Letters

She does it on her own initiative which I think is simply perfect. I just want her to play and use her imagination and cast broad strokes of gloppy finger paint across the big paper on her easel from Santa, but if she wants to sit down and practice writing letters then I'm all for it. She has a natural interest in the shape of letters. She likes to look at the Waldorphy alphabet books I bought that present letters in works of art: using a painting of a mountain with two peaks to teach the letter M, a river with two forks and a connector stream to teach R, three witches on a broomstick to teach W. For a while she has been writing her name. The S is usually backwards and I used to not say anything about it because she received such joy from the accomplishment I didn't want to ruin the experience with a criticism. But now she has written the whole alphabet, several times, and even a three word sentence once, that I feel like I can be more honest. And so the other day when she told me that they all wrote their names at preschool the other day I asked, "Did you write the S backwards?"
"Yes, I wrote it backwards, wait..no, I wrote it the right way."
I remember writing my name for the first time. I remember sitting at our dining room table with the plastic gold tablecloth in our government house in the valley. I remember the way the letters looked on the sheet of white paper. Same size. Same boxy feel. Four letters. I remember what it felt like to put letters on paper.

Water

Swimming lessons has been a hit this year. Ms Perpetual Motion has conquered her fear of getting her face wet and plunges into the pool, the lake, the shower and the rain, nose first with glee. She graduated from the Pike class and is now an Eel. She wants to swim all the time, even on windy, sunny..yet chilly, early September days at the lake. Normally I would wimp out, requiring heat, deep heat, to go swimming in my old age, but I actually found the cold immersion convenient for keeping myself awake on post-call day so I could actually hang out with my kid.
I noticed at the beginning of the summer she was more content to hang out in the sand, sifting tiny pebbles, mixing sand-pie batter, creating muffin pan after muffin pan of delectable beachy delights. Catching frogs has also been a favorite pastime this summer. She has become quite adept at sneaking up on the green spotted creatures and deftly flicking her wrist and hence the net squarely down on their amphibian shoulders. But since the water-in-the-face feat has come and gone she has come back to the water as her primary source of play at the lake. She wants to swim with someone, preferably an adult who can also launch her into the air so she flops down in the water. She wants to tool around on the big floaty lounger. She swims underwater for a distance of three, four even five feet. She works her skinny fins hard to keep her button nose just above the surface and makes that gasping sound when she comes up out of the water after being completely under.
She was born in the water, surging out with the force of a mighty wave. Now, four years later she has found her welcoming water home again. She says she doesn't want to be astronaut. But I think this summer she has found an otherworld in the under, in and on water and is exploring it to it's fullest splash extent.

Circus

We went to the circus the other night. My favorite part was the Rolling Diamonds, roller skaters on a platform several feet up. T enjoyed the pigs of course, evidenced by our freezer full of pork. He also seemed to notice all the groady details of circus performance like when the performing goats humped a little before their number was over and like when the performing dogs enjoyed a little snack of goat droppings before their number was over. It was like I was at the circus with two kids, a little one who kept saying, "How does she do that?" or "How does he do that?" and a big junior high age one. The finale involved a little too much patriotism for my liking and I think we could have done without the National Anthem in the beginning especially since it seemed to put a girl four rows in front of us into a seizure. The clown medics were right on task though and no, their O2 tank did not shoot out confetti, it really had oxygen in it. Did you know that blue cotton candy turns poop green? I guess I am just as juvenile.





This one is for you weasel.

Spring Tonic

A few weeks ago I had my first dream about residency*. I was in the clinic with three other interns (first year residents) and every other resident in the practice was also in the clinic that day so it was really crowded. The senior residents were sort of enjoying a mild form of hazing by monopolizing the exam rooms with their patients and making it difficult for the interns to get their patients seen. My attending from third year med school rotations was there as well as a few other attendings I'd worked with in the past. They were directing us interns, trying to provide some guidance in the insanely busy clinic. One attending in particular who I have shared my med school mama musings and writings with in the past was even trying to protect us shivering lost little chicks and keep the disorderly senior residents in check. I don't remember details about the patients I saw in my dream but I know I did because the next thing I remember is writing my first prescription. I wrote a script for maple syrup.

*I matched at my first choice family practice residency. I start in June.

Happy Patriots Day

Well, I was living in the South at the time.

Only Once A Year

Happy Spring!!!


If you have rabbit ears that work better than ours you may have already seen this.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=221774

Public Service Announcement to all Parents...don't bring your kid to the Emergency Room

Unless of course your kid turns blue, does not wake up, gushes blood, needs stitches, ingests poison (call poison control first 1-800-222-1222 or on the way), falls several feet, gets hurt 100 or more miles away from your home or does something else that causes your heart to stop. The ER is not a good place to doctor your kid for colds (viruses), influenza, ear infections or chronic low grade things that you could wait to see your regular doctor for. Because the stuff is there they will use it: x-rays, cat scans, other people who are good with needles to stick your kid and draw blood. Why expose your kid to radiation for a cold or flu? And beacuse ER docs are just trying to do a good job in the world of medicine with no follow-up they will defer to antibiotics more often than a family doc or pedi might because they have better contact with you. So your kid might not really need a bacteriacidal agent and still get one. One day down the road they may get a more serious infection and need an antibiotic and it may be harder to find one that works because so many organisms are developing sneaky, witty, dammblasted resistence that is faster than we are because we have overtreated with the magical cillins, mycins and sporins at our disposal. Really, we don't even have to write the scrips anymore, just push a few buttons. I'll just briefly mention the cost thingy. I see a lot of financial waste with kids being treated for really, really, really non-emergent things in the ER. And this is coming from a member of the Green Party and if there was a Socialist Party in this country I would sign up in a tenth of a heartbeat. Single-payer I believe in thou.
I want to reiterate that I am a student and this post has not been evaluated by the AOA or the AMA and nothing I say should be taken as sound medical advice or doctoring know-how.
But this is my opinion. Next time stop and think, do I really need to take my kid to the ER for this? And if you have the luxury of stopping and thinking about it maybe you could just as well wait for your doc's office to be open.