Waves of Sickness

It would be an easy excuse to say the reason why I haven't posted in nearly a month is because we've had waves of sickness course through our little clan. So, instead of apologizing, let's get on with the story.

It all started on an early Monday morning three weeks ago. I woke up at about 1 a.m. with what felt like a ball of fire that had been dropped into my stomach. Then came a series of cramps, each stronger than the last, and before I knew it, I was up, out of the bed, and making a mad dash for the bathroom.

Some time later, I returned to bed, thinking my little crisis had been averted, that the cauldron in my tummy had subsided. But less than an hour later, the fires in my gut returned, and I was again sprinting to the bathroom.

Well, each hour for the next ten hours, I would repeat the bed-to-bathroom dash. Each trip I would alternate between vomiting and the other conduit by which your body expels unwanted stuff. I felt as if I had been poisoned. Towards the end, I was dry heaving over the toilet; my body had violently jettisoned all contents, and there was nothing at that point except bile.

As I lay like a heap of bones on the bed, Michelle appeared to have been unscathed. She got up and left for work. Yet within a few hours, she was stricken, and she returned home to repeat - in some measure – the same dance I had done.

I was knocked out of work for two days, and even though I returned on Wednesday, I was a shadow of myself. I ate exactly one bowl of chicken noodle soup over three days, and I didn't have an appetite until the fifth day.

One day during that week, Michelle brought home a copy of a local paper that said a prep school had been closed for the week due to an outbreak of a sickness called "norovirus." We had never heard of it before, but the symptoms matched ours: vomiting, diarrhea, chills, nausea, stomach cramps. Lasts 48 hours or so.

Apart from being miserably sick, I would say the hardest thing about the ordeal is we still needed to tend to Nathaniel. Miraculously, the little bugger had dodged the virus. So, while Michelle and I lat moaning on opposite ends of the sofa, Nathaniel was prancing about, urging us to play with him. And that was just the bit of it: Of course, we still needed to feed him, bathe him, change him, dress him ... the typical checklist of tending to a child.

We endured, as parents do, even when they feel worse than lousy. As we recovered by the weekend, it became Natty's turn to get sick. His appetite plummeted, and his demeanor turned quite cloudy. He pawed at his right ear, and his breathing became wheezy. In short, he got sick.

Thankfully, he didn't contract the norovirus, or whatever it was that we had. But for two weeks now, Nathaniel has been out of sorts. He's been to the doctor twice. He's on his second prescription of ear drops to relieve the gunk lodged in his right ear canal. (The tubes are still in, thank goodness.) We gave him a mist twice a day to loosen his congestion, and he's on antibiotics to ward off a potential infection in his head, nose and ears.

He's been a handful, but it hasn't been his fault. It's just been more trying with Michelle and I also being sick. But things appear to be looking up: Just yesterday, Nathaniel returned to his sunny self, and his appetite roared back with a vengeance. He's eating everything we're putting before him. Michelle feels better. I feel ... I mean, I felt better until today. My stomach has been boiling again.

I think I need to get to the bathroom.

Walking Proof

Forgive the short post for now, but here's one of the first videos we got of Nathaniel walking. He's progressed a lot since, and he's now speeding his steps, so much, in fact, that he's tumbling all over the place, like drunk staggering out of a bar at closing time. It's as if his mind is moving faster than his legs can take him. That's where I want to go – now! Dang, why can't my fool legs get me there?

Meanwhile, we're witnessing some spectacular tumbles. Forward face plants. Backward butt landings. Sidelong, twisting turns that look like a pirouette gone awry. Eat carpet, little man. Each time, though, he bounced right back up and tries again.

You know, you can see the joy in his face with this walking thing. He really, really digs it. As Michelle noted, he relishes in seeing the world from this new vantage point, and he's now trying to grasp all of it at once. (She said it more eloquently, but you get the point.)

A month ago, Nathaniel was a crawler. Now, he's a walker. The transition has been incremental, I guess, but it still seems stunning when I think of it in its entirety. No wonder he seems amazed by it all.

Walking

Nathaniel is walking.

I'm a little late in letting you in on the news – about a month, in fact. So, let me catch you up on this monumental development.

Natty's walking saga began, as it does with probably all babies, with an accidental step or two as he went from clinging to one object (say, a table) to another object (like his miniature shopping cart). He had no idea what he had done, but Michelle and I sure knew. With a knowing glance and nod, we figured it would be just a few days before our little boy was strutting around the room.

How wrong we were.

For out of those "Oops! I walked" steps came a string of days when Natty did nothing else but crawl. I'd like to think we're generally laissez faire kind of folks, but after a while, we got impatient and wanted to see Nathaniel repeat his fancy little trick. So, we'd stand him up and coax him to walk toward us. We were mildly successful at our ploy. Mostly, Nathaniel would drop immediately from his contrived standing position to crawling and scoot over to us, a big grin flashing across his face. "Look, Mom, I'm here. I made it!" he seemed to be saying. He had no idea that we were trying to get him to attempt another form of locomotion.

