Do You Know What Your Kids are Doing?

It's an ominous question. The resulting answer can never be anything good.
Three examples:
 A few days ago I made a lemon meringue pie because we had guests coming and the lemons are exploding off of the trees and there is no better dessert at Omo than a lemon pie. It was a gorgeous pie. The meringue was perfect--light golden peaks, white valleys, the meringue thick but light. It was chilling in the refrigerator for the afternoon, I was sitting on the floor with Daisy in the living room. I noticed that the refrigerator door was swinging open, and got up to go close it. When I reached the door, I realized the reason that the door was open was because a certain three year old was standing in the fridge. Eating the meringue off of my pie by fingerfuls. I looked over at Caleb's mom, sitting in the living room, "Do you know what this child is doing?

We've recently acquired my kind of pet: Yertle the Turtle. He's tiny. He comes out once every morning to munch on a lettuce leaf, leave a tiny pile of poo for me to clean up, and then disappears for the rest of the day. I love him. His morning excursion is right at breakfast time. So a couple of mornings ago, I had placed Daisy on the kitchen floor to wait for me to finish getting her breakfast together and then went into the bathroom for a minute. Caleb comes in from letting out the chickens and calls me from thekitchen, "Joanna. Do you know what Daisy is doing in here?" I enter the kitchen to see Daisy, Yertle in hand, gnawing on his shell. Quite likely, she is the only child to ever have done her teething on a live turtle.

  I had a bad night last night. Daisy was up for hours and I didn't sleep much. So this morning, when Elsa and Ezra were out of the house for a long period of time, I really didn't pay much attention to it, I was more focused on enjoying the quiet house than peering through my hazy fog of tiredness to really wonder what they were up to for so long. Close to lunchtime, Caleb yelled over from near the workshop, "Joanna! Do you know what the kids are doing?" Uh oh. I walked over toward the shop and down to the water's edge. The Omo has flooded in the past two weeks and we have floodwater much closer to our house right now than the usual river's edge that is down a strip of grass and outside our fence. Elsa and Ezra were sitting in the canoe that we use to pole across the floodwater, fishing. Somehow they had gathered everything necessary--my broom to make a fishing pole, a long string for line, one of Caleb's major hooks that he uses for his perch line, and a frog. Which Elsa had baited on the hook by herself. (The child is fearless) Resourceful, aren't they? I meant to get a picture of the two of them with their makeshift fishing pole, but Caleb swiped their hooks before someone lost an eye.

Sick Baby

Let's start with the good news first: Daisy is fine. On the mend, getting better, looking good, fine. But we had some scares over the last week. We returned home from Addis last Friday. On Sunday night, Daisy woke up about an hour after putting her to bed and when I went to put her pacifier back in her mouth, I felt her head and she was hot. Her fever was 104.2. I got her up, we draped her with cold wash clothes, dosed her with Tylenol, and put her back to bed. I was pretty sure this was the start of malaria--she was 10 days post-exposure to being bitten in a high-malaria area where we stay the night on our travels in and out of Addis, and although she sleeps under a net, I don't have her on an anti-malarial. I started her on a treatment dose of malarone and she was basically fever-free all day Monday, until late Monday evening when her fever started to go back up. I was sitting by her on the couch as she slept, feeling the heat radiating off of her small head, when she went into a seizure. I yelled for Caleb and he came running from the workshop, Caleb's mom came running from her house, and none of us knew what to do. Any kind of head knowledge goes out the window when it's your own kid lying there. She stopped seizing after about 2 1/2 mintues and Caleb scooped her up, completely non-responsive. I know the term 'post-ictal non-responsiveness', but that does nothing to describe how it feels to look at your child and see all the life drained out of her. Come back. Come back to me. She revived after about 90 seconds, and Caleb took her to the bath tub and soaked her with cold water. At that point, it was about 6:15 pm, and we had to decide what to do. All I knew is that I could not be at home again if she had another seizure.

We decided to take her to the hospital. That is like deciding, if you live in Seattle, to take your kid to Northern California to get to a doctor. We left our house, got in our boat, drove upriver 25 minutes to where our car is parked, loaded our car, and started to drive through the night to get to the hospital. We arrived in the town where we usually spend the night around 2:30 am, and since Daisy was keeping her fevers down, we decided to rest for a couple of hours. We woke up at 5 am and continued on to the hospital, another 3 hours away. We got to the hospital in Soddo, a private hospital that has a number of foreign doctors and is home to friends of ours that we could crash with. We took Daisy to get lab work done, came back with a negative malaria smear and her CBC all over the place. In consulting with our organization's doctor in Addis, she becomes most concerned about Daisy's bloodwork being all out of whack, and suggests getting a repeat CBC done. It is common for malaria smears to be negative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she didn't have malaria. We find out that the lab at the hospital is actually not all that trustworthy because of under-trained lab technicians, and so decide to leave the next day to drive a further 4 hours to Awassa, a town where hopefully we'll be able to get some accurate labs drawn. We both found it impossible to return home with the question hanging that something else might be going on with Daisy.

Wednesday afternoon we had a repeat CBC done on Daisy and it came back all clear. Her fevers were abating after finishing her malarone treatment and we decided to head home on Thursday, another 11 hour day to reach our house from Awassa. So this is how we take care of our sick children--when they are at their worst, we pack them in the car to endure 30 hours over bumpy roads. Good.

Despite the bloodwork scare, we are quite certain that Daisy just has malaria. The malarone treatment hasn't quite taken care of the malaria completely, and so two days ago her fevers returned and we started her on coartem. Her fevers have been lower though--running only 100 to 101 rather than the panic-inducing 104.

We're thankful for a lot of things in the midst of this scare. We're thankful that we could leave Elsa and Ezra with Caleb's parents. We're thankful for the NUMEROUS concerned doctors who gave us advice and help. We're so thankful for the friends who let us stay with them, in Soddo and in Awassa. And we are SO thankful for all of the prayers offered up on our behalf. We are incredibly blessed.

I have hated this experience. It has accentuated the extreme hopelessness I feel in the midst of one of the kids being sick, and how much I dislike being the one responsible for making the right call when it comes to their health. But here is what I hold to. On Monday night, when we were getting our car out of the shipping container where we park it, I walked over to wait at the house of the Icealandic couple who live on that compound. I told them what had happened, trying not to lose it, and Kalli walked over to a little box and pulled out a little index card. The card had written on it a verse in Icealandic, and Kalli read it to me and then got his English Bible and read it to me in English. It said, "The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on him sincerely." Psalm 145:18.

I tucked it in my pocket and carried that verse I could not read but knew in my heart for the rest of the journey.