And on a happier note…

Here’s the latest update from The Other Site…shhhhhhhhhh!

Change of Plans…

So, The Bee and I didn’t go to the loooooowwwwww desert after all. No palm tree farm. A good thing, as it turned out, since when R. arrived at the little house at the farm, the AC was once again dead on its proverbial feet and the thermometer was reading 120 in the shade. A toddler disaster averted.

As an alternative, The Bee and I stayed home, where it was/is 98 in the shade, and in three days got to experience the following. No, I shit you not:

+ Heimlich Maneuver. That would be me, performing it on The Bee. No shit. I peel and cut her apple in tiny pieces every single time, but, on this day, she still choked on one. Second time I did the big squeeze, out flew the apple. Purpling cheeks returned to normal. Mama puts toddler down for the night and promptly makes a gin and tonic. Only one. I promise.*

+ Phlebotomist Hell. Okay, people. How many phlefuckingbotomists does it take to put a needle in my little girl’s arm? Apparently, four. FOUR. Oh, and BOTH arms. Digging around with needles for veins they couldn’t find if one had jumped out and lassoed their necks. Hmmmmmm. That’s a rather disturbing image. Okay, you try to describe what this scene is like with a newly-adopted toddler screaming her bloody-murder head off on your lap.

+ Scorpion Shower. So, The Bee and I have taken to showering together. It saves time; it guarantees that both mother and daughter get to be clean; it provides The Bee with healthy attitudinal skillz when it comes to the naked body (even if Mom’s attitude in that area sucks); it demands skin-to-skin contact, which helps to promote attachment; and it’s fun for Mom and The Bee alike.

So, The Bee is playing with various and sundry sundries on the floor of said shower while Mom washes her hair, when some bottle or another slips out of her needy toddler hand and The Bee, who is squat-sitting, reaches for it–and slips and slides. She starts to wail. I look down and see It. IT. One inch from her general leg area. A scorpion. On the floor of the bathtub. While we’re taking a shower. OMG. You have never seen anyone scoop a baby up and get out of a shower so fast in all your life. I, of course, am wondering whether the scorpion stung her, and she slipped and wailed as a result of some life-threatening pre-historic horror-film-worthy creature, or whether The Sighting was (amazingly) coincidental. Turns out, it was Amazingly Coincidental. The Bee is clueless about why I’m looking all over her precious, precious, unpunctured skin. She is fine.

I beat the living daylights out of The Creature with a shoe.**

+ The Thousand-Dollar Foxtails. Our third dog in three months needed to be put under anesthesia to extract a frickenfracken single pointy foxtail seedpod from her ear. That put us up over the big 1,000 in weed surgeries this year, and it’s only June. CRAP. By the way, this operation took place during the time that the rotten phlebotomists weren’t doing their jobs on The Bee. But that wasn’t the worst of the three days, as you can now see.

And all this happened whilst R. was away. Natch.

*Requisite disclaimer clause: no, I do not drink to excess or even to moderation when I am caretaking for my daughter. Nothing to see here. Shoo.

**Remember that latent anger my acupuncturist had sussed out? Hmmmmmmm…I say it’s a damn good thing. I felt like I could have conducted a seminar on the fight or flight response that day.

Doings Around the Ranch…

Just a little hodgepodge of what’s been going on around here…

First, the garden:

It’s hell on earth gardening in the desert. Inevitably, one of the little spaghetti tubings pops off its little emitter and some plant (or two or three or a whole row) dies. It’s constant vigilance. And the dirt here is decomposed granite–not sand. So, basically, if you apply water to it, it’s as good as concrete. Truly. The stuff should be patented. We hauled in dumptrucks of good dirt, but it’s never enough.

The only thing that can’t be killed by lack of water, 115 degree heat, and beetles, are the weeds. We would own a lovely weed farm if we allowed it to happen. Or went away for a week.

Nonetheless, we are getting zucchini, kale, chard, and turnips right now. The tomatoes are green. It’s too early to tell what the fruit trees are doing, but I am hoping for some serious apple pies this fall, so I am hoping they are hip to the program.

