The Fur Mother

The Big Kid

2010-10-04T17:12:00.001-07:00

Limelet really turned the corner developmentally in the past six months or so. I wonder about ethical issues in maintaining a blog about him as he gets older--sooner than we think, he'll have his own online identity; he's not "my baby" any more in that way (though of course he'll always be my baby!)

His speech became suddenly more grown-up between spring and summer. He can tell and understand jokes involving word play now. He still uses "w" for both "r" and "l" sounds, but I've heard him trying them out. He now says "j" instead of "dz," too.

Around the same time he got the potty thing down. That was a really big deal (for us at least). Now he has his own little potty, with his bookshelf next to it. I put that there after the night he carefully carried his potty into our library room so he'd have something to look at while going, which was both cute and pitiful. I think he got the idea from the Potty Power DVD, which shows children playing with toys and reading books on the potty. He also frequently sings the theme song: "I can do it myself, I'm a big kid now!" Very catchy tune, it was.

Limelet's little friend--whom we'll call Olaf though that's not really his name--was visiting recently, and as they sat in small chairs happily having dinner and watching a cartoon, Limelet turned to his friend and said, "I love you, Olaf!" And Olaf replied, "I love you, too." It's so cute. In a year or two, they'll be too cool to be so affectionate, no doubt, so I'm enjoying this while I can.

Limelet has the same territorial issues about sharing that his peers do (i.e. No one else should play with my toys! Sharing means I get to play with your toys!), but he has a generosity of spirit that I'm proud to see. For example, when other kids try to impress him or even shame him (which I've seen) with how much better a toy/drawing/whatever they have, he happily tells them that it's great! He loves their toy/drawing/whatever! He seems totally immune to the one-up, which is nice. It also means one less way for him to potentially feel bad about himself.

As Limelet just turned four, he got a shiny new silver astronaut outfit, which he then wore for several days in a row. Happily, this coincided with Picture Day at day care, so I am looking forward to seeing the class photo with all the nicely turned out children--and one astronaut. Well, if you can't have formal portraits taken in your astronaut costume when you're four, then when can you?

Limelet's birthday party went really well. I invited just a few kids from class after asking the teachers for the names of a few kids he plays with frequently, as well as Olaf, a couple neighbor children, and the hairdresser's kids. So we had maybe seven or eight all told, including a couple babies, but mostly kids his age. I made it a morning party and told parents to leave the kids in their pajamas, and I served breakfast. That went over pretty well, because if you don't have to dress the kids or feed them before you come over, it's a lot easier.

I kept it as simple as I could and served items with little or no prep (though it always ends up more complicated than you think it will, even so). I served grapes and cut-up fruit, donut holes, brown-n-serve sausages, tater tots, coffee & tea, and milk & juice (of course). Well, I did make homemade cinnamon rolls, which are fiddly and time-consuming, but I made them ahead of time and froze before their second rise, then thawed them out the night before and just popped them in the oven that morning.

I also got about seven bales of straw (only about $3-4 each) and stacked them in the back yard so the kids would have something to climb on outside. And a few cans of silly string, naturally. And we have a swing on the apple tree. After breakfast they went out and played, and the parents wandered in and out to keep tabs on them.

I got a half-sheet cake from the grocery bakery with no decoration, and had the kids decorate it after they'd played outside for a while. First I had Limelet write his name on it (under the candy "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" I'd applied), then each child got to put on some sprinkles, or gel, or colored sugar. It actually looked pretty cool, and the kids had a great time doing it. And then eating the cake, of course.

Fur Mother Explodes!

2010-10-04T16:37:00.001-07:00

Welp, looks like I better prepare for some company here at Furmother thanks to Nurse-and-Blogmeistress Debbie over at Wee Care!

Luckily I don't have to clean the bathroom and kitchen as I do when IRL company (or the landlord) is coming over, because we'd just have to be be outta luck with that today.

**Update**

Okay, waitaminit. Turns out that although Wee Care did post a link yesterday, the source of most of my hits is actually a link posted by Kim over at InAShoe. Which, apparently, is still more popular than many "official" sites. So, go Kim! Looks like it was a fun beach trip.

Art, Hugs, and Reinforcements

2010-05-04T17:56:00.001-07:00

Limelet's little friend from across the street moved away only a few weeks after they met. Luckily he moved not too far away--still walkable in nice weather at least; definitely driveable. Last night he and his mother stopped by for a surprise visit. Limelet was so delighted. They stayed for a couple of hours, and the boys had snacks of cheese, candy, half a twinkie each, and milkshakes (made by TheLimey). So a lot of health food, basically. They played pirates, legos, and turned on the sprinkler much to the surprise of the parents, who were sprinkled. At the end of the visit they gave each other a fervent hug as only nearly-four-year-olds can, and then another. It was beyond adorable.

Limelet has suddenly begun making representational drawings. Where he used to ask us to draw certain objects, he's suddenly realized that he can draw them himself. Or he'll ask us to draw one, and then copy it. So far it's mostly rockets, cannonballs, and dynamite. But this bodes very well for the whole art thing that I plan to do with him. With as little pedantry as possible, of course.

He's also taken really well to potty training now that the seal is broken, so to speak. He's started telling us when he needs to go, and then going on his own. The only thing I don't know how to deal with is how to stop giving him reinforcements after each "number 2" potty session!

Milestone. So There.

2010-04-25T07:45:00.001-07:00

I know parents are mocked for poo posts, but you know what? You never
know what a huge achievement pooping on the potty is until you try to
teach someone else to do it. I can't imagine that high school
graduation is any more exciting for parents than this is.

Cheers and the Sad Song

2010-04-17T17:09:00.001-07:00

On the corner of our block is a salon where TheLimey gets his hair cut. The stylist also coincidentally is American with an English husband and has small children, who are occasional playmates with Limelet. Yesterday Limelet wanted to stop at the salon to say hi, which we did. The little boy his age was there, and both got ring pops. A few minutes later I noticed that they were clinking candy rings with each other, saying "Cheers!" repeatedly. It was really funny--I don't know which one started it, though I know Limelet knows to cheers us when we're all drinking tea.

This evening we decided to get out of the house and go to a small local coffee shop for a little while. Limelet got an ice cream cone and we had hot drinks. It turned out to be an open mic event, which was fine while no one was actually doing open mic. They played some dance music. But then a young woman got up to sing with a pianist. The song she sang was one of those sad soft-rock leave-taking kind of ballads with lots of swooping minor-key vocals. Limelet was initially completely hypnotized because he loves performers with microphones or instruments. But as the music became sadder, his face crumpled and he collapsed into into racking sobs over my lap. It was so pitiful. He could hardly breathe for sobbing. So we had to quick grab up all our stuff and escape. It took him some time to recover once outside, clinging to me and weeping brokenheartedly. "Well, at least we know he's not a psychopath," said my husband.

Once home, I put a Wiggles tape on, just to counteract the sad music with some happy music. It seems to be working well.

Darnit, I didn't get a chance to drink my hot cocoa, because it was still full when we had to go, and then it spilled on the bumpy sidewalks on the way home. I had only some dregs.

3...2...1... Aaaand We Have Literacy!

2010-04-13T10:33:00.001-07:00

As of last week, Limelet can suddenly read three words. Well, two phrases, perhaps. "ZOO" and "THE END." Both gleaned from media, of course.

"ZOO" he actually gets the whole letters/sounds concept and it happened rather suddenly. I pointed out the letters and their sounds in his favorite video game ("Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo") and he just got it, and now recognizes the word when he sees it anywhere.

As for "THE END" I think he just recognizes the overall look of the phrase, especially in context. "TH" is a kind of hard letter combination to get initially.

He loves for me to point out the letters in his name while sounding them out. I guess he recognizes his name, too, come to think of it. But mostly the first letter.

So far, he doesn't recognize "bigfoot" but I'm sure it'll be any day now.

The Porch Pirates

2010-03-19T10:27:00.001-07:00

The other day after daycare Limelet was playing on our front porch in the unaccustomed sunlight and warmth. He was pretending to be a pirate, the porch his ship, waving his little plastic sword and toy prosthetic hook, and having taken one shoe off to simulate a peg leg. "Avast!" he cried to all and sundry up and down the street. "Swab the deck me hearties!" and "Prepare to be boarded!" and "Ships ahoy!"

Across the street was a young mother with a little boy about Limelet's age, having their supper on the porch. "I'm a pirate!" Limelet shouted to them. After exchanging a few similar pleasantries, the other little boy wanted to come over, and the mother brought him over to visit. In seconds both boys were swarming our porch, each wearing only one shoe, pretending to be pirates piloting our porch. I invited the mother in for tea and Limelet showed the other boy the imaginary ropes. They attempted to sweet-talk a squirrel over from the next porch, played sword-fighting, and generally ran about like little banshees. It was cockle-warming.

Limelet was disconsolate when they left. I don't think he realizes the likely recurrent nature of the visit, since we haven't really had neighborhood friends to have over much previously. He kept looking out the bedroom window across the street and asking where his little friend was, and he sobbed for about half an hour that he didn't say "nice to meet you." (Luckily we saw them next morning in the street and he finallly got to say it.) Anyway, I think this will be a wonderful friend for Limelet and maybe even finally someone for me to have a chat with from time to time, which is so nice. But even without that, it's wonderful to see Limelet having such fun with another little boy.

Last night he allowed me to put his training pants on him for overnight instead of diapers, although he's been staying dry at night for ages. He stayed dry, except for some milk that spilled on him when he was trying to have a midnight drink. After I changed all his clothes, he realized that he had to go potty, so we went, and he continued dry the rest of the night. I was about to have him wear them to daycare, but he did have a small accident just before we left, so I think he doesn't feel ready for that yet.

This is the 6th night since the goshblanged fritillary blooping daylight-savings time change, and as always it has completely disrupted the entire household, every day, all day, all night. Home, work, and daycare. We haven't had one night of decent sleep in a week. Mostly we've all been awake from 2-5 am, more or less, often 6 am. As always, I hate the time change and wish it would die a horrible lingering yet instant death, somehow. However it is that abstract concepts die. I wish it could suffer as I have suffered.

Tragedy / Comedy

2010-02-23T19:29:00.001-08:00

(Cross-posted)

The other day Limelet was in a rare mood of hyperness. He galloped over to his Lego box and tore the lid off, throwing it across the floor to crash noisily on the opposite wall. TheLimey and I both shouted "Limelet!"* at once. He looked cowed. TheLimey prompted him: "What do you say?" expecting a brief "Sorry."

Instead Limelet answered, "Thank you." TheLimey and I stared at each other, paralyzed with equal parts horror and mirth. Before we could correct his misapprehension, he continued, "Thank you for shouting."

It was such a smartass thing to say--if he meant it that way, which I'm sure he didn't--that it was really funny. At the same time, it was so pathetic that it was mortifying. "Please sir, may I have another?"

With our genes, it'll only be another six months or so before he says stuff like that and means it.

*Not his real name. I hope this is obvious.

The Depths!

2010-01-04T11:48:00.001-08:00

Yes, my need to find a social outlet has led me to new depths. I actually posted on the local Mensa Yahoo group site to ask if there were any parents of young children, in case they might want to arrange child-friendly activities together.

Of course, the first thing that happened was that a couple someones pounced and tried to recruit me to do some kind of program coordination for gifted children, or some dang thing. You know, I'm new in the area (practically speaking, anyway) and all I want is to have a dinner/playdate etc. with some other people who have children, too. I'm not looking to groom my poor kid into a genius--whatever that even means. Nor am I currently interested in focusing on the possibility of his potential giftedness. And that's not even what I asked for in the post!

Anybody who with little provocation immediately tells me their kid is gifted...it seems like they're compensating for something or other. I just want Limelet to have friends and have fun! Oh, and us, too. (Although TheLimey has friends through work, of course, I don't know of any with young children.)

If Limelet does turn out to be "gifted," then we'll deal with that at such time as it becomes a meaningful issue. Right now I'm more concerned with social development and happiness. His and mine! His intelligence is being nurtured just fine, thank you very much.

I should have known. Well, I have other potential groups.

jump_5

2009-11-30T14:13:00.001-08:00

jump_5
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Music

2009-11-17T12:26:00.001-08:00

Limelet has become smitten with performing music of any kind. His main musical idol is Raffi, and he uses a tennis racket to pretend he's playing along with the Raffi concert video. He also does all the bows, dancing, and hand motions, as well as copying Raffi's banter with the audience. Limelet played with a child-sized guitar at a party the other evening. He was completely enchanted by it, and wept heartbrokenly about leaving it all the trip home. We're getting him one for Christmas. In an odd coincidence, we found a little toy drum set placed out at the curb for trash on the way home. He's been playing it with chopsticks, and of course wanted to take it to bed. (For once I said no!) He also has been playing his little keyboard (garage sale) and "playing" the microphone.

I wonder which thing(s) he'll settle down to?

Ages

2009-11-11T17:36:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I last blogged, and I don't even really have any pressing excuse. It just seems to take forever to do all the endless lists of stuff that I've been saving up to do "when I'm done with my PhD." And daily home maintenance takes forever, too, though you wouldn't know it to look at my house.

Anyway, we took Limelet to the Adventure Farm last weekend, which is the last weekend it's open for the season. He loves it, especially the conveyor belts that feed the goats, the fuzzy chicks, the giant trampoline-pillow things, the fries, the water pumps, the...anyway. We like it, too. It's big enough to be interesting, but small enough not to be overwhelming.

Limelet is doing really well. He actually likes daycare now, and yesterday when I dropped him off he smiled and blew me a kiss. He's also become much more outgoing with others. At the park the other day he asked a slightly bigger boy if he wanted to go down the slide together, and started a conversation about the giant slide at the Adventure Farm.

We both have our (regular) flu shots now, which is good (Daddy still needs his). Limelet asked the nurse if she was going to give him a shot--he was excited about it. I tried to warn him that it might hurt, but he was still a little taken aback by the ouch. Nevertheless he was very brave, and then at bathtime gave Daddy and me scores of "shots" and insisted that we say "ow" and otherwise act like it hurt.

Guess it's a good thing I got him a doctor coat and kit awaiting for Christmas, although he still wears his firefighter outfit every. single. day. At least now he wears the nice shiny and sturdy new one I got him instead of the flimsy, hole-ridden one with the buckles falling off that he'd been wearing for months. It took Halloween to get him to wear the new one, but now he likes it. Limelet's such a big boy now, not even very toddler-like anymore. He's moved on from using the term "ducka" to "construction vehicle," though I don't know exactly when that happened.

His mood has also been very good generally, and even his sleep isn't too bad since we gave up on trying to get him to sleep earlier than 10. If it wasn't for that bloody late two-hour-long nap at daycare, we could do it, but it just won't work with that nap. This means that we never have even the hope of an hour or two to ourselves. However, it also means that he won't wake up for four hours in the middle of the night, and then have a screwed-up sleep schedule for three or four days, to be repeated ad infinitum. We just all go to bed at 10 (we usually read after he sleeps, if only for a few minutes), and then all wake at 6:30 or 7:00.

His eating habits are as strange as ours. He loves sardines and cous cous, but doesn't particularly like peanut-butter sandwiches. Figures. The other day when I picked him up from daycare I brought him a hot homemade whole-wheat waffle and a sippy cup of herbal tea to have on the ride home. He loved it. He also always wants his own tea when we have ours, so I usually make him some decaf.

Now We Are Three

2009-09-18T05:46:00.001-07:00

Limelet is three today! We will do his birthday stuff tomorrow (balloon store, presents, cake) as it will be Saturday, but we did get cupcakes for his daycare class today. It turns out that his little "best friend" in class has a birthday the day before his.

Limelet definitely speaks two languages now: English and American. The other day I was in the kitchen with him and he told me he wanted to peel a buh-neah-nuh. Then TheLimey walked in and Limelet told him he wanted to peel a buh-- he stopped himself-- a bih-nah-nah. He also sometimes drops his terminal r's on words and not at other times, depending who he's talking to.

After three weeks of trying the earlier bedtime of 9 or even 9:30, last night we gave up and went back to 10-ish. If Limelet wasn't getting that bloody two-hour nap (and so late in the day!) at daycare, I'm certain we could do it. But that nap just tips it.

If he goes to bed even as early as 9:30, it's just too early--Limelet wakes after just one sleep cycle and then stays awake for 3-4 hours. That usually means he goes to sleep at 9-9:30, then wakes up at 1-2am, struggles to go back to sleep for an hour, an hour and a half (he really tries--just can't close the deal), then he's simply broad awake until 5 am. And therefore so am I. It's exhausting It's also meant that TheLimey has had to go sleep in the office just to be able to get to work, because he can't be going to sleep at 5 am and getting up for work at 6. It really ruins the entire day to for me and Limelet be up the entire night, and has a ripple effect into the next several days. It messes with his daycare attendance, wioth my routine (such as it is), and everything.

It's maddening, because everything else about the daycare is really great. Except that they're ruining our lives with this frikkin' naptime!

Big Boy

2009-09-09T14:03:00.001-07:00

Yesterday when Limelet went potty, he stood up! Just like that. Apparently they've already taught him in day care. I didn't know they'd be that throrough, but--it's working.

In other news, he's sick (home yesterday and today with congestion and fever), so his dental procedure for tomorrow has been canceled. Rescheduled, rather. I really wanted it over with, but it can't be helped.

Verbaltude

2009-09-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

Limelet seems to be undergoing a verbal development spurt. This week. He's suddenly started sounding a lot more grown-up in his speech, though I think some of the things he's yoinked from daycare "teachers," or us, or even videos. But ya gotta start with something, right? He says things that make us, his parents, look at one another in perplexity (Where did he get that phrase? We don't say it!)

The other day we heard that he told another child "stop your tears." ??!! It has to be something his teacher says, as neither of us says that. The daycare teacher told us about it with pride, as evidence of his growing confidence with other children. Well, we don't want him to be downright mean! I hope he wasn't too mean.

He's also suddenly started asking "why?" about everything all of a sudden--I don't think he really knows what why means, but he gets that it evokes a response about whatever we're discussing. And he says it with such feeling. For example, TheLimey and I were discussing the tuna roll I had just made for dinner. Limelet: "Tuna roll? Whyyyy?" It was pretty hilarious. Finally, the other day he spouted back something I've said occasionally for years without even thinking about it. "Mama, I want da other nursie. Dis one's tapped out." I couldn't stop laughing. My laughter made Limelet laugh while nursing, which was also funny.

Oh Yeah...It's Potty Time

2009-07-29T13:33:00.001-07:00

Limelet has been peeing on the potty several times a day most days now and is usually dry overnight. I was going to use that one-day method of potty training that uses positive reinforcement, but he's just grown into it himself before I got around to it. The one thing I did do right was to scuttle his kid-potty and get a wide, stable footstool for use on the big-people potty. He just did not want to use that little plastic one, especially since the potties at daycare are normal toilets (though a bit small). He climbs right up and sits down. It's very cute. He even did a poop on the potty for Daddy last weekend, while I was napping. Yay Limelet!

Basically, this means that when he ages out of diapers we'll be starting a whole new diaper cycle with the new one, for about a 6-year-long stint of diaper changing.

Beach

2009-07-28T12:42:00.001-07:00

We finally got a chance to take Limelet to a beach over the weekend. I found a state park that's about an hour away. It's the first long-ish car trip he's been on in....I don't know; a really long time, anyway. Well, Limelet absolutely loved the beach. There was a thunderstorm in the afternoon, but at least we got in a good long morning of digging in the sand and paddling in the water. He was really upset to leave, of course. I can't wait to take him again.

Limelet is thriving in his new classroom. He likes his teachers and talks to them spontaneously (I've seen it), and goes readily to them in the morning when I drop him off. It's just a way better situation. Limelet now discerns between cumulus and cirrus clouds (learned in daycare), and sings little songs that I have to look up online to figure out what they are. They have the same super-late, super-long naptime as the rest of the center (1-3pm), so he just doesn't go to sleep until 10pm. It's ridiculous, I know. But if we put him to bed earlier, he's awake from 2-5am, which is way worse.

When we were at the state park, there was a woman there with three children ranging in age from maybe 4 to 10. We first started noticing her when her daughter was playing in the sand with Limelet. They were happily pouring water into sandy holes near the water's edge, when the mother started closely directing into exactly which hole her daughter should pour the water, and in what manner. "No, not that one--the other one. No--inside the hole!" Geez, I thought, here come anxiety disorders galore for this child. Moments later, the mother started badgering her about how her tummy looked, and asking whether she had just eaten a lot of food or something. I tell you, this kid was a skinny-to-normal four-year-old kid (and very cute). The mother was quite heavy, so it was no leap of imagination to see her dumping her own anxieties all over the daughter. Here comes the disordered eating, too, I mentally added.

