Q-Tips Aren't Just for Ears Anymore

The Prince and Princess of Poop are going to put me in the poor house.

Two kids in diapers = small fortune for mommy and daddy. Is it wrong to look at every poop as literally flushing money down the toilet?

Yeah, more poop stories from me. I have a history. See this. And this. And this. And this. But, of course, this is the best one.

Part of this is my problem. I swore I’d have Sydney potty trained by age 2. Then, we would only have one kid in diapers.

But then Tyson was born and we were dealing with his heart issues and surgery and I didn’t have the focus or the energy. Now, I just lack the energy.

She is going on 29 months. It is time. We talk about it constantly. We read books about it. We do trial runs to the toilet. But she simply doesn’t want to cross over into Potty Land.

And between the energy required to just keep our heads above water with our full-time jobs as parents and our just full-time jobs, we aren’t up for the fight.

Pathetic. I know.

So I stand by and watch the Princess put me in the poor house with her many daily poops.

At least the boy is a little less prolific in this area.

Actually, Tyson has a constipation problem.

It is little wonder he has this problem, with all the fortification we do of his breast milk. In order to catch the little guy up on calories, he’s been on supplements since birth. We put so much powder in there, he probably feels like he is drinking sand.

We try to account for this by feeding him prune juice and adding oil to the solid cereal he eats. But it isn’t enough and about every three days or so, he gets cranky as hell because of constipation.

The question is, what to do? We didn’t experience a lot of this with Sydney. Remember, she suffered from Explosive Ass Disorder and was prone to explosions anywhere, anytime. Tyson has the opposite problem and is often as backed up as a Manhattan street during rush hour.

Well, my wife got a pretty good tip. Put a little Vaseline on a Q-tip and insert it into the rectum.

Yes, you heard that right.

This is one of those jobs, much like the NoseFrida, that is best reserved for mom. Dad always seems busy when it is time for this task.

So far, it has worked pretty well. The insertion is usually followed, within a half hour or so, by the production of a few logs that could provide the foundation to Lincoln’s cabin.

This kid is pooping out logs as big around as my fatty fingers. That is quite an ordeal for a 8 month old. I’m fearing an anal fissure in his future.

Then, within a few more hours, all that stuff that was backed up inside comes pouring out in one Explosive Ass Disorder eruption. After that, the boy is all smiles.

For those of you experiencing these types of problems with your kids, I highly recommend this tactic. I am not sure if doctors approve – I know they don’t like you sticking Q-tips in your ears, but I am not sure how they feel about your rectum – but sometimes you have to go against the advice of the experts and go with your gut.

No matter how full of poop it may be.  

Will this Nickname Stick?

Tyson has a nickname. He is the “Budster.”

Here’s how I know: the other day, when 28-month-old Sydney was talking about him, instead of using her normal “baby Tyson” to address him, she called him Budster.

When a 2-year-old picks up on your nickname, it is a sign you may be branded with it for life.

  

I can’t tell you precisely how he got it. I think I probably was calling him “buddy,” but because of his weight issues, he is too tiny to qualify as a full-size “buddy.” He’s more of a little buddy, or a Budster.

I’ve been calling him that since his August operation. Somehow, it has stuck. Unlike Sydney, who had a million nicknames, Tyson has really only had one. And, unlike Sydney, where none of the nicknames stuck, this one seems to be sticking.

It is not as manly as the coolest of all nicknames, The Boss, but I like it better than Puff Daddy or Snoop Dog.

It is better than Shit-for-Brains. I think my dad may have called me that a time or two. And it is better than his uncle, Little Dick.

Although, I do feel a little like that guy on Saturday Night Live making copies every time I use the name Budster. It really does sound like one of the nicknames he would toss around.

Is this something that can be carried on into adulthood? I wonder if at some point in his young life, he will turn to me with a look of disgust and declare that he no longer wants to be known as the Budster. It will probably be during some moment of pre-teen angst where he is trying to be cool and develop a rapper persona like Iron Tyson or Ice T or the T Kettle.

No worries. I can change with the times. I’m as fluid as his breast milk. I won’t call him Budster in front of his friends. I won’t make him wear “Budster” on the back of his T-ball shirt. I won’t introduce him to his junior high teachers as Budster Gregg.

But, in my mind, I’m always going to remember my little buddy who struggled so hard in his first few months to even eat, making every meal a marathon. I’m always going to picture that tiny body that emerged from open-heart surgery so battered I wasn’t even sure he would make it, despite the doctor’s assurances. I’m always going to recall all the nights his mother and I held him tight, wishing that love alone would help him heal and become whole.

To me, he’s always going to be my little Budster.

Let's Make Some Money from our Walking Billboards

Did you ever notice how young kids become walking billboards for corny sayings?

