Langer Loksh

One More Reason to Watch the Superbowl

More than just an excuse to eat far too many Roche Bros. honey stung drummies (TM), the Superbowl now offers an opportunity to embrace deaf culture. Pepsi is planning to air an ad all in sign language. Check it out!

We've Moved!

Just kidding. But if we ever do relocate, this is going to be the picture on the change of address cards I send.

(I'm finally getting around to organizing my vacation pictures from August.)

I'm Sure There's Something More Important I Could Be Doing

Have you ever seen those magnets that say The Dishes are Clean/Dirty depending on which way you have it flipped? Do you think they make a magnet that says The Dishes on the Bottom Rack are Dirty but the Dishes on the Top Rack are Clean and I am So Not Doing Anything About That Until At Least Tomorrow?

Scratch That

Something incredibly exciting happened this weekend! We had brunch with AUNT ELLEN! And there were cupcakes from the Shop-Rite cupcake bar! It was SO GREAT!!!

Weekend Digest

Speech note: Charlie has learned to say an initial h. He's now marking his inital f's with the h sound. So he eats with a "hork" and builds a pillow "hort." The cuteness, it is painful.

Big girl note: Summer has picked up the following useful bit of information from the school bus: If your head gets chopped off, your eyes keep on blinking for several seconds until your brain dies.

Note of inevitability: When kindergarten was new and the weather balmy, I sat on my stoop for 20 minutes or so waiting for the school bus at the end of the day. I now hide in my house until Linda the bus driver actually has to honk for me.

This weekend we went to visit the Garden State fam. My mom said, "I hope something happens so you can write about it on your blog!" In fact, nothing happened. Often there's a reason I go there--someone's in town from far away, or it's a holiday. This time we just hung out. Very relaxing. Uncle Joey took the kids to two different playgrounds. (There's no snow there right now.) My mom and I took the kids to the Morris Museum and enjoyed dinosaurs, minerals, stuffed birds of prey and a grizzly bear, and a free production of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Then we got 10% off at Friendly's with our museum ticket stubs.

When People Ask Us How We Named Her

Living With It

No one wants to read about my protracted panic attack over the ringworm situation, which included sweating, shaking, crying at my desk, and eating nothing for two days but half a piece of buttery rosemary toast prepared by the stylish and sympathetic Paula L. and some fresh hot cornbread prepared by the lovely and talented Alissa M. Let's just say it was worse than the scleroderma panic of 2006 but not as bad as the full-on loony tunes breakdown of 1998. It was more than uncomfortable. But I know some of you want to know what's happening, so I'll outline the most recent events including, I hope, the resolution of this painful chapter in the history of my anxiety.

On Wednesday I saw Applesauce chewing her foot and I remembered that the vet told me that the ringworm would appear around the cats' eyes or at the base of their claws. I did not sleep well. On Thursday, I decided I had to call the vet and find out whatever happened to that culture. They told me the cats are carrying ringworm. (They tried calling me during December when someone--Charlie?--accidentally forwarded our phone to nowhere for about a week.)

My options: dip the cats in sulfur-smelling liquid twice a week, after squishing some sort of protective lubricant in their eyes, and then put those big plastic collars on them so they don't lick themselves. Or pay the vet $25 per cat, per week, for vet to do same. For four to six weeks. Or give them pills every day.

Neither treatment will work unless I decontaminate my house of shedded fur. Which means vacuuming and bleaching every surface and confining the cats to a room I can swab with bleach three times a week. Everyone has a room like that, right? I decide on the pills, even though it won't work, because I'm not going to move three beds and vacuum under them every day.

On Friday I set about attempting to catch the cats to bring them to the vet so he can culture their fur again. If it's negative, I can just stop the pills and the bleach and all that and move on with my life. I seal off the bedrooms and the cat flap that leads to the basement. Applesauce lets me pick her up and plunk her in the carrier. I chase Rebecca around the house for half an hour until she ends up stuck behind a book case in the study, crying. I call the vet and tell them I can't come.

