I spent six weeks of the summer teaching in Upward Bound’s summer program at UNH, my alma mater. Upward Bound is nationwide; it is one of the Education Department’s Trio Programs, begun in the ’60’s as part of the War on Poverty. It’s purpose is to help prepare high school students for college, and serves students from low-income families or historically underrepresented groups. This was my third summer teaching there; I love Upward Bound, not only is it a great environment in which to teach, it keeps my confidence in the federal government from bottoming out. (OK, so the Bush administration did try to zero out Trio’s budget a couple of years ago, but several people in Congress fought hard and won. Trio and Upward Bound live on.)

When I tell people about the population I work with - low income families, recent immigrants, racial minorities, urban (as urban as New Hampshire demographics allow), they often assume these young people are more challenging to teach. Even other teachers assume this. The secret is that I’m working with the cream of the crop: students who want to learn. Academically they run the range of every other demographic of student, from the so-smart-it’s-scary to the strugglers, but in terms of motivation and behavior, they’re tops. Teaching kids who appreciate the opportunity they’re being given, who are interested in what they’re learning, and who ask about my day and my family… it doesn’t get much better than that.

But it is a lot of work. Not overwhelming like regular teaching; I get nights and weekends to myself, but it is a intense six weeks. Maia went into daycare full time for the summer, where she has loads of fun (judging by the amount of sand in her hair and all the new songs she knows) but she was exceptionally clingy at home. It left me little time for blogging.

But now I’m done, back to my more relaxed schedule, back to being vague about my employment (Note to IRS: It’s all legit. I just don’t feel like writing about it), back to blogging.

(Before you read this, we’re all fine now.)

After a relatively normal morning yesterday Maia went down for her nap early and slept a long, long time. She woke up crying and vomiting, with a high fever, then immediately fell back to sleep. Fast onset fever, vomiting, lethargy and sleepiness. Not good. Not good at all. In fact, red flagged every baby book as ‘CALL DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY’. I tried the doctor… busy… tried again… busy. After about ten tries, the operator informed me that phone lines were down throughout the area and there was no possible way to get in touch with the doctor.

I hesitated…. was I over reacting, kids do get sick… am I going to be one of those mothers who panics at every sniffle? But by this time Maia’s fever had crept up another full degree, and that Pathogenic Microbiology lecture on meningitis from my undergraduate years came rushing back to me; I could actually hear my professor describing Maia’s symptoms. I went ahead and called 911. Within two minutes of picking up the phone someone from the fire department - the volunteer fire department - was taking Maia’s vitals. Two minutes later the paramedics were here. Then the ambulance.

I was all set to hear them pronounce her ’sick, but kids get sick.’ Instead they asked for her car seat so she could ride in the ambulance. Maia just stared at us with glazed eyes, which scared me more than her fever and vomiting. The whole neighborhood watched us drive off.

It’s a 25 minute drive to the hospital; in other words, an eternity when you’re in the back of an ambulance with your baby. The paramedics were great; part of their training must be keeping people calm. They gave Maia a little purple bunny and played peek-a-boo. One of the paramedics reminded me that we had met once before, years earlier when I had whooping cough and had a coughing fit so bad I stopped breathing. I reminded him that he had knocked on my door two years ago to tell us we had to evacuate before the river rushed into our house.

When you get to the emergency room by ambulance, you get to bypass the waiting room, so we were seen right away. They brought down Maia’s fever, watched her for several hours, declared her, ’sick, but kids get sick’, and sent us home. She slept all night long and woke up laughing and ready to play.

The morals: 1) Kids get sick. 2) No one will accuse you over overreacting if you call 911 when your child shows scary symptoms; if in doubt, call. 3) Everyone in the neighborhood loves Maia. We’ve had visitors stopping by all day asking if she’s OK. Even people I’ve never seen before came over to ask about her. I love my neighborhood. Especially the fire department.

The little blue wagon: Maia likes to pile a random assortment of items into her blue wagon and push it around the house. At any given time there could be stuffed animals, blocks, a colander, measuring cups, pot lids, shoes, books, and raw potatoes in the wagon. Once one of my bras ended up in it. Our living room, kitchen, and dining room make a circle, and Maia does lap after lap with a fully loaded wagon, humming to herself, sometimes stopping to gather more items. She does this every day and I’m ticked pink every single time.

BANG!: Whenever Maia falls over she has one word to let us know she’s been hurt: ‘BANG’. She starts saying it with a tearful face and a wimper, ‘bang, bang’ pointing to the injured part. Then she makes sure we know exactly what happened by reenacting the event and yelling ‘bang’ at the point at which her head strikes the coffee table, or knee scrapes the floor. Eventually she asks to be picked up and gently hits her forehead against mine, laughing, ‘bang, bang, bang.’

