Yooo hoooo! Hello! Sorry to have disappeared on you like that. My computer was hobbled for days, and also, we have been preposterously busy. And also this is Langer Loksh Post # 500 and I felt more pressure than usual to write something scathingly brilliant. You'll have to settle for this instead.
Friday night we attended the gala dinner dance slash auction to benefit the day care center. In 2004 I bought a trip to Africa and have not been back since. I decided it was time to face my demons. We got off relatively cheap this time. I bought a Bose iPod SoundDock.
I guess now I have to go buy an iPod.
Ba dum bum chhhhhhhhh.
Also I was the sole bidder for a chance to sing with the band. I paid $50 and sang Brown-Eyed Girl. With the principal of the elementary school Summer will be entering in September. (Another mom has photo evidence; I await her email.)
On Saturday we went to the Red Sox game. The day game, the one where the Red Sox clubbed the Braves like baby seals. Not the night game, in which the role of baby seal was played by the Red Sox. (That there is a Harpoon IPA that cost seven U.S. dollars.)
On Sunday we celebrated Summer's birthday a little early with her killer-whale themed party. There were eight preschoolers and three toddlers. After the party (and the napping), we took the kids out for Chinese food and then to see Shrek the Third--Charlie's first time at the movies. (Summer's first time was Shrek 2.) I thought maybe he'd run up to the screen and make giant shadow puppets or something. He did pretty well, only getting bored at the end, and even then he stayed in my lap.
Dr. Kenny called on Sunday. He said he'd like a copy of Charlie's CT scan, and that if Charlie has an extra ear canal, we wouldn't want to obliterate it because it could potentially be useful for the hearing repair surgery. Then on Monday, Charlie's ear doctor Dr. Kenna called. I'd been waiting for weeks to hear from her. All she said was that she wants to show the CT scan to the surgeons on her team. I told her that was fine, and that I was faxing her a release so she could send a disk to Kenny and one to Dr. Kesser in Virginia, who does the hearing repair surgery. "I just saw Dr. Kesser," she told me. "Oh," I said, "I heard he just won a big award." Kenny had told me that--something about some molecular research. "Yes," she said, "That's where I was. I saw him get the award. Then I went over to him and said, 'I have this patient, and his mom has been in contact with you--' and he said 'Charlie Maxwell!'" My Charlie's name was on the tip of his tongue, even in an out-of-context setting. I don't know if Charlie's doctors all put a note in his chart that says "pushy mom," but at least they remember us.
Which brings us to today. Charlie and I played at the library playground, where I chatted with Mindy, a mom from preschool. She told me all about how her two sons have this problem with their teeth. They're missing something, something very important... enamel? Dentite? Something that makes their teeth all soft and they get lots of infections and abcesses and they have to have their teeth pulled and it sounds just dreadful. I could really relate to the way she seemed to feel about it. Like, obviously it's nothing life threatening, but it's painful and distressing and a big bummer. It seemed like she had a healthy sort of sadness about it--not too much, but she didn't deny herself the disappointment, which is something that I struggle with, particularly in my Early Intervention group, where I force myself to remember that some of the families have much worse problems, to the point where I start feeling like I have no right to feel even a little sad about Charlie's birth defects.
So then I took Charlie to the eye doctor for a checkup. In the waiting room we met a mom with an eight-month-old. I commented on how long I always have to wait for the eye doctor. "I'm not going to take long," she assured me. "It's just going to be like, 'It's nothing, now go.'" She told me that a family friend who is an eye doctor told her to have her baby's eyes checked because one looked bigger than the other. "I don't even know what they would do about that," she said. I explained that that is basically the situation Charlie is in. He's more farsighted in his smaller, right eye, and that I patch him once a day for an hour. She looked aghast. "How do you keep it on?" she asked. "It's best if we can go over to someone's house and play with their toys, so it's a little different and he's distracted," I said. She went into the exam room, and came out looking relieved. "It's nothing!" she said. "It's OK! I mean, babies are not all symmetrical." I smiled at her. "Mine certainly isn't," I said.
The person we see before we see the doctor (nurse? tech?) showed Charlie some tiny black and white shapes that were supposed to look like a house and a car and a tree, and Charlie kind of grunted at her. Then the doctor showed him a fire truck and a Spiderman action figure and watched his eyes. She said things look good--Charlie is still using both of his eyes and tracking and all that good stuff. "Come back in three months," she said. "Then it will have been a year, and I'll put drops in his eyes and actually measure his vision. If there's more than two diopters difference, we'll talk about glasses." I said I didn't think we were expecting his smaller eye to "catch up" to the left eye. "It does happen," she said, rather optimistically. Then I said, "It was interesting for me to meet that mom with the baby in the waiting room. She was all freaked out, and I was like, 'Whatever.'" The doctor laughed. "Yeah, you've got some perspective," she said, patting me on the shoulder as we walked out of the office.
Tonight after photo class (topic: Perspective) Paula and I went to Not Your Average Joe's for apple-tinis. I told her about Dr. Kesser, and the two different moms I'd talked to today. I told her that Lee gave me her hypnotist's business card, and I was thinking of getting hypnotized to stop spinning my wheels so much about Charlie. "But spinning your wheels about Charlie is how you get your perspective, and how you make decisions and take action like getting in touch with the best doctors," Paula said.
I'm sure you're absolutely right, Paula.
That's it, post 500! As always, thanks for reading and commenting.
