Advice

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Helpful Hints for a Medical Emergency

I have this persistent feeling in my left foot that there’s something caught between my toes, or maybe there’s a hair wrapped around my second toe. I have checked; there is nothing between my toes, no hairs in the vicinity (although of course I had to remove a hair that was draped casually over my shoulder as I was looking). And even if there were something caught between them, I would have expected it to dislodge itself over the course of two weeks, which is how long I’ve had this feeling. 

(I’ve looked it up. The closest “diagnosis” Google has to offer is a Morton’s neuroma, which is a thickening of the tissue around the nerves of the foot. But the symptoms don’t quite line up. Neuromas cause a feeling of “sock bunching” or “small pebble” but usually between the third and fourth toes.)

Anyway, I have this niggling memory that the feeling “there’s a hair wrapped around your toe” is Something To Watch For. I don’t find anything, upon Googling. Although I did find some articles about how critical it is to remove an actual hair that is wrapped around any appendage, as it can cut off circulation. But it’s somehow stuck in my head as one of those things that you listen for, and if you hear it, it Means Something. Something that would be important for medical staff to know in an emergency.

Based on no evidence at all, I like to think I would be good in an emergency. I have had the incredible amazing luck of not having been faced with an emergency of any sort. But I want to be READY. Which is why I have stowed a few little helpful medical hints away for future emergency use. 

Do you have any of those “medical hints” that you’ve come across somewhere and never forgotten?

After reading Hatchet by Gary Paulsen a million years ago, I am constantly on high alert for people who have arm pain followed by gas. CLEARLY that is a heart attack just waiting to happen. (I can never remember which arm the pain will be in, though.) (Apparently, it is usually the left arm.)

And I read at some point that A Feeling of Impending Doom is a medical clue you should never ignore. (You could have the bubonic plague! Or, more likely, although you never know these days, anaphylaxis! Or a pulmonary embolism! Or a bad reaction to a blood transfusion!) Unfortunately, I am filled with doom so often it seems like it might be hard to separate that feeling from the one that means, like, imminent death. But it’s a medical clue that’s forever lodged in my brain, just ready for me to leap into action the next time someone nearby sits down heavily and says, “Oh no, I’m filled with doom.” 

I seem to fuzzily recall that there’s an acronym you can use to tell if someone is having a stroke. But I can’t remember the acronym itself. Oh here it is: FAST, which stands for Face, Arms, Speech, and Time, which themselves are shorthand for facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties and… time, which I guess means if you notice any of these things it’s time to get help? Oh – and here are some other sites that say you should really be using the acronym BE FAST, and also be alert for Balance and Eyes (trouble with balance/coordination and sudden blurring or loss of vision). Now, in a possible-stroke type situation, I will be sure to forget not one but two life-saving acronyms.

I read/heard once that singing the Bee Gees’s “Staying Alive” when giving chest compressions during CPR will help you keep the appropriate life-saving rhythm. (The video I linked to made me unreasonably giggly. All those very serious dancers!) (Also, I suspect – based on previous experience of watching CPR scenes on TV/in movies – my husband would say that you need to be more forceful and less elbow-bendy than this particular video demonstrator.) 

This little rhyme may someday come in handy, although I sincerely hope not: “If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s white, good night.” But that’s more in case of bears than in a medical emergency. I do appreciate the absolute surrender of the last couplet, though. Don’t even try, you’re dead already. 

What helpful medical hints do you have stored away in case of an emergency? And have you ever had to put them to use? And, if so, did they WORK?

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Phone Etiquette in the Age of Texting

I am looking for information/ideas about how to teach my child phone etiquette. Is that even the right term? What I mean is, how to have a phone conversation with another human.

Do I remember learning how to use the phone? No, I do not. I am guessing that I learned it through emulating my parents. You answered the phone a certain way, you handled the call a certain way, you closed the call a certain way. Those were all things I probably absorbed just from living in my house.

But… How do you teach a child how to use the phone when you can’t teach by example?

My house as an adult is nearly phone free. AS I PREFER, of course. We have no landline. My husband and I each have a cell phone, but we both actively avoid phone calls. I talk to maybe three people on the phone on a regular basis. I call my mom once or twice a week. I call my best friend from back home once or twice a month. And then there’s a mom from school who is a Phone Fan and who calls me, on average, once a week or so.

