Crossover

Today is Makena's "crossover" day. The date that marks the time that she has officially been with our family longer than she was without us. This time last year, I had had several nervous breakdowns from the stress of knowing that there was a little girl somewhere in China who I would soon be a mom to but I didn't know who or where she was. All that changed on June 27 when her picture was faxed to me at the hotel I was staying at in the jungle of Guatemala and then again on August 15, in Chongqing, China, when I could finally lay my hands on her and give her a long awaited hug.

I thought I would post more pictures than words, this time, to show Makena's "evolution" these past nine and a half months. This one was taken while we were still in China. She was nine and a half months old.

Makena (10 months,) attending one, of many, of Jack's soccer games.

Makena (11 months) and her first trip to the cabin.

Makena (almost 12 months old) and her first Halloween.

Still crawling around at thirteen months.

Her first trip to Hawaii at fifteen months.

One of many Little League games at sixteen months.

Loving her bath time at seventeen months.

Another trip to the zoo at eighteen months.

Makena at nineteen months.

Your family loves and adores you, Makena.

Is - proud to be your mother.

911

I'm sitting on our deck overlooking the lake and Makena is plopped on my lap and I'm reading her a book. That should have been my first warning sign: the fact that she was sitting still and listening as I read her Baby Bug after Baby Bug (a baby magazine of short stories). EM and I were blissfully enjoying a moment of calm when Makena started to jerk. I thought, "Great, I knew this was too good to be true". I started to set her down, thinking she wanted to get off, when I noticed that her head was cocked back as if looking over her shoulder and her eyes were rolling to the back of her head.

As the realization that something was terribly wrong hit me like a two by four, I quickly yelled at my husband to call 911 because Makena was having a seizure. I turned her over in my arms to brace her because her body was jerking so violently. Her eyes had disappeared and she was grunting with white foam forming around her lips. Waiting for someone to answer my husbands plea for help was torture in and of itself. He finally got an operator who instructed us to quickly strip Makena and cool her down. I ran into the bathroom and put her on the floor while the operator kept my husband on the phone and told him that the paramedics were on their way.

Makena was still jerking, I had her stripped and I discovered, to my horror, that her stomach was boiling hot -- abnormally so (I had been clueless up until then.) I ran towels under cold water and covered her head and stomach with them, constantly telling her that "Mama is here, mama's trying to help you..." In the meantime, EM was running in and out, to be in front of the house when help finally got there and to give me encouragement. I was inside, Makena was still shaking -- although now her eyes were back in place but she had a far-off look in her eyes and she was just moaning. She didn't see me... I didn't know if she could hear me.

I kept trying to stop my thoughts from going to the last moments I held my mother as she was dying... trying to remain positive. Telling myself that Makena might be epileptic... remembering my old roommate who had it and was fine... just trying not to cry and remain calm... because what good would it do?

Finally the paramedics got there and when they tried to take her from me, she started to cry. Everyone said that was a good thing. It meant that she was fighting. They started an i.v., oxygen, and the works and threw me on the stretcher with her strapped across my chest and wheeled us off to the E.R.. Just as they closed the doors, Jack appeared in the street. He didn't want us to leave until he could see Makena for himself (he had been playing video games with a friend, in his room, and was oblivious to the drama.) EM told him that Makena was not feeling well but that she was going to be okay. That seemed to reassure him and he let us close the doors to the vehicle and take off.

In the meantime, as relief was spreading that she was going to get help, I started being questioned about the black and blue bruises on her back. What? I realized that they were pointing to her birth marks, the Mongolian spots that stretched from her middle-back to tail bone. It was nauseating to think that they weren't ruling out child-abuse as a cause for her seizure.

By the time we got to the ER, the nurses and doctors decided to transfer me to the stretcher and treat her on top of me. They ordered blood tests, CAT scans and urine tests and pointed again to her Mongolian spots. I realized that even though we were in a mountain resort emergency room, that they hadn't come across too many Chinese babies. I told them to go on-line and google "Mongolian Spots". The paramedic came back and backed me up (he had just checked it out himself) and this seemed to appease them. Meanwhile EM had reached our pediatrician in town, who told him that she had most likely suffered from a febrile seizure and that she would be okay. He told him that 3 to 5% of children suffer from this and that once you reach that subgroup that the likelyhood of it happening again is 20%. It's the result of the child's body not being able to adjust to a spike in temperature. The temperature increases at a rapid rate just before the seizure, and sometimes -- as a result of the seizure -- so you don't necessarily see it coming.

Six hours later and the temperature down to 101 degrees, the ER confirmed what our pediatrician had told us in the first ten minutes, and they finally allowed us to go home. We were all drained and exhausted.

Now that I can safely say that Makena has fully recovered, I have met and spoken with four people whose children also had it -- and several times to boot. I feel like I'm now part of the "febrile seizure" club. I've been instructed and drilled by our pediatrician not to call 911 the next time it happens (unless the seizure lasts more that 2 minutes) but to cool the baby, call him and then drive her into the office. The paramedic/ER approach can be traumatic and more stressful than is otherwise necessary. My friend whose son had seizures five times before the age of four, also confirmed that she called the paramedics the first time and then never again after that.

