| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |

Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

5/6/10 (Thursday)

Owen's surgery happened on Cinco de Mayo. The part I forgot to put in was that the nurses in the admitting and recovery areas were all wearing sombreros and mardi gras beads. There were maracas. There was dancing.

In the evening, Owen was more awake and more himself. He hung out and looked at things and was pleasant. Now, when we'd first come into the room, we'd had a room mate. She was discharged, and I'd been very glad, because her monitor had been beeping almost constantly. It went on and on and on and on and on. It made a small variety of noises. Since, by now, Owen was awake and moving around, his monitor started going off almost constantly. The oxygenation would drop precipitously, or the respiration would pick up the heart rate, or the heart rate would drop. It would beep and beep and beep and beep. Because he'd slept all day, Owen wasn't interested in sleeping much more, so he was pretty active. The nurses tried everything. He got new leads. He got a new oxygenation light on his foot. They moved it to his big toe. Finally, around one in the morning, the nurse took him and his monitor back to the nurse's station.

The next thing I knew there were some residents in the room to check on Owen and he wasn't there. They headed off to see where the nurses has stashed him, and I followed slowly. It was five thirty in the morning. There was Owen, in a dim room, sitting up in a little infant chair, wrapped in blankets with only his head sticking out, bright eyed. He'd had a wonderful awake night. I went back to bed for another hour or so.

When the day shift started, around seven, Owen came back. He was still awake. The night nurse and the day nurse basically agreed to give up on the monitor. Things were much better! All he had on was his IV, which wasn't hooked up to anything. I was pretty up front about wanting to get out of there, so things went, judging by hospital time, pretty fast. We left before nine. Owen finally went to sleep in the car.

He's been doing really well. They'd talked about him coming home with prescriptions, but all he's had since the surgery is Tylenol. He got one dose in the hospital last night, when I asked about it, but then he never seemed to need more. We did give him another dose this evening, kind of just in case.

Steve had taken off from work, so we got to see Daddy when we got home! Owen woke up cheerful and contented, and he actually sat around in the bouncer for a good hour or so, just looking at things. We took a three-hour nap together in the afternoon, which I think we both enjoyed. Now, though, he seems pretty sure he's not interested in going to sleep for the night. I really think he should. Unfortunately, because I'm cursed or something, we have to be back at CHOP at eight in the morning for Owen's hearing test. We'll be leaving before six. This time, though, Owen gets to have a bottle before we go!

In the meantime, Cara did something she never has before: she came into our room last night. Around four in the morning, she came in and told Steve, who was asleep, that she'd had a nightmare. She wanted him to come sleep in her bed. (Em, who had to go to PJ's bed to cuddle him night after night after night, is enjoying this.) Eventually Steve managed to say that he wouldn't fit in her bed and that she'd be safe if she closed her door, and she went back off to bed. She's talked about it today to both Steve and Grandmama, who took her to dance, and apparently there was a scary noise, possibly a cat by her door or something, and maybe a dream about a goblin. This might be because she was upset or worried about me and Owen being gone, or maybe it's because Juliana came over yesterday and told Cara that some cuts she'd given herself with her weed whacker were actually from a man who came out of the gully with a knife and stabbed her. Or maybe a cat went into Cara's room and scared her.

This evening, Cara was pretty sure she wanted to just stay up all night. I think Owen wanted to, as well. I think maybe one day we'll let them. We'll just go off to bed . . .

5/7/10 (Friday)

Cara was up around ten thirty and then Owen was up between one and two. I made Steve get up and give him a bottle. I got up at four thirty to get Owen down to CHOP for his audiology appointment. Am I done now?

We've been using JFK for audiology, but our next step was to find an ENT. We went with a CHOP ENT, and they told us to call their audiology department to schedule an ABR. What we did today was the same test that we have scheduled for June 21 at JFK, except that JFK wanted to sedate Owen. At CHOP today, they gave me a comfy chair, turned down the lights, and came back in fifteen minutes, when he was asleep. Em is going to have to email me after she reads this to straighten me out when I mis-explain things. (Or really when you're just not geekly nerdly enough for my liking. An ABR is an "auditory brainstem response" test, which assesses auditory function to the level of the lower brainstem.) And now Em is famous because she's in the journal.