She continued to loudly harangue, micro-manage, and viciously nag her kids, especially singling out the daughter and one of the two boys for whatever reason. (Nice vacation for them, huh?) This culminated shortly before we left, when she screamed at her son, who did not want to go near a busy nest of massive hornets at one end of the beach. She wanted him to get something or cross that area for some reason; I don't know. What she shrieked was "If you don't get over there right now I am going to pull down your pants and spank you in front of the entire beach for being a sissy about some bees!" And then as an aside to me muttered that it was as if a monster was going to jump out of the beach and bite him. Well, it was--it just wasn't the hornets.

I just don't get how someone can think that's even close to okay to say to their kids at ALL, let alone imagine that it's okay to scream it in public. I know we all lose our tempers sometimes, but this wasn't losing her temper--this was hours of just miserable, wretched nagging.

Happy

2009-07-07T07:53:00.001-07:00

Limelet is doing much, much better in his new class. Several times now he has smiled as he waved bye-bye to me in the morning, which has never never happened before. He does still cling to me and then to Mr. Luke (usually) or Ms. Sarah (sometimes) when I hand him over. But he seems much happier. He's also started interacting with other kids in public (like at the park) a lot more.

This morning when I dropped him at daycare, the class was outside in the little playground area, and some of the children were playing with a big plastic baseball and bat. Instead of clinging to me as usual, he said, "They're playing baseball. I want to play baseball!" And he actually wriggled out of my arms and ran off with barely a goodbye. This would have been unimaginable even a month or so ago. I'm so relieved.

Over the weekend we visited a new park and Limelet played with a little boy who was perhaps a year older. Now in the way of most older children, this other boy was bossing Limelet around, which Limelet was mostly ignoring. The other boy showed him a pile of wood chips that he was using to "make a pizza," and Limelet obliviously pushed the entire pile off the little ledge onto the ground. The other boy got upset. Not terribly, but in the way of "hey, you're ruining it!" I translated to Limelet that the older boy was trying to make a stick pizza, and suggested that he help him get some more sticks. Limelet became concerned that the other boy was upset. "Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Are you alright?" he asked, solicitously tilting his head. It was really cute. I'm happy he can apologize and make amends already, because that's a difficult skill that a lot of adults still lack. (I attribute this to our willingness to apologize to him ourselves, instead of pretending we didn't do something or insisting we were right when we obviously weren't.)

He still phrases some things awkwardly, and some phrases have even become ingrained family slang, such as "You want no?" Meaning, "I don't want this." But he's moving a lot more towards proper pronouns.

Fireman Lost

2009-06-21T11:43:00.001-07:00

I haven't been able to stop being upset about this. I think I'm more upset than Limelet. We accidentally left his fireman outfit (jacket and helmet with moveable visor) at the park last night (9pm), and of course it was gone this morning when we went back (8am). He loved that thing, even wanted us to bring it up to the bedroom so he could sleep with it nearby. He would dress up in it and sit watching his fireman video, while holding his toy fire truck. He wore it for hours every days lately. He'd go in the back and spray water from the hose while wearing it. He's been asking for it today, of course. "Da fireman stuff?" I've been avoiding letting him see that video.

I haven't been able to find a replacement set online anywhere. This year's versions seem to be cheaper and flimsier (already). The helmets have no visors, etc. I got it from Rite Aid last year.

Who would take a little kid's stuff like that? I know that's a dumb question. But I'm just so ticked off about it, and can't seem to let go of it.

Especially since a few weeks ago when I found a pretty dang expensive hand-held video game I turned it in to public safety, even though Limelet loved it. It wasn't ours!

I went back today and put up some signs, though I'm sure nothing will come of that except probably dirty prank phone calls on my cell.

Stupid me losing stuff. Stupid people taking stuff.

Random Bits

2009-06-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

It's been such a long time since I wrote anything, but not because nothing's happening. It's because everything's happening!

Last night was a record five nights in a row of good sleep! !! !!! The previous record was three. I think this is partly because we've given in fighting against the late naptime at daycare, and started putting Limelet to bed late. Like 9:30 or even 10. It's sure better to do that, than put him to bed at 8:30 and have him wake up from 11 to 3, which was happening a lot. That was especially hard because I was finishing out my contract at work, and the last few months were the busiest and most tiring. (This is my first week "off.")

It's been hard to discern which sleep disturbance has been from what, since he's been sick so often. Generally speaking it's been a big deal if he's had three or four days in a row in which he's not been sick, which is suspiciously similar to the number of nights in a row he's had good sleep. In the past four months alone he's had four (4!) ear infections requiring antibiotics, that week-long horrible GI thingfor which we went to the E.R., hand-foot-and-mouth, and at least one upper-respiratory infection that lasted three weeks. I spoke with another woman leaving the daycare yesterday who complained of the same thing: "my grandson never got sick at all until he started daycare this year, now he's sick constantly and they're planning to put tubes in his ears." Which, incidentally, Limelet's doctor mentioned last week when we were in for the fourth ear infection.

Limelet has undergone another developmental jump in the past couple of months, and has grown very interactive in his conversation skills now. It's also clear that he remembers things that he couldn't describe at the time. For example, he remembers songs from videos he saw months ago and never sang before now, when he's become big on singing. Even as we have tried to shelter him from violence, some kid's videos and cartoons nevertheless have shooting. He doesn't know what a gun is, but calls them "explosion tubes" at this point. Which is fine, because he thinks an explosion is something fun, like fireworks.

The other night when he was awake from 10 to 2, I was very tired (as you might imagine.) At midnight, as Limelet was happily sitting up reading a book in the night light, I yawned and said, "Limelet, it's midnight. Mama's turning into a pumpkin!" Startled, he turned and looked me up and down a few times with a serious and expectant look. I burst out laughing, because I realized that lately he's gotten the concept of something "turning into" something else, and imagined I was literally turning into a pumpkin. Characters in videos sometimes turn into other things, after all. I had to explain to him quickly that I was not, in fact, turning into a pumpkin.

Limelet has also become very affectionate lately, and gives us kisses and hugs when he's feeling especially happy. Or sad or scared, which is pitiful. For example, the other day we were at the playground, which was very busy. I was crouched down by Limelet, who was standing on the ground pretending to slide down a sliding pole ("Like a fireman!") I heard TheLimey shouting and looked up in time to see a Big Kid (probably 10 or so) sliding straight down at us. I shouted at him to watch out, and that he should look down before he slides, as I snatched Limelet away from the pole. Well, Limelet thought that we were shouting at him and that he'd done something wrong, since I snatched him away while shouting. Poor little thing. It took us a minute to realize that he was still shaken and quiet, and when I picked him up he hugged me and tentatively kissed me. However, after I explained that we were not shouting at him, but shouting at those big boys to stop jumping on Limelet's head, he perked up immediately. It was clear that he understood the explanation, because a minute or two later he walked a few steps away from us and shouted "Stop, stop!" in the direction of the big boys.

Oh, and a while ago, we got him a toy tool set. He was hammering on the doorframes around the house, and wanted TheLimey to join him. "Daddy, ham with the hammer?" Hee. There was some other similar construction that we laughed about, but I forget it.

Kerpow!

2009-05-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Limelet now likes scenes in videos that feature "consplosions." He also insists that one of his favorite ducka beeps is a "compact hammer" instead of an "impact hammer." I don't know if this pattern means anything, but it's funny. He's using first-person sentence construction a lot more lately, especially when he really wants something.

Limelet also had his first skinned knee recently after falling at the playground. Not a bad one, but he got to experience picking a scab, which he seemed to find really fun. [rolling eyes]

Crazy Bus

2009-05-06T09:18:00.001-07:00

crazy bus
Originally uploaded by swissmiss

Oh yeah...here's the other ride he loved! It's surprisingly high up, too. I didn't know if he'd be terrified, but he laughed like ... well, crazy, the entire time.

Bear Affair ride

2009-05-06T09:14:00.001-07:00

Bear Affair ride
Originally uploaded by A.M. Kuchling

Limelet loved this ride especially. I wonder if there's a pic of the Crazy Bus (his other favorite) somewhere too?

Sick!

2009-05-06T08:08:00.001-07:00

Last Friday got Limelet in to the doc as he had been having "cold" symptoms for three weeks solid, and they were only getting worse. He was ending up being awake from 1-5 am each night because of the congestion. And it was turning green. (Ewwww.) I wondered if he was getting an ear infection because of the non-sleeping thing. I used guafenesin a couple nights, which helped, but it's so nasty that it was hard to administer. By the day we got in, though, he was already getting a lot better. The doc said his eardrums looked a little bulgy, but no sign of infection. So that was good. He had a really good night's sleep that night (and so did we.)

However, over the weekend, his sleep deteriorated again, where whenever he would stir in the night, he would start crying or almost crying and stiffen his body up. Sunday night he started telling us his throat and his mouth hurt, and his appetite dropped. I had to relent on the no-night-nursie because he was obviously sick and miserable. Monday I saw a little sore on the tip of his tongue, like a canker sore. Day care told us he couldn't come back in without a doctor's note, because there were several cases of hand-foot-and-mouth-disease, which I'd never heard of. All I could think of was hoof-and-mouth disease. However, the flyer at the day care suggested it wasn't something so terrible (which Google later confirmed.) He was okay eating ice cream and maybe a little pancakes and donut sugar, but that's about it.

I had to take Limelet to work with me yesterday, as there were a few important things I couldn't put off doing that day, and he couldn't go to daycare. (And he was not lying-around sick, but happily-running-around sick.) There was a lot of running back and forth to use the snack machine in the hall, but not really because he wanted snacks. He just loved the dispensing process, especially putting money in. I was able to make some important phone calls while Limelet watched kid videos on YouTube at my desk computer.

I took him home at lunch time (a few frozen peas, donut sugar, and milk) and put him down to nap. Then I had a phone conference. Luckily, Limelet stayed asleep for exactly the length of the call. Literally he began stirring and crying out for me just as I was hanging up the phone, so I was able to get him back to sleep for the rest of his nap okay. Then when he awoke, I struggled to get him reluctantly ready for his doctor appointment and ran out to the car with kid and bags--only to find that the baby seat was out and the car seats still down from the move. We so seldom use the car these days. I had to call them and say we'd be late, but it still worked out okay.

At the doctor's office, Limelet played with everything he wasn't supposed to--the ear light covers, the stirrups on the exam table, the supply drawers, the exam light--instead of the books and calculator I brought for him. The doctor finally arrived and needed only a tiny glance at the tongue sore to confirm HFMD. He wondered why they would send him home for that, and then checked Limelet's ears. Holy moley, they were very inflamed, and the doctor said most kids would be screaming in pain with that much inflammation. So, surprise! Only takes a night to develop that great stuff. The doctor wrote a prescription for a different antibiotic than the last two times.

I'm not ready yet to try the no-antibiotics route--I need to see more data on the recent studies, and I need to have this job contract be over so I can deal with some (more) sleepless nights more readily.

We went to "the medicine store" and got the new antibiotic as well as a couple ice lollies, which Limelet selected and ganwed on in the store. (They're in the freezer now.) Thank heavens, this new antibiotic is not horrible tasting! It's made it much less of a trauma to medicate him than the last two times. The pharmacist gruffly recommended that I give Limelet "Milkshakes. Milkshakes with a raw egg in it. He'll never know it's there!" He was pretty funny. Like a caricature of a small-town old-tyme guy of some sort (pharmacist, I guess.)

We got home in time for Daddy to return home, too--now with sore throat and feeling cruddy generally. Daddy also brought home some ice cream and a really cool toy set: two battery powered bubble gun sort of things, which the two of them played with while I made dinner. I made dinner but TheLimey could barely eat it, and Limelet was also uninterested, preferring the salty blandness of a huge pile of corn chips. I kind of get that. I want salty bland stuff when I'm sick, too.

I got him bathed, medicated, lotioned, powdered, pajamaed, nursed, and asleep by 8:45, which is really good timing for us. (Especially after I let him stay asleep until 2:40 at naptime.) He sure slept a lot better last night, partly due to being allowed nursie when he stirred, and partly because of baby Motrin. His appetite was back this morning. He selected a yogurt for himself and ate half of it, and then ate a whole soy sausage, as well as some animal crackers and milk. Thank goodness!

Miraculous!

2009-05-01T06:46:00.001-07:00

Limelet had a "cold" for nearly three weeks, right as we were moving (coincidence?). Last week he was so stuffed up that he ended up being awake from 1-5 am for 5 nights out of 7. It was pretty much destroying our family, as that meant that not only was he miserable, sick, and awake, but all three of us were miserable, crabby, and awake. It finally occurred to me that we have some guafenesin syrup and that it has dosages for small children, so I gave him that. It's nasty, so it wasn't so easy getting it down him. That seemed to help considerably, and I think even helped the infection (probably viral) clear up, since it allowed his passages to clear out. At any rate he slept mostly through both those nights, so that was a huge relief to all of us. Daytimes are a million times better when we're getting more than 4 hours of sleep apiece.

Last night he seemed better, but still somewhat congested, so I tried giving him one more dose. However, he spit it out--twice--so I decided to risk the night without it. He was better enough to sleep without it. In fact, last night was probably about the best sleep he's had in his whole little life. He went to sleep at 9:30, only stirred once around one and went right back to sleep, and awoke on his own around 7. Amazing! This also means that Mama had the best sleep she's had in three years (since before he was born.)

Really, I can't described how much better I feel, how much more like a human being and myself again. Three nights of decent sleep topped off by a great night's sleep for ONCE. I'm happy as a cricket, as Mrs. Banks says. The past couple nights Limelet has been snuggling up against Daddy in his sleep instead of me. Last night he just about crowded Daddy off the bed, as I heard. I awoke to find TheLimey trying to gently squeeze Limelet more into the middle of the bed, muttering that he only had a foot of space at the edge of the bed in which to sleep. Welcome to my world, I thought, and went back to sleep.

Tonight is the night that there are extremely noisy fireworks after the nearby baseball game, so I am making sure we install our air conditioner this evening so that Limelet at least has a small chance of staying asleep. I hate to break this great sleeping streak. Last week was a nightmare--he went to sleep at 8:30, the fireworks went off at 10:30 (?) and lasted maybe 15-20 minutes. He twitched and stirred and generally came out of his deep sleep. Woke up after they were over, and then was awake for four hours. The following night (Saturday) we were unfortunately somewhat late to bed and the fireworks were fortunately somewhat earlier than before (9:30), so he actually got to sit with Daddy and watch them out the window. He loved that and was really upset that they aren't out there all the time on his demand.

I'm still giving him melatonin before bed (down to .45 mg or 450 mcg). It's been about 4 weeks. I just want to get his sleep somewhat stabilized and then titrate it down, hoping we've gotten his circadian cycle in order for once in his life. The initial .65 mg dose worked to put him to sleep but seemed to give him disturbed sleep (twitching, talking, crying, and waking), but .45 seems to work well. Also I make sure to turn off all lights, even the night light. The studies I saw indicated that "even a very dimly lit room" can give melatonin users disturbed sleep and nightmares.

In other news, the fair has come to town, and it's on the campus of the college. I saw that it was going when I left work Wednesday, so I picked up Limelet from daycare and went straight back there (having stopped at home to grab some soy chicken for him to eat, and change into my jeans). I didn't know if he'd be scared or love it. He loved it. The lights, the big machines, the people everywhere. The first ride we went on he was a little uncertain ("Guy turn it off, guy turn it off!') But after that he warmed up to it and wanted to try every ride, even the ones he's too small to be allowed to go on ("Ring of Fire").

Daddy arrived after we'd been on a couple rides and took over being the accompanying parent for a while, until he needed a hot dog break. Limelet loved the ride with big bears that you get inside and they spin around; he loved the motorcycles on a circular track; and he really loved the Crazy Bus, which goes way up in the air and then back down again in a circular motion. We got some fries or chips and had planned to put vinegar on them, but Limelet would not part with the entire hot and greasy $6 container, so we just let him have it. He ate tons of them, as well as about half of Mama's 1/4 lb hot dog. We had to sneak chips when he wasn't looking.

Limelet was really upset to not be able to go on the ferris wheel, and asked for it again at bedtime. Poor thing. Not until he's 48" tall!

That afternoon was really living out my fantasies. It was great. We were all happy, Limelet was having fun, the air was cool and smelled of fried food, and the trees and lilacs were coming into full bloom. It was like living a Bradbury story.

We plan to go again Saturday, less spontaneously, but it'll still be great.

Post-Move

2009-04-29T11:34:00.001-07:00

We had a meeting with someone from Limelet's daycare yesterday, where we compared what we see of his behavior at home with what they see there. It seems clear that he's having a hard time getting used to being in an environment in which there are 12 kids and two caretakers, and so he does what he knows how to do: sits down and reads a book. Poor little thing. They were initially concerned that he was autistic or something. Luckily, I have the training to know that he isn't even close to meeting diagnostic criteria. However, it makes me feel very bad to think that he's overwhelmed and lonely for 40 hours a week, which is how I picture it.

They do say he usually seems happy, just off in his own world of reading or playing with toys. I realized from their feedback that he tries to get the adults to talk to him in the way we would, but they think he's just muttering to himself, so they don't respond to what he's saying. At home, he's used to having what he says matter. He's used to being one of the people who matter, not one of 12 minions in a tall hierarchy. Poor critter.

We are supposed to meet with his teachers and talk about ways to help him feel more comfortable so he can get more involved. He has good teachers, but the lead teacher is very extroverted, which he's not so used to given us as his parents. It's good to have other examples than us, but if it's all at once, it can be simply overwhelming. Furthermore, in my experience extroverted people have a lot of trouble understanding introversion (though the opposite is not as common). I don't want Limelet's general personality devalued, as much as I hope he can become more relaxed and happy in the setting. I do want him to have the chance to develop some friendships now that we've stopped moving.

Yesterday Limelet began counting to ten in Spanish all of a sudden out of the blue, so I guess he's getting something out of those Spanish lessons they have. It was really pretty cute and made him seem very sophisticated. He really loves counting now. His Sesame Street counting videos are his favorite--a combination of counting and catchy songs! Wow! ("Five-teen!")

He's been doing pretty well with the night-weaning, although he has never stopped asking for it entirely. He does go back to sleep without nursing; just wants to be rocked or picked up. Which in some ways is going backwards, for me, but we haven't had the time to implement the second half of the protocol (learning to get back to sleep without picking up) because it will probably involve several nights of being awake for hours and with a lot of crying. So we're waiting until I'm not so swamped, maybe even until my contract is over here. (Soon!)

However, we've had several nights of all that crying and waking stuff lately, anyway. I think he's had a sinus infection or something, since he's had a "cold" for nearly three weeks and lately has had green stuff in his nose. Eww. Especially bad when you can't blow your nose, although he is actually learning this skill right now. Last night I gave him guafenisin syrup to help with the nose stuff (also used a bulb to clear his nose, and swabs, and some other similar steps). That seemed to help. He had fitful sleep and stirred a lot between 11 and 5, but wasn't ever awake for long, unlike many other nights this past week. Poor kid; poor us.

He seems to be at a developmental juncture right now and is changing in a lot of ways. This is always the case, I guess, but this seems like one of those times when there are inexplicably larger underlying changes occurring. He's changing from echoic second-person speech ("Do you want the drill?" [meaning himself] to third- or first-person speech "I want Daddy's drill" or "Jack wants Daddy's drill.")

The other day he told me he wanted a present. Join the club, kid.

We're Not Alone, But...

2009-03-20T10:50:00.001-07:00

A rambling post because I'm never NOT sleep-deprived any more. It was another night in which Limelet kept us / me awake most of the night. His sleep is just so messed up since being sick. He didn't go to sleep until almost 11 last night, then woke up at 1 (briefly, and went back to sleep just fine with no nursie), then again at 3--when he ended up staying awake until after 6am. I would put him on my shoulder and walk around a little, or rock him in my lap while sitting (his 2nd-preferred ways to get to sleep) and he would drop off, but then when I sat on the bed or lay down he'd wake up again and beg for nursie. He really wants nursie to get back to sleep.

Night-weaning has been such a huge pain for all of us (especially Limelet, no doubt). If he hadn't been such an agonized teether I could have done it a year ago. So now that he's finally done teething, he's getting this steady stream of illnesses that interrupt the process instead.

I have now instituted night-weaning three times, (the first two times went as planned and then--BAM! Ear infections) and I am bloody well not doing it again, as I insisted at the last, horrible, traumatic time where he was sobbing pathetically for nursie. The first night is always just awful, awful, awful and traumatizing. He's always okay by the second night, doesn't seem traumatized and rejected by the whole "nursies are sleeping" thing, although he might not like it. So we are NOT going to initiate the process all over again--we're going to get through it this time. This going back-and-forth thing can't be good for him. He needs consistency, and he needs to practice falling asleep without nursing.

Just--last night, he had a lot of trouble doing it. I am feeling proud of myself because I managed to talk myself through the irrational angry impulses and be (mostly) soothing, even after repeated almost-sleeps and recurring getting-ups for three hours.

