the odds

I can get really hung-up on the improbability of having a baby with differences. I don’t mean that in a bemoaning woe-is-us and our unusual baby sort of way. In the everydayness of our life, his limb differences rarely cross my mind anymore.  He’s four months old now and when I look at him, I don’t see an absence of tibia bones, I don’t see cleft hands. I just see Ulysses. But sometimes, in the quiet hours when everyone else sleeps and I don’t (or won’t or can’t, who knows), I start to think about how in the statistical heck it happened that he is even here, the way he is, at all. And I wonder, is there anyone else here on the whole planet who has a body like he does? His lower leg condition (tibial hemimelia) occurs approximately once in one MILLION births. SEVENTY percent of those occurences are unilateral, and generally without other issues. His presentation is bilateral. AND he has hand differences, as well. He is rare.  And the hugeness of his uniqueness can about knock me over.

I was talking to the husband about these thoughts the other day, just yammering on about “what are the odds?” thinking he’d pull some fast number out of his Math Brain for me, when he clarified, “what are the odds that Ulysses was born like Ulysses?” I think I was just curious, like I wanted him to tot up all his issues and figure out exactly how rare our rare boy is, indeed. The husband just looked at me funny, “one in seven billion. he’s a one in seven billion baby. just like everybody.”  Of course. There is no one like any of us. And, yeah, most of us fall into the typical median, and, sure, my boy’s differences will present him with challenges that most people never even consider, but he’s just one of seven billion. Same as me, same as you. That any of us is here is nothing short of amazing, how ever many bones we’ve got.

I’m delighted to report that our post-op visit with the cardiologist confirmed that the repair was successful, that Uly’s heart is working exactly as it needs to now. There is a chance that as he grows, he will need another surgery. But that’s a big, blurry If and the good news at present is that he’s gaining weight and doing wonderfully and we don’t have to go back again to the cardiologist for another check-up for SIX months. His incision is a faint pink line now and I can barely remember the acute level of dreadful apprehension we lived under for months.

I have been tinkering around with some changes to my own lifestyle (sorry for the annoying vagueness), trying to get out of the funk I’ve been in for a while. It was a hard winter. Not in the Long Winter twisting hay and grinding the seed wheat sort of way, but just endlessly gray. The sky, my brain, the way I feel. I think the week between finding out about Ulysses (you know, when everybody thought he was going to die) until his extremely emotional birth affected me more than I have readily admitted aloud.  And I largely spent the winter at home, being affected. I have worked through some of it, but I’ve got a lot of unseen sludge, tarlike and sticky, to get rid of. I am ready to feel good again.

So, bring it on, Spring. Even if it doesn’t feel very springy in these parts yet. We’ve still been seeing light dustings of snow, atypical for this area in March. I chose to live in the pacific northwest not in small part because I love the weather. Despite growing up in southern New Mexico and West Texas, and then confirmed by our three  year Arizona experiment, I prefer the overcast to the blinding blue. But. But I could sure go for some bone baking sunshine right now. That dry oven heat that feels like a solid thing touching your face when you step outside. We might not see such a thing up here until August, if at all. So I’ll have to hope we get some clear skies and dry days soon, and make do with that.

(photo is of the birch trees and the house across the street. by the time i bothered to pick up my camera and take some snowy day pictures last week, everything else had already melted away.)

world read aloud day

Every day is a read aloud day at my house, but today (March 7) was actually World Read Aloud Day. Did you hear that, world? I hope you read something great. Reading out loud to my children is one of my favorite things, right there at the top of my Favorite Things list (and it’s a long list, so I’m not messing around here). I started collecting books to read to my children before I had children. And now, with more than thirteen years of parenting under my belt, my collection of children’s books has grown and we have a lot -A LOT!- of children’s books (it helps that I also love to poke around in secondhand shops). And we read them all.

The whole point of world read aloud day, though, is to inspire the effort to increase world literacy: Imagine a world where everyone can read… My multiplying hoard of out-of-print picture books isn’t helping world literacy, but who knows the good that will come from my young book lovers growing up and taking their book loving selves into the great big world. I don’t do it for some kind of altruistic ripple effect, though, I read to my kids for my own selfish reasons.

