Child Four comes home

Amy’s water broke a couple of Saturdays ago. She thought she’d wet the bed. Ha ha ha, these pregnant ladies and their strange goings on!

I expressed my usual sensitivity: “Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Now let’s go work in the yard.”

By Monday afternoon she was on a gurney with a pitocin drip dropping drips of baby-causing oxytocin into her. I stood by her side in the Adam position, my hands clasped together in front of my crotch, watching lamely while nurses came in and out to look at monitors and check on Amy’s ever-dilating parts.

“I love you,” I said, a hand resting gently on her forehead.

“Where’s my epidural?” she said, smiling I think.

The epidural came. A guy wheeled in a cart carrying various lancets and needles and prods and swabs, and he stabbed the heck out of her spine while I stood there holding Amy’s shoulder. “How y’ doin’?” I asked, like a moron.

“You’ll feel some pressure,” said the anesthesiologist. Amy breathed in and out stoically, her head down.

Then an hour later the doctor, his head flanked by my wife’s raised knees, said, “Just pretend like you’re going number two, Amy. That’s a girl!” The doctor who delivered Louisa, our third, had said the same thing: Do a Number Two, Amy.

No, this is Number Four. Tell Amy to go number four, guy.

And then at 11:44pm, April 26th, Charlotte sluiced out. And there she was, a tout le monde, 5 pounds and change, her head all purply from using it as a battering ram against Amy’s cervix these last few weeks. I clapped and kissed Amy on the forehead. (My job through all this was to attend to Amy’s forehead in all things.)

By 1am, baby Charlotte was in intensive care, intubated and IV’d with a cocktail of antibiotics, and I was at home asleep. The next day I collected the kids from some saintly neighbors and sent them to school. That afternoon we all went to see Mom, but no one could see Baby. Baby—that’s the name the nurses use—could not come home until she figured out those life skills we call breathing and eating. Until then, we’d have to visit her in NICU only at certain times and go through a cleansing process similar to what those top-secret government biohazard scientists had to go through in The Andromeda Strain. To newborns, we are filthy, filthy creatures.

A week after Charlotte’s birth, while we were in bed watching Sherlock Holmes, Amy started leaking again, but this time it wasn’t amniotic fluid. The next morning, after spending all night in the ER, Amy went in for a procedure whose active verb is scrape and I sat in my car at 6am in a McDonald’s parking lot, a dull vacant expression on my face, drinking a huge Coke and wondering whether my wife was bleeding to death.

In the afternoon, as Amy was climbing out of an anesthesia cloud, I asked a young heroic couple to watch the kids and I drove to the hospital to visit my daughter in ICU and then my wife in ICU. The nurse told me that during the procedure Amy had lost all but 500 milliliters of blood. She almost went the way of the pioneer woman. She was pale, and her lips were pink and gray, like a trout. She, too, was intubated and IV’d and drain- bagged, and she was parched and could have no water. When she talked she sounded like Grover, and I could tell she was glad to see me but wasn’t in the mood to talk about the Utah Jazz. I put my hand on her forehead and tried not to be a big fat sissy.

The kids and I spent the next few days eating noodle casseroles the neighbors brought by. I spent the week maintaining normalcy, which is exactly what Amy told me to do. I gave Lydia burritos for breakfast. I forgot to bathe the children. I swept the floor again.

With each hour, both my ICU girls got better and better. By Thursday they were both moved to less invasive care, which meant that I could bring the kids to see their mother. Louisa jumped on Amy’s lap the moment we got into the room. Ben and Lydia ate all the cookies and pulled out flowers from the vases and wheezed into the AirLife Incentive Spirometer and told every nurse who stopped by that they had a new sister named Charlotte. And they even got to peek through the nursery window at Charlotte, their noses and mouths smashed on the glass. The next day, Amy came home in the afternoon and Charlotte in the evening, and then all members of my family were out of the hospital.

After dropping a box of Krispie Kreme donuts on the front counter, I told the nurses, “No offense, but I hope I never see any of you again.”

“The feeling is mutual,” they said. “Do we have to share these with the nurses in NICU?”

I drove out of the Timpanogos Regional Hospital parking lot exultant. Everyone was fine. Everyone would be home. Life, now, could start anew.

At 3am, when Charlotte let out a piercing squawk I could feel in my solarplexus, I thought, Oh yeah, forgot about that part.

whispering in the dark

A quiet morning, all dark still, new snow. I’m hunched over a bowl of cereal, scripture laid open on the table. The house was quiet, writes Wallace Stevens, because it had to be. I don’t like how much I like being up so early, being the only one who knows what this day’s all about so far. It’s not about much so far. But at least it’s quiet. Still would be a better word. It’s a Christmas word, a word less about volume than salutary emptiness. I’ve read all this before; it’s not the content I’m after anymore but the access of perfection to the page. Stevens again. I don’t even know what he means, but the only way I know to keep from being a damnable rascal is to lean over the book—leaning early, if I can revise Stevens, and wanting “much most” to be the saint to whom the book is true.

Someone’s at the bottom of the stairs in the dark. I hear whispering. I lean over the rail and look down and there’s Lydia, or the head of Lydia, and her bare shoulders, peeping out from an upright mummybag, which she sleeps in for no reason other than it’s not the hum-drum sheets. When she sees me she stops her whispering, as I knew she would.

“Daaad,” she says. “I’m imagining!”

“About what?”

“About writing my name in cursive!”

