I sometimes play guitar for L. She likes it, but she doesn’t sit quietly and listen, much to my dismay. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate music — she loves music. The problem is she wants to play too:
It’s not that I mind her playing. Rather, it’s somewhat dangerous: her little fingers fit between the strings and a tug can cause her sudden pain as the string digs into her.
Still, it’s an enjoyable way to pass some time.
The Girl met her first horse the other day:
She wasn’t exactly thrilled.
Last night, before L went to bed, I’d put in a Nina Simone CD, figuring it was calming enough to play in the evening.
Little did I know.
A few minutes later, while trying to put the Girl to sleep, I began the CD again. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t settling down. I rocked her, walked her, bounced her gently, talked to her — all the tricks, but she was just not completely calming down.
When track six — “I loves you, Porgy” — began, instant calm. So I did the logical thing: hit repeat and put the Girl to sleep by playing one of the loveliest songs ever…about fifteen times.
As an aside, here’s a very sweet claymation video set to a Simone song:
Who would have thought it was possible for a little, sweet, burpy seven-month-old to sleep a full twelve hours, enabling parents to get work done and get eight hours’ sleep?
Who would have imagined that a body used to significantly less sleep can sleep a full eight hours without the whole system going haywire?
Who would have thought it would only happen one night?
When the Girl is being put to sleep, she sometimes gets angry. Scratch that — furious. She can howl and scream and whimper endlessly when I’m the one trying to put her to sleep instead of K.
I usually just wait her out. She’ll literally scream and push and wiggle and cry until she literally passes out. While she’s doing this, I simply walk around the apartment, holding her close, and whispering sweetly (or as sweetly as I can manage while every last nerve in my body is being assailed simultaneously). There comes a time when she’s crying, then whimpering, then crying, then tumbling quietly toward sleep — until something disturbs her and reminds her, “Oh, yes, I am indeed irritated.”
That’s when toys can become landmines.
There are two beeping, flashing, musical toys that are particularly deadly. In one of them (a caterpillar that plays about four songs and flashes lights where one wouldn’t think caterpillars would have lights) has expired: the batteries are dead, and gosh darn it, I just can’t seem to remember to replace them. Touch it and it begins a loud, loud, loud symphony.
The porcupine is not much better. Give it a kick (as I did last night) and it begins talking to you. Nothing too intelligent, but you wouldn’t expect physics from a porcupine.
Last night, I kicked it dead center. I’m not sure which woke L: my sudden, frustrated gasp, or the porcupine.
The video is fixed — don’t know why it wasn’t playing, but I just re-“compiled” it and it seems fine.
Update: Some folks tell me the video stops halfway through. I give up on this one…
We’ve been taking L to swimming lessons at the local YWCA. Within a few weeks, we’ve gone from calmly moving her about the pool (“Dig, dig, dig! Kick, kick, kick!”) to dunking her under water after blowing in her face. She doesn’t much like the former, and the latter sets her to screaming more often than not. The instructor suggests that it’s the water running down her face when we pull her back up that upsets her.
Still, we take her regularly and follow the instructor’s advice, on the hopes that it’s the unfamiliarity of it all that is bothering L.
There’s a progress report at YouTube.
I don’t think any of us could have anticipated L’s success on the potty chair. In the past ten days or so, L has done her messier business almost exclusively in the potty chair.
So, she’s potty trained, right!? I mean, a couple of accidents, statistically speaking, are fairly meaningless. And the fact that she’s not telling us that she needs the potty chair is a function of her age and development and nothing more. After all, she knows what it’s for — every time you put her on it, she does her best to have a BM.
Well, admittedly, she’s not potty trained in the truest sense of the term, but I think we’ve laid a fairly sure foundation for a quick, painless training when the “real” time comes…
We’ve entered the wild, wonderful world of solids,
which means a number of things:
On the other hand, feeding is more amusing and more conducive to photography.
Few things in life are more of a milestone for a child than to learn how to use the toilet. There’s tons of advice about when and how to begin. “Most children show signs of readiness to begin using the toilet as toddlers, usually between 18 months and 3 years of age,” writes one site. It continues,
These signs include staying dry for at least 2 hours at a time, having regular bowel movements, being able to follow simple instructions, being uncomfortable with dirty diapers and wanting them to be changed, asking to use the potty chair, or asking to wear regular underwear. You should also be able to tell when your child is about to urinate or have a bowel movement by his facial expressions, posture or by what he says. If your child has begun to tell you about having a dirty diaper you should praise him for telling you and encourage him to tell you in advance next time.
Well, L can’t communicate yet, and in fact she’s just learned how to sit up on her own. That doesn’t mean she can’t use a potty chair already. How do we know? Because she’s successfully used the chair several times.
