Category Archives: parenting

The Little Man’s Little Thumb

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A few weeks ago, the Little Man injured his right thumb. It was by no means a serious injury, just one of those things that happens when 4-year-olds play. He didn’t even cry. We noticed that he couldn’t straighten out his thumb afterward. We visited the urgent care, then his pediatrician, who sent him for x-rays. The x-rays came back normal but he was sent to a orthopedist just to be safe. Turns out, he had what’s known as “trigger finger.” The condition probably existed at the time of his injury, and the injury just brought it to light.

This morning, the Little Man had surgery to correct the condition. This required general anesthesia, which is always a little nerve-wracking. But this was the third time that the Little Man has had general anesthesia and the surgery itself took only 15 minutes. We left the house at 6:30 am and were back home by 11 am. The Little Man was brave and smiling throughout and the surgery corrected the condition. In about 9 days–when the cast comes off–he will have full mobility and functionality of his right thumb once again.

Yes, there is kind of a cast. Lots of padding and wrapping and bandages, which almost seems overkill for an incision that was barely a few millimeters. But the Little Man is nearly four and the cast will help ensure proper healing.

Thumb Cast

At the time of this writing, the Little Man is downstairs, happily playing with the Little Miss (and some new toys). He will miss t-ball for two weeks, but he was going to miss a week anyway as we are taking a road trip on Memorial Day weekend. He is a little trooper, though.

I always get a little nervous before these things and it is a relief to have this behind us.

A Perspective on Priorities

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When I picked up the Little Miss from her daycare today, she had a bloody nose. Not a big deal, just a little bloody nose. She has a wonderful daycare and the caretakers told me what had happened that led to the bloody nose. Perfectly normal stuff.

I brought her home. Kelly and the Little Man were already home. The Little Miss had brought a rose for Kelly for Mother’s Day.

“Happy mommy’s day,” the Little Miss said, running into the house to give the rose to Kelly.

“Oh, thank you!” Kelly said. There was a pause. “What happened to–”

“She got a bloody nose at school,” I said.

The Little Man perked up. At nearly four years old, he is fascinated by blood.

I explained what happened. “When so-and-so’s dad came to pick him up, all of the kids suddenly wanted to play with the same toy, or something. I think they said it was a dinosaur. Anyway, in the commotion, whosits threw the dinosaur and it bobbed the Little Miss squarely in the nose.”

“Aww, my poor little girl!” Kelly said. The Little Miss did not seem bothered by this in the least.

The Little Man seemed to consider the story carefully and then asked what he deemed to be the most significant question.

“What kind of dinosaur was it?”

Get Whatever You Want in 12 Easy Steps

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This post is brought to you courtesy of the Little Miss, who demonstrated the process this very evening to a small audience. I am merely passing along her methods, which, I should add, are frighteningly effective. Credit where credit is due.

Step 1. Begin nonchalantly. Stand up on your mom and dad’s bed.

Step 2. Release your stored up energy. Jump around on mom and dad’s bed, until mom says, “It’s time to relax, no jumping.”

Step 3. Demonstrate your independence. Continue to jump anyway until mom say, “If you don’t listen you’ll have to go into your own bed.”

Step 4. Call the bluff. Live for the moment. Do it again.

Step 5. Marvel at how quickly your are transported to your own bed.

Step 6. Play along. Lay down quietly, feigning sleep.

Step 7. Wait five minutes.

Step 8. Start yelling for mommy. Throw in a few screams. Turn on the waterworks.

Step 9. When daddy asks why you are crying, say, “I want mommy pick me up.”

Step 10. Surprise your opponent. When daddy says, “You can’t sleep in our bed, you have to sleep in here,” you say in your charming, voluble, 21-month-old voice, “I be good girl!”

Step 11. Puppy-eyes for effect.

Step 12. Marvel at how quickly you are transported to mommy and daddy’s bed.

Game. Set. Match.

The Little Miss Channels… The Terminator?

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The nightly routine

We go upstairs. The kids play for a little while, while Kelly and I do various tasks in preparation for the next day. Lay out clothes. Pack bags and backpacks. Then it’s time for a bath or shower. When that is over we read a book. Sometimes, we read two, one for the Little Man and another for the Little Miss. When the book-reading is done, the kids usually climb onto our bed. They each get to watch a show. The Little Miss generally watches Caillou, while the Little Man, obsessed with superheroes as he is1, watches The Avengers cartoon. They both drink their milk.

It is during this brief respite that I squeeze in the my daily fiction-writing. I can generally get as much as 500 words done before the shows are over. At some point, Kelly gets the Little Miss into her sleep-sack, usually with only minor protest. Not long after that, the Little Miss will say, “Daddy, I ready!” Usually she has to yell this, as I wear my noise-canceling headset as I write. Usually, I respond (once I hear her), with “Okay, I just need two minutes.” This is because the Little Miss has chosen the exact wrong moment in my writing to “be ready.” I finish my thoughts, typing feverishly. Then I stand.

“Okay,” I say, taking out my iPhone and holding it up, “should we go listen to rain music?”

The Little Miss waddles across the bed in her sleep sack, a big grin on her face. She practically leaps into my arms.

“Goo-night, mommy,” she says. “Goo-night, Little Man.”

“Goodnight,” Kelly says.

The Little Man generally says nothing, absorbed as he is in what is going on with the Avengers. We prod him and without taking his eyes off the TV he says, “Goodnight!”

“I love you!” the Little Miss says.

“I love you,” Kelly says. “Sweet dreams.”

