the temps today are in the 30s, and if there wasn’t snow on the ground, i think we’d be running around without jackets and mittens on. well, at least the mittens. i just sent oren and seb to play outside, because what good is homeschooling if we don’t play outside while everyone in school is stuck inside? especially on a day like today with the sun melting the snow away and making MUD.
on the way down the back steps, seb grabbed oren’s hand to help him out since there is no railing. i didn’t even have to ask him to! he’s been such a good big brother lately, in between all the fighting and arguing and telling oren what to do, of course. he has embraced his role as protector of his little brother so he doesn’t hurt himself again.
things seem normal now, except that we are still careful with oren going down steps, etc. thankfully, he’s his own best caretaker. he is very cognizant about what he should and shouldn’t be doing, and i’m glad i don’t have to be the one to draw the lines. he’s become very vocal about warning people not to do things to him because he has a head injury (don’t touch me, i have a head injury… don’t look at me like that because i have a head injury). we play with friends and we play at home and we don’t do things that require a helmet. or should require a helmet. although who knew that eating dinner at the dining room table at home should require a helmet? (no, we don’t all sit around eating dinner now with helmets on!)
we’ve battled through most items on the list i posted previous to this. a lot of those bad habits were easy to break because we just didn’t do those things at home. like, peeing in a bottle while laying in bed. the ones that are a little harder are screaming at the help (namely, anyone who tells oren to do something), and not watching TV every day. my explanation, “we just don’t do that” doesn’t always suffice. oh well. i’ve been saying, “suck it up!” to them A LOT in the past few weeks. “just go PLAY, for CRYING OUT LOUD!” parents have to say (holler) the strangest things.
friends of mine have asked me, recently, “are you still paranoid that something is going to happen?” by this, i assume they mean “something” by his head suddenly emploding. believe me, at one point i was totally paranoid about that very thing. my answer now is, “no… as long as he doesn’t hit his head.” but i’m still surprised how often that actually happens. maybe in my life PHI (pre head injury), a bump on the head never caused a second thought. now, AHI (after head injury), a bump on the head can bring back the evil Hover-Mommy from the hospital days. are you okay? can you see? how many fingers am i holding up? does your head hurt? why are you tired?
time goes on and life is becoming much less PHI and AHI, but our lives will always be colored by it in some way, i think. especially for oren. his current way of delineating time now centers around his accident. he’ll say, “remember when we did thus-and-such (okay, so he doesn’t himself say thus-and-such)? it was before i had a head injury.” or, as i like to think of it, before he received blunt-force trauma to his skull and bled all over the dining room. some things are not easily forgotten, should not be easily forgotten. oren is also more focused on blood in his play time. blood, and getting nails driven into different body parts (which is how he described his IVs at the hospital). i’m glad in a way that he can so easily work it into normal parts of life. i think it means he’s dealing with it well and accepting that it happened. though i doubt he’ll ever have a great opinion about hospitals, those disgusting, gross and stinky bastions of pain and torture.
Posted on January 14th, 2010