NP Conference, Etc.

I'm in the weird vacuum of a professional conference - the sort of time-warp where days start to blend together and you get to know all the obscure restrooms in odd corners of the conference center, and we're not even staying at the conference hotel.

We drove down late Wednesday night, after our first dinner with the brand new stove. Unfortunately it was just quick spaghetti and broccoli, the oven was unused other than the 30 minute trial after installation. We also have a new dishwasher, which, if all goes well, will not flood the kitchen on its maiden voyage.

Mom/Oma made us a reservation at the Sleep Inn; she was due for another of her injections for macular degeneration and her eye usually bothers her for a few days afterwards, so the hotel seemed to be a good alternative to having four house guests and feeling miserable after an injection to her eye.

Thursday we came to the conference center at National Harbor so I could register and check out where things were. Most of the attendees had gone to Capitol Hill for visits with their states' representatives, so it was pretty empty. The Gaylord is very nice, though grossly overpriced (bottle of water $3.00; large cup of coffee and a plain croissant $7.00). I feel sorry for those actually staying here because there is no easy access to a Wawa or grocery store - I could make a killing by bringing in provisions for people or shuttling them to the supermarket if I were so inclined.

The Sleep Inn has an indoor pool, which is nice if the weather is bad. Micah seems to love it; Thea had a slip and dunk in the whirlpool so she's a little water shy. Yesterday was day one of the 'real' part of the conference so Steve had to entertain both for the entire day - and I stayed for the 5:30 performance of the Capitol Steps, which was funny and fabulous. I think I saw them almost 20 years ago at another conference and they were just as hilarious then. Imagine a Robin Williams-ish rapid fire wit with a political bent.

Anyway, I'm sitting around waiting for the exhibit hall to open at 6:00pm. Both the sessions I went to yesterday and the ones today were really good; it's nice to feel somewhat energized and enlightened. Steve and the kids will be coming down and we'll have dinner later on.

Sorry this one is mostly about me, me, me.

L.

PS: On the Wednesday before we left for Maryland, in addition to the new stove and dishwasher being delivered and installed, going to Sound Beginnings with Micah in the morning, we also met with a speech pathologist to have Micah evaluated. He's more or less on track for sounds that he should be producing at this age, but she'd like to see more spontaneous production of language rather than response to our prompting, so she'll be seeing him for an hour a week for awhile.

One month later. . . .

It's been almost a month since I last wrote anything here - I've written numerous witty, amusing posts in my head that have never survived long enough to be typed into the computer.

At work we've moved into the world of the EMR, electronic medical record, so now in addition to my prescription pad, stethoscope and PDA, I drag a laptop along with me into the exam room. It's been an interesting transition, and I'm not sure whether I love it or hate or am somewhere in between, but I do know that I am so bleeping tired of hearing "It's going to be great, eventually. . . ." The amount of time I now spend on the computer at work definitely lessens the amount of time I spend on the computer at home. And yesterday I found out that the additional time we get in our schedules to catch up is going to be phased out over the next few months. It's definitely making me think that if I ever move to another practice, it had better be one so small, poor or non-profit so as never to be able to afford instituting an EMR system. There is something so much more deliberate in writing down what one did and said rather than ticking off a bunch of boxes.

Meanwhile and far away, we've made another trip to Washington last weekend, Thea finished up Pre-K and will be starting summer camp next week, Micah is going to be evaluated next week by a speech pathologist to see if he has any other impediments to acquiring and producing speech other than his hearing impairment, the kids are going in for their check-ups Monday and Monday evening our social worker will be making a visit to be able to write up our 12-month post-placement report for Micah, which will officially end our relationship with the adoption agency and is a cause for celebration since there isn't a whole lotta love flowing in either direction. (Fortunately, we love our social worker - she's not affiliated with the adopton agency.)

Two weeks ago on the 6th, in the midst of that hot spell, the kids and I went to Target to get a pump to inflate the pool we got from Aunt Shannon last year - and upon opening it discovered that the pump had to be charged for ten hours before using. So we hauled out the pump that came with the pool. Whether due to the heat, general crabbiness or just because, Thea and Micah fought like badgers in a sack over pumping so we resorted to ten pumps for one, then ten for the other - and if you've seen the size of this pool, it was going to take a lot of pumping to get it anywhere close to blown up. I was ready to lose it because Micah wanted to 'drive' the pump (spin the pump handle) rather than contribute to the cause, so I said to him, "Micah, I am going to kill you." Which passed unnoticed, until Thea piped up, "And if you get up, she'll kill you again." Fortunately after an hour of torture, the pool was up and ready to be filled. The down side is that once in the pool, it's hard to get Micah out, even when his lips start to acqure a purple-y blue tinge from cold. I had to lure then to the front lawn with a promise of bubble goop and chalk to get them out of the water.

