Unearthing a life.....

The eyeballs of both Allie and myself are as healthy as can reasonably be expected. And while his vision is likely superior to mine, I am, by far, more of a gentleman while in the eye doctor's chair. Hands down.

Al's appointment yesterday lasted for three hours. A significant percentage of that time was due to his apparent inability to follow any order and/or suggestion that came from any adult mouth, including mine. At one point, it took two technicians and myself to put the eyedrops in to dialate his pupils (I was in charge of restraining his hands). As we walked out to the lobby to wait while the drops took effect, he remarked, "I'm a coward about eyedrops." Well, AMEN to that!

But, the doc could find nothing wrong with his eyes .... after all that. As I understood it, the impetus for doing this sprung from his pediatrician's concern when Allie's eyes did not properly 'track' an object that was being moved back and forth. The eye doctor hinted that the pediatrician may have not done it quite right.

Later, as we cruised towards the Silverdale Toys 'R Us store (as per my much earlier promise), I said to him, "Well, Al ... we got out of there alive, we're not bleeding and we'll make it home for supper ... can't have a much better day than that."

"GRANDPA! I do not want to talk about it!"

One thing I've notice about Allie since he returned to the shelter of our wing, is that he is asking a string of questions that seem to constitute a reassessment of his assumptions about reality.

Bookworm got the first one when he asked, "Is there a God?"
I would have said 'no', but Bookworm gave him the long answer that snaked through the 'a lot of people believe this and that' territory and she left out the possibilti of a plain 'no' answer.

Then, on the way home from speech therapy, he asked me, "Is Santa Claus real?"
I said, "No, he is a character that people made up to put into stories to make themselves feel better and have more fun. Like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Mamas and daddys and grandmas and grandpas are the real Santa Claus and Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. And people like to scare themselves with their stories, so they make up things like vampires and zombies. It's just story stuff."
"What about GHOSTS?" he barked at me.
"Story stuff," I said.

On the way home from Toy 'R Us, he asked, "Are you really my Mom's dad?"
"No, not really," I said. "She calls me Dad because I'm nice to her and she likes me a lot." (How's that for self-serving) "Grandma Bookworm is your Dad's Mom and I'm married to her." And where did that get me?

This morning he proclaimed that I was not part of the 'family'. But God was because God made everybody. When I protested, he thought a bit and decided that if I was married to Grandma, then I could be in the family.

It seems to me that he's tidying up his reality. He's also moving out of denial about his missing father and beginning to make occasional remarks that recognize his Dad's existence.

So life is not the same old same old.