Langer Loksh

Only Mine

We're at Jeff's parents' house, and Charlie is sitting in Jeff's lap eating bowtie noodles one by one. He is so happy eating his big-boy food. He rubs his eyes, and then rubs them some more. Red spots appear on his hands and cheeks. The noodles had come from a big pasta bowl with cheese, broccoli, and shrimp. Shrimp! One of those things you are not supposed to feed babies.

Charlie is having an allergic reaction to shrimp. Charlie's throat is about to close up. My only job is to make sure the children don't die, and Charlie's going to die from anaphylactic shock. My heart pounds and I lose feeling in my legs.

Jeff and Jim calmly take Charlie to the sink and wash his hands and face. They tug down the front of his undershirt to look for spots on his chest. I'm still sitting at the table with everyone else. They're all chatting away about nothing. "I think I'm going to faint," I say quietly.

"Don't faint," someone says, wine glass halfway to lips. "He's fine. Look, he looks better already."

I look at Charlie by the sink, cheerfully jamming wet paper towels into his mouth. He looks the same.

"I'm going to call the doctor," I say.

"Don't call the doctor, he's fine," someone else says. Jeff says, "The doctors aren't even there now. They'll just tell you to go to the hospital. I don't feel like going to the hospital. He's fine."

I stand there with my hand on the phone. My brain swirls. Everyone's acting normal. As if nothing at all is happening. This is my job. Only mine. I get a mental flash of Charlie dead and people saying things like, "That's too bad, but he did have those birth defects, so, you know... "

NO. No no no no no. Charlie is my special secret message from God, my secret message, from God, special for me, me only. He is mine, mine, mine, MINE MINE MINE MINE. "How will you all feel when Charlie's dead because I didn't call the doctor," I say, picking up the phone.

"JILL," Mary says firmly. "I deal with allergic reactions all the time. He's FINE."

I look at Charlie again. Now the spots look faded. The swirling stops. The feeling seeps back up my legs. My heartbeat slows down. I put down the phone. It's my job. Only mine.

Gifts Given and Received

My friend Allison, without whom I would not have survived college; that sketchy year after college that we can summarize as "Hoboken"; marriage; miscarriages; and parenthood; had a real survival drama in her family this year. Allison's father needed a new kidney, and the wait list for a donated kidney is seven years. Allison's mother wanted to give him one of hers, but she was not a match.

Their kidney guy in Manhattan had an idea. There was another couple in the exact same situation. Maybe the wives would be matches for the opposite husbands?

They were. In April, both husbands and both wives were wheeled into surgery simultaneously so no one could chicken out. In November, the two families celebrated Thanksgiving together, and Allison's dad, who seemed to have a rougher recovery than the other guy, is feeling better. That's a better gift than a whole bottle of Goldschlager.

Wear are ewe? Rite hear!

I guess I used the wrong "here" here. I meant to say "hear." Very impressive catch by the astute Alissa M.

Avenging Lobsters

Tonight we observed the ancient annual cookie decorating rite. This year's offerings included a dead Iraqi and several angry lobsters. The lobsters were for Jeff's sister Kerry, a marine biologist who cuts off the eyeballs of lobsters to figure out how old the lobsters are.

Return of the Butt Scoot

Summer never crawled. I think Charlie will, because of the amount of tummy time I give him and the PT we do. Today Charlie demonstrated some preliminary scooting. This clip does not show his best effort, but in all the other clips, Summer plants herself between the camera and Charlie and complains bitterly that she is not the star. You'll here a tiny bit of that at the end of this clip.

He's From Finland, Can You Blame Him?

My mom hadn't bought a wreath for her front door yet, so she asked her hubby John to pick one up. John came home and said, "It's not a wreath, it's a decoration--it was only $15.00." He spent several hours attacking the screen door with various wires and fasteners. Finally, he asked my mom to come out and see.

It was a grave blanket.

John drove to the Revolutionary War cemetery that's about half a mile from their house and my mom hopped out and laid down the blanket between two American flags. She reports, "It looks really good!"

The Angel in the Mirror

My friend Meredith held a fundraising raffle for a little girl who needed a prosthetic eye and lots of chemo treatments. I won a pair of handmade South American salt and pepper shakers. Better yet, this little girl has a new eye! Doesn't she look great? I love the way her father describes the look on her face when she saw herself in the mirror with her new eye.

Did Anyone Else Just See

what Stephen Colbert just did with his ear on Letterman?!

