shannon’s mid-day update to a working mother

she who is queen and princess of all she surveys and most of what she doesn’t, who has been almost downright unpleasant company since about halfway through the grocery store, who greeted a delightfully shy two year old girl at the deli counter by swinging her arm as if to hit the poor girl, and who told me repeatedly that she wanted her mommy, and who is eating her lunch after coming directly off the bench of a timeout for hitting her brother while they were in the dining room and i was in the kitchen putting groceries away …

yes, she … she just took a bite of her ham and cheese tortilla, and through her chewing smiled at me and told me she loved me more than chocolate ice cream on a cone in the whole wide world.

smith’s disease

now, there have been any number of ailments — physical, psychological — that, over the years, i might have labeled “smith’s disease.” but this one comes to us from a real honest-to-god doctor (not we fakers with mere doctorates) as a legit diagnosis.

it all started when mairin was outside with her bfitwww, leo. as is her wont, she took off her pants. leo was in shorts, and i was admiring their sturdy little toddler legs, slightly muscled and completely blemish free.

but by the time mairin came in she was covered in little bug bites.

i was stumped, having just seen her milky white gams on parade. she’d gone into leo’s house briefly — did maybe one (or more) of their three dogs have fleas? she’d spilled bubble-soap mixture all over herself — was she having an allergic reaction? she’d been at the zoo earlier in the day — had she contracted some deadly tropical skin disease? but she wasn’t scratching and didn’t really seem to notice, so being the carefree mother i am, i decided i didn’t really need to pay attention either.

not long after that she started acting sick. breathing through her mouth, sitting glassy-eyed and slack-jawed next to me on the couch while i read to her. she leaned her head onto my arm and i realized she was warm. not necessarily feverish warm, possibly only just-been-playing-outside-warm, but warm. so i’m thinking maybe she’s just worn out. it’s been a big day, what with the zoo and the bubbles and the fleas and the tropical insect bites. i decide this is nothing a little tlc won’t cure, so we snuggled and read some more.

but later when i checked her forehead again she was really heating up. so shannon went for the thermometer and eventually (much searching, some battery replacement, and a trip to the store later) we learned that her temp was up at 102. and those bites! there were easily 2-3x more than before, and they looked kinda angry. and they’d spread — in addition to covering her thighs they were behind her knees and down her calves. so she got a nice cool bath and her thomas jammies, and extra kisses and cuddles — at which point we all agreed that the fever was gone, we noticed that the bites had vanished, and mairin celebrated by eating two pieces of pizza before her weary little self was bundled off to bed.

when she woke up at 2:30 am to go to the bathroom i was mildly surprised that the fever was back but shocked to see the return of the bites, flaming angry and red in new configurations. since she was sitting down and leaning forward i checked her back — nothing — but her temp was back up to 103. i decided just to repeat our earlier success: meds, tlc, and back to bed. as usual, shannon was the one with the presence of mind to worry — and in checking the rest of her found that her poor little tummy was covered with the little bites, too. i don’t do my best thinking when i’m exhausted, but eventually shannon convined me that this was a little weird and that maybe we should find out if something was wrong.

an e-visit with dr. sears and webMD left us worried that it might be chicken pox but more generally certain that it was some sort of viral rash. relieved, i dropped off for a few extra zzzs before eamon could wake me up for his pre-dawn, pre-breakfast (like a hobbit, he eats breakfast 3-4 times per day.) when we all finally got up, mairin’s skin was clear, her fever was down, and all was well with her knee-high little world.

until the afternoon. the bites re-appeared, her temp shot up, and she started acting for all the world like she was genuinely sick. so i took a photo and sent it off to dr. auntie erin, who confirmed our suspicions that yes, it was probably a viral rash, that yes, it was a little different that most viral rashes, and that yes, mairin would probably survive it. after erin consulted with a few e.r. colleagues who confimed that yes, what we were seeing was similar but also different to what they might expect to see in a viral rash, the little viral bugger earned its name: smith’s disease.

smith's disease, 2009

personally, i think a disease that flares up of its own unpredictable accord, flies in the face of traditional medical definitions, and makes you feel alternately miserable and then just fine thank you very much, is really much more a chabries’s disease. but as i said, i’m not the doctor.

