What if it turns out my Mommy Intuition is wrong?

So... the gastro-pediatrician took baby i off of Axid and put her on Prevacid. She suggested we try prune juice to help with the constipation. All of this meant to hold us over until her lower G.I. Well... we put it to the test yesterday. We gave her Prevacid in the a.m. & prune juice in the afternoon. She spent the day clinging to me like a koala bear & I her eucalyptus tree and whining and crying. Oh, and spitting up/puking. She tried very hard NOT to drink the prune juice... she'd let it fill her mouth and then when it overflowed it would just drain right back out, down her face and all over her shirt (and me). (Man, is that stuff THICK!) She was beside herself all day. Girlfriend is not going to do well when she's sick. That stuff I said to the gastro-ped about my "Mommy's intuition" has me thinking... what if I'm wrong? She had her worst day ever after seeing the best we could find right now. What's the common denominator? Is it the medicine (Axid) that makes her sick/grouchy in the first place and nothing is really wrong? Should I just leave the poor thing alone? Am I the common denominator? Is our infamous over-parenting the common denominator? Today I'm giving this a shot - doing nothing, giving her nothing, not looking for signs of something. Clearly my intuition that something is "wrong" hasn't entirely left... but I'm wondering now if what's "wrong" is that I think something is "wrong" and I'm treating her for that and making things "wrong" in the process. Oh boy, this motherhood thing is fun.

So we had the day from Prevacid with baby i yesterday and a despondent F who was just strung-out tired. He wept through his bath b/c he had so many sores the water "hurt." He counted and he has 45 boo-boos and they all are "killing him." He wept through my cutting his fingernails after bath because his right hand, according to him, was not long & didn't need to be cut. It was his left hand that was long. I wasn't even going to try to reason with him on this one. I just clipped and he cried. And as he was falling asleep (at the wee hour of 7) he gave BP the "my life is terrible" speech... "I had a bad day. I have 45 boo boos. I lost my bouncey ball. I got a bad note home from school. Mommy cut both of my hands' fingernails and they didn't need it." Etc. Etc. I walked in to BP giving F a "Control your own destiny!" speech. I think it was a little heavy-handed (when all F really needed was to just fall the heck asleep), but it did give me reason to smile. We were trainwrecks last night of the first order.

And now entirely off-topic but also among the macabre...

It's so gross and cliche that the VT murderer was just a reclusive weirdo with no real motive other than to act out his internal pain at such a hopelessly high cost. It makes me plain sick. When you're going to turn the gun on yourself in the first place, belly up to the bar and do it FIRST. My heart hurts awfully for those families and friends of the victims who lost something so definitively irreplaceable for someone so decisively sick. A friend of mine works with someone who lost their son on Monday at VT in this, the end of his senior year. Thinking of that, I feel gutted. This guy doesn't deserve to go down in infamy. I don't want to see his "creative writing" or hear about his "stalking" and alarming behaviors. I don't care about him one whit. I think others should turn their back on this dissection of this maniac as well. Find out how to prevent this from happening again? I'm all for it! Understand this guy? No thanks. But it does raise the question, why are all of these incidents remarked on with, "Oh yeah - that guy was unhinged!" or "Surprised? No way. The only thing surprising is that he didn't snap sooner." or my favorite, "I contacted the cops twice he had me so concerned. They said they couldn't do anything to him for being weird." Ugh. Ugh. Moan. (And here I reveal my one discrimination - people who raise that inner red flag. I hate them. I know they're not stable. Read "Protecting the Gift" - I beg you - and you'll know why!)

Finally, watching the Oprah two-day special on the "backlash" from Don Imus I felt I was in a parallel universe. One where I'm meant to be enlightened by the likes of Common (who was honestly verbose & composed) and Russell Simmons (who has such a strange lisp BP asked if he'd had a stroke) and to find meaning and "poetry" in hip-hop & to understand why it is a rappers' right to say the things the rest aren't meant to say & that are not meant the way Don Imus took license. Sure, there's some poetry in there sometimes and sure, Imus had no business saying what he did. I get that; I don't use that language myself (and heaven help the child of mine who does). But, for once can we address why anyone is using anyone in the entertainment world or the media as their moral compass? And for crying out LOUD can we stop repeating these slurs over and over by anyone with a byline or a microphone when they take place? Wagging my finger and saying, "Parents... arrange your children so that when these words are flung at them they won't fall down." This way when rappers, talk show hosts, Don Imus, Mel Gibson, et al get verbal diarrhea they can understand this kind of shit can roll right off.

And to lighten things up - taking F to see Blades of Glory and hearing him use the term "sex addicts" was a true highlight (or is it low point?). Didn't I tell you being a mom is fun? To quote Carmine Jr from last Sunday's Sopranos, "The sacred and the propane..."