***UPDATE Dad is out of surgery and doing fine. It went well, he is in recovery and asking when he can play golf.
A few months ago, my dad slipped and fell on the ice. He hit his head and his hip. I’ve mentioned it before, but dad’s a pilot. For the past lifetime, he keeps in shape because he doesn’t want to lose his pilot’s license. He always gets up at 5am and works out, and eats healthy, and generally is annoying with the fear of going to the doctor. Not because he is afraid of what they’ll find, but of what they’ll report back to the FAA. The FAA=God. So he refused to go to the ER. A simple concussion could ground him for a year.
A few weeks ago, the bigwig at work told inferior bigwigs to tell dad that she didn’t feel safe flying with him. This was HUGE. Like HUGEBIGFUCKINGDEAL huge. It was a slap in the face to him to hear that. What the f*ck was going on?? My mom called me at work, and it took my breath away. Oh dear, this HAS to do with the fall.
We (my mom) had noticed little things. Like, he generally didn’t feel good. He was whinier, bitchier, if you will. He shuffled a bit when he walked, and at Easter Workaholic saw him fall against a door frame, twice. And when they golfed, his normal slice had turned into a hook. All of this was explained away by arthritis and Charlie horses. Until last weekend.
Last weekend, my parents went to a wedding, where my dad saw his brother and his cousin, who is a MD. Between the two of them yelling at him and asking him what the hell was the matter with him, why hadn’t he been to a doctor?? he decided to go to the doctor. The woman that he saw sent him for a CT, and was like, “I’m sure it’ll show nothing, you are completely asymptomatic.” Imagine both of their surprises when the scan came back and the right side of his brain was squished by fluid.
He can talk normally…just ask the doctors and nurses. He can argue. He was driving his manual transmission truck up until last Tuesday, when he was ordered not to. (Apparently the risk for seizure for a chronic subdural hematoma is pretty severe when you’ve got a ton of blood/spinal fluid on your brain, and driving is not advisable.) He could golf, although not well, just ask him. His memory is what it used to be, that is to say, he can remember the story of his student who had a grand mal seizure at 30,000 feet 5 years ago, but he can’t remember where he left his coat.
So at this moment, my dad is in surgery. My sister is on a plane from England. My other 2 sisters are here with me and my mom and his brother and sister-in-law. And we are just feeding ourselves and hanging out and waiting. The neurosurgeon and his resident seem to think this is a fairly routine surgery. Drill a couple holes, let the fluid drain, DON’T PLUG THE HOLES WITH CAULK, go home and recuperate. (after a couple of days) Give it a month before you start driving again. Flying…well, one step at a time, but we think so. It might take a couple of years, but I think he’ll get back up there.
So the past week has been scary. Not as scary though, as the weeks before, when he was GROUNDED and we didn’t know why. Now we have a plan. And my dad will be around for a long time to come. He’ll see Sam grow up, and can teach her and her little brother or sister how to fish. Maybe even play golf. Who knows…all I know now is that we sit, and wait, and hope for the best. Prayers are welcome.
I talked to my sister today. She lives in Europe, and was spending her Spring Break in England with some friends. Needless to say, due to Eyjafjallajokull, she is stuck there. So instead of flying to her home when she can get out, she is thinking of flying back to America for a visit. I told her she could fly into O’Hare and take the bus to get near our house. And then I talked to Workaholic.
And he’s all, “I can pick her up from O’Hare!”
And I’m all, “Are you sure?? Last time I did that, it was 2 ½ hours each way, and will be you be able to get off of work in time AND pick up our daughter AND pick up my sister?”
And he’s all “I LOVE to do airport runs. You get to see airplanes!!”
I wish it was so easy to make me happy. (he does too)
I'm participating in Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop this week, due to some recent events, I thought it very appropriate...
3.) What does that tell you about your father? List five products your father used (or uses). Write a longer piece about, at least, one of them.
Five products my dad uses…
1. Total/oatmeal. Dad eats super healthy, and has since I can remember. He used to eat Total cereal every morning, and then the doctor told him there was too much iron? maybe in that, so he switched to plain oatmeal with raisins. Every. single. morning.
