It’s been a really long time since I last posted. Since B and K were diagnosed as being autistic, there’s been a lot of learning and many, many counseling, occupational therapy, and Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) appointments. So many appointments, in fact, it’s been difficult to keep up with even the most basic responsibilities at home. I’ve had a lot of work travel, which is a mixed blessing. I get to interact in person with people who are working on projects with me around the western U.S., but I have to be away from home to do that. It’s always hard.
Not Actually a Great Mom
Just as a heads-up, I’m not a great mom. A lot of people say to me, “I don’t know how you do it!” “You’re amazing!” “You’re so great!!” News flash: I’m NOT great. Not only am I not great, I’m kind of a sucky mom in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I love doing things with my kids, but I’m completely and totally NOT patient far too much of the time. But I’m willing to learn, I’m willing to work hard, and I’m so happy for the times when things go well and we actually have a fun time as a family without any major blow-ups or harm done to anyone.
Badass…Also NOT
I would never have thought that a child could be capable of putting me into fetal position. But then one did. He put me straight into fetal on the stairs. Just too much. I used to think of myself as a quasi-badass chick. After all, I’ve finished a loop at the Barkley Marathons. (Pause for appropriate gasp and applause…LOL. If you don’t know what it is, look it up. It’s kind of crazy and fabulous.)
I’ve climbed Mount Whitney via the Mountaineers Route. I’ve finished some really tough 100 mile trail races. Badass, right??! Alas, not so much. Having a little boy who gets SO out-of-control upset and freaked out over things like, for example, a piece of duct tape being crooked on a piece of cardboard, that he literally breaks furniture? (Big furniture. My dining room table.) Now THAT’s tough. That’s just one challenge.
Bites, Bruises, and Scratches, Oh MY!
Another challenge I went through with my little B: For a long time, when something went wrong and he got all melted down over it, his Plan A was to run to me and start beating me up. Literally. For months and months I was covered with bruises, bite marks, and scratches. I had to learn safety holds and also learned a suite of techniques for helping him to calm himself down when things sail out of control. But this year something kind of amazing has happened. We’ve learned how to help B stay out of meltdown mode more and more over time.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the angelic ABA therapists who’ve been helping him and the other two triplets learn how to behave better and how to communicate their needs through language rather than through acting out. The trips are often not kind to them. But without them, I’m not sure how we would have made it to today.
Real Emotions
We still have a long, long way to go. B still struggles with handling his emotions. A couple of weeks ago he got upset about something (I don’t recall exactly what the problem was), so he threw a heavy object at a framed piece of artwork in our front room. I was upstairs, and I don’t know for sure what the weapon of choice was.
I still haven’t cleaned up the broken glass that fell all over the floor below when it shattered. It’s just one increment too far away for me, given all of the responsibilities I have to keep up with every day. I’ll get to it soon, I think. The good news is that he targeted an inanimate object and not me. And not one of the other kids.
Better Every Day
But more and more often, B is getting through his disappointments without coming completely unglued. He’s cheerful more of the time. So am I. I’m not a happy mom, and a lot of the time I end up yelling at my kids. It’s kind of bad. Okay, it’s TOTALLY bad.
I’m overwhelmed by the stress of our lives and the responsibility for raising three special needs kids while keeping up with my career, being a wife, momming my three older kids as best I can figure out how (it’s not easy to “parent” adult children…they are, after all, adults).
There’s almost no time for me to take care of myself the way I used to. My running has been close to nonexistent. That’s changing. I haven’t been cooking the way I love; that’s changing too. I’m doing better at managing household demands. It’s getting better every day. Then worse again (shrug emoji). It just is what it is.
When I was growing up, my family backpacked together. My first official backpacking trip was in the mountains north of Boise, Idaho, when I was four years old. I carried a can of peaches in a little drab green knapsack (and nothing else) and was pretty proud of that. We spent the night in a big sleeping bag with my whole family, the kids squished between my parents. My memory is of two rectangular car camping bags zipped together, taking up the entire floor of our pup tent.
