I am panicking, and I find it helps to write out the panic; once I see it in writing, I switch into “What if someone else were saying these same things?” and I get more reasonable. (“Why doesn’t this person just…?” Ha.)

Here is what set me off: Edward (he’s 8) had a playdate at our house. I couldn’t tell if it went well or not, if I should be interfering less or more in their disagreements, if Edward’s social skills were normal or advanced or sorely lacking, if the other boy was typical or a concern. I came out of the experience feeling wrung out and like I don’t know how to do anything, and also HATING having to deal with the kids’ social lives. I don’t even like to deal with my OWN social life, but THEIRS?? I have to manage OTHER PEOPLE’S??

And it’s not just a matter of “I hate to do it,” it’s that I don’t know how to do it. There’s this precarious feeling of I COULD BE WRECKING EVERYTHING BY NOT KNOWING WHAT I’M DOING. I could be getting my kids involved with people who are bad for them, and I could be encouraging them to act in ways that attract more of that. I could be over-interfering/under-interfering. When I THINK I’m teaching social skills, I could ACTUALLY be passing on my social anxieties/mistakes, not only genetically but by example and training. I don’t know if that’s even avoidable; it might just be one of the things my kids will have to work through, the way we all have to work through things we get from our parents.

This one single playdate has spiraled me off into a whole “How am I supposed to get these kids safely to adulthood?” panic attack. It’s the “peer contact/influence and social life in general” version of that attack, and it has combined tidily with the “THERE IS TOO MUCH TO TEACH THEM AND I’M FAILING TO COVER IT ALL” version. Furthermore, the things about the other boy that made me wonder if he might be “a concern” reminded me strongly of Henry, so then I’m panicking about THAT, TOO. And then of course there are my own interactions with the other boy’s mother to fret about, both current (“Was I too weird? I shouldn’t have referred to drinking”) and future (“What if she calls and tries to arrange another playdate but Edward doesn’t want to? What if she knows her boy is A Concern, and she’s hoping these playdates will help?”).

I’m remembering two things from my own social life as a child, but I don’t know how specific those were to me and my particular social preferences. The first is that it did NO GOOD for my parents/teachers to set up playdates with kids they thought I’d like. And it didn’t work to try to make people be friends with a misfit: learning to seek out other misfits was something I had to figure out myself, and it was a very useful life tool: by the time I was in high school, I knew not to chase popular kids, and I knew there were good friends and good alliances to be found among the unpopular kids. INVALUABLE. But perhaps I didn’t have to figure that out? Perhaps that’s something we COULD teach kids? I don’t know. And there can also be danger in the misfit crowd: it’s not like “being a misfit” automatically equals “being an awesome person who has been rejected by the mainstream for stupid and superficial reasons.”

The second thing I’m remembering is that as a teenager I was very annoyed any time my mom made my social life “about her.” I didn’t see what my social choices had to do with my parents AT ALL, GAH MOM. Now I see it from more a Mom Perspective and it looks different to me: of COURSE we wonder if it’s our fault when our kids struggle or make poor choices. Certainly SOCIETY gives us the side-eye about it. But their social lives ARE theirs. Their friend choices WILL affect their lives—but THEY will choose those friends. I can try to expose them to Nice Kids all I want, but I don’t really know which kids are Nice, and I don’t really know which ones will be good friend choices and which ones won’t be. As I child I had some dicey-seeming friends from dicey families, and some of them turned out dicey—and some of them were excellent. I also had some Nice friends from Nice families who turned out to be bad choices and not at all Nice.

Here’s another thing: some of my childhood experiences with Bad Choice friends are what TAUGHT ME WHAT A BAD CHOICE FRIEND WAS. From the outside, in the parent role, it can look like “This is a bad choice for my child”—and yet it’s the very thing that kept me from some bad choices later on (“Ick, this is reminding me of that bad friend; I think I’ll back away”), when the stakes were higher. But it didn’t have to go that way, and how could anyone tell ahead of time whether it would be a lesson or an influence?

