A cruel blow January 24, 2013
Posted by philangelus in family, sarcasm.10 comments
This comes up often enough that I have to blog about it: how do you get an object out of a child’s nose?
The reason this keeps coming up is no one seems to know what to do when it inevitably happens. Now as a reasonable, sane adult, you’re thinking to yourself, “Why on earth would I take an ordinary household item, like a Cheerio, and shove it up my nose?” In response, I would have to say there are children out there who would stare in disbelief that you should even ask such a question. In their world, the question is, “Why not?”
When Kiddo#1 was a preschooler, we planted a little garden (by which I mean, nothing grew) and there were some leftover seeds. Among other things we’d planted peas, since they’re not hard to grow (see above) and because the packets had more seeds than we needed, the leftovers remained in packets on the counter.
My son came to me at some point and gave me to understand what we had planted in the garden was insufficient for his purposes, so he’d planted one by pushing it up his nose. I got a flashlight and there it was.
I’m not terribly smart, but even I knew that going in there with my tweezers would push it further. I was about to call the doctor (and get sent to the emergency room) when I remembered out insurance carrier had a nurse hotline. I called that first.
The nurse assessed the situation, then said, “There’s something to try before going to the emergency room. Sit him on a chair, and kneel beneath him. Pinch the opposite nostril shut (in other words, not the one with the obstruction) and blow into your son’s open mouth.”
I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s never going to work!”
Nurse: It’ll work.
Philangelus: There’s no way.
Nurse: Just try it. It’ll work.
Philangelus: You promise?
Nurse: Just go ahead and do it.
Philangelus: Hold on.
I set aside the phone, positioned my son, pinched the opposite non-pea-planted nostril shut, and blew really hard into his mouth.
The pea shot out of his nostril.
I grabbed the phone. “It worked!”
The nurse exclaimed, “It DID?”
I gasped. “You made me do that and you didn’t even think it would work?”
She said, “That’s what came up on the computer, and I had to read it to you.”
Feeling like an idiot, and at the same time glad I didn’t have to wait around in the ER, I said, “I guess in the hospital they’d have a machine that would have puffed in a measured amount of atmospheric pressure, huh?”
“No,” she said. “They’d have used a tweezers.”
And there you have it, folks: a blow-by-blow description of how to remove an object from your child’s nose. May you never have to use this information, but if you do, you’ll be glad. Really.
The way things open and close January 1, 2013
Posted by philangelus in family, pensive.Tags: cats, death, pets
7 comments
She arrived in our house after we’d been married a few months, part mistake and part fate the way good things always are.
We had seen teeny-tiny kittens in the pet store, so I went to the animal shelter to ask if there were any laws about selling kittens too young to be separated from their mother. The shelter folks said no, but I looked at the cats. She was there, newly turned in after someone found her wandering around a parking lot in downtown Ithaca. Out of the cage, she stood on my Patient Husband’s shoulder just like our goofy kitten did, so I put our name on a list, and a week later they called.
The two cats got along great, but that was seventeen years ago. Our family has transformed from me and my Patient Husband living in a terrarium with two kittens…to seven angels, four kids, and up to as many as eight cats for six teeth-clenching weeks one summer. Stormy died two years ago. Last year we acquired the brain-damaged kitten (because every household needs a furry beast that will never grow up, a furry beast that finds twist-ties wherever they hide and plays with them on your bed in the middle of the night.)
She hadn’t been doing well, and the vet said there were two separate problems. She lost weight, and in the last week, she looked skeletal. She still was in good spirits, but she couldn’t jump on the bed any longer. Whenever I went into the bathroom, she’d follow because that was her domain, and she’d look at me expectantly as if waiting for something good, but she didn’t want food. Or cold water. Or her treat. Nor even to sit on the toilet lid, her kitty-throne.
On Sunday night, Kiddo2 and I sat up with her, petting her, brushing her, talking about her. She purred, and in the morning she was still with us. She spent the day in her basket by the window, then moved to her spot under the bed, and sitting underneath where I was reading, she died.
God answered our prayers: her death was peaceful and quiet, and the ground wasn’t so frozen we couldn’t dig a grave. I carried her basket outside, and we laid her in the ground wrapped in her blanket. Stormy’s ashes had been waiting for two years in a locked box in a plastic bag sealed with a twist-tie, and we sprinkled them over her now.
Back inside, I set the basket in its place in front of the window. So much for the physical realities of death. I sat in bed to knit and feel miserable.
Orion, our brain-damaged kitten, went to the basket and sniffed around it, then pounced. His head came up out of the basket, and in his mouth he had a twist-tie: the twist-tie that had been on the bag of Stormy’s ashes. And he began to bat it around.
