heart all flutter

Asa's surgery is Monday and I've been feeling very calm and sort of enthusiastic about it up until about 15 minutes ago. A sudden flurry of activity surrounding the surgery has got me all wound-up. I did the pre-registration form on-line this morning and then received a call from the nurse going over the pre-op details regarding food (withholding of food) and what to bring along and that left me feeling good. I felt more prepared and ready to go. And then I get a call saying that our pre-op form hasn't been received yet.

Surgery can't go forward without that form. It's 2 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Surgery is scheduled for 7:30am on Monday morning.  What if I can't track the doctor down? What if the form is missing? What if we have to go in for another pre-op visit? What if they don't have any openings? What if we have to postpone the surgery?  As I've done so many times in the past, I'm "what if'ing" myself silly.

A call to the doctor, a back-and-forth, a dropped call (damn you AT&T), a frantic redial, a missed call, on-hold, call waiting, click over ... a wonderful, helpful, dedicated pediatric nurse has star-69'd me after the initial dropped call! We've sorted it out, the fax is being retransmitted, this time to me so I can deal with the back-and-forth double-checking that the fax has been successfully received by the surgeon.

A call to the surgeons office to confirm the fax number and bingo-bango, the fax is sent. A few minutes pause to breathe and sigh in relief that my job is done and then a call to confirm receipt. Failure. No fax has been received. Double check the fax number, re-send, wait ... (are you as stressed reading this as I am living it??) ... Call to check receipt, holding, holding, holding ... Success!!

And a new mom breathes a sigh of relief. Now let's get to 8am Monday morning when little dude should be waking up and looking at us through groggy little eyes with brand new ear tubes and ears free of pus and then, then, I will truly relax.

(dog) slumberparty

Ah, the joys of pets! They play, they frolic, they roll around on the floor acting cute doing anything they can to get your attention and affection. They shed, they gnaw, they spill their food and water on the floor, they drink out of the toilet and get the seat wet so the poor unsuspecting soul who has to wee next get's a wet tush ... And then they invite their friends over for a pup-slumber party and things get even crazier!

Yes, we are dog-sitting this week. And yes, she is a good dog, plays nicely with Midnight, is primarily disinterested in the baby (which I deem a good thing) and really isn't too much more work than just having the one dog.

But here is the hiccup: She does not sleep at night. She licks, she pants, she scratches, she whines, she wanders the halls, does everything but sleep ... I guess she misses her home and her parents. It reminds me of when we were kids and had slumber parties and inevitably there was always one kid who cried and missed their mom and had to go home at like 1am and sort of ruined things for everyone else, especially for the parents!

Of course I'd never considered it from the parents point of view before, but for the family hosting the party they've all the sudden got to deal with a bunch of other people's kids who were raised with different rules, have different idiosyncrasies and could turn out to be whiny wimps when it comes to actually sleeping at someones house (something you won't discover until everyone is exhausted and it's bedtime). And then there's the poor parents who were duped into thinking they actually had the night off for a change until the phone rings at 12:45am and they've suddenly got to drag their butts out of bed and go schlep to pick up their kid. I applaud my parents for letting me have so many friends sleep over, you guys were troopers!

I guess Jeff and I will suck it up as most parents do and host slumber parties one day too. In the meantime, we've got one more night of doggie slumber partying to get through and then we will breathe a sigh of relief as all parents do when they close the front door after their guest has left and life returns to the normal level of insanity.

yard sale hag

A couple weekends ago we had a yard sale in our neighborhood. I knew the yard sale crowd was a weird bunch, I knew they were tough and I knew I'd have to be tough to even make a dime. But damn, was I surprised at how rough the old ladies played.

Right around 9am, an hour after the official start of the sale, this old broad comes shuffling up, all smiles and chatty, playing to my good nature. I'd already made plenty of sales and was off to a great start and decided when she asked me how much a silk scarf was going for that I'd do the old "What'll you offer me for it?" schtick.  She waggles her head and says "Oh you shouldn't ask me that!" and I told her as long as she wasn't about to offer me 50 cents we'd be fine. And then to my shock she gets all uppity and is like "I never pay more than 50 cents at a yard sale" and scoofs at me when I say I was looking for $3.  Then that cheap old hag asks me what day the big garbage pick-up is in our neighborhood so she can just come back and take things. I was flabbergasted. That's right, I said flabbergasted! And stupid Anna, so taken aback by her brazen cheapskated rudeness goes right ahead and tells her the big pick-up is on Monday ... What was I thinking??

Well so anyway, the old lady shuffles off, the yard sale goes on, we sell well over half our stuff and make a nice chunk of change. And who do you think I saw wandering our neighborbood Monday morning? That's right, our rude little mean old cheapskate and her cart were out "shopping" and she'd found a weed-whacker, a vaccum and god only knows what else. And she wasn't alone, there was a small army of rummagers in our neighborhood, some in pick-ups with fairly awesome looking finds stacked feet high in the beds.

That scarf by the way, I sold for a dollar, so suck it you cheap yard sale hag!

a trip to the ER and the end of an era

So things took an unexpected turn shortly after my post last week.  Just before bed I began to have what doctors called Anaphylaxis as a result of an allergy to my antibiotic. Luckily it came on slowly and took me several hours to feel bad enough to call the doctor. In fact I called thinking that my staph infection was getting worse, not that I was starting to experience a life threatening emergency. The on-call doctor insisted that I visit the emergency room immediately and threatened that if I didn't go now on my own I'd most likely be taken there shortly afterward in an ambulance. I promised him I'd go and hung up the phone. Jeff and I then googled the antibiotic I was on and were somewhat shocked to see that my condition really was as bad as the doctor said ... Sorry Doc, it's not that we don't know your smart, it's that we just really wanted to go to bed.


Long story short, if you have to go to the ER, the best way to be seen right away is to list "difficulty breathing" as one of your symptoms. They do not mess around with that symptom. We were being attended to by three nurses and a doctor within four seconds of finishing the registration paperwork. And, happily, we were home within three hours. Of course it's been a long road to full strength and I'm rather shocked to sit here today and say that we've now finished breastfeeding. It's a day I knew was out there but thought was still about six weeks away. I guess maybe only other mom's can understand why it makes me a little sad, but it does. After all the pain, the leaking, the engorgement, the pumping, the hours sat by myself (and Asa) nursing in the dark hours of the night, listening to the party going on from other rooms while I pumped ... I've spent every day since November 2009 asking "Is this safe for the baby", not taking medicines when I was sick so that he wouldn't be exposed to too many chemicals, skipping the tylenol when my head ached, not drinking alcohol at all and then timing my alcohol so that it wouldn't be in the milk I'd be feeding him ... My entire life has revolved around protecting him from second-hand harm and now I'm free.

I can drink caffeine again if I want. I can drink and not worry that I'll get him drunk. But more than that, he doesn't need me anymore like he did. There's no more "I'm the only one can that can do it". I'm not. Anyone can. Anyone can feed him, change him, hold him, play with him, cuddle him, encourage him, dress him, bathe him. Anyone. It's liberating but part of me isn't ready to be liberated. It's been 24 hours and even though I'm relieved that he's no longer gnawing on me with his sharp little teeth, I feel a little lost.

Maybe a vodka redbull will help ease my pain ... It's been almost two years after all!