enough condition to do the rest of the work. I have a smorgasboard of church tasks that I try to keep up with. In addition to that there’s my spiritual adventure – not the same, but related. Then we get to the fact people expect me to work a job and do complicated stuff and answer emails and write code. On top of that is managing my career, which isn’t at all the same thing as doing today’s work. And there’s handling the finances responsibly — have I gotten all my W2 forms yet? Can we afford to just order pizza tonight already? Do we need to rebalance our retirement portfolio? (Answer: yes, but I’m too lazy). And of course there are my responsibilities as a citizen, which range from being well informed (people tend to ask me questions, so it behooves me to have answers), to voting, to sending contributions of money and effort to wracked Haiti.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to be the harem-mate for a Mongol warlord? If not Mongol-centric, what other, simpler time might I have lived in?

I indulged the fantasy for a few minutes: maybe a Victorian lady, or Medieval peasant. I could’ve been an Anchoress.

You could argue that my degree in Medieval studies was completely self-indulgent. I rarely encounter a burning need to tackle middle English texts in my role as a software engineer. But one thing I learned about life as a Medieval scholar is that people are people, and the broad outlines of our lives have not generally changed.

Victorian ladies had wildly distorted body images, and had to work really hard to cripple themselves appropriately. They also navigated highly political lives with great opportunities for social humiliations. Medieval peasants woke with dawn, had complicated relationships with their finite communities, and had little recourse or opportunity for change and pretty much no privacy. And I really can’t imagine that being in the harem of a Mongol warlord was fun and games, even if you managed to produce some nice little male heirs. Most of all, in all those imaginary past roles, I would face a much greater risk of burying one or more of my children.

I was reading a summary biography of John Donne the other day (don’t ask). His wife bore him 12 children. Two of them were stillborn. Three of them died before they were 10. His long-pregnant wife died 5 days after birthing her final child. “In a state of despair, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one less mouth to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_donne) He loved his children as deeply as I love mine. The poetry he wrote about them is breathtaking.

I bet Mongol Warlords don’t get to sing showtunes with their kids, either

I think I’m content to live in this busy age, when I have the most opportunity to choose the path of my own life, and when my children have the best chance of living to ripe old age of any generation ever in all history. So, after long consideration, I’ve decided that my plan of going back in time to become Mongols is right out, love. Sorry. Have you ever considered getting lost on a desert island?

Heritage posts

So as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve actually kept an online journal since about 2003. Its’ been interesting to go back and read it. I made many fewer posts that stood on their own — most of them were very circumstantial to where I was at that point in time. It’s also interesting to watch myself find my voice and my own style of writing. By mid 2004, I’d started getting into the rhythm, which I’ve continued here.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that since I couldn’t think of anything entertaining for you this morning, I pulled in two months of archives instead.

There’s July 2004: https://bflynn.wordpress.com/2004/07/
And August 2004: https://bflynn.wordpress.com/2004/08/

Enjoy!

24 hours late

In the last months, we’ve missed 2 Sundays of church due to overnight snow, falling heaviest during the church-commuting-hours. This is unprecedented. This morning, we awoke to a tapping on our windows.

The Sunday morning snowstorm was a day late.

One of the truths about working in technology is that you can work from anywhere, as long as you have your trusty laptop and high speed internet access. So on one hand, this is great news for a snow day. Both my husband and I are staying safely off the treacherous roads. Five years ago, this would’v been a fantastic and relaxing opportunity. We would’ve looked gooey-eyed across the table at each other while writing our SQL scripts and complaining about the latency of the VPN. But, as you all recall from my incessant complaining, daycare is at the same location work is. So if I’m not going in to work, the kids aren’t going in to daycare.

What this means for me NOW is that I have two full time jobs I’m supposed to pull off today: full time getting coding done, and full time keeping people alive and reasonably happy. (So far this morning, Thane’s been able to trap himself in his toy bin and irritate his brother by playing with noisy toys while Grey was watching tv.) Add in undigging the driveway; a two hour job I’d guess, assuming this doesn’t turn to snow with a layer of ice on top. Happily, my husband is home to share the pain. Sadly, he didn’t bring his laptop home, which means he’s in the attic where the desktops are while I keep the home fires burning in the living room.

Thus the excitement of my life! So tell me, what do you do on snow days? Do you look forward to them? Dread them? What day of the week would you most like to have a snow day on?

Attention Citizens of the Commonwealth

Raise your hand if you like the fact that running for national elected office requires raising millions of dollars, which then indebts the recipients? Anyone? Anyone?

I’ve thought about this probably more than I need to, and I’ve come up with one, fool-proof, Constitutionally valid solution to this problem. We, the citizens of the United States of America, need to stop making our voting decisions based on paid media advertising. Then poof! All the need for money disappears!!

