I just looked back in the archives to see how much I told you about Carmi when we got her. Surprisingly little. Actually, not that surprising, because that post is four days before my first date with Clay. I didn't have much time for blogging, what with all late night phone talking going on. How sly am I, with my "I'm in love" declaration? Heh.

Well, the background on Carmi is that my mom found her online. She was at a shelter across town, and we'd been searching for the right dog for awhile, so we headed over to see her. It was nearly closing time when we got there, but when the staff heard we wanted to see Carmelita, they hustled us off to meet her. It seems she'd been listed as a pit bull cross, and so she'd lingered there for nine months, and her time was almost up. They were really hoping she would find a home in time. A patient shelter, but not a no-kill shelter, you see.

Having been locked up so long, Carmi was a little stunned. We took her out to an open space to try to get a sense of her. She stood and stared at us, not seeming to understand what we wanted. I had to take Raphael in for a trip to the bathroom, leaving the other boys and my mom outside with Carmi. When I came back, Max had managed to make contact with her, and he was throwing a ball for her to fetch. 

We took her home (obviously), and she loved us completely and irrevocably. At first, she was awfully nervous whenever we left the house. She would sneak into the van in the chaos as I was loading the boys in. More than once I glanced in the rear view mirror, preparing to back out of the garage, to see her sitting there, trying hard to look like one of the kids. And looking guilty. She always looked sorry.

I'd haul her out of the car and into the house and she'd leap up into the front window and watch us drive away, quivering with anxiety. And looking sorry. For a few weeks, I was worried that she'd never really know that she was finally safe.

It took a long time for her to believe that she was home for good. She fell into the midst of the boys like she was created for them. Whenever they barrelled through the house, racing from point A to point B, she would leap to her feet and run after them. And even though she was clearly a herding dog, and tending to her pack of boys, she never nipped at them, but tapped them gently on the sides of their legs with her nose. 

She was love. Pure love, in a cloud of dog hair. 

But of course "safe" isn't a permanent condition, and love doesn't stop the years from stealing what they will. Carmi got more and more stiff with arthritis, and her wonky liver meant the vet couldn't prescribe her the good drugs for the pain. She became more and more confused, wandering aimlessly through the same rooms for hours, in and out the door, looking lost. Lost and sorry. She ate less and less, and her bones pressed at her skin. Sometimes she just fell down, and sometimes she couldn't get back up without help. She pooped in the house every day, and didn't even know she was doing it.

How do you decide to let a good dog go? I agonized, sought advice, and cried for days. My sister-in-law suggested we ask ourselves if Carmi could still do her five best things ever, and if she would recover and be able to again. And obviously, no. She couldn't go on walks, or fetch balls, or chase squirrels. She couldn't even sit comfortably enough to rest her chin on a friendly knee. Clay pointed out that she didn't even wag her tail anymore, so fragile was her balance. 

She was so tired.

I will never, ever again underestimate how difficult a decision it is to put your animal to sleep. I am not exaggerating when I say that I cried for days. But on Monday Carmi's vet came to the house. Raphael waited upstairs, not ready to see something so hard. Sophia went to the park with Amma. And Clay, Tre, Max, and I huddled around Carmi and said goodbye. It was a transcendentally sad moment. 

I don't question if it was the right choice, I just wish we didn't have to make it. I wish I could hear her shake her head and jangle her collar again. I miss her every day. Every dog picture I see on Facebook makes me cry.

But I think about her there, surrounded by her people. Each of us had a hand on her, and she gazed up at us, grinning (don't even try to tell me dogs don't smile, just don't). She trusted us, completely, and we did our solid best to live up to that trust. We loved her. 

And she didn't look sorry.

Last weekend I drove down to New Mexico to pick up Raphael from camp. Thank God, camp is over for another year, and everyone is home now. That trip is brutal, especially when you drive there and back in one day, like I usually do. 

On this last trip, Tre came along to help me with the driving and to see his friends at camp. It was really nice having him along, even though he plays music at entirely unreasonable decibels. At one point I was silently weathering all the noise in the passenger seat when a song I actually know came on. I perked up and listened for a moment to the lyrics.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go

"Is this Green Day?" I asked. He nodded, mildly impressed. Psssht. Song's nearly as old as he is. Good Riddence, I think it's called. Doesn't sound to me like an unaffectionate sendoff.

So make the best of this test, and don't ask why
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right.
I hope you had the time of your life.

So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf of good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it's worth it was worth all the while

It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right. 
I hope you had the time of your life. 

Of course this is exactly where my mind is these days. Tre is not going to Turkey this year, it turns out, but he is off to Arizona in just a few weeks. Today is his 19th birthday, a number that takes my breath away. 

