Six Years

May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Yesterday was my anniversary. I usually would’ve written something long and sentimental on Facebook about that, something about Kyle being my life partner and best friend and favorite teammate and all, but we had other matters to attend to, namely returning home from a vacation to see his family in Texas.

It was a great vacation, really. We had a lot of fun, despite plentiful mud and rain (or, in some cases, because of it). Sam got to see and fall in love with his Nana’s puppies, and he got to spend a lot of good time with his Nana and Poppy and Uncle Grant, none of whom he sees as often as any of us would like. We stayed in a gorgeous hotel and just had a nice, relaxing time together as a family. I think it was one of the more relaxing vacations we’ve had in a while.

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(not quite this relaxing, but close)

But getting home. Oy.

We were flying out of DFW, which is no small task. When Kyle and I first started dating, he started bragging to me about the size of his airport (that isn’t a euphemism) and how it had five ZIP codes (that isn’t an exaggeration). Plenty of airports are big, but DFW is scary big, intimidating and confusing and hot.

We got to the airport around 3:45 p.m. for our 5:51 flight–plenty of time to get through security, get some snackish dinner items, and relax a little before boarding. Kyle and I were feeling good as we reached the check-in counter for jetBlue and asked them to print off our boarding passes and luggage tag. As those items printed, the lady behind the counter gently informed us that the flight had a new departure time of 8:30 p.m. but that we should stick by the gate in case that changed.

I had to ask her to repeat herself three or four times because, for those not willing to do the math, that’s a three hour delay.

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I can handle three hour delays when traveling on my own. I don’t like them–nobody does, of course–but just give me a place to plug in and a phone or Kindle full of books, and I’m set. Kyle’s the same way, and we can both handle them together, just between the two of us.

Sam, though.

Sam is three. He’s a very clever three-year-old with a massive vocabulary, a stunning imagination, and an almost cult-like following in his junior preschool classroom. What he does not possess, however, is patience. At all. He’s a devotee of the idea that instant gratification takes too long; if he has to wait for anything, he will protest and he will make sure the entire world knows it.

An hour and a half wait before boarding would’ve been doable, but three hours, and not only that, three hours at bedtime?

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But we tried to make the best of it. We stopped at TGIFriday’s for some dinner (Sam munched on soft pretzel sticks because his usual choice of noodles and broccoli was unavailable). We picked up snacks and magazines and souvenirs at the news stand. We managed to placate Sam for a while, with space to run and his Kindle to play on and snacks from his Nana to keep him sated.

Around 7:30, our resources were exhausted and the inevitable meltdown began. Sam sobbed that he wanted to eat a WHOLE bag of M&Ms, not just a FEW M&Ms, and he didn’t WANT water, he just WANTED WATER, and WHY WAS EVERYTHING HARD. The other passengers gave us stank eye, knowing full well that this shrieking child was going to be on their massively delayed flight; Kyle and I tried very hard to melt into the floor.

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But finally, FINALLY, we boarded the plane (passing large families and a Bernese Mountain puppy named Bo as we did), and despite a few rough patches, it was a smooth flight. Sam slept from about an hour in; I dozed, and I don’t know what Kyle did. Once we landed, we made our way to the bathrooms so that Kyle and I could relieve ourselves and so that Sam could get his diaper changed.

There was only one problem: Sam did not WANT to get his diaper changed.

Kyle took one for the team and changed him. I don’t know exactly what went on in there, but based on the screaming and Kyle’s haggard appearance afterwards, I can only assume it was an exorcism.

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(The Exorcist teaches you more about parenting a toddler than any book ever will)

As they approached and I opened my mouth to offer to take Sam from him, Kyle interrupted me. “If you have to use the bathroom, do it now.”

So I went. When I came out, Sam was once again crying and out of his stroller, looking down at his pajama pants. Kyle looked about five seconds from crying and was also looking at Sam’s pajama pants. “Can you go get some paper towels?” he asked, and I hurried off to do just that, no questions asked. Kyle explained the situation when I returned: Sam had been throwing such a tantrum when Kyle changed his diaper that the diaper got put on wrong. Sam had then peed and, well. The results were predictable, to say the least.

Back into the bathroom they both went to change, and after that, we were finally done with our bathroom adventure, 45 minutes after getting off the plane.

I should mention, too, that this was at 2:00 a.m.

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The airport was empty by then, or mostly, and had taken on that liminal space quality, where it felt like reality blurred. Kyle and I got lost on our way to baggage claim, since the security guard at the closest door was gone for the night, and finally reached our carousel at around 2:15. It took a while to find our bag, but once we had it, we headed out to retrieve our car, only to have our parking stub not register in any of Logan’s automatic pay machines.

Because of course.

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We gave up and just brought it with us. Thankfully, we’d taken a picture of the row we parked in, so we didn’t have to worry about hunting that down. We shoved everything into the Prius, paid our stub at the gate, and exited the airport…

…right into a traffic jam.

Kyle initially blamed it on “some idiot doing something stupid” but it was just construction lane closures that ended more quickly than we expected. The roads were clear the whole way home, and Sam was wide awake, asking both of us question after question, mostly about reflections in his window (“what’s that planet, Mommy?” “that’s not a planet, sweetheart, that’s a street light”).

Finally. FINALLY. We got home around 3:30. The neighborhood was quiet and eerily dark–no streetlamps, no cars, not even our porch light. We shuffled inside… and then Sam refused to go to sleep. This continued for about half an hour, until Kyle finally delivered him a “way past midnight” snack, and we all crapped out, officially at 4 a.m.

So I’m exhausted and haven’t got a romantic bone in my body, just some weary ones. But I will say this: our marriage works. It works because of nights like last night, when the world throws curveball after curveball at us, and we just link arms and laugh at it. It works because we don’t snap at each other when we’re mad at something else, because we bear the load together.

There was a great article on Cracked.com about six years ago (exactly four months after Kyle and I got married, so I was in a sappy mood when I read it). The author writes about “5 Ways You Know It’s Time To Get Married” and ended by proposing to his girlfriend, which was sweet enough. My favorite part, though, was the second-to-last point, about neither of you being in debt to each other, neither of you resenting pulling more weight when the other can’t:

Don’t picture your relationship as two people pulling a wagon. It’s like two legs carrying a person.

If you break a toe, your legs don’t have an argument about the fact that one of them is forcing you to limp. You just automatically change your stride and keep going.

I take it even further. When your legs are both tired, your right leg doesn’t just give up because it’s tired and leave your left to do all the work. They slow down and work together to get where they need to be, so that they can both rest.

Marriage–building your own family–is a team effort. You’re not pulling for yourself anymore; you’re pulling for the team, the whole team. Your successes and failures are shared, and so are the burdens you carry. Marriage doesn’t make the bad things in life go away; instead, it makes them easier to manage, because instead of being one person panicking and trying to carry it all by yourself…

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…you have two people sharing the load, even when things get tough.

And, well. All that to say: sugar, I’m glad to be on your team. I love you.

Made of Love, Part 3: Dear Sammy

May 12, 2017May 12, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Dear Sammy,

Well, here we are. It’s the day before your third birthday, and here I am, writing you a letter on a computer. This is objectively ridiculous because you’re turning three yet, and you can’t read (I think. I’m still baffling at how you learned to recognize the word “STORM” of all things), but maybe someday, you’ll come back to this and read it and know that I was thinking about you today.

I think about you a lot, really. You always tell me at the end of the day how much you missed me, usually while snuggling up against my shoulder and right before demanding that I play a video for you, like the little dictator you are. I miss you during the day, too. My entire office is full of pictures of you, and my computer background cycles different pictures from the last couple of years–little five-month-old you looking all dapper in October; you holding an umbrella as it pours down rain in Disney World; you with blue gel in your hair, grinning like a Cheshire Cat. I miss you; seeing you is the best part of my day. I find myself sometimes at odds with myself, not wanting to go and do anything outside of the house, just wanting to come home and hang out with you.