Tyson must have 13 shirts that say things like “Daddy’s Little Rock Star” or “Santa’s Little Helper” or “Ass, Gas or Grass…no one rides for free.”

I see these kinds of shirts on kids all the time. You get a bunch of babies together for a play date and it is like going to a family reunion in West Virginia or Kentucky – everyone has a shirt with a stupid saying.

How did this start? Parents who would never wear shirts that say “Crack Kills” right above their butt cracks have no problem dressing little Jimmy in a shirt that says “FBI” in big letters and “Female Body Inspector”  in little letters or “Don’t Make me Violate My Parole.”

I stopped wearing such shirts in college, or shortly thereafter. I think I had one of those Salty Dog t-shirts from a Spring Break trip that said something stupid, or maybe it was a Dick’s Last Resort t-shirt that said “Chicks Love Dicks” in big letters followed by a microscopic “Last Resort.”

Now, when I see someone dressed in something like that, I’m looking around for the trailer park.

Am I wrong on this? Have I gone Park Avenue? Have I forgotten my roots?

Once, when I was a kid, and Olivia Newton John was doing her thing in sweatsuits and headbands, I wore a shirt that just said “ANIMAL.” I liked it because she sang a song that went, “Let’s Get Physical, Physical…I Want to Get Animal, Let’s Get Into Animal,” and I was a 14-year-old kid who wanted to get ANIMAL with anything of the female persuasion.

I remember adults looking at my shirt with puzzlement and asking me what it meant. I really didn’t have a good answer. Most likely, BECAUSE I WAS A 14-YEAR-OLD IDIOT.

Now, I am the adult. And it is my kid who is wearing shirts that say “I’m not as Think as you Drunk I am.”

Ok, maybe not that.

But then I got to thinking. What if we turned this trend into something positive? Babies are cute. People love to look at them. If you walk into a restaurant with a baby, you can bet nearly everyone will look at that little bundle of joy as you walk from the door to the table.

So, instead of wearing a shirt that says “Daddy’s Football Star,” what if we put him in a shirt that said “I Like Gerber” or ‘I Buy My Carrots and Peas at Kroger.” Would Gerber or Kroger be willing to rent space on my kid?

You see the possibilities, right? If your kid has great muscle tone, he could wear a Gold’s Gym shirt. If he is a little portly, a Skyline Chili shirt might be a little more appropriate. If she has crystal blue eyes, maybe a shirt that advertises colored contact lenses. If it is a great hair day, a shirt for the local beauty salon.

Suddenly, I am making money off my kid. I like that idea. How can I get this movement started?

In the meantime, I’ll try to find some shirts that match my family more closely. Sydney  can get a “Fart Now Loading” shirt with a Internet loading status bar below it. Tyson can have a “Shit Happens” shirt and Brooke can get the classic ‘I’m with Stupid” shirt.

Hell, maybe I even will get an “I Beat Anorexia” shirt.

Two Words: Dog Poop

 

 

My daughter has an unnatural obsession with dog poop.

Any brown spot she sees leads her to call out, “Daddy, dog poop!” A fleck of mud on her clothes or her hand? “Daddy, dog poop!”  When I am changing her diaper, or her brother’s diaper, she looks down at the dirty mess and says, “Daddy, dog poop!”

Twenty times a day, I hear this refrain. It has kind of become her answer to everything.

Brooke has an old night stand where a candle burned a stain into it. (Most likely the result of one of her drunken college binges.) Every time Sydney passes that stand, she points to the spot and says, “Daddy, dog poop.”

Sometimes, she can't go to sleep because, well, you know.

“Sydney, it is TIME TO GO TO SLEEP!”

“Daddy, dog poop! There’s dog poop on the bed.”

When I loaded her into the car at 3 a.m. prior to our Thanksgiving trip to Milwaukee, she was excited about the middle-of-the-night excursion to grandma and grandpa’s. ‘What are we going to see in Milwaukee?” I asked, anticipating some joyful squeal.

“Dog poop?” she asked.

Sigh. 

In her defense, she does see a lot of dog poop. We have two dogs, both weighing near 100 pounds. She’s told frequently to watch out for dog poop in the yard. (In the summer, I can mow that into fertilizer and in the winter, it is frozen and easy to pick up. Fall and summer are just messy.)

Plus, our German Shepherd, Vegas, has been diagnosed with degenerative myelopathy, which means that his brain and the nerves in his back end don’t always communicate. That sometimes results in accidents on the porch or in the house.

Yeah, I know. TMI.

Still, my daughter’s obsession is a bit out of control. When other people listen to her, they probably think we spend our days swimming in dog poop.

I suspect there will be many more obsessions over the next 16 years. My goal will be to channel them into something a little more positive than dog poop.

Like farts and burps.

Life Has Been Hectic

I’ve been on a little hiatus. Long enough to grow a beard. And then shave it.

