Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Welcome to the official beginning of the US holiday season, the 2+ months from Halloween through New Year’s Day. This is, also, the first half of the Season of Sick.

So far in my family we’ve gone through a 3+ week battle with a cold, with overlap of those effected. Today happens to be the start (and hopefully the finish) of another bout with sickness.

My wife is off on a pre-school trip to the pumpkin patch this morning. The plan was that I’d take the youngest until a friend was available, and then I’d go into work a little late. When he woke up this morning he felt a bit warm, and was acting odd (lethargic). Whilst sitting on the couch with him, he proceeded to give me his opinion on my sweater by vomiting on me. He vomited at least one other time — this was before Aj left, so I was changing and don’t have an exact count of the times. He has since regained his normalcy; ate his breakfast, is wandering around playing with toys and reading to himself, etc.

Said friend is available now, but I’m not about to go dump off my kid who was puking 2 hours ago. So here I am, at home, half working and half making sure he’s ok. I just don’t want to have to change again.

I gave the boys a bath tonight. Nothing unusual, really, just a normal bath experience. My bath time routine goes something like this:

1. Get the water running; usually the sound of the running water brings the boys with excitement.
2. Strip off their clothes, “toss” them into the tub.
3. Let the playing commence.
4. After a while wash them down.
5. Let the playing continue.
6. Oldest out first; dry him down, and send off for pjs
7. Youngest out; dry him down, and let him roam freely until the wife clothes him or I…
8. Clean-up the mess of toys in the tub; address naked boy situation if necessary.

Everything went as normal until #8. I was picking up the toys, and youngest was roaming freely. He happened to step right up next to me to watch what I was doing. I thought nothing of it, until I recognized something was happening to my foot. Yup, naked boy was peeing on my toes. Fortunately I was wearing shoes, but I think I need to wash them now.

I am happy–immensely happy, but at the same time, tragically, deeply anguished.  The perpetuation of my emotional dichotomy stems from the fact that my wife and I just found out that we were going to have another child.  That, in and of iteself, is mostly the source of my unbound joy; however, we also found out that we are not going to be the ones to raise our little one–that honor, in all its joy, belongs to Jesus.

You see, our little one was brought home from this world earlier than I ever could have imagined; I never would have thought that I could feel a part of me so barren, but so alive.  Not alive and blossoming with vivacity; rather, alive in the sense you get when you have a sudden, deep injury.  That part of me is rubbed so raw, bleeding, but feels so alive because of it.

I mourn the loss of my child, but how awesome would it be to be raised by God Himself? I mean, my dad was great, but he kinda pales in comparison.  Let’s see….a wooden house….or golden streets?  Which would you rather see every day? : )

Though it pains me that I will never be able to hold this baby, snuggle it in bed, sing it to sleep, and watch it grow, laugh, learn, and love, I do feel grateful knowing that my child is in the best of hands, and will be waiting there for me, welcoming me into the arms of the Father, who has raised my baby in His glorious perfection.

I am dying inside–but I rejoice in the Lord and all He has provided.

–Aaron

Oh. man. I need one right now! (who doesn’t?)

Neighbor kids, LDS, Seventh-day Adventists, and girl scouts (I don’t really need those Thin Mints and Samoas anyway) beware!

I guess you all should call now before you come over

I mentioned in the post about my son getting a pebble stuck in his bronchial tube that there was a story to tell about my family and three other families camping and white water rafting/kayaking on the Rogue River in southern Oregon.  This is that story.  It was amazing.  There were parts of the trip that were hard but more that were not.  We went down with our small group from church.  I have been part of small groups before but this is the first one I can honestly say functions like what I think a small group should function like.  We share life together, not just Sundays.  It took a little getting used to, for everyone I’m sure, to know how to camp with so many other people.  I think we figured it out pretty well.

This was the first time any of the families, except one, had been camping with kids.  My wife and I are pretty avid outdoors-men, or outdoors-persons to be more accurate, and have spent a lot of time in the backcountry; our kids are one and three and have not.  The main difference I found between backpacking alone and car camping with kids is that camping, or being for that matter, anywhere with kids is fifteen million times dirtier.  It was dusty, muddy, outdoorsy bliss for anyone under the age of five.  The first thing the kids started doing when we got to the campsite was to start digging a hole.  Seems pretty exciting.  They worked on this hole the entire trip.  It was an obsession for them and they went at it with the fervor of a rabid wolverine fighting a pack of marmots.  I bet when they are all older they will say to one another, “Hey do you remember that time when we were camping and we dug that hole?” …pause for staring off into the distance and ford remembering… “That was a great hole.”

