Pam Mellskog: Mommy Musings

THREE ORANGE PLOW TRUCKS headed westbound on a deserted stretch of Colo. Hwy. 52, each one appearing about 10 seconds apart on the ridge a quarter mile off under grey skies with flurries.

They rumbled by, steel blades dropped, to throw snow aside again and again and again.

The power of those truck drivers working together to make a path — and then a two times better path –  stuck with me as I drove little Ray to The Children’s Hospital in Aurora for a sedated hearing test.

This storm closed schools in Boulder County and the Denver metro on Friday.

But I banked on four-wheel drive and lots of extra travel time to get Ray there.

For the test, an anesthesiologist sedates the patient while an audiologist sends a battery of sound waves into the ears. How the unconscious brain responds — or not — during about 75 minutes of receiving slightly different sound stimulation determines hearing aid need.

The power to know, to know for sure, what Ray hears makes me for the thousandth time grateful that my baby was born in 2009.

Every time our family benefits from the power of science, I glance over my shoulder at those boys and girls with Down syndrome born in 1909.

I wish I could stretch out my fingers through all that time to touch them and hear them. . .

When I finally met the anesthesiologist — a tall man dressed that day in a sweater, corduroys and Sorrel boots — he listed to Ray’s chest and folded his arms when he heard the remains of a cough.

“I know you got here today by dogsled,” he said. “But I have three kids. They’re older now, of course.  But for something like this I would go home and try again in a few weeks. . . . Blame it on me, the damn redneck from western Colorado.”

I wanted to hug him for being a father first.

After I got Ray out of his printed gown and white pants, we headed for the hospital cafeteria.

It was 11:30 a.m., and he last ate and drank at 8 p.m. the night before to prepare for  sedation.

I usually go without much when he needs to go without. I think that’s my way of going down the road as far as I can with him, which is not far at all.

So, my boy and I felt ravenously hungry.

As we gobbled our potato soup, crackers and melon mix, a mother nursing her baby under a cloth square at a table nearby struck up a conversation.

Ray and I joined them and smiled at the unveiling of baby Bethany — another one with 47 chromosomes versus the usual 46.

My new friend, 26-year-old Crystal, takes care of horses, goats and chickens at a farm in Fort Collins.

She kept her appointment in the storm, too, to get help in feeding solid foods to 13-month-old Bethany.

While this young mom ate her burger and fries, we bobbled the kids in our laps before heading north together through the snow.

Crystal followed us with Bethany in her grey Mercury LaSabre until Ray and I needed to exit Interstate 25.

I flipped my blinker on, rolled down the Jeep’s window and pumped my arm furiously in the blowing snow.

Good-bye, sister! Press on with that beautiful baby of yours!

As I drove up the ramp, Crystal passed me and waved just twice without taking her eyes off the slick road.

ON A BLUSTERY JANUARY day last week, I remembered my sunshine in a jar — three Kerr jars of salsa I stashed on a top shelf after canning tomatoes from our garden last summer.

Had I not run out of the commercial product, they likely would have sat there — behind cans of green and red enchilada sauce — until who knows when.

I broke the seal on one to serve with tortilla chips and pictured last summer, a season more memorable for being the first one in which we grew garden veggies behind the garage.

Growing anything — a story for the newspaper, a batch of yeast rolls, a quiet time in the wee hours with God — all of it brings a little more wonder to a day.

The garden just made the concept all the more tangible, something my kids enjoyed most during the harvest.

Carl, 5, and Andy, then 3, watched the squash and watermelons grow every day and kept asking if the time was right to pull the heavy produce from its vine.

Finally, my husband and I gave the OK.

The boys at first walked around holding squash like a baby until they realized it could double as a Star Warsesque light saber.

They rolled the watermelon around the backyard as if it were a barrel of beer on its way to a party.

Andy eventually exhausted himself this way. So, he used the watermelon as a pillow, sucked his thumb and rested while watching clouds drift by above and aspen quake just over the fence.

Dipping chips into this homemade salsa last week brought me back to this garden scene and the rest of late summer  — back to hikes around Mud Lake near Nederland with the kids and some friends; playing at the park; picking flowers; and climbing trees.

