The two minute mile

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So this happened 😦

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Before I go further, everyone should know we think he will be ok, but yes, that’s my son in a hospital bed yesterday. This started with a phone call at work around noon:

‘This is David Hamilton”

“David, it’s Caroline. I’m sorry to just blurt this out, but Brady’s had a seizure and lost consciousness, and we’ve called an ambulance”

!!!!!! what…the…fuck!!!!!!

Before you could say boo I was out the door and running to the college’s football field, about a half mile from my office, which is where Brady was and where the ambulance was headed. They beat me to it, and I arrived winded to the sound of the siren receding and Caroline, the director of his daycare, waiting for me in the middle of the road.

A summary of the next 40 minutes is Susan and I connecting in a panicked frenzy, me running right back up the hill to campus to get her, and us scooting off to the hospital with almost no facts in hand. Fortunately when we got there he was conscious if spacey and dazed, laying calmly in bed with one of his daycare caregivers, who fortunately had been able to go with him in the ambulance.

The preliminary diagnosis is that he had a seizure in reaction to the rapid onset of a fever. It’s called a febrile seizure and is not uncommon in kids under 6 and not threatening so long as they’re caught quickly, don’t cause choking, and you bring their temperature down quickly [edit so I don’t promulgate bad info to search visitors: according to our doctor, temperature stabilization is what is key, and quick is bad – you basically want to reduce quick changes in the child’s temperature in either direction. Older pediatric care books (which included ours) which advise cold showers are wrong. Consult with your own physician before taking any action]. We spent several hours in the emergency room with him yesterday while he stayed hooked up to a variety of apparatus. His temperature came down from 103, he took a long nap, Susan and I fretted and worried, and ultimately we had him home by around 4 or 5 last night. We have to give him medication every three hours to make sure the fever stays down, so last night was a bit rough. Today he’s still running a fever and not feeling so great, but he’s no longer as spacey and more or less happy and close to his normal self.

We have an appointment with his general practitioner late this afternoon where we’ll find out more, but hopefully above is everything there is to know about this and we won’t see anything like this again. On balance I’d say Susan and I took the brunt of this – the kid got to ride in an ambulance, something he’s fascinated with to begin with, and had something of an adventure he’s still chattering about. Meanwhile Susan and I went through a mini-hell, which later spiraled into a family argument over whether it made sense to keep our plans to head up to Maine this weekend. None of this was fun, but I’m tentatively happy that the worst of this seems to be in the past now (fingers crossed!).

 

You could spend $50 on a toy…

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… or you could hand the kid a broom, which he’s never seen before, and set him to sweeping the porch. Brady spent half the afternoon messing about with this pushbroom:

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and I couldn’t be happier. I relaxed with my book and leapt up for the occasional ‘don’t fall down the stairs after it!’ moment. Thus is a relaxing holiday spent.

Aspirations

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It’s my sense that most parents hope for great things for their children- fame, fortune, respectable careers as lawyers and so on. I’m trying to reconcile myself to what appears to be irrefutable proof that Brady’s destined to be a plumber:

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(full disclosure, the photos a bit old. Grand plans, but often too busy to follow up on them. Finally remembered this)

Finally using our firepit

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In the spring we bought a long coveted fire pit for our patio. Tonight weather, temperature, our schedule, and the approach of fall all combined into the first opportunity to use it. I guess I can look at it as the bright side of summer daylight receding 🙂

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Let’s go out to the ballpark

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Hard to find a better way to spend a late summer day:

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The proof’s in the smile you see on Brady’s face as he shares a moment with his cousin Parker. This despite him coming down with a fever and ear infection the night before:

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Do not be alarmed, site may go down for a bit

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So I might have to turn off the website for a bit. I’m still haggling with the hosting provider because they’re seeing too much database usage on it, which I have no explanation for. If you try to get here and get nothing over the next week or so, don’t be alarmed. It means I’m moving the site.

Site features removed

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My ISP is complaining about database performance issues and threatening to kick me off their hosting service. I’m going to dump them as a result, but I need to spend some time sorting out next steps, so for now, I’ve turned off most of the bells and whistles on this site in the hopes that one of them is causing the issue.

Why a company would sell me a service (fairly straightforward wordpress hosting is all I use them for) that their server infrastructure won’t support I do not know. My site gets like 3 hits a day. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, more later. For now, no more social media streams.

Breaking a difficult addiction

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Lip balm. Yep – lip balm. I first started using little pots of Carmex lip balm in high school when I started to have enough disposable income for little luxuries like that, and I’ve used lip balm of one form or another ever since. I still recall a conversation with my brother in law many years ago about it, and about how he doesn’t use it after having fought through his lip’s addiction to it. At the time I thought, well, it is odd how so many people including me are addicted to it, but…why stop? And I didn’t, until this month.

At a recent physical I asked my doctor about a little growth on the edge of my lip which had slowly been expanding. I had thought it was some kind of cold sore, and had been treating it accordingly, but instead of getting better it had been getting worse. It took her half a second to diagnose it as a case of the harmless “Perioral dermatitis,” and she prescribed a prescription ointment and the use of any acne cream with salicylic acid in it. A couple of weeks of that combination and it was all cleared up. Meantime I had read a bit about possible causes, and a few studies drew a relationship between paraffin, lip balms, and outbreaks of this, so as a precaution I dumped the lip balm when I started the medications.

A month later and me and my lips are still here. It was a little tough the first week but since then, I rarely even think about it. They do occasionally get dry, especially after eating salty foods, and then I crave the lip balm, but I’ve done fine without it so at least for now, I’m sticking with it. There are plenty of lip balms without paraffin, but I figure if I can do without, why do with? I’ll check back in if I end up caving in when winter comes and things get tougher on the lips.

It’s the new taste sensation

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I had a wonderful exchange with my ~20 month old son Brady yesterday. I talk to him about everything I do when I’m watching him, to help him with language acquisition and to help provide context for the world. Yesterday I was making iced tea from a powdered mix. He’s aware that I drink iced tea a lot, and knows it’s called ‘tea’ He asks for some occasionally and knows he can’t have any. So anyway, yesterday I’m making it, and talking him through the steps – water into the bottle, tea mix into the water, shake shake shake, and viola, tea!. He asks ‘tea….water?’ Yes, I put the tea mix in the water, and it makes tea!’ He considers this, then plucks a curd of cottage cheese* from his dish, holds it out to me, and demands ‘Cheese Water! Cheese Water!’

😉

* (Cottage cheese is one of his favorite foods).