We didn’t do much family backpacking for quite a few years after that first trip, but when I was a teenager we started up again. Over the next decade, one combination or another of my five immediate family members backpacked into one basin after another in the Uinta mountains in Utah and in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming. We logged hundreds of miles on trails in the two mountain ranges combined. It was a routine summer/fall activity for us. We trained in advance for our trips, hiking many miles to get in shape (sometimes carrying backpacks with jugs of water or encyclopedia volumes in them).
Mom planned out our menus and made fresh beef jerky and baked “Logan” bread and dried fruit in a dehydrator and so on. It was a huge undertaking. Then she methodically organized our meals and snacks in carefully-marked plastic bags. Dad had each of us weigh ourselves, then he distributed the gear and food packages among our packs, reweighing from time to time, trying to keep our starting loads at or below the recommended physical limits for our respective body weights.
Our backpacking trips lasted anything from a few days to as long as a week or two. For our longest trips, we cached food ahead of time at midpoints on our planned routes.
Uintas Highline Trail
In my young adult years, after my two older siblings had moved away, my parents and I still backpacked together. Twice, the three of us (and our Old English sheepdog, Chaucer) backpacked the Uintas Highline trail in Utah from one end of the mountain range to the other; once from east to west (a route covering 85 miles) and once from west to east (a 100-mile trip). We did the east-to-west trip just before I left to serve an 18-month church service mission in South Korea. (2 months of language training in Utah, 16 months of missionary work in Seoul.) The west-to-east trip was just after my return to Utah.
Fairly early in the east-to-west trip, my parents and I spent a morning climbing up a valley to a broad ridgeline west of Chepeta Reservoir. As we climbed to the northwest, the forest thinned out until only scattered small scrubby trees remained. Then there were no trees at all. We couldn’t see much ahead of us other than the higher ridgeline and a few clouds. Along the trail here and there we passed surprisingly large rock cairns, some as tall as me or taller. I wondered whether they had been built by sheepherders. The morning weather was a bit sketchy. Shredded white, misty clouds rose up around us and blew past. It was foggy in places.
As we reached a point at the top of the climb where the highline trail turned slightly southwest, we could see to the north of the mountain range for the first time that day. The view was unsettling. Big cumulonimbus clouds were billowing up from floor of the basin to the north of us. As we hiked westward, the clouds rapidly built into a dark, threatening storm that soon rose above the mountains. It was headed our way.
Trouble
In the High Uintas, there are some basic rules for summer travel: Get up early, get packed, and get going. Storms are going to hit—and they’ll often hit hard with little warning—at any time from noon-ish on. Lightning is the biggest danger, but hail, high winds, and driving rain are typical hazards as well. The daily storms can sometimes be avoided by getting over a pass, or by hitting a summit and then getting back down, early in the day. But there are times when circumstances make high altitude travel during storm hours unavoidable. This was one of those times.
It became apparent that the storm was going to reach us soon. The specific place where we were on the Uintas ridge is a kind of wide plateau where the elevation is about 12,000 feet for a mile or more in any direction. There was nowhere safe to go to in the time we had left.
The three of us decided that we would have to hunker down and ride out the storm up there on the ridge. We took off our backpacks, removing a rolled-up foam sleeping pad and a plastic tarp. We put on our rain gear then leaned the metal-framed backpacks against each other. Then we covered them with black garbage bags that we used as pack covers, tucking in the bottoms of the garbage bags to hopefully keep water out.
Lightning
After we had covered the packs, we moved a ways away from them to get away from the metal. We spread the sleeping pad on the ground and squatted on it in a row, facing north, shoulder to shoulder, and covered up with the tarp just as the storm hit. The wind, rain, and hail blasted us. We hung onto the tarp and to the dog, doing our best to keep as dry as possible while minimizing our contact with the ground. Lightning was popping all around us. I could feel my hair standing up and thought for sure we’d be hit at any second.
The noise was deafening. Over and over blinding lightning flashed around us and the sound of close-up lightning—like a bedsheet being ripped—was followed instantly by the rifle- then crushing cannon-shot KA BOOOM of thunder right on top of us. Hail was pounding and the wind and rain and the storm on the tarp were all so loud, we couldn’t hear each other even when yelling at the tops of our voices even though we were physically touching each other.
I was certain we were going to die. “If lightning hits one of us,” I thought, “it’s going to take out all of us.”