I guess there’s a lesson somewhere in there if you care to find it, that death and life are intermingled in ways we don’t truly understand — pain and play, youth and age, endings and beginnings. But I didn’t have the energy to find them. Instead I just watched the kitten play with a twist-tie, unaware of the way things open and the way things close.
And you thought you hated those Christmas songs… December 10, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family, music.4 comments
Yesterday, I was involved in creating Christmas music that made you reach for the ear-sporks. My Patient Husband and daughter decided to get out their respective cello and violin, and using a book of Christmas carols that came from when my mother took piano lessons, they began working through the first song phrase by phrase. I grabbed my violin and joined them.
“Give me an A so I can tune to you,” I said, only it turned out no one had tuned. This boded well.
An hour later, we’d managed to stumble through two songs, plus Kiddo3 and come upstairs to bang on Kiddo2′s retired drum set, and Kiddo4 had Kiddo3′s very old quarter size violin, and he enthusiastically made sounds with it. We made a lot of noise and all had fun, and I’m a little excited to go back and practice both songs again (solo.)
I started thinking last night about something I’ve had in mind since I started taking music lessons. Back in 2000, after Emily was diagnosed, I took guitar lessons because guitar lessons were significantly cheaper than psychotherapy, and I’d have a usable skill at the end. My goal was to be “better than the church lady” who strummed in time to the choir every Sunday. This was a reachable goal (and I would have reached it if my guitar instructor hadn’t said, “Actually, why don’t I just teach you to play?”) but I never did play in the church.
One morning, though, I brought the guitar out to the cemetery, and I sat beside Emily’s gravestone and played for her. She’d heard me playing badly in utero, and now I played there, just me and her (and maybe anyone whose house bordered the cemetery) and it felt right to do that. A couple of songs, and then I went home.
Yesterday, I realized what I wanted to do was play violin in the church. To just sneak in sometime during the day when no one’s around, play a couple of songs, and sneak out again.
But it feels wrong. Disrespectful. I don’t play well (trust me) and it feels as if bringing those multiple mistakes before God doesn’t make them holy mistakes. It just has me playing lousy in a sacred space. God does, after all, hear me when I’m playing at home. (Maybe He wishes He didn’t.) Yesterday, though, I wanted to bring it to Him.
Quick update — we’re back (Edited with How To Help NYC) November 2, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family.7 comments
Power came back on. Actually, the power company guy came and restored power after I pulled over on the side of the road next to the only power company truck still left in Angelborough. I pointed out that two separate guys had come out to inspect the line outside our houses on Halloween, promised to restore power that night, and it hadn’t happened. I said, “Website says only 8 customers are without power in Angelborough now, and they’re all on my block.”
The guy said, “Yeah, sounds like you fell through the cracks.”
Half an hour later, power was restored.
Then I got to look at all the pictures. 
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The first things I found were the photos of where Breezy Point used to be, and then everything else. I kept thinking, “What have you done to my city?” but there’s no one to think it to, just a hurricane that blew through and then blew away.
If anyone can recommend a charitable organization that’s actually on the ground right now in Staten Island, handing out water, food, blankets — go ahead in the comments. I can’t load a car with stuff and head down there, so prayers and donations are the best we can do long-distance.
—
EDITED TO ADD: Kate has provided a long list of locations in Staten Island that will take material donations if you FedEx them there. Also, there’s an article in the New York Times about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has mobilized to provide relief services in New York City, helping people who are stranded in buildings or have urgent medical and physical needs.
Going on 72 hours without power… November 1, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family.13 comments
…but we’re doing okay. When the power went out on Monday, I thought, “This is too soon. We’re going to be down for days.” Fortunately.
Up until now, we’ve never lost power for more than eight hours. In fact, the joke has been that the military must be keeping a UFO in cryogenic storage in The Creepy Zone because we always got power restored first, even before our three traffic lights on Main Street. Well, now if I look at the Angelborough Outage Map, there are half a dozen houses without power, and they’re me and my neighbors, the only dark lights in the Swamp.
And I said “fortunately” because as soon as I thought that, I piled kids into the car and headed to Angelborough Hardware and bought one of the last three propane grills and a little propane cylinder, and hand sanitizer (I’d forgotten to get that) and shelf-stable milk. And when we got home, I filled a 55-gallon trash barrel with rain water. We can’t drink it, but we can use it to flush toilets.
So we’re working through our bottled water and our “good for washing dishes but not drinking” water and our “don’t use this for anything other than the toilets” water, and the power company keeps promising things like “Your power is already back on” and “It’ll be on later tonight” and “We haven’t forgotten you, Ma’am.” (I’m not seeking them out, btw. The “Your power is on” came from a phone call they willingly made to us, unprompted, to let me know the house was not actually cold and dark. I guess the Force is strong with the weak-minded?)