Our elections are not a media production, where we should vote for the best-produced and scripted candidate. It should not be the responsibility of our elected officials to motivate us to get to the polls. If you are a person who cares about the future of your country, and you are blessed enough to have a say in how it is run, it is your responsibility to educate yourself and make your preferences known at the voting booth.

Imagine a world where people spent even half an hour researching the positions of the candidates and then selecting the one who best meets their criteria of policies, ideology, background, and non-obnoxious speaking voice. (Ok, so maybe I have a few unique criteria for elected officials who will be interviewed regularly on the radio.) I know that asking the voters of America to spend half an hour or an hour to do research to figure out who they want to represent them is much harder than raising millions of dollars and hiring lobbyists, but with such an evenly divided electorate, if even a small block of voters started doing this, it might have a real impact.

For the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we can start doing this right now.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 19th we have an election for US Senator.

There are three candidates who will be on the ballot:

Martha Coakley is the current At tourney General for Massachusetts, and is the Democratic nominee.

Here’s her official website

Scott Brown is a Massachusetts State Senator and holds the Republican nomination.

His official website is here

Joe Kennedy (no relation to Teddy or JFK) is an independent who describes himself as “The Tea Party Candidate”

You can read his official site here

Unfortunately, while there is often a site offering a “by the issues” guide to voting for many major elections, I could not find one for the Massachusetts special election. The Boston Globe has a page that has links to several substantive issues, including transcripts of the debates and statements issued by the candidates.

Turnout for the special election is predicted to be extremely low. This is not “election season”. The campaign was short, but just long enough for Senator Kennedy’s death to have been a bit forgotten. The election keeps getting buried by other issues (the holidays, the economy, Tiger Woods, and now the tragedy in Haiti).

Voters of Massachusetts — you have something a million dollars of out-of-state money cannot buy: the right and responsibility to vote for the candidate of your choice.

Having done my research, I will be voting for Martha Coakley on Tuesday. Regardless of who you choose to vote for, I urge you to do some independent investigation, make a decision, and show up on Tuesday to cast your vote.

A quick update on ear-related issues

At 8:40 am on a bitterly cold January morning in New England, I bundled my 14 month old into his winter gear – with practiced negotiation passing the beloved cars from one hand to the other. Our journey was short – maybe a quarter of a mile. If it hadn’t been 15 degrees and windy with snow-covered sidewalks, I would’ve walked. Even 25 degrees and moderately clear sidewalks. But no.

I wrestled him out of the car and into the clinic. I think that until he can walk, I need to leave the coffee cup at home. If you know me, you know how much it PAINS ME to admit that there is ever a circumstance before noon that I might be parted from my beloved beverage. But 30 pound squirmy 14 month old makes it unusually challenging to keep my coffee upright.

I digress.

Thane was actually lovely in the waiting room. He played with his cars on the table “Vroom vroom!”. He lost a car behind a chair, managed to reclaim it, but was unable to extricate himself. I did not laugh, but politely extracted him. The ubiquitous office ladies with perfect manicures were unable to find our referral. I suspect this has to do with the fact it was submitted on one of those new-fangled computer thingies. My pediatrician verified that the information had been submitted and accepted, so I’m unconcerned. He has an iPhone and a brand new computer system and enough savvy to go around.

Then we went to wait in the office, and this was less lovely. The number of exciting things at boy-height made it imperative to keep him off the ground. Thane does not like to be kept off the ground. I contemplated the brightly lit “on” switch for the auto-clave and the child safety covers on the power strips and decided that someone around here wasn’t aware of just what would attract a 14 month old’s eye.

The doctor came in a very long 10 minutes later. Thane’s tonsils were pronounced “tiny”. (I think that’s good.) He looked in both ears. Shocking, he found fluid in both ears. (Duh!) He recommended surgery for ear tubes. He said that we’d schedule in 3 to 4 weeks for Boston. Done! I spent more time doing the exiting procedures than we’d spent in the exam.

And there it is. Sometime before Valentine’s Day, Thane will likely go into Boston for a very quick surgery. Apparently children are only “out” for about 10 minutes. They cut a tiny hole in the outer skin of the ear drum, vacuum up the offending liquid and insert a little tube to prevent the cut from healing over. Sometime in the next 6 – 18 months the tube will fall out of it’s own accord. The procedure is meant to help prevent ear infections (by preventing the buildup of fluid) until his face lengthens and the Eustachian tubes start going down instead of straight across.

I hope that this will make Thane slightly happier. Where he is right now, he can be a delight but… I am unwilling to take him anywhere. Dinner out is disastrous. The library was extremely hard to manage. He bolts, he pulls things off, he has a very firm idea of what he wants to accomplish and if thwarted will pitch a fit. He’s ok in the safety of our own home, or in any area where it’s acceptable to put him down and let him wander. Most of the time. Except last night, where he was 100% crying if he wasn’t being held and only 30% crying as long as I had him on my hip. Not Daddy. Not Emily. Mommy.

On the other hand, he is absolutely adorable. You should hear him say “cheese”! It’s awesome.