Sunday, June 29, 2008

Visiting

As we are moving out of state soon, we are trying to see people we probably won't see again for a long time. We recently visited a couple who have four small children (3-7 or so.) The youngest are twins who are perhaps a year older than Limelet.
The whole thing made me feel very inadequate, because I have one small child and I barely manage to shower every other day, our apartment is usually a pit, and we don't ever cook anymore (cooking in our place is basically like cooking in a bathroom). This couple's house was clean, the mother was wearing nice summery clothes that looked new (and makeup!), and they made lunch for all of us. The kids didn't constantly destroy the house but played with their toys and each other, they took their naps right on time, and the mother just seemed a whole lot saner than I feel.
Meanwhile, Limelet was too hyped up about all the goings-on to sleep in the car on the way there as we hoped (usually he sleeps exactly noon to 2pm); instead he slept for 20 minutes right about at 2pm as we were arriving. So the entire time we were there, he was cranky and sensitive and contrary and I spent the entire time holding him back from grabbing things that the kids who lived there inexplicably ignored (like baby-height CD collections and the family's cooking implements).
Luckily, with all those kids, there were also plenty of novel toys to distract him. But just as I feared, he slept really hard on the car ride home, which then became his nap for the day. Great, you'd think, except that it meant he awoke from his nap at 8pm and was awake until midnight on the dot.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Bad Scalp Day, Good Pool Day

Over the weekend I noticed that Limelet had lately developed cradle cap, hidden by all that luxurious blond hair. I used the standard cure of saturating his scalp with baby oil (in this case, Burt's Bees Almond Kernel Oil), letting it soak for a while, and then brushing it out.

He resisted the application of the oil because he wanted to play with the cute little bottle and pour out the oil, and had a tantrum about that on the floor. Poor greasy-haired little thing.

Then when I put him in the tub and started brushing it all out, he flipped out because he wanted to play with the hairbrush. (And probably because it was scratchy on his poor tender little scalp.) Anyway, I dealt with this by letting him have the brush whenever he wanted, so he quickly decided it was boring.

The brushing-out part was fun in that sunburn-peeling way. And it was very gratifying to see that clean little scalp after I'd washed and dried his hair.

His eczema has been pretty dormant for a few weeks now. No dairy, and also no walnuts, which seem to be another trigger. However, he does fine with peanuts so far.

We took him to the water park the other day, which he loved and in which he was completely at home instantly. It's especially nice because they have a zero-gradient pool (or something like that) so that it has a gradual sloping bank like a natural beach instead of a vertical wall like a standard pool. Also the surface is rubbery: grippy and soft. He went down the little frog-tongue baby water slide and was in ecstatics about it. They don't allow those long "pool noodle" things, so I was disappointed about that, but Limelet didn't even really know what they were for anyway. He just loved the water jets and fountains and so forth.

Then a huge storm came in and the pool area was evacuated, and we almost ran out of gas while in the wind-tossed car queue to get home, and then we stopped by the health food store to get his soy/juice boxes and discovered that the price is going up from $2.69 to $4.09, which means that he will maybe get one per day if he's lucky, instead of limitless boxes per day.

But overall it was a good day.