Intervention

Right before dinner tonight, I noticed Petra and Tova playing in the backyard in their jammies. Petra had plunked Tova on an old rusty tricycle that showed up at our doorstep one day; she strapped a helmet on her and then tethered her legs together with an orange jump rope. The Petra used the jump rope to tie Tova to the seat. I should have intervened, instead I watched and waited.

A short while later Soren joined them and then the plan clearly started to evolve.

If she was nervous about anything, Tova certainly didn't let it show.

Annike caught on to the adventure ensuing, and she scrambled to take her place. With a second jump rope, a scooter (also left mysteriously at our door one day) was attached to the back of the trike.

Then, peddling as fast as he could, with sharp turns and off-road detours, Soren pulled them all for a ride.

This feat would have never been possible without the vehicle donations and two (probably) stolen jump ropes. Oh, and four kids. You need four kids to do this kind of work.

Half Way Up, Half Way Out

A long, long time ago on Petra's 2nd birthday, exactly 1-week after Soren was born, she and I went out into our massive backyard, poked little holes in the soft dirt next to our chimney, threw in some seeds, sprinkled them with water and then left them.

Several months later, the seeds sprouted sunflowers. They grew beyond where our roof met the walls of the house. Later they grew up to the roof line, depositing seed across our shingles.

She was 2-years old. We had tiny Petra and her tiny new baby brother. We had a tiny house. We drove tiny cars. We were a tiny family. But, we had these huge sunflowers. They were probably trying to tell us something. There was some foreshadowing in the stems of those suckers.


Over the years, things changed. And now, here we are. We're so much bigger. I suppose I'm probably romanticizing those early days, the simplicity we had in that little blue house of ours with just two small children so close in age that eventually people began to think they were twins. I marvel now at the thought that Petra is the one who started this all.

Unbearably and without much foresight, Petra Leigh turned 9-years old today. As the clock struck 1 o'clock this morning, Petra managed to turn nine in her sleep snuggled next to her homey and little sister. Shortly after that, she groggily flopped onto our bed, complaining that she couldn't sleep because Taylor was kicking her too hard and Annike was snoring too loud.

She was eager for 9-years old. She had blueberry pancakes this morning, then kissed me goodbye before she flew off to Taylor's place to go bareback horseback riding. I stuttered, came up with an excuse to nurse Tova but then couldn't take it. Instead, I grabbed my camera and ran after her. I mean, really, you all know what is on my mind. Birthdays are tough for me. I lament and flubbber. I make resolutions to give them a better childhood, to be a better mother, to do more good stuff and less screechy stuff. Of course, this time of year is rough for me. Soren starts it all with his birthday, the next week is Petra's, the next week is Annike's, and the close of the month marks Lars' birthday.

I'm running out of time with my kids being children and my husband's birthday just means I'm gonna be older soon too and I'll stop remembering things sure enough and I haven't even ordered my walker or big sunglasses that stick on over my readers and wrap around the sides of my face!

Today, Lars said the most horrid things. Awful things. I almost feel as if I couldn't say them here, now, today, under these circumstances. He said that she, at age nine, is half-way grown up now. He said she was half-way outta our house.

We took her out to lunch with her favorite two sisters and her best brother. We went all the way to the big city, she wanted to go to Corvette's Diner. Which we did. I made her order from the kids menu. I didn't even let her see that they serve Cesar salads there, she just had to order from the kids menu, else it woulda stung too much. She had pop, which is expressly forbidden in the world of orthodontia. She had French fries, which is what 9-year olds do. She had a milk shake, which is what birthday children do.

She did big girl things, like dances that people did back before even I was born. She did sassy eyes and brazenly looked into the camera . . . 'I dare you, fools, to say I'm still 8!'

Then at home she nestled into the front lawn and wrote down all her 9-year old thoughts and feelings. But, when I look at her pages, they were filled with her outline for her upcoming book report. On her birthday, which is on a weekend, she worked on her homework? She's like a 19-year old. She does these things because she wants to go to UCLA, 3rd grade achievements weigh heavily in their admissions process.