I call those images my memory’s melody line — the catchy ways life plays out.

But behind the scenes, David and I were paying bills and cleaning — well, not so much of that happens here anymore. We were going to work and running errands. We were wading through toys and shoes and rumpled clothes that could as easily be clean as dirty strewn as they were on the floor.

I don’t have pictures of those activities because that stuff is what we need to do, not what we get to do.

Being the mother of three young sons lands me in the practical more than I like, what with changing diapers and ironing school uniforms and making Play-Do.

So, I have begun trying a little more to appreciate how the weave of practical and whimsical makes music in a life.

I try to remember that a good time, like a good garden, happens because someone kept watering and weeding.

The trick is — at least for me — learning how to re-frame farming moments into something worth framing.

Photo/Jeff Haller

THIRTY FOUR YEARS AGO now, my husband’s parents asked him where he would like to go for his birthday dinner fully expecting him to say “McDonald’s!”

Instead, my guy — then a boy gunning to celebrate his fifth birthday — happily asked for lobster, which gave his parents a case of shock and awe even before they got the bill.

Growing up middle class in the Midwest, as David and I both did, sort of limits seafood exposure to fish sticks and tuna fish.

How he developed a taste for lobster before his fifth birthday baffles me, although my father-in-law suspects that he gave David a forkful of the seafood once while out to eat at Mr. Steak.

So, the family returned at the end of January in 1979 to the surf-and-turf restaurant popular then in Grand Rapids, Mich.

For David’s 39th birthday, I knew he would dig a little retro birthday date.

We both love lobster, though years go by without us enjoying it.

In January 2003, when we had been dating for four months and sensed that we would marry that year, I bought two lobsters to cook for him on his birthday.

We used my semi-filled bathtub as a holding tank as we cooked the rest of dinner in the kitchen.

The Times-Call food writer at the time inspired this act after she told me a gruesome fact — that cooking lobster means dropping them live into boiling water.

Looking back, the fresh water may have hindered more than helped my bid to keep lobsters alive between the grocery store tank and the boiling pot.

On our honeymoon, David and I ate it almost every day there, in Maine, where it sold fresh off the fishing boats for cheap.

So, last week I called our new babysitter, a girl who showered little Ray with TLC  at our town’s rec center play area before she knew his name.

She might as well be his guardian angel.

After Megan and her older sister settled in with our three sons, some homemade pizza, chocolate chip cookies and directions to call 911 — not us — if someone started choking, David and I headed to Red Lobster in Longmont.

Driving there, I called his folks to tell them that we were thinking about them and the fifth birthday splurge they gave their son, my future husband.

I tried to picture then and there — what they wore, what David wore and what they talked about as they dipped lobster morsels into clarified butter.

Yummy, yummy, yummy.

But my, how we play musical chairs in life.

Waxing nostalgic always brings me back to that, to noticing two empty seats in our booth as we unfolded our napkins and studied the menu in dim light.

As much as part of me misses them, David’s parents — the people who shaped so much of what I love about this birthday boy — another part of me already misses being there with my kids when, inevitably, they will blow out candles away from home.

This kind of birthday business brings my Grandma Nelson to mind.

At 93, she knows about musical chairs — how birthdays can remind you of who has come and who has gone before the ever-brightening cake.

But she would say the same thing about a birthday as the ordinary day before and after it. She would say to enjoy what God puts before you today.

Happy birthday, David!

RAY SAT IN THE late afternoon sunshine pulling his arms in just the right way to make that thing — that Sit-N-Spin activity toy — turn.

Around and around my boy went in a slow, dreamy orbit.

I dried my hands and watched him from the kitchen, but I might as well have been squinting through a keyhole.

I felt exactly as I did when I photographed Carl playing on the vast beach we call Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colo., almost three years ago now.

Against this backdrop — either sand piling up in hard waves against a mountain’s elbow or Colorado’s famous sunshine flooding our living room — I can see the essential child before me.

That child comes without trappings, without all of the things that measure — report cards, growth charts and the like.

I’ve written about this before, but seeing my kids this way reminds me of viewing a diamond on a jeweler’s black velvet.

