It rained on our wedding day. And oh - vernal varieties of pluvial pulchritude - it's raining a lot these days too. Guessing there's some kind of heavy handed moral mummery about how new life must spring from the dreariest dampness in there.
But let's start with the flowers. Because they're flowering in all their allergenic glory. Even Chaya's apple tree has survived that hot and dry summer and cold winter. It's looking quite verdant already.
Our little flower herself continues to spew brilliance (only 50% snot and phlegm-based). The youngest Wright is clearly no longer a piddling two and a half.
No no, she may not be three yet, but I am not quite there for reporting age in six month increments. She's got such a depth of complex syntatical structures, wicked ideas, numeric understandings, emotional nuance, and coordination that blows away her February self. As predicted, her time in preschool has attended a major mental, social and physical spurt. Kid is most definitely coming up on the exciting TWO AND THREE QUARTERS. But right now, more like "2.7" We leave to you to decide if that's base 12 or base 10 (Andrew joke).
We're still on a schedule of twice weekly preschool with a little music class mixed in there. This summer, we'll escalate to thrice. Because, well, she likes it a lot. Itty bitty Art School suits her.
We're going through an appropriately artistic phase with an obsession over markers, coloring, and drawing. She's made quick magnificence of her first coloring book. And mommy and daddy have both been drawn into (har har) the chromatic Fauvism. Our meals now involve several pads of paper and the three of us all scribbling away in our own separate spheres.
Can I just say that washable markers may be the best invention ever imagined? Chaya also rather enjoys markering the table, demanding I spray water on the drawing, and then wiping it up with a wipe. This alone is an art project. And the marker actually completely comes off. Yes, daddy and mommy have also started coloring straight on our brilliantly cleanable Ikea table. Not so much on our faces in the same exuberant way that Chaya likes to. Maybe in time.
After a seven month stall in healing, Andrew has finally been cleared for plating. This means he'll be a little more Wolverine and a little less lamed (fingers crossed). Basically things are just not knitting together right in his collarbone, so they're going to put a little mechanical wizardry in there to start the healing process all over, but much faster. He'll be going in sometime on May 3rd (exact time to be determined in cable serviceman style with a last minute informative phone call just to muck up childcare and the like). Then probably some time in a sling and maybe another month or two of healing. He gets to keep using his tantilizingly-named "bone stimulator" in the meantime and take the wretchedly-redolent Vitamin D drops in the interim.
Not to be outdone, I've got my usual rotating health oddities. My hands are currently de-chillblained and largely look like hands again. My reflux issues come and go but are currently a little mellower on a very observant diet. I had the ever exciting "barium swallow" test, in which I swallowed radioactive soda and got pictures of my insides taken. They were beautiful, but revealed no abnormalities. So that's goodish news. And I've currently received a prescription for a lower dose birth control pill after a "fun" tour through actual hormone replacement, which left me with the full scale progesterone miseries.
So I go back to some prior issues: back, arch, and neuropathy. I have no idea where one thing begins and another end but it adds up to "not super able to move/sleep/exist without some kind of serious stiffness and discomfort." I used to think numbness/tingling in my hands and feet was just part of the Raynaud's, but I guess not exactly. I've always have hands and feet that are prone to falling asleep faster and occasionally get said neuropathy. There's also tingling that seems to come from my lower back and down my leg. There's tingling that seems to come from my injured arch and the tarsal/tibial area around it. And there's an increasing bit of weakness and muscle spasm in a very tight leg that doesn't thrill me. I've got knots in my calves instead of muscle these days and it hurts much worse after walking. And I get some seriously reduced sensation in my right leg and foot right now.
The tingles touch my fingers, with some reduced sensation sometimes and some weakness that may just be texter's thumb. I've been waiting much of the year for a neurology appointment that will not come until July. In the meantime, I am limping along conjuring up slivers of body for other specialists to look at. A podiatrist is arranging for custom orthotics to help the pronation and arch issues. It's quite possible that the old running injury is turning into tarsal tunnel syndrome. It's also possible that whatever compressed disc in my lumbar region is causing sciatica, so I'm seeing an orthopedist and have had an MRI done. My doctor finally sent a referral for a electrodiagnostic test through the orthopedics in the interim. Lord for all I know the twitching ain't fasticulations as much as the first stages of ALS. Wheee. Who knows. Or maybe it's all in my head and i'm taking psychosomatic to special new levels. But enough about my medical mystery mayhem... for now. I'm out of shape, but still alive so far and awaiting new and exciting testing to hopefully tell me if there's a progression I'm due for or maybe even some kind of treatment. In the meantime, I'm happy for whatever energy I have.
It's cute that whenever I say Chaya goes to preschool she says "mamma go to doctor." But you know, I like to sometimes mix it up. Sometimes Mamma go to church. Or I try. I attempted going to the 8 a.m. "service" at the church I attended on Easter. This because it fit better with our current schedule. But turns out that it kind of lacks anything I'd connect with church other than being in a church. That is, it was five women who read the Book of Common Prayer together for a half hour. No music. No sermon. No standing or sitting even. So back to the drawing board/Ikea table. We've talked about maybe I go to the actual church service and let Andrew know if their coffee hour is sufficiently full of "little treats" to justify dropping in to say hello to coffee hour.
And while I have that old present of the present, I'm trying to learn to be present in those present moments.
I always go back and forth with my internet addictions. I think there's a fair deal of histrionics over our usage of electronics, but I have noticed that I am much terser with Chaya when using my smartphone. I know there's research supporting that parents tend to have harsher interactions with children when their using their phones. I always question cause and effect, but I do think that a pattern I notice is that Chaya will momentarily be off doing her own thing. I'll then let my thumbs wander to the lockscreen of the ol' pixel. And of course just when I'm in the middle of a long diatribe against somebody else's strange political developmental theological dietary theory... MAMMA! And if I close the phone I'll lose everything. If I keep writing Chaya will get more and more rabid. And it gets high pressure. It gets intense. Crazy 2.75 year olds are prone to doing risky things when unattended. And that's just arguing. What if I've actually wandered into a conversation with somebody I liked?
So I'm trying a little bit more just to take minimal steps to limit my wandering texters.
It's actually quite amazing how easily the temptation can be mitigated just by obstructing habit. I turned off all my notifications, as well as turning the sound off on my phone. So if i look at the phone face, there's nothing there. Blank and boring. There's a lockscreen and an empty home page. I've also started carrying the phone in my bag instead of my pocket. And I've started leaving it on the charger in the kitchen when we're home.
To make this more doable, I've been carrying at least one pen everywhere because I'm one of those people who needs to take notes constantly. But that seems to work pretty well. The issue of the camera is still tough, since I need to constantly photograph my child's every moment. Sometimes I wish I still had a standalone camera, but at least when the notifications are off, I don't get horribly distracted.
I'm still constantly hovering over the computer, but at least it's usually locked with a screensaver that Chaya likes (pictures of herself).
And so we stumble on with our slings, our surgeries and our rainy days. Fortunately little Miss Thing has a rain suit and boots. And the rest of us will just spray ourselves down with mildew killer and wait for the sunshine (and all those fun allergens!) with a fist full of tylenol and claritin!
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