Trisomymommy

Update: 28 months

It’s been an eventful month around here.  First , we’ve taken the next big step into the bourgeoisie life and hired…gasp…a nanny.  I’m now working about six hours per day, which is perfect for now.  I’ve been grateful to have so much time with Mojo Jojo (except maybe during those first couple of months, when gratitude was not the prevailing emotion), but it’s time for me to get back to my other life.  We were generally happy with Top Dollar Day Care, but we wanted more individual attention for Miss B, and the cost of sending two kids to Top Dollar was almost the same as the cost of having someone come to us.   We spent a lot of time working from home for the first week she was here, which enabled us to train her and watch her closely, and so far she hasn’t turned all Rebecca De Mornay on me. 

Perhaps dissatisfied with our collection of children’s music (KT Tunstall doesn’t cut it?), the nanny made a mixed CD of kiddie tunes that were sure to please (having worked in a daycare center, she knows much more about these things than I do).  And please they did.  In fact, Miss B is so happy with this CD that the entire dynamic of our family has changed.  Whenever we’re in the living room she signs “music” and goes over to the stereo.  She presses various buttons on the CD player until it starts.  While her music is playing, she’ll sometimes do these new little dance moves.  (Even if the nanny doesn’t work out, I’ll be forever grateful that she taught Miss B the chicken dance.)  And as important as I think music is for a good life, and as much as I appreciate that B loves music so much, this music is driving me batty.  After three or four repetitions of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” or “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”, I’m usually ready for something either a little edgier or a little more silent.  But can I really deny my Bean her music?  What kind of mom does that?   Last night we were trying to catch the News Hour and B kept trying to start her CD.   I found myself telling her, “No, no more music.  It’s time to watch TV.”  Mother of the year.

In addition to taking over our living room and planting daily earworms, I’m convinced that the nanny’s CD has corrupted B’s taste.  B used to be charmed by my singing.  My singing would always get rapt attention and a standing ovation.  But my thin little unaccompanied voice is no match for the rocking excitement on this CD.  I seem to have lost a great deal of entertainment value.  This does not really bother me.  In fact, I think we’ve reached an important milestone.  Part of growing up is falling in love with music that your parents don’t appreciate.  Like when I was 12 and became obsessed with “Heat of the Moment” by Asia, and even though I tried to explain that Asia was not just a group but a SUPERGROUP, and that they had the coolest sea creature on the album cover, my parents just didn’t get it.  Nobody ever understood me, ever.

Also in the music vein, I’ve been sitting B in front of the piano a lot lately.  She loves it.  She bangs, of course, but I’m impressed that she really seems to be listening to what she’s doing.  She’ll vary the pitch by reaching as far to the left and then as far to the right as she can.  She’ll play very softly and then will break out with some loud banging (Smells like Bean Spirit).  She rarely imitates me with speech sounds, but when I play the piano, she’ll often then try to reach for the same keys I just played, as if to copy.  Okay, so maybe I still hold a little entertainment value.  I hope she will learn to play for real someday.

We’ve had some language progress in the past month.  While she’s been able to point to her eyes, ears, mouth, etc. for a while, indicating her receptive language skills, she recently started saying “eye.”  Unfortunately, she often says it when pointing to her ear, but it’s still talking so I can’t complain.  She now says “bye bye” too.  Actually, this is part of a shtick in which she picks up her purse and keys, goes to the front door, waves, says “bye bye,” and then signs “car.”   I guess she sees a lot of that.  As I said, mother of the year.    

And then there is the walking.  She still crawls to get around a lot, but she’s starting to walk more and more.  The other day she made it out of one room and well into another, taking 28 little steps in a row before flopping down.  I like to count them.  For some reason it seems to be easier for her if she is carrying her purse and keys in her hands.   We have waited so very long for this. 

