Making a scene in the waiting room

You know those moments where you know you're being a little crazy but you can't -- or don't want to -- stop yourself? I had one, recently, in the waiting room of the pediatric ENT. 

Terza's been having chronic and recurrent ear infections. Like constantly. Basically, as soon as she gets off antibiotics, she gets another ear infection. Since October, it's been non stop. So, finally, we took her to a pediatric ENT, an outstanding one, a superstar. I love this doctor, for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

1. She has the best bedside manner I have ever witnessed, to both kids and grownups
2. She knows her shit, backwards and forwards. 
                                                                     3. She is extremely glamorous

We saw her once and then scheduled a follow-up in a few weeks, and that follow-up is what I reported for one Friday in the not-so-distant past. It turned out to be fortuitous timing because the night before the appointment, Terza got a fever and was up all night crying. I had a strong suspicion she had ANOTHER ear infection (I was right, by the way, and it was a raging, hard-core double doozie). 

The trouble with seeing such a rockstar doctor is that everyone wants to see her, so when we walkd into the waiting room, ten minutes early for our 11am, the room was mobbed. Every single seat was taken by a parent or a child, ranging in age from little babies who could barely keep their heads up to  school-agers. You could hardly walk in the door, the hallway was so jammed with strollers. We squeezed past and a thoughtful parent pulled their toddler off a seat onto their lap so I had a place to sit and read Sandra Boynton to Terza. We read and read and read. We ate Goldfish. We ate Veggie Booty. We drank milk. We looked at magazines. We looked at pictures on my iPhone. We played with other children. We pushed other children. 

At 11:45, Terza discovered the water cooler. This was an unfortunate discovery, for reasons I hope are obvious (if they are not obvious that means your kid is so impeccably self-regulated, they'd never think to press the Poland Spring lever down for seconds on end, allowing a waterfall to overflow the tray). Once Terza had wasted approximately ten gallons of water, I grabbed her and carried her kicking and screaming back to the mobbed waiting room, where she continued to scream and kick and carry on like a child from an PSA for abstinence.

By this point it was almost 12. We'd been waiting for an hour. My toddler was overdue for lunch and for her nap and, oh yeah, she also had a RAGING EAR INFECTION IN BOTH EARS. Not a coincidence, since we were at a pediatric ENT office. So, was she being a shit? Sure. Did she have good reasons? Hell yeah. The first one being that she's 22 months old. 

So when another doctor - not MY doctor, the rockstar, but another one who shared the office -- walked in and announced to the waiting room at large: "We have a lot of doctors at work here and we really need you to try to keep the noise down," I went a little loco. 

Not full loco. If I had to measure it, I'd say I was 20% as crazed as I felt. Meaning, I restrained myself quite a bit. Still, I felt the doc deserved a little crazy for being such an asshole. 

"TOTALLY!!" I chirped with deranged sarcasm, "We will absoLUTEly keep the kids quiet! Because it's SO EASY!"

That was crazy enough. But then I also started muttering under my breath and shaking my head, like a genuine wackadoo. 

"Man keeps me and my sick baby waiting for an hour in his damn waiting room and then tells me we're being too loud."

Five minuets later, they called Terza's name and we were seen. It was probably because thepeople in charge overhead my little scene and decided to avoid a riot. 

So the morale to the story is: when you've been waiting for the doctor for an hour, make a scene. It costs you in public humiliation but it saves you time. 

Sick Baby + Elvis on Repeat Play = Deranged Mother

Terza get a lot of ear infections. One might use the word "chronic." One might even suggest ear tubes, but that's a whole other blog post . This chronic, ear-tube-worthy ear infections make her quite cranky, quite frequently. Now I'm not averse to putting on some Elmo for the kid when necessary. She's baby number three, and as such certain AAP recommendation such as "no TV under the age. of two" just don't apply, but if I let her watch Elmo every time she was cranky or sick, she's be glued to the iPad pretty much half of her existence and even I think that's a bit much So i try other measures before resorting to Elmo. One such measure is music. 

After all, my close personal friend William Shakespeare once told me that music tames the wild beast, and when she's got an ear ache there is no doubt my daughter is both wild and a beast, though I certainly don't hold it against her, poor thing. Primo right now is going through an Elvis phase, and one day while DJing on my computer one evening, he put on "Hound Dog."

