Our Little Candy Cane

It was Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. Morning. Tom and Shreya were in the kitchen putting together a loaf of no-knead bread. Suddenly I hear screaming as I have never heard anyone screaming before. I rushed over to see what had happened. It turned out that Shreya had fallen off the little stepladder that she had been standing on to reach the counter. It was not a long distance to fall, but it seemed to hurt a lot. We tried to calm her down with kisses and a youtube video about primates (a current favorite) but it didn't seem to help. Rolling up the sleeve of her long sleeved shirt revealed a left arm that was swollen a lot, and looked strangely mis-shapen. We thought that she might have a hairline fracture, so we gave her some Ibuprofen and headed over to the pediatric urgent care over at the hospital.

Unfortunately, when we got there, they were predicting a very long wait -- 2 to 2.5 hours, perhaps correlated with the holiday weekend. Tom went over to the ER, around the corner, and found that there was hardly any wait there, so despite the much higher co-pay, we decided to go there.

Sure enough, we were seen there fairly quickly. But around then, the Ibuprofen had started to kick in and Shreya had stopped screaming, and the swelling had gone down. The nurse that examined her found that she was able to wiggle her fingers, and that, coupled with her claim that "Ibuprofen cannot mask the pain from a broken bone" led her to diagnose the injury as a "contusion" (just a fancy word for bruise?) and send us home with instructions to give it rest, ice and painkillers (but only every 6-8 hours). She also said that they did not like to do X-Rays on young kids.  


So, having no recourse, (and I guess believing her...) we took Shreya home. Unfortunately we had received no instructions on what to do if the pain returned in under 6 hours, which, of course it did. Repeatedly. Unfortunately, Shreya's pediatrician, who is usually very responsive to being called even in the weekend, was away until Tuesday.  Unfortunately, the doctor filling in for her in her absence was booked. Anyway. We were able to get an appointment for Thursday. In the meantime, we somehow got through five days. By Monday evening, Shreya learned how to hold her hand so it didn't hurt -- except when she bumped it or accidentally twisted it. She even went to preschool on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday dawned bright and clear (or rather, grey and windy, it was apparently the worst wind storm in a decade, but that is another story that I probably won't tell here.) We went to the doctor. She looked at Shreya's arm, scoffed at the ER nurse's claims that fractures hurt more than Ibuprofen can mask, and that young kids should not be X-ray-ed,  and sent us off to do just that, saying, "It may be nothing, but let's just see..."

So we went, and this is what we saw.

R     (photo taken from below)     L 

Even I can see that it is broken, and not even just a hairline fracture either!

So we went over to the Orthopedic group at hospital and had a cast put on Shreya's arm. There, just as at the doctor's office, everyone expressed surprise that she had been sent home from the ER without an X-Ray.


At no time during Thursday's proceedings did Shreya act like a child with a broken arm. She was happy and smiley. She demanded stickers from the nurses. She played with said stickers. She was excited about having X-Rays (though she did whimper when they twisted her arm into the correct position for the picture). When asked what color cast ("bandage") she wanted, she was delighted to find they had red. She didn't cry at all when they put on the cast, even at the crucial and supposedly very painful moment when they shaped it, seconds before it set into rigidity (she winced, but didn't cry out.) The technicians were just enchanted with her. One of them had the idea of making her cast more festive with a green stripe to make it look like a candy cane. Then she looked sad, like she wanted to object but didn't dare. I think though, in the end she rather liked it!

Well, she liked the candy cane part anyway. Not the rigid part. On the way home, she said, "My arm doesn't hurt now, so I can take this off!" I had to explain that she would have to keep it for some time. I wonder how much of a concept she has of four to six weeks, or whether that to her mind is distinguishable from forever...

Anyway, we didn't get any pictures during the five day ordeal (I wonder why!) but here are some from later. She's a brave kid!

Has it really been over seven months?!

Here are the highlights...

Halloween / birthday party and a pinata

In case you haven't guessed, I'm dressed as a tree.

A pirate and a tiger.

Chilling with "Mavashi" & "Unky"

My sister and brother-in-law visited in late December. Shreya has always adored Pallavi, right from their first meeting, but had, until this visit always been afraid of Pramod. This visit though, they seemed to really hit it off. We did some fun stuff like going to the River of Lights and Explora, but somehow the photos seem to mostly depict the "chilling" part.

Christmas in January

Tom's parents spent the Christmas season at (would you believe this!?) the South Pole! But we were invited to a belated celebration at their Michigan home in mid-January. Once again, we did some fun winter stuff like sledding (with Shreya; she was clingy and resigned at first, but towards the end started to really have fun) and cross-country skiing (without Shreya) which seems to have missed being photographically recorded.

Which only brings us up to January. But if I save this as a draft and wait until I'm up to the present, who knows how many more months will have passed!

Two!

