The Rankin Zoo 

I know I’m biased but I’d like someone to try and argue that these two kids aren’t cute.

Thanks to Kirstin for taking the photos!

Click on the slideshow for bigger versions of the pictures.

She’s #1

The kids and I walked up to the farmer’s market this morning. We had fun and made a video. It’s not that exciting.

Farmer’s Market from Andy Rankin on Vimeo.

Okay, here’s the story of how I smashed up my face.

My brother is moving and asked me to help. We were working on loading the truck for a second time. I had just secured some furniture with bungee cords. I was walking to the back of the truck, looking for the next thing to load up. At about that time, my nephew David hopped in the truck to help out. All of the sudden there was a bang (I guess, I’m not sure I heard it) and I had a searing pain under my left eye. At first I thought David had thrown something at me and whacked me in the face - wouldn’t have been the first time. I was actually starting to turn to him to yell at him when I realized that whatever hit me in the face hit me a lot harder than David could have.

At about that time I realized that it really, really hurt. I might have started to suspect the bungee cord but I’m not sure. Somehow I hopped out the back of the truck with my left hand up to my face over my left eye. I looked down to see blood pouring into my right hand. I that point I started saying (or maybe yelling), “I need some help.” I think everyone got to me fairly quickly and my older brother (Tim) was right in front of me. I looked up and moved my left hand away and asked him if my eye looked okay. At about the time he was saying that it looked fine I realized I was able to see out of the eye so that made me feel better.

That was also when I saw Coral standing in Brian’s front yard looking at me. I’m sure it was scary for her so I asked people to get Coral away so she couldn’t see me bleeding. I also asked for a towel and contemplated taking off my shirt to jam up against my face. Tim told me to put some pressure on it with my hand but I wasn’t too into that idea - but about then someone handed me a wad of paper towel. I put some quick pressure on it and then pulled it away for Tim to look at and he said it didn’t look too bad. Well, bad enough that I should go to the hospital but not so bad that I should be too worried about it.

At that point I actually called B to let her know what was up (I was supposed to drive Coral over to the pool soon to meet up with B and friends). Tim’s wife, Andrea, offered to drive me to the ER so we were heading to the car. Before I got in I took a quick look in the truck mirror to see the wound for myself - it didn’t look too bad.

It only took about 5-10 minutes to get to the ER and the bleeding had mostly stopped well before we got there. I started wishing someone had hooked me up with some ice but overall it wasn’t all that bad.

At the ER they got me through triage pretty quickly but then I had to wait about 1.5 hours before getting a room. Actually, they were out of rooms so I got to sit on a bed in a hallway. There was some excitement in the room next to my hallway that involved a patient, police, and hospital security folks - but that’s a story for a different time.

After a while they took me back for a CT scan - the same machine that they had run Pearl through a few weeks ago. The tech said it would take about 30 minutes before the radiologist looked at it but that it looked good to her. A while later, back in my hallway, the doctor (actually a physician’s assistant) told me the CT results were fine - no broken bones.

More waiting and then the PA came and washed the wound and decided I needed a couple of stitches. Still more waiting before she came back and gave me the two stitches. Still more waiting before I decided to leave without getting my official discharge instructions (she had already told me what to do - it was just taking a while for her to close out my file). Of course the checkout person didn’t care - as long as I was willing to pay her the $100 co-pay she was fine with me leaving.

So, there you have it. I’m lucky my eye isn’t busted. I’m unlucky that I got hit in the face in the first place. I’m lucky I got out of the rest of helping Brian move. I’m unlucky that I didn’t get to spend the afternoon at the pool with my family. Overall, not my first choice for how to spend a Saturday but I can’t complain too much.

Another day, another update. Who knows, maybe I’ll even post some pictures sometime soon.

Ever since Coral was born we have talked about where she might go to school when she’s older. B grew up in DC and went to private schools. I grew up in Reston (more or less) and went to public schools. I think we both have open minds about the options but we also have no first hand experience with the other way. Well, as Coral gets older we’ve been thinking more and more about our options. Even though we’re still a year away from kindergarten, if we wanted to go private school we’d have to start looking into the silly admission tests soon.

