Spotlight on Dee!

Time to slow down for a minute, in the middle of all the baseball and spring holidays and gorgeous weather and garden days and just look at this second son of mine. Its all too easy to get revving right up like crazy and just survive parenthood. (we all do it, its necessary) Every once in a while we need to take little ordained appointments with ourselves to notice our lives. This is my "Notice Dee" pause button session. Time to take a deep breath and be present with who he is.

Suddenly, I feel like this boy is stretching out and getting all long-legged. I can tell his face is changing too and he's relaxing into his big boy role now. Its cool to see him learning to deal more amiably with pressure and anxiety and figure out how to confidently set boundaries for himself and make choices that can allow him to feel emotionally safe. For instance, he still occasionally has migraine type headaches from junk food but he now refuses proffered foods that he knows will make him feel like crap or limits how much he eats and voluntarily puts the rest away for later or just pitches it. Its great to learn that kind of confidence. So much else emerging for him right now too...

Dee Loves

1. Shadow play. This is one of his latest obsessions....the high bleachers at baseball practices are one of his favorite stages for shadow casting. His favorite thing to do is to make his own shadow into things just but changing his body position or holding things that can change the shape of the shadow he throws. He's pretty brilliant at it. He can make himself look like a weight lifter, a roman column and Darth Vader using nothing but a spare sweatshirt and his own body.

2. Scootering in the backyard. We have a pair of little Razor scooters for the boys to share and Dee loves to ride one or BOTH of them. He works on tricks a lot lately which kind of new for him. Usually Ru or Nib are hot dogging all over. Its a mind game for him though, he is less of the crash and burn type and more about clever engineering mixed with whimiscal jokes. My favorite at the moment is when he rides two scooters at once!

3. Wearing his pajama top in the daytime. He thinks its a very clever joke on his Mommy and the height of efficiency to go chance just his pajama pants when told to get dressed in the morning. Its amazing what a mother won't notice when her boy shows up to the table dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, with his teeth all brushed and his bed made. Keep your eyes open...I bet you catch him doing it.

4.What-If questions. He loves to ask me which kind of imaginary vehicle would go faster, what would happen if a volcano blew up on the moon and what I think would be the hardest thing to get in through a keyhole. Lots of these kinds of questions while we are driving places in the car. Love hearing that little mind a whirling.

5. Braiding. He asked me one day how I braid my hair and so I showed him on three strands of grass. Now its a frequent activity....sometimes he braids my hair and sometimes he braids other things: ribbons, plant stems, cords or even seaweed.

6. Pokemon. He and Ru play Pokemon pretend games and battles almost perpetually around the house and he is the master at sound effects, always making all the sounds for each character in an astounding variety of sound registers and voices. He is also the walking encyclopedia of Pokemon factoids. Ru always consults him to answer questions like "What color is Digalit?" "Tell me one the strongest attacks that Slo-King has?" He has an incredible memory for a the data and is very pleased to be consulted like a kind of personal reference librarian.

Dee Loathes

1. Doing Things Without Mastery. He has the hardest time being an early learner at any subject and really feels frustrated and easily like he is being made a fool of, simply because he isn't demonstrating high skill at any given task. He prefers to say he "doesn't know how" so that he can fly under the radar while he practices, only admitting that he can when he feels really confident and smooth. This is tricky in school.

2.Taking a bath. Never much for bathing, he still hates it. He doesn't scream through bathtime like he did when he was a baby but he sure does grumble and gripe about the suggestion that he take one. Once in the tub he loathes the soap getting in his eyes and the being chilly when you come out of the bath, having water in his ears and countless other little physical irritations and inconveniences about the whole process. So many reasons to never get clean.

3. Mushrooms. I don't know where he gets it. Mushrooms are one of God's best inventions, if you ask me...but my boy isn't of the same opinion. Even if I mince them and mix them into a mixture and cook them, he'll often discover they are there and make sure I know that he doesn't approve.

4. Math homework. I don't know if its the fact that A (who teaches math at our house) keeps a strict progress schedule and makes it clear when his students are "behind" and insists that they get no weekends off in such a status, or if its just the subject matter itself that get Dee's goat. Whatever it is, almost nothing gets under his skin and makes him melt down more spectacularly. Its very tough for me because I see so much of myself in him. I have a hard time listening and watching and remember, "This is NOT my emergency, its his." because I was so frustrated by math for so much of my young learning years. Weird how empathy can be a stumbling block sometimes.

5. Being ordered along on hikes. Dee hates most forms of being ordered around, he's the independent sorts (fits right in at our house...we are a house of clashingly independent thinkers and strong wills) and he doesn't hate hikes themselves or the outdoors which is one of his favorite retreats and play spaces. But he really does hate being told that he'll be going hiking with the family at such and such a time in so and so many minutes though. "Go get your shoes on, we're going for a walk soon and yes, you have to come." is pretty much always certain to put him in a bad mood. No choices, forced forward walking, ordered time in nature with a strict schedule....all his buttons.

