Nailed it! #3

MRIs are pretty interesting devices. Our body contains a lot of hydrogen atoms which all have their own tiny magnetic field. These fields are pretty random in the body and cancel each other out, which is why you're not just a big walking magnet. However, if you zap your body with a really really strong magnetic field for just a fraction of a second, that's the M in MRI, the magnet, you can get some of them to line up in the same direction. When you release the field, they wobble back to the position they were in before, that's the R in MRI, resonance. You can actually measure this wobbling if you have the right machine (which is what a MRI is) and you can map it all out and make really really detailed pictures of the insides of a body, which is the I, imaging.

Movie night. They really missed him.

MRI is a pretty amazing technology, but it has three downsides. The first is that you have to slide into a tube, which freaks some people out. The second is the noise generated by switching the magnetic field on and off at a high frequency. It's loud. Ear plug's needed loud. The third is that you have to stay very very still while you're being measured so the images aren't blurry. These last two are a bit of an issue when you're a five year old who doesn't like loud noises or holding still. I'm pretty sure that an image of his whole body would have been really blurry except for the one foot that was strapped to the table. That was the important foot, and they were happy with the images, so they finally let us go back to the room and start the medicine.
The medicine was IV antibiotics every 6 or 8 hours, depending on which of the two was next. This means that they started together. Then in 6 hours there was another dose. Then 2 hours after that, at 8 hours, another. Then at 12 hours the second dose of the first and then at 16 the second dose of the second and then at 18 the third dose of the first and then at 24 both of them together again. Couple that with measuring vitals every four hours, and then try to find a gap in that schedule for sleep.
Three nights of that, and not a whole lot of sleep. After the first night I gave up trying to sleep in the recliner and just climbed into bed with my son. He's a hard boy to sleep next to because he flops like a fish, but it turns out I'd rather sleep next to a live salmon than in a recliner. Eventually three days passed, and honestly I could tell stories about every one of them, but in the name of brevity I'll skip to the last one.
We were woken at 5:30 on the last morning by a large stern woman. She needed blood and she was in no mood to discuss anything about it. Ninety seconds out of a dead sleep and she had two vials of blood in her bag. She swept out of the room leaving behind her a cloud of perfume scented confusion and a small weeping boy. It was.....traumatic. After that we waited. Another MRI was needed to show that the infection that had started in the joint of the big toe had gone away before release was possible. It was scheduled for 8:00 am, so of course it didn't happen until about 2:00. My wife relieved me from my position at the hospital and brought the boy home at the end of the day. By that time he had become so acclimated to life in a medical facility that he fell asleep during the second MRI, loud noises and all.
Now we're a few days into a week of oral antibiotics and still living under the threat that the infection will return and send us back to the hospital. We had a bit of a scare yesterday when his foot got very very sore and started to get red. I actually brought him back to the hospital, but by the time we had waited for an hour things started to feel better. All we can figure is that he had aggravated the toe running around at preschool. We were able to able to walk out of the hospital before ever seeing a doctor or even officially checking in thanks to the absurdly long wait times in the ER. 
This whole thing has been quite an adventure, one that I'm hoping we don't have to repeat any time soon. I have learned a few things though. Nails are dirty, but shoes are dirtier. If you step on a nail, do it barefoot, you'll be a lot better off. If you're sent to see a specific doctor, try really hard to see that doctor and not get caught in the web of admissions and bureaucracy that exists in the hospital. If you have to go to the emergency room for anything, bring a snack and something to do. If it's not serious enough that you need an ambulance to get there, you're going to wait. And wait. And wait. You can spare the extra two minutes it will take to make your wait bearable.
I hope some of you enjoyed the telling of this story. Even though it took me three days to type, it's still the short version. Catch me in real life sometime and pull up a chair and I'll tell you the rest.

