Cabin fever

We've hit the third week of January. This is the week where we expect temps to barely get above 0. On Monday I was walking Cece in -12 (windchill close to -30). My breath froze on my scarf so I had to keep moving it to keep the ice off my lips. Once you feel your nose hairs freeze, you know it is 0 or below.

So we are stuck inside. I feel like giving Penny's daycare teachers some kind of treat. Can you imagine not being able to go outside with 20 4-year-olds? I wonder if they get as crazy as us to stay entertained. On Tuesday all of us practiced headstands.

And we really did practice. Penelope thought it was so much fun to take our picture, but every time she'd move her thumb to hit the camera button she'd move the camera and take a picture of the floor. So this is really handstand #4 for me and Chris.

My sister-in-law had hoped that she'd see a picture of Cece doing a headstand, but alas, our dog does not cooperate in our crazy antics.

Also, since I got a smart phone I've become an Instagram addict. If you want to follow me my name is lastrand411. I post most of them to Facebook, but there's a few I haven't. If you are on Instagram, I want to follow you, so drop me a note.

Playing with my Christmas present

I finally took the time to play my beautiful new Christmas present from my mom. It is so much easier to just sit and watch a movie or climb into bed at 8:30 from exhaustion, but I was determined to tune my new violin and play it tonight. I read 2 book on happiness recently. They are both by Gretchen Rubin if you want to check them out. She has a pretty nice life, but wanted to work on being happy and most importantly realize in her day-to-day life what she has right in front of her. So for a year she read up on happiness and tried all sorts of tactics. This is as close as I get to reading a self-help book. I like it because she's a huge reader and quotes tons of authors I love.One thing she talks about is the different levels of happiness. Sitting to watch a movie can bring you a level of happiness, going on a long-awaited trip can bring another level and then an even higher level are the ones you have to put more work into like mastering an instrument you've always wanted to play, or finally getting the guts to take a fiction writing class, training for a triathlon etc. In her first book she finds her splendid truth to happiness while riding the subway. It is hard to understand if you haven't read her book, but she explains it like this: So my new-and-improved formula for happiness is this: being happier requires you to thinking about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth

 I'll come back to that splendid truth. The violin took me a while to tune, but it stayed nicely in tune for close to an hour. I've been playing a 3/4 violin for years so playing a full size violin makes such a difference to the tone and well, fullness of the sound. I pretty much raced through Suzuki Book 1. Mom--You would not have approved of my practice tonight. There were more bad notes than good, and I did NOT go back to the beginning to start over.

As a kid I played the violin for 13. Once I hit 12 my amount of practice was minimal, but I kept going 3 more years despite my violin teacher saying "I can tell you didn't practice" every week. Then after a 10 year break I started lessons again when we moved to Minneapolis. It only lasted a year. I think I've only played once or twice since Penelope was born. The amazing thing is in a way the violin fits the "riding the bike" cliche. The brain can sure be a tricky thing. Sure, I'm wobbly and would not play in front of anyone right now, but it is amazing how all that music seems to sitting somewhere in my mind ready to be dusted off and played.  Even after all these years I can look at the first 3 notes of a piece I played over and over as a kid and play the whole thing from memory.At one point tonight I had hit a few wrong notes and was all of a sudden playing a different piece. I couldn't tell you the name of it. I think it is from Book 2.

On a fun note after playing Minuet I and Minuet II by Bach, Penny said "Mommy, you know how to play songs from Little Einsteins? That's so cool!" Thank you Disney Channel for making classical music cool.

I'm not sure where I'm going with the violin. I've thought of trying fiddle music again, or finally becoming good enough at reading sheet music to join an ensemble. (Suzuki teaches little kids to play by ear and then by 5th grade I was too stubborn to learn how to read music since I could hear a song a few times and start playing) Right now I'm not planning anything but to practice what I know. Playing the violin clears my mind in the same way knitting does. I don't think about anything and that's such a nice feeling -- one I've never achieved in yoga or meditation. When I was a kid my mom would always be frustrated how I seemed to be in la-la land when I was playing and how I needed to focus. I'm glad she made me focus then. It was all that practice and focus that allows my mind to disappear into the finger patterns as an adult.