At 4am TheLimey recommended that I just give in and nurse (he was being woken up a lot, too, of course), but there was no way I was going to do that. It's like saying no, and then giving them the thing they wanted at the store just because they cried about it enough. It trains them to "press the bar more frequently" or cry more just to get that thing.

TheLimey wonders if we shouldn't wait a couple months to try this again because then at least I won't be working so many hours. However, Limelet's dental procedure is coming up in just a few weeks. He can't have anything, even water, after midnight, so no nursing. I want him to be used to not nursing at night by then and okay with it. If we go ahead and let him nurse all night up to that night, and then stop just for the night, what's going to happen is another traumatic "first night" of sobbing pathetically all night, and both me and Limelet being traumatized and weepy the night before his procedure. Just what I don't need, and neither does he.

That's not the only reason I want to finally get through / past this, but it certainly is a galvanizing factor. I also want to stop with all the ambivalence already! and just give him the one option: no nursie at night. Sleep through! Or get back to sleep some other way. Rather than, "well, some nights you have to sleep through, but other nights I may give in if you cry the right way, or for long enough, or whatever." That's too hard and confusing.

We were doing that thing where you limit night nursing to before 11pm and after 6am, (7 hours of no nursie), but parts of that are not working. As someone warned me, he has started to anticipate the 6am nursing and to awake earlier and earlier for it. Because it's still so darn dark at 6am, or even 7, I can't use the "wait until it's light" technique. I think he does not know what the difference is between nursing at 6am and at any other time in the middle of the night, which confuses the issue for him and creates inconsistency. So that will have to be the next thing to change--the first nursie of the day will have to be either when it's light (which is too late to get up for work and day care), or after we get up and go downstairs in the morning, just to differentiate.

Of course, then I have to figure out how I am going to get in my 10-minute morning routine (bathroom, wash face, throw on clothes) which I usually do while he's sleeping in the morning after his 6am nursing. If he's awake, he totally freaks out that I'm in the bathroom, especially in the mornings when he knows we are all getting ready to go our separate ways. It's really not fun trying to get washed and dressed while your tiny kid is screaming miserably and hanging on your leg. I really hate starting the morning like that, for him, too.

Looks like a lot of other co-sleeping parents are having the same issues we are . In one sense this helps, because I feel like I'm not crazy. But in another sense, I want to hear that these people found X, Y, Z to work once they implemented it, rather than "this is awful for all of us, and we can't escape it!"

My Son, the Sparkly Vampire

2009-03-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

In the past few days more than one person has randomly told me that Limelet looks "just like" the guy from Twilight. Which I haven't seen and probably won't.

Unfortunately, he's just too young to capitalize on it because he's 2-1/2. By the time he's even in middle school, no one will remember the movie. (Except way-older people.)

Oh well; he'll still be good looking. ;)

Neverending Story (of Sickness)

2009-03-19T13:42:00.001-07:00

Limelet was sick again this week, with similar symptoms to his previous ear infections, i.e.: a few vomit episodes apparently out of the blue, sort of feverish, fussy, cranky, loss of appetite, wants everything he can't have, exhausted but can't sleep (meaning Limelet and I both got 2-3 hours sleep a few nights in a row--well, he actually got a few more hours than that, but I was facilitating it). The sleep deprivation would have been difficult but tolerable if I wasn't working [outside the home] because I'd take a nap with him. But going out to work on that amount of sleep is awful. It's still amazing to me how functional I am with almost no sleep for nights on end. Highly unpleasant, but amazing. Nevertheless, it still meant that I got almost nothing done at work those days because I simply couldn't, which means that all the work I've been waiting to do over spring break when students are gone--hasn't gotten done. Also took a day off to take Limelet to doctor, so my five long-awaited work days have just evaporated.

Good news: no ear infection this time, just some viral illness! So that means it will only last a few days, most likely--it's probably almost over already.

I am still angry at myself for how cranky I get at him after just a few nights of sleeplessness. Well, not when he's just sitting there being normal, but when he's being unhappy and miserable because he's sick and exhausted and miserable, too. I just lose my patience entirely when he goes to pieces over something trivial. I've even had the (resisted) impulse to spank him when he's screaming, despite knowing that it won't actually help anything at all (even if I thought it was okay to do so). I wish that didn't come up for me, but there it is. I had to leave the room once and ask TheLimey to go in and watch him for a minute as I was becoming unreasonably angry. (Thank goodness I have a partner so I can do that.) Of course, then I feel horribly guilty because Limelet is crying his guts out in the other room and feeling abandoned on top of whatever misery he was already experiencing. Then when he goes to sleep he continues with little sobs while he's sleeping. Terrible!

I am so sick of this whole constant, constant, constant sickness thing. It darn well better end after a year as everyone says. I can't imagine how people cope who have a child with a serious chronic illness, as opposed to Limelet's (and our) constant minor-to-moderate illnesses. I imagine they have to marshal more resources, or it just wouldn't work.

Five, Six, Who's Counting?

2009-03-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

I realized the other day that Limelet has been sick five times in the past six weeks. Two of those illnesses were ear infections, which we (his parents) didn't get, but we got the other things. And this pattern has been pretty stable since last September. We were just discussing the other day how before one has kids, one hears parents say things like "once they're in school/day care, you'll be sick all the time, at least during the first year." Which I guess we heard but--didn't really hear. We really are sick all the flippin' time. You know how great it feels to get over an illness when you've been struggling through each day tired and bleary, or coughing, or with diarrhea, or throwing up, or whatever?

Well, I used to know that feeling of relief, too. But now, it's downright unusual to have a day (or even group of days--imagine!) in which we don't feel awful. It certainly makes everyday life a lot harder. We were so excited to have Limelet's teething finally end so I could start night weaning. Which went well for about 5 days. But this constant stream of illnesses just blows any kind of routine--day or night--completely out of the water. It's more a matter of just surviving day to day. Who feels well enough to cook something this weekend so we can eat it during the week? How can we keep Limelet occupied and distracted from his symptoms without having to expend too much energy because we're too tired to play with him properly this evening? This has led to way too many viewings of Arthur and Mary Poppins for my conscience.

Oh, and speaking of his teeth, we finally were able to get him to the dentist. He got my oral bacteria instead of TheLimey's, it's pretty clear--he has seven (7!) cavities already and will have to get general anesthesia to get them taken care of. Since TheLimey took him in, he only got a mild version of the erroneously informed anti-nursing lecture, but I'm sure if it had been me it would have been more accusatory. Okay, I don't know that, but I'm betting on it. I'm going to take the path of avoidance as far as possible.

In other news, Limelet is really starting to engage in imaginative play. He makes "food" out of Play-Doh and pretend to eat it (luckily is not much of a non-food eater so far), and reads books to his "action figure", Ducka Guy. He saw that Ducka Guy was standing in such a way that he appeared to be looking at a book, and asked him "You want a book? A libwawy book? How 'bout dis one?" And then read Scuffy the Tugboat to Ducka Guy by turning the pages and describing what was happening in the pictures. It was unbearably cute.

Babywearing Humor

2009-02-24T13:30:00.001-08:00

This cracked me up. Advice on babywearing during a zombie apocalypse . I think babywearing is most appropriate during any apocalypse, but I had not yet considered zombies, specifically.

Ears, Ears, Ears

2009-02-23T06:59:00.001-08:00

Poor Limelet.

He just finished a course of (much-loathed) antibiotics for ear infection a bit over a week ago, and it looks like he has another one already. This will be the third time since he started day care. He never had them before (though a couple of times his ears were a little iffy, they never actually got to a bad stage).

He went to his well-baby visit last week, and got his second Hep A (as planned by me) and also a chicken pox vaccination (one of two, which the doc talked my husband into, and I'm still kinda ticked about). Anyway, four days after the vaxes (Friday night) he came down with a fever and threw up once in the middle of the night. Of course I was trying to get back to night-weaning that week, so once again I feel like a monster because he was sick. He was in decent spirits all weekend, at least in the daytime, but had a fever the whole time. I attributed this to the vaccination reaction, though this may or may not be the case. Maybe his ears were just getting bad again and caused both the fever and the throwing up; I don't know. TheLimey is convinced that the vaxes caused it all.

Limelet didn't sleep very well Saturday night (so I slept about 3 hours) and then last night it became obvious that it was his ears again, so in the middle of the night we dragged the blankets and stuff downstairs so I could sleep in the chair with him. He whimpered and slept only fitfully and intermittently for the remaining few hours (so again, I got about three hours total sleep last night, too). Once it was daytime, he was cheerful again (if a little fragile and clingy). He feels okay when upright, basically. This morning he has an appointment at 10:30 to which TheLimey will take him, since he is still not back to work yet (second interview Wednesday, though!)

We went all out and spoiled him over the weekend, really just to have some way to help him feel less miserable. It was too cold to go outside, and Limelet was too sick to be around others much, so we were trapped in the house. I got several "new" videos at the Starvation Army, and on Sunday Daddy broke down and went to Toy-R-Us and got him a little train (the generic version of the wooden Thomas trains) and some new Play-Doh. Also, we let him eat whatever he wanted, since his appetite was so down we were happy to have him eat anything at all, even ice cream.

I know that a naturopathic treatment for ear infections is to cut dairy out entirely. Maybe we will be trying that soon.

When do their ears (internally) change shape enough to grow out of this?

Wow!

2009-02-18T09:08:00.001-08:00

Limelet slept last night from 9pm to 4:30am. And I slept from 10pm to 4am (when he started stirring.) That's a record 6 hours of sleep in a row!

He was doing well on the new post-teething night-weaning program (a month ago), but after the first week he became ill, and then had 3 illnesses in 3 weeks, so it pretty much went out the window. I still feel terribly guilty for the first night when I didn't realize he was sick, and would only give him a sippy cup instead of nursie. Poor little thing.

But now that he is done with teething and is no longer sick, his personality has suddenly blossomed. It's an amazing change. He's so much more cheerful and patient and generally happy. Just goes to show what chronic pain can do to a person. And what would he be like if he hadn't experienced that for the first 2.5 years of his life? I'm certain his sleep would be very different by now, and a whole host of other related things. Including his diet--he's sudddenly eating up a storm again. He began doing so after his teething was over, but then he got sick immediately and his appetite diminished again.

I predict he will become a vegetarian, like so many on both sides of my family. I brought home a roasted chicken from the supermarket the other day, and I was cutting some pieces off the leg for Limelet. He watched carefully and then happily exclaimed "Meat weg! Wike Dack's weg!" while grabbing his little thigh with both hands. Well, he already likes soy milk amd eats soy sausages for breakfast every day, so it shouldn't be too shocking when it happens.

He recently had a "well-baby" visit (Daddy took him). His ear infection was all cleared up, thank heavens (as we could tell by his behavior anyway). His height was 37" and he weighed 28#. Accoridng to the percentile calculator , and he is in the 77th percentile for height and 41st percentile for weight. So he's actually gone up in his weight percentile: it used to be 25th. Glad to know he's gaining some weight, even if he's still tall and thin. Which is normal for my family, anyway. Not sure about TheLimey's. I still think Limelet will turn out to be a tall guy, as I have thought since he was born.

Mary Poppins is still his favorite movie, replacing Rat (Ratatouille) after many months. He has memorized way too many passages of it, and talks about the "flying Mama" at day care. It took me a while to realized he was referring to Mary Poppins flying off with her umbrella.

He does seem to have somewhat of an English accent, at least as far as his r's go. One of the support staff at the doctor's apparently told TheLimey that she remembered Jack as having "the vocabulary of a college student." (This may unfortunately be true in the case of some college students.) He is beginning to play with other kids more at day care (as opposed to parallel play). He's also generally more comfortable just going there and being there. Today he sat down at the breakfast table with the other children when I took him in, instead of needing to be handed over to the daycarer personally. When he feels better physically (i.e. not sick, teething, or exhausted), he's a lot less clingy on me (understandably) so this teething and sleeping business could make a lot of other everyday things easier, too.

Limelet has begun drawing up a storm lately. He wasn't that interested before, but now he really is. He also got some Play-Doh (and the extruder), which he loved to bits. We need to get some more already. His other favorite activity these days is basketball (still). He wants us to shoot hoops with him at his little PlaySkool basketball hoop that I got him on eBay for his bIrthday last summer. We sure are getting the most out of that particular $20, that's for sure.

I feed him whatever the heck he wants, and it works. He wanted some chocolate the other day, and I let him have some. After one bite, he asked for an apple, some meat, and some milk, and ate large amounts of those instead. He eats lots of whole-grain couscous, homemade stew, and anything with potatoes. I think his weight will go up somewhat, at least I hope so.

The Sicklies

2009-02-06T06:10:00.001-08:00

Last couple weeks have been pretty hard. We all fell ill last week with stomach bug of some kind or other. Limelet threw up several days (but not a lot), was generally fussy and cranky I held out until the weekend but then got it worse than either of them, had to take a day off work but taking care of Limelet. (Not exactly a real day off, then.) Limelet also got a cold or similar over the weekend, and then during the week started not being able to sleep at night. We thought it was because he was so congested.

After several increasingly miserable nights of 3 spotty hours of sleep or so, we figured out that it was probably ear infection (perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the throwing up). Doctor confirmed double ear infection; Limelet now on antibiotics and doing much better. Also, the past two nights I slept sitting up in the living room chair while holding him up somewhat, so that he was actually able to sleep (ears hurt when he tries to lie down.) That helped us all a great deal. Poor little thing. I was losing my mind and my temper by the third night awake.

Thank goodness our medical insurance was through my work and not TheLimey's.

Limelet loves Mary Poppins film (got VHS at 2nd-hand store for $1.99), has surprisingly little bad stuff for kids, and we've seen it about 20 times in the past week. He likes the dance numbers, especially the one with all the sweeps on the roof.

Nighttimes

2009-01-29T10:33:00.001-08:00

Limelet has actually been doing a lot better, faster, with night weaning than I expected (feared?).

I have been using a modified version of Dr. Jay Gordon's technique . It is modified in that I am taking longer about it and doing it in a less cry-y fashion; I am being flexible and following my gut. We did do the first three nights as per instructions.

The first night did involve crying and wakefulness, but not nearly as much as I thought it might. Initially he cried his little heart out when told that the nursies were sleeping. However, I discovered that he calmed down and was satisfied thereafter with being held/carried with his head on my shoulder, much as TheLimey has always done to put him to sleep. Limelet has never previously accepted this form of ensleeping* from me, so I was surprised he did accept it. I was awake a lot that night getting him back to sleep. The following couple nights, he did not cry about nursies sleeping, but accepted the shoulder instead.

I was a bit worried about that, because one thing I actually worked at doing (a long time ago) was getting him to accept lying down and nursing to sleep instead of being carried and nursing to sleep, so at least I could lie down and semi-sleep, too. I didn't want to regress and have to now get out of bed each time he awoke during the night. However, I this fear didn't materialize. In the nights following, he accepted just being held and rocked or wobbled for a few minutes while I sat up, and he went back to sleep immediately. I was able to then segue that into me lying down and holding him on my chest, followed by rolling over and just having my arm under his head.

Because this was all working well and moving rapidly towards my goal of having him stay asleep without nursing/carrying, I decided to just continue (relatively) gradually instead of moving into the next Gordon phase which would likely involve another few nights of crying and misery.

And in fact it's been going quickly: just 10 days ago, Limelet was still nursing back to sleep 3-5 times per night, meaning I awoke several times per night. Night before last I awoke only twice and he fell back into deep sleep both times with very minimal intervention and within just a couple of minutes. During the daytimes he comments happily that the nursies are awake.

I'm not counting last night as a real setback, since when he stirred at 3 or so and was very flippy, it turned out that he was sick, and threw up. Poor little thing. He got to have the nursies wake up after that. But I was still awake from 3 to 4:30.

*Neologism!

Sleep!

2009-01-15T07:02:00.001-08:00

As always, our big problem is still sleep, one way or another. Poor Limelet is chronically sleep-deprived (as am I, of course).

On weekends he has a decent bedtime (for him) of around 9pm. This is because his natural nap time is from about 11-1. But on weekdays, the day care center's nap time for every child in the place is 1-3pm. This is really bad, because Limelet can absolutely not go to sleep at bedtime before approximately 7.5 - 8 hours after he wakes up from his nap. Of course we thought about having them put him down earlier, but they can't really do that in a room with 10 kids all doing the same thing all at once. The tots don't even get their little lunches until noon. The best we have been able to do is to ask them to get him up by 2pm.

I have a suspicion that they sort of let this 2pm time slide later and later at times, because of how hard it's been getting to get him to sleep even by 9:30. Last night he didn't go to sleep until 11:30, and this week it's generally been 10 or 10:30. If you go to the center between 1 and 3, all the rooms are dark and full of sleeping kids, and it's the time that the workers get their breaks. So I imagine it's ind of hard (mentally speaking) for them to get just one kid up at 2 while all the others are still sleeping and the room is dark.

So, bedtimes are kinda hard for us at home. We have repeatedly tried the thing where you catch the earlier sleepy cycle time of 7:30 or so, which theoretically is his proper bedtime. However, the result has invariably been that his body takes it as a nap, he sleeps for exactly 40 minutes, then wakes refreshed and bouncy to stay awake until midnight or so. (Believe me, we have tried everything to keep him asleep at the earlier time.)

In looking at the night weaning materials, I saw one mother's account of why she decided to night wean. It was something along the lines of, "our only time alone together is evenings, and we got tired of being interrupted every two hours to put him back to sleep." So, what she's saying is, she and her husband actually regularly had TWO HOURS together before their kid woke up. And I'm guessing that if they had two hours to spend, it wasn't 9:30 to 11:30, or 10 to midnight, as it would be if she had our kid, or she would have said something about the lateness. They probably had something like 8 until 10 alone together. (Maybe that's just my fantasy, but that seems pretty common).

And so--what the heck are they complaining about?! That would be unbelievably great! We would LOVE to have "only" two hours alone together one evening, any evening! Or day, for that matter.

Well, anyway. Night weaning is coming up this weekend. I anticipate complete sleeplessness and lots of crying and emotional trauma the first several nights, by all accounts. However, since we are prepared for it, we hope to help each other remain patient and calm in the face of all that. We aren't making any plans for the weekend; I'm even trying to get the grocery shopping done Friday evening because I'm going to be knackered Saturday morning.

Naturally, Limelet tosses and turns all night, but right after 6am he begins sleeping like the proverbial log and is bloody hard to wake, even at 7.

I Love You, Tubes!

2009-01-14T11:03:00.001-08:00

I haven't mentioned that Limelet has been taking (or asking for) non-squishy bedtime toys, such as his toy drill, the tube from the vacuum cleaner and an accompanying small green bouncy ball that just fits inside it, the radio-controlled car his Daddy got for Christmas, or the stickle-brick street sweeper, etc. This leads to a nursing situation that is less than comfortable for me in some cases (that drill is cold!) or just silly looking (snuggling a vacuum cleaner tube while sleepily nursing). However, heaven forbid we turn off the lights and then discover we have to go get his drill, or whatever. Usually he'll settle for the drill. But lately he's been waking up asking for the vacuum tube first thing in the morning. He had a huge tantrum after Daddy put the actual vacuum away the other day, because that was his new favoritest toy ever.

Oh yeah, there's also a random funny anecdote. Limelet has an Arthur video that shows library books opening up to disclose their contents, including (among many other things) a knight, various fish, cowboys on horses, and an unraveling mummy staggering out of a sarcophagus. I verbally labeled these items once when we were watching it. Some time later, we watched it again and I asked him what the things were on the screen. In reference to the mummy, he said, "Mama!" Now every time he sees a mummy swathed in bandages in any image (comes up surprisingly often in kids' books) he points to it and gleefully exclaims "Mamaaaa!" I can't begin to imagine how he has rationalized this particular appearance of Mama.

Too Much!

2009-01-12T08:25:00.001-08:00

I haven't blogged about Limelet in way too long; as usual because there is just too much going on with him to spend time blogging about it. So, perhaps bullet points or highlights.

1. Counts mostly to ten, also heard to say "eighteen, nineteen, tenteen...". Even heard him say "ninety-eight, hundred!" recently, which I guess I'm surprised they're already teaching him.

2. Sat on potty at daycare last Friday, all three times! After vigorously refusing for months. I've been priming him by nightly offering to let him sit on his potty after undressing for his bath, which he sometimes did momentarily. Last night he spent about 20 minutes on his potty at home, stuffing bits of toilet paper into it, which he thinks is the whole point.

3. Loves raw parsnips, as we discovered yesterday while making a vegetable stew. Turns out they are pretty good, actually. I was letting him select veggie chunks from the tureen, and he discovered parsnips.

4. Will be undergoing night weaning as of next weekend, as Mummy is tired of 30-seconds nursings interrupting her sleep every two hours for nearly three years. We'll be using Dr. Jay Gordon's technique, as I've never been able to quite implement the slow "unlatch before falling asleep" technique. I'm not looking forward to it, but the AP parenting community on Yahoo recommend it.

