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You know you are a confirmed scrapaholic who has been in the hospital wwwwayyyyy too many times when the doctor calls an ambulance to transport your child to the hospital, and your first thought is: Man! I don’t have the camera!

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Yes, Michael and I in the hospital…again. He took the cold we’ve been passing around and added a few degrees of drama to it. However, we are not in the ICU. And it’s a very different thing to simply be in the hospital, rather than in the ICU. For one thing, I’m expected to change my own baby’s diapers. (Boo.)

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I actually feel better now that we’re in the hospital. After the week of Sick

, in which I commented that we have entered some Bermuda Triangle that sucks up both good health and rest, I didn’t know whether to trust my skyrocketing anxiety level. Was it mother’s instinct talking or lack of sleep? Michael perked up and began eating, at least a bit, as soon as he got some oxygen in him. And this morning he’s not on oxygen at all and is doing much better. So I am reassured in my instincts.

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But I also question this crazy lack of health in our family. We are generally really healthy people. Did we really have these kids too close together? Is that why we have such a poor record of health, so ridiculously many hospital stays? Or am I overreacting? After all, most of the hospital stays have been Julianna’s. But really, we’ve had illness after illness upon illness for two full months. Looking at the state of my kitchen this week I’d blame my housekeeping for the germ breeding ground, but the fact is that the dishes didn’t get done this week because I had to hold the baby so much, and when I wasn’t holding him I was trying to make up lost sleep. Nonetheless, all you people who say “dust bunnies can wait, enjoy the kids”–our experience makes clear that cleanliness cannot be sacrificed entirely!

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Escalating the Month of Sick to hospital levels adds marital stress that we didn’t need. Nothing can make you feel quite so disconnected, and breed so much conflict, as being on call 24-7 and being forced to devote every second of couple interaction to the business of co-parenting. We had to cancel a date last weekend and reschedule for this, and now I’d say we’ve lost it this weekend, too. But at least this time we’re local, and I can actually leave for a couple hours and help get kids up (as I am doing this morning, which is why I have internet access).

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This week, as I wrangled a very sick baby and a recovering toddler, it occurred to me how creative we moms of young’uns become. For instance, how many of you, like me, use your mouths as an extra appendage?

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And last but not least: Here’s a video of an interview I gave about Bring Lent to Life. I look at myself, hugely pregnant, and I wince. It’s amazing how much the human body can stretch. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway for a signed copy!

7QT is over at Hallie Lord’s today.

(Feb. 2007)

July 2007, post-heart-surgery at Cardinal Glennon’s PICU

First birthday, Feb. 2008

PT, January 2009

Big sister, March 2009

School supply shopping, August 2010: The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades

First day of preschool, Feb. 2, 2010

Winter 2011, with baby cousin

Kitchen Aid, June 2011

At the pool, summer 2011

Holding Michael, December 2011

At Michael’s baptism

February 2, 2012: five years old. Happy birthday, sweetie!

This is a story about Tylenol. Or, since we’re a generic type family, acetaminophen.

Michael had his 2-month well baby visit on Monday. You know what that means–shots. Michael’s face went beet-red–I mean, beet–with two little yellow dots in the middle where his eyebrows came together. But then he was fine. The nurse wrote down dosages for the various formulations of acetaminophen and sent us on our way.

About bedtime, Michael became inconsolable. It seemed like any way we touched him caused him agony. We’ve never had an immunization reaction, at least not like this, so I ran upstairs and gave him a dropperful of acetaminophen without looking at the nurse’s notes. After all, it’s either one dropperful or two, .8 or 1.6, and I knew I needed the smallest dose. As the night progressed, he refused to wake up. At the 4 1/2 hour mark, feeling my own well-being reaching the danger zone, I went and got him up, but he refused to nurse. Flat-out refused. After fifteen minutes and a second dose of medicine, I managed to get five swallows of milk down his throat. I put him back to bed and went downstairs to pump. On the way, I tripped on a shoe left on the stairs and slid the rest of the way down. Temper tantrum. Bad mood. Resentment skyrocketing. Can’t sleep…though everyone else in the house is like the dead, even the one that shouldn’t be.