Then an odd thing happened. I thought, “This couldn’t possibly be any worse,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be worse if, in addition to the storm, a sniper were shooting at us right at that moment. A sniper would have definitely made things worse for us in the middle of the storm. And that thought—for some bizarre reason—was comforting to me. I suddenly felt relieved.
(A Word of Apology
Now, in no way at all do I mean to trivialize the complicated trauma associated with actual sniper shootings. I can’t imagine the horror of being a part of, living through, or dying in a sniper shooting, whether in war or otherwise. This was a time well before the U.S. had experienced the shootings that have occurred in recent years. I thought about changing my story to get rid of the sniper part. The idea of a sniper making things worse was central to my experience and my story, however, so I decided to be true to that. I apologize if this re-traumatizes anyone in any way.)
Survival
After what seemed like a very long time, the storm blew over. We stood up in a bit of a daze, shook the water off of the tarp and the sleeping pad. Then we repacked and gathered ourselves enough to get our backpacks back on and continue on our way westward. We had been incredibly fortunate.
*
Late last Monday afternoon, I got into our car and drove away from a medical office building in Bountiful, Utah, lost in a haze of thoughts. For years we’ve struggled with our triplets’ behavior and have sought out many professional opinions and educational support for them. We’ve been in and out of multiple school and medical and psychology offices, trying various types of therapy, counseling, and treatments, looking for answers and trying to find ways to help our kids and ourselves.
After several years of this and having made minimal progress, we were recently able to finally get all three into in-depth neuropsychological testing to find out what their individual specific issues are. Last week, I met for an hour with the triplets’ neuropsychologist and one of her interns to get the results from Miss A’s four hours of testing. During the meeting, as we went over test result after test result, Dr. C (who is great, by the way) explained to me that little Miss A has deeply challenging learning disabilities. Her test results indicate that she has ADHD, an anxiety disorder, a social disorder, and multiple cognitive challenges.
Autism
I also learned that my sweet boy B has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. This came as no real surprise, given B’s behavior over the past four years or so. Still, it put me back on my heels a bit, so to speak. (Today, Ryan and I learned that C, too, has been diagnosed with autism. B and C are identical twins, so it isn’t surprising that their test results are similar. Both boys tested as having cognitive disabilities and attention deficit issues as well.) Two past screenings had missed it, but it seemed obvious to me that B was autistic. Even with that, the official diagnosis is a lot to absorb.
Dr. C said to me, “[A] has a complex set of things she’s dealing with, and she’s the least complicated of your three. You have three one-in-one-hundred kids.”
As I drove home that day last week, thinking through everything Dr. C and her intern had discussed with me, I found myself slipping into an increasingly negative state of mind. “How are we going to get through this? What’s going to happen to my kids? How will this ever be okay?” And then the thought came to me, “At least there isn’t a sniper shooting at us,” and I knew it was going to be okay. The storm will blow over, we’ll get up, we’ll get ourselves pulled together, and we’ll get going again. And it will be okay.
I was pregnant with triplets, it was the afternoon of January 25th, 2012, and at 28 weeks and five days into the pregnancy, a routine solo pregnancy checkup had turned into an emergency.
But let’s back up a bit. Earlier that day I had come in for a normal (normal, at least, for a high-risk triplet pregnancy) maternity appointment at the office of our MFM (maternal-fetal medicine specialist), Dr. Michael Draper. His office was at University Hospital on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley, sandwiched between the Huntsman Cancer Center, up against the Wasatch foothills, and Primary Children’s Hospital just above the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Photo credit: University of Utah
Each of my check-ups started with an ultrasound exam. The ultrasound tech had put jelly on my tummy, scooted the transducer around a bit to get things going, and had just barely started taking a look at Ryan’s and my unborn babies when she quickly stood up, wiped off the transducer, excused herself, and went out to get an MD.
She returned with one of the doctors in the practice who took her own look. I don’t recall her name. After just a couple of seconds of looking, she told me that our Baby A—the tiniest and most vulnerable of our unborn triplets—was in trouble. Her amniotic fluid was all gone, and she was getting smashed by babies B and C who sat above her in my uterus. She was having heart decelerations (her heart was threatening to stop beating).
Dr. Draper
That doctor left, and just a few minutes later our own MFM, Dr. Michael Draper, came into the examination room. He said to me,
“We have a name for people like you.”
