The Crying Game

Elliot slept through the night last night.  Which was a joy.  He's had kind of a wet cough for the past few weeks, and it has been keeping him up.

And when he stays up, we stay up.  So it's been great to have him sleeping a little better.

One weird effect of Elliot waking up frequently at night is paranoia.  It's a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, actually.  Once you've been woken by a baby's cries a few times, you go into a kind of fugue state.

It's not just that I'm always worried he's going to start crying.

I actually hear him cry.

I'll be half-asleep, head stuffed under pillow, and I'll swear that I hear him.  I can actually hear it in my ears.  The exact pitch and timbre.  The way it rises and peaks and falls, everything.

I whip the pillow off my head.  Silence.  It's 3:30am.  My heart is full of adrenaline.  Elliot is not crying. Everyone is asleep.  Except me.

But now, heart pounding, I'm going to be awake for the next hour at least....

Pretty excellent custom-made onesie...I think either Danielle or Desiree made it.  Thanks!

How did I avoid posting this gem for so long?

Taken heart-stoppingly by Ed.

You Wish You Had a Sweet Outfit Like This

Day of the Arm, Part 3 of 3

Elliot is okay.  This trilogy was not meant to induce suspense, dear reader.

Okay maybe a little suspense.  But James Bond-flavor suspense.  Will he escape from that devious trap?  Of course he will.  Will he rescue the girl?  Of course he will.  Will his arm get better and he'll grow up and pitch in the World Series?  Of course he will.

Furthermore--- as I'm sure the highly intelligent readers of this blog intuitively understand--- if Elliot did develop some kind of permanent arm problem, we would share it with you personally and individually.  (Except for those random fans who neither Hannah nor I know personally, like yesterday's visitor from Overland Park, Kansas.  You, Sir or Madam, will get your Elliot health news here on the blog.)

Anyway.  Back to our story.

We doped him up with Ibuprofen juice every six hours, as prescribed, but he still wasn't using the arm.  I'd been considering letting him go back to daycare if he was better, but when his arm still wasn't back to normal Thursday morning I agreed that I should just stay home and watch him.

When Hannah first left the house he wasn't using the arm at all.  I kept laying toys on his left side, and just like the night before, he would reach across his body to grab them with his right hand.  Even in situations like this he wouldn't use his left arm:

Is it just me who find that absolutely heartbreaking?

You may think I'm a sick puppy for spending all this time videotaping my temporarily disabled son.  But the point was to capture him using the left arm and then email the video to Hannah to make her feel better.  (I never actually managed to do that successfully, but it's the thought that counts.)


As the day went on, I noticed that he started using the left arm for a few seconds at a time.  When he got focused on a toy, it seemed like he would "forget" that he wasn't supposed to use that arm.  Then suddenly he would realize, and switch back to using only the right.

Here's what I think was happening:  he had Nursemaid's Elbow on Wednesday, and somewhere along the way it got popped back into place.  But there was residual soreness in the area, so when he moved the arm he got a few twinges of pain.  And even though the pain wasn't as bad as before, it was enough to make him stop using the arm.  That lasted Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Ibuprofen has an anti-inflammatory effect, so as we gave him his 6-hourly squirts the swelling went down and the pain got less.  By mid-afternoon it was clear that function was coming back.  Here's one of the videos I took to try to reassure Hannah:

Eh voila!  By evening he was holding a bottle with both hands.  That's the non-suspenseful ending to our 24 hours of drama.  Thanks for reading.

Day of the Arm, Part 2 of 3

Yvette's voice on the phone was so calm.  That's what threw me off.  If she was calling I knew something was wrong, but she was so calm that it couldn't be serious.  "Someone has to come and pick up Elliot," she said, as though Elliot were at the Cineplex snacking on Twizzlers. 

He had three poops today, I thought, which to them meant diarrhea, and meant that he wouldn't be able to come to daycare tomorrow.  Immediately the future started yarning out before me.  I would have to take care of him all day on Thursday.  Which meant I wouldn't be able to work on my article, which meant I would have to spend twice as much time on it Friday....

"He's not moving his left arm," Yvette said, for the second time.  This time I heard it.  "What?"  He's not moving his left arm."  She started again at the beginning.  He had fallen.  He cried every time they moved his left arm.

It suddenly hit me that this was serious.  My son had something wrong with him.  I looked around at the cars and vans and business suits moving through the Financial District.  Was I going to remember this moment forever?

