The Perils of Summer

Nate is asleep in his bed.
This may seem like an obvious statement but this morning it seemed like an unlikely outcome for tonight.
It starts last night when we ran around outside planting flowers and watering our garden.  Nate ran around like a wild man, and proving that he is my child, he refused to wear shoes for about half the time.
There were no accidents, no drama, and a fine time was had by all.
This morning, when I pulled him out of bed, I noticed an angry red spot on the bottom of his foot with a large splinter in the middle of it.
When he took is first steps of the morning he put his foot down, picked it back up and looked at me, his mouth formed into a little "O" of confusion.  "What happened, Mommy?" he asked.
I tried to explain about splinters but finally settled for explaining that when he was walking around with no shoes on he got a boo-boo on his foot.
Needless to say, this was an inauspicious beginning to his day.  While newly-bactrim-allergic-benadryl-snowed-Dave held him, I tried to get it out.  There was a big piece sticking out so I grabbed, and pulled, and  . . . half of it stayed firmly anchored in his skin.
After some time futilely trying to hold him still enough to fish it out, we gave up, covered it in Neosporin and a Band-Aid ("to keep it safe" says Nate) and sent him to school.
On the way to school, Nate piped up "That Nate bed get boo-boo on Nate foot.  Nate not sleep in that bed anymore"
I thought I'd done a good job with the explanation about the bare feet, but he had been fixated on the boo-boo so I tried again.
He listened, but then just shook his head.  "No, Mommy Dactyl.  That Nate bed put boo-boo on Nate foot. That's right! Nate not sleep in that bed anymore."
At this point I actually did get a little anxious because he can be a little strong willed (understatement of the year) and we really have just gotten him to sleep well again.

This evening, however, we tried again to remove the aforementioned festering piece of wood, and after that spot of misery, he wanted to retreat to the safety of his bed.
After he laid down, he was awake for a while, chatting with his stuffed dog.  "Nate keep that Band-Aid on.  That Band-Aid keep Nate boo-boo safe.  Feel Nate's foot all better."

From his mouth . . .

A new list of things I find charming about my boy.

1)  I have no idea where he learned this, but he acknowledges compliments with "Thank you".  "That's a nice shirt,"  "You look cute today,"  "I like those shoes," - all things I have heard said or said to him over the last couple weeks.  And he always smiles and says "Thank you".
And just to be clear, I don't mean to imply that Dave and I acknowledge compliments with a head toss and an "of course", it's just that until very recently he's always said nothing or "uh huh" and I've not made a conscious effort to change that.  It's intimidating to realize what he can learn by watching.

2) His "reading".
A few weeks ago, over a Saturday morning breakfast:
Dave: "What do you want to do today?"
Nathan: "Um, read some books."
Mommy: "We have succeeded."
The thing is, there are not enough hours in the day for us to read all the books he wants to read.  This is a problem I have struggled with my entire life, so I sympathize, and I love that his solution, when we don't have time to read to him, is for him to "read" to us.  He knows many of his favorite books verbatim, a fact he will prove by reciting pages of them to us over dinner or during a long car ride.  (Just ask him Big B, Little B, what begins with B?)  When he climbs into our bed in the morning with a stack of books and proceeds to narrate the story, carefully turning the book around to show the pictures, providing different voices and expressions of wonder or dismay as indicated, I just melt.  His dramatic interpretation of "Are You My Mother" is the finest thing I have ever seen.

3) The way he anthropomorphizes just about everything.
The trash can says "I like trash", his stuffed animals thank him for every morsel of food and care that they get, and last night, as I was cooking dinner, the pan full of hot oil suddenly exclaimed "I like chicken!" only the pan proved to be a skilled ventriloquist who could make its voice sound like it was coming out of the two year old hovering behind me.

4) His passion for water play
This is him "helping" with the garden last weekend.  Basically he managed to flood the backyard and keep everyone's feet cool.








And if you aren't thinking "Holy Moley! What a big boy!" you aren't looking.