I haven’t been writing, but not because there has been nothing to write about. I’ve been eyeball deep in other stuff. Two days ago Amy got a call from Lydia’s elementary school psychologist. She wants to meet Lydie and get up an IEP before the end of the school year. Lydia has been doing just fine in school. Her teacher’s been fantastic. Lydia tells us about friends and recess, though her teacher says she’s still a solitary player, like some other kids.

Today’s Day Two of their spring break. I asked Lydia what she did all day today and she said, “Stare out the window.” And she couldn’t have been more happy about that. She reads Amelia Bedelia to her younger sister, even when her younger sister refuses to wear clothes, and at times, beyond belief, she gets along just fine with her older brother. She skips around the house humming U2′s “Magnificent” or the theme music to Wii Super Mario Bros. She’ll turn 7 in May.

There has been recent debate about the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, due out in May 2013. The American Psychological Association has made public an early draft and invited public comment, which seems weird to me. What are morons like me gonna add to the conversation? One of the more controversial proposed changes is to get rid of Aspergers Syndrome and merge it with autism on a single spectrum. More on that if I find out I should care.

Invisible airways crackle with life

It’s been a while, I know. I’m sorry. I had to cook dinner.

My daughter Lydia loves “Spirit of Radio” by Rush. Of course she does. And she loves Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk.” She loves Coldplay, and Coldplay loves her right back. She also loves the Strawberry Shortcake soundtrack, whose composers found a way to write songs that lay eggs in your brain and hatch worms that burrow into your prefrontal cortex all day long. (Don’t. Ever. Play the song, “Friendship Boogie.” It will rewire your neuronal pathways permanently. You will still be singing that song in your mind long after you’ve lost control of your bowels for good.)

Lydia likes this music mostly because we like it. There’s no way Lydia’s going to go off and discover the Arctic Monkeys all on her own. We spoon-feed her this stuff because it’s what we play when we’re driving around or doing the dishes or trying to get Lydia’s parakeets to stop pooping in their water. Our music becomes her music, but it’s still pretty fun to watch her experience the Beatles for the first time. You discover the extent to which good music is enjoyed innately.

When Lydia hears a song she likes—in the the car, for example—she begs us to play it over and over until she owns it. “Okay, last time!” we shout from up front. And then we say it again when we play it again. One time she borrowed my i-Pod and speakers and played “Limelight,” the Ayn Rand-inflected Rush anthem, at least a dozen times in a row. Interestingly, she does not sing the songs she listens to—she’s busy imagining. Sometimes we’ll see her turn off the radio and walk off, her back straight, mumbling stories to herself. Her imagination needs a soundtrack; she carries the music off with her after we get puking tired of it and shut it off.

Louisa sings and dances to her favorites. It’s a public performance, too—out on the hard wood floor, full body participation. She favors the hits of the RockBand 2 soundtrack, but she’s also been known to want Coldplay every hour. What is it about that band that children love? They’re schmaltzy, sure, but they’re no Strawberry Shortcake.

Our son doesn’t dance much to the music he likes, but we hear him singing behind his closed door. He’s too young for a Megan Fox poster, but when I hear him in his room bellowing out “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, I start sniffing the air for pot. It’s all my fault, of course. Once I saw the way Ben responded to my kind of music, I started grooming his ear to take in my favorites, from Thelonius Monk to Nirvana. “In Bloom” is, of course, harmless. But really, Dad–”Welcome to the Jungle”? He’s in there on a Saturday morning with his friend Aisea, behind the closed door, singing, “You are a very sexy guuurl / You’re very haahd to pleeez . . . .” Pleeez is right. He’s too young for that crap.

Lydia, like most sensible women I know, doesn’t care much for the hard stuff. She likes “Spoonman,” maybe a little Led Zeppelin. But even with Led, her favorite song is the synth-friendly “All My Love.” (Not to be confused with “Whole Lotta Love,” a song you have to be over 21 to listen to. Walk through the beaded curtain at the video store sometime—they’ll play it for you.) She doesn’t remember the names of bands or songs; she has no truck with that kind of triviality. She knows what she likes, and she waits till we play it. And then she’ll want us to play it till the button breaks.

The plague

It struck Louisa first, last week. Caked on her peejays, her pillow case, her pink blanket, her bedspread, her fitted sheet. I didn’t even notice at first. She showed up at my bedside at 2am complaining about whatever, and I rolled out of bed and took her by the hand and hurried her down the stairs, and all the while she clucked, clucked, clucked about whatever had made her get out of bed this time, and I ignored her, as I usually do, knowing that if I could just get her tucked back into bed, sing her a few bars of “Blackbird,” and tuck a coupla stuffed kitties under her arm, she’d go back to sleep, and so could I.

The smell hit me the moment I stepped into the girls’ room. And there it was, on every available surface. And I looked down and there it was, all over Louisa’s chin and shirt in a technicolor bib.

And right then I knew. It starts now, I thought, and ends when the last of us gets it. Before us, the Thompsons and Bigelows and Penningtons and Baxters. The ultimate act of consecration: spreading disease to all members of the family, each according to his needs. Louisa gets first turn.

I could have handled it all myself, but I thought Amy would enjoy practicing our teamwork, so I hollered up at her. She set up the little mattress at the foot of our bed, with two big silver mixing bowls on either side of a fresh new pillow. I took Louisa into the bathroom and stripped her and dumped her clothes in the sink and turned on the faucet and toweled her down and got her some new clothes and sent her up to her mother.

Then I stripped the sheets, all the while indulging in hypochondria. I could feel the contaminants working their way through my fingers, up my arms, and down into my stomach. I felt my insides wobble like green jello.