You and I are so alike and so different. I’m sure you’ll change as you get older, but right now, you’re SO energetic. My god, you never stop moving, and it’s amazing to me. I have low energy naturally, some of the lowest energy of anyone I know. I’m happiest when I’ve entered stasis and can just sit and observe the world around me. Not you, my speedy little boy. The only time you wholly stop moving is when you’re asleep, and even then, I imagine you’re running in your dreams. You don’t love to get dirty, but you love to be outside, digging in the dirt, having adventures, climbing on everything, jumping off everything. Me, I’d rather look at the outside from behind our enormous window and not have to worry about bugs. Or ticks. I hate ticks.

(haaaaaaaaaaaaaate)

But for every way that we differ, we’re the same, too. You inherited my language, my love of music, my creativity. Nothing in the world could make me happier than that. You love stories, and you’re so good at words. I don’t think I’ve ever met a three-year-old who speaks like you do, talking to your Uncle Grant about your “weaponry,” and then sighing contentedly and saying, “Oh, that was wonderful!” You communicate so well, and maybe that’s a weird thing to be proud about, but I’m incredibly proud of you. Words aren’t easy. My life is words, and I know that words aren’t easy, but they come so naturally to you.

You love listening to music, probably more than anything else, including Star Wars. Whatever movie we watch, you insist on silence during the closing credits so that you can hear whatever song plays as words scroll up on the screen. Your very worst tantrums are silenced with the simple application of well-placed Tchaikovsky or Williams. You flutter your hands in the air like you’ve actually taken a class in conducting (I have a lot of friends who took classes in conducting; they look like you). You love music so much that you’ve taught your friends, who’ve never seen Star Wars before, to sing the “Imperial March” and the main theme. How crazy is that?

Your teachers tell me that you have the best imagination of any kid they’re working with, and I believe them. You’re our son, after all. Part of me thinks that you realized you could play pretend with your toys the first time you saw Toy Story and just went from there. I love watching you play, watching you make your stories with all of your toys. You are a joy, my little baby boy.

(this is an inside joke with your dad, your Auntie, and me. It is hilarious. You don’t get it, but it’s hilarious)

There aren’t enough numbers in the cosmos to enumerate how many times a day I’m thankful for you. I love the things we share together–watching Chopped, baking and cooking, playing lightsabers, reading books, recreating baking videos with Play-Doh, dancing while we wait for Daddy to bring your water cup at bedtime, playing the “faces” game (during which you always say, “I have no planets, just a moon,” which I STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND but that is okay).

Part of me wants to tell you that you’re not my baby anymore, and that’s partly true. You’re 0% baby; you’re tall and lanky, and you understand the world as a little boy, not a baby. And, of course, you’ll only get bigger and understand the world in bigger ways. I’m in a weird state where I both want that and don’t want it; I can’t wait to see what kind of man you become, but I wish that I could preserve your innocence forever. I wish I could protect you from the truth of the world and let you think that things will always be good, but part of growing up is knowing that sometimes, things will be bad.

So I suppose the best thing to do, then, is to tell you this: if and when things get bad, your job is to do good. Treat people kindly. Help people who need it. Look for beauty yourself and show it to others. Create beauty if you can’t find any. Remember the spark of goodness inside of you and help others to see theirs as well.

You may be a little boy, not a baby anymore, but you’ll always be my baby, my very first. I can’t remember the specifics of the moment you were born, what people were saying or what they were doing, but that’s because I was wholly engrossed in you, finally meeting you, finally holding you in my arms, kissing your slimy head (babies are really slimy when they’re first born, it’s okay, I kissed you anyway), knowing that no matter what else happens in life, it’s gonna be you and me.

Daddy can come too 😉

(we rather like him, after all)

I love you, baby. Happy, happy, happy birthday.

Love always,
Momma

Glitter

May 4, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Today is Star Wars Day, celebrated in the tradition of the date: May the Fourth, as in May the Fourth (Force) be with you. I’ve been telling Sam about this for roughly a week, and he’s not a fan of the pun, mostly because he’s not quite at a point where he understands that it’s funny when one word sounds like another. Still, he’s come around somewhat–this morning, he did say “May the Fourth be with you and may the Force be with you!” so he’s not a total lost cause when it comes to our great family tradition of punning.

This Star Wars Day is special, in that a lot of people are wearing glitter today, in memory of Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia. Carrie spent most of her life struggling with mental illness, specifically with bipolar disorder. There’s a great video of her explaining what that entails here; it basically boils down to her brain chemistry either pushing her into “really fast and impulsive” or “really sad and slow.” (“Or both. Those are fun days.”) Outside of Star Wars, her most enduring and fantastic legacy has been as an advocate for mental health. She did so much to normalize mental illness, to remove the stigma and say hey, just because your brain is a little off kilter doesn’t mean that you’re broken as a person or a bad person in any sense of the word. I only really became aware of her advocacy in the last couple of years, and I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t spend more time loving her for it.

Anyway, glitter. In one of her memoirs, Carrie talked about how her therapist always knew if she was having a bad day because she’d be wearing copious amounts of glitter. Glitter was her way of adding brightness to the world when she found it to be dark and difficult. She was notorious for glitter bombing people at conventions, and it was her way of trying to cheer people up if they seemed to be having a bad day (and I will tell you, having Carrie glitter bomb me would absolutely make any day 6000% better). You can find all sorts of pictures and anecdotes about this across the internet.

SO. Today I am wearing glitter for Carrie, to memorialize her and to bring awareness to mental illness. In particular, I’m going to talk today about postpartum depression and anxiety, my own two personal shoulder demons.

Depression and anxiety have been companions of mine for a long time. When I was really young, seven or eight or nine years old, I’d spend sleepless nights praying for God to forgive me of anything I couldn’t think of because I was terrified that I’d done something bad and would end up possessed by demons or sent to hell. When I was eleven, just as puberty was starting to hit, I entered one of the more hellish years of my life, overfull with bullying, bad grades, and lost friends. In any given week, I’d spend nights curled up on the bathroom floor because I felt like I was going to throw up from all of it together. One time, riding in the backseat of our family minivan, I heard a woman on the radio talk about how she’d been sick for so long that she couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be sick; I could relate.

I don’t think I had my first bout with depression until college, and that particular downswing was a long one. It started in bits and pieces during my freshman year; I started sequestering myself in my room, not eating meals with my friends but instead microwaving whatever I could find. Sophomore year it got worse, and then, the summer after sophomore year, I was in an emotionally manipulative relationship with a guy I met at work. He used to keep me on the phone late at night–on our house line, mind–trying to get me to talk him out of killing himself. It was exhausting. It dragged me down.

In a desperate bid to come back to myself, I spent a semester abroad in England (after, thankfully, dumping the boyfriend), and that helped, but when I came home, I was still in that place.

The imagery we use when we talk about depression is so dark, and that’s not what depression is like for me at all. Really, it’s more like a foggy day where you can’t see more than a couple of feet around you. You know there’s something on the other side of the fog, but you can’t see it and you can’t get there. If you’re stuck there long enough, you just want everything to stop because what’s the point? There’s no tomorrow that you can see. There’s nothing but the monotony of right now, and tomorrow will be like it, and the next day, and so on. You don’t want to die, not necessarily, but you want to stop, and what way is there to stop but to die?

(this is a kitten and a deer and they’re friends)

I don’t remember how I pulled out of that particular downswing, but I did. I finished school, I graduated, I flailed around looking for work for a while, lowkey depressed all the while. I wasn’t quite in the same place I’d been, but I was low. I didn’t really have anything to look forward to, and I always felt like I was on that precipice, like I was verging on another downswing.