Later she humored us with our age old tradition of planting sunflower seeds on her birthday. We planted them all over our front yard. Now, though, I know better. I know that when they reach our roof, really what they're trying to get me to establish is that my children are going to reach new heights soon whether I'm ready or not.

The Bad Child

Soren, on the right, on his 7th birthday with his friend Grant.

There are a lot of very redundant types out there. Lots of people who want to put others into slots and categories, it makes life neater for them. They live in a world of absolutes, where a person is either A or B, a person could never be partly A and partly B. God forbid that person isn't either.

People often ask of me, "which one is the bad one, which one is your problem?", this is a reference to my children. People who think of themselves as the 'good child' love this question, they love to know who the bad ones are. When you have more than a couple of kids, you're bound to get this question. I choose not to answer it.

My kids are neither A, nor B. They are an alphabet of adjectives. Nuttiness. Joy. All that stuff that makes us laugh and glimmer. All that stuff that exasperates us. My children are all of those things, each of them capable of any range of rare expletives and frequent praise worthy events.

Having a sibling helps me understand it from my kids' perspective. My brother and I were different kids. Undoubtedly, we were very categorizable for those who choose to walk through life that way. It's nauseating, really, because it gets you in a rut. In our case, because my brother was the 'smart, good one' (and because Category People love mutual exclusivity) I was always perceived as the 'dumb, bad one'. I wasn't bad, nor dumb but the label stuck. For much our of family, I believe they still think that way. Family has the hardest time with labels, labels don't evolve. All families want to remember are the few dumb and bad things you did, never the smart or good things that you predominated with. Families and their labels. Category People. I snub my nose at you.

It's my brother's birthday. My brother-in-law will celebrate his birthday tomorrow. And most significantly, for me, my darling Soren celebrated his 7th birthday this week. As mommies, we owe it to our children to do a quick and dirty ripping off of all those ugly and not so ugly (remember? smart and good?) labels.

Birthdays are a big deal for kids, but what a lot of people fail to consider is the importance of that day for the woman who is raising that most beautiful son. Birthdays are a chance for a mother to be self-reflective and review the choices she has made. It's another opportunity for us to consider, am I doing the best I can? Is my 'best' good enough? Have I loved and cherished my baby the way he deserves? Have I sincerely apologized and asked for forgiveness when I fell short? And then, most importantly, how am I going to proceed knowing that one of the most, important people on this earth came from me and needs me to make this world stunning?

Mommies everywhere, new and old, our precious children are valuable and deserve us more than we deserve them. Birthdays are our days to remember elation and responsibility that comes with the title of Mommy. And lest we forget, their weaknesses are ours but their strengths are their own.

Happy Birth Day to mommies everywhere. Let's remember our places as lovers of the best that is yet to come.

Earyngitis

Tova is a spunky fella. Impish at times. Today, Hope said she took off her shoes and then put them away in the correct spot on her shoe shelf. What a kid!

Tova's appointment with the specialist went well a couple of weeks ago. Dr P told us that Tova's hearing changes were probably not permanent, hopefully with cold and flu season abating she would be infection free and her ears could start to heal. Surgery was discussed briefly and hypothetically, but mostly we heard what we wanted about her hearing issues and left happy. Dr P made arrangements for Tova to be seen by him again in 5-weeks with the stipulation that if there were any changes in her health or our perception of her hearing that she was to be seen by him (and not our general pediatrician) ASAP. He gave us the number to contact him and then we said our good-byes.

Tova is a tricky kiddo. See? She can shovel sand with her eyes closed! On Sunday night she woke up after an hour of groaning and crying in her sleep. She began tossing around, staggered drunkenly to our bed tripping over herself multiple times. It was early, early morning and I was quite sleepy but I could tell that her equilibirium was off. I dragged her into our bed where she threw herself about like she couldn't tell up from down. She also started to act nauseous, spitting and swallowing hard like she was about to vomit. Hours went by like this, but clearly escalating discomfort. Then suddenly, she stopped crying and fell asleep, snoring away between the two of us.

