Cerin Amroth

A year and a half ago we spent two weeks away from both of our children, but I think maybe this past week was harder for them, when Dominic and Ella spent four days apart from each other — Ella with us and many of our friends and their kids in the UP, Dominic down south with one pair of grandparents and then the other.

It was great fun to take Ella up to see the Cabins for the first time.  Her initial bout of shyness didn’t last that long, though I could see her flitting back and forth between interacting with the other kids and then retreating to play by herself when it got a little much for her.  But there she was, playing games and riding in rowboats and running around outside and doing all the things that we imagined the kids we’d have someday would do up there when we idly talked about it a dozen years ago.  But not a day went by when she didn’t mention her brother, and how she missed him.  When we were getting ready to leave she explained to me that it was a happy-and-sad time, because she was sad to be leaving the Cabins but happy that she would see her brother again soon.

Though he had a grand time first with one set of grandparents and then the other, Dominic seems to have had the harder go of it.  Though more outgoing than his sister he’s of an age where maintaining routine matters a little more.  I’m writing this from a hotel room halfway home to Alexandria, where he suffered a late-night meltdown because we had yogurt drink instead of milk for him to drink before he fell asleep.  And though it was “mommy” and “daddy” that he cried for sometimes when we were gone, I think of Ella had been there he probably wouldn’t have noticed so much.

At any rate their reunion was touching.  Ella had picked out a balloon to present to him when we arrived, and thrust it into his hands as soon as they met.  He seemed to understand the gesture and didn’t let go of the balloon once through all the assorted hugs and kisses that followed.  That night they slept on adjoining mattresses, each on the side of their mattress closest to the other.  Ella’s limbs were splayed but one hand rested assuredly on Dominic’s arm.

Well, Captain Ear Infection is back.  On the road halfway to Michigan Dominic started running a fever and acting Vaguely Out of Sorts, like he does.  I wish the kid would learn the sentence:  ”My ear hurts like hell, Daddy!” but either he’s not really in pain or he is a child of steel who does not deign to reveal weakness to others.  Having experienced a couple of seizures by this point, though, we didn’t waste time getting him checked out.  Bring on those sweet, sweet antibiotics.

Being in a state of malaise brings out a few good things, though.  If you want to see Ella at her best see her when Dominic’s not feeling so well.  She is concerned about him, attentive with him, patient with us, eager to help, and she keeps her cool.  And D himself gets a little more prone to wrap his arms around your neck and say “I wub you,” which I’m pretty sure will add five years to your life if you’re lucky enough to experience it

Ella loves summer. Yesterday, we bought a new tank-top for her at the store. As soon as we got to the car, she slipped off her short-sleeved shirt and put it on. Then she put her sunglasses on, and said, “Oh yeah, now I’m all summered up.”

We’re going to Michigan at the end of the week, so we’ve been talking about making the long drive. The last time we went to Michigan, we took an airplane because I was going up for a conference. Ella said that she prefers riding in the car. “The airplane makes my ears feel all twisty inside, and then I can only hear the big noises.”

At dinner, Ella told me that she was dreaming about what it would be like to be famous. She said she was going to the store and there were all these people following her around asking for her autograph. We talked about how that might be neat, but would also make it difficult to do normal, everyday things.

We went to a birthday party of one of her classmates yesterday. It was at a bowling alley, and some of the kids were playing a video game at the end. She asked if I would go over to watch the game with her. I told her I wouldn’t because I was talking with one of the parents. Without skipping a beat, she turned to Dom, grabbed his hand, and said, “Oh, you want to go watch the game, Dom.”

One of her favorite TV shows right now is The Electric Company. She’s learning quite a few reading skills and especially likes the rhyming games. When we were walking down the street, she said, “Car becomes far.”

Dominic is a bundle of words these days, and more and more of them are understandable. Like Ella, he’s a lover of books. He will spend an amazing amount of time focusing on a book, especially if it is a comic book with lots of detailed pictures. The way he focuses on it, he really makes you believe that he is seeing all the nuances and understanding the words.