We’re not that bad off. We’re camping at home. It’s okay. My prayers are with the power crews and with the folks south of us who really got whalloped. But I’ve gotten a few emails from people who were concerned, and I wanted to let you know — we’re fine. I’m cooking out of an ice chest like my great-grandma did, but we’re fine.
I’m sure this will work out just great October 17, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family.Tags: nature, pet, snail, terrarium
4 comments
Kiddo#3, on an unseasonable October day, pointed out a snail shell on our front steps. He put it in his pocket. I said, “Leave it outside,” and he said, “No! It’s dead, see?” How could this go wrong? How could it possibly?
He’s had a few disappointments lately, so I brought him and the snail shell inside. He put it on the table and started doing his homework.
A minute later: “Hey! It’s moving.”
Perfect. Just perfect.
I said, “Put it outside,” which resulted in wailing and lacrymation: he loved it; he wanted to keep it as a pet forever.
I should have been grateful he wanted to keep only the snail and not any of the fuzzy caterpillars inching around the yard, confused because it’s not April. (Poor things. They’re not going to make it.)
So I stuck it in a bowl with some lettuce and went online to figure out what snail-care entails, since if we’re going to fail at keeping a snail alive, we are going to fail the most correct way possible. I’ve got a penchant for finding new and special failure modes, after all. It would be giving in to just kill a snail the ordinary way.
Mechanic: I can check that, sure, but that’s never the problem.
Me: You sure?
Mechanic: Yeah, never. See, right here….holy crow.”
Me: So, one credit card or two?
But really, this was a snail. Snails live in the dirt. How hard could this be?
The first website, How To Tenderly Shower Lovingkindness Upon Your Garden Snail dot Com, began with explicit instructions about seven different sources of calcium your snail requires, and in what proportions they must be administered on alternating days. After I finished sobbing, I asked for help on my parenting group, and it turns out there are other websites for snail care that aren’t quite as, um, well, obsessive.
I looked in the basement and closets for a plastic habitat the kids had, but I never found it. When I returned upstairs, I looked in the bowl, and the snail was gone.
Gone.
There was now a snail loose in my house.
Yes, you may feel free to have an excellent laugh at my expense. I looked all around the table, under the table, along the table legs — nowhere. I said, “How fast can a snail move?” Seriously. The table isn’t huge, but it’s got to be miles for a snail.
Kiddo3, now missing the love of his life, decided the best course of action was to watch TV. I scoured the kitchen again, and this time, I looked back through the lettuce leaves. And there, hidden in one of the folds of lettuce, was our snail.
We have identified it as a Dwarf Pond Snail, half the size of a nickel. My Patient Husband wants to know where Dwarf Pond is located.
We now are proud landlords over a Snail Palace: a plastic deli container with an inch of dirt on the bottom, a layer of moss (thank you, Driveway, for the privilege of harvesting your bounty,) a tiny spider plant, and a few drops of water in a PlayDoh lid. A couple leaves of lettuce. And a snail who doesn’t move very much and has not, at the moment, been given his calcium supplement(s).
The perfect parent October 11, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family, pensive, religion.6 comments
Back when I had Kiddo1, my mother told me not to try being a perfect mother, but instead to be a good-enough mother. Since there are no perfect mothers, you’d pretty much kill yourself trying to live up to the standard. The advice sounds good, and I think the theory is sound, but of course we never know what’s good-enough. You can always find a way you fell short.
At church, the homily was about God as a perfect parent, and the priest (who, I might add, has no biological children) said something about how we can see glimmers of God’s perfect parenting in the parenting we see around us. My reaction to that is always to compare myself to “a perfect parent” and of course we get the big “SURVEY SAYS….X.”
Today, though, it struck me: when I picture a “perfect parent,” I also picture a perfect child. These perfect parents in my head are painting at the kitchen table, or doing crafts, or going for long walks in the park, and the child is pliant, clean, cheerful, well-rested. I don’t picture the perfect parent dealing with a child who’s screaming “I HATE YOU ALL!” because he can’t find his left sneaker, or a child who’s still on the couch twenty minutes after saying she’ll set the table. I’m certainly not picturing the perfect parent dealing with a child who’s destroying someone’s property during a meltdown or being physically violent.
If God is a perfect parent, and none of us are perfect…well, the conclusion here is that I’m missing the point. That the state of the child is not a verdict on the state of the parenting. Because if God is the parent to us all, and people are people (think of the person who infuriates you the most, or the person whose behavior leaves you shaking your head) then there’s something more to perfect parenting than rearing perfect children with their loving smiles and their clean clothes and their crafts at the kitchen table. In other words, perfection is in the loving response to the child rather than the child as a product.
I haven’t processed this yet. Feel free to tell me where I’ve missed the boat.