I pick up the kids at their schools and head to pediatrician. Charlie has zits on his face, zits that come and go and do not look like the ringworm that I had on my rump, but like my friend Sarah says, if you buy a new shirt and it has a tag in it that itches, you think, oh that is an itchy tag--unless you have just checked into a room at a sketchy hotel and you think you see a flea, and then you put on your new shirt and you feel the tag and you're like " Oh my God there's a flea in my shirt, I'm infested with fleas getitoff getitoff getitoff!" So everytime I look at Charlie I think

He's got ringworm on his face.

Because I am crazy. For real. 

The pediatrician--not Dr. J., but that nice blonde lady from his practice, because Dr. J. was booked--asks me if Charlie's ski jacket rubs on his face. "Yeah, I guess so, especially in the car," I answer. She tells me his zitty rash is an irritation, nothing systemic. Then the she and I both say at the same time, "Aquaphor," and then we laugh. Then I ask her if it could be ringworm. "Absolutely not," she says without hesitation.

We see Dr. J. in the hall. "What's up?" he asks, looking interested. "Nothing," I say with a relieved smile. I fill him in, and he confirms what newly minted pediatrician slash book club member Eliza told me, which is that ringworm does not make the hair fall off the heads of caucasian children.

I called the house call cat vet and ask her to come over on Monday.

She came this morning and looked the cats over. We talk about the ringworm. The cats don't have it. We don't have it. And that whole house decontamination thing is impossible, as well as pointless, because I could go outside and pet a dog and bring ringworm back into my house all over again. "It's everywhere," she said. "It's just not a big deal." In other words, I don't have to do anything. This is exactly what she told me when I had ringworm, now several months ago. But I went to the regular vet for their regular shots because I didn't want to pay the $65 fee she charges to walk in my door. And I mentioned the ringworm, and that's when the trouble started.

I am now never going back. I don't care how much of Jeff's money I have to give her. Sanity is priceless. It's the house call cat lady for me, 4 eva.

My mom made me promise that if the house call cat vet lady came and told me to forget about the ringworm, I would have to forget about it. Really forget about it. And believe me, I want to forget about it. But this afternoon I noticed a perfect circle of tiny red marks on Charlie's hand. Ordinarily I would recognize that the size and shape were an exact match for his own teeth. But because of the shirt tag flea effect, I felt the flush creep into my face.

He's got ringworm on his hand.

No he doesn't.

I have post-traumatic ringworm stress disorder. I want to believe the house call cat vet. I really do. It's just going to take me a few weeks or months to crawl out of this deep dark mental hole that I've dug myself into.

I can't imagine who actually read this whole post, but just for you, since you stuck with it, here's a picture I took of some dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets because they were frozen together and it reminded me of how fossil hunters sometimes find the bones of dinosaurs that were like, caught in a death clutch, because a killer sandstorm blew up while they were fighting.

Does this make up for the crazy? No... no I suppose it only proves it.

Fancy Pants and Lazy Momma

I just found out how to get all the work done that I want while Charlie plays. All I have to do is threaten to put his pants on him, and he leaves me alone.

On the topic of Mr. Man, he now calls himself Cha-ee instead of Ah-ee. His speech pathologist Rachel tells me that he told her that he has a cat named Applesauce, which is not something that someone with unintelligible speech can convey out of context. He says almost all of the consonants now--"Stop scaring my Mommy!"--except for F. Fire truck is now eye-chuck instead of eye-uck.  Rachel asked me about preschool and I told her about my dilemma. About how, for example, I would have to get him to integrated preschool by 8:30 a.m., even though I can barely get him to day care by 9:30. "If you've got a good thing going, why mess it up?" she said. "I mean, since he's doing so well."

Funny how I've managed to call the parents of children with hearing loss who decided to stay at our preschool rather than go to their town's integrated preschool, and I can't seem to find time to call the mom whose daughter has the same little ear as Charlie--and goes to integrated preschool.

Breaking News

Call the Tooth Fairy!

Pretzel Logic

I asked Summer why she declined to purchase a soft pretzel at her school's snack cart today. I remember the soft pretzels from my high school, and how I would peel and eat the skin and then roll the dough between my fingers. "I think a pretzel should be a private thing," Summer answered, "for you and your family. And a princess never eats a pretzel."