New ENT for Micah - Dr. Choe

Wednesday we made an early morning trip up the NJ Turnpike to Englewood to ENT and Allergy Associates. While at Oma's last week, I called to make an appointment with Dr. Choe for Micah, figuring that it would be sometime later this summer. There was a cancellation and I was offered 8:45 on Wednesday morning.

Which meant the Turnpike, in rush hour. Rand McNally estimated travelling time at 1 hour, 20 minutes - but I don't think that factored in traveling at the peak of rush hour. So Micah and I left at about 7 am, and we got there with a few minutes to spare - enough time to fill in the four pages of patient registration paperwork before Thea and Steve arrived.

Dr. Choe was one of the nicest specialists I've met. No lab coat, no suit and tie, and he introduced himself with his first name. I think he spent almost an hour going over the options for us (rib graft followed by atresia surgery, atresia surgery followed by MedPor, or prosthetics.) He has cared for 70+ patients with microtia, according to what I read - and he's young enough that he won't be retiring any time soon.

So next year, around his third birthday, Micah will have a CT scan of his head done and after Dr. Choe evaluates the scan the first atresia surgery can be planned for the best of the two ears. Then six months or so later, the second surgery will be in the works. Then after that we can figure out who'll be doing the MedPor.

So if all goes well, Micah will have his ear canals and his ears by early elementary school, which is right when children start to notice differences and begin to tease.

Throughout all this, Micah was clueless and worked on dismantling the rolling stool in the exam room. We left that chair with two washers and one nut on the floor, but fortunately the chair still worked.

Bite me, Sotterley Quilt Ladies....or the Weekend at Oma's

This post will probably put a curse upon the six raffle tickets that I purchased for the Anne Arundel County Fair 2007 blue ribbon quilt, but I don't really care.

Thursday, the kids and I drove down to Maryland to see Oma, arriving around dinner time. We made a stop at the McDonald's with the groovy play area in Middletown, DE (groovy until the outside temperatures hit the upper 80s, then it's a miserable sauna; note to self: plan alternate route for the summer months.)

Friday, Oma's dance card was already booked, so we made plans to go to the Sotterley Plantation's quilt show with Lorrie, who actually seems to enjoy Thea's and Micah's company (and mine, too, despite being housemates for about ten years). Sotterley is gorgeous, just a really pretty house and grounds; Mom, Thea and I were there about two years ago in December for a Christmas-themed event and we had a blast touring the grounds, picking up stamps on a "passport" to the event that could be redeemed for a prize from Santa and Mrs. Claus at the last stop. There was a horse-drawn wagon ride around the grounds.

The Quilt Show wasn't that sort of event. It had rained the night before, so the grass where the cars were being directed to park was a near-swamp. We paid our admission fee ($7 per adult), got the map (a necessity for Thea) and started with the outbuildings - only one of which had quilts, the others were vendors. Micah was buckled into his containment device, the orange umbrella stroller, Thea was counting ribbons on the quilts and needlework pieces; the day seemed off to an auspicious start.

Until we got to the main house, that is. After purchasing six chances for $5 on an absolutely beautiful quilt, I horrified the person selling the tickets by telling Thea that, if I won it, I would wrap myself in it, grab a pile of books and never emerge from my room. That lady looked like she swallowed a bug or a fried pickle (more on that later). What's the purpose of a quilt, if not to use it? Then we had to park the stroller to go into the main house to see the quilts, so Micah was on the loose. And he promptly went in, ran over to a small quilt artfully displayed over a large embroidery hoop stand and smacked it. No harm done, and I picked him up - he was running loose because I was putting the camera in my purse, finding a way to hold Bunny Bear and getting organized before grabbing him to carry him through the house.

The white cotton gloved lady on duty in that room took the smacking of the quilt rather well, but in the next room, another biddy with white cotton gloves decided that she had to make absolutely, positively certain that Thea would not lay her little hands on any of the precious quilts, so she hounded Thea about half a dozen times, asking if she had pockets in her pants (no, pockets are not standard on cotton knit stretch pants from Gymboree, and if she had used her eyes, she would have seen that) and telling Thea to put her hands in her pockets and not touch anything. (Thea had already gotten her marching orders from me, and I don't need some blue-haired biddy trying to buck the chain of command, and Thea is remarkably good at looking and not touching. Telling her one time was ok, two times not that much of an issue, but beyond three biddy lady needed to push her own "mute" button or let me do it for her.)

