Flotsam

I have mixed feelings about 2008. I started several end-of-the-year type posts, but as you may have noticed, none of them made it online. It’s complicated. Part of me, understandably, was standing at the door ready to give 2008 a solid kick on its way out. But the other part—well, like I said. Complicated.

On paper, 2008 looks terrible. Ames’ death alone should have been enough to ruin the year, not to mention the fact that I spent a full third of it in the hospital: first as a patient, and then hunched next to an isolette. But 2008 was the happiest year of my life. It feels traitorous to say so, but as I keep explaining, it is not because the bad was insufficient, but because there was so much good. Plop the events of January 2008 into any other year, and said year would surely qualify as the worst I have ever had, but besides January, 2008 had March, and May, and July.

But I fully expect 2009 to be better, though I admit it got off to a rocky start. Saturday we put Simone to bed at six, as usual, and she kept waking up, screaming in what was obviously agony. Actually, that sentence was misleading: SCOTT put Simone to bed at six, while I ran off to have a sidecar and eat truffle chips, and I returned at 11 to find the both of them awake and miserable. Scott then went to bed and I tried everything to soothe our fractious baby: I nursed, I shushed, I swaddled and rocked. She would be fine for ten minutes or so, and then start writhing and panting and screaming in a way I had never, ever heard before. Simone is a very easygoing baby. I don’t say this often, because I know some of you have Difficult Babies, and if I had a Difficult Baby I would hate to hear about a baby who is cheerful and easily soothed, but Simone really is. Sure, sometimes when she’s teething she demands to be walked around and cajoled, but Saturday, nothing was working, and her screams were unlike any she has made before. Because of the writhing and panty/grunty noises she was making, I thought she might be constipated, and naturally decided some well-intentioned buggery was in order. In the NICU, they taught us the ol’ lubed-thermometer-up-the-bottom trick, so I tried it, and while the *ahem* desired result was *ahurrumph* achieved, it didn’t seem to make her any more comfortable.

To abridge what is becoming a very tedious story, we eventually ended up in the ER, where they decided she may have a telescoping bowel, then ruled that out via CT, decided her Area looked inflamed and that it was a bladder infection, which they then ruled out via catheter, and finally discovered that the culprit was in fact ear infections.

Now, lest you think the ER doctor should have thought of this earlier, let me assure you that she did: she looked in Simone’s ears first thing, and while one was slightly pink, they looked fine. She asked whether Simone had been pulling her ears, and while she has scratched one of them to ribbons, this is nothing new, on account of they itch from her eczema. But finally, out of ideas, on a whim, the doctor put numbing drops down Simone’s wee aural canals, and five minutes later our baby was grinning and blowing bubbles at the nurse.

While all this was going on, I was in a bad way, sitting uselessly on a chair in the exam room, trying not to throw up as Scott held the baby. Usually I am the one holding the baby, not to mention peppering the medical personnel with questions, but I was anxious, and having what I can only describe as flashbacks to the night I was admitted, and later, when looking at the monitor, to the NICU. Strangely, the flashbacks were to times I remember handling quite well—stoically, even. It was only Saturday night that I realized how terrifying they had been. It was a bad night all around, and I blame January.

January last year is when everything went so horribly awry: when we lost Ames, when I went into preterm labor. The January before I had a tiny miscarriage, the January before that Scott and I nearly separated, and the January before THAT—New Year’s Day, to be exact—I miscarried again. I swear to god, January has it in for me, and I have been terrified all week that sometime this month, Simone will die.

I know how completely, ridiculously irrational that is, and I am a big fan of rationality, honest! But when Simone was screaming in pain and they told us to take her to the ER and then couldn’t figure out what was wrong…well, it was hard not to think the worst, somehow.

But! by six a.m we’d all made it home alive, and Simone is much improved, so I am trying to relax and enjoy my shiny new year. And I have plenty of things to keep me busy this month, which is good, because ridiculous or not, I think I will feel much better when January is over.

During Level One of my beloved Shred, Jillian says:

“For those of you at home who are looking for a modified version of a jumping jack, look elsewhere… I’ve got 400 lb people who can do jumping jacks. So can you.”