We’ve been doing a lot of artsy craftsy things lately.  On our OT’s advice, we broke B’s crayons in half to encourage her to hold them in her fingers rather than in a fist and we’ve also been trying to get her to use the crayons more purposefully.  For the first few months that we were playing with crayons she would either bang them on the paper, leaving little pock marks that she didn’t even seem to notice, or she would drag them across the paper in whatever motion was most natural to her little arm.  She didn’t seem to get that there was a connection between how she moved her body and the result that appeared on the paper.   (Aside:  One of the things I’m starting to really enjoy about parenting is how it makes me appreciate seemingly automatic, uninteresting things.  Via the technology of crayons, a fleeting action becomes fixed in a two-dimensional representation that can be hung with pride on the refrigerator.   It’s a recording of sorts.)  Now she’s starting to get it.  We work on moving the crayon up and down and around in circles and she’s starting to copy these strokes.  Yesterday she drew her very first circle.  Actually, it’s an ellipse, but it was the very first time she tried to draw a circle.  I hadn’t realized how meaningful this milestone would be for me – my baby is going to write.

Update: 27 months

On Sunday, Mother’s day, we were cooped up in the house all day because of rain, so by evening we had to get out. We bundled up both kids, raced out to the car, and then drove to an actual restaurant. A restaurant. With a toddler. And a baby. It wasn’t too bad. They brought a paper place mat and crayons for Miss B, as restaurants often do, and for the first time she was able to use them to entertain herself for a few minutes. It’s a small milestone, but a meaningful one to me. Last summer that happened and I remember how it struck me that any random moment is an opportunity for someone to convey their expectations about your child’s development.  You may not be thinking about it at that moment, you may be wondering what’s on tap and feeling relieved that you don’t have to cook, and then suddenly you’re thinking, “Oh.  I guess she should be doing crayons by now.  At least the waiter thinks so.”  And do you send the crayons away because she can’t do crayons and you don’t want her to eat them, or do you try to get her to use them even though you know she’s not ready, which then fails, leaving you all fixated on another thing that you should be working on when all you really wanted was a beer?  Anyway, this time the crayons were not fraught.  She banged them on the paper mat and drew a few random lines and only licked some of them without actually chowing down.

The restaurant is small, and in the corner there was an older couple performing folk tunes.  We seated B so that she could see them and she was thrilled.  She was dancing in her seat, bopping and swaying to Will the Circle Be Unbroken?  and clapping as the song ended.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  She was just gorgeous: animated and totally engaged and grinning from ear to ear.  And when she started to climb out of the high chair, T took her out for a walk around the restaurant.  There was something so tender about the sight of this I got a little choked up.  He was leaning over a little and holding his daughter’s hand as she walked slowly and stiff-leggedly across the room towards the musicians. It makes me all gooey to see him taking such care with her.

So yeah, walking.  It is very slowly starting to happen.  Yesterday she took about ten tiny little steps before plopping down, which is the most I’d ever seen her do independently.  Although she’s clearly making progress, I’ve decided to bring in a physical therapist to get some more advice. Our OT has been covering the gross motor stuff, and she’s great, but I want some more input.

In general, I’ve been feeling rather down on therapy.  It is so rare that the therapists suggest anything that I hadn’t already thought of myself or that I couldn’t get from one of the books or bloggers that I read.  For instance, here’s one from Cate’s therapist:  I took an empty formula can with a plastic lid, cut a slit in the lid, drew a face on it so that the slit was a mouth, saved some small lids from milk containers and jars of baby food, and taught B how to put these through the opening.  It’s fun because the lids make a nice rattling sound once they drop in.  At first B just tried to press the lids horizontally against the opening, which didn’t work very well, but she got the hang of it before too long.  It worked well, and it came from some stranger on the internet.  (Hi Cate!)  Do I really need therapists?  Managing the visits can be a hassle and with $25 copays, I sometimes wonder if it would be more beneficial to invest that money for her long term future and spend an extra hour per week just hanging out with her myself.

