October 5, 2006

sweet nostalgia

Last night, Wade brought this home with him:

Not literally packaged in the 60s. At least I hope not.

I’m all about surprise candy, so as soon as the kids were sufficently distracted, I started rummaging through the box. I was trying to remember what kind of candy we ate as kids; I was hoping for some Tootsie Rolls (mmm). No luck.

However . . .

Do you see what I see?

Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, kids!

Candy cigarettes! Who doesn’t remember candy cigarettes? And who can even IMAGINE buying them for a kid NOW?

When I showed Wade the pretend glowing end on one of the “cigarettes,” he said, “What were they THINKING?”

Duh. They were thinking that we would all learn that smoking is COOL! And that it tastes just like candy. Really bad stale candy.

We spent the evening rummaging through the box looking for something really yummy. I ate the candy necklace and the Bottle Caps and the Smarties lollypop; Wade went with the pumpkin seeds and the Bit O’ Honey. We were amused by the clearly not 1960s packaging; the French Vanilla taffy included a cheery declaration that it contained “1 gm FAT PER BAR!” The candy cigarettes don’t actually have the word CIGARETTE on the packaging, although I’m pretty sure they did when I was a kid.

“You know–you KNOW,” Wade said, “that somewhere in the files of one of the tobbaco companies there is a memo about those things. ‘We heartily endorse the manufacture of candy cigarettes!’ You KNOW it.”

Anyone got a light?

October 4, 2006

pink is the new medicine

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond, constructively and thoughtfully, to this post. I feel better today, because I’ve slept and because we know what’s going on with Charlie and because I read an editorial by Roger Cohen in today’s New York Times that included this paragraph:

I know this much: It was a more civil time, when people had not yet forgotten that reasonable disagreement is the mark of any healthy society, and people had more time for each other, and the political manipulation of fear and anger had not yet turned political discourse into a sterile shouting match.

I believe in a lot of things, but I believe most strongly in the power of civil discourse. That, and pink medicine.

Henry was a little baffled yesterday when I picked him up from school an hour and a half early. In the past, leaving school early has been a sign that he’s having a Bad Day, one in which he is disruptive and difficult to reason with; as he gets older and smarter, he is more and more aware when he is having a Bad Day and less and less happy about it. I had called the school to let them know that I was going to pick him up at the early dismissal time, and I had asked the secretary to be sure to let him know that nothing was wrong, but I could tell he was a little nervous when I showed up. When he saw that I had Charlie with me, he got even more confused. “Where are we going?” he asked as we got in the car.

“Charlie has to go to the doctor.”

“About my bleedy NOSE!” Charlie informed him.

“Okay,” Henry said, “but why did you come and get ME?”

“Because Charlie’s appointment is at 3:00 and there was no way for me to get you at school AND get him to the doctor.”

“So . . . no one is in trouble?”

“No, buddy, no one is in trouble.”

“Oh, good!” he said, relieved. “Can we go get a snack first?”

Thanks to everyone for your good wishes for Charlie and his bleedy nose. Our trip to the pediatrician revealed that yes, his nose was irritated, probably by a combination of dry weather (damn drought) and allergies. To be on the safe side, she sent us on to an ENT this morning, who confirmed that yes, his nose is ripe for bleeding (I’ll spare you the gory medical details) but that he thinks we can conquor it with a combination of saline spray and Vaseline, both of which have to go IN Charlie’s nose. Three times a day.

Doesn’t THAT sound like fun?

So in the end, it was nothing. But! Lest I feel like I have wasted two copays and two days of my life! Charlie has an ear infection. One in each ear, in fact! Hooray!

Dear god I am a terrible mother. TERRIBLE.

We had no idea his ears were infected. He never complained or ran a fever or acted at ALL like he didn’t feel well. The ENT was actually MORE concerned by the symptomless ear infection than he was about the nose, but I was all WHATEVER, we’ve got drugs for that, now TELL ME WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE BLOOD.

No, actually I was very sad about Charlie’s ears. Poor little thing.

The poor little thing was a trooper about the doctors (both of them) although he was angling to take the whole day off school today (him: “What if we go home and PLAY?” me: “What if you go to SCHOOL and Mommy goes home and WORKS?” him: “Okay, I guess . . . “). I don’t know how he will be about me sticking various things up his nose for the next I three weeks, but if we’re going to prove that the blood vessels don’t need to be cauterized (again, sparing you the details! you’re welcome!) we’re going to have to do it.

I’m sure pinning him to the floor to shoot that saline in there will make me feel LOTS better about the state of the world.

thud

My review of Catherine Lloyd Burns’ It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks is up at mamazine.com:

“I am skeptical of memoir, not so much because I am uninterested in other people’s life stories but because I am leery of the sense that simply because an author says something happened in this way or that, it is then imbued with a sense that this is the Absolute Truth. Memory is always colored by subject position, and the truth–as we learned from James Frey, if no one else–is a slippery fish.”

I think being a parent is all about seeing the cracks in the truth; it is all about realizing that we make the best decisions we can, based on what we know in the moment, and we hope like hell that things turn out right. But sometimes they don’t, and then we are left to tell the story of what happened, and to tell it honestly.

That is the real truth.

