Back in the E-E-E-R ...you don't know how unlucky you are, Boy

5:00 pm Boy attempts jump from tiger chair in living room, hits right temple on unknown toy or piece of furniture, comes into the kitchen, crying with half of his face smeared with blood.

5:05 pm Crying has stopped, until Boy sees his palms are covered in dried blood and he has a fit until they are wiped down with baby wipes. One paper towel is soaked in blood getting the very small laceration under control.

5:10 pm Call goes out to Father of Boy to come home to be with Oldest Child, who does not want an adventure to the ER. Father proposes alternatives such as meeting us at the ER which are rejected by Management as too much drama for the ER waiting room.

5:25 pm Boy and Management leave for University Medical Center at Princeton, which is close to us (at least until 2011 when it moves to a new building across Route 1), chanting, "Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, 'No more Micah's jumping off the chair'. . ."

5:35 pm We sign into Triage and go into the waiting area. Micah promptly finds the kids' area and is playing there when the unit secretary comes to slap on an identification bracelet. Since she neglected to push up his coat sleeve he pretty much can take it on and off at will.

5:45 pm The triage nurse does her thing and walks us over to the Fast Track, where we sit and vegetate for awhile until the doctor sees us, then the physician assistant sees us and essentially does the exact same assessment that the doctor did. Then we vegetate some more while the tech assembles the papoose board and all the other supplies for suturing.

6:00 pm Boy is strapped down and is beginning to get the notion that the party to fix his boo-boo isn't going to be a barrel of laughs, especially after the PA starts numbing up the laceration. That stuff burns and no one seems to mix 1 mL of bicarb into the anesthetic to adjust the pH to something more physiologically neutral.

6:02 pm PA starts suturing. The last time he got about five or more minutes for the anesthetic to take effect. Other than that she is remarkably cool about suturing a howling child.

6:20 pm Boy is released from the papoose board and immediately stops crying.

6:30 pm We get our discharge instructions and head for the car.

Five days until the sutures can come out. He got Thomas the Tank Engine stickers and seems no worse for the wear. I wish I could say the same for me.

A Slice of Life

Tonight the kids and I were going to be on our own for dinner, and since Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (aka Kiddie Crack) two nights in a row would not be a culinary high point, I decided that we would make chicken vegetable soup tonight.

We went to the store and picked up some chicken, a bag of egg noodles and a few vegetables, to be supplemented with stuff already at home. It was going to be a group project.

Until Thea got bored with being on the sidelines because chopping celery and carrots is a Mommy job. So I thought, she's been cooking at the stove (with supervision) for more than a year, how about some simple chopping? She was interested in stepping up to the big leagues and we made it through more than half dozen carrots (the baby peeled variety) before the knife met the finger and bloodshed ensued.

She was pretty calm about it, we rinsed it, elevated, wrapped it up in a couple of bandaids and she gamely went on to cut a few more before deciding to hang her knife up and move on to sauteeing the chicken.

We changed the bandaid after we got done cooking, and it was still actively bleeding and I could see it was a small flap-type cut. So I started wondering if we should go to the Fast Track at the ER to get a little Dermabond or whatever type of skin glue that is used on kids. At the mention of the ER/hospital, Thea completely lost her composure, so I really bandaged it up well in the hopes that we could at least make it through dinner. The back of my brain was still thinking we're going to need to go to the ER, wailing or no wailing.

Needless to say, Thea didn't eat much of her soup, and resumed wailing once I again mentioned that if she was still actively bleeding through the bandage, we're going.

Fortune smiled on her and it looked pretty good. Even after peeling off three bandaids it wasn't even oozing, so we all got a reprieve. And thanks to all the emotional trauma she was falling asleep on the sofa at around 7:30, but revived after the move upstairs to our bed where she managed to watch Word Girl and Cyberchase before going to bed. Since Thea still likes one of us to stay with her until she falls asleep, Micah was left on our bed, singing himself to sleep.