Here is our second attempt at a front yard:

Two winters ago, when we started the adoption actually, we decided that the future girl would need some grass to run around in. So R. went in with the tractor and ripped out scrub and mesquite (nasty stuff) between the house and the gate to create a little playspace. Grass is controversial at best in the desert, but we have an artesian well at the ranch, which means there’s so much poundage of water coming out of the earth (the drill hit water at 9 feet!) that we can’t possibly use it properly. Our pump guy actually told us we should just let water run all the time because we’re hurting our well system by not being able to take advantage of the amount of flow…um, okay. Whatever. Last summer, we planted grass seed and had sprinklers on all the time and had an awesome grassy yard. Then winter came. The thing about the desert–even the high desert–is you can’t let grass go entirely dormant because there’s no winter rain or snow to help keep it alive. We didn’t water it over the winter. It never rained. It snowed once–that would be this paltry show one morning in January:

The grass died. We started again last month, ripping out the old lawn, using a stump digger machine (I made that name up because who the hell knows what the thing is really called), bringing in two dumptrucks of dirt, spreading the dirt with the tractor, and then leveling the dirt with the wide wooden rakes. Next comes the seed. Then the water. Maybe by late fall, we’ll have a lawn again, just in time for it to go brown. Cycles of death, people. That’s what we’ve got here. Death. Cycles.

I AM proud, however, of the fact that I can grow the ONLY poppy in the universe that foils Martha Stewart every time. Heh. She announced at one point in her magazine that she has collected and now grows every single variety of poppy in the entire world–except the kind that grow like weeds in the desert Southwest, which routinely die in her acidic, moist, peat-like conditions of New England. That would be these.

For some perverse reason, I find immense satisfaction in this little factoid and repeat it to every visitor at the ranch. I can’t kill them to save my life. They grow everywhere, and I rather like them, so I let them choose their own places to bloom just to spite Ms. Stewart.

Finally, the lovely and talented walternatives sent an awesome stool for The Bee, all handcrafted and such*:

When The Bee got up this morning, she found it waiting for her in the kitchen…Little Miss Bee thinks her new sitting place is just amazingly cool:

Thank you so very much, Auntie C!

(*and I just have to say, that my bloggy pals are WAY more handicrafty and creative that way than I…I’m just sending clothes and books, FYI. Sewing, woodworking, painting and decoupaging, embroidering and the like? Y’all (and you know who you are) impress me in that nineteenth-century sort of way. You would rock on that Pioneers reality show.)

Now to answer a few questions that people have asked in the comments section:

+ no, The Bee has not gotten a haircut…heavenstoBetsy! NO. I am trying for pigtails by her 2nd birthday in August. A pipe dream, I know, but I’m feeding her lots of Omega 3’s just in case.

+ I have no idea why my new acupuncturist is treating me for non-apparent anger issues…WHY WOULD YOU INSIST ON ASKING ME SUCH A PERSONAL QUESTION???!! DAMMIT. Um, okay. Not that funny. Anyway. My acupuncturists use a form of energy work called NMT to communicate with their patients’ bodies. And this is where I have to say that one must suspend disbelief to gain benefit from such a practice. It isn’t for everybody. But that’s how she diagnoses me…my body “tells” her through reading muscle impulses and the like. As for her comment about my internalizing anger, I don’t know…I don’t consider myself an angry person, although…um…I have opinions. So, who knows. It’s something to think about, in any case.

We are headed off to the palm tree farm, where it will reach literal biblical proportions of heat this week. If you don’t know about the palm tree farm, see this and this for quick background. The Bee will get to swim and meet her Granddad; the dogs will get to run around on grass (ahem!); I will get to eat the avocadoes that grow there.

Historical Interlude…

So, my mom’s been going through my old school papers that she still has stashed in her house and found the following vocabulary/spelling test I took in the third grade, when I was eight…circa March of 1975.

Check out this list of words! Is this a document of its moment, or what?!?!

My favorite is the mix-up I made between “status” and “static”…okay, there’s gotta be a poem there somewhere, yes?

Happy Father’s Day!