the (eerie) ties that bind

a chronology of freakiness:

item 1: in one of the 45-minute naps that passed for a good-night’s sleep, courtesy of  eamon and The Fever That Ate 2009, i dreamt that i was taking care of a young mairin when a skeevy creepoid tried to wrest her from my loving arms. KIDNAPPER! i yelled and hugged her to my chest, trying to run but finding my dream-legs leaden and unmoving. skeevy creepoid dude made another move for her. RAPE! i screamed, and tried even harder to get away. i woke from the dream just as mairin herself, sleeping in the next room, started crying out “mommy, mommy, MOMEEE!” heart pounding, i stumbled out of bed and went to her. she was sitting up in her bed and when i sat down next to her she threw her arms around my neck and would not let go. i reassured her that everything was OK and i would see her in the morning. she kissed my cheek, whispered okay, mom, snuggled back under her covers and drifted back to sleep.

item 2: mairin and leo were playing at their new game in our adjoining front yards: each holds one end of leo’s jump rope and then, keeping the rope stretched to its full length between them, they run around squealing with delight. they have done this a lot over the last few weeks, and they both love it. i have never thought anything of it, except to think that they are too cute when they play together. so i’m holding eamon, watching them play at their game, and suddenly think oh my god mairin is going to hurt herself. and that instant — THAT INSTANT — she tripped and fell. since her hands were busy she didn’t really break her fall with them very well, and so she smacked face-almost-first into the concrete. she lifted her face to me and she was covered in blood from the nose down. i passed off eamon to leo’s mom, grabbed mairin and dashed into the house to rinse her mouth, test her teeth, reassure her she was fine, try to convince her to let me put ice against her rapidly swelling lip, and miss the piece of gravel ground into her gum (never fear, shannon found it as soon as i would let anybody else touch her).

item 3: mairin is walking around the house. i think to myself wow, she’s doing so well with the potty training. WAIT! maybe she needs to go to the bathroom! at which exact moment in time she turns to me, crotch in hand, and says mom, i need to go potty. please give me some privacy.

so there it is. eamon may be the one who refuses to literally detach from me, but apparently some spooky part of me isn’t letting go of mairin. either that, or massive sleep deprivation has launched us into a new astral plane.

invasion of the princesses

saturday morning i heard mairin making her veeeerrry careful way down the stairs (she likes to run and jump down them, which rarely ends well), when i heard her stop and gasp.

“mommy! look at that!” and there, on our front porch, was christmas in february.

our neighbor’s girlfriend is moving in and his kids’ old playroom will become her office. so our neighbor was making the trek from his attic to our porch, and apparently had been doing so all morning.

to bring us an easel.

and a play table.

and a little nursery-type doctor’s cart, complete with stethoscope, thermometer, knee-reflex-bangy-thing, and miniature x-ray machine. (it only does skulls. go figure.)

and a purple stroller.

and a my little pony head. (now don’t go all godfather on me. it’s the kind of head with a lovely long (and brightly purple) mane that besotted young girls are supposed to spend hours combing and braiding.)

and an ariel head. (ditto.)

and 9 cushy puzzly mat pieces, 8 of which have a disneyfied princess likeness on them: cinderella; snow white; briar rose; etc.

well.

mairin and i sat outside in our coats and mittens and put the princess mat-puzzle together, and have left it out on the front porch as a warning to all tonka trucks or boy superheroes welcome mat. i was not thrilled about this plethora of princesses, and so contemplated taking a small measure of revenge against the culture machine by calling the princesses just plain “girls” (which in fact i have done) and letting mairin name them (which we will have to do, in part, because i don’t know all of their names anyway). 

now lest you think i am a thoroughly ungrateful wretch of a neighbor, i will confess to be pleased by the notion of toy recycling and i am, in the abstract, quite happy to be given a ton of stuff that will entertain the kiddos and not require any outlay of cash on our part. but as much as i have defined my mothering by being anti-pink, i am rabidly anti-princess. you all know me, so i’m sure it is no stretch of anyone’s imagination to guess how i feel about having a princess welcome mat, let alone a disembodied princess/mermaid head, floating around my house.

so imagine my pleasure when mairin put ariel’s head in the purple stroller and pushed her away, hollering over her shoulder “be back soon, mom. we’re going to target. she needs some thomas panties.”

discipline & punish

a.m. timeout:

p.m.  timeout:

yeah, it’s not floor-cleaning day at our house. (then again, it rarely is.)

now, if we could only get the whole panopticon thingy worked out….

because everyone needs a villain …

mairin is fascinated with thomas the tank engine — she received some track as a gift not long ago, and since then she has added several new engines to her collection. every evening includes the question “is it too late to build track?” and most mornings begin with dumping the track on the floor and playing with her engines. even more fascinating is that she has full-fledged conversations with her engines, as well as with the other engines she doesn’t have. she’ll ask carole, “where are henry and edward?” (two missing from her stable) and then proceed to “find” them (usually in my pocket) and play with them, right alongside the more physically present thomas, percy, and james.