AND, this is yet another of those situations where if we WANT to blame/credit our parents, we can blame/credit them no matter what they did: “My parents kept forcing me into social situations I wasn’t comfortable with, so I learned to deal with them!” / “My parents kept forcing me into social situations I wasn’t comfortable with, so I learned to avoid social stuff and also that my parents wanted to be someone other than who I was.” Or “My parents never gave me experience with social situations, so I never learned to deal with them” / “My parents never forced me, so I had time and space to learn and become comfortable in my own way.” And of course each set of parents will have their OWN experiences to work with: “I was shy and my parents really helped me by setting up playdates, so I’ll do the same for my kids”—which leads to the next generation saying “My parents set up playdates and it was the worst thing ever, so I won’t do that to my kids.” SIGH WHY IS IT ALL SO HARD

There are times when I want to collect the full spectrum of experience (“We’re considering a guinea pig: tell me everything you know”) and times when I want to deliberately skew the feedback to hear only a specific kind (“I’m fretting while my daughter is at summer camp; tell me only good camp memories”). Today is a day I’d like to deliberately skew the feedback.

My friend has a daughter the same age as Rob (14), and has just discovered her daughter has been self-harming/cutting. We’re going to need pseudonyms to keep this from being confusing. I’ll give them both the most common names from their birth years: we’ll call my friend Jen, and her daughter Emily. Emily told Jen she does it because she feels stupid and ugly and thinks her friends don’t care about her. Jen asked anyone had, for example, touched her inappropriately, and Emily said no.

Jen is starting by finding Emily a therapist to find underlying issues and learn new ways to deal with those issues. She would also be very interested in hearing people’s personal experiences with what worked or what didn’t, either from the point of view of the parent or the child. If you cut as a teenager, what did your parents do right/wrong? How do you wish they’d handled it? What could they have done, if anything, to keep things from progressing? If you tried to stop, which methods helped and which didn’t? If your teenaged child cut, what worked and what didn’t, and what advice would you give to another parent going through the same thing? And it would be so, so lovely to hear about anyone who came through it fine.

This is the kind of subject where there can be stories that are scary without being useful; I think at this stage I’d want to filter those out. The story can be scary (it’s a scary topic), but here’s the filter question: “Is this story USEFUL, or is it scary without being useful?” I remember when I was expecting the twins, it was scary-but-useful for my doctor to prepare me that twin pregnancies are less likely to end well than singleton pregnancies—but it was scary-but-not-useful to have people telling me sad and horrifying anecdotes illustrating this.

Feel free to go anonymous if you like. It’s a difficult and personal topic.

I took Elizabeth to an allergy/asthma doctor for an evaluation (the results of her blood test for a pecan/walnut allergy made the pediatrician say she should see a specialist). I always hate the first time doing something new: I’m so anxious when I don’t know what to expect. And it seemed like things got off on the wrong foot from the very first phone call: the receptionist asked me “Is she having a skin test?” and I didn’t know: the pediatrician just told us to see the specialist. So then I was thrown by the question, and felt foolish for feeling thrown, and got into the kind of scrambled-up talking where I have to say to myself that it doesn’t matter if I sound stupid, it only matters that I GET THE WORDS OUT and not sit in silence on my end of the phone. And that it’s okay to say, “Oh! I don’t know! The pediatrician just told us to see the allergist! It’s because she had a blood test that showed a nut allergy.” I was pleased that we could get an appointment so soon: sometimes with specialists it can be AGES.

They sent us some paperwork to fill out before her visit. It asked a lot of questions about things like hives, wheezing, seasonal allergies, etc., and I kept feeling silly because I couldn’t answer. How long has she had this reaction to nuts? Hm. I don’t know, because she hardly ever HAD pecans or walnuts. How long has she had reactive airways? Hm. I don’t know; she was DIAGNOSED last winter, but she’s had those symptoms on and off for…years? I don’t know, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to mention it or if she was only here for the allergies. What are her primary symptoms, and how serious are they on a scale of 1 to 10? I don’t know what symptoms would be considered “primary,” and I don’t know how serious they are on a scale of 1 to 10. Etc. So I just filled them out the best I could, with too many little explanatory notes in the margins. When we got to the appointment, they asked all the questions on the form ANYWAY, and no one criticized my patchy form-filling-out, and they DID want to know about the reactive airways because with allergies and breathing issues it’s all a rich tapestry.

She wasn’t supposed to have any antihistamines for 72 hours before the appointment. I was nervous I’d forget, but I didn’t: I put it on the calendar, and also the doctor’s office called 72 hours before the appointment and said “No antihistamines from now until the appointment,” which was nice.

