cribchronicles.com

we leave early tomorrow morning for Halifax, for the next installment in the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant, the continuing saga.

this time we’re aiming for a daytrip…a zoom there, zoom back operation, wherein Oscar will remain with his sitter for the day and be picked up by Nannie for supper if we’re not back yet.  simple.  concise.  no worries of vomit in the backseat, no eight hours strapped in a carseat for the little monkey, no naps to time with the ultrasound appointment.  all good, we think.  easier on everyone.

and we should be home by bedtime at the latest, to tuck him in.

but i have this packed suitcase that i’m bringing with me just in case.  just in case they keep me, hospital bedrest, because we are rounding on the dates where that becomes a possibility and it has happened twice before and both times, somehow, it was still a shock.  my mind reels to think that suddenly, like fingers snapping, i might not be here for months, in this house.  i might not be here to see that the laundry currently in the dryer gets folded, ever, that the paper towel gets replaced, that my plants don’t wither and keel over dead.  i might not be here to sing O to sleep at night, to snuggle him close in the mornings, to stuff his daycare bag and put away the winter clothes when summer finally comes and make sure we have that oatbran cereal because he looooves it.  nothing life or death, these things i’d miss, these things i do.  and it’s only just in case, i have this suitcase…it’s only just in case.

still, i think he knows.  or suspects.

counting

he picks them with a zeal bordering on obsession, with a “wow-oo” of admiration for those most ripe, most worthy. those that come free of the ground with long stems he deems “biii-iiig”…those whose heads he pulls off, still unsure of the physics of this whole plucking art, are “babies.” he gives me the babies, sweetly, reserving the more impressive long ones for his own esoteric collections, scattered through the backyard like random floral shrines, Victorian and faintly eerie. and then he is off again, careening full-tilt on short, sturdy legs across our expanse of yellow-dotted lawn, hunting.

he has been so thorough we are beginning to run out of dandeliion cover. he’s better than a goat. we could rent him out to landscaping companies.

tonight the light was golden before bedtime and we found our first ghost dandelion of the season, wispy and white. i taught him how to blow. he inhaled most of it, but we laughed and tickled our noses with the remnants and dropped the stem into the mulch.  he looked back then, picked up the stem with its clinging half-cloud still intact, and picked another yellow bloom and introduced the two, touching their heads together, intoning words i do not understand.

and soon they will be gone, all these yellow weeds my son finds so beautiful, so magical…blowin’ in the wind, seed for another year.

and i look at him and his solid little body suddenly seems so fragile, ephemeral…this childhood so impossibly short.

every morning since last Monday, Oscar has slept past seven o’clock.

this is a first…a sort of shocking, oh sweet merciful Jeebus thankyou kind of first, one his father and i - mostly me - have spent the last two years sacrificing small imaginary goats to the gods for.   Dave will say he’s something of a morning person, but this comes from growing up in a crack-of-dawn fishing family, where copious amounts of coffee and silent focus on the task at hand were hallmarks of early morn.  babies do not provide their own premade coffee when they wake you up at ungodly hours…a design flaw that somebody should really rectify soon.  and they tend to like to be, erm, talked to and engaged with, activities requiring a level of consciousness neither adult in this house aspires to before seven bells.  or nine, if you’re me.

but i’ll take seven over five-thirty any day, and thank you for it.

parents whose small children have not naturally or easily fallen into sleep rhythms copasetic with the adult body clocks in the house are easy to spot.  they have a frayed look, and tend to guard their kids’ sleep fiercely, dragons at the mysterious magic cave from whence peace comes. hyper-alert to all threats, they will cheerfully smother small neighbourhood puppies whose barking threatens to shave fifteen precious minutes off their already uncivilized wakeup.  they unplug phones, and shout curses at early-morning garbage collectors.  and at those odd times when Junior does miraculously slumber like a civilized human, their jubilation is matched only by their desperation to replicate whatever happenstance of weather, blankets, and tea leaves marked the occasion.  they will happily strangle themselves so as to avoid interference with the blessed event.

or, erm, at least i will.

