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We could have done a better job of preparing Zoe for the aftermath of four weeks in a cast above her elbow.

In her typical optimistic fashion, she thought she would be waving her injured arm around as if nothing had happened after the white plaster was removed. (As you can see in the photos below, we had to reinforce the yeso with duct tape by the end because it was beginning to crumble around the hand and wear through at the elbow.)

The transition to a splint on her left limb resulted in her arm feeling much more exposed and uncomfortable than she anticipated. And her wrist still hurt like hell! (It apparently has a bone chip in it that will resolve with time, but will cause pain if she tries to move it.)

Zoe’s marching orders are to begin working on elbow mobility, and continue with that for the next two weeks. Then she is to start manipulating her wrist through various ranges of motion.

Of course, being an uber-healing kid, the difference between today and yesterday is pretty profound.

Now we just gotta get all of that dead skin sloughed off! (Ewww, gross.)

I guess the rumors were right.

It’s now official: Starting Monday, all schools will be closed for the remainder of July. That means BA schoolkids get an extra two weeks of winter vacation…though there’s talk of canceling the week-long spring break in September to make up some of the missed days.

English readers can check out the WSJ article, while Clarín provides more details for Spanish readers.

Photo by Flickr user The Artifex used under a Creative Commons license.

This evening, Tom will be running out to get some small bottles of hand sanitizer and travel tissue packs for the girls — a requirement at school now apparently.

Over the last week, the rumor mill has been really churning, with parents worried that the Ministry of Health was going to close down primary and secondary schools after the elections because of Swine Flu fears, essentially moving up winter vacation.

Sure enough, we did get a notice today, Tuesday, but it was a cancellation of all extracurricular activities, parent events, and conferences.

We’ll see what comes next. Speculation is rife that Swine Flu numbers are much worse than the government has been reporting and that after the election Sunday, it would all leak out and result in Mexico-like restrictions on public events, schools etc.

We’ll see…

Damn, I still can’t tie my shoes! I feel totally ridiculous having Tom lace up my tennies for me, but what can I do?

On the other hand, I am able to successfully make my way through the rest — dressing, showering, and misc. personal hygiene. More good news: I can lean forward with my torso much more substantially, which means I can reach things lower down, though I avoid trying to pick up things off of the floor…still a bit too far. Light giggling is now tolerated by the old respiratory system, but outright guffawing is out. I can obtain a near full range of motion overhead with my right arm (fractured side). I can sleep on my stomach with my head either way. Raising and lowering my body, sitting or standing, is getting easier and smoother every day.

Still unfortunate: I am really noticing a lot of rib pain under my right breast — in some sleeping positions, my ribs hurt more than my fractured vertebrae! Sneezing and coughing, especially if unexpected, immediately put me in a panting house-of-pain world-of-hurt that I can only compare to the worst of natural childbirth in terms of scale. And I used to like sneezing… .

All in all though, it is remarkable how far I have come in two weeks. The change is so dramatic, it makes me question how bad the first 3 or 4 days really were. (Whenever I do that, Tom chimes in and assures me they were as horrible as I remember!)

Cross your fingers that I will be suitably recovered for my zillion hours of traveling back to Portland in two weeks. It’s a race!

Spinal Fracture Recovery Posts: Day 1 | Day 5 | Day 14 |

As I’ve mentioned before, the Zs have been working on media training as a part of home school. One of their tasks is to improve their delivery of this inspirational short poem that summarizes Cammi Granato’s ice hockey career and the empowerment women engender from sports. (It’s from an old Nike advertisement, which I posted the words to previously.)

They were just so damn cute selling this bit of girl power verbiage, I had to stitch together a montage of their work! Watch it below.

If you find yourself, on a beautiful crisp winter Saturday with your children away at an overnight, and you want to stretch your legs and see how your broken vertebrae can handle a longer walk — I suggest a getaway in the park!

Specifically, the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívari. This is a small, very cozy modern art museum that shows a rotating collection of 19th and 20th century Argentinian artists. It is utterly approachable and features a variety of exhibits, a quaint store, a sculpture garden, and they offer courses as well. (When we were there yesterday, there was a class of sculptors tapping away at pieces of wood.)

One of my favorite aspects of this museum is the little cafe that opens onto the sculpture garden and features both indoor and outdoor seating. The service has always been gracious, they have an amazing plato de frutas and they are supposed to have fabulous desserts. (I always seem to get the fruit when there, so I can’t vouch for the postres personally!)

We just joined the group of people at Infinite Summer, devoting ourselves to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the summer — about 75 pages a week. That meant a purchase at the Amazon store, downloads to the Kindles, and we were ready.

This book is giving us the opportunity to run the Kindle through its paces. The first thing I have LOVED is the built-in dictionary. DFW likes to use a lot of archaic and unusual words (concupiscence, festschrift, and deliquesce, to name three), so the Kindle dictionary has been a boon. Although, there have been a few words that we’ve had to look up online:

Kekulean Knot: which is how he described a tie, and is a reference to the scientist who discovered the structure of benzene and how he came upon his inspiration.

Incunabular: which means “extant copies of books produced in the earliest stages (before 1501) of printing from movable type.”

