Doin' it wrong... with first aid

Everyone thinks their child is unique.  But on a couple of issues, mine is down right weird.
Like Band-Aids.  She's afraid of Band-Aids.

Less so now than when she was a toddler, but she still gets a little freaked out when she has an injury that might require parental attention.

A lot of kids, when they're small, will insist on a bandage for every little bump and scratch.  And they want you to buy the cartoon character bandages so they can be festive.  Not Hannah.  She had no interest in Dora or Backyardigan bandages when she was a munchkin, and actually applying a bandage to that child required a brief wrestling match.  Most small cuts and scrapes were left to the open air, on the premise that the emotional trauma of applying the bandage was far worse than the injury itself.  

Hannah is now 7, and tolerates a Band-Aid now and then for real injuries, but still isn't a big fan.  On Friday she was outside playing with a neighbor, when she slid down the side of one of the trees in the front yard.  She came in, looking contrite, to show me her injury.  Since she was playing with an actual friend (as opposed to her regular retinue of invisible ones), I figured she must be really hurt.  She doesn't abandon actual human playmates lightly.  She had found a scrap of the kind of fabric that sometimes is used to line camp-chairs or thermal windshield screens, and, for some reason, placed it over the rather mild abrasion on her rib cage.  The wound, on its own, really didn't require any attention to speak of, but the filthy scrap of fabric that she had applied to the broken skin was what concerned me.  I told her we would have to clean that up, and I sent her friend home, knowing that Hannah would be too frantic by the time we were done to want to play anymore.

Now comes the Keystone Cops portion of our story.

Hannah doesn't really like to be handled, as I mentioned in this post last summer.  So the idea of sitting still for me to douse her mild abrasion with hydrogen peroxide and Dermaplast spray was too anxiety provoking for Hannah, and she started backing away from me like I was holding a blow torch.  I tried to get her to sit on the couch, and she would briefly perch on the edge of the cushion, only to spring up, landing 2 feet away, every time I approached her with the brown plastic bottle of torture-liquid.  She was crying, and trying to convince me that the wound wasn't so bad, as well as trying to calm herself down with some cartoonish deep breaths.  I'm trying my best not to laugh, because Hannah is clearly distressed, but I'm losing the battle and I keep making that snorty nose laugh sound, which only upsets her further.  After about 10 minutes of what would surely have resulted in hyperventilation for most humans, I got Hannah to sit on a kitchen chair for a moment.  It occurred to me that the bottle of peroxide I was holding has a silicone seal that allows you to squeeze out just the amount you want, rather than the regular open-neck bottle that I'm used to.  So I decide I'll just squirt her with the stuff and be done with it.  From about a foot away from her I squeeze the bottle, shooting enough to make her scream at the contact with her broken skin, and to cause some to splash back and hit me in the eye.  Which hurt.  Kind of a lot.  Who knew?

Now Hannah is sobbing, and I am grumbling about my eye and holding my hands over my face.  Hannah then wants to know, between wails and sobs, if I'm okay.

The torture victim wants to check on the collateral injuries of the torturer.

I could not possibly love that kid more.

Doin' it wrong... with holiday spirit!

I hate the Elf on the Shelf.

My daughter, a typical little girl in every way, dearly wishes we had one. 

My grandmother had one of those things when I was growing up.  It sat in the shelf of the built-in hutch that was part of her Cicero dining room.  Hanging above it were a giant stuffed buck's head and a couple sets of antlers that my Papou had brought home from hunting trips in years gone by.  The disembodied deer head was less disturbing to me than the damned Elf.

First of all, the deer was a handsome example of its breed.  The elf is a creepy, leering, fingerless mongrel crouching in a corner beside some plates we never used.  The antlers held no particular malice, despite their forcible removal from their original host.  The elf was silently judging me every time I went past. 

Those little buggers scare the crap out of me. But wasn't this their original intention?  Did I mention the absence of fingers?  How is an elf supposed to function without fingers, anyway? I thought their whole existence was based on their ability to make toys and do Santa's bidding.  Perhaps that's why this goon was relegated to the shelf, perfectly suited, as it was, for scaring children, and lacking the opposable thumbs required for building a toy train or a doll house.

I always just associated that elf with the vaguely tacky 50s-based decor that characterized my grandparents' house.  You know: the plastic carpet runners everywhere, the carnival glass ash trays, and colored-pebble-lined candy dishes.  Oh, yeah, and the empty wine bottles turned into dolls with plastic heads and crocheted dresses.  Remember that stuff?  No?  What about the padded toilet seat and the fuzzy rug that fit right around the base of the toilet?  The plastic-canvas yarn-embroidered tissue box covers?  Come on, I can't be the only one whose grandmother made this stuff.

Anyway.  One thing that I did NOT miss when my grandparents moved to Florida was that stinking elf.  Then, a couple years ago, Hallmark or some other bunch of jerks starts marketing those things again, and presenting them as an essential part of the Santa Claus myth.  Dude.  It's not bad enough that he sees you when  you're sleeping; now he leaves his creepy minions around to scare your mother.