Nailed it! #2

Yesterday the story that began with stepping on a nail left off with a short drive over to the hospital. When I say short, I mean really short, it's less than a mile away. We could have walked if the whole reason for our visit in the first place wasn't foot pain. It was, we drove, and we made it.
This hospital, like many, is confusing. I suspect that they do this on purpose, but I'm still not exactly sure what that purpose it. Perhaps it's to keep people from escaping? I don't really know, but unsurprisingly I couldn't figure out where to go. When I left the pediatrician's office I was sent with a note basically giving me a prescription to head right to the children's ward to meet with the doctor that already knew we were coming. Not being able to figure out where to go, I asked a nice person who sent me to admissions. Ok, I can dig it, my son needs to be admitted, so off I head to admissions.
I showed my handy dandy get into the hospital free card to admissions and was met with a scowl. The owner of the scowl made a few calls and then sent me to a cheerier person to show my insurance and ID and such. This person received a call that instructed her to send us to emergency. For some reason that's how they wanted to admit us. I put my non ambulatory son on my back and headed to emergency, the one part of the hospital I could find. At emergency I showed my paper to yet another person and explained that I was sent over to go the the children's ward but couldn't find it and I had been sent from admissions to them. They assured me that I was in the right place and that they were the real ones that knew whether there were beds available. Ok, sure. We wait. More paperwork. Triage by a nurse to confirm that he did indeed have a puffy foot with a hole in the bottom. More waiting. A doctor to confirm what the nurse confirmed. More waiting. A nice trip to radiology for a series of x-rays. More waiting. Finally sent back to the back of the emergency area to......wait. After about the third very nice nurse asked us why we were there some phone calls were made and things started to happen. As it turns out, a doctor had been waiting for slightly over four hours in the children's ward for us and she was worried and annoyed. Things started to happen.
A big slightly scary bald guy came and got us next. We had seen him walking around the emergency area and I was starting to wonder if he hadn't been hired as a bouncer. He was wearing scrubs, but he looked far more likely to be the type of guy to put you in an ambulance than take you out of one. He was the nurse assigned to put an IV in my son's arm. If you have a five year old, take a look at their arm. It's skinny. Really skinny. Now imagine that you have to find the tiny little vein in that arm and get an IV in there and do it in such a way that they don't freak out so much that they jerk their arm and undo everything you're trying to do. I did not envy the job of this man, but he was awesome. He talked to my son and calmed him down and drew a little snake head on the elastic tourniquet. I hugged him (my son, not the nurse) and held his arm and witnessed the best IV stab I've ever seen. In, out, taped up and two vials of blood drawn before I could even explain what had happened, which is pretty good because there's no real way to explain to a five year old what's going on in a way they understand. A big scary guy wants to stab you, but only a little bit, and take out some of your blood, but only a little but, and then leave a plastic tube taped to your arm.
It was done, the IV was in and we were almost instantly in a wheel chair and off the the children's ward to get settled down for our next three days of sitting. Except before we could sit, we had to head back out for an MRI.  This is where I'll leave the story for today, a small boy with a big foot on a moving table being slid into a room sized magnetic doughnut.

Nailed it!

On Wednesday I was in the middle of the perfectly choreographed dance of getting the dinner in the oven, getting the kids in the car, picking up my daughter from her after school project, driving home, pulling dinner out of the oven, and serving it, Ta Da!, and my youngest son started screaming outside. I was pretty sure that his brother had done something to him and the noise was headed toward the door so I waited. When he walked inside blood was dripping out of his shoe. That's probably not good, especially since we had to be in the car in four minutes to keep on schedule.

More Legos, stat!