Something that helped was Kyle; he gave me something out of the ordinary to look forward to. Traveling to see him, having him travel to see me–they broke up the monotony. I had someone telling me that, hey, on the other side of the fog is someone who loves you, and you get to see him.

(coming later: me analyzing this entire movie and the amazing way these two played this scene)

It helped. It helped a lot. And for a long time, I was out of that downswing. I finished my master’s degree, I started working, I got married, I started trying to get pregnant.

I don’t know if infertility increases the risk of postpartum depression, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does, particularly because you’re afraid of losing what you’ve got, and that quickly turns into anxiety.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My pregnancy with Sam was great, up until about the last four weeks. My body was SO done with being pregnant. My liver was the most frustrated with the situation and just sort of lost its fool mind. I ballooned up with excess fluid; my calves were so swollen that Kat and I spent many afternoons drawing pictures in my legs by just pressing down on the skin. I was physically miserable, and when I finally gave birth, I was relieved. So relieved. Within a day, I lost 30 pounds of water weight. Boom, gone.

(late pregnancy in a nutshell)

Early motherhood didn’t come particularly easy for me. Some parts of it did; Sam was a delightful baby overall, a unicorn, really. He only fussed or cried if he was hungry or needed a diaper. He slept easily. He loved being held and was so curious about the world. He learned to smile at six weeks on the dot, and he learned to laugh about two weeks after that.

But other things were more difficult. Breastfeeding was hard. For the uninitiated, it involves so many more moving parts than you realize, and if your kid is not interested in latching, you’re up the crick without a padoodle, as my history teacher used to say when warning us to study for tests. And Sam? Sam did not want to latch. He didn’t want to breastfeed. He had no interest. He wanted to eat, that much was true, but he didn’t want to breastfeed at all. We ended up switching over to formula when he was two months old, and thank God we did.

And even with an easy unicorn baby, the transition from no baby to baby is difficult. You go from having moments to breathe, think, be yourself to having none. You go from understanding your body to inhabiting a monstrous form. Hell, you go from knowing when you need to use the toilet to peeing your pants because you didn’t know that you needed to use the toilet.

And all the while, your body is having this enormous hormone crash. Everything that went into sustaining a human life for the last 40 weeks suddenly drops off, and your body flails in confusion, like what am I doing with myself anymore?

Your entire identity changes. You promise yourself beforehand that you won’t be one of those people who’s wholly consumed by motherhood and loses yourself, but in the first couple of months, you can’t do otherwise–unless you want to pass your baby off to a nanny or wetnurse and have done with it. The person you were before is gone, and if she does come back, it won’t be for a while.

So with all of that going on, it’s no wonder that postpartum depression and anxiety are huge things. It’s no wonder that, when you have a prior history of depression and anxiety, your doctor gives you pamphlets of things to look out for. The real wonder is that PPD/PPA numbers aren’t higher, and sometimes, I wonder if people just underreport.

The tipping point for me, the point where I decided to get help and end the fog and nausea, came about a week after my gallbladder surgery. I was at about 80%, health-wise, but I was still off-kilter and very high key anxious about everything. I was having panic attacks every night, lying in our queen-size bed by myself while Kyle slept in the living room with the baby so that I could rest and heal. My usual coping mechanisms weren’t working at all, and I didn’t know what to do.

It was a Sunday, and Kyle wanted to go to my parents’ house to do laundry, like we always did. I wasn’t going to join, because I still wasn’t feeling well, and Kyle wanted to leave the baby with me so that he could have some alone time for the first time that week (my parents were out of town). The idea of being left alone with the baby sent me into a panic. I didn’t know what to do. What would happen if a sudden complication from surgery came up and I got sick? What if I panicked and hurt the baby? What if I couldn’t do it? What if I took one of the vicodin they’d given me and it made me too tired to take care of the baby? What if? What if? What if?

I was shaking and crying, and Kyle said to me, “Look. I’ll take Sam with me, but you have to promise me that first thing tomorrow morning, you’ll call your doctor and use the words, ‘I think I have postpartum depression.’ Do you promise that you’ll do that?”

He had me backed into a corner in more ways than one. I promised.

And I got help. My doctor took one look at me and put me on one of the stronger antidepressants out there, venlafaxine (or Effexor). When the first dosage didn’t seem enough, she bumped me up and referred me to a therapist. I found things to look forward to, like moving into a new house, celebrating Sam’s birthday. I got a job so that the daily monotony could be broken up. I started to feel better.

I’m not out of the woods, honestly speaking. I still have days where I feel that fog coming back, and there are still things I need to work through. Lately, though, if I have one of those days, I’ve been drowning myself in Wet N’ Wild glitter and taking moments to think of what I have to look forward to: Sam’s birthday, trips to Texas, the hypothetical next child, etc. It’s a short term solution (and I do need to find myself a new therapist, though blogging helps a lot), but it works to break up the fog on all but the very worst days.

So here are my takeaways.

First, if you’re feeling that fog or that nausea, if you don’t think you have anything to look forward to or if you’re constantly afraid, you don’t have to feel that way. Talk to someone–call a doctor, find an online resource if you can’t speak with a doctor, talk to a friend or family member. Ask them to help you find something that shines through the fog so that you can keep going. Ask them to help you find your center again. Douse yourselves in glitter, and remember that depression and anxiety lie. Good things will happen again. Not everything in your future is bad, and you’re strong enough to withstand any bad that does come.

And second, if you know and love someone who’s dealing with that fog or nausea, help them. Talk to them. Give them something to look forward to. Sit with them when they panic. Help them find the strength to keep going. Step in and help them. Be the glitter for them.

Sick Days

May 1, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Sam was sick this weekend, one of those vague childhood illnesses that isn’t really anything definable but that still had him whining and sleeping a lot during the day both Saturday and Sunday. He didn’t eat a lot either day (we couldn’t even entice him to eat by giving him cookies for breakfast, which shows both [a] how crappy a mom I can be when I’m desperate to get my son to eat and [b] how desperate I was to get my son to eat), and on Sunday morning, he slept until 8:30, as opposed to his usual 6:30. He was fine after his nap on Sunday, but we still spent most of the weekend working our way around an almost!three-year-old who wasn’t quite sick enough to merit being called “sick” but was still too sick to act like his normal self.

He almost never got sick during his first year of life, or at least nothing that I would call “sick.” He spit up a lot, just a little bit after every feeding, and we were concerned about that until his pediatrician pointed out that he was still in the 65-70th percentile in terms of weight for his age and size, so he must be getting some nutrition. He was something of a unicorn baby in that and other regards–he slept through the night at three months (by which I mean, he slept from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m., which totally counts) and was an excellent eater. He was healthy, and it was great.

He got his first cold about a month before his first birthday, the same weekend that we had the funeral for my beloved grandmother AND the same weekend we celebrated Easter. The pictures I took of Sam from that weekend are the saddest thing ever: there he is, in an adorable Easter outfit (featuring Thumper from Bambi because what’s the point of being a mom if you can’t dress your kid in adorable Disney clothes?) with bright red eyes and nose and cheeks, looking stoned out of his mind.

Colds quickly became routine for us, as Sam started daycare about two months later. I forget when he brought home his first cold, but it was quickly accompanied by his first ear infection, which quickly spread to me and resulted in me missing a total of four days of work during my first month. Understandably, my bosses weren’t exactly fans of this and told me that I needed to make sure I was available or else. I don’t blame them for this; I worked remotely as a call center representative back then, and a lack of presence on my part would result in a more difficult time answering call volumes, especially since it was the busy season.