so it is that i have noticed, this past week, that gods willing to accept small imaginary goat sacrifices have a rather ironic sense of humour.  Oscar has been sleeping, yes.  quite beautifully.  Dave too.  but i have, you see, a wretched, hacking cough that has - combined with antibiotics i am on to rid me yet again of some skanky and insistent parasite that may increase risk of premature labour and must thus be vigilantly and regularly flushed from my system - made sleep sketchy and woken me almost every hour on the hour all night, every night for the past week.  and it is worst in the morning.  so about 5:30 am  - or earlier, on lucky days - my body bolts awake, trying to rid itself loudly of a lung or two, while my trained mother’s ear harkens like a hunting dog for the sound of my offspring.  since his usual peeping is not forthcoming, i panic, sure that i am about to wake him and thus destroy this fortuituous pattern of decent sleep that i just know i’m going to enjoy if i can ever actually shake my own pestilence, so i chug water and stuff the entire pillow down my throat in hopes of muffling myself.  and then i lie there, utterly awake, eyes wide, listening for telltale “mama!” that will break the spell and doom me to never, ever sleeping in again.

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do your kids sleep in?  do you drug them?  do you know why?  do you let them get up by themselves, and from what age?

and…out of curiosity, do you have kids who share a room?  did the transition impact the older child’s sleep significantly?  do you need a non-cry-through-the-night baby in order to make this work?  would having said baby next door in an utterly unsoundproof house be any better?  tips?  advice from those who have survived two early morning creatures in one house?

i can’t believe i’ve used this many words before seven am on a Saturday.  shakes head.  coughs.  swallows tongue and cocks head, listening.

…Bon enters stage left, peers around with puzzlement, as if expecting something to fall from the sky…

then lies down.

she smiles tentatively, then looks up again sharply, suspiciously, and scans overhead.   she bundles herself into a small ball, looking very content…but most uncertain about this odd state of affairs. 

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after my u/s appointment, at which all Down’s Syndrome markers were totally written off, baby was active and measured a healthy happy normal percentile, no uterine septum was detectable, and fluid was plentiful, my doctor came out and announced to the receptionist - and the entire waiting room - “Bonnie has a beautiful big long cervix!”

it’s not a compliment i’m accustomed to receiving in public, i will admit, but i tried to smile and preen graciously, the very picture of a Miss Cervix Universe contestant.  i begin to believe we may make it after all.

and baby looks mysteriously and amazingly like the little girl i was sure i’d never have.  consider me knocked over with a feather. 

…or how a three-day, two-party, four-cake,  triplicate-dinner bonanza of second birthday celebrations ensured that Oscar will now expect pure sugar with every meal for at least the next month.

every little boy should have a mother on bedrest for his birthday, apparently.  parties materialize from all corners.  mamas gain ten pounds and like it.  teeth hurt.  good times are had by all.

the first cake was gelato and sorbeto, at Auntie Cindy’s, with cousins and friends and Grandmaman & Grandpapa.  all cakes are now greeted with the gleeful cry of “ice!”

the second cake, upon return to Charlottetown, sported homemade boiled icing by Grandpa Tom.

in the full swing of the party spirit by day 3 of the party circuit, Oscar welcomed guests to party number 2, hosted by his babysitter.

and downed a cupcake to boot…

to cap the festivity round-robin, Nannie dressed as a clown to surprise Oscar at her house.

but the Elmo cake was the crumb - or ze waffer-thin mint - that broke the camel’s belly…and sweet Oscar blew up like Mister Creosote in that Monty Python sketch.  i swear, he said fug off, i’m full.  then he asked for more.

he is two, and wild and beautiful, and has consumed more sugar in the past three days than in the entire rest of his life to date.  he is my joy.

happy birthday, little one.  may every year be so sweet.

small and sturdy, fierce and tender, he is a study in contradiction.

he communicates his needs and his affections most effectively, but with the vocabulary of a child much younger.  his consonants are few, clearly a struggle, and he has only one or two regular word combinations.  he builds puzzles, though, that would challenge a four year old.  he claps for himself when he completes them, and turns his face to his audience, beaming.  he knows most of his letters, can spell his name, but cannot actually say it.  he is more beautiful than i ever imagined a boy could be.

he is closing in on two with a rapidity that astonishes me.  he slams doors, sometimes shutting himself in his room in the midst of a meltdown just to be alone.  when he is done, he is tearful, snuggly, ready for comfort.  he kisses his trains goodnight as he lays them down for “naps,” pounds out violent scales on his plastic piano.  he has a wicked, full-body laugh and lives at full speed.  handed a telephone, though, he is all saucer eyes, shy and full of wonder at the miracle of the disembodied voice.