I pulled off his shoe and he told the story. He was following his brother around the back yard (ha! I knew he was at the bottom of this!) and he stepped on a board. The board had a nail poking out of it and the nail ended up through his shoe and into his foot, hence the screaming. Luckily the boy clots like it's his job and by the time I had things washed off the bleeding had stopped. A quick dab of antibiotic ointment and a bandaid and we were in the car only one minute late. If the story ended here it would be a nice little story about wound care and excellent time management skills. You might notice however that there are a LOT more words on the page. We're just getting started.
Like all wounds, good parenting says that this little nail stick should be watched for a few days. My kids have cut there feet a bunch of times, and we bandage and watch and things get better and life goes on. He woke up the next morning saying that his foot still hurt, but things really still looked fine. He insisted that he couldn't walk and we chatted about him going to school anyway. In the end we decided to let him stay home and heal. At about 9:30 my wife called and asked about his foot. She's one of those concerned moms. I had been watching it and reluctantly admitted that it was starting to swell and even more reluctantly agreed that I should call the pediatrician and see if they could get him in to have a look at it. I was torn between knowing that having a doctor look at it was the right thing to do, and my general belief that most things heal if you give them a few days.
At the pediatricians office we were met by our usual super happy doctor asking why we were here. I explained and she looked at his foot. Shortest appointment.....ever. She was out of the room and on the phone with the hospital and the next thing you know we're back in the car and on our way to a more serious medical environment.
It seems that puncture wounds, like those caused by stepping on a nail, are serious business. The nail can shove a bunch of stuff into the hole, but bleeding stops before the body can really flush it back out. The only thing worse than stepping on a nail is stepping on a nail with your shoes on because on the way through the shoe the nail picks up all of the nasty things living in your shoe and shoves them up in the wound. That cute little boy created the perfect storm of circumstances for a multi day medical emergency, and that's what he got.
As this story took three days to play out, it's going to take me three days to tell the story. For now I'll give you the bullet point version so nobody has to worry, and I'll fill in the details later.
-The boy steps on a nail.
-Wound gets all red and puffy.
-Pediatrician stops being cheery, becomes serious and sends us to the hospital.
-Three days on IV antibiotics.
-An x-ray and a couple of MRI's.
-Hospital chairs suck to sleep in.
-Home safe and sound.

Clan

Feast for the whole clan.

I was just sitting around thinking, and it occurred to me that over vacation my kids were able to see four great grandparents, three grandparents, two uncles, three aunts, five cousins and an almost uncountable number of great aunts and great uncles and distant cousins by birth and by marriage. That's pretty cool.

Missing Dinner

When my wife is away from home
Working late or at a meeting
I don't quite put the effort in
to what the kids and I are eating

It's still good food, and tasty too
I pay attention to nutrition
But without my wife to serve it to
It's not the same sort of mission

No four course meal, no pretty food
No fancy candle light
Just hot and brown and tasty
Is all they get tonight

I've made her meals for 13 years
Still here so I say bless her
After all these years and all those meals
I still want to impress her

Racecar

 A photographer by the name of Luke Guillory was at the last rallycross event and took some pictures. I love this one. I'm surprised my daughter can see out of the car.

Problem Solving

Prison.

My wife isn't the complaining type, not even a little bit. When people tell her that she's lucky to have the best husband in the world she tends to agree. She sings the praises of my cooking and my childcare and sometimes my cleaning. Not too much on the cleaning. If she were a glass half empty type of gal she could easily turn those compliments about me around and find things about me to shoot down. I looked at the cup on the floor this morning and contemplated this.
Like all houses we have bugs. Spiders are the creepiest, but at various times of year we have other visitors as well. Right now we have a series of seemingly identical black beetles that will make their way across the living room, from one side to the other, and disappear. I don't know what they're doing or where they're going but they seem to be harmless. My inclination would be to just let them be, but everyone else in the house seems to think that they should be put outside as part of our humane bug removal policy. It's a simple process really. Just place a cup over the bug, place a piece of paper under the cup, and carry the bug outside where it belongs. Generally this job falls to me but sometimes I'm busy and I don't make it all the way through the process. Yesterday my son saw a beetle and demanded that it be trapped. He's five now and I told him I thought it was high time he start trapping his own bugs, but he said it was a daddy job. I was getting everyone ready for school at the time and figured that if I took a second to trap him under a cup then I could just pitch him outside later. The heart of the problem was a bug crawling across the floor. Now there was not a bug crawling across the floor. A large part of me felt that the problem was solved.
Last night my wife came home and eyed the upside down cup in the middle of the floor and shrewdly asked about it. I hastily explained that there was a beetle under it and I'd get it later. Of course I did not get it later. In fact later, after the kids went to bed, we were watching TV and another beetle had the bright idea to crawl across the floor. I got up, and moved the cup, and now I had two beetles trapped. My wife suggested that I put them outside but it was cold and I didn't have a piece of paper at hand and I felt that since I had once again solved the problem immediately at hand I would be fine until the morning. This has turned out to be true. In fact, I haven't quite gotten around to putting them outside even yet. You see, the cup in the middle of the floor hasn't become a problem. When it's time to pick up the living room I imagine it will be, and then I'll solve it.
I do believe that I married well.