Apart from the hole digging there were other things that happened as well, all of which pale in comparison to the hole though.  We took a trip down the Rogue River in rafts and inflatable kayaks.  This was incredible.  I have not been on any white water since moving to Oregon three years ago and never in a kayak.  I’m sold.  If I have my druthers I will never ride in a raft again; it’s kayaks for me all the way.  We went down with a company called Obrien’s Rogue River Outfitters.  They were amazing.  I don’t normally make plugs but it was probably the best guided trip I have ever taken.  They have some pictures and a little blurb about our trip on their blog, http://www.rogue-river-rafting-trips.com

The only blemishes to the weekend were when my son inhaled the pebble, even though that probably shouldn’t count because we didn’t know about it until 10 days later, and when our friends’ son tripped over one of the guy ropes on my tent and got a spiral fracture of the femur.  That’s right I said a spiral fracture of the femur.  Crazy huh?  It not like he was traveling with any great velocity either.  He was running as fast as a two-year-old can run with only having 10 feet or so to gather momentum and tripped over the ropes and got a, incase I didn’t mention it earlier, spiral fracture of the femur.  He has to wear a cast that goes from his ribcage to his ankles with a dowel between his legs and a chunk taken out of the crotch so he can do his business.  So basically for the next five weeks or so he has to either lay down or stand up, and by stand up I mean be propped up against the wall.  If it were me I think I would name this chapter of my family’s life “Benadryl and Movies All Around.”  But that’s just me.

I am glad for this trip on many different levels.  I am glad that we got out and did something outside with my family.  I am glad that despite two of the children needing to have surgery because of the trip we are still looking forward to the next time we can cam as a group.  I am glad that we shared in so many different levels of experience together.  And I am glad our small group goes beyond superficial groups I have known in the past to being friends in the best sense of the word and when things are hard and some of us need help and support it’s there.

Whoever first said, “You can’t get blood from a stone” was an idiot.  I just got back from the hospital with my one-year-old son where he had to have surgery to remove a stone that was lodged in his right bronchial tube for 10 days!!!  About a week and a half ago my family and I were camping and white water rafting/kayaking with three other families, more to come on that trip in a very near post, when my youngest son put a handful of pea gravel into his mouth.  This is not an uncommon occurrence.  The cat would eat a pile of radioactive scorpion tails tied together with barbed wire and soaked in vermouth if he could get his hands on them.  I walked over to him and did the regular, “No, no, spit it out” routine and he did, for the most part.  He must have missed one in the expectorating because he started to gag and cough pretty vigorously.  I looked in his mouth and saw a little piece of gravel in his throat.  So I did what anyone would have done at that point, I put my finger in his throat to try and get the choking hazard out.  This had roughly the same effect as poking a feeding rhino in the eye with a flaming baton.  He didn’t like it much and showed me by nearly dismembering one of my fingers.  This, as you can see, wouldn’t have made much sense because then he would have had a piece of pea gravel, which was only pushed farther down by my attempts to remove it, as well as a finger blocking his airway.  I am glad he thought better of biting my finger off and just decided to swear at me in baby language instead.  He cried for a couple of mintues and then settled down so my wife and I thought he had swallowed it and would deliver it back to the soil in a couple of days.  

The camping trip regrettably ended and we headed home where we noticed a little bit of a rasp in my son’s breathing but attributed it to the dust and camping.  Over the next couple of days his cough didn’t get any better and it didn’t get any worse and he had an appointment with his doctor in a couple of weeks so we decided to keep an eye on it and just wait and see.  Well a couple of days ago he developed a cough that kind of sounded like you where choking Elmo while kicking him in the giblets repeatedly.  At first it was only an isolated incident but when it kept happening over the course of two days we decided to take him to urgent care.  Here we got an X-ray on his chest and found an almost almond-sized piece of pea gravel lodged just at the top of his lung in the bronchial tube.  We were off to Children’s Hospital and the land of teensy little operating instruments.

We were admitted overnight and the surgery happened at about 10:00am the next morning.  Now I know this was probably a traumatic experience for the little guys but I do not think I have ever seen anything so funny as a one-year-old coming out of anesthesia.  When we walked back to the recovery room we could hear the nurses laughing before we even got there.  Think back to high school parties when you were a senior.  Remember the freshman that would always show up and drink too much trying to impress the seniors but end up naked on the pool table mumbling incoherent song lyrics while others at the party prodded him in the stomach with a yard stick because it would make him giggle?  It was kind of like that but without the hangover and, I’m sure, much more expensive.