My own father was my go-to parent, which is one reason that I’ve always taken the paradigm of the “mother and daughter” connection with a grain of salt. I love my mom, but she just wasn’t my go-to growing up.

My dad loved his two girls. In my eyes, he was this Great Intellectual Mind, who could sit for hours at the table after a meal arguing debating the finer points of some great question, or some inane question, or what was on that evening’s news. He always had Peter Jennings on during dinner, which drove my mother batty. He was stiff on the phone, ultra-private in the neighborhood, demonstrative with his kids, responsible to a fault, non-handy, kind, generous, and–did I mention?–intellectual.

In fact, the greatest compliment he ever gave me was when he said to me one day, “SBird, you are the most intellectual person I have ever known.” It makes me well up just to write that out. It doesn’t, by the way, mean that I am the smartest person he’s ever known. No, no, no. Just that I am a hound for ideas. I get that from him.

He took my online literature class in 2003 after he had retired, and he earned an “A,” even though he was a science wonk (thank God, since I’m not sure how one goes about giving one’s father any other grade…). He liked to talk about the congruence between physics and poetry. Aldous Huxley’s play Fences was his favorite text of the semester–a play about failed dads, to a large extent. He used to weep at the National Anthem. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, he took me to see the Baltimore Orioles hosting the Boston Red Sox because Jim Palmer was pitching to Carl Yastremski–Yaz–and Dad said I needed to see a Hall of Famer pitching to a Hall of Famer. When my parents moved into the very first house that they owned in 1972, my father came home from work every night and went out back to dig the rose bed…he would dig until well after dark with a rigged-up spotlight illuminating the hole. Apparently, the neighbors thought he was digging a grave to get rid of some body. Heh.

In 1995, I had an academic conference in San Francisco, and he did too, so we met afterwards and rented a convertible and gallivanted around the west coast for a few days together…through the wine country and down the coast on Route 1. We talked a lot. It was one of those occasions that you don’t realize is as momentous as it is until much later. We won’t be doing anything like that again.

My dad has Parkinson’s now. He has trouble moving, trouble speaking and is surrounded by therapists, doctors, in-home help, and my mother-as-primary-caregiver on a daily basis. It is difficult to carry on a conversation with him on the phone. He mumbles and can’t remember what he just said. It is a very strange thing for me to negotiate. I fail miserably most of the time at being the kind, generous, supportive, and present daughter I’d like to imagine myself being. He is, after all, why I am who I am today. Of that, I am sure.

He once defied all the glib cliches about grandchildren when we were discussing him becoming a grandparent someday, and he said, “well, that’s fine; I’ll be very happy for you, but–for me–I want to watch my own children grow up and make choices and live their lives. That’s really what I want to see.”

Here are some photos of our own Father’s Day celebration this morning at the ranch. The Bee and I got up early to make blueberry-and-lemon muffins for Papa, who surprised us mid-way through:

I had to teach her how to lick the spoon!

What He Said…

So, on Wednesday we took The Bee down to the 104 degree heat of the Valley of Death to see the Craniofacial Surgeon par excellence…so we’ve been told. I think that the expertise of any given medical professional comes in direct proportion to how long you have to sit in a random waiting room, waiting to be graced with the presence of said expert par excellence (is that redundant?).

The answer for this one was an hour. In the waiting room, that is. And then a 20-minute appointment. Heh. I clearly became the wrong kind of doctor.

I held her upside down on my lap (which was, by the way, the means by which I got my own first glimpse of her open palate), and he peered in with a tongue depressor. She screamed bloody murder. As well she should, given what’s coming.

His comment–and I quote–was, “it isn’t trivial, but it’s not by any means the worst I’ve ever seen.” In point of fact, he was rather blase about it, which I’m sure is the pose he’s learned to adopt for nervous-nelly parents. Been here, done this. He doesn’t need her to come again before the day of surgery. It’ll be only one night in the hospital, and then home with 10 days of liquid diet, and then 10 more days of soft foods diet. And that’s that. He quoted only a 2-4% rate of fistulas in his experience (fistula=nasty little gape in the new tissue repair that can open up like a sinkhole and require an eventual second surgery), which is a very good success rate. And he wouldn’t do a lip revision before she was four because he wants her to understand what’s happening for that one, so she can “participate” in the massaging of the scars and so on. But he can completely eliminate her upper-lip scars, says he.