Bloody Foot

You come walking up to me
Your foot a bloody red
I ask in horror "What did you do?"
"I don't know" you said

Were you cut by a shell or a rock
Or bit by a bear or a whale?
"I stepped on something sharp" you said
"While running down the trail"

Come here my boy, I'll patch you up
And send you off for fun
But next time be more careful
And watch out where you run

You stop fussing very quick
And ask me on a whim
"Does my giant bleeding foot
Mean that I can't swim?"

Pit Crew

High quality pit crew.

What a fantastic weekend. For the first time ever I was able to bring one of my kids on a racing trip with me, and it was a pretty special one. A few months ago while rallycrossing with the local group I met a really nice guy who usually rallycrosses in Louisiana. He was over playing with us as a way to spread good will and to invite us to come drive with him and the loony rallycrossers from the New Orleans area. An event finally came up that I could attend and I got the OK to bring my oldest daughter.
Most of my racing trips are just day trips. The drives to and from are a couple of hours at most and I'm usually home by bed time. New Orleans is 7 hours away though, and adding 14 hours of drive time to a full day of playing in the dirt was a little beyond what I thought I could do. I talked to my wife and we decided that it would be a super special daddy-daughter weekend if we were to drive to New Orleans and stay overnight in a hotel and then race the next day. We would get a lot of time together to talk without having to fight for attention with three other siblings. That's what we did, and it was great.

Happy girl and a fun weekend.

The only downside to the weekend was the four days of rain leading up to the event. The ground the course was on was muddy and slippery and pretty much un-raceable. The best you could hope for was to make it through the course without getting stuck, which not everyone did. Cars got stuck and cars broke and none of the driving was particularly fun. It was a race weekend, and the racing wasn't great, but the weekend still was. We changed tires together and my daughter was able to ride along with me when it was time for me to make my runs and we had a ton of time to just hang out. We were able to talk cars for the first time ever, which was a pretty cool thing to do. In one weekend she's gone from identifying cars only by color to being able to tell a Mustang from a Camaro and being able to tell you why it's important to tighten lug nuts in a star pattern. Not bad for a ten year old girl who loves sparkly things.
Like I said, it was a great weekend. I'm already checking the race schedule to figure out when we can do it again, and trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to give everyone a turn going on race weekends with daddy when they're all big enough. I can't wait until they can drive.

A Fence for the Fence

Not a whole lot of time to write today. I'm installing a fence for the fence. You see, our dog has now taken to climbing over the fence in the yard. I tried installing electric fence around the part of the fence she was going over but she just moved to a different part. Maintaining that much electric fence is a serious chore so I broke down and bought one of the invisible fence thingies. For the time being is seems to be working. I'm not certain that she quite has a grasp on the concept that she's not supposed to go near the fence but she seems pretty afraid of the gate, so that's a start.
I've included a picture of her sledding with my wife to show that she's not a completely horrible dog. There are times when it seems like a good idea to not give her away. There are days that she's walking a thin line though.