his favourite word right now is “mine.”  the cat walks across his dinosaur puzzle?  an affront.  mine.  mama folds his laundered pyjamas in front of him?  what you’re touching, woman, is mine.   we spend the weekend at his cousins’ house playing with their train sets?  he’s convinced the cousins are the interlopers…and those fine toys?  mine.  he’s easy to find in a group, these days.  he is the child hugging things wildly to his chest, squawking like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.

he is an equivocal kid, though, when not protecting his worldly goods - and yours - from the preying eyes of other living creatures.  he will befriend anyone who makes an effort, eat anything from raw tofu to zoodles, depending on whether it’s me or the babysitter feeding him.  he is gentle with babies, likes to bedeck himself and other surfaces in stickers, and is taking an interest in flowers suddenly, now that pale green shoots are beginning to peek through the soil of our backyard.  he is learning to ride his new trike, though his feet don’t quite reach the pedals.  he prefers to be pushed than to do the work himself.

he is suddenly, so clearly, ours.

for the whole first year of his life, love him though i did - and deeply - he was foreign to me, other.  this blond, curly-headed male child who could not sleep in my arms, who would not sleep past six am, who was genial and yet a still water i could not seem to fathom without language…he was so utterly himself, so entirely unlike me, so not any of the permutations i’d imagined when envisioning the mother-child duo.  no more.  and he has not changed, barely at all.  he still looks like a changeling left in our dark-haired gene pool by fairies, still wakes at ungodly hours, still can tell me very little - in words - of what is in his heart.  but somewhere along the lines, somewhere in the long months of learning to tolerate dinosaur puzzles and repeat “please do not throw your food on the floor” with a smile on my face, i have come to forget all that i ever imagined of children before i had them, all i ever hoped for this boy other than that he be who he is.

this week has not been a pleasant journey.

drowning in work after an unanticipated ‘vacation’ spent getting pretty blue thread stitched into my lady parts, i came down with Oscar’s cold on Monday. then i saw my regular hometown OB, who felt me up and could find no evidence of any cervix left at all, other than the stitch. so my pelvic rest got upgraded to real, bonafide bed rest and we got ordered back to Halifax for another appointment this Friday. and i was not to drive, so Dave booked yet another day off work. i sent copious work emails from our couch, feeling out of the loop and out of control, and tried not to over-research the failure rates of cerclages and the chromosomal risks of fetuses (fetii?) without nasal bones at 12w4d and scar tissue septums (septii?) in uteruses (uterii?), and i waited for Friday with the dread of someone who feels like bad omens are in the air. about thirty hours before we were to leave for Halifax, i woke up in the middle of the night nauseous and wretched, and not the kind of nauseous and wretched that goes with pregnancy. the kind that goes with flu. turns out when Oscar woke, with alarming screams, that he’d been having the same problem. his crib, floor, and wall were newly decorated with memories of the previous evening’s strawberries, and the whole room was pungent with sourness, dried vomit caked in his hair. his father bathed him, washed the contents of the bed, scrubbed. i lay around on the bathroom floor trying to smile at my miserable child whilst moving as little as possible.

twenty-four hours later, with no further signs of illness from O and my own day of retching behind me, Dave packed the car, and i reclined the passenger seat, and the three of us started of for Halifax, where my little family would visit cousins and i would - my doctors had cautioned - likely be admitted, either for another cerclage (for double luck) or to be deposited head-down in a craftmatic without even bathroom privileges for the coming, um, next three months.

it was a sunny morning. i ate an Egg McMuffin and marvelled at its rubbery goodness after thirty-six hours of nothing but the back and forth of juice and bile. Oscar was conducting an elaborate kissing session between plastic ponies and Thomas the tank engines in his car seat, and we were arguing with the CBC morning show. it was the high point of our week. and then, with little warning, a high-pitched squealing noise issued from the back seat, a whine that built in pulses into the gutteral, shocked, wet shriek of alarm that a not-quite two year old strapped into a car seat and throwing up most of what he’s eaten in the last twenty-four hours emits when he finds himself sick in a moving vehicle. one gush. O’s shirt, pants, and the car seat take most of the hit. two gushes. Thomas and friends are showered in half-digested blueberries. three gushes, and half the back seat of the car is awash in puke. it’s a Kia Rio. we pack tight. and we are past the point of turning back, especially since this appointment is so urgent, but we are also still three full hours from our destination.

