No way! It's November! Yes that joyful month where Vembers fear to treat and everyone knows it's basically Christmas. This is going to be such a weird holiday season. But it started out promisingly.
Halloween was long awaited here. "When it's halloween I'm gonna dress up as a butterly!!!!" has been roughly proclaimed since we peeled the grimy long-worn butterfly costume off our little gremlin on November 1st 2019.
And long debated. Trick or treating in a pandemic? For real? Go outside and maybe run into others? Should we leave candy out for other kids or is that some kind of complex pandemic tort liability waiting to crop up on a law school exam? Should we make up some whole new series of pinterest-worthy offerings to the holiday gods? Are you a terrible terrible monster for exposing your child to plague by going out into the death-air, OR are you a terrible terrible monster for denying them a whiff of relatively safe normalcy in this traumatic year where they've lost so much already???
Whatever the answers, we knew two things for sure: candy was happening and Allan was gonna be dressed up as a friggin' butterfly.
She helped me get in the spirit too. She intended for me too to be a butterfly, but last minute she added soe touches to make me a Bunnyfly. It all works. A little weird since last year, my previous incarnation of this costume involved all my favorite glitter makeup and hair product. None of which I can use anymore, due to various allergies. I've gone a bit feral these last few months. No hair salons, no product. Basically just one giant bar of all natural olive oil soap, some vanicream lotion, and the occasional instagram filter. So the bunny ear addition helped add back some pizzazz for sure. Kudos, Allan.
I did not do anything truly impressive or magnificent, but I met my mommy-duties by calling the Halloween Bunny to come by and pepper the household with delicious sugary junk for "Allan" to find.
We ended up trick or treating ... later.
No contact. Just an early walk around the neighborhood taking from the candy left out and catching candy here and there from ingenious mechanisms people had devised. It was impressive. Safer than the supermarket, and everyone was bundling up way more candy than usual, so the ultimate haul was actually quite favorable despite the lower participation. In a lot of ways, it was actually more like the fun experiences of my childhood than the more modern mega-party-at-a-business area events of Allan's. It's cool living in a neighborhood that is trickortreatable after years of not doing so.
I started our candy layout with carefully prepared paper bags full of candy (all the ones I liked the least, mind you). Those were going so fast, that they were all gone after we got back from our little trick or treating jaunt. I put another table out and they were gone within twenty minutes. So, I just ended up dumping the rest of our giant bag on the table. Roughly around this time, kids stopped coming by our house. So we should have plenty of "dessert" for a while even if we did have a nice binge into the candy this evening.
We followed Halloween with our hackneyed Day of the Dead remembrance. Allan, being a child and thus particularly morbid, has been quite upset that Andrew's grandmothers don't know that she's Allan instead of Chaya. Since both of his grandmothers died before Andrew and I started dating seriously, I don't think they really would have any reason to be stuck on a memory of her as Chaya per se. But she knows this day as the dead the dead come back to visit, kiss her on the forehead and realize she's a bunny named Allan and she's five. We left out lots of half nibble hallween candy (splitting candy is a very big rite in this house), some fruit, a few waters, some chips and a giant card from Allan tonight for any visitors.
I suggested Cheerios, but Andrew didn't really think the dead would be all that thrilled coming all the way back to earth for Cheerios.
And with that, we crash into the penultimate month of 2020! Gulp!
October was a pretty good month. We all survived at any rate.
Allan continued classes with her preschool. Last month her first teacher went into the hospital for surgery, THEN had a hard time healing and ended up in the hospital again AND THEN her partner ended up in the hospital for a longterm spell. So she thought maybe let's get a new teacher. Teacher Candice was great too and Allan loved her. She had a sick day a couple weeks ago. She was back on Wednesday. But then on Friday she was in the hospital!
I worry for this preschool.
Now we have yet another new teacher. I'm praying for her health. The kids are consistent, though, and Allan chirps "look,, it's my friend!!" as each kid signs on to zoom, so I'd say it's a good arrangement.
On in between days, Allan does classes through outschool. Some of them more or less educationally bent.
Allan's a princess, but she's a princess bunny who fights evil and likes spiders and snakes and has super speed, so I feel pretty ok about her strange but dogged notions about gender that occasionally conform to traditional wisdom and occasionally are all her own.
Yeah, she's still Allan. And most of the time. Allan is still a bunny, though sometimes she looks at me like I'm insane when I call her a bunny and is like "do I have ears? Am I furry? I'm a girl, Adellwah." And occasionally she cries because she wishes she could really really be a bunny like she feels in her heart, but wishes don't actually come true and there's no magic here. Sob, my heart.
Chaya is still around. There's "The Chaya Who Knows Her Name" and "The Chaya Who Doesn't Know Her Name."The Chaya Who Knows Her Name is a good little girl and often snuggles with Allan at nighttime. The Chaya Who Doesn't Know Her Name is a the mischief maker. She's the one who hits everyone and tells Allan to hit people too. She gets angry and impatient and digs in the neighbor's yards.