Infinite Jest also features a really long set of endnotes that you must read along with the book. Happily, the Kindle makes this easy; we can bip back and forth between the two seamlessly. It is pretty cool how it takes you exactly to the endnote specified and exactly back to where you were in the text. There is one problem though — last night, I wanted to go to bed, but was stuck in a 14-page endnote, and the Kindle wouldn’t let me go back to my spot in the book until I came to the termination point of the endnote. I grudgingly finished it so I could bookmark my page in the main book and get some rest!

And lastly, since we are doing this with each other, and as a part of the larger community, we have been taking notes on the Kindle as we’re reading so we can discuss items of interest together at a later date. After you are through gagging, you will be happy to know the thumb typing on the Qwerty keyboard is fine as long as you don’t want to write a thesis.

What do we think of the book so far? It’s complicated and intriguing…but we’ve only just begun. It is fair to say that we are enjoying it so far.

When picking up the girls from school, there are always droves of parents waiting outside of the institution’s gates, naturally congregating into groups of 2, 3 and 4 people having intense conversations.

Now, as we’ve talked about in the past, part of the greeting ritual here in Argentina is that when you see people you know, regardless of how engrossed in each other they may be, you barge in and insert yourself, giving everyone the Argentine cheek buss to say hello.

As an American, I have the hardest time doing this. It is literally impossible for me to bust up a discussion amongst people happily chatting just so I can kiss everyone. I can’t help it — I feel rude! Especially if I break into a particularly heated conversation and have nothing to say or add to it.

Not kissing everyone at all times, of course, leads me to the funny situation of being rude in this culture while trying not to violate cultural norms of rudeness from my own country. *sigh* It’s so complicated!

I had an interesting greeting situation happen a while back though that taught me the cheek smooching thaaang is not entirely universal.

You see, I was at a weekend birthday party pick up that involved a bus dropping off our kids outside of the school grounds. I was the second parent there waiting, the first was a dad whom I didn’t really know. We nodded and said, “Hi.” After that, about 5 or 6 dads came, and each one stayed equidistant from the others. They would all nod to each other and offer a short “Como te vas?” or “Como andas?”

It wasn’t until a Porteño mom showed up, floating around kissing all of the equidistant dads, that the cheek bussing started. I was intrigued.

I remember hearing that the beso greeting is relatively new here in Argentina, and, in fact, some older residents are not really fond of the the cheek press/air smack upon arrival or departure. Perhaps these middle-aged dads are on the cusp of the custom, and left to their own devices, are not so comfortable with it themselves!

Zoe and Zelda have been telling me for a while that fear of swine flu is the reason that their school has not been visiting the soccer and hockey fields for sport days this winter.

At first, I didn’t believe the girls. I mean, hasn’t it been proven that going outside in winter doesn’t make children sick? And hasn’t it been proven that keeping tons of snotty-nosed kids cooped up together does make them sick? I thought perhaps it was a language misunderstanding…but now I’m suspecting the Zs may be right!

Yesterday, they brought home a sticker, pictured above, that is supposed to inform them about how to prevent the spread of swine flu. The notice advises young people to use a disposable tissue over their nose and mouth whenever they sneeze or cough.

As an experiment, I asked the Zs to translate the sticker for me. They took one look at the picture and said, a little unsure, “when you cough, cover your mouth with your elbow?”

Advertising 101: pictures should match the message!

Below are some musings, observations, and concerns that I have had since fracturing two vertebrae five days ago.

Concern. I spend a lot of time laying on my back. Since I am not able to lift my head significantly, I have a deep and abiding worry that I will rub a bald spot on the rear of my scalp, such as a baby does!

Observation. I started my period the day after my spinal break…what more can you say but, “of course you did.”

Musing. Just like with my knee surgery last year, it is odd to have an injury which isolates you so much from others just when you need to be touched. There is now nothing I like better that to have Tom lightly press his hand on the skin of my back, especially where the break occurred. (It gives him the willies, but it feels fabulous!) I miss having the kids in my lap, freely hugging them, snuggling in bed with Tom…blah blah blah.

Observation. My ass is still bruised from that damned backboard!

Musing. I believe that this injury has reactivated my junior high craziness. During those years, I was often sent into the hall from class to recover myself after laughing fits of hilarity that occurred for no reason except the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be guffawing. Currently, laughing is probably the second most painful event that happens to me, behind coughing, but I still get these entirely inappropriate urges to giggle just because I’m not supposed to — and this perverseness is absolutely killing me. I get to the point where I’m frozen in pain, unable to breathe, and I have to banish Tom from the room because our desire to laugh feeds off each other…

Concern. I think that I may have some bruised ribs as well. Now that my back isn’t quite so painful, I am realizing that I feel real twinges in my ribcage during respiratory events, like, you know, breathing deeply!

Anyhow, below you will find some of the milestones that I reached today:

• I laid down in, and got up from, a prone position without Tom’s assistance today. (”All by self!” as the Zs used to say.) Really, it was rather weird, since I couldn’t even contemplate getting out of bed yesterday.
• This morning, I was able to lay in bed on both my left and ride side, albeit briefly!
• Used the bathroom all by myself. (I know, TMI.)
• Am rising and sitting down in a more true squat fashion instead of an exaggerated plié with my back rigidly straight. Yes, that’s right, I’ve got a little forward degree of freedom with my torso that wasn’t there yesterday.
• Baked some home-made biscuits from scratch. (With a little help from my hubby…okay, a lot of assistance, and I was exhausted afterward, but still!)

Spinal Fracture Recovery Posts: Day 1 | Day 5 | Day 14 |