Reading to my children guarantees us shared experience and close contact. I hold all this reading responsible for us liking each other so darn much. Many of our favorites have become so engrained in our family history, so tattooed into my children’s psyches, that the books are practically elevated to honorary family members. In addition to reading to my children myself, we also have a lot of beloved audiobooks. Both of my kids have listened to E.B. White reading Trumpet of the Swan (recorded in 1978) so many times (thousands!) that I joke that E.B. White’s voice is their audio grandpa. The joke falls flat, though, because it’s kind of true. Their own grandfather moved to this corner of the country last year, and so they see him every month or so, but E.B. White’s slow, careful account of Louis and Serena and Sam Beaver is far more of an influential presence in their lives. My boy always has a messy stack of CDs by his little bedroom boombox, library holds or discs from our own collection, and he listens to something every time he’s in his room playing. But Trumpet of the Swan is the constant. That audiobook really is more to us than just a book.

Currently, I’m reading The Secret Garden to my boy for the first time. One of the fun parts about having such a big age gap between my children is that we get to revisit books again and again. While picture books are my number one love, we have a whole, tall bookshelf devoted to children’s chapter books. And we don’t give up one for the other. It’s not like once a kid in our house reaches a certain level we retire picture books, oh no! We read them all. I started reading chapter books to my girl when she was three. My son wasn’t quite as precocious of a listener, though, but now that he’s six, we’ve nearly caught up. The husband reads a whole different book, or series, to him at bedtime (currently they’re working their way through the L. Frank Baum category). I keep a fidgety daytime listener interested by reading during lunch, or with a big stack of blank paper and drawing supplies at the ready, or a pile of legos, or some other busy little thing to occupy fingers. I haven’t read The Secret Garden in probably eight years and I’d forgotten how much tricky pidgin Yorkshire dialog it contains. I’m a pretty excellent read-aloud-er (hey. but self-deprecating is really my top talent, so there’s the balance if it sounds like I’m being all braggy) and I’ll tell you that trying to replicate Martha the maid’s dialect is a challenge even for me. One chapter and I can use a drink or a nap.

As soon as we finish our current read it’ll be time to start our annual Spring reading of The Wind in the Willows. Do you have a favorite book to read aloud? Because that’s mine. I’ve read it every year to my kids since Two Thousand TWO when my daughter was just three. I’m an abysmal speaker, I trip over words and lose my train of thought and leave uncomfortable long and awkward pauses, but when I read out loud, especially such perfect prose as Kenneth Grahame’s classic, I get to hear such eloquence coming out of my own fumbley mouth. I love that. I also love that kids who listen to excellent books develop excellent vocabularies. It’s ok to read books to your children above their level of comprehension. I’d rather overestimate what my kids can understand, anyway, than shoot too low.

But we don’t just read great books. We read a lot of dumb stuff, too. My son is riding a year long, so far, crush on Geronimo Stilton. I thought the end was in sight when, lo! my desert dwelling goodwill trolling pal sent us a whole BOX full of Geronimo Stilton books. I groaned, my son cheered, and we compromised and read one or two a week. There are plenty of contemporary books I adore, I’m not a classic purist by any means, but that mystery solving goofball mouse with those thin paperbacks full of cheesy puns is my read aloud nemesis. But until my son can sound them out on his own (at six and three months, he’s not there yet), I’ll make a big cup of tea and sip (so as to not grit my teeth) through them.

What are you reading aloud at your house?

And! I’m not even going to tack on a photo quality apology footnote, I’m going to make a whole paragraph here. I’m having focus issues with my standard lens on my Rebel, hence the blurriness up top and that’s another lazy phone shot in the middle there. Picture taking isn’t even a thing I *do* anymore; I’m lucky to snap anything. But, because it might appear from the top photo that we have tidy shelves, I thought I’d include the real life pull back. In my son’s room, we aim to just get the books ON the shelves every couple of days (although, frankly, they don’t all fit). I really do alphabetize all of the chapter books, but the picture books are just a jumble and there’s usually some kind of mess happening all around them, too. Like this:

march on!

I’ll blog when I have a good picture to post, I think. I’ll blog when I am feeling less confused and rudderless. I’ll blog soon, I’ve been telling myself for days. But if you follow me over on instagram, you know that I have barely posted pictures over there. I don’t think I have even touched my actual camera in over a month. I might not have a good picture for a long time. And if I wait until I have something positive to write about, it might be longer still. I’m not completely negative, but life does feel a little like Wesley and Buttercup flailing in lightning sand and contending with rodents of unusual size in the fire swamp: one damn thing after another.