5. Loved Christmas, and we didn't overdo it with presents. I did make his box castle, which he learned immediately could be a refuge from bathtime.

6. Still obsessed with ducka beeps, in particular with street sweepers. He compels us to make street sweepers out of stickle bricks (or bristle blocks, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're from). I believe I started this with one street sweeper I made a few months back. Those bricks fall apart constantly, leading to a constant cry of "uh-oh wheel!" And then we have to fix it.

7. I believe he may have finally produced his last milk tooth!! He started at 4 months and has been teething at a rate of approximately one slow, sleep-interrupting, agonizing tooth per month. I think that the 20th one erupted a couple weeks ago, though. He's much less miserable. We should have had stock in baby Motrin.

8. His face is developing around his eyes now, so he is starting to look more like Daddy (my eyes, Dad's face.) Before he looked more like me because his eyes were the least-amorphous part of his appearance.

9. Loves to "read" books, and will sit on the floor next to his "library" carefully examining his books (or ours; he likes chapter books, too).

10. Is becoming very affectionate and will hug us while saying, "aaaawwwww!" In the "oh-how-cute" tone of voice that we use with him.

11. Prefers salty to sweet snacks or foods. I made rice pudding (the hearty kind, not the goopy kind). He opened his mouth for a taste, then immediately opened his mouth looking for a place to spit it out. Thinking it might be a fluke, I tried again later, with the same results and a "why are you doing this to me?" expression. Guess I'm the only rice pudding eater in the household.

I'm sure there's more, so I'll add to this later.

One Step Forward, One Back

2008-11-10T08:39:00.001-08:00

Limelet had two great days and nights last week after his ear infection was cleared up (apparently). I also think I saw a new molar on the left side, where I recently saw just a point or two poking through. Hard to tell with one that wiggly. Anyway, as always, we both remarked how he seems like a completely different kid when he's feeling okay: happy, outgoing, much sounder sleep, and often forgetting entirely that nursie's available. So he was like that for two days, and I had probably the best sleep I'd had in nearly three years (despite TheLimey's coughing and my own coughing). The time change helped somewhat, except that it would have been perfect if day care could have maintained the same absolute time for naps (of course not).

Saturday, Limelet started telling us his mouth 'urt while poking at the right side of his mouth. He started doing it several times a day, sometimes with a sudden outcry and a few running steps. Now he can tell us when he's teething. Well, this is true to form: the poor thing has a couple days at most of feeling okay, then right back to being miserable. I can't wait until these dang teeth are finally all the way out!

He was so exhausted and uncomfortable yesterday from teething, he fell asleep at 7:30 in my arms (nursing), which always means he will wake up later and be awake until midnight---which he did. And he awoke nearly every hour thereafter, until I tried to get him up. Then he couldn't be woken no matter what. He's also off his food again, after beginning to eat again for just a couple of days. I worry about his weight! Well, when he's miserable like this he nurses constantly, so he's not completely starving. He mostly eats yogurt, milk and soymilk, and sometimes onion buns.

I did get him outside to play in the recently fallen leaves, so that was good. It distracted him for a little while. He loved the leaf pile. He also allowed Daddy to give him a bath while I made a pie Saturday night, so that was extremely helpful. We also took him to an "Adventure Farm" that day, which he loved. It's the kind of place with a hujambous corn maze (we didn't go in that, but we would have with no kid), petting zoo of farm animals (Limelet loved the black chickens and the ducks, while TheLimey loved the baby chicks--I liked the baby mini-goats), food booths (1.5 pounds of fudge somehow came home with us), and kid activities. Limelet's favorite was a big wooden tractor he could "drive", although he was not that interested in jumping on the giant "jumping cushion" without his shoes.

In other aspects, Limelet's gotten pretty good at counting to five, at least the verbal part of it. He still counts objects sort of randomly. He does know the numbers up to ten, but doesn't always get them in the right order. He also still does that startling thing where he puts words to something that he remembers from before he could talk about it. He loves Ratatouille and we have now watched it about 100 times during the past month while one or the other of us was sick. Thank goodness both of us like it as well as he does. We have tried not to watch TV with him too much (or rather have him watch TV with us), but have failed in some cases (like during sickness). Well, not regular TV, but videos. Mostly Ratatouille and videos of construction trucks.

I desperately hope the tooth comes through soon. I can't even peek in there to see how it's doing unless he's crying or laughing.

My current goal with him is to be more patient with him when he's crying for no apparent reason, because sometime a person just needs to cry. (And sometimes there's another reason I don't know.)

Toddler Traumas

2008-11-03T07:58:00.001-08:00

This morning as I was carrying draped over my shoulder a lightly snoozing Limelet down the stairs to gently wake him in the armchair, my socks slipped on the carpet and I fell. Slid on my behind, really, which hurt in several places but not so much as what happened to poor little Limelet, who was woken by having his head bang against at least two stairs as we fell. Horrible, horrible, horrible! I can't tell you how awful it was to see his little shocked face, mouth wide open in a soundless cry as he tried to react to whatever the hell terrifying inexplicable thing had just happened. I had to give him words for it, tell him that Mama and Limelet fell down and bonked his head, and his head hurt, all phrases he can understand. Without an explanation those things are more traumatizing.

Luckily the stairs are carpeted (I can't bear to think of what it would have been like if they'd been uncarpeted wood) and I don't think there was any serious damage, but it wouldn't be out of the question for him to have a concussion or whiplash. I think I'm getting a little whiplash from it myself. I watched him for about an hour afterwards, and I left him at daycare with a note explaining to keep an eye on his eyes and so forth.

He's also still on antibiotics for his ear infection (we've all been sick for over three weeks now) and he still has a very low appetite and has been pretty touchy, so he's just a wreck overall, poor little thing. He had to go home early on Halloween since he wasn't feeling well enough to join in the snacks. (He did, however, greatly enjoy the handful of trick-or-treaters we had at the house.)

He's still occasionally mentioning--apparently out of the blue--how he had throwup and Daddy wiped it (it was last week.) So it helps to have a verbal explanation when you're trying to process a trauma. I'm so glad I get that, for his sake.

Ear

2008-10-29T09:42:00.001-07:00

Limelet's first ear infection. I feel I've let him down somehow, because so far he's never had one. I know that being in day care increases likelihood of ear infection, as does lack of breastfeeding. Guess he can't be 100% immune to everything. I just hope this doesn't turn into a regular thing like you see with some kids.

But he's had this lingering cold-type thing (that TheLimey also has been having, lingeringly), and he was coughing so much that it made him throw up last week (and again last night). The day care called me yesterday to tell me that he was running a fever and he was crying. Luckily I had already seen my last client for the day, and was able to cancel my group. Poor little thing was definitely not well. He was better after some ibuprofen for his fever, but I called and got a clinic appointment for today anyway. Poor little thing had no appetite for anything except yogurt, which he snarfed down like crazy. It wasn't so fun when it was coming up again a few hours later, however. He learned the word "throwup" pretty quickly.

During his bath last night he told me "ear hurt" and "tummy hurt," and sure enough: threw up soon after, and was found to have an ear infection this morning. I think his ear was really hurting him last night at a few points. At any rate, he went to sleep okay initially but woke up soon after (to cough and throw up) and we went downstairs and let him watch cartoons on tape. (Lately a lot of Ratatouille, with fast-forwarding over any violence). We were up until about 1am.

TheLimey took today off (his brand-new job, no less) to stay home with Limelet and to take him to the clinic, which apparently went well. I'm glad I made the appointment even though it seemed like something he'd probably get over with or without the doctor, because of the ear infection aspect. I do have to believe that nursing him has at least reduced his chance of ear infections, and it certainly helps during. If he is still doing poorly tonight/tomorrow, then I will probably work only in the morning and then stay home with him, so TheLimey can get back to his new job.

Midnight Comic

2008-10-14T10:00:00.001-07:00

Like many of us, Limelet sometimes gets slap-happy when he's awake too late.

The other night I was trying to get him to sleep and he was almost there, but then had a sudden wake-up, which turned into hysterical laughter for no apparent reason. He pointed at me and joked, "robot mama!" I pursed my lips so as not to laugh, but he persisted. "Mama robot," he insisted, poking his little finger into my pursed lips. "Vunny!" he exclaimed, "Vunny!" as he tried to physically force me to laugh at his joke.

I don't know where he got "robot Mama," but in case he reads this in the future, yes dear, it was quite vunny. I just really needed you to sleep.

bloon_1

2008-09-22T19:08:00.001-07:00

bloon_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Now We Are Two

2008-09-18T12:05:00.001-07:00

Limelet is 2 today! But we're having his celebration on Saturday. Well, I may give him a prezzie tonight, and I did take cookies to his day care today. But the day of kid fun stuff will be Saturday.

Odds

2008-09-08T09:24:00.001-07:00

I keep forgetting to write--okay, wait, I'm not forgetting, I just don't have the time to do it.

Do-over:

I keep not having the time to write about all the stuff I think that I want to keep a record of, like the time recently when we were visiting some acquaintances and Limelet saw the father (or grandfather now, I guess) coming up the basement stairs towards him bearing a big, (sharp) metal trailer-truck toy from the '70s for him to play with. He was so delighted that he clapped his hands and was frozen to the spot in open-mouthed ecstasy. We sure had a hard time prying him away from that truck later when we had to leave, I'll tell you that. It was traumatic. But the earlier part was great fun.

I may have mentioned before that Limelet is now completely obsessed with contruction vehicles (or tucka beeps). I would say that tucka beep is the phrase that most often leaves his lips during any given day lately. (Daddy says doggo beeps, but that's his take on it.) He also runs to the front windows (Limelet, not TheLimey) when he hears a siren, because he wants to see the la-la tuck. He now knows the nearby hospital as the la-la 'ome, because that's where the la-las live, of course.

It's been quite a while since he said a-a-a-a-pole (apple); he now just says appole. He's developed a lot of pronunciation skills in addition to increasing his vocabulary.

In the past couple months he also developed a strange nursing quirk. It started as him wanting to stick his hand into my tummy folds while nursing, and gradually developed into wanting to rest his thumb or finger in my bellybutton. In fact, now if he can't reach my bellybutton, he tears at my waistband and loudly demands but-ton. I imagine that I've allowed him to develop a behavior that will later be some bizarre f#t1sh. (Apologies, future girlfriend/wife!) I guess some kids have to play with their mothers' hair while nursing, so it's not objectively strange in that sense. It's just conditioned association. But--button? Really.

Earlier this year he was highly amused by a Youtube video featuring a cartoon blowfish humorously deflating. Recently I got him a video of 1930s Disney animal cartoon shorts, and one has a blowfish that inflates, is subsequently eaten by a penguin, repeatedly inflates while inside the penguin, is popped out of the penguin, and wriggles off in an inflated huff. That cartoon makes Limelet laugh his little behind off. But again, I worry that somehow this will develop into one of those truly odd inflation f#t1shes. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky.)

Limelet started his new day care last week and seems content with it. He didn't cry when dropped off by either of us, and he is sleeping and eating fine while there. I think he is still a little leery about the separation aspect, but is becoming more at home with the whole concept. I will be happy when he's been there a few weeks and it starts feeling familiar to him.

It certainly seems a lot less chaotic than the chain daycare we were using here (though in Michigan it was slightly less so), and all the kids in his "class" are new, so they're all new together. They do have great toys there, small class sizes, tidy rooms, and a cute little teeny toilet for training. It's especially awesome that it's only a few blocks away. (The day care, not the toilet.) There is also going to be a nursing home in the same building, so apparently they're looking into doing some sort of intergenerational granny-nanny thing, which might be nice.

Even if my contract is not renewed or updated or something, we'll likely keep him in the same facility, now that he's in. The only bad thing so far is their inflexibility about scheduling, but we'll deal with that later, right?

Leaps and Bounds

2008-09-03T13:20:00.001-07:00

I can hardly even keep up with all the changes in Limelet during the past month or so. He's exploding in a flurry of development.

He's talking up a storm these days, and immediately mimics everything he hears. Not always understandable to others, but it's getting to be more so. A few days ago he started pronouncing nursie as nursie instead of nehnie. Well, he still says neh-neh for shorthand, but says nursie as the more formal version. However, he does appear to have somewhat of his Daddy's accent for now, so it comes out as nuhsie.

He also generated his first complex sentence the other day (if I remember my high-school grammar, which is doubtful). Correct me if needed. I hate not knowing.

Anyway, we were out walking with Limelet in the stroller, and a motorcycle went past. He reported motorbike. I gave him a few squirrel peanuts, which he loves to shell and eat himself. He tossed one on the sidewalk and exclaimed Bah-bah mobike eh peadut, linking those two disparate events and objects with an and. I was ever so proud of him. He even says squirrel now (koi-oi-o).

Limelet had to go to Kindercare a few days a week for several weeks until a space opened up at the new, really cool daycare that is associated with the College and is only a couple blocks from home and work. Poor thing has had so many transitions lately. He had diarrhea for several weeks around the time of moving, especially the week we were packing. I think the tension and stress and unpredictability got to him. He got over the worst of the transition to Kindercare just in time to be moved to the new daycare, but we really want him there. It's a lot nicer, and way closer (walk a few blocks instead of drive five miles). And because it's subsidized, it's even a bit cheaper. I hope we can keep him there through kindergarten, as they are apparently developing kindergarten classes, too. I want some stability for him.

He seems greatly recovered from the move now. He loves the new place and seems noticeably happier. Possibly because his parents are happier, I don't doubt. It's a million times easier to take care of him there, as there is space for him to play while one cooks or tidies up a bit. He can walk out into the back yard and play with twigs, balls, or the neighbor's doggie. Even the bathtub is bigger and easier to bathe him in! I instituted a policy of us all simultaneously doing activities that we were having trouble getting him to do, such as brushing teeth or eating breakfast. It has worked extremely well. He appears to be very socially influenced (by us).

He's still obsessed with balls, especially basketball (ba-bawh). He calls American footballs eggy-baw, because of the shape.

Certain odd things--words, phrases--have struck him as especially funny, mainly things in his videos (which he does watch maybe half an hour from time to time). 1. Bunny character talking while blowing dandelion fluff, "breakfast time - pffff; lunchtime - pffff; teatime - pffff; suppertime - pffff". Especially the "teatime" part. 2. Arthur Aardvark begging for his puppy to be allowed in the house, "Please please please please please!" 3. Two mouse characters saying to one another "Twelve?" "Twelve!". He asks to see those segments over and over, and talks about them later. I think they just strike his fancy as interesting or unexpected sounds.

Toddler Culture Shock

2008-08-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

We moved to Pennsylvania. We're here. (This post overlaps my other blog's post somewhat, just so y'know.)

We said bye-bye to home and Limelet's favorite "Auntie" babysitter/neighbor. I think he did understand that we were leaving for good. Poor little thing developed daily diarrhea during the week we were packing, and it's continued until now, though it's a little less bad now. He also stopped eating very much at all the week before we moved. He had a checkup and was in good shape physically--I think it's just been the anxiety of everyting changing and him not knowing what was going to happen next or influence it. The boxes completely filling that tiny, squalid apartment didn't help at all, nor did having stressed-out parents, I'm sure.

The train trip was 27 hours of hassle, but still not as bad as taking Limelet in the car would have been. At least he slept and ate. The really annoying part was that the first leg of the trip was changed from 4 hours of train to hours of bus--train--bus; this meant that I had to get off and on numerous conveyances wityh a toddler and all my luggage and drag it all around in the sweltering heat three times instead of just getting on a train and spreading out. I took as little as possible, but still with a small child you have to take a lot of stuff that may never get used, because you never know which thing will be necessary.

Lucky for both of us he likes buses and trains, and looking out the window and eating snack crackers was pretty entertaining for most of it. I'm so glad I had a couple of slings along, because then Limelet felt secure and I could drag my luggage and old tickets and whatnot. Oh, I also had a new collapsible Jeep stroller that someone left at the laundry "donation" area of our old place just a couple days before we left. That was incredibly helpful, too, because it's a stroller he actually likes being in (higher up, and can sit up straight and see things instead of being forced to recline). I like it because it's very maneuverable.

Also lucky is that I'm still nursing, given his reduced appetite and increased need for comfort and snuggulations lately. I bought a few (used) interesting toys for him to play with, but one unexpectedly came with a siren and I didn't get it out; the other one was a little Leapfrog music device that he loved at a neigbbor's, but turned out to be a lot less interested in on the train. Oh well.

People were mostly nice and often helpful, at least the passengers, especially the women. Most of the people who spontaneously helped me with my baggage were women. However, there were a surprising number of conductors who were less than understanding of a mother traveling alone with a toddler.

Limelet loves our "newome". He actually has space to walk around and play inside the house, as well as a fenced back yard with a Boston terrier nextdoor who is exceedingly accepting of Limelet's feeding him miniscule pieces of sticks. TheLimey made sure to install baby gates before he left, as Limelet is obsessed with our stairs and will not stay off them. For some reason he narrates stair-climbing (or -descending) by chanting "Oh-dee, oh-dee, oh-dee." This may stem from Go Dog Go in which dogs climb a ladder up a tree ("Up the tree, up the tree!"), but I'm not sure.

His language development grew completely weed-wild in the week or two before we moved. I think this was developmental rather than situational. I can actually have a conversation with him now, although I don't know that others would understand his responses. But it's clear that he understands what I'm saying to him. What's strange for us, his parents, was realizing that he can talk about a lot of things that occurred during the past year for which he didn't have language at the time, and that he remembers things a lot further back than we imagined.

His communicative leap has been helpful in being able to explain important things to him now, too, such as moving or going to the doctor. I always tell him when there's going to be something unpleasant so that it's not out of the blue, like when he got his recent shot. And I'm now able to tell him that we are or are not going to day care, because it got so that he would become pensive when we were driving anywhere. I figured out that it was because he was waiting for the day care shoe to drop, so now I tell him outright. He's always happy when I say "No day care. No, no. We're going to the store."

Limelet is accepted into the college-run day care, but not until they move to their new location on September 1. So he's in a chain day care place, and I don't feel very comfortable with it (day care in general and this one in particular). Not as many workers per child as the last place, which means that when he's upset, they don't have time to comfort him. And I hate making him have all these transitions. He was crying his heart out when I came in to pick him up last night, and he immediately burst into tears this morning when I dropped him off.

Everything is all changed or gone, Daddy's gone (Limelet doesn't really understand when he'll be back), day care (that he had just barely gotten used to anyway) has complete strangers in it, and he's spending longer days there. I want to get him into the new day care (which is nicer, and two blocks away from us instead of 5 miles), but it will mean yet another transition to strangers, when he's already so homesick. Poor little tyke. I just think it's unnatural and kind of wrong to do this to him. I hate, hate, hate dropping him off and leaving him crying.

Meanwhile, at home, I did set up the TV. No reception, but I picked up a couple of used videos at the thrift store. Limelet is enthralled with the Raffi ("Bwabbi") concert video and wants me to sing the songs in the car. He also loves our new bathtub (as do I) which is a lot bigger and swimmier. There is a playground down the block, so we still get to go do that when I'm not too dead to take him out.

posted by liz @ 10:05 AM

Videos

2008-07-28T05:25:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed, a while ago I posted some breastfeeding how-to video clips on YouTube. I've gotten about ten bazillion annoying comments on them, which generally fall into two groups: "I am a creepy fet1sh1st, thanks for the pr*n," or "I am a product of a bre@st-fet1sh culture, hide those things, this is pr*n!" I'm not sure which is more annoying. But I keep the video clips up there, because every once in a while I get a message like this:

Breastfeeding videos

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR POSTING THESE VIDEOS... Im a new mommy, just 8 days old, and I have had excrutiating pain while breastfeeding. It was so bad that I abhored the momment when the baby woke up hungry, because it only meant more pain. Tonight me and my Mom started checking some pages on the web to see if there was any way to improve the pain. We saw the video and decided to try it...and I have never been happier. No pain whatsoever, now I look forward to breastfeeding my baby.

Thank you so much

[sender's name withheld to protect privacy]

I actually teared up when I read this, because I know how hard it is even when the breastfeeding is going okay. But once that's established, it starts making everything else a little easier.

Green Eyes!

2008-07-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

Limelet's eyes turned green today*; a striking pale aqua green like his Daddy's eyes.
For the past two days or so I'd been thinking I saw some green highlights in the blue, but I was always wearing a green shirt or being outside in the grass with him, so I wasn't sure if it was my imagination or reflections. But suddenly today the green burst out, especially right around the pupils.
Also, his hair has been looking strawberry blond more and more frequently. Maybe I'll have a green-eyed redhead after all.

*His 22-month birthday.

