Daddy's Coming Home

I've said over and over that I can't wait for the time when Tom is in our new house full-time because at that point, he'll stop being a guest and just be home.

Right now, the girls act like monkeys when he's there. They run, they scream, they push him around like he's a big toy.

And he loves it. He really does. He chases them around the house, from the kitchen, through the living room, down the hall and back into the kitchen and they giggle and Olivia lets him catch her so he can carry her as they chase Alyssa, who will get far enough ahead of them so she can stop and wait to see if Tom's changes the route and waiting around the corner for her.

Honestly, I love that they all have so much fun. I do. And I hope that once he's just home instead of visiting the fun continues.

But we'll see.

And the time we'll get to see that is in three days because closing for the sell of the house in Huntington has been scheduled for Thursday. Thursday night, Tom will be HOME, in our only house, with me and the girls and it will be lovely.

It will be right.

Last night, he sat down on the couch with a sigh of relief and said, "I'll be so glad to not have to make that drive anymore."

And I smiled beautifically at him and said with sympathy, "I know. It's been tough, hasn't it?"

See, my New Year's resolution was to be kind. Kinder to myself, to my girls, to my husband.

And so, instead of getting up, going to the kitchen, getting a fork and coming back and stabbing in the eye with it, saying over and over, "Five months, you did it for five months, you ass!"

Instead of doing that, I smiled and agreed that it will be nice that he won't have to make that drive anymore.

But let me remind everyone (because I don't necessarily have to be kind here, right?) that I made that drive for eight years. Yes, EIGHT freaking years.

The first year I made it while increasingly pregnant. The second year, I made the drive with an infant who screamed the twenty minutes home every. single. day.

The third year, it got better, because Alyssa no longer screamed and she and I stopped going home every day.

But...five months people.

He's bitching and sighing in relief after five months.

Really?

But...I'm done with that. The kinder, more loving side of me says, "So what? We're both done making the drive and isn't that what really matters?"

And it is what matters.

He's coming home. And that's truly what matters.

Well, that and the fact that as of Thursday, we'll only have one mortgage again. Whew.

Monosomy

I was perusing the archives of a fairly well-known blogger last week and came across the word monosomy. This particular blogger was explaining all the things that came occur when a person with a balanced translocation attempts to procreate.

See, I've never actually seen or heard the word monosomy before.

Knowing that meaning of trisomy, obviously, I was able to figure out what monosomy meant.

I also knew how it related to Olivia and 5p-.

But...

For some reason, that word really hit me hard. It rattled around in my head. Monosomy, monosomy, monosomy.

Why does hearing/reading that word hit me harder than hearing the doctor say she has 5p-?

Does it make it more real?

Not really. Olivia is Olivia. She's still my sweet, beautiful girl. Her chromosomes are no different today than they were a week ago, when I'd never seen or heard that word.

Of course, being a child of the internet, I googled monosomy.

Google brought up Turner's syndrom and 5p- (Cri du Chat) as two monosomies that are compatible with life.

Wow.

I realize that 5p- is actually a partial monosomy. Olivia does have some of that short leg of her fifth chromosome. Does adding partial to the front of monosomy make a difference?

Not really.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

I guess I just want an honest account of my emotions concerning everything about my girls and the things that affect them.

And obviously, O's chromosomes affect her. Duh.

So this has hit me harder than any other part of her diagnosis.

When I first heard of 5p-/Cri du Chat, it was in the abstract. Olivia was not even a year old and she was nowhere near being diagnosed. So I had almost a year and a half to take it in, to turn it over and over in my head, considering the possibility of it applying to my little girl before it actually did.

This time, though, it's right there and it obviously applies to my child.

Perhaps that's why it's hitting harder. It doesn't actually make O's diagnosis more real. It is what it is, but maybe, just maybe, because I can't consider it in the abstract, I can't think about what it means without applying it to Olivia, it feels more real, it feels more final, it hurts just a little more.

So I'll work through it. I'll roll this word, this monosomy, around in my head, feeling it out, figuring it out even as it applies to Olivia.

It doesn't change her. It doesn't take away from the joy of having her ask for red lipstick every single day or insisting on tights instead of sock. It doesn't make her less joyful or even less frustrating.