I do have phone meetings with clients, as well. But those are infrequent and tend to cluster.

All of these phone calls take place, almost without exception, when Carla is in school. Sure, sometimes I am still talking with my mom when I pick up Carla from school. Sometimes the mom friend calls when I am at home with Carla. But those instances are rare. The VAST MAJORITY of all of my human interactions take place via text or in person.

(This is the third time I’ve used the word human in this post; I deleted one of the instances, so you are only seeing two of them. Well, now three since I used it again just a second ago. What is the deal? Am I subconsciously worried that you might think I’m spending time talking to… cats? Birds? The deer in my yard?)

Back to the subject at hand: I wish I could just wiggle dismissive fingers at the whole idea of talking on the phone. By the time Carla’s old enough to want to communicate with her friends outside of school, she will probably want to text them or snapchat them or whatever it is young people do these days.

Be that as it may, being able to talk on the phone is a SKILL. A dying one, perhaps. But one that could come in handy in Carla’s future professional life and at the very least is useful now when talking to her very patient grandparents. (I have a full-body cringe thinking about my poor mom saying, cheerfully, “Hello? Carla? Are you still there?” when Carla has CALLED HER and then given up on the call halfway through, with no heads-up to my mother.)

My parents wind up being the guinea pigs for phone calls, by the way. And I am sure that the conversations are as frustrating on their end as they are on my end (where I am gesturing to Carla to pay attention and stop doing a backbend off the couch and answer the question your grandfather just asked you). But how does a child get better at talking on the phone without talking on the phone?

I have googled, of course. The majority of articles seem to be mainly about… when to talk on the phone (as in, appropriate situations for phone conversation), rather than how to hold a conversation. And maybe THAT’S where I need to start. With conversations.

Because part of learning the phone skill, I think, is learning how to hold a regular old in-person conversation. A conversation is a conversation, after all, no matter what medium you use to hold it. And I definitely could do some additional coaching in that regard. My husband and I try to teach Carla, in our own conversations, with each other and with her, not to interrupt, to pay attention, to ask questions and show interest in what the other person is saying, to take turns, etc. etc. But I admit that we aren’t perfect about it. It’s easy, when there are only three of you, to be a little bit lenient on the interruption front. And when we are all chatting around the dinner table, requiring Carla to look us in the eyes just isn’t super important. Plus, my husband and I both need to be better about putting our phones down when we are talking to one another and to Carla because THAT is certainly giving Carla the wrong idea about what’s appropriate. And it’s easy enough to have a conversation with your parents, or with people you see all the time. It’s a whole other thing to have a conversation with a stranger, or someone you see infrequently. When I am on top of things, I can remind Carla to smile when she says hello, to look the person in the eyes, to do that little “hi how are you fine how are you” exchange that humans do. But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, most conversations are sort of impromptu, rendering preparation impossible.

Another part of learning how to talk on the phone is, I think, understanding how different it is from in-person conversation. There are no visual cues. You have to convey everything with your words.

And part of it is… a lot of intangible stuff about social cues and social expectations that Carla is still learning. Like… if one grandparent asks if you want to talk to the other grandparent, you say YES, even if it is not technically true. And… as I mentioned above, it is polite to ask how someone is doing, even if you don’t technically care. And… long silences are not a good sign, on a phone call. And… it is totally okay to end the call if you’ve run out of things to discuss, but you need to do it in a polite way, rather than just setting the phone down somewhere and wandering into a different room to build something with LEGOs.

Carla is six-and-a-half. I feel like… this should be something she’s working on, if not something she’s already mastered. But I have no frame of reference. Are other little kids having full conversations via phone? Are other parents working on this skill every weekend? Are we failing our child because we, ourselves, are so phone (and human) averse?

Do I need to start having Carla call one of her friends on the phone, to practice? Should I try to incorporate phone calls into our pretend play? Should I stop stressing out about this and remember that Carla is learning a TON of things right now and this probably doesn’t need to be a top priority?

Probably the latter. But it is really hard to notice gaps in your child’s knowledge and have no real idea how to fill them in.

Sort of how I feel when I remember that she is already six-and-a-half and we have only read half of the Ramona books and NONE of the Little House books and are the Winnie the Pooh years already in the rear-view, because we have yet to read that book all the way through. I get panicky, thinking of ALL THE THINGS I want her to experience and ALL THE THINGS I want her to learn (and read). And yet we only have so many hours in the day.

