To purge this field of such a hilding [worthless] foe

Our dear Readers,

Last week, not particularly expecting our post to be read, we made a mad foray into the realm of political opinion only to be met with hoots of hostility from readers round the globe, all stridently protesting that the worldwide readership of this blog cares not a fig for our political sentiments, but that that readership relishes—indeed has come scarcely to be able to live without—the delectable anecdotes, crafted in elegant English prose, detailing the lives and times of the adorable little girls to whom this blog owes its birth and concerning whose adventurous comings and goings this blog was, in its days of greatest glory, wholly dedicated. We are not deaf to the cries of our readership, and we now return, abjectly, from our backsliding.
WHEREFORE: With this blog’s eponymous family having returned from what we ardently hope was its LAST stay at the Yale-New Haven hospital; with the whoop and clamor of another great national election having subsided; with the party of the ass having successfully supplanted the party of the elephant in the halls of Congress; with Trevor Chapman’s curiosity about Justin’s first impressions of life at the Yale Law School duly sated; with Capricorn, everyone’s favorite sign on the Zodiac, swift approaching—with the stars nearly aligned and the immediate environs of 517 Prospect Street nearly asleep, we turn at last to the latest, and much-anticipated, installment of our illustrious Week in Review.

Monday (6 November): We took Eli to the hospital, ostensibly to have her stitches removed from the last surgery. Lia, however, knew that something was wrong and arrived with her bags packed for an extended stay. She told Dr. Lou Moratti that she thought Eli’s catheter had been dislodged; the good doctor said such a thing was highly unlikely, then proceeded to feel the shunt track and admit, to his surprise, that Lia’s diagnosis was right on (in the Millennium children will live to the age of a tree because the doctors will then learn to trust the mothers). Eli was admitted and another shunt replacement surgery scheduled for the next day, early afternoon. Julia meanwhile romped over every inch of the LaDuke’s apartment a dozen times over as she and Callie successively dared one another toward greater heights (depths?) of revelry.

Tuesday (7 November): With partisans nationwide seeking to “get out the vote” (i.e. irritate the citizenry into submission by inundating every home and hamlet with a thousand unsolicited phone messages—“I’m gonna go vote,” one Iowa farmer was quoted as saying, “just to get away from that devil-begotten telephone.” The highlight of the election was of course, the election of Heath Shuler—the former Tennessee gridiron standout whom the Washington Redskins made the third overall pick in the 1994 NFL draft and who went on to become, in the unerring appraisal of ESPN, the seventeenth most spectacular professional sports flop in the last quarter century—as a representative from North Carolina. But we digress.), Julia sought to set an example for Callie of the big-girl life of going potty in the big toilet, which she apparently did a dozen times or so during the course of the day, often punctuating the attempt by loudly singing the BYU fight song while enthroned on the LaDukian commode.

Wednesday (8 November): Eli came home from the hospital earlier than we expected and still very much feeling the effects of surgery number (who’s counting?). Julia did her best to cheer her little sister, which apparently cannot be done without at the same time convincing her parents that the life and well-being of their second born is in grave peril. On a happy note, Justin, who had missed class all week to this point, got a break when his contracts professor, drunk with the democratic victory of the day before, plum forgot that he had a class to teach, leaving Justin so much less behind than he expected.

Thursday (9 November): Justin returned to school where in the morning he bathed in the warm light of some Calabresian moralizing (Guido actually said at one point, “You’ll never get into the Kingdom of Heaven because of your brains.”) and where in the afternoon he and his beleaguered classmates were once subdued by the chilly gaze and icy cold calling of the Resnikator. Eli was understandably crotchety and Julia showed signs of how much time she had spent with Callie this week, imitating Callie’s voice and echoing her younger friend’s more limited syntax (it is quite a thing to have to berate one’s child for reverting to monosyllabic gutturals when she is fully capable of articulating sentences—subjects, predicates and all).

Friday (10 November): Julia visited her friend, Mayah Sevy, in the morning. When she came back she insisted that she had not had fun and then proceeded to launch into an interminable account of the morning’s every minute occurrence. In the afternoon, Addie and Callie LaDuke stopped over for a welcome visit. Julia and Callie bounced off the walls like so many unstable electrons before it was decided to transfer the visit out of doors. With Eli napping, Lia, who exited first, forgot to inform Addie, who exited last, that the door was locked. Lia, who from a childhood graced with endless but always instructive reruns of McGuyver knew never to panic in such circumstances, made haste to climb through the kitchen window. Her haste was slowed only by the timely appearance of two neighbors who asked if she needed help. “No,” she answered. “I’m just locked out and I need to climb through this window.” “Oh,” said the kindly neighbors. “Well do you need some help?” Again Lia demurred. Wondering that she didn’t proceed, the neighbors looked on with bemused interest. “Well I don’t want to do it with you watching,” said Lia, thinking the attempt might place her in an “inelegant” light. “Ah,” said the embarrassed neighbors, who turned quickly away. Finally, Lia made her way through the window, only to look back and see those same neighbors, smiling and waving, having watched her climb through the window all the same. At just this moment Addie walked through the back door, bearing in hand the house keys she had just fetched from Justin at the divinity school library.

Saturday (11 November): We celebrated Armistice Day by going to the emergency room. Eli had slept terribly all week and grown progressively cranky—a repeat of the strongest signal of her many previous shunt malfunctions. This time, Lia decided to have done early and get a CT scan and some X-rays. We did so, and both tests confirmed that the shunt is firmly in place and functioning properly, meaning that Eli’s irritability was owing to one of the thousand causes outside shunt malfunction that make infants irascible. This was no small relief (Lia was ready to return to Utah if something else had gone wrong). While Eli was posing for the million-dollar cameras, Justin enjoyed the relaxing assignment of keeping some control of Julia in the cramped confines of an ER exam room—this was tantamount, it seemed, to releasing an angry hornet in medium-sized bedroom and striving to prevent it from leaving the southwest corner of the room. All the same, we made it home alive, very tired and very relieved—much like our readers, all tired by the soporific text above and relieved at having reached, at length, the final period.