Without a setting, that stone looks like what it truly is — a precious chip extracted from a dark, deep place to catch light.

Not all diamonds come with the same clarity.  Not all diamonds get cut the same way.

But all of the jeweler’s diamonds, like all of God’s children, sparkle.

I know this is true.

But many nights I go to bed wondering what happened to my good intentions to see my sons — to really take them in as we move through the day together.

How could I let working, tidying, washing, grocery shopping, cooking and shuttling kids to and from school become such blinders?

Routine life tends to trick the eye, to make the background more noticeable than the family standing in the foreground.

The camera reminds me that all is not lost, that life comes to every one of us second by second in frames.

And, of course, the moments matter more than the hours or even the years.

So, when I get busy and start stumbling over my kids as they play with their Legos and Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels cars, I want to see them more than the proverbial pot boiling over.

“Too fast, Mommy! Too faaaaast!” Andy wails sometimes when we need to get to another door on the double.

Too fast, indeed.

As the weekend comes, I hope to do more of what kids love for adults to do — to stop, stoop, smile and look them in the eye when they tell their story.

I hope to say “I see you” as much as “I love you.”

AS THE PRESCHOOL CLASS Christmas pageant began last December, Andy strode on stage as a shepherd and then — before my wondering eyes — held up both bare hands and pretended to blast the angels encircling the nativity.

The angels, girls wearing white gowns and crowns of silver tree tinsel on their heads, paid my shepherd boy no mind.

They focused instead on their adoring parents while my husband and I imagined yanking the boy in the brown robe off stage with an extra long shepherd’s crook.

Well, we all somehow survived the incident and went on to munch cookies and swig apple cider with the group.

I’m not sure Andy remembered any of his lines — if the teachers assigned the shepherds lines.

But tonight, as I thumb through the notebook I keep in my purse to catch kid quotes, I see this little shepherd delivering all sorts of lines in our life together.

Sept. 8, 2011:  “Maaaaaaaama!!!! Carl is stressing me!” (Scene: Andy hollers this from the kitchen in the midst of a butter knife sword fight with his brother, Carl, 5.)

Sept. 9, 2011: “Ray? Are you ready to fight? Get your kung fu pants on!” (Scene: Ray, then 21 months old, stops crawling on the kitchen floor and sits up to watch as Andy practices “kung fu” moves in the air.)

Nov. 17, 2011:

Andy: “Why did the kid throw the clock out the window? [No pause after the question - just straight to the punch line. . . ] Because he wanted to see time fly!!!”

Me: “Where did you learn that hilarious joke, Andy?”

Andy: “From an Iron Man Popsicle stick!” (Scene: Andy practices this — the first joke he can share, down-pat — on anyone anywhere.)

I’m still digging through all the quotes I’ve collected on this kid in my notebook and scraps of paper and napkins stuffed in my purse and pockets.

But so far in 2012, he has chattered off some good ones — like the time in early January when he knocked macaroni from a shelf at Target.

“My naughty hand did it, Mama,” he said, gingerly putting it back.

Or, what about that time on Jan. 6, 2012, when I parked the car in our driveway, pulled out my tweezers and began plucking my eyebrows?

Granted, a grown man would find this strange. But women get that natural light makes this grooming chore a lot easier.

So, I eyed the rear view mirror and began removing stray hairs until I noticed Andy staring at me from his car seat in the back.

Me: “What do you think I’m doing, Andy?”

Andy: “Something strange.”

Me: “Uh, huh. Well, Mommy can see better outside.”

Andy (after watching for a minute or two): “Mama, let me see your eyes. Mama? When you do that, you look like a mushroom. Ha! HA! HAAA!!!”

Most of the chitchat between Andy and me revolves around ordinary activities.

But on Jan. 5, 2012, as I tucked him into bed, he took his thumb out of his mouth and looked up from his ladybug Pillow Pet.

Andy:  “Why can’t we see God?” he said in his bedroom, dark but for a small night light.

Me: “Uh. . . Hmmm. . . Well, Andy. God is a spirit, and we can’t see spirits. But we can see something true about God in loving people and in all of nature.” [I flub teachable moments all-of-the-time, by the way.]