Monday morning she was still fast asleep when I left for the barrio clinic, so I kissed her and left. Certainly she was feverish, but still sleeping comfortably. Lars called Dr P, our pediatric ENT guy, at the number he gave us. He called multiple times starting at 8 a.m. By noon, I had a text from Hope saying Tova wasn't herself and she was going to bring her to my work 45-minutes away because she was worried. Hope and Tovey arrived, burning up and red cheeked. Because midwives are nurse-practitioners trained in the full-range of family practice and not just OB/GYN I am fully qualified to assess an infants' health. My barrio clinic has excellent tools, so I gently arranged her head on Hope's shoulder while she slept and visualized her right ear (the problem ear). Big bulging and bright red tympanic membrane, turgid and fluid filled. Clearly problematic, clearly re-infected. Just as I turned her head to check the other side, Hope gasped because fluid was draining from her ear, some of it bloody. I looked in her ear and it looked a lot like the right except the membrane was ruptured and oozing. It certainly explained her previous night's symptoms. Poor little guy.

With Lars having difficulty contacting the right people, I placed a phone call to our pediatrician, explained the clinical data and got her an appointment. Lars drove home from the city, Hope drove home from the barrio and then Lars took Tovey to the regular pediatrician. She confirmed what I saw and then wrote another prescription for another round of antibiotics. As he was leaving, Lars got a phone call from Dr P's office. He needed to be downtown at the children's hospital clinic at 8:00 the next morning. This morning they drove downtown together, Hope took the big kids to school and I did my normal Annike drop-off and went to work. At the specialist, the exam confirmed what I determined (for free!), Tova got another prescription for antibiotics to use in addition to the Suprax and a surgery date for May 18, plenty of time for her to kick this infection. The hearing loss she's currently experiencing is TEMPORARY and should resolve with the surgery.

I don't get overwhelmed easily or often. As a working mother of four children -- who choose not to do their own laundry -- getting overwhelmed has no value. Today though, I'm feeling a bit edgy, cliffy even. My eldest, a competetive gymnast, is injured and is now on day 10 of pain and limping. My son has left his reading book at school 6-school days in a row. I'm having emotionally draining childcare issues. I've got a baby who can't hear a damn thing, has blood and crud draining from her ears and is on day 3 of a fever. My dog keeps wetting my bed because she's old and tired and old. There's a mouse in my house, it leaves little notes to me in the form of poo. My husband loves to talk about bad news. And, there's a volcano erupting in Iceland, grounding my flight plans to the Mediterranean where I was planning on going to escape it all. With the lottery winnings. The lottery I was supposed to buy a ticket for. Then win. I forgot to buy a ticket. The trip was theoretical. It's raining in Southern California today. I've run out of bleach spray and don't have time to disinfect anyway. Irk.

That's All She Wrote

My parents got Annike a new bike as an early birthday present and I wasn't going to allow training wheels.

You can do it Daddy.


No matter how cute and precious they are, sometimes you've just gotta let go and see what happens.

And sometimes on their very first try, they show you that they have all sorts of hidden talents.

And maybe you sort of have to run after them cause you don't quite believe it.

But it's truly true. Some things they can just do. Without you.

Whoopah!

In Good Company

When you spend much of your waking hours air born, you're bound to hit a pothole in life's occasionally bumpy road. Petra has been limping around for about a week, I thought maybe her sneakers were a little tight. On Thursday she told me her heel hurt but that it was "only a little" and that she didn't need anything for it. By Saturday morning, with 9-hours of gymnastics practice behind her and three in front of her, she told me again that it was hurting. For any other kid, including my own, this would be equivalent to crisis mode. I called her pediatrician, who runs a puppy mill as far as group practices go, and got her in for a 9:40 a.m. appointment with the athletic pediatric nurse practitoner (coincidentally named Kelly, coincidentally saw us last year when Soren had that awful bout with pneumonia). She thinks Petra may have some developing tendinitis or inflammation of her growth plate in her foot (sounds eewy but apparently not uncommon). Either way, treatment is the same, and if it's not better in two weeks then we re-evaluate. Good by us, Petra feels a bit antsy on the other hand.
We got her some heel cups, per the PNP's recommendation, which Petra finds quite soothing. Tova does too, we've found then in her mouth several times.