all of this is prelude to the most recent addition to her engine collection (the physical one, not the imaginary one), diesel. (and yes, we are sucker-fools who are likely to make a run for contact solution and come back with a new thomas the tank engine engine and forget the contact solution.)  diesel was a surprise choice, since he’s an unsympathetic engine, self-absorbed and domineering. the description card that accompanied his packaging describes him as “oily, scheming, and ever-ready to stir up trouble,” and he’s definitely less of her favorite than some others she doesn’t yet “have” (henry and edward, for instance).

but it was diesel she returned home with, and carole and i shook our heads a little and figured what the heck, maybe in play “her” diesel will be sweet and friendly.

ha. since he came home friday evening, diesel has been in continuous “time out,” banished from the other engines and isolated at the bottom of the stairs. in fact, moments ago i reunited him with the other engines; mairin spotted him a few minutes later and said, eyebrows arched: “diesel, you need time out.” and off he went.

say ‘cheese sample’!

item 1.

mairin loves cheese. i assume that she will do her birthstate right and grow up to also love brats and beer, but for now that girl loves her cheese. and she has evolved from shaving her own block of parm — yes, her very own, reserved especially for her (since she is wont to chew on it) — over her noodles while belting out “oh, i LOVE NOODLES! NOODLES with PEPPER & CHEESE!” to requesting trips to whole foods. specifically for the cheese samples.

“mom, you need to go to the grocery store?”

“um, well, we are out of milk.”

“mommy, i go with you?”

“sure, honey, when i go to the store you can come with me.”

mairin walks around the dining room, pondering this answer.

“mommy, can i have some milk?”

“(sigh) ok, sweetie, let’s go to the store now.”

“whole foods, mommy?”

“sure, sweetie, let’s go to whole foods.” (which, lest you mock our extravagance, i should tell you now sells 1/2 gallons of organic, pasteurized and non-homogenized local milk for $2.99 a half gallon. that’s a better deal than we can get anywhere else.)

“okay, mom! whole foods! cheese samples!”

and while we shop we must be quick to make our way to the cheese section, where we either sample the cheeses out for our pleasure, or buy cheeses to take home to make our own cheese samples. 

item 2.

a few weekends ago we bought a new laptop and went wireless in the house. for mairin, this means regular access to PICTURES! and THOMAS VIDEOS! but the pictures are her favorite part. we watch slideshow after slideshow of our sets on flickr or from our computer’s photo folder.

which has prompted mairin to ask for her own camera.

“mommy buy me a small camera?”

“a what?”

“a small camera, mommy. i take pictures.”

ah, so we’re back to the whole extravagance thing. shannon “gave” mairin his small handheld camera that he takes on bike rides. when you turn it on a green light glows on the top, the lens telescopes open, and the camera makes a cute little chirping sound. mairin walks around with this camera for hours on end. she holds it johnny carson-swami style against her forehead with her eyes closed, turns her face toward her desired subject, and squeals “say cheese.”

until she realized, while munching on our plate of (note the non-extravagance) monterey jack & sharp cheddar, that her two favorite things were on a collision course to funny. “say cheese samples mommy” she hollered at me, kicking over my glass of water and waking eamon with her giggling fit.

because i’ve heard late is better than never…

look!

i marilyn!

she slays me …

… she really does.

yesterday evening the kids and i bundled into the car to go pick up c from work. mairin, who had a good nap, kept a monologue going for the whole drive, occasionally asking me if we were going to pick up mommy at work. we get to the parking lot, and she starts peering up and trying to see over the back of her seat, saying “we picking mommy up from work?” again and again. when carole came out, and got into the car, mairin could no longer contain herself and blurted: “hi mommy! i so happy to see you!”

i’m perfectly willing to believe (in fact, i know) that you had to be there, but for some reason this gobsmacked both of us: it made us giggle for the incongruity of such a grownup phrase in such a toddler’s voice (and enunciation), but it also was one of a number of moments recently that highlight how quickly she’s developing language — in fact, it’s so fast that i think we’re missing a fair chunk of it.

and with a four-month-old who looks more and more like a little kid and less and less like an infant every hour (rice cereal?!?! already?!?!?!), all this crazy high-speed development is a little dizzying, and makes me want to s-l-o-w down just a little.

not much chance of that. and when push comes to shove, i wouldn’t have it any other way.

maybe it’s just the hat

mairin in chariot, november 2006

mairin and eamon in chariot, november 2008

i look at them both often (duh), and i almost never think they look alike. and then, this.