They told us to expect the appointment to take an hour and a half, but it was more like an hour. We were the only ones in the waiting room, so I wondered if they build in time to deal with other patients but didn’t need that time while we were there. First the nurse called us back and got Elizabeth’s weight and height, pulse and blood pressure. She then asked me pretty much every single question that had been on the form, and entered the answers into a laptop.

Next, the nurse did the asthma testing. She set up the laptop to show some animated birthday candles. She had Elizabeth take a huge deep breath in, then breathe out as hard as she could into a plastic tube; the harder she breathed out, the more candles blew out. Then, without taking her mouth off the tube, she had to breathe in again as hard as she could. The nurse had her repeat this three times with short breaks (15-30 seconds) in between. Then she gave her two puffs from an inhaler, waited a few minutes, and had her do it all again. The doctor never said, “Yes, she has asthma”; he just came into the room referring repeatedly to “her asthma.” She’ll have an as-needed inhaler. Right now she only has trouble when she gets sick, so he said we could come back in the winter for another evaluation if the inhaler wasn’t enough.

The doctor came in to talk to us about the allergy testing before beginning. He said there were two ways to do it: the less-torturous, less-accurate way, or the more-torturous, more-accurate way. I was leaning toward the latter, but was having trouble understanding the difference and asked what he’d recommend. He said he recommended the former for children and for first-time screenings, so I went with that. When the nurse came back in, I thought to ask if there was a price difference between the two methods (we have a high deductible, so we’d be paying for the whole visit), and she said she didn’t think there could be because they bill both methods using the same code.

It turns out that the more-torturous way involves marking the child’s back with a grid, then doing a separate needle-stick into each of forty grid squares (in Elizabeth’s case—I don’t know if it’s always forty, or if they do a different number depending on what they’re testing for) and putting a drip of chemical onto each needle-stick. The less-torturous way involves using pre-made blocks of ten needles each, pre-filled with the chemicals. The nurse presses down each block, so it’s ten needle-sticks at a time but only four of them, and it’s over quickly. Pain-wise, Elizabeth said, “Ow. OW” with each press-down—but in sort of an annoyed, “Hello, this HURTS” way rather than in any kind of distressing way. The “less accurate” part is because it’s harder to be consistent with the depth of the needle-sticks, and because the testing sites are closer together: a reaction from one can easily spread into the area reserved for another.

Elizabeth had to lie on her stomach for this, with her shirt off. I think she hated having her shirt off more than she hated the rest of it. She was glad the nurse did the actual testing, because the nurse was female. She had a paper johnny to wear, and that helped a little, but she still felt nervous and exposed.

First the nurse wiped Elizabeth’s back with rubbing alcohol, and then she used a marker to label four areas with A, B, C, and D, so they’d know which area was which testing block, and then she did the needle-stick blocks. After the four blocks of needles had been pressed down, the nurse checked to make sure all of them had worked, and then she gently blotted off the extra chemical. She then used a marker to put a dot by each of the forty test sites.

Then Elizabeth could sit up, and we waited 15 minutes for the test to finish; the nurse set a timer outside the door “so you won’t have to suffer any longer than necessary!” The doctor came and checked twice mid-test, and the nurse also kept checking. Elizabeth said it was very itchy, and that it itched more and more. But she didn’t freak out or cry or anything, just a few irritable complaints. I kept looking at her back—it looked pretty cool and dramatic, because even the places where she had no reaction were pink from irritation, and then of course there were all the dots and letters. Very quickly some of them started looking like mosquito bites; the nurse had left the testing sheet behind, so I could see for myself which ones were which.

When the timer rang, the doctor came in and filled in a chart of the reactions: little dashes if there’d been no reaction, or little size-of-reaction codes (3, 3+, 3-, etc.) if there was. She had reactions to pecans, walnuts, and most of the other tree nuts. He said her skin-test results were nowhere near as bad as her blood-test results had been: if her skin test had matched her blood test, he said the reaction area would have been as big as a plum; instead it was about the size of a mosquito bite. He recommends not having pecans or walnuts in the house, but he didn’t sound too impressed with her reaction. She had no reaction to peanuts or almonds, which is convenient. He prescribed her an Epipen, but said we should use Benadryl instead unless she (1) was struggling to breathe, or (2) turned pink all over her face and down her torso, or (3) threw up the Benadryl.

