Kiss my.....

Setting: yesterday evening, as Brody and I are walking to my car after school. I have pulled out my back and cannot lift anything.

Me: Ok, buddy, you're going to have to help mommy and get into the carseat yourself.

Brody: I help mommy? Why? (helping him climb up into the car seat)

Me: Mommy has an owie in my back, and it hurts.

Brody: You got an owie? On yer back? (buckling him into the car seat)

Me: Yeah, buddy. I'll be okay though.

Brody: I wanna kiss it. Make it better.

Me: Thank you, Brody. You are very nice. You can kiss it when we get home.

Brody: I gotta owie too.

Me: You do? Where?

Brody: On my butt.

Me: On your butt?

Brody: Yeah. Kiss it, mommy.

He said, "It's perfect!"

Brody had the cast removed, which means we got our first real look at the new thumb. He wears a splint for a month full time, but we get to remove it when he takes baths, or goes swimming.

I've posted this picture on Facebook, his carepages, and now here. I can't get enough of it. His thumb is magnificent. Stunning. Captivating. I can say these things because I didn't have anything to do with it and so it's not (really) bragging.

It's all Dr. Doug Hutchinson at Shriners, and of course, the wondrous Brody.

Brody has thumbed his nose at being conventional and, instead, has thumbed his way to greatness.

Too much? I know. I couldn't help it.

Oh, and the title of the post today is because that is exactly what Brody said, with a grin splitting his face open, when we were looking at his new thumb.

I'm getting worse

I think I might be a vampire.

Because I woke up at 1:11am this morning, thinking it must be 4am, and therefore, time to wake up.

Shriners books our flights, you see. The flight they booked today left the airport at 7am.

Which means we had to get up at 4:30am.

I tried to back to sleep, but I was haunted by images of Kate Gosselin's bizarre hair and then the intermittent shifting of the dog paws on wood floors, or Brody coughing. I was about to doze off for good around 3am, but then Brody cried "Mommy, there's a bad guy in my room!"

No, not much sleep after 1:11am.

Jeremy and Brody did get on the flight, however. Barely.

If I had more energy, I would describe the nonstopchatter from the backseat en route to the airport. I wonder sometimes if one of my other personalities laces Brody's victuals with caffeine. I just can't believe that anyone has that much joie de vivre at 5am.

Nothing in particular

I woke up at 3:30 in the morning, in the middle of a 3-day weekend for goodness sake, thinking.

Just.thinking. I bought some melatonin the next day.

The next night I had a dream a plaintiff (I'm a defense lawyer) was stalking me. Not any particular one, just generally speaking. It was a mean plaintiff and she stole my hard drive.

During the days, however, life is good. J and I took Brody on a steam engine train ride this weekend. It was lovely, because of how wide Brody smiled and how overwhelmed he was. I've lived in Colorado for 12 years and had never done this train trip. And wouldn't have without Brody. I have pictures.

In the sodden mess that was weather this weekend, we avoided the grill and instead introduced Brody to smores last night. It took one bite before he was persuaded, and then he had two smores himself.

I completely rearranged and resorted my office at work. Furniture moved. Probably 500 pages of paper recycled, from cases that were closed or research I no longer needed. It felt good. Really good. I have received many compliments. Usually, you cannot see my desk for all of the paper. Now you can.

Tomorrow Jeremy and Brody fly to Salt Lake to have the cast removed and a splint made for B's left hand. I cannot wait to get the cast off, even if he has to wear a splint for a few weeks. Also, I hate it hate it hate it when Brody flies without me. I have it in my head, and I know it's irrational, that if I'm with him, even if the plane crashes, I can save him. Control issues? Me?

My mom and stepdad are coming for the 4th of July. I am so happy. I miss her, and want Brody to be closer to her. I have felt very guilty because we were supposed to go to them in May, and then June, but couldn't because of money and, mostly, work.

I find out in June if I will be taking (unpaid) furlough days in the new fiscal year, as the powers that be have decreed.

I have stopped working out. I am starting again tomorrow.

I want another smore. And a margarita. Or just tequila.

We all progressing

Brody fell again at school. Rather, he was pushed.

I got the call after a very long day at work yesterday. He was pushed by another child climbing a ladder (there's a slide in his room). He fell on his mouth. He was bleeding.

I went to him immediately.

He's fine. Sure, one of this eye teeth is jammed a wee bit up into his gum, and loose, but it had stopped bleeding, and he had stopped crying. Screw it. I hate the ER, especially on a nice Thursday evening. If it falls out, it falls out.

(See how much I've progressed in just a few weeks?)

One thing we have discovered is that daycares and schools never tell parents who the other kid is in the altercation, whether your child is the perpetrator or the victim. Probably to avoid warring parents. In the verbal description, in the written report I have to sign, there is never any mention of the other child's name.

However, as I discovered last night, Brody does not adhere to such notions.

As I carried him to the car, I said, "Who pushed you, sweetie?"

"Noah push me. I fell down."

"That wasn't nice of Noah. Did he get a time out?"

"Yeah, he hadda take five minutes." [Take five minutes at B's school means time out for five minutes to calm yourself down.]

"Did you have to take five minutes?"

Looking at me horrified Brody said, "No, Noah push me. I fell down."

Hugging him for the 5th time in 5 minutes, "Are you okay, baby?"

"Yeah, I good. I wanna cuddle on da couch, watch Nemo."

So we did.

But more importantly, he is now a source of gossip from daycare.

I heart him.