I didn't buy one.  Hannah wistfully says now and then "I wish we had an Elf on the Shelf," and I remind her of how their lack of extremities is deeply disturbing to me.  But I do feel the guilt of disappointing my child by not providing her with the delight of finding her Creep on the Shelf doing something mischievous and clever every morning.  I would really expect any Elf that infiltrated my home to behave more like the Bloggess's elf than any of those sweet mommy-blogging elves I see tagged now and then on Facebook.  And I'm pretty sure our Elf would terrorize me and give me nightmares.

So.  No dice for Hannah on this one.  I'll have to think of something equally creepy for her. Preferably something with fingers.

Not doin' it wrong with breakfast cereal.

I am a big drag about breakfast cereal.  I limit Hannah's choices to about 4 different products, and specifically outlaw anything chocolate and anything with any Flintstone on the box.  Perhaps sensing my nutritional hypocrisy, Cheerios has started making about 20 different flavors, all pretty much weird, figuring I'm dumb enough to buy anything with their logo on the box.

Turns out they weren't wrong.  A while back we tried the fruity kind.  Blech.  Hannah once had some Fruit Loops on vacation, and wanted to get them at the store.  I compromised with the Fruity Cheerios, but she wouldn't eat them.  I didn't blame her.  This week she wanted to try them again, so I bought her just a single-serving cup of actual Fruit Loops, knowing she wouldn't eat the other stuff.

So this morning, I poured half of those gross little circles in a bowl and gave it to her for breakfast.  She wasn't two bites in before she gave me the puppy face and said that this cereal was kinda weird, could she please have regular Cheerios.

Hm.  Really?  Who would have imagined.  Could you just take my word for it next time?

Not likely.

Look at me! Look at me!

I was talking with my husband recently about whether we should get Hannah a milkshake while running errands.  An important point to bear in mind is that milkshakes and mirrors are Hannah's favorite things in the world.  I'll get back to the mirror later.  We talked about the relative nutritional value or harm of a milkshake, versus a frozen lemonade, or whatever other frozen-ish beverage we might grab at a drive-through so Hannah would feel like she'd had a treat.  Husband pointed out my relative hypocrisy in complaining about the junk content in a milkshake for Hannah, although I eat various other junk without a thought for its nutritional impact.  My reply was: That's true. Still.

This double standard is applied to how I spend my time, as well.  Hannah has always had a limit on daily screen time.  Some days, just because life is busy, she has none; occasionally, on a sick day or rainy day off, she'll get extra time if there is something we all want to watch together.  I give myself no such limitation.  If I had a timer on my web browser as Hannah does, I might spend less time reading stuff on Cracked.com, although I can't promise that.  I check my Facebook and work email multiple times after I come home in the afternoons, even when everyone else is home to offer live human interaction.  Then, after Hannah has gone to bed, Husband and I settle in for grown-up television time.  Don't get too excited; it's usually old episodes of Cheers or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on Netflix.  If I added up all my screen time, I'm sure it would better than double Hannah's daily allowance. 

Why do I think this is acceptable?  It takes approximately four minutes to look at my work email to see if I need to change my schedule for tomorrow.  The other 20 minutes are spent trying to catch up a few points on a Words with Friends game or see if anyone has responded to my Facebook status. 

That brings me back to the mirror.  Hannah loves to look at herself in the mirror.  She can spend 30 minutes in the bathroom having a conversation with herself before she gets around to brushing her teeth.  I wouldn't let her have a mirror at eye level in her bedroom when she was smaller, because it only exacerbated her tantrums.  She loves to look at herself, and talk to herself, and pretend there is someone other than her talking back. I'm pretty sure that's the purpose that social media serves for me.  I want to see my reflection, and pretend someone is talking back.  Have my friends responded to my last comment?  Did anyone Like my status?  Do I have any new blog minions? 

I'm fourteen years old and I'm electronically checking my  hair every 20 minutes. 

Someone needs to install some parental controls for me.

Doin' it wrong on vacation time.

This is the first day of Hannah's Thanksgiving break from school.  I have to work, but her Dad is staying home this week.  The key here is I don't need to get her to school before I leave for work in the morning.  Typically, I get up 3 hours before I have to be at work, so I can get myself ready, then get her ready, then get us both to the places we need to be.  On mornings I want to go for a run first, I increase that lag time to 3 1/2 or 4 hours before I need to start work.

So this morning I was up at 5:00 to go out for my run.  It was 56 degrees, which passes for cold in Florida, so I was decked out in running tights and an ear warmer, feeling semi-professional about the whole thing.  I'd completed my circuit and was passing my own driveway for a cool-down walk when I realized I was out here at least an hour early.  No one has to get anywhere under my supervision but myself this morning. I could have slept until 6:30, and still gotten everything done, and been at work by 9:00. Psht.  I'm not good at days off.