(Yes, I know I didn't really post this on October 27th, but that is when I took the picture)

Lo! and behold

October is Balloon Fiesta month here in Albuquerque. Followers of this blog may recall that, last year, we went to the fiesta and really had a good time. Nevertheless, this year we had initially not given any thought to going. However, we now live almost due south of the Balloon Fiesta Park (about 8 miles away). So once the event started, every morning from one of our north facing windows, we could see hundreds of balloons in the sky, scarcely bigger than pinpricks in the distance, but brightly coloured and exciting. Shreya saw them first. "Lo!" she said to us, pointing. "Lo! Lo!". "Yes, they are balloons, Shreya," I said, and thought no more of it, but after this happened the next day and the next, we decided that we should take her out to see them. Fortunately the event spans two weekends. So we made plans to meet some friends at the balloon park on the second Saturday, bright and early for the 7a.m. mass ascension.

Since Park-and-Ride had been so grueling last year, we decided to drive this time. On Saturday morning, we left our home around 6 a.m. Initially the drive was quick, but as we got close to the park, suddenly we were in the midst of a lot of cars (Surprise!). At 6:30, we were passing a small private parking lot about a mile and a half away from the park. We briefly considered just parking there and walking, but we were in the wrong lane for it, so we drove on. At 7:30, we had moved forward somewhat,  but were still waiting to park. Balloons filled the sky around us as we sat in the car, fuming. In the back, Shreya was asleep in her car seat. At 7:55 we were just arriving at the place to pay and enter the parking lot, but by that point we were really frustrated and decided to just go home instead. (It later turned out that our friends had left home even later than we did, but they had aggressively changed lanes and managed to park in the distant lot, probably just a few minutes after we had passed it up, and made it to the park by 7:10.)

As it happened, it was a good day to be at home. Previously we had just seen balloons on the horizon, but on this particular morning, the wind was blowing due south, and just as we drove up home, we saw dozens of balloons flying over our house! So we stood outside for a while and watched the balloons, feeling that the morning was not totally wasted after all. A couple of balloons even landed in the park a few block away, and we went and got a closer look at them, and watched them deflate.

The house on the right is ours.

Lo!

Pfffffft.

Still, we remained enthusiastic about going to the park, and the following day (Sunday), we got up even earlier, left the house at 5 a.m. and at 5:30 we had parked and bought our tickets and were wandering into the park. What a difference being early makes! We watched the "dawn patrol", a line of balloons tethered to the ground, which lit up and glowed in the morning darkness. Then as day broke, we watched balloons take off to the skies. Maybe there weren't as many balloons because it was the last day, and maybe some of the coolest shapes did not ascend that day, but there were still a lot of balloons and we walked among them and waved and had a good time!

Dawn patrol.

It's very early for these two.

Mr. Mojo rising.

The bee family has a new addition this year.

Lots of lo's.

Attack of the 100-foot tall rooster!

Summer Days

Fall is here. As I enjoy the cooler weather it occurs to me that once again, I have allowed a large interval to slip by without regaling my gentle readers with tales of Shreya's young life. Maybe I am really not cut out for this blogging thing....

Anyway, here are just some of the highlights of summer.

We went to the park.

We went to the pool.

We played at our new home.

We went camping and hiking. (Forgot to take pictures of the campsite, but here is one of Shreya on the trail.

We befriended our new neighbours.

Shreya enjoyed Grandma's visit.

Shreya's first sentence

For a while now, Shreya has been expanding her vocabulary, pointing at object after object, saying their names, and paying rapt attention to what we say back to her.  Sometimes she babbles several "words" in a row, but it is generally not intelligible.  This is the story of the first two word sentence that we could actually understand.  Read on, gentle reader!

We just put Shreya to bed, a moderately short ritual that begins with cleaning her up after dinner (a bath in this case), and ends with a nursing session after the lights are out.  She then lies in bed by herself, and is usually asleep within five minutes or less.

Tonight, when she was done nursing, she pushed me away and said "Dow," which presumably is telling me she's done.  Then she said, "Hug?" and gave me her version of a hug, which involves presenting her face for a kiss, while putting her arms around my neck.

Then she said "Poke eye!" and poked me in the eye with her finger.  We're so proud!

Our Little Monkey

As I mentioned in my previous post, Shreya has been doing a lot of climbing. I did eventually manage to get the following video of her climbing into her car seat (although not of her doing up the buckles). Notice that she is comfortable performing this trick with a pretzel in one hand. She did ask for a little help on this climb; I don't know if it was on account of the pretzel or because she is self-conscious on film. Usually she can do the whole thing on her own, even if the photographic record doesn't show that.

Seats, at the dinner table or in the car, are by no means the only things Shreya has been climbing though. I was really not ready for her to be grown-up enough to climb this play structure at the park, and the first few times she did it, my heart thumped so hard  I could hardly hear anything else. I followed her around with my arms outstretched below her, ready to catch her if (when?) she missed her footing. However her personality is such that when she learns to do a new thing she keeps doing it many, many times, to the exclusion of all other activities until she is quite good. So after the first twenty or so times, I stopped holding my breath and felt confident enough to use the camera instead. Tom, who wasn't present to witness this, expressed disbelief at my filming this rather than imitating a safety net! The following week, he came along and made his own video. Here they are!