So! Then we went back to the receptionist, and she made us copies of all the testing forms and also printed out a sheet that included the doctor’s instructions. Meanwhile Elizabeth was rubbing her back against the wall, and I realized I’d forgotten my plan to give her a Benadryl as soon as the testing was over, AND I’d left the water bottle in the car. The receptionist offered her a Zyrtec, but I gave her the water/Benadryl in the car instead. (I was remembering when she had a single dose of children’s Tylenol in the hospital and we were billed $14 for it.)

The whole thing was about what I’d expected, except less stress for Elizabeth: I’d thought she might be weepy and upset during the allergy testing, but she was just annoyed. I was relieved that at this point her allergies and asthma are unimpressive, though I was also a bit stirred up by references to “if she can’t breathe” and so forth. We had lunch out to celebrate having the appointment done with.

[Edited to add: Because our insurance denied the claim, saying there was no referral (sigh, we have a COPY OF THE REFERRAL in our anxious little hands, AND the allergist’s receptionist told us they’d received it), I can also tell you how much this appointment costs without insurance: $1,045. That’s $570 for the nurse to run the allergy tests, $125 for the nurse to run the asthma test, and $350 for the pleasure of the doctor’s company.]

This morning I saw a funny license plate on a minivan: 4&DONE. Nice to see the words “one” and “done” getting out and seeing other people.

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Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that irritated me. It said “Relax, you’ll get there.” Okay, but I’d get there ON TIME if you would MOVE YOUR BUNS, you HIPPIE.

Also, it seems like there are a lot of people who would be hurrying for reasons an empathetic person would never say “Relax” to. It seems like the bumper sticker is making certain unflattering and smug assumptions about the only possible reason a person might be hurrying: “Because you’re unnecessarily stressed/anxious about unimportant things, instead of being peaceful and full of healthy perspective like me.”

Perhaps one single phrase doesn’t work to address EVERY SINGLE PERSON DRIVING BEHIND YOUR CAR, is what I’m concluding on the subject of bumper stickers.

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This morning while wiping the stupid counter I suddenly thought of some cleaning advice that bothered me a long time ago. It was in an interview, I think—probably in Real Simple with a cover headline like “THE SECRET TO A CLEAN AND ORGANIZED HOME!” They asked an expert what her secret was, and she said, “I just clean up after myself.”

And that reminds me of the book I read about giving up sugar, which STARTED WITH no longer eating between meals. Like, “Okay, we’re going to get started. Make sure you’re not snacking between meals, and now let’s….” That is TOO BIG A FIRST STEP. Yes, I can see how if I “just cleaned up after myself” my house would be cleaner! Yes, I can see how if we START from a place where I’m not snacking, we could make big progress. But both of those things are like saying, “Well, to graduate with a degree in French, you’ll really need to take Advanced Conversational French 401. So let’s start you there.” “Oh, you want to climb this mountain? The path begins at 1000 feet, so just….get there. I’ll meet you there, and then we’ll get started!” “You’ve never run before, and you’d like to run a marathon? Excellent! Let’s START, on the FIRST DAY, by running HALF a marathon!”

It demonstrates how we tend to think of our own strong points as being natural and obvious and easy. “Just blog whenever you think of something to blog about!” would be terrible advice for someone having trouble keeping a blog going. “Just make sure all the pieces go together—but not TOO well!” would be terrible fashion/decorating advice. “If you want to make friends, BE a friend!” “What I do is, I just don’t let it get to me.” “I just stop when I’m full.” “I just make myself do it.” “I just get it over with.” “I just let it go.” In fact, if the word “just” fits comfortably before the action verb, it’s not useful advice.

We have at least for now decided NOT to get a guinea pig. (The comments on that post were amusingly spread out: “Guinea pigs are THE BEST!!” followed by “Guinea pigs are A NIGHTMARE!!”) The main sticking point for me is Where to Put the Cage: I walked around and around the house looking for a place, and there isn’t one. If we were to wait for all our fish to die of old age and then get rid of the aquarium, we could use that place. Or we could put it smack in the middle of the dining room table. That’s about it.

In the meantime, we are considering a third cat. But it seems like with indoor-only cats, that’s getting a little risky, territory-sharing-wise.