When I think back to Rubin's formula for happiness, playing the violin makes me...
 feel good--it reminds me of childhood
feel bad--this part of the formula gets a little odd because she uses it in multiple ways. You can think of things that make you feel bad, but in the end will be good and help your happiness. Her examples are talking to her parents about their will or taking the time to do a chore you hate. The other context is to find things that help you feel less bad. In this way the violin helps relieve my anxiety that has been pent up for weeks
it feels right  Since I started playing when I was 2, the music feels like a part of me. Cheesy, but my life feels more fulfilling when I play.
in an atmosphere of growth Once I asked my mom if she was disappointed that none of us turned all those activities into a profession. We didn't become professional athletes, end up on Broadway, or Carnegie Hall. She was sad that I felt that way. She wanted to expose us to a ton of experiences...something she never had as a kid. Because she gave me music years ago, I can grow and develop my skill in a way that would be very hard to do if I hadn't been given the groundwork as a kid. And it turns out I really do enjoy practicing.

well, that's all from self-realization Laura for today.

Clarification

When I reread my last post it makes me seem like some paranoid person about the medical profession. I've had great doctors all through my life. I know they go into the profession to help people and solve problems. In my own experience, I had a doc in NY who always ordered a battery of tests. Then I moved to MN and my new doctor who I really liked said many of the tests were unnecessary, and she found his treatments to be over-the-top for my case. Although, she ended up being right, it was tough to give up some of those tests that gave me a sense of control over my condition. I think the over-testing/over-treatment issues are a 2-way street. There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that reward hospitals based on their patients customer service surveys. I think this can put a lot of care staff in a pickle. They can do everything right, but if a doctor refuses an unnecessary test that the patient wants, they aren't going to get a good customer survey. It can be a tough profession.

On another note, we took Penelope to the indoor playground today. She saw friends from preschool and played for over 2 hours. I got to talk to a mom I had seen a couple of times at drop-off. Lo and behold, she is a neurologist at Mayo! She specializes in headaches, but obviously knows about seizures and has worked with the pediatric neurologists. So we talked about our Thursday experience with her. It was like a 10 minute  counseling session. She was great and reassured me that the chances are very high that this was a 1 time incident. Also, she's really down-to-earth. Like me she does not do well entertaining her 4-year-old at home in the winter and her husband works on the weekends so we planned Saturday play dates at the indoor playground for the rest of the winter.

Penelope has been completely her normal self for a few days now. She has no recollection of the hospital until that moment where she snapped out of the zombie like state. The neurologist I talked to today said that is normal and she'll probably never remember those 4 hours. Chris and I agreed it seems like Thursday was a really bad dream. I hope it stays that way.

One free seizure

Penny woke up at 5:30 this morning and said "I'm hungry. I'll make you a bowl of cereal all by myself, kay Mommy?" Never was I so happy to hear that little voice so early in the morning.

We went to primary care for Penny to be evaluted again. We didn't see our family doctor since she was booked, but the one we saw was excellent. She did all sorts of exercises with Penny: hop on one foot, follow my finger with your eyes, puff your cheeks, wink, squeeze my fingers, etc. Penny thought she was hilarious. There was no need to ask Penny questions like how old are you or what's your favorite book. Being her usual chatterbox she offered all that up and more: "This is my Dora skirt. I got it for Christmas. It says Dora, see? that's a D"

The doctor was still leaning towards sending us to neurology based on the notes from the ER, but due to Penny's excellent evaluation today she decided to consult with pediatric neurology. I'm not quite sure how Mayo does this, but it seems there is always someone on call from the specialty areas to answer questions from other physicians. I'm sure in the long run it is much more efficient then rescheduling appointments in those areas for decisions that can be made collaboratively over the phone. So the family doctor spoke with the pediatric neurologist, they reviewed all the lab work and EKG from yesterday and discussed Penny's very normal behavior today. The pediatric neurologist said that so many kids have seizures, the vast majority of them happen once and never again and the tests don't show any reason for them, so they have a rule that kids get one free seizure. If anything abnormal happens in the next week, or if she ever has another seizure, they will do all the brain testing.

