Our scary week

Occasionally DH has to ditch telecommuting and actually commute up to the office for meetings and face time and, I'm told, dinner at Friday's. Or maybe it was Chili's. At any rate, he was supposed to drive up last Tuesday. That being Massive Ice Storm Day. The roads were clear enough out here in the western badlands of NJ, and I got in to work OK, so he got going. A couple hours later, he calls my cell to say first, that he's fine, and second, the car went off the road entirely and flipped over, and he's waiting for the police and ambulance.

My initial reaction, because I'm not one of those graceful heroines in the movies, was unprintable. And then I kept asking if he were OK, as though examining him over the phone was going to do the same good as, say, an actual doctor doing it in person. Way to react, there.

This, more or less, was his description: He was on one highway, it seemed fine, he switched to the next one, it seemed slippery, he started to get out of the left lane, it spun out of control. It may have only flipped once, or maybe more than once. He was very, very grateful to have been wearing his seatbelt. He was also grateful that he'd taken the car seats out of the back before he left (the idea being that his mother would be picking the kids up from school for me, so I wouldn't have to duck out of work early), because that was how he got out of the upside-down car -- through the back seat. Not too sure how he would've done that had the car seats been in the way.

Also, instead of being out a car and two car seats, we're just out a car.

Because oh boy is that car totaled. At least that's what the tow truck guy said when I called him to check on getting DH's laptop/suitcase/etc. out of it. And the insurance folks told us flat out, start car shopping. I have not seen the car, or pictures of it, and I'm guessing I don't want to, ever, or this whole thing is going to come home to me in a way that it has not and I will have a breakdown of some sort.

A nice couple going to have lunch saw the accident happen and the guy jumped down to try and help DH out of the car, and then they sat and waited with him till the cops got there. Anonymous couple, you have my gratitude, because DH was especially freaked at that point. Then DH went to the ER to get checked out, just in case, which of course took basically the rest of the day, but the tests were fine. He's since had some stiffness, but otherwise more or less good.

I spent the day at work basically not working, running point between him and his bosses and his mother and letting my bosses know what was up, in case I needed to leave, although I couldn't figure out whether that was the right move. 1. I probably would've spun out exactly where he did. 2. I also probably would've gotten massively lost in upstate NY, even with a GPS, because that's a special talent of mine. If he'd been admitted to the hospital, of course, that there is a different story.

The thing we couldn't figure out was how to get him home, and a colleague of his solved that by driving up and getting him, on the grounds that it would've been on the way to the office anyway. We owe him, big time, and he wouldn't even let us feed him dinner. I think we managed to shove a bottled water into his hands before he left. He did see the car, when the two of them stopped by the yard to get the laptop and suitcase, and he seemed pretty freaked about it in his own right. He said DH was lucky.

Which yes, I think so. It seems unreal to me that he could've walked away from that kind of wreck with basically not a scratch. Consumer Reports said about 33 percent of car rollovers result in fatalities. Scarier in retrospect. I feel profoundly grateful that he's home, and that our biggest worry right now is getting another car.

I am sad about that wrecked car. It was the first one we bought together, when we were engaged and living in Florida, and it had a sunroof and leather seats and cruising down A1A in it was a nice way to spend a sunny afternoon. I was amazed we could even afford a car so nice.

No more leather seats for us, I think, what with the years of juice boxes and playground dirt and beach sand and who knows what else ahead of us. We just started looking at cars yesterday, and we were looking at (shudder!) SUVs. Small SUVs. Non-ostentatious SUVs. Big enough for a family, not a soccer team.

In the meantime, I am driving my car very very carefully, because I've never felt that luck was an infinite thing.

No more wandering

Kiddo's eyes, that is. It's been more than a month and we haven't seen them drift out once. The redness seems about gone, too. And the eye doctor is quite satisfied with his progress. I guess you'd call this an optimum result.

