23/52 (and an update of sorts)

It’s been a long few weeks.

Thursday afternoon, Mike was discharged from the hospital after a full week of poking, prodding and procedures. His nifty new summer accessory is a PICC line that was inserted in his upper left arm so that he can administer IV medication to himself twice daily for at least the next 30 days, in addition to the oral meds he will take 4 times a day. A nurse comes out to our house to check in weekly and he will see two doctors this week.  The hope is that a follow up CT scan in the next week will show progress to suggest that the medications are doing their thing and that further procedures or surgeries can be avoided. He’s utterly exhausted and still mostly bedridden, or more accurately, couch ridden.  Regaining strength and stamina will take time but we’ll take that over the many other more awful possibilities we could have been facing.

Meanwhile, life goes on for the two little people that live in our home. The thing about a crisis is that even in the midst of it, a 2 year old and an (almost) 5 year old carry on somewhat like it’s business as usual. The demands for snacks don’t abate, nor does their need for trips to the park or their requests for ice cream or their pleas to watch The Muppet Movie just one more time. Friday is still pizza night and they still want tubs every night, though we certainly may have missed a few in the last week. And there’s something quite grounding about their insistence that some things remain routine, even if they were sad that someone was missing from all of this.

On Friday, the day after Mike came home from the hospital, I picked up Lilly and then Zoe and headed towards the park near our house where we could soak up the sunshine for a while and Mike could rest at home while it was still quiet there.  When we got to the park, the exhaustion that had been creeping up on me settled in and all I wanted was a place to sit down. It was bright and sunny and I found myself feeling irritated that I couldn’t find a comfortable spot in the shade and then simultaneously thinking that it was pretty ridiculous that the SUN was making me cranky. So I didn’t argue when after a few minutes, Zoe suggested that we move to the shady grass and she and Lilly would look for bugs. I didn’t argue and in fact, I laid right down and focused my energy on not falling asleep in the middle of the grass because I was fairly certain that if I did,  it might take a cattle prod to wake me.

It didn’t take long for the girls to wander over to the spray pad that Zoe had noted was on for the season when we entered the park.  First, the request was, “Can we press the button and turn the water on? We won’t go under the water, we just want to press the button.”  “Uh….yeah, sure”  Then predictably, it was,  “Can we just  run under it really fast?  We won’t get too wet.” A pause on my end. “I don’t have extra clothes or shoes for you. I don’t want you both getting all soggy.”

Then I paused again and sat up. It was really warm out. After the park, we were getting pizza and going home. The sprinkler was spraying water, not permanent neon paint.  While I’m really good at saying “No”, the truth is that saying “Yes” is way more fun.  A lot of time, the “Yes” might seem like more work, more mess, more of a hassle and sometimes–okay, usually, it is. But I’d rather clean up a beautiful mess than miss out on all the stuff that comes along with it–the belly laughs and the gleeful looks on two little faces as they revel in doing something that might be just a little bit ridiculous. After the 3+ weeks that we had just had, I was embarrassed that I was even for a second considering saying “No” to a moment that was pretty much a no brainer.

“Go ahead,” I said.  “Maybe we have a beach towel in the trunk of the car. Probably not, but the ride home is a only few minutes after we get the pizza. Your car seats will get wet but they’ll dry out by tomorrow. Go ahead.”

First I watched from the grass and then the bench by the spray pad and then I was on my feet because it was too good to watch from a distance. A little girl who was maybe 10 was hovering around the spray pad and had earned the tacit approval of Zoe and Lilly because she had a Frozen t-shirt on. She asked if she could push the water button for them when the sprinkler would turn off and she embraced her role as the button pusher as they got wetter and wetter and laughed louder.  Finally, she looked at them and said to us, “I asked my mom if I could go in the water with my clothes on. She didn’t want me to. She said I would be really cold afterwards and I would regret it.”

I saw Zoe give me a sideways look, unsure of how she should respond and scanning my face to see my reaction. After all, this little girl had a good point.  I just nodded at the girl and said, “That makes sense.” She looked again at Zoe and Lilly. “Won’t they be cold?”  I looked at her and smiled, but my answer was more directed to Zoe than to the little girl and it spoke more about the last few crazy weeks than about a soggy car ride home.

“We’ll be alright.”