I find it hard to believe that we’re two and a half weeks past heart surgery. Did we really do that? Did that happen? Ulysses has the healing wound to prove it. Yes. But it feels like a dream. And now that we crossed that hurdle, what next? We learned that he had a congenital heart defect on his due date. Within the hour of his birth, we knew the specificity of his issue and that he would require open heart surgery in a few months. Those “few months” loomed hazy and obscure ahead of us. But we had a goal, as dreadful and undesirable as major surgery on an infant can be, it was a thing to plod toward and do. And now it’s done.

I did a lot of heart surgery research prior to my boy’s hospitalization. I admit to feeling pangs of envy over all the families I came across on the internet who just had that one scary terrible thing -heart surgery- to conquer and then, pow! a projected normal childhood! In our family’s case, the heart surgery was huge (a healthy beating heart is everything, is it not?) but invisible. We can’t turn in our Special Needs card now, broken heart successfully mended. No one can see his heart. His heart isn’t the part of him that makes strangers squint and peer more closely. His heart doesn’t make clothing him a challenge. His heart was, I admit now honestly, the least of my worries. Heart surgery was frightening. I was in an out-of-body haze for the five days we spent in the hospital with him. But I knew our surgeon knew what he was doing. I trusted that the surgery would be successful, that Ulysses would recover quickly. And that’s just what happened. I remember our cardiologist initially explained the necessary surgery as a “one and done”. He’d need surgery once and then he’d have, knock on wood, a long life with a healthy heart. I could wrap my brain around that.

Everything beyond the solid fix-it response to his heart defect, though, is blurry. We know he’ll need bilateral amputations. I say things like “knee disarticulation” now without flinching. The more time I spend with this little guy the more I am not afraid of choosing to cut off his legs. I see, even now as a pre-mobile baby, the way his tiny legs get in the way. It’s hard to dress him, tricky to change his diaper, and he’s still just a little thing. I can see, very clearly, how much these non-functional legs will hinder his development as he grows. What is unclear, though, is how we do get from here to there.

This last week took us back to the pediatric ophthalmologist. My three and a half month old has now had three eye exams. After our first ophthalmology appointment (also, I always thought I was a super speller, but that first H in ophthalmology was news to me!) we were charged with patching our boy’s “good” eye for a couple of hours a day. His left eye has mild corneal clouding (another very rare condition) and impaired vision. He does see with that eye, but not as clearly. The optic nerve is like a garden path, though, and in this case the hazy vision means the path is somewhat overgrown. If we don’t encourage him to use that eye often, the path could become lost completely. It won’t ever be a well manicured pathway, but we aim for it to always be passable. The challenge is that Ulysses has very sensitive skin and all of the eye patches we’ve tried cause an allergic reaction. We shuffled his eye issue to the backburner while we prepared for heart surgery, but now it’s a priority. We need to find less irritating eye patches and continue encouraging him to use his left eye.

In the meantime, we’re awfully consumed, this little family of mine, with how to move. It’s pure irony that my husband works in the Portland metro area and yet we live an hour away. When we lived in Arizona, we couldn’t wait to get back to Portland. We knew right away that Phoenix was not the city for us. We stayed long enough to have a second baby, make some good friends (one super great one in particular), and collect a lot of excellent junk (there’s no thrifting like phoenix thrifting). We didn’t quite make it back to Portland, though: he found work about an hour and a half away. Close enough? Maybe for occasional visits, sure. But he’s since moved on to a dreamy position where he’s appreciated for being the project managing rockstar that he is, and we are stuck being way out here. We’ve endured the current set-up for over two years. And now we have a special needs baby and a calendar full of city-based appointments. For every reason we need to move. But knowing what you need to do doesn’t make the actual doing any easier.

So that’s where we’re at, which is really no place at all, just this foggy limbo of restlessness and vague discontent.