I'm slightly more paranoid now. At the onset of a runny nose, we have to treat her as if she has a fever and if she is up for vaccinations, we also have to alternate between Motrin and Tylenol -- other than that, she's back to her active-exhausting self.

All this to explain why I hadn't posted in a while.

Is - exhausted.

Re-entry

The memories of the ten days of fun in the sun I spent in Mexico were quickly erased on the return from Cancun. Makena should have slept at least two hours of the five hour flight home according to my calculations. She drank bottles, ate her food, read her books but would not go down nor sit still. Any time I tried to coerce her to recline she would scream... Sometimes those screams turned to tears... Sometimes they went back to laughter... She was hysterical in every sense of the word. Highlights included ripping the head covering off the seat and tossing it at the passenger behind me. She went on to assault him with my dinner fork, an ice cube and one of her Playmobil toys (I left it behind on the plane). She would simply not shut up or slow down. She had to babble loudly and constantly, so much so that I thought I was losing my mind. Jack managed to nap through this but that act seemed to drive her mad. She crawled onto him and then managed to headbutt him -- hurting him and herself in the process -- and then I had two crying children.

A woman tried to help me by letting Makena watch a DVD and that lasted the whole of two minutes. Another dad gave her some squishy light-up toy that distracted her for all of thirty seconds and then she tossed it at the flight attendant who was not amused. I got zero service from him. Zero eye contact, just a cold shoulder and a glass of warm Chardonnay that did nothing but give me a headache. At one point, I was so desperate for relief I asked him if he had any mini parachutes with built in GPS tracking devices. I told him that I would be glad to toss Makena overboard and retrieve her in a couple of hours. He couldn't even manage to pretend to be amused. Let's just say that I was not flying the friendly skies.

Makena finally did fall asleep (predictably) as the plane touched the ground. I watched as three hundred passengers (my guess) filed past me, none of them making eye contact. If I had cringed any harder my head would have disappeared inside my chest and stayed there, I was so embarrassed.

This great idea to stay on in Mexico for five more days after EM returned to work was a fiasco. Granted, Club Med was fab and beautifully renovated in a very grand "Legoretto" way but I didn't really love being greeted with a mystery cocktail and then made to wear an i.d. bracelet. I felt like I had just walked onto "The Island" and Ewan McGregor was going to tell me that my brain was going to be harvested for some bimbo on "Days Of Our Lives." Nevertheless, my Guatemala travel buddy showed up with her son and we did have a lot of fun hanging out, watching our boys play ping pong, and trying to keep Makena from drowning.

Because when it came to playing in the ocean, nothing excited her more than having a wave crash onto her and being dragged back into the water. It was horrifying. All my efforts to give her a sense or prudence when it came to bodies of water seemed to make her want more. Chlorine, sea water, or sand did nothing. She didn't cry, she laughed. It was truly maddening and not one bit restful.

I did manage to hire a baby-sitter and escaped for a morning of fun the last day we were there. We took the boys to Wet n' Wild, a water park five minutes from where we were staying and bought ourselves a swim with a sea lion. We got there early and watched as fifty tourists ahead of us were lead to the dolphin tank while the four of us stayed back for what was essentially a private forty-five minute session with this hundred-and-fifty pound sea lion named Jenny. It was awesome.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/10332241/detail.html

Okay, so maybe there was a reason everyone went to the dolphin tank.


Is- not prudent, but Is-a-tanned!

Yes means yes

Yes, it was hot. Yes, it was sunny. But going to Playa del Carmen during spring break was a bit like going to Daytonna Beach expecting to have some wholesome family time.

The guys had a blast because our hotel and beach happened to be popular with the European ladies who didn't believe in wearing "two piece" bathing suits. Jack and his friend Conner were at first quite shocked by the sight of topless women but under the careful tutelage of their pigs -- I mean fathers, they spent their time trying to spot them. A sighting was greeted with a "yes". The boys were so well trained (so fast) that the dads could keep reading their books certain that their spotters would pat them on the shoulders when they sighted "a pair". Did they have fun? Yes!

Makena was extremely frustrated at not being able to hang out with Jack, Conner and Olivia in the pool and would often launch herself into the water whether we were ready to catch her or not. It was insane. We decided not to give her inflatable wings because we didn't want her to think that she could float. A couple of times when she charged into the water, we let her go under so that she could appreciate the difference between having air to breath as opposed to H2O. Did that stop her? No. She learned how to close her mouth and kept going. That's our girl.

Nevertheless, life was good. We even had Makena wearing a dress which took some getting used to because it kept getting caught in her legs when she tried to climb and that frustrated her.

This was Jack in front of our casita away from home resting from his fun in the sun. I did make him swear that he wouldn't share what he saw while on vacation with the rest of his classmates when he returned from spring break. I told him that he needed to learn that "yes" means "no!"

Is - mother of the year