2. New Balance running shoes. OK, so he doesn’t use these really anymore. Along with the super healthy eating came daily vigorous exercise. It used to be running. Then his feet started bothering him, and his hip, so he had to give that up for the Stairmaster and elliptical machine and swimming. Which he doesn’t enjoy nearly as much, but he wants to stay healthy. And he does it every. single. morning.
3. Aspirin/saw palmetto/multi-vitamin. Again, healthy living. He takes an aspirin every. single. day because that is what the doctor told him to do. Same with the saw palmetto…prostate health. And duh on the multi-vitamin.
4. Ziebart. Yeah…the rust-proofing company. He buys a new truck about when it is absolutely necessary (when one is totaled or deemed un-drivable by Toyota), and the first stop is always Ziebart for rust-proofing. And if his beautiful truck gets dented?? Well…you fix it, otherwise it might rust.
5. Overnight bag. Dad’s a pilot, so he has a bag that he uses when he needs to be gone overnight. It’s a black, leather one that he got from Purdue. Because why pay for something when you got a perfectly good one for free???
It wasn’t hard for me to come up with this list. My dad was raised by parents who lived through the Depression, so you take care of what you have, don’t buy something new unless you absolutely need it, and did I mention take care of what you have?? When his truck was taken from him by Toyota, he found a way to retro-fit his old camper top to the new truck. And when he accidentally lowered the garage door onto said camper top, he was sooo upset because he “lowered the value of it.” (Umm…dad? Probably not worth much before it was dented. I mean, it was like, a jillion years old!)
And while flying is dad’s career, it also has defined his life. He adjusted his lifestyle to accommodate the healthy food and made time for exercise because he loves flying, and wanted to make sure no one ever had an excuse to tell him that he was not allowed to fly. He has had to change plans hundreds of times because something at work came up, and he had to fly. I know lots of other kids’ dads have had the same thing…can’t make a recital/game/play because of work. It happens, and especially in that generation, you work because you need to support your family (because people haven’t always been so lucky to have a job and be able to do so) and so you make it at the top of your list. People rarely work for the same company for 42 years anymore, but my dad has. When retirement calls, whether sooner or later, I know dad will be fine. Yes, he’ll miss flying. But give him his oatmeal and his exercise and his multi-vitamin, and he can get in his Ziebart-ed truck to go golfing. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to pack his overnight bag to try out a new course.
Sam had her 15 month check-up today. She weighs 20lbs, 8 oz (yay, she broke the 20lb mark!) and is 29 ¾ inches tall. That puts her in the 25-30th percentile for height and 20th percentile for weight. Just a little kid, that’s all.
She used to be very cooperative at the doctor, she’d smile and let her listen to her heartbeat and look in her mouth and ears. Somewhere in the past few months, my toddler has decided that she doesn’t like the doctor, or the nurses, and WILL NOT cooperate, at all. So she cries, and pushes away using her hands and there is kicking and screaming involved. Who knew it was so hard to hold down a 15 month old? Yes, that kid you hear all the way down the hallway? Is mine. She doesn’t even like the scale! What’s so bad about a scale??
She also loves to be outside. Absolutely. loves. it. I blame it on her being a winter baby, and probably not really remembering much of last summer. She’ll run down the driveway when I get home, we go get the mail together, and sometimes she stops and scruches her shoulders and just giggles and claps her hands. That happy to be outside. She doesn’t need any fancy outdoorsy slides or anything like that yet…she is perfectly content wandering around the backyard and chasing The Fonz. Our yard is about ½ acre, which probably seems like the Great Plains to her.
I can’t wait to take her to the lake and see how many times this summer she gets knocked off the pier by Fonz. (Yes, I know that is not a good thing and it could be very dangerous, but she’ll be supervised at all times when she is outside. But I know him, and I know her, and I know how things are, and it’s gonna happen. Might as well resign to that fact, rather than get all freaked out and angry when it does. Last summer, our neighbor girl who was 3 at the time got knocked off of their pier by Fonz with her dad standing right next to her. She was a little freaked out, but fine. And I think she liked telling the story later. “Bo made me go in da wada!”)