He seems to have forgotten the whole thing, which might be for the best. I will be perfectly happy if the only thing we ever have to worry about with his eyes again is the inevitable glasses, since Mommy and Daddy are both four-eyed types.

I can't say he's behaving any differently -- he seemed to be doing well in school anyway, and he still won't eat dinner unless dinner involves pizza and/or chicken nuggets. But the point, I think, is that this would've eventually affected his behavior if his eyes had continued to deteriorate. So the timing was dead on.

Now if we could just get this kid to use the potty regularly, we'd be set.

How many Santas does it take ...

nah, I can't even make the lightbulb joke. That's just wrong.

So we did three events with the jolly dude in red, partially to see how such events are in this new area we still don't know a whole lot about (still haven't found my way to the library yet, for instance, which for me is sacrilege) and partially because, well, we could. #1: Kiwanis Club breakfast with Santa. Not bad. Food OK if unmemorable -- your bagels, your Pop-Tarts, your coffee. Santa nice enough. Beard: Fake. Arts and crafts were cute. Kiddo flipped because the bagels were "broken" (pre-sliced) and then flipped again because he asked Santa for a garbage truck but could not find one among the freebie goodies they were giving out. We explained that Santa had to go back to his shop and make the garbage truck first. Kiddette gave us a "huh?" look about the photo but put up with it pretty well.

#2: Santa train at this place. Kinda fun. Nice train, travels out for a bit then reverses back to the station. Mostly you see back yards. Santa (beard: fake) ho-ho-hos through the cars and poses for pics. Very nice about it, chats with the kids, poses as much as you want. Kiddo made sure to remind him about the garbage truck and Santa quickly pretended to jot down a note about it. A conductor handed out little plush snowmen. Kiddo and the slightly younger boy in the seat in front had a grand old time pointing out the window, jabbering at each other, jumping up and down and yanking on the garlands strung from the overhead racks. Kiddette used her big blue eyes to charm the heck out of that boy's dad, then swung around to conquer the older kids in the seat in back of us. She also managed to get into their picture. Fortunately the mom thought that was funny. Sadly the snack bar back at the museum was out of lemonade. Cue kiddo flipping (mildly).

#3: Another Santa breakfast, but this time at the local hangout restaurant. Just kiddo and me, since DH was working and I thought we could have some Mommy-and-me time. Santa (none of these guys grow their own beards, do they?) was stationed in the back of the restaurant, ready for quick photos and hugs -- and in kiddo's case, a high five. I took pictures of him with Santa, of him looking at the decorations on the windows, and at his insistence, of his toy car. He ate an entire waffle, thus proving he still does have an appetite when carbs and/or sugar are involved. There was face painting, which kiddo did not want, and decorate-your-own cupcakes, which he did. Also managed to dump half the sprinkles all over his plate, which was our cue to leave.

You'd think all this Santa-ness would be confusing, because how could Santa be everywhere at once, all month, but still be able to make all the toys? Are the elves on permanent time and a half? DH is no help on this point, because he doesn't remember there being this many Santa-type events when he was a kid. He remembers going to Macy's, waiting on line, doing the lap thing and that was it. I don't know if it's nice or a little weird that you could see Santa, literally, everywhere if you wanted, from Thanksgiving right on through Christmas.

I don't know how I would feel about that if I were a Christian. Would it be heartwarming, or another example of the crass commercial juggernaut that Christmas has become? I'm trying to imagine Hanukkah getting to that level of saturation, so I could see how I felt about that, but the idea of Hanukkah achieving total Christmas-esque domination is so laughable that I can't do it.

At any rate kiddo didn't seem confused. I guess at his age all adults are mysterious and unexplainable, so why should the dude in the fake beard be any different?

