DDDT Post: Blood Work

Post Number III from DDDT on our kids:

I always wanted to be tough as a kid. I’m not really sure why. Tough wasn’t a huge deal in my family. Maybe when I was three someone saw me be sort of tough and gave me the right bit of praise at the right moment. Whatever the reason, that was a big value for me when I was little. Not necessarily strong or athletic, just resistant to pain and stoical in the face of danger. Braden would tie me up in the bathtub and instead of crying for Mom like the other kids, I’d calmly work my way out of the knots without springing the line that was set to turn on the bathwater if the victim struggled. Stuff like that.

That characteristic became a little exaggerated in later tellings. I wasn’t ever very tough by the standards of most people in the world. And the contrast with my siblings (of whom, let’s admit it, our older sister was actually the toughest) helped my toughness profile considerably. But whatever my success in staring down pain, it did instill in me an impatience for whining and theatrics when it comes to plain old suffering. I haven’t always been successful in passing these prejudices onto my kids, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Anyway, last week I had to take Rex and Molly to the hospital for some blood work.

They both have some serious food allergies and it was time for an analysis to see if they’re getting better or worse. We scheduled it on a Saturday so Macy wouldn’t have to do it, as I have an easier time restraining screaming children through painful medical stabbings than she does. As we left for the hospital, Lucy came out and told Molly not to be scared, that it’s “just a pinch and then you giggle.” Molly is two and a half. She had no idea what was coming, but she conjured some scenario that would make her giggle. I let her hold onto her fantasy.

“. . . Actually, Molly, it’s much more likely that you’ll scream in terror and pain when the needle enters your arm. But yeah, you might giggle instead.”

At the hospital, Rex, who is seven, volunteered to go first, to show Molly how to be brave when a large hollow needle is stuck in one’s arm. I went to sit in the victim’s chair and hold him in my lap, but he declined, opting to sit there all by himself as an added show of bravery. The phlebotomist jabbed the needle into him and I took in a vicarious sharp breath. Rex, knowing that Molly was watching, minimized his reaction and stared straight ahead while the tube running out of his arm ran dark viscous red. In a few seconds I was holding a cotton swab on the gusher and it was Molly’s turn.

Rex was feeling a little too nervous to stick around for Molly’s turn, so he quietly excused himself. I sat down in the chair and grabbed Molly to pull into my lap. She said “no, Dad, I wanna sit in the chair by myself.” I knew she couldn’t possibly mean that, so I persisted. So did she. But I wasn’t going to let Molly just sit in this big chair all by herself, free to flail around once the needle pierced her chubby arm. We argued to an impasse. She was very firm with me, and it became clear that if we were going to get the blood, I needed to let her win this one. What would possess a toddler to do that? The phlebotomist quietly said “well I’ve never seen this before,” as Molly climbed into the big blue chair by herself and volunteered her forearms across the padded bar.

I sat beside her, a little useless, but with my arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding both her arms for the crisis to come. Having watched Rex, she was fully aware of what was about to happen now. I saw Rex peek his head tensely through the doorway and then withdraw. The lady readied her needle and I grabbed Molly’s head to turn it away from her arm, toward me, so she wouldn’t see the needle sliding into her flesh. She shook me off and stared at her arm. Poke. The metal tube slid into her soft tissue. I tightened my grip. We all waited for the response. Molly kept staring, and I felt a slight flex in her shoulder. That was it.

But we didn’t strike a vein. So the needle probed around in my two year old’s arm. Both Molly and I stared with scientific interest as the metal pivoted around in the hole in her skin, looking for a vein. It took around 30 seconds of feeling around, severing fat and skin, to finally hit a line. Molly didn’t react. Not a word, not a sigh, not a sound. And not a hint of a movement or recoil as she watched the whole grisly process. As the blood slid into the bottle at the end of the line, she exhaled a little laugh– just a tiny giggle. It took a few minutes to fill the bottle, but she sat perfectly still the whole time. Then we put on the band-aid and walked out of the room. Rex had wandered in surprised when he didn’t hear any crying. He and I just sort of exchanged incredulous looks as Molly toddled out under her own power. Rex made me go back and ask if there were any treats for the victims, but there weren’t. Then we walked out of there with two shiny new band-aids. I almost felt a little cheated not to have had a single tear to wipe away, or even a shudder to stabilize.

I don’t know what makes a kid do that. She could have just as easily decided to make a huge painful production of it all, and on a different day she probably would have. But for some unfathomable reason, she decided she wanted to be tough that day. Something made her kick me out of the chair, and made her hold in her breath when she got stuck. I would so love to know what it was that made her do that. But whatever it was, I tried not to overpraise it too much. I love that she’s tough, but I don’t want her to feel like she has to be for me. But still, now I know I got a tough kid. It’s not the most important thing in a kid. But I’ll take it. Especially in a chubby two year old girl.