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Elizabeth’s camp sent out a survey asking for feedback. I practically rubbed my hands together with glee. I hadn’t wanted to write a letter of complaint, especially since Elizabeth had such a great time—but MY experience was NOT good, and they were asking me specifically to tell them what my experience was. So I did. It was very satisfying. Except that given their previously demonstrated lack of paperwork skillz, I’m certain they’ll misplace the results.

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Summer continues to be pretty awful. I would say it is the worst summer of my child-bearing years so far. I keep having to play self-therapist: I’ll think “I hate my life” and then have to respond soothingly/reasonably with “No, no, you don’t hate your WHOLE LIFE, you just hate PARTS of THIS SUMMER. It’s going to be FINE.” I saw them setting up the back-to-school aisles at Target and nearly CRIED with happiness. (What do you mean, “What about next summer?” SHHHHHHHHHHH.)

The tricky thing about being a secret blogger is that people outside of that circle of secrecy think you don’t do anything. Two friends of mine were talking about a third person I didn’t know, and they mentioned that her kids are in school so they “don’t know what she does all day.” They said it in unpleasant get-a-job-you-bum tones of voice, so that I’ve had to breathe through my nose and remind myself that even when I feel like someone might be talking about me, usually they’re not actually talking about me and would be appalled if they suddenly realized it sounded like they were talking about me. Still. It showed me what they might say about me, and how they might say it, if they were to be talking about me next year when my youngest starts school.

Do you remember that group I’ve been getting together with once a month? Last night the subject came up. I told two of them (not the same two as in the paragraph above—those are different friends) that I did some freelance writing, which seemed like it gave the relevant information (“I do something, but it’s not something where I leave the house or do it full-time with benefits!”) without giving up anything private (“Hey, everybody!! I have a secret blog!!”). But I hadn’t thought through what the natural follow-up would be to that statement. So then I had to mention blogging. Now I’m feeling paranoid. It’s not that I’ve said anything on the blog that would offend (or at least, it would offend only one member of the group, I think), it’s that I wouldn’t want to be revealed like this to people I’m getting to know. Do I want them to read my Inner Thoughts about these meetings? Why, no.

More importantly, do I want them to know that I discuss those get-togethers with another get-together? Because that’s basically what I’m doing. It’s like if I went for an evening with a group of friends—and then the next day got together with another group of friends and reported on the whole thing. It’s different than that, but it could seem similar.

And I think for people who don’t blog, it would seem odd—like finding out that someone at the party took a bunch of photos secretly. One woman there mentioned that she-didn’t-read-blogs-but had any of us heard of D00ce? And I nodded and said sure, and everyone else seemed to me making the kinds of sounds people make when they don’t really mean yes—little mmmm’s and encouraging noises that mean “Go on, I don’t know who that is, but I’ve understood you’re talking about a blogger and my guess is that that’s enough for you to continue with your story.” On the other hand, that’s the kind of noise I might make, especially if I were suddenly feeling a bit nervous about the conversation heading for blogging.

Another interesting thing is that some people, upon realizing they had information about someone that they could look up, would…look it up. And some people would not. And so it’s possible that even if I said outright to this group that I was a blogger, not one single one of them would try to find me online. They might even ask polite questions, just as I would if they mentioned that they collected stamps or bought things at Goodwill to sell on eBay, but they wouldn’t then Look Me Up.

I suspect all of us are looking at each other with interest on Facebook; I suspect this because _I_ am looking at THEM on Facebook, and also because the subject comes up all the time: someone will be showing a photo around, and several people will say, “Oh! Yes, I saw that on Facebook!” Or someone will say to me, “I saw on Facebook that Elizabeth went to camp! How did that go?” And yet—when someone mentioned that they were members of such-and-such a club, I didn’t go look that up to see if there was interesting about them there. And people seem familiar with Twitter, but I haven’t searched for any of them on Twitter. And even though I have everyone’s full names, it occurs to me that it hasn’t even occurred to me to search for any of them on Google. (…Although NOW it has occurred to me.)

Anyway. It’s tricky.

Personality test! Ready?