(call center work is a special type of hell)

Busy season or not, Sam kept bringing home colds and ear infections at predictable three week intervals. He’d get a cold, it would turn into an ear infection, he’d suffer miserably, get better, and then have a week of being healthy before another cold turned up. As I understand, this is par for the course during the first year of daycare, but it was exhausting. We saw our pediatrician so many times during the first year that she now actually gets excited if it’s been more than a month since she saw us last.

Eventually, we had to face the fact that Sam had inherited his dad’s eustacean tubes (those are the tubes that go from your ears to your throat and drain excess mucus). They clogged easily and would have to be held open by ear tubes, which he got the December before he turned two. The procedure was quick and painless, and Sam hasn’t had an ear infection since–and we’re to the point now where he may have to get surgery to get one of the tubes removed, since it’s still firmly in place a year and a half after the fact.

I’d happily keep it in there forever, though, because it’s just that nice to have gone so long without having to go and get a bottle of the pink stuff or having to negotiate whose deadline was less important and therefore who’d stay home with Sam because the daycare won’t take him if he has a fever or is contagious. That’s not to say that he hasn’t been sick at all since getting the tubes, but his illnesses have been… well, let’s just say both rarer and more dramatic.

(if a three-year-old could express this sentiment, he would)

For example. About a year ago (a year ago today, how ‘bout that?), I started a new job at as a marketing assistant at a construction firm. Not a week after I started, Sam had a nasty bug that acted very much like the flu, even though he’d gotten his flu shot that year. The flu stuff went on for about a day, and then he started to get spots around his mouth, on his hands and feet. He’d contracted the dreaded hand, foot, and mouth disease, and guess who had to take a week off within the first month of her new job because she also contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease?

Things went back to normal for a while after the spots all went away (they are TERRIBLE, they feel like someone is pricking your fingers and feet with needles if you put even the slightest pressure on them), and they remained normal until this winter, when Kyle and I noticed that Sam, after a few days of a minor cold, had a spotty rash on his torso. Sam’s fully vaccinated, so we didn’t expect measles or anything of that ilk, but we did rush him to the doctor, just in case it was something very serious that we’d never heard of.

As it turned out, we had heard of it, just not in a modern context. The spotty rash on Sam’s torso turned out to be a sign of scarlet fever, as if our son had decided it was actually 1917 rather than 2017. Fortunately, a case of scarlet fever in 2017 is very different from a case of scarlet fever in 1917–Sam just got a bottle of the pink stuff and was declared fit to return to daycare the next day. Go figure.

(meanwhile, in Little Women, scarlet fever eventually leads to Beth dying, so I’m glad it’s 2017)

All-in-all, he’s a healthy kid, and that makes me exceptionally grateful for vaccines. They have a vaccine for rotavirus now–that’s a stomach bug, the one that causes really bad diarrhea in babies. Sam got that vaccine right on schedule, and even though he’s had some pukey bugs, he’s never had a proper stomach bug, which blows my mind. I’d always heard tell of stomach bugs so bad that a kid would be confined to a tarp for the duration because it was just that hard to keep them from puking everywhere. That’s never happened to us, and it’s amazing.

And then I think of the stuff I had when I was a kid that Sam won’t have to deal with because he’s been vaccinated. There’s a chickenpox vaccine now; isn’t that wild? I missed my sixth birthday because of the chickenpox, and I remember that chunk of time as miserable, itchy, and boring. Sam won’t have to deal with that. He also won’t have to worry about coming down with certain types of pneumonia, which stole a good month of my life away when I was seven and has left me with bad lungs, like I’m the protagonist’s sister in a Tennessee Williams play.

I just really love that there’s technology now that prevents these illnesses and that keeps Sam from having to suffer the way that people suffered in the past–or worse. I hate him being even whiny sick like he was this weekend; that I’m able to prevent him from dealing with more severe illness is legitimately so awesome to me. Science is amazing.

Making a Jackass of Myself

April 19, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

The trouble didn’t really start yesterday until I got home from work. Sam was cheerfully watching PAW Patrol and playing with Duplos. After we said good-bye to my mother, he trotted over to cuddle on my lap, there wanting to play with me and watch videos on my phone, as we tend to do in the afternoon.

And really, it didn’t start until I started playing with the Duplos. He wanted me to build a light saber and fight him, but I was exhausted from a busy day at work and the looming prospect of cooking dinner. I stacked the 1×1 bricks into a tower, light saber style, and then held the tower against my nose. “I’m Pinocchio!” I told Sam and received a blank stare in response.

uhwht

Oh. Right. My son isn’t quite three yet, and we don’t own Pinocchio, and it’s too popular of a Disney film to be available on Netflix or On Demand. It’s a classic, so they want you to spend lots of money on it, but I’m just not that committed. Pinocchio hasn’t ever been one of my favorites, though until last night, I’d forgotten why. Still, when Sam didn’t understand that reference, I went into Google-fu mode and pulled up a clip of Pinocchio dancing to “I’ve Got No Strings.” Sam thought it was hilarious, particularly the Russian marionettes at the end, kicking themselves in the head and shouting, “Hey!” He wanted more, so I blindly tapped on the next video.

My mistake.

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As an adult, you realize a lot of things about “charming” children’s films you watched in your youth. Pinocchio, for example, is about as charming as the latest installment of the Saw franchise. Oh, sure, it starts out innocently enough, with a kindly old man wishing on a star to have a son and a blue fairy granting his wish by giving life to a puppet, but it’s all downhill from there. The living puppet gets kidnapped by an amalgamation of racist stereotypes who threatens to literally murder him if he doesn’t stay in his cage and perform on the road. That “I’ve Got No Strings” scene? It’s immediately followed by Pinocchio’s kidnapper laughing maniacally as he throws Pinocchio into a birdcage and throwing an axe at a pile of splintered wood that used to be marionettes just like Pinocchio. Yikes.

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(“this is the axe I will use to tear you limb from limb if you try to run away”)

And that’s just the beginning! The movie ends with a terrifying sequence involving a giant whale that could only be described as “rabid.” The beast, drawn with horrific exaggerated features, chases Pinocchio and his kindly father (and a cat and a goldfish and a cricket) through the ocean before attempting to crush them against a seawall. And he actually succeeds in killing Pinocchio! (I mean, inasmuch as one can kill a child made out of wood)

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(a family picture)

AND THAT ISN’T EVEN THE SCARIEST SCENE. The scariest scene, by far, takes place on a place called Pleasure Island. On Pleasure Island, “bad boys” can run wild to their heart’s content: drinking beer, smoking cigars, destroying a house, fighting, eating all the delicious food they want, and so on. The average denizen looks to be between the ages of eight and ten, so you can imagine their propensity for chaos. Things are not as they seem, though, as we’re taken below and discover that this island is magic: it turns “bad boys” into donkeys (“jackasses” per the film). Once they’ve completely lost their humanity, they’re sold into various forms of slavery in salt mines or circuses or various other places.

As if that’s not horrifying enough, we the audience get to watch this transformation take place. Pinocchio, hanging out in a pool hall with his new friend Lampwick, takes a long drag of his cigar and then sees Lampwick’s ears turn to donkey ears. A tail bursts from the back of Lampwick’s pants, and his face becomes that of a donkey. “What do I look like: a jackass?” Lampwick asks with a laugh, sounding every bit like a Chicago gangster.

“You sure do!” Pinocchio also laughs, but his laugh morphs into a donkey’s bray.

Lampwick, still naive to what’s happened, finds this hilarious. He laughs, but his laugh, too, becomes a donkey’s bray, and he clamps his hands over his mouth in horror. AND NOW THINGS GET REALLY FUN. Lampwick realizes that he’s turning into a donkey, and the bravado and tough-guy image vanish in an instant. He panics, as you do, and claws at Pinocchio, begging him for help, but there’s nothing Pinocchio can do as his friend’s hands turn to hooves. Lampwick’s pleas for help turn to only one word, a scream of “MAMA!” as the transformation completes. The donkey formerly known as Lampwick kicks and runs in terror, braying and screaming.