The surgery itself lasted a grand total of about 16 minutes and the doctor gave us the piece of gravel in a cup.  The only dilemma  I am currently facing is what to do with the pebble.  I am thinking that I may have it set in a chunk of amber and mounted on the end of a cane.  It would be my pimp stick but I am open to suggestions.

Recently I have realized something about my self but before I get to the great epiphany I should probably give some background information about my situation.  When I was growing up I led what some would call a sorted life in regards to partying and the like.  Never anything too serious but I did take my fair share road trips with my brother, ie we spontaneously followed the Grateful Dead around the country for a summer during high school, and we would never hesitate to throw or attend a party.  I tell you this merely to let you know that I have always been willing to do anything and was rarely sedentary for long.  After I got married and sired, that’s right I said sired, a couple of offspring I didn’t get out as much as I used to but always assumed that it was a time thing.  I always assumed that if given the chance I wouldn’t hesitate to paint the town red.  

My wife and children have flown back east because her grandmother is not doing very well.  This means that, despite the unfortunate circumstances, I have the house to myself for about two weeks when I will join my family back east.  Now I would have thought that a man with my history being put into this situation of rare accountability to no one but himself there would be a certain level of debauchery happening.  Now before you go ahead and make assumptions about my present lifestyle I should say that I am apparently not the same man I used to be.  Since my family left four days ago I have been ‘out’ a grand total of 0 times.  That’s right I haven’t even gone out to see a movie let alone get into any high-jinx.  When I came to this realization, that I am much more domesticated or boring, than I used to be it caused a little rain cloud to follow me around for about seven minutes but then I snapped out of it and remembered what I have traded for.  I traded my life of parties and the Grateful Dead, even though they still do make an appearance now and then in my house, for something much more.  I have a family.  I have someone in my wife who is not only always there with me, which is what I think we notice more often when we are frustrated, but there for me as well.  I also have two boys, or ass-kickers in training as I like to think of them, who at the very least keep life interesting.  I miss them. 

I’ve got two kids.  The oldest, now 3.5 years, didn’t like not being able to move.  When he could roll, he wanted to crawl.  When he could crawl, he wanted to walk.  And as soon as he was walking he wanted to run and climb and jump.

Our youngest, 11 months today, is a different story.  He never was a “holy roller” like his brother.  For a long time he preferred to army crawl as opposed to regular crawling.  It took some encouragement from another boy his age before he started pulling himself up on things about a month ago.  The latest development is when the fun (and “fun”) start happening.

Just yesterday, having pulled himself up on things, he started letting go.  It’s fascinating to see one so little developing a two-footed sense of balance.  I just really hope he doesn’t start walking this week while I’m out of town for work.  That would be teh suck.

In light of my recent basketball post.  I thought I would post this video I was reminded of the other day.  It is an old SNL skit in which Charles Barkley takes on Barney.

As I have mentioned in a previous response to one of my fellow bloggers I am a novice gardener.  This is the first year I have had a garden of my own for many reasons.  This is the first time I have had a yard big enough to have a garden and I have always been around someone who had a garden so I would just help with theirs.  I am growing, with good success so far, jalapeno and green peppers, roma and sweetie cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, red and yellow onions, cucumbers, lettuce, zucchini, carrots, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, strawberries, basil, cilantro, mint, chives, and parsley.  I have been growing most of these plants in my house for some weeks now and have started moving them into the outside garden.  Up until this time all of my gardening has been pretty theoretical in nature.  Almost like I have been playing acting the farmer.  Now that I have put plants into soil I have broken myself makes everything a little more real somehow.  

However there is a little flaw to my plan.  I have found myself becoming more and more obsessed with gardening and gardening techniques.  I have added four or five different plants to my garden/herb/berry garden since the first till and this does nothing but divide my attentions more and more.  I feel kind of like I am playing a progressive game of Whack-a-Mole where the longer the game last the more moles are thrown into the mix.  On one hand you want more moles because they deserved to be whacked and who better to whack them but you but one the other hand the more moles that are added the more places you have to give your attention.  Right now I feel like I still have a handle on the number of moles that are in my game but if many more get thrown at me I may just keel over.

Anyway the reason I titled this post the way I did was because I made pizza tonight for my family’s pizza and a movie night, Lion King in case you were wondering, and I was able to harvest some fresh basil to put on one of the pies.  There is nothing like fresh basil, especially when all you have to do is to walk out your back door and yank some off a bush.