About A Boy

This morning we were on our way to "school".  He loves to look for trash trucks, school buses, fire trucks, anything big, preferably with flashing lights.  He always tells me he has his "eyes open" for a train and a peacock.  Along the route we travel the odds of either are about the same, zero, but he looks every day.  Today we were talking about what school buses do and how someday, when he is big, he might ride a school bus to school.  "Uh huh" he agreed from the back seat "And, Nate get so big, Nate use that lawnmow just like DaddyDactyl."
It brought a little tear to my eye, that enthusiastic endorsement of his dad and the cool things he gets to do.  It seems that you don't have to be a baseball star, (or even a trash man, Dave) to earn the earnest admiration of your son.

*****

He has another obsession besides heavy machinery.  Poop.

Mommy: "What do you want for dinner?"

Nate: "How 'bout some poop?"

Mommy: "What book should we read for bedtime?"

Nate: "A poop book."

Mommy: What song should Mommy sing while I brush your teeth?"

Nate: "Um . . . a poop song!"

You get the idea.  I am choosing to view it as a logical move in the direction of potty training, but I am just plain tired of talking about the potential production of any one's butt.  It seems like every few seconds, but is probably not nearly that frequent, that he announces that he is about to poop.  And then, cheerfully, "No, just some gas."

Does he want to sit on the potty?  Um, no.  Or in his words, "not yet."

****

He spends so much time in his imagination right now that I think it was foolish to provide him with actual toys.  A few nights ago he played, for easily 20 minutes, with a small blue Care Bear (a gift from my other boy, Noah, on the occasion of my wedding) and all he did during that time was multiple repetitions of a pretend diaper change.  He would pick the bear up, squeeze his tummy, and make a little grunting noise.  "I smell somepin" he would singsong.  He checked for poo between the bear's legs and then ran around the living room gathering imaginary wipes and "a new Elmo" as we call the character emblazoned diapers in our household.  Then began the ritual of cleaning and applying cream.  ("That cream is nice and warm.  No little cold cream.  Yucky, yucky" - To which I reply - "sorry kid, you live in Pittsburgh in an 80 year old house.  Cold butt cream is the least of our problems.")  Eventually, with butt thoroughly cleaned, the bear moved on the a raucous game of "Rock-a-Bye-Baby" in which the baby bear repeatedly fell with a gleeful "Plop!"

But he doesn't use his creativity only for matters of the lower intestinal tract.  He vividly imagines food and drink as well.

And ceremony.  On Friday afternoon I picked him up early and we had Shabbat about a million times.  Solemnly wearing a fabric Frisbee as a kippa he took us through an entire Shabbat service.  Candles were lit, prayers were sung, wine poured and imbibed, Challah covered, lifted, unveiled, and greedily consumed.  All there on our couch with only some coasters and a paper towel.  I was impressed, proud, touched, and a little guilty.  After all, he didn't learn this nuance and detail from our spotty home Shabbat celebrations.  This is the product of school and Michal and the blessing that is the education and stimulation he gets when he is away from us.  (And yes, this is true, no matter how much I blather on in my coming post about my frustration with the above "school".)

All in all he is a joy.  Sometimes he is stubborn, difficult, demanding, and unreasonable.  But he's two and those two sides of the coin are what being a two year old is all about.