I spent the night jumping out of bed every time Louisa made the slightest sound and grabbing one of the silver bowls. “Get it in the bowl, sweetheart!” Then I’d hold her hair out of her face while she dribbled the contents of her empty stomach into the bowls we use to mix our bread dough. Then she’d look up at me and give me what she calls the “good thumb’s up” and she’d roll over and go back to sleep.

Lydia was next. She, too, was struck while sleeping, only she was on the top bunk in a sleeping bag with two stuffed animals. I heard her cry out, and I knew. Lydie’s turn. I got to her bed in time to step on the lower bunk and catch the second volley in my hands. Lydia leaned forward and deposited her retch in my cupped hands, like she was bestowing a precious gift. I bellowed up to Amy again, who came down and told me to calm down for once and just deal.

I dumped the contents of my hands into a rubber toy box and grabbed Lydia by the armpits and carried her, my arms straight out, into the bathroom for the same routine we went through with Louisa the night before.

The sleeping bag and pillow case and bedspread all went into the tub to be rinsed. So did Dan, her penguin, and Scarlatti, her scarlet macaw, who both had been shampooed in Lydia’s sick.

Another nice touch: the remnants of a cascade, having run down the safety bar, down the side of Lydie’s bed, down the side of Louisa’s bed below, and puddled on the carpet.

We led her up to the Bed of Sickness, flanked by the Big Blech Basins, where she spent the night in a 45-minute cycle. Lydia was stoic in her suffering. “That’s it,” she’d say when it was all over. “No more.” And she’d roll over and go back to sleep.

By 4am Amy had it. By 6, I had it.

Ben survived. We sent him to ski day with a gallon Ziploc bag, just in case. That night, after he came home in good health, we put a bucket on his dresser by his bed and laid a plastic tablecloth on the carpet, expecting Ben to run anchor for us, but so far he’s decided not to participate.

As far as plagues go, it wasn’t all that bad. I can think of worse things happening. By this morning we had all pulled out of it. We made scrambled eggs and hot cocoa and exulted in health, though with a renewed sense of its fragility. We’re more than happy to pass the plague on to the next family. We wouldn’t want to keep it to ourselves.

Four Bamboo Sticks

I was telling Lydia about Polar Bear swimming. It was mid-morning, and we were walking on the levee along the delta in Stockton, California, where Amy’s parents live. I saw a seal pop its head out of the water; she and Louisa didn’t, or couldn’t, see it. She had a dirty bamboo stick in her hand and a lemon Starburst in her mouth. (She actually likes lemon.) In the other hand, a dried reed bent at the middle, her fishing pole. While I told her about Polar Bear swimming, she walked over the rocks to the water’s edge and dipped the reed in the water and yanked a huge salmon out of the delta and told me to put it on the chain with the other invisible fish she’d caught—mostly trout.

I tucked my freezing hands in my pockets and asked her if she wanted to go swimming.

She looked at me with narrow eyes and said, “Are you serious.” It wasn’t a question.

I had Polar Bear swimming on my mind because we were planning to sit in my brother-in-law’s hot tub on New Year’s Eve, and undoubtedly we would dare each other to jump into the cold pool next to the hot tub and tread water until our blood was about the consistency of wild cherry Slurpee and then get back in the hot tub. It is exceedingly macho to do this, even if (A) the word “macho,” when you use it in English, sounds cretinous, and (B) swimming in cold water surely can’t be good for your reproductive organs. (Seeing as how we’re not interested in having any more kids after Child Four, that may be a cheap way to end my breeding power.)

Hot, then cold, then hot. Quite a sensational experience of opposites.

Like Lydia herself.

A few days ago we went to Six Flags in Vallejo, and I was asked to accompany my delightful ten year-old niece, Morgan, on all the rides, like the Medusa, calculated to mangle thoracic vertebrae. After throwing up in the bushes, we limped over to the dolphin show where the rest of the family had taken seats, way outside the splash zone. Right on schedule, the tall guy with the stupid hat who always sits in front of Lydia at every engagement—anytime, anywhere—shuffled over and took his place in front of Lydia, so she came over and sat on my lap. The dolphins leapt, the dolphins splashed, the dolphins waved their tails and and held their heads high and smiled their smug smiles and looked exceedingly cute and un-shark-ish, and Lydia, Nature’s Child, loved every minute, as we knew she would.

At the end of the show, when we told her we were going home, she exploded.

“O! now what!” Her new favorite expression–also a grammatical question that isn’t a question. “This is the worst day of my life!” She threw her hands in the air and looked into the cloudy heavens for divine intervention. “Every day is the worst day! I’m never ever coming back to Six Flags again!”

The next day her affective gyroscope spun the other way and the sun came out over Star Land. After we walked along the delta, she wrote this story, titled “The 4 Bamboo Sticks”:

On my walk I saw 4 bamboo sticks and we all got our own bamboo sticks. And we walked all the way home. And we had so much fun we forgot all about Six Flags. The End.

We were sitting at grandma Crum’s table in the afternoon, a cheerful sun streaming through the open blinds, a plastic bucket full of markers in the center of the table, the two girls marking up every page of every coloring book grandma owned. Lydia was on a roll. After spinning out The 4 Bamboo Sticks, she wrote me about a hundred love letters. “To Dad,” she wrote at the top of them. Smiling girls with a dozen fingers on each round hand, floating in constellations of hearts and stars, a galaxy of love. She drew a girl that had a great big heart for a body—a great big green heart bulging with love for me, the father of the luckiest girl in Christendom.

She gave me this picture and said, “Daddy,” also not a question, and then she went back to coloring.

