rivka

Alex had a doctor's appointment this morning for her annual check-up. It's Michael's day at home, but I decided to go in to work late and take her to her appointment so he wouldn't have to haul along both kids.

We rushed out to the car with juuuust enough time to make it to her appointment. We approached the car on the street side and I buckled her into her booster seat. And then she said, "Mom! What's on our car?!"

Safety glass. Safety glass is what she was seeing. Someone threw half a brick through our driver's side window. The brick was sitting on the passenger seat.



As I called the doctor's office and then the police non-emergency line, someone came out of the apartment building behind me and said he'd seen the guy. He heard the window break, looked out the window and yelled, and saw the guy run away. No description; it was dark. He called the police, who never showed up.

We keep our GPS in a hidden compartment. It was still there. We mostly keep home-burned CDs in the car, but we had some purchased ones in there too and from a quick glance I think they're all there. (I didn't do a comprehensive search, because everything was covered with glass.)

The police came in less than 15 minutes to take my statement and give us an incident report. Baltimore City doesn't actually investigate car break-ins or even, I understand, car theft. But they do come by and take your information and give you a paper to give your insurance company. He asked me if anyone had any problems with me. Rather than give that question the complicated answer it probably deserves, I told him I didn't think the break-in was anything personal.

Michael called our insurance agent, who pointed out that we have a $200 auto glass deductible and that it might not be worth our while to file a claim. And indeed, when he called the auto glass company they priced the repair at $297. Not worth filing a claim and having our premiums go up. They're going to send a truck out this morning to do an onsite repair and clean all the glass bits out of the car.

This is, like, the most hassle-free crime victim experience ever. But I still feel rattled. And annoyed that we missed the doctor's visit, because it took them three months to get her on the schedule for this appointment and the woman I talked to said her doctor's next available well-child visit was in January. At least she said they'd waive the missed-appointment fee.

Michael has the flu.

He started feeling a bit under the weather on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon he felt (and looked) awful. Oddly, he's not running a fever at all. When Alex had it, she seemed much sicker than her relatively low fever would suggest; Michael seems to be following the same pattern.

He went to our doctor today. She prescribed Tamiflu and also an antibiotic because she didn't like the way his lungs sounded. (Our doctor hands out antibiotics like candy.)

Tamiflu needs to be taken in the first day or two of symptoms to be effective, so I became livid when I went to the pharmacy this evening and the pharmacist told me that they had to order more Tamiflu and wouldn't have it until tomorrow. I asked her why she didn't tell Michael this when he dropped the prescription off earlier in the day, or at least call us when she realized they didn't have it. She shrugged and told me that I could have the prescription back if I wanted to take it elsewhere. Then she said that, also, they didn't have the Prozac refill I had called in the day before, because she was going to have to order that too.

So I became That Customer. I raised my voice and said "This is absolutely unacceptable," and explained why. An assistant manager nearby heard me, as I had intended him to, and he came over to investigate the situation. He found my Prozac prescription already filled and waiting on the rack. Then he called around until he found another pharmacy branch that still had Tamiflu in stock and faxed Michael's prescription over there. After a few more rounds of drama (it was faxed to the wrong number and I had to track down what had happened and get them to re-send it), Michael finally wound up with meds in hand. Whew.

I hate this damn pharmacy. They are constantly running out of things and having to order more, or asking me to accept 24 hours worth of pills because they don't have enough right now to fill my full prescription. But, you know, they're a block from our house and they're open 24 hours. It's hard to change.

I had a headache earlier, but I think it was just stress. I've had a lot of that lately, and it's always ramped up by having to deal with both kids solo for long periods of time. (Even if Michael were feeling up to caring for them, we don't really want him touching them.) I was hoping that Michael had seasonal flu, for which I have already been vaccinated, but our doctor thinks it's more likely to be H1N1. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I'VE LOST MY PACKING LIST.

I went to get my third trimester lab stuff done today.

This time I got better advice about how to prepare for the glucose tolerance test so it wouldn't make me violently nauseated. My plan was to drop Alex off at school and then go to a diner to protein-load. Unfortunately, after I parked outside the diner at 9am and fed the meter, I discovered that it didn't open until 9:30. No problem, there was another diner a block and a half away. I struggled through the bitterly cold wind only to find the lights off and a "family emergency" sign on the door. Okay.