This, however, pales in comparison to the time I returned from a vacation a day early and actually reported to work on a day that I was NOT SCHEDULED to see clients.  I don't remember the trip, but I know it was a trip to someplace, and I recall thinking what a dufus I am because I could have stayed a day longer, if only I'd actually payed attention to the dates I'd requested off from work.  I walked into the office, settled into my desk, and went to retrieve my files for the day from the administrative office where they're kept.  All the admin women were looking at me funny as I stared into the empty space in the file drawer, but weren't sure it was okay to laugh at me until I started laughing myself.

So after I've returned from this morning's exercise and settled in to waste  spend some time at the computer, Hannah comes out of her room talking in non-sleepy voice about how it's still so dark outside.  By now it's 6:15.  This is the child that routinely takes about 30 minutes of snuggling, alternated with whining about being tired, to actually get moving most school mornings.  Even on most days off she'll sleep until 8:00am if allowed to do so.  But for some reason, the two of us can't get this particular day off right.

Alas.  I sent her to snuggle with her Dad, and I'll go get in the shower, and we'll try to straighten ourselves out here shortly.  Happy Monday, everyone!

Doing it wrong in inappropriate clothing

I don't watch daytime TV.  I don't watch a lot of TV at all; I don't have cable, so I'd have to watch stuff as it airs. I can't predict the likelihood of actually catching a program on time beyond the degree of "There-Might-Be-Oatmeal," as measured on my personal Probability Scale.  But on Wednesday I let Hannah entertain herself for an hour (not exactly a stretch for her) and watched Katie Couric's show at 3:00.  I'm not specifically a fan of Katie; I don't have any particular feelings about her, but Jenny Lawson had posted on The Bloggess that she would be on, in a red dress, no less, and I wanted to see her. THEN she posted that Brene Brown would also be on the show, and that moved it up to the Jennifer-Drinks-Coffee level on the scale, which means this eventuality is no longer in question.

I love Brene Brown.  She is the most sensible author on relationships and mental health I have read.  I love that her big rallying cry is "Be Brave,"and I love the title of her new book: Daring Greatly.  It's not a complicated prescription, but the implementation of it is Herculean.  I spend my days talking to clients about the value of courage and vulnerability in their relationships, and struggle with implementing it in my own just as much as they do.

And I love Jenny Lawson.  She is brave in ways I can only dream about, and has challenges I can not imagine.  I love her Red Dress phenomenon.  I cried when I read her original post, and I cry every time she has red dress update post.  I love the idea of women supporting other women and refusing to allow them to hide in shame without at least inviting them to come out and play dress up for a little while.

My red dress story is not quite as dramatic as some, and, in fact, I didn't recognize it as being a red dress story until this week.  When my Dad died 3 years ago I felt all the warmth and color drain out of the world in a very tangible way.  I was convinced that my heart was irrevocably broken, and I wasn't really even alive anymore.  I could barely participate in the funeral arrangements, other than to criticize the funeral director's grammar when we reviewed the obituary copy.  No.  Criticize doesn't really describe it right; maybe excoriate?  I think I may have tried to wrestle the keyboard out of his hands and do it myself.  Raise your hand if that surprises you.

It was all I could do not to say something hateful when the preacher came over to my Mom's house to plan the service.  I got into a fight with my Aunt over whether I had to help write thank-you cards to people who came to the funeral.  Instead, I spent the week going over my Dad's mysterious balancing act of bill payment; no one else wanted to be involved in that mess, and I was guaranteed to be left alone.  I was angry and hurt, and I didn't care what anyone else felt.

I don't remember who suggested it, but someone said we should all wear red to the funeral.  It was one of the few suggestions (along with playing the Rolling Stone's Brown Sugar during the viewing) that didn't make me want to punch someone in the face.  I figured Daddy would think it was funny if we all wore red dresses to his funeral.  Of course, being that we had travelled for a funeral, neither my sister nor I had packed anything red.  So the next day, the Aunties brought over armloads of red dresses and skirts for the most bizarre dress-up party I've ever been to.

My sister and Mom and I decided that wearing red to his funeral was the last joke we could tell my Dad.  I don't think it was courage so much as defiance and a fierce and blinding love for my Dad that carried us through those days and that funeral.  I still hold my breath through much of the month of August, hoping I can keep it together until my birthday, and then September, when I can try to remember how to breathe again.

So now I think I'll buy myself a red dress.  Probably not a sparkly gown, but one I can wear regularly.  One in which I can be defiant.  And fierce.  And whatever else it is I'm having trouble mustering up that day.

Let's put that in perspective

My last post referenced Hannah's waking up nicely as coming close-to-never on my probability scale.  I worked up the rest of the scale, just to give you some perspective on the relative likelihood of all things.  Hannah helped with suggestions for categories of probability.  And with the coloring-in.

I think this 5-point Likert-type scale is sufficient to describe the probability of most eventualities.  However, it is a work in progress; I mean the concepts, not the quality of the art work.  That's not going to get any better.  My apologies to people with actual skill...