So, we gave up. Better said, we shelved the idea of rushing the little guy into bipedalism. He'd learn eventually, we figured.

Eventually took some time. Yet, suddenly, we noticed him taking two, then three steps all by himself. We also noticed he was doing this with some regularity, mixing in occasional steps even as he mostly crawled. So, we started coaxing him again. Gently. No pressure, kid. We just want to see what you're capable of. 

Days before Christmas and a time when we'd be visiting my sister and her family, Nathaniel set his personal record by taking seven upright, stiff-legged steps to Daddy. We cheered. We clapped. We roared with delight.

And he reverted to crawling.

At my sister's house, however, the walking bulb finally went off. Nathaniel began walking more, not only stringing steps together but at times making walking his first choice of movement. I think it was because he watched his three cousins, and, admiring them greatly, wanted to mimic what they were doing. Plus, with sets of cousins and relatives in different rooms, I imagine he wanted to keep abreast of the action in as many places as possible. No matter, it appeared to be a decided change in mentality. Our little boy seemed to want to master walking.

Watching a baby walk for the first time (and times) is a mix of comedy and dread. The comedic part comes from watching the movement; in Natty's case, he looked like someone on stilts. His legs were stiff and he lurched from side to side. As he took each step, he looked perilously close to listing over. If one sway was too exaggerated, down he'd go. Or, he'd accumulate too much forward momentum and down he'd go. 

Those falls aren't particularly forbidding when you're a couple of feet off the ground and cushioned with fat and diapers but to a parent, it can be scary. After all, who wants to watch a child fall and possibly get hurt? So, that's the dread I'm speaking of. 

The kid-on-stilt phase lasted in earnest for a couple of weeks. This weekend, it really looks as if Natty Lou has opted for walking over crawling. We watched as he walked through the kitchen into the dining room (converted into his playroom), hung a right and walked through the playroom and into the den, stopping at the coffee table for a well-deserved congratulatory hug. You can see his confidence going with each series of steps. Yes, he's still stiff-legged, and no, he's not running, but he's much more fluid in his walking than he was even a week ago.

This time, there is no turning back. Our boy is walking, determinedly. Video to come soon.

The Year That Was

When I think about 2009, a lot of it seems a blur.

You know when in the movies, the director will evoke time passing by showing the pages flipping on a calendar? That's kind of how I felt in many instances last year.

Of course, the year was not without so many blessings and outrageous joy.

It was also a year turned inward, where my attention and affections were cast mostly upon wife and son (and dog, intermittently). I would say that Michelle and I are close, but Natty Lou's arrival tightened those bonds even more. It really felt like a nuclear family, and my perspective of home changed as well, I think. 

Not sure how to explain that exactly, but I guess the best way to say it is I was perfectly content to just plant my fanny on the sofa in the evenings, on the weekends, and just be with our little clan. 

That fanny planting never lasted long, however. There were always things to do, and the chores mushroomed with Nathaniel on the scene. I've written about many of those things already, so I'll go sparingly on the whining. Suffice it to say that a child's addition to a home presents a whole new dynamic to the family relationship. It brings such happiness, such wonderment at the creation of life and witnessing a child progress from a wholly dependent being to a caring, playful, tempestuous, yelling, giggling, cackling, blabbering, kicking, flailing, cooing, head banging, riotous, comedic person who, you never would think, actually wants to copy what you do and say. Natty Lou has been all that – and then some.

A real highlight had to be our week-long stay in Block Island with Michelle's brothers, sister and a sister-in-law. We couldn't have asked for crisper, more pleasant days to gaze from the back deck toward the shimmering Atlantic and Long Island, which appeared so close you think you could have swum to it. We hiked, we biked, we played games, we cooked gourmet meals (including lobster boiled in water straight from the ocean), we happy-houred, we swapped stories, we watched movies, and we simply hung out with ourselves and Natty. We couldn't have imagined a better trip.

We capped the year by traveling on Christmas Eve to my sister and her family's house. Unlike the first time the cousins saw Natty, this time they could play with him rather than simply cradle a blob-like being. Nathaniel basked in brotherly and sisterly love and attention. You could see how much he wanted to emulate them. I'll have to put up a video that shows Natty's seizing of the familial stage one night. It's a keeper.

So, here we are in a new decade, having ended a decade that no one seems able, or willing, to name. So be it. I'll take it. For me, the past decade ended just great. I can only hope this one will be as rewarding and fulfilling.

Insulation

It was a long time coming, but we have finally received our first dose of frigid weather. 

