The Stanley Milgram monitor

It's been a rough day. It's been a rough week. Things barely kept together starting to crumble. Maybe someday soon I'll have the energy to get into the details of all that is sinister in our lives right now. But not tonight. Because tonight I was reminded of how we've moved so far from appreciating the true beauty of having a special child like Sam.

Tonight, after nearly 8 months of negotiations and appeals Sam's new SleepSafe bed was finally delivered. It was delivered much later than we had scheduled it and the delivery driver was not allowed to help us carry it into the house. So out in the cold, dark night David and I went and carried each over-sized, unwieldy piece into the house while Clara screamed from inside. We had already moved Sam's old bed (aka the futon) out of his room to make room for the new bed. But with bedtime fast approaching there was no time to assemble the contraption so we placed Sam's play pad (aka memory foam) on the floor of his room to serve as a makeshift bed. During all the furniture moving I had had to unplug Sam's apnea monitor (yes, the kid still stops breathing at night) and this must have done something wonky to the insides because when David went to turn it on the alarm beeped and the lights flashed with wild abandon. In other words, it couldn't be trusted to monitor Sam's vital signs. I was up putting Clara to bed at this time so David fiddled with the monitor for awhile until I was able to find the manual for him. The manual told us which secret series of buttons to push and to which gods to offer our sacrifices. Once we got it working again David apologized to Sam for delaying his bedtime for so long but then told me that Sam actually seemed to be kind of amused by the whole beeping blunder. I joked to David that maybe the electrodes from the monitor that were attached to Sam's chest gave out a series of electric shocks during the whole fiasco and that's why Sam was "amused." And this is when David reminded me of how much more we used to be able to appreciate life with a special needs child. Because when we would go out in public with itty, bitty newborn Sam hooked up to the apnea monitor and well-intentioned people would ask what it was and how it worked we'd tell them that when Sam stopped breathing it delivered a series of electric shocks through those electrodes until he started breathing again. Most people had no other choice but to believe us. And we would get our amusement for the day at the expense of poor little Sam. Good times those were.