Nico rolled over back to front. Film at 11.

Friends,

Our cat, Puck, is one of the sweetest animals I've ever known. He's about 8 years old, declawed, healthy, and a strong 18 lbs.

I really don't like cats much. I've never been into the idea of caring for an animal whose idea of love is to avoid me and go his own separate way. I understand why there are cat people in the world and what they get out of such a pet, but I like furry pets that love me back. Puck does. He likes nothing better than to lay on you on the couch or the bed. He can cuddle for hours, get up and have a quick snack, and hurry back for more. I have never liked a cat the way I like Puck.

Alas, he's not adapting well to life with a baby. It's been 5 months now, and he's just not happy. He wants to be the baby - and he's not. We often don't have room for him on us because we're holding the baby. We are certainly not able to shower him with the love he deserves.

So this is a call for help, one very difficult to make, but ... do you want a cat? We love him far too much to give him to a stranger, but before we move to Chicago, we'd like to find him a loving home.

( Some Pictures )

A future colleague at my future institution has offered to let us use his condo when we go apartment hunting this weekend (well, Sunday through Tuesday). He's in Europe.

I feel welcomed and, well, collegial or something.

Yay.

Yesterday, Nico started to fuss a little while standing on my lap, so I lifted him up in the air, as I often to, to calm the flailing of the limbs. Out from his mouth came a river of warm, white, goo, all over my face and chest. It was genuinely disquieting. Fortunately, Shannon was there to take the boy and let me go clean up.

More importantly, yesterday started at 5:15 A.M. Shannon got up and fed him, and we all got up an hour later with the mission of keeping Nicholas awake and not feeding him any more. We set off for Chidren's Hospital a little around 7:30, with Shannon sitting in the back seat with the nigh-impossible task of keeping the boy from sleeping in the car. She poked, she played, she opened the window, she poked and played some more, and more or less kept him from getting any rest. Once at the hospital, the plan was to lightly sedate him, attach sensors to his brain, and truly test his hearing.

( Read more... )

So the upshot is pretty good news. He probably has some congestion in his ears. His basic equipment (and brain) are dealing with sounds just fine. We'll need to get tubes, likely, or loaner hearing aids (to turn up the gain a little) for a few months as his ears grow, because we don't want to let things be too muffled for him as we move towards speech. He can hear us when we speak to him, but things aren't going to be all that clear, especially quieter sounds.

Everyone we meet in the hearing business praises our Ear-Nose-Throat doctor to the skies, especially as a doctor for children, so hooray for that. We'll just follow his recommendation (we like him too. And he's from Chicago, I think, so should have a good reference for us).

In other news, my son has found his toes (they are so neat!) and his daddy's mouth. When I hold him on my chest and talk, he reaches his upper hand up to play with my lips and beard, staring wonderously at them, and trying to figure it all out.

I've been thinking a lot about development, disability, and delay. A few months ago I wrote that although I frequently tell people (healthcare administrators, disability services in Chicago, and other professional strangers) that I have a disabled child, I have never seen it. I've never seen my child fail to do something that he should able to do, I've never seen the barriers that his "syndrome" will place in front of him.

And maybe it's only because I am watching for it so intently, so that I can learn what difficulties he'll encounter and try to help him, but I think I do see it now.

( Read more... )

I told Shannon that the last four months have been the happiest of my life, and this is essentially true. I've been exhausted, stressed, filled with anxiety about the future, and all that. But there is this happiness down at the core that is somehow ... more significant? stronger? true-er? - I'm not sure of the right word ... than anything I've felt before. I've been in love, but somehow love for Shannon plus love for Nico is really different. Love for family, my family, me (grunt) pater familias. It's not patriarchal, but I like it that I can feed my family, provide for it. And when Nicholas smiles at me, which he does 30-50 times a day, that deep happiness just swells to the fore.

But there's fear and sadness too. ( Cut for length and discussion of abortion )

We've uploaded a large array of recent pictures of Nico, of which my favorite series is from yesterday, when we took of his clothes and hung out on a blanket outside.

( Cut because posting pictures without cut tags is rude! )

As always, you can see the album here.

NY Times on Testing for Down Syndrome and it's consequences.

An interesting article and a subject I plan to write about down the road. This issue of how you break the news is pretty critical. Once, as Michael Berube wrote in his book, parents were told they had, or were going to have, a "mongoloid idiot" who would never recognize their parents, have an IQ of 20 or so, and would probably die by age 5. We've come a long way.

George Will wants to stop the test because, in his conservative reactionay mode, he wants to deny people information. He doesn't trust people.

I think, in my rosy liberal way, that people need to be educated and then allowed to make whatever choice they think is best, and that how we educate people is critical.

I do think the premise that programs for people with Down Syndrome will vanish if this test is made routine for women under 35 is flawed. Yes, rate of increase may slow, but the population won't vanish and hundreds of babies, at least (instead of the 5500) will still be born with the condition every year.

Anyway, it's complex. I look forward to seeing your comments.

In August 2000, I went to Turkey for about 3 weeks. It was my honeymoon for my first marriage and was, frankly, a pretty grand time. There was much to see in Istanbul, then a little (2-day) bout of indigestion followed by a long drive from the city to Ephesus (we went by way of Ankara because the person who rented us the car said the roads were better and it would be easier, but it was about 5 additional hours). We spent the night in Sart, the site of the ancient city Sardis, capital of the kingdom of Lydia, then drove the short trek to Seljuk and found a pension (European for very cheap hotel, this one was 8$ a day, no hot water). After a break, the owner of the pension drove us, two blond American girls, and a red-headed American guy to Ephesus, one of the great ruins of the world. Once a city of 250,000, the Mediterranean retreated and the city shrunk. It was never pillaged, just forgotton, and then largely excavated in the 20th century. Afterwards, we were taken to a tourist site where one sat in the shade (it was very hot in August in the summer) and drank juice and ate some flatbread that a "peasant woman" made. It was tasty, but very touristy.

During the wandering through the city we hung out with Erik, the red-headed guy. He was on his way back from a Peace Corps tour-of-duty in Armenia and was spending a few weeks in Turkey before returning home. He was a very interesting person and the three of us had a really nice time seeing this astounding site. After the van ride back to Seljuq, we had been warned that every Pension owner also owns a carpet store and would try to bully us into the store and get us to buy something (in gratitude for the "free" ride to Ephesus, or something). Thankfully, when the owner parked outside the carpet shop, he was so focused on the blond girls that Erik, Lilah, and I just wandered off in a different direction and escaped! We found a really nice lunch somewhere in the city, mostly the "meza" appetizers for which Turkish cuisine is justifiably famous. Lilah and I bought him lunch, because he was running on pennies and we were flush with the cash given to us at his wedding.

So I tell you this story because ( Read more... )