Sibling Rivalry

Duke informed me last night the wretched beast has reared it's head in our household. I am afraid I now need to make more deliberate, careful remarks to the girls, for fear they are keeping tally in their poor little heads. (Mommy said I'm good at this and you're good at that.) This is an apple of knowledge I was not ready for, and it is going to upset our little Eden, for sure.

Let me go back and point out some wonderful things about Francie, my precious four-year-old. Just like any firstborn, she constantly surprises us with things we can't believe she is grown enough to understand, accomplish or articulate. As soon as she could speak in full sentences, she was fully capable of empathy and awareness that you don't often see in one and a half year olds. Not long after that, my brother-in-law passed (I was pregnant at the time, also). The typical toddler would struggle in such a stressful and saddened environment, surely. But Francie was a spot of sunshine for everyone around us. I feel that her love and gentle sympathy really solidified into part of her psyche that summer. Without her I'm sure the hole in our hearts would not have healed as cleanly, as much as can be healed after losing someone so young and so close.

Francie is a very sensitive child, and has always been in tune to the world around her. She observes everything. She is an amazing artist, and although some of that is just god-given talent, I think some is from really watching everything that her eyes can see for four whole years. I describe her often as a daydreamer, but she is a special variety of daydreamer; she is so in-tune to the world, that she often has to just stop and think. You can look at her and see when she is taking it all in.

Last night she had one of these moments, and then turned to her Daddy, who was watching little sister do a puzzle. Jane is a speed-puzzler-- she puts them together as fast as she can so she can move to the next one. Jane was doing this and as Francie watched, she mentioned that yeah, the puzzle was only a hard one for two-year-olds, but NOT for big girls... Francie realized her sister had a unique talent. One she did not herself possess.

Oh Francie, I want to scoop you up in my arms and show you all the beauty and intelligence you DO possess!! because you are an amazing creature, a child with the innocence and heart you only see once in a blue moon! But as a young girl, abd a sensitive one at that, I fear your heart is going to be hurt, and you will not see the forest for the trees. Or perhaps you will, and you will paint it with the beauty that you express with such ease, you won't understand how amazing that talent actually is.

In defense of my second-born (Part 2)

Okay-- so to pick up where I left off...One thing I have gotten bad about these days is not going to bed, so I keep waking up with my finger on the touchpad of my laptop. I'm gonna click on some weird stuff one day...

Jane has had a rough go at it this year. And the year before this. And you know, it was kinda tough for her as a baby too-- She is quite a kid. Amazing. She started out with allergies (milk mostly, but everything else too). She also has frequent ear infections, and is on her third set of tubes. This last time, though, we took out the adenoids so we hope we have fixed that issue! She knocked her teeth up into her gums last summer also, so he had to have those pulled and replaced, and of course, since this is Jane, she broke those and will have to have it put back in. Uggh. Hey, break? Where you at? You mind cutting one for Jane?

She is many many things-- Drama Queen, Opinionated, Miss Prissy Pig Pen, Live Wire a total Firecracker. She is quite different from her sister. Francie is really easy-going and agreeable. She is usually described by people as a sweetheart, darling. As a young toddler, we fretted and worried and consulted all the manuals. The biggest problem her panic-prone parents had to worry about was the constant fluid in her ears one winter, leading to a set of tubes when she was learning to speak, and then a bad case of croup early one summer. But that was so easy, we had Jane. We could take anything, we thought. So when Jane came along everything was a big deal, and this time it wasn't just new-parent hypochondria, it was allergies, it was ear infections, RSV, torticollis, umm... what else? Teeth. Right. And what next? We will see.

But, it might seem difficult. No, maybe just trying. And it is. But everyone who has ever met Jane will tell you she is an amazing child! These two are quite a precocious pair. They are kind, helpful, beautiful, charming children. So despite the heartache we have had waiting in waiting rooms (the worst of all was her eye surgery the other day) we are happy. Tired, anxious, but really happy.

In defense of my second-born (Part 1)

Tomorrow is the day we've been waiting for!! Jane's last surgery (knock on wood). She is have surgery for strabismus and ambylopia, two eye conditions that lead to torticollis (head tilt) and one eye squints sometimes to compensate for her not having binocular vision like you and I have. Without being corrected, she would slowly lose sight in her less dominant eye. You want to know what we did 4 weeks ago? She had ear tubes and an adnoidectomy. Last October? Teeth pulled, new partial put in. Those teeth had been damaged when she fell in my shower.


Now it is actually the day of... I fell asleep typing this last night.
I will post more when I get home from surgery today.

And now for something completely different...

My life is hectic. I have two beautiful and precocious girls, a very busy husband and a lot of different hobbies. I am a reader and former teacher. I raise red worms in my backyard, I volunteer for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Honestly, I miss teaching a lot, but mostly because it challenged me intellectually. I love to learn about all sorts of subjects, and especially media and parenting and culture and education and just about anything else out there. I am currently reading 3 books on my Kindle and one by the tub, and I also read 2 or 3 magazines a month, and that is kind of how my brain works-- do 4 things at once but don't do them very quickly :). I am sort of at a crossroads in my life, as I am currently staying at home with the girls and so when my unemployment runs out I will have to decide do I want to go back into the classroom or find something more in tune to being a full-time parent? But as of now, I've been looking since I left the classroom and nothing has come my way, so the girls are my main job. So here is a page about the things I am learning chasing these two wild ones down.

