Trisomymommy

Update: 30 months

How did the little miss get to be two and half years old?  Just by being, I guess.  For two and a half years.

Last month we moved her from a crib to a toddler bed.  She had been working on climbing out of the crib.  When she started getting her right foot up on top of the railing, I realized what a long fall down that would be and decided that it was time.  The evening we put her bed together, she kept going over to it and spreading herself out on it as if to establish her ownership.  She seemed very excited and proud.  I was concerned that she would not stay in bed, but this hasn't been much of a problem.  At night, we read stories and then put her doll to bed and then she voluntarily climbs right in.  We listen to Segovia and talk about the five little monkeys.  Well, I do most of the talking, but she does the corresponding hand movements and sometimes she'll chime in with "Noooooooo" when the doctor says, "No more monkeys jumping on the bed."   I can tell when she's close to falling asleep because she stops shaking her index finger at the imaginary monkeys.  Then I just sit next to her bed for a few minutes until she's asleep or just very, very calm.  Sitting in a darkened room with this drowsy little girl, all tucked in to her tiny little bed, is one of the sweetest moments of the day.  She stays in bed all night, as far as I know.  She wakes up in the morning, gets out of bed, opens the bottom drawer of her dresser, pulls out all of her dresses, then closes the drawer (very conscientious, this kid), and then starts putting on her dresses over her pj's.  She's happy to entertain herself like that for awhile, which sometimes translates into more sleep for me.  Nap time can be more of a challenge, and always has been.  Sometimes she'll lie down in the bed, act all sleepy, and then whisper, "Bye bye."  Taking my cue, I'll leave the room and within a minute I'll hear that drawer opening as the fashion show resumes. 

Speaking of the monkeys, I took her to the ENT last week.  As we were wrapping up the appointment, I said to B, "He's a doctor.  What does the doctor say?"  The ENT looked quizzical, but B knew where I was heading with this and shook her index finger.  "That's right." I said.   "He says, 'No more monkeys jumping on the bed.'"  Since the appointment had been about ear tubes rather than non-human primates playing on furniture, this might have been utterly baffling to him, but he went with it. 

We went to her third appointment with the new speech therapist.  B tried to do something with a toy and succeeded, and then made some sort of exclamation, as she often does.  The ST said, "That's right, you did it."  Apparently the ST has a magical ability to interpret B's babbling and what B had said was, "I did it!"  I was a bit skeptical.  B says stuff all the time that we can't understand and sometimes I think we read too much into her noises, hearing whatever we think made sense given the context.  Besides, there are so many words and phrases we work on with her (How about "Mama?"  Can I please get a "Mama?") and this is just not one of them.  When we congratulate her, we say, "You did it!"  but it seemed unlikely to me that this kid, who has maybe 10 spoken words, is coming up with a full sentence including a pronoun reversal.  But the speech therapist reminded me that she had modeled that phrase for B in the last session, and then suddenly B came out with it again.  It was perfectly clear and contextually appropriate.  A couple of days later, she climbed all the way up the stairs while holding on to the vertical bars that support the railing, and when she got to the top, she yelled out, "I did it!"

What does it say about this winsome little imp that after all of the work we put into teaching her words and phrases that we think are important, all of the drilling and slow repetitions and hand wringing (it's "mmmmmmmaaa mmmmmmmmmaaaaaa") and all of the discouraging silences, what she picks up spontaneously is an expression of self-confident triumph?  She teaches us what's important.

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.” 

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.

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.

Two!

Dear b,

Yesterday you turned two years old.  In the morning while your dad and J were still sleeping, I heard you talking in your own secret language and I went in, scooped you up out of your crib and pulled you into bed with me for some early morning snuggle time.  You are so independent now that you only wanted to snuggle briefly before insisting on getting out of bed and starting your day. You brought cup cakes for snack time at day care, which made the other children very happy and almost prompted a brawl when some of them demanded seconds.  When I picked you up, you were a little grumpy and quick to cry for reasons I couldn’t fathom.  Even wearing my “I voted” sticker didn’t seem to cheer you up, though it was awfully cute.  You cried a lot when we got home and it made me so sad that I cried a little too.  You are too young to know about birthdays, so this day was much more important to me than it was to you, but I really wanted it to be a happy, special day for you and it made me sad that you were crying.  You are usually so cheerful, but you’ve been feeling a little sick lately and have been trying to get out of your afternoon nap, so sometimes our evenings are a little rough.  Aunt A came over to have dinner with us and that cheered you up.  Over and over again, you held your fingers up in this adorable way that means you want the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song and every time one of us would sing it for you.  You like to say, “Down!” when it’s time for the rain to come down. We had your favorite dinner, which is pasta with smoked salmon in a lemon cream sauce, although you didn’t eat that much because I had let you eat too many cheesy poofs before dinner.  You love cheesy poofs.  After dinner, I gave you a gift of four large pieces of colored tulle fabric.  I thought you’d enjoy this because you really like playing with blankets.  You seemed both excited and a little scared, but I think you’ll come to like it a lot.  Dad gave you a toy school bus with big wheels. 

You have had such a big year!  You’ve learned to crawl and climb, so now you can get to most places that you want to go.  You can walk while holding on to furniture or people’s hands, and I think you are going to be walking on your own very soon.  You can now stand for several seconds at a time and the other day I saw you stand up all by yourself without holding onto anything at all.  Your beautiful blond hair is now long enough to wear in pigtails and everywhere we go people comment on how cute you look.  You give great hugs and often pat me on the back as if to comfort me (it works!).  You’ve picked up some signs (more, eat, all done, baby, flower, Itsy Bitsy Spider) and have even started saying some words (down, no).  Just recently you’ve begun pointing at things with your index finger and eating with a spoon. 

Eight weeks ago, Grandma came to take care of you while I went into the hospital to give birth to your new baby sister, J.  J demands a lot of attention from me right now, so lately Dad has been giving you your bath and nebulae (that is, your breathing medicine) and reading you a story.  This makes me sad because I miss spending this time with you, but at the same time, it makes me happy to see how close you’ve become with your dad.  You and your Dad love each other so much and it is so sweet to watch you play together. As for J, I think you are unsure about her.  Sometimes you smile at her and pat her on the head or touch her hair and I’m impressed with how gentle you are with her. But she cries a lot and sometimes it upsets you.  We try to make a joke of it by asking you the question you’ve learned from your noisy farm book, but instead of asking about the billy goat or the brown cow, we say, “What does the baby say?  Waa waa waa.”  Right now, J is tiny, so she doesn’t play yet, but soon enough she’ll become more fun and I think you will really enjoy having her around.

I’m so proud of you and all that you’ve learned this year.  Just when I think I love you as much as anyone could ever love anything in the whole world, I find that as you grow bigger, so does my heart, and I love you more and more and more. 

Happy birthday my Bean!

Love,

Mama

Update: 22 months

If all goes well, Miss B is now facing her last weekend as an only child.  People ask me all the time if she knows what’s coming, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world to explain.  She has no idea.

In small ways, we’ve tried to prepare her.  She has a baby doll and I sometimes play with the doll by making baby crying sounds, giving it a bottle and then burping it, all the while talking to Miss B about babies.  Now B will sometimes pick up the doll by her hair, smash the bottle into her eye, and then hit her on the back while looking to me for approval.  This bit of pretend play lasts about a minute before she gets bored and throws the doll or crawls over it to get to something more interesting.  I think it’s going to be a little while before we can expect her to help out with childcare.

We have also been trying to teach B the names of parts of her body, which involves a lot of discussion of the tummy.  B likes to pull up my shirt and pat my enormous tummy gently, and then not so gently grab my newly protruding navel.  Sometimes as we’re doing this, she’ll suddenly grab the hem of my shirt and pull it back down emphatically, as if she finds mom’s immodesty embarrassing.  It’ll be interesting to see how she reacts to my attempts to nurse the new baby.  I hope she doesn’t go to day care and try to pull off her teachers’ shirts to grab their boobs

Not too long ago, I questioned whether developments in one skill area inhibit those in another, and here is some more evidence that maybe they do.  In the past month, I’ve seen few linguistic developments.  Now when we read our Noisy Farm book, she can tell us what the billy goat says.  Also, sometimes she’ll yank on my hair and say, “Ow!”  In contrast, she’s been making good progress on walking.  Unable to wait until Christmas, a couple of months ago I splurged and bought her this very nice radio flyer walker-wagon.  At first she would try to push it and it would go too fast for her and she would fall down, which was hardly the point of the exercise.  I considered weighting it down to give her more resistance, but I was concerned that this would reinforce her tendency to use too much forward force rather than keeping her weight over her feet.  Then one day, she just figured it out and now she can walk upright quite well while holding onto the wagon.  She cannot steer it yet, so she doesn’t get too far before hitting furniture or a wall, at which point she just climbs inside of the wagon and waits for T to give her a ride around the house.  And climbing?  This kid can climb.  She climbs into any available empty box.  She climbs up the play structure at the park and goes down the slide.  She climbs up onto the coffee table.  When other people are over and B climbs on top of the coffee table, they seem to expect me to do something about this behavior, but I just let her be.  I know that I will need to teach her that coffee tables are not for climbing, but first I want her to figure out how to climb down.