I keep remembering when I was pregnant with him. He was…an unexpected blessing, and I was terrified. I remember coming home from my baby shower, sitting in my living room and staring at my new baby swing. This is really happening, I thought, this baby is really coming to live here. And it's bringing FURNITURE. 

And then I cried some more.

I'm glad I didn't know then how fast it would go. It's for the best that I didn't realize how soon I would be loading furniture into a van and driving him to his new home. If I'd realized how soon these years would be over and how much I would miss him, well. I don't think I would have ever stopped crying.

Last week the kids and I went to the zoo. We have always gone to the zoo, and I could hardly see the exhibits before me, for the layered scenes of years past. Here's the prehistoric looking turtle, floating in murky water. I believe that for each of the past 19 years at least one of my children has left a handprint on that glass, leaned in to watch it propel itself lazily past. Here's the gorilla statue that all of my children have climbed on as babies. I swear I can see all of them, shadows hanging off the bronze gorilla, like some multi-species version of a storyteller doll.

When that song came on in the car, on the way to New Mexico, it didn't take very many lines to start me crying. Tre glanced at me, then shook his head.

"Are you crying? REALLY?"

Ah, my boy. Some things change…

…while some things never do.

 

Between sickness (Sophia is now on her THIRD antibiotic, shoot me please) and trips to New Mexico to take the kids to camp (Max is now home and Raphi is now gone), I have never slept ever. I am made entirely of sleep deprivation. When my head hits a pillow, I get so excited I almost can't sleep.

That's not true. I sleep. 

Last night, that's exactly what I was doing. I had gotten myself to bed at a lovely hour, and fully intended to stay there until the morning had lost its sting. That third antibiotic seems to have been the charm for Sophia, and she doesn't cough that much anymore at night and almost never throws up, so I planned to actually sleep right through. It was going to be gooooood. My mouth sort of watered as I shoved my feet between the cool, lovely sheets. 

About four in the morning I heard our cat Melody thundering around the room, leaping and running and scrabbling across the floor. She has this stuffed blue monkey that she attacks in a fierce routine that Max calls Monkey Death Battle, and that's what I figured she was doing. That's fine, as long as she doesn't bring it onto the bed, and she was rampaging around on the floor. I relaxed back toward sleep. 

Then Melody jumped up on the foot of my bed. And then she started scrabbling around by my feet. She was so active that I lifted my head to glare at her. When I looked at her, she looked back at me.

When she looked back at me, she lost hold of the mouse she was fighting with.

And in a flash, a strobe light length of time, an unbelievably quick moment, that mouse scurried away from my cat, the killing machine. It ran away from her and up the length of the bed and over my shoulder. 

My own, personal shoulder. 

I clapped my hand to my shoulder in an automatic reaction, and for just a moment its soft, warm body wriggled between my palm and the very top of my shoulder. And then it scrabbled free and slipped over the top of the mattress and was gone. 

Except not gone. Under my bed.

I leapt to my feet and shrieked helpfully at Clay, "IT WAS A MOUSE IT WAS A MOUSE IT WAS A MOUSE SHE HAD A MOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUSEEEE."

He jumped out of bed too, because that's just what you do when your beloved is gibbering in the dark at 4 AM. I told him the story (a couple of times, because of the "dead sleep"/"alert and concerned" transition time). He peered over the top of the mattress, moved the curtains around a little, then looked at me.

"Are you sure. Did you SEE the mouse?"

And friends, it is a testimony to my deep and abiding love for that man that I did not kill him where he stood. Deep love. Very deep.

After it was determined that there was no longer a mouse in our bed, we returned to sleeping. Actually, Clay returned to sleep. I lay rigid and still, listening for mouse-like sounds. When his alarm went off at 5:30, he glanced over to find me staring at him, wide-eyed. He was surpised to see that I was letting Melody sleep on my chest, but I figured that she seemed to CATCH the mice and the take them ELSEWHERE, so damn straight I was sleeping with the cat. That was the only safe place to be.

Somewhat predictably, I was so tired today that when I put the sheets in the washer (because OF COURSE I put the sheets in the washer. My washer has a "sanitize setting. DUH.), I accidentally put my pillow in too. I am a sparkling conversationalist today. And a pretty pretty princess.

And I'm sleeping under my dumb cat tonight, too. 

I had to go back and re read what I'd shared with you about the Cough That Will Never Die, because I have now never slept and my brain is dribbling out my ears.

Seriously. I probably shouldn't be allowed to drive.