How to get your kid excited about going to the hospital

Gorge him on pizza and ice cream first. Mr. Persnickety never eats dinner anymore, and we knew he wasn't getting breakfast before surgery, so we let him eat his most favorite food before we drove up to the hotel. He was in heaven. He discovered all seven levels of nirvana simultaneously. Pizza! and ice cream! The nice folks at the neighborhood joint we got the ice cream at (mmm, they still had pumpkin) let us take our time as Mr. Nirvana savored every teeny spoonful, even though they were putting chairs on top of tables and sweeping down the floor. The girl at the counter got a huge kick out of his excitement when we ordered, telling us that was one of the perks of her job. Have I mentioned how nice people are around here?

Of course, he sugar-crashed about two seconds after we got back into the car and slept the whole way to the hotel.

If we ever do this again -- and I hope we don't -- I'd spring for a suite, just so he can sleep in one room and we can watch TV or something in the next room. Once we got him changed and resettled, we were afraid to move around too much in case we woke him.

I didn't sleep much, on account of the mattress was hard and it was an unfamiliar setting and I was worried about oversleeping and my kid was having surgery in the morning.

We each snuck downstairs to grab food for ourselves so that he wouldn't catch us. I guess we could've also fasted to show solidarity, but hey, he didn't have to drive. Luckily he didn't seem to notice the lack of breakfast, what with all the interesting stuff going on around him.

There was another couple with a young son checking in the same time we were. He was having a different type of procedure, though I can't remember what. The kiddie waiting area had these cool magnet-boat table things that fascinated kiddo, and I briefly wondered how expensive they were.


All the little curtained-off pre- and post-op rooms have little TVs in them. That is genius. Because kiddo got to watch Mickey Mouse pre-op and Special Agent Oso post-op, and it was practically as good as a narcotic. Which begs the question: If TV is so good at keeping kids in hospitals docile, why do we let them watch the stuff at home?

Anyway, the team was brutally efficient at managing kid and mommy. I took him into the operating room, they coaxed him up onto the table by showing him the neato equipment, they got the mask over his face just long enough to put him out, they suggested I give him a kiss and then reassuringly ushered me out. So clearly down to a science. I was both annoyed by it and impressed despite myself.

The hospital's downstairs cafeteria has Starbucks coffee and a huge wall aquarium. (And, DH said, pretty good omelets.) I saw a clown fish ambling about and wondered if it was there because of "Finding Nemo." Just one of those things you think about when there's something else you don't want to think about.

And then it was over. He took a while to wake up, and he was groggy and grumpy and kept rubbing his unbelievably red eyes. We offered him ice packs, but they would've blocked hs view of Special Agent Oso, so no way. He sat on the oversized wheeled recliner chair in Daddy's lap, as zoned out as he could manage to get, munching graham crackers.

And then when they gave us the all-clear to go, he spied the playroom in the back of the recovery area and threw a fit because he wanted to play with the trucks in there. So we hung around the hospital for an extra 20 minutes or so.

His eyes are still red at the edges but less so, and he hardly ever rubs them. They're turned inward a little now, but overcorrecting is common in cases like this and they might snap out a little more later. They're definitely not wandering out the way they did before. So promising, I guess.

Of course, they're going to look red in photos, so I'm not too sure how to handle the holiday card thing. Stick sunglasses on him?

I do wish we hadn't forgotten the leftover pizza in the hotel fridge. Maybe the maid got to eat it.

Waiting for one thing to go right over here

Kiddo has a tiny cough, not the sort of thing I would remotely worry about normally, except his surgery is in two freaking days and we already postponed it once because he had a (much more noticeable) cough. Worse than waiting for your kid to have surgery? Preparing yourself mentally for it for two months and then finding out you have to wait another month anyway. Really just kind of want to get it over with.

He also had a fever a few days ago, although that's gone. So just the issue of, does he have a real cough or is he OK for anesthesia? Making things worse is that he's figured out he gets to schlump on the couch and watch more "Phineas and Ferb" if he stays home sick, so periodically he fake-coughs and says he can't go to school because he's coughing. We are never, never letting this kid see "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

The whole apparatus is primed to go. Grandparents are ready to drive up. We have a hotel room booked near the hospital so we can get there on time. I have the day off from work. I have a monster truck ready for him as a post-op reward. He just needs to be OK for two more days and then he can cough -- or fake-cough -- all he wants. Although he still isn't getting to watch extra Ferb, because he's getting a little too TV-obsessed lately.