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(Walt Disney, are you okay)

It is fucked. up.

So. Which of those scenes did I accidentally show my almost-three-year-old? The deceptively charming opening? The whale? The chopped up marionettes? OR THE DONKEYS.

(it was the donkeys)

I think I’d suppressed how horrifying that scene really is (seriously, Walt Disney, what was wrong with you making that scene), along with its wretched implication that these children deserved this horror because they were “bad boys.” As the scene progressed, I felt a mix of emotions, the most prominent of which was the sinking regret of knowing I’d just created a new phobia for my son.

His tiny hands gripped my arm tightly as the scene played out. When it was over, we sat in silence for a beat, before he said in a quavering voice, as if fighting back tears, “I don’t want that.”

MOM OF THE YEAR RIGHT HERE.

I flew into damage control mode. The first step was to give him some resolution. I showed him the ending scene of Pinocchio and pointed out, hey, Pinocchio’s not a donkey anymore and he’s okay and everyone’s happy!

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(except Lampwick)

Then I gave him a hug and told him very firmly that you cannot turn into a donkey. Little boys do not turn into donkeys no matter what they do. This movie is not real. And for good measure, I added that I would never let that happen to him anyway, and if anyone ever hurt him or tried to hurt him, I would kick them and punch them and hit them.

(he liked that quite a lot)

But now he started going on about the donkeys in his room. “Mommy, go upstairs and kick and punch and hit the donkeys in my room,” he ordered. So we had to tackle the donkey issue now. I explained that no, there were no donkeys in his room and that donkeys are actually quite sweet creatures. I showed him cute videos of donkeys and then Donkey from Shrek as comparison. Eventually, he calmed down and hugged me and said, “You’re the best Mommy ever, you’ll kick and punch and hit them,” which assuaged my guilt a little bit.

But of course, that was undone entirely this morning, when Sam climbed up into my lap and said, “Mommy, do you remember the video and he turned into a donkey? That was scary.”

Sigh. All I can really say in my defense is that sometimes, you get a blue fairy to grant a wish and sometimes, you make a complete jackass out of yourself.

Easter and Tradition

April 17, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Yesterday was Easter.

When I was a kid, we had a lot of Easter traditions. The day before Easter, we all piled into my parents’ minivan and trekked out to Hebert’s Candy Mansion in Shrewsbury, MA, for our annual purchase of Easter delights (Hebert’s has wonderful solid chocolate bunnies and probably some of the best tasting chocolate I’ve had in my life). Once we’d spent way too much money on sugary goods, we’d head home and dye eggs. My mother hard boiled a dozen large white eggs, and my brother, sister, and I sat around half a dozen coffee cups filled with vinegar and fizzing tablets intended to stain the eggs in red and blue and purple and green.

The next morning, we rose before dawn (we had to get all the Easter festivities out of the way before heading off to church) and typically went through an extended telling of the Easter story over breakfast before combing the house for hidden eggs and Easter baskets. The baskets were stocked simply: the candy we’d purchased the day before and maybe a simple gift, usually with a religious theme (one year, we all got Bibles; another year, it was all Christian literature. In contrast, though, one year, we all got small toys–my sister and I got My Little Pony bunnies and my brother got a toy train).

From there, the day varied year by year. Every year, we went to church. Some years, my siblings and I sang in a church chorus that my dad directed (I think they still have the video of all of us shriek-singing “Hear the Bells Ringing,” the congregation falling over themselves with laughter at the sudden bombastic increase in volume as we all exclaim, “JOY TO THE WORLD!”). Other years, we sniffled our way through a simpler service, all reminded that we’d inherited my mother’s allergy to Easter lilies. After church, we often had my mother’s family visit, which meant a lot of cleaning and cooking and prepping of our little house. At some point in the afternoon, my dad and my uncles went out into the yard and hid candy-filled eggs for the little kids to find and money-filled eggs for us big kids. It was almost always cold and rainy.

Kyle and I take a much simpler approach to Easter, owing at least partly to the fact that neither of us are really church-goers… and partly to the fact that Sam is still not quite three and has only the vaguest grasp of concepts like “Easter” and “candy” and “look for the eggs.” We don’t dye eggs because nobody in our house really eats hard boiled eggs, and we don’t really entertain, so those colorful eggs would end up sitting in our fridge until someone got fed up and threw them away. We do Easter baskets and candy eggs, mostly because Kyle and I only have one kid right now and we really like lavishing him with goodies.

(true story: Kyle has to hold me back from overspending on Sam’s Easter basket. I don’t go to the lengths of people who treat Easter as Christmas 2.0, but he’s reminded me on numerous occasions that both of us got maybe one or two trinkets for Easter and turned out just fine, and so Sam will turn out just fine if I don’t fill his basket to overflowing)

(other true story: Kyle really hates Easter grass, but Easter baskets look ridiculous without it. We tried to compromise this year by getting edible Easter grass, but it’s kind of like if raw spaghetti tasted like cotton candy. Sam wasn’t impressed, I’m not impressed, and I think Kyle’s going to end up eating all of it)

(yummy)

So it went this year. Sam had a modest basket filled with mostly candy and a few toys and books (namely, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures that are exactly the right size for his toddler hands; he hasn’t put them down since he plucked them from the basket). We got some oversized plastic eggs from Target and filled them with jelly beans and pastel M&Ms and chocolate bunnies wrapped in foil. I love dressing Sam up, so I got him some turquoise pants and a striped shirt from Old Navy, and he wore those to my parents’ house, where we all ate spaghetti and meatballs and watched a decade-old documentary on the making of Star Wars.

Oh, and I baked a cake that tasted “okay” and that looked like a frosting factory had a tragic accident. Suffice it to say that I will not soon be quitting my day job to be either (a) a Pinterest Mom, or (b) a baker.

(this happens to me with unerring frequency. Complex decoration is not my forte)

Holidays are honestly one of the more delightful parts of raising our own new family. We consider the traditions that we enjoyed as kids, discard the ones that don’t fit (dyeing hard boiled eggs) and keep the ones that do (the trip to Hebert’s, which is much less crowded at 10 a.m. a week before Easter than it is at 2 p.m. the day before Easter, let me tell you).

We create our own traditions, too. This year, I sort of invented a tradition that Sam isn’t quite old enough to understand yet: the Easter lobster. While we were at Hebert’s, Sam spotted a lollipop shaped like a lobster and dyed his favorite shade of cherry red. I’m horribly indulgent when it comes to holidays and Sam making cute faces at me, and so I bought it. I have no explanation, as of yet, for the Easter lobster; but you bet I’m going to buy a lobster lollipop for Easter every year until the day I die.

All of those traditions wrapped up together create our family identity, and what I really love is that a family identity in that sense isn’t limited to traditional nuclear families. It extends to found families, too. I love reading about my friends in their 20s who just live together as roommates and friends and are still pulling together found family traditions–dyeing eggs and giving each other Easter baskets and the like. And those traditions and identities, in turn, become part of your individual identity, and basically, humans are really cool in that way.

(we’re all Tevye at heart, a little bit)

The upcoming months are free of any major holidays but are absolutely packed with things to do–Sam turns three on May 13, Mother’s Day is somewhere around there, we’re flying to Texas for a vacation on May 18, getting back in time for Memorial Day, then Father’s Day and Kyle’s birthday in June, and throw in a business trip for good measure. It’ll all finally calm down somewhere around Independence Day–a holiday for which our traditions mostly entail going to my uncle’s house for a cookout (for which I intend to bake something else) and then coming home, hot and exhausted, to watch Boston’s Pops Goes the Fourth! on television rather than in person, because I am not braving those crowds thank you very much.