Visiting

2008-06-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Bad Scalp Day, Good Pool Day

2008-06-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Wow

2008-05-23T07:15:00.001-07:00

Many of us could probably do this, if we were lactating and had enough caloric intake. But how many police officers even think to breastfeed nine children of other people, even in a disaster?

Explosion

2008-05-19T08:01:00.001-07:00

As of yesterday, Limelet's 20-month birthday, I would say he officially began his vocabulary explosion. He started repeating words after one exposure, including cards (cahds), bubbles (bolbols), berries (bouries), and signs for several words, including blocks and game (which, actually, I forgot I showed him the other night).

Ouch

2008-05-07T10:00:00.001-07:00

Having been away from Limelet for almost two days, I can say that he drinks a lot more nursie milk than I thought. I brought the pump, thank goodness, but still experienced a lot of engorgement and soreness--think I have a bit of mastitis today, in fact. The pump hurts to use and hardly gets out anything compared to a baby. And when my flight was delayed for several hours in the middle of the night, I had to pump in a bathroom stall at the airport, which is not fun at all. I was so grateful to climb into bed at 3 am and allow him to nurse. Even in his sleep he was obviously very happy to have the nursies (and me) back, too.

TMI, But Not Explicitly So.

2008-04-29T06:38:00.001-07:00

It's taken nearly 20 months, but I finally have my hormonal cycle back. Some women get it back immediately, despite nursing. I admit I worried a little bit, since other mothers I know have been back to normal for months.
Although it was actually kind of nice not having to deal with it, in some ways. But it's reassuring to think that maybe I can still produce the other bio-kid we were thinking of. (Besides the adopted one(s) that we're also thinking of, of course.) And there are other aspects of hormones besides childbearing, such as just feeling more like my old familiar self again. (It's just too bad that had to include the familiar breaking-out-of-skin aspect of myself.)

Big Kid

2008-04-24T20:07:00.001-07:00

Limelet lost his container fetish at some point in the past couple of months. I'm not sure exactly when it was, but he isn't that interested any more. Well, okay, sometimes he's interested in containers, if they're full of something, preferably something dangerous.

He's starting to put two words together--both in sign and spoken language--to form little sentences. Moh, neh-neh, he says, requesting to continue nursing, while signing the words too. You'll notice he doesn't say more but moh--I think this is actually an accent and not an omission. He no longer says bah for ball--he says boll. Like weevil. Or like a kid with an English daddy. It's cute.

He no longer says no nooo! when he means oh no--just today I noticed he started saying oh nooo! instead. And he waves hi (but doesn't say it) in addition to bah. He's started mimicking actions and signs on the first go, and often tries to do so with words, too. He really likes the sound of one two three, but can't really pronounce it yet.

He imitates anything that makes a noise, from the ducks at the door to the air vent in the back yard to the signal beep of the construction trucks. I think I got him started on that, probably by constantly imitating things that made noises. And he often imitates the sounds of older kids shouting to one another, but in a gibberish way.

Spring

2008-04-17T16:17:00.001-07:00

Spring has finally arrived, despite the snow last weekend. Limelet and Thelimey can go outside for a lot of the day, which is a huge relief. Heck, it's a relief for me that I can take him outside after dinner. It means that a) he's happy, and b) I don't have to carry him the entire time because he can climb up on the little slide on his own and c) he sleeps better if he's been outside playing. That's a big one.

He's teething again (or still?), which means that there were 5 nights in a row on which he woke up at 3am, then stayed awake for anywhere from 3 to 6 hours. This means I have been getting a number of 3-hour sleep nights before going to work, which is a frikkin' TORTURE. And it's not like I can come home and nap, either; I just have to hope that the following night goes better. So then we had three nights of relatively good sleep (two of which involved baby Motrin), and then a really late night, then a funeral the following day that completely threw off his nap schedule (which takes several days to recover from).

Every time this starts to happen (which is all too frequently, or constantly, really) I tell myself it's teething. Then after a while I begin to doubt my judgment and start thinking that I just don't have a good handle on keeping his sleep schedule in line. And then a new tooth appears, and I feel guilty for the breakthrough irritation events (rare as those are despite the severe sleep deprivation!) This time, I told myself that I would not forget that it is always teething in the end! And then the pediatrician confirmed the tooth coming through during Limelet's torture--I mean, office visit / vaccination--yesterday. If there was no possible liver and kidney damage with taking Tylenol or Motrin every night, I'd just dose him up. But I have to save it for especially bad nights, and...honestly, there's no way of knowing which night is going to be really bad until it's already underway, and then it's more or less too late.

A while back he started getting more eczema in random places, for which the pedi gave him some cortisone lotion. I used it because there was a spot on his leg about two inches across that had become so raw that I was worrying about infection. Keeping in mind what our previous pedi had said about food and eczema, I tried the no-dairy thing for 10 days. I didn't want it to be milk, but that was my suspicion. Sure enough, the eczema improved greatly. Then we let him have a bunch of dairy again for a few days and it came back like crazy. Stopped it again, and after a week it had diminished dramatically again. Then I forgot and let him share my ice cream cone one day, and he had a rash again.

So, he's allergic to milk. Crud! I love dairy. Actually, so does he. We tried just reducing his dairy intake to one small cup of milk before bedtime, which he particularly likes, but that led to fresh breakouts. We hope he may grow out of it. However, until then, he's getting rice milk, soy milk, fruit juice, and his new favorite, Kidz Dream soy smoothies.

It seems like he knows more than he's letting on. He often seems to understand words after one exposure, but doesn't necessarily try to say them himself. He's more likely to mimic if the words are sung or chanted than spoken. He does like to mimic our actions now, including signs. He still loves music and dancing.

He seems like such a boy now instead of a baby. A small child, but a child nonetheless. He loves to interact with people in public, usually by waving bah-bah. He uses bah-bah like aloha, coming or going. The other day he had some more vaccinations at the doctor. He hates not only the injections but the examinations. Maybe especially the examinations--a stranger overpowering him. Poor little thing. Anyway, after the exam, as the doctor was leaving the room, TheLimey reports that Limelet waved and sobbed, "bah-bah" through his tears, to the doctor as he left. Pitiful!

It seems like there's tons of other stuff that's been going on that I wanted to blog about, but can't remember it now.

Enough!

2008-03-28T10:42:00.001-07:00

This winter has GOTTA end.

Both TheLimey and I are beginning to understand why people choose to move to warmer states, although we used to pooh-pooh them roundly. Winter is tolerable when you're an adult and you can do grownup stuff. Even fun winter-oriented stuff.

But when you're stuck in the house for FIVE freakin' months of the year with a baby or toddler, things look otherwise. And when you're stuck in a tiny, tiny, tiny squalid (even roach-bearing) apartment that is chock-full of things a kid really really wants but isn't allowed to have (like the stove, the soggy germy kitchen sponge, the VCR, Daddy's entire computer, the bread knives, boxes of chokey dry noodles and beans, jugs of cleansers [although of course they're way up high], rolls of toilet paper, and the toilet itself, etc.) it's very otherwise.

I've been looking online for advice about activities to do with a bored toddler. Many of them include "go outside!" Well, duh. And we do take Limelet outside as often as possible: it's just such an event to get him fed and dressed to go out (and yourself at the same time). It often takes an entire hour just to get out the door. And then if it's really cold, he needs to come back in after 15 or 20 minutes. And it all has to be timed around his nap, meals, and...whatever. This can mean an entire morning revolves around taking him outside for 15 minutes. He does go to certain activities, like some playgroups at the library or whatever. But they are at certain times and on certain days, and therefore don't help when he's crying and cranky at some other time.

Just being able to step outside at any time would be a HUGE help, but we can't do that so simply.

Other suggestions I've seen include letting them play with a bunch of dried beans or sand and scoop them around. Finger-painting was also in there. Well, I could potentially see doing that, but we really just don't have the space for him to do "projects". Especially messy or potentially hazardous ones. I can't emphasize the crampedness factor enough as a problem. It doesn't help that along with the smallness, there is the fact that every room leads to every other room. What I mean by this is, you can't get to the bathroom or the bedroom without going through the kitchen and the office. We don't really have a usable kitchen floor.

So not only is the kitchen literally the size of our old bathroom minus the tub (for those of you who've seen our old place) it's also a major thoroughfare. And the office would be a decent size if it wasn't mostly taken up with throughways to the bathroom and bedroom, plus a big desk with our computers, and our office bookshelves. Oh, and my dresser. What this means is that we have to take Limelet through the kitchen and office (FULL of items he wants but can't have) to go to the bathroom ourselves, give him a bath, change his nappy, get his clothes, or put him to bed. And the only other place, the one room that he can even freely be in is the living room, which makes him truly insane after a while of being trapped in it. (Who wouldn't be?)

The rugs are filthy and ragged after a winter of high use and constant food exposure, and the windows are far above his head so he can't even look outside unless he's a) being carried by one of us or b) standing at the open door, looking out the storm door (which it's still too cold to do).

Other suggestions included making playdates. Again, duh. I think a lot of the suggestions must be for older toddlers who maybe have slightly more "friend" relationships than "parallel play" interactions with other kids. So theoretically, he could go visit some other kid, if TheLimey was up to organizing, initiating, and preparing for that activity. However, I can't even imagine having another kid over to our place to play.

I guess all the suggestions simply boil down to "do something" or "go somewhere" and both options are just hard right now. All this would be completely okay if the weather would just stop being completely inhospitable, so he could just go outside and play during the day.

18 Months

2008-03-20T08:10:00.001-07:00

Limelet's 18-month-iversary was actually two days ago, but there it is.

Last night when I got home, TheLimey was heading to football [soccer], so I decided to take Limelet out during the brief period before his bedtime. A nearby shopping mall just opened a new play area for small children, and I wanted to try that out. It's ironic that they opened it just as spring is springing, instead of during the winter when we so desperately needed it, but--oh well. It might be useful for hot weather, too. Anyway.

So I fed, dressed, and packed him up, and we went to the mall. I don't know if he's ever been to one, come to think of it. Neither TheLimey nor I tend to frequent malls, and I can't remember the last time I went to one, so it's likely that Limelet hasn't been before. He was very impressed with the mall decor and music, and kept staring all around us murmuring, ohwow, ohwow. ohwow!

When we got to the play area, I was happy with it. It had a thigh-high padded wall all around it with soft benches, and soft carpeting inside. There area contained maybe five soft play structures/sculptures for kids to climb on and slide down. They were made of something like a yoga mat is filled with, but the plastic coating was shiny and slippery instead of matte. The play sculptures were in various shapes such as a bridge, a truck, a staircase, and (Limelet's favorite) an airplane. The airplane also had a little "cockpit" where the children could sit and turn a steering wheel. That was his favorite part of the whole place. They also had some toys built into the walls, which he also liked a lot.

The negative aspect was just basically a few older kids that were running around and around the enclosure at top speed and shrieking, completely not noticing when they bashed into anyone, whatever that person's size. I'm not sure those kids weren't all the progeny of one harassed-looking woman. At any rate, one of the dashing shriekers pushed another child who was climbing on the airplane, who then slid off and inadvertently kicked Limelet in the mouth. It hurt him, but amazingly he didn't quite cry. His little mouth crumpled up and he looked at the other child in a very wounded way, but he didn't quite get to the point of crying. And then he went back to playing and it was fine. (The rules stated that kids should be under 42" to use the area, but I think a few of them were stretching it.)

Limelet has started understanding words in one go more often, and he may be set to start generating them after hearing them once as well. Yesterday he learned instantly the new word "tuna" ("nuna"). He was also very upset that he couldn't play with the open tin of nuna as he really, really wanted to do. With a knife, of course.

Nuna is aurally closely related to his full term for n-n-nursie, which is neh-neh-nuna. (Abbreviated, it's just neh-neh.) Ha ha! I almost forgot. He just discovered in the mirror after his bath that he has little tiny "nursies", so now he pinches at them and asks, neh-neh?

When he wants to go to sleep at night (which occasionally happens), he climbs into my lap and asks for neh-neh. Then I announce that it's time to say night-night Daddy, which Limelet has translated to bah-bah-Didda. TheLimey would often say not only night-night but bye-bye Booboo, which Limelet has also taken to saying. Sometimes he gets Bs and Ds mixed up, though, so last night he said bah-bah Doodoo. (He doesn't know what doodoo is, though. We say poo.) After we sat down in the rocking chair to nurse, he uncharacteristically interrupted the nursing process and sleepily said, bah-bah Booboo. And then he went back to going to sleep. Just couldn't go to sleep while he knew he'd said it wrong, I guess.

Baby Borrowers - Revolting

2008-03-19T06:56:00.001-07:00

By now you've all probably all already seen the fracas about the Baby Borrowers, an NBC program in which parents abandon their babies (yeah, I said it, ABANDON!) to teenage strangers for three days solid, leaving the infants to grieve for their parents as if they were kidnapped or orphaned, since babies can't be made to understand that their parents are coming back in a few days. I don't care that the parents are watching from behind a two-way mirror. The babies don't know that.

The focus of the program, of course, is on whether the teenagers can hack it as parents. We all already know people who were teen parents or raised by teen parents. Parenting is hard, and even harder on teens, that's all there is to it, so expect it to be frickin' hard, whoop de doo. Some hack it, some merely survive it.

But meanwhile, I am just sickened by the baby aspect of it. Who would do this?!

If it was for 8 hours a day, maybe it would be similar to daycare, and at least the babies would have their parents back for bedtime etc. But then you couldn't get to see how teenagers respond to being kept awake all night by a grieving infant, so I guess it wouldn't be as interesting.

I guess it's already too late, as the filming must already have been done. I'm still angry about it. Will they survive and grow up to be normal people? Probably; kids are resilient. But there are a lot of terrible things that kids can survive that you shouldn't inflict on them purposely.

Gender Issues

2008-03-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm not that concerned about trying to present Limelet as super-masculine.

In fact I'm a bit annoyed with a lot of children's clothing (and toys, etc.), as it seems to fall either into the "trucks, dinosaurs, military, and [American] footballs" category or the "sparkly pink and purple marabou princess" category, with little in between. Since I buy his clothing second-hand, I may limit my choices somewhat further; I don't know for sure. Why can't they have more stuff that's broadly applicable, like planets, animals, atoms, musical instruments, and smiley faces? (And why are dinosaurs supposed to be "for boys"? Weren't at least half of all dinosaurs likely female?)

Anyway, I try to get basic, solid-solor (hopefully) cotton items that are not specifically "girl" items. So most of his clothes end up being some form of blue, green, red, and white, with some orange, brown, and black here and there. His little coat with the zip-out liner is navy and dark green camo-print (the alternative? Pink, of course). He has little brown hiking boots.

So why, why WHY, given that he's not wearing pink and sparkly clothes, does everyone refer to him as "she"? Always! Even if they have a sparkly pink-clad toddler in tow themselves!

Granted, part of it may be because I haven't been able to bring myself to cut off the shiny curls at the back of his neck yet, but it's not like he has a huge mane of hair or something. And with his hat on, you can't even really see his hair anyway. I don't think it's really the hair: I think it's because he has such big, pretty eyes and (his dad's) pouty lips.

But it does make me think people are pretty narrow-minded. (I'm trying to avoid the word "dumb".) For gender clues, you look at a child's clothing, as their bodies aren't very differentiated yet physically (which is why our gender-anxious society came up with the whole monster-trucks-versus-mermaids toddler clothing dichotomy in the first place).

But basic politeness suggests: if you can't tell, then use gender-neutral pronouns. Duh! How much harder is it to say "How old is your baby?" than "How old is she?" Of course, this all goes to the whole gender-sex discussion, in which those things are social constructs anyway.

But I just can't figure out why people apparently must specifically say "girl" if they're not sure. I guess it's lucky Limelet has a gender-confident same-sex parent.

Briefly

2008-03-16T09:30:00.001-07:00

Limelet now says "ummmm...." complete with furrowed brow and all. His application is a little scattershot, however.

Despite all the discussion about people snarking about nursing mothers (whether in public or just in general), I don't think I've had even one negative comment so far about nursing Limelet. One older woman asked me if I still had enough milk for him, but that's about as far as it's gotten.

I don't know why I haven't had any problems where others report it. Of course, I don't usually nurse him in public openly, so there goes one source of potential conflict. No one has criticized me for nursing him longer, either. Which is a good thing, because I'm not that interested in stopping just yet!

firs_5

2008-03-14T19:42:00.001-07:00

firs_5
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Thank goodness that winter's finally broken after that last few weeks of really snowy weather. Limelet and Dada can go outside again instead of being trapped in the tiny hovel.

Almost 18 Months

2008-03-05T10:10:00.001-08:00

More of a news roundup than an essay.

Limelet has lately begun "using his words" (as they say) a lot more, both spoken and sign. "No" is one that he manages to do really cutely, and it's been easy to see the progression of head-shaking from turning his face away from unwanted food to general nay-saying.

He does seem to be picking up the odd word in one go lately, but it hasn't taken off like crazy. He realized that he could say "up" the other day, for example (well, he says it without the "p", but he's trying) and that it would make me stand up. He crawls onto my lap and grabs my shoulders and tells me to get up, because he's bored by being near the floor. Also, there are more cool things to grab and manipulate above the three-foot mark...which is for a reason. It's all stuff we're trying to keep out of his reach.

He draws in the bath with his washable crayons, and has reduced his eating of them. He draws pretty good circular figures now ("around and around"), but I can't tell which is his dominant hand yet. He ALWAYS kicks left-footed, however, which makes TheLimey pretty happy. (Apparently a left-footed kicker is always in demand.)

Limelet has occasionally had some eczema in the past, but not to the point where some Noxzema wouldn't get rid of it in a few days (and I tried a bunch of stuff, including olive oil, and dietary changes.) But in the past week he started getting some really bad patches, including one on his leg that got pretty raw from scratching. Luckily, we had a doctor visit set up for yesterday anyway. Now he has been prescribed cortisone cream (2% solution, and diluted with equal parts Eucerin cream.) It seems to be helping, which I'm not too surprised about since cortisone is an anti-inflammatory agent. However, I was hoping to avoid cortisone anything--though it's better than his leg becoming infected, which was a risk with how badly raw it had become. (And I thought it was pretty odd that the doctor declared the zinc-oxide cream I'd been using--mainly as a barrier--as being "too strong", but then prescribed cortisone.)

Limelet has gone directly to wearing size 3T, which theoretically is a size for three-year-olds. Or maybe it's just "toddlers' size 3." His 80c hiking boots still fit him, but they won't for too long. I went back to the second-hand store and found another pair of boots that are a little bigger for $2. They look kinda like Docs. (I'm sure TheLimey will want him to have little braces and a bowler any minute now.)

Still working on getting his vaccinations done gradually, so that he can enter day care next summer. I am of mixed emotions about that. I would like to stay home with him at least half time, and it seems like being away from parental care for 40 hours a week (plus drive-time, I'm sure) is an awful lot for a little tyke. Yes, I know plenty of people do it, but people do all kinds of things that I don't agree with. One of the sites I recently applied to advertised "convenient on-site day care", so I was pretty excited about that one. But haven't heard back from them--they're probably looking for someone more experienced (heck, maybe even licensed).

Winter has been especially hard on both TheLimey and Limelet lately. They are often trapped in that tiny, tiny apartment all day since it's been so bitter bitter cold. There are indoor activities they go to on some days, like the library playgroups, but if either of them is sick, or something else happens to throw off the daily schedule, then there goes that day's possible outlet. Of course going out like that requires an entire morning's preparation for an hour's activity, too.

So we are all impatient for spring, though Limelet doesn't know that's what he's impatient for. He just wants to be outside. He will play at making footprints in the snow until his fingers are numb and his face is beet-red, if it's left up to him.

He still plays with his Matchbox cars daily. They are his most constant entertainment. I also found at the second-hand store a device that apparently blows ping-pong balls out and rolls them down a swirly ramp, only to be sucked up and blown out again. We need to get some batteries and ping-pong balls to try it out. Meanwhile, Limelet stuffs it full of Matchbox cars and then demands that it be emptied out so he can drop them in again.

Several of the Fuzzi Bunz diapers became destroyed (plastic came unbonded with the fabric, and some elastics denatured) by the super-hot dryers. Ideally, they are line-dried, or at least dried on low heat in the dryer. But we can't really have a clothesline here, and the dryers have limited settings: basically scorching or air fluff, and we've been using scorching. Now we have to go to air fluff; hope it doesn't take all day!

Limelet is becoming a regular little boy instead of a baby, but he's still my little baby. Weird: when he's 30, we'll be about 70!

Email Blog Entry About Toys

2008-02-08T19:01:00.001-08:00

One of those entries excerpted outright from an email.

_____________________________________________

Limelet is happy and has plenty of toys, though we do our best to keep them weeded out. He does like those little cars and has a little plastic spiral ramp that they can drive down (some of the models anyway). Though potentially the wheels could be a hazard he has not shown any interest in biting them off so far, so he is allowed to play with them.

