On Context

Having a blog is a funny thing.

As Arianna Huffington reported to Jon tewart, it is meant to be both intimate and immediate; as photographs have always done, it fixes you in moment after moment, but what feels new is the inclusion of an immediate response to them. I remember when I went to school in Switzerland when I was 17, one of my roommates kept a journal, but unlike my own elaborate emotional accounts of my experiences, she simply wrote down what she did each day. She claimed to have problems with her short-term memory; for her, the daily log was about literally fixing each moment, without interpretation, as something to come back to one day to actually put back together, or re-member, her life.

If I had written each day this week, you would have gotten something of an emotional roller coaster as Eleri got sick again, and went through a similar series of events as we experienced at Christmas: chest x-ray Tuesday, "cleared" on Wednesday, spiked a fever Thursday, chest x-ray and hospital admission Friday, monitored Saturday, discharged Sunday. Each day brought it's own series of emotional reactions, like free association. But today, I can convey it all as a simple list because in a way, it's all behind us (Eleri is home again), but in a way it is all ahead of us (we don't know what's wrong), and the details of the journey don't matter. On Tuesday, we'll go to a specialist in pediatric pulmonology and hope he can tell us something. (More specifically, we hope he'll tell us she's just fine, that she's had some bad luck, that she'll outgrow it, no harm done. Or that he knows just what's wrong and how to treat it.)

Speaking from this moment in-between feels strange; I never quite got back in the rhythm of blogging after the holidays, yet I'm aware, each day, of what I would write if only I had the time, energy, or wherewithal to get down here and type something. I've been missing it. On Wednesday, when our pediatrician called to say the x-ray looked clear, I thought about finally posting about Eleri's ordeal over the holidays, and sharing, for posterity, some of the details and photos from the hospital, such as the crib they dug up from the basement which distinctly resembled the cages lab monkeys often escape from in the movies. Now I almost feel compelled to post anything else - the funny Clio-isms I've been capturing lately, forgotten photos from the holidays- but those stories are different once you have this other context. (Clio: "Holy Cow. Holy dog, holy cat. Holy LION!!!! Holy LION!!!!)

They're happening, too, and I don't even know that I think about them differently, but to post funny Clio quotes or a photo of her neon orange sled from Morrison ends up seeming inappropriate when you post them while her baby sister is in the hospital. So instead, while Dave was with Eleri, I did 10 loads of laundry and organized the pantry in our basement. And he told me that the Silver Monkey Cage crib is not so unlike the cribs they have at NYU. It would have made a good post before I knew that. But now it kind of makes a sad post, doesn't it?


Oh, what the heck, here's Clio, dressed in Dave's toddlerhood snowsuit (yes, Barb still has it!) just before she took me down the hill for our only run on her new sled (it was very, very cold).
The truth is, this IS what she was doing while Eleri was in the hospital the first time.

And this is what she was doing while Eleri was in the hospital the second time.

And honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. Just to put all our minds at ease, here's Eleri a few days ago.
The weird thing is how perfectly happy she continues to seem, despite the junky lungs and the difficulty breathing.

We'll keep you all updated.