So I guess yesterday was similar to the "get out of jail free" card. From my logical side I know that the US does excessive testing that doesn't improve our outcomes any more than other developed countries that do much less testing. One of the major differences of Mayo vs other health systems is their doctors are on salary and have been since the early 1900s. This is one of the reasons when looking at Medicare data, Mayo acheives some of the best results in the country at a much lower cost than other medical facilities. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most neurologists would have said the same thing, but I think there's little chance our family doctor would have been able to call through to a pediatric neuroglogist who could pull up Penelope's record in seconds and within minutes have his opinion. In most places in the US, we would have been sent to a neurologist specialist probably not in the same system as our family doctor. Once we got the appoinment and insurance worked out, there's a good chance that specialist  would order tons of tests to rule everything out "just to be sure". Those tests are also how they get paid. Cynical way to look at it, but that's one of the main criticisms of the US system. Fee for service, not results. Since I've worked for health non-profits, I've been reading articles for years and more recently some books by Atul Gawande about our current broken system. Many say if the new system that bases payment on results is going to work, then doctors should be on salary. In our case the Mayo pediatric neurologist is making his decision based on the statistics of kids seizures and the rare chance of actually finding a reason for it in a test. Logically I trust him that Penny doesn't need all these tests...

...but emotionally? I feel like having them scan every part of her "just to make sure."  Once again I think this is due to our over test and over treat US mentality. We like answers. We don't like flukes or things that happen for no reason. This seems like the oddest comparison but I HATE the movie Birds. Not because it is scary but because they never explain why the birds show up. If there was a reason given, I could settle in and watch everyone run around like crazy. In my life I want challenges to have a specific order: problem, reason for problem, solution. Unfortunately the human body, especially a growing one, rarely works that way.

So we watch and wait now.

Let this be the worst day

Today I didn't turn my phone off in a meeting and today I got the phone call from daycare that every working parent fears: "we are going to call 911. We think Penny had a seizure"

I will start with saying that Penny is asleep in our bed right now surrounded with her doll and teddy bear so she is home now.

I met Chris at the emergency room as she was being wheeled out of the ambulance. As I ran towards her my little Penelope looked at me and looked away. She didn't know who I was. She was wheeled into a room right away. I tried to put my arm around her but just looked at me with a blank stare. The fingers on her left hand moved constantly like she was trying to play the piano and she rolled her tongue in her mouth over and over again. We had to take off her vomit soaked uniform and put her in a set of pediatric pajamas 2 sizes too big.  It took about an hour before she seemed to recognize us and say a few words. When the doctor examined her she became extremely irritable and started violently vomiting. Within minutes of that she was lethargic and only wanted to sleep. They had us go to ultrasound to see if they could find an answer for the stomach pain and vomiting. She had fitful sleep through most of the process and cried when she was woken up. The doctor who saw her was very concerned by her fitful sleep and tiredness that he was getting ready to order a CT scan and admit us for the night. They don't like to do a CT scan and put that much radiation in a little one unless they absolutely feel it is necessary. But a half hour later the woman doing the EKG woke Penny up and it was like the whole episode didn't happen. She was our fun little chatterbox, full of smiles and more than willing to teach all the nurses and doctors the names of the Disney Princesses. So we did a waiting game for 2 hours while we waited for the lab results. She kept food down, watched movies, colored, wrote her name. The paperwork we were given says she had a seizure-like episode and intense vomiting. They can't say seizure since the paramedics or ER docs didn't witness it. So now we are at home, Chris and I still shaking.

I learned that seizures are not that uncommon in young kids. They will happen when a child has a head injury or is sick with a high fever. Penny had none of these which makes it more complicated. The other concerning part was the amount of time it took her to get out of the "post-seizure fog." That was the almost 4 hours where she didn't talk, became irritable, fell asleep and woke up in 30 second increments. This could likely be a one time thing that will never happen again...or it could be a list of things which one doctor listed. The list included the words infection or tumor. The labs were negative for infection.  She was referred to neurology for tests to rule other things out. I'm trying not to be the catastrophist that is my nature. I know enough information about rare childhood disease to scare the bejeezus out of me. For instance, when she was getting the ultrasound I thought to myself "well, if it is Wilm's tumor the survival rates are 97%" I was racking my brain for all the genetic disease I know. "adrenoleukodystrophy? Nope, too young and she's a girl, even for boys that's a 1 in 30,000 chance, okay, what's that other one that affects girls...I'm pretty sure she is too old for that one"

I'm trying to get my head around the idea of this being a one time fluke with no known cause. It makes me feel like I have no control (are you thinking, guess what, you don't have control, Laura?). But a one-time fluke is better many of the other problems where you really have very little control. I guess it will be trusting our instincts when we meet with neurology regarding the testing and how much we do. It sure helps to know that people from around the world come here for pediatric neurology.