This is about me this time. My reaction, my hurt. But it won't hurt for long. Because it can't. I'll be too busy applying red lipstick and find a different pair of tights because the first, second, and third pair bothered her toes.

Life gets in the way of thinking about things like this for too long. And that's a very good thing.

Girls with Boys' Names

Growing up at the only Tommie in the tri-state area, I went through several years of hating my name, to several years of accepting my name, to a few years of thinking that if I had daughters they'd have names like Alison nicknamed Sonnie and Penelope nicknamed Pete (I know, that one doesn't make any sense at all, I was 15 at the time, give me a break.)

Over the years I've come back to the state of acceptance.

I was named after my dad, Tom (duh!) and one of my mom's favorite cousins, Tommye Jean. My mother was born in Memphis, TN and lived there until she was eleven, at which time her parents moved her and eight of her eleven living siblings to Vermillion, OH.

By the time I got to college, I was okay with my name. I even still considered eventually giving a daughter a name with similar gender neutrality.

We all know how that worked out.

When I met Tom (on-line, I know!!) I refused to even meet him at first.

I was all, "Please. Do you really want to be Tom and Tommie? Give me a break."

But he wore me down and here we are.

I still really like gender neutral names, but for my girls, it didn't feel right. When Tom suggested the name Alyssa, I mentioned that it was on my list. He settled on it right then and there was no more discussion.

When I mentioned the name Olivia, he liked it and decided again, that that was it.

But sometimes...I think about those daughters I imagined when I was fifteen. I wonder how much Sonnie would hate her name. And how much Pete might want to kill me in my sleep once she hit the teen years.

I suppose this is just one more reason fifteen year olds shouldn't have babies, they usually have terrible taste in names. (Please note, I wrote USUALLY! If any of my readers, all either of them, had a child at fifteen, I'm sure he/she has a lovely, perfectly appropriate name. End note.)

Oh, there it is...

So I started a diet on Monday, as one does on the first Monday of the new year.

And...it was hard. It's been hard every single day, hour, minute since waking up on Monday morning.

Usually, when I start a diet it isn't so hard. Usually, I have this sense that it's time, I'm ready, let's go. I don't even want those foods that are suddenly 'forbidden.'

This time? Ohhh, how I wanted that peanut butter fudge that someone (EVIL!) brought in on Tuesday morning.

I confess that I found a small bag of Funyuns in my car yesterday and devoured them in the twenty minutes it took me to drive home.

This morning, though, I found that elusive will power that had evaded me for the past three days.

Suddenly, when I passed the chocolate fudge (EVIL!) in the breakroom, I could say honestly, "Don't want it. Don't need it."

And I walked away.

So here I sit, eating my lettuce with salsa and anticipating my cucumber. I only hope this will power sticks around because...ohh, how hard it is to resist when it's not here.

"Just" 5p-

I was talking to a co-worker yesterday and in the midst of the conversation, I heard myself say, "Well, she just has 5p-."

And I stopped right there.

Just? She JUST has 5p-? Good Lord!

To back up, we were talking about social security benefits and how I've heard that it's easier to be approved to receive them as a child than it is as an adult.

I went on to explain to my co-worker that we have no idea how far Olivia will go. So far? She's amazing.

And yes, she'll always be amazing as far as Im concerned.

But...will she someday be able to hold down a job and live by herself?

We just don't know.

I explained that at this time, she doesn't seem to have any of the complications that can sometimes accompany various syndromes. She's healthy, she's aware, she's mobile.

So is there any such thing as 'just' having a chromosomal disorder?

I didn't mean to come across as flippant in my conversation. I feel like we got so incredibly lucky with Olivia. As this point in her development, she's very high functioning (as well as high maintenance.) But I'm well aware that that might not always be the case.

I go back to the moment we got her diagnosis. She was just a couple of months past two years old. I'd found 5p- when she was about eight months old and mentioned it to her doctor, who poo-pooed me and waved me on my way. I looked at Olivia and thought, "Well, she doesn't really have any of the physical features, so maybe he's right..."

But I always came back to that cry. That tiny little cry of hers when she was in the NICU. That cry that told every single person in the room that MY baby was crying. The cry that when she was about six months old and we were out and about one afternoon, we were asked while at WalMart, "Do you have an exotic bird in that carseat?"

And then at Dairy Queen, the cashier asked if we had an angry cat in our car.