So at about the sixth or seventh time, this prune squawked at my child, I had had enough and told her that this child wasn't going to touch the quilts and to stop pestering Thea. Both Lorrie and I felt that the enjoyment had been sucked out of the house tour, where the white gloved ladies seemed to outnumber the visitors and be in the way of viewing the quilts so we went back outside to tour the grounds. Thea took some nice photos of the garden using my camera, Micah tried to remove a few stakes from the garden, but otherwise did not run wild.

On the way back to the swamp where the car was parked, we asked the two guys collecting the entry fees (poor suckers obviously conscripted by their Quilt Nazi wives) where could we find a child-friendly restaurant nearby. St. Mary's County has changed a lot - there is now an Outback, a Ruby Tuesdays; it's gone from rural/quaint to being almost anywhere else in the US. Near the Outback there was a Cheeseburger in Paradise, so that got our vote. And it was pretty good: Micah ate almost all of his grilled cheese, Thea got macaroni and cheese, I had some sort of salad with coconut, pineapple and chicken on lettuce with a curry dressing. Lorrie got fried pickles, which just seem like something that came about as a part of someone going on a culinary-inspired acid trip. Right up there is fried Oreos. Blech, blech, blech, phtooey. (In all honesty, I have no right to write this, because I couldn't even bring myself to try one.)

The coconut and pineapple layer cake for dessert almost made me able to forgive the Quilt Nazis, but not quite (for that the magic formula called for coconut, caramel and chocolate to be present.) Both kids zonked out on the ride back to La Plata and Thea awoke in a thoroughly grumpy mood and it took some work to get her to snap out of it since I try not to smack some sense into my children when friends and family are around no matter how richly they deserve it.

I read in the quilt show program that the group that runs this event needs a board of about fifteen members to be able to successfully plan and organize the show; it has nine members now and a few will be retiring so the group is desperate for members. Maybe if the members were less obnoxious, others would want to join. Stay tuned to see if there is a 19th annual Sotterley quilt show in 2009.

The next day we took Oma to the National Lutheran Home in Rockville for the Ladies' Auxillary's Spring Festival. The Spring and Fall events are sort of a ritual for us; my grandmother used to volunteer at the Home in the stamp room. I remember her bringing backs of the torn off corners of envelopes, which she soaked until the stamps came off and then she put them between sheets of newspaper and then put the newspaper under the table pad on the dining room table to flatten them. I used to go poking through her bags of stamps as a child, hunting for foreign stamps for my album. My mother took me out of school for the afternoon for the Spring Festival; once upon a time it was held under tents in front of the old NLH at 18th and Douglas Streets, NE in Washington.

Nowadays, it's indoors - and it doesn't seem to hold the same thrill it did when I was little, but we still go because we can see Miss Ida Mae, who is almost 101 and who attended Sunday School with my grandmother, and the former neighbors from Hyattsville who live in the independent living community on the grounds surrounding the Home. All of this entails about an hour's travel, some of which is on the Washington Beltway, which works Mom's nerves (and her BP, too) even when my driving is not the problem, she's always on the watch for the other idiots on the road.

Part of my mission was to pick up a couple of nap quilts for baby gifts - these nap quilts and the children's book Sheep in a Jeep have become my almost standard baby gift. Unfortunately, given a choice of five by Eleanor, I bought four of them so I'm stocked up - though I may not be able to part with the sock monkey quilt. It is just too funny and makes me think of 7th grade home economics with Miss Castle. We had to buy those brown socks with the red toes, I think Mom and I went to G.C. Murphy's to make a sock monkey doll. The sock monkey fabric is far cuter than the one I made in 1972 or so. I also wanted to get a picture of Thea with her 100 Good Wishes Quilt and Eleanor, but I packed the quilt along and forgot the camera (and the cell phone, so sort of Freudian slip re: technology I guess.)

That evening we went out to Oma's Special Park (which the locals call Laurel Springs Park) so the kids could blow off some energy after the long car ride back to La Plata. I like that park better on weekdays without the hordes of people. Micah got run over by some older child, completely knocked down - and the little beast who flattened my kid didn't apologize, didn't look backward so he got an earful from me (nothing impolite, just a reminder to watch of for those smaller than he, and that saying sorry for making someone fall is considered the polite thing to do; pretty good for me considering my instinct was grab the brat by the scruff of his neck, waggle my finger under his nose while giving him a lecture on manners.)

Sunday we got to see Christine and Elise, which was nice. Micah and Elise got to hang out and play with each other, babbling nonsensically but each seeming to 'get' what the other was saying. Trying to get the three of them to sit on the couch to take a picture was nearly impossible - to get a good print I'd have to cut and paste from about ten pictures to get each of them looking at the camera, smiling (or at least not pulling a face) and sitting still.