And sometimes she leaps at me yelling "I'll pretend to be Chaya sucking the milk from your boobs and scratching you" (referring to the story of how I ended up with an abcess after baby Chaya scratched my chest up so much with her lethal baby nails during a bout of mastitis. She thinks that's a great story. Having weaned 3 years ago now, having my child leap at my chest feels... different.
Earlier this month, we also watched our very first family ballet. The PNB is doing a digital season this year, which is pretty cool actually. So we thought we'd see how Allan did sitting through a ballet...
Everyone survived, but we decided to watch the second act after her bedtime... we'll see how she does with more kid friendly fare like The Nutcracker.
Oh oh oh and we passed a major milestone and actually visited a playground (formerly known as plagueground formerly known as our back yard). They're allowed again, I guess based on the limited evidence of fomite transmission or maybe just pure fatigue.
You're still supposed to wear masks and sanitize your hands and whatnot.
Allan pretty much spent the entire time rubbing her hands all over every single surface and then plunging both hands into any available orifice. So that was fun!
But so far so good. She did get a splinter from her second visit to the playground. This was about on par with having to amputate both legs on whiskey and a prayer, in her world. But, I managed to sneak it out of her palm with my tweezers, wrap her hand in a pink-tape-and-paper-towel bandage and regale her with tales of my ER visit for the much more aggressive picnic table splinters in my leg. Her favorite part was when I told her mommy's friend Fidel looked at my open leg procedure and felt ill enough to need to puke (which he gallantly held off on until the leg was sewn back up and he had excused himself to find a restroom). She wanted to know what woulda happened if he had puked on my leg. Would I need a bath? That seemed like probably one of the least of my worries at that hypothetical point, but ... well yeah I probably would have needed on eventually...
And doesn't that segue nicely to...
... My personal-health update (it's always something and it's always creative!). I'm still a beautiful mess. I have an endoscopy, a covid-19 test (for the endoscopy), and a neurological appointment coming up soon. I also visited an oral pathologist on my dentist's whim to freak me out a fair bit. The pathologist was more on the lines of "where? what? Oh yeah that? Stop tongue-ing it and come back in a month." I also-also went to an orthopedist to check on my knee and wrist/hand/arm pain. No arthritis anywhere to be seen in what's slowly becoming an entire skeleton of Adella imaging, so once again, probably not autoimmune after all...
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| Me in my sexy sexy x-ray shorts! |
Best guess for the knee pain is patellofemural pain syndrome (a/k/a "knee generally hurty) so just keep up with PT! And early stages of carpal tunnel syndrome.The neurologist is welcome to chime in on any of this. I've had some other weird sensations in my arms and legs for a while and - although previous tests have all been pristine - who knows...
A while back, I stumbled into taking this test, which concluded that I have the markers of fibromyalgia. Common medical wisdom is that there is no test for fibromyalgia. But there's fairly promising evidence that fibro involves a certain presentation/deficiency of specific cytokines that can be found in blood work, and Ido have abnormally low numbers of those. The test has so far been up to 99% specificity in their peer reviewed trials, so it's not without any credibility. Just in the "needing more research" category.
Fibromyalgia is something I've been aware of for years, as I have a handful of friends with the condition (or however you want to label it). I'd say many doctors dismiss it as a cluster of symptoms without an etiology, but there's increasing evidence of cohesion and causality.
It involves full body pain - involving a neurological hypersensitivity to regular stimuli and/or inflammation in tendons -chronic fatigue, a sort of distracted foggy feeling where you can't quite find your words or focus. So...
... pretty much being a mom of a 5 year old in the middle of a pandemic, I'd think. If I think about it, yes I have pain in every quadrant of my body. Isn't that the norm past thirty? It is also associated with a slew of wonk-body syndrome features I know well: raynaud's, reflux, IBS, neuropathy, dry mouth and eyes (sjogren's maybe), sensitivities to heat/cold/smoke/smells/environment, allergies, eczema, anxiety, intolerance of heat and cold... But I still am hesitant to say that's what's going on with me, because I've seen how devastating it is for a lot of sufferers and I'm not that floored yet.
In a sense, it doesn't matter. You can't treat it as much as ease the symptoms, so the official diagnosis doesn't change much. I think there are other things to rule out before embracing fibro, especially since other things actually have treatments and fibro kind of doesn't still. And one clean scan does not an eternally negative MS diagnosis make and not all cases of sjogren's are seropositive, and maybe it's low copper, or that many trapped nerves, or lord knows what else so... off to neurology I go!
But it'd be nice to have something that says "well, it's not all in your head as much as in your nerves that get relayed back to your head all wonky." And maybe know that the pain is a misfiring signal. Psychologically understanding that would be helpful since we developed the pain response to stop us from doing things that will harm us.
At any rate. I'm sure it'll be a long winding exciting journey to find out more. And thank goodness, Andrew has plenty of time to hang out with the bunny princess super hero.
I don't know how the rest of the holidaze will pan out in this mounting plague times. I don't even know what the country will look like in a day or two. But whatever happens, we'll have candy. Lots and lots of candy.
And Allan's great grandparents will finally all be clear on the fact that Allan is a bunny and she's five.
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