early valentine's daffodils

I just realized it is already mid-February. How did that happen?

I keep writing a post in my head about Elan's 1-month post-tonsillectomy update.

But somehow, writing it in my head doesn't mean you get to read it. Funny how that goes.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that Elan loves Instagram. He loves playing around with the filters and choosing one his very own self. Like this:

I love my new iPhone. It's my first smartphone (after years of using hand-me-down cell phones from Mikhail and even my parents).

While driving Elan to preschool, I asked Siri what the weather would be today. When she responded, Elan exclaimed, "Mama, your phone is smart!" Perhaps that's the origin of the term smartphone: a 5-year-old.

It's pretty. It's white. It takes great photos and video. It talks. Now if only it could fold the laundry.

"Siri, fold the laundry!"

I've tried it. It doesn't work.

after dinner

Tuesday, 8:35 p.m.:

If I just eat that last bit of mac and cheese, I won't have to find a Tupperware lid that fits.

You've been there too, haven't you?

today's confessions

I confess that...

Sometimes the baby gets chocolate bread for breakfast.

Emry, 14 months, January 2012

And he really likes it.

(Notice the gummy smile - Emry's first tooth has broken through so he's toothless no more!)

Both my children drink bottles. Occasionally while watching TV.

December 2011

In the hours between 5 and 7 a.m., I frequently want to curse. Sometimes I do. Early morning is not my finest hour.

I found more amazement, pleasure and simple joy in Elan's Magical Crystal Garden than he did. I felt 7 years old again.

Magic Garden, January 2012

Smiles make everything better. It's such a relief that Elan's back to himself again. I am so glad that those 12 days of parenting hell are over.

Post-bath with Grandma Karen, January 2012

I spend a lot of time in cafes, since I work best away from the distractions of children, laundry and dishes at my house. But I've never heard singing in a cafe like the nine women clustered around a table across from me are doing right now. It's gorgeous, and it feels soulfully appropriate today. Today is my dad's birthday (Happy Birthday Dad!). And it's also the day we learned about the passing of a beloved preschool teacher at Elan's school after a long illness. I led a yoga session for Elan's class this morning, breathing and stretching with the kids after a difficult morning dealing with Elan's 5:00 a.m. restless and overtired crankiness, and my own frustration and worry about this ongoing sleep struggle, even post-T&A. So I think it's a day to FEEL. To feel the sad, the joy, the frustration, the gratefulness, and the messy combinations of emotion that make up being alive.

Water and cousins in the driveway, January 2012

my mom's banana bread

Can a boy live on banana bread alone?

Elan is testing this theory.

My mom (aka Nana) bravely volunteered for 10 days of post-tonsillectomy hell recovery without really knowing what she was getting into (along with my dad, who was here for the first few days and then had to go back to work). My mom left on Saturday and has since been replaced by my equally brave mother-in-law. Getting through Elan's tonsillectomy recovery is a family affair!

Nana and Emry, December 2011

My mom has made this banana bread all of my life. When Elan was refusing nearly all foods, my mom came up with the idea to try banana bread, which he does normally love. Thankfully it was a hit, and now he has consumed FOUR entire banana breads in the last week. Which is probably the only reason his pants are staying up at all, since my little guy has lost several pounds off his already-lean frame since the surgery.

I have modified my mom's original recipe in several different ways over the years, reducing the sugar and adding different flour options. What I like about this recipe is that it's quite flexible and I can vary the content of the flour depending on my mood, what I have in the house and who will be eating it. It's also very kid-friendly (though beware, the crumbs WILL get ground into your carpet mercilessly if said kid eats while wandering the house, as mine is inclined to do). You could probably even add in wild things like vegetable purees. Maybe I should try that for Loaf #5.

Tip: You want ripe bananas for this recipe, over-ripe is even better. Whenever I've got a banana in my fruit basket that's too over the hill to eat, I peel it and throw it in a plastic bag in my freezer. That way I always have a stock for banana bread. Just put your frozen bananas in a bowl and microwave briefly to unfreeze them enough that you can mash them. They will probably turn brown in color, but they taste just fine in banana bread.

Another tip: Spoon the batter into muffin cups (I love the silicone ones), reduce the baking time to 20-30 minutes, and you've got great banana muffins (which my son loves even more than banana bread).

My Mom's Banana Bread (modified version)

3 ripe bananas

1/2 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/4 cup flaxseed meal and/or oats (quick-cook or rolled) - optional

2 cups flour (You can use 2 cups of white flour or vary the flour content. I often use 1 cup of white flour plus 1 cup of a combination of whole-wheat flour, almond meal, quinoa flour, whatever interesting kinds of flour I have in the house. If you use more of the heartier flours, you might need to add more liquid (milk, or applesauce works well) to the dough at the end of mixing or reduce the baking time in order to not have a dry loaf.)

1 t baking soda

1/2 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

3 T milk

1 t vanilla

2-3 T applesauce - optional

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a masher. Add vegetable oil and sugar and mix well. Beat eggs and add to wet mixture. Add flaxseed meal or oats. If you'd like to use both, you can substitute for an equal amount of flour or add a few tablespoons of applesauce to keep the mixture wet enough.

In another bowl, combine the flour(s), baking soda, baking powder and salt. Stir well. I like to use a wire whisk to stir my dry ingredients; it distributes the baking soda and baking powder nice and evenly.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients (this keeps you from having 2 very dirty bowls).