“What’s that?,” I asked.
“In-patient,” Dr. Draper said and smiled at me.
Then he asked me where Ryan was. At work downtown, I told him.
“You should get him up here,” he said. “You might be delivering these babies this afternoon.”
Yikes!
I sent Ryan a quick text message, and he left his office and hopped onto a bus to head up to the hospital.
By not long after that, after I had been moved across the hall to a room in the labor and delivery department, I was checked into the hospital (mobile check-in…modern technology, right?), had changed into standard hospital attire (big gown, opens in the back, you know the drill), and was lying on a big hospital bed (“on” because I was definitely not IN the bed) with a bunch of wires and monitors attached all over me, some for me and some for the babies.
Ryan arrived and found the labor room where I was. There was some hurried paperwork and we took care of some signatures, but things still seemed fairly calm. Ryan and I had taken a childbirth prep class and had previously toured the labor and delivery department, as well as the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), so we had at least some idea of what was going on.
While Ryan and I were talking with the nurse, and as other people came and went from the room, Dr. Draper had been monitoring Baby A. He had been listening to her heartbeat with a Doppler monitor and watching her heart on ultrasound at the same time. The head of my bed was somewhat elevated. Dr. Draper had told me that he wasn’t sure whether what looked like Baby A’s decelerations were actually THAT, or whether it might be that the monitor was picking up my own, slower heartbeat.
Someone explained the process Ryan would have to go through to get gowned up so that he could be in the delivery/operating room, should monitoring turn into a C-section. We were chatting in a completely relaxed way with one of the nurses, discussing whether or not I should have my tubes tied as long as I was already opened up, should a C-section end up happening that day.
Everything Changes
But then suddenly everything changed from calm to terrifying.
“That’s it. We have to get her out!”
Dr. Draper quickly reached behind my head, hit the red alarm button on the wall behind me, and slammed the head of the bed down flat (seriously, SLAMMED). He instantly ripped off all of the wires that had been attached to me, shoved away the wheeled monitoring and ultrasound equipment, sending the machines sailing out of the way across the room, and released the brakes on the bed. Then he RACED the bed out of the room and down the hallway into the next-door operating room, the medical people running behind, leaving Ryan standing alone in the labor room.
My heart was pounding and everything was getting fuzzy.
A flurry of activity was already going on in the OR. There were beeps and people attaching things to me and oxygen and people moving around the bed. Almost the instant the bed came to a stop, an anesthesiologist asked me to sit up. I did, and found myself looking straight through a big glass window into the NICU where a sea of masked and gowned people were all looking back at me, three teams of seven people each, each team waiting to receive one of our babies through the window.
I found out later that as soon as Baby A’s scary situation had been found, the NICU had been notified and they had frantically called staffers all over the Salt Lake Valley in order to get enough of them, in all of the right specialties, up to the hospital in time for our triplets’ delivery. Twenty one sets of eyes were looking at me from the spaces between surgical hats and masks. Even today, almost seven years later, I get choked up when I think about that moment. All of those people, waiting to save our tiny babies’ lives. It’s hard to talk about it without crying. Such an overwhelming feeling.
The anesthesiologist put a needle into my spine, injected the anesthetic, and then had me lie back down. The surgical team quickly put up a curtain across me so I couldn’t see my lower body. I also couldn’t see or hear Ryan.
“Where’s Ryan??!” I yelled. Nobody answered. “WHERE’S RYAN???” No response. Everything was happening really fast. There hadn’t been anyone available or enough time to help him gown up.
Dr. Draper ran something across my lower tummy. Three times, in quick succession as the anesthetic took hold, he asked, “Can you feel that?” “Yes.” “Can you feel that?!” “Yes.” “Can you feel that?!” “No,” and instantly Dr. Draper cut me wide open with a big scalpel swipe across my lower abdomen.
Babies Out
In seconds, Baby A was out and had been passed through the window into the NICU. No crying. Then Baby B was pulled out, and I could hear a weak cry as he too was passed through the window into the hands of the team that was waiting for him. Then there was some HARD tugging, and Baby C was out and into the NICU as well, one more tiny cry as he went.
