Dadblog

drained

It was a long week on the home front. By Thursday, Rachel was looking like the Giving Tree towards the end of the book, when the boy's neediness is getting out of hand. We had tears streaming down cheeks or bedroom doors slamming every single evening.

There was one night when Andrew's "Mom....Mom.....Mommm" was echoing hauntingly from the bathroom upstairs. We were ignoring him, but we still winced every time we heard him. I finally went up to the door and implored him to just get out of the tub and get into pajamas so we could read books and get to bed.

"But I don't have pajamas here," he sighed.

"So go to your drawer and get some," I replied, struggling to keep my voice to a reasonable tone. It had been a difficult dinner, with lots of cross-child sniping.

"But I'll be wet."

"So grab a towel!"

[pause] "...I need you to bring me a towel."

As I reported this to Rachel, she wondered if perhaps she had made a mistake long ago, being too available to her children, sabotaging their ability to help themselves.

This morning, though, everyone was authentically jolly. There was a pivotal moment when Andrew and Elizabeth were sitting at the breakfast table. Andrew had walled himself off with cereal boxes and his sister asked if she could have one. I braced myself for the shouting, but Andrew said, "Sure" and handed her the biggest one. "Thanks!" she chirped in response. And I let out a sigh of relief.

quiz time

It's a real shock sometimes leaving the workplace and coming into a house that has been roiling since breakfast time, when someone warmed her cold hands in an unhygenic way causing great distress to one of her siblings.

See if you can guess which things I say at work and which things I say at home.

• That website won't load because the name server is down. It's outside our control, but I bet it will be back up soon.
• Has anyone fed the cat? Because she's going nuts.
• Please, oh PLEASE, shut the door while you're pooping.
• Did it keep happening after you rebooted?
• Excuse me, you left a wet towel on the floor.
• I'm restoring those files Annette asked for.
• We should put Emily's present away so it still looks nice by her birthday party.
• Can you maybe move into a different room if she's bothering you so much?

practical

After I put Elizabeth in the bathtub last night, I went to Alex's room where she was doing her homework at her desk. "Forget to flush?" I asked her.

"NO!" she said, with the indignant face on, the one that is not always borne out by real events.

"Because I see that the toilet is full, and you were the only one up here."

Rachel chimed in, "is it poop?"

"No," I said.

"I didn't even GO!" exclaimed Alex, her eyes wide in alarm.

"That would mean," I said, leaning in close like a detective pressuring a suspect in the interview room, "that the situation has been brewing since this morning."

Alex said, "Why don't you stick your finger in it and see if it's still warm?"

Tolstoy was wrong!

A worthwhile post from Rachel's brother's blog, in which my family makes a cameo appearance.

Rachel wonders why her brother didn't ask her for advice.

playdates

Many of our kids' friends have a single sibling. If both Friend and Friend's brother come over to play, it's usually Elizabeth who is left unmatched. And man, does this get her mad. With no memory for her own playmates who came yesterday, or even this morning, she rages against the unfairness of the current regime.

The second thing she does (after sobbing to her parents) is storm into Andrew or Alex's perfectly good game and demand that it include her. And as every older sibling knows, there's not much you can do with a petulant kid sister who is determined to be miserable. She cries. Alex stomps downstairs and implores us, in the very-fast-speaking-tone-of-extreme-impatience, that drop what we are doing and remove this obstacle to her happiness. I pretend to have forgotten how to speak English and wish I was on an errand at the hardware store.

Sometimes we can pacify Elizabeth with what we call "screen time", either in front of a video or playing games on the computer, but it often seems like she'd rather just fuss.

Naturally, when she does have a playdate and Andrew doesn't, her favorite game is to chase him and accuse him of stinking. This makes him - predictably - furious.

We need to make more friends with three-child families.

big week for Alex

Last Tuesday, Alex took the stage for her fifth grade play. I was just stunned to see my sometimes shy kid stomp around on stage, boss around the other characters and sing a solo, hitting all her notes. Many parents came up to me and Rachel after the performance to comment on how well Alex did, and what was the deal with her hiding the light under the bushel all this time? Alex accepted the compliments with as much grace as she could muster, looking at her feet most of the time.

Here's a clip of Alex singing. My mother apologizes if the YouTube link doesn't work so well, as she may have worn it out.

Rachel gets a lot of credit for pushing Alex to practice her lines. Even now that the show is over, Alex still likes to rattle them off. She did invest a lot of time and effort into acquiring them.

On Friday, Rachel and the kids put Alex on the 5:08 train from Overbrook for a solo ride downtown. She had her mother's cell phone in her hand, a $20 bill in her backpack, another $10 in her jeans, her name and address rammed into two separate pockets and instructions to fuss loudly if anyone gave her a hard time. Alex was hoping to use her pirate curses in this eventuality.

I claimed Alex at track one, section A in Suburban Station 15 minutes later, and we rode the subway together to the Phillies game. The preseason game itself was not of consequence, but the barbecued ribs were delicious and I was very proud of my daughter for taking another big step towards independence.

overdue

The happy news is that a tiny dose of Topamax, which is often given as an anti-seizure medication, has greatly reduced Andrew's noises. When he's excited, he still coughs, snorts and sniffs, but the baseline is much lower than it used to be, and it has greatly reduced our household stress.