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Extremely Pleasing Case of Serendipity + Parenting Book Giveaway

A few months ago, I asked for advice about kids’ books with an instructive element. I loved the comments on that post – they were so full of good ideas, and I have since requested many of your suggestions from the library.

THEN. After I published the post, I got an email from A Kind and Generous Person who just so happened to have an entire STACK of the Joy Berry books I fondly remember from my own childhood.

Her children had outgrown them, she said, and she was thinking about the best way to release them from her house. And would I want them?

WOULD I?!?!

She boxed them up and sent them to me, FOR FREE – AND DID NOT EVEN WANT ME TO COVER THE SHIPPING – and they now live in my daughter’s bedroom. (Can you even believe how KIND and GENEROUS and ALL-CAPS WONDERFUL that is?!?!)

Joy Berry Books 1

I get a little tingle of delight EVERY TIME I see this stack of books!

We have read them several times over. Carla was OBSESSED with them when they first arrived, so we read all 20 of them right away, two-at-a-time before naps or bedtime. And then she began asking for specific books. And now we work them in among the other, less-instructive books that crowd her bookcase.

The books, by the way, are as wonderful as I remember… PLUS they are better, because now I am the one trying to teach my own child certain concepts. And some concepts are HARD.

Joy Berry Books 4

The elephant is already very clear on the concept of disobedience.

Thank goodness for Joy Berry. She very clearly and simply lays out a term and what it means and then offers several clear, firm, no-nonsense examples, all accompanied by a cartoon that shows the concept in action.

Joy Berry Books 5

There’s always an animal along for comic relief/extra shaming.

Then she lists simple examples of what you should do and what you should not do in order to avoid the concept being taught.

Joy Berry Books 6

SO EASY to abstain from disobeying! Just follow the two steps! (Disclaimer: May not be quite as easy in practice as it seems in the book.)

It was such a wonderful, pleasing case of serendipity. That this Kind and Generous Person would not only have the Joy Berry books, and be done with them herself, and be looking to pass them on to someone else… but that she would also read my blog at the exact moment I posted about my longing for those very books.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me itch to pass along the kindness.

To that end, I happen to possess three books that a) I LOVE and b) I am no longer in need of and c) I would wholeheartedly recommend you buy anyway because they are soothing and easy to read and short. So I would like to give them away to you.

They are by Louise Bates Ames, Ph.D., and they are slim “guidebooks,” if you will, to the inner workings of a two- and three-year-old.

Louise Bates Ames

I have no idea why these are not ordered CORRECTLY. It is driving me batty (although apparently not so batty as to retake the photo), so let’s just quickly look away, shall we?

The two-year-old book and one of the three-year-old books are gently used. The other arrived from Amazon as a surprise extra, and Amazon – which apparently has more money than it knows what to do with – just shrugged its shoulders and said, “keep it.” So the book is fresh as the day it arrived, more than a year and a half ago.

The books follow the same basic structure, outlining the characteristics of a child of that age, techniques for dealing with a child of that age, accomplishments and abilities typical for the age range, how the child sees the world, etc. There are “real life stories” sections in the back of each, where parents give a brief description of some problem they are encountering and the author responds.

I like these books for their cheery and matter-of-fact tone, for the “help with routines” sections, for the books/toys suggestions at the back, and for the short lists of “things to avoid” when interacting with your child. Sample, from the book on two-year-olds: “Avoid any expectation that all daily routines will go smoothly.” Second sample, same book: “Avoid any questions that can be answered by ‘no.'” I don’t know why, but these simple suggestions give me the giggles. And have I mentioned that they are short and very easy to read? Some parenting books are so dense. Others are so wordy. These books are so quick. Of course, that also means that they don’t really cover anything in-depth. But as an overview of what to expect from your kid at a specific age, they are top notch.

If you (or a loved one) are in possession of a nearly two-, or three-year-old, and if you don’t already own these books, let me know in the comments if you would like a) Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender, b) Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy, or c) both. I will do some sort of random number drawing on Friday.

Oh! And whether you want a copy of the Louise Bates Ames books or not, I would love to know what your favorite instructive-type children’s book is… and/or your favorite/most useful parenting book.