The Longest Shortest Time

Leg Book: Part 3

Yesterday morning, while standing in the kitchen scarfing down cereal and wondering if Sasha understood what was about to happen, she picked up my cell phone and dialed what she must’ve imagined to be my brother’s number.

“He-yo, Uncle Josh,” she said, holding the phone to her ear. “Cast come off. Okay, bye.”

Guess she understood.

Because of what happened a couple weeks ago, I was afraid she might not be right. Thank goodness, she was. And though there was no “boop” involved, she walked out of the orthopedist’s office with two shoes on and legs unencumbered.

I took her home, threw her in the tub for the first time in two months and presented her with this certificate:

I think I expected her to be running around, jumping for joy, but she wound up being in a pretty rotten mood. Not wanting to be washed. Or wear clothes. Or even walk much. (Turns out it’s going to take a few days for her to get back to walking normally.)

But after about an hour at home her friends began to arrive and we began our all day party of eating raspberry muffins and dancing, making piles of things, moving those piles one item at a time to another location, and going back for more raspberry muffins.

And so it is time to write the conclusive chapter to our book. Once we have it done I’ll post it, but for now I thought I’d share the evolution of the two pages Sasha has wanted to return to daily.

Interestingly, most mornings Sasha would want to draw big dark slashes on the calendar—I think imitating my marks. And on the FIX IT! page she’d usually want to just add one tiny dot in about 10 different colors. She wasn’t interested in revisiting any of the other pages. I guess it makes sense. The parts of the story that continued to matter were: FIX IT! and HOW LONG BEFORE WE FIX IT?!

Now that things are beginning to settle down, I will get back to producing the podcast. I’m not sure yet exactly when the next episode will be ready but I can tell you it’s about a mom’s struggle with a toddler with Tourette’s.