First, she'd done some of the same test as JFK, the one to see whether his eardrums moved. One thing she found was a lot of wax, which made things interesting. The left eardrum, though, seemed pretty flat when eventually she got it to work, which is consistent with some sort of middle ear dysfunction. Middle ear dysfunction is a medically treatable ear pathology, compared to an inner ear dysfunction which would require hearing aids to treat. Think "ear infection"... although I'm not a medical doctor and not allowed to diagnose. The right seemed okay. While I made a bottle, for purposes of bribery, she stuck three electrodes to his head. Each one had a snap on it, for connecting wires to! When he was all ready, I put him to sleep. Unfortunately, he'd just slept in the car and all night, so he wasn't particularly tired. It's fun, though, to watch his little eyes clo-o-o-ose and then open and then start to roll back into his head. Sometimes, too, they go back and forth very fast, as if he were reading. By the time she came back in, he had really drifted off.

It was tough. She had to snap the wires to the flaps on his electrodes; that was easy. The hard part was getting the little wires into his ears to produce sounds. For this test, sounds at different frequencies are emitted into the ears, and the electrodes pick up the neural responses his auditory system produces from the cochlea up the 8th cranial nerve to Owen's lower brain stem. It takes a while! Occasionally, too, the baby stirs or wakes up for a bit or knocks things out of place. A couple of times Owen screamed emphatically, which he occasionally does as he is going to sleep. Sleeping is hard. Sometimes he just looked around and then drifted back off. There was no real sign that he noticed or objected to what was happening.

Here's the part that makes the early drive worthwhile: At one point we took a break from putting sounds into his ears, and she held a little black box to his head, behind each ear. This thing actually is pretty cool in that it's placed on the bone of the skull behind his ear and shakes his skull a bit, which puts sounds into his head but bypassing the outer and middle ears as a more specific test of a middle ear vs inner ear pathology. Those came through fine! (yea!) As far as the rest of the ABR, he had trouble on the right with one frequency and trouble on the left with more than that. However, we know that that trouble is isolated to the middle ear and is probably fluid built up where it shouldn't be. It's not something we need to be concerned about as a permanent problem. It is so, so good to know where the trouble really is.

For Owen's next hearing test, things will be different. The audiologist predicts, and I concur, that in a couple of months he won't be willing to go to sleep like that. If we wait long enough, though, we can test his responses to sounds. He just has to be able to really sit up and hold up his head. Then he can sit on my lap and hear things and they can gauge his responses. There will be a puppet involved. Em points out that he is genetically predisposed to like puppets. This is true.

Here's the other part that makes the early drive worthwhile: We hung out in the examination room while the audiologist went to call the CHOP ENTs. They weren't able to schedule an appointment right then, but, when I got home today there was a message from a nurse practitioner. I called back and got to talk to her, rather than just a scheduler, and she got us in to the Princeton office on June second. They'll have access to all the data from today, as well, of course, as information from Owen's cardiologist and urologist. (The audiologist today knew all about Owen's surgery; I love their computer network!) I won't have to fill out any paperwork about insurance; they know who we are. So I'll have to take a day off from work, but I want to get this done. I wonder whether I can schedule our follow-up with the urologist for the same day; it's the same office . . .

I've finally found the best possible way to drive to CHOP, and I do think it's a bit of a shame that I don't need to go there again. (Only from a navigational standpoint.) My other navigational triumph of the day was not using the GPS to get from CHOP to Sewell to see Grandmom and Grandpop. It had been a while! I was very glad to take a break, and Owen had a wonderful time. He has discovered that they have a really, really great ceiling fan in their kitchen. He stared and stared. We set up the Pack n Play, which lives there now, and he lay in it for a while and stared and stared at the little bear mobile that came with it. The only time he cried was when I tried spinning his bears for him; apparently I didn't do it right. Grandmom and Grandpop were much better at it.

What I want for Mother's Day this year (and I'm going to get it) is to not make a long drive.

5/8/10 (Saturday)

Today Cara and I went to our second Tea Party! We both got dressed up; Cara looked lovely in her Easter dress. This one was in a hotel. Cara doesn't remember ever staying in a hotel! All of the vacations she remembers have been staying-with-relative vacations. Some day, I told her, we'll stay in a hotel. I didn't tell her that Steve and I were discussing it the other day and decided we should take a just-the-four-of-us vacation . . . when Owen's two. The hotel today, though, was very fancy.