Like Mommy

Taking Nathan to the market has never been the easiest thing. He hates to sit in the cart, prefers to be carried, and when he consents to walk he seems to have a knack for finding the largest heaviest and most delicate things to pull off the shelf and wave around. So there we were, on a weekend afternoon, and I needed just a few things for dinner and Nathan wanted to "come too".
He had been playing with one of my evening bags, (seen here it all its satiny beaded glory) and about 15 cents he had scrounged up from around the floor and end tables.
Unzip the bag. Change goes in. Laboriously zip the bag. Unzip the bag. Change tinkles out. Bag closed again. All with extreme concentration and amusing exclamations of difficulty and success.
Because he is an excellent negotiator and I am quite frankly a sucker for his tactics he wheedled into not only going to the market but also taking his "purse".
(Daddy's disapproving look is cropped out of these photos.)
I made a token effort at leaving it in the car and when that predictably failed, I just knotted the string so it wouldn't drag on the ground and put in on his shoulder.
And wasn't he an eye catcher in the store. He paraded about, walking next to me, not grabbing anything or asking to be carried. He occasionally stopped, unzipped his bag and volubly counted the coins inside. Sometimes he removed one to show off but usually after he took inventory he simply zipped it back up and kept on walking.
He drew a lot of commentary, most of it charmed, some of it vaguely disparaging. This is, after all, Western Pennsylvania.
He had a ball. I had an easy outing. And the bag? Well, it did loose a few beads but I've had it since high school and they sure weren't Swarovski.

Mommy Guilt Gone Viral

I am reading a book called "Hope and Suffering - Children, Cancer, and the Paradox of Experimental Medicine".  It details the medical and social changes from the 1940's through 1980's; a journey of childhood cancers, specifically leukemia, from unrecognized, to untreatable, to experimental, to largely curable.  It's a great story in some ways because medicine/science really has prevailed.  Leukemia used to be universally fatal within months.  Now about 90% of kids with ALL can be cured for life.  But this progress came at a price.  Kids were basically experimented on for years because parents and physicians were desperate for anything.  Even agents that only bought time and didn't change the eventual outcome were willingly taken because it might keep them alive until a cure could be found.  The meds were toxic, the effects of the disease were terrible, and children and families alike suffered horribly.
But there's another part of it the bothers me and really hits home.  As soon as childhood cancers were recognized as existing as separate entities from adult cancers, the lay press and organizations like the American Cancer Society published material advising mothers to be on the alert.  They stated that they could save their child's life with their vigilance because early diagnosis was the key.  Which was completely bogus.  Science knew these diseases existed but there were no effective cures.  If you had a local tumor that could be completely excised, you stood a chance but the chances of detecting a solid tumor before there is at least nodal spread is so unlikely.  The book is full of stories of moms who took their kids to the pediatrician time and time again and were basically told they were crazy, go home, oh, and by the way the child turned out to have a brain tumor or leukemia or retinoblastoma.
Even now the majority of the parents that I meet blame themselves for their child's cancer diagnosis.  Childhood cancer comes up during a time when parents really are responsible for everything involving their children, and if not for the disease itself they always feel guilty for not bringing the child in sooner.  Still today, many children have seen their pediatrician a few times before anyone realizes it's more than migraines or a cold or constipation.  Uncommon things are uncommon and every child with a headache doesn't need and can't get a CT scan.
This whole book is set in an era when World War II was over and women were expected to come back out of the work force and have babies.  It was the Patriotic thing to do.  For the first time in our nation's history children were treasured as more than just parents' possessions and potential revenue sources.  Women's successes were judged by their parenting.  I just can't help thinking about all those mothers who watched their babies suffer horribly and die and were told by every newspaper and flier that went past their door that it was their fault.  If only they'd been a more attentive mother.

*****

Not that everything always has to be about me, but this is often how I feel when I think about Nate and his allergies and vomiting.  For so long I just didn't think anything could be wrong with my baby and I really overlooked and excused all his symptoms.  And to be fair the first pediatrician that we went to over and over really did tell us that i was being an over reactive pediatrician parent and nothing was wrong.  But now, when I look at my little boy, especially pictures of when he was sick, sick and looked it, I just feel awful, and I want to take it all back, go back and fix it, make those months of his babyhood less miserable.  This isn't going to kill him but it has plenty of power to make me feel like an inadequate mommy.

For this reason the first time I tell a parent that their child has cancer I also tell them it's not their fault.  It has nothing to do with what mom ate during pregnancy or whether they made the kid go to bed at 8pm every night.  I also tell them they brought the child in at just the right time and the job now is to go forward and not torture themselves looking back.

I hope it helps.