An hour later she was sprinkling the bedspread with tears.

“Why are you scaring my head off?” she screamed at me.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” I said. “I just don’t want you to throw things at your sister.” She’d just thrown a Fisher Price lantern at Louisa and slammed the door closed.

“Fine! I’ll stay here and never ever go on a walk ever again!”

“That’s not necessary, Lydia.”

“I know I’m in big trouble!” And then the real zinger: “I know you’re going to kill me!“

What happened to that girl with the great big heart, the green one shaped more like an arrowhead than a heart? Maybe she’d meant it to be one of those optical illusions that look like one thing at one point and another at another. Look now, and it’s a heart. Look again, it’s a weapon.

Why fret? Life’s most acute learning moments come from dramatic contrast. A cold pool, then a hot tub.

My wife Amy got a hot/cold blast just yesterday. She got a note from Lydia, who for the past six months has been quite a prolific author of interpersonal notes of all kinds.  The first note she gave Amy was gushing with good stuff:

I love my mother so. And I like to be with her. And here is something I want to tell you. I love you.

In the left margin was a drawing of an oval womb inside which a floating a stick baby said, “hi.”

Later Amy got a note on yellow paper. Lydia uses a little yellow notepad to send us sweet letters with nothing but stamps on them. The stamps, I’m guessing, act as staccato endearments: the more stamps, the more love. Sometimes she sneaks up behind us and crams a folded note into our pants, a note covered in dog stamps and candle stamps and smiley stamps and owl stamps. Amy got one with cupcakes and coffee mugs all over it.

And then later, after Amy asked Lydia to do something she didn’t want to do, Lydia asked for the cupcake note back. She took out a pencil and drew a big fat ex over the whole thing. Then she wrote one word right in the middle: canceled.

Joy (and diabetes) to the world

[The following is a ditty I submitted to the Deseret News. They didn't want it.]

In December 1991 my younger brother Kevin started dropping weight. Mom thought it was the paper route—all that pedaling through the slush, up the steep hills, with awkward sacks slung over the handlebars, his snowcap all sweaty. But when he started blacking out at school and pitching, face-first, into the Jefferson Junior High cafeteria lasagna, my parents had him checked out.

I was there when they came home from the doctor’s. Kevin’s cheeks were wet with tears. My parents led me and my two sisters to the family room for what was obviously going to be a solemn family council. Since nothing ever happened to us, and because the drama didn’t involve me, I was pretty excited.

“Your brother has diabetes,” said dad. Since the rest of us knew zilch about diabetes, he might as well have said, “Your brother has triskaidekaphobia.” They explained that Kevin’s pancreas was not producing insulin as it should, and it was making him sick. He would need to spend some time in the hospital over Christmas, which meant that the rest of us, too, would celebrate Christmas in a hospital.

I’m sure someone more pliant would have thought it novel to spend Christmas in a hospital, but I was annoyed. I was even more annoyed when I found out who would be the unlucky kid covering Kevin’s paper route while he was in the hospital. As a teenager, I kept annoyance as my default emotion.

So two days before Christmas Kevin checked into Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. On Christmas Eve Grandpa Smith graciously volunteered to spend the night on the fuchsia fold-out next to Kevin, who was now all tubed up with insulin drip.

On Christmas Day my father woke me at 5am and we folded and bagged copies of the Salt Lake Tribune and threw them in the back of the Voyager. Then we drove into six inches of pristine powder in the dark suburbs of Kearns, into the most profound stillness I had ever experienced. At one point after tossing an orange missile into a snow-covered juniper bush, I stood on the sidewalk in all that stillness and watched the street light on 5400 South turn from green to yellow to red, without a car anywhere on the road, without a noise but the muted fullness of a world covered in snow. I was as moved as a self-absorbed teenager can be.

Back at home, while I was in a hot shower, my parents stuffed Christmas in black garbage bags and loaded the van. Then they woke my two sisters and we piled into the van and drove up to Primary Children’s Hospital where I discovered, to my surprise, that Kevin was not the only child spending Christmas morning in the hospital. As I looked in each room, checking out the inmates, I recall seeing a bald boy with a bandana on his head sitting up in his bed watching TV. I let myself indulge in the noble sentiments of Christmas among the suffering.

Kevin beamed when we walked into his room, black garbage bags over our shoulders like hapless Christmas Elves. He had his hospital pajamas on, and he yanked up his shirt to the chin and showed us how he had learned, after practicing on an orange, how to pump a squirt of insulin into his own guts. With the earned boldness of a hospitalized child, he also told us that from now on he would have to lance his finger and squeeze out his blood onto a strip to test his sugar levels. Since neither I nor my sisters had any idea what our sugar levels were, we envied his bionic coolness, though we had some vague and (it turned out) inaccurate understanding that Kevin would never touch a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup again in mortality.

We opened presents. Santa brought me an Erasure CD, which means I must have been a pretty bad boy that year. Conveniently Kevin got a CD player, so we danced around the hospital bed to British synth pop with butterscotch Life Savers in our mouths. It was not an unpleasant Christmas, not by a long shot.

Sometime during the morning a middle-aged married couple knocked on the door. They gave us a large netted Christmas stocking stuffed with fruit and candy.

“We were here at Christmas with our son a few years ago,” they said. “We know what it’s like.”

Dad was inspired by this family’s charity and decided to inflict his inspiration on the rest of us. The next year on Christmas Eve he made us go caroling to the unfortunate patients at Holy Cross Hospital, where he worked as a health care consultant. Most patients waved us into their rooms with joy, a few waved us off with a Scrooge-like grunt. A few patients greeted us with such elation that we might has well been the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” rather than a sextet from the west side singing Alfred Burt, a shave off-key. It felt good to pass along the holiday bedside manner, even if we were targeting people who, in their weak condition, couldn’t flee or fend us off.