Andy (after a long pause): “Mama, sometimes angels glow, and sometimes they don’t.”

I kissed him goodnight and wondered what else my kids see that I miss.

THE NURSES LOOKING THROUGH the recovery room’s sliding glass doors laughed from their station as my pot-bellied son stood in his bed — a buck-naked boy, all grins and wobbles in the anesthesia afterglow during his first post-surgery diaper change.

I brought him there, to The Children’s Hospital in Aurora, at 6 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-November so the cardiologist could plug a hole about the size of a pencil tip in a vessel near his otherwise sound heart.

I’ve been meaning to blog about that day and the way it presented the last big medical mountain in 2011 for my little boy with Down syndrome to scale.

So, in the New Year, after a very busy stretch of life that kept me from posting since Halloween, I’m back to write about the party at the top.

Taking Ray home from the hospital that day gave me that feeling — that impulse to break out the bubbly, even though I’m a teetotaler.

This situation and so many others since his birth remind me that if he can make it, I can make it.

I told myself that again and again months earlier on Labor day when my buddy, Rob, and I climbed the 14,270-foot Mt. Grays’ peak in Colorado’s Arapaho National Forest.

I met Rob 18 years ago, when we both wore heavy, cranberry-colored choir robes with stoles — green, white, purple or cream-colored, depending on the liturgical season– to sing gospel music at our church in Minneapolis.

Though I moved to Colorado in 2000, we kept in touch. And when we started up the trail, I loved getting in step with my old friend under a robin egg-colored sky.

But as the grade steepened and the air thinned, it became more obvious that Rob and I represent opposite ends of the fitness spectrum.

He runs marathons — 44 since 1993 — and has bagged 13 of Colorado’s 54 famous “fourteeners,” those peaks that stand higher than 14,000 feet.

As for me?

Well, I run from the kitchen up a flight of steps to change laundry loads.

I still marvel at my grand oversight, one that by midday converted my legs to seaweed and pinched my lungs.

My light-duty lifestyle back home, a place nearly 10,000 feet below, felt as far away as India and as cushy as Buckingham Palace.

Rob, ever cheerful, assured me repeatedly that I could do this, and I knew he was right.

But it took a focus change from dwelling on what I lacked to dwelling on what I possessed.

That possession turned out to be memory after memory of little Ray Ray making it through surgeries and slowly, but surely, making developmental milestones with his zest for life and all-star try.

It helped in the tighter switchbacks to mentally hook a tow rope to Rob’s fanny pack.

But during the last hour, it all came down to faith — to asking the one who made the mountain to make me strong to climb it.

Then, I was there, standing in the wind with Rob, and the two of us rested with the whole beautiful state at our feet.

I wish I could bottle the mix of relief, gratitude, bewilderment and joy that washed over me as I looked to the plains and imagined my boy napping somewhere far away in the haze.

He napped, yes.

But, like me, Ray spent much of his day  climbing.

For the first time, he climbed alone from the main floor to the second floor in our home a dozen or more times with Daddy spotting him.

Happy New Year to you and yours!!!

UNTIL MY PARENTS TERM-limited my trick-or-treating, I looked forward to the annual Halloween candy bonanza and sidewalk costume party as soon as the first leaf on our farm turned red or gold.

So, what a surprise to me when the holiday lost its enchantment altogether — probably due to teenage self-consciousness about tangling my hair with wigs and hats or messing with makeup other than the lip gloss and mascara we girls wore then.

By the time I moved to the Twin Cities to attend a Christian college, Halloween took on a sinister tone. Local witches studying dark arts made headlines for animal cruelty charges related to their sacrifices.

So, how fun for me now as a parent of young children to view Halloween and all its pageantry and sugary excesses as glamorous again.

Anything can be twisted for naught or uncoiled for good — including Oct. 31.

The festivities at our house start in early October, when our two older boys — Carl, 5, and Andy, 3 — plaster clings of ghosts, bats, haunted houses and pumpkins on our living room windows.

We later visit the refreshingly candid lady down the road. She brought up five kids and still can’t believe she can spare the time to grow a pumpkin patch and man the stand from 9 to 5 on weekends.