Okay. The Cough. Max had The Cough, and was put on antibiotics. Normally I'm heavy on the antibiotic avoidance. The doctors hands me a prescription, and I say "um…maybe we'll wait a few days and see?" It actually kind of drives the kids' pediatrician nuts. We have an understanding. His part of the understanding is that I'm annoying. I can live with that.

But this time, when the doctor handed me the prescription, I was in a small panic about it possibly being whooping cough, so I filled that puppy and Max took the first dose in the car on the way home. And lo, he felt better! Right away! It was a Z-pack, which sounds all snappy and effective, doesn't it?

Then Sophia got sick, and we toddled back to the doctor's office, and left with an antibiotic prescription. Not the same one Max got, but whatevs, am I right?

No, I am not right. Because Sophia's antibiotics didn't work. She just kept not getting better. Then she spiked a fever. Then she got worse. BACK to the doctor. Apparently this is probably mycoplasma? Which is often responsible for pneumonia? And does not feel the least bit threatened by the antibiotic Sophia got, but is wiped out by a Z-pack?

So now she's on the stuff, and then Raphael got so suddenly sick that I took him into the doctor during their SUNDAY office hours (the doc on call showed us a picture his wife texted him while he was examining Raphi, of his kids at the pool without him. Nice), and now he's on the mighty Z-pack too. My dad's on the same stuff. Tre is coughing, but swears he's fine. Someone has been coughing and/or throwing up all night for the last…thousand years, I think.

And within the course of a week and a half, I am entirely converted from someone who would rather avoid antibiotics at all costs, to someone who would really like to pick up an extra strength 25-dose super Z pack at Costco, and just dose everyone I know. Maybe make a room mister? Antibiotics for everyone!

And that, my friends, is what a couple of weeks of constantly interrupted sleep will do for you. 

Tre went to his recently former high school today, to obtain an electronic copy of his transcript. He was irritated that he had to drive all the way over there, that the office staff couldn't just get him a copy when he called.

"Well, to be fair," I said, "most people aren't requesting copies of their transcripts right now. Most people are done applying to colleges."

"Yeah, I guess that's true," he grudgingly allowed.

And why, you may wonder, isn't Tre done applying to colleges? Tre has been accepted, granted a scholarship, signed up for a dorm room and scheduled to arrive in two weeks for orientation at ASU. Why would he be applying to colleges?

Because Tre is very seriously considering going to college in Turkey. 

I told a friend of mine about it today, a fellow mom whose son is a few years younger than Tre and was also on the (World class) robotics team this year. She sucked in her breath and then sat silent for a moment.

"Are you going to LET him DO THAT?" she finally said.

"I…don't have to let him. He's doing it." I answered. 

I've gotten this reaction several times. Is that wise? people ask. Right NOW? You don't MIND?

I think about their questions as Tre works his way through paperwork. Is it wise? I don't know. I don't think that's as easy a question to answer as you might think. Is he statistically more likely to be in mortal danger in Turkey? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. I don't know, and neither do you. But I've never trusted statistics to protect my children anyhow.

Right now? Yes, now is when he's going to college. Right now. The days slip past us and this summer, already not-new, is all I have left of his childhood. Right now. Do not think I'm under reacting. Don't imagine you know what happens in my heart when I realize all I have left are weeks. A handful of days. I am not crying every day, or even most days, but my eyes are never dry. Right now. The finish line is in sight. Now. 

I don't mind? Oh, I mind. I mind it all. But I also feel a surreal peace, for now. This is actually not my decision. I am a consultant, but this is his own life. I mind, but the only thing worse would be for it to be up to me. I want him to make the right choices, but even more I want him to make his own choices. 

I don't know what's going to happen. Tonight, the sun has gone down and the heat slipped out of the sky, and the air breathing in through the window is soft and cool. I can hear Tre downstairs, rustling around. He doesn't have to work in the morning, so I suppose he'll stay up too late, then sleep in ridiculously long in the morning. I listen to the sound of him. I don't tell him to go to bed, but it's not because I don't care. 

I care. 

So remember the cough Max had? Well, it wasn't whooping cough. You knew that, right? Max was trundled off to camp, and all was well.

Except of course, Sophia has the same not-whooping-cough, and please kill me now. Because the cough is now causing her to gag. And throw up. She's not that adept at throwing up, and she doesn't like it (go figure), so she tends to clap her hand to her mouth, causing a spew-out-the edges reaction. And then she offers me a handful of vomit. No. No,thank you. I'll have none.

Or she coughs in her sleep. And gags. And throws up. But doesn't wake up. So I hear her from the other room, and come flying to her bedside to find her snoozing in a puddle of puke. And she does not appreciate clean up.