Curse you, Phineas and Ferb, for being so funny! And curse Doofenschmirtz, too. Also Perry the Platypus.

I guess it's a little hypocritical to freak about his TV watching time when I have every intention of going downstairs and catching up on Stewart and Colbert till I fall asleep on the couch. But then I don't throw a tantrum when the TV gets turned off.

Still waiting to give poor Pigeon a proper burial. The emergency vet (who, incidentally, sent a nice condolence card, doubly nice considering they'd never seen me or my pet till that night) said their standard procedure is to mail the cremains to the house. Convenient or creepy? Celia already voted creepy. I voted they're 40 minutes away from my house and if I walk back in there I'll start sobbing again, and I dislike crying in front of people. Otherwise I'd watch Nicholas Sparks movies.

I hate "cremains." It sounds so stark. Like a lame attempt to put a tactful spin on a gruesome word. "Ashes" is better, if not completely accurate.

At any rate, I got some bulbs to plant over her in the yard. Ironic, really, since all she ever did was eat my plants. But it seemed like a nice touch. I kind of need the ashes, though, before I can plant anything, and I very much hope the ground doesn't freeze before I get a chance to do this.

Bad week, please get better.

The carrier is empty

But I can't quite bring myself to touch it yet, or put away the food and water dishes that still have food and water in them. At least we can leave the bedroom doors open now, since there's no worry an ailing cat will seek out a substitute litterbox.

By the numbers: 14 years, 7 homes, 2 states, 5 jobs, 1 marriage, 2 kids and any number of car rides. I drove her back and forth between my first (and second) apartment and my parents' house countless times. I worked nights and was physically unable to wake up early, so sometimes I drove us down after work -- at 2 a.m.

We drove her down to Florida when we moved because I refused to bring her on a plane. (Although I reversed course on that when we moved back, because that was the year four hurricanes hit the state one right after the other, and I'd already moved back to start my job, so I flew down and got her. Nice how I left DH there but came back for the cat, right?) We let her run loose in the car because hey, 14-hour trip, and she bopped around and eventually settled on the back of the back seat, that little shelf under the rear window, and stared at the cars behind us. We only ate fast food that trip, because we needed to be able to bring food back to the car.

So I guess it's appropriate that she died in the car, on the way to the emergency vet, radio off, moving quietly through the dark. I had a feeling she was gone, but I kept driving, just in case.

She never liked traveling much, especially not in the carrier, but she liked being places. She knew every hiding spot in my parents' house. Her first trip to my mother-in-law's house upstate, she saw a bug outside and leaped straight up to grab it, attaching herself to the screen door three feet up. (I still wish I'd gotten a picture.) She liked the high living room windows in my second apartment, the huge living room/dining room in our third apartment, the year-round balcony in our Florida apartment, the sunny living room spots in our New Jersey condo. In the new house, she'd claimed the big window in our bedroom as our own and was apparently taunting the neighborhood dogs from it. Plus our bed. Always our bed. Frequently on top of me. The only times she was evicted were when we had a newborn in the room, and she did not like that whatsoever. Anytime I wasn't holding a child was fair game for lap time.

She liked to play fetch and hunt bugs, and then eat them, even though they didn't agree with her. She destroyed nearly every couch we ever owned, plus a recliner, the sides of our mattress and several patches of carpet. She also destroyed about half the knickknacks I owned when I first got her, along with all the plants. Including an aloe, normally unkillable, just by knocking it over repeatedly until it gave up. And I'm pretty sure she scared the iguana into a premature death, because she loved the heat lamp on top of his tank and kept hopping up there to warm herself.

She was also sweet and friendly and loved being petted by whoever. Even people who didn't like cats, liked her. Which says something.