We live in an old house, built in 1900, refurbished (by us) in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 ... and counting ... and I know when the cold hits because you can feel the puffs of frosty drafts in different areas of the house. Mind you, our house is no sieve. It's insulated pretty well, as far as I can tell. I checked the attic, and it's dry, with lots of puffy, yellow insulating material. The previous owners installed double-paned storm windows before they sold the house to us. Still, you can feel places where the cold seeps in, slithering along the floors with chilly tendrils. I can feel a draft just now, as I'm sitting at our kitchen table. And I know exactly where it's coming from, the cracks of space between the baseboards and the wall. In the dining room, now Natty Lou's playroom, we have a light switch plate located at the base of stairs where there is a small opening that the plate doesn't quite cover. You can feel a little draft there. In the den, where the hardwood floor doesn't quite meet the wall, you can feel a draft there. We have little carpeting, which is a good thing, although that means a cold floor in the winter. Especially with an unfinished basement below. 

Yet by far the most serious chink in our house warming (get it?) strategy is with the window in the stairwell. It's one pane, an old pane, a pretty pane, irregularly shaped. There's still rope on the sides of it that was used as a pulley of sorts to open it back in the day. So, you could say it's got some historical, or perhaps nostalgic, significance. That window happens to face west, where in many cases the direction from which the coldest winds of winter blow. We can hear that pane rattle when the wind gusts. And I can see those heating dollars just sail on out...

So, this year, I tried to address that. I bought some of those plastic sheets and tape job kits at the hardware store. Perhaps you know about them. There supposed to be simple, and indeed, the instructions are so minimal, they're displayed by way of cartoonish sketches on the back of the box. It's plastic sheeting and two-sided strip tape. All you need is a tape measure and scissors. Any fool can follow those and follow cartoons, right?

Well, as with many things in life that come with fail-safe directions, the task is anything but simple. I started with the two windows in Natty's room. The idea was to further insulate the room, to add an extra layer of protection against the cold. I surveyed the window. OK, I can do this. I started to unspool the tape. Then, I realized that the blinds we have in his room, which I think are Roman blinds, the ones that are cloth-like and accordion into a roll as you pull on a string and unfurl when you let the string out, well, those have brackets that have been drilled in at the top. In other words, the brackets (and the blinds) block me from being able to seal the window frame at the top. That is a problem.

My solution was to tape the plastic sheet over the window and go as high up the pane as I could without interfering with the blinds and the brackets at the top. So, the plastic sheeting goes about 4/5 of the way up the window. This may sound to you like I solved nothing with this setup, but here are my thoughts: a) cold air drops, so whatever comes in will dive down the window into the plastic seal and b) the heavy cloth blind catches any cold air that would escape from the top. Of course, I have no way of testing my theory, but it makes me feel that what I did wasn't completely in vain.

The next job involved two windows in our bedroom. One of those windows was a necessity. It sits above my head when I'm sleeping, meaning it runs perpendicular to the length of our bed. And my head has little natural covering, so I'm especially prone to feeling any cold plumes. I covered that window and another with the plastic sheeting, but I'll be damned if the sills are cracked, uneven wood, and the tape doesn't stick too well to it. So, here I was, my arms outstretched with this plastic sheet, trying to stick it on to a tape strip that kept peeling off. Adding to my frustration was I was listening on the radio to the Patriots losing to the Dolphins. Perhaps because of that, I really botched the window near my sleeping head. I had to use packaging tape to adhere the bottom of the plastic sheet to the sill. It looks ugly, but at least it's covered by a red curtain. Again, questionable how much cold is being kept out. 

The last window was the one on the stairwell. Our stairwell is high, perhaps 15 feet to the ceiling, and the window sits a good 9-10 feet up where the stairs make a very sharp L-shaped bend. Can't put a ladder there. So, I balanced a chair on three legs on a stair and reached as high as I could, placing my first strip of tape across the window frame. That strip is probably 3/4 of the way up the window. Much to my surprise, considering my debacle in the bedroom, the rest of the taping and the placing of the plastic sheet went seamlessly. I am proud to say that one looks nearly smooth enough as to be mistaken for glass. And I really think it's made a difference. Whereas before you could feel a tunnel of chilly air whooshing from the stairwell and spilling into the room below, that channel has largely been cut off. 

At least I think so. We'll see with the next western wind.

Butt Up

Recently, Nathaniel has been going through a period of not sleeping well at night. For a few days in a row this weekend and spilling into the early parts of this week, he's been waking up several times during the night and crying. After mulling various possible causes, our best guess is he's been bothered by a lower tooth that's coming in. It's his seventh little biter – four up top and three on the bottom. 

