Friday, September 26, 2014

At least it isn’t a leash. Yet.

September 26, 2014tempestpilot

One of the immutable laws of parenthood is If You Make a Threat, You Must Follow Through. That is why most of my threats are ones that I can not reasonably be expected to accomplish. “Pick up your socks, or I will stuff them up your nose and use you as a swiffer.” “Get buckled up, or I am strapping you to the surf rack with duct tape and bungie cords.” My cousin, at the age of 3, had a moment of terror and collapsed around my knees in tears when I threatened to tie the kids to the ceiling fan and hit them with a stick. Gavin, also 3, cackled and said, “You hold the stick, and ’round and ’round and WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP.” He understands how this works.

But if you make threats like, “Put that down or we are leaving!” you then have to leave, and the smug child has successfully ruined your trip to the lumber yard. And if you make threats like, “If you keep whacking your head and having seizures, we are getting you a helmet!” well, you pretty much have to buy the damned helmet the next time your kid whacks their head. Which mine did. Again. Last night.

I got home from work and said, “Hmm, I mysteriously feel like having a glass of wine, which is weird because I do not like wine.” I was halfway through my glass when the man burst into the house, Zenny ran laughing into my arms, and he said, with the slightly dazed and smoking air of a man who has just been shocked by the toaster, “Yeah, you TELL HER what you just did at the store.” She did not, because she is 18 months old, but I deduced what had happened, using my keen librarian sleuthing skills*. She had lunged from her umbrella stroller while the man was choosing bananas, landed on the side of her head, cried, froze for a just second, her eyes dilated, the man scrabbled for his phone to call 911, and then she gasped and cried and went back to normal. Mike went a bit greyer around the temples. I gave him my glass of wine.

And then I got online to shop for helmets. Her doctor said it takes months and months for a noggin to heal from a concussion; she is risking seizures every time she falls from now until next spring – and we don’t have enough wine for that.

Baby safety helmets are ridiculous.

WHAT

WELL… ok, this one is kind of – ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS?

Fine.

We bought the blue one. It says “SONGZHLONG” across the front, so there you go. I am going to find Gavin’s sneaker-wings and hot glue them to the sides like a Valkyrie helmet.

If it weren’t 92 degrees here, I would just knit her a hat. Something seasonal, with lots of padding.

YES.

And I still haven’t dropped off the box of stuffed animals I’m donating to the ER. At this rate, I won’t need to; I can just dole them out to her every time we visit the hospital. Sheesh.

* I asked what happened.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Mini-vacation and more trauma

September 22, 2014tempestpilot

“Well!” I said, standing at the door with our backpacks, “Whatever happens, it will be an adventure.” Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled.

I braced for the worst, wrangling three children through airport security, but they were fine. The rental car was so lux it made us all giddy, turning on butt warmers and scrabbling around in all the seats. We picked up a fourth child, one of the large boy’s best friends, and drove for two hours into the night, along the switchback cliffs – and the baby slept. It was a vacation miracle. I opened the moon roof and watched the stars and felt love for the universe.

Our cabin was perfect.

And the knitting spot was divine.

We met friends at the bay, I lunched with the new librarian over Thai food, and there were lobster sightings with the snorkel. The newest fad in these parts are handmade whips. Bull whips, made of duct tape and rope and whatever the hell. A modern take on the kind that were in fashion 80 years ago, when my great-grandfather had his eye taken out by one. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. This can not last. Trends are no good unless they get you laid, and there will be no hanky or panky amidst the threat of eyeball loss. In the meantime, it’s a perfect time to shoot someone, because nobody will even notice with all the noise.

We were overrun by pre-teens, and it was beautiful.

And then Zenny slipped and fell and smacked her head.

She was walking in the carport, following our friends’ dog with an outstretched hand, and hit a wet spot on the concrete. She went down and threw out her hands, but her head hit the ground in just the same spot as the last time. I ran and picked her up, and she started crying – which was reassuring until the scream froze, her eyes dilated, and she went rigid, jerking. I called to Mike, he ran to the landline to call 911 (there is no cell phone service), and we waited. It’s a bit of a drive from the health center, and there is just one ambulance. She went from staring and stiff to limp and unconscious, and we called to her and gently tried to wake her until the EMTs arrived. They stuffed us in the back of the ambulance and tore along to the airfield, strapping her to a board and trying for an IV until she was alert and screaming. While waiting for the helicopter to get in, they told me I couldn’t ride with her. I bent over her and murmured soothing things while she gripped my fingers, then they had her out of the ambulance and into the helicopter and I was standing barefoot on the airfield, sobbing. I took a shitty picture as they went, feeling stupid, but whatever – bad things need documentation, too.

One of my old library patrons who works at the airfield looked hard at me.

“… Holly?”

“Yeah. You probably don’t recognize me, because I wasn’t usually sobbing at the reference desk,” I hiccupped. He gathered me up and I cried on him.

