Twenty months

Minihammer,

Good grief! 20 months already. Seems like most of my pictures of you this month were taken during our only quiet time:  waiting in the car for your dad to return from one quick errand or another. I’m glad my new phone has a semi-reliable camera, because I haven’t brought the regular camera out at all this month.

Your aunt Liz asked after you recently and I sighed, “he’s so advanced. Hitting the terrible twos at only 19 months.” Of late you’ve been, in a word, irritable. You do have some pretty good excuses, what with the ear infections and some seriously GIANT teeth coming in and all. You wake up some mornings thoroughly disillusioned with the world, and you insist that you fuss and cry and stay in our arms until you’ve worked your way out of the glum, which can take what seems like an eternity. Someday, you will probably solve this problem with coffee, I’m thinking.

What perplexes me most is that there’s no storage of good-will with toddlers. It’s not as though tirelessly working to keep you happy for an hour means that you’ll have to “ramp down” to unhappiness, or that a tantrum will be something I can anticipate and head off before it happens. Instead, you can be perfectly content and entertained for an hour and then BAM! Inconsolable unhappiness takes over and there is little we can do to get you back. It makes for days of emotional whiplash for all of us. I read somewhere that to put yourself in a toddler mindset, you have to think of times when the world has pushed you to your very last nerve, and even a simple “hello” from a stranger with just the wrong tone will send you flying into fits of rage (sadly, I’ve worked with people in the past who regularly fit this description and were not, in fact, toddlers). Anyway. I try to remember that - that’s where you are right now, always teetering on pure joy and pure misery, and that the triggers are rarely going to be totally apparent to the outside world.

Hand in hand with the irritability goes Willful Placing of Self In Peril, and as a result you’ve been in time out so much this month that you’ve learned to count to ten with us - or at least, you’ve managed to distract me from time out once or twice by following my stern “FIVE…” (we count down to timeout) with a sweet and innocent “six?” I am SO easily manipulated by your quick maneuvering from Utter Hellbeast to Charm Personified, I think I’m going to be in big trouble from here on in.

Glad to report that we can still make you smile (most of the time) with a quick song or game of peek-a-boo (the variety where I hide behind something and jump out - none of this wimpy covering-eyes stuff). And now that you are feeling better (we think), you really are showing the happiness to which we had grown accustomed.

Developmentally, you’re stringing words together into phrases sometimes now - usually some variation on “no” - “no more, daddy”, “night-night Ludo”, and your favorite, “french FRIES”. Easily the most entertaining is probably something you picked up at daycare - you order all of us to “sit down” - and include a Jedi-mind-trick hand gesture. It works. Your Nana has stayed over with us a few nights so that she can care for you during sick days, and one of those nights, you flat out wouldn’t go to bed. You tried to stall us as we gathered you up to take you to your room with “sit down, Nana, sit down”. It was such an earnest request, we felt we had to oblige. See what I mean? Big. Trouble.

You also sing now, like actual notes in actual tunes. That’s pretty cool.

I have had the opportunity to drop you at daycare a few times this month, including this morning (your daycare is in your dad’s office building so normally he takes you and picks you up). I have to say, maybe because I don’t go very often, it hasn’t really gotten any easier to leave you for the day. I thought it would be great to get to see you in the morning before I went to work and you went to school. And certainly, coaxing your sleepy body and out-of-control bedhead into consciousness, holding you while you were still warm and half-dreaming, and seeing you snug in your footie PJs and starting to wake up to the day was wonderful. Still, I found myself weepy as I walked away from the daycare today - you’re happy to go there, and in fact the teacher who took you in her arms had you completely distracted with the colors of toy ducks before I was even out of the room. But that moment right before, when you clung to my neck as I handed you over - that stayed with me long after I had left. This whole work/life balance thing is tricky, and sometimes very rewarding, and sometimes equally heartbreaking. I try to remember a line from Friday Night Lights (yes I watch a lot of TV, or at least used to back when I could stay awake past 8:00), where the family struggling with needing to find daycare for their daughter remind themselves that “that is not our burden, it is our gift”. That applies to everything about our life together and is worth remembering: even when you are testing my very last nerve, you are never a burden, always a gift.

