The Life Well Lived

I guess everyone has one of those moments that we would have wished we had put the peaces together in a more timely fashion. I still have a hard time believing that my first reaction when A. threw up was to grab a napkin and try to catch it/wipe it off. One would think that with all the times I “helped” drunks in college, my first reaction would have been the correct one: turning her over so she’s not on her back. Sometimes, I’m just a little slow. Hopefully next time my first reaction will be the right one without J having to remind me what I should have known… Ah well, thankfully this was a no harm done situation. I guess it just goes to show it’s easy to deal with that which I’m familiar and expecting. It’s the other stuff that gets me. Setting up the feeding pump, giving dozens of meds a day through a g-tube, rubbing A. down with various ointments and salves to ease her exema, etc. are no problem now. Still, it’s the normal baby things that get me when I’m not expecting it or when I haven’t done them before. Heck, changing a diaper was a nightmare to be avoided whenever possible at first. Now it’s a ho hum occurrence that happens all the time. I guess I’ll get the rest down pat too, and in the meantime I’m just happy to have somebody who knows what she’s doing living with me (J).

All that being said, we got great news this week. A. went to the cardiologist, and she is doing better than he had hoped for her. At this point she’s cleared to travel, and riding in a plane shouldn’t be a problem for her. Now that doesn’t mean we can actually travel with her as we still need to get clearance from her social worker to take her out of state, but at least it’s not a medically unable to travel at this point. It always nice to have the tests show what we’d thought, that she is doing well. We just have to make a mental note that she should not have the sedative given to her for that test again. It shouldn’t have put her under (not anesthesia), but evidently her body didn’t like it, and she ended up out for a few hours with J having to do some basic body functions for her like swabbing out the spit from her mouth since she was no longer swallowing…Did I mention I’m glad J is a nurse? I’d have been freaking out. At least she came out of everything fine and the test results were positive. We just won’t let her have that sedative again.

Experience of the week that probably only makes me smile: My quintessential American fast food experience:
J and I decided on McDonalds for lunch over the weekend. It’s close, you know what you’re getting when you order, and most importantly I was feeling lazy. Five minutes after deciding on the meals, I was there. That’s what is great about fast food here in the U.S. It’s everywhere. When I get there, there is only one person in line ahead of me so I thought “woohoo, I’ll be out of here in no time flat.”

I should have known better, but at that point I didn’t know it was to be a lunch where all of the stereo typical things that can go wrong at a food joint would go wrong. It turns out the guy ahead of me was ordering for his family, and he got in a bit of a spat with the order taker (who was wearing a manager pin). She in turn took her time getting the meals together making sure not to grab more than one thing per trip. After all carrying a cheeseburger and an apple pie might cause her back to strain. So much for being a quick trip, but at least she was only moderately surely to me as I ordered my two Big Mac meals. 5 min after getting our food, I was comfortably sitting down in my recliner in front of the brain-suckage machine back at home. It was at that point that we opened the bag and discovered that our two Big Macs with no onions had been turned in to 2 quarter pounders. No fair! Ah well, we said we’d just eat them (sheepishly goes back to me feeling lazy). We’d just made our peace with eating our non- Big Macs when J. opened up her quarter pounder to find mold on the bread. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I drove back to the McDonalds. The meal was now a complete stereotype of all the things people complain about with fast food. Surely, slow service combined with getting the wrong food, and suitably topped with moldy bread makes for a complete American fast food experience. I should probably add that at least the McDonalds refunded us what the meals cost as they gave us replacements. Quality may be out the door, but thankfully recognizing a mistake and doing what’s possible to rectify it has not yet gone the way of a tipped hat and held doors.

National Ice Cream Sandwich Day…Timing Is Everything

I can’t help it. With yet another day in the upper 90’s and low 100’s, I can’t help but long for a hazy shade of winter. Maybe I’ll look back on this post in 6 months and wonder what on earth I could have been thinking, but for the time being I find myself looking forward to the next time I’ll feel cool. I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude to my coworker who decided to honor this great day by bringing in ice cream sandwiches for the office. Sometimes timing is everything.

I’m also reminded of a study my psychology teacher told the class about in college. He was trying to point out that correlation does not equal causation. To make his point, he was talking about a study that showed the murder rate in NY was closely correlated with ice cream sales. Now the point of the discussion was that ice cream should not turn us all into murdering sociopaths. That may be different if we have to listen to thousands of people going around saying “I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.” Be that as it may, the real reason was supposed to be that hotter temperatures make us crankier, and they make us desire ice cream. The one thing I’ve never gotten about this study/example is who the heck has energy to go around killing people when it’s this hot? All I want from life on a hot day like this is a cold shower (and maybe my darn ice cream).

Speaking of being warm, A. has developed a new trick to beat the heat (not that our house is that hot). When we give her a teething ring, it seems to be about a 50/50 proposition that it will not end up in her mouth. Rather it will end up on her face as she scoots around trying to see what she can do and still keep the icy teething ring on her face. It’s actually really cute. In truth it may just be brilliant, as a nice ice pack on my head doesn’t seem totally unappealing right now.

Going back to the timing is everything theme, I keep chuckling thinking about the order A. has learned her latest tricks. We’ve been working on tummy time where she lays on her tummy. Our hope was that she would eventually crawl from this position, but she hates being on her belly. Time on the belly was instant invitation to fuss most of the time. The other thing we were trying to get her to master was rolling over. Care to guess which she learned first? The hatred of being on her belly must have been a good motivator to learn to roll, because she seems to have that one down. It should be interesting getting her to spend enough time on her belly to become comfortable enough to put some weight on the arms and crawl. Ah well, all is well in good time, eh?