1. You have a dream in which you’re an alcoholic: you look in the mirror and your face is ravaged, you’re at a check-up and your doctor says you need to check into a facility, etc. You:

a. Conclude that the universe, a deity, or some mystical aspect of your own consciousness (a part that knows more than you do) is Trying To Tell You Something.

b. Conclude that dreams are weird, and/or that your worry that you’re drinking too much is coming out in your dreams, and/or that your worry that someone else is drinking too much is coming out in your dreams, and/or that the alcoholic’s memoir you just read is coming out in your dreams.

2. You are wrestling with the issue of whether to have a baby. You suddenly start seeing pregnant women and babies and stroller sales EVERYWHERE. You:

a. Conclude that the universe, a deity, or some mystical aspect of your own consciousness (a part that knows more than you do) is Trying To Tell You Something.

b. Conclude that you are preoccupied with the issue of whether to have a baby, and so are highly attuned to elements related to that theme.

3. You have given your child a name. Now you are hearing that name EVERYWHERE. You:

a. Conclude that the name got way more popular after you used it.

b. Conclude that because that name is your child’s name, you are now much more highly attuned to other uses of it than you were before you used it.

4. A Big Controversial Thing happens. You:

a. Feel a rush, and get right onto the internet to start interacting with others about it.

b. Feel a cringe, and stay away from the internet, and avoid interacting with others about it.

c. State publicly on the internet that you are cringing and avoiding interacting, but actually keep interacting.

d. Invisibly monitor the fallout/reactions on the internet, but stay completely out of it.

5. Your small child says something like, “But Mommy, why do we have to HAVE war?” You:

a. Assume that the question comes from a place of Deeper Wisdom and The Way Things Ought To Be, and answer with tears and hugs and a renewed inner wish for A Better World For Our Children.

b. Conclude that the question comes from a place of Asking Questions and Having An Immature Brain, and answer with a list of possible reasons (money, land, religious differences, the inherent fightiness of the human species, etc.).

6. There is a big scandal in which someone has committed a crime (stealing, adultery, etc.) and then lied to cover it up. You:

a. Are even more outraged about the lying than about the crime.

b. Think the only sensible thing to do if you’ve committed a crime is to lie about it.

7. You are feeling unhappy about some extra weight. You:

a. Eat less/differently, start exercising.

b. Eat some cookies and Cheetos to cheer up.

8. You’re making a multiple-choice test, and you suddenly realize that such tests usually have a scoring system. You didn’t have a scoring system in mind when you started, though, and so the only thing that ties any of the answers together is “What you’d do” versus “What a whole assortment of different types of people do.” Which is a particularly lame way to score a test, now that you think of it. You:

a. Scrap the whole test. Never mind.

b. Publish it anyway.

My dad sent me this article by an economist, about whether it does any good to sponsor a child. Short answer for those of you who, like me, dislike clicking links or reading articles: yes.

I found myself convinced. And I’ve had that low-grade-fever feeling of wanting to DO something to HELP THE WORLD—but WHAT??? This seemed like a good answer.

The next step was to find an organization that met two requirements:

1. It should not be a religious organization; I’m on board with Feeding/Clothing The World, but not with Converting The World

2. It should score well on Charity Navigator

Several of you on Twitter recommended Plan International (I went specifically to PlanUSA.org, since I am in the USA), which has such a forgettable name I’m not surprised I’d never heard of it: maybe I DID hear of it, even MANY TIMES, but COMPLETELY FORGOT. They have four stars (out of four) on Charity Navigator, and they’re not religious. They also run Because I Am a Girl, which specifically works to improve the education and safety of women and girls. And they have a child sponsorship program (that’s the USA-specific one I’ve linked to; use the Plan International link above to see if they have it for your country), so I signed up.

You can select a child based on location, age, sex, and photo, which is both SUPER FUN and SUPER UPSETTING. I knew if I wasn’t careful, my “But how do I know I’ve chosen THE VERY MOST EVERYTHING child???” feelings would take over, and then I’d end up getting overwhelmed and not choosing anyone. (It took me, like, a YEAR to get going with Kiva.org, because I couldn’t chooooooooose.) I don’t know anything about The World, so I left location as “any.” But I wanted specifically to sponsor a girl, and I thought it would be fun if the girl were Elizabeth’s age (for Elizabeth to write letters, if she wanted to, but also just so I’d always be aware of the age our sponsor child was), so I chose “4-8” for age, and “girl” for sex.

