Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [12]
Yay, team.
Amy is growing so fast. You think you hear that all the time, but I mean growing. She is six years old and the top of her head comes to the middle of my chest. No guarantees, but it would appear she is headed for the far side of six feet. Not only is Dan six-seven, he is the shortest of three brothers. His mother is an elegant woman of six feet. His sister—who looks just like Amy in her baby pictures—is six-two. Being so tall can be tough on a little one—even we sometimes grow impatient with her based on the age projected by her height as opposed to her actual chronological stature. And because we are homeschooling, we often forget how tall she is until she goes to dance class or swimming lessons and stands beside her peers. Still, we’re taking the straight approach. We just tell her, Yes, it looks as if you will be tall—just like your beautiful grandma, and your lovely auntie. Sometimes in rehearsal for the future I lift Amy up and stand her on a kitchen chair. I am five-eight at my most optimistic, so I tip my head back, shake my finger at her from below, and say, “Go clean your room!” And then in unison we both say, “Just practicing!” and she always laughs.
Shortly after we return from Colorado, she gets chicken pox. Poor kid, this makes three times she’s been sick since Christmas, when she broke out in red spots all over. It looked like measles. Being self-insured, we made the diagnosis using Google and my twenty-five-year-old nursing textbooks. I was up at 2:00 a.m., going back and forth between text and screen. Everything matched up, with the exception of some spots in her mouth. I dug a little deeper, and there in the text discovered scarlatina, which is potentially less hassle than measles. The buccal cavity lesions matched up, and so we called it.
The thing that caught me off guard was how helpless I felt when she was sick. Over the years my parents have taken care of many severely ill children, some of them terminal. So I’ve seen far worse than flu and scarlatina. But this would be the first time it was a child for whom I was responsible. Early indications are that I respond by going weak-kneed and turning everything over to Anneliese. In theory I support her in her determination to not be medically overaggressive, and I am even open to certain alternative therapies, but the minute the kid is symptomatic, I’m ready to run for the drops and pills. In this case, Anneliese held the line, and soon Amy was better. I tell you though, the next time I heard Greg Brown’s song “Say a Little Prayer,” it sat me right down.
We are still in the process of moving possessions from our New Auburn home, and with the real estate market in a funk, there is no sign of an imminent sale. I’ve already caused Amy to move thrice between the age of three and seven. When we met, she and Anneliese had finally settled into a home of their own after living in more temporary conditions in Colorado and Wisconsin. After Anneliese and I married, we sold their house, and they moved to mine. Now we’re moving again. As a kid allowed to grow up in only one place, I wonder what effect all this moving will have on Amy. Sometimes she gets teary and says she will miss her New Auburn bunk bed. Sometimes she gets teary about what she calls her “Talmadge house” (she and Anneliese lived on Talmadge Street). So I am second-guessing our move when we take time from a hectic day to stop by the New Auburn house for another load of boxes, but as Amy waits for me to unlock the door, she looks up cheerily and says, “This is one of my hometowns!” She says it like more than one hometown is a good thing, and this lightens my heart.
Somewhere along my patrilineage—I think it may have begun with my great-grandfather Wyman—our family developed the habit of responding to childish or unrealistic demands with the phrase “One, two, three, want!” “I want a new wagon!” I might say, to which my