We have this large preschool activity book that has several pages of detailed pictures where you have to search for objects. Even though he has done every page and circled every object, he still wants to spend more time going over the pages.

I have been putting him to bed for the past week because Nate is reading a chapter book to Ella. Two books is never enough for him. And he loves to read the same ones over and over again. He especially loves the books where he can find the little details of the pictures – like the insects on the ground. I’ll say, “Where’s the butterfly, Dom.” I hardly have the sentence out of my mouth, and he is saying, “I-don-know.” (He makes it sound like one word.) But the reality is that he often does know, and he’s eager to point it out. If I ask him what an object or animal in the picture is, I get “I-don-know” again, but it’s usually quickly followed by him naming the thing.

After we’re done reading, I’ll ask him to turn off the light. There’s a postcard of a pelican taped to the wall above his switch. He always tries to stall by pointing something out about the picture. “Oh, bird.” or “Oh, boat.” (There isn’t really a boat, but he likes to say that the spot where part of the picture was damaged in the mail is a boat.) The way he says “oh” makes it seem like he has just solved a complex math problem or figured out the answer to world peace.

As I’m hugging him and giving him a kiss good night, he says, “I wub you, Mama.” That usually makes me squeeze him a bit more and hold him a bit longer before putting him in his crib. He’s a crafty one at his tender age.

He always asks for songs, but I rarely understand what song he has in mind. Part of this is because he’s asking for the songs that Nate usually sings to him, and I don’t know those. He also sometimes points to something on the floor and tries to divert my attention. Then he reaches up and says “my hair” by which he means MY hair. He insists that I lean over the crib so he can have a hand full of my hair while I sing to him. How can I refuse?

After my back gets sore from leaning over the crib, I pull my hair out of his grasp and walk toward the door. I say good night, and he says “one mo song.” The slower and quieter I sing, the more he settles down, but that doesn’t stop him from protesting when I close the door a bit and walk down the hall. Sometimes, his protests are half-hearted because he’s so tired, and he quiets almost immediately when I say, “Good night, Dom” as I’m walking down the stairs. Other nights, his 5 or so minutes of cries are tough to listen to. Fortunately, they never last too long before he falls asleep.

I think bedtime is among my favorite times to be a parent.

At bedtime Dom and Ella often have a book or two read to them on Ella’s bed before he is whisked away to his own room to go to sleep.  But right when we say it’s time for hugs and kisses for Ella he likes to curl up in a ball and say “night-night,” hoping that we’ll let him sleep with Ella in her bed that night.  And Suanna and I don’t ever have to decide whether it’s OK with us because Ella always makes it clear that he most certainly may NOT.

We read a couple books on Ella’s bed just now, the three of us, before naptime.  (Ella announced that she was tired and would be taking a nap too, a pretty rare event these days.)  As I finished the last book Ella spoke up in a spot-on imitation of my ho-boy-you-kids-are-lucky-I’m-allowing-this voice:

“All right, Dster.  For a SPECIAL TREAT you can have a nap in my bed today.”

As I stepped out they were both curled up under the sheets.  I have no idea if they will actually sleep, but I could tell from his smile that at that moment Dominic was the happiest boy in all the world.

Thirty years ago doctors wouldn’t have known to distinguish what happened to Dominic from epilepsy.  Less than a century ago the antibiotics to treat the root causes wouldn’t have been around.  And you don’t have to go too far back in time beyond that to be in a place where the prevailing opinion would have been that what was happening to him was a result of demonic possession or a curse from the gods.

There is no time I’d rather be living in than the present.

True to form, you’d never guess looking at him now that he was in the hospital a couple nights ago.  Antibiotics appear to have deep-sixed his ear infection (fingers crossed) and his fever’s pretty much gone.

The thing we have to deal with now is that, having had a couple of seizures, it’s very likely that he’ll have more between now and when he’s five years old or so.  They are in themselves benign, so the trick will be making sure that when he’s susceptible (i.e. when he’s running a fever) that he doesn’t get put in situations where a seizure could hurt him — alone in the bathtub or at the top of a slide, that sort of thing.

Hopefully we can avoid another one by responding quickly whenever he gets a fever and, if there’s a clear root cause like an ear infection, get him treatment for that right away.  But this last time we had done that and were doing everything we could possibly do for him and a seizure happened anyway.  It’s something we’ll have to live with for a few more years.

Ella took far more comfort from the facts on the ground than she did from our words — seeing Dominic the next day in perfectly good spirits did a lot to allay her worries.  I talked to her about the fact that it would all probably happen again some time, and that that was OK because the seizures don’t hurt him.  She was greatly reassured by the fact that she was already 5 and so they weren’t going to happen to her.

Assuming the next one runs the same course as the previous two, we don’t really need to be taking him to the ER.  Which only brings darkly comical scenes to my mind:  Us at some neighborhood BBQ, Dominic suddenly thrashing around and foaming at the mouth.  Flabbergasted friends:  ”Don’t you want to call 911?”  Me and Suanna, nonchalantly:  ”Nope, he’s good, we’ll just plop him in this chair over here ’till he comes to his senses.”

A febrile seizure is not as scary the second time around.  I would prefer to be a parent who didn’t know that firsthand.

Twenty minutes or so after Suanna wrote the previous entry, we thought we were out of the woods — D was coming due for another helping of Ibuprofen and the shivers had stopped and he had the antibiotics in his system and his fever, while there, seemed down.  But while Suanna was in the kitchen getting bedtime milk ready with Dominic in her arms, he had his second febrile seizure.

I had not seen the actual seizure the last time — I had arrived perhaps in its last moment, or in the aftermath.  This time, knowing what it was, it was not as soul-wrenchingly terrifying as I’m sure it would have been to someone who didn’t know what was going on.  The main thing I was aware of at the time was that Ella was there, watching the whole thing, and at the same time I was calling for an ambulance yet again I was trying to see what was going on through her eyes and was thinking of what to say to her, and when.

Suanna and D are the hospital now and hopefully all will be well.  He recovered quickly from the last one and the cause of the fever this time (i.e. the ear infection mentioned in Suanna’s post) is pretty well established.  In my frenetic re-reading of online information on febrile seizures I noticed one article say that they can occur as a fever is rising but also as it is falling, and that would definitely mesh with Dominic’s experience today.

I sat down with Ella after the ambulance drove away and reviewed what had happened and why.  She listened carefully but was eager to talk about other things — like our experience playing Lego Batman earlier.  We had finished off a book the last time I had put her to bed, so she told me I could pick one out for tonight.  Briefly scanning her shelf, my eyes landed on Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH, which I remembered loving as a kid though I thought it might be a little old for her.  ”Let’s at least try one chapter,” I said to her, and she agreed.

In the first chapter, Mrs. Frisbee’s son Timothy becomes very ill.  I hadn’t remembered this part exactly — it had been something a little shy of 30 years since the book had been read to me — but it started coming back to me as I read.  ”Kind of like Dominic,” I said to Ella, and she nodded.  The next page had a description of Timothy’s illness that was just eerie:  high fever, constant shivering, and then some twitching, all just like D.  Needless to say, she opted for lighter fare to close out her evening, rather than Chapter Two.  But it left me wondering:  did some unconscious part of my mind remember those very words when I picked that particular book off the shelf?

Just heard from Suanna.  Dominic is sleeping.  They’re going to give him antibiotics through an IV to take on the ear infection, which I imagine is something like calling in orbital bombardment on the neighborhood bully.  They want to see him wake up naturally from sleep and observe him to make sure everything’s all right, which unfortunately means Suanna may be stuck there for a while.  She’ll try to get some sleep there, and I’ll try to get some here.  If it’s anything like the last time this means that while we’re stumbling around bleary-eyed tomorrow morning D will be chipper as can be.

I’m going to preempt any possible claims by Nate with this post. He’s such a masterful writer, I’m worried that he might just be able to convince you that our doctor’s office told him to play X-Box for Dom’s health.

We found out today that Dom has ear infections in both ears. He’s had on and off fevers for the past week, but when we took him in a week ago there was no apparent infection in his ears, his lungs were clear, and he didn’t have strep throat. Yesterday afternoon (while I was still in Michigan with the kids), he woke up from his nap crying and burning up. His behavior was consistent with what it had been, so I gave him some pain reliever, and we headed to the airport. At a few points on the ride there, he was crying and inconsoable in a way I had not seen him since he had strep last year. On the whole, however, we could distract or quiet him with books or food.

When we got on the first airplane, he refused to leave my lap to sit on the seat. He fell asleep for most of the ride. When we landed in Detroit, he wasn’t complaining and showed interest in drinking and eating, so I thought he might be feeling better. Ella even convinced him to play with toy dinosaurs. Halfway through the plane trip, he became restless and inconsolable again, until I quieted him to sleep. By the time we got home, he was burning up and clearly not himself again. Enough time had passed, so we gave him some pain reliever and he slept for most of the night.

The whole process started again today after his nap. Only this time, he was also pulling on his ears. That turned out to be the missing link. Nate convinced the doctor’s office to sqeeze him in for an appointment and received the ear infection diagnosis.

Dominic spiked a fever again when Nate got home after picking up the prescription, so he called the doctor’s office again. They said to give him a different pain reliever and the antibiotic as soon as possible and do something to distract him from the pain … hence the X-Box. I grabbed a cab to get the prescription and rushed home from work. I was surprised to see Dom sitting quietly on the couch entranced by the new game. At least we finally have a diagnosis and can hopefully put the fevers behind us … this particular string of them, anyway.

“At our house we open cans. We have to open many cans. And that is why we have a Zans.
A Zans for cans is very good. Have you a Zans for cans? You should.”
- Dr. Seuss

On Wednesday, Ella, Dom, and I traveled to Michigan by plane. I had a work meeting in Ann Arbor on Thursday, so we decided to take advantage of the proximity and see family for the weekend. Nate elected to enjoy a child-free weekend. The last time I traveled alone with the kids, we went to Canada to see friends. Ella was 3 and a half, and Dominic was just a few months. Then it was also challenging, but at least Dom wasn’t able to run off, and Ella was content to ride in the stroller. With two kids on the go, I suspected it might be a bit more challenging, but that was before I realized what a good helper Ella would be … actually, not just a helper, but a partner.

She not only managed to carry and keep track of her bag the entire trip, but she also carried the diaper bag at some points. When we checked the suitcases in with the sky cap, she grabbed the diaper bag and slung it around her neck and shoulder. When we were going through security, she insisted on being in charge of pushing our containers along the track and into the x-ray machine. She stepped through the scanner on her own, and then walked over to start taking things out of the container. She was very concerned about helping Dom with his shoes – even before she had hers taken care of.

While we were sitting on the plane waiting to take off, Dominic started barking like a dog. Ella looked at me and said, “Mom, I don’t think he should do that. The people will think there is a dog on the plane.” She turned to him and said, “Dom, don’t speak that language. People will think there is a dog on the plane.”

The amazing part about the whole experience is that she didn’t do it in a bossy or know-it-all sort of way. It was pretty clear that she wanted to do what she could and help me out with Dominic. It also helped that we were going somewhere she was very eager to be going, so she wanted to get there as quickly and smoothly as possible. And not only was she a great help and good traveler, she was also a good conversationalist. It makes me delighted to think that we’ll have many more years of fun travel ahead of us.