2009

Problem: Girl wakes up in the middle of the night screaming that her stomach hurts.

Solution: I call the nurse at the pediatrician’s office to ask what kind of medicine to give her. I’m pretty sure she needs a laxative, but I don’t know which one is safe for a 5-year-old. The nurse says, “With abdominal pain, you need to take her to the emergency room,” so I do, choosing the closet one with the smallest chance of a gunshot wound victim sitting next to my kids.

At the ER, I tell the nurse on duty, “I think she needs a laxative,” but the nurse says they need to check for appendicitis or anything else that may need surgery. She orders a blood test and urinalysis. After two hours (it’s now 2:30 a.m.), the doctor says Girl is fine and can go home. I say, “But she’s in pain. Can you give her anything?” So they do: a little shot of morphine.

The next day, I take Girl to our regular pediatrician. I say, “I think she needs a laxative.” The pediatrician says, “Yes, but we need to check for bacteria and parasites,” so she orders another blood test, another urinalysis, a stool sample (which I get to collect), an upper GI and an ultrasound.

Before Girl and I can complete all these tests, the results of the x-ray confirm what I have known all along: Girl needs a laxative. The pediatrician’s nurse calls with the answer I had been asking for: “Miralax.”

1969

Problem: I wake up screaming in the middle of the night that my stomach hurts.

Solution: Castoria. And if that didn’t work, enema.

Post script: On the one hand, I feel personally responsible for the current high cost of healthcare in the United States. On the other hand, the 1969 ultimate remedy seemed like one step better than leeches.

Post script 2: The pediatrician’s nurse just called again. Another test came back. Girl has giardiasis, an infection caused by drinking bad water. Where she got the bad water, I don’t know. I hope it wasn’t out of our faucets. I have to admit that this problem probably would not have happened to me in 1969: we had awesome well water. God knows where our city water is coming from now. And no more Miralax — Girl needs stiff antibiotics now.

Post script 3: Thanks, Doc, for not jumping to my conclusions.

Yesterday Girl found a pretty green notepad with a “D” on it, sitting on my dresser.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s a notepad I bought for Aunt Dora, but I didn’t get a chance to give it to her. Do you want it?”

Of course she did. She’ll write on anything that isn’t nailed down.

Aunt Dora passed away in June. For a while, whenever I woke in the middle of the night, the thought “Aunt Dora is dead,” would involuntarily pop into my mind, as if my subconsious were grappling with the hard concept. Only recently has this stopped.

Girl doodled on that notepad for hours. On the first page, she drew a picture of Aunt Dora, but it looked as if she had four legs. Girl explained to me that that was her walker.

Then, on the next dozen or so pages, she wrote sentences all beginning with “Aunt Dora is.” In her best kindergarten phonetics, she wrote, “Aunt Dora is a special person.” “Aunt Dora is a great aunt.” “Aunt Dora is the best person in the world.”

She kept wanting my help. “What else should I put?” she kept asking me.

I didn’t know what to say. I got tripped up on the word “is.” Did Girl realize Aunt Dora is gone? Would she ask me when we can visit her again?

I didn’t remind Girl that Aunt Dora is in heaven. Maybe the next time I wake up in the middle of the night, I won’t think “Aunt Dora is dead.” I’ll just think, “Aunt Dora is.”

Kindergarten has given Girl a new appreciation for words. Here are a few of her recent adaptations:

- Octopus: This is the biggest word she knows how to spell, so she puts it on everything. She learned it one evening, right before Open House at her school. So of course, she had to tell every teacher there that she could spell octopus. And they, being teachers, all replied, “Spell it.” And she did. Recently I taught her how to send an email, so now she begins her correspondences with “octopus” as well.

– Dumbongous: Girl made up this word to describe something that is humongously dumb. There’s a new cartoon called Glenn Martin DDS that she hates so much she can’t believe it’s on TV. That’s what inspired dumbongous.

– No. 3: Girl is going through an incredibly modest phase right now. Anything scatological embarrasses her to death. Especially the word diarrhea. So she calls it going No. 3. (It’s No. 1 and No. 2 combined.) Boy and Bob supplied ideas for No. 4 and No. 5. I won’t even go there with you.

Every night I tell Girl a bedtime story about Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo, the Girl Who Wouldn’t Listen. Usually I try to take the opportunity to impart a lesson to Girl about the events of the day. I have to be crafty about it or she’ll see right through me and take the story in her own direction.

Like the story of how Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo goes to the dentist and finds out she has cavities and needs to stop eating so much candy. “Mom, this is just boring,” Girl says. “It needs some magic.” So she highjacks the story and has Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo flying off to Iminagation World on her bed to meet with the Evil Bunny. I had forgotten Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo could do that.

Lately I have taken to exaggeration to get my point across. Girl has been eating too much watermelon before bedtime, with wet results, so a few nights ago I told a story about Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo eating a whole watermelon by herself and having to use the bathroom every 5 minutes — for 3 solid weeks. Girl got the message and told me she would never eat as much watermelon as that.

Last night, I told the story of how Emily Poochydoochydauchydoo came home from kindergarten and got so angry at her dad that she turned bright red and had to go outside and climb a tree to cool off (I borrowed heavily from the storybook “When Sophie Gets Angry,” which we had just read.) I don’t know if that one sunk in or not.

Girl has been on green at school for three days now (green means good conduct, for those of you without elementary schoolers at home). This model behavior has its repercussions, however. When she gets home, she’s like a steam kettle blowing heavy and hot, and Bob is the one getting burned. By the time I get home, she’s upstairs wailing in time-out, and Bob’s in the kitchen with his hair all frazzled.

So now I’m waiting to see how the story of The Man with the Short Fuse Versus the Chip Off the Old Block plays out. I’m hoping for a happy ending.