As I wandered around the middle floor, I decided to get out the sheets on immunizations, you know, the ones they hand you every time but you never, ever read. I figured I’d look at the reactions and see if extreme sleepiness and lack of appetite was par for the course. And I saw the handwritten dosage note: .4 mL.

My insides turned to a hard rock. I’d just given him .8. Twice. I thought a whole lot of words not fit for the public and turned on the computer to look up acetaminophen overdose, and by the time I finished reading I wanted to throw up. All reason told me that .8 mL is a miniscule dose and they build in huge margins of error…but the fact remained that his symptoms were right there on the computer screen.

I called poison control at 2:45 a.m., and a lovely woman named Janelle talked me down from the ledge. In the morning, Michael sort of ate, and began coughing, and it was soon clear that he was not overdosed, he had simply, and finally, succumbed to a full-blown virus.

But I didn’t give him any more medicine.

Fast forward to last night. At 1a.m., he woke up screaming. Not crying–screaming. He wouldn’t nurse, he wouldn’t let me put him down so I could go pump–he was absolutely inconsolable, and he kept rolling up in a ball like his tummy hurt. I managed to get him to sleep on my chest for a little while, but by 2:30 a.m. I was out of tricks, and I pulled out the acetaminophen again, this time turning up the light to make sure I got the correct dosage. And I discovered something that made the bottom drop out of my stomach again.

The dropper is not .8. It’s more like 1 or 1.2. And I gave him a full dropperful. Which means what I told Janelle on the phone last night about his dosage is wrong. And the web site said the symptoms of overdose usually show up 12 hours or more later, and abdominal pain is a big one on the list.

I cannot call poison control two nights in a row. I just can’t.

What if my baby IS overdosed, and I DON’T call, just because I feel stupid?

I thought about what  I’d read: liver damage, brain damage. I can’t imagine having another child with special needs, not when it was my fault.

I called.

Janelle answered the phone again, thank God, and after about three exchanges she remembered me from the night before. She talked me down off the ledge again (because let’s face it, at this point I was on the way to a second night running of less than four hours’ sleep, on the heels of a week or more with less than five. Let’s be frank, I was not in a good emotional place). “Let me do the math for you,” she said kindly. “How much does he weigh?” Calculation, dosage, division. “It’s probably a one-mil dropper, and he could have ten of those before he overdosed.”

Thank God…crisis averted.

I laid down with Michael on my chest again, in flagrant violation of everything anyone’s ever told you about baby safety, and I listened to his horribly stuffy nose…and didn’t get back to sleep for an hour. But at least I knew I didn’t poison my baby. And I am properly humbled. It’s clear to me that I will never, never have this whole parenthood thing figured out. Even the part I’ve done four times.

Then I came up with one. And another. And another. And the more I thought, the more I realized I do have them, they’re just more practical in nature, and less easily summed up in a pithy title. But they’re all aimed toward one ultimate goal: independence. I guess I’d have to call myself a middle of the road kind of free range parent.

I think I will probably address some of these in individual posts, so today I’m just going to share what I came up with. And then…then, I’d like to know what your philosophies are.

• Telling kids no.
• Letting them fight their own battles and ask their own questions.
• Being willing to admit I’m wrong.
• Moderation: in food, in toys, in TV, and related to that…
• Giving the gift of family instead of Stuff.
• Loving touch.
• Tolerance: Not stopping them from doing things that aren’t wrong, even when it’s annoying.
• Allowing them to suffer. (I have a lot to say on that subject, so as horrible as it sounds, bear with me. I’m not talking about making them suffer, just allowing it when it happens.)