Cute things B is doing these days:

1.       Barking at the sight, sound, or mention of dogs.

2.       Grabbing phones and remote controls and then holding them by squeezing them between her ear and her shoulder.  (Note to self:  She is watching what you do.  Be careful.)

3.       Signing “Mommy” by bringing her index finger vertically to her lips, a sign that she developed from that line in The Wheels On the Bus where the mommies go, “Shh shh shh.”

4.       Rocking out to KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and A Cherry Tree.” 

Mojo Jojo Gets An Entry

Poor Jojo Mojo.  It’s the classic second child neglect, turned 21^st century.   Her milestones go unblogged.

So, here’s a randomly timed update on J.  She still spits up a lot, but is not so screamy anymore.  I can soothe her now, at least usually.  At today’s checkup, she was in the 25^th percentile for length, 10^th for weight, and 55^th for head circumference.  She smiles.  She coos.  She giggles occasionally.  She has figured out how to work the bouncy seat and can get a pretty high-amplitude bounce going when she puts her mind to it.  She likes her baby gym and can grab onto the hanging toys.  She has rolled over from back to front a few times, but hasn’t gone the other way yet.  Until this past week she was still waking up every three hours to eat, which is Just. Too. Often.  I decided to give her some rice cereal to see if it would help.  I made T video her first solid food experience, but it wasn’t much of a celebratory event.  It was just an exhausted me spooning food into her while chanting, please sleep more, please sleep more.  I give her some by spoon most evenings and I put some in her bottle at about 10:30pm, which had been suggested by a doctor for the reflux anyway.  Now sometimes she’ll sleep until about 4am, which is a huge improvement.  Last night she slept until 6:30am and I got up so happy and rested, I felt like those smiling people that you see waking up to what will surely be a productive day on those direct-to-consumer ads for sleeping pills.  The night before last she was up every two hours, so eh, it’s unpredictable.

Nursing is so much better now.  She rarely screams and pulls away in agony these days, and come to think of it, T hasn’t called me “acid boob” for weeks. 

Here’s a random thing that makes me really angry when I think about it, so I try not to think about it because there is nothing to be done anyway:  this baby was almost certainly exposed to contaminated Chinese heparin.  You know, the stuff that killed several dialysis patients?  I never had any adverse effects, but due to my sticky blood, I was on it for the last month of my pregnancy, which was shortly before the contaminant was discovered.  So here I am, forgoing wine (mostly), cutting back (a little) on coffee, and trying (usually) to do right by this fetus, and meanwhile, I’m injecting some unknown substance that some assholes used instead of the real stuff because it mimicked the structure of the real stuff (thus making it harder to detect) and it was ever so slightly cheaper to make.  None of the press coverage has mentioned that this is commonly given to hypercoagulable pregnant women and that we have no idea if it has any impact on their babies.  I’m thinking about this today because Mojo Jojo had a round of vaccinations and it freaked me out more than it usually does.  Sometimes I want to go live off the grid and eat only home grown vegetables and wear only clothes sewn by hand out of cloth woven by hand from wool sheared off of my own sheep.  But then I realize that we’re running low on disposable diapers, so I make a Target run.

Road Map

I know I'm way behind the times, but I finally did read Jennifer's Roadmap to Holland.  Wow.  What struck me most about it was just how remarkably vivid it was.  My own memory of those early days after B was born is pretty hazy, especially of her (mere) four days in the NICU, but Jennifer captured every nuanced emotional detail, and I was transfixed.  This experience is so emotionally complex and I found it almost shocking to see my own private thoughts and emotions expressed by someone else, much more vividly and eloquently than I could have expressed them myself.  Jennifer, what have you been doing inside my head?  There is a moment when she describes reading the twins' chart in the NICU.  She hadn't had enough breast milk, so Avery had been given formula, and she sees the minuses marking all of the times that she wasn't present.  This was the most compelling description I've ever seen of that desperate not-enough feeling.  I got teary reading it as I remembered how I felt when I didn't have enough milk, which, looking back, was a stand in for the powerlessness I felt in the face of the diagnosis.  I had been overwhelmed with that "not-enough" feeling even though I didn't have another child miles away and another premature infant to care for!  I also remember how desperately I wanted to be holding B in the NICU while also wanting to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.  I had forgotten the tension of that, but Jennifer nailed it perfectly.  And that ubiquitous Babies with Down Syndrome book!  So disheartening. 

Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of the Welcome to Holland thing.  It's nice and all, but it all seems too tidy to me.  Or maybe it's just that I received so many copies of it when B was born that it quickly came to feel clichéd.  Or maybe I just resisted the pressure to feel comforted by it because I'm ornery that way. Whatever.  I love that Road Map to Holland is not so blithe.  Although it is painfully raw at times, I think that as a new mom, I would have taken more comfort in it than in its namesake.

Boston?

So... who all is going to the big Boston conference?  I think I may try to go on my own, without the fam.  If I can pull this off, I'm going to be wanting to party with my friends inside the computer.  Uhm.... do I still have any friends inside the computer?  I mean, I know that I'm not a very good blogger and all, and I don't update all that often, and I haven't been leaving comments regularly, and well, I'm just kind of lame all around, but we're still friends, right?  I mean, friends enough that if we happened to be in the same place, we'd want to meet and have a glass of wine (or whatever you mormons are into), right?  Or would you be too busy with your real friends to make time for little 'ol me? 

Anyway, I'm going to decide in the next two days.  If anyone wants to share a hotel room, let me know.

-b

Update: 26 months

As David Byrne predicted, sometimes I do ask myself, "How did I get here?"  The question always comes to me in his voice with a vivid image of him jerking around in a very large suit. 

As she rounded the corner to 26 months old, Miss B decided it was time to take a step. Two in fact.  From her cute toddler-size upholstered chair across a vast empty space to the couch.  This came just in time for a certain mother who was starting to get discouraged.  We've been trying so hard to get her to walk.  For over a month now she has been able to do it while holding on to us with only one hand, although sometimes she resists and gives us the noodle legs.  Even though it is always faster to carry her, we've made an effort to be patient and make her walk from room to room and from the car up the walkway to the front steps.  When the weather has been good, I've made time before dinner to practice walking out on the sidewalk. (The neighbors like to come out and cheer her on.)  Still, she has not seemed interested in letting go.  Our OT hasn't offered any specific advice and has just encouraged us to keep giving her as many walking and standing opportunities as possible.  Looking for more direction than that, I checked in with my gross motor skills in Down syndrome book, which suggested having her lunge toward a toy on the sofa.  So, I tried that.  I set her chair about a foot away from the sofa and put various desired objects (a doll, a book, and yes, I'll admit it, even a cheezy poof) on the sofa.  B would stand up, fall forward into the sofa and grab her prize.  Over the course of a week, I gradually moved the chair slightly further away.  For several days, she would still lean forward and lunge without balancing her weight over her feet, only moving her feet after she had a secure hold on the cushion, but then one time she stood up and stayed perfectly upright, taking two little steps.  (Edited to add that we hope to win these adorable shoes from Prince Vince in celebration of her major achievement!)  A few days went by and then she did it again, and then another time she did it again.  Then I saw her take two independent steps from the door that she had been holding onto over to the stereo speaker.  There was no toy or treat on the speaker -- she did it only because that's where she wanted to go, and I was thrilled that she succeeded because unlike the sofa, it has awfully sharp corners.  I have videotaped about 20 trials of the chair-to-sofa move in hopes of getting a really good clip to share with the grandparents, but I think there's some kind Heisenberg thing going on here because such attempts to capture the phenomenon seem to fundamentally alter it. 