Meanwhile, earlier in the day, I stopped at FedEx/Kinkos to copy the form to begin Micah's evaluation by the Child Study Team at Orchard Elementary, then handdelivered the form to the school. Ela suggested registered mail, but since we were coming home from Summit School and going right down Route 206, why give the business to the USPS? The clock starts ticking, the CTS has 90 days to schedule all of his evaluations.

Paging DYFS, catching up, etc.

Day of Guilt. I am a bad mommy, I've been thinking about Micah needing new shoes for a week or so, but never managed to get us to Village Shoes to do something about it. Today, on the way home from Sound Beginnings, he woke up as we were almost home so I decided today is the day.
Last time we got shoes for him was on a trip to Oma's last fall. Size 6. Measured today, size 7.5 - almost eight. One ticket punched on the guilt express. And we have a second kid with wide feet so it limited our selection a little bit, but overall I think Micah found the experience satisifying because when we got in the car to leave, he looked at his feet and said, "Wow, SHOES."

Our morning was spent at Summit School. The mommy group was especially heinous today because I didn't have much to keep me occupied other than cleaning out my mental sock drawer, having brought the scraps to write up my call slips but having left the booklet of pink messages at home. Fortunately the mommy whose voice was getting on my last nerve has a child who turns three and is aging out of the system at the end of this month. And I work the next two Wednesdays, so no group for me. By the time we go back, it will just be the cochlear implant moms and their usual minor monopolization of the group. Majority rules, whatever, them I'm used to.

I still need to connect the camera to the computer and download a bunch of pictures. Micah Thea and I went to Oma's the week/weekend of the 26th-30th. Oma had an appointment at the nail salon on Friday, so I went to Babies-R-Us, bought an umbrella stroller and took Micah and Thea on Metro to go downtown to meet up with my friend Lorrie and see the cherry blossoms. Thea had her own farecard so she thought she was all that and a bag of chips.

We got there early so we got off at the Smithsonian stop and went to the Air and Space Museum, which was a huge hit with Thea. ("I'm the luckiest girl in the whole world!" - Mommy will remind you of that comment one of these days, Miss T.) Then we subwayed it to Federal Triangle, which is not the Federal Triangle stop of 1995, the last year I worked in DC. Someone has built a huge building there, named it after Ronald Reagan (doesn't he already have an airport named for him dammit?) thereby throwing both of us off the proposed meeting place. Fortunately, we connected despite all of this and set off for the Tidal Basin. Thea was a trooper - we only had the umbrella stoller for Micah - which Aunt Lorrie pushed, for which I was probably not sufficiently expressive in my thanks. I miss the Stand-n-Stroll that was such a help in China but didn't survive much beyond the trip, it is the best stroller for the toddler/preschooler como, IMHO. The cherry blossoms were beautiful, the crowds weren't horrendous (the actual festival started the next day), and the whole trip exhausted them enough that they went to bed early that night.

Oh, and we had another ER visit, this time at Civista Medical Center in LaPlata. Micah was walking backwards, fell on a sofa pillow (that he had earlier pulled off of Oma's couch) and hit the back of his head on the brass handle of the drawer on the TV cabinet. Small hole in the back of the boy's head, and since I nearly didn't take him to the ER for the forehead thing that took four stitches, I thought it should be checked out.

When the triage nurse put the thermometer in his armpit, Micah said "all bettuh", which was cute. We got sent over to the fast track side and had to wait 20 minutes or so - long enough for Micah to discover a small plastic cup for medication on the floor, crutches that were propped against the wall and the rolling gurney-side table. By the time the physician assistant saw him, the small hole had swollen enough that he said just to put antibiotic ointment on it. Four mini packets of Bacitracin and a dose of ibuprofen for the $50 co-pay; peace of mind, priceless.