And then long, hot, boring July and August and September, Renaissance Faires and Kat’s birthday and Halloween in October, all bleeding into a holiday season that stretches, for me at least, from October straight on through January. And then it all starts over again.

Other People’s Pregnancies

April 14, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

As a rule of thumb, I’ve become immune to the overall distress that comes with infertility, at least when pertaining to other pregnant women.

I don’t think this makes me special in any way, but it does create some distance when I’m talking with other infertile women. A common sentiment in infertility communities is this sort of bitterness or frustration with seeing other people in your life get pregnant while you try and try and don’t succeed. And… yeah, I get that. I was there when we were trying so hard to get pregnant with Sam, only it was rarely with people I knew. Instead, it was with random strangers I’d pass in the mall or wherever, waddling along with their round bellies in front of them, daring to look happy. I wasn’t mad at them, not really. I only thought, “Why not me?”

This second time around has been pretty different for me, emotionally speaking. I think part of it is because I’ve been through pregnancy, so I’m not looking at them and thinking, “Why not me?” but rather, “Oh man, I hope you get a chance to put your feet up later today.” Pregnancy isn’t easy, and I think a pet peeve arises for me when people act as if you shouldn’t complain about being pregnant, either because some people can’t get pregnant or because you should be happy that you’re having a baby. Look: if I ever get pregnant again, I will be over the moon with joy about that fact. That said, I will also complain about morning sickness, the aches, the pains, the fact that my body will suddenly be the same temperature as the sun, all the swelling, the exhaustion, the Braxton Hicks contractions, the need to pee every 30 seconds, the inexplicable magnetism of a pregnant belly as it acts upon complete strangers, and so on.

In other words: I don’t think your happiness and gratitude about being pregnant in any way precludes you being able to complain about being pregnant.

When I was pregnant with Sam, my body basically decided it was done being pregnant the second we hit the 40 week mark. The trouble was, it didn’t make this decision by going into labor. Instead, I swelled up like a balloon, gaining 30 pounds of water weight in a week. I couldn’t exist comfortably. Every position possible was miserable for me. My hips and lower back felt permanently misaligned. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I itched (this, I would later learn, was likely intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy… either that or a symptom of my gallbladder quitting). I was miserable, but that in no way meant that I wasn’t grateful for Sam’s impending arrival or happy that he was on his way.

I think the difference ends up being that for me, pregnancy is just a means of getting to the place I want to be, that place being motherhood. I didn’t get pregnant to be pregnant; I got pregnant to have a child. I wasn’t happy about being pregnant; I was happy to be having a child.

And now he’s here, and I’m still happy about it.

With that in mind, it doesn’t faze me in the least when people complain about being pregnant. Being pregnant is hard! It’s one of the most stressful positive things you can put your body through (and I don’t say that to make any martyr statements; training for a marathon is pretty stressful and positive, too. So is climbing Mount Everest and like. Six bajillion other things that I’m like “hey, I’d never do that, but you do you” about). And I don’t really relate to the idea that people shouldn’t complain about the physical stress of being pregnant because “hey! At least you’re pregnant!” Yeah, you’re pregnant. And that means you’re physically uncomfortable. A lot physically uncomfortable. I feel you.

And on the flip side, it doesn’t faze me when people are really happy about being pregnant, either. Dude, it’s awesome! There’s the physical discomfort, sure, but there are also so many cool things you experience, like those first little shivery flutters that turn into movement. And man, everyone spoils you rotten when you’re pregnant. They stop the second the baby is born, but as long as you’ve got that belly, people will open doors for you and help you carry things and ask if you need anything and be overall far more generous than usual. And absolutely best of all, you’re getting a human at the end of it. An actual, real live human that you get to raise. That’s pretty sweet!

I remember the first times I felt Sam move, when I didn’t even realize that’s what I was feeling. It was that sensation of butterflies in your stomach, that light and fluttery shivery feeling. The bigger he got, the more I felt him. The first time I really felt him was, hilariously enough, when we were watching the first Hobbit movie with my family and someone started speaking the Black Speech. Thump, thump, thump went Sam as the infamous script on the One Ring was read: “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.” It was hilarious!

And gosh, but I love my little human. He and I are baking a cake later today, and he’s been excited about it all week. He keeps running to our supplies and asking if it’s time yet. Every time I go into the kitchen, even just to get a drink, he runs in with me and pulls his baking chair over to the counter so that we can bake together. And I kind of dissolve into a little puddle of momma goo, like, Kiddo, you could literally ask me for anything right now and I’d be like, “Absolutely.”

So joy over pregnancy? That doesn’t faze me. I get it. And I’m happy for you.

The things that do faze me, the things that make me angry and say, “Why not me?” are usually when I see objectively bad parents continuing to have children. I don’t mean parents who don’t give their kids organic food or who are crunchier than I could ever dream of being or parents who are struggling to get it right and mess up sometimes.

I mean abusive parents. Parents who beat their children or sexually molest them. Parents who say such terrible things to their children–that they wish their kids had never been born, that their kids are worthless, that their kids don’t deserve nice things. Parents who see their children as objects to be used and discarded at their whim, abused if they don’t behave “correctly” or otherwise don’t live up to impossible expectations. Parents who let other people harm their children, who don’t listen when their kids come to them for protection, who make things worse. Parents who refuse to get their children medical help because it goes against their personal beliefs, and so they let their children die of easily treatable things.

(that’s a depressing thought, so here’s a kitten hugging a puppy)

I see stories, so many stories, about parents who’ve done these things and have so many kids. And that’s when I think, “Why them and not me?”

I know I’m not a perfect mom. It’s impossible to be a perfect mom. I’ve probably already given Sam’s future tell-all book at least three chapters of material. But my god, I love that kid, so very much. I couldn’t ever intentionally hurt him, not more than the pain that comes with not letting him get his way 24/7 or holding him in place so that he can get a vaccination. The idea of someone hurting him simultaneously breaks my heart and fills me with such preemptive rage that I feel myself hulking out.

(DON’T. HURT. MY. KID.)

I remember when he had to get his first vaccines, at two months old. I am SUPER pro-vaccination; I think vaccinations may be the greatest invention of the last three hundred years. The diseases prevented by the two month vaccines are so terrifying to me, and understandably so: whooping cough, diptheria, polio, tetanus, pneumococcal disease. The idea of watching my baby with any of those was horrifying to me, and I was intellectually super ready to get him vaccinated.

But emotionally, I was not ready. For every moment of his existence to that point, he was able to wholly trust me to keep him from feeling any pain. Whenever he cried from hunger or discomfort, I was there to feed him or rearrange him or do whatever he needed. I kept him warm and fed, safe, and free from pain. And even though I was intellectually all about getting him vaccinated (because duh, Abby, the pain from tetanus is MUCH worse than the pinprick of a needle), knowing that I was allowing him to experience pain kind of broke my heart into a million tiny pieces.

The nurse noticed me tearing up as she got ready to give him the shots. “It’s alright. You’re normal,” she said with a wry smile. “Trust me, this is much more upsetting to you than it is to him. He won’t even remember this.”

And she was right. Sam still trusts me wholly. Kyle is usually the one he calls out for when he’s afraid (because Kyle is 6’4” tall and built like a bear), but I’m his go-to when he’s an emotional wreck.

But either way. It was hard enough for me to let someone cause him pain when I knew it would have a long term benefit. Letting someone hurt him just because? Hurting him myself just because? Seeing him as anything less than the fantastic human being he is?

FUCK no.

(just no)

That’s when infertility feels keenly unfair to me. It’s when I see someone who hurts their children going on to have more and more and more children. It’s when I see someone who’s willing to let their children be harmed, physically or sexually or emotionally, walking around with a baby bump. It’s when I see someone who’s an objectively horrible parent having so many kids and I, who try so hard to put everything into bringing up my child to be the best possible person, can’t manage to stay pregnant for more than a couple of weeks at a time.