Kiddo2 Builds-A-Bear July 27, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family.Tags: Build-A-Bear, consumer, customer service
1 comment so far
We ended up in Build-A-Bear yesterday, and Kiddo#2 exclaimed, “Mom! It’s my bear!”
I didn’t know what she meant at first. Last year, one of her bears got recalled, so I thought maybe it was back, but instead she pointed out a blue bear with white stars. And I remembered.
On November 29, 2010, she sent this email to Build A Bear corporate:
Dear Guest Services,
My name is Kiddo#2. I am nine years old and have three build a bears that I love very much.
I have a suggestion for a new bear called the Starlight Shimmer Bear. It would be navy blue with yellow stars all over it. The stars on its belly would would form a constellation. A sound to go with it would be a falling star sound. For clothes it should have a crown with stars all over it, a dress with “I {heart} stars” or “I {heart} constellations” on it. The heart should be made out of stars!
If you release it for 4th of July, the Starlight Shimmer bear could have a companion, the Star Spangled Bear.
I would really like this bear. Can you please let me know if you ever make it?
Thank you very much,
Kiddo#2
At the time, she asked me to check weekly to see if her bear was out, so I’d told her it takes a year or two for these things to get through production. There are meetings; they have to develop the catalog. I told her, “It takes about eighteen months.” She said, “What about next summer? Could they do it in six?” so I said yes. And last summer, she was disappointed. No Starlight Shimmer bear.
She held the bear and looked at me wildly. “But they didn’t write me to tell me they were making it!”
The always-awesome employees at the Build-A-Bear were impressed that she’d suggested a bear to corporate. And looking now at her letter, I can’t help but think it really might have been part of their planning. Why? The display bear was dressed entirely in red, white and blue. They called it the Star Style Bear, not the Starlight Shimmer bear, but I think it’s close enough in execution that they might have run with her idea.
The bear was on sale for $15, and we had a $10 credit to the store. Her brothers had just bought something at the Lego store for $5. I said, “Do you want the bear?”
Five minutes later, one of the Build-A-Bear attendants was stuffing the bear, and Kiddo2 was naming it Midnight.
As an side, The Guardian (the Tabris novel) now has a new title. And a new cover. But I’m not going to tell you yet.
Great for guzzling! July 13, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family, food.3 comments
Being the Mom Of The Year takes a lot of hard work. Last week, for example, I brought my daughter to the liquor store.
These little mother-daughter field trips are an excellent time to brush up my daughter on the important things in life. For example, I pointed out to her that Angelborough has three stop lights, and three liquor stores, and this tells you something about our town’s priorities. We go to the one furthest away, coincidentally right next to the Post Offal (or not-so-coincidentally) because the owner knows every single thing about every kind of alcohol ever made, and he’ll even post signs on the wine bins to let you know which wine goes with what. “Excellent with fish,” for example.
“Mom,” said Kiddo2, “this one says Great For Guzzling.“
Great.
They’re totally the nicest people. I have great luck finding businesses where the owners are super-helpful: eg, I’ve had offers to help me carry one solitary bottle of wine to the car because I had a baby on my hip. They hold the door. They let me walk out the door once with a product becuase I didn’t have enough cash on hand and they didn’t feel like running a credit card. “Just pay it back the next time you come in,” said the owner. That would never fly in New York City. Could you imagine?
I brought my daughter to the till with our assorted purchases, and I said, “Oh? Remember Uncle Tom?”
She nodded. I pointed to one of the wines and said, “When we visited a few years ago, he told us how he found his new table wine.”
You can click this rather than stalking someone.
At this point the owner is listening, since he knows everything about the finest wines. I said, “He went to Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, and found a wine store. And he waited there until a ninety-year-old Italian man walked into the shop.”
The owner is now wearing a look of disbelief, and I said, “Uncle Tom followed the guy around the store, and then followed him up to the counter. The old guy bought a bottle of this, and Uncle Tom was next, so he said to the cashier, ‘I want a case of what he just bought.’”
The owner choked on laughter. “He did not!”
“He totally did. He said he wanted to find a real Italian peasant wine.” And I pointed to what I was buying. “That’s it.”
So now you know. You know how to find a “real Italian peasant wine,” and now that you know how to do it, you don’t need to follow my Uncle Tom around Brooklyn to find out what it is.
Drowning doesn’t look like drowning June 29, 2012
Posted by philangelus in family.Tags: children, drowning, safety, swimming
1 comment so far
I’m linking to this article again because it’s terribly important. Hollywood has given us a predetermined picture of what drowning looks like (arms flailing, panic, screaming) that is not at all the reality.
The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC). Drowning does not look like drowning – Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene Magazine, described the instinctive drowning response like this:
- Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
- Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
- Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
- Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
- From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.
If you ever go to the pool or the beach, please go check out the entire article.