Now he just has a scablet on his head that everyone thinks is a tick. No, it's just a scab, I broke the baby. Again. Stop picking at my kid's head.

Not much else going on. Tomorrow I have EMR training - our electronic medical record system goes live at the end of the month, so in preparation I have to sit in one place for three hours (read: a nightmare, the one thing I don't have to do in my job is sit still), in front of a computer screen, with my phone on speaker setting connected to a training teleconference. I'd rather have a rectal and a root canal. Simultaneously.

Thea learned how to sing the Barney song in Chinese. What a nightmare. I hate Barney in English and his status is not made any better by putting him in Mandarin. (I much prefer "I love you, you love me, let's hang Barney from a tree. . . but I don't think Thea's Mandarin proficiency is at that level, yet.

She's sleeping in her Dora bed these days, which beats having a 60 lb. snoring lump in our bed. We had a couple of partial successes with the 100 Good Wishes Quilt and her 'real' bed, but it's going to be incremental progress to evicting her into her own room. She loves that quilt as much as Soft-Soft, her fuzzy blanket from Betty at my office.

Baby's 1st ER Visit

We've always told Thea no ER visits until after you're five years old. Somehow I missed out on conveying that important piece of information to Micah - and tonight we went to the ER for the first time and he got a few stitches in his forehead. It all started with his standing on the sofa and trying to jump or walk, and going off the edge and right into the edge of the coffee table - not the first time this has happened, but this time he conked his head just right and there was a little gash on his forehead. It looked tiny enough, but since it kept oozing, I wanted to have it checked out, especially since it was on an area on the forehead where his BAHA band sits.

Fortunately tonight was a quiet night at the University Medical Center ER (I've always hated that name, it's like the hospital is trying to capitalize on a non-existent relationship with Princeton University). No sooner than giving Micah's information to the receptionist and getting an ID bracelet slapped on his ankle were we taken into the triage area, and no sooner did the triage nurse tell us to go out and wait did the trauma tech come along and take us back.

The tech took off Micah's bandaid, told me that it was going to need stitches and went away. Phooey, I was hoping that someone would glue Humpty Dumpty back together and we could get out of there quickly, but it was not to be. And a big fat non-thank you to that trauma tech for not giving me a tissue or a gauze to catch the blood that started to seep out and run down Micah's forehhead yet again after yanking at the bandaid. Fortunately I felt ballsy enough to rummage for what I needed (I really like the vest I had on and didn't feel like getting blood on it).

The rest of the staff we dealt with (Dr. Lee, Nurse Jacqueline, Cecil) was very nice. The doctor and nurse got him numbed up, and then Cecil came in to wrap Micah in a sheet and then put him on the papoose board. Micah had a little snooze after the local anesthetic went in, so he came back full throttle with the wailing and wiggling for Act II. I held his head for the first set of stitches, then the nurse took over for round two - it's hard work to hold a little body still for more than a few minutes and Micah's determination to fight and let us know how pissed off he was did not flag for one single second until he was released from the Velcro.

All in all, with his bonking his head at 7:05, getting to the ER at 8:00, we were home by 9:15 pm which has to be some sort of record. Micah should sleep like a rock after this - but he's fooled us many other times.

The Mind Boggles

Wednesday we got a phone call from our service coordinator at Somerset County Early Intervention letting us know that Micah's application for hearing aids was approved. Since the application went from the county to the state on the 10th, the turnaround time for this is supposedly quite fast (unless you're the parents of the child who needs the hearing aids who are looking at the calendar thinking it's THREE months since we got home from China, what is taking so long?). Yesterday the letter actually arrived from the SCHEIS (Special Child Health and Early Intervention Services - if you know German, you know what letter is missing to make it a very appropriate acronym) informing us that we could call the audiology department at JFK (another of the banes of my existence) to set up an appointment for a hearing aid fitting/distribution. So this morning, with one child occupied on the computer and the other destroying the living room, I got on the phone with JFK.

And the audiology department hasn't gotten its letter from the state yet, so no appointment. Once all of this fall into place and the hearing aids can be ordered, it's about two weeks until they come in, and then the wait for the appointment - so we'll have probably been home with Micah FOUR months by the time he's amplified. But it is boggling my teeny tiny brain that I have a letter telling me to get an appointment and cannot do so.

Then later this afternoon, there was a message in our voice mail for Steve, a woman named Debbie from Mercer County EIP stating that Micah had been enrolled with the state's birth defects registry and she wanted to discuss services available because she had received Micah's packet from the state. Huh? Services we've been receiving through Somerset County, where we live, for the past two months. Our mailing address is Princeton, but we're in this odd little corner of Montgomery Township that is in the southernmost part of Somerset County, so in the real world, the equivalent would be trying to convince people you live in Brigadoon. So whatever documents our Somerset County EIP service coordinator needs to do her part in the adventure of getting hearing aids are now languishing in a Mercer County EIP outbox waiting to be sent on to Jessica or into The Void. And the mind boggle rollercoaster rockets onward.

All of this once more proving that if I was going to be diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm, it would have already happened because it would have blown wide open after the morning/afternoon I had.

Meanwhile and far away, it was a good day for the kids, other than Micah whacking his sister over the head with a toy wooden rolling pin. Thea survived, but with many tears and a nice goose egg - but the saving grace to pull us out of any post-whacking funk was that we met Steve at Panera's for lunch. Micah's ibuprofen dose kicked in; he's cutting at least four, possibly more, teeth so he's somewhat miserable in his cheerful Micah manner; Thea tried salmon from Steve's lunch. After eating, Thea was game to go to Snip-Its for a bang trim- which was a bonus for me because usually there is cajoling and bribing involved in the haircut process.

While Micah slept this afternoon, we tried on Thea's Halloween costume. She wants to be an international super spy, a la Pablo of The Backyardigans. We put together a child's white (polyester) dinner jacket, dress shirt, black bow tie with a pair of black stretch pants and black patent leather shoes. Add a pair of black glasses - and voila! She was quite pleased with the result. (Pictures to follow.)

Dinner tonight was courtesy of my new NP colleague, Karen. Her husband went tuna fishing and got two tuna so yesterday at work there was a nice chuck of tuna in an airtight, sealed freezer bag. And Thea loved the tuna - eating her entire piece and then some. Even Micah, who is trying out being an ovo-lacto vegetarian on for size, or so it seems, tried a bit.

Now it's 11:30 pm, our neighbors just called awhile ago and dropped off their Emily, one of Thea's absolute favorite friends, on the way to the ER in New Brunswick with their younger child who had a fall at daycare with a nice knot on his head and woke tonight throwing up. Emily scores huge points for her resilience - she just took her blanket and stuffed animal and climbed into Thea's bed. Thea's bed is in a state of shock that someone is actually sleeping in it - we're using it with Thea to read books, but she's still sleeping between us. Which was fine back in the days of a 25 to 30 pound two-year old but is not as wonderful now that she's a 50 pound boulder. Thea will be in for a surprise in the morning if Emily's still here.

So with all that going on, I won't bore you with details of Micah's and my trip up to the Parent-Infant Group at Summit Speech School. (Where, while Micah was engaged in productive activities geared toward enhancing his communication skills, I was sitting in a room of mommies discussing their cats and dogs and other stuff that might have been therapeutic for them, but was an hour or so of my life that I am not going to get back. When the facilitator tried to engage those of us who were reorganizing our mental sock drawers rather than talking about pets by asking, "Lydia, do you have pets at home?" I told her that yes we did, an almost seven year old guinea pig that I wish would die so I could reclaim that corner of the dining room and not have Micah trying to figure out whether he wants to put aspen chips with guinea pig feces in them into his mouth. Sort of a conversation killers, but it was too good to pass up.)