That is when it hurts.

Hair!

April 10, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

I love getting my hair done, and I am absolutely blissful about the way mainstream fashion has embraced funky hair colors.

From the time I was about thirteen, I’ve always wanted to have purple hair in some way. When I was thirteen, that way recalled various anime heroines–a short black bob with long purple pieces in the front. Think something akin to Mako Mori in Pacific Rim. I just thought that was the absolute pinnacle of coolness (because it is), and though I wasn’t allowed to put purple streaks in my hair back then, I dreamed of the day when I could go absolutely nuts when it came to hair color.

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(were this a movie blog, I’d tell you how this movie taught me SO MUCH about visual storytelling, but it’s not a movie blog)

Purple was out, as I recall, because this was back before wild hair colors were mainstream enough that you could wear them to school or work without getting in trouble for being a distraction. Purple was out, but somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, bleach blonde was in. I remember sitting in the hair salon that I’d visited since I was eight, tears streaming down my cheeks as my hairdresser plucked strands of hair through a net to give me highlights. She kept accidentally stabbing my scalp, and oh my god, it hurt like you would not believe.

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But the results were utterly cool, in that late 90s, early 2000s way. Back then, everyone frosted their hair (that’s what we called it–frosted tips, which sounds so wrong now for some reason), and I was part of everyone. About five minutes into my freshman year of college, I chopped off the damaged bleach blonde hair, and the next year, I dove into the world of lowlights. In my mind, I wanted to look a little bit more like Kelly Clarkson at her Kelly Clarksonest.

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(she is awesome, but why any of us late 90s, early 2000s kids thought this was a good look is beyond me)

Instead, I ended up with a deep mahogany wash that was SO CLOSE to the purple I’d always imagined. I loved that hair, and I stuck with the deep red for years after that. It was fun to play with, the color of cherries when the light hit it, almost black in the shadows. I could wear it all gothic and serious or I could wear it elegant, which I did for my wedding in 2011.

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But. It still wasn’t purple. I loved it, but I still dreamed of purple, and that remained an impossible dream for a long time. Up until recently, the idea of working in corporate America with an unnatural hair color was absurd, to say the least. My dreams of purple hair were desperately at odds with my need to work for a living. Red was elegant and professional enough to allow me to blend in, but purple? Not a chance.

Things happened, though. My career came to a sudden halt when I was laid off from my first post-masters-degree job. I spent the next four years focused almost entirely on the business of getting pregnant, being pregnant, and raising a gleeful child. I couldn’t really afford to get my hair done for most of that time, and when I could, I stuck with a wash-cut-and-dry rather than anything particularly memorable. I didn’t see the point in doing much more, since my life was almost entirely indoors and away from anyone who’d care what my hair looked like.

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(in case you are wondering, this is what experts call “depression”)

Last winter, prompted by Kat’s enthusiasm for getting her hair done (her hair is PINK. It’s also enviably thick and falls past her waist because Kat is unfairly gorgeous) and with Kyle’s encouragement, I finally made an appointment to get my hair purpled at a salon near my house. The whole process took a couple of hours, and my GOD, I was so happy with the results! It was a tame purpling, by most people’s standards: I just had them put a wash over my normal hair color, making it glint amethyst in the light. Still, I finally had my purple hair, and I was pleased as punch about it.

Meanwhile, there’s Sam.

Sam had his first haircut a couple of days after his first birthday. He has thick blonde hair that grows like a weed; by the time he turned one, you couldn’t see his eyes anymore. With his Nana along for moral support (and handholding), I took him to a cute kids’ salon in the same plaza as my usual salon. He cried the whole time, mostly out of confusion and concern, but afterwards, he looked so grown up and so handsome.

(I’m biased, I know)

We’ve taken him for regular salon trips since, roughly every six months to keep him from looking completely ridiculous. Our most recent hair salon trip was this weekend, and in excitement for that, he told me that he wanted to have red hair. Not ginger red, mind you. Fire engine red. Crayola red. Darth Vader’s lightsaber red.

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(Ariel red, I would have called it, but he is not me)

And, well, I obliged. 2017 is a rough time to be alive for a lot of reasons, but it’s also a pretty great time to be alive, if only because people have, by and large, stopped caring if you have funky hair, whether you’re almost-three or thirty-three. Sam wanted bright red hair, and he got it (albeit in the form of hair gel that washed out in the bath later that night, but still). If he wanted bright blue hair, I’d be happy to oblige him there, too. I love seeing him express himself, whether it’s by wearing three shirts to school (son, I have a lot of questions, but you do you), by taking fastidious care of his (and our) toe jam, or by getting streaks of primary colors in his hair.

red

As for me, I’ve been watching a woman who works in the same building as me for a couple of months now. She drives a bright yellow car with a license plate that says “B HAPPI,” and her hair is a fantastic shade of turquoise. I figure I’ll take her car’s advice, and with any luck, the salon will have an opening this weekend, and I’ll have purple hair again by next week.

Nothing to Fear, Except…

April 5, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Three-year-olds and almost!three-year-olds are funny creatures in the way they develop completely irrational fears.

My parents have long taken great delight in this story. When I was three, I saw what appeared to be a rather large spider in the ceiling corner of the room. A budding arachnophobe, I called my father and said, “Daddy, kill it.”

As it turns out, the spider was not a spider. It was some dust.

(shown: also not a spider, but definitely not dust)

I probably had other irrational fears at that time, though none of them get the milage of the dust spider story.

Sam, too, is developing irrational fears. No sooner do we quash one than another springs up in its place, like so many weeds. There’s probably a long child psychology reason for this, but I’m groggy and don’t feel like doing my research today. And anyway, the long child psychology reason behind three-year-olds and almost!three-year-olds isn’t the point of this story.

About six or so months ago, we saw irrational fears for the first time… though in that period, they seemed completely logical. Sam was going through a pretty stressful time. He’d recently switched classes at his daycare (from the infant and toddler room to the junior preschool), moved from the bedroom he’d slept in since we bought the house to the smaller room next door, and changed from a crib to a big boy bed. By day, he embraced these changes as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

By night, however, things got a little hairy.

You see, we’re bad parents in the sense that we help Sam calm down for the night by watching videos with him on our phones. He has various preferences, but the longest running favorite, the one he goes back to even after months of being away, is Disney’s Fantasia.

(for the most part, harmless, right?)

We used to watch it in segments, one segment before bed every night. Each segment is about 10-15 minutes long, and there are eight segments in total. We’d get through Fantasia in a week or so and then start it all over again. The final segment is called “Night on Bald Mountain” and literally features Satan–here called Chernabog–having a party with his minions while looming over a sleepy European village. I never watched it as a kid, but as an adult, I love it, if only because it’s a really neat bit of animation (especially for 1940!).

Sam loves it, too. When he was much littler, and that would be his Fantasia segment for the evening, he’d chirp, “Good night Satan!” as we turned the program off. More recently, he wriggles in his seat, dancing along with the demons and harpies and furies and what-have-you as they rock out to Modest Mussorgsky’s classic piece. He always begs us to watch it, no matter the time of day.

(while I’m here, why is Chernabog so ripped?)

We weren’t really in a Fantasia stage six months ago; we were getting ready to go on a family trip to Disney World. As part of our preparation to do so, I was showing Sam videos of Disney’s Fantasmic! fireworks show before bed. The show features Mickey Mouse battling the Forces of Darkness in his imagination and has some Disney message about the power of imagination to triumph over fear or something like that. One of the featured Forces of Darkness was the Chernabog (really, he shows up for a one or two second cameo), and he was the one Sam was most excited to see, if only because he didn’t recognize any of the other villains.

SO.

