Baby Elephant Lost

This is a picture of a baby elephant trying to wake up its dead mother. She died following translocation to a larger game park in Kenya but baby elephants are orphaned all the time through poaching, illness, natural disaster and accidents (like falling into an open drain and becoming stuck). Thankfully, this baby elephant was rescued by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust which runs a very professional Elephant and Rhino orphanage (which we have added to our list of Charities and you could too!).


I became empassioned about baby elephants after the most traumatic dentist appointment every, this past Tuesday. I went in to my new space-age spa-like dentist for a major filling. It was almost a crown and took about an hour and a half. As they began they turned on the flatscreen TV about the chair and offered me headphones to watch the BBC Life on Earth series. I have seen ads for this on TV and it is truly stunning in HD so I agreed. It was a bad idea.

I have never been good at nature shows. I know that you are always rooting for the underdog. We love the wolf when we have met the wolf pups (with sweet names) and urge the doe to stumble to save the wolf pups from starvation. But come the time we meet the cariboe who struggle on their long migration and we will the evil wolves to tire to let the spindle legged caribou baby find it way back to its mother. After seeing about 10 minutes of one of these shows I am always reduced to trauma and anger (anger that the wildlife photographers and David Attenborough are so manipulative and trauma at the reality of Life Is Suffering while we remain attached to it and our babies.

So, I cope through a few gruesome tragedies until we meet the elephants of the Kalahari desert who make a migration over 100s of miles in the dry season (starving, dying of thirst and assailed by dust storms that blind the little baby elephants) to the okavango delta which floods the desert in the annual rainy season.

We meet a mother and baby who are lost in a dust storm but find their way back. Then the group moves on. But there is another baby elephant who has become disoriented in the dust. He has lost his mother and when the dust settles he cannot see her. Instead, he finds her trail and as we pan back from the helicopter we see him setting out across the vast desert following her footsteps. The voiceover continues "sadly, in this case he is following her footsteps in the wrong direction".

This tragic futility is very very sad. I wanted to rescue the baby elephant and all my feelings of protecting Wren were transferred to protect that lost elephant following the wrong way. I felt Wren was out in the desert and although my mouth was trapped open by that horrible dental contraption my tears ran down under the sunglasses and were wet in my ears.

So, we are now supporting baby elephant orphanages and I am never going to watch those awful nature shows again. And Wren is never going hiking in the Kalahari.

Much many more

It has been only 3 days since my last post but I am overwhelmed with loose ends and stories untold. I feel as if I am sitting in my kitchen with 20lbs of apples and not sure what to make of them.

Ok, here are some little story-pies:

• I went to an indian/middle-eastern grocery store today and bought mango chutney and mint chutney and ingredients for a new dal. It is made with squash and chicken and fresh fenugreek seeds and ground fenugreek. I am going to try and grow some fenugreek seeds to make leaves for the indian day in a few weeks. I love mint chutney. Nothing is wrong in the world when I am eating mint chutney.


• Wren is recovering from his cold and loves playing with the animals. He spends a lot of time carrying his animals around. He makes them eat things (making a munching noise while pressing their faces into something he imagines to be food), make noises (pigs snort, cows moo sometimes, tigers roar, sheep baa) and they also chase and tickle people. He plays hide and seek with them too. He is a very good mimic. For example, he watched us playing the Clue boardgame and started to roll the dice himself and raise his arms as if going "yeah" when the dice fell.


• I know I shouldn't but I have been following the carepages of some CHD babies who are awaiting or having surgery:
  Justin's Blog &
  Jacob's carepage = JRHONAKER


• We went to Wyndi's wedding on Saturday. Wren was surprisingly good and liked to climb up and down the stairs and roam around the room. It was a beautiful wedding at the top of the Columbia tower and the food was delicious. Wren ate a great deal of fruit salad which reminded me to buy him more grapes and pineapple.


• Mum is travelling somewhere in Africa. According to her itinerary she is in the Orange River Canyon tonight (or this pre-dawn darkness).
  

Snotty Boo

At infant co-op we sing a song that goes: "huggy boo, huggy boo, you are my huggy boo." This morning, Wren, who has been up since 4.45am (and his mother with him) is my snotty boo. He has a cold in his nose. It has kept him waking all night on the hour or so. He was easy to settle again until 4.45am when he lay and moaned and sang and cried for 30 minutes before I gave up on him returning to sleep.

He was so glad!

He rushed off and grabbed a toy, dumped it on the bed where I was lying. Climbed back on the bed. Bounced a bit. Looked down the crack behind the bed. Squealed to me about the ongoing darkness. Rushed to the door of the bedroom and set about our usual daily tasks like chasing the cats and making coffee (hoo hoo = hot hot).

I suspect Wren has contracted the virus Josh has been suffering from over the past 3-4 days and in this context I cannot resist referring to an article I read yesterday on BBC News. It reports on contenders for Australia's Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year 2007. One of them is "man flu." Now I am not suggestion Joshua had a man flu but there are times he has:

Man flu, meanwhile, refers to a minor cold contracted by a man who then proceeds to exaggerate the symptoms, the dictionary said.

