Blog a la Cart

Currently Gawking

Zac (per usual). And his tee.

You can grab ’em here. We just need a “Some Gals Marry Gals. Get Over It” version.

Temporary Disaccharidase Deficiency

We have a diagnosis! Or a hypothesis of one. One that has helped us keep our little girl from being sick for the past 24 hours. One that makes sense with all of Sunny’s symptoms…

The kid would be fine for two days and then suddenly announce that she needed to throw up. The peeing out of her bum has been a constant, but the throw up has been so on and off. And she showed no signs of lethargy or illness or fever or malaise. It has been a bizarre month indeed.

After all of her test results turned up nothing. Not Celiacs. Not hepatitis. Not parasites. Not Giardia. Not Rota-virus. Not LEUKEMIA! The C word can go stick it where the sun don’t shine (to then be dramatically expelled by Sunny’s warped gastro-system. *Ahem*).

All of that is to say that our pediatrician spoke to a GI specialist who suggested that she has something called Temporary Disaccharidase Deficiency. Which is just a fancy pants way of saying that she has developed a temporary intolerance to simple sugars.

Dude, what is sugar not in? AIR?! You try keeping a pre-schooler from consuming sugar and dairy. She wants her fruit and milk like Ursa wants her tennis ball.

There’s a lot of unsated want going on chez Cart.

Essentially Sunny’s bout of gastroenteritis four weeks ago caused some “intestinal mucosal damage” so that the enzymes responsible for helping breakdown sugar and lactose were reduced. Thus the vomit and diarrhea. It sounds like if we eliminate sucrose and lactose from her diet for a week or so, along with a regime of probiotics, her system will normalize and she’ll be back to consuming berries like the fruit bat she is.

Hooray hooray. Our intestines are crossed that this works.

And you’re welcome for today’s lessons in medicine and biology. I’m sure that’s why you come here. For all the talk of diarrhea and puke and enzyme deficiency.

Currently Reading

My hilarious pal, Courtney (she, the catalyst for my introduction to James and the gifter of the Pigs in a Blanket maker) passed along a link to this tweet yesterday. The subject of her email message was as follows: To inspire a feminist rage.

And indeed it did.

She and I share a great sense of humor.

Yet neither of us find this “joke” in a pair of men’s trousers funny.

The woman who posted the picture and tweet wrote this piece:

We really are in a bad place as a society when laughing something off has become virtually the only response to anything vaguely anti-female, or anti-male for that matter.

And I very much appreciated this follow-up post:

Banter is not humour; banter is what people have when they lack a sense of humour. Banter is a catch-all word for idiocy that warns the rest of us that Here Be Lads… It is cruelty unleavened by wit but which is excused because it is a bit like wit, if you look at it from a certain angle. It what is left when humour has died, and just the rotting, stinking carcass remains, bearing a resemblance to the living being but lacking all that made it good… If you like banter, you are an idiot.

Pants can’t convey a tone of irony or sarcasm.

And even if they could, the dullness and pathetic obviousness and sexism embedded in this attempt at “humor” would still fall flat.

Week 29

Despite this weekend’s shit show (ba-boom, ching!), we managed to shoot Week 29. We missed Week 28, so there was no way in puke-covered Hades I was missing this week. Sure, Addison had thrown up earlier that day and James was still a permanent resident in one of our bathrooms (I don’t think I have ever been so grateful for a home equipped with three bathrooms. Ever), and then Courtland took it upon herself to spit up all over Sunny’s hair and our bed mere minutes into the shoot but GUESS WHAT?! I am now the expert Barf-Cleaner-Upper. Seriously. I am a bodily fluid cleaning Olympian! My children are nurturing this skill. How supportive!

Suffice it to say, I shot an abbreviated Week 29. And here it is folks. Brava, me.

It started out a bit rocky with Addison refusing to relinquish her blanket and Courtland practicing her four-limbed mobility, but we had a brief 60 seconds of success, and then? Bile! Duh!

Courtland: 29 weeks
Addison: 33 months