Homonyms for Mothers' Day

For Mothers' Day, I got a large mylar balloon from Micah, who quickly repossessed it. Thea gave me a beautiful little peach-colored rose plant (a flower) and a one-pound bag of ShopRite bleached white flour. Someone's having a thing about homonyms these days and laughed herself silly.

While upstairs making the bed and putting laundry away I heard the sound of scissors, tape and wrapping paper being folded, and I was actually hopeful for about ten minutes. I like the homemade or school-made art projects better. . . . . . . .the plant doesn't have a chance with me taking care of it and the oven is out of commission so the chances of the flour being used are almost nil, and I'll spend the next two or three months praying that the damn balloon deflates and can be tossed out. (Thea did draw me a picture of our house and family in metallic blue ink. She rendered her brother as something that looked more insect than human, but he's been getting on her nerves lately.)

The Ecstasy and the Agony, and the Miscellany

The Ecstasy: My Brilliant Child

Today Thea and I went out to run errands because Micah was down for a nap, and Steve wanted to follow suit. We went to Princeton Market Fair to do a little shopping and have ice cream, then to Staples to pick up another box of Kodak paper and printer cartridges. On a whim, and since we were parked right in front, I decided to go into Marshall's. We've been on the hunt for size 13 summer shoes for Thea and sandals for Micah.

We were scoping out the selection of girls' shoes when Thea looks at a box that has a large, red Chinese character on the lid and says, "That's Ai Li's name." (Sarah/Ai Li and Thea share a birthday, Thea's a year older. The name is pronounced Eye Lee in English.) Since what little Chinese I know, I know that "Ai" is "love" ('wo ai ni' is I love you) - and the brand name for the shoes was Like Love printed right there on the box. I was a little freaked out that after ten months of language immersion school (and zero reinforcement at home), Thea's teacher says that she can make and understand jokes with them in Mandarin. Now she recognizes a character in a completely random context just blew me away. My daughter is near brilliant, at least in my mind.

The Agony: Despite her numerous flashes of brilliance, she's an airhead.

Sometimes brilliant people have disorganized little brains. . . .this afternoon on our errands, Thea took one of her white tigers along, and wanted to schlep him into the stores. This was common up until last year or so, but now she rarely takes them along in the car and even more infrequently does one or the other actually leave the car to go into a store. And I brought the curse down upon her by saying to her as we were traversing the parking lot to enter Barnes & Noble, "Don't be a Micah and have me hunting that thing down after you've left him somewhere." Micah constantly is leaving his smelly old Bunny Bear everywhere: he has filed Bunny Bear amongst the 15,000+ charts at my office, nearly tossed him out the window of the car, when Bunny Bear goes for the permanent Buh-Bye, I won't be terribly surprised. In Micah's hands, BB's day are numbered. But Thea is usually the more responsible of the two, especially where the tigers are concerned.

And our excursion proceeded as detailed above.

Until bedtime tonight. One tiger on her pallet on the floor, one tiger allegedly in my car. Until I go out to the car and turn on the interior light. About that instant that the back seat was illuminated, my brain received the thought that I don't remember tiger coming back into the car. I don't remember the tiger being with us since we were at our first stop, the Gymboree store or perhaps our second stop, Barnes & Noble. Damn, damn and double damn. That tiger has made innumerable trips to Maryland, to Indiana/Illinois, to Florida, to South Carolina/Georgia, to the beach in Delaware and has never been lost. Those tigers went to CHINA and back.

So I grab the phone and call Barnes & Noble - we found a Spy Case with a periscope in it, a cause of much excitement since she's been bugging me to build one just like Curious George did in the Spy Monkey episode (damn simian) and I haven't a clue. There it was right in front of me ready to go, if I'd had to I would have auctioned one of Steve's kidneys on eBay to get it. So perhaps in our mutual excitement over the periscope, Tiger got left behind. No dice. Not in the Lost and Found, not in the Children's section. (And might I add that calling Directory Assistance and asking for the telephone number of the local Barnes & Noble only to be given a toll-free number is not what I wanted at 9:50 pm when I was under the assumption that the store closed at 10 pm. (My bad on that one, it closes at 11 pm on weekends.) I had to run downstairs to the computer to look up the phone number.

So I called Gymboree, which was closed, though one of its staff is still there. As is Tiger. He'll be partying overnight at the Gymboree and I'll be darkening its door at 11 am when they open. I could have kissed the girl who answered the phone, and she was nice enough to put Thea's name on the tiger.