When the family gets together for the holidays and someone starts a great big cheeseball of nostalgia rolling, Kevin’s Diabetic Christmas is the one we all remember most vividly. Positive psychologists—the guys who study happiness, of all things—talk about how the “unquantifiables” tend to trump the material stuff when it comes to joy. Open the i-pod Nano on Christmas morning and the happiness peaks practically before you get it out of the box. Spend time with your family in the hospital listening to Erasure and eating oranges and watching your brother jab himself in the belly with a needle, and you might end up living happily ever after.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Taking Sammy “back to the pet store”

Lydia is an absent-minded little girl. A while back I compared her to Tom Bombadil, the only creature in all Middle Earth who is not tempted by the Ring of Power, and the only one, according to Tolkien, absent-minded enough to lose it if entrusted with it. When Lydia puts something down, it’s as good as gone. In the summer she loses a pair of shoes a day. She’s been known to step over her shoes with her bare feet on the way out a neighbor’s door. We would have to spend half my salary on Lydie’s shoes if we didn’t have kind neighbors knocking on our door, a dirty pair of purple Crocs dangling from their fingers.

Every night when we tuck her into her sleeping bag—yes, she insists on sleeping in a sleeping bag above her bed covers—she asks, “Where’s Penguin?” And we answer, “How should I know where Penguin is?” She doesn’t understand the logic of this question, so we end up turning the house upside down every night, looking for Dan, the stuffed penguin, Lydia’s bedfellow. We find Dan on the toilet, outside at the bottom of a plastic slide, stuffed in a suitcase.

Her grandmother once sent her a little plastic prism. Lydia took it up with joy and held it up to the sunlight coming down from the skylight and split the sun into a thousand colorful sparkles. Then, twenty seconds later, she put it down somewhere. Gone.

Apparently she has other things on her mind.

You may reasonably ask why, considering her absent-mindedness, we thought it would be a good idea to give her a guinea pig—a sentient being that requires, at the very least, regularly-dispensed food and water. And you may reasonably and more productively ask this question of Lydia’s mother Amy and not me—it was all her idea. Perhaps she was inspired by the tale of Horse Boy, the three year-old autistic whose language skills improved once he started riding Mongolian horses. Autism specialists call this approach hippotherapy, which goes to show you that even people with advanced degrees can get their animals all mixed up.

Actually, it may not be a bad idea to have Lydia sit on Sammy, her guinea pig, because it would be an inexpensive, though likely traumatic, way to get rid of him. Amy thought getting Lydie a guinea pig would teach her some responsibility, and, to our astonishment, it has. When the water gets low, she’ll fill it. When the food runs out and Sammy makes that violin-from-a-horror-movie noise, she’ll get him a leaf of romaine lettuce. From time to time she’ll go to Sammy’s cage on the floor of the pantry and squeak to him and stick a naked toe through the bars and offer Sammy a taste of her toenail. She’s been pretty good to Sammy, and Sammy’s been pretty good at squealing as loud as bus brakes and pooping all over his cage.

But alas, Sammy’s got to go. Apparently pregnant women shouldn’t be around cats and other furry animals because their feces could be contaminated with toxoplasma. Nobody cares if the rest of us breathe microscopic fecal matter contaminated with potentially lethal oocysts, but when pregnant women are involved, let’s all hyperventilate—but not around a full litter box. Anyway, I’m pretty sure you get toxoplasmosis from cats rather than guinea pigs, so I suspect Amy’s using her fetus as an excuse, which she does on occasion when taking seconds of dessert or when asked to participate in the Act of Marriage.

We’ve asked around the neighborhood, and nobody wants him. My neighbor down the street said he wasn’t interested but asked if we wanted a rabbit that their daughter had lost interest in caring for. We know we can take him to the animal shelter to have him “put down,” a practice far more sinister than merely assaulting his dignity. (Hey, I was put down every day in 7th grade.) The shelter, however, would charge us fifty bucks for “handling” (translation: injecting with lethal poison) and “disposal” (translation: burning the limp furry body in an incinerator).

But paying someone to kill our pet sounds to me like passing the buck. Shouldn’t I be man enough to take the poor, unwanted rodent out back and do him in myself, like my ancestors did with their horses and old dogs? Or has modern suburban life, scrubbed of any sign of nature’s red tooth and claw, made us into a squeamish lot, too delicate to deal death ourselves, except when participating in recreational activities like elk hunting and drive-bys? We’ll eat the corn-fed protein of the food industry’s mass slaughter–never mind the debeaking, the crowded pens, the cattle prods, the throat-slitting—but we wince at the thought of doing it ourselves.

When I began contemplating my life as a guinea pig slaughterer, I called my dad, who one afternoon had taken one of my sister’s hamsters “back to the pet store.” How did he do it, I asked? He said he gripped ol’ Felix, the hapless hamster with only three feet, and took him out to the back yard and zipped him up in a freezer bag and set him on the ground and brought a carpenter’s hammer down on his head. Dad said one of his neighbors devised a less bloody method for putting a pet to death. He put the family’s long-in-the-tooth, cancer-stricken toy poodle in a box, cut a hole in the box, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of his truck to the hole in the box, and gassed the little guy.

Ew.