All three babies were delivered within two minutes. It had been less than seven minutes from when Dr. Draper hit the alarm button until all three babies were in the NICU. It had all happened so fast, Ryan hadn’t been able to get gowned up fast enough to get into the operating room before all of the babies were gone.
Ryan did get into the OR in time to see my uterus being sewed up and put back into me. Dr. Draper stitched up the layers of my body where the babies had been pulled out, and then I was wheeled back into the labor room where we had started.
Apgar = 0
A bit later, as I was being monitored to make sure I was doing okay, one of the nurses told us that when Baby A was pulled out her head was smashed flat, she had no heartbeat, she wasn’t breathing, and she was completely blue. Her first Apgar score—a way of describing a newborn’s overall health on a scale from zero to ten—was zero. The NICU team had had to resuscitate her, but thankfully her heart had started beating again and she had started breathing. Her head popped out into a more normal shape (babies’ heads are amazing things), and she pinked up. The nurse told us that Baby A wouldn’t have made it to the next day if we hadn’t found out how bad off she was and delivered her that afternoon.
I later learned that Baby A had suffered from what’s called “intrauterine growth restriction,” or IUGR. Ryan noticed that Baby A’s umbilical cord looked like a thin, curly old-fashioned telephone cord. The boys’ umbilical cords, in contrast, were as thick as Ryan’s thumb. At some point in gestation, babies begin to produce their own amniotic fluid. A’s body apparently hadn’t been getting everything it needed through the defective life support system she was attached to inside of my uterus. She had stopped growing and had stopped producing amniotic fluid. Without enough of fluid to adequately cushion her, she was smashed between her twin brothers and my pelvic bones, putting her into fetal distress.
After they had been stabilized and placed on ventilators, all three babies were moved into the highest-care room in the NICU. I was transferred into the regular maternity ward. The triplets had been born just before staff change, a period of time during which parents are not allowed in the NICU. After staff change, someone came to my room and asked whether I wanted to see my babies. Of course, I wanted to see them! But I couldn’t get out of bed; I couldn’t move my legs right yet, and I was still in a post-surgery haze. So they took the whole bed with me.
NICU Babies
They wheeled my bed out of my room, down the hall, past the labor and delivery ward, and into the NICU. They threaded the bed through a narrow hallway and into the small, dark rooms where the triplets were. Tiny, tiny babies, with tubes and wires all over them, lying in gently-lighted plastic incubators. At birth, Baby C was 3 lbs. 4 oz.; Baby B was 3 lbs. 1 oz.; and tiny Baby A was 1 lb. 5 oz. So small!
I didn’t think about it at the time, but after our babies had been in the NICU for a while I realized that rolling an entire bed into there was not typical. I suspect that they had done that for me so that if one or more of the babies didn’t survive, I would have at least had a chance to see them when they were alive. As it turned out, I was able to see them, hold them, and—eventually—take each of them home from the hospital with me. Not all NICU or preemie parents have that happy outcome, and my heart goes out to them. I can’t imagine anything more heartbreaking. We were very fortunate to have all three make it.
The morning after the triplets were born, Dr. Draper came by my room in the maternity ward to visit for a few minutes with Ryan and me. As we talked, he told us that the nurse in the labor room had been wrong about Baby A. He said he wanted us to know that her survival had been a true miracle. If we hadn’t found out that she was in distress right when we did, and if she hadn’t been delivered right when she was, she would have died.
He said, “She wouldn’t have made it for five more minutes.”
My triplet boys are identical twins. And something cool is that they’re mirror identicals: where B has a dimple on one side of his face, K has one on the opposite side; where K has a freckle on one side, B has it on the other; etc. Fortunately, both of them have their internal organs in the correct places. Sometimes with mirror identicals, one of the twins has his or her organs on the wrong side, which can be life-threatening in a medical emergency. (Imagine being opened up for surgery on the wrong side of your tummy!) I’m glad neither of my boys will have to worry about that. Anyway, they look and think a lot alike, and they enjoy the same kinds of play.