Then his nurse Fabiola with the auburn eyebrows and the incredible Botox lips brought us his scheduler’s card. Um, yeah. He has a woman, Victoria, who doesn’t even work in his office schedule his surgical appointments. She’s like a freelance scheduler, off-site. Um, yeah. Fabiola told us Victoria won’t answer her phone, just leave a message, and she’ll get back to us in 24-48 hours. Um, yeah.

I dialed the freelancer before we even hit the parking garage. No answer. I left my message, emphasizing that The Bee is now 22 months, older than most kids who need this surgery. She called me back on Thursday afternoon, while I was on the acupuncturist’s table, stuck with little copper-topped wires in my feet, belly, and hands (I’m being treated for non-apparent anger issues, according to my acupuncturist. Heh.). I hopped off and answered anyway because I knew it was Victoria.

Early September. That’s what they’re scheduling right now. The surgeon par excellence has vacation most of August. If there’s an earlier cancellation, they’ll call. We should be ready to go in an instant. An instant, plus two+ hours of driving to get there. And then the waiting room. Ahem.

The Art of the Singular.

I have been trying to teach The Bee the concept of one-at-a-time. She has some hoarding tendencies–not too severe, no pocketing or stashing of items or food until later; no hiding of toys or food. But she will stuff 20 goldfish crackers (no kidding!) in her mouth at once. Or six pieces of apple. Or four pieces of watermelon. No small feat. But then she can’t chew, of course. And she looks at me, dumbfounded.

This is happening because Mommy has given her a snack in its own little bowl, on its own little coffee table, for her own little fingers to manipulate. And her fingers decide they need ALL OF IT right now. So, we have been working on what it means to choose one piece, one at a time, for insertion in the mouth. And to slow down, in general, because there’s always more. Or–usually–always more. Temporal moderation.

I have found the same is true for my days, these days. I can do no more than one thing per day. And that’s okay. It’s just not my normal m.o. I am used to setting aside a large stretch of time and getting a project done, from start to finish. Dog-with-a-bone done. Now I find I’m satisfied with the undone, the partial, the piecemeal, the synecdoches of my days. If I can unload the pictures from my photocards onto my computer today, then tomorrow I can edit them, and the next day I can ogle them, and the day after that maybe I can print a few out. Or email them to Grandma. One or the other, surely.

Sunday I dared to look at my Bloglines for the first time since mid-April. More than 250 posts. I skimmed. I apologize to those of you whose lives passed me by…I tried to get the basics down. Yesterday, when Bloglines was clear again, I started to comment on new posts. Today, I cleaned up my blog links a little bit. Temporal moderation.

Tomorrow, we go to see The Bee’s cleft surgeon. Should be an interesting meeting. The Bee hates hands in her mouth. Not sure how that’s going to work. She’s had three blood draws in the past week or so for about 30 separate tests, and all of them have come back normal. Relief is sweet.

She had her first taste of macaroni and cheese last night at a church shindig, and–on the way home–we pulled off the road twice so that I could show her the first amazing Arizona sunset she’s ever seen. Firsts are good. They keep one young. Namely, me.

Her new toy farm:

One of the weirdest faces I’ve ever seen The Bee do:

Signing “flower” in her new wading pool:

Kisses!

Signing “tired”:

Lest you think she doesn’t ever get totally pissed off at her Mommy. Heh:

Quarantined!

So, yesterday I was quarantined for two hours at the local hospital. Uh-huh. You heard me. Quarantined. As in, Isolated. In a small, dark, back room off the ER, behind two gurney-sized swinging doors that were not to be opened under any circumstances, stripped down to a hospital gown and wearing a face mask.

The Isolation Room, by the way, was dirty. There was a bin of medical waste sitting about three feet from the bed, propping the door to the bathroom open. It was full of used urine bags and clear tubing where various and sundry bodily fluids once flowed. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned. There was a camera behind a bubble in the ceiling.