The doc told me if I notice any abnormal behavior or if the vomiting starts again to bring her back to the ER. I have to admit, if she sneezes in her sleep, we may be back in the hospital. Chris and I discussed that we may be co-sleeping for the next 14 years.

Speaking of Chris it is interesting how we deal with things and what we find cathartic. He does not want to talk about how he saw her at daycare with the paramedics. I guess she was completely unresponsive and couldn't move her right side. Very scary. Here I am blogging about the whole experience to anyone who wants to read it. But in the moment of it, we helped each other stay calm, listen to the doctors and ask questions. This moment made me realize the strength of our little family.

I'm headed to bed to snuggle with my little one.

2012 in numbers

After 4 years of blogging, it fell off my priority list.  I'm not sure how much I'll blog in 2013. My friend Christen did a great post last week where she measured her year in minutes. I've always tracked things from states visited, to books read, to miles on my bike so I thought I'd do something similar.

1 month spent commuting from Minneapolis to Rochester by bus. 4 hours a day! I've since met people who have done this commute for 10 years. Despite the amount of knitting and reading time I got in, I could never have done it long term. I was exhausted. The worst part was I only saw Penny for 45 mins a day.

37 books read in 2012. Chris mentioned this year how people reading my blog wouldn't know how I spend a great amount of free time. For people who know me well, they know reading has been my one constant past time. I've been keeping a book journal since 2001. You can see my whole list here http://www.librarything.com/profile/strandbooks. Here's the list of books I rated with 4-5 stars in 2012:

• Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Harris
• The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherford
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Drop City by Tom Coraghessan Boyle
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett
• The Tortilla Curtain by Tom Coraghessan Boyle
• Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
• The Paris Wife Paula McLain
• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Home by Toni Morrison

I've found there are some years I can be more generous with my stars. I think this year was one of those. There are a few that I might go back to and bump down to a 3. I'm always willing to talk books. Not sure if book talk would bore everyone to death on the blog, but it might get me back in the swing of it.

The knitting craze continued this year: 13 knit hats, 4 washcloths, 1 cardigan, 1 scarf, 3 cowls, 2 booties, 1 pair of legwarmers, and 1 pair of boot cuffs. Almost all the pictures are on my Ravelry page http://www.ravelry.com/projects/lasmpls

4  trips: a long weekend to Kansas City for Easter, a week to Itasca/Crosslake, a long weekend to Omaha NE, and 5 days to VA for Christmas

2 new vegetables Through our CSA we tried garlic snapes and kohlrabi for the first time.

2 weeks to catch up on 2 seasons of Parenthood. I stayed up till 11:00 many nights in a row to do that. Unheard of for me. Then I missed the start of the current season so I'm going to do a marathon on that one when it comes out.

4 Disney Princess dresses in our house. Although Penny also loves her 9 Hot Wheels and deluxe Pirate ship toy

55 blog posts in 2012 Considering I stopped at the beginning of October that is a lot! Maybe that's why I burned out.

2015 emails in my work inbox  In 2009 I made a New Year's Resolution to have "Inbox Zero" at the end of each day. I did it through all of 2009 and part of 2010 and haven't done it since. It takes a lot of time and I'm skeptical that it made me that much more organized/efficient. But the inbox is getting out of control so I'm going to move all of the emails to a folder tomorrow and attempt Inbox Zero again.

Some more estimate numbers:

250 miles rode on my bike commute to work I want to do more in 2013. It does add up quickly at 8 miles a day, but there were many weeks where I only rode once a week. It's tough to pack business attire in a backpack. Plus, I only ride when it is 50 degrees to 80 degrees in the morning otherwise I'm too sweaty or Penny is too cold in the burley.

$500 the amount of money we'd have if Chris had a new quarter for every time Penny asked him to pull one out of her ear. He says he needs to learn new magic tricks pronto!

50 cans of black beans Penny loves these. She usually eats 1 can a week.

25 Halloween costumes the amount of costumes Penny would have for next Halloween if she could be everything she's come up with so far.

Hmmm...so that's all I can think of now. I could do some depressing ones like pounds gained, or how much we could list our Minneapolis house for if we wanted to sell, but I don't feel like adding those.

Looking at the list and how I spend my time makes the constant backup of 8 loads of laundry less mysterious!

2013 here we come.