A friend of mine (a phoenix friend, ha!) posted this little clip on ye olde facebook the other day and I thought right away, I need to share this! I watched and loved that movie Once a few years ago, as much as everyone else did, even as I usually disdain sweet romance flicks. It was a bitter kind of sweet, the mixed emotion salty kind that suits me best. Anyway, you know the song and the singer, but look who’s accompanying him! Yes, I have a longstanding crush on Eddie Vedder and, no, I’m not ashamed to admit it. Eddie sings and I swoon and a tiny part of me is always seventeen. I just really liked this. No shit, no roses, indeed.

i get by with a little help

After more than a decade of avoiding cow dairy, I started eating ice cream again when I was pregnant. Not any ice cream. Only one kind: Straus Family Creamery Organic Coffee Ice Cream. It’s expensive but I’d pay twice as much, if it came to that. It is the best. Throughout last fall, I said I’d stop eating it after the baby was born. For the week before his birth and a number of weeks afterward, I could barely make myself eat anything. But once “the baby” (I really do call him that. good morning, The Baby! I say every day) was settled into his position in our family and I became more comfortable with everything about him, my taste for my favorite ice cream came back. I don’t eat it every night, no. But I sure look forward to the nights that I do. It helps.

It’s been a rough adjustment. I am so glad we have his heart surgery behind us. I wish I could have some kind of eternal sunshine of this mother’s mind performed on the part of my brain that keeps remembering him being tubed and cut. Of course, I didn’t actually *see* that stuff happening, but after I handed him over to the anesthesiologist and they walked into the operating room, it was all I could think about. I don’t even have to imagine that hard. I know what the surgery entailed, I know what he looked like directly afterward, I can fill in the blanks. And those images wake me up in the middle of the night, still.

So what I’m saying is that I appreciate small pleasures. I am glad for little distractions that make a difference.

And I am incredibly grateful for all the people who are the coffee ice creams in my life.

Local folks have brought numerous meals. Far away pals have sent thoughtful things in the mail. Many of you have emailed encouraging words. A dear friend of mine flew out from Phoenix not only during that difficult week surrounding Uly’s birth, but last week, as well. I honestly do not know what I would have done without that friend, who put her own life on hold to help out with mine.

For a lot of reasons, I really ought to wean myself off of my ice cream vice, but I confess I will likely remain dependent on the goodness of others for some while yet. Before the end of this year, he’ll have more surgeries. In the meantime, we have worries about whether or not he has other issues, are we missing anything? Some days I have barely been able to keep it together, but I would have fallen apart completely if not for the help we’ve received.

(yes, another cheater phone picture, previously posted on instagram! i can barely string a few coherent words together lately, so careful picture taking with an actual camera is probably some way off. but the baby! he is so sweet, you don’t even know.)

we did it!

This is just to say that we’re on the other side. The dreaded thing is done. Soon I will go to sleep on fresh clean sheets in my own bed with my baby tucked up next to me. As it should be.

I am so exhausted. It was a very rough five days, but that’s better than a rough whole week, which is what we were planning for. Ulysses had the best case scenario every step of the way. His recovery could not have happened more swiftly.

It was wrenching to see him so out of himself. He was completely machinated, reliant on technology and constant management to live for the better part of two days. I’m glad I prepared myself for what he’d look like post-op. I was not surprised by the large angry incision down his chest. However, the drainage tubes did catch me off guard. I knew there would be tubes, but I guess I thought they’d be out of the same cut. I wasn’t expecting sizable tubing out of three separate entry spots. That’s four cuts, three small and one large, right there. He also had his central line in his jugular (straight into his superior vena cava), a line in his femoral artery, and an iv lock in his left foot. And then there was the ng tube in his nose pulling out stomach bile, the breathing tube down his throat, and a foley catheter. He had temporary pacer wires exiting the main incision which were attached to an external pacemaker. He was extremely connected to things. We couldn’t pick him up at all for over a day. And then when we could it was tricky to manipulate around all the stuff and he seemed uncomfortable.

After several days of seeing my boy glassy eyed from sleep and morphine, his face puffy and blank, I can’t tell you how good it has been seeing his smiles again. He has been so smiley since we got home.

We hope we won’t ever have to do that again.

(maybe after some catch-up sleep I’ll write a things I learned/observed while hospital living entry)

hospital food is gross (and ain’t you ever seen a two fingered baby before?)

Ulysses is out of intensive care and onto the regular pediatric floor! He’s doing as well as any baby ever does after cardiac surgery. We couldn’t have expected a better recovery, so far. Yay!