All my love,

Mom

PS Pictures to follow, once I figure out this newfangled phone technology.

Grandma

Earlier this week, my grandmother - your great-grandmother - passed away.

As circumstance would have it, you never got to meet her in person.  She lived in Australia, and by the time you were born had retired from her travel adventures which would bring her our way (and we have inadvertently managed to keep travel relatively local for the past, er, decade or so).

Growing up, we saw her every few years, either with her coming to us during one of her world travel outings, or with us going to her for family reunions and the like. I remember her most vividly coming off airplanes; brightening gray airport corridors with her trademark leopard print raincoat and vigorous wave and dimpled smile upon seeing us. I remember, as a child, visiting her house in Melbourne and being exhausted beyond recognition from the travel, but then instantly finding vitality upon drinking some mango juice she offered. To this day the scent of mango takes me right back to that afternoon in her kitchen.

Her memory started to fade and her health to fail, I believe, somewhere around the time you were born. Even so, she managed to send you letters and gifts from Australia, including your Platypus toy, which is one of your favorites. She hoped you would remember the Australian part of your heritage, and we will do our best to make sure that you do.

I am hoping that my aunt Lindy won’t mind if I recount what she sent me in an e-mail four days after you were born:

Mum’s face immediately lit up when I said that I was bearing lovely news and
she asked straight away, ‘Has the baby arrived?’  When I showed her the
photos she looked for a little while and then said, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous!’  I
told her the vital statistics and she sounded very happy about his good
birth weight and judged that he looked well done and ready for the outside
world!  We talked of other things for a little while, but she was very keen
to look at the photos again and to display them to some of the other
residents and staff, proudly proclaiming that this was her first
great-grandchild.  So Minihammer’s image has been much admired half a world
away already!  When she had gazed at him again she said, ‘How sweet!’  This
from someone who doesn’t generally go all dewy eyed over babies (unlike her
own mother who Mum says would cross the street to peer into prams of total
strangers to admire a baby!)

The sweet smell of skunks

I spoke a little too soon on the whole “healthy” thing. We were out and about for much of the long weekend, and your cough returned and then got progressively worse. On Sunday, you started gagging on your coughs, which is something you did when you had pneumonia. We were in the process of deciding whether it was time to take you to urgent care when you gave your input on the topic by vomiting all over yourself in the back seat. You immediately looked at the aftermath and burst into tears. We were stuck in both rain and stopped traffic on an onramp to I-25, so we pulled as far over as we could and I hopped in the back seat with you and started Cleanup Crew duty.

I rarely gag at smells, but man, this was a close one. I cleaned you up, holding my breath as much as I could, as your dad navigated us through The Slowest Traffic Possible to the urgent care facility.  It was still raining hard as we made our way down the highway, but the stench was so overpowering in the car that we had the windows cracked open. I advised your father, based on an experience I had drowning a Toyota Corolla a few years back, NOT to drive through the small lake that had formed in the right hand lane. You know who DID decide to risk driving through the lake? EVERY SUV ON THE ROAD. Our entire front seat and dashboard were soon cascaded with sheets of water from the trucks dashing by.*

So! Soaked with water and highway sludge, stinky, somewhat panicked and still in traffic, we crawled along on our way to the doctor. At one point we drove through an area that had recently been sprayed by a skunk, and I’m not kidding, I thought “well, that covers the vomit smell nicely” and was actually disappointed when it faded away.

We got to the urgent care, found a stray pair of your PJs in the trunk that you could change into, got you checked in, changed, and were soon taken back to see the doctor. Happily, he reported that you were showing no signs of pneumonia. One of the criteria the doctor laid out was that you usually “don’t see a social smile like that with pneumonia”. I dismissed this one right out because kid, I don’t know who you’re related to, but you smile through pretty much everything, and had started beaming once you were cleaned up a bit. Anyway. It seems you have an upper respiratory infection and both your ears are infected. Two ear infections for the price of one! Poor little buddy.