What all these have in common is this: letting go. As parents, we are often urged  not to “rush” children to grow up. But at the same time, we feel anxious if we don’t have our kids in one sport every season, music lessons and speaking three languages. Most of my music students have more than one extracurricular activity every day. If that’s not pushing kids to carry an adult’s load, I don’t know what is. And I think we feel that instinctively, which is why we end up doing things for them that they should be doing for themselves–to try to offset it. And that’s how we get helicopter parenting.

I want to be the anti-helicopter parent…but still nurture and love them. My goal is for my children to leave–even Julianna, my little girl with the magic chromosome–to fly the nest, to leave me free to do all the things I’ve put off in the service of my children–but to love them so thoroughly and completely that they’re happy to return.

Most days, I think I fall far short. But every once in a while, when I’m loving them so hard my body almost can’t stand the force of it–every once in a while, I’m sure I’ll succeed.

Image via Wikipedia

When sick moves in, you don’t always know it’s happened at first. It’s just a cold, right? Okay, a long and extended cold, a toddler who needs a “tih-oo” every five minutes, but no big deal. An infant who has to have his nose suctioned periodically for a week, then two, then three.

When sick moves in, you load up the kids and go to the doctor on a Thursday to make sure the baby really is just getting virus after virus, and it’s not something that needs treatment…and then, that night, the toddler spends the entire night wailing and screaming, until your nerves are raw and you wonder what you were thinking by having children in the first place, and in the morning there’s crustiness outside his ear and you feel horrible for not recognizing that your child has an ear infection, the first ever in six years of parenthood. And then you think how lucky you are to have avoided it so long, and berate yourself for your shot nerves and hair-trigger temper. And you load up the kids and go to the doctor again…at nap time…with kids and a mommy who haven’t slept well. Nearly hysterical, you call your husband and tell him to COME HOME FROM WORK RIGHT NOW. Which he doesn’t, of course, and by the time he does–early, just not as early as you wanted–everyone’s calmed down and you feel like a total loser for calling at all.

When sick moves in, it’s the cruelest kind of face slap: just as you think you’re finally going to get a good night’s sleep, the toddler’s roommate comes down with a cough bad enough to make you waffle about sending him to school. But he wants to go, you want him to go, and he’s borderline, so you send him. Half an hour after you put the kids down for nap, the school calls and says, “Sorry, come get your kid.” So you lose yet another day’s nap for the sick children, and top it off with two days with four kids in the house and nowhere to go.

When sick moves in, you come face to face with the reality that it’s not the big stuff that gets you, but the minor ones. You tell yourself that this too shall pass, that kids need to get sick, that this will make them healthier when they get older. But the truth is, you want to murder everyone, or at least exile them, or at least find a really deep hole to dive headfirst into. Preferably one where it’s quiet and will allow you to sleep uninterrupted by coughs, screams, and wails, not to mention that cute baby you have to nurse twice a night. And you berate yourself for your poor attitude, because you know other people who really have it bad, and others still who would give up several years of their life to have medical problems so trivial as viruses to deal with, instead of the ones they’ve been given. You snip at your spouse, burn with resentment because s/he sleeps through it/doesn’t do enough/isn’t being sensitive.

And then child number two hops a plane to Ear Infection Hell. Another sleepless night, and the spouse snips at you because he didn’t sleep, and you want to scream, “THIS IS MY LIFE ALL THE TIME, AND YOU’RE ACTING THIS WAY BECAUSE OF ONE NIGHT???” A date night canceled. Doctor visit #3. (Thankfully, Daddy handles that one.) Another round of amoxicillin, and you breathe a deep sigh of relief…until Daddy starts hacking, adding yet another layer to the Reasons Why You Will Never Get A Full Night’s Sleep Again, and you feel guilty and selfish for thinking about that when those you love are suffering.