I think in sets and organization (the typical condition of my house notwithstanding). I want all of the Duplos to be in one bin together, all of the wooden building blocks to be in one bin together, all of the Brio train parts to be in the Brio bin together, and so on. If they’re scattered all over, you can’t really play with them, right? My boys, on the other hand, are free-thinkers who like to collect things in disorganized randomness. Case in point: Here is a list of the contents of a small, worn-out Thomas the Tank Engine backpack that I found tonight in a corner of our family room. Note that, with a few exceptions, these are sad, lonely parts from bigger sets, many of which sets haven’t really been able to be enjoyed as intended due to some of these individual parts being hidden away for who knows how long in this backpack. In the order in which I pulled them out, the backpack contained:
A small pink Crocs-style shoe (just one)
An odd bowl-shaped piece of blue plastic (no idea what it is…maybe a lid from something?)
A toy screwdriver
A very small book about time capsules, from a Chick-fil-A kids’ meal (I don’t buy kid’s meals at Chick-fil-A)
Minnie Mouse’s little pink car (no Minnie Mouse)
An orange letter S (made out of closed-cell foam)
A yellow plastic top part of a toy watering can (and now I know what the blue thing is…it’s the bottom half of the toy watering can, lol)
An open-top truck or golf cart or something for a Fischer-Price person to drive (no Fischer-Price person)
A tiny dog with a “Build-A-Bear” tag on it (my guess is that it was actually out of a kids’ meal from somewhere)
An odd, hard, round yellow thing (no clue what it is…)
The letter P, also made out of closed-cell foam, but this one’s a different type of foam and much thinner than the first
A yellow “C”-shaped toy from a set of link things that snap onto each other, but there’s only one
A flash card with the letter f and the word, “fox” on one side and a cartoon picture of a fox on the other
An Arthur (the PBS cartoon character) action figure, dressed for summer camp
An empty sandwich-sized Ziplock bag
A toy four-wheeler with no back wheels
A Paw Patrol action figure (I’m so lame, I don’t know who it is…it’s a police dog wearing a pirate hat; maybe someone can fill me in on that one)
A 2×2 Duplo block wrapped tightly in cling wrap and decorated with Easter egg stickers
A flat yellow wooden random shape with one side that’s magnetic
Ben Elf (from Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom, a favorite of ours from the U.K.), flying a wheeled helicopter
An X-wing fighter
A wooden “right triangle” building block
A wooden letter block with the letters X, B, C, and Y plus pictures of a xylophone and two candles in a candle holder on it
One soft, teal-colored doll shoe
A yellow letter R, this one is wood with a thin layer of magnet on the back side
A Brio-style train car (this one’s a passenger car)
A tiny drag racer
A Christmas-stocking-shaped red plastic cookie cutter
A red play “nut” from a tool set
A green 2×4 Duplo block
A clear rubber spider
A blue letter N, this one is plastic with a hollow back with one rectangular magnet in the middle
A blue wooden person figure from a Brio train set
A flat blue wooden random shape with one side that’s magnetic
A blue Hot Wheels race car with fancy decorations and the number “6” on the sides and the front hood (but it’s a four-door…not sure how that works out on the race track)
(That was a lot of blue!!)
A flat cutout of a brown bear, mounted on a magnetic back
A Ninja figure, ready to throw a grappling hook with a rope tied to it
A bit of thread/string that’s half apple green and half yellow with an ombre fade in the middle
Three pieces of tan-colored dog or cat food
A silver, uninflated balloon
One square white sticky note, decorated on one side with an abstract crayon picture and decorated on the other side with fake letters in ball-point pen ink
Another flat blue wooden random shape with one side that’s magnetic
A small rectangle of paper that seems to be one corner of a page from a toy catalog
A blue oval plastic “toy link” (the kind that can be part of a chain to keep toys from falling off of a stroller and onto the ground)
An uncolored extra-small-format Minion coloring page
A green wooden random shape with one side that’s magnetic
Yet another flat blue wooden shape with one side that’s magnetic, except that this one is a trapezoid
Some toy figure’s missing in-line skate
A blue wooden number three with a magnetic coating on the back side
A blue plastic letter S with a hollow back side and magnet in the middle
A blue wooden number six with a magnetic coating on the back side
A green wooden number seven with a magnetic coating on the back side
A flat cutout of a turtle, mounted on a magnetic back
Contents
On a smaller scale, we find “groups” of objects like this all over the house. Sometimes they’re in a paper lunch bag, sometimes in a box sealed with duct tape, sometimes in a plastic bin or other container with a lid, and so on. On multiple occasions I’ve come close to throwing away some part or another of a nice toy set, thinking that I had picked up some trash the boys had left behind but then having it occur to me to open it and finding the object(s) hidden inside. Sometimes I’ll open a discarded envelope that’s thicker than it should be and find two or three unrelated toys from different sets. And on a larger scale, the boys make what we call “midden piles;” piles of similarly random toys except that these piles include big items like stuffed animals and (single) gloves and (real) kitchen utensils and books and things, tucked under the piano or in a corner of their closet or behind a chair. It’s hilarious and cute and frustrating and endearing.