Miss B must be going through a growth spurt because her appetite is suddenly enormous.  For breakfast, she gets yogurt (which she can eat with a spoon on her own, freeing me up to make my first round of espresso) and then half of a waffle.  Lately she has been signing, “all done” after only a few bites of yogurt and then pointing to the freezer and saying, “Eh eh eh!”  in order to speed things along to the waffle part.  (You didn’t think I was actually making waffles from scratch every morning, did you?)  She loves waffles so much that she now points to the freezer and says, “Eh eh eh!” with every meal.  We couldn’t find a sign for waffle, so we taught her the sign for pancake.  She picked it up immediately.  For lunch and dinner, she’ll eat whatever is handy:  sliced turkey and cheese (she prefers muenster to swiss and she spits out reduced fat cheddar while looking disgusted), peanut butter and jelly, any kind of pasta that I can drum up, beans, eggs, or take-out pad thai with tofu.  The daycare tells me that she is eating everything they give her and is taking food from the other kids.  I was momentarily concerned about this behavior, but I’ve decided to just let it go for now as there isn’t much I can do about it anyway. I think I said, lamely, “Oh.  Uhm.  Don’t let her do that?” For now, I’m using her interest in food as a way to teach her new words.  She just learned to say “chee” (cheese).  She has also learned to say “ah”, which in context clearly means “hot.”  While I am very careful to cool off hot food before I give it to her, T hands her a waffle right out of the toaster and says, “Careful, it’s hot.”  She now touches all of her food to determine whether or not it is ah and if it is, she says, “ah” for awhile while pointing at the food, until it eventually cools down and then she eats it. 

People always ask me how she feels about having a little sister.  It’s hard to tell.  She smiles at Mojo Jojo and likes to pat her, and sometimes she’ll try to stick a pacifier in her mouth and when it doesn’t stay in, she’ll put it in her own mouth instead.  She doesn’t scowl at her, and doesn’t seem to get upset when I pick her up.  She’s playing with her doll more these days, which gives me a little insight into how she sees babies. For a while now, she has been giving the doll a bottle and patting its back. I had demonstrated this for her, so it wasn’t clear to me if she was really pretending that the doll was a baby or if she was just copying what she’d seen me do with the doll.  Copying is great --  we’re always trying to get B to imitate more -- but pretending is a more creative and sophisticated sort of play and I want to encourage it.  Lately she’s been adding cute little slurping sounds to the bottle routine, and now she’s sticking her doll in Mojo Jojo’s car seat and rocking it. 

We have also had some important musical advances around here.  For some time now, Itsy Bitsy Spider has been in heavy rotation.  It is a magic spell that can suddenly lull this willful toddler into compliance at any moment.  Hair brushing is no problem as long as you’re ready to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider.  She has most of the choreography now and likes to say, “Down” when we get to the rain part.  In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed her waving her hands around at random moments and it seemed like she was signing something but I couldn’t figure out what it was.  Then one day I got bored of Itsy Bitsy Spider and decided to sing Wheels on the Bus instead, and she immediately started doing that same hand waving thing.  So all this time she had been trying to submit a song request.  She knows about half of the choreography for Wheels and likes to say “All” with us. She was probably bored with that damn spider too. 

Whine

With Mojo Jojo in tow, I took B in for an ENT appointment today.  There was a long wait, which meant that there was plenty of time to spend in the waiting room observing other children.  And while it started off well, by the end I was having one of those moments.  I've written about these before.  The moments when everything is going along fine and then suddenly I'm sad about B.  Grief sneaks in. 

