It’s been a pretty busy month since the last update, too busy to update on how busy everything has been.
Mikey’s birthday went brilliantly, though he took the notion of the “birthday suit” literally, and didn’t wear his clothes through most of it. The theme of the get together with family and friends was Bubbles, Balls, and Balloons. The latter two were great successes, but the former was a flop – the cheap bubblemaker I got spit out a zillion bubbles in the first twenty seconds and then stopped. The next day at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, Mikey’s little cousin Natalie was baptized, and Ian and I were godfathers. Mikey, to Ian’s horror, would only wear the very dirty tee-shirt his grandparents brought him of a basketball to church.
He got an embarrassingly huge pile of gifts for his birthday, considering we hardly made a big deal of it. We had to open up one or two presents a day for two weeks to go through them all, and meanwhile the cards had gotten all mixed up, so we don’t know who gave the good stuff and who gave the crap. Ian’s boss gave a great present though: Mikey’s first big boy bed. It’s from Pottery Barn Kids, the Catalina twin bed, which we liked because it gets down low so he can crawl in now, and later can rise up with room for a trundle bed for sleepovers. (And no, this isn’t Mikey’s bedroom, this is the bed from the catalog – I’ll take a pic of the bedroom later)
At school, he’s moved up to the “older kids’ class” which is filled with 2-year-olds, up from the babies class he’s been in up to now. He loves it, but Ian and I have asked the teacher to tell the kids to let him do some things on his own. We know that Mikey just points and people run to get him whatever he wants … it’s the curse of being cute. As I know all too well, alas.
Last Friday was a bit of drama. Mikey had a bit of a cold. Nothing serious, we thought, just a bit of a sniffy nose. We put him down at the usual time of 7:30 after a great night of sushi at Akari, and at 9:00, he was awake, calling, “Daddy! Papa! Daddy! Papa!”
When we checked on him, he was touching his ear, “Ear, boo boo!” I figured he had a bit of sinus thing like I get when I have a cold, and I was looking at his medical records to see whether he was approved for children’s ibuprofen, when Ian said, “I think we should take him to the emergency room.”
Mikey had quickly turned from whining to screaming, and we quickly threw our clothes on, and got him in the car and to Northridge Medical Center in three minutes – it’s about ten minutes away by foot. I haven’t been to an emergency room in decades, and so I was picturing a scene like you see in “e.r.,” but it was very calm and orderly. In fact, Northridge is the Valley’s first pediatric trauma center.
Despite Mikey’s howling, it took us an hour and a half to be seen, and when we told him that the doctor needed to look in his ear to see the boo boo, he calmed down and let her do it. She said it was an impressive otitis media middle ear infection, and sent us off with a prescription for codeine and antibiotic. Mikey was so exhausted at two o’clock in the morning that he had the hiccups and still fell asleep, hiccupping with his head resting on his chest.
He’s better now. Tomorrow, he’s dressing as a puppy for his first of several Halloween parties. And, like I said at the beginning of this blog, on November 19th, we’ve been told, which is when National Adoption Day is celebrated in Los Angeles, we will be able to adopt him!