His fitful nights got me to thinking about his sleeping patterns in general. Unfortunately, they seem to mirror mine. Natty is a light sleeper who slips out of slumber at the slightest of noises. We play music in his room – a running loop of a soft, instrumental rendering of some Beatles songs (quite good, actually) – yet he still will awaken to sounds, no matter how soft.

It's gotten to the point where we have had to map our way when walking into his room to avoid stepping on any creaky spots in the hardwood flooring. The path goes like this: For step one, we veer right at the threshold , hard against where the floor meets the door frame. Then we take as long a stride as we can for step two, trying to land on the small carpet in the room. From there, we creep gingerly toward his crib, staying on the carpet. Unfortunately, even some carpeted spots have shown signs of creaking, so we may need to plot our steps there as well. Once we arrive at the crib, we have to be careful where we stand, since some of the floor boards are a little loose, and prone to let slip a squeak. If we've negotiated our way well, and he hasn't woken up, then we can gaze upon Natty and put a blanket over his sleeping body.

We know Natty's having a good night's sleep if he's in the butt-up position. What I mean by that, is he's face down, his body bent in a relaxed V-shape and his little, rounded butt is pointed upward. It's been his favorite position ever since he realized he could have a position when he's sleeping. It also means he hasn't been fidgeting while he's been sleeping.

I tried the butt-up position the other night. It was a brief experiment. First, it didn't feel too comfortable, the most likely reason my joints are not accustomed to being bent so. Also, it just seemed so alien, a weird way to doze off into la-la land. I'm much happier on my side, with my head resting on a firm pillow.

This all makes me wonder why Natty and other babies like the butt-up sleep posture. I guess for now I'll just leave that question unanswered. But I do know one answer: Nathaniel is sleeping peacefully.

Whew!

Wee Problem of Pee

I was just about to make a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with blueberries when I stepped in it.

It was a river of pee courtesy of our dog, Hviezda. Actually, there was a main channel that ran about three feet and a shorter, parallel tributary on the kitchen floor. Description aside, it was a lot of pee. And, before I could savor my blueberries and cream, I had to get on my hands and knees to sop it up.

I wouldn't be writing about this if it were a one-time occurrence. Sadly, it's become all too common. For months, our aging Irish setter has released the contents of her bladder in our house. Tail tucked between legs, shamed by her actions, she slinks away when we notice her latest accident.

It all started, I think, last spring when Hviezda, who's 14 and a half years old, peed in Michelle and my room, where she sleeps on her doggie bed in the corner. OK, we weren't happy, but the rare whizzing inside can be forgiven. Yet it continued, and so I took her to the veterinarian to find out why.

A urine sample indicated she had an urinary tract infection. The doctor prescribed some antibiotics and in a week or so, Hvezda was right as rain. Problem solved – or so we thought.

Beginning in July, we noticed that Hviezda had peed again. If I recall correctly, this happened when Michelle, who arose early that morning, drenched her sock when she stepped in pee massed in the carpet on our upper floor landing. As more days passed, it became clear that Hviezda had peed in several carpeted locations on both floors of our house. Clearly, something was not right. So, I took her to the vet again. The same antibiotics were prescribed, and we waited for them to work. I rented a carpet cleaner.

Hviezda kept peeing in the house. I took her back to the vet, who prescribed a stronger dosage of antibiotics. We waited for them to work. I rented a carpet cleaner.

Hviezda kept peeing in the house. So, yet again, I took her to the vet, who prescribed medication designed to strengthen her bladder muscles, which, due to her age, may have weakened, leading to uncontrolled releases of doggie wee. I borrowed a carpet cleaner.

Hviezda kept peeing – although by now, we had confined her to the kitchen, where we have hardwood floors and no carpets. The situation, bad to begin with, had become untenable, what with one-year-old Nathaniel crawling about. We obviously had to do all we could to keep Nathaniel from being exposed to dog urine. Hviezda, meanwhile, was having accidents at least every second day, on average, and on some days, more than once in the same day.

We were reaching a breaking point. A doggie non grata. An ostracized pooch. A woof without a roof.

After speaking with the vet on the phone and consulting with my neighbor's girlfriend, also a vet, we decided that Hviezda would get an ultrasound, so her innards could be thoroughly examined. Perhaps there was a stone in her bladder, or a growth in another organ that was exerting pressure on her bladder. Worse, her kidneys were failing, or she had cancer.

I took in her today for the examination. Nearly $600 later, (there were other tests.) it appears as if Hviezda has a chronic bladder infection. If all goes well, the vet should know within days which bacteria are causing the infection and can prescribe antibiotics that will knock them out once and for all.

The good news is our dog, despite her many flaws, is a picture of sound health, especially for her age. The better news is the bacterial infection can be diagnosed and treated, Hviezda will no longer feel the urge to constantly pee. And, then, maybe, she'll have the run of the house again.

Or at least a good part of it.