Amy has forbidden me to talk about this with anyone. The first few times I floated the idea in public garnered twisted looks of  horror, and dry heaving. People are odd that way: have a pet “put down” and people awwww sympathetically; say you’re going to put your pet in a Ziploc bag and crush his skull with an Ames True Temper sledge hammer, and suddenly you’re the bad guy. We have a bizarre collective moral compass.

Seriously, I’m just talking tough. I could never bring myself to do it. Those deep brown trembling eyes would look at me through the plastic of the freezer bag as I raised the hammer. I can step on an earwig without losing sleep, but really, a guinea pig is too much bone and blood and viscera. And he has a name. Can you brain an animal you’ve named?

It looks like Sammy and I are both safe. Last night we put a picture of him on an online classifieds site with the word “FREE” in all-caps, and the phone has been ringing off the hook. We haven’t asked these people what they want him for; perhaps someone’s pet python is hungry. At any rate, Lydia has made her peace with losing Sammy. A couple of nights ago she brought him his last piece of romaine lettuce and said her goodbyes. He’s going away, but he’s not going back to the pet store.

The cult of poo

[Many thanks to all those who tune in to this blog from time to time, and many much more thanks to those who take time to write comments. Sorry I don't respond to them like I should. Nevertheless I enjoy hearing about the associations you have when you read this stuff. And now a warning: Today's entry is gross. As the title suggests, it's about poo and associated bodily phenomena. If you're squeamish, I would direct you to a safer blog, like any of these ones about cute cats and the cute things they do. You have been warned.]

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working with Ben, our oldest, to get him excited about walking to school with his sister, which is kind of like trying to get an eight year-old boy excited about the tax code. Customarily Ben leaves ten minutes early so he can play on the space net with his friends before school starts; asking him to walk with Lydia is asking him to sacrifice space net time. It’s also asking him to endure Lydia’s Tom Bombadil-like dilly-dallying–her frequent pauses to pick up sticks, stand like a statue, or look heavenward and bellow like a lonely cow. She’s a jolly girl most mornings, but these distractions, as you might have guessed, drive Ben to grind his teeth practically to powder.

Actually, he’s been pretty good now that the space net is covered in snow. In fact Ben and Lydia often show signs of actually liking each other, especially when they collude on toilet taboo talk, which happens pretty much every day. Heaven help you if Lydia’s within earshot when you say the words behind, gas, rear, or even butter or brown. Say the common word “brown” and Lydia falls into manic chortling and turns to Ben and says, “Brown! Get it, Ben? BROWN??“

Ben contributes to this taboo talk by inventing ostensibly safe euphemisms so that he and Lydia can sneak past the censors. We already tolerate the silly word toot for all the gastric noise we make around the house; now Ben wants to add doop and treat (as in, “Something smells like doop around here!” and “Bentley the dog left a treat on the lawn”). Lydie and Ben relish in this talk—it really brings them together as sister and brother, providing the laxative, so to speak, that gets their friendship running smoothly. Alas.

I had no idea before I had children how much of my time and conversation would be taken up with scatological phenomena. To provide an exhaustive list of my observations would be tedious and, well, gross, but a few insights might be useful here. Earlier in Spring I remember Lydia coming up the stairs to tell us that Louisa had pooped on the floor in their bedroom, like a puppy, and that Lydia had stepped in it. Being the helpful older sister she was, she ran up the carpeted stairs to tell us all about it, leaving little brown footprints as she went. Since I had chicken to marinate, Amy went down with the bottle of Pet Resolve Carpet Cleaner, a dear friend over the years. We’ve cleaned many a brown-green smudge from carpet, wood floor, car seat, bike seat, playground swing, slide, kitchen counter, tub, bed, and lap. Grace be the day it’s a simple log, a king-size Tootsie Roll, picked up in a wink with a wet wipe and rolled into the toilet. But we’ve had explosions too. Infants make the most dramatic explosions that fly out the back of the diaper and go straight up to whatever hair they have. As much as you want to gag, there’s something sublime in it. You turn the baby and see a Grey Poupon (“Get it?” Lydia would holler) streak soaked through the shirt from bum to neckline.

Alternately infants can do their business with maddening stealth, leading to the revolting, but necessary, practice of pulling out the back of their diapers to look for deposits or lifting them up so their diapered fannies touch your nose and taking a whiff. Watch what happens at church when an unpleasant odor starts to spread: Parents everywhere either look down a child’s pants or smell their rear ends to sniff out the culprit. I guess that’s why they call them pews.

Though Louisa’s getting the hang of this whole potty thing, she cannot yet be fully trusted to go Number 2 in the Number 1 place to do it. Therefore, we are in the midst of the Third Celebration of the Cult of Poo in our ten-year marriage. The Cult of Poo begins with the Buying of the Underwear, bedecked with Disney characters that, within twenty-four hours, will be streaked with excrement, making Ariel, The Little Mermaid, indistinguishable from Jabba the Hut. The next stage in the ritual is the Potty Chair. The Potty Chair becomes the locus of our worship, the nexus where heaven and earth meet, the shrine of hope. When the ritual begins, we all run to the Potty Chair holding our bellies. Oh we have to go so bad! And where do we go? In our pants? No! That’s what babies do! We go on the toilet! That’s what we all do! Where does brother Ben go? The toilet! Where does mother go? The toilet! Where does Lydia go, even though she never uses the flush technology? The toilet! Where does T-Rex go? The toilet! (Then Mother brings T-Rex and puts him on the Potty and makes splashy, squirty noises.) And if you go on the toilet, we’ll give you a gummy worm! And if you go on the floor again, we’ll make you eat it!

That last part’s not true. With Louisa we have never had to force her to eat her own feces. She has done that herself in the tub.

