Pill Popper

Bar Mitzvahzilla can't swallow pills. This has become a pretty awkward situation for him now that he's fourteen. It's good that he's healthy and this issue doesn't come up often, but when it does, it immediately becomes a problem that requires parental involvement.

First of all, at his age, height, and weight, to give him Tylenol or Ibuprofen in liquid form means he practically has to down the entire bottle. This can get expensive. Also, he has limited tolerance for liquid medications. He will only drink so many of those tiny cups of medicine before he declares himself cured, or at least done. He wants to mix them with them with many substances - fruit juice, Gatorade, smoothies - but then finds that the drinks don't taste just right and there's way too much of it anyway. He always manages to spill as much of the medicine as makes it into his mouth.

When Bar Mitzvahzilla had stitches recently, the doctor gave him an antibiotic to take since we didn't absolutely know what had collided with his face - was it teeth? Was it a rusty nail? The antibiotic was big, about an inch long. He soon discovered our pill splitter, using it to break the pill into halves, then eighths, and, then sixteenths. He breaks them into so many pieces that on cleaning day I find scattered shards of pills on the floor. Must have been the 1/32ths. Of course, he looked longingly at our pill pulverizer - the ultimate pill disintegrator!- but we whisked it out of sight, putting our collective foot down. No pulverizing.

There's the physical act of the pill-taking and then there's the psychological - he has to mentally question this whole process, to see if he can squirm his way out of treatment. He scoffs at the doctor's opinion of the necessity of the antibiotic, then he scoffs at the faulty medical medicine behind the theory of antibiotics, and then he scoffs at our parental decision-making, anything really, to avoid the pills.

I blame all of this on his prematurity. Bar Mitzvahzilla was a small baby - really small. A pound and a half small. He was born 3 weeks before my Lamaze classes were even scheduled. He was born while the crib was on order from the fancy crib store. He was born before my best friend even had started planning a baby shower.

During his 10 weeks in the hospital, besides obvious things occurring like machines breathing for him and surgery and the brain ultrasounds we saw everytime Husband and I walked into the NICU, he was poked and prodded a lot. When he got an infection - and he did - it was not only life-threatening, but it had to be treated with 3 or 4 of the strongest antibiotics ever invented all at the same time. Somewhere, the memory of this trauma lives on inside of him. He's never willingly taken medicine since we got him home.

And since I'm such an optimist, I think, at least he probably won't become a pill popper.

Nanny 602

In the middle of my children's Spring Break week, the stomach flu hit our house. Here's what happened. First I left the house knowing my daughter had a stomach ache. I knew my husband would be home, but it turns out he came home and stayed in the garage fixing the outside refrigerator. Daughter comes out, tells him she's thinks she's going to be ill, so he sends her in to the bathroom but she doesn't make it there.

I get home and because I'm the mom and the dad is spending hours outside trying to fix a sixteen year old refrigerator I start cleaning. Well, first there's the mopping. Then I get to throw away the rugs daughter destroyed. Then there's the sponge-mopping with anticeptic cleaner, then there's the crawling around and cleaning all the collateral damage. Then there's the nursing.
The next day I have it. The day after that, son, a.k.a. Bar Mitzvahzilla, has it. Today I feel a little punchy again but I must have gained a little immunity from all the cleaning of all these years of being a parent because they definitely get it worse than me.

But for 4 days I am laying on my bed, which is apparently the only place my kids can convalesce, with a sick kid - first one and then the other, and then the well one who feels like he or she is being ignored so they have to pile on too, and then the husband because no one's in the rest of the house so it's like the sun has moved from its spot in the sky. But we're looking for something to watch on TV and we watch Nanny 911 twice - which I've never seen before - and I'm chagrined to find that I'm every woman, so to speak. I'm not exactly those women, but there are certain similarities, things I'm not proud of, things that Nanny would give me a stern talking to about and a swift Mary Poppins kick in the behind about if she descended on my house.

In the first show the mom was a perfectionist, unable to enjoy her children because she was so busy nagging them about cleaning up, about all the stuff they were leaving out, destroying, etc. Check. The second time I watched the mom wanted the kids to be independent and grow up yet kind of didn't; she wanted them to glom onto her, to need her enough that she would kind of ruin their relationship with the dad so she could make herself the most-loved parent. Checkmate.

Well. I kind of wish I had just left the station on HGTV. Decorating I can handle, but here was my life, my glaring errors up in front of me. Have I walked through the house noticing only what has been left undone? Have they cleaned and then had me wondering why there was still filth everywhere? Have I created a close relationship with my kids at my husband's expense? I never have these kinds of revelations after watching Househunters.

So without Nanny coming to visit, without Nanny 602, so to speak, coming to visit Arizona, I've seen myself in the face of every mother who's ever slipped and slided. I'm good at this in so many ways, but surely I can bring the things I'm bad at up a level, at least to "fair."