Let me start by stating for the record that I’m not known for my skills in lying. I have a history of messing up even the most benign versions of deception. I’m just not good at fibbing! So last night, it took all of my concentrated feeble powers to pull off a giant hood-winking; one of stellar mom-proportions. Whether the lie will stick remains to be seen. The victim could potentially still smell out the rot at the core of my spun-out yarn, so to speak. Here’s what happened:
The Set-up
Halloween is a medium-sized deal at our house. We go to the effort of decorating the front porch, but in comparison to the masterpieces in multiple nearby neighbors’ yards, our decorating is a bit weak: Pumpkins and gourds, some dried corn stalks cut from the garden outback, fake spiderwebs and even-more-fake spiders on the handrail going up the steps. That’s about it. Inside, I usually fix a special “fall” themed meal, put a batch of spiced cider on a burner (as much to make the house smell good as to be consumed), serve raised glazed doughnuts, stuff like that. I ALWAYS play “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” on the TV at least two or three times during the evening.
This year, the triplets, who are six, got off to a bit of an early start. Our church hosted a neighborhood “trunk-or-treat” in a parking lot at a nearby park the evening before Halloween, so even before they woke up yesterday morning they already had piles of candy in their orange plastic jack-o-lanterns. And then last night, they dressed up in some regurgitated costumes and we took them trick-or-treating at our local grocery store, where some of the employees manning their department candy stashes encouraged the kids to grab as much as each of them wanted. (This was the second event for A’s costume, an Elsa outfit left over from a non-Halloween“princess” birthday party; it was at least the third time B and C had worn their Crayola crayon costumes, their call. Ryan wore the“crayon box” costume. He’s a really good sport.)
Actual trick-or-treating was a bit brief. It was cold, and since the trips already had so much candy at home, their motivation flagged a bit after they had hit their main targets, the homes of closer friends who had special treats waiting for them.
After they returned home, the two boys decided they would be in charge of handing out candy to trick-or-treaters who came to our house. For some reason, in an act of generosity I had not seen before in any of my six kids, B chose to hand out candy FROM HIS OWN STASH! He came to the kitchen and asked me for a bowl to dump his candy into from his plastic jack-o-lantern. At first I didn’t understand what he was wanting it for, and I pushed back a little. I was busy cooking. He got a bit frustrated with me, but then I clued into what was going on and found a plastic bowl for him. So now visitors were greeted by identical twin boy crayons, each holding out a bowl full of candy for them to choose from.
This mostly went well. But there were two hiccups for B. The second wasn’t a huge deal. A kid looked into B’s bowl, his face brightening up considerably when he spied—and he grabbed—a full-sized candy bar. I was sure B would lose it right then, having overlooked the big candy bar in his stash. But he didn’t let on if he was upset at all. I breathed a sigh of relief. No meltdown! But the other, earlier hiccup turned out to have a lasting impact.
Here’s what went down: A young mother came up the steps in a cute costume, carrying a small critter-costumed baby in a front pack. When they went to take some candy, the mom leaned the baby over the candy bowls that the boys were holding, and she stayed leaned over for a while as the baby (seriously, a tiny baby) tried and tried to grasp a piece of candy. That in itself wasn’t a problem. The disaster was the string of drool that dribbled from the baby’s mouth as he grabbed for a bit of loot. The drool trailed downward ONTO B’s CANDY!!! I could tell that B was immediately distressed, and I quickly distracted him from the disaster that had just occurred. He seemed to get over it pretty fast as the mom and baby went back down the stairs and I shut the door, so I thought all was well. I was wrong.