I got on my bike and started over the Brooklyn Bridge, heading for the daycare.  Should I go home and get stuff first?  What might I need?  Insurance card, immunization record?  Was I wasting time on this bike?  Should I just park it and take a cab?  I was so focused that I nearly hit a few pedestrians on the narrow bridge walkway.

When I got to the other side, I remembered to stop and call Hannah.  She would meet me in the ER, we agreed.  Then I kept biking.

When I got to the daycare, they took me in back.  He was fine, sitting there with a toy in front of him.  He wasn't crying, wasn't in pain.  I picked him up and they showed me where it happened.  They said he had been standing against a "saucer" which made me wonder what a saucer was.  They pointed and I realized that they were referring to, in our lanugage, a jumperoo.

"He just fell to the side," Laura said.  "He cried a little, but not much." 

Yvette picked up the narrative.  "We didn't notice anything was wrong until later, when we were giving him his bottle.   Normally he takes it with both hands and holds it, but today he wouldn't move his left arm."

At this point I started examining his left arm.  It seemed completely normal.  He was using his right hand to poke at my chin whiskers, so I took his left wrist and bent the arm gently.  No reaction.  I bent it all the way.

He screamed. 

I quickly straightened the arm out, and he, just as quickly, stopped screaming.

Okay, time to stop playing doctor.  I knew when I was over my head.

I tried to load him into our frontpack.  Holding him against my chest, I asked Laura to hand me the shoulder straps.  She handed me one, but it was for the wrong shoulder.  I said Not that one, that's the wrong one, I need the left shoulder.  And she was down there around my knees hunting for the other strap, when Yvette said You already have the left shoulder strap on.

I called a car service.  Yvette and Laura came up to the front and waited with me.  I told them to go back and take care of the kids but they stayed until the car came.  I sat in back worrying about not having a car seat.  When I said we were going to the ER, the driver said "What's wrong with the kid?" in a way that made me want to put my hands around his neck and squeeze. 

This, I realized, was irrational.

As I got out of the car, I saw the hospital and my heart filled with dread.  The ER suddenly became real to me.  The memories from every crazy crowded ER shift I'd ever worked came flooding back.  And I was arriving at 6pm, by far the worst possible time to go to the emergency room.  Given how healthy Elliot looked, people would think we were abusing the ER, using it as our primary care clinic.  I was expecting a long wait and lots of dismissive looks.

Maybe it was Elliot's cuteness that saved us.  I had arrived before Hannah, so the two of us walked in alone. The receptionist did that head tilt-fractured smile thing that women often do when they see me holding him.  Within thirty seconds we were inside the ER with our own crib.


The first person who approached me was a PA student, and I told her the story.  Then I repeated it to the PGY-3 resident.  Somehow word got out, and within ten minutes there were five people huddled around us, nurses and residents and med students, squeezing his fat and commenting on his eyelashes.  He acted shy but was secretly happy to be center of attention.

Hannah arrived, to Elliot's great delight.  And finally we were seen by the very nice attending Dr. Kelly, who had a neatly trimmed red beard and was upbeat and reassuring.  (Hannah noticed that he wore no wedding ring and pondered trying to set him up--- I refused to go along with this.) 

Dr. Kelly told us that this was most likely something called Nursemaid's Elbow--- the official medical term is "radial head subluxation."  Infants of Elliot's age don't actually have a ligament connecting the humerus to the radius, which means that it's pretty easy for the radius to pop out of the joint.

The treatment is a reduction maneuver.  "Supinate and flex" was how my doctor friend Justin put it in a text message.  And that's exactly what Dr. Kelly did, twisted Elliot's arm around and flexed it. 

Elliot screamed.  His little face went sweaty red, and his mouth opened all the way.  He had just munched on a pretzel that I'd bought at CVS, and I sat there trying to hold back tears, looking at a little wet crumb on the back of his tongue.

The maneuver didn't work.  If it had, the bone would've popped back into place and he would've started using the arm immediately.  But we sat there and watched him continue not to use it. 

The saddest part was how Not Sick Elliot was.  He sat on his hospital mattress and smiled at us and munched his pretzel and played with toys.  But only with his right arm.  I put my cell phone next to his left leg, and he reached across his body with his right arm to grab it and play with it.

To him it was no big deal: the left arm hurts when I move it, so I just won't move it.  But to me it was heartbreaking.  I was convinced that this experience was screwing him up.  Even these few hours without his left arm was deforming his little brain forever.  If he ended up right-handed, this would be the reason.