And when I went upstairs to tell her, the brilliant airhead was already 95% asleep.

I'm sure my headache and palpitations will eventually subside.

Other miscellany: We got our one-year post-placement packet from our adoption agency. In about 75 days it will be one year since we returned from China - and that's when the report is due. So I've already emailed our social worker to get the ball rolling. One that report is in, then we are DONE, DONE, DONE with our adoption agency. I think even if we were to consider adding another child, I don't think we could bring ourselves to use this agency in spite of a 'discount' it gives to returning adoptive families. I'll tell all once the final paperwork is submitted, approved and there are no further ties - but it's nothing more than what has been written about the agency on a number of adoption-related web discussion groups many, many times before.

Today marks ten months since Micah's adoption, yesterday was ten months since we actually signed a 24-hour custody agreement and brought him back to the Cruella DaVille room at the White Rose Hotel.

Yesterday we went to the Duke Farms Indoor Gardens for a tour with Thea's school. Micah and I have driven past this estate every week that we go to Summit School and I've always wondered about it, so this was the first chance to see at least a small part of the grounds. The indoor gardens are going to close for renovations at the end of this month, and won't reopen until 2010. The greenhouses were beautiful; orginally they were used by J.B. Duke to grow foods for the estate - both the family and the workers. After his death in the 1920s the greenhouses were unused until his daughter, Doris Duke renovated them in the 1950s. There is an Italian garden, an Edwardian garden, an English garden, a French garden, a Chinese garden, a Japanese garden, a Persian garden, a desert - and probably something else. Our guide was very good at bringing it down to school-age level. She also claimed to have an accent because she was born in England. I heard nothing vaguely English about her speech whatsoever - what came out her mouth sounded pure northern New Jersey/metro New York to me. Micah loved the fish in the Chinese garden's ponds. Fish-EEEEEE, fish-EEEEE he kept warbling as he was being dragged to the next display. Despite the day being cold and grey, there were a few frogs in the ponds as well.

Since we were just joining the field trip because Fridays aren't a regular school day for Thea, we went home to have lunch and hang out. The weather was dismal and rainy, so there weren't too many options for the afternoon other than going back to school for Spencer's birthday celebration, which featured an appearance from Silly Billy, the Lizard Guy (see http://www.thelizardguys.com/ if you doubt me). It was all pretty cool stuff: a Dumpy Tree Frog from Australia, a blue-tongued skink, a snake from the Everglades, an African tortoise, an albino Burmese python and a giant millipede (which only had 700 legs, the liar - and it would have been a candidate for a can of Raid, IMHO). My kids were willing to touch everything that was offered up for a one-finger inspection. I was delighted in a very secretive, evil sort of way that the boy who was part of a twosome who called Thea a baby enough that it bothered her and became an 'issue' was a total wimp about touching the animals. Insert evil demented laugh here.

Silly Billy himself was quite a sight. Think late 1970s/early 1980s. Think Styx, Journey or any other band with long hair. Except that with his rather slight frame, all that hair made this dude look like a pale yeti. Again, if you doubt me, check out the web site. I got nostalgic for music from my high school and college years and am that much closer to getting myself an iPod.

The Backyardigans Live!

Thea and I were kiddie culture vultures yesterday. We had tickets to The Backyardigans Live! The Tale of the Mighty Knights at the Susquehanna Bank Center (formerly the Tweeter Center, and probably a few other names before that) in Camden.

Given that gas prices are getting higher by the day around here, driving an hour and paying ten to fifteen dollars for parking seemed stupid. Our other option was the NJ Transit Riverline, a light rail that runs from Trenton to Camden - complete with free parking a number of the stations. I picked Bordentown as the closest town that I'm a little bit familiar with (thanks to its annual Cranberry Festival). And for $1.35 for each of us, we were transported to the Camden waterfront in an hour or so. On the train platform we ran into a patient of mine, who was at the earlier show with her daughter and mother, and who recognized me first - I have more of a context memory for names and faces, out of the office environment, the synapses just don't fire well enough.

We arrived early enough to talke a walk around the small marina and down to the battleship New Jersey, before going into the arena, snarfing down a carbohydrate, nitrite and sugar-laden lunch, all at prices that border on extortion.

After an initial, "These aren't the words to the song!" as the show opened (the story was adapted from The Tale of the Mighty Knights cartoon and the storyline deviated a bit), Thea just sat there, sang along and smiled so much that I could see her dimples even in a darkened theater.

Thea's batteries ran out in the car on the way home. We'd just driven into Princeton and were planning on getting ice cream at Thomas Sweet's, one second she was there and the next out cold.

Anyway, all in all it was a good day.