I went to the hospital. Fortunately, the cafeteria was still serving breakfast. I loaded up on two hard-boiled eggs, two sausage links, and two strips of bacon (no carbs allowed) and went down to the lab. I waited ten minutes to check in and another half-hour to be seen. They drew some blood to type and cross for my Rhogam shot and made me drink a hideous syrupy orange drink with 50g of glucose in it. Yum.

I settled in for the hour-long wait. Another woman who arrived shortly after me for the same test decided to while away the interval with a long stream-of-consciousness cell phone conversation. At the other end of the room, some kind of Christian news broadcast informed me that 45% of people surveyed thought the US had become too open to different ideas and lifestyles. It was a long hour.

At the end of the hour, they drew more blood and told me that the blood bank needed another half-hour to prepare my Rhogam shot. The sugar crash hit, and I fell asleep sitting upright in the waiting room. They woke me at noon to walk me down to the blood bank, and then, Rhogam dose in hand, on to the "Center for Advanced Fetal Care," where ten people were already crammed into a tiny waiting room the size of a large elevator. Including a noisy preverbal toddler and a family playing "Bible Trivia" from a book. Poorly. ("On what island did Saint John write the book of Revelation? ...I'll give you a clue, it starts with P." "Pennsylvania?")

A nurse eventually led me back to an exam room and asked me to bend over the table and expose what she euphemistically referred to as my "hip." "They brought me a big needle, and I got a smaller one," she said, "but this is still going to hurt." And it did, a lot, as she punctured my skin. Then: "Okay, this is the part that hurts." She started to depress the plunger, and I was unable to stifle a sharp Wow. "Yeah, they changed the formulation, and most people seem to think this one hurts more."

I had been at the hospital for more than three hours. I made my way back to my car and drove over to Michael's office. I pulled into the parking lot, gathered my things, and realized that I had left my library book at the hospital. I fervently wished that I could just go home. The blood sugar challenge was interacting predictably with pregnancy hormones, making me exhausted and overwhelmed. But I had an important meeting with my boss at 3, so I had to go to work. I drove back to the hospital, went back to the Center for Advanced Fetal Care, found my book in the exam room, drove back to Michael's office, and walked from there to the light rail platform. It was bitterly cold, and I was underdressed. I cried a little while I waited for my train.

Took the train to my stop, hit my work hospital (it's a different one) for some lunch - by now it was 2pm - and came to my office. Only to discover that Lydia had left a message on my machine yesterday, which for some reason I hadn't gotten then. Canceling the meeting, of course. I could've gone straight home from the hospital.

My "hip" hurts.

Twice in the last week I've fallen and hurt myself. That seems a bit much.

A few days ago I tripped on the edge of the plastic floor protector under my desk chair at home. I fell sideways towards my desk and landed hard on my right (small) wrist. It hurt so badly that I felt intensely sick to my stomach, and for the first few minutes Michael and I thought that I might've broken my wrist. I've still got a large, painful bump there, although curiously it didn't bruise much.

Then, just this afternoon, I headed out to lunch and apparently tripped over a sidewalk crack or something. I fell hard enough that when I landed my laptop backpack actually flipped over my head to rest on the sidewalk in front of me. And I scraped my left palm, left elbow, both knees, and the tops of both feet above my sandal straps. The elbow, left knee, and left foot scraped deeply enough to draw blood - the others just lost the top layer of skin.

This encounter wasn't as painful as the wrist injury, except for the part where I had to scrub the deeper scrapes with alcohol wipes. (God only knows what germs are lurking on a Baltimore sidewalk.) My elbow still aches, and it's bruising up pretty well around the scrape.

This seems kind of excessive, doesn't it? It's not as if my center of balance has really changed, yet.

Last night was so awful.

It started out well enough. My friend Emily came over to stay with Alex (yaaay, babysitting trades!) so that Michael and I could go out and enjoy Baltimore Restaurant Week - a summer promotion in which dozens of restaurants are offering special $30 three-course menus. We went to Sascha's 527, a neighborhood restaurant serving what I guess I'd describe as upscale-American food. Dinner was good, but not amazing.

