Trisomymommy

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.