We start to walk out of the room and this is where the Little Miss channels the Terminator, every night, without fail.

“I be back,” she announces.

And before morning, she almost always is.

Notes

  1. I wonder where he gets that from? ↩

Down the Drain

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I am on my third reread of Stephen King’s It. (What can I say, I like it that much.) Those who have read the book know that significant portions of it either take place in, or are related to, the canal and drain system beneath the fictional Maine town of Derry.

I was in the house a few evenings ago reading the book, the part where Bev Marsh is in her bathroom and hears the voices in the drain of her sink. Kelly and the kids were outside, playing. I was totally and completely absorbed in the story, but from somewhere, from a distance (like a voice coming from deep within a drain?) I heard crying. I emerged back to consciousness, feeling the same kind of weary connection back to reality that I experience when I’ve spent much of my day heads-down writing code. I saw that just out front, Kelly was holding the Little Man and that he was crying. Curious, I went out to find what had happened.

They’d been playing with a ball. One of those brightly colored, inflatable plastic balls you see stacked in great piles within mesh bins in grocery stores. Giant gumballs filled with air. Kelly had reinflated one of the balls and it bounced really well. Too well. It got away from the Little Man. It got away from Kelly. It rolled slowly across the street, following a track that curved slightly to the left until it dropped into a drain basin. I’d recovered many a lost object from that drain basis, but the thing is, the ball entered the side of the basin closest to our house–dropping straight down into a pipe that resembled, well, a Morlock hole, and was lost in the waterworks deep below our street.

The Little Man was devastated. “Where does it go? Why can’t we get it?” he asked.

“The pipes are too small for us to fit in,” I said, thinking about those pipes running underneath Derry, thinking about the voices.

“But why?”

“Because they are made for water,” I said.

“Where does the water go?”

“Eventually, out to sea–to the ocean.”

“The salt ocean?” the Little Man asked.

“That’s right,” I said.

He burst into tears again, “There’s sharks in the salt ocean and they’ll eat my ball.”

“No they won’t,” I said, “they don’t eat rubber. Or plastic.” I wasn’t sure this was true, but I am, after all, a fiction writer, and it doesn’t have to be true, it just has to make sense to the audience. My audience, in this case, was my three-going-on-four-year-old.

“But the ball will just stay there?”

“Well,” I said, “I think the ball will eventually get used as a house for some small sea animals.”

“But how will they get inside it?”

A gave him a little grin, “The Octonauts will carve some holes in the ball so the animals can get inside.”

He gave me a half-smile, “That’s just a joke, Daddy?”

“Yeah, that’s just a joke.”

We have another ball, just like the one he lost, only orange instead of green. I figured he’d forget about it right away. But he hasn’t. Even as recent as yesterday afternoon, walking home from school, cheerfully telling me about his day, he paused for a moment, silent. Then he said, rather resignedly, “Daddy, my ball is lost down the drain.”

“I know.”

“I’m sad for my ball,” said the Little Man.

Daylight Saving Pet Peeves

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First and foremost, it is daylight saving time, and not daylight savings time as I both see and hear it referred to by so many people. There is a difference, slight at it may be. It is not a bank account into which you put your accumulated savings of daylight (and earn an utterly meaningless amount of daylight interest). You cannot withdraw daylight from your daylight savings account in the winter to get you an extra hour of sunlight. Small pet peeve, I know, but there it is nevertheless.

I actually like daylight saving time, and I like even more that it has been expanded. It is, like my birthday, yet another harbinger of spring, and spring is probably my favorite season. (And spring is always so much better after a somewhat cold and snowy winter!)

My real pet peeve regarding daylight saving time has plagued me for only a few years. Daylight saving time and parenting don’t mix well. Parenting, especially when your kids are very young, seems to be all about routine. Daylight saving time (and the eventual return to standard time) screw up those routines. It’s not so bad when your kids are infants. But when they are toddlers or preschoolers, it can wreak havoc on a well-ordered household.

Advantage: we can start taking our evening walks again as a family.

Disadvantage: the kids aren’t tired at their usual bedtime.

Advantage: it feels like we have more time to accomplish all our chores in the evening.

Disadvantage: the kids see the extra sunlight as meaning its not time to do those chores yet.

It took me an hour to get the Little Miss to fall asleep last night, this despite putting her to bed nearly an hour later to try to compensate for daylight saving time. I suspect that I would not have had this problem had we not sprung forward early Sunday morning1.

Notes

  1. Okay, who else likes to wake up at 1:59am on Sunday and watch the clock on the cable box change from 1:59 to 3:00am? Anyone? Anyone? ↩

The Little Man and Zeno’s Paradox of Broccoli Eating

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This evening at dinner, the Little Man managed to illustrate a mathematical concept I first learned of in 12th grade pre-calculus: Zeno’s Paradox. The Little Man had broccoli on his plate, which he generally enjoys. He consumed all of the crowns of broccoli, save one. For the last one he decided to do something different.

First, he tore the piece of broccoli in half and then, with exaggerated motions, consumed the other half.

Next, he tore the remaining piece of broccoli in half and then, with exaggerated motions, consumed the other half.

Again, he tore the remaining piece of broccoli in half and then, with exaggerated motion, consumed the other half.

This went and and on and if I tried to capture it all, this would be the longest blog post in the history of blog posts. In fact, it would be an infinitely long blog post because as the piece of broccoli grew smaller by half each time, it was never entirely gone, nor would it be. Expressed mathematically, the limit of the size of broccoli approached, but never actually reached, zero.

And for some reason, I found this completely amusing and worthy of a blog post.