October 3, 2006

just one thing

I’m feeling a little edgy these days, and not in a good, artsy, rock-n-roll kind of way, more in a little-things-make-me-want-to-weep kind of way. Except the things that make me want to weep don’t really seem that little; in fact, they seem huge, which makes the little things seem even worse.

The list of Things Making Me Edgy is long and complicated, and includes everything from Mark Foley and his dirty text messages to yesterday’s school shooting in Pennsylvania to the President’s new ability to label pretty much anyone an “unlawful enemy combatant.” The world feels like a very scary place right now, like a place where people have forgotten how to use their nice words, or how to use their words at all.

Charlie had another nosebleed last night, one that took nearly two hours to completely stop. When it was all over and we were finally sitting down to dinner, I told Wade that I thought I should call our pediatrician, just to check in; I’m pretty sure it’s nothing, but I don’t know for certain any more. He agreed, because even though we’re doing everything Doctor Google recommends and even though we’re sure it’s allergies or a cold, it’s scary and unusual.

I hate the unusual, especially when it’s scary.

A couple of weeks ago, Charlie had a lockdown drill at school. When the boys have fire drills, I always make a point of having them talk about what they did and what the rules are IN CASE there is a REAL fire. So when Charlie told me about the lockdown drill, I did the same thing, even though it scared the hell out of me to think about the REAL thing. “We go to housekeeping,” Charlie told me matter-of-factly, “and Mrs. H turns off the lights in our classroom and puts our card in the window.” Housekeeping is one of the centers in Charlie’s class, the one with the dress-up clothes and the pretend kitchen; it is in a corner away from the external windows. The card shows school officials that everyone in that class is safe and accounted for. I asked Charlie if he knew why they might need to do that, to lock the classroom like that, and he said, “Yes, in case someone comes into my school who isn’t supposed to be there.”

I’m baffled these days by the decisions I see people making, by a President who sees no problem with advocating torture, by a Congressman who purports to be protecting missing and exploited children while he’s soliciting young boys, by a father who walks his own children to the bus stop and then executes someone else’s children. I don’t understand that combination of cowardice and stupidity and maliciousness.

Yesterday I sat on the bathroom floor holding a Kleenex to Charlie’s nose for over an hour. Henry brought us wet washcloths to wipe the blood up with; Charlie cried and said he wanted the bleeding to STOP RIGHT NOW. It was the most mundane of childhood moments, this nosebleed, but it was almost overwhelming to me, because of all the other things going on around us. I want to protect my children from everything, from bloody noses and people with guns and a government that seems to be playing by its own rules. And I can’t do it and it makes me edgy.

I’m picking the boys up early today and taking Charlie to the doctor. I’m sure she will look in his nose and say that he’s fine, that it’s just allergies or a cold or dry skin, but I need to know. I feel these days like there are so many things that are wrong in the world, so many things that I can’t fix for my children, and I need to know that this ONE thing is okay.

October 2, 2006

next time, just kick Mommy–it’s faster and cheaper and it won’t hurt so much

On Friday, both of my kids went to After Care at their respective schools, so that I could have a drink with lunch get some stuff done. Also because at the end of next week, I’m going to Kansas City for a girls’ weekend with some friends and we thought it would be a good idea to preview the After Care situation before I actually left town.

Henry, the child I was most worried about, was fine with the idea (he didn’t really seem to care one way or the other, which was good) and Charlie was TOTALLY excited, so much so that on Thursday night at dinner he announced, “I want to go to After Care EVERY DAY. Can I?”

I could see Wade fighting the urge to say, “Yes! And Mommy could get a JOB!” Yeah, like THAT’S going to happen.

As it turns out, After Care was not what Charlie had hoped, whatever that might have been. Oh, everyone was INCREDIBLY nice, but he cried the ENTIRE time anyway. The director let him sit in her office for a while, but finally she had to go outside to help hand out snacks; she asked Charlie if he wanted a snack and if he wanted to help her, and he said, “No, I just want to be sad.” She told me that she asked the other kids from his class what they did when Charlie cried during the school day, and one of them said, “But Charlie never cries!” When I came to get him, he was sitting on the playground with tears running down his face. He ran over to me and wrapped his arms around my neck and sobbed.

So that was good.

Then we went to get Henry, who was out on the playground. When he saw me, he came running toward me and I could see that he had a bandaid on his knee. He was talking when he got to me, explaining that he had been running to the bathroom and he fell down and scraped his knee. “At first it didn’t hurt,” he said, “but then it felt wet and when I touched it I was BLEEDING.” By now he was crying, too.

I was sure I would be next.

One day last week, Henry asked me to fix a toy for him; when I was done, he gave me a gigantic hug and kneed me in the solar plexus. It knocked the wind out of me and hurt like hell, at the same time that it was incredibly sweet and loving.

Friday afternoon felt a lot like that.

By the time we got home, everyone was recovering. I gave each kid a Pop Tart, even though it was nearly 4:30, because Pop Tarts make everything better. And then we got on with our lives. Mostly. But my stomach hurt all weekend.

The upside is that this TOTALLY strengthens my I-can’t-get-a-job argument. Because our kids would be WRECKS! Or something like that. And unless someone loses a limb this week, I’m still going to Kansas City. But I will probably call home three hundred times in three days. Just in case.