There, we pick imperfect jumbo pumpkins — ones that grew so scary fast from blossoms to gourds that the side snuggled into the earth stayed flat and the side facing the sun grew round.

Their lopsidedness makes them fit better on our porch steps anyway.

Mid-month, I start hoarding candy. I keep the stash a secret from everyone to prevent a second candy run to to the store on Halloween eve.

Finally, I pull together costumes.

Ray, at 23 months, fits our Star Wars theme this year with his mini-Chewbacca outfit.

But he could do without the hat, which looks to me like a squirrel’s tail.

The furry/felt headgear probably bothers him more than the cute pumpkin blossom bonnet we tied on his noggin last year — and on his brothers during Halloweens past — because we could not help ourselves.

No holiday is perfect, though.

On pumpkin carving night, I realized the carving tools I hid to keep our littles from meddling were now hidden even to me — a sure sign that all the Diet Coke I drank in college finally caught up with my brain.

But I never forget the mysterious boy who every year comes knocking here and lingers on our porch after his buddies take off for the next door.

“You know, I lived here once,” he says.

I know the story from our neighbor lady.

He did live here, with his mother, his father and two — or was it four? — siblings.

Then, his parents split, and he moved from this home to another one across town.

“I know,” I say. I smile and wish I could hug this trick-or-treater.

“You know you are welcome to come back with one of your parents to see your old room any time,” I say instead.

He nods.

Then, this boy scampers into the night, leaving behind our unlikely haunted house.

YEARS AGO NOW, AN old boyfriend insisted that I watch the movie “Fargo” — a dark comedy set in North Dakota — because the characters actually scrape ice off their windshields.

Instead of driving rust-free vehicles past palm trees, this cast brought home a realistic image for we then-Minneapolitans who faced snow from as early as September and as late as May.

In mid October, I reconsidered such real deal life while driving the 881.84 miles between my front door in Colorado to my parents’ farm in northwestern Illinois.

Besides the three kids in the backseat, I drove with my cousin, who just finished working in Wyoming, and needed a lift there to pick up the Ford Crown Victoria our 92-year-old grandmother recently lost interest in driving.

Rolling through the Midwest — a place my oldest son, Carl, 5, still considers another country — always stirs up the stuff of my sensibility, reminds me why I am the way I am.

For instance, when “Fargo” debuted in 1996, I went to a party with that old boyfriend one Saturday night when the straight temperature hit something like 20-plus degrees below zero.

I should mention that when it gets that frigid, a respectable furnace struggles mightily to keep a poorly insulated older home above 55 degrees — no matter if you crank the thermostat and stop caring about the bill.

Anyway, the frigid weather caused one of our chums at the party to pull out the strangest party trick ever — something one can only expect from cabin feverish young adults on a breathtakingly cold night in January in the upper Midwest.

We yanked open the front door of this friend’s house, braved the gust of deep freeze-like air that instantly made clouds of our breath and tossed water from a glass into the night.

Since I am a confirmed teetotaler, I know I saw the water freeze in mid-air with an absolutely clear eye before it shattered on the sidewalk.

Surviving cold weather made an impression on me.

Whenever I visit our family farm, I see all the other stuff that slowly weaves a sensibility into a person — the fields, barns, tractors and other fixtures of country living that remind me of how hard some, like my parents, work to stay put.

Now, my brother and I wonder how our clan can stay put a little longer — how we who live in Minnesota and Colorado, respectively, can keep the farm in the family after my folks pass on.

It’s worth millions today and none of us — including my sister, who resides in New Zealand with her family — can afford to buy out the other.

But for now, my kids can meet their cousins there to do some of the same stuff I did with my siblings and cousins.

They bounce on the old, springy barn planks as if they were diving boards, feed the pony with a flat palm, pretend to drive my Dad’s 1956 Allis-Chalmers tractor and run into town to pick so-called penny candy at the Kandy Kitchen on Main Street.

It is hard to tell how all that stuff pans out into a certain sensibility.

But it does, and I am so glad that I still can go home to find it.

I PACKED PUMPKINS, hairspray, a comb and my camera in a shopping bag and set out to photograph my 2011 harvest “beauty shot” — smiling boys playing with pumpkins beside yellowing cornstalks.