Alternatively, we need a word to refer to the case in which a woman gets the flu and continues in daily life with all responsibilities intact (cleaning, cooking, waking for children, driving carpool) and does not get to collapse on the couch until everyone else is doing their daily grind. Oh, and if a baby is involved the baby must be having a nap before she rests. See, it would be a hard word to find. Easier just to say "man flu" with envy for its opposite.

Angels or Devils

Last week I took the boys to JC Penney for a photo shoot. Great Granny Charlotte had asked me for some pictures and none of the ones I have seem quite right. I put it down to the difficulties in taking good indoor photos with my digital camera. It wants to go to flash all the time and that washes everyone into startled deer expressions or paparazzi ghosts. I digress.

Here are some of the pictures from the photo shoot. I think they are lovely. However, an experience there reminded me of the different perspective you have once your child has serious health concerns.

The walls of the studio are covered in portraits. Many of them have children posed with some captions underneath. Some have them posing with bears and fake Christmas trees. Some have them wearing wings.

I was looking at one portrait of a little girl with ringlets with a background of wings and clouds. It was captioned "My Angel, Marie". Among those whose children have been in hospital and certainly on all the online communities, an angel is a child who has died. People write something like "Mother to brian (8) and ^o^ angel Claire. I felt sad for a moment thinking of the little girl who had died. The next picture had four children in fuzzy clouds "our 4 little angels". Suddenly, it dawned on me that the child wasn't dead!




I was pleased. Still, it left me feeling very superstitious. I would not let her make Wren into an angel or do any fuzzy clouds. The one of Wren in the stars is okay although I was a bit disturbed when Heather (the babysitter) said "he looks like an angel".

No, he does not. He looks like an earthbound troll. He is.

Heart Kids 'Community'

Yesterday Wren and I went to our monthly CHD family support group which meets at Children's Hospital. Wren was a noisy explorer. He wanted to eat chocolate, drink juice, climb on the table and hoot loudly. He picked the noisiest toys to throw, thunk and beep with. It was a good meeting (as always) although I was the only one who actually ate chocolate. A new family attended for the first time. They have twin 5 month old girls, one of whom has DORV, TGA, VSD and ASD. She has had some procedures but they are waiting on the major repair. It is always hard to be in that waiting part but I hope it goes smoothly for them.

Meanwhile, I have been following another Heart Baby blog. Baby Justin, who has had the first of the three surgeries pre-Fontan, is also 5 months old and is due for an exploratory cath tomorrow. I am sure his family would appreciate positive thoughts and prayers.

Finally, I was told that February 14th (yes, its Valentine's Day) is CHD Awareness Day. As the the Congenital Hearts Information Network reminds us:
"

CHD is the most frequently occurring birth defect, and is the leading cause of birth-defect related deaths."

We talked about doing some publicity for the day in Seattle but we are not a particularly press-savvy bunch so we were not sure what steps to take. We are going to try and publicize our Heart to Heart group as a way to reach out to families with heart babies to offer support.

The Wisdom of Frost

Frosts joke:

Q: What kind of monster likes maple sugar candy for his birthday?
A: Count Sapula.
Q: What do they sing at his birthday party?
A: Sappy birthday to you, sappy birthday to you...


A Conversation about Criminals
Q: Do you think its better to do graffiti on an old billboard like that one?
A: I guess so.
F: Its still bad.
A: Mmmhmm. Why do you say that?
F: Because they are still breaking the law. The people who do graffiti are bad people. They're criminals!
Me: I am not sure its that simple. I did graffiti when I lived in South Africa.
F: You did?
Yes, it was political graffiti but I still did graffiti.
What's political mean?
Its about what people do in the place you live, in your society. In South Africa they had politics called Apartheid which was like slavery. Black people did not have the same laws as white people and they weren't allowed to do things the same or live in the same cities.
F: Were you a black person or a white person?

Timmy Tiptoes

When these stumps were full, they began to empty the bags into a hole high up a tree, that had belonged to a woodpecker; the nuts rattled down--down--down inside.
"How shall you ever get them out again? It is like a money box!" said Goody.
"I shall be much thinner before springtime, my love," said Timmy Tiptoes, peeping into the hole.

Some of you may recall the story of Timmy Tiptoes, the industrious squirrel who is accused of nut theft and spends the winter becoming obese on stolen nuts. Timmy is a good little squirrel to the point that he is captured by squirrels fighting the war on terror who put him in jail in a godforsaken tree. While there he gets influenced by a down and out furry of some sort and goes downhill from there.)

Wren likes squirrels. He looks out the window and hoots when he sees one scurrying along the fence and becomes excited when I feed the crows bread and attract squirrels instead. At the Zoo yesterday we bought Wren a pair of squirrels to add to his animal collection.