Because baby Uly doesn’t eat any food that I don’t make for him in my own in-house milk machine, I can order up meals while I’m here for myself. I’ve been mostly avoiding this nursing mom “perk” and relying on the cashews and tangelos in my bag, but I started feeling shaky last night and needed something more. The husband was gone for the night and I didn’t want to leave my boy’s bedside, so hospital food it was!

Thanks a lot, hospital, for perpetuating the myth that vegetarians like to eat plain cold tofu! It’s not that I LIKE plain tofu, oh no! It’s that I don’t eat flesh (13 years and counting, though I keep threatening to eat meat, a post for another time!) and I need protein. Granted, I didn’t know it would be cold and plain when I selected tofu as my salad add-in. I assumed it would be at least marinated. Anyway, I ate it all because I was hungry, which is probably why anybody with tastebuds would eat that bland, squeaky stuff. Sure we eat tofu at home now and again. But plain? No. Just because I ate it, doesn’t mean I like it!

Just because I’m handling this all reasonably well sure as heck doesn’t mean I like it!

I am glad for the mostly unflappable demeanor of hospital staff. It’s a comfort feeling like they’ve seen it all before. Even if they haven’t. I know my son has an unusual body. But I don’t want to see that surprise flash across your face when you see him for the first time. (I know this will always be part of his experience, and mine through him.) Thankfully, there been very few of those confused flinches here in the hospital. Hospitals should be very safe places, especially where things like differences and special needs are concerned.

It figures that one of the only double-takes came from the same nurse who administered meds like it was a squawking cat on the other end of the syringe and not a baby. Slow and steady, dude, your aim-and-fire-and-see-what-sticks technique could use some compassionate improvement. But this was in the middle of the night and I was punchy and exhausted so I met his vague insensitivity head on, “clearly it’s not every day you get to see such an awesome baby who looks like this!” Nurse dude caught himself and his expression immediately shifted from perplexed to neutral, “well, he’s a handsome guy, he’s got that going for him.” And I answered, “he’s got a lot going for him. Ulysses is amazing.” That’s what I said, but my voice was all Eff you. Eff you for letting your judgment seep out where I can see. Eff you for over-correcting with an insincere compliment (but not untrue! Super Uly is a beautiful baby). Eff you because it’s past 1 a.m. and I’m so tired and I know you want me to leave and sleep in the quiet room (because he kept saying, “why don’t you leave? I’ve got it under control here?”) but I don’t want to leave because I don’t like you and I don’t trust you, so there. (that’s a lot for a tone of voice to convey!)

For the record, I did go to the quiet room because I was just that tired and I did intend to stay but just a couple hours but I overslept and got myself locked out of the picu until after shift change.

I beat myself up about that gaffe all morning, but as Ma* says, “all’s well that ends well” and I’m typing this with my left thumb because my right arm is full of sleeping baby. It’s good to be able to hold him again, even if I can’t pick him up out of his bed by myself. He’s still attached to lots of stuff (but not as attached as yesterday!) and maneuvering him is tricky.

We might go home as soon as Saturday! In my limited experience, hospital discharge can take longer than expected, so I’m not holding my breath or anything. But it’s good to see homeward progress. Ulysses is weaning off of oxygen and still has two chest cavity drain tubes in place, which might be removed tomorrow. His post-extubation raw throated cry (sad baby dinosaur!) is sounding better already and he’s starting to wake up and open his eyes now and again. It’s torture, what we’ve put him through, really. But there was no other way.

And the thing about Ulysses is that it’s not heart surgery and then we’re home free. But one thing at a time. We’ll climb the next hurdle when we reach it.

*Ingalls

i am other people and so are you

This is what you want to know: The surgery was text book, no surprises, and Ulysses is doing beautifully!

I’m sitting at his bedside in the picu, lulled into pensive sleepiness by the aquarium sounds of all those liquids dripping in and out of him. I have a bed reserved in the intensive care parents’ quiet room, and I should get over there soon.

Once Uly was stable this late afternoon, the husband and I snuck away to a restaurant a couple blocks away. We really needed to eat. Anyway, the server teased us, “are you texting sweet nothings to each other?” as we both were buried into our respective iphones. I looked around and realized we were surrounded by couples, dressed nicely and looking relaxed, happy. Valentine’s dates! She left before we could explain, but as soon as she was back to our table I blurted out, “we have a baby in intensive care at the hospital! he just had heart surgery! we’re messaging friends and family with updates!”