I have tried him on crayons, which he loves---a little too much. He draws a few lines and then bites chunks off each crayon, which is probably not the best use for them, right? Lately his favorite thing to play with has been a very small saucepan from the kitchen, with an onion ("neyno") in it. A real one. He has little toy wooden spices that he can shake into the pan like he's cooking, and he stirs or rolls the neyno around and around in the pan. He also loves toilet paper rolls--full ones, from which he can unroll all the paper to cover the living room floor. Please don't get him any more toilet paper, however.

Oh, which made me think of one thing that he really loves and doesn't have that's very simple! At the library playgroup, reportedly they had two sticks with floaty ribbons attached to them so when you wave the sticks around the ribbons follow in twirly fashion. Now he tries to do that with any ribbon-like thing he can find (including toilet paper of course.)

So--now it's the end of the day and I must head home; I did a hospitalization for a student today and it was quite draining and took all afternoon. Luckily for me TheLimey went to Boston Market and gathered some food like the good husband he is.

[Limelet loved it, too.]

blackeyedpea_1

2008-01-25T17:08:00.001-08:00

blackeyedpea_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The poor little thing. It was ouchy, but he got over it pretty quickly. It looks worse with every passing day.

Right now he has the contents of the spice drawer scattered about the office, muttering to himself "Ohwow, ohwow, pahdiz [spices]!"

Our little chef.

Playin' With Sticks

2008-01-21T09:08:00.001-08:00

DSCF0158
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Winter is fun!

Nutshell Update

2008-01-21T09:06:00.001-08:00

Limelet practices running in the living room now, between the door and the sofa. He loves going outside and is very upset on days when it's too cold to go anywhere (like recently). The library helps to fill this gap, as he can run in the children's section and meet other children, as well as dance to kid's music. I hear that he particularly loved playing with ribbons on sticks that the playgroup ladies brought.

He grew out of his little leather slipper-shoes in about three months--I thought he'd be going to the next size in, say, March or April, but instead had to get them out just this past weekend. I don't understand what clothing size he wears. He seems to be in between baby and kid, and sizes don't match up to his actual body. I had a heck of a time getting him some new socks yesterday. His feet are way too big for baby or even toddler socks, but too small for boy socks. He is wearing size M boy socks now, which are too big, but the size S ones were too small.

And pants? Don't even get me started. Baby sizes are out of the question now. Yet he's too wide and also too short for toddler sizes, so what does that mean? I know there's less diaper accommodation and toddlers are slimmer than babies, but come on. There's got to be something that's in between. He grew out of his 2T pants width-wise within, like, a week, but they are still about 4" too long for him. I can't imagine how long the 3Ts would be on him.

At least we have something to put on his feet for a little while longer. He loves the little blue-and-red airplanes on his bigger shoes and brings them over so I'll put them on him. He's getting a lot more directive, and tries to get us to fix things or open them or otherwise help him with them in some way.

He's also gotten more frustrated lately--he seems to want to do more things than he can, and is very frustrated when he can't make something do what he thinks it should (like opening the pepper grinder) or when he can't have something he sees (like the knives). I think that when he starts talking more it will help the frustration somewhat, as now I get the impression that he believes we just don't understand what he wants when we won't give him something, or can't open it or whatever. Maybe then when we explain that the pepper grinder doesn't open, he'll be okay with it.

Limelet now sleeps more soundly at night--it started very suddenly four nights before my dissertation defense. He still stirs and wants to nurse in his sleep, but it's only a few times a night and takes longer for the first stirring to occur. Last night he slept in his little sidecar cot from 9:30pm until 1:30am, and overall he only stirred twice in the night. Whew! (Who knew this would take 16 months? Not me.)

The only potential drawback is that he may simultaneously be changing from needing two naps in the daytime to needing only one. That doesn't sound like a problem, but the routine doesn't just snap into place automatically. And when his sleep routine is upset at all, he's very, very cranky. So today I got a call from TheLimey explaining that Limelet has been cranky and wanted his nap all morning, but just couldn't quite fall asleep, so it took him about four tries over a period of nearly three hours. It's grueling (for us) to repeatedly try to put him to sleep, I'll tell you what.

As for nighttime, I added more pre-bed relaxation time to Limelet's bedtime routine. Between bathtime and bedtime, he eats his whole-grain gruel and has a cup of warm milk (as before) and I play a CD of classical guitar music with the lights dimmed. He's started sitting (relatively) still in my lap for a reading or two of Goodnight Moon now, too. He even brought it over last night for me to read to him when I was doing something else. We couldn't be prouder, of course.

He's becoming so interactive, and always understands more of what's going on than we think he does.

I confess that he has now been exposed to Teletubbies, and he loves it. I don't even know when the actual show is on PBS--he's just seen bits of it on YouTube. Mainly the intro, which he dances to, and the ending, to which he replies "ba ba" as the Tubbies all say their goodbyes. So he doesn't really have TV programs per se, but he sure gets excited about that Tubbies intro, and tries to get me to play it if I so much as look at my computer when I'm carrying him. We have to be careful not to actually say the word Teletubbies or hum the infernally catchy theme music, or he'll be desperate to watch it right then.

laundry_2

2008-01-01T18:13:00.001-08:00

laundry_2
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

New Year's at the laundry. He likes the open spaces where he can run around and kick his little ball.

Toy Cars

2007-12-27T08:46:00.001-08:00

xmas_6
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Just like I would have liked when I was little. So far, he plays with them without trying to eat the wheels, press thumbs.

Hot Wheels 10-pack courtesy of Auntie Argot and Uncle Frinky or possibly Father Christmas.

snowy_1

2007-12-20T05:52:00.001-08:00

snowy_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Can I swim in this?

Progress Note

2007-12-20T05:51:00.001-08:00

Limelet is daily individuating and maturing. His abstract thought is clearly taking off lately. While he still doesn't talk a whole lot, it turns out he understands a lot more than I suspected.

At bathtime, I started asking him where his body parts were, and he knew a lot more of them than I thought (which was 0-1). So I started asking him where other things were out in the rest of the house, and he would run right over to the item in question. "Where's your latches board? Where's Peek-a-Boo (his favorite book)? Where's open-closed (pepper grinder with a lid)?"

And according to TheLimey, the other day he was in the bedroom putting away the baby clothes and Limelet wandered out the living room, then returned in a hurry, flustered. TheLimey thought maybe something out there had scared him, and went out to investigate. It turned out that I was in the process of leaving a message on the answering machine, which is audible in the living room, and Limelet heard my voice and wanted the phone. He puts the phone (and now other objects) up to his ear, or sometimes to the back of his head.

He also now "asks" us to play with his blocks, which means he wants us to build a structure for him to "kssshhhh!" (knock down). In just the past few days he has started carefully building things with the blocks himself, and then knocking them down. And just this morning, TheLimey found him "reading" to himself. That is, he had his Peek-a-Boo board book, and was non-verbally imitating my intonation when I read it ("Peek-aaaa.... zoo? Peek-aaaa.... choo-choo?"), including the ending flourish (Which goes: "Peek-aaaaa....YOU!!")

His statements about food are twofold: mmmm-gd, or mmmmm-bgmf-bgmf (which translates as mmmmm-delicious). Also, he now asks to nurse by making a sort of repetitive chompfing noise (and staring at my chest or pulling at my shirt). The other day he combined these and made the chompfing noise while declaring nursie bgmf-bgmf. "Mmmmm-bgmf-bgmf, [chompf, chompf]." I guess it's nice to know that he likes the milk I make for him!

He's also slept fairly decently the past few nights. I've actually gotten perhaps 5-6 hours of barely-broken sleep several nights in a row.

Which inevitably means he's due for more teeth.

Wish Oops

2007-12-16T07:15:00.001-08:00

I just looked at Limelet's wish list, lately updated, and I swear when I put that one item on, it was about 30-odd dollars, not 100! I feel like I look like those people who put $1000 vacations on their wedding registry. So don't get that.

Fever

2007-12-13T06:13:00.001-08:00

Sunday I thought Limelet was more listless than usual about sitting in his car seat on the way to pick up some groceries. He got sleepy and a bit cranky at the end of the trip, which was not strange since it was time for his nap anyway.

But later after his nap he suddenly started feeling really, really hot and acting tired and cranky again. By evening, though he'd had a lukewarm bath and some baby meds, he was clearly not well. He hates getting his temp taken, even under his arm, but it looked as though it was about 103 °.

It was a rough night. I slept from maybe midnight to about 2, and then 5 to 7, in between trying to keep him hydrated and comforted. He mostly just wanted to nurse nonstop while I rocked him. His little feet seemed particularly baking-hot, though all of him felt hot of course. We called the on-call doctor from our practice, but despite the service saying someone would be back with us in fifteen minutes, no one ever called. We tried four times, to no avail, which was very aggravating under the circumstances.

Limelet was willing to drink fluids and take some baby Tylenol, which did seem to help. His fever got down to about 101 °, which is at least not dangerous, so we didn't take him to the E.R. that night. I have been in enough E.R.s to know a lot about sitting in a noisy, crappy, fluorescently lit huge room with dozens of sick people, for hours, waiting to be seen, so I had to balance how that would affect him (in the middle of the night) versus how hot he was getting.

Hi guys,

Had planned to return your call(s) this weekend, but Saturday was our "date" day. Then Sunday after I dragged Limelet to the grocery store he ended up developing a high fever, so we've been juggling a sick baby for the last 13 hours or so. He just went to sleep again and we've been awaiting a call from the Doc for over an hour now -- great paging system. Anyway. I was able to get his fever back down to about 101°, so that's at least less bad. Wish us luck in not having to go to the E.R. Will call when more able.

--Liz

I called in sick to work that morning. We took him to the doc, which was not the one he had seen the week before but someone who couldn't understand how I arrived at the 103° figure. Nevertheless, I just wanted a health crisis assessment, and I felt we got one. As I expected, they couldn't find anything "wrong" with him--no ear problems, no throat infections, cough, congestion, wheezing, GI problems, etc. Also, he hadn't been around anyone sick, certainly not around any sick little kids.

Limelet was nervous about being at the doctor's after his injection experience of last week, but only got really upset when the doctor poked that hard viewer-thing into his little earholes. After that he shrieked with inconsolable terror until we left. Poor little critter.

The doctor reiterated what I suspected, that vaccinations "can all cause a fever reaction". Since their own handouts had stated that the MMR could cause a fever 7-12 days later, I pretty much already thought that was the cause. From what I've looked up, measles vax in particular causes a delayed fever like that (others are mostly within 24-48 hours.)

He had a rough night that night, too. I gave him some very diluted vitamin-C drink to tempt him, and he drank quite a bit of it, which made me feel better. Again, we called the doctor-line, which this time caused someone to return our call--the doc that TheLimey had met when he took Limelet in for his shots, who coincidentally was from London.

He seemed a bit more sensible than the colleague we had met that day (although he completely ignored the information from his own handouts and stressed that most vaccination reactions are within 24-48 hours). Anyway, he recommended a 50/50 combination of Pedialyte and Gatorade, which Limelet took to quite well and drank a lot of.

He also recommended the switching-medications bit, which involves alternately giving Tylenol (acetaminophen) and Motrin (ibuprofen) every three hours. It made sense to me, as then neither one is given more often than every six hours (those substances are pretty hard on little livers), but the fever can be controlled by having an anti-inflammatory of some kind every three hours.

It's a fine line to balance between brain damage and liver damage, and quite scary when you see high numbers on that thermometer.

Tuesday:

Hi All,
Limelet seems to be getting better this afternoon, though after a couple of sleepless nights and a trip to the doctor. He's not 100% but I believe the worst is over. We'll see how he does tonight of course, as fevers are better in the day and worse at night.

I feel pretty certain he had a reaction to the vaccinations he had last week, as it pretty much exactly fit the pattern described in the handouts from the doc. (And online information. Also apparently a lot of [Lizardos] have had strong reactions to vaccinations.)

He's lost some weight, but we have been able to tempt him to eat if we chase after him with a wide variety of foods. (Ice cream, not surprisingly, has turned out to be an easy one.)
Now, back to recovery for the entire family!
--Liz

Wednesday he was still a bit feverish when I left for work, but I believed he was over the worst.

Today (Thursday) he seemed much better. He slept pretty well last night and didn't need any midnight meds. I'm not looking happily forward to those future vaccinations, but I'm sure glad I delayed these ones until his first year was over.

Breastfeeding Basics

2007-11-26T06:22:00.000-08:00

These are pretty basic nursing instructions, and they're also from the '80s (I think), but they could still be helpful. I had a lot of younger siblings that I saw being breastfed, but when the time came I still wanted to compare someone else's baby's latch to mine. These do show several latchin' babies, so I found them helpful. There are three different positions described here: cradle hold, clutch (or "football") hold, and lying down.

I recommend learning to nurse lying down ASAP! For us it made the difference of being able to sleep most of the night, right away, versus having to awake fully and get up five or six times. (Of course look up safe cosleeping practices if you're going to do this.)

Cradle Hold

Clutch Hold

Lying Down Cradle Hold

snowday_4

2007-11-22T17:56:00.001-08:00

snowday_4
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Limelet got to play in the snow for the first time today. He did see snow last year, but wasn't really old enough to play in it yet. He needs some boots, 'cause his little feets got wet. We only had him outside maybe 15 minutes, though.

He now pushes the pegs through his little wooden hammer bench, and imitates the animal sounds that various of his toys make. A lot of them growl, apparently, but not the kitty or the birdie.

He also has a little plastic boombox that plays one electronic song when he presses a button, to which he dances. The other buttons are broken, and only beep loudly when he presses them. He imitates the beeping as a growl, too.

Capitalist Peeg

2007-11-19T05:08:00.001-08:00

That would be me.

I'm trying out the adsense gimmick, as you can see. If you hate it, let me know. I guess I'm really doing it just to try another internet thingy out as is my wont.

After all, I'm clearly not some wildly popular web writer, so it's not like it will generate much if any revenue.

And while as a family of three we're not exactly flush with the cash that my internship is bringing in, we're not desperate for the four cents or whatever, either. I just want to see what happens, and I'm so used to tuning out ads now that I've had Gmail for several years that it doesn't seem like it will matter that much.

Feeding Time

2007-11-18T17:50:00.001-08:00

Lately Limelet has taken to feeding us. He seems to find it very entertaining to see food items disappear into our mouths. (Luckily for us, they are food items.) Often this involves sticking a lot of his hand in there, sometimes his entire fist. I think we should stay away from the zoo for now.

Yesterday he had a fine squishy piece of buttered toast upon which he was gnawing sporadically that he decided Daddy should eat, and he started on the long 6-foot journey across the carpet to the couch. But in a surprise move, he quite suddenly stopped and fed the toast to this picture in a catalog on the floor instead.

Night-night

2007-11-16T06:59:00.001-08:00

Limelet is walking like crazy now, especially if there's any opportunity to kick a ball. We usually have at least three rolling around the living room somewhere. I'd always heard that kids sleep better at night when they begin crawling, and then I heard it's when they begin walking. The next thing I'll hear is that it's when they start driving, which is too bad, since at that point I will definitely be sleeping poorly, right?

Anyway, with all these teeth erupting, poor Limelet does not sleep better. He does go to sleep, which is a change from when it was 100 degrees here. But he often awakes at 11:30, 1:50, and 3:50. Just by way of example. He may struggle to get back to sleep for 90 minutes, or he may just nurse and go back to sleep almost immediately. Oh, how I love those nights when he goes back to sleep immediately.

He's actually had two good nights in the past three. The first one, I couldn't believe it when I looked at the clock at his first awakening, and it was 4:30! He actually slept nearly 8 hours straight without even stirring to nurse! Then there was the night in between, during which he awoke at 11:00 (one hour after I dropped, exhausted, into bed myself), and writhed miserably half-asleep in my arms until nearly 2. And then woke again at 3:50. But last night, once again he hardly awoke at all--just a couple times, and went right back to sleep. It was like a beautiful dream. Heck, it was a beautiful dream!

When I'm able to catch a glimpse of the teeth, they're like big vicious pointy white mountain ranges jabbing out through his tiny, tender little reddened gums. They really do seem too big for his mouth, and all of them have several separate points, like a jagged crown.

I feel terrible for how irritable I am in the middle of the night, as he's miserable too. I have written myself post-its reminding myself to be understanding in the middle of the night when I'm tired, so I don't make things worse for both of us. I don't want his memories of waking up in the middle of the night to be having a Mummy who was a huge mean B.

laundry_1

2007-11-06T19:12:00.001-08:00

laundry_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Daddy started singing the Oompa-Loompa song about these blue clothes, which got stuck in my head so I sang it as we walked out to the laundry.

Me: "Oompa, loompa, doompa da dee..."
Limelet: "Opa."

Too funny.

halloween_2

2007-11-01T19:32:00.001-07:00

halloween_2
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Happy to be taking baby Motrin?

Big Boy

2007-11-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

Limelet has been undergoing a lot of developmental leaps in the month since he turned one.

He was having a dickens of a time sleeping for a while last week, which was very hard for me (sleep three hours and then be gone at work for 11 hours!); I suspected he was teething again. Drooling a lot, biting me in his sleep, gums thickened (like teeth were inside them, instead of just being a thin ridge), constant sleep waking that was alleviated only on nights when I gave him Motrin...all circumstantial, but telling. TheLimey bemoaned the lack of any visible teeth as reward for all this upheaval.

But last weekend, I was finally able to see the points of two top molars back there in his little gums (when I leaned him upside down and made him laugh). And the next day, TheLimey saw two more teeth on the bottom gums. So I guess that means he has 12 teeth now. More are still coming through; perhaps he'll be done by the time he's 18 months! (Arbitrarily chosen age.)

When his teeth are noticeably growing, he's always been going through a growth spurt in general (teeth being just a part of his growing body, of course) so he's outgrowing some of his clothes. He's now wearing size 2T (or 24 months), and some of that is pretty close-fitting on him. People comment on his tallness all the time.

He's also mimicking our speech like crazy these days. He especially likes to sing along with the familiar songs I sing for him (such as the "Limelet and Mama" song, which has only those two words and is sung to the tune of Old King Wenceslas), and also some Kate Bush. He says "mmmmgud" when he's eating something he likes, says "baba dadi" when Daddy goes somewhere, and of course "bowiss" or just "dhish" ("play with this" or "this") while making the "play with" sign at some forbidden item, such as the fire extinguisher. He's especially good with "B" words, such as "bathtime", "ball", and "book". He's also mastered "nonononono" which refers to anything he wants that he thinks he can't have.

He's been taking a few steps here and there lately--and of course creeping around the perimeter of the livingroom while leaning on the wall, table, or sofa--but hasn't been wanting to commit himself to actually walking outright. His first actual step (that I know about) was at the first birthday party of his little pal Justin--a big festive affair, since the first birthday is a big huge deal in Korean culture as I understand it. Justin was toddling all over the place when we were there, but Limelet maintained his crawling except for that one step.

Until yesterday, when he suddenly decided that if he was going to kick a ball around with Daddy, he would need to walk over to it. So apparently yesterday he spent a lot of the day walking around the livingroom, kicking the many balls littering the floor. I can't tell you how proud TheLimey is that he actually got to kick a football with his son. I had a feeling that the walking thing would be sudden, since he had all the skills and had been practicing them. Seemed like just a matter of feeling ready to let go and do it, and it was.

I took some Halloween pictures of him (the whole reason I bought a hunter-orange nappy in that last batch), but I haven't yet had a chance to download them.

Limelet Being Babysat!

2007-10-22T13:49:00.001-07:00

Yes, right this minute!

He has been so sociable (and social) lately now that he's had the opportunity to be around people on a regular basis, so we are beginning to get him accustomed to having someone else look after him once in a while. That's right, he's never had a babysitter before today. No one has taken care of him but us two for his entire life, but that can't go on indefinitely.

There's a South African lady upstairs from us who always offers to watch Limelet. So today TheLimey took Limelet up there as he arranged last week. Apparently, the whole family is up there playing Legos with him (big Legos for babies), and the idea is to let him stay there for an hour and see how he does. I hope it goes well. It would be so nice for us to have dinner alone together one evening, or something. Anything, really.

Also, I had a meeting cancelled this morning, so I sat down and planned out his vaccinations as I've been trying to do for about 6 weeks now (that is, my own staggered vaccination schedule, not the standard one). I'm not very happy about the Hep b vaccination, though. I haven't plugged it into the schedule yet. We'll see if it'll be feasible to do one vax a month instead of, say, five at a time, as a colleague's baby just experienced.

So Limelet's on his way to being able to enter mainstream American child society! If we don't completely ruin it for him by being way too geeky, that is.

One Year Leap & Veggie Mixture

2007-09-30T20:17:00.001-07:00

The one-year mark does seem to have brought another developmental surge.