[Aside: I have realized I dislike buying ONE of any animal for our animal box. It makes playing so sad. Its like buying endangered species. "Wren, here is the last tiger. It must play with this lone horse. Here is a bunny. It can play with the lonely hen." No, instead of treating the animal box as a vocabulary exercise with one of each specimen we are going to buy families of plastic horses and cows and squirrels to play in happy prolific flocks. This idea came to me as I recalled my paternal Grandmother who in a famous family tale came across a closing sale at a toystore where the animals were on a deep discount. Apparently pigs are not the most popular toy animal. There were many pigs left so she bought all the pigs. As a child we played pig farmers. I enjoyed playing pig farmers]

Well, last night I caught Wren squirreling away things under the floor. Those of you who have not visited our house may not know that our kitchen has been in the process of a remodel since well before Wren was conceived. As part of this remodel we moved the fridge and stove, revealing holes in the floor where the appliances used to be. Frost and Wren loves these holes which are now in the middle of the floor near the dishwasher. Frost shines his flashlight down the holes, I use them to hide clues (dangling on strings) in treasure hunts and I had often seen Wren sticking his fingers in them. What I did not know was that Wren has been dropping things DOWN the hole into the space between the joists, a space inaccessible from any other point.

Last night he was playing with one of the bolts from the Christmas tree base. Its a big metal thing which you screw into the holder to keep the tree upright. Its important. Without it the fancy shmancy Christmas tree base is pretty much useless. Wren was carrying it around and then there was a clunk and he started hooting and pointing at the hole.

For a kid that doesn't talk he is very expressive and it was clear that he was saying "LOOK IN THE HOLE, THE HOLE, THE HOLE MOMMY!"

I looked in the hole. It was dark dark down there.

I got the flashlight and looked in the hole and was shocked to see the Christmas tree bolt, a few forks, a shiny black stone, a wooden hammer, a baby spoon and some paper.

I said "shit, Wren. What are you doing?".

Frost looked up from his laptop army on Feudalism and said "It is not good to be cross at Wren. He is just being a baby."

I said "I am not cross, I am just surprised. I shouldn't have said that."

Frost came over and took the flashlight.

Wren started shouting and trying to hit Frost in order to get the flashlight. I asked Frost to give Wren a turn with the flashlight which Wren promptly hit Frost with and then threw it. Frost said "NOOOO, Wren." Wren shouted loudly because we took the flashlight away.

I went to find the Moo Magnet. I tied it to a piece of string and started dangling it through the hole. I managed to attract the forks, the bolt and a baby spoon.

Frost said "this is the best day of my life! This is sooo fun!"

I closed the hole with tape. This morning I found Wren dangling a fork into a smaller hole. I should not be surprised. I mean, half the day I am encouraging him to squeeze shape blocks into various brightly colored toy containers. He found another hole and is following my lead.

I taped that hole shut too.

The Official NO from Insurance

We received a letter from Premera, finally. Wren was denied RSV vaccination this season. According to the letter he does not meet the criteria for treatment. The criteria are:

* less than two years old YES
* Chronic lung disease NO ...or
* hemodynamically significant cardiac condition YES
* requiring treatment in the past 6 months NO

So, he will not be getting vaccine this winter. We were prepared for this after our clinic visit. Dr Lewin said he was "too healthy" so he doubted they would approve it.

I guess that Wren will be pleased to forgo the shots and we shall hope that he remains free of RSV or any serious respiratory virus this winter.

Tree Take-Down distraction

We are going to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE today. I have no destination in mind although the downtown library and/or Elliot Bay Bookstore is an option. We are all going stir crazy after weeks of winter, rain and festivity. Josh goes back to work today and I think we shall go and ride a bus after naptime. Wren is growing a tooth and complaining like heck about it so I am even more driven to find everyone distraction.

I have just dismounted the Christmas tree and Wren is eating a cherry candy-cane lollipop. Did I mention I needed distraction?

Happy Day

Frost, Wren and I were on our own today because Josh was at work. We have had a lovely day. Frost played with Wren without too much suffering on either part and Wren was happy to run around chasing Frost and hiding in nooks. Hiding gives Wren great pleasure. During naptime, Frost and I played a game of Take Off which he won. It was interesting to trace our potential holiday route for next year as well as reveal how truly awful is my knowledge of geography.

We went to Whole Foods to buy diapers and raspberries and there was a man campaigning for gay rights. I asked Frost if he knew what it meant to be gay. He said it meant you "dance around and don't work hard like a real man like a lumberjack or something". He said he learned this from the Simpsons.

I tried to explain the non-frivolous meaning of gay but when I got to the part about boys marrying boys and girls marrying girls Frost looked incredulous. He said "are you allowed to do that?" and then said that "Alexander said you were allowed to but then how do you make babies in a man?"

Hrmm..

I think I covered all the important facts but it was a long conversation. Ever since Frost is making puns about things being gay because they love other things that are the same as them. I have tried to explain the sensitivities on the issue but now he has the "facts" he is brightly unconcerned with tact.