I always thought heart defects (if I thought about them at all, which I doubt) happened to other people. I’d been in an ignorant fog. Other people have babies with serious health issues. Other people have babies with limb differences. Other people go to pediatric specialists and worry about insurance lifetime maximum payouts. Other people.

But now I realize that I am the other people. Some other ignorant lucky bastard out there is me, before I had the life experience to learn that we are ALL other people.

It only takes a little time spent in a hospital to see that all types are represented. Every kind of family is here. And we’re all as out of place as we all do belong.

I could’ve passed tonight at the restaurant, I could have allowed the server to assume we were just employing poor date etiquette, with our technology all up in our faces and hardly any words spoken between us. But I wanted her to know because this is such a huge thing and because I want to represent what families with children with birth defects look like. Which is the same thing as saying what families look like. Like us. Like you. Like anyone. The more we talk about it the less anyone can dismiss the possibility as something that happens to other people. We are all other people. We are all just people.

And people!! You all blew me away today with your constant and true stream of kindness. Every comment, every text or message, would cause my phone to chime and even before I read your words (and I read them all, I did.) I would breathe deeply and smile. Love. I depended on that stream of love so much.

Ulysses will remain sedated and on the ventilator until tomorrow. I rub his head, stroke his fingers, fat from retained fluid, and tell him I’m here. That’s all I can do for now.

(will try to post more tomorrow)

please and thank you

When we finished up with all the pre-surgical tasks (ekg, chest x-ray, blood draws) and concluded our tour of the pediatric intensive care, she asked if we had any questions. I shook my head No. I am pretty sure this woman, the cardiac care liaison, meant questions about the procedure or related logistics. I’m clear on all of that. I wish I could have said Yes! Tell me how it is that I’m standing here now. Tell me how to breathe tomorrow. Please tell me that when he’s grown he will look back on his babyhood with vague memories of goodness and security and love, not fear and pain. Will he grow up? Will he be ok?

Please know that I’m expecting a great lifting surge of kind thoughts and intentions from you (whoever you are) tomorrow.

My tiny boy, just barely three months old, is having his chest cut open and his broken heart repaired tomorrow. My baby is going to have his heart stitched up on Valentine’s Day and nothing else matters. If you know my boy or know his story, I have to believe you will be thinking of him. How could you not? Every heart shape you see will be etched with his name. Ulysses is loved.

I have been so caught-up in the newness of everything, so focused on learning about my son’s issues, that these past three months have happened in a snap. This is my honest excuse for having such a backlog of thank you notes and letters. So much kindness has come into our home, through the mail and from in-person friends alike and I am so appreciative. Consider this a placeholder of a proper thank you, a sincere acknowledgment until the worries fade some and I can send an actual written response.

Please think of us tomorrow, with all of your love and hearts and sweets. It’s going to be a very hard day.

Thank you.

(if this first post from my phone is successful, i might be able to blog during the coming week at the hospital)

happy birthday, babe lincoln!

How can you not be charmed by a little girl whose first crush was on President Lincoln? The little girl’s a teenager now (whoa.) and is out of town for a couple of nights, so we didn’t bake our traditional cake. Her crush has long been downgraded, anyhow, to some kind of history lover’s fondness. But old number sixteen is still her favorite and we try to observe his birthday.

Remember when we lived in the desert and I was freezer paper stenciling everything five years ago? (just nod your head, I’m reminiscing here.) And when I asked my girl what image she’d like on a shirt, she had only one answer:

We should locate that shirt in the too-little bins (I’ve saved everything, you know.) and cut out Abe and sew him onto something else. I’m not sure that she’d want to wear a dead president on a shirt anymore but I can see him looking just right on a throw pillow perhaps.

Because she’s not here and I can’t ask her permission, I won’t take a picture of the small Lincoln statue on her desk. But I will show you some (we have others but I was too lazy to search) of our related books. I wouldn’t bet for sure on this, but we might have more Abraham Lincoln books for children in our house than in our local library (ditto Ancient Egypt and various other subjects). I pulled this handful off the shelf to have on the table today for mister six to look through and read.