They herded me into the office, I called my mother on Oahu, who texted Mike in the Dead Zone (texts work with wifi), and he rushed to pick me up. We drove for two hours into the night with no cell reception. My legs started drumming and my hands kept moving up to gather my hair, twist it, let it go. I wanted to climb out the moon roof and run to the hospital. I did breathing exercises and tried not to think about bleeds, swelling, secondary seizures, or brain damage. I skidded into the ER and could hardly tell them why I was there. “MY BABY. HANA. HELICOPTER.” They brought me in.

And she was ok. One of the nurses shushed me when I reached for her, because she had just gotten her to sleep after her CT scan. The doctors were embarrassed that the helicopter had left me. They hadn’t even gotten her name; her ankle bracelets said “baby girl, 1 year”.

They discharged us when the scans came back normal. “Well, she’s very likely fine, the seizure was probably caused by post-concussive bruising from her previous fall. Anyway, we don’t have a pediatric neurologist on this island, so you’re just as well at a hotel as you would be here, really.” That is encouraging.

The only hotel that wasn’t full was the stupid fancy one. We showed up with our eyes like boiled eggs, and I threw out bloody gauze in the receptionist’s trash and asked her to cut the hospital bracelets off. She looked like she was considering calling the hospital to see if they had an escapee. Still, it was a nice suite.

Our friends drove the boys down in the afternoon, and we flew back in the evening, crawled into the house, and collapsed. My mother poured a glass of wine down my throat.

RUN AWAY

So we are home. HOME. HOMEY HOME HOME. I am never traveling again.

Oahu put on the welcome lights for us.

At least, not until we can get one of these for Zenny.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Lake George of my own

September 16, 2014tempestpilot

I drove home from work, listening to Stephen King’s Joyland. It’s a ghost story about a college kid working a summer job at an amusement park, and he isn’t there for long when he gets a Dear John letter from his girl. It breaks his heart to little bits.

“There were three breathless pages, mostly saying how sorry she was, and how she had fought against the attraction but it was just hopeless, and she knew I would be hurt so I probably shouldn’t call her or see her for a while, and she hoped we could be good friends after the initial shock wore off, and he was a nice guy, he went to Dartmouth, he played lacrosse, she -“

“- knew I’d like him,” I said aloud with the narrator.

“- etc. etc. fucking etc.”

I laughed.

Travel is imminent, which means I am ruminating moodily and listening to terrible music. Returning to the sites of former golden days is like holding a negative over the landscape, watching ghostly figures through the overlap of the years. Standing beside those ghosts feels intrusive and sad, but the kids are charging in and blazing their own imprints, so I’ll try not to be a complete turd about it.

Instead, I am going to go, and eat things, and confuse people by pretending I’ve been there all along and did not actually leave.

To do (UPDATED):

* swim in the ocean, instead of just laying on a towel cursing the sand – I did not do this.

* buy ice cream and cookies for any child in my company, especially if they are not mine - I did not do this, either.

* duck and roll to avoid particular individuals, in repeat of last year’s hiding-behind-rental-car prowess – wasn’t necessary, thank goodness. Couldn’t have taken it.

* hunt the wild Krispy Kreme - SUCCESS.

* get home without anyone barfing or getting in a fist fight – success, but next time will add “no injuries, emergency air-lifting, trips to ER, and expensive hotels in the middle of the night.”

Keep it short and reasonable, is what I say.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Inedible oranges

September 12, 2014tempestpilot

Mandarin oranges full of seeds are no damn use to anyone. They have been sitting around as a Time Piece; a long-term study in decomposition and the futility of staff room fruit bowls.

Update on my wandering-banshee fitness plan: have lost 1 lb, but have been banned from pacing in the house because it “makes everyone uncomfortable”.

Very supportive, family. Have snuck it in anyway, fetching drinks and brownies for people. Am not sure who is prevailing here.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Fitbit for zombies

September 9, 2014tempestpilot

I have been given a fitbit as an early get buff by your birthday present, and I have been trotting everywhere for the past two days, spurred by blinking dots. It even tracks your sleep – and that is where I laugh like a sad person, looking at the long chart of red lines that mark wakefulness. “5 hours 3 min sleep” it says optimistically, but no, there was not any sleep between those lines. The instant I got a device to track my rest, two of the kids developed night fevers and asthma attacks, and I only stopped administering medicine and cold cloths and inhalers at 4am, crashing for a restful 45 minutes of sleep before leaping up for the work day.

On the plus side, I logged 300 steps before 5am, so I am winning. The darling thing doesn’t even care if the next 9,700 steps are hollow-eyed foot-dragging staggers, because it is forgiving like that, and I am 32 oz of coffee closer to my daily fluid quota. Suspecting this is a relationship I will be good at.

The 2-hour commute makes movement necessary. The driver’s seat is shaped like my backside and I get tetchy when people adjust the lumbar angle. My phone is filled with dashboard cloud formations.

There are other, wonderful sights, as well. The other day a motorcycle roared around me, and astride it rode the best-looking driver I have ever seen; he had on a big black backpack, and across it in large white letters was the word LUNCH. I chased him for half a mile, but he escaped.

Working on maneuverability.