What are you people thinking?!

The medical fun continues.

How about a popular parenting topic for a change: waste management (change! the puns are killing you, right?). I've never really had a problem changing diapers. Poor J will do it without ever complaining, but he has a much more finely developed gag reflex and it tends to fire on him when a diaper's particularly pungent. That has yet to happen to me. Until now.

I'll just come out and tell you; we have to fill 7 vials and 6 paper smearing thingies with fecal samples. It's as awful as it sounds. It seems to take forever and I feel like bleaching the world when I'm done. There is a chasm of difference between folding up a diaper and immediately sealing it away in the diaper genie in the garage vs. performing this vile (vile vial!) task in order to allow the medical community to do their duty. And that's all I better say about that.

The other task at hand is the endless blood letting. With checking vaccine titers and infectious disease tests, there are about 15 things that require around eight vials of blood. We learned today that her veins are "tiny" and are not disposed to giving up the goods. Duh, of course they aren't.

She screamed and struggled the entire time, working herself and me into a sweat. The phlebotomist chastised me a bit for allowing her shoulder to move (seriously!) even though I was holding it so tight I was afraid it would bruise and part of my hand fell completely asleep from the pressure. I'm going to ask them to do it with her laying down next time rather than in my lap. When the flow slowed and stopped, they had to do the other arm. Then that stopped, too. The plan had been to get most of it today and then a smaller amount, but instead we're in for the same kind of party tomorrow.

Before.

After. You can't tell, but even her hair was soaked.

She recovered quickly, though afterward she pointed several times to her inner elbow with a "what the heck?" expression on her face. "Mom, what is WITH those people?" she'd like to know. She fell asleep in the car on the way home, about an hour before her usual nap. I don't blame her.

She's such a clear communicator, she must think we're all a little dense relying on these silly words all the time. I wish we could explain more about this strange world to her in a way she could understand right now. The other day at Red Robin she was entirely freaked out by a person-sized Statue of Liberty in the lobby entrance. After standing in the same spot for five minutes, she suddenly started clawing up me, and sort of quietly screaming "Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhhhhhh!" Once we were seated and eating, she kept pointing over toward it and babbling questions our way, tilting her head and scrunching her eyebrows a little. I tried touching the statue's nose, tapping on the metal and explaining it was a toy. None of it was convincing her this creepy thing belonged near vulnerable unarmed humans.

She's right: it is a creepy statue.

We'll have to keep just confusing her with our weird world. Can't wait to hear what she thinks of all this when she's old enough to understand us better. I've always loved the chatty stages. This morning, Isaac was curious about whether I had ever been in the Ballet or if I was perhaps breaking a rule by using the Ballet Parking at the Children's Hospital. He also announced to the phlebotomist, "I'm here to comfort her when you start in with the needles." Ha.