When sick moves in, the sickos breathe all over the healthy ones: the immuno-compromised child, the newborn, and the caretaker of the whole household. And you start thinking, Oh, no, when is it my turn? So you spend Saturday morning running around with a spray bottle full of vinegar and a rag, wiping down every surface you can think of that might be harboring microorganisms. You develop the worst plugged milk duct you’ve had yet this time around, and all tricks are powerless against it when you have a baby who doesn’t appear sick, but just wants to sleep and nurse back to sleep without really eating.

And then Toddler starts coughing. And wakes up the next morning with a high fever and spots all over his body. And now you know which child it was that had a sensitivity to penicillin. Only it’s Sunday, and your only medical option is a trip to the ER, which seems an overreaction considering how long it took to show up. And Baby decides he doesn’t want to nurse.

When sick moves in, you start perusing the mental calendar and realize  it’s only January. We have two full months of sick season left, and we’ve already been sick for six weeks straight.

Entering week seven, and hoping that I’m telling the end of the story. This has been a very self-indulgent run, so if you’ve made it this far, you should also know that although I’m incredibly sleepy this morning, I’m in a better emotional place simply for having vented it all out. Sometimes that’s what you need most.

Here are my offerings …

If you’re looking for ideas for how to observe Lent, I have a book to give away. Come see!

I had some thoughts on Jonah, Marines, and prenatal diagnosis.

If you want to see what my kids are up to, here’s one on Julianna, and here’s one with pictures of Michael.

It’s almost Lent, folks! I know, I’m ahead of the game, but I have a good reason: I am hosting a giveaway for my new book, Bring Lent To Life. If you’re a Catholic mother with young (or youngish) children, click over and leave a comment for a chance to win a signed copy!

Okay, now that I’ve done my shameless self-promo…moving on.

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I was poking around online, doing magazine market research yesterday, and an ad for “Molexit” caught my eye. Considering the helpless rage with which I am consumed every time I walk across my big lawn, my ankle twisting on the maze of mole hills, you can imagine I clicked. A little browsing led me to THIS. All I have to say is: These are people after my own heart.

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I teach flute and voice lessons in my basement, which you might imagine can be a bit of an adventure with three small children and, uh, a nursing baby. Alex used to be very quiet over in the corner, humming vocal warmups along with the students while he bent over a Lego creation or a rescue hero. (Precursor to the autopilot humming he does All.The.Time now.) But Julianna? Julianna takes it to a whole new level. This week in lessons, she turned her back to us, planted her feet shoulder-width apart, and sang to the sunny window with arms out Broadway-finale style, “Eee-AAAAAAAHHHHaaaaah!”

Ah, how I love that girl, despite her selective deafeness to anything she doesn’t feel like hearing…

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Speaking of Julianna, or rather, Julianna and Michael…my baby is 8 weeks old already. I cannot believe it. I’ve been anxiously watching for his first smile, and we got it this week–a few, fleeting, absolutely adorable smiles. But incredibly hard to catch. I spent twenty minutes making a complete, blithering fool of myself while the dish water got cold one night. Once–once–I hit the button at exactly the right moment….and the camera turned off. I had my finger on the power instead of the shutter. Sigh. In the end, this was the best I got:

While Julianna, who torments him ceaselessly, turning him sideways in his bouncy, soundlessly and sneakily rolling him over onto his tummy (and here I thought I was making a big joke when I said she was destined to be a superspy), dragging him by one arm when my back is turned, lying on top of him…what, you think I’m kidding? Look at this! Caught in the act!

Julianna is the one Michael smiles for most often. What is this, some freaky variant on Stockholm syndrome???????

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Smiles aside, Michael adores all his big siblings. He can’t smile with his mouth yet, but his whole face smiles. Moms, you know that look, right? Heart-meltingly bright eyes, arms and legs kicking, face alight? He does that often for us. And it makes me happy to see how much Nicholas loves him. I was worried about Nicholas, because he’s such a drama king, and so needy. I was afraid we’d be in for all manner of resentment and tantrums. But the transition has been remarkably smooth, and he absolutely adores his baby brother, asking to hold him at all times of the day. Of course, he lasts about ten seconds, but hey. He’s a boy.