I learned in the first 10 minutes of sitting there that their HVAC venting system was broken. They turned it on in order to keep my air isolated from their air. Instead of blowing my Isolated Air back on me, it blew it out under the door into their hallway, which they discovered by sticking a piece of paper on the floor under the door. It gusted over to their feet. During their frantic phone calls to the maintenance folks, I learned that I was the first person to be quarantined here in quite some time. I also learned that it was more likely that the maintenance man was going to show up and fix the ventilation ASAP than the doctor was going to show up to fix me. Ahem.

I’ve had a sore throat for several weeks. I decided to have it swabbed for strep just to make sure. I’ve never had strep in my life, although I have nasty sore throats every time I get sick. But I was trying to be pro-active. I was also trying (assuming) it would take about 20 minutes to have an RN poke a culture stick down my throat, and I’d be on the way home with the little girl (who stayed in the car with R.) for her nap. I forgot one crucial little fact: I live in bohunkville, USA. As in white. As in small. As in provincial.

I went to the “fast track” urgent care service at the ER because my primary-care doctor (whom I generally love) is on hiatus this summer. She told her patients in March just to go to Urgent Care if we had any problems this summer, and she’d see us in September. Um, yeah. That usually means a problem will find me.

The trouble started with one little word that I happened to drop in my initial interview with the triage unit: China. “Um, when did my sore throat start? Ah, about five weeks ago when I was in China adopting my daughter.” Masks got whipped out faster than you could spell lickidy split. The dude dropped the word SARS. Then no one ever spoke it to me again. When the nurse finally swabbed me, for instance, she told me she had to do it twice because the doctor wanted to check for “something else,” other than the strep. Um, okay.

By the way, except for my relentless sore throat, I Am Fine. I am not running a fever, NOT coughing, sneezing, wheezing, chortling, spewing, hacking, drooling, or guffawing (well, maybe I’m guffawing…it was a pretty guffawable experience). I also do not have a single chronic health concern (apart from infertility) that would warrant extra precaution. I am healthy as a horse. To their chagrin, apparently. These people clearly wanted An Excuse.

The triage dude shows up in the ER with big eyes up above his face mask, and drills me, “were you ever in the Guangdong Province?” (he’s obviously been furiously checking the computer). I told him the two cities I was in (he can look up the freaking province, I decided) and that we stayed in five-star hotels. I told him the adoption process is streamlined and Westernized (unfortunately so), and we weren’t wandering around the Chinese hillsides or loitering in packed subway cars. I have more vaccines in my system than a three-month old.

When the first nurse came into the Isolation Room, she peeked around Door #2 like I was The Thing That Shall Not Be Named. She adopts Sympathetic Nurse Face and says, “Oh, how are you feeling, dear?”, as if I’m going to be dying any minute. Clearly, someone, somewhere out in The Non-Isolated World, had whispered something to her…”SARS-girl is in Quarantine…who wants to be the one to go check on her?” “I feel great, actually” I say from behind The Face Mask. She edges a few steps closer. I tell her the story of adopting. She wants to know why I adopted. I tell her the story of infertility. She returns to looking at me like The Thing That Shall Not Be Named. I am feeling smaller and smaller. Did I do something really wrong?

After she leaves, I get pissed. I immediately get out of the hospital gown and put my bra and shirt back on. I mean, there is NO REASON I need to be naked to have my throat swabbed for strep. I also decide I’ll give them half-an-hour, then I’m walking out. Quarantine, my ass. Aren’t people allowed to have a common cold anymore?

Trust me, I understand that rules are rules. And panic is also panic. I decided that health professionals over-react in direct proportion to how often they get out of their own self-contained little universes and see the world. What I mean is that my treatment at my community hospital yesterday bordered on being culturally insensitive and even offensive. They didn’t react to me, the patient they had in front of them, exhibiting a certain symptom and not any others; having just participated in an international adoption. They reacted to a word. What was evidently a very scary word to them: China.

By the way, I don’t have strep. I have a virus. I was sent home with instructions to drink fluids and take Vitamin C. Um, yeah.