Looky, Daddy!

My Second Grade Pencil

I know I promised you an Ask The Dad today, yesterday, two days ago, but one e-mail I received--in a misguided attempt at getting real advice--requested a response not from me but from The Mom, and Monday night, when I passed the laptop over to The Mom, she promptly coughed a lung onto it. So that will have to wait a few more days. But as you know, marriage is nothing if not a competition, so that same Monday night, as I looked at my wife drowning in her own phlegm, I said, "Oh yeah? If you think you are suffering, watch this!" and I promptly signed myself up as a chaperone on Kathryn's second grade field trip.

I won.

Actually, ever since Kathryn made the extremely inconsiderate decision of contracting epilepsy (One week seizure free, by the way! Thank you and thank you again for your concern and well-wishes.) her school, fearing an episode away from home, has been pestering me to come along on field trips, and they have not been very gracious accepting my normal response: laughing and hanging up. But that boost of seizures Kathryn had this month made me rethink the issue and, before I knew it, I was calling the school to see if there was room for one more person on the bus. And, god help me, there was.

Second graders should not be allowed to talk about intangible events or objects. Their conversation should be limited to concrete objects that they are holding in their hands at that moment. For example, if someone happens to be holding a pencil, they should be allowed to say, "I have a pencil." If they choose to, they could describe the pencil. "It is yellow. It has an eraser." At this point, others could chime in. "Yes, and it has a silver metal band. The band holds the eraser to the wood." Or, if someone happens to have a pencil of their own, they could produce it and say a few things about it as well. "My pencil is blue," and so on.

Under no circumstances should they be allowed to talk of pencils they have seen, or once had, or heard about from someone else. Because I guarantee you, each and every second grader has seen, or had, or heard about the coolest pencil in the world, and they will not rest--or lower their voice--until their pencil is crowned the champion of all pencils, and award that apparently goes to the student lying the most and yelling the loudest when an adult finally breaks down and asks everyone to please shut up. FOUR FEET LONG WITH SCALES LIKE A SNAKE AND FEATHERS ON TOP THAT REALLY ERASE AND LIGHTS THAT RUN UP AND DOWN THE SIDES AS YOU WRITE AND AN ALARM THAT SOUNDS WHEN YOU MAKE A MISTAKE AND--- and I was looking around for my own 'coolest pencil in the world,' one sharp enough to end my miserable life then and there.

When I got home, I made a sign out of cardboard nailed to a wooden stake reading "BULLSHIT!" If I am ever coerced into attending another of these field trips, I will take it with me and hold it up as needed.

Which will be always.

What Would You Do?

What would you do if your daughter, after a day of neurological tests, came up to you with a mitt one one hand and a ball in the other?

Well, so would I.

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend, everyone. On Tuesday I plan on firing up the long-neglected Ask The Dad column again, so send those burning questions to lookydaddy [at] gmail [dot] com.

Where's Flick? Has Anyone Seen Flick?

I'm going to tell you one story in order to tell you another one. Neither puke, nor poop, nor seizures will be featured in either, although the second story still has a healthy dose of suffering, lest you think you are reading someone else's website.

Friday was Kathryn's third birthday party this month. There's just one more to go. Four birthday parties in one month was, of course, my wife's idea: The four-part-Indiana-Jones-birthday-party marathon. It had started with a casual "Let's take Kathryn to the new Indiana Jones movie for her birthday," and had turned into a "Let's invite all of Kathryn's friends over every Friday night for a month to watch each of the old Indiana Jones movies and then take them all to see the new one when we're done," all before I even had time to remind her that Kathryn's birthday comes in late July. By the time I did get that not-unimportant fact out, it was moot. "...and each night can have a theme and games and, ooooh, I wonder if the movies come in a boxed-set," my wife rambled on to herself. When she turned to me and asked if we should have a fifth party night just for the DVD bonus features, I admitted defeat and mentally added one more layer of bricks to the internal tomb in which I keep my poor dead soul.

Now that we are three movies into the saga, even my wife admits she thought there would be a lot more movie-watching involved at a movie-watching party. Instead, what we had for the first movie-and-a-half was a bunch of girls screaming at odd intervals for no apparent reason, and for the second movie-and-a-half, screaming because Camilo wouldn't stop saying, "Ah, dessert! Chilled monkey brains!"