Alas, back on antibiotics you go! And on to the next, hopefully less smelly, adventure for us all.

*When I lived in New York, my good friend Becky discovered, the hard way, that one of life’s more uncomfortable feelings has to be inadvertently stepping ankle deep into a New York City puddle of rain/snow/godknowswhatelse that has collected in the gutter.Our car dousing was a startling reminder of this lesson.

Nineteen months

Well, I’m happy to say that this past month actually went relatively well in terms of health issues. Hooray!

So: a bit about all our activity. We are moving! Soon! It’s been a long process, but the short story is that we found a really good deal on a house that is much closer to your dad’s work. The house also gives us a little bit more room to grow, and (we hope) will pose less moneypit-deathtrap issues than our current house.* Here you are playing in the new living room:

It seems to have passed the rocking horse test, at the very least.

The weather is FINALLY a little better - in fact it’s pretty much perfect. Not too hot, not too cold, rain at night so green things have a fighting chance. We’ve been out to the parks a few times and get to spend plenty of time on the front lawn at our current/soon to be old house:

Developmentally, the biggest changes in you seem to be in the speech department, closely tied to the Expression of Emotions department. You now call things by name (besides me, your dad and the cat, that is) and even in the last week have correctly identified “Nana” and your aunt Liz (well, aunt “Eesh” for now). You also have formed close attachments to some of your toys. In the process of abandoning ship*, we decided to move your toy hippo chair so that you’d have it as soon as we got to the new house. Your Nana managed to get it out of your playroom without notice, but unfortunately you caught your dad carrying it to the car. Nana said “I think we have a crisis brewing here,” and sure enough, moments later you were in my arms wailing “Happo! Haaaaaapooooooo!” while I tried to explain that Hippo was in the car and we’d all be driving to the new house together. You weren’t convinced until you were actually buckled in next to her and patting her head and chanting “Happo. Happo.”

Trauma of separating you from things you love best aside (er, sorry), you’ve had a really excellent month. With all the change going on around us it’s wonderful to be able to share all the experiences with you and your dad. Have a great month, little one –

Love,
Mom

*case in point: this week, part one: “Do you smell that wet paper smell?”; this week, part two: “let’s rip out parts of the basement ceiling and see if we find mold”; this week, part three: “let’s move three weeks sooner than we planned lest we all die far earlier than anticipated”. I don’t know if we actually have a mold problem, but if we do, it’s something we’re going to solve while no one is living there.

Passage of time

Last June:

And then October:

And present day:

No, no no, no no no no - no! Oh wait, yes.

As has frequently been mentioned before, you are quite adept at saying “No”. We are partially responsible for this in that we laugh with you when you start going on about how serious you are that you don’t want more food, or don’t want to go to bed, or don’t like what we are doing. But your train of a thousand “No”s ended today with your first spoken “Yes” which was also accompanied by a big nod of the head. You did want a scone from Starbucks! Luckily they had the kind you like and you proceeded to lick all the frosting off the scone and then begrudgingly ate the rest. You are growing so rapidly mentally and physically right now, it’s hard to report on all of the new things but they are all exciting.

Eighteen Months

When I was a teenager, I didn’t babysit all that much. I’m not really sure why; I guess I was pretty busy in high school. And I can’t say I had a lot of interest in kids; not that I disliked them, just that with the exception of younger siblings of my friends, I hadn’t really been around people significantly younger than me. Certainly not the three-foot-and-under crowd. In fact, I’ve said on a few occasions that I think you might have been the first person whose diaper I changed. It may not actually be true (I did do some babysitting after all), but by the time we had you I had totally forgotten how to change one. Not that it’s difficult, thankfully.