Presidential birthdays aside, I like the gather and strew approach to presenting other topics, too. We have a lot of books. It’s amazing how many can get lost or forgotten unless I gather up small groups and put them in noticeable places, like the dining room table. You know that whole No Reading At The Table traditional rule? Yeah, we don’t do that here. When Ms. Thirteen has her nose in a novel (per usual), I ask her to put it down, but I often read aloud during meals, little bits or small factoids, interesting things, so we can all talk about it together.

And that’s it. I have a longer book post to write but it will have to wait. I’m less than forty-eight hours away from my baby’s open heart surgery and it is, understandably, affecting me.

(photo quality caveat: the 1st two are from the point and shoot I used from 2003-2007. at the time, i thought it produced a decent capture. ha!)

chop an onion, see what happens.

When I don’t know what to make for dinner, I just start making dinner. You know how everywhere you turn, popular advice outlines how to be a better meal planner? Yeah, well, I’m the opposite of that. And not only am I NOT a meal planner, I’m kind of an anti-planner. I don’t make out menus weeks in advance. In fact, I rarely think about dinner at all until dinner making time. Granted, I’ve had a lot of housewifing years to cultivate both basic cook skills and a certain level of kitchen flippancy, and I depend on having pantry staples on hand, plus fresh produce. But the key, for me, is to just start. If I stand around thinking about it too long, it’ll never get done and we’ll be doomed to takeout (a rare cop-out, especially due to the limited number of takeout food options in our small town. I’d trade a lot of valuable somethings to be near Indian food again).

I chop an onion, and see what happens next. While I’m chopping, I mentally run through my kitchen inventory. What do I have that I need to use up? What have I not made in a while? What am I in the mood for? By the time my eyes are watering, I usually have an idea. Last night, I remembered that near-empty quart of blackstrap molasses in the cupboard. It had gotten so thick and unpourable, the last inch or so was stuck in the container. It would need hot water added to liquify and pour out. And do you know what I could use watery molasses for? Barbecue sauce. So I made up a big pot of barbecue red lentils, which starts, as most things do, with an onion.

Dinner was ready just as the husband arrived home, which wasn’t until 7. I hate eating dinner that late, but not as much as he hates coming home that late, especially after a twelve hour workday and over two hours of commuting time. We had the lentils over polenta with green beans on the side. With the advent of digital photography and blogging came this idea, I think, that dinner is always beautiful and interesting and served on eccentrically mismatched china atop a vintage tablecloth. At my house, it’s often as boring as plain steamed green beans on, yes, vintage but chipped up dishes and no tablecloth. Another thing to wash? No thanks.

And it wasn’t like a brilliant revelation or anything, but we were all sitting there eating dinner, and I thought This Is It. Full bellies and simple, wholesome food and all five (FIVE!) of us and the husband singing I’ve Been Working On The Railroad between bites because the baby loves it so and me randomly wondering out loud what I could spray on sidewalk chalk drawings to make them last a little longer, and then the husband singing his answer, so as to keep the baby happy, and me laughing because I didn’t really expect an answer (which was hairspray, by the way, that fella has an answer for everything), and the boy dancing like he does and the teenager telling me, “for the record, mom, I wholeheartedly approve of your choice of husbands”. And it hit me: This is it.

We didn’t know how to be married, how to have the kind of family we wanted to have, the husband and I. But we just did it. And we’ve had a number of what you could call Big Life Stressors over the years and not only is our little family still intact, but we laugh a lot and like each other. I’m sure I have something to do with it, team effort, you know. But I give a lot of credit to that husband of mine. My kids don’t know how lucky they are to have a good dad. Good isn’t even the word. Present, engaged, completely involved. He didn’t have an example of that sort of father but he became one anyway. He wanted to be a good dad and so he is one. Like that. And sometimes the simplest snapshots of our life remind me that we’re doing it right.

And that’s what we’ll keep doing. I’ll keep chopping onions and he’ll keep working a million hours a week and still find time for his family, too. We’ll do what we need to do no matter if we’ve never done it before, if we haven’t a clue. I feel dreadful about next week, about the baby’s surgery. It’s a necessary but dreadful thing. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to be with him for a week in the hospital, how to make sure my other kids are fine, how to keep myself fed and rested and healthy. I don’t have any idea at all.

So I’m not going to think about it. I’m just going to do it.