While my son Dan and daughter-in-law Kristin vacationed in Hawaii for 10 days, I served Grandma Duty to my two youngest grandsons, JD (3 years) and Trey (19 months). It was my first time totally in charge of two little ones since my own were that age. Friends said, “Oh, Nancy, it’ll all come back,” meaning all those instincts and parenting skills. “Just like riding a bike,” said another friend. “Some things you never forget.”
I found both were right and wrong! Basic principles of parenting remain the same but the tools and tactics are all new and exciting. And my youngest grandson had RSV shortly after he was born and takes asthma medication to keep symptoms under control. I kept track of our adventures and bloopers in what I call the GrandmaDiaries. Here are a few excerpts:
Ear Plugs
Ear plugs. How do you get ear plugs to stay in Trey’s ears during bathtime? Kristin showed me how before they left. It looked easy enough. She said we can’t let any water get in his ears because he just had tubes put in. But these little red silicone custom-fit thingie disks just fall out the moment Trey starts wiggling around. After two tries, I gave up. Opted for a quick shallow bath instead.
Too late. Didn’t realize Trey is a fish. Hope I didn’t wreck his ears. I snatched him out of the tub, dried him off and got him ready for bed. Meanwhile, JD entertained himself in the water park formerly known as a bathroom.
Nasal Steroid
How do you get a 19-month-old to sniff nasal corticosteroid spray? Mercy me. They didn’t have nasal sprays for babies when my kids were little. Trey sees the spray coming and turns his grimaced face away. What to do, what to do?
Trey’s nose is a cruddy mess that backs up into his sinuses and ears if he doesn’t get this medicine. Think, Grandma. Think. I reached back into the cobwebbed, rusted-shut drawers of my mind and remembered babies learn from watching other babies. Mimicking was part of the great success behind “Baby Breaths,” the video that shows babies laughing, playing, sleeping and using holding chambers and nebulizers. Babies watched the video and suddenly cooperated with treatments. Would it work with Trey?
JD, Trey and I sat at the table with a bedtime snack. Trey eyed the nasal spray in my right hand and shook his head. I slowly lifted the spray bottle to my nose and pretended to spray it. Then I made a silly face. He laughed. So I did it again each time with a sillier expression and had both boys giggling so hard that Trey never balked when I slipped the nasal spray tip into one of his nostrils and sprayed. He laughed! OMG! Will he do it again? YES! YESSS!
Trey Hates Bubble Gum
Kristin warned that Trey hates taking his bubble-gum-flavored chewable tiny pill. Before she left, I took on the challenge to get the pill into this kid every single night.
But it’s not working. I’d rather give him liquid medicine, but there is none. Kristin said he rejects liquid as bad as pills, but with the pill there’s no mess if he spits it out. What am I to know?
But it’s Day 6 and I found the little stinker has been spitting the pills out behind the kitchen garbage pail. Oh no.
Bedtime Stories
Both boys love snuggling and reading with me on the couch after bathtime. It’s that magical time when JD chatters about the calendar -- yes, he loves knowing the month, day of the week and date and talking about what he’s going to do tomorrow. Trey’s little toes wiggle as JD jabbers and rotates his hands. I read a page and we talk. I think how fast these moments pass. It’s the little things that light up their eyes. My heart swells; these boys are medicine to my spirit. I’m a lucky Grandma. I’m a lucky mom.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Grunge era
Call me an indoor air quality freak. I won’t be offended – quite the opposite! I’ve just learned that we are absolutely a product of our environment: the one we breathe, eat and sleep with every single day. Just as I can’t expect my car to run well on dirty sticky gas, I can’t expect my body to perform at its best if I continually expose it to and ingest things I shouldn’t.
My husband is a heating and air conditioning contractor so our indoor air equipment is finely tuned to provide breathe-healthy air all year round. We maintain biohazard-free indoor air humidity between 37 and 50 percent depending on the outdoor air temperature and other factors.
So when the ophthalmologist told me I could ease my chronic dry-eye symptoms by raising indoor air humidity higher, I balked. You can’t do that without introducing mold and encouraging a dust-mite population explosion! I walked out of her office with eye-drop prescriptions and a reluctant agreement to at least try using a small humidifier in our bedroom.
Kicking and screaming, I did it. Okay, so that means we change the sheets twice a week instead of once. No biggie – there are no rugs in there and the room is rather Spartan otherwise. We like the clean, clutter-free look and feel. Everything seemed shipshape at first. So imagine my surprise when we returned from a short vacation to find that our bedroom smelled funky.