Add the milk and vanilla and stir. The batter will be bumpy because of banana lumps - this is fine. It should be thick enough to spoon out of the bowl, but liquid enough to pour fairly well. If it seems too thick, add a little more milk. Or you could add applesauce or veggie purees at this point for extra nutrition and/or to add more liquid to the batter.

Spoon the batter into muffin cups or pour into a greased loaf pan.

Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes (muffins) 40-60 minutes (bread loaf). Check by inserting toothpick. Toothpick should come out clean. Cool before cutting (unless you just can't resist).

not for the faint of heart

Botanical garden, Berkeley, January 2012

Let me tell you, having your kid get their tonsils out really sucks.

I'm really hoping this is worth it, because last night, when I was awake with a screaming, thrashing, kicking child who refuses to take his medicine in the night, from roughly midnight to 4 a.m., with breaks when he'd fall asleep, then wake up twenty minutes later, hysterical once more, and I felt so helpless and bad for him, and also so frustrated that he wouldn't just swallow the medicine, this simple thing to help himself, I had that thought I knew I would have at least once in the recovery process: This was a really bad idea.

A friend of mine recently posted this quote:

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.

-Buddhist proverb

I am hoping that we are facing in the right direction.

mil gracias

Botanical gardens, Berkeley, January 2012

I want to say thank you for the text messages, emails, phone calls, voicemails, old-fashioned cards, and telepathic messages that have been sent our way over the past week. It's been so nice to feel the support of our community as we deal with this, our first real medical situation with one of our children. (And how lucky we felt, at Children's Hospital, where there are some very sick children, that this was our first -- and still an elective procedure.) (Though don't tell Elan we elected it. Poor guy would be quite peeved at us if he realized that.)

He made a break for it when we got into the pre-op receiving area, and who can blame him? Most anyone would feel the same urge, even if adults wouldn't act on it. They gave him an oral sedative and an iPad with Uzu, a sort of hypnotic fireworks game, on it. Mikhail carried him down the hall to an antechamber to the operating room, where he got the anaesthesia via a mask. Once he was unconscious, we stepped out into the hallway and I burst into tears. "90 percent of parents cry," the very nice Child Life Specialist told us, as I tried to pull myself together, away from the image of my little boy lying on a gurney.

But I digress. What I want to say is that we have an arbor of holiday cards adorning our big front picture window. It's nice to look up and see friends and family looking down at me. I think I'll leave them up there till spring.

post-op: days 1-2

Elan doing his impression of a giant-eyed wood elf, January 2012

First off, Elan's T&A surgery went fine. The surgeon told us afterwards that his adenoids were big, and that she thinks the surgery will correct the sleep apnea. So that's the good news, and it was a big relief to hear after what was, for me, the worst part - the time during the actual surgery. I have an overactive imagination, and I've watched a lot of Grey's Anatomy episodes.

The bad news is that the recovery is rough. We knew this would be the case. Every parent who had been through it told us that it's awful while you're going through it, even as they celebrated the results. At the end of Day 1, Elan was doing better than we expected. He tucked into several bowls of pasta with an enthusiasm we rarely see him show for any food.

Night 1 was a parenting comedy of errors, one of those nights we'll look back at some day when our kids are grown, while we're sipping pina coladas on some tropical beach and reminiscing about the diaper days, and laugh. Mikhail put Elan to sleep in our bed while I was out at a kindergarten information night. That was our plan, so one of us could keep an eye (albeit closed) on him while we slept and to keep him further from Emry so that hopefully we wouldn't have them both up screaming at us at the same time.

Getting into bed, I knocked over the humidifier next to the bed and spilled water all over the floor. After cleaning that up, I got into bed, careful to not wake Elan, and pulled the sheet up. The sopping wet sheet. In my exhausted state, I couldn't figure out how I had managed to spill humidifier water into the middle of the bed. Then I realized my son had wet the bed. FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. Really. Mr. Iron Bladder was laid low by a combination of IV fluid, the anaesthesia still in his system, and the morphine the hospital gave him before we left that afternoon.

I notified Mikhail, who was just getting into bed in Elan's room, that the plan had to change. Screaming commenced, as we woke Elan by taking off his wet PJ bottoms and moved him into his room. Then, while Mikhail tried to soothe Elan back down, and Emry, woken by his brother's yelling, cried in his crib, I quickly stripped the bed, mopped up the pee from our expensive latex mattress topper with cloth diapers, sprayed BioKleen (love that stuff), laid down every beach towel in the house, remade the bed, nursed Emry back to sleep, and then collapsed on the half-size camping pad next to Elan's bed. For a half hour. Until Elan woke up again, pee-soaked in his bed (also with no mattress cover - when will I learn?). We did the whole thing again, with Elan back to sleep in our bed (after insisting on a bathroom stop - I do learn some things).

Then during Day 2, he really stopped eating or drinking pretty much anything except his medicine. It's painful to swallow, that's clear, but we also saw him click into a war of wills mode, where he just seemed determined to stick to his guns, even as he felt worse and worse from a combo of hunger, dehydration, and worsening of his throat from not drinking. We made it very clear that, come Day 3, if he wasn't drinking, he'd have to go to the hospital and get an IV. You know that big needle that was in your hand when you woke up from your operation? That, for four hours! But still he refused.

Parenting (and grandparenting, from my very brave parents) skills worn out, we put him to bed. He came around in the middle of the night, after quite a long time of screaming and carrying on, and finally we got him eating and drinking.

Jello and Odwalla party - our bed - 3 a.m.