I'd read in the New Yorker that he had a tumor scooped out of his ear with a melon baller, but I guess I'd forgotten because I was sitting there addressing Christmas cards and staring at Stephen Colbert's ears thinking, "I bet he's had his ear reconstructed" and then all of a sudden he folded his ear inside itself and winked, and the action of the winking caused the ear to snap back out.

SPECTACULAR.

Doctors Behaving Badly, Part III

Today Jeff took off work to accompany Charlie and me to the expert jaw surgeon at Mass General. Mary came over to our house to stay with Summer.

"We're here to see Dr. Kaban at 1:00," I told the girl behind the desk. She scurried off and returned a couple of minutes later with another woman, who made cootchy-coo noises at Charlie and then turned to me and informed me that Dr. Kaban was in the OR today and we'd have to reschedule. She looked in the computer and told me that everyone who had an appointment today was called on Friday, and that our appointment had been rescheduled for December 30 at 9:00 a.m.

FALSE! No one called us, and for sure if they had I wouldn't have taken that appointment because that would be rush hour into Boston and I may be insane but I'm not stupid.

Jeff and I both got really snippy as we left the hospital. He took off work! Mary came over to babysit! And they didn't call! But it was so fresh and bright outside it was hard to stay mad. We had a nice lunch at Pace's and Charlie gobbled up his baby food and smiled at everyone in the place. I told Jeff that I would like other people to see our family and think "They have so much fun," and I don't mean that we take big vacations, I mean that we have fun even going to the grocery store. Or, to appointments with specialists that don't end up happening.

When we got home, Summer was napping. Mary filled us in on their afternoon. They had consumed copious quantities of Trader Giotto's Mini Mezzaluna pumpkin raviolis, and watched Barbie and the Nutcracker. Except, it was a bootleg DVD that Mary's sister Kathleen had bought while in China on business. They watched the movie IN CHINESE. This is exactly the kind of family fun I am talking about. Good times, good times.

Hey, Look! A Castle! Flip flip flip. Hey, Look! A Castle!

Yesterday I took Charlie to the hearing impaired baby playgroup run by our Early Intervention office. Charlie loved playing with new toys, watching and reaching for other babies, bouncing on a big ball with his speech pathologist Priscilla, smiling at his physical therapist Mary, and generally charming everyone with his alert- and wiggly-ness.

The group meets for an hour and a half. The babies--there are maybe six or eight kids ranging from Charlie at the youngest to about two years old--play in a room with the speech paths and PTs, and the parents get together in another room to talk about hearing loss stuff or just other parenting stuff. Since it was our first time I never made it out of the baby room.

After the first hour of "free play," they have a little circle time with a song and some sign language and then they have a snack. Now, when it came to the snack session, it was like these women had never met a baby. Odd, considering they were surrounded by babies. First they had me put Charlie in a chair that would not be too small for Summer. Then they served him juice in a straw cup. I told them he was too little for juice and one woman said, "It's OK, it's diluted with water," and I was like, "Yeah. He can't have juice." Then they gave him three Cheerios and one animal cracker, which he promptly swiped onto the floor.  Fortunately I had some wagon wheels in my bag for him to gnaw on. I explained that if they wanted to give him Cheerios they would need to make a pile of about 4,000 and maybe he would get three of them in his mouth. However, I must say, he is BRILLIANT with the straw. Priscilla had given me a plastic teddy bear cup about a week ago, just like those bear-shaped plastic honey bottles, and Charlie figured out how to use the straw after about one minute of practice. Now he is Mr. Straw, which makes for a better mouth movement for developing speech than a sippy cup does, according to Priscilla--and Julie, my personal on-call speech path.

There was a baby, Graham, who is one month older than Charlie and who wears two hearing aids, and then a two-year-old girl, Eliza, who is totally deaf in one ear. I talked to both their moms a bit. I can't believe I even thought for a second that this group would be anything but a positive. I was worried about treating Charlie differently, but as I watched him squirm on the floor next to Graham, I realized that all these kids are overwhelmingly normal. That is to say, they are not defined by their hearing impairments or whatever else they have going on. They are babies. Who happen to have hearing impairments.

Duh. 

There's an Ani DiFranco song, "Little Plastic Castle": "They say goldfish have no memory / I guess their lives are just like mine / And the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time." It's like I forget, and have to learn every day all over again, that Charlie's going to be ok.