6. Being asked about his eye. Remember this post?  This doesn't embarrass or infuriate him like it used to but does annoy him. He gets asked all the time if he's okay and "What happened to his eye??" and told that his eye looks funny and it gets old. Its hard for a kid who lives with some little visual difference to understand why its so broken-record-fascinating to everyone around him. He feels like, "Big deal! My eye! Who cares! I don't wanna explain again." If you're a new California friend who wonders why his eyes looks different, ask me for the story on the side, out of ear shot.

Dee At The Moment

 Oh, little Dee! Time for a little zoomed in focus on who this little person is turning out to be. I am trying to figure out how to handle all his little quirks and mannerisms. He's easily upset, only moderately communicative, and really hard to talk down once worked up, but also sweet-hearted, observant and very full of spirit. I find him both uniquely charming and particularly draining. I am so glad he's not a baby anymore as he is a lot more fun as a little boy.

As an infant he was a bundle of nerves, and pretty impressively colicky. I remember walking and walking the floor with him in my arms and wondering if the night would ever end. He's my asthma child, my surgery baby (see this post about his ptosis surgery), my wee engineer, my collector, and my thinker. I love working with him, having quiet moments alone together and watching all his little interests flicker and glitter as he tries on new ideas and expresses his likes and dislikes. Have a look yourself!

Dee Dislikes:

• The strings in fresh mango
• Spicy things....except for salsa...he likes salsa
• Pebbles in his shoes
• Buckling his seat belt
• Rumpled tags in the back of his shirt
• Getting things stuck in his teeth
• Ru, making faces
• Eating with a fork
• Tomato sauce on his pasta
• Open containers...he has to put lids on bottles, fasten hinges, lock locks and close boxes.
• Sunshine in his eyes
• Sleeping
• Red peppers
• Strong wind
• Having his hair cut or washed
  

Dee Likes:

• Painting (he could paint by the hour...especially if alone)
• Wiping things down with a sponge
• Watering plants (with his own little watering can)
• Baby ducks
• Soft eggs yolks
• The color yellow (everything should be yellow)
• Spiderman and Batman
• Motorcycles
• All seafood....smoked salmon, shrimp cocktail, steamed lobster....you name it!
• Cutting things with scissors
• Being outdoors alone
• Listening to birds "talk"
• Muffins
• Pancakes
• Steak
• Milk

Ptosis Update

You can see that his left eye creases differently, but otherwise looks pretty darn ideal. There is also a touch of scarring in the eyebrow incision spot that you can't really see in this photo.

Those who have been following for only a short time may not know that Dee our second son, was born with congenital ptosis, an eye condition which basically means his eyelid didn't raise and lower properly and was permanently drooped. I talked through my blog about how the surgery procedure worked and shared the immediete recovery aftermath business with everyone, but I have said nary a word about it for ages, very nearly a year really, so I thought I'd give a quick little update.

Dee's vision is vastly improved and I really think we did the right thing. He can see up above him, squint his eyes, view the world binocularly, and has a lot more physical confidence than he did pre-surgery. That said, his eye will never look perfectly normal, sometimes he only opens one eye, sometimes his control is delayed and sometimes even when he does have his "adjusted" eye open it just looks slightly uneven. The cosmetics aren't perfect. That said, I have no major complaints. Surgery was scary, but I think it was a good choice.

We are still on a fairly frequent upkeep schedule with lots of eye doctor check-ups compared to the average kid although they are dropping off to be less and less frequent since he's had no real issues post-op. There have been no documented problems since although we're wondering if he might be starting to have a little lazy eye muscle movement, amblyopia is the technical term. No clear confirmation yet on that and in many ways we're still really waiting for him to get obedient and communicative enough to undergo serious visual testing. Only then will we really know how he's actually developing. He's only two and we've been told that this sort of thing will begin around three or so.

Its been pretty interesting to have a teeny, tiny taste of family handicap politics present itself in our life. I very, very often field pretty bold questions from strangers in public places:

"What's wrong with his eye?"
"Is he okay?"
"Did something happen to him?"
"Can your son see?"

That sort of thing...and I try to answer honestly and warmly. Its a little shocking to have people point out their observation that they notice something amiss and a piece of me feels defensive but there's a small bit of me that is glad that they just ask, frankly instead of whispering behind their hands at us. I wonder how having ptosis will affect him as a person and what he will say when people start to ask him their questions instead of me. So far, I have yet to hear anything from Dee himself about how his eye affects him either physically or socially/emotionally. I'm very curious to see if anything will ever emerge there and also wonder if he remembers the surgery experience.

For now, things are good...easy and uneventful, which is about as great as you can hope for in a post surgery world. You want things good and boring in the health histories of your kids. Its just a good way.