The people running the event were very nice. We registered at one table and got a beautiful tiara, a raffle ticket, and a coin. At the next table, Cara got a box of Princess Crayons, since this was a Royal Tea Party, and a little booklet to color. We went and turned our gold coin in to the photographer and had our picture taken in front of a royal backdrop. It felt like going to the prom.

In the ballroom, before we even found our table, we were pointed toward the table with free face painting! Cara got a beautiful princessy design on her face, in colors that sort of coordinated with her dress. She got very glittery. She enjoyed a lot of today, but I think that the best part was walking around being told how beautiful she looked.

The event was MCed by our fairy godmother. She came out and sprinkled glitter around, and then we had to close our eyes and say, "I wish, I wish, I wish" and then suddenly, when we opened them, Belle was there! Here's part I think was very funny. Belle also had us close our eyes and say "I wish, I wish, I wish," and then Tiana and Naveen (her prince, except that he was played by a white guy) were there. The princesses and prince had brought makeup and tattoos for the kids, who had already had their faces painted, and then later they gave them tiaras and crowns in an official coronation, having had to ask them to take off the ones they'd already gotten! I guess there are only so many royal activities for kids to do.

Cara was shy about going up with the other kids. It's funny; she's so ready to charge into things like her swimming class that I forget that she's ever shy. It surprises me. She stayed in her seat and learned everything, though. A princess always has a smile on her face, and she does a nice royal wave and curtsy and knows how to spin around to show off her dress. Naveen taught the little knights to sort of "charge" with their swords and how to bow, which was a challenge because he couldn't talk into the microphone when he had his hands in bowing position. The first time he tried it, the microphone was in the hand behind his back. The second time, he planned better.

When it came time for the coronation, our fairy godmother came over and brought Cara up to get her crown. She walked up with two other girls when it was their turn, and they all did their royal waves and spins and curtsies, and they got tiaras.

At the end, there were door prizes. They pulled raffle tickets for a few baskets, and then they pulled for a couple of other things. Cara wanted to win something. And wanted to win something. And then, the last thing of the day, she won! It turned out to be an autographed poster of the Cheetah Girls. The author was there and had given a little talk. We may try to find out who the Cheetah Girls are.

I left with a very happy little girl. She said goodbye to lots of people. She was delighted with the tea party and with the hotel and with the spinning door and with the wind outside blowing her dress and with pretty much everything. She said goodbye to people in the parking lot. So, yes, I forget sometimes that she's shy.

In the meantime, Owen and Steve had done the groceries. At the supermarket, a man looked at Owen and said, "That's a 2010 model, isn't it?"

5/9/10 (Sunday)

My sixth Mother's Day was probably my least ambitious ever. We didn't go see anyone. I didn't get presents for anyone. I didn't mail cards to anyone. Heck, I don't think I called anyone. I think I have decided to accept that I've been run ragged. What I did do was stay home with my two wonderful kids. And Steve vacuumed.

I got some cards this morning. Steve helped Owen sign one. Cara was very excited because I got to get out the map she drew me a couple of weeks ago, which was to lead me to her long-sleeved shirt drawer (it's a good thing I knew that, because the map consists of the three bedroom doors and an arrow). In the drawer was a picture she'd drawn for me. It was taped shut; we had to get scissors to open it. It says "MOM." "It's for Grandmama!" cried Cara when we finally got it open. This was not a terrible blow, as she'd told me as much last night. It's just nice to know that it was for me, for a while. The map was definitely mine. She'd brought me a nice present from preschool; it's a really nice photo of her, framed by puzzle pieces. On the back, it says "I love you to pieces."

Steve gave Owen a bottle, and I played girls with Cara. It's funny and sort of sad to realize that I very rarely do that. I'm always busy getting things done. Today, though, was playtime. The best part was when I got to be Prince Naveen and Cara got to be Prince Charming, and they decided to fight. First, though, they had to get ready. Each of them wore a bikini top on his head. Charming also had a miniskirt on his head and a palm tree ring around his waist. I put pink sunglasses on Naveen and this feather thing on his head. Charming got a pocketbook, and Naveen got three of them. I was somewhat disturbed to find that they had guns in their purses. They got into cars and drove over to the place where they were going to fight, and then they shot each other. Naveen lost. It turns out that he was the bad guy.

