Headlong

The big kids will be back Sunday. And we hit it full-speed Monday morning. I've never done re-entry this way before -- usually I plan a few days of getting us all back on track and running a little more quickly every day, but this time we've got school and appointments and practices and meetings all piling up very quickly. I had thought this part of the year might be quiet, relative to December. Ha.

Q has finished his second full day of oral Baclofen -- tiny dosing this week, increasing over the next three weeks, at which point we check in with our lovely neuro guy for a new dosing schedule. Have I mentioned how much we love our neuro guy? He's very cool. It's a little odd to be back to cutting, smashing and combining doses again. I feel a little like I'm managing a compounding pharmacy on wheels when two spoons, toothpicks, and something to cover the taste are all parts of the regularly packed-along items.

Q and I took turns being sick during the big kids' visit with their dad. Q started out their time away with projectile vomiting and is finally wrapping up a snotty nose. My bug flattened me a little, so some of my projects (and writing here) didn't get done. Wah. But I did debreed Q's shelves so now everything that should fits easily in either shelving or the one toy container on the floor. I'm considering waiting a few more weeks and doing it again. I got rid of four big bags of toys and paraphernalia -- it was awesome. Now if we could figure out some way to combine all the other things he has and needs. If someone could make his walker be a seating system, stander, potty system, bath seat, and alternate sleep space (keeping his tiny recliner until I can figure out something else that will let him sleep on difficult nights) -- man, that would be miraculous.

New Year's Eve I was remembering where I'd been ten years earlier. Heh. E had swallowed a penny a day or so earlier, as reported quite seriously by G. We'd been, um, watching for it to come through with no sign of it at that point. We'd been thinking about the options available to us if at midnight that night, all electronics went poof while E suddenly had need of medical attention, and had thus ended up in the local children's hospital for an abdominal x-ray. It was very quiet there that afternoon. I sat my pregnant self down while the daddy tracked the two year-old. He went in with her when it was time. While I waited outside the room full of radiation I wondered about how things would go over the next several hours. Something about the pregnant brain encourages apocalyptic tendencies, I think. I wondered if we'd be living, as one friend puts it, "a Thunderdome existence" while trying to plan for the arrival of the baby that's now known as K. As stressful as things could easily have been, I have very sweet memories of all those adventures with kidlets. Good times.

I've been thinking a lot lately about ringing in new... things. Attitudes. Undertakings. About peeling away the outer scalings that protect us from each other and keep us from being genuine, kind, present, useful. I don't know what to say about it. Things are still organizing in my head. Perhaps the leading thought is that it's important to always be willing to return to the table, as it were. If one were in, say, some sort of corporate negotiations, one would always need to return to that table in order to have progress between the parties, yes?

Sometimes achieving just that much, the coming back when exhausted by the weighty things of life, just that much is the hardest thing to pull off in that moment. It feels insurmountable, and yet not. I have lived long enough now to see a teenager changed by soft words when harsher ones were earned. I have felt dire frustration melt away to nothing when it was simply acknowledged as legitimate. I have prayed for deeper reserves when at 3 a.m. I was sure as I'd ever been of anything that the well had run dry -- and had it filled again. The swift, silent power in that grace experienced is compelling, breath-altering, and so, so bold.

This year I'm looking for opportunities to cement that as instinct within myself and to introduce that to my children. I want them to come to this early, to be on a first-name basis with an internalized peace that simultaneously rocks the world and anchors us, and for them to eventually allow this to frame and inform everything. It is a tall order, I think. We'll begin with hot drinks and something yummy come Monday morning, chatting first, as we work back into our rhythm.

Happy 2010, dear people. Wishing you rest and renewal, strength and vision, and opportunities (take them!) to glory in all that you have. Mwah.