OR CAN I?

Feast your eyes upon my new, bionic knee. I spent this morning getting x-rays and being fondled by an orthopedist. Specifically, someone who specializes in Sports Medicine. I never would have imagined that a time would come when I would require the services of someone specializing in the medicine of sport, but life is full of surprises.

My left knee continued to get worse last week, despite discontinuing my morning date with Ms. Michaels. And then I slipped on a patch of ice while taking my jeans to the tailor, and before I knew it things had disintegrated to the point that I was going to bed early in an attempt to avoid the pain with sleep…only the pain prevented me from sleeping, so I spent an hour or so every evening crying and rolling around clutching a heating pad. Early to bed, early to writhe. Makes a girl consider a home amputation.

My knee began refusing to descend stairs, and experimenting with other methods of bending—backward, for instance, or to the side. Sometimes it would rudely comment upon my weight by neglecting to support it. My mother arrived on Thursday, and while we were at dinner, my knuckles white around the stem of my wine glass, she blithely mentioned that she has had faulty knees since Junior High. Apparently, one day she was walking home from school after a particularly vigorous lesson in the Trampoline unit of her PE class, when her knees simply gave out and she tumbled to the pavement.

{Let us pause for a moment to delight in the fact that TRAMPOLINE was a gym class subject in my mother’s small North Dakota town. It was as a result of that particular unit, by the way, that her peers nicknamed her “Crazy Legs.”}

The point is, it turns out that bad knees run in my family—I am physically akin to an overbred puppy-mill Cocker Spaniel. According to the doctor I saw this morning, I have something about an IT Band, and a Hamstring Whatsit where it attaches to something, and Possible Meniscus Involvement. I am to wear this brace, and begin physical therapy, and return in six weeks. I should be much improved by then, and if not she will order an MRI. I have been taking 800 milligrams of Advil every four hours for days and days, to the chagrin of my sensitive stomach, so I asked her whether I couldn’t have something else for the pain. She displayed a miserly attitude toward dispensing medication, and instead of something useful like Vicodin (I’m allergic to Codeine), prescribed me Ultram, the effect of which is to make me feel sleepy and vaguely stupid while leaving my pain virtually untouched. Though I hate feeling drugged—I requested my Morphine be discontinued early after my C-Section, because I found it unsettling—I will put up with a little drowsiness in exchange for pain relief. But this Ultram? Not cutting it.
And the one pill I took will be my last, because I looked it up online and found that it is ABSOLUTELY CONTRAINDICATED during breastfeeding. Thanks for the heads up, doctor! Simone only nurses about twice a day now, but still. Back to gnawing bullets and muffling my screams with a pillow.

The orthopedist said that I can work out in some sort of low-impact way once my knee feels better—like with an elliptical machine. Unfortunately I do not have an elliptical machine, or the room for one, but I do need exercise I can do at home. I loved the 30-Day Shred, and am desperate to find a suitable replacement. I didn’t lose any weight in the two weeks or so before my knees mutinied, but I felt much stronger. Besides, I don’t trust scales: we moved ours to another part of the bathroom, and apparently over THERE I weigh four pounds more than I do next to the bathtub. When I have a little more time on my hands, I am thinking I will try moving the scale around from place to place until I find some forgotten alcove behind a radiator where I am already at my goal weight.

My knee is distracting me, so I will leave you with my favorite moment of my mother’s visit so far:

She was staring out the large sliding doors leading to the deck. It was dark and blizzarding, and she gave a sorrowful shake of her head.
“Oh…Look.”
“What?” I asked.

Here is where she meant to point out the wind blowing the snow across the deck. But instead she misspoke, and for the rest of the evening, from time to time my brother or I would lapse into silence before heaving a sigh and then saying broodily, as she had: “Oh…Look. The wind, blowing the snow across the dead.”

A person with my particular dimensions should never attempt to buy a brassiere anywhere other than Nordstrom, a specialty lingerie shop, or the Internet. But, as it is quarantine season, it had taken me a week to get around to my much-needed Target trip for groceries. I knew chances of coordinating a separate bra-shopping outing were negligible, so I figured I might as well TRY to find something there.

I know, it sounds just as stupid to me, when I see it all typed out like that.

I really did need a new bra, because people are coming to take pictures of me next week and no, I can’t hire a model to play the part of Alexa, because my editor reads this website and she knows what I look like. Things have changed since my initial nursing bra shopping expedition, and by “things” I mean “my breasts” and by “changed” I mean “deflated in the manner of a once buoyant, now despondent balloon.” My comfy wireless nursing bralettes aren’t doing me any favors.
I originally planned to do the sensible thing and order something online, but I found the measuring process confusing. No one seems to agree about where you measure, and whether you add inches to that measurement, and I don’t own a soft measuring tape and so instead wrapped a belt around my chest and then measured the belt. As best I can tell, I am about a 32Elephantine or 32Fearsome, but I figured if I could find a 34DD that ran a little big, that would do, in a pinch.

I started off thinking I would like something that came in black or a pretty color. What can I say, I’m a dreamer. It didn’t take more than a few cursory glances to tell me that anything that came in a shade other than white or nude was out of the question. So I decided that all I really needed was something in my size—or rather the size I had decided I could wedge myself into—no matter how menacing and vaguely Germanic the construction, no matter that it was made with girders and rivets and the fullest sails of a noble Viking ship.
The only DDs had band sizes nearly a FOOT too big. A foot! That’s practically the circumference of my smallest cat! Eventually I found one lone 34 that was shoved in the middle of a rack of unrelated items, and because I had already spent an absurd percentage of my precious out-of-the-apartment-time on this fool’s errand, I snatched it up and went on my way without trying it on.
And…guess what? It gives me the dreaded Quadraboob, and the overall effect is of trying to corral a large quantity of pudding with a thimble. Now trust me, I am not that large-breasted, really. I see bras that look too large for any human who has the capacity for bipedalism, and then somehow, once on my body, they are too small. Do my breasts have some sort of stealth technology that enables them to conceal their true dimensions? Am I going to have to order something with my sad, cobbled together belt measurements and hope for the best? Do I really have to drag my ass to the Mall of America, where joy goes to die, during the holiday season? Did I really just spend seven paragraphs discussing my bosom?

Let’s move on!

At least three of you have commented upon how often Simone seems to be unclothed, and lest you think we are closet nudists over here, let me assure you that she begins every morning fully dressed. By the end of the day, however, she has soiled every garment within drooling/butternut squashing distance, and frankly it is easier to hose her down post-supper if we feed her wearing nothing but a diaper. Wait, that’s not right—if she EATS wearing nothing but a diaper. I haven’t worn a diaper in ages.
We live on the top floor of our building, and even with all our radiators off save one, it is always broiling. I am typing this in a nursing tank and Capri-length yoga pants, and it is maybe 15 degrees outside. So there. And just to end any crazy-closet-nudist speculation:

See? Clothes. Three of those pictures feature her March of Babies NICU team shirt from last year. The smallest size they had was six months, and it was big enough to serve as a caftan when she got it, in April. Now it is getting a little snug.

It has become difficult to get a picture of Simone without something in her mouth, because as of yesterday, her first tooth has shown its sharp little tooth-head. It’s just a sliver so far, but at least it has broken the surface at last, after months of on and off teething symptoms. Frankly, I was starting to doubt the existence of these “teeth” you speak of, but there it is. Drool pours from her mouth by the cupful, now, and she can’t get enough of those refrigerated teething rings. Can you imagine how odd it must be, when you have no concept of teeth, to one day wake up and find some painful, pointy THING taking up residence in your mouth? I mean what the fucking FUCK is that? Sometimes I think babyhood must be like one long acid trip, only with more milk and fewer Lava Lamps. Number of viewings of The Muppet Movie are probably comparable, though.

I have a bunch of little updates and, once again, no conceivable way to string them together, so I am resorting to my old friend the bullet-point:

• We are pretty sure that Simone is allergic to rice. Once we discontinued the rice cereal, her eczema improved rapidly and dramatically. It’s still there, but in a much milder form, and the itching must be better as well because there are no more bleeding ears and rubbed-raw eyelids. Of course it is hard to know for certain that removing the rice was what did it—maybe the salves and unguents finally kicked in. I suppose the way to tell would be to reintroduce rice and see what happens, but I’m not eager to do so. I suppose this means no rice pudding or baby-sized handrolls for the foreseeable future.

• I started doing something new, exercise-wise, and it is my favorite routine yet. Though I should warn you that as a result I cannot go down a flight of stairs without wincing in pain and causing my husband to inform me that I am walking like the Tin Man. And yes, I’m going to make you go over to Lemondrop if you want to read about it. It’ll be fun, I promise! I even changed my bio picture!

• Tonight I am meeting my best friend from Junior High for a drink, all thanks to the magic of Facebook. I haven’t seen her in almost ten years, though from the ages of 12 through 16 we wore a literal path between our houses. To be honest, I don’t really “get” Facebook just yet—I have a blog, an email account, and Twitter, so in some ways it seems redundant—but I have to admit that rediscovering people I haven’t talked to in years has been kind of amazing.

• I don’t usually do product reviews, no matter how charming the marketing representative, but someone sent me something I really like, and since we have talked before about the challenges of swaddling older babies, it seemed cruel not to share this with you. Aden + Anais makes large all-muslin swaddling blankets, and when I say large, I do mean large: frankly I don’t think they would have worked for Simone when she was teeny tiny (it would have been like wrapping a mouse in a bedsheet), but for a wriggly almost-16-pounder, they are PERFECT. They would probably work for full-term newborns as well. I use the “winter-warmth” version, which I prefer to the original. It isn’t as heavy as the term “winter warmth” would have you believe, and muslin is very breathable, which I appreciate as I have been paranoid about Simone overheating ever since the apnea nurse told me it was a SIDS risk. We only swaddle Simone’s arms (then bundle her into a sleep sack, which takes care of the legs), but even so, she can wriggle herself free of most blankets. I SO wish I’d found these earlier.

• I finished the poll for the ELVER AWARD Readers’ Choice winner. I intended to narrow the field to ten, but eleven was the best I could do. And yes, I KNOW there is another platypus verse—what can I say, I like Platypi. You can view the entries here, and then vote below.

• And finally, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, tomorrow is St. Nicolas’ Day, and I think you all know what that means. This weekend, a certain someone comes to visit. I have been warning Simone all week that she had better be on her best behavior if she doesn’t want to be beaten, thrown in a sack, and roasted over a makeshift campfire in the woods. May Schmutzli spare you!

The final selection came down to a simple matter of which verse I find myself singing to Simone most often. And so the winner is…
JESSAMY!

“Oh, I wish I were a little platypus,
Yes, I wish I were a little platypus.
I would paddle in my stream
and be a happy monotreme,
Oh, I wish I were a little platypus!”

However, because there were so many excellent entries, I am going to narrow the rest down to my ten favorites and put up a poll, so that you all can vote for the Readers’ Choice ELVER AWARD Recipient! Who will ALSO get chocolates ferried from Zug by my fine mother—if she isn’t too bitter about having been disqualified for an ELVER AWARD herself. I shall try to get the poll up tomorrow.

I’ve had an email problem. I could blame Gmail’s “starred mail” function, because it gives you the illusion of having dealt with something when really, you’ve just shuffled it into a different receptacle. Or I could blame the anxiety disorder, the ADD, the perfectionism, or my bone-deep laziness. But whatever the cause, the effect was that as of yesterday morning, I had 1310 messages in my Inbox, several hundred of them starred for reply. Of these starred messages, some date from just before my wedding. Which was in May. Of 2007.
How it generally works is this:

1) Read message.
2) Gracious, I really want to reply to this one, but I don’t have time to do it justice.
3) Add star to mark for later.
4) As more mail comes in, message is pushed out of view.
5) Forget about message entirely.
6) Two days later, visit Starred Messages folder.
7) Oh no!
8) Well, now that I’m so late in responding, my reply has to be especially well thought out.
9) …So I certainly can’t write one now.
10) I should wait until I can properly devote myself to composing The Great American Email.
11) More days pass. Revisit Starred Messages folder.
12) Fucking hell!
13) I will need an epistolary masterpiece, to make up for my tardiness—I don’t have TIME to write a masterpiece today.

Two months later, while scrolling through mailbox:

14) GOD DAMN IT!
15) No point in replying, as they certainly hate me now. I’ll save the message, and some day, when I’ve been told I have two months to live and am thus putting my affairs in order, I’ll write a heartfelt, apologetic response.

So as you can see, I am completely insane.
Worse, if I told you the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about these messages, and my poor beshitted Inbox, and mentally chastising myself for same, you wouldn’t believe me. So yesterday I decided it was time to end this once and for all: I would declare Email Amnesty and start fresh. After all, if I weren’t constantly trying to make headway on responding to old email, I could easily keep up with the new mail that comes in! I don’t actually receive very much, you see, but once it starts building up, exponents seem to get involved.
So I started going through my Inbox and starred mail, archiving things (not deleting! never deleting!) older than a month or two. And because I am the sort of girl I am, I reread messages as I went.
And that is how I came to spend Thanksgiving crying quietly on the sofa.

After Ames died, every email was like an arm around my shoulder (okay, yes, that would be a lot of arms, and probably more uncomfortable than reassuring—work with me, here). I wanted to reply to each one, but I never seemed to know what to say, and they have been languishing in a Gmail folder ever since. Then there was bedrest, and people wrote to check on me, to distract me, and to give me the facts and statistics and studies and information I so desperately craved. I had a virtual army cheering me on when Simone was in the NICU—you wouldn’t believe some of the amazing email I got, and every single one buoyed me up and carried me forward. I have saved them all, and reading them again yesterday brought me to astounded and grateful tears. I remember very vividly a comment from a group of Scottish NICU nurses who referred to themselves as S.C.O.T.S, which stood for “Scottish Contingent Of Tiny Simone Supporters” (I believe that they were supporters of Tiny Simone, not merely Simone supporters who happened to be of diminutive stature). People sometimes tell me how well they think I have handled the events of the past year, and if I did so, I think it was because I had all of you with me along the way.

I remember a grief counselor asking me about my support system, back before Simone was born. She seemed concerned, and I tried to explain about my website, and I don’t think she understood at all. Online relationships are often discounted. One of the common threads in the email I receive is people wondering whether I think they are “weird” or “stalkerish” for writing, and I have to tell you, the thought has never crossed my mind. One of my very best friends, with whom I have now shared real life conversations and very corporeal Gilmore Girls cake, is one I met through my comment section. I met my husband online, and it was through blogs that I more or less diagnosed my infertility, and gained the knowledge I needed to advocate for myself to my doctors. While Simone was in the hospital, other mothers of preemies wrote to tell me that they had been where I was, and it helped me so much that finding ways to support other NICU parents has become something of a preoccupation of mine—I write about our experience, I am trying to involve myself with programs that help current families in our NICU, I am becoming active in the March of Dimes, and when Simone is older I hope to do more. After all I have been given, it is the least I can offer.

I spent yesterday whittling my Inbox down to a few recent messages, a task I expected to be arduous and entirely free of the spirit of Thanksgiving. We had more or less given up on the holiday anyway, as I’d forgotten to go to the grocery store for ingredients and simply did not have the energy to fight the scrambling hordes that morning. We ate ravioli, fed the baby, and I sat for hours with my laptop burning its way into my thighs. I thought I would feel terrible about all of the messages I had utterly failed to respond to, and I did, but more than that I felt supremely lucky, thankful even. I pity the poor pilgrims: you all are better than maize any day.

I left Simone in her high chair today while I went to answer the phone, and when I returned, I found her like this:

She feigned nonchalance:

Now, ever since she learned to lift that foot out, it’s a struggle to get her to sit in the chair normally. Because, you know, her way is so comfortable.

Babies are weird.

Penny asked:
“Is it too soon to talk about the possibility of another child? Or deciding that another child is definitely NOT in the equation?”

And Aimee had a similar question:
“I’m curious if you guys open to another cycle? I was wondering if after all you have been through with Ames and Simone if you would try again or are you content with the way things are now?”

Long ago, when we were young(er) and foolish(er), Scott and I decided we’d have two children. Frankly, I always thought I wouldn’t mind having a passel of them running around the house, but we settled on two, in the highly theoretical fashion of infertile couples—much in the way a broke college student might settle on preferring a Jaguar over a BMW.
We got pregnant with Ames and Simone, a boy and a girl, and just like that, our family was complete.

My pregnancy with the twins was hard, even before things went rocketing downhill. I threw up until I delivered, despite popping Zofran and Unisom and waking myself up at 4 every morning to eat saltines and drink milk. I was in pain from the beginning of the second trimester due to some horrible malfunction in my pelvis and hip that would sometimes rob me of my ability to lift my right leg, and later morphed into the sciatica that has plagued me ever since.
Pregnancy was emotionally difficult as well: a few weeks before The Bad Ultrasound I started having intense panic attacks and crying jags (in retrospect, I wonder whether Ames’ placenta wasn’t already failing, causing some sort of hormonal drop). I spent the first trimester terrified of miscarriage and the rest of the time before we lost Ames worried about pre-term labor, and AFTER Ames died I woke up every morning and waited tensely to feel Simone kick, waiting to see if she had died too.
The point of this litany of complaints is that while I was always grateful to be pregnant (and some parts of pregnancy I relished), I must have said a dozen times how GLAD I was that we had our two babies and were finished with the exhausting business of reproduction. There were moments when I thought a third, someday, might not be so bad, but there were many more moments when I honestly couldn’t imagine going through the sickness and pain and anxiety a second time. Even though I had never particularly wanted twins before getting pregnant, I was so relieved to have my two children safely created and boxing away inside me.

Of course, we all know how THAT turned out.

After Simone was born, after the weeks in the hospital and the bedrest and everything else, I was certain I never, ever wanted to be pregnant again. I couldn’t so much as think of pregnancy without feeling ill, and I had to throw away everything that reminded me of it. Pregnant women looked like waddling, ticking time bombs to me. I remember reading a parenting magazine in the NICU lounge, and turning the page to find a picture of a fetus in its amniotic sac and a column of pregnancy facts. I went cold all over.

It has been nine months since all of that, and I have a happy, healthy daughter sleeping down the hall. While I still believe pregnancy is like crossing a landmine-strewn field on a malfunctioning electric pogostick, I no longer feel ambivalent about the idea of another child. We want one.

But not now. I would like Simone to have me all to herself for awhile, and part of me selfishly wants to stretch my child-raising years as long as possible. Incidentally, even though there is no real “planning” of sibling spacing involved when you have fertility issues, I’m always interested in hearing from people about how they think the spacing between their children has worked out. Right now, we’re thinking of trying again in four years, give or take.

However, Aimee asked whether we plan to try again, “or are [we] content with the way things are now” and the answer, truly, is “both.” Deciding to try again is one thing, deciding how far we’d go is something else entirely. We intend to try on our own, at least, though none of my unassisted pregnancies have lasted beyond seven weeks. If we don’t get pregnant, or a pregnancy goes awry, would we persist? I don’t know. I am not at particular risk for another preterm birth, as Simone’s early birth was entirely a result of Ames’ death, but I could get an infection again, and while I am fairly certain I can handle another early miscarriage, another stillbirth would be too much for me.

(Well, that’s not true. I always hated it when people said things like that when Simone was in the hospital. “I could never handle that,” they’d say. They meant well, but it made it sound as if they loved their children too much to bear seeing them in the hospital, whereas for me, being a callous sort, it was easier. It’s not like there is an option other than “handling it.” Believe it or not, it is very rare for a person to spontaneously combust from grief during a difficult situation. You get up, you make it through the day, time marches grimly on. Much like this post. So let’s abruptly end it here, shall we?)

I am deeply exhausted, so I’m doing it up bullet-style tonight:

• I took Simone to the pediatrician today for her check-up, bloodwork, and a flu shot. I feel like I spent several hours wrangling a feral, furious, drooling midget. Which I did, really.

• Have you ever noticed that a pediatrician’s office sounds like a field hospital in wartime? Strange screams floating through the hallways, the sounds of crying and desperate pleas for mercy: NOOOOO I DON’T WANT IT! NO SHOT! I DON’T WANT A SHOT NOOOOOOOO!

• We left the house at 3:15 and returned at 6:00, and I would estimate that about 15 minutes of the intervening hours were spent in the same room with a health care professional. I could have driven home, fed Simone, eaten a pudding cup, braided my hair into an elaborate coif, and driven back in the amount of time we spent waiting.

• Fun fact: Simone’s heels are so calloused from the myriad blood draws she had in the NICU that she didn’t even notice today’s heel stick.

• Not so fun fact: Despite not noticing the heel stick itself, she objected strenuously to being held down (by me!) while three vials of blood were milked from the wound. “Wow, she’s REALLY strong,” the poor tech kept saying.

• I once again managed to spill half a bottle of milk in the waiting room, due to my inability to remember that Dr. Brown’s bottles require the insertion of some sort of leak-preventing disk before being transported.

• You might think this will ensure that I remember said disk NEXT time. You would be grievously mistaken.

• However! Even without adjusting for her prematurity, Simone is now on the growth charts for weight: 15 pounds, seven ounces at nine months. Her head circumference had been on the chart for a while already. She has a big head.

• She also grew two inches last month.

• She has terrible, terrible eczema, and we have been ordered to butter her up with salves and such. I am hoping that these salves and unguents will get her to stop clawing at her itchy eyes. And scratching her ears until they bleed. And looking like a tiny leper whenever she gets angry enough that all the bumps on her skin flush red.

• Simone can sit unassisted now for brief snatches of time, and today she had been doing it for a minute or so when she tipped forward and gave herself a bloody nose. I was sitting right behind her, but did I catch her in time? No, I did not.

• I think the dried blood in her nostrils went a long way toward convincing the pediatrician of my superior mothering skills.

• Should I be buying tumbling mats for the floors before she really hurts herself?

• I’m out of things to say, and too tired to say them if I weren’t. Sweet dreams!

So, it’s that time again, the day of the week I reserve for showcasing the Artifacts of Alexa, some small and odd and useless, others rare and long-cherished. Last week’s jokestravaganza was a delight, but I’m afraid I have nothing funny for you this time. This time, the thing I am showing is Ames’ candle.

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance day, and at 7pm on that evening, families light candles to remember. I have always liked the tradition of lighting candles in remembrance, or as my own silly, secular sort of prayer—there was a time some years ago when I was in the habit of walking to the cathedral down the street from my apartment and lighting a candle every morning. It’s contemplative, and quiet, and it creates a space for you that wasn’t there before. This past October 15th, I went out searching for a candle to light for Ames.

The one I settled on was sitting on a shelf with other, dissimilar candles, the only one of its kind. It came in a little ceramic pot that I plan to keep when it has burned out, and it smells like Jasmine.

I lit it on the 15th and sat with it awhile, and then I took a picture:

I think I may light it again tonight. The thing about this month of everyday posting is that next year on any November day I will be able to see exactly what I was doing, worrying over, and thinking one year prior. Because I posted every day last November as well, it has been impossible not to look back and marvel at the distance between then and now.

So. Though I am ever mindful of all I have gained this past year, I am going to take a moment tonight to remember what was lost. A moment for Ames, mostly, but also for Simone, and for how thoroughly things did not go as expected, how tenuous everything always is, whether we remember it or not.

Michelle said:

“I’ll take cute baby pictures and/or more verses to the Little ‘Lectric Eel song any time you need a quick post.”

It has been one of those weekends.
Lack of sleep? Check!
No appreciable dent in Mount Laundry? Check!
Failure to Use Time Wisely? Check!
Baby DROPPED ON HER HEAD by her father? Check!
So yes, a quick, no-thinking-required post idea is exactly what I need. I doubt anyone will find this picture as cute as I do, seeing as how it was taken through the wavy plexiglass of an isolette in low light with a terrible camera, but I found it when I was cleaning up files on my computer this weekend and it got me all verklempt. It’s from the end of March, when Simone was almost two months old. You can just see her little eye open—I remember when lifting her eyelids required a great deal of eyebrow waggling on her part.

And! Michelle has given me an idea. She wants more verses for Oh I Wish I Were a Little ‘Lectric Eel. (Well, who wouldn’t?) I could write them myself, OR, OR…I could induce others to write them for me.
And so is born THE ELVER AWARD, to be given to the commenter who comes up with the best supplementary verse for my semi-original song. An elver, as you probably know, is what a baby eel is called (and if that isn’t the cutest name for a baby animal you’ve ever heard, I’ll eat my hat).

Besides the great honor of being an ELVER AWARD recipient, the winner will get a box of Swiss chocolates, purchased by me and conveyed by my mother from the lovely town of Zug, Switzerland. And of course, your verse will be sung in TENS of nurseries across the world. Entries accepted until midnight on Friday.

This morning I looked up from my laptop and noticed that Simone’s play mat was empty. Empty, as in the baby who had been there moments before was missing. Naturally, my first thought was Gypsies, but Gypsies prefer warmer climes, and have usually moved south by this time of year. A hawk was another possibility, but surely I would have heard it screeching as it carried off my delectable spawn. And then I DID hear a noise, and glanced to my right, and lo and behold there was Simone, halfway across the room.

Why, she’s learned to crawl! you’re thinking, but no. Simone despises her belly (though that doesn’t stop her from rolling onto it 396 times a day and screaming to be rescued), so I think crawling is still far off. Instead, as I discovered when I watched her make her way under a chair, she has learned to scoot around on her back, head first, by pushing with her heels. It looks…uncomfortable, to say the least, and she is going to rub off what little hair she has by scraping it along our hardwoods, but I must admit she makes good time. I put her back on the mat, and half-a-minute later she was on her side under a distant piece of furniture, toying with a power cord.
Scott is worried that she’ll scrape the back of her scalp raw. Obviously I need to build Simone some sort of pen, or at least clean my floors more often. I may just tape a Swiffer cloth to the back of her head—two birds, one stone.

Well, I made it eleven days without having to resort to a cop-out baby picture post. That’s not bad, right?

In my defense, this picture was taken only MOMENTS AGO. As in yes, the baby is awake nearly three hours past her bedtime. FIE ON YOU, WAKEFUL INFANT. FIE!

So, today I got a call from an audiologist, who had been contacted by the people at the NICU Follow-up Clinic—you know, the poor saps for whom I left three long, rambling messages pleading for help after being told I’d have to wait six weeks for Simone’s sedated hearing test.
Anyway, the audiologist was calling to tell me that if I liked, she could squeeze us in this Thursday morning for a repeat of the same UNsedated testing that Simone failed to sit still for last week—an Otoacoustic Emissions test and some Tympanograms, otherwise known as The Stick-Things-In-Your-Ear Evaluation. She promised she wouldn’t make Simone sit (Simone has a horror of sitting, and prefers to stand, which caused problems last time) and suggested that I bring the baby already sleepy.

(“Does she take a morning nap?” she asked innocently, prompting a grim little chuckle from my end of the line.)

To further twist the plot, she mentioned that she’d looked over the results of the NICU hearing screen, and while she agreed that technically Simone had passed, she felt there was something “questionable” about the results for one ear.

So naturally, after that little tidbit, I decided to accept the appointment. The waiting is killing me, and if this Thursday turns out to be useless, well, we already have the sedated test scheduled at University Hospital in two weeks. So my question to you is: Baby Benadryl for Thursday—for or against?
I’m kidding, of course. Only not really. Of course I am! Maybe. Or not.