Shooters

Over vacation we visited a variety of houses. During those visits we played with a variety of people and with a variety of toys. One of the very favorite people we visited was my niece, and one of the very favorite toys she played with was the nerf gun. She hadn't had a whole lot of nerf gun experience before this day, but she took to it like a duck to water. Aiming and pulling the trigger were second nature and all she needed to be able to shoot over and over was a willing big person to cock it over and over and over. She found that person in my wife. They had a great time. My wife also showed her how to lick the suction cup on the end of the dart to get it to stick better. My niece decided that if a little spit was good than more was better and we ended up with a pretty slobbery window by the end, but it was worth it. Cock, lick, load, aim, shoot, retrieve. Do it again and again and again. That's what I call a good time.

Christmas Vacation

We just finished our Christmas vacation
It might be the best that we've had,
Whoever decided to call it vacation
Sure wasn't a stay at home dad!

Beyblades and Mavericks

On our recent long drive we saw a lot of stuff. For me, stuff means cars. Lots of cars driving of course, but lots of cars sitting in yards along the road as well. One interesting car that I saw was a Ford Maverick. Probably a '79. It was sitting on blocks with the wheels off, but it looked pretty good. Not many of them around any more so I pointed it out to my wife. She had no idea what it was so I told her about it and what engines it could have had and just what I generally knew about this fairly obscure car. She turned to me and asked: "When are the kids birthdays?" This was a strange question and quite frankly felt like a trap. In truly heroic form I rattled them off and got every one right. Feeling like I'd dodged some sort of mysterious bullet, she then asked: "What years?" I had to admit that I had no idea. Well, I had a vague idea and could have worked it out with some math, but I really didn't know. I did not dodge the bullet after all.

My wife wondered how it was possible that I could remember a full page of information about some fairly obscure car that I'd never even sat in much less owned, and then I couldn't remember my kids own birthdays. It was a fair question. I do not have an answer.
A bit later in the week there was some present opening and a certain young boy tore away some paper to reveal a set of Beyblades. If you don't know (and I didn't) a beyblade is a top. It's a top with a launcher and interchangeable parts that is supposed to battle with other tops for supremacy of something. I'm still not clear what. They're pretty cool tops, but they're just tops. The kids love them. They know what powers they're supposed to have and whether they are offensive tops or defensive tops and the significance of spinning clockwise or counter clockwise. They have beyblade battles. They change out the parts to try and gain and advantage. They talk about them constantly. I finally broke down and asked them if they realized that they were just playing with tops. "They're not just tops daddy, they're beyblades!"
That's when my wife reminded me of the Ford Maverick that she used to trick me into feeling like an inadequate father. To her it was just a car. To her, most cars are just cars. To me they're all individual and special. Maybe beyblades are as awesome as my kids say they are and I just can't see it. I suspect that this isn't the only time this is going to happen. As my kids grow older and become teenagers I'm looking forward to wave after wave of things that I don't get. When that happens, I've just got to remind myself of that old Maverick up on blocks and grumble about 302's and positraction.

Snow

I spent about six hours over the last two days decontaminating my wife's truck. I had to clean off the salt and the cracker crumbs and the dog hair and all of the other debris that we collected on our recent journeys. The real reason I'm telling you all of this is because I'm still not getting any real blog writing done. I do have pictures of children in snow though, and I figure those might be well received. Enjoy.

Inappropriate Shoes

I talked to a lot of people over the holidays that have been reading what I write. I want to take a moment to tell all of you that I really appreciate the nice things you had to say and any not nice things that you kept to yourselves. I enjoy writing and taking pictures and assembling them into something that I think people might like to see. When I hear that people actually like them, it makes me feel good. Thanks to all of you.
I have a lot of thoughts and images from the last two weeks to share, and it's going to take me some time to get it all together. In the mean time I'll leave you with an image of truly inappropriate footwear for the snow. "I don't need boots daddy, I won't go outside." Sure you won't. I did make her go inside after twenty minutes of frolicking and the announcement that her feet had gotten cold enough to stop hurting. No permanent damage I'm happy to report.