I am hoping to address life as a SAHM from my own point of view, and topics I think other moms are interested in. This is a pretty vast topic, but in case I find that some ideas are better for my personal blog or my reading blog, those posts will be on those pages. (Check out my profile for those links.) Hope I can keep you entertained and happy to read along!

reliving

This was the scariest moment of motherhood for me so far. It took a couple seconds to register, and I think my first words were quiet, slow, and then crescendo-ing towards panic, “Help. Blood. Lots of it, from her mouth, and… her teeth are gone.” I’ve been through a lot in the last couple years. Most of it, not as the primary sufferer, which adds a strange twist to the tragedies I’ve lived through… and I would have to say this is the one that made me wretch, sweat and cry unlike ever before. But as a wife and mother, I have learned how to let someone else have the spotlight in the pain and struggle of life. I watch, I clean up spills and I put the band-aid on it. A couple days after watching my baby, who is too young to enunciate “Mommy, I knocked my teeth out,” we reached the anniversary of another marker that is now etched into my experience forever. Flag Day, three years ago, my husband’s best friend shot his brains out with a brand new antique rifle, in his garage, for his roommate to discover. I remember thinking on that day, three years ago, how could he leave that mess for her to find, and yet he did, and then I found out he whole story and now I know why. In Alan’s case, a young man with debilitating schizophrenia, he was leaving this world with less heartache this way, without watching the disease, unresponsive to the medication he had been taking, eat away at his psyche and leave him incapacitated and unable to understand the delusions he would eventually be living in. Duke then had to live through the accidental  death of his brother, who had been prescribed a dangerous level of a medication that, like with Alan’s, was not able to keep his disease at bay (this time, ADD was the culprit). Duke has been affected by each of these events; they’ve broken him down, and he has had to build up again.  But I have seen these events tear my husband limb from limb, shredded and ragged, and now he has started to put those pieces together again.  As I sat up, that whole night after Jane had drooled buckets of blood in a matter of hours, I had Duke sitting next to me; proof that the shredded and ragged feeling goes away. You can see the patches, the stitches, the repair and the duct tape all holding his wounds together. He wears them on his face, his eyes, his sleeves, his soul. I feared the feeling that I had a torn and jagged piece of flesh in my chest, on fire and burning and bleeding, and with him next to me I had the assurance that the bleeding and burning would smolder and cauterize and heal over. It would of course, be scarred, but everyone has scars.  I will make it, and although the pieces might not go back together exactly, but that doesn’t matter.

On Wednesday, the girls were in the shower. They had fun doing it, and I told them not to jump on the wet tile, thinking I could protect them like that.  So I soaped them and sprayed them clean, and let them play in the body sprays. I blew on the glass, inflating my cheeks, and then Jane fell. I wanted to catch her before she fell, but I couldn’t—she hit faster than I could think to catch her. I was helpless, not a thing I could do. And I was the one in charge, so I started to react. The next hour or so it was me and Duke, calling suggestions back and forth—“should we do this?’ Should we do that?” “What do we do next?” We had run out of good ideas when the dentist called us back—finally. He looked, she screamed. No teeth. He numbed it; he spoke to us, he phoned a friend and they came up with a game plan. The professionals were back in charge, and so I was relieved. The next day when I went back to tell him the results of the x-ray and conversation with the pediatric dentist, he said, “You look better, today, too.” So you could see on my face how poorly I was reacting to the trauma? Uggh, I thought I had done okay.

So seeing how well I had handled this, that which ended up being nothing more than a set of teeth jammed back into the gums (right where they came from), I wondered how I have lived through everything else. Wade, Chip, Alan, surgeries, C-sections and child-rearing. I was stitched almost all the way from my pee-pee from my woowah, to use the pre-school parlance. I carried my whole body weight in pregnancies, and my husband has gained and lost the same. We’ve buried friends, loved ones, bought and built a house, built a family, and grown up. And this gory incident sticks out in my head, probably because of the gore and violence, and the effect that has, but I think also for the metaphorical usage. I can handle blood, body parts, victims, tragedy. I can sit down and relive them, in my head, and on my paper, over and over and over for hours, days, years. Rough nerve endings rubbed and rubbed, but it makes me feel stronger in a sick, sadistic way. Of course, I still feel the ragged edges being rubbed, the same as I did that first night. I know that if I can still hold on to my head, “when all of those about me, are losing theirs, and blaming it on [me]”, then I can live through this pain, the deaths, the lives and the wounds. The pain is still there, but the bleeding has stopped. I still wish I could have Alan, Wade, back; I pray there is a cure for cancer before a doctor ever tells me it is me or the girls or Duke. But I can stand in a house that is burning down around me and by instinct grab what needs to be saved and decide what must be relegated to memory. And that is a powerful instinct.