That cry.

But I kept thinking that her doctor was smarter than I am. I'm just the mom.

So when our new doctor, our developmental pediatrician, walked into that room and confirmed the 5p- diagnosis, all I felt was profound relief.

Finally! We had some answers.

And I'd done enough research to know it wasn't degenerative. Olivia is Olivia. She'd already shown how much more she could do than doctors several decades ago would have expected out of her. We'd take our little gir who 'just' had 5p- home and let her set the pace, (while continuing therapies, if only to give her the very best chance of proving everyone wrong.)

Obviously, right now we're taking things one day at a time. She's four, for Pete Sakes. (That one was for you, Julie.) Each day brings it's own challenges, whether you 'just' have 5p- or not.

But yeah, that social security issue has been on my mind quite a bit. Any Ohio moms out there with any advice on this one?

"The bus is FUN!"

Those words were shouted at me as I walked in the door to my mom's kitchen yesterday afternoon.

The words were shouted by the very same girl, who, nine hours earlier had put on her bravest face, looked at me one last time as if I'd betrayed her trust somehow and climbed onto the bus to school for the first time in her entire elementary school career.

She's in second grade, dudes.

She'd never once ridden a bus to or from school before yesterday.

But she pressed her lips into a hard, resigned line and climbed onto that bus and took the seat the driver pointed her to (her assigned seat, much to her relief) and off she went to school.

And I was on time to work during the school year for the first time in almost three years.

The night before this new bus routine, Alyssa didn't sleep much.

She was nervous. She was scared. She cried. She didn't understand why she had to start riding the bus.

Couldn't she just start with riding the bus to school for awhile and having Gram pick her up. Just for a little while?

No, we jumped in with both feet. She rode the bus to school and then back home again.

And it was fine.

Heck, it was better than fine, it was FUN.

I held her that Sunday night, whispering that the first day is always the hardest. Didn't she remember those first few days of school earlier this year? They were hard. They were scary and now? They're great.

She remembered, but it didn't help with the fear of the bus.

What if Gram wasn't home when the bus dropped her off?

What if the bus driver forgot that she was on the bus and didn't stop at Gram's house?

There were so many fear and she's only seven (for ten more days, she's only seven.)

But she did and I couldn't be prouder of her.

She did it and she realized and acknowledged that it was fine. It was fun.

My girl is brave. And she's tough and she's sweet and willing to admit those moments she realizes her fears were unfounded. She did tell me that it's also loud and bouncing. Which, when you're seven, makes it all the more fun.

She's awesome and I love that she figured out that the bus is fun.

Ringing in the New

Alyssa tried. She really did. She wanted so much to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve. She made it to 10:30. But she couldn't quite make it past that point. She's not a night owl, that girl.

Of course, she beat both Olivia and Tom. O was sound asleep by 8:30 and I'm not sure Tom made it much past 9:00.

Me? I stayed up and kissed each of my lovelies at 12:00 (or 12:01 or 12:02, depending upon where they lay in the house.)

The next morning, Tom got up with Olivia, our early bird, at 7:00 (she was awake at 6:00) and gave her the corn flakes she requested and let me sleep until 9:00. It was lovely.

It was a wonderful way to start the new year.

When I finally dragged my sleepy butt out of bed, I made breakfast and Alyssa fussed over her one scrambled egg, but in the end, it was eaten and all was well. Olivia, on the other hand, ate most of two over-easy eggs and three sausage links. She's an eater, that one. There's something to be said for the 5p- metabolism.

It was a lazy day. There was laundry, and tv. Alyssa raced through the house being a horse, and then a lion and Olivia twirled around the house declaring to one and all, "I'm a ballerina."

Which? Is awesome. Just like the horse and the lion are awesome.

We left 2010 behind with barely a look back.

Yet...it was a good year.

We bought a new house. We got an offer on our old house.

Alyssa started a new school and is thriving.

Olivia talks more and more and her words become more clear every week. Her balance is incredible these days. She runs, she jumps, she stands on her head.

Tom and I are working together these days instead of against each other and that's just so very nice. We can laugh and be silly and actually talk to each other in ways that are important and meaningful.

I hope and pray that 2011 is better still. But I know that it will take continual work to make it so.

So bring it, 2011. I think we're ready.