Tough Guy

DDDT Post: Rahrr

Another DDDT post about one of our kids:


We’ve been having a little problem with Lucy, our boisterous six year old middle child. She has stumbled on the joy of scaring people. Peaceful Sunday afternoons and late weeknights after bedtime are often punctuated by the sounds of a six year old roar, followed by a very girly squeal from seven year old Rex, or an angry jump from Macy. That has led to some intense conversations with Lucy, who has been exhorted in very frank terms to stop with the scaring already. But Lucy doesn’t seem to care. Where Rex is classically stubborn, and Molly is mischievously resistant to parental restrictions, Lucy just sort of flits away from instruction without it entering her head. Her disobedience on this point is not so much a matter of defiance as just the feeling that you’ve never had the opportunity to tell her to stop at a moment when she could actually hear you. So she spends a large part of her time hiding in Rex’s closet, or sneaking in perfect silence up to our bed in the mornings (you can always tell a Milford girl). And also sitting innocently through lectures that she has decided she can’t hear over the din of fairy music playing in her head.

Scaring people seems to run in our family. One of our older nieces went through a scaring phase in which she mercilessly victimized her several younger siblings in contravention of strong parental admonitions. From what I’m told, her reign of terror got so awful that the littler kids had to walk the halls in twos, constantly afraid of what was around every corner. When your kids lose the ability to freely traverse the hallways and other passages of your house, family efficiency declines noticeably, because the mom can no longer send kids to grab this or that from the basement, or tell them to go to bed, etc. Thus, the petty fears of a few little kids become a real family problem. When this issue threatened to effectively shut down the smooth operation of the entire household, they implemented a new rule effective immediatly. The no punching rule that is the basic foundation of all other kid rules in all families was lifted for a period of time, limited to scaring situations. Now there were couples of children roaming frightening halls in terror, but they had their fists clenched, and they were ready to swing. I believe the scaring ended soon after the new punching regime was implemented.

We had our own scaring epidemics growing up in our big, basementy house. My little sister used to be terrified of going down in the basement when she was little. My mom and dad wanted to help push her through that fear, so one night they sent her down to grab something from the storage room (the scariest place in the house, because it was unfinished. Bare concrete is sooo much scarier than drably painted sheetrock.) It took a lot of coaxing and real prep-work to get her ready, and they assigned Kook, five years older but possibly more jumpy than she was, to accompany her down into the underworld. All of which gave me plenty of time to hide in the dark corner at the bottom of the stairs. When the brave fellowship got to the bottom step after several minutes of a one-step-at-a-time descent, I jumped out and scared the living daylights out of them. Eliza crumpled instantly to the ground and melted into disconsolate sobs while her trusty guardian high-tailed it back up the stairs at superhuman speed and disappeared without ever looking back. That left me to enjoy my joke with a weeping, terrified little girl (I still have that image in my head- she was bent over a stair wearing a pale blue nightgown, waiting to be eaten whole by whatever monster controlled the basement). She wasn’t much fun, and I didn’t get near the enjoyment out of that prank as I had expected to. My dad called me upstairs and read me a scripture about people who mistreat little kids getting tied to a millstone and thrown into a river. It was sort of effective.

See, some people just don’t like to get scared. Eliza is still jumpy to this day, possibly because of some childhood trauma. One that none of the rest of us had anything to do with, presumably. And that explains why Macy has campaigned so hard against Lucy’s scaring tear too. She’s never been able to come up with a principled position against scaring, and her attempts to do so convince no one. The real point is the scaring has to stop because it’s so effective on her- it startles her and that makes her mad (just like some people are happy drunks and some are mean drunks, some, like my mom, are giggly-startled, and some, like Macy, are angry-startled. Ten bucks says Eliza is still weepy-startled). I sort of find myself taking Lucy’s side on this one, because I’ve always enjoyed the gratification of watching someone freak out when startled, most of all Macy. This began late one college Friday night on a group date. Several girls had asked out a bunch of us guys, and to avoid getting asked out by one of them, but still be around to watch the awkwardness, my buddy Greg asked Macy out and slithered his way into our plans (his nickname was the Gila Monster, based on a long history of slithering away with other peoples’ girls). We all ended up at the home of one of the girls, which was large enough that the couples wandered around on self-guided tours when we got there. Knowing well enough not to let Macy (unattached but a person of interest to me at the time) hang out in a darkened basement with the Gila Monster, I snuck down there while they were looking around. When they rounded the corner I jumped out and scared them. I still remember the scene of Macy jumping high in the air and landing in sitting position on the ground, convulsing like her legs were being electrocuted. It was really cute. I sort of think she fell for me right there, while simultaneously alerting Greg that she was a little too jumpy for him. It was a win-win.