Before I get into the subject of my post – which will be the use of babies as billboards – I will explain my extended absence. 

 

Since my last post, my mom has taken ill and has spent more than a month in the hospital. She’s undergone stomach surgery twice, but that has not fixed the problem. We’re told it could be about six more weeks to confirm a diagnosis (they suspect a blockage that they just can’t see) and then she will likely have a third surgery. The good news is, she gets to go home (well, to my house) today. No more hospital food. (Actually, she didn’t eat for 30 days, so she can’t even complain about the food.)

Once mom went to the hospital, caring for Tyson became an issue. He has to be fed through a tube, and until my mom’s illness, only my wife, mother and I have fed him. I stayed home from work for more than week to care for him after my mom went in the hospital. That's when I grew a beard and kept it for about a month. But I've since returned to just the goatee, for all those who could give a damn, which probably only equals my wife.

Life should slow down for me now, too. I've been going straight from work to the hospital, then home by 8 p.m. to eat, do dishes and put the kids to bed. (A 2 hour ritual when you include bath, story time and Sydney's grousing about not going to bed.) I get to sleep about 11, wake up at 2 and feed Tyson, go back to sleep at 3 and wake up at 6:30 for work. 

I'm exhausted. All. The. Freaking. Time. I could sleep for about four months. In fact, wake me up when Kim and Kanye get divorced.     

 

But life is moving in the right direction. Mom is getting better and we eventually transitioned Tyson to the child care provider who cares for Sydney, the wonderful Ms. Amber. Things are going very well. Learning to feed through the tube is not difficult, and she quickly mastered that. But when you have to spend 20 minutes getting him to drink as much as possible by mouth and then another 20 dumping the rest of his required nutrients down the tube, you are tied up from doing much else. Ms. Amber has five other little ones running around. That can be challenging.

Her solution is to pop in a movie during his morning feed and hold nap time during his afternoon feed. It is working. Thank you, Ms. Amber. In fact, a thousand thank yous.

As for a Tyson update, he is doing well. His disposition is great, a complete 180 from his pre-surgery crying and screaming. He’s a pretty quiet and gentle kid. His heart continues to heal and there are no red flags. He still is not on the growth charts, but he is slowly gaining weight. We can’t remove the tube until he is voluntarily eating what he is supposed to on his own. Right now, he is probably at 60 percent. Still a few months to go, I suspect.

I think Sydney could care less about having him at day care. Other than doing her best to wake him every time he falls asleep, she ignores him, like she does at home. I was hoping some sort of protective instinct would kick in, but I’m pretty sure if we left him at Ms. Amber’s permanently she would be fine with that.

Ok, this update is already too long. I’ll pick up the whole babies-as-billboards thing in a couple of days. There’s probably some money to be made there if you do it right.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

I’ll never be elected to the Fatherhood Hall of Fame.

I may look good on paper. I may say all the right things in this blog. But believe me, I have incredible shortcomings.

On a daily basis, my wife kicks my butt in parenting. There is no comparison. I am a Single A ballplayer and she is not only in the Major Leagues, she is all-star, Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera.

But I am smart enough to know parenting my two children will be the most important job I have in life.

That’s why I have made a very difficult career decision. I am leaving my job of only six months and returning to my old job, which provides far more flexibility to deal with Tyson’s medical issues.

Caring for Tyson has been more challenging than we thought. The main problem right now is he still must be fed through a tube, eight times a day, with each feed taking 30-45 minutes. This could go on for a few months. He has fallen off the growth charts and voluntarily eats only about a third of what he should in a normal day.

On top of that, he has numerous doctor’s visits. His regular cardiac appointments are sometimes three hours long, and we will soon add therapy sessions.

We’ve been lucky that my wife had the summer off from teaching, but, now that she has returned, those appointments will fall primarily on me.

As you can imagine, this is likely too much for a child care provider who might be caring for five other kids at the same time. Even our provider, the super Ms. Amber, might struggle with this assignment. So we had to come up with a plan to nurse him to normal.

We examined three options: my wife taking a year off work, hiring professional help and asking my mom for assistance.

If my wife took a year off work, it would hurt us financially and she would have no guarantee of getting her specific job back when she returned. Not a good option.

Hiring professional help would be expensive and mean leaving Tyson with a stranger. Not a good option.

Asking my mom for help would cost us some food and gas money and put Tyson in the care of someone who knows him and loves him. A good option.

My mom has agreed to this. She is an angel; I’ve counted on her all my life and she always comes through. My brother will play a huge part, too, making it financially possible for her to be away from her day job. He’s a hero in this story, too.

But my mom lives four hours away. It is a tough drive for a 64-year-old woman and then she has to care for an infant. We need to find ways to give her breaks. Plus, we really need a parent at these doctor’s appointments.

So I am going to fill the gaps.