Combining a bunch of changes with videos of literal Satan is absolutely a recipe for disaster when you have a toddler. The first week those changes took effect, Sam woke up every night, terrified that the Chernabog was going to get him (he’s yet to be “gotten” in any way that involves anything but tickling, but I suppose I’d be terrified of literal Satan tickling me, too). After the second sleepless night, Kyle and I implemented a bunch of changes. Anything featuring Chernabog was completely banned from nighttime rituals. We watched innocuous videos–baking shows, silly songs, nothing scary. We set Sam up with his Darth Vader Bear (a gift from his Aunt Veri) and gave him several lightsabers. We used “dream cream” (lotion that I rubbed on his hands and told him would keep bad dreams away). Even Kat got in on the action and made Sam an awesome painting of Darth Vader–his hero–fighting the Chernabog.

(are you wondering if Kat is the best? Because she is)

And eventually, the nightmares went away. Sam is not in the least afraid of the Chernabog, and Kyle and I thought we’d learned our lesson about exposing our kid to things that would scare him.

Key word being thought. I’ve learned a curious truth about toddlers in the last several days: they will develop irrational fears of absolutely anything for no reason whatsoever.

The newest fear began about a week or so ago. Sam sat on the couch picking at his feet and growing increasingly concerned at the toe jam he was finding in doing so. “What is that?” he asked, alarmed.

“Oh, that’s just toe jam,” I answered, brushing it into the abyss of the floor that was vacuumed shortly thereafter. I thought that would be the last of it.

It was not.

Sam now refuses to go on the floor barefoot. If he’s not wearing socks and shoes or footie pajamas, he wraps around me and Kyle like an octopus and insists on being carried everywhere. If we try to set him down on the floor, barefoot, he shrieks like we’re setting him down into boiling oil.

The first time he did this was a weekday, and I asked Sam as he clung to me, “What are you so afraid of?”

“Toe jam!” he answered, much the way I’m sure I asked my father to kill the dust spider. “There’s toe jam on the floor!”

His fear extends to us as well. On Saturday, Kyle sat with his feet up, watching TV. Out of nowhere, Sam trotted over and began inspecting between Kyle’s toes for toe jam, all the while wearing the most serious of expressions (Kyle, meanwhile, was doing his best not to shriek with laughter for how much it tickled; I didn’t even try). Later, he more than willingly stayed in the bathtub, scrubbing his feet until he was certain they were free of toe jam.

I’ve tried to explain that it’s just dust from his socks getting sweaty, but Sam remains unconvinced. As far as he’s concerned, toe jam is worse than the Chernabog and dust spiders combined. It’s pure evil, and nothing and no one can tell him otherwise.

I’ll figure out the psychological implications of this situation later. In the meantime, I’ll be happy that at least my son is willingly washing his feet at night.

Panic! At the Parental Disco

April 3, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Last night, Sam didn’t eat a nickel.

It began like this: I got home from doing some shopping with Kat (makeup and books, in ladylike fashion), and as I was taking something out of my pocket, a nickel fell out. Sam seized upon this like a toddler seizing upon a shiny object.

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“A penny!” he exclaimed and insisted on this description, despite Kyle and my attempts to correct him. He’s a stubborn kid, that one.

Sam gleefully marched around the living room, showing off his “penny” to anyone and anything within earshot. During one pass, he brought the nickel up to his lips, and Kyle and I immediately pounced. “DO NOT eat the nickel!” we scolded him, and, scolded, he did not eat the nickel, at least on first blush.

(contrast with his usual response to us telling him not to do something, shown above)

We looked away, as we do. As a parent, you look away. It’s just a thing that happens. You turn to answer a phone call or change the channel on the TV or have a conversation. Tragedy can happen in those seconds you look away, and that’s what we thought we were getting yesterday.

“Where’s my penny?” Sam asked at bedtime. He’d developed an astonishing attachment to the coin in the exactly two hours he’d known of its existence. We searched for it high and low, but we didn’t turn up a single nickel.

“Do you remember where you put it?” we asked Sam, and he nodded.

“I ate it,” he said.

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Sam isn’t usually a kid that eats things–any things. I’ve never met a pickier eater, myself included. He shuns most toddler basics–including juice, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese–and picks idly at even the things he does like (including, oddly enough, broccoli and carrots. The kid won’t eat a hot dog, but he’ll go nuts over some broccoli). We’ve tried several methods of getting him to eat more, but no dice. This child eats like a very finicky bird.

On the plus side, this means we almost never have to worry about him investigating the world with his mouth. We’ve had exactly two incidents of this in his three years of life. Once, we came upstairs to find that he’d taken a bite out of his blinds (and promptly spat out what he bit off; I’m really not sure what he was thinking). The other time, while playing with Play Doh, he popped a pretend piece of pepperoni pizza in his piehole.

(prompting protests from precious perturbed pandas)

So we don’t have a lot of experience with him eating stuff, but we do have a lot of experience with frantically googling whatever is going on with him in a bid to figure out what we should do next. Our frantic googling last night taught us that as long as he hadn’t choked on the errant nickel, he had a 95% chance of passing it through his digestive tract without incident. Every link told us, however, that we should be on the lookout for severe stomach pain, constipation, and fever.

Imagine, then, our panic at 10:00 p.m. when Sam woke up complaining that his tummy hurt.

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“Where does your tummy hurt?” I asked him.

“Right here,” he said, pointing to nowhere in particular and climbing onto my lap for a hug.

“How bad does it hurt?” Kyle asked him.

“A little bad. Can you read me a story?” he asked, climbing under the covers.

“Is it getting worse or getting better?” we asked him.

“I don’t know. Can you turn off the light?” he continued, his eyes falling closed.

Kyle had entered a parental state of anxiety, and I was right there with him. What if Sam had a bowel obstruction? What if he needed surgery? Mentally, I took a tally of the people I’d have to contact about taking off from work. I’d have to stay home with him, and I’d want to postpone this month’s FET cycle. Kyle and I would have to call our offices in the morning, and then we’d have to call the daycare and Sam’s primary pediatrician. He’d have to change a lot about his life. Maybe he’d have to have a colostomy bag; what an awful thing for a toddler!

As I went through all of this planning mentally–my preferred method for dealing with Bad Things–Kyle called the 24 hour nurse line and continued to consult google. We changed back into our jeans and T-shirts from our pajamas, prepared to drive to the nearest ER if they told us to. At length, the nurses called back and said, “If he’s fallen back asleep, he’s probably fine. Keep an eye on him, and call us again if anything changes.”

Probably fine. Alright. Still charged with anxious energy, we went to bed, but both of us kept an ear turned towards the monitor, certain that at any moment, Sam would wake up screaming in agony. Kyle scolded himself as we drifted off: “I should’ve taken it away from him when I had the chance,” he said.

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But the night passed without incident (though not without jarring anxiety dreams). We all came downstairs this morning, Kyle and I groggy and still half-panicked, and Sam cheerful and talkative. I helped Sam to get dressed, tugging on his favorite black sneakers (his Darth Vader shoes). Kyle reached for his own shoes and started laughing.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to wrangle my wriggling toddler.

Without words and still laughing, Kyle held up a nickel that Sam had stored in the toe of his shoe for safekeeping the night before. Sam saw it and lit up. “My penny!” he exclaimed and jumped off my lap to retrieve his treasure.

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We learned a lot of things last night. We learned to pay closer attention when Sam is playing with basically anything. We learned to focus on how he’s actually behaving and talking than how we’re afraid he’ll start behaving and talking. We learned that our local nursing team have the patience of saints when dealing with panicky parents.

And most importantly, we learned that our son is a little turd who will 100% say that he ate coins when he did not, in fact, eat any coins.

Love, Science & Nat 20s

The family life of a bunch of nerds.

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