Not only did I not want to get sucked into the CAN’T CHOOSE sinkhole, I’d also thought I couldn’t go back to a child if I hit the “search” button again. But right now, as I was trying out the search feature so I could describe it to you, I saw it actually just cycles between two girls in the 4-8 category—so I wonder if they are a bit short on children who need sponsors, or if it’s that they want to discourage browsing, or what? No, it must be the discouraging-browsing thing, because I see I get just two choices in ANY category I choose. You could keep changing locations, then, and get two choices from each. And maybe you get different choices if you go back another day, I haven’t checked.

But ANYWAY, I chose the very first 8-year-old girl presented to me, a girl from Cambodia, because I INSTANTLY liked the look of her. She had an Elizabeth look to her, I thought, even though they look quite different. The way she was looking at the camera like “Fine, I understand you have to take my picture, so I will stand here and allow you to get that over with.”

We got a big packet in the mail a few days later with more information about her, and that was fun too. I found myself a bit tongue-tied trying to write the first letter to her. “Hi! Our daughter your age just got back from a one-week camp where she really ROUGHED IT in living conditions way better than your usual ones! And it cost more than it will cost to support you for a WHOLE YEAR, isn’t that incredible?” No. “Hello! Do you like Hello Kitty and owning twelve pairs of sparkly shoes and going to the large public library and large public pool, like Elizabeth does?” No. “Here’s a picture of us, looking kind of fat and over-healthy in front of a house that’s roughly ten times the size of yours and also has central heating/cooling, running water, indoor toilets, and floors that aren’t made of dirt!” No.

I finally had to think to myself, “This is not the really crucial part of this whole program. Just say hello and it’s nice to meet you.” So I told her the ages and sexes and names of everyone in our family, and I said that Elizabeth and Edward were twins and that they were her age, and I said which country/state we lived in and what that state was known for, and I said how many people were in our city, and I said we had two cats, and then I wrapped it up. I put in some stickers and a couple of postcards that show our area.

For future letters, I’m planning to include those little Dover activity books—but those, too, were a little hard to choose. Would she prefer to put a pretty little white girl in a dress that cost more than her house and will be worn for part of a single day, or do kitchen activity stickers with electric appliances and no wood fire anywhere? Or perhaps she’d like to make her own sticker ice cream sundae! (Has she ever…HAD ice cream?) I went with decorating butterflies, baby animal stickers (cute baby animals seem like they’d translate well), wildflower stencils, and fairyland activity stickers. I’m also going to look around online for other ideas. The items need to be the sort of thing you can mail in an envelope, so maybe…fabric ribbons? That’s all I’ve got so far.

Elizabeth had mentioned that when she ate pecans or walnuts, her lips and mouth felt “weird.” I was hesitant to pursue it, considering how infrequently we eat pecans or walnuts: nut allergies are taken so seriously, I didn’t want to get her sent to the Nut Table in the cafeteria if all she had was a little bit of a skin sensitivity and could easily just avoid the nuts that caused that reaction. I also wondered if she might be imagining it, and it seemed like she’d had too few exposures to even start making a connection.

But when it happened when she had a tiny bit of pecan from a piece of candy, and when she immediately asked “Did that have pecan or walnut in it??” just based on the reaction she was having, and when she added “it feels like there’s a lump in my throat” to her symptom list, I thought I’d better mention it to the doctor at her annual check-up a couple of weeks later.

He ordered a blood test to screen for an allergy, and I don’t really understand how it works but anyway he called us and said it showed allergies to both pecans and walnuts, and an IgE of 247 (he said 100 would be considered high), and that earned her a referral to an allergist; her appointment is next week. I don’t know if this means she IS allergic to pecans and walnuts, or if it means she screened as being POTENTIALLY allergic, but there is no way I’m going to Google nut allergies. The allergist can tell me what’s going on.

On one hand, I have an “Oh, great, here we go” feeling. On the other hand, I’m glad to be going this route: the doctor we’re seeing does asthma as well as allergies, and Elizabeth already has a diagnosis of “let’s call it reactive airways for now, but if this continues we’ll want to look into whether it’s asthma,” and this IgE thing apparently relates to both allergies and asthma, so it’s nice to be Working On This if it’s going to turn out to Be Something.