Brodyism: he's catching on

When J and/or I do not want to watch something on TV, like the 3425th showing of Nemo or the Mickey Mouse Club, we have said to Brody, "Sorry, Brody, [insert name of movie or cartoon] is sleeping/broken."

It worked for a while. It did. We didn't have drama or more tears or tantrums. He accepted that the movie was broken or that Mickey Mouse was sleeping.

It was a short-lived utopian household we had back then, where parents could take the easy way out of parenting with a simple white lie and watch the news with impunity.

A morning or two ago, Brody woke me up for the day. As we were changing the diaper and going downstairs, I told him that I needed to watch the news so I could see the weather.

Brody disagreed. "Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!," he whined, "News sleeping!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Reminiscing by the numbers

I am not by nature a pack rat, except for email. Before I blogged, I would write long and winding emails to people.

I have had the same email for personal use since 2004. The beginning of my miscarriage history.
I currently still have 6,495 email messages in my inbox. Read, of course. Not including spam or order confirmations.


Of the 6,495, there are 1,611 that mention the name Brody. I think there are actually more messages about him, since a lot of the time I refer to him as B in an email.

One of the first messages mentioning Brody is me telling one of my friends about how J and I like the name Brody. I wrote that email about 3 months before he was born, before we knew he was a boy, before we had ever heard the words Vacterl, craniosynostosis, or bilateral radial club hands.

I found one email that I wrote about one week after he was born before we knew everything that was wrong, and everything that would be right, with Brody. I wrote it to a coworker who is a good friend, and apparently I needed a blog even then. Especially then. Suffice it to say, I already had undiagnosed post partum depression. Brody had had two surgeries so far, and we were waiting for the results of the Fanconi's anemia testing. Brody was in the NICU, and I was largely incoherent. But what I like about the email, if I do say so myself, is that it is an exact record of my life on September 7, 2006. It's exactly how I felt, and I had no idea of the great joy that was awaiting me with Brody.

I wish I could go back to me then and reassure myself that it's going to be okay, that Brody was going to be okay.

It takes me back to read this email, for good and for bad, seeing the dark days I've come out of, and it gives me a kick to see how far we have all come. So, for posterity and, let me be honest, my own self-indulgence, I am reproducing my email here:

Hey xxxx,
I'm not avoiding you, really I'm not. It's just every time I talk to someone I start to cry even if they are just saying something mildly nice, let alone if they say something very very nice, as most people do (like your email). We really appreciate all the love you're sending us - we feel very supported and I'm so grateful.

Today was a bad day. They did the dye test to see if his esophagus was healed, and it is but in the middle of that test they noticed he had a hole in his stomach from the GI tube. So they did emergency surgery, since bacteria was leaking into his stomach (I think) from his bowel. I got to see him afterward, and they even let me kiss him, which I haven't done since Saturday. But it was surgery, and he's back on the vent again, and he's at enormous risk for infection; they have him on triple dose antibiotics and it kind of sounds like they're expecting an infection. So this will be a very long weekend as we sit there again.

I've never had such a feeling of complete helplessness. And I look at him and he's so beautiful and so innocent and he didn't deserve any of this and I wonder why this happened and is happening and when we are going to get some good news. I felt like I was a pretty strong person before last Friday, like I could cope with a lot; but this week and the continual stream of bad news and more problems and more specialists that we are inundated with - I don't feel strong at all and I don't understand why this is happening. The doctors say it's just bad luck, but come on - really? Bad luck? How much bad luck can there be? I feel very weak and I feel so bad for Jeremy - this is his sonand he's got to deal with all of this. There's all this grieving we're doing for the baby we thought we'd have and this tremendous, overwhelming love for the baby we did have along with liberal doses of sheer terror for his immediate future and the life he has to lead. I feel like I'm a logical person and if someone could tell me why - as in, what is the point of making some poor beautiful baby go through all this - then I could cope better. Maybe I wouldn't. I just wish we could skip over all this bad stuff and get to the part where I get to learn what his laugh sounds like and what his face looks like when he smiles.

It's like after my dad died.... But the day after he died, I was shocked to my toes that Good Morning America was on TV. I couldn't believe that the world had gone on, even though he had died. And even though my sweet little boy didn't die, which is probably a miracle in itself, I look at everything, and it's the same, but completely different. Even my neighborhood and my dogs and Jeremy and family and friends - things I've had my whole life - everything has changed. And all the fun and funny things that used to be in vibrant vivid color are now in black and white - except for Brody.

Christ - aren't you glad you aren't on the phone with me now? Thanks for letting me get all this out. It's hard finding a good outlet - I get so scared when Jeremy talks like this and so I don't want to burden him with all of it. He already sees me crying most of the day while he is strong and talking with doctors and coordinating all this care.

As for coming to visit, you don't have to ask - just come. I warn you that it's pretty depressing and distressing if you haven't guessed, and you are by no means obligated to come. When I see people I haven't seen I just sort of start to cry. The rest of the time we just sort of take turns going in to see him, and then hanging out in the waiting room with people telling me to eat more and staring at me to see when I'll next start to cry right out of the blue.

[our supervisor] totally made me cry very hard today. [Coworker] told me she had already talked to the benefits person about the extended leave, and that it would be covered whenever I did the memo asking for it. I was trying to tell my mom and sister about it, but all I could get out without sobbing was "My supervisor, my supervisor" and they thought something bad had happened. It was kind of humorous, in a gallows humor sort of way.

I've taken up enough of your billing day. I just wanted to thank you for all your love and support - it means more than you will ever know.