I had an appetizer of pepper-crusted raw ahi tuna with what was described as an orange Thai sauce. The sauce tasted like orange marmelade seasoned with way too much chili pepper, and it totally concealed the flavor of the fish. The very, very good Asian coleslaw on the side saved the dish. Then I had their take on bouillabase, which was sort of a New England clambake version (it had potatoes and inch-thick rounds of corn on the cob in it) with a really tasty broth. Finally, I finished up with the world's best carrot cake.

We came home and curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Planet Earth. Partway through, there was a loud crack and our power went out. I looked out the window - no lights anywhere on the block.

This is where I need to back up and talk about the weather. Because it was 100 degrees Farenheit yesterday, and humid, and breezeless. By the time our power went out, I estimate that it was still over 85 degrees. Our brick rowhouse had been soaking up the sun's rays all day long. Within minutes of losing power, the house was noticeably hot and stuffy.

We called the power company and were given an estimate of 1:30am power restoration. We tried to go to bed. Meanwhile, I started worrying about Alex. Her room is on the third floor - the hottest part of the house. It works out nicely enough in winter, when her room stays much warmer than ours, but in summer it's damn near uninhabitable without air conditioning. It's a small closed room - we can't open the window because the air conditioner is in it, and there isn't much opportunity for cross-ventilation on that floor.

She woke up shortly after we went to bed, calling for Mommy. I went up to her hot, hot bedroom, disentangled her from some blankets, and helped her find her pacifier. She went back to sleep. I went back to bed and didn't sleep.

Some of the other people on our block had spilled out onto their stoops, where it was slightly cooler and (thanks to the nearby hospital's emergency generator) better lit than indoors. They apparently decided that it was a fine time to have a blackout party. We were subjected to bursts of loud conversation and even louder laughter, with occasional running and squealing, until... I think until close to 2am.

Our bedroom got hotter and hotter. A damp blanket of still hot air stifled me as I tried to relax and go to sleep. When the neighbors shut up for a few moments, I could hear rats squeaking outside in our garbage. Which - and this is the other thing that made yesterday awful, and today doesn't look any better - hadn't been picked up when it was supposed to on Tuesday evening, and had continued to fester in the 100-degree heat ever since because the city kept swearing that they'd send a solid waste truck by any minute so we should leave it on the curb. So every time the human party waned I could hear a rat party on the sidewalk.

In my weird half-asleep, half-awake, intolerably uncomfortable state my worry about Alex started to balloon out of control. I thought about children trapped in hot cars. I thought about elderly people in Chicago dying in a heat wave because they couldn't open their windows. I started to seriously believe that there was a chance that the heat could kill her - not to such an extent that I woke her up and drove her to an air-conditioned motel, but to enough of an extent that any chance of restful sleep for myself was hopeless.

Around 1am it became so intolerably hot that Michael hammered open one of our stuck-shut front windows. (Our only bedroom window that opens easily had the air conditioner in it, naturally.) I opened the tiny bathroom window at the other end of the house in a feeble attempt to create a cross-breeze. The bedroom was still sweltering. I went up to check on Alex. Her room wasn't any hotter than ours, at least. She was breathing. Her hair was damp with sweat, but her skin was a normal temperature. I tried to ratchet my anxiety down a little.

At 2am I got up and called BGE again. Now they gave an estimated power restoration time of 5am. I began to worry about our refrigerator and freezerfull of food, as well as our own survival, our utter exhaustion, and Alex. But shortly after that - maybe around 2:30? - a cool-ish breeze sprang up, and I was able to get a solid couple of hours of sleep.

I awoke at 4:30 because the air conditioner coughed itself into action. Michael went downstairs and turned off the TV and the ground floor air conditioner, but when I asked him about the refrigerator he said he had been too sleepy to check it. So I got up and went downstairs, and was relieved to find the meat still quite cold to the touch and the frozen food rock-solid. I listened at the foot of the attic stairs to be sure that Alex's air conditioner had re-started (it had), and went back to bed for a few more hours of broken sleep.