Anyway, we lived in Fairfax County, which generally has really good public schools. Our neighborhood elementary school was apparently pretty good but we had heard bad stories about the middle school. We lived very close to the City of Falls Church, which has a national reputation for it’s very small, independent school system. It seemed like it might be a good mix of the benefits of public and private schools.

We had been casually looking at houses in the City for a while and over time realized that unlike Fairfax County there wasn’t a lot of turn over in the City. We figured that there wouldn’t be many houses up for sale that fit what we were looking for so we got mentally prepared to move quickly if something popped up. We weren’t in a position to buy a new house before selling out old house, especially in this market.

As it turned out, a couple of months ago we saw a house that we liked. We made a mad scramble to get our house on the market and got very lucky with the timing - someone happened to be looking for a house just like ours right as we listed it. The house sold in 24 hours. We turned around and put an offer in on the house we wanted in Falls Church. Now, I’m writing this blog post from our new house! Wow.

To make a long story longer (just like yesterday), this house isn’t exactly new. It’s actually two houses stuck together. The first house was built in 1871 and the rest was added about 10 years later. In 1983 the house was moved a few blocks from its original location to its current location. Speaking of location, we really like it here. We can walk to the community center, park, library, shops, restaurants, and the metro. I can walk to work. The neighbors seem really nice.

We’re still getting settled in and we do miss our old house. We bought that house in 2000 and I lived in that house longer than I lived in any other house in my life. We did a lot of work on it over the years getting it just the way we wanted it - and now we’re gone. We have tons of memories in that house and I think we’ll always remember it fondly. But, with two rug rats running around (okay, one running and the other just lying there for now) it was getting a bit cramped.

The new (old) house is still a disaster as we try to get all our junk stuff moved in. Once we’re a little more settled in we’ll start having people over. Of course, if you’re up for carrying boxes around you could probably come visit sooner!

Hey, maybe now that a couple of hurdles have been hurdled I’ll start updating the blog more often. I guess only time will tell.

If you’re reading this you probably know that Pearl was born with strabismus. This is a condition which causes her eyes to not work together properly. In Pearl’s case, her eyes tend to angle out - which is called exotropia (or, if you’re not a doctor, wall-eyed). Congenital (from birth) exotropia is apparently fairly uncommon and is usually associated with other scary problems. However, Pearl has undergone a battery of tests (okay, mostly just an MRI of the brain) which seem to indicate that there isn’t any obvious cause of her condition.

What does this mean? Well, practically speaking it means that when Pearl looks at something only one eye is pointing at that something and the other eye is pointing at something else. This is kind of confusing when you’re interacting with her because it’s hard to tell what she’s looking at. The eye doctor is fairly confident that she sees well with each eye individually and that she basically just uses whichever eye she feels like to look at things. Apparently, her brain is able to selectively ignore what the other eye is seeing, preventing her from having double vision.

The deviation is pretty dramatic with Pearl’s eyes. As she’s gotten older she has actually been able to pull her eyes together to focus on things from time to time but it usually doesn’t last long and one of her eyes drifts off. To prevent her brain from permanently giving up on one eye and just use the other for seeing things we have had to patch one of her eyes each day for about 90 minutes. We alternate the eye that we patch, forcing her to keep using both eyes.

The doctor said that technically we didn’t have to do anything to fix Pearl’s condition. She would likely have gone through life without much trouble seeing things. Her depth perception would have been impacted, but even there it’s not like she would have had no ability to perceive depth. However, if nothing else, it’s a bit of a cosmetic issue having one of her eyes all over the place.

So, to continue a long story and make it longer, last week Pearl had surgery on her eyes to hopefully correct her strabismus. Believe it or not, this procedure involves moving the muscles on the side of the eyeballs in order to realign them. It seems scary but it is apparently a fairly routine and risk free thing (hey, even her eye doctor has had the procedure done on him… I’m not sure if that’s good or bad).

She came out of it great. The anesthesia took a while to wear off but her eyes look pretty good - not too swollen and just a little red. It’s to early to tell if the procedure was successful but we can already see that her eyes are aligned much better. Se may need an additional adjustment down the road but it’s too soon to know about that.

We’re very happy to be past the surgery - it had been looming for quite a while. Big sister Coral was very concerned about Pearl but is happy to see that she is doing well.