I hoped to replace the summer masthead on this blog, the one I shot in June of my three shirtless sons slurping on Popsicles in our backyard.

But Christmas-card style photos usually backfire for me, an amateur photographer, because manufacturing an image takes so much more setup than capturing one.

Before we left the house to pick up Carl from afternoon kindergarten, Andy, 3, foreshadowed the doomed plan.

He once loved denim overalls.

But they come with too much hardware for a potty-training boy who needs to drop trou in a hurry.

So, Andy had not worn his farmer duds in months, and he writhed as if in a straightjacket when I clipped them on him.

We fetched Carl, 5, and embarked anyway on my crusade for the keepsake image.

At stop No. 1, I combed and sprayed 21-month-old Ray’s surfer dude hair and toted him and the bag of mini pumpkins to the corn field’s edge.

That is when I noticed Carl and Andy vanishing into the field to follow a row or — to my horror — to bash across rows as I did as a kid growing up on a farm in Illinois.

During that first photo shoot, everybody held their pumpkin, put up with the scratchy weeds and smiled fake smiles when I hollered “Cheetos!” or “Peeps!” or “Halloweeny house!”

By stop No. 2, about 3 miles down another road,  I left the comb and hairspray in the car and focused instead on positioning the two older boys around Ray just right.

During this propping attempt, Carl and Andy looked at me as if I were speaking pig Latin, and Ray kept crawling away.

Finally, my favorite little crawler got fed up with the whole scene and started in with his chainsaw-sounding sobs.

Carl tried to entertain him by stacking mini-pumpkins on his head. So, by the time we all piled back into the car, I was cursing the grasshoppers nesting in Ray’s car seat, which we abandoned on the side of the gravel service road.

At the last stop a half-mile away, I noticed Ray actually clutching his pumpkin –but only as his face reddened with the effort of filling his diaper.

About then I started to practice one form of enlightenment — to look at myself as a Colorado State Patrol trooper might were he or she to pull me over for parking illegally or trespassing.

I immediately let the kids go off duty– something safe to do at stop No. 3 — and I clicked on the serene nature scenes surrounding us for a couple of minutes.

While driving home, it helped me settle the score with wily reality to remember why Hollywood includes outtakes at the end of so many films.

RAY SAT ON MY lap in that dimly lit, soundproof room, and we looked at ourselves in the mirror until a speaker on either the left or right sounded off.

When my boy heard it — sometimes a pitch, sometimes the audiologist saying, “Ray? Raaaay? Oh, oh! Oh, oh…” in a fairy godmother voice — he turned his head the direction of the amplifying speaker.

Then, as a reward for that response,  a spotlight would illuminate a little, glass-encased, mechanized monkey clapping symbols above that speaker.

The audiologist working the booth outside the door would look at me in the mirror through her observation window.

I read her lips.

“Don’t move,” she said, to keep me from influencing the outcome with my physical responses to the sound cues.

By the time we stepped out of that room in late August, I knew that Ray got the monkey to go bananas too few times.

The report the audiologist wrote showed moderate hearing loss.

However, the doctor’s exam gave me hope that the hearing loss might related to fluid behind his ear drums, not nerve damage.

So, on Monday my boy and I showed up at Exempla Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette on Monday where Dr. Abby Emdur of the Longmont Clinic drained the fluid and inserted the tubes that would encourage continuous drainage.

I gladly signed on the dotted line.

Ear tubes seemed so completely minimal compared to what Ray underwent in March — a nearly 6-hour bowel obstruction bypass surgery and 18-day recovery at The Children’s Hospital in Aurora.

But as soon as the nurse for the ear tube procedure gave me the kimono-looking hospital gown and started talking about rectal Tylenol during the recovery phase, it transported me back to then.

And I thanked God for about the thousandth time this year for putting this boy in this time and place.

In another time and place — or really, even in a more remote or underdeveloped place in this time — Ray without the bypass surgery would have been a goner, a child unable to keep his food down to grow much past the 15 pounds he weighed then.

In another time and place, he might go through life hearing as if he were underwater.

Ray gets another hearing test in three weeks, and I hope he gets that monkey to raise a ruckus.