Dr. Kelly came back half an hour later and tried a different reduction maneuver.  The immediate effect was the same, screaming and misery.  The doctor said that this time he felt a little pop, which meant the bone was sliding back into place.  But fifteen minutes later there was still no improvement in his arm. 

Nonetheless, we were reassured that Elliot's symptoms were "classic" for Nursemaid's Elbow.  We were told to give him Ibuprofen solution every six hours.  We were given the phone numbers of two orthopedic surgeons and told to call if he didn't get better.  And then we were discharged.

We got home about 9:30.   That may sound late, but to get in and out of the emergency room in 3.5 hours was, to me, unbelievably good luck.

Elliot fell asleep in the carrier: long day.  We laid him on the changing table and pulled off his dirty diaper and his clothes. He still wore a tiny plastic wristband, the one with his name and medical record number on it, which had irritated him immensely when they first put it on.  I removed it by yanking it over his hand; only later did scissors occur to me.


We laid him down in his crib.  He slept.  We sat on the couch and tried to take comfort in the fact that Dr. Kelly had laughed at us when we asked if he might never regain function in his arm.

Eventually, we went to sleep. 

Occupy Wall Street

Two Wednesdays ago, I decided to go to the Occupy Wall Street protest.  I wasn't working and I wanted to show my support.  (Turns out, if I had decided to show my support three days later I could easily have gotten arrested.)

I looked on their website to figure out what was happening that day, and found out that they were marching to the SEC at 3pm.  So I biked over about 2:30.  I got to see Russell Simmons come by and give a quick 5 minute talk and tell everyone to keep up the good work.

I remember Zuccotti Park from the days back when I used to live at 45 Wall Street.  I had a temp job in the World Trade Center, and I used to walk through that park in the morning and evening.  On the Wednesday I visited, they had a massive "media center" in the center of the park, and because it had been drizzling they had everything covered in blue plastic tarps.

Contrary to what the internet taught me about NYPD treatment of protesters, I saw no clashes.  While I was there, the police made them take the tarp off for the inspection, and they didn't do anything inappropriate, and the protesters thanked them at the end.

The protesters have come up with an ingenious way of communicating.  The speaker shouts "Mic check!" and everyone who can hear her shouts back "Mic check!"  Then that person starts their speech, but only says one phrase at a time, and everyone else repeats it.  For example, "The police officers just told me," and then everyone who can hear it repeats "the police officers just told me" as loud as they can.  At first this seemed dumb.  But there came a time when I was at the back of the crowd, and I couldn't hear the speaker, but I could hear the repeated shouting of the crowd.  

About 3:30 we started to mobilize to march.  There were five simple rules to follow: 1) stay together.  2) don't antagonize the cops 3) keep moving, and then there were a bunch about how to communicate Left Right turn around etc.

One phrase the speaker said stuck with me, because it was clearly not a phrase she invented herself.  "Respect diversity of tactics," she said, "but consider how your actions may affect the whole group." She was clearly throwing a bone to someone, and when I got home and googled it I realized that of course it was the anarchists.  

There is not a lot of agreement about how activism should occur in this country.  And in order to keep activists from turning on each other (which happened at the WTO meeting in Seattle), the phrase "respect diversity of tactics" was coined as a way of keeping activists focused on who the common enemy is.

Anyway.  We set off on our march.  We shouted things like "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out" and "all day, all week, occupy wall street" and "Get up, get down, there's revolution in this town."

As I walked I tried to think of good chants.  "1-2-3-4 what good is the SEC for?" didn't quite scan. "Hey Hey Bernanke, how many homes you foreclose today?" But Bernanke isn't exactly foreclosing homes in particular, his name is just the closest to rhyming with hey.  

I used to find these marches incredibly awkward.  It seemed so silly.  But this one was great.  It was easily the most fun I've ever had at a march.  Usually I'm jealous of the reporters and photographers I see.  They get to be there and experience it, without the awkwardness of having to walk around shouting and drawing attention to yourself.  But today I was sad for them.  I was sad for everyone who was staring at us in curiosity.  I was even sadder for the people who were obviously sympathetic, the ones who smiled and nodded and gave a quick fist pump before ducking their heads and heading the other way.  

Does this have something to do with me being older?  Possibly.  But I'm pretty sure that watching Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian dictatorship collapse a few months ago has a lot to do with it. 

It's funny how that happens:  you can read all about the '60s protests, the amazing power of nonviolence and civil disobedience, you can read about King and Selma and Birmingham.  But there's nothing quite like watching it happen in your own lifetime.

