Monday, May 30, 2011

It was a very stinky day

Friday, we discovered the source of the horrifying smell in the car was from a gallon of milk we had missed bringing in with the rest of the groceries that were purchased on Monday. Oh my. It took all week for it to get to the point that it actually burst, but burst it did and thank goodness it was in a cloth bag, because who knows how well a paper bag would have done. As it was, we wound up deciding that preserving a $1 grocery bag was not worth the work it would take to salvage it and threw it away.

That afternoon, on the way to pick B up from work, Alec threw up in the car. I think it was a combination of too long in the car and the heat, because he was perfectly chipper, albeit in possession of an unspeakably gross shirt. And once I got him into the library, I discovered the poopy diaper.

What a shame I had forgotten to bring the diaper bag.

Thankfully, we did have wipes in the car, so I cleaned off his carseat as well I could, and since the fabric is a decidedly unnatural artificial fiber, it didn't really soak in. But as for spare clothes or even a clean diaper - out of luck. This is how Alec wound up running around the library wearing nothing but a diaper cover I had rinsed out in the bathroom sink, with his pants stuffed inside to substitute for a diaper.

Say what you will about the relatives advantages of cloth versus disposable diapers, but cloth will definitely serve you better in this sort of emergency. I freely admit this is not the first time I have diapered my children with a piece of their own clothing, and as long as you have a useable cover, it works just fine to get you home.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Well, that was fun

I took K to get her VCUG on Monday, to try and help figure out why she's getting so many infections. Instead, K FREAKED out. It hadn't been a good sign the night before when she had thrown a massive tantrum over something trivial and then cried herself to sleep over how scared she was. But I was hoping when she walked into the hospital and sat in the waiting room without a problem that it would be okay. Sigh. We got into the procedure room, we were handed a hospital gown and she absolutely lost it.

Thankfully, since we were at a children's hospital, they place an emphasis on not traumatizing small children, and the suggestion was quickly made to reschedule so we could perform it with sedation. I suspect this is pretty routine, since absolutely nobody who I talked to about rescheduling afterwards acted surprised. The scheduler in the urologist's office said sympathetically, "Yeah, you look like you put up a fight."

Of course, I still have to get her back in the hospital. Normally, I feel it better to be as honest with children as is developmentally appropriate, so I had told K about the test, emphasizing over and over again that they would use something so it wouldn't hurt. However, we all can see how that went. I find myself wondering if it would have been better not to tell her the details so she wouldn't have time to develop anxiety about it beforehand. Unfortunately, that's a bell we can't unring, so short of cold-cocking her before carrying her into the hospital, we're going to have to deal with more pre-test anxiety and freaking out until they give her the mellow juice.

Anyway, two days later I still feel emotionally wrung out from the ordeal, plus now I get to look forward to trying to do it again. I had really been hoping Monday would be our last day of warming the waiting room chairs at that hospital for hours at a time for a while.

Of course, the real question is - should I bring along the camera to record her as she recovers from the sedation, in hopes of getting a video to rival David After Dentist?*








*Note: before anyone decides to flame me, I wouldn't actually do this. Although I clearly don't have a problem sharing my childrens' lives over the internet, I feel like turning your child's vulnerable moment into a cottage industry is where my personal line for exploiting your child gets crossed.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Books so far this year

I took a stab at keeping track of my reading this year, but here we are over a third of the way through the year and the list is getting too long to be able to get into every specific book in any detail. Fortunately, I haven't so much been reading new books as reading several new authors, which makes this much more efficient.

Rhys Bown, Her Royal Spyness series : This is a mystery series, starring Lady Georgianna, a young noblewoman living in London in the 1930s. Great-granddaughter to Queen Victoria and 34th in line to the throne. Unfortunately, her branch of the royal family is quite broke and her dreadful sister-in-law makes the family home in Scotland unbearable, so she is attempting to live independently while being too well-born to be able to earn a living. She scrapes by while periodically getting called upon by Queen Mary to do various favors, like attempt to distract the Prince of Wales from that dreadful Wallis Simpson. But really none of this gets across how hysterically funny these books are. Imagine the love child of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers (conveniently ignoring the fact that Dorothy was FAR too proper to do something so scandalous) with a generous dollop of Cold Comfort Farm (there's something very Flora Poste-ish about Georgie), and you begin to get the tone of these books.

Jennifer Crusie : I admit, I've been on a kick of light reading. She's a romance author, but her books are intelligent and well-written, and usually very funny. Her female protagonists tend to be intelligent women in their late 30s with real bodies who enjoy eating, as opposed to Barbie dolls in their early 20s. Her male protagonists aren't asssholes who make you wonder why anyone would ever want to get within 15 feet of them. There are very few moments of even slightly dubious consent. They're really about as good as a romance novel can get, particularly when you're in a mood for light and entertaining but don't want to have to turn your feminism off.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy : And now for something completely different, a dystopian future where teenagers are chosen by lottery once a year to fight each other to the death for everybody's entertainment on tv. Hijinks ensue! Need I say that it isn't a good idea to get too attached to any of the characters? Truly, not so much the series I would recommend for someone who wants something light and easy. But much like Battlestar Galactica, despite the fact that I'm generally feeling too unsettled about the state of the world to be able to enjoy dystopia, this is just too damn good for me to put down.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

100 years of waiting

I took K to the urologist last week, to see if we could find an answer to why she gets a new UTI every time she turns around. We got a maybe answer (this is the part where I hedge because I'm starting to feel like K's getting to the age where she deserves some privacy on these issues. So rather than get into the whole saga, Google "dysfunctional elimination" if you want to), and get to go back in a couple weeks for a delightful test called a VCUG, which involves a urinary catheter. I anticipate great fun getting K to sit still for that. Sigh. It will be at a children's hospital, so they should be used to dealing with uncooperative children.

Mostly, I'm hoping the office staff will be a little more on the ball this time around. We had a 9:45 appointment and didn't get home until 1:30, due to little things like the fact that it took over an HOUR just to check us in. Then we saw the actual doctor for about 30 seconds and a highly distracted nurse practitioner the rest of the time, if by "see" you mean "Spent five minutes someplace else for every two minutes she spent with us." And part of that approximately ten fragmented minutes was spent informing K that she needed to give up what the NP saw as a bad habit (completely unrelated to K's urinary tract) and outlined the behavior reward system we were apparently going to implement. All without every even directly speaking to me, the parent sitting right there in the room, let alone thinking that maybe things like this should be up to me, K'S MOTHER. Plus we already use a good bahavior chart, so her stupid star chart would be kind of redundant.

So now I have another reason to want the UTIs to end, so I don't have to keep finding myself wasting my quickly waning youth in a waiting room while waiting to get passive aggressive unwanted parenting advice.