The nose knows
My husband has learned to trust my sniffer. Walked into a house one time and detected a gas leak that was so dangerous that everyone inside evacuated and a special team had to deal with it. Other people in the house didn’t notice a problem. Another example: I kept smelling moth balls and garbage in one room in our house but only on sunny and windy days. Two home inspectors and 22 cut holes in our drywall later and with still no answers, I stood outside my neighbor’s house and caught wind of the familiar odor. Turns out he’d been throwing mothballs into a utility hole next to his garbage bin in a little hideaway spot that shares a wall with our garage. When we put a light inside, we could see a space from the utility hole leading to the firewall between our homes. Sealed the hole and solved the problem.
But in the case of the mysterious funky-bedroom smell, I was at a loss. For 24 hours I searched. The laundry room and bathroom drains were clean. And the odor was strongest in our bedroom with no other source of water… than the table-top humidifier.
Culprit: the bottom part of the tank
No, I thought. It couldn’t be that – it’s brand new! I retraced our steps – I remembered hearing John fill it with tap water shortly after we got home from our vacation. I had made a mental note to pick up more distilled water at the grocery store, and I did the next day. When I removed the water tank to fill it with fresh water, that’s when I saw it: grunge in the bottom part of the tank. Grunge that collected while we were out of town. Grunge that multiplied happily in the portion of the tank BEFORE it goes through the sanitizer and mist. Grunge in the part of the unit you don’t see unless you go looking for it. GRUNGE that STINKS! AGH!!!
Worse, that kind of grunge is all too happy to take up residence in my asthma-prone airways. Funky water can cause pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory nightmares. It’s not likely we’ll ever forget to empty the water tank and the bottom part of the humidifier when we leave home ever again!
My husband is a heating and air conditioning contractor so our indoor air equipment is finely tuned to provide breathe-healthy air all year round. We maintain biohazard-free indoor air humidity between 37 and 50 percent depending on the outdoor air temperature and other factors.
So when the ophthalmologist told me I could ease my chronic dry-eye symptoms by raising indoor air humidity higher, I balked. You can’t do that without introducing mold and encouraging a dust-mite population explosion! I walked out of her office with eye-drop prescriptions and a reluctant agreement to at least try using a small humidifier in our bedroom.
Kicking and screaming, I did it. Okay, so that means we change the sheets twice a week instead of once. No biggie – there are no rugs in there and the room is rather Spartan otherwise. We like the clean, clutter-free look and feel. Everything seemed shipshape at first. So imagine my surprise when we returned from a short vacation to find that our bedroom smelled funky.
The nose knows
My husband has learned to trust my sniffer. Walked into a house one time and detected a gas leak that was so dangerous that everyone inside evacuated and a special team had to deal with it. Other people in the house didn’t notice a problem. Another example: I kept smelling moth balls and garbage in one room in our house but only on sunny and windy days. Two home inspectors and 22 cut holes in our drywall later and with still no answers, I stood outside my neighbor’s house and caught wind of the familiar odor. Turns out he’d been throwing mothballs into a utility hole next to his garbage bin in a little hideaway spot that shares a wall with our garage. When we put a light inside, we could see a space from the utility hole leading to the firewall between our homes. Sealed the hole and solved the problem.
But in the case of the mysterious funky-bedroom smell, I was at a loss. For 24 hours I searched. The laundry room and bathroom drains were clean. And the odor was strongest in our bedroom with no other source of water… than the table-top humidifier.
Culprit: the bottom part of the tank
No, I thought. It couldn’t be that – it’s brand new! I retraced our steps – I remembered hearing John fill it with tap water shortly after we got home from our vacation. I had made a mental note to pick up more distilled water at the grocery store, and I did the next day. When I removed the water tank to fill it with fresh water, that’s when I saw it: grunge in the bottom part of the tank. Grunge that collected while we were out of town. Grunge that multiplied happily in the portion of the tank BEFORE it goes through the sanitizer and mist. Grunge in the part of the unit you don’t see unless you go looking for it. GRUNGE that STINKS! AGH!!!
Worse, that kind of grunge is all too happy to take up residence in my asthma-prone airways. Funky water can cause pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory nightmares. It’s not likely we’ll ever forget to empty the water tank and the bottom part of the humidifier when we leave home ever again!
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