My mom told me once that a doctor assured her he had never sent a kid to kindergarten who didn’t know how to Go. I have every confidence Louisa will learn to be a sanitary human before Child 4 comes and we have to start the whole yucky thing all over again. After all, we have the poo chart. Louisa gets a Scooby-Doo (“DOO??” shouts Lydia) sticker every time she performs her miracle. When she completes one line of stickers, mom pulls from the cupboard a package of big glossy Kung-Fu Panda stickers and Louisa gets to pick one.

Her brother and sister offer moral support by chanting the taboo words over and over, in spite of the stinkeye they get from their parents.

Conversations about nothing

At dinner every night I interrogate my children about their day. Every night they know what’s coming, and yet when it’s time for them to answer, I get blank stares–far-off looks, spaghetti noodles hanging from their mouths, their eyes twitching with the herculean effort to recall what they had done three hours earlier. I have to assume that when they walk through the school doors in the morning, the janitor muffles their mouths with a chlorophorm-soaked rag and then stacks the bodies in a dark closet until the end-of-school bell rings.

This frustrates me, mostly because the whole ordeal reminds me, every night, that I, too, have nothing interesting to say about my day when I get home. No one has ever made a movie about a (junior) writing program administrator, and it’s not because special effects are at this point too rudimentary to capture the action.

Sometimes I wish I had an occupation that lent itself to totally awesome stories when I come home to my family at the end of the day. I bet paramedics come home with totally awesome stories, stories about how they pumped fluids into a scorched human, put the paddles to a flatliner and made her jump like a fish, or scooped viscera off the road at the site of an interstate collision. I have no such stories. Sometimes I’m just a big bag of sand at the dinner table, watching dumbly as the kids stab each other with sauce-tipped forks or staring off somewhere in a stupor with my glass halfway to my mouth. I know there’s a kind of alert, progressive, cheerful dadness that it would be my privilege to perform at family meals, but after a day or so of agonizing about which bloodless bureaucratic phrase in an email will best convey my petty power, I don’t have the vitality.

Every thing I say, therefore, comes out sounding pedestrian and, well, dad-like. It drives me crazy; it probably drives the kids crazy. Come eavesdrop on my dinner dialogue for a moment. Here are a few lines from last night’s performance:

“Louisa, no toys on the table, sweet heart. Let’s put those puzzle pieces away.”

“Ben, we’re not going to negotiate. Eat your food or no D.” (D, in this house, is dessert.)

“Lydia, please get out from under the table. Stop playing with our feet.”

“So. What did everyone do today? Anybody remember? No?”

“Me? Sent some emails, met with students, read some stuff online, wrote some stuff no one will read.”

“No, Louisa, Raja the Tiger cannot sit next to your plate. He needs to wait for you on the stairs.”

“Please, guys, no singing at the table. And no whistling either, mom has a headache.” [And even if she didn't, she wouldn't let me near her. Pregnancy gives her bionic smell. She can tell I haven't brushed my teeth from 20 yards out.]

“You don’t have to eat all the sauce, Ben, but you have to at least try it. Please don’t eat your noodles with your hand.”

“Lydia, please get back in your chair. Thanks for the hug, but you just wiped pasta sauce all over my shirt.”

“No, you can’t have more milk until you eat your corn.”

“Ignore it; it’s probably the Fraternal Order of Police.”

“Are there more noodles or is this all there is?”

Considering my own soporific discourse, I shouldn’t expect my kids to spin gripping yarns about their daily slogs through the public school experience. But I’ll give them this: Though they don’t remember what happened at school that day, their natural chatter is always so bizarre, so wing ding, so what the?, that they keep their parents entertained. When the kids get talking at the table, they couldn’t be boring if they tried. Here’s a transcript from the same dinner scene, all direct quotes:

Louisa: “Lydia’s getting the milk! Her’s a big hero! Her’s gonna save the day!” [gives a big thumbs up]

Ben [with socks on his hands]: “Mmmmm, this looks yummy. Me’s a Jar Jar Binks.” [then singing] “I am princess Ariel.”

Lydia: “Then you’re in love with a prince!”

Ben: “Nooooooo, I’m a boy! I rip my face off!”

Lydia [leaning over her chicken with fork and knife]: “Stab! Stab! Stab! Then cut.”

Ben: “Can anybody here tell fortunes by hand marks?”

Lydia: “I’m stuck in this chair, this stupid chair!”

Ben: “I want more screen time.”

Lydia [after farting]: “Oops!”

[Dad asks Louisa, the three year-old, what she did that day.]

Louisa: “I played and I laugh, something bout it. I play in the city. I play in the Mary’s.”

Lydia: “Who is the most powerfullest . . . No. Who’s the boss of Darth Vader?”

Ben: “Darth Sidious.”

Lydia: “No, I’m saying the words. Well, who the heck is the boss of all the good side? Yoda, Count Duku, or Luke Skywalker?”

Ben: “Four words for ya: yip-ah-dee-doo. Yipadeedoo!”

Lydia: “I wish we had an old cow. So we could get milk!”

Ben: “We’d grill ‘er up on the grill.”

Lydia [singing]: “When I grow up, I’m moving to a farm. Are there farms in Texas?”

Ben: “You should get a job, mom.”

[Mom asks what job she should get.]

Lydia: “You should work at Burgers Supreme! No, build something! Build something!”

[Lydia gets out of her chair and gets in mom’s lap.]

Lydia: “Now I’m imagining mom as an old lady. Are old ladies smart?”