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Alex was home from school two days this week. And now we have piles of homework to catch up on. Actually, he did most of it while I was teaching yesterday, but it’s a wakeup call, reminding me that whew, we are entering a new phase of parenthood!

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Well, I’m officially back to that phase of my life: the obsessed with sleep stage. It’s cyclical, and varies in cause and style. Right now it’s the “how many times did he get up last night?” strain. The Shangri-la of sleep for me right now would be getting to that stage where the baby wakes up around two and then sleeps till five or six. My babysitter keeps asking, “Is he sleeping through the night yet?” I’m like, uh…no. Is he supposed to? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a child who slept through the night until he or she was three years old.

Whatever, dude. Sleep is for wimps.

But that makes me wonder–how many of you actually have kids who slept through the night consistently? And at what age?

Enough from me. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway!

I know, probably most of you are sending die, evil woman, die! looks at your computer screen right now. I’m ahead of the game, but I have a good reason. I think Lent is the great misunderstood season, and it is possible to approach it with joy–as perhaps you can tell from the image to the right. Today I’d like to share a short excerpt from my new book, Bring Lent to Life, and…I’m hosting my very first giveaway! So let me begin by asking: have you thought about “what you want to give up for Lent”? Read on!

The problem with simply giving something up is what I call the Mardi Gras syndrome: You’re sacrificing sweets for Lent, so the day before Ash Wednesday you have four bowls of ice cream. (There’s a reason it’s called “fat Tuesday.”) And on Easter Sunday you celebrate the end of the fast with two chocolate bunnies, a couple dozen handfuls of jelly beans, three slices of pie, and a cinnamon roll.

Kind of misses the point of the fast, don’t you think?

Fasting should change us in some way–move us to a place of greater holiness. It shouldn’t be something we do to torment ourselves for a while, only to revert to our former selves when it’s all over.

I believe it’s time to think beyond the ordinary Lenten penance. Why not give up a  specific sin instead?  In many ways, sin is a habit, a pattern of behavior. Selfishness, irritability, unkind words, gossip, gluttony–each of us struggles with the same sins again and again. Instead of choosing a specific item to forgo, why not choose one sin particularly troublesome to you and spend Lent focused on breaking its power over you?

This can be a great exercise for kids too, although they may need help, and that help must be given carefully. It’s important that we, the parents, not tell children what sins we think they need to address. True conversion happens from the inside out; it cannot be imposed by authority, however loving.

Penance, when heartfelt, is frequently a very private action and very difficult for people to share, even with those closest to them. Respect this. If a child is unwilling to share what he or she is giving up, that’s OK. As a parent, it’s tempting to feel that we must know everything our children are up to. But it’s also possible that a child (especially in the teen years) may want to be free of a habitual sin but is too afraid to admit it to his or her parents for fear of punishment. If your children are sincere enough to choose to work on something for Lent, rejoice, and allow them the freedom to make good choices of their own volition.

(Excerpted from Bring Lent to Life, with permission of Liguori Publications. Click here for more excerpts.)

Okay, folks, it’s time for a book giveaway! If you like what you see, leave a comment here between now and Feb. 5th and be entered to win a signed copy of Bring Lent to Life!

For extra entries, help me spread the word! Mention Bring Lent to Life on Twitter or Facebook (and mention me so I know about it!–Facebook: Kathleen M. Basi, Twitter: @kathleenmbasi). Better yet, refer people to this post. For each one you’ll get an additional entry. For every day you tweet or FB it, you get additional entries. On Feb. 6th my lovely little ones and I will do an old-fashioned, low-tech drawing and announce a winner.

Any questions? If not–go!

Julianna’s the ringleader of this little comic group, and her repertoire of jokes consists of one: She signs “eat” and points to random objects–the baby’s nose, the pillow, the wall, my jeans, the phone–and giggles hysterically.