so i swivel in my seat and try to comfort the poor child until we can stop at a gas station and Dave can lift him from the car and carry him through the cold, busy parking lot, drenched in vomit, for a change of clothes and a wash up. i scrape the reeking back seat and its contents with baby wipes, my throat revisiting my McMuffin with displeasure. Dave returns, deposits a now cheery, freshly-dressed Oscar onto my lap in the front of the car, then removes the car seat and takes it away to scrub it. i pine for the vinyl seats and sticky car seats of my childhood, with their uncomfortable but blessedly non-vomit-absorbing qualities. Oscar has a little of his rice milk from the car cooler. Dave re-installs the soaking wet car seat, covering it with a recycling bag so O won’t shiver to death. we set off again.

an hour later, same whine. i swivel again, quicker this time, ask Oscar if he needs to stop. we’ve just missed the exit, but i am nothing if not courteous. he tries to say yes, and loses his rice milk all over himself. we go to the next exit. we stop. we are less thorough this time. we dispose of pukey recycling bag, wipe down seat, change O’s clothes, place him on a bed of Irving plastic, give water, no milk, start off again. the appointment time is looming.

twenty minutes later, same story, except that this time his poor little stomach is going for the big guns, bringing up the deep, undigested bits like he’s auditioning for a part in “Stand by Me” and his eyes are big and frightened and the sun is beating in on the car and the reek is overwhelming and i am on my knees, beltless, in the front seat trying helplessly to calm him and comfort him except i am losing it myself and i start to sob and choke, half-sick, too much, overwhelmed, careening down the highway backwards in a little silver car that smells like a frat house puke party when i am not even supposed to be sitting up straight and i try to say, “it’s okay baby” except i still have a cold and i’m crying so it comes out as gibberish and all i can think is my god, this is the stupidest trip in the world and yet i cannot think of any options we had to do anything differently and this, this, is what really does me in, the utter powerlessness of it all, my inability to help my child or my unborn, to keep either safe and i collapse back in the front seat crying like a baby and then the cell phone rings and Dave, looking for an exit, picks up and says, “vomit express” and i say “no, vomit comet!” and we laugh because hell, what else are you going to do?

so we pulled in, and Dave cleaned him up again, and then the poor little creature, bless his heart, fell asleep in his wet, stinky, garbage-bag covered car seat and Dave cancelled the visit with the cousins and booked a hotel room for he and O and they dropped me at the hospital and in i went, just on time. and my doctor greeted me with a hug and a concerned, “are you by yourself?” and i explained and they ushered me in for the ultrasound and we discussed worst-case scenarios and they called in the med students because i’m special like that. but then she pulled up the screen and there it was, not only that same big round-headed baby with its beating heart but a cervix, with a good centimetre or more still above and below the stitch, not perfect but as good as they left me and fine, fine for the moment and my doctor looked stunned and measured again and there were smiles and congratulations all around the room. we did not see a nasal bone yet again but one of the med students ran to get my screening results and the Down Syndrome risk, all things combined, is that of a 27 year old mother which i most assuredly am not and so i am good with that, far more afraid of my body failing this child anyway than i am of anything else. noses are not the most important thing. and the septum - which is likely a scar tissue product of last fall’s D&C - is not likely to cause any significant problems until somewhere between 28-32 weeks anyway, which if my cervix holds til then will be a bridge we cross when we come to it.

and so i got to walk out of there, still on orders of fairly strict bedrest but not bedpan-style, not head down, not hospitalized, not yet, and i got a cab to the hotel and found my boys, still with the slight stench of vomit about them, and we got to be together and so the week, for all the wretchedness of its journey, has ended far better than i ever thought it would, even in destinations not quite planned.

though i’m not looking forward to the drive home.

Oscar had to go back to the emergency room the other day, when his breathing suddenly bottomed out again after almost five months without an ER trip.

he’s been using an asthma inhaler twice daily since the last ER visit in October, and we had a consultation with the local asthma clinic to discuss how to manage symptoms if they began to appear again…and he’d fought off a number of colds with no sign of impact to his lungs, so really, we thought all was going well.

so well that we put him back on dairy…which we’d dropped, at least in the form of milk, after that same last visit back in October. though formal medical channels made no peep about any connection, Dr. Google had most kindly informed me that a lot of kids with asthma symptoms have dairy sensitivities, so we started soy milk and moved to rice milk after a visit to a naturopath in November. the naturopath was a bit of a bust really - all about evangelizing veganism and making presumptions that any child not currently taking wheatgrass suppositories must be living off Cheetos and Coke (which, um, thanks but could we talk about my kid? the one right here with the tofu smeared on his face?) - so we dumped his willfully deaf self and fast…but still cobbled a few of his lofty dietary prescriptions into our own big picture of what may be going on inside O’s little body.

