Whaddaday

Today we were on the move most of the day. Micah had an 11:00 am appointment with his ENT surgeon, and the office is up near Fort Lee (which somehow rings a bell from the movie "Desperately Seeking Susan"). Minimum drive time, barring traffic issues, is an hour.

Micah had a good time in the waiting room, and he was the only child there for most of the wait. It's less than a week before the surgery, so I'm not feeling like Ambassador for BAHAs and Atresia/Microtia, and it's exactly those days when people seem to want to get chatty. One lady who said she had a special education background wanted to know when we knew Micah had atresia, and I was tempted to say when we read the diagnosis on our adoption agency's web site, but she barely gave me time to answer before she was grilling me on who referred us to Early Intervention (um, no one, we knew about it and we contact them before Micah even came home) and then jumped right into what his hearing aids do and what can be done to 'fix' him. (Um, it's not a 'fix', he's not broken, dork, I had wonderful interior monologues while talking with her.)

Meanwhile Steve was getting questioned by a man with hearing aids who came in with his daughter; I tuned him out when I heard the "does he know sign language?" Aggggghhhhh. No, he SPEAKS FOR HIMSELF. It was a mercy when the medical assistant called Micah's name and we got to escape from the curious.

First we had to see the audiologist for a hearing test, then we got to meet with Dr. Choe - he's not seen Micah since May 2008, other than Micah's April CT scan. We were done with the appointments, paperwork and whatnot by noon. The interesting thing is that Micah's new auditory canal is going to be BEHIND the vestigal piece of ear cartilage that he has, and that's the norm.

Micah's scheduled to be first case on the 26th, so he and I will go up the night before and stay at a hotel near the hospital.

So now his surgeon goes on vacation, to Cape Cod, so cross fingers that Hurricane Bill leaves New England alone and he comes back relaxed and ready to make a gorgeous auditory canal.

So we came back down the NJ Turnpike to figure out what to do about the offer of a sectional couch from Thea's friend Lucas's mother. I have hated the coach in our living room since I first saw it in 1998, and once the ink was dry on the marriage license I have been plotting its demise. It has taken me more than ten years to achieve victory over ugliness. First went the ghastly pink recliner. Just an eyesore, and it cluttered up our already crowded living room. I don't even remember what happened to it, the memory has just evaporated.

Next went the unloveable loveseat. Another fuzzy memory. Gone, gone, gone. Another one bites the dust.

Then the matching chair went out to the garage.

Leaving the couch, which was probably made/sold in the era before disco died. Sitting in the living room like a big, ugly tumor waiting to be excised.

Until today.

With the help of a Home Depot flatbed truck and more sweat than I want to think about, we brought home two of the three sections and the ottoman.

And we managed it all (getting the old sofa out, renting a truck, picking up the sofas and getting them home), and got Thea picked up before daycare closed at 6 pm. And I got to go out to dinner tonight, at Santino's Bar One, leaving Steve to deal with Thea who had cried over the theoretical loss of the sofa on Sunday, and who utterly decompensated when she saw the only sofa she's ever known sitting at the curb. She managed to howl for thirty minutes, and only quieted down when she could rescue one of the throw pillows.

I came home from dinner at 9 pm and went upstairs, stopping in Thea's room to give her a good night kiss. I just about choked when she showed me the pillow on her bed.

So there is still a trace of ugliness to be erradicated. I am plotting how to get that pillow into the trash, and when it goes, victory will be mine.