The first time, I admit, I was slow on the uptake (as I often am with jokes). “You’re gonna eat the phone?” I said blankly, and she fell on the pillow, overcome by mirth. Now that was funny. You poor people out there in the e-verse have no way of comprehending how magical Julianna’s laugh is. I was powerless against it. The first time, anyway.

Nicholas found it so hysterical, he couldn’t even sit up. Instantly, he adopted the joke as his own, wholly forgetting that he can talk.

Although–and I hope you’ll permit me the tangent; my story’s finished anyway–Julianna actually is talking now. She almost always asks for “milk please” and names a whole bunch of colors, as well as counting one to ten. You have to know the context; you wouldn’t just recognize the words automatically–but she is saying them. Yesterday her big speech therapy task was to learn to say “go home.” I’m so proud of my little girl. Except when she’s sitting motionless, pretending she can’t hear me issuing instructions, that is. That girl can use her disability to play stupid when she doesn’t want to do something. We really have to stay on our toes to try not to get manipulated. I know she’s winning some of the battles…like the chores battle. Nicholas is way farther than she is on the “complies with instructions” continuum. I know I have to fight that battle eventually, but I don’t have the time and emotional energy to deal with them simultaneously. Let’s just hope I manage to do it before Michael gets old enough to need the lesson!

(By the way–I’m well aware that today is Wednesday, not Thursday, but I have a special post prepared that requires editorial approval, so I’m doing Motherhood Moment a day early today to make room for it! Stay tuned!)

Photo by *hiro008, via Flickr

It’s 1:15 when the last door upstairs closes. I hear her patter down the stairs, one to fourteen, landing lightly on Pergo. Afternoon sunlight glows on dirty dishes; the floor at my feet is a mine field of plastic bags, the spoils of the morning’s Target run. She surveys the mess, then looks longingly at the office…and the couch.

Come on, girl. You know you need this. I heard how many times you were up last night.

She picks her way among the bags, and I cheer. Reaching across the glass surface, she presses a button, and I obligingly begin counting upward. At twenty, her finger lifts.

No way. That’s not nearly enough.

She makes a face; she knows that as well as I do. But there’s so much to do–the assignments that tap out from beneath her fingers, the music that’s due in a week, the mess in the kitchen… I watch her waffle; at last, she punches in another thirteen minutes. Thirty-three minutes. Three to fall asleep, thirty to nap.

I start the count: twenty-nine. Go on. Get over there and lie down. You don’t know when that baby’s gonna wake up again.

She takes a drink from a big hospital mug, grabs a few sheets of paper and tosses them in the recycling–halfhearted attempts to split the difference between rest and housecleaning. Then she flings herself across the couch, burying her eyes beneath a pillow.

Twenty-eight minutes. She’s having trouble getting to sleep; the breathing is all wrong.  She’s thinking about what she’s going to do when she gets up.

Twenty-six minutes. The phone rings. She punches it on and back off without answering–must have been one of those 800 number calls. Twenty-five.

At twenty-four minutes, her breathing slows; the house settles into a quiet it rarely sees during daylight hours: the soft ticking of the wall clock, the refrigerator’s hum, the low rumble and tumble of the dryer upstairs. I wish I could slow the relentless countdown, but I can’t; my reliability is the only reason she trusts me. Twenty minutes. Fifteen. Ten. Upstairs, a child rolls over, its feet thumping the walls. I tense, but the slow, even breaths don’t change. She must be tired. Five minutes. Three. One. Now we’re counting seconds…three…two…one..

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

She takes a deep breath, stirs, and groans. Nap time is over.

**

To my regular (non-Write-On-Edge) readers, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this prompt; it seemed pretty far outside of what I would normally write. But Christian encouraged me to try, and since the heavyweight stuff yesterday didn’t seem as interesting, I figured, What the hey? Hope you don’t mind.