Trisomymommy

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.

Stickk it for Parker

I’m struggling with a writing project.  It should be about 15,000 words, but I seem to have stalled out at 5300, and it’s making me unhappy.  I need me a kick in the pants, and I think I’ve figured out how to do it.  If I don’t reach 6100 words by the end of the day on Monday, I will lose $200.  That $200 will go to Parker.*

I love behavioral economics.

An interesting problem in behavioral economics is that even when people know what is best for them to do, they do not do it.  They know they should save money, lose weight, exercise more, procrastinate less, finish the damn paper, whatever, but in the moment, they do not make the decisions that are consistent with those goals.

Now, a key principle in economics is that people respond to incentives and disincentives.  If a penalty is high enough, you’ll do what it takes to avoid it.  The problem is, we rarely have adequately powerful incentives for personal goals.  We’re grown-ups now, and there is nobody to punish us by taking away our toys if we fail to meet some personal goal.  Until now…

At stickk.com, you can commit to meeting a goal by a certain date, declare how much money you will lose if you fail, and designate who will get the money.  They charge your credit card when you make the commitment and then on your deadline the money gets distributed either to you if you succeeded, or to the beneficiary if you failed.  You can have the money go to charity, in which case they’ll send it off to one of several non controversial charities.  You can have the money go to anti-charity, which is some cause that you despise, such as a pro-choice group if you are a pro-lifer, or the NRA if you are pro-gun control, the theory being that the thought of having your money go to such a hated group will give you further incentive to achieve your goal.  Or, you can designate an individual to receive it, like Parker.  Although psychologically, it would more effective for me to go the anti-charity route, I figure if I’m going to lose some money, it may as well go to Parker.  Also, this gives me a reason to be honest about my reporting, because if I’m dishonest, that would be like lying to Parker, and who can lie to such a cutie?  And if I achieve my goals and don’t lose any money to Parker, I’ll be so happy that I might just make a donation to his medical fund anyway by way of thanking him for egging me on.

So here’s a weird fundraiser.  Let’s stickk it for Parker.  Anybody willing to join me?  My user name at Stickk.com is simply "B", so come say hi.

*I made this bet on Friday afternoon and now Miss B has come down with an awful stomach flu, which means she can’t go to daycare tomorrow, which means it won’t be a productive work day, which means… gulp…

Mojo

So I haven’t been blogging lately.  I just haven’t felt like I had much to say these days. Life goes on, rather mundanely, and there is nothing very worthy of note.  But I realized recently that time is flying by and without any record, I will not remember any of it.  I need to keep more notes, even if they capture nothing more than everyday life. 

I’m thinking of this because I recently reread a journal I was keeping a few years ago, while we were gearing up for IVF. In it, I just write about whatever work project I’m struggling with, what I did that day, and my deliberate efforts to manage my sadness and anxiety.  I think if I didn’t have that journal, it would be very easy to gloss over that time of my life and to forget just how painful and scary it was.  Once a problem is resolved, the mind does not keep what it was like back when you didn’t know if it ever would be resolved.  And it really does feel resolved for me now.  I don’t know if I’ll ever try again, but I’m certainly not feeling the urge right now.  Maybe someday I will, and I’ll call up the RE and schedule one final attempt with our few remaining embryos, or maybe one day I’ll call him up and tell him to dump them, or maybe I’ll never call and will just keep paying storage fees throughout my life, never able to destroy something so precious.  I don’t know, and I don’t need to know now. 

Anyway, days are flying by without any record, and I need to do something about that.  So here’s what’s happening.  J is doing better.  Some days she only spits up a few times and doesn’t cry quite so much.  But there are other days that are much worse.  I’m trying to cut out onions, broccoli, and dairy (mostly – I can’t give it up completely, I just can’t) to see if it helps.  I did talk to some more doctors and nurses about her issues and, on their advice, tried Maalox.  It didn’t help, so we’ve just moved on to Zantac.  I wish I had been more aggressive about pursuing this earlier.  I guess I was concerned that I was overreacting to what might just be fairly normal baby behavior.  But then I took her to B’s daycare and after a long, painful day, the caregiver told me that J was the crankiest baby she’d ever seen.  And this woman has seen a lot of babies.  She also said that they had nicknamed her Mojo Jojo.  I didn’t know who that was, so I had to ask the internets. This is Mojo Jojo: 

I had to agree that there is a striking resemblance.

I’ve taken a hiatus from stay-at-home momhood to finish a work project that I meant to get done during the pregnancy but… well… didn’t.  The deadline is looming and I found I was not able to get anything done while caring for Mojo Jojo and I was getting very anxious about it.  So for the time being, I’ve saddled B’s day care with the crankiest baby ever.  My hope is that I’ll be able to wrap it up in about two more weeks and take her back out of daycare just as she hits three months old, which is when people say babies cheer up. 

The first day I brought her in, the daycare called in the middle of the day to say, “Did you know that she has thrush?”  Hey, that’s me, #1 mom who doesn’t even know that about her own baby.  Actually, I had suspected it two days earlier, but then the symptoms seemed to go away so I thought I had been wrong.  The treatment is gentian violet solution, which is dark purple.  Seriously dark purple.  As dark as India ink.  I swabbed the inside of her mouth with it, staining her entire mouth and lips purple.  Then she spit up, sending purple dye all over the changing table and her clothes.  Then she put her hands in her mouth, turning them and everything they touched purple.  It was purple chaos, and it earned her many strange looks from people, but it worked.

Miss B is doing great.  She keeps getting more communicative and more engaged and it is so much fun to hang out with her now.  That is, if she has napped.  She is resisting naps a lot and sometimes she is extremely cranky.  She is such a little girl and not a baby anymore.  Last night as she was eating, she started spitting for fun, so I touched her lips and said, “No spitting” and made a stern face.  She smiled a new smile, one that I hadn’t seen before.  While most of her smiles erupt from a natural and immediate surge of joy, this one was slightly coy and self-conscious, and I could tell by the way she was studying my face that she was trying to get me to smile back at her.  It took all of my self control not to.  A major milestone has been reached:  Miss B has learned to play the cute card.