But now I regret saying no when the doctor who did her tonsillectomy said he could do allergy testing while she was out anyway. I felt at the time like he was just trying to upsell, and maybe he was, but in retrospect it would have been nice; I had the scratch test done as a child, and I remember it being weepingly uncomfortable—like having 100 mosquito bites on my back and not being allowed to scratch them. It would have been nice to be unconscious.

Well, but at the time I’d also thought, “Wait, is it good for her to maybe have an allergic reaction to something while she’s already under anesthesia for the first time?,” and I guess I still do wonder about that. And I don’t think I would have enjoyed worrying about the tonsillectomy recovery AND about the newly-discovered-and-previously-unsuspected (at that time) nut allergy, and she was enough of a cranky mess after surgery without adding 100 mosquito bites, so perhaps it’s better this way after all.

Elizabeth is home from camp! I’m so relieved! I am also so annoyed:

1. The camp assured me that the section I should put her in (after her first choice didn’t work out) would be for grades 3-6, not grades 5-6 as in the camp description. But it WAS 5-6, with her the only 3rd grader. Some of the other girls were going through puberty and were as tall as the counselors. Fortunately most of the girls were nice to her, though of course they preferred to spend time mostly with their peers. And one girl was mean to her: every time Elizabeth mentioned liking/doing something, the girl said it was babyish to like/do that; she also made fun of Elizabeth for being less competent at tasks.

2. The camp said that since groups were being combined because of low enrollment, the section she was signing up for would include the pottery lessons from the section that was her first choice. It did not.

3. The camp said there would be letter-writing time every day. There was not.

4. The camp said we could bring a week’s worth of letters on drop-off day (each letter labeled with the day it should be delivered), and they’d hand them out on those days; this would ensure our daughters would get daily reassurance from us, especially on the first few days. They gave her the entire week’s packet on Thursday.

5. The pick-up was just as badly organized as the drop-off: no indication of where we should go or what we should be doing or where we should park or when we should leave, and no one seemed to know. Everyone’s stuff was jumbled together in a big pile, so that if I hadn’t been compulsively re-checking the heap, I would have missed a whole bag of her laundry and also one single shoe lying on its own.

6. They gave us a letter on the way out saying, “You know how we checked everyone for lice when they got here, but we were so badly organized that lots of people didn’t even know they were supposed to get checked? Well, to our shock, there was a lice break-out! So you might want to check your daughter and launder/trash/bag all her stuff when you get home!”

But all these things that have me in a big agitated fit were total shrug-offs to Elizabeth. I asked if she thought she’d have had more fun if the campers had been her age, and she shrugged and said she didn’t think so. I asked if the mean girl had been upsetting, and she said yes, but that she knew those things weren’t true, and anyway that girl was mean to everyone. She also had a satisfying story where she (Elizabeth) said she liked the show My Little Pony, and the mean girl said that was a baby show, and several of the other girls chimed in saying NO that show was AWESOME, making the mean girl feel uncool for not knowing about it.

She wasn’t sad when I left, and she didn’t feel homesick even early in the week. She said they did one fun thing after another all day every day. When I said, “Are you happy to be going home, or do you wish you were staying another week?,” she said “Both!” I asked if she’d want to go back next year, and she said yes in a voice that implied she thought it was weird I’d even ask. She liked her counselors, and she wants to write a letter to the awesome lifeguard who was so funny and cool. The swimming was organized very safely: everyone was tested, and then they had to wear bathing caps color-coded to indicate their swim level (which is probably how she got to know the lifeguard so well, since she tested as a beginner and had to stay right near the lifeguard).

She didn’t come home badly sunburned or badly bug-bitten—just the unavoidable light tan and scattered bites. She came home with most of her belongings (that is, if anything’s missing, I haven’t noticed yet), and only one small item belonging to someone else (looks like a bag for a shower cap or bath pouf—nothing I need to fret about trying to return). Both pairs of sneakers were ruined, but I’d assumed they would be and had sent ones she was about to outgrow. Several items of clothing are probably not salvageable (two with mildew stains, several with very ground-in dirt that then sat for days in a damp laundry bag), but we expected and planned for that. The stamped envelopes I sent with her all got sealed shut from the dampness, but that’s okay. She almost lost her new raincoat, but didn’t. Her hair was reasonably combed. She had a great time.