Dinner theater: Once Maia is finished eating, she’ll ask us to entertain her by moving her arms back and forth and saying ‘row… row’. This is our cue to sing ‘row, row, row your boat’. If one of us is slow to join in, she’ll point at us like a professional conductor and say ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ over and over until we’ve joined the song. At the end of every verse she bursts into applause. Bossy, yet appreciative.

Other random eccentricities: Our neighbor’s boy is the same age as Maia. She says his name, Liam, without opening her mouth. When she is in her car seat she practices laughing; we’re the only car I know that has its own laugh track. She will only listen to Aimee Mann. Whenever we put on another CD she will say Ma, Ma, Ma over and over until will put on Aimee Mann.

Being an only child…..: Last week both Bodhi and I had to be out one evening. Maia stayed with friends who have two children, 5 and 6 years old. When we picked her up, Maia was curled up in bed with the six year old. She looked so peaceful and happy sleeping next to another child that I felt enormously guilty taking her home to a house where she’s the only one. She seems happy enough, looks peaceful and happy sleeping next to us, too, and she certainly gobbles up all the one-on-one attention, but still….

I screamed ‘no’ and reached to move her away from the caterpillar, just a split second too late to prevent her foot from crashing down on it. She screamed when saw the remains of the caterpillar, complete with colorful fluid leaking out, and frantically said “more, more, more”, while wildly gesturing the same. She wanted the caterpillar back and all I could do was say, “all gone, all gone”. At 19 months, the word ‘death’ would have meant nothing, and certainly ‘death because you killed it by intentionally stomping on it’ would have been too cruel.

She cried and cried, but now she has a glimmer of understanding that living things die, that actions have consequences, that she has to power to affect other creatures. Not easy lessons to learn, especially all at once.

But they itched too much, for too long, and we decided it must be flea bites. We have no cats or dogs, but maybe a visitor dragged them in the house, we hypothesized.

Then they got big, red, raised, and even more itchy, which an hour earlier I didn’t think was possible. Poison ivy? Poison oak? Some other contact dermatitis? On the soles of her feet? Unlikely. An allergic reaction to the antibiotics she’s on seemed most plausible at that point and a late night call to the doctor had us discontinue the antibiotics, (oh yeah, there was an ear infection in here somewhere), give her benadryl, and watch her to make she she didn’t stop breathing. Fortunately the benadryl helped her sleep. At first.

The next day at the doctors office they nixed the idea of an allergic reaction; an allergic reaction wouldn’t happen on the first exposure. The first doctor we saw was perplexed, but after much discussion and consultation with the other doctors in the office we got a verdict: scabies.

The brochure the office gave us describes scabies as ‘the worst itching ever’. They are tiny little mites with a six week incubation period. The itching is due to an allergic reaction to something in the mites. Probably their waste, but I try not to think about it too deeply. So these little mites have been on her for six weeks, probably since our visit to the farm in April. In those six weeks she has learned how to climb on and off the couch, go up and down the carpeted stairs, take all the towels out of the closet, all my clothes out of my dresser, oh and did I mention we co-sleep?

I got to wash all our bedding, clothes, and upholstery, vacuum the entire house, and bag up everything that couldn’t be washed. All while watching a toddler who was getting progressively more hyper with each dose of benadryl. Clean during her nap? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Nap time consisted of her laughing hysterically while making funny faces, while practicing her jumping skills.

After finally falling sleep two hours past her bedtime last night, she tossed and turned until 3:30 AM, when she woke excited to begin a brand new day. Today was a fun-filled 15 hours of uninterrupted toddler excitement, but she is now finally back to sleep. The benadryl has been locked away, replaced with mom-friendly, sleep-compatible calamine lotion.

“It is isolation that is critical to war. You cannot be abusive when you realize your connectedness.”
-David Kadlec

“If you have a gun, you can go out and shoot one, two, three, five people. But if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh

“War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off.”
-Karl Kraus

“The non-violent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had. Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it doesn’t teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.”
-Anna Sewell

It was early in the Vietnam War and an American platoon was hunkered down in some rice paddies, in the heat of a firefight with the Vietcong. Suddenly a line of six monks started walking along the elevated berms that separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and poised, the monks walked directly toward the line of fire. “They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through,” recalls one of the American soldiers. “It was really strange because nobody shot at ‘em. And after they walked over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this any more, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.”
-Quoted in Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence

” I wish to let my love of peace outweigh my distaste for war.”
-Raven

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” -Anne Frank