The doctor perked up when I mentioned that the recent explosion of tics happened after Andrew came down with strep throat; he said there is a correlation between strep and tics, and that we should have Andrew treated aggressively the next time he comes down with a sore throat. We had the opportunity to do that a few weeks later, when the school nurse called to say "get him out of here, he has a white patch at the back of his gullet." Rachel got him into the pediatrician's office, where she learned that not everyone in the medical community subscribes to this strep-tic link. Apparently, it's something that crazy parents like to obsess about on Internet forums. She declined, in the presence of her wide-eyed med student, to prescribe antibiotics for a little white patch probably caused by good bacteria.

Okay, that's a fight for someone else. We are just fine with how things are going.

tick tock

Andrew saw the psychiatrist the first week in March. On the drive there, he tried to engage me in a discussion of next October's Halloween costume. He won the "scariest" prize at our community's annual parade, and considers it important to defend his title. Unfortunately, he was hoping I would tell him what to wear, and I wasn't cooperating. "No Andrew, I can't decide that for you. But what do YOU want to be?" "I don't know - what do YOU think I should be?" Both of us repeated our positions for the short drive.

At the doctor's home office, Andrew sat cheerfully on the couch, and I left for the waiting area and a stack of architecture/antiques magazines. After 45 minutes, I was summoned into the office where the doctor told me what a great kid Andrew is. Andrew beamed. We scheduled a follow-up visit for me and Rachel, and then we left.

"Did you know I have a secret weapon?" asked Andrew in the car.

"What is it?"

"snorrrrrrrk [sound of cough]. I can use it whenever I want."

So this is what he was doing in there, I thought. Andrew seemed very upbeat about the meeting, although he didn't want to discuss it, preferring to return to the costume obsession.

Andrew employed his secret weapon with gusto all week long, snorking constantly through dinner a few nights. Rachel and I were feeling pretty grave about our son's ability to fit into normal life with this tic - marrying outside the deaf community was looking pretty unrealistic at this level - but Andrew himself seemed okay.

Last week, when we met with the doctor, he asked us if Andrew had said anything about his appointment. I mentioned the secret weapon. "Yes, he told me about that too," said the doctor. "Frankly, I found it surprising."

Rachel and I looked at each other in astonishment. We both assumed he had suggested it to Andrew.

"Andrew said that he can use his tics to make other kids back off," the doctor continued.

To Be Continued...

noisy

Andrew got really ticcy over the Presidents' Day weekend. His new noise sounds like he's trying to expel every last bit of air from his lungs, or like he was just punched in the belly. Sometimes he makes these noises when he's in a distracted state, like listening to a story or watching TV, but lately he's been wheezing while he's talking.

Alex was able to get him to arrest it in the car ride home by having him breathe in, hold, and breathe out. I called it ten-year-old yoga. But the rest of the time it was very disruptive.

Since Andrew also seemed more anxious and volatile than usual, I e-mailed his teacher to ask how he was doing in the classroom. The teacher called me that afternoon to say "I'm glad you wrote. I was going to give you a call..." He said that Andrew was making lots of noise during the day, which was new, and that he didn't seem to be mixing with the other kids in the class, which surprised us. Nobody is giving him a hard time, but he seems to only want to talk and play games with the teacher.

Andrew does not like discussing the matter with us, as it makes him so embarrassed, but he did say he'd like to talk about it with a doctor. We've lined up a child psychiatrist someone recommended to us, and Andrew will spend a very expensive hour with him later this month.

feel the love

Rachel and I gave both Andrew and Alex some assistance with classroom valentines this week. Andrew made an origami fortune-teller, sometimes called a cootie-catcher, and we reproduced the original on our printer 21 times. He then customized each one. I cut out a cardboard valentine heart for Elizabeth to use as a stencil, and then she traced it 18 times on paper folded four times into a greeting card shape. She wrote a classmate's name atop each one and inside she wrote 'Liz'. She only wants to be called Elizabeth, but that's a lot of letters to write by hand.

Alex professed not to be interested. Rachel wondered if she would regret this, but I counseled staying out of her business.

Yesterday, Rachel took Elizabeth up the hill to the big kids' school, and they saw fifth graders running all over the place, making valentines deliveries. She called me to ask if I thought Alex would feel bad. I suggested that if Alex has a romantic life, and she wanted us to know about it, then she would tell us.

Today was the last day of school before the long weekend. Sure enough, Alex stayed up late cooking up a batch of valentines to bring into school today. Something she saw yesterday motivated her. I bet we need a new $40 color cartridge in the printer real soon.

Rachel reported that she is fed up with yet another holiday and its associated crap and cheap trinkets. No less than five children in her classroom gave her lollipops, and she got even more junk like pink plastic heart-shaped slinkies that don't even slink properly. "Are you fed up with flowers too?" I asked. "No, I don't get enough flowers," she replied. "It's just the wasteful junk I hate. And on that note," she continued, "I suppose I have to approve your using recycled [printed on one side] office paper for Elizabeth's valentines. I mean since they are only going to end up in the recycling anyway."