And that’s why I don’t mind Lucy going around scaring people in our house. Sort of takes me back to those sweet early times of being on group dates with Macy while she was with one of my friends. I guess I’m more of a romantic-startled kind of guy.

DDDT Posts: Hard Work Pays Off

The other day I wrote a post about Lucy on my other blog. I later realized that I had now written a post about each of our kids over there. I want these to end up in our family blog book, so I'm going to repost them here this week. Sorry if these are repeats for you.

Before a program honoring the 7 year-olds at church, we were asked to submit three adjectives that sum up our 7 year-old, Rex. Our brainstorm included possibilities like “driven, focused, one-track, responsible, smart, task-oriented, competitive, busy, athletic, studious, attentive, hard working . . . ” You start to get a sense for Rex’s personality. I think on our final submission we went with two of the above and then threw in a ‘fun-loving’ just to mix it up.

In other words, Rex is an adult. Okay, not a normal adult– he’s one of those hyper-competent, always-in-motion adults. If life is a school, Rex is on scholarship, in the accelerated track. Which is kind of unexpected, given that his parents live more at an enjoyable half-speed than full throttle. As an adult, the high speed individual can be scary and intimidating. But we’ve got some time to figure that out before Rex ever gets to that point. When it’s a little kid though, it’s pretty fun to watch.

Rex doesn’t have a career to focus on, or exams to tear through, so he directs his considerable concentration on more childish endeavors. Two years ago, he took note of my ability to whistle, and he tried it himself. Couldn’t do it. The next day I came in on him practicing whistling.

That’s right, he whistles all during basketball games now.

He asked for a few pointers, which I gave him (having been a whistler of some note in my younger days). Two days later, Rex could whistle. I was pretty blown away. Later, he noticed that his cousin Nate could snap. Rex grilled me about technique and flexed his fingers against his thumbs over and over. It took him two weeks of constant effort, but pretty soon, Rex could snap as well as any adult. We found a sloppily written list of a bunch of his friends’ phone numbers by his bed one night, and he told us he was just trying to get them all memorized. They were memorized a few days later.

The obsessions took a turn for the unsavory when he discovered his friend’s gift for arm-pit flatulence. Rex spent the next week and a half with his arm up his shirt, just getting his reps. I bet he hit 1,000 attempts before liftoff on that one. But he did it, and instantly began teaching all of his cousins (for which my brother in law is still cursing me, for some reason). Now he’s on to advanced simulated stinkering, using the back of his knee as his instrument. It’s pretty amazing to watch.

When Rex was about two, we had a little storybook that told the story of the Three Little Pigs. When the pig with the brick house prevailed against the wolf, all of the pigs agreed together that “Hard Work Pays Off.” That’s been kind of a motto for us in raising our kids, especially Rex. If he ever whines about a project, I’ll say “Rex, hard work . . . “ and he’ll half-heartedly say “. . . pays off.” And now he’s living the motto.

We set up a basketball hoop in our driveway not too long ago. Rex and I go out and shoot hoops together pretty frequently, and usually end with a competitive game of HORSE. At age seven, he’s pushing me. So I usually pull out all the stops and start shooting from long distance, where I know he can’t compete with me. You may think this sounds a little cruel, but you’ve never known what it’s like to lose to Rex. It’s not like just throwing a game to some kid or something. Anyway, after a few easy victories, I noticed that Rex was spending more time on his own out in the driveway. A week or two later, for our next game of HORSE, Rex was ready. I got him on a few straightforward jumpers. Then Rex lined up at an angle behind the backboard and swished it. H for me. He stood behind the base of the standard, eight feet behind the board, threw it high up in the air . . . and swished it. O. He climbed up a slope under the neighbor’s cherry tree and tossed a shot through a fork in the branches. R.

The assassin

He beat me, pretty handily. With a new repertoire of trick shots from out of nowhere. He figured out that he couldn’t beat me straight up, so he just put in the work to master a bunch of shots he knew I couldn’t make. He must have worked on those shots every day. Since then, I’ve upped my game, found a few tricks of my own to stay competitive. But man he makes me work for it. Still, the extra hours shooting with my eyes closed, and through the aspen branches will be worth it. Hard work pays off, right? Rex taught me that.

Fall Fun

Emily and I took the kids for an adventure up north to a really great pumpkin patch. The kids had a blast!

Halloween Fun!

I am so late in posting our Halloween. It was a great year , well with the exception of the rain on Halloween night. Here are some photos of our neighborhood Halloween party, Bonneville's Halloween parade, and our carved pumpkins that Ryan's very nice mission companion helped out with while visiting. It has been a very fun, very busy October.

Rex and Lucy Win Election!