Julia's off to bed now, ending a long and often hard week for her. Proof of the last seven days' difficulties came this afternoon, when she uncorked a nap that was nearly three hours long - about twice as long as her usual 90-minutes-on-the-dot naps. Despite having an intermittently rough time of it since last Sunday, she has also been in a great mood for much of the time, which testifies to her innate good humor and inner beauty. Really, seeing her aplomb made me feel that strange sense of future loss that seems characteristic of parenthood: assuming that Julia goes off to college when she's 18, I only have sixteen more years of being around her all the time. I don't think that's enough time to get to know her well enough.
Anyhow, the week started with Julia's test at Children's Hospital in Minneapolis. Since Shannon's already blogged this dismal event and its outcome, I'll just comment on how wrenching it was to see Julia on the exam table, looking up at me with not a little fear while trying trying trying to watch the Elmo video which was supposed to distract her. Sadly for her, the video seemed to be nothing but Mr. Noodle, the loose-limbed, Einstein-haired dancing fool whom she finds rather frightening. Perfect. When the exam team inserted the catheter (which looked about as wide as a freaking firehose), Julia cried, of course. But she squeezed the tears away and just said a few times, "Julia felt a pinch," as the tech had told her she would. Then she stared imploringly at me and glanced at the video screen until the test was almost over. Before she could get up - which she asked to do about a million times, with increasing desperation - she had to void her bladder, which had been filled via the catheter to zeppelin dimensions. Since she can't pee at will, she had to just wait until the subconscious trigger was tripped, flooding one diaper after another. Then it was done. By the time she was dried off and standing on the changing table, getting out her kid-sized gown ("just yike Mama's at the hopsital!"), she was already smiling and chattering away, as we knew she would, about how "Julia dident yike dat test." A nice lunch and a new Big Bird doll - and the happy surprises of encountering a near-life size Big Bird statue in the hospital entrance and a naked little boy on the men's room changing table - made everything more or less okay.
All that was enough badness for one week. Luckily, Grandma was around to entertain her and shower her with presents like a kid's baseball-and-bat set, and she had a few days before the next trial, a Thursday-night class, offered via Northfield's Early Childhood & Family Education program, intended for dads and their kids. As Shannon described, it's a "separation class," which means that the kids spend some of the time totally apart from the parents. Julia had on Wednesday successfully and tearlessly separated from Shannon at another ECFE class, but on Thursday night she bawled when I had to leave the room to join the other dads for our discussion and when I returned to the room after it. And she cried hard: juddering shakes that wracked her whole body, wheezing and hyperventilating, copious tears, wailing stab-in-the-heart questions like, "Where Daddy go?" I came close to crying, myself. I knew she'd be okay, though, when she stopped sobbing long enough to ask, in her charming way, "What Julia crying about?" As with Monday's test, she has been discussing the class, and her crying jags, at some length since. (I've also since learned that she was just fine while I was gone, playing with a friend and having fun. I'm not sure if this makes me feel better [she can do all right without me!] or worse [ditto].)
Friday's bad times were two in number. First, having recently learned to open doors, she graduated to the next class: learning what happens when you catch your fingers in the door. Again with the crying, and rightfully: it was a heavy door. After the interesting novelty of having her hand iced, she found no ill effects. In fact, within an hour we were at her favorite playground, clambering up onto her favorite slide. Unfortunately, we had to share the slide with two girls, roughly five years old, who were pretending to be jaguars and who were thus snarling and pretend-clawing at everyone who came near. As the playground curmudgeon, I had to repeatedly lift one of the jaguar girls out of the way when she tried to climb ahead of Julia, and to (less and less gently) chastise her for slamming into Julia after following down the slide too closely. I hate being That Parent, but geez - after Julia's week I thought I had the right to try to prevent further trauma.
Though not of the meteorological sort. Saturday night, we had a massive thunderstorm which of course woke Julia and kept her awake for an hour. I may be toying with the idea of starting up a cult to worship Ukko, the Finns' pre-Christian god of thunder, but he did me no favors by scaring Julia so badly last night. Luckily, Sunday saw nothing worse than an indoor picnic, a few stumbles during a long walk, and some fussing over whether we could read ten zillion or eleven zillion books before bed. That kind of trouble, I'm happy to handle. I hope your next week's a better one, Bobo!