Tag: Emma Carnell

Saturday afternoon, my wife took the kids to visit her grandmother and parents in Jackson, about a 45 minute drive from here. I stayed behind to work on lots of important things (i.e., B:TVS marathon time). By the time they returned around 8 or 9 p.m., my daughter said she had a headache. Actually, she’d been reporting having headaches all week, and the pediatrician we took her to a few days ago said it was an ear infection and gave us some antibiotics.

By Sunday morning, though, it was clear that this was no ear infection. She spent most of the night and the following morning throwing up, saying she had an intense headache, and by the time we obtained authorization to take her to the hospital, she was bordering on delirious (it did not help that she couldn’t take her ADHD medication because of all the vomitting).

So my wife takes her to the hospital while I stay at home and watch the baby. They hook her up to an IV to rehydrate her and pump her full of antibiotics. My wife said she that night was very rough, with my daughter having all sorts of odd behavior (including calling her by one of her friends names and informing her she was in time out).

By the time I went to see her Monday morning, she was back to her grumpy self, insisting that she didn’t want to eat chicken fingers and french fries and would much prefer a lunch of ice cream and doritos.

It appears to be a kidney infection, which means she’s likely to remain in the hospital through Tuesday at least and maybe even into Wednesday.

My six-year-old daughter has this often-amusing (and occasionally not-so-amusing) habit of latching on to stray phrases she hears on television or the radio and then fixating on them almost obssessively.

For example, as part of a homework assignment we worked on this weekend, she had to describe what she wanted to be when she grew up. She settled on being a teacher because she wanted to help children.

She was pretty adamant about that until today when she insisted that being a rock star was actually superior to being a teacher. Why a rock star? Because, repeating something she had to have heard in an interview with some vapid entertainer, in order to be a rock star “you have to feel it in your heart.”

Of course, she informs us, she still plans on being a teacher on the days she’s not out being a rock star. I guess it’s all about balance.

My daughter has had very short hair for most of her 6 and a half years. On the one hand, she was born without hair and it took forever for her hair to grow to any length. On the other hand, once she was old enough to figure out how to do so, she’d sneak off with some swiped scissors and cut her hair (she also trimmed the hair an a couple of our cats one night). Those episodes prompted several visits to the salon for corrective hair enhancement to make the patches she cut less obvious, and meant even more months of short hair.

Anyway her hair as finally grown out enough (and she’s stopped sneaking off to cut it) to do things like this,

This morning I was reading yet another pointless article by John Dvorak, this time about the horrors of realistic videogame violence. As computer and videogame graphics get more realistic, Dvorak wonders,

My concern is for the mental health of the game players after years of being subjected to visual images that are just plain disturbing. Game technologies are improving the graphics to such an extreme that what was once a cartoonish image is now a photorealistic nightmare. That can’t be good.

Translation: when I was a kid, we didn’t have them fancy computer graphics.

But the interesting thing is watching my daughter grow up and how she handles violent media (which is impossible to avoid, even if we wanted to). We watch a lot of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at my house, and initially I was worried that the show would be too scary for a 6 year old, but she seems to get off on the strong female character kicking butt. Never had a nightmare nor does she act out the violence — she seems to have a good grasp of the difference between make believe and real life (and obviously, Buffy’s about on the outer limits of what we’ll let her watch).

The thing that gives her nightmares and sends her into fit is the one channel that I never even thought about — the Weather Channel.

One night my wife left the TV on the weather channel, and the next morning Emma got up long before any human has the right to and switched on the TV. That was the day, unfortunately, that there were those flurry of tornadoes, including one that hit Tennessee where here aunt lives.

Now she pretty much is obsessed by the weather channel as well as completely freaked out by the slightest indication of a storm. A couple weeks ago my wife and Emma were out planting flowers. That evening it started to rain and we had some lightning. Emma woke me up around 2 a.m. to suggest very urgently that we needed to bring the plants inside so they wouldn’t get hit by lightning.

She’s a bit behind in her reading skills due to her ADHD, but she will proudly come in and tell me that the Weather Channel just said today is going to be partly cloudy (of course that was as likely for Montana as for Michigan).

So, like Dvorak I’m concerned about the long-term effect of hyper-realistic images on my child. But in my case, it’s Doppler radar images rather than monsters that is my big concern.

My daughter had been pestering me to go bike riding, and the weather cleared
up enough for us to venture out (with me on my rollerblades) to a local bike
trail a couple weeks ago.

Of course once she saw the monkey bars/slide/swing combination set in the park,
it was all over. She spent about 3 minutes in total on the bike:

Then it was off to a small park at the university to fly our new Spider-Man
kite:

 

Of course when you’re six, the kite tends to spend a lot of time on the ground
(hmmm . . . happens to me a lot too, but I figure that’s just because I’m uncoordinated):

But when the kite finally gets in the air, it’s a thing of wonder:

I had to bribe Emma with ice cream to get her to sit still for this shot: