Trisomymommy

Jumping Jo

I want a doorway hanging jumper thingy.  Not for the baby, mind you.  She has one.  I’m jealous and I want one for myself.  I wonder if this doorway jumping baby gear created the psychological conditions that eventually lead to the bungee jumping craze?

Baby Mojo Jojo has turned 7-months-old.  At 16½ lbs, she’s on the small side, which is convenient for those of us who carry her around.  She’s sitting, although not all that steadily.  Our pediatrician is not concerned and even seemed impressed that she puts her hands out when she’s about to fall over.  She likes to say “Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.”  And then sometimes she’ll repeat it.  She wants to stand.   She’s been trying to crawl, but usually ends up rolling instead.  The other day, she sort of crawled forward just a tiny bit.

I love to see her learn new things, but I have to admit that it’s a little complicated for me.  She does it so effortlessly, and often she just starts doing new stuff before I even have a chance to stress about the fact that she’s not doing it yet.  So, she crawls forward ever so slightly and we give a little cheer and that’s it.  It’s just not that big of deal.  It’s nice, but there’s a kind of ruefulness to it as well.  When B first managed to propel herself forward, she was nearly 11-months-old and it was a powerful moment for our little family, described here.  I remember getting a bit teary over the accomplishment.   The developmental differences between my girls are starting to show now, and it makes me a little sad that B had to work for so much longer to achieve these same goals.  One day, and it won’t be too far off, J is going to lap her older sister in development.  

I wonder how the family dynamics differ when the child with DS is the oldest?   For most of my friends in the DS circles, the kid with DS is the youngest.  I can see how that would work.  I imagine the older kids just thinking of their sibling with DS as the baby of the family, feeling protective toward him or her, and always understanding him or her to be someone that needs some special care.  But in my case, there’s going to be a reversal of sorts when both daughters realize that the younger one can do things that the older one can’t.  I wonder how that will play out and how best to handle it.   

I guess I’ll know when I get there.

Update: 29 months

A couple of weeks ago (I'm late on the update) Miss B turned 29 months old.  I had to stop and calculate that.  I no longer know off the top of my head exactly how many months old she is. 

We spent a week visiting my parents.  They live in a large ranch house that seems to be conducive to B's gross motor skill development. Last year she spent a great deal of time in a long hallway with thick carpeting, and that is when she learned to really crawl.  This year, the same hallway taught her to walk.  Actually, she has been walking inconsistently for several months, but our vacation there brought a real shift.  She now prefers walking to crawling.  She still stumbles often, but she gets right back up.  If I try to hold her hand while she's walking, she now lets go as if to tell me to let her do it herself.  Upright, she looks much older to me.  I have to admit that I have felt some pangs of sadness over that.  I'm thrilled that she's walking, of course, but somehow it makes the scary future seem more imminent.  She's going to grow out of early intervention soon and into the school system and then into the rest of her life, and I will not be able to protect her so much anymore.  Also, by making her look older, it highlights some of the ways in which she is so far behind other 29-month-olds.  But still, it's good.  To celebrate her walking, I bought her a pair of pink converse high tops.  What would Chuck Taylor say?

It's becoming clear that B is a girly girl.  She likes to play with her baby dolls and can spend a great deal of time covering them up with blankets and signing "sleep."  She always goes for the little play house that they have at a nearby playground.  Yesterday she stood at the play sink for awhile and eventually I realized that she was doing dishes.  But the real kicker is dresses.  She has several cute dresses that used to belong to her cousin, but I've never put them on her because they are hardly the most functional fashion for crawling, and I'm all about function.  (Really.  Sometimes I wear clogs.)  But as she started to get the hang of walking, I thought I'd discourage crawling by pulling out the dresses.  Turns out my girl loves dresses, especially pink ones.  When I leave her alone in her room, she'll find her dresses and put them on.  All of them.  At the same time.  She doesn't usually manage to get her arms through the sleeves, so they don't stay on very well, but it makes her happy. Yesterday she went around wearing a dress, and then a swimming suit on top of it, and then another dress on top of that.  It's a look.

We have bailed out of speech therapy through our early intervention program and started seeing a private speech therapist who is much better.  Unfortunately, our insurance won't touch this.  She's really good, but is she good enough for this cost?  I don't know yet.  I asked her about the signing.  I feel like it may be time to quit signing.  B has a few words and is slowly picking up some more, but if she knows the sign for something, she refuses to say the word.  I think signing has become a bit of a crutch for her and for us, and that as a family we really need to be more aggressive about speech.  The therapist whole heartedly agreed that we should focus all of our attention on getting her to speak.  So we still accept signs from B, although we usually try to get at least some sort of speech sound along with it, but we're not signing and we're not teaching new signs.  I'm glad that we did the signing that we did, but it was meant to be transitional and so we're going forward with the transition.  (For the record, I'm not making any sort of statement about what anybody else should do, and I know that all of the research shows that on average, signing doesn't inhibit speech.  I'm just saying that for this kid and this family, it seems sensible to focus solely on speech for awhile.)

Lately we've tried to work on sharing.  B has become rather possessive of toys and things.  Sometimes she'll pick up several items (book, toys, dresses) and clutch them desperately as if she thinks we're all out to steal them away from her.  It's a problem because she can't walk or climb stairs very well while trying to maintain her grasp on so many treasures, so she ends up in a real bind when it's time to go eat or play outside.  She refuses to let go, and yet she can't go anywhere.  It's like she's living in her own little monkey trap and she gets quite upset.  She doesn't always do this, but at least once or twice a day she goes into this mode of desperate hoarding.  I'm guessing that this is one of those things that will pass.  Her little sister is now getting really into books and toys, and sometimes B will grab these things out of Mojo Jojo's hands.  We've try to talk about sharing and turn taking, but who knows if it's really getting through.  Maybe it is.  Yesterday while I had my back turned, B put some of her very own rigatoni into Jo's seven-month-old mouth.  Yay for sharing.

Superstar Zen Mothericious

Just a brief post to say that I am superstar zen mothericious.  I did the trip, there and back, with no major difficulties.  The only stressful moment was getting through security on the first leg.  I carried Mojo Jojo through, the stroller went through to some other area, the carseat to another, my cell phone and iPod and overpacked zip lock bags of babyfood and bottles went to yet another, and Miss B was still being held by her dad.  I felt a little panicky about how everything had suddenly dispersed.   I retrieved the stroller, put Mojo Jojo in it, found my iPod and other necessities, and started wheeling back to get B when the problem came up.  The TSA jerk wouldn't let T carry B through because he wasn't ticketed, but she wouldn't let me wheel the stroller up close enough that I could stay with MoJo while also going to get B, and she was adamant that if I went back to get B, I would have to go through the whole process again, which would mean leaving MoJo out of my reach.  As we were trying to work this out, with T and B on one side of the scanner and me on the other, T just set B on the floor and she walked right on through.  It was a triumphant moment, in its own little way.  Here I'd been freaking out about how I could get both babies across this great electromagnetic divide when one of them proudly reminded me that she is not such a baby anymore and can just walk through, like everybody else, thank you very much.  On the way back I just made sure that all three of us went through security at the same time and it was no problem.  I found that the most comfortable way to manage getting through the airport was to bjorn Mojo and put B's carseat in her side of the stroller (it sort of fits lying on its side and I wrapped its strap around the stroller's handle to keep it securely in place).  The diaper bags (I needed two because I packed tons of extra diapers and food just in case we got stuck someplace) fit in the bottom of the stroller.  When I got to the gate, I smiled sweetly and let them know that I would probably need a little extra help, and the crew was terrific.  On the way back, B refused to nap and yelled and cried a little, which was surely not ideal for the other passengers, but I didn't let it phase me.  I entertained her by letting her listen to her playlist on my iPod, which was hard to do because the earphones are too big for her little ears and so she had to learn hold them more or less near her ears.  We also did about 50 renditions of the Five Little Monkeys and several rounds of Wheels on the Bus.

Coming soon:  B's latest update.  Preview:  It involves lots of walking!