She's different.  I've known this for a long time, of course.  But what hit me today is that it's not simply a matter of her delays.  The evaluations that place her, as I predicted, at about 12 months developmentally for language skills and 19 months for fine motor skills, give me this sense that she's just like other kids except delayed, but really, she's not.  Today she was waving hello at everyone and grunting, "uh uh uh."  It's the sound she makes when she wants to get someone's attention and I'm so used to it that I don't even notice it anymore, but today I realized that it's kind of weird.  I mean, she can say something much closer to "hi", but instead she was waving, smiling, and grunting.  The other moms were nice and smiled and waved back, but I could feel them watching me and I felt self conscious, and for the first time, I realized that I was feeling self-conscious about B's behavior.  It wasn't just the grunting.  I gave her some paper to play with and she kept putting it in her mouth.  I'm trying to teach her not to put everything in her mouth, but she does it anyway and I end up saying "No" nonstop or taking away the very thing I just gave her to keep her occupied.  (Although I have to add that when she wasn't putting it in her mouth, she was trying to put it on top of her head like a hat, which was damn cute if I do say so.)  So after I took the paper away and she was getting restless, I thought maybe I should use this time well and practice her walking, since it was a huge waiting room and there was plenty of space.  But she did not like that idea and she flopped down on the floor and rather than tell me, "No!" which she is able to do and which would have been appropriate, she did her whiniest grunt.  Loudly.  And people turned to look.  Or maybe they didn't and I just felt like they did.  And I found myself wishing that I had brushed her hair better and dressed her in something cuter and that I hadn't tried to make her walk, thus drawing attention the fact that she can't. 

I was feeding J a bottle (I'm really bad at public nursing) and holding B on my lap, and she was waving at this adorable little girl who must have been just over one.  The girl walked over to us and was smiling.  I think she wanted to see the baby, so I said something about the baby drinking her milk.  I was totally welcoming toward this girl and B was all smiling and waving, but the mom kept urging her to come away and not bother the baby while she's eating.  It was so obvious that we were happy to talk with her, so did the mom really think she was being a bother?  Maybe. Some moms are quick to think that.  Or maybe the mom didn't want her to go up and talk to strangers like that.  Reasonable enough.  But of course I end up wondering if the mom felt uncomfortable because of B. 

And this is what I hate about the special needs parenting thing.  It's not B herself -- she's great, usually.  The whiney grunting thing is annoying, but every kid whines and it's always annoying, so I don't hold that against her.  It's that it adds all of these layers of interpretation to inconsequential interactions.  It’s exhausting.  And I feel like I have to put on this show.  I don't want people to pity me, and I want them to feel positively toward people with Down syndrome, so I have to present an image of What It's Like.  Because that's what they're all wondering, isn't it?  What's that like?  And even though lots of other kids might be whiney at a doctor's office, when my kid whines (in her special way), I have to carry the burden of not wanting other people to think that this is What It's Like.  And if I'm in a hurry and don't fix up her hair, I end up feeling like I've let down the whole DS community by not being a good enough advocate, even if my own hair is an unshowered mess.

I’m not sure I’m articulating this very well.  I just want us to be us, and I don’t want to feel like everywhere we go, we stand for Down syndrome.

And as for the whining?  You can see where she gets it from.

Goodness

1.  I met my last goal, just in time. 

2.  J has started sleeping for up to five hours in a row and screaming much less (Yay Zantac!)  I am a better person as a result.

3.  B said "chee".  Since at the time we were asking her if she wanted cheese, her meaning is pretty clear.  This is the first new spoken word we've heard in many months.  Now if we could just get her to eat something besides cheese...

4.  J giggled the first of what I hope will be many giggles.  There is nothing in the world like that sound.  I had been starting to wonder if maybe she just doesn't have a very good sense of humor. 

Update: 25 Months

Miss B celebrated turning 25 months old by vomiting.  We plied her with gatorade, trying to get her to just take a sip, just one little sip, it's really good, just a teeny tiny sip, every hour or so, changing up the flavors (or rather, colors) in hopes of avoiding the Garcia effect, and finally, finally, just as we considered bringing her to the hospital for IV hydration, she started drinking.  For the next couple of days she wouldn't eat, so we just kept offering more gatorade.  Hey, let’s try Fierce Grape!  Because grapes are such a ferocious fruit. Then she started eating again and everything seemed to be going well, until the next day when she destroyed our home with a massive diaper explosion, coating everything in a two-mile radius with foul-smelling, liquid poo that was, I kid you not, fluorescent blue.  I looked for a Geiger counter so I could tell you exactly how radioactive was this toxic blue poo, but apparently we do not own one.  The baby books never mentioned that this would be an indispensable item for the nursery.