Limelet has been experimenting with prepositions: not the words, but the concepts themselves. Inside, on top, out, under. He is figuring out how to get the nursies out in the open, himself. What's really funny is when he lifted Daddy's shirt, craned his head down to peek under, and laughed. Unfortunately I was not there to see this, but reportedly he was doing it repeatedly. He also likes to take things out of containers and place them back in.

He now knows for sure what "bye-bye" means when I say it. It's really hard to leave him in the morning. Heck, it's hard to go take a shower as he wakes up and starts crying like his little heart will break. In turn it's heart-wrenching for me.

In motor news, Limelet's been standing up lately on his own, apparently without noticing. Especially if he's got something in his hands so he feels like he's hanging on to something. I'd say today was his biggest real standing day so far.

We had lately gotten him back on a schedule with an 8:30 bedtime since it got cooler, but last week he seems to have begun teething again. Of course. Not nearly as bad as the entire 4 months to 9 months period, thank heavens. However, we've had a couple nights of being awake from midnight to 4am and also nights of awaking every single hour. That's tough when I've got to go to work, especially as this is NOT a slacking job in the slightest. There is absolutely no chance for any slacking there or even legitimate napping. Heck, I barely have time for lunch, but I do take that, as that is the only break time in my LIFE.

Teething seems to go with growth spurts (logically enough) so I guess he's growing, too. He seems to fit 24-month size items better than 12-month ones, and I had to take back the toddler-size socks for kid-size ones.

I have now reduced pumping milk to lunchtimes. I feel kind of sad about it even though pumping's been a pain, but Limelet seems fine, and happy with nursing dusk 'til dawn and weekends. He's started drinking bovine milk during the day in addition to his diluted juice, enriched rice milk, and water. Digestion seems fine, so he must not be allergic or lactose-intolerant.

Since his nutrients are increasingly coming from his solid food, I am making an effort to add more of a variety of veggies to his diet. Yesterday I bought all kinds of veggies in season and today had TheLimey chop them up, as he is really good at chopping. Then we steamed them all and I just now froze them in a couple ice trays. Limelet had some of the mixture at dinner and glomped it right down. Heck, I stole some and had it at dinner myself. It was darn good!

Recipe:

-baby-cut carrots: place in saucepan & cover with water. simmer until semi-tenderish. top with expandable steamer.

-very small onion, sliced red cabbage, chopped sweet red pepper, diced summer squash, diced zucchini (courgette): add into steamer and replace lid

-diced green beans, chopped broccoli, minced celery: add next and replace lid with steamer that sits on top of saucepan, then lid.

-leaf spinach: clean & prep, place in pan-top steamer, replace lid.

when spinach is done, it's all done.

Take veggies and steamers out and empty into bowl. Use potato masher to roughly chunk up cooked carrots still in saucepan. add to bowl.

Add butter or butter-like substance and a trace of seasoned salt, toss all together.

Freeze in ice cube trays.

Use broth for something--it's very vitaminful, though dark purplish-grey.

Limelet Turns One

2007-09-18T18:31:00.003-07:00

A snapshot of life as Limelet becomes one year old today (we mostly celebrated Sunday) .

He walks around the edges of the room holding on to things now (the radiator, the sofa, the table), and occasionally he lets go for a second or two. He has little bruises all under his chin from bonking it on the table constantly, poor little guy. His crawl has remained kind of sideways, as he crawls on his left knee but his right foot, as though he's half trying to walk while crawling. I think he's going to begin walking before he ever corrects that funny crawl. He loves smooth surfaces, such as the kitchen floor, because he can scootch himself backward on his bottom.

Bathtime has recently gone from funtime to struggle time, as he no longer wants to sit down in the bath but wants to stand up the entire time, which is a bit slippery. He especially hates lying back on his bath pillow so I can rinse his little curly blonde fluff.

He can eat most everything now, though he still doesn't get much dairy, soy, or nuts. His favorite food still seems to be the gruel I make from brown rice, peas, and broth, but he also loves Daddy's lentil chili. He drinks enriched rice milk or diluted fruit juice at meals, aside from the pumped milk he gets (in a sippy cup these days). He holds his own cup, and eats some foods with his fingers, although he's just as likely to flail it back and forth or throw it as eat it. Unless it's his favorite junk food, which is those baby cheesy-poofs. (At least they're whole corn and lower salt.) Those go right in. He sometimes likes sweet things but seems to prefer salty things--not surprising with us as his parents. He even likes toast with vegemite!

He still nurses when I'm home, and still prefers to be carried and nursed to get to sleep. Failing that (like when I'm not there) he'll settle for being carried as long as Daddy sings "Pattycake" to him softly. I made up the tune, or else it's a cryptomnesiac tune. He nurses several times during the night but doesn't really wake up unless I'm not there to nurse him.

For the first month or so here, we had to put him to sleep out in the swings almost every night because of the heat. He couldn't get to sleep otherwise. Thank heavens it's finally cooled off so I can put him to sleep indoors! When everything goes right (like since the heat finally broke), he goes to sleep around 8:45 and stays asleep until 6:45am, with just a bit of help staying asleep here and there. He's also been napping at two regular times during the day. Yippee! But something's been wrong the past two nights--I got about three hours of sleep (individual hours, not a chunk) last night, as I was up with him most of the night. (Daddy just won't do in those cases, more's the pity.) We wonder if he's beginning to get some of those back teeth in now.

He is still just obsessed with plastic containers, especially detergent jugs. The larger the better. One night I had to put him to sleep (outside in the swing, no less) hugging a big yellow laundry jug. TheLimey has come up with an entire sitcom (including theme song) based on this premise. "Me and Limelet and a juuuhhh-hug, lalala, la, lalaah..."

He loves playing with a ball, or two or three. He'll throw them along the floor (or the grass) for himself to get, and then throw them again. He's beginning to open the pages in his little board books, though his favorite thing with books is still to chew them. One of his first words was "book" after all. He also loves his wooden blocks, especially if someone else stacks them up so he can knock them down. He still sometimes wants to just jump up and down for a while in his jumper-bumper, which we have hung from a support out on the "porch" area.

He really loves for people to pay attention to him and talk to him, though he's still quite wary of being picked up by anyone but us. His favorite people are the young waitress called Adela at a nearby restaurant (we call her his "girlfriend"), and our nextdoor neighbor Kim. He's even begun letting Kim hold him and take him into her apartment. This bodes very well for future babysitting possibilities!

As far as communication, he clearly understands a lot more than he expresses. He'll sometimes say a word, or even repeat a nonsense syllable he hears ("Baby Boo-Boo!") And he loves to imitate sneezing, especially right after he sneezes, which he enjoys. "AH-hooo, AH-hooo." But he rarely initiates conversation. He does say "mamamamamamaaa" near the end of the day when he's getting fussy and ready for me to be home. He also sings a song about his dada that goes like this: "da, DA / da, DA / da, DA." (The first note is usually low and growly, while the second is high and breathy.) He sings other random songs at times, too, but that's his favorite.

He loves to ride on our shoulders and play tickle games. He also loves to play "Buttercup," in which I swing him back and forth precipitously high (yet very safely!) while singing "My lit-tle But-ter-cup, dear lit-tle But-ter-cup, I love you!" I think it's a mutation of Gilbert & Sullivan. Now if I just say "Buttercup!" he starts laughing.

His favorite music to listen to is still Ricardo Lemvo's Mambo Yo-Yo, from way back when he was only a couple of months old. He breaks out in a huge grin as soon as he hears the opening bars, and sometimes laughs. He also loves going on the swings, and looking at animals and birds. Good thing we're on a campus with swings, birds, and squirrels! And there's plenty of grass for him to grounge over.

He still enjoys riding in the Mei Tai (when awake---I have to use the sweatpants carrier for sleepytime), but right now I'm trying to finish the sewing on it, so that the straps can stop crumpling up and being uncomfortable when I wear it. I don't know how much he weighs now, but three months ago he was 20 pounds.

I ordered some 18-month-sized clothes for him from eBay (used, for winter) but he's already wearing them now. He still seems tall and slim. He's due for his one-year checkup, and the beginning of his delayed-and-staggered vaccinations.

We turned the car seat around to face forward now that he's old enough. It seems to be better for him as he's less apparently isolated. But sometimes it makes him want to be picked up because he can see us. Nevertheless, now we can both ride in the front seats instead of there usually being a "chauffeur."

The time he's happiest is when he wakes up on weekends and we are both there waking up with him. We call it "The Valley of the Parents." (He especially liked waking up like that and getting presents on Sunday, as far as I could tell, and who wouldn't?!) The time he's most unhappy is waking up when I'm in the shower and not beside him.

He's recently discovered the fun process of peeing. He usually does it while I'm changing his nappy, because then of course he can watch it occurring. (So exciting!) So then I have to change his shirt, too, which is something he hates. Don't all babies love being naked?

For his birthday celebration Sunday we decided to spend the day doing stuff that makes him happy. First of all, that meant avoiding things that make him unhappy, like getting overtired or going on car trips. We started with Valley of the Parents, of course. He's happiest when we're all three together and not stressed out about scheduling. So we carefully maintained his normal schedule, got him up on time, and gave him his naps and meals on time so he'd feel good.

Then we basically did stuff he enjoys that was within walking distance, like playing in the grass and rolling a couple balls around the basketball court, going on the swings, going back inside to play his favorite song (still Mambo Yo-Yo), playing his favorite games (Buttercup!) and so forth.

We gave him a number of (modest) presents individually throughout the day, starting when he woke up, instead of giving them all at one time, late in the day. How would a baby enjoy that? Ours would certainly have been overwhelmed. As it was he got to have new excitements all day long, and enjoy the heck out of each one before moving on to the next one.

Today was his actual birthday, but I was at work being a serious zombie from only sleeping three hours last night. Nevertheless, I managed to get one genuine birthday photo of him today.

birthday_hat

2007-09-18T18:31:00.001-07:00

birthday_hat
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The genuine article.

Newborn Limelet

2007-09-13T07:57:00.001-07:00

Newborn Limelet
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

As Limelet's first birthday approaches (9/18), I was reading a great article in Mothering Magazine about the unbelievably high cesarean rates and neonatal mortality in this country. Here's a mere snippet:

Many advocates of better birthing practices think that one of the greatest costs
of high-tech birth is the loss of traditional birthing rituals. But if rituals
are used by a people to organize and define their culture, then, Davis-Floyd
believes, we actually do have rituals around birth—it’s just that our rituals
are now based on machinery.

“The obstetrical routines applied to the
‘management’ of normal birth are also transformative rituals that carry and
communicate meaning above and beyond their instrumental ends,” she stated in an
interview. “The meaning they communicate is that high technology is superior to
biology and women’s body-knowing, and is essential to ensure the safety of
birth.
...
Nature is to be feared, technology to be trusted. This
cultural ethos prevents us from using the vast available information we have
about how to support and facilitate the normal physiology of birth without
unnecessary intervention.”

Mothering, September – October 2007, p 54.

Lawn Racing

2007-09-11T09:13:00.001-07:00

thechoice_3
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

This is pretty much Limelet's life these days.

A Total Lazy Cross Post of Everything

2007-09-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

...because I can't separate the threads of baby versus non-baby material in all that's gone on in the past month + since we moved, plus I have very (even more-) limited time. That also means that this will likely be a disorganized post, or more so than usual.

So we moved into University housing, which initially was a bit scary. Tiny, dark, smelly as heck, and the carpet (the Grease Mat) so nasty we couldn't put Limelet on the floor even for a minute. Yep, you bet that was a pain. We ended up spreading old bedsheets on the livingroom floor just to be able set him down. Since he had just begun crawling, it was a matter of trying to constantly corral him on the rumpled, rapidly dirtying sheets.

What we wanted to do was get everything off the floor and shampoo the heck out of the carpet. Over and over. And over. However, this took about a week and a half to accomplish.

Backing up a bit: on the day we moved in, I walked into the livingroom where the moving guys had been stacking our boxes to find that the tiny room was COMPLETELY filled with boxes up to the ceiling, with only a little path through to the kitchen and to the sofa. When we were packing and building up to the move, we had thought that once we moved, we could finally relax a bit because we could unpack at our leisure.

HA! It actually ended up more stressful and urgent even than the packing, because we had to hurry to get that enormous pile of boxes unpacked and sorted out enough to shampoo the carpet before we could do much of anything else. And since the place was so tiny, unpacking was like an incredibly complex puzzle. A two-bedroom four-dimensional Tetris. In 90-something-degree heat.

It took over a week (was it ten days?) of solid work to get things to a level at which we could even think of shampooing the rug, so it's a good thing we chose a move-in date that was a bit before my internship started. (I wouldn't even have known where my work clothes were, had we not done that.)

Once we got the shampooing done and had covered the Grease Mat with a series of area rugs, there was a mutual deflation of stress. Thank goodness!

Since then we have been gradually fixing this or that situation in the house, like adding babyproofing and unpacking my work clothes, for example. Just this past Saturday I finally got my laptop set up, which tells you how much there has been to do. Normally I wouldn't think of going over a month without a proper desk setup, but it was just quite a bit lower on my urgency list than...well, than a month's worth of other stuff, I guess.

So TheLimey has been staying home and caring for our Limelet, a transition which has for the most part gone way faster than either of us thought. True, the first week or so there were a few meltdowns (and I'm not saying they weren't mine!), delayed naps, lost sleep, and hassles pumping milk and transporting it and using it--all that sort of thing, but we've all gradually begun to find a new rhythm.

For one thing, I stopped coming home for lunch. Limelet's pediatrician had suggested it as a transition device, and it seemed like a good idea. But in practice, it ended up making Limelet have to say goodbye to me just 15 or 20 minutes after I'd gotten home, and then he was often upset for the entire afternoon. Now that I'm staying away he stays happier all day, and when I come home at night his delight in seeing me is not shattered by my immediately leaving. Not to mention it was a huge pain in the butt for me to use thirty or forty minutes of my lunch hour just driving back and forth and parking. By the time I'd nursed him I often wouldn't even have time to eat something myself.

We also have switched from using a bottle for serving the expressed milk, to just putting it in his sippy cup before naptimes. He likes the bottle primarily as a toy, so it more distracts him from sleeping than puts him to sleep.

Since it's been so @#$%& hot every single frikkin' day since we moved, there have been Sleep Issues. Particularly at night. Turns out that about the only way to get Limelet to sleep on a hot night is for one of us to take him out on the nearby swings and swing him to sleep. If it's me doing it, he also nurses. (Luckily it's usually dark anyway.)

I've been worried that he'll become addicted to falling asleep on the swing, but on the three cooler nights we've had, he's fallen asleep inside, so I hope that we can get back to normal when the weather breaks. I'm not going to be swimging him to sleep in February, I'll tell you that much! It makes me think that we should just replace our bed with a hujambous hammock.

Daytimes--from what I hear--TheLimey and Limelet hang out outside under a shady tree, even napping there at the appropriate naptime. (Probably cooler than inside the apartment, anyway.) They've been exploring campus while I'm gone, so that's nice. It's such a gorgeous campus, too. There's also a grocery store and some other conveniences within easy walking distance, so sometimes they go there during the daytimes.

Limelet is learning about Other People now that we're not isolated in snowbound Tinytown USA. We have neighbors galore, as well as some after-hours activities with my fellow interns. One of the other interns has a baby who is jsut a couple weeks younger than Limelet, so we all get together and the two of them parallel-play, and sometimes try to grab each other's hair or eyes.

Limelet has always just loved having (most) people talk to him and pay attention to him (though there are a few people who sent him into fits of terror, but we won't discuss that here and now), however he's always been afraid of having others hold him. But just yesterday he finally allowed our nextdoor neighbor, a Chinese grad student named Kim, to carry him back from the launderette (as TheLimey calls it) and play with him, with Daddy close at hand of course.

We are going to try getting him exposed to being taken care of by others so we can have a babysitter at some point. Possibly the non-mother interns would take care of the two babies sometime while the parents have some time off. For us it would be our first time alone together since his birth!

I've also met some other mothers in the apartment complex (Or "Baby Alley" as I like to call it.) Across from us is a Filipino couple with a tiny 4-month-old girl, and living above us is (I think) a West African family with a 6-month-old girl and I think two older children, but I haven't really met them yet. TheLimey has found a couple weekly games of pickup football (real football, I mean, not Meatball; comprised, so he says, of the United Nations) in a couple locations on campus, so I feel happy about that. Now he can get to know some men-friends.

My office at work has high ceilings and windows up to the top, facing East, so that's going to be great for the long northern winter. There are three other interns: two are Korean international students and one is White and from California. We're all women this year. I'm happy to be somewhere that has good coworkers. And the site has an especial emphasis on multicultural issues, as I guess it would have to for me to fit in there.

I am somewhat surprised to find myself at the more-CBT end of the treatment continuum compared to others here. We have arguments about evidence-based treatments, with me on the side of research. So funny, as my Feminist orientation places me on the flakier end of many locations. I am co-facilitating an anxiety group with the center's big CBT guy. I've invented a treatment called "Accidental Exposure Therapy," which consists of running around doing random things until something makes you anxious. (Just a joke, of course.)

Of course every workplace has its paperwork/computer/etc. system that takes a while to learn, currently I'm taking more time doing those things than I want to. Theoretically I could see all my clients, attend all our meetings, eat lunch, AND get my paperwork done--all within the 9-5 model, but for now that's been a little bit of a stretch. I feel certain that I'll be able to do it relatively soon, though.

I have a campus bus pass that I've used a few times. I think I will use it more as winter comes on. For now my time is so tight in the morning that I don't have the extra 20 minutes to take it, but I hope to start doing so regularly. If it weren't for the baby care aspect, it would actually be a lot easier to take the bus.

Downtown has changed somewhat since I lived here, but other than the destruction of locally owne businesses by chains such as Starbuck's and Barnes & Noble, most of the changes are either nice or neutral. The downtown is really nice to walk around in at lunchtime. I saw an Indian restaurant nearby and can't wait to try it sometime. Perhaps when Limelet gets his babysitting experience the two of us can go. Together! What a thought.

My "baby weight" has almost gone, but I'm definitely shaped differently now. I'm still experiencing a few other unpleasant physical sequelae, but we won't go into those for now. I'm happy to be able to be outside and walking around again, I'll tell you that much. I even went for a (short) jog the othe rmorning, with the actual jogging stroller and baby in it. I plan to incorporate more jogging if possible, once we get our mornings ironed out better (which is somewhat dependent on getting our nighttimes ironed out.)

Limelet's first birthday: next week Tuesday. Wow, no longer infant, officially toddler!

Too see the photographic documentation of what we've been doing on weekends, look here.

Pals

2007-08-26T19:34:00.001-07:00

Pals_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

I have even less time than before to be on the computer, so here's a photo instead of a real blog entry. (Click on the photo to go to the Flick'r description of the playdate.) Must think of an appropriate online ID for the new little pal!

By Email

2007-08-19T04:23:00.001-07:00

Just trying out the Blogger email feature. If it works perhaps I can once again toss a post up here from time to time.

'Taint Natural

2007-07-21T13:03:00.001-07:00

Pureed baby food, that is. According to this guy.

I do believe the part about baby food companies and marketing, as that's been their M.O. the whole time anyway. But the thing about babies not being able to regulate their intake if food is pureed? I don't know. My kid lets me know when he's done, squished food or not.

The article also seems to be conflating pureed food with manufactured baby food. I've pureed his food, and/or squished it with a fork (or potato masher, depending.) They said that pureed food leads to babies being "picky" and "constipated," neither of which characterizes Limelet. he eats everything (except mangoes) and then gets rid of it all just fine.

Of course, it's all been homemade food items, not jarred food. And I did add items one at a time to screen for allergies, though lately I've been a bit more cavalier about that as he's 10 months old now and should be able to process more kinds of foods. He still doesn't get much if any dairy, soy, tomatoes, strawberries, shellfish, egg whites, and a few other common food allergens. Maybe some traces of dairy and egg whites, or as ingredients in his teething biscuits.

I started adding a little whole wheat to his diet this past week. He likes to wave it around, mostly, whether in bread form or spaghetti, but he does also eat it eventually. He's been getting squishier poo, but I don't yet know if it's the wheat that's doing it.

Tonight is the third night in a row that he's gone to sleep by 8:30. We are incredibly grateful, as it's been weeks since he's gone to bed before 9:30, usually about 10. Today I noticed the point of tooth #8 finally sticking out of his gum a little bit. Not a coincidence, I think.

It took three days for tooth #7 to erupt, and then six weeks for its opposite to erupt. Six miserable weeks, I might add. He was in a much better mood today than he has been for a while. Probably the teething relief and the good night's sleep combined. Boy, when they said that teething can throw off babies' sleep schedules, they weren't kidding. We had some 11:30 nights last week, which is rough when you're already completely knackered by 6pm.

[Knocking wood] Maybe we'll be able to keep him on this steady schedule for a while now. (Please, no laughter.)