Lydia: “Daddy, let me tell you a secret.” [Leans over and puts her mouth next to dad’s ear and whispers]: “The older, the smarter.” [Goes back to her seat]

Ben: “You could be a person who makes movies.”

Ben: “There’s this movie preview that’s so awesome, there’s this girl, and she’s so strong she can break walls and there’s another girl that can control stuff with her mind and this boy that can turn invisible.”

Lydia: “And there’s a girl that’s so in love she can fly!”

Ben: “You’ve never seen the preview, Lydia!”

[Louisa walks around table and climbs in mom’s lap and opens her mouth. Mom forks up some rice.]

Louisa: “Put it down my shirt.”

[Lydia crawls under the table, again.]

Lydia [to Ben]: “I’m smelling your feet. Groooooooooooss!”

Ben [following a unique, and solely-his-own stream of consciousness]: “Who’s drunk? Al Qaeda’s drunk!”

Immersed in French

We don’t speak any language in our house but English, because we don’t know any other language. Amy took some Latin. My junior high Spanish classes were only slightly more advanced than Sesame Street. I have two memories of jr. high Spanish: (1) getting sent to the principal’s office by Dimitrio Cabanillas, a marathon runner and moonlighting Spanish teacher, for throwing wood dadoes across the room, and (2) consuming half a box of Twinkies and a whole six-pack of Mt. Dew at the end-of-the-year class party. What I do not remember, sadly, is any Spanish.

Progressive, neurotic parents who speak only English worry about how they’re going to get their kids to learn another language, because learning another language, like learning clarinet or piano or capoeira or how to put together way-hard Lego sets, is what above-average, middle-class kids do. At one point I thought the worst thing in the world would be to have a vanful of above-average white kids, my genes all a-twist in their fibers, with Nature Valley fruit bars in their hands, ready to go to the museum again. Now I can think of way worse things (e.g., Mt. Dew and Twinkies in their hands), but we’re still worried about the language thing.

Earlier this year we heard that our school district was starting a few first-grade immersion programs in Chinese, Spanish, and French. In these programs, half the day is taught in a second language and the other half in English. We knocked around the idea of getting Lydia into one of these programs. Amy’s dad speaks fluent French, her mother speaks some French, and Amy once took a few lessons to prepare for a trip to France we took earlier this year with her parents. We had a fantastic trip, and I picked up the only phrase worth a damn when you’re abroad: “Where is the bathroom?” Of course when they answered, I had to pretend I understood their instructions and then go outside and pee in a bush. But no matter. If we want Lydia immersed in a second language, we want French–the language of Baudelaire, Proust, Hugo, Flaubert, and Tin Tin.

But when it came time to sign up in September, we hesitated. We had just been told that Lydia had a social disability. When class started, we saw how Lydia struggled for the first few weeks finding friends and figuring out how to cope with school life. Though she got better rather quickly, we thought, All that drama would be times two if she didn’t understand a word the teacher said.

Now we’re repenting, fast. But we might be too late.

Today we met with with a young French woman who had the misfortune of signing up for a teaching gig abroad and flew straight from Paris to Provo, Utah. (I imagine it would comfort her not at all to know that Provo is named after the French Canadian fur trapper, Etienne Provost.) We had an appointment to meet with her at a local elementary school where she teaches first-grade math, completely in French. She had a pleasantly oval face with stylish glasses, and she led us to the back of her room where we sat in very small chairs at a small table. Firmly but kindly, she asked us why we hadn’t signed up Lydia at the beginning of the semester.

“We were worried because she was just diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.”

This word was not known to the teacher, who had been in-country for about three months. Amy wrote it on a piece of scratch paper and we all looked at the word.

“It is not a problem of intellect,” I said, pointing to my forehead helpfully. “It is social.”

“Yes, she’s doing just fine in school.”

The teacher nodded. “Do either of you speak French?”

I was tempted to show her I knew how to ask where to take a leak–wee wee, madam. Amy said, “Not really, no.”

She nodded again, and we could tell she expected the answer but was not impressed by it. “This is going to be very hard for her. I speak only French. She will sit there and not know one word I say. Maybe she will, but maybe not. We have a boy who came to us one month ago. Only now can he speak a little French. And his accent is very bad. It is hard to sit and listen if you do not understand. I can mime, point, and gesture, but I do not speak English to them. And it is very hard. If they cry, it makes me very sad. And you will be sad, too.”

This was true. Being immersed in French might make Lydia, the teacher, and some of the other kids sad.

“But this is what I can offer,” said the teacher. “You can come on Monday and bring her and see how she does. She can see what it will be like to sit there not knowing what anyone else is saying. The other children are learning sentences. It is amazing how fast children can learn this. Bring Lydia. Then she will see how hard it is.” She made it sound like a dare.

Sigh. We thought Lydia would take to being immersed in French like a cucumber takes to pickle brine. One time when she was two she was in the bubble bath skimming the bubbles off the water and eating them by the handful. My mom asked her why she was doing such a gross thing and she said, “It’s okay, grandma–it’s French!”

Who knows what she meant, but we thought she was destined to parlez up a storm. We thought the immersion program might give her expertise no one else had, a special skill she could practice when she’s wandering in the backyard making up stories.

But that’s part of the problem. When in the world would she use French outside those three hours? Certainly she couldn’t parlez with us unilingual sticks-in-the-mud. Sure, we could get out the Post-Its and plaster the house with vocab, but that’s not the way you learn a language. This young teacher from France had no interest in half measures. Immersion means baptism, with every hair buried in the stream. Is the pain worth it?

It’s not too late to buy her a recorder.