This diary started with a desire to flag tiggers thotful spot‘s diary about increasing infant mortality in the US over at dKos. I also read Ductape Fatwa haunting diary : They passed the babies forward, about the NOLA refugees desperate attempts to make sure that at least their children would get out.

But then I thought: why focus (yet again?) on the bad news? Let’s maybe look at the bright side of this: parents’ love for their children, and their desire to want the best for them.

I don’t know how many tribbers are parents, I suspect a majority (take the poll below and we’ll maybe have a better idea), which means that such tragic news or stories resonate immediately for many of us. Today, however, I’d like us to bring out some happy stories.

In my case, I would just like to tell you about my Sunday at home with my family – a happy, and thankfully not so unusual, day together.

As some of you know (see for instance Protection from the random miseries of life), my son is battling a brain tumor, and the most recent news are good, in that the tumor, which was killed by the ongoing chemio, has not reappeared as per the latest IRM early this week, and that his physical therapy doctors seem more optimistic about his ability to continue to recuperate movement in his right arm which is partly paralysed as a(n expected) result of the surgery. Things are moving, and moving in the right direction, which is good.

And today, we are actually celebrating his 5th birthday – for the 5th time. As a result of his illness, we’ve tried to find as many occasions as we could to cheer him up and have happy moments, and his birthday (in late August) was one. It was celebrated in early July at his school – they have a small party for all the summer birthdays, and he was keen to go to school that day (in the past year, he only went a few hours per week, due to his treatments and his overall tiredness). Then in August, there was a further celebration with my parents as they came to visit us for a while; on the actual date, there was another cake (and presents) at home, and again a few days later with his other grandmother on her day off… Finally, a party was organised in early September at home for his friends to come over. That party (like the one a year ago, which eventually took place in late November) was cancelled because he had to spend that day in hospital, so we are finally doing it today. We’re having a clown – actually, a Spiderman – come over to entertain him and ten friends of his, and we’re hoping he’ll have a good time.

Actually, although he’s had a tough last year, he has been blessed with a smiling, irrepressibly positive personality; he has complained very little throughout, and has been able to have a lot of good times. He has been back to the (very high) energy levels we were used to until summer last year, and is running around, banging on stuff and being a fun and facetious little boy (and a very literal-minded one, which i suppose he could use to become a good lawyer: if you tell him “stop banging on the table with that sppon”, he will pick up his fork and do it with that new tool…). He’s a charmer and makes you melt a few seconds after you’ve been wanting to ground him for the rest of the day for yet another destructive experiment with his environment (this week’s best: can I cut a credit card in two with my parents’ scissors, and the answer is sadly yes).

Now, one of the hardest things when you have a very sick child is to learn how to treat your other children fairly, and explain to them why you need to spend more time with their brother. He has two sisters, one older, one younger. With the older one (now almost 7), we’ve tried to take advantage of her already reasonable and well-behaved character to explain to her what was going on, what we expected from her, and how grateful we were for her autonomy and her understanding. We’ve tried to do special things with her alone – going to the restaurant just with her, going shopping for her clothes (not me!), bringing friends over or letting her go over, and so forth. We hope this has worked. She was always a serious little person and she still is today, very caring for her brother, and very responsible. Now in first grade, she wants to do her homework with zeal, and to have her things in order, so we’ve created special disorder-free zones just for her… She loves to sing and draw, and we’ve encouraged her to do this as much as possible. So today, she has been preparing a big drawing as a present for her brother’s birthday, and our home is decorated with her work.

The younger one, now two and a half, probably had the hardest adjustment to make, as she suddenly lost the attention she was used to as the baby of the family at a tender age (she was barely 18 months last year when we discovered our son’s situation). So she’s had to fight even more for our attention than a third child usually does. Whether caused by this or because this was her personality (I think the latter), she has thankfully had no difficulty doing this. She is forceful, totally fearless, and happy to take her bigger siblings one on one at any time. She also loves to run around and jump with her brother, which keeps them busy at the expense of our neighbor’s peace, and makes him use all his limbs in their  joint exertions, which is great for him. They get along amazingly well, falling into fits of laughter together, and always willing to test the limits of physics together, which makes us alternate between pure terror, flashes of anger and amazed content. I often join (or initiate) the games of the two little ones, and we have loads of fun together. Their older sister often joins us, but she’s usually the first one to get hurt first, so I have to play with her separately (but we can also do more serious things with her). Ther little one is very cuddly with us, always requesting hugs and playtime and reading, which we are happy to provide, and which we have indeed made a conscious effort to provide in higher doses after the several weeks last year when, per force, we neglected her somewhat.

So we’ve had doses of all this today already – races across the apartment, cooking the cake together, then playing with the leftover ingredients and a little bit of water (some cleaning up at some point…), now dancing on music as we await Spiderman and the first guests.

Having kids is a totally new life. We have been to the movies extremely rarely in the last few years; we don’t travel overseas anymore on our holidays, and we have much less time to read or other personal activities. We have a rollercaster of emotions, a lot of responsibilities and worries, and a lot of great moments throughout, on which I think it is important to focus once in a while, to remind ourselves that life is not just crises and pain.

So, what good moments did you have recently with your kids? Or with friends’ kids? (i love to play with the kids of others – I get all the fun, and someone else gets to deal with the overexcited children afterwards… and it’s actually pretty flattering to be popular amongst 4-years old). Do you remember to concentrate on the good times, those worry-free periods of pure happiness?

Update [2005-10-2 17:38:15 by Jerome a Paris]: I have taken out the reference to the poll in the title. I forgot to include the poll when I posted this, and now it makes little sense to add it… Sorry about this small mix up – but thanks to all for all the grrat stories and/or pictures!