On the Mend

Boy wonder is on the mend, bouncing off the walls as usual. Mama, on the other hand, has been a basket case thanks to sleep deprivation, general anxiety and the challenge of trying to entertain a restless preschooler and an increasingly independent toddler without leaving the house.

Hank’s procedure went smoothly, but the past few days have been grueling all the same. We had chosen a hospital around 40 miles away, and our admit time was scheduled for 5:30 am on Thursday. So, at the suggestion of our surgeon’s office, we decided to spend the night before in a guesthouse adjacent to the hospital operated by the ladies auxiliary. This turned out to be a mistake. While it was nice getting the commute out of the way the night before, we had failed to consider the many drawbacks of sleeping in a strange place. Henry was out of his element and going nuts until almost 11. With my anxiety about the surgery, plus my first night ever away from my baby girl (sleeping peacefully at home with grandma), I couldn’t get to sleep until 3:30 am…about an hour before the alarm went off. Right in the middle of a nice dream in which an old friend’s new bride was showing me her collection of Prince albums.

We did make it to the hospital on time where we were promptly admitted and watched cartoons on PBS until they came to wheel him away. The doctors would only let one parent stay in the room while they put him under, and we agreed that Christian would certainly handle it better, so I bailed for the waiting room. After an hour or so, they called us back to the recovery area where we were met by a screaming, disoriented three year old. (As it turns out, little kids are a mess coming out of anesthesia. Fortunately, I had been warned about this--on facebook-- by a former colleague whose son had had a broken arm repaired a few days earlier.) We spent another hour in recovery with a very surly patient, thanks to the anesthesia hangover and having had nothing to eat or drink since the night before. And then they sent us on our way, with just a tiny wound covered with a bandage. There are, by the way, no stitches. Just some crazy space age tape called steristrips which hold the skin together.

So we headed back to Lovetown dazed and exhausted. On the way home, I officially put myself on the list of contenders for the worst mother ever award: we decided to stop at the drugstore on the way home to pick up the opiate-laced elixir recommended for a painless recovery. The plan was for me to run in while the boys waited in the car, but Henry insisted on coming in to pee. I carried him in to the store but let him walk out of the bathroom on his own, upon which he immediately fell and hit his head on the floor. So there I was, haggard and bleary-eyed, with a screaming child, filling a prescription for codeine.

Coco, meanwhile, was apparently having a blast with my mother. I’m not at all surprised since they are both party girls (as evidenced by the empty mini-bottle of Sambuca Christian discovered on his bedside table).

Hank spent the next two days drugged and watching videos I had checked out of the library (Christian has now become a devoted fan of Miffy the bunny). But by Saturday, he was ready to rumble, barreling through the house and finding new ways to push my buttons. When I refused to give him a cookie before bed last night, he got a devilish look in his eye and hollered, “I’m going to push on my hernia. Push! Push!”

Overtired and housebound once again (just when we were finally starting to regain some semblance of normalcy), I had a little breakdown yesterday when I convinced myself that Coco had swallowed a couple of refrigerator magnets. The boy, who had lost the bloody things in the first place and stubbornly refused to help me look for them, seemed to find my agitation pretty amusing. However, after a costly medical procedure, throttling him seemed ill advised, so I changed strategies and resorted to bribery, upon which the magnets were located in short order (stuck to the leg of one of our chrome kitchen chairs).