plain, unsweetened yogurt and rice milk and lots of protein in the form of soy and legumes and eggs it’s been, through the winter, with cheese here and there without incident. plus noodles, avocado, fruit, the usual.  O seemed, January ear infection and the spate of runny noses aside, pretty healthy. at least his lungs were great.

so great that i decided last week that really, i’m no freaking dietitian, and it was a snake oil quack of sorts who got us started on this rice milk stuff - which organic and whole grain and fully of fluffy unicorns though it is, has no protein in it, you see - and oh my god what if i’m causing beriberi or something by not giving my child the milk of friendly cows? so out i trotted and bought a four litre jug of local, farm-fresh-ish homo, and by the time we got to the bottom of the jug, O was in the emergency room with blood oxygen sats of 88 and it all just came on overnight no matter how many puffers we pumped into his little lungs.

now, i realize this could just be coincidence. one event does not a scientific trial make, and all that. but for the moment, i’ve restocked the rice milk, and think we’ll go back to what was working at least for another month or so, and then when i’ve wrapped up the big project at work and we have a little more time for hanging in the emerge, maybe we’ll try those happy cows again. all the while watching very carefully.
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what i’m wondering, though, since the traditional medical community here seem largely oblivious or resistant to the idea of any link between dairy and asthma symptoms and thus i don’t really have anyone to ask except Dr. Evangelivegan (the other naturopath, the one i really want to see, is on maternity leave), is whether any of you have experiences, anecdotes, or knowledge to share about kids and dairy sensitivities and breathing “issues”? just curious. and grateful for anything you’ve got to add to our pastiche of a picture.
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this province has the highest asthma rates in Canada. we’re by far the smallest and one of the most rural provinces in the country. high levels of pesticides due to mass farming practices are suspected…and yet, we ourselves live dead smack in the middle of the (admittedly teensy) capital city, and O’s only ever driven by farmer’s fields a couple of times in his life, never even during spraying season. the cows, though…i dunno. they’re probably living a little closer to those pesticides, if, indeed, the assumptions of a link aren’t specious. or maybe Oscar just has problems because he was a 36 week baby, or maybe the five rounds of experimental prenatal steroids i got as part of a study while i was on bedrest with him have actually backfired and weakened his lungs, or maybe he’s allergic to the cat or the dust mites that likely party in his room at night despite my semi-diligent HEPA vaccuming…all these things are possible, are part of our picture. and it is probably too early to tell, definitively. and he may grow out of this. if he does not, it does not worry me overmuch…there are worse things. but it interests me, fires my mind, you see.

and so i wonder if you can help, if you can tell me what you know, too.

of the many things keeping me awake at night these days, add one new item to the list.

why, oh world, do little kid pants suddenly stop coming with elastic waistbands once they hit the size 2T? why, exactly, does a not-quite-two year old need to be wearing narrow, slim-hipped jeans that cling just like i wish mine would an Olsen twin’s? is everyone else’s offspring sprouting into a lithe, willowy, diaper-less supermodel the minute those 18-24 month sizes start getting a bit snug?

you hear what i’m really saying here, right? is Oscar the only husky little short-legged munchkin in Canada whose cloth-diapered derriere still requires cute little bubble-shaped baby pants?

am i emasculating and infantilizing him by being blind to his need for big-boy streamlined skinny jeans?

or is the consumerist marketing fashion machine just evil? is Pampers designing for Old Navy these days? cause sending O out to daycare with half his diaper hanging out the back of waistband and his cuffs rolled up to his fat little knees seems to be the only option available to us once he’s outgrown those last wee tot rags we’re still squeezing him into.

i mean, dudes. he’s not even two. he doesn’t need tight back pockets to slip his pack o’ smokes into, now does he? he just needs some fanny in his freaking pants.

dignity, folks. dignity in children’s clothing. where do i buy that?

what you can`t see, in this picture, is the big furry red monster. the one who materialized magically, bigger than life, at the weekend`s Jack Frost winter festival.