In the afternoon Grandmama and Grandpapa and Claire and GiGi came up and we got takeout. GiGi and Owen really seemed to have a good time together. She walked around holding him and talking to him, and he stared and stared. He was definitely a happy baby. He loves to be talked to. I think that perhaps he also enjoys accents. He did get to look at our ceiling fans, and I even turned one on for him. It was good, but it wasn't as good as Grandmom and Grandpop's.

5/10/10 (Monday)

Owen slept until 3:40 last night, and on Friday night he slept until five. Maybe he's toying with the idea of sleeping through the night! This would be a really good time for him to start doing that, since I'm going back to work next week.

I took pictures of Cara all dressed up on Saturday, and then I took pictures of Owen with all of Cara's Barbies. Steve refused to make a joke about being "all dolled up" in the captions. I'm not sure why. I just thought it needed to be said.

Last week at preschool was Z week. This week is the CH sound. It made no impression on Cara today. Yesterday Cara was able to read the word "BAD" from Bad Kitty, which we'd been showing her, and then she was able to figure out "BED," "BID," and "BUD." I'd like to try her on "bat" if I get a chance.

We went to the Loefflers' for dinner. When we sat down to eat, we put Owen on a blanket on the floor. He was fine for a while, but then he got fussy. I was about to get up and get him, when Em pointed wildly at the ceiling. Ron went and turned on the fan. Miraculously, instantly, Owen became quiet.

When she picked them up from Susan's, Em told PJ and Casey that we were going to come over. What does Owen do, asked Susan. Casey: "He wears baby clothes!!"

5/11/10 (Tuesday)

Owen woke up at quarter to three, and he took the first three and a half ounces of his bottle in about ten minutes. I thought, wow, I'll be back in bed in record time! Then, though, things slowed down. The next ounce and then the two-ouncer I made him took us until quarter to four. One problem was that he was wide awake. The other problem was that his arm kept hitting the bottle out of his mouth. Sometimes we'd get into a position where I could brace it, but generally it went flying. (Figuratively.) The arm was like a windmill. I was reminded of the Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa beat each other up, saying, essentially, "I'll just stand here and punch, and if you happen to get in the way . . . " He did still want the bottle. Eventually he finished his six ounces and finally fell asleep.

He had a very sleepy day. After he slept all morning, I thought we'd play. I put him down on his blanket in the living room. I stepped away for a minute. When I came back, he was asleep on the floor.

The other day we gave Owen a bath for the first time since his surgery. I was a little nervous, but he still loved it; nothing bothered him. Cara had pointed out that he smelled like cheese, which I had not noticed. That used to be what I said about him when he needed a bath, but, since the switch to formula, it hadn't been an issue. The next morning, Cara said that she thought he smelled like cheese again and needed another bath. I smelled him. He did not smell like cheese. I said as much. Had she actually smelled him, I asked. "Mo-o-om, I said, I thought he smelled like cheese!" No, she hadn't smelled him.

5/12/10 (Wednesday)

I had Owen try tummy time today, for the first time since surgery. It went about as well as it used to, maybe a little worse. We'll have to get back into practice. On one side, his little plastic bandage has come off already! The other one will get there in a day or two.

Miss Jane showed me when I picked Cara up that the kids had learned about baby owls and done a drawing about them. Most of them were scribbles. Adrian and a few others had done recognizable birds. I could tell right away which was Cara's. It was a picture of a blonde girl sitting at a table. Maybe those were baby owls in her hands? Was she studying baby owls? No. I asked Cara later what she had drawn. "A girl eating dinner."

Steve was talking about work, and he mentioned his boss. Cara was shocked to discover that he had one.

Cara: Really?!

Steve: Yes.

Cara: What's her name?

Steve: Diane.

Cara: Just like Mommy's name!

We've been watching music videos on youtube. Peter Gabriel is popular, and "Take On Me" was a hit. Tonight, I decided I wanted to show Cara some Queen. First I spent at least thirty or forty seconds looking at titles and trying to pick one that would look interesting. This was too long. I gave up and picked "I Want to Break Free," because I knew it wasn't just boring band footage. It was, I know, sort of an interesting choice for a five-year-old. During the cross-dressing part, she pointed at Brian and suggested that he was wearing a wig. I had to explain that he, with his long hair in curlers, was the only one not wearing a wig. Her response to Freddie when he wasn't dressed in drag: "Why isn't he wearing a shirt? . . . I guess he's too hot." At least now Cara sort of knows who the guy is whose picture is on the mug we keep our toothbrushes in.

| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |