« November 27, 2006 | Home | December 11, 2006 »
November 30, 2006
By Margot | November 30, 2006
My advice to anyone going through a major life crisis: Have a baby. Preferably a three-and-a-half-month-old baby because he will be smiley and happy and look as if you just made his day every time you walk into the room, but yet he can’t move yet and you don’t have to chase him around like some other children in your house whose names will go unmentioned. The three-and-a-half month-old baby doesn’t care that you have been the incredible shrieking mother at his two older brothers who won’t stop fighting for the past week. When you come home from a particularly frustrating day at the hospital that was supposed to take a little over an hour and for various reasons, took four and a half hours, and you give your not happy almost-four-year-old a hug and then turn to your baby, he lights up like he’s just won the baby lottery. You pop the baby in the Baby Bjorn and he hangs out happily while you make dinner. This is a good thing because your six year-old who has been so good and nice at the hospital is now playing light sabers with your almost-four- year-old and is bringing him to hysterical tears by telling him that Yoda (played by Sam) is the first Jedi master and is the best and Luke Skywalker (played by Andrew) is not even a Jedi master and is not even second in line but probably like the twentieth jedi. This makes almost-four-year old boy cry hysterically. A short while later, you kiss baby on top of the head and turn to see almost-four-year-old throw himself on the floor in the kitchen and cryingly yell something totally unintelligible. You have the patience to crouch down and try to figure out what he is saying. It turns out he is saying “I wanted to wear stretchy pants today!!!” It is now 6:45 at night and you wonder why he is just deciding this now and then you clue in to the fact that he is playing lightsabers with his brother and you need stretchy pants to stick the lightsaber in the waistband and whip it out when needed. So you and happy baby go upstairs to find stretchy pants for almost-four-year old. You come back down and happy baby doesn’t even fuss while you chop an onion, realizing only after the onion is chopped that it is not a good idea to chop an onion with the baby in the Baby Bjorn. Because if the onion is making you cry it is surely irritating the eyes of your poor baby. By the time dinner is ready the baby has fallen asleep and you put him down softly and then put dinner on the table for his brothers- turkey tacos- which both have said they wanted. Almost-four-year-old (who is very tired) looks at his taco and starts to cry and say, “I didn’t want anything IN my taco!!!!” So when he said he wanted a taco for dinner you realize he really meant he wanted to eat a tortilla for dinner.
There is fine print to this baby advice: 1. Baby must be good happy baby like Charlie. A colicky angry-type baby is not recommended. 2. It helps to have child/baby whisperer like Elizabeth who has watched the baby while you’ve worked and gone to the hospital hand him to you happy, fed and in a clean outfit. 3. Some life crises might not apply.
Sam is fine. He’s in school today. This is his first full week of school since it started. It’s half-days all week (wouldn’t you know it) for parent teacher conferences. I met with his teacher on Tuesday and he’s doing well. He’s behind in a lot of things but not outrageously so. I’m hoping we can catch him up. I looked at his report card and there have been 44 days of school so far and he’s missed 23 of them so he’s really doing pretty well considering. Mrs. Gage is awesome. I’m so happy we have her for a teacher.
He had his ascorbic acid infusion yesterday (10 grams) and has another one on Friday. We start chemo again next week. As of 2am last night, Neil is back from New York. He had some really good meetings with Dr. Scholler form University of Virginia and Dr. Modak at MSKCC. We’ll have some big decisions to make after scans (hopefully sometime in Dec.). If he is NED (obviously what we’re hoping for) we need to decide how to keep him there. If he isn’t, we need to decide what additional steps we need to take to get him there. Anyway, all is good for now. Sam is really loving going to school. The “high” of his day at dinner is always school.
Andy’s doing well too. We actually made it to music class this past Tuesday and he loved it. He’s looking forward to Santa but he’s “still a little scared of Santa.”
Margot
Topics: Progress Reports | Comments Off on November 30, 2006
Comments are closed.