Anyway. I remember one babysitting job I did have. It was for these two kids, one of whom was an eighteen-month old little girl. I liked her instantly; she was so calm and sweet and communicative, but didn’t know many words yet. So she would point at things and babble and smile and run around, and seemed so at peace with her environment and curious about the world around her. When I put her in her crib for a nap, she started handing me all the toys out of her crib, one by one, and somehow managed to indicate to me that I was to set them on the bed, carefully, which I did. When she woke, we repeated the ritual in reverse, and I passed her each toy, one by one, and she carefully arranged them around her. When we were finished, she smiled and outstretched her arms for me to pick her up, ready to go on to the next.

From that day on when I spoke to people about kids I usually noted that while I didn’t know much about children and hadn’t spent much time with them, I thought eighteen months was a pretty good age, both to be, and to spend time with.

So I thought back on that babysitting experience and smiled when, the other day, I realized that you had turned eighteen months old. You are all those things I remember about the age; all sweetness and curiosity and humor. You are pre-verbal, with just a few words coming out clearly (”help”, “home”, “no”, and “bubble” are your current favorites). The rest comes out in strings of sounds that sound almost Ewok in nature (nerd alert!), melodic flows of questions or tirades or excited explanations of what you are seeing.

You’re affectionate; you cling to people you love, you offer hugs with generosity, and you love to laugh and make others laugh.

You definitely have your moments: as I mentioned, “no” is a favorite word. You usually use it in a string that, as your father pointed out, sounds a bit like an engine revving, “no no nonono NONONONONO no?” and you shake your head vehemently, in case we didn’t get the point. Problem is, while sometimes you really mean it (if you know, for instance, that it is nap time), sometimes you say it as a default answer to any question. So your dad and I are trying to teach you to say “yes” and nod your head. Thus far you’ve conceded with a little head bob now and then. It’s small progress, but we’ll take it.

You had your eighteen month checkup the other day. Your height (31 inches) is in the 25th percentile, your weight (21 lbs or so) is in the 3rd percentile, which puts you on the charts for the first time in over a year (W00T!), and your head circumference is in the 50th percentile, which brings to mind all manner of quotations from the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer. You’ll have to watch that when you’re a bit older.

Unfortunately, the checkup was only the latest in a long string of bi-weekly doctor visits. About a month ago, you got pneumonia. Then a few weeks after that we took you in again because your cough was so disturbing, and your manner was tired and cranky. Turns out you had croup (again - you had it in December, too). In between all of this you’ve had what seems like a permanent cold. I’ve said a few times that I am one doctor’s visit away from public scene-making. I do realize things could be so much worse, but it’s still so frightening to cart your kid from the doctor’s office to the x-ray facility, hoping that nothing too awful shows up. It’s been scary, but we’ve been lucky in that everything has been manageable and curable. Still, I wouldn’t mind a month where you felt good, and I’m sure you wouldn’t mind that either.

Your croup coincided with my first week at my new job, and your dad had missed quite a bit of work during the pneumonia, so we decided to call in a pinch hitter and ask my aunt Shelley to come out and stay with you last week. While the circumstances were less than ideal, it was great to see her and I think you loved spending the week with her  (in fact, when it was time for her to go to the airport, you clung to her neck and shouted “no no noooooo!” which was simultaneously very sweet and very heart wrenching).

By the end of the week you were mostly feeling better, and your Nana had Good Friday off, so she and Shelley took you to the Art Museum. Apparently there’s a bubble exhibit for kids (which I can’t fully visualize, but it sounds fun!) and you have since talked about bubbles with regularity. There is little in this world more endearing, I imagine, than watching a tiny person waddle away, consumed in his thoughts, chanting “bubblebubblebubblebubblebubble” and presumably remembering a perfect toddler day. Particularly endearing when said tiny person has already claimed one’s heart.

Happy eighteen months, little guy.

Love,
Mom

Nephew of an author!

With Nana and holding Aunt Rebecca’s new book!

Tour of the mess

Quiet time