Of course, the fact that we're moving in two weeks and then I'm going back to full-time work right after that probably won't help his sleep any.

I'm turning into one of those breastfeeding religious convert types. I just think it's really an incredible process. The more I find out about it, the more milk seems most closely analogous to blood: the same kind of living fluid that adapts its function to whatever's needed at the time, with the same living components (a lot of the same cells, in fact). Now I think of it as part nutrition, part transfusion. This is why there's no good "formula": the same reason there's really no artificial blood, only aspects of it, and those are usually for temporary use until "real" blood is available.

I can't believe how common formula feeding is. It seems odder and odder to me as time goes by. Yes, I know some people can't breastfeed and that's what formula is for--which is for some strange reason often the first thing that many people say if I mention anything about breastfeeding. You would think that most mothers can't breastfeed, by how often it's mentioned.

But I also recently read a discussion in which a woman wrote about how her 6-week-old "weaned" himself off breastmilk onto formula. She's really convinced herself the baby did it himself, rather than just finding the bottle-suckling easier (which it is, to their developmental detriment.) So, there's considerable blindness to some important issues out there.

I remember reading something about how there's this common conception that formula is "standard," and breastfeeding is some kind of "extra" boost (usually mentioning IQ, but sometimes immunity). But really, breastfeeding is the standard--babies need to be breastfed. It's not some super-duper extra thing. They can survive on formula, is what it is.

Also, I now can't believe how weird people are about breasts. I just can't even see them as any big deal at all. I really just think of them as my kid's food these days. And surely I can't be the first person to point out how cultures where formula feeding is the norm seem to be the most breast-fetishy, at least in my really unscientific "mental survey".

Jug Band

2007-07-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

Limelet seems to have settled into a pattern again, finally. The pattern is that I can't get him up before 7 without crying (him) and we can't get him to go to sleep before 9:30 (us crying). At least it's a pattern. Funny, I realized that this has been his underlying sleep pattern since he was about six weeks old, but now it's stupid daylight savings, so it's technically "later" in the morning and night.

His favorite thing to play with lately is any plastic jug--laundry detergent, vinegar, milk, whatever. As long as it's large (and preferably brightly colored), he desperately wants it. There's a whole collection of these jugs by his little toy bin. Insert your own euphemistic joke here.

He's getting a bit too big for his little bébéPOD chair, so I got him a booster seat at the resale shop. Did I mention I love the resale shop for his stuff? Clothes, toys, baby gear--it's great. Anyway, it's so cute to see him sitting in his little chair like a big boy.

I'm packing away some of his earliest toys now, since he's getting to the stage in which he likes toys with which he can "do" something, like press buttons or manipulate parts. Aside from the jugs, that is. Today in the store we played with a toy that consisted of a circular ramp to roll a little plastic ball down. After I did it a few times, he started doing it himself, and laughed when it came out by his feet. I think it's the first time I've seen him so overtly use several objects together like that, and copying my actions to boot. So funny!

He also likes to pick (and in some cases eat) flowers. His favorite delicious flowers are the leek blossoms in our garden, which are quite surprisingly oniony and hot. I'm surprised he keeps eating them.

Then he has little tiny onion breath all morning, after he washes the flowers down with breastmilk, of course.

No Real Update

2007-07-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

I think of updates all the time in my head, but when I get my limited chance to write something down, I've usually forgotten them. Of course, I'll remember again later when I can't be online.

Limelet seems very close to crawling. He leans forward from sitting onto hands and knees, and he's desperate to get somewhere. Everywhere. He still tries to "fly" on his belly, but a lot of times he just rolls where he wants to go. He's also learned to scoot backwards on his behind on the kitchen floor.

Limelet and his dad both love the wooden blocks, for different reasons. They also both like the little pool, especially as it's been incredibly hot these past couple of weeks. However, only Limelet likes the noisy Explore 'n' Play toy I got him recently. I have to admit, Froggy Went a Courtin' has gotten permanently stuck in my head, too. I wish the volume was a bit lower, but that seems par for the course for kids' toys. Actually, I was thinking of the old Farmer See n Say when I was looking for it, but there's only the updated version now. I didn't even find that, for some reason. I originally looked under "See n Say", so that's probably why.

We went to our last LLL meeting at this location last week; hope we find another nice group.

While we have continued to keep regular get-up times, naptimes, and bedtimes, Limelet's sleep schedule is actually devolving now, such that he has a hard time staying asleep between 8 pm and 11 pm.

He looks so tired even by 6 or 6:30: circles under his eyes, glazed expression, etc. etc., but if I put him to sleep then, his body treats it as a third nap and he awakes 40 minutes later, thus taking the edge off his sleepiness and ensuring that he stays awake at least another 3 hours.

Whereas before if I kept him awake just until 7:30, he'd go to sleep and more or less sleep through (albeit with some help), this pattern seems to have dissolved in the past few weeks. Now he wakes up some time after 8 and can't get back to sleep, until at least 9:30, usually 10:30 and sometimes after 11, no matter when he initially fell asleep. Sometimes we just go out for a walk in the evening with him in the stroller when he can't sleep. It may not get him to sleep (and so far it hasn't) but at least we all get out of the house and its cargo of non-sleeping vibes.

Sometimes I think he's still trying to take three naps, though I've kept it to two.

These days I absolutely must take his second nap with him, or I am an absolute wreck due to lack of sleep. I'm usually knackered by 6 pm anyway, even if I do take his nap. It's really hard to get up in the morning to get him up, which only makes the whole darn cycle worse.

Have I mentioned how nice it is to take a nursey-nap? It really is the most comfortable, pleasant activity ever. The closest thing I can think of is it's like sleeping in a warm bath. Apart from the obvious aspect of snuggling, it must be the hormones. ("Nursie" = body part, or the activity, or the milk itself, but I just have to spell it "nursey-nap" for some reason.)

Limelet's not feeling too well today, as he wasn't yesterday. Could be teething again / still--there's no fever or any specific illness symptoms. But he seems to have been teething forever! And no more teeth have come through in a long while. I wish they would. He's really miserable today.

2007-07-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

No title! For some reason Blogger won't let me enter one. Huh.

It feels like forever since I last posted. I constantly compose entries in my head that I haven't had time to enter, as we are packing to move, along with the persistent dissertation-and-baby-care drumbeat.

First, more about sleep:

The sleep plan was working. Oh, it was working great. I loved it! There were days in a row in which he went to sleep by, oh, 8pm or at least 8:30, only needing top-ups for the first few hours. It was wonderful. Then Limelet had several nights of teething, which meant he stayed up late several nights in a row. This was immediately followed by an evening we went out and dragged the poor thing out with us.

I meant to truncate the event severely and only push his bedtime forward a little, but it took most of the allotted time to even find the place. And there were people there that I haven't seen since his birth (who hadn't even seen Limelet in real life yet), who are now leaving state so I won't see them again for who knows how long. So we really didn't get him home until a couple hours past his bedtime. He was falling asleep sitting up by the time we left. And instead of falling asleep in the car as I thought he would, he freaked out and cried, in fact was screaming in misery by the last mile of the trip. So that was terrible.

But since he'd had about 4 nights of staying up, this only served to reinforce the pattern. It's a week later and his circadian cycle is still all messed up. He's been going to sleep immediately after his bath (not my intention), and then waking up at 8, only to remain awake until 10:30. And he's cranky and unhappy during that time--so we are, too (soothed only by Haagen-Dasz, Bailey's flavor). As TheLimey exclaimed in exhaustion, "it's the longest two hours of the day."

But other than that, he's still developing by leaps and bounds, as far as I can tell anyway. He's almost crawling now; he lunges forward from sitting in order to try to grab things that he's purposely thrown out of his own reach, including and especially over the edge of the couch. When he really wants to get somewhere, he rolls, of course.

But that throwing thing--that's his favorite game now. Just two weeks ago, he started realizing that things he dropped went onto the floor and could be picked up again (by his slaves). Within a day or two he started dropping things repeatedly for fun. Then he realized that he could get more interesting results by moving his hand while dropping, and thus he discovered throwing.

He's still obsessed with the baby monitor and cries when he can't have it. Ditto laundry detergent jugs. One of his favorite toys is a big empty vinegar jug. He especially liked it when it had some vinegar traces that he could taste when he chewed on it. (I guess he wouldn't be our kid if that weren't the case.)

Lately he has had several instances of being frightened--no, terrified--by loud noises. One, the train going past the sidewalk he was on and blowing its whistle; two, the suddent demolition of a structure Daddy built out of wooden blocks; and three, the town's monthly test-siren going off. (Needless to say we haven't tried taking him out to any soccer games with crowds lately, like the one that made him scream for an hour straight.)

We got him a wading pool that's on the back patio--he loves it. He is just crazy about water! Cries when it's time to get his little blue-lipped self out of it.

He's eating a lot of meals, but I don't know about total amount of food. He loses patience with eating after a short time, just as I used to. (Used to.) He loves legumes, meats (even fish), grains, and veggies, but oddly is not that interested in fruit. Well, I always used to say I had a "salt-tooth" instead of a "sweet-tooth," so maybe he does, too.

Well, so much for break time, back to the dissertation.

Random Interactive Stuff & Links

2007-06-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a neat device with which to find your best place to have a baby. Change the weighting of various factors to change the rankings. You can also look up your own city (assuming you live in a major metropolis). Portland looks pretty darn good, while Detroit looks abysmal. Anywhere on the west coast looks pretty good, in fact.

And don't forget the Name Voyager, which I'm sure I posted before. But it's just so cool. I think I would have still chosen the name we did, though I had no idea it had become so popular.

And for those who don't already know, or who lost the link, or whatever, all Limelet's photos get posted here on Flick'r from time to time. Don't I have a link on the sidebar? Guess not. Better do that sometime.

And finally, c'mon! Try listening to a robot reading this blog (links also still on sidebar). It's funny! Especially when it has to read the phrase, here comes your milkies, deet deet.

Nine Months or "Sleepie Beepie"

2007-06-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

I missed posting for his nine-month birthday earlier this week, though I thought about it.

Anyway, it works. Hallelujah, it works.

I wish that I had known it was okay to be a little bit arbitrary in choosing naptimes. I was too concerned with finding the exactly right sleepy times according to Limelet's circadian cycle, and too concerned with never ever letting him be sleepy for fear of the Dreaded Overtired. I guess maybe it's a common thing that parents keep their babies awake too much, too long--and then can't get them to sleep at night. Turns out I actually had the opposite problem!

Once I decided that we were going to have two naps, darnit--sleepy afternoon or not--things have gone much better. Instead of several half-hour naps and cumulative hours of daylight spent trying to facilitate that sleep, he now sleeps twice a day. It only took a few days to get him into the schedule, too.

I kept his 9:00 a.m. naptime, and then took the average (more or less) of his sleepy times in the afternoon for a 1:30 naptime. The length of his naps has increased and become more stable, and he is actually starting to fall asleep at bedtime now instead of requiring several hours of coaxing to sleep many nights. Thank heavens!

The other thing that has helped a whole lot is the addition of a "calmness" break after Limelet's evening bath. It seemed that bathtime was so exciting that it was actually getting him all riled up each night, no matter how sleepy he was to begin with. So I made bathtime a little earlier, and then once he's bathed and dressed there's a half hour break (with reading and possibly a healthful but complex-carbohydrate-ridden snack, like potatoes) before I actually put him to sleep. This seems to work a whole lot better--he usually falls asleep.

He often still needs a few top-ups for the first few hours, but still that's loads easier than spending the entire four hours (or whatever) trying to get him to sleep in the first place. Part of that is also probably a matter of consolidation of his sleep cycle (maturation-related). He's sleeping much better, at any rate.

Lucky, too, because the disruptive teething is back. Or continuing. But it seems less disruptive to his sleep now--more disruptive to his daytimes. When he's like that, he wants the distraction of 1: being carried constantly and 2: grabbing all interesting objects, or else.

I carried him around so much yesterday that I ended up straining my back when I bent down to pick him up just once more. (Now Daddy has to carry him around all day for a couple days.) The grabbiness made the grocery trip extremely difficult, since everything in the store was apparently highly desirable. At home he mostly wants stuff he can't have, such as the antenna on my phone, raw onions, the hot teakettle, and cleansers. Many times he'll look away while grabbing at something forbidden, as though we can't see it if he can't. So funny.

In other news, we finally realized that Limelet now signs to get his wet nappy changed. It took a while because he makes the sign a lot like he makes the "gimme ride" sign (though more slappy). But now that we realized he's doing it, it's hard to miss. So funny! He also signs for food. It can be easy to miss his signs, because he doesn't usually make eye contact while doing them. He just sort of looks around the room and casually drops a sign out there. But he gets really excited if we respond correctly.

Limelet's nine-month check-up went well, although I can't help worrying because he's now dropped to the 30th percentile for weight. I forgot to ask if that's based on all babies or breastfed ones. However, he is eating a lot of solid foods now (3 to 5 small meals/snacks a day), so I assume that will become somewhat less of a factor. I think a lot of the weight thing's hereditary, rather than a lack of nutrition. I certainly try to feed him all the time, both milk and solid food.

Limelet also seems more interested in crawling these days--he's finally starting to try to get up. It was only a few weeks ago that he started sitting up reliably! I bet it won't be long before he's crawling. He seems to enter developmental stages suddenly instead of gradually.

I'm not looking forward to the transition and to not being around him all the time (let alone pumping milk), although I am looking forward to the internship itself.

The Frayed End of My Sleep Rope

2007-06-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

I've gotten varied responses as to how to approach Limelet's sleep, even some from non-parents. (If you are a parent yourself, you will quickly guess which is the non-parental response.)

One type of suggestion is that I should basically just wait until he falls asleep on his own, instead of spending so much frustrating time trying to "get" him to sleep. Which is tempting, since that is the frustrating part after all. Unfortunately, this would be analogous to my deciding that instead of going to bed, dimming the lights, and closing my eyes, I will just stay up doing stuff until I fall asleep in my tracks.

While some babies just fall asleep in their cereal bowls (you lucky person who told me that, you), most of them need their sleep to be facilitated, just as we facilitate our own sleep by going to bed and so forth. Some babies seem to need a lot more facilitation than others.

Limelet -- I don't know what his deal is. I really don't. I'm not a dumb or unobservant person. I watch him for even the tiniest signs of sleepiness, so I don't miss that "window" of sleeportunity. He nearly always goes down for his morning nap just fine--often with very little parenting-to-sleep, in just minutes. But that's often the only time. (And I can't predict if it'll be a 20-minute nap, or a 90-minute nap, anyway.)

So anyway. I digress. The other sort of advice is on the opposite end (comment from my two-time-mother friend Karen quoted here:)

I wish you lots of luck in the getting-baby-to-sleep department. I've found that
my kids sleep best when their sleep times are regular and they don't skip naps
or stay up past bedtime. When they're too tired, it takes them much much longer
to get them to fall asleep.

>sigh< .... Oh Karen, you're preaching to the choir here. I totally agree with you; I believe in sleep routines, I really do. I recommend them for my (adult) clients with sleep problems. I even recommend them for myself! I know that establishing a regular sleep rhythm is very important. So he does have a schedule, and it's based on his natural sleepy rhythms as charted very scientifically in a spreadsheet and everything (and what he does looks very much like what most people's babies do, according to the examples I've seen.)

He gets up at the same time every day, he goes to sleep for his first (9:00) nap every morning (for some reason), he has a very regular evening bathtime & bedtime (also established by the circadian observation method) etc.

The problem comes in the afternoon, when he either won't take his second nap, or takes it and then wants a third, or -- who knows. I have been trying for months to establish regular sleep in the afternoon for him, and he just won't go along with it. It's like he can't decide whether he's a two-napper or a three-napper, and it's been like that since he was about 4 months old. His afternoon just usually "messes up" his evening schedule.

I do have to say that the 4-months to 8-months teething bout didn't help at all. It's almost like it established a bad precedent, because afternoons were when the teething became more painful (and disruptive), so his chance to get good sleep habits was undermined. He's teething again lately, but it doesn't seem as bad as those four months were.

As far as sleeply laissez-faire, I've never "skipped" his naps--but I have spent every day for months and months and months trying to actually get him to have those naps! I even use labor-intensive nap-extension techniques (like listening closely to his breathing on the monitor, and running in to nurse him in his sleep before he actually wakes up, which occasionally works.) Obviously, I can't just keep him up all afternoon, because then he's miserable and overtired and would just cry at bedtime.

I have heard so many times and from so many respected sources that overtiredness is the cause of sleep woes, that now I think I've actually been overdoing it the other direction for a long time, maybe from the beginning. I think I have been trying to catch all his sleep windows too early, and then lulling him into too many naps (which end up being too short because he's not that tired). Of course I don't know this for certain, but this making-him-go-to-sleep-all-the-time thing is not working for any of us, so I have to try something different.

So as of this weekend, I've decided that it's going to be two naps. That's all there is to it. He's been teetering on the cusp of two versus three naps for months now, and he's nearly 9 months old. Plenty old enough to be out of the three-nap stage. So I'm making an executive decision to make an afternoon sleepytime and then accustom him to it.

I really want to get him firmly napping and sleeping before I have to go to internship and Daddy has to start staying home, as that will be enough of a big shock to Limelet's routine as is. I guess I can't force him to sleep, but it just seems like this will be a better chance of there being more regularity. We have eight weeks.

If I hear you wishing me luck, then thanks!

I'll need it.

Surge Ahead

2007-06-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I felt Limelet was on the cusp of one of those developmental surges. As indeed he was. So many things have once again changed so quickly, in some cases nearly overnight.

A week ago he was lying down most of the time he wasn't in arms, now he's often sitting up (mostly) unassisted and playing with his little bin of toys. It's so cute. And he's much less frustrated, because now he can be upright and see things even when he's not being carried, as well as reach out and grab the toys he wants instead of waiting for someone to figure out which one and give it to him.

He eats four little meals a day: breakfast, usually chicken and sweet potatoes; second breakfast, usually pintos and pumpkin; lunch, usually oatmeal with fruit; and dinner, usually beef with broccoli and oats. And he has begun having little drinks from his sippy cup at some meals--enriched rice milk or diluted apple juice. He carefully and concentratedly pinches his little crispy fruit puffs and eats them, though they often fall just as he gets one up to his mouth, poor little thing. The other day he actually asked (signed) for food a little while after rejecting the porridge. Guess he just wanted something else, because he was happy to eat.

It's easy to miss his signs unless I'm looking for them. His little hands are always active anyway, and it's not like he's terribly exact with the signs, so I was very happy to figure out that he meant "food." He was becoming frustrated at my denseness.

I'm working on moving his wake-up time to an hour earlier, just by 15 minutes a week, so that by the time I have to go to work, I can still have an hour in the morning with him to get him nursed and perhaps fed. If I say "it's two months until the internship starts" it sounds like a long time, but if I say "it's 8 weeks" then it's clear it's just around the corner.

I'm worried about the transition from me being primary caretaker during the day to Daddy. Not that he'll do anything wrong--he's a great caretaker--but just that Limelet is really attached to having me around all the time. We have to find some more time to have them do things on their own. I also am trying to consolidate the daytime nursing, as he's been such a grazer, casually nursing ten times a day. If we can consolidate it a little, then it will be easier for TheLimey to know when to give him milk, and less traumatic for Limelet.

I hear little sounds--must go try to extend his current nap!

Multipurpose Utility Fluid

2007-06-04T17:52:00.001-07:00

Caution! This post mentions eyeballs and infections and gross biological stuff. In case you can't handle that.

Did I mention how cool breastmilk is?

That sore throat I mentioned turned into a bad one, and Limelet had been runny-nosed for a couple days, so we all went to the pedi/family caregiver. Not strep, luckily. The pedi thought it was likely haemophilus (a bacteria), since it was going around, and we'd had contact with children the weekend before. Since the teething trauma had been especially bad last week, I was up really late for several nights in a row, so my immune system was apparently down pretty low.

I think Limelet got the infection first and got better first, I was next, and TheLimey was the last. I was miserable Friday and got steadily better over the weekend, except that it somehow migrated up through my stuffy nose into my right eye. I realized last night that it was not allergies--it was full-blown pinkeye.

I was really annoyed for a few hours thinking that I'd have to go all the way back to the doc and pay for yet another office visit and also get antibiotic eye drops. Then when Limelet awoke me at 11 for a brief nighttime social visit, I suddenly remembered that I already had the cure on hand. As it were.

I've used breastmilk for Limelet's eyes and for his ears, too, which was recommended by the pedi (and La Leche League, of course.) So why not mine? I started last night, rinsing the eye with saline first. I've been using it for less than 24 hours, and the eye is vastly improved. Almost better.

It's like magic! I guess it's also like immunoglobin A, keeping bacteria off mucosal surfaces, 'n' stuff. Not to mention the environment-specific antibodies.

I was already going to nurse as long as I could, but now I'm even more enthused.