He's like the son I never had.

But it's not the screaming girls I wanted to tell you about; it's the screaming men. Well, screaming man. To be precise, the screaming me. I know you're surprised.

Late last night, I found a forgotten casualty of the three weeks of partying: an untouched bowl of ice cream, spoon and all, stashed away in our freezer. Cookies and cream, it appeared to be. Delicious, it appeared to be. Waiting for me, it appeared to be. And cold, it appeared to be.

The only one of the above I can actually confirm is that it was cold. Because when I spooned that first bite into my mouth, using the spoon so conveniently left right there in the bowl, and I know you can see where this is going, that metal spoon froze to the inside of my mouth so quickly I didn't even realize what had happened before, in shock, I pulled it out, taking with it the tender skin of my tongue, my left cheek, and the back of my bottom lip.

Cue the screaming.

The bleeding stopped within an hour or two. I'll let you know when the pain does.

Mountain Climbing

This is not an epilepsy blog. This will not be an epilepsy blog. This blog will continue to be what it has always been: a puking blog.

But...

The seizures keep coming.

On the day her doctor said Kathryn had epilepsy, I could easily have kissed her full on the mouth. I had heard of epilepsy; I knew what it was. It was so much less scary than what I thought we were facing. And her doctor was super hot.

At that point, Kathryn had had two seizures. The first one came and went in the middle of the night. By the morning, it was easy to dismiss. The next one landed her in the hospital for three days. But still, two seizures in two years? Piece of cake. Throw in a daily dose of anti-seizure medicine for good measure, and I was sure we would be in for smooth sailing.

The seizures keep coming.

There were more last night, even after we increased her medicine. Two in a row. And longer. So we increased her medicine again this morning. And now I am scared. I am scared that what we have seen in the past were the foothills, little seizure bumps in the landscape, hills that we crossed easily before finding ourselves climbing Mt. Epilepsy. And thinking about Mt. Epilepsy scares me to the pit of my stomach.

And it makes me want to puke. (See? A puking blog!)

And Did You Know That Some Dads Call Their Children Homeschooled?

"Did you know that some boys call their wieners balls?"

"Oh honey, balls aren't wieners. Balls are... balls."

I didn't hear the rest of their conversation. I was too busy searching for a size 6X nun's habit on eBay.

Sparky

Kathryn imagines her thoughts as sparks. And her brain is a forest. She tells me that most of the time sparks can fly around a forest and nothing will catch on fire. Sometimes the sparks land on dirt, or in a puddle, or they just bounce off of the tree trunks. Plus it's wet in a brain. Kathryn should work for PBS. She should do voiceovers for science programs. She should write the scripts. You would all watch them. You would rearrange your schedule to make sure you could.

Almost always the sparks fly around the forest and it's okay, she says. And then, every once in a while, her voice rises a little here like she's saying oh those crazy sparks, the sparks catch things on fire. And that's a seizure.

Kathryn doesn't talk much about her seizures, mainly because they don't happen very often and because they aren't Webkinz, but when she does, it makes me happy I have this website. People should hear her. And by people, I mean the people outside the radius of her normal speaking voice. Which is a half-mile.

Anyway, now that we know she's still having seizures, the medicine tweaking begins. A little more at night, and now some during the day. Controlling the sparks. And part of me wants to cry out: But she's Kathryn! She's supposed to be sparky. Sparky and quick-witted and bouncy and full of beans. But the rest of me knows that there isn't enough medicine in the world to empty her of beans. Her brain will eat these meds like candy. Certainly, up to this point, the medicine she's taken at night hasn't, say, kept her in bed more than usual. Kathryn continues to fight sleep like a prizefighter, convinced that as soon as she closes her eyes, there will be a party she'll miss. She's certain we tuck her in every night with our pockets filled with streamers and noisemakers and cake with ice cream and all we need is for her to drift off so we can PARTY! Which, of course, is true, if you substitute 'PARTY!' with 'fold laundry and bicker.'

The irony is her EEGs show the biggest party happening every night around here is the one happening in her brain. Her wet, forested brain.

In Which We See Something New

"Sometimes when I wake up, my mouth goes back to sleep." It was weeks ago Kathryn told me this. I paid it about as much attention as I pay to most of the nonsense she says.

It's impossible for the human mind to pay attention to all of the words that come out of a child's mouth. To try would be to court insanity. Court it, marry it, and raise children with it. So sometimes it's not until weeks after an utterance is made that its import comes to you. And kicks you in the face.

Kathryn awoke hours early this morning and crawled into bed with me. She put my arm around her, curled up against my chest, and fell back to sleep, and by sleep I mean beat the crap out of me. A sleeping Kathryn could power a city. Boise, perhaps. She is a marvel of kinetic energy, arms and legs twitching, starting, quivering, flailing. Bruising. Sound asleep, the girl spins around so much, all she is missing is an "air fluff" setting and she could be a clothes dryer.

This morning, as the hours of night gave way to day, Kathryn woke up once or twice, pulled my arm tighter around her--exposing my soft underbelly to her assault--and then drifted back to her pummeling sleep.

When she finally woke up for keeps, she sat bolt upright in my bed and I got to watch her have a seizure.

Twelve years ago, when I lived in Japan, I had a secret desire to experience an earthquake. I wanted to know what it felt like. So when one finally happened, here's what I learned: They feel wrong. They fill you with the overwhelming feeling that something wrong is happening, something that shouldn't be possible. Things--walls, beds, floors--behave in ways that they shouldn't, in ways in which they've never behaved before. That's what watching a seizure is like.

Her jaw locked open and her face shook. Her eyes rolled. Way back in her throat, her tongue clicked. She looked like a person trying to perform some Herculean feat, shaking with the exertion of lifting a boulder or willing something to explode with the power of her mind. It lasted for all of fifteen seconds, about as long as that long-ago earthquake, and then it ended. Kathryn's eyes came back forward, she gave a long blink, and her hand reached up to wipe away the two lines of spit making their way from the corners of her mouth to her chin. Her first words were too slurred to be understood, so she paused, swallowed, and repeated them.

"That's why I keep tissues next to my bed. Because sometimes my mouth goes back to sleep."

It's What the Internet Is For

What do you do when you don't have time to post? You share with the Internet something cute your seven-year-old daughter said. Like when we were driving through Newark and she read that sign on the side of the road and said,"No littering. $200 fine. That makes sense. I mean, who would mind if you littered two hundred dollars?" The Internet loves that kind of stuff. That crazy Internet.

So...while I'm knee deep in work, why don't you share with the Internet, too?

Pink-ish

Flush. Wait. Plunger.

We have one bathroom in our new house. It's on the second floor.

Flush. Wait. Plunger.

The previous owners had the bathroom completely tiled, from the floor to about eye-level. The tiles are pink. Well, pink-ish.

Plunger plunger plunger.

Interspersed within this sea of pink tiles, every tenth tile or so, is a tile with a floral bouquet printed on it. The flowers are pink. The leaves and stems taper off and curl delicately.

Flush. Wait. Plunger.

The sink is the same color as the tile. The tub is the same color as the sink which is the same color as the tile.

Plunger plunger plunger.

The toilet is the same color as the sink, the tub, and the tile. It's pink. Well, pink-ish.

Plunger plunger plunger.

The toilet stops up a few times every week. It's the toilet paper.

Plunger plunger plunger!

With two preschoolers and a second grader, that toilet sees a lot of paper. Much of it superfluous.

Plunger Plunger Plunger!

With the grandparents here and my wife and I just back from Central America, that toilet saw a perfect storm of paper.

Plunger Plunger PLUNGER!

Whole trees went down that toilet.

PLUNGER PLUNGER PLUNGER!

Forests.

PLUNGER PLU--- Whoosh, gurgle gurgle. Aaah.

It took a long time to clear the pipes. Just not long enough. Because remember back at the beginning of the post, back when I said this house has just one bathroom? Well, that was a lie. There is a second bathroom. It's way, way down in our new basement. It's really more of a potential bathroom than an actual bathroom. Right now, it has no tile. No tile, no fixtures, no toilet, no nothing. It's just a small room with pipes coming out of the walls and a big open sewer pipe in the floor. And do you know what happens if you clog up your upstairs pipes with a big ol' wad of toilet paper, then plunger and plunger and plunger it all the way through the pipes, plunger it down two stories, plunger it through the basement, and plunger it just past that big open pipe in the floor of the basement bathroom? Well, then, you've made yourself a fountain.

A shit fountain.

Hurrah.