The baby, who was on day two of earache, went LOCO. It was as if she was a teenage girl seeing Elvis live in concert. Alongside her brother, who was attempting some pretty fancy, pretty frenetic dance moves, she began to get DOWN. Mainly her dance consisted of the warm-up Jennifer Beals does in Flashdance in her leg warmers -  the super fast running-in-place on her tiptoes -- except with a chicken wing flap added in that really made the move really sing. Making the moment inedible and delicious, she was laughing like a madwoman the whole time. 

It was one of those moments you live for as a parent, a transporting moment where there are no problems, no troubles, no stressors. Just joy, mind-erasing, expansive, effervescent joy. It was the kind of moment you wish very much to replicate. Be careful what you wish for.

After her Elvis Flashdance Moment Terza often asked to listen to "Hound Dog" and how could we deny her? The problem is, the more she listens to it, the more she wants to. She just can't get enough. She wants it on repeat play, two, three, four, twelve times. There is no amount which is too much. The first time she hears it, she gets up and dances her patented Flashdance Chicken Joy Dance and it is delightful and life-affirming. The second time, too tired to maintain such ebullience, she sits down and listens, not unhappily, but not altogether pleased either. And after that, she just goes about her cranky business, throwing kicking tantrums on the floor, whining to get more cookies, grabbing her sister's drawings and crinkling them into balls, except that in the background is Elvis singing "Hound Dog." Whenever the song ends, the takes a break from screaming COOKIES! or ELMO! or "PICKAMEUP!" to screaming "HOUN DOG! HOUN DOG," and we put it on because our brains are so addled we don't know what else to do.

Which is how I have come to hate Elvis Presley. Sorry, Mr. Pelvis, but talk to the president of your baby fan club, because it's her fault. 

Saturday morning, David let me sleep in until the crack of 7:30 at which point I was awoken by the sound of a drum roll followed by "You ain't nothing but a …"

"Nooooooo," I moaned.

Five minutes later, when I emerged from the bedroom to find Terza whining about waffles while listening to "Hound Dog" for the fifth consecutive time, I was forced to ask David, "What is this song ABOUT anyway? Who is the hound dog in this scenario? And is it supposed to be a bad thing to be a hound dog? In what sense? I JUST DON"T FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHAT HE KEEPS TRYING TO TELL ME."

This is how people go insane. If I end up in Bellevue, have the docs go on my history on Spotify and tally up how many times I was forced to listen to "Hound Dog" and they will understand why I am sitting in a corner muttering incessantly to myself: "you ain't never caught a rabbit.". 

Girl Got Amoxy

So the baby was slammed with her first double ear infection. Poor old thing. Thankfully, her doc was at the ready with a handy script for Amoxicilin.

All that remained was to administer the stuff to the baby. Doesn't sound so terribly difficult, but it is. Oh, how it is.

We got one of those syringes that shoot the meds right into the baby's mouth. Surely, I thought, with this handy device, there'd be no fuss, no mess. I mean, you shoot it right in their gullet.

Of course, they retain the ability to shoot it right out. At first, Terza would just bat it away with her hands or jerk her head away, so we got smart and ruthless and would hold her hands and her head so there was no way she could escape the medicine. That's when she realized she had mounted the in-mouth resistance. Because there was nothing we can do to prevent her from gurgling and she she gurgles, the meds csme spraying out -- all over our faces.

Then we were left wondering how much she had actually swallowed and was it enough to make the dose effective. I mean, we didn't want to overdose with her extra meds but from the look of the pink goo splashed all over our shirts and faces, she definitely hadn't ingested much of it.

So I called the pharmacist.

"How much of the antibiotics does the baby need to swallow to make the dose effective?" I asked.

It did seem like a dumb question to me as I was asking it but its kind of a dumb situation and I was certain he'd fielded an inquiry like this before. From the sound of his voice, he had not.

"Ummm, the whole thing," he said, "A dose is a dose."

"Yeah, but she just keeps spitting so much out," I protested, "I don't know what to do."

"Just give her some water afterwards to wash the taste away," he suggested.

You should keep your day job, I wanted to tell him,  Because you are piss poor at baby advice. I mean, have you ever actually tried to get 4 mls of Moxy in a baby's guts? The water chaser is not going to get this job done.

The more times we gave her the meds, the better able she became at resisting through her Super-Gurgling Technique of civil disobedience.

"But why? why? WHY?" I asked her, "Don't you know this is GOOD for you? Don't you know this will make the pain go AWAY?"

She looked at me like, "What the fuck, man? You know I'm just a baby."