We knew for a few years that the kidney failure she was suffering from would eventually kill her. But we could never get a firm read on when, or which medications meant something and which were meaningless, or which tests were necessary and which were padding the vet's apparently bottomless pockets. She wouldn't take pills. She wouldn't eat special kidney-diet food. The only thing that ever did anything was injecting her with fluids -- a fun time, really, I'd recommend that to anyone -- and it got more and more difficult to do, what with all the scar tissue on her shoulders.

Don't for a minute think I'm claiming to be Saint Pet Owner here. I'm not. Minus the kids, minus the jobs, with an ounce more free time or sleep, we would've taken better care of her. She got so emphatic about not being medicated that I quit, well before I should have. I got tired of waiting for her to die, which is a horrible feeling to have. I'll never know how much longer she would've lived if we'd done everything right.

As it is, her last conscious memory may well have been being medicated one last time, because she went limp right afterward. I hate that.

But at least I never had to make the conscious decision to put her to sleep, which was my deepest fear all along. I didn't want to choose to do that to her.

There are worse ways to go, I think, than a quiet ride in the dark. 

Goodbye, Pigeon. I'll miss you.

Trick or treat and treat and treat and treat

Wow. Seriously. 15 bags of candy. They just kept coming. DH spotted cars lined up around our complex, so we're figuring people were coming in from outside because it's a nice easy sidewalked kind of walk with lots of houses. Our last place, if we went through two bags it was a good night. Here it's Trick or Treat Central.

It was nice though (even despite DH running out twice for more candy). Because I love Halloween. I dress up. I put bats and spiders in the windows. I watch Charlie Brown. This was the greatest holiday when I was a kid (you get to wear costumes! People give you candy!) and I hope it still is for kids today, so I want to do my part.

Especially for my kids, even if our trick-or-treater was still coughing. Possibly from asthma, we're now told. Hooray and I'm sure that won't affect the rescheduled surgery at ALL. But at any rate, he seemed at least well enough to take a spin around the block. Kiddette had an attack of the teething, so she and I answered the door together. (Her: Princess Kiddette. Me: Black and red brocade dress, pink witch hat.)

Here's a gender quiz for you: When someone answers the door holding a small girl in a pink princess dress, who will react to her, 1. girls or 2. boys? Really, you need an answer key on this? The boys went right for the candy. The girls, no matter how old or young they were, went "Awwwwwww" and "She's so cute!" and "I love her dress!" and "Aw, did you go trick-or-treating?" Which just proves that girls always check out other girls' outfits, and boys have no idea girls exist until puberty.

The kids were mostly in costume -- OK, teenagers, if you're too cool to dress up shouldn't you be too cool to do this at all? -- and mostly polite enough to say "thank you," which is about all you can ask for. Many of them openly approved of our candy choices (that would be all chocolate, all the time). I saw some Elvii, a couple Hogwarts students, some '50s girls, at least one flapper, a bunch of fairies, a few princesses, a ninja, a Spider-Man and the cutest little ladybug girl, whose dad was apparently filming our entire exchange on his smartphone. "Say 'trick or treat'! Now say 'thank you'!" he coaxed without ever taking the thing away from his face. I thought about demanding he produce a release for me to sign, since he was using my image and all, but then figured negotiations would really drag things down and the next batch of kids needed candy.

The parents were generally cool, coaching the kids on politeness and waving to me from the street, but I have to say, I think some of them weren't getting the point of the whole thing. You're not supposed to be driven from house to house. You're supposed to WALK. Boo hoo, it's cold. Wear a turtleneck under your costume and suck it up like I did. Was I cold? Yes. Did I get a ton of candy? Hell yes. The good outweighs the bad, kids. Also you should probably burn some calories before you scarf down all the Reese's.

Honestly, parents, land the copter for one night. It's a safe neighborhood.

So, things we know for next year: Buy more candy. Have a little more fun with the decorations (which were on the sedate side). Film the parents and see how they like it. And don't even try to have dinner until at least 9.