Oscar was beside himself. the boy has a thing for Elmo. it`s not just a man-crush, it`s a shine, a full-on pure-hearted love and delight that i can`t quite begrudge him even if Elmo`s cloying over-marketedness irks me. when the Elmo impersonator enfolded him in his fluffy red arms moments after this shot was taken, i think Oscar thought he`d been transported to heaven…or he would have, if we talked about things like heaven in our house. we don`t.

but then, we never talked about things like Elmo in our house, either.

i ran away screaming the first time one of those “Elmo likes to go up up” dolls assaulted me in a toy aisle, and i`ve mostly eschewed toy aisles since. we`re a hibernatory, bookish people. we don`t watch tv, really, and the DVDs O owns are mostly of the Little People, Baby Einstein, and Richard Scarry variety. even then, i kinda feel i should flagellate when he watches more than one. so, other than a replica of his namesake Oscar the Grouch, replete with trash can, i didn`t think my boy knew Elmo and the rest of Muppetkind from a hole in the wall.

erm, okay, i was pridefully SURE he didn`t know Elmo and friends from a hole in the wall.

until the day, before Christmas, when my mom and i decided to take a rare Saturday morning shopping trip with Oscar. he was in the cart, happy. we steered through the seldom-visited toy aisles, because my mom was thinking she`d like to get him something nice and developmental and, um, smart. or something. and he lost his mind.

every time we rounded a corner, my wee darling morphed into a cart-troll, howling an unrecognizable blue streak at the top of his lungs and flailing fiercely at…something. i thought he must be tired. i thought he must be overstimulated. i thought we should find him some bloody playdoh or something and get the heck out of there. but just as we were about to flee, my mom happened to stop the cart quite close to one of the displays, so she could find her wallet.

fur flew. red fur. not one but two separate Elmos came flying off the shelves in the fat, gleeful paws of my son, who held them aloft like victory itself and crowed, “Mamie!” and i realized that that was what he`d been shouting for the ten minutes previous, each time within sight of a different Elmo toy.

what happens when a toy-snob sanctimommy discovers that, unbeknownst to her, she`s been raising not only a child who knows Elmo but a child who would clearly sell her outright for a furry piece of red plastic that sings in a saccharine falsetto?

she caves, friends. utterly caves.

over the past few months, i have come to live in a Muppet universe. we didn`t buy the singing Elmo toy, or any other Elmo items from the toy aisles, admittedly, but we started watching old Sesame Street Elmo clips on youtube. and then Oscar the Grouch clips, which seemed…welll…a natural extension. then Grover, and Kermit…and before you knew it we were sliding down the slippery slope into hardcore Muppet Love and watching Swedish Chef reruns and “Beaker sings Danny Boy” every night before bed. we sing “Rubber Ducky, you`re the one” in the tub, and “The Rainbow Connection” any time we`re feeling snuggly. we have Sesame Street stickers all over most surfaces of the house. Oscar still calls the whole Muppet crew “Mamies”, and loves them indiscriminately…though i think his heart belongs to Elmo first and foremost. and i - gasp, i, heartless cynic - have begun to think Elmo’s kinda cute. sometimes.

so when we saw Elmo - or the dude in the Elmo suit - at Jack Frost on Sunday, i didn`t react at all like i would have even a few foolish months ago. not a nose-hair did i raise in disdain. nope, instead, i did a double-take and stood there with my mouth wide open like i`d just been confronted with the spectacle of superstardom there in front of me, live and in the fuzz. because in Oscar’s world, this was like running into Elvis…and since we’ve never done any of these kid fair things before, the whole presence of Elmo stunned me just as much as if it had been Elvis in front of us. then i came to my senses, grabbed my boy, hightailed it over in front of that ersatz Muppet, and beamed like a twit at the joy on my little Mamie-obsessed rerun-addict`s face. and after Oscar had gotten his hug and was backing away from the plush wonder, stars in his eyes, i had to remind myself that the sixteen-year old kid inside the Elmo suit really didn`t need a hug from me, too.

because for a second there, the delight on that little face overcame me and i was small again too, eight or nine, trying to understand why the words to “The Rainbow Connection” made my eyes fill with tears…for a second there, with Oscar and Elmo, i almost believed.

so thank you, mass marketing…for the unexpected joy i’ve found in being wrong, about Elmo and tv shows and all the rest. now to just get that boy hooked on “Fantasy Island” and “Little House on the Prairie”…oh, yeh, and “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Mr. Dressup,” or maybe really “Mr. Dressup” should come first because Daisy’s short shorts are way more risque than Casey & Finnegan’s purported relationship…and oooh yeh, maybe some “Polka Dot Door”…nah, they were lame…