As the evening ran into night, and as it was getting close to our drop-dead bedtime for the twins (triplet A already having gone to bed…she was wiped out), I overheard the boys talking about the problem of the drool. A couple of minutes later, B came toward the kitchen sliding in front of him a “car” that he had made out of a good-sized box (big enough for him to sit in). On the floor of the “car” was the remainder of his candy, which was still a lot of loot. He said he was going to throw the whole thing into the kitchen garbage. When I asked why, he became agitated and yelled that it was because it was contaminated by baby spit.
Oh dear.
I stopped him from dumping the candy into the trash. It was too much candy for me to just let it all go to the county incinerator (although that probably would have been an okay thing…I just knew that B’s regret after the fact would come back to haunt me). So then I launched into my big lie.
The Lie
“You don’t have to throw it away. I can clean it with my baby drool cleaner ray gun.”
B stared at me. “You have one??” (As if he’d ever heard of one before. Even I had never heard of one before.) “Yes,” I lied. “Let’s go get it.”
I led B up to Ryan’s and my bedroom. I stepped into the closet and climbed up a rung on the step stool that’s always in there, quickly scanning for ANYTHING that B might buy as being a ray gun. A RAY GUN! A hairdryer was out of the question. Duh. I was kind of embarrassed for myself for having even considered it for a flash of a second. Then I spotted my electric back massager. No go. He’s seen that one in action. But then through the translucent front of a plastic drawer unit up on the closet shelf, I saw the box for a staple gun. I was pretty sure he’d never seen a staple gun before. It might work!
I pulled the staple gun box out of the plastic drawer, opened the end of the box, slid the styrofoam packaging out from the cardboard sleeve, and ceremoniously pulled out the gleaming silver staple gun. “Look,” I said. “It even says ‘heavy duty’ on it!” (A sticker on the side of the staple gun says, “HEAVY DUTY.”) He looked up at me with solemn, hopeful eyes.
We carried the staple gun downstairs to where the “car” full of candy was sitting on the floor. I said, “STAND BACK!!” B stepped behind me. I made a quiet, improvised “ray gun” noise as I passed the poser back and forth over the candy, being sure to ray gun all of it. “All done! It’s all clean now!” I said. B stepped out from behind me.
“Were you making that noise?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. He looked at me. I struggled to maintain my deadpan face.
“Is it magic?” he asked.
“No, it’s physics.” An even bigger lie.
“Why couldn’t I see it? Is it invisible?”
“Yes, it’s invisible…it’s infrared.” I couldn’t believe the stuff that was coming out of my brain and out of my mouth. It was all I could do to keep myself from bursting out laughing.
“You’d better do it again,” he said. “Nope,” I said, stifling my giggles. “That would be like baking it twice. You don’t want to burn it, do you?”
“No.” he said. Long pause, as he thought about it, then looking up at me with big eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “That would be like toasting toast twice. Not a good idea.”
“Okay,” he said. And that was basically the end of it.
I told B that we’d better let his candy sit overnight to let the after-effects of the ray gun wear off. He bought it. I’m pretty sure that any residual drool that he imagines is still on the candy will be dry by morning. At least I hope so.
Is it wrong of me to set up my kid to eat candy wrapped in wrappers that could potentially have been contaminated by actual baby drool? I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I saved his candy from going into the trash—at least for the night—and that the big Halloween lie is going to go down in my mom history as a biggie. I hope he forgets all about it so that I don’t have to account for myself at some point in the future. But I kind of expect to be confronted over it at some family event down the road. If so, I might have to lie again, at least until B is old enough to know better. So in, like, a decade or so, if all goes well, I’ll let him in on the secrets of the ray gun. I’m not sure I can pull off another whopper any time soon.
Before I went to bed, I put the staple gun back into its box and pushed it WAY back on the shelf in the closet, where (I hope) it will remain out of sight, even if it’s not quite out of mind. My only fear is that he’ll tell the story to someone at school who will know better and who will set things straight. Like a teacher. Or the principal. Wish me luck!
(Update: It’s later in the morning and the kids are awake. B is blissfully chowing down on some of the formerly-contaminated candy. It’s looking promising so far… 🙂 )
