Rusty’s Ramblings December

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The Fifth Dimension

Published:
1-August-2005

The past few months I’ve written about the problems I have faced as my daughter grows up with diabetes. I have written about the bickering and fighting between my two girls. Some of the adventures with well meaning relatives. Grandparents who have way less of a clue than I originally thought. And my own “hit-the-wall” meltdowns. In short, all of the daily aggravations that make our lives so normal here.

Something happened this past month. Everything went right. Smear my face with jelly and tie me to an anthill Virginia. Everything went right! The moon was in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligned with Mars. And peace guided the planets, and loved steered the stars. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…no wait, I digress.

I can’t remember the last time I had to go to Kari’s school to change an infusion set or refill her insulin cartridge. She has actually begun to change her own infusion sets. It seems every time she was running out of strips she managed to notice before she left for school. High and low blood sugars were mild and were handled very nicely by the school nurse. Lunches were remembered and homework made it into backpacks like magic.

My two girls were even nice to each other. This was the one phenomenon that was the creepiest. They actually would eat breakfast together without me having to break out the fire hose and rubber bullets. When we were all together in the car they carried on conversations at a normal decibel level and I wasn’t tempted to dive out of the moving car into traffic even once. My neighbors came and picked up my mail two days in a row because the house was so quiet they thought we were away.

I asked Kari to pick up her room. Do you know what she had the audacity to say to me? “Okay daddy”. Okay daddy? Okay daddy? Where the heck did that come from? For the past few months if I had asked her to go pick up a bushel basket of twenty-dollar bills and bring it into her room she wouldn’t have said “okay daddy”. She would have at least complained that she hadn’t been the one to leave the basket out, it wasn’t her basket, and did Kristin have to lug a basket of twenties to her room too?

I asked Kristin to bring me her dirty laundry. Do you know I got a full basket? I didn’t have to go pull her bed away from the wall to get all of her underwear and socks. I didn’t have to send the dog into her room either. He loves to go into a bedroom and bring every stitch of clothing he can lay his paws on out to show you. He’s very handy when the clothes are dirty. You want to kill him when they’re clean.

I’m not quite sure what caused all of this. I don’t expect for a minute that it will last much longer. But it has been a terrific reprieve from the bedlam that passes for everyday normal at our house. I sometimes wonder if ours is the only family that’s this crazy? Then every once in a while I notice newly bloodshot eyes on one of my friends who also has kids or a new twitch that I hadn’t seen before. It’s then that I realize that all is right with the world and I am not alone.

With special thanks to the Fifth Dimension,

Rusty