In other news, we had a showing last Saturday, and there were 2 negative comments. One was about the green. If you haven’t heard me mention it before, our house is green. The siding is a light olive color, which I think is very pretty and complements the stone well. The trim is a forest green. As in, it matches the grass. So while we love the green, we have to wonder how many people won’t even come and look at the house, even if we offer a credit for painting. This made Workaholic call a painter friend of his to get an estimate. To paint the green. The green that we’ve spent the past almost 6 years defending. The green that when people say, “I hate that!”, we say, “Well, it’s our house, and we built it, and we like it, so suck it!”
I think that if we paint the green, it’ll be a sad, sad day. Some of our neighbors will probably rejoice, and say “I told you so”, when the house sells a few weeks later. Others will probably be sad, since they use the green house as a landmark. I might even shed a tear. Either way, we had a green house. And it’s awesome.
Last weekend was one of those weekends that just makes you long for summer. And it also was one of those weekends that makes me really happy that I don’t have to stay home every single weekend during the summer. By Sunday night, I was pacing the floor waiting for Workaholic to get home. He’d been working all weekend, which I knew was going to happen, and I chose to stay home, because I am lazy and didn’t feel like packing or driving. I also had kidded myself into thinking that I’d go to church on Sunday, which of course, did not happen. I knew that I had another closet of clothes to go through and put away due to my every-expanding belly, and a couple of containers of maternity clothes that also could be brought out, but that is no fun. I didn’t want to do that.
In my pacing, I started to notice things about the house which I’ve always seen, but they never really bothered me. And they started to bother me. Workaholic made the comment the other day that it seems like I just think of things for him to do when he is sitting still. So I tried to refrain from making a list, but I’m now at work, and I can’t stop thinking of these things. The paint touch-ups, that light bulbs that need to be changed, the drywall tape that popped, the little blue foam pads that they put underneath furniture when they clean your carpet, and don’t get me started on the landscaping!! AAHHH THE LANDSCAPING!! We’ve let it go for a couple of years, and now an overhaul is needed. And I am pretty sure I am not going to be able to get my mom up here to go on a planting spree. And the garage, the garage!!…Sauna anyone?
Many of these things might not bother me if we weren’t trying to sell the house. Our house, at first glance, is perfectly presentable. But when you look a little closer, there are just THINGS that should be done. And there is a certain amount of staging that needs to happen, and I know that is my responsibility. Many of the pictures that we have around the house are going to get packed up, except the ones on the walls. Those are staying. Because I don’t have anything to replace them, and even though “they” say that you shouldn’t have pictures of yourself all over the place because then people can’t imagine themselves living there, I am fairly certain that pictures of my cute kid and good-looking siblings are better than a nail sticking out of the wall. (No, we’re not conceited, why do you ask?)
I am making a list, because I am a big fan of lists. We’ll see if anything actually gets crossed off of the list. I have one for me, and a much, much longer one for Workaholic. And believe it or not, nothing on the list is related to “getting ready for baby.” I’m just not there yet. I’ll start to panic around August, which is when I am due, and if karma works out, probably when we’ll sell the house. Keep your fingers crossed! In the meantime, I hope that summer hurries up and gets here. I’m ready.
First of all, let me just tell you about HOLY COW THE SNOT!! My cold has moved past the sneezing/sore throat portion, and is now into the SNOT portion. I hate the stuff, and can’t wait until I am finished with this darn thing. Judging by my headache, there is a lot left in my poor little noggin.
On another note, I have pictorial evidence of my daughter, “the girl”. The first is a shot I took of her when I finally was able to get her to go down for a nap on Easter. (Actually, it was me throwing her in her crib and letting her cry for 10 minutes…and then she was OUT.) Please take note of the arm around the baby and the head on her blanket. The second is an action shot…last night she was “feeding” her baby. She’d grab this random plastic baby bottle that came with one of her babies, take her blanket and go sit in her new fab-u-lo-so rocking chair. Then she’d feed the baby and when we’d ask if it was nite-nite time, she’d cover her with the blanket. JUST LIKE I DO TO HER. Super cute. And then she’d get bored, get down, wander around the living room, and then start the process all over again. I’ve also documented part of the amazing cutenesshere, because I was smart enough to grab my Flip. Yay me!!
I’ve also documented part of the amazing cuteness