The other day, she climbed up onto the sofa, lay down on her left side, and pulled a blanket up over her shoulder and just stayed there.  It took me a few minutes to realize that she was imitating mom on bed rest.

Update: 21 Months

This has been a fabulous month in the world of Miss B.  For one thing, she is healthier.  We gave her two back-to-back courses of antibiotics last time and when we finished them, her symptoms did not return immediately as they had been doing for the past several months.  She still has some congestion and wakes up with a wet cough, but it's much better than it was.

B has always been a night owl and she had been going to bed at around 9pm, sometimes later.  In some ways this worked for us, as it meant that we got to spend time with her in the evenings, but in some ways it didn't, because we had no time to ourselves in the evenings. I decided that we needed to get her on an earlier schedule, but it was not easy to do.  Until... lo and behold... the end of daylight savings time.   Miss B doesn't know that twice each year, most of our country (even the good people of Indiana) just declares that it's now a different time.  We could keep time constant and decide, hey, let’s all get up a little earlier or later, or let’s change our work and school schedules so as to take advantage of changes in daylight, but instead we make time itself change.  It has never made sense to me, but I follow along because everyone else does and I have to be able to schedule things with them.  Taking advantage of B’s ignorance about such things, when it came time to call what was 9:00pm 8:00pm, we just started putting her to bed at 8:00pm, and it worked.  Now sometimes T and I have actual conversations in the evenings.

Of course the huge development for B, which I have already blogged about, is the talking.  She continues to say “Mmmmmmmmmuh” whenever we discuss cows.  She says, “All done” (or rather, “awduh”) appropriately in a variety of contexts.  Recently I was trying to put her hair in a little samurai ponytail, which is acutely annoying to her but better than the chronic annoyance of having hair in her eyes all day, and as she tried to squirm away she said, “All done!”  Another time she was climbing up the stairs and slipped a little, lightly bonking her head.  She turned around, sat on a step and declared, “All done!”  This used to only apply to meals, and I’m impressed at how well the concept has generalized.

In other language news, last week, our infant educator was here and played some music on a little cassette player, which B loves.  The IE started to put the tape player away, saying, “Okay, we’re all done with the music” and out of nowhere, B yelled, “No!”  We had never heard this from her before, and shocked at her impertinence, we scolded her for talking back.  No, that was a joke.  Of course we cheered and had some more music.  I guess there will be a time when, rather than celebrate any talking at all, we’ll have to teach her what not to say.  But right now she could tell me to go f- myself and I’d be charmed.

People often say that when kids are making big strides in some area, such as motor skills, they plateau in other areas, such as speech, as if they can only handle one developmental track at a time.  I was discussing this with a friend who is a developmental psychologist and we concluded that we have no idea why this would be the case or if there is any research showing that it is true.  At least for my kid, I’m starting to suspect that it is true.  As we’ve finally started to see speech kick in, we haven’t seen any major advances in walking.  She doesn’t really like to practice walking and lately has been giving us what we call “noodle legs” when we try.  Maybe we haven’t been trying enough because we know she doesn’t like it, and besides, we’re so thrilled with her moo that we’re happy to forget the walking and let her crawl to the cow book.  So, maybe the reason development seems to happen in one area at a time is that parents are satisfied when there is at least development in one area and they stop pushing in others.

Speech

From the way parents talk about their kid's first words, I had always assumed the matter was clear cut.  One day, your kid says "Bye bye" or "Mama," so you cheer, call grandma, and make a note in the baby book.  With Miss B, it has been such a slow, gradual progression toward speech that I don't really have an exact celebratory moment to point to.  The moo was nice, but can we count an animal sound as her first word?  Before that she had been saying an "m" sound sometimes while signing "more" or saying a "d" sound while knocking down blocks, but do those count?  I don't require that she get each and every phoneme, but I think reasonable criteria would be that she should use a sound consistently in its appropriate context and it shouldn't be something she just says all the time anyway.  She says "m" and "d" all the time anyway.  But over the past week her "d" has turned into "dow," and she's been saying it when throwing things out of her crib.   And a few weeks ago she learned to sign "all done," occasionally pairing it with something that sounds like "d" or "ah-d."  Then today during breakfast she was signing "all done," but I didn't think she had eaten enough so I tried to give her more food anyway, and then, like an exasperated teenager, she yelled at me!  She yelled, "Awwwduh!"   Her meaning was clear.