I was so proud to be there, even when it was awkward and messy and disorganized.  I was proud when the front and back of the march were chanting different things; I was proud when our chants faded out because our voices needed a rest. All of the awkwardness and self-consciousness that I felt when I protested against Bush's inauguration or against the Iraq War, was completely gone.

Why am I sharing this?

As I was leaving the march, our daycare called and said that Elliot wasn't moving his left arm. 

Ding Dong!

We went to our friend Irina's place for dinner recently.  She has an adorable all-midnight-black cat named Ding Dong.  Knowing Elliot's affinity for animals, we thought we would put them together.   There were many minutes of adorableness squared.  Tail rubbing against face.  Giggles, etc etc.

The result was mostly not captured on film, sadly.  Here's what we managed to capture for you:

All His Glory

Or most of it anyway....

That used to be a peach

Laptops

He loves 'em.  Has no idea what they're for, but nothing better in the world than banging on their keyboards.  

Sweet overalls

Learning to Share

Kind of.

Laundry Basket

Not Really Eating

Crawling

As I mentioned before, he's been crawling now for a few weeks.  Hannah says he crawls like one of those plastic crawling dolls: knees tucked up beneath him, very small precise movements like he's worried about falling.

We actually first found out he was crawling from daycare.  Our theory is that the wide-open stretches of carpet at the daycare demanded crawling, whereas in our tiny apartment there's always a couch or coffee table to reach for.

For some reason I wasn't able to really capture him crawling for at least a week.  Here's one of the unsuccessful (but adorable) attempts:

A few nights ago I finally managed, through shameful trickery, to get him to crawl for the camera:

Cruising

The order seems to be all wrong on this.  You haven't seen any footage of him crawling, and yet here he is on the way to walking.

This is not case of selective editing.  I have not been hiding the footage of him crawling.  He's been doing stuff like you see in the video below for a while.  Even when he wasn't crawling an inch.

Cough

Here’s something:  Elliot loves coughing.  He’ll cough, and then he’ll laugh because apparently coughs are funny, and when he laughs it's kind of a laugh-cough, which is even more funny to him, so he’ll laugh at that, which produces an even bigger laugh-cough, and well that's outright hilarious, and triggers more laugh-coughing, and so on.

Here’s something else:  It doesn’t have to start with a real cough.  He will make himself cough—you can hear that it’s fake, it’s obvious!— but he doesn’t care, he still thinks it’s funny and it starts the cycle going. 

It’s pretty adorable to watch.  He’ll be sitting, playing, and from somewhere down in that nectarine of gray matter will emerge the idea to start coughing.  And he’ll just go for it, coughing and laughing and coughing.  And for the next few minutes he’ll just entertain himself with his own bodily functions.

Which, now that I think about it, is not all that abnormal.   

Standing up

I'm down in Washington DC for a conference, and missing Hannah and Elliot....

So okay, a few deposits for the memory bank.  The way Elliot dances right now.  He stands with both palms flat on the coffee table and bounces.  I come up behind him and sing, "Dance dance dance, ants in your pants, dance dance dance you've got ants in your pants"  and he bobs on his little knees and smiles.

The sound heh-heh.  It's a laugh he makes, a little George W sound that burps out when he is mildly amused.

He's just starting to enter the age of Peek-a-boo.  I've been trying to play this with him since he was three months old and he never went for it until a few weeks ago.  Now I can dip beneath the table, or drop below the side of the bed, and when I pop up he is waiting expectantly, eager for what's coming, and seeing my face puts a smile on his.  Another reminder:  anticipation is pretty awesome.

I hung out with John and his 2 year-old son Will last weekend.  Will was shy and sleepy at first, but slowly he woke up and started walking around the playground.  John and I started out chatting on the bench, but eventually had to walk around following Will as he explored.

By the time we had walked back John's place, Will was fully awake. He toddled over and sat on a stump in front of their apartment, and I made a game out of saying "I'm going to come sit with you!" over and over as I crept toward him.

As often happens, the first time the adult does something silly the kid looks quizzical.  But Will quickly realized it was a game and started smiling.  I crept up and sat next to him, and he ran off to sit on the stoop, about ten feet away.  So I repeated the phrase and crept toward him again, and he ran back to the stump.  "I'm going to come sit with you!"  I said it over and over, probably thirty times that morning.  And each time Will laughed louder and louder, knowing what was coming.

Anticipation, apparently, is the theme of this blog post.

And I, apparently, am in Elliot withdrawal.