ninanevermore

I don't believe that children need to be decked out in designer threads, but I try to dress my son nice enough so that people don't mistake him for a street urchin. I also try to dress him so that his outfit looks coordinated. He's not going to grace the front of any kiddy fashion magazine, but he usually looks cute enough for company, as they say. At least he did before I bought a pair of sandals with Elmo on them. Now, no matter what else he is wearing, his Elmo sandals are the only shoes allowed on his feet, whether they compliment his shirt or not.

For those of you who don't know, Elmo is a red child-like Muppet who appears on Sesame Street. He is a fuzzy little guy who speaks in the third person and sings made up songs to the tune of Jingle Bells. Very small children think he is the coolest thing ever, and my son is one of his biggest fans.

"Melmo!" my son exclaims every time this Elmo appear on TV (or in a book, or on a toy). "Look! Melmo!"

I don't know why the name comes out as "Melmo," but it does. Probably for the same reason that the word "rabbit" comes out as "babbit" when he says it.

The Elmo sandals left red marks on his feet the first time he wore them, so when he insisted on wearing them again I put socks on his feet to protect his skin. It looks dorky, but he doesn't care. I've tried to put other shoes on him, but when he sees what I am doing he jerks his foot away and demands, "My Melmo sandals!" I guess I could try to force him to his other cute shoes that mommy likes so much, but he would scream and writhe about as if I were putting red-hot irons on his feet. Then, after I got the offensive footwear in place, he would rip them off and throw them across the room. Letting him wear the sandals is easier.

Hopefully, we won't have to attend anything fancy in the near future that would require that my toddler be dressed in nice attire. I can just see him now in a little three piece suit with a toddler-sized tie around his neck, and his beloved Elmo sandals on his feet. With socks on underneath them, of course. It's how all the cool 2 year olds are dressed this season.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
My stepmother showed me a framed photo of Reese, her grandson, the other day when I asked how he is doing. The first thing that surprised me about the photo was that his chemotherapy has not made him lose his mop of auburn curls. His mother says she thinks his hair is a little thinner, but there is enough of it left that not to advertise that he is a very sick child.

The second thing that surprised me was that he was in drag. His mother had asked his older sister, who had wanted him to be a girl in the first place, to dress him for the photo. She chose to dress him as a girl, and he came out very pretty. Standing in a very vogue-sort of pose, he wore a pink ruffled shirt, a short pink top that showed off his scar, and a sparkly headband in his hair.

It turns out he is doing just fine, and has found that showing off his new scar is a great way to impress women. Whenever he meets a new woman, he runs up to her and lifts up his shirt to let them see where the doctors took out his kidney. The scar runs from one side of his ribcage to the other, and it looks kind of like someone tried to saw him in half, then stopped and stitched him neatly back together.

After the women are suitably impressed with his scar, he ups the anti by raising his shirt up even higher to show off the port in his chest where his chemotherapy is administered. This gets even more oohs and ahs. He is very proud of these things and the reaction he gets for having them.

He endures his chemo on the days he must have it, and as soon as the nausea passes he is playing with his siblings again and back to his old self. My stepmother is impressed by this, but I could have told her he would be this way. As someone who used to be a little girl who took shots every day of her life to stay alive (and who still does), I know that a child with a serious illness is, above all else, still a child. An illness is simply a thing a child lives with and works around.

Children seem brave because they don't know how else to be; their job is to face obstacles and do whatever it takes to grow and learn and reach adulthood. It's not that these children are more impressive and wonderful than other children. We only notice how impressive and wonderful they are because we expect their illnesses to diminish them and we are suprised when it doesn't happen. These children glow no more brightly than they did before they got sick, but our own dark expectations make them appear to shine like beacons.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~