All I really do these days is laundry. Except when it's time to sleep, and then all I do is spring out of bed at the slightest rustle of a cough, shoving towels, bowls, and fervent prayers at my sleeping girlchild. It got so bad that I took her into the doctor's office, and let them put her on antibiotics. She's been on the drugs for three full days now, and she responded tonight by…spiking a 102 degree fever and falling asleep on the couch in the middle of the afternoon. What GOOD is it, resorting to the Devil Antibiotic, if it's not even going to HELP? 

So that's my story these days! I'm sorry to subject you to it. What's up with you? How many times can you wash a down pillow (The Comfy Pillow) before it disintegrates? Let's share.

This week has been pretty relaxed. We needed it, after the wall-to-wall business of last week. Yikes. I tend to think of this sort of week as being "regular summer days" even though not much of summer is very much like this. This weekend we're taking Max to camp, he'll be gone for two weeks, then we take Raphael down for two weeks. Run run run. 

So anyhow, this week has been fairly chill.

Until Max stopped breathing.

Early this morning, about 1:30, he staggered into our room and flipped on the light. When that didn't wake us, he pounded his hand on my desk, so I leapt out of bed and ran over to him. He was gasping for air, eyes huge. The breath he managed to pull in whistled in his throat.

Clay ushered him over to the sink, because it looked like he was trying to throw up. He stood there, gagged and gasped, hunched over the sink. I patted his back helpfully, thinking things like "This will stop any second. This has to stop. This will stop." and "Clay could probably give him a tracheotomy if he had to. I'm just betting that's something he could do."

And then I got hot all over, and everything went black and white checkerboard, so I decided to sit down on the floor, and help that way.

Max threw up a little. Gasped a little. And then…he could breathe. 

He could breathe. 

I sat on the floor and blinked up at him as he spit in the sink and breathed. I asked both Clay and Max later how long they thought the episode lasted. Clay guessed two to four minutes. Max said a year. It was somewhere around in that general vicinity.

He's had a cough, you see. For a couple of weeks at least, this awful cough that's been getting better. Now Raphi and Sophia have it too, but other than the hacking cough, it hasn't been that bad. No fever, no other symptoms at all. Just an annoying cough that makes our house sound like a TB ward at night. But last night, Max started coughing and his throat decided to contribute to the proceedings by locking down.

So as you can imagine, we toddled off to the doctor's office today. Doctor looked in his throat, listened to his lungs, had us tell her the story a couple of times, then looked at me and said, "Well. I think we need to have him tested for whooping cough."

Did you catch the part, earlier, about him leaving for camp this weekend? Yeah. Not so much, if he's got whooping cough. Public health officials are Very Serious about that. He already started antibiotics, so even if it is whooping cough, he'll be good to go by tuesday, but the director of the camp is kind of an…um…heartless wench, and I don't know if she'll let him come. And yes, "heartless wench" is the most polite way to describe her I could come up with. Yes, it was.

Anyhow, the doctor sent us off to Children's Hospital for a whooping cough test. We walked in the door and told the nice lady behind the desk what we were there for, and she shrank back, just a tiny little bit. "Okay!" she said, just a little too brightly, "See those yellow face masks in that box right there? Why don't we have him put one one – and how about Mom puts one on too? GREAT! And I'm going to put one on! FABULOUS!"

They hustled us back to a room, where a fully gowned respiratory therapist came in to do the test. This turns out to be a nasal swab, which Max assures me is actually more like a nasal stabbing. If it does turn out to be whooping cough, we'll be quarantined, and EVERYONE gets to go in for testing and to have antibiotics. 

I would like to apologize in advance, if it is whooping cough, to all the people who have been in our house in the last few weeks. And the people they've seen since. So. I'm sorry to the entire state of Colorado. And Georgia. Heh. And Arizona. And Washington. Oh lord. And North Dakota. Feeling a little woozy again.

Fun fact: one of the shots Sophia got on Monday? Was for whooping cough! HA! HA HA! So. That was good.

I don't really mind about the rest of the nonsense that comes along with a whooping cough diagnosis, but I don't want Max to miss camp. I really really don't. Bah. Out of my hands. Also, I would like him to be able to breathe. At all times.

So to sum up: substantially older today than yesterday. Feeling guilty about all the people who have been coughed on by my children over the last few weeks. Really really really hoping it's not whooping cough.

 *UPDATED!!!!*

IT'S NOT WHOOPING COUGH! I REPEAT: NOT WHOOPING COUGH!! 

WOOT WOOOT!!!

I just read something on a cooking website that urged me to transform my cocktails with smoked ice, and now I'm pretty sure the internet is just making fun of me. 

Smoked ice. That's not a thing.

Sophia had a checkup yesterday, and you'll be pleased to know that although she's holding steady at the 8th percentile, she has SOARED all the way up to the 10th percentile in height. I know! She's so big! For a garden gnome or something!

She also got one shot in each leg, which she responded to with steely silence. If I hadn't been holding her, I wouldn't have felt the frisson run through her. She had brought Max along as her security object, and she clutched his hand and stared at the nurse as though she were possibly plotting the demise of her entire village. It was pretty awesome. 

Then her leg started to ache, so she dragged Mom's old orthopedic boot out and wore it all afternoon. I fail to see how a large, plastic boot that comes up to her upper thigh and weighs nearly as much as she does could be soothing to a sore leg, but I'm assured that I am wrong, and it helps.

Also, she needs to gain another 4 pounds before she can be moved out of the car seat and into a booster. She is in despair about this, because on our scale at home, she weighed in a full pound heavier. When the nurse mentioned that she was only four pounds away, she whipped around to me and whisper/shrieked, "FOUR? FOUR POUNDS?"

Heads will roll. Maybe next time she should wear the boot for weigh in!

However, the scale fiasco can only work in my favor, because I assume that means our home scale is hopelessly wonky, and when I work out the complicated equation to figure out what I actually weigh, it turns out I must be a size four. My pants are just wrong, but that's because they don't know math. 

IS smoked ice a thing? Would you put it in YOUR drink? 

Raphael buzzed his green hair off, and is left with the merest shadow of green. In certain lights, he looks a little like he's molding. 

Also, he is now 13. He turned 13 on Friday the 13th, under a full moon. I now have three teen aged sons in the house. Insert joke about our food bills here. 

And that's WITHOUT the smoked ice.

Mir and her family were here this weekend. Her whole family, staying in my house with almost my whole family (Tre came home from Turkey Monday night, and they left Tuesday morning). It was, as you can imagine, a house chock-ful! Full of people, full of noise, full of love. Full of cups. We all appear to be heavy drinkers, even if it is of the stay-hydrated sort of heavy drinkers. It was lovely. 

At one point Mir and I mused for a few minutes about blogging, and what makes it so very difficult to DO these days. Part of it, we agreed, was having teens with bigger issues that just aren't as easy to talk about as potty training. Some if it isn't for sharing here at all. And part of it is the fact that those teens never ever ever go to bed (and also never ever ever get up in the morning – I'll let you figure out how that works), and so the hallowed quiet evening writing time is gone, baby, gone. 

Mostly, I think it's that life is so noisy. So many people, so much stuff to do. It's hard to get a moment to think about it all, as it whips past, much less compose a post about it. If once my life consisted of a rapid paced series of vignettes, now it comes at me like I'm trying to take a sip out of a fire hose. 

And then, all of a sudden, Mir and her people left this morning. My kids and I are bereft, wandering around the dishevelled house and being fractious with each other. Tre is mostly still jet lagged. Oh, and he works at 6 AM tomorrow, which is an excellent plan.

To top it all off, tonight Clay is working, because he was on call and everything he works with responded by breaking. It's almost 11 PM, haven't seen him since 6 AM, and I don't know when I will. Despite the fact that he's out there, working relentlessly, and I'm here at home, with all the comforts therein, this still leaves me feeling miserable and abandoned. I mean, after all, I don't really like any of the ice cream in the house. The struggle is real.

There is so much happening in my life right now. Raphael turns 13 on Friday. And on the same day Clay and I will be getting married in the Church so I can finally get all Catholic and stuff. Tre is seriously considering going to college in Turkey, which I am entirely sanguine about. As one would expect. Sweet Carmi is working on dying, which is cosmically unfair. I moved the new baby chicks (who are now not-so-new adolescent chickens) outside today, and I'm almost entirely certain they will be fine, which turns out not to be the same thing as actually entirely certain. 

What I'm saying is that my head is buzzing with things to think about, things to say. And for once, the house is conspicuously quiet (although Max did just come downstairs. AGAIN). Sometimes I feel like I have much to say, and no time to say it. And then other times, in an unexpected lull, I step up to the microphone here, and find I hardly know what to say. Life is funny.

I miss my own voice though. I think I'll keep trying. Again.

(On a not-so-side note – is anyone interested in me finishing the series about how Clay and I fell in love?)

Tonight was Raphael's first baseball game of the season. And at the first game of the season, my boy had two RBIs, a single, and a triple.

Oh, and he got the first game ball.

And yes, his hair is green. 

And yes, I approve.

Because he's just awesome.