Vacation: Sisters

You know what's sad? I took around 300 pictures on vacation last week, and I took exactly 4 of the girls together.

These four:

The girls outside Nana and Papa's church:

The girls in the pool:


The girls at the top of the Harbour Town Lighthouse:

The girls by the stuffed bear they wanted to stand next to:

That's it. What kind of mama am I?

I know that part of the trouble here is that we have a man-to-man parenting style. David is usually with Elizabeth and I'm usually with Lilli. I don't know how we'd switch to zone defense if we ever had a third child, because we're used to this. That's how we put them to bed, that's how we wash them in the bath, that's how we get them in and out of their car seats when we're all together. So we divide up the children when we're exploring, and even though we switch I usually just focused on one kid at a time. So it makes sense, but I'm still kind of grumpy about the lack of sister pictures.

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Anyway, in other news I have an EEG update! Elizabeth's EEG was this morning and while we don't know the results yet, the procedure was fabulous and didn't stress her out (or me either actually) at all. We went in the room, the technician had her lay down on the table and turned on the Cat in the Hat. She measured and marked Elizabeth's head up with a red crayon, then attached a whole lot of electrodes with paste stuff, and then wrapped the whole top of her head in gauze. This was a "sleep-deprived" scan, so we had to keep her up until midnight last night and get her up at 4 this morning. So she wasn't the only one who was feeling sleep-deprived. They needed her to fall asleep on the table so they slowly dimmed the lights and had her blow for three straight minutes on a pinwheel. That was actually funny because she was so sleepy that as she blew the pinwheel would get closer and closer to her mouth, it would touch her and she would startle and start blowing more fiercely on the pinwheel, and then start to doze off again. Wish I'd brought my camera that's for sure. They observed her for a good 25 to 30 minutes (I fully admit that David and I had a bit of a snooze in the dark and quiet), and then roused her enough that she could react to the strobe they started flashing in her face. We got up and got to see her brain reacting to the lights. I don't know if her reactions were good or bad, but it was fascinating to see the lines going crazy. After that she got to get up, and got to take home the pinwheel, a slinky, and stickers, and since she'd had a bit of a nap she was super cheerful.

I'm a bit nervous about tomorrow though, because tomorrow she has her MRI and she will need to be sedated for that, and when we were in the emergency room with her last May she had a HORRIFIC experience getting an IV in. They couldn't get the needle in her tiny vein and I lost count of the number of times they poked her. And the screaming. I might never get that out of my head. Immediately afterwards she was totally cheerful like nothing had happened, but I was a little bit scarred by that, so I'm really worried it won't go well tomorrow. The IV part I mean. That's the only part I'm worried about. If I should be worried about the rest of it don't tell me. Anyway, supposedly the sedation team who will be working on her tomorrow does nothing but children so they are used to tiny veins, and I hope that's right. Or I might be forced to raise my voice at someone.

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And on a happier topic, ready for today's Anniversary Anecdote?

David's and my first official date (we had been dating for a bit by then even though he'd never actually asked me out- that might be tomorrow's A.A. although he hates that story- but we'd never actually gone Someplace Specific and Semi-Date-like) was at Johnny Rocket's. 12.5 years ago it was still kind of a novelty, at least in Columbus, Ohio, and it was super close to the movie theater. Perfect! After grilled cheese, fries, ketchup smiley faces and milkshakes, the waiters got up to dance like they did every half hour or so, and David got up to dance with them. As he serenaded me with a ketchup bottle microphone to (randomly) "New York, New York", that's the moment I first started thinking long term about us.

You hear a lot about balance in a relationship. A messy person and a clean person balance each other. A frugal person and a spendthrift can balance each other. But you can't have a silly person with a non-silly person. The non-silly person would just not understand the weird things a silly person does, and the silly person would always feel self-conscious about what they're doing. I burst into song constantly, and they often aren't real songs, they're just whatever I want to say to whatever tune is in my head. I will dance in the grocery store with the girls if the Muzak is playing something good (I can't tap dance, but I enjoy pretending I can). I am kind of obsessed with cook books, My Little Pony, and American Girl (only two of which are respectable obsessions for a grownup).

David is just as weird and silly as I can be. We have discovered, for instance, that a frightening number of the expressions we use on a VERY FREQUENT BASIS come from the movie "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me". When I randomly sing something at David, he sings back. He knows how to do a super dramatic movie almost-kiss with me, the kind from the 30s or so when the couple looks passionately at each other, swoops in real fast and just presses their cheeks together as they look towards the (non-existent in our case) camera (you might have to see us in action to get what I'm talking about). He will Merengue (not sure I spelled that right, just go with it) with me anywhere.

We know perfectly well we will embarrass the girls one day and we are kind of looking forward to hamming it up and seeing just how far ahead of us they are going to want to walk.