My old job is 15 minutes from my house and 5 minutes from Children’s Hospital. I have four months of accumulated sick time there from rarely taking a sick day (they allow you to accumulate and roll over). I also am able to use sick time to deal with my child’s illness, something I do not have at my current job, which requires sick time only for the employee’s illness.

While my new employer has been super great regarding this whole Tyson thing and very flexible, I’ve only been here long enough to accumulate six days of sick time. And I am more than a half hour away from home and the hospital, adding more time away from work to those long doctor’s appointments.

When you add up the pros and cons, it is simply much easier for me to be a caregiver for Tyson while working the old job instead of the new job.

I liked working at CVG and will miss my colleagues. I’m burdened with a heavy heart to leave them in such a lurch, but sometimes you have to be selfish. Those who work closest with me understand.

I’m very lucky I am in a position to go back. JFS could have filled my position as soon as I left, but, somehow, it was still open at the time I came to the conclusion going back would be a good option for me.  Perhaps that is a little divine intervention.

It is an unexpected career detour, but it works. One, I always liked the job and the people I worked with, so I am not going back to a bad situation. Two, it is what my son needs from me now.

Like I said, I’ll never make the Fatherhood Hall of Fame. But I am sure as hell going to step to the plate when called upon.

Focusing on a New Battle

 

 



 

 

I’ve had more than a few people ask for an update on Tyson, so here it is.

His heart seems to be ok. There haven't been any red flags to this point. The small tear that didn’t completely patch is being monitored and they think it will eventually fix itself.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic. This is not a miracle. But it is a tremendous outcome. We are blessed to have come this far. If I wasn't so bashful, I'd do a thank-you dance in the middle of Cincinnati's Fountain Square, that's how happy we are. 

But there is still a big obstacle to overcome.

First, the good news. His demeanor is better. He smiles a lot more and engages in a little back-and-forth cooing with his mom and dad every now and then. I absolutely LOVE to see him smile and when he is in one of these moods I stop everything I am doing and engage him.

It is so nice that his tiny body doesn’t have to work as hard anymore. He used to be constantly exhausted, as well as writhing in pain. You can now see the potential for him to be a “normal” baby and he has several times a day when he is actually a pretty happy kid.

But not all is well. I’d say that where he was a 10 on the scale of cranky babies pre-surgery, he is probably now a 7. He still has a lot of stomach issues. While the doctors told us to expect this with heart babies, we are still a bit unclear on the connection between his heart problems and his stomach issues and wonder if something else is at play. 

He simply doesn’t like to eat. I believe it causes him pain. He gets extremely gassy and it is very painful, so he doesn’t want to put himself through that experience.

This is how bad it is: after we try to feed him everything we can via bottle, we then have to pour the rest down his tube. When you hook the syringe up to the tube, you sometimes can hear gas bubble up through the tube and watch it come to the surface of the milk in the syringe. On really bad days, when he gets particularly cranky, he can force the whole syringe-full of milk he just drank out of his belly and back into the syringe.

Poor kid. We have talked to doctors and tried different fixes, but nothing is working.

As a result, he is only getting about half of the food they want him to take in a day, and he only takes about half of that voluntarily. We are slowly adding more – 5 milliliters per feed every week – in hopes of getting him up to what a normal kid eats.

Brooke and I hate the tube. Not only is it a burden on us – we feed him eight times a day (every three hours), and each feed takes about 45 minutes – but he seems to really dislike it and we wonder if it is a reason he DOESN’T eat. Filling his belly constantly also leads to a couple of throw ups each day.

The docs don’t seem to mind. Their only concern is getting the food into him. He has fallen off the growth charts and they want him to get his calories up. Whether he is miserable doesn’t matter.

So, we plug away.

I wouldn’t mind waking up every three hours in the middle of the night if we knew it was helping, but I am not so sure it is. The irony for us is we have a baby who would completely sleep through the night, but we have to feed him every three hours. Meanwhile, our 23-month-old still parties like a rock star throughout the night.

If we can’t fix this problem with the feeding tube that runs through his nose, they will eventually put one directly into his stomach. We certainly don’t want that. You can bet we are doing everything in our power to turn this around.

Caring for him is especially challenging now that Brooke is back to work. As you can tell from my previous descriptions, you spend nearly a third of a whole day just feeding him. We’ll soon add therapy sessions to catch him up developmentally. And, of course, he still has numerous doctor and cardiology visits.

We are working on some things to put a system in place where he has the right people to ensure he gets everything he needs and I’ll have more on that in a later post.

To all who have sent prayers and good thoughts his way – the key message from this post is that they worked. He is on the right path and we have every reason to believe he will come out of this A-OK.

But don’t completely forget him. He still has a tough piece of road to travel and your support means the world to us. Someday he is going to understand he made it through on the strength of his community’s shoulders.