When she's not at gymnastics, she's supposed to rest her left limb on ice. She prefers to rest it on ice on her piggy pillow. Piggy pillows make everything better. Baby sisters think icy piggy pillows must be nice, cause this baby sister plunked herself down on Petra's piggy pillowed and pilfered Petra's ice pack. Eventually she got her own bag of ice. This went on nicely, until . . .

she took her ice out of the bag and started eating it, dripping frozen drooly drops on to Petra's perfectly plush piggy pillow. Petra rolled with the punches, perservering per usual. Poor Petra.

In addition to stretching, Petra's new program includes pampering. We're supposed to massage the tissues in her leg a couple times a day. Of course, Ms. T needs pampering alongside Petra so she plopped next to Petra and propped her pudgy, stubby legs atop a pillow, pointed to Mommy and demanded bilateral lower extremity manipulation. It was only after much time had passed that I realized I was using sun screen to massage their legs.

Tooooova? Cannn yooooou hearrrrr me?

Recently Petra stuck her nose right into Tova's face and spat "Tooooova? Cannn yooooou hearrrrr me?" Of course, Tova stared blankly at her and then slapped her in the face.


One of the things about being some one's mommy is that that little baby of yours is perfect, no matter what. It doesn't matter if they tantrum 12-times a day, or if they pick crusty boogies from their muddy noses and pop those morsels of crunchityness into their mouths. It's the just the way we do, us imperfect mommies loving our very precious and perfect babies.

We're primal people, mommies, no different than sea otters or elephants. Our passion and love for our progeny is monstropolous. It drives us to insanity! We do everything we can to serve the world to them on silver platters. Any of us would do whatever it took to protect them from bad things, bad guys, bad dreams. All us mama bears here on this planet, we're mostly doing the right thing.

And, try as we might to teach them up from down, left from right and poop from high quality gardening soil, somethings sometimes still go wrong. We did our best, but our best wasn't quite enough. Tricky and sneaky things happen. Tough things that leave you wondering why everyone made you feel like adequate Vitamin D and vegetarian sources of Omega-3 fatty acids had all the answers. When good isn't good enough, you don't give up! Nooooo we don't! We sniffle, maybe pout, but we're mommies and we rule the world! Even when tricky little pooey things creep up.

Maybe your precious and perfect baby is a different perfect, like ours is today. For now, and probably since August, that's our gal. Differently perfect, with an imperfect mommy who wants to serve her up with a lively, buoyant and happy world on a cute little platter just for her.

Last week we were told with deep and apologetic sighs that Tova's recently diagnosed hearing impairment could be temporary. The "p" word (permanent, duh) was graciously not discussed. Our own hearing tests at home, like the one where you slam The Riverside Shakespeare anthology onto the hard floor behind her or the whisper into her "good" ear, confirm more selective hearing than the complete hearing loss in her right ear and greater than 50% hearing loss in her left ear that the doctor confirmed. I mean, you tell me, how does deaf baby sing on key or have such a wide vocabulary or listen earnestly to me when I sing pitchy French lullabies to her as I nurse her to sleep? Whatever it is, in the fact finding weeks to come, we know that at 16-months she's in a critical time period for language and social development. Maybe it's a simple fix, like talking louder (cause seriously, we can do loud round this house). Possibly more. So armed with our list of questions and our babbly baby we're heading off to the local children's hospital this week to see the 'best doctor' and get to the bottom of it. I know that we're all so happy and so excited that Tova is in our family that we're happy to do whatever we gotta do to make her a happy fella . . . maybe even including giving her one of Soren's ears, as he so generously offered.