She recovered just in time for her year-two evaluation.  I was pleased with myself for not getting all emotional as they were testing her and asking me all the Can she do this? Can she do that? questions.  There were several things that she couldn't do that we have never even tried with her.  For instance, she has never strung a bead, or used scissors, or done anything with play-doh.  Are we actually there already?  Is it time for crafting? I guess so. I think that because she's not walking, we tend to think of her as younger than she is, but her fine motor skills are quite a bit more advanced than her gross motor skills, and we need to remember to give her new challenges in that domain.  Yesterday I bought her some pipe cleaners and rigatoni (for stringing), a box of large crayons, and a play-doh set with plastic scissors.  Not sure what to make of play-doh, B just poked it tentatively, but T and I had fun with it.  I made a snake.  Because I’m creative that way.

I'll be interested to see how they rate her language / cognitive skills.  I'd guess that language is at about 12 months.  Regarding language, the research supposedly shows that signing with kids does not delay speech and that it may even help it along, and while that may be true in general, I'm starting to wonder if it might not be true for my kid.  She was beginning to get some words, but lately she has been relying on sign almost exclusively.  I know that we should stop accepting the sign once she speaks the word, but it is really hard to ignore the sign when you are so happy to have your child communicating at all.  Still, I think it's time that we pushed her a little more to speak.  I wonder if sometimes she tries speaking, but we don’t understand her, so she reverts to sign.  Our speech therapist has started hinting about introducing a picture system for communication.  I know she's the expert and all, and she says it would just be transitional, but this seems crazy to me.  It would make sense if we thought she was non-verbal, but we don't think that.  Are we really going to have this kid using three different communication systems?  No, we are not.  It bothers me because not only does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea (at least right now), it makes me think that this therapist might be selling B short, which is so not what you want in a therapist.

Vomiting and radioactive diarrhea aside, B has been delightful lately.  I think that when we first got her diagnosis, I expected that raising her would be so much work.  I imagined that it would feel like a constant struggle, but it just doesn’t.  We laugh a lot and we poke at play-doh snakes.  We hug.  It’s fun.

Stickk it for Parker, Goal #2

So, I met that last goal. 

I think this way of committing myself is helpful for me.  I don't know if it's the money itself, or the humiliation of losing money in this way, or the public declaration of the goal, but somehow these things all combine to keep me focused.  For several days I had been struggling to work on my project, but setting that goal energized me and got me track. 

I feel ridiculous for having to do my work this way, but maybe I just need to accept that this is my nature.  I have always been motivated by deadlines.  I pulled many all nighters through high school and college and never once submitted a paper early.  Sometimes I have had to plead for extensions because I find that I can't pull it off at the last minute, and it is embarrassing to do that at this stage of my professional life.  This is a bad way to work, not only because the work suffers for being all rushed at the end, but also because I get very anxious during those days and weeks when I know I should be working on something but can't seem to make myself do it. 

I need to work more steadily and happily, and the way to do this is to meet sequential, intermediate goals along the way to the big goal.

At stickk.com, I am committing another $200 to my next goal, which is to have a complete draft of my project by April 1st.  This draft has to be at least 13,000 words.  Not just any 13,000 words, mind you but the right 13,000 words. That is, it has to be reasonably good.  For this goal, I've decided to enlist an old grad-school friend to be my referee.  I will send her my draft by the end of the day on April 1st and she will do a word count and judge it.  If it is at least 13,000 words and at least B-quality work, then I will have met my goal.  If not, then I will have failed.  She will verify whether or not I met the goal with Stickk.com.

If I fail, Parker gets $200.