What. A. Night. And I don't think I really stopped worrying about Alex entirely until we finally woke her up this morning. And they still haven't picked up our goddamned trash. The bags had holes chewed all over them this morning - I didn't dream the rats squeaking.

I don't know how people managed, in the years before air conditioning. I really don't. Now I understand why Washington DC was considered a hazardous posting for foreign diplomats, and why cities would be emptied, in the summer, of everyone who could possibly afford to go anyplace else. I guess we would've had awnings, and a better ventilation plan, and maybe a sleeping porch in the shaded back of the house. And certainly we wouldn't have had windows that couldn't be opened in the summer. Because Oh. My. God.

We got robbed.

Michael was home alone this morning when, in broad daylight, someone came in through an unlocked, high-up, hard-to-access window in our kitchen. Michael interrupted him, but not before he'd stolen my laptop from work, which he then proceeded to bounce off the pavement trying to get over the alley gate in a hurry. (So the bastard isn't even going to profit by this - he destroyed our sense of safety at home for nothing.)

Here's Michael's full story.

I never imagined... okay, I knew that security between the yard and the house was weak. (The back door doesn't even have a real lock - just a chain.) But our yard is fenced, and bounded on two sides by other yards, and all access through those yards to the street is through locked gates. I didn't think that anyone would ever come in that way.

I can't believe it. He could have killed Michael. He could have killed him.

In a massively high-crime city like Baltimore, I wasn't sure what the police would even do, beyond filing a report so we'd have a case number to give our insurance. But they sent an officer out, and he talked to Michael and walked through the yard and talked to some workmen who'd been out on the street behind the house and had seen the guy scale the gate. And then, a few hours later, a crime scene investigator came out and dusted the window for prints. She told us that if there's a match in the system when the prints come back - and I'm sure that this was some local dope fiend or crackhead, so I can't imagine that he doesn't have a record - they'll follow up on it. So maybe they'll make an arrest, and we can think in some abstract way that justice has been served. I guess.

For a while, I had hopes that the computer might be recovered - it's got those metal security stickers all over the bottom, saying that it's owned by the University of Maryland. That was before Michael found the doors to the CD drive lying on the sidewalk outside the gate, and talked to the guys who saw the computer get tossed through the bars. There wasn't any unduplicated data on it, or confidential patient information, or anything. Fortunately.

What an ugly, creepy thing to have happen. I'm so glad that Michael is safe. I'm so glad that the guy didn't make it any further into our house - I can just imagine how much stronger the sense of violation would be, if we came home to find that he had been all over, upstairs, in our bedroom...

And I am so, so, so glad that Alex wasn't home when it happened. I keep thinking, sometimes she's downstairs by herself for a minute or two, when whichever one of us is home with her runs upstairs to get something. What if she had been downstairs alone, and a guy had come through the kitchen window? It's awful enough thinking about this happening to my husband.

We are okay. Just shaken up (me) and furious (Michael). It could have been so very much worse. But oh my God...

Between six and eight this morning, we went through four sleepers, an undershirt, two parental bathrobes, two maternal shirts and a pair of maternal leggings, half a dozen cloth diapers, and three child-sized towels. Not to mention about a half-bottle each of surface and carpet cleaner.

Mercifully, since then the Pedialyte has been staying down. But pity us.

Alex asks for milk by sippy cup color. And she's started asking for a different color of milk (i.e., a different-colored cup) halfway through a meal.

Tonight at dinner, she had selected the yellow sippy cup. When she finished her milk, I asked her if she'd like more.

"Alex have more milk! Alex have pink milk!" she suggested brightly.

"No, only one color at a meal," I said. (I hate washing sippy cups.) "But I will get you some more yellow milk."

I took her cup and went into the kitchen. At which point I heard her say, very clearly, "Damn it, a pink milk!"

"Did she say what I think she said?" I asked Michael. He confirmed it, glumly.

I brought her refilled cup back in and gave it to her. "Damn it," she said in a disappointed voice. "Alex have a yellow milk."

We are such horrible examples to our child. If only she had already started preschool, so that I could've blamed it on her poorly-raised classmates.