Is this real “potty training”? I do indeed think so — we’re giving her an alternative to dirty diapers from an early age, and we’re showing her how “grownups” do it.
The key is knowing when she usually relieves herself. BMs are the easiest, because she announces it clearly and well in advance. But at least two times, we’ve sat her on the potty chair after eating when she wasn’t showing any signs, and within a few moments, she made use of the chair.
Our hope is that this will make “real” potty training more manageable. We’ll see in a few months…
Last Monday we took L to her first swimming lesson. Granted, most of it was for us parents — teaching us how to hold our children, how to roll over with them into a back float, etc.
L loves water. She splashes like mad when taking a bath, so it seemed fair to expect her to like swimming. And she did. Sort of. It got old relatively quickly, but she valiantly survived to the end of the thirty-minute lesson.
Yesterday, we finally took her swimming in our apartment complex pool, complete with the floating crab the grandparents brought:
In reality, L really didn’t like the crab that much. Or at least she tired of it quickly. Being tossed about was much more fun, I suppose.
She enjoyed it, but she seemed happier while drying off.
When we first had L, we did what we thought was the environmental thing: we used cloth diapers. Today’s cloth diapers are not what they were thirty or so years ago. Now there’s liners of all sorts, including silk and impregnated wool liners that supposedly keep baby dry longer. “All night!” the makers boast, but at thirteen to eighteen bucks a piece, you’d think they’d just about have to change themselves to be worth it.
And then a little common sense. Though we were not filling the landfill with our daughter’s nasty diapers, we were using a heck of a lot more energy with all the extra washing. Our power bill more than doubled when we had L and were using cloth diapers. Of course, it was late December and we were keeping the apartment a lot warmer than we had been in the past. Still, a lot of that jaw-dropping electricity bill was due to the extra washing.
So, environmentally, it’s the cliche “six of one, half a dozen of the other.” Fiscally, disposable wins by a slight margin.
Sitting requires a lot of development, balance and strength chief among them. While L has, for some time, been sitting with supports, she’s recently begun sitting (and falling) all by herself.
Sitting brings a whole new set of possibilities. The ability to entertain herself by picking up things she sees around her is a big plus when everyone’s busy. The promise of crawling emerges when L leans forward and puts a fair amount of weight on her still-weak arms. Sitting is the first step toward mobility, for it means a much-expanded horizon for the Girl — much to see, much to tempt…
I often wonder what L is going to look like when she’s older — three, seven, ten years old. Once she reaches three it will be easier to guess what she might look like five years later.
At five months, though, it’s fairly difficult to imagine what she might look like as a little girl rather than an infant.
But sometimes, when her expression is just right, there’s a little glimpse.
The girl has begun reaching for things. For anything. If it’s in her field of vision, she’ll put out her little hands and try to grab it.
The other day, she grabbed a glass of water while we were eating dinner and turned it over on K. First time, certainly not the last.
And so, for the first time, I proposed making pre-planned video. “Just go around the apartment and hold her in front of things,” I asked K.
L, most unexpectedly, also has her own little canal. It too is singularly effective at channeling .
L doesn’t do much of anything without putting her full effort into it, and pooping is no exception. But with pooping, she has a particular gift. Without some much as a raised eyebrow, L can expel her cottage-cheesy poop with such energy that, upon impacting the diaper, it follows the path of least resistance, right up her back.
A good poop means that she leaves wet marks mid-way up her back. A spectacular poop goes three-fourths of the way up to her shoulder blades. Her personal best is just below her shoulder blades.
It’s spectacular. I had no idea babies could achieve something as wondrous as pooping halfway up their backs. And when she’s done, there’s a little mischievous smile that, though I know is from relief, seems like it just might also have a bit of pride mixed in.
When I was in Poland, I eventually reached a point in my linguistic development at which I understood everything going on around me. It wasn’t fluency, because in any given sentence there might be one or even two words I didn’t know, or couldn’t immediately place, but I learned that understanding 100% of the language doesn’t mean understanding 100% of the words spoken.
Once I reached that linguistic milestone, it felt I’d always been at that point. It felt like I’d always been able to understand everything, even though I knew it wasn’t the case. Like swimming and reading, understanding Polish was something I couldn’t remember what it was like not to be able to do. (What an awful example as a teacher I’m setting with that sentence! And this one…)
Today, we went to see my cousin and her recently-adopted baby. The little girl — S — is six weeks. She’s about a pound heavier than L when she was born. And I looked at that little girl, her eyes still mostly closed, and I couldn’t imagine L being that size. I know she was. We have the pictures to prove it. But, as with the language, I just feel she’s always been this size; that she’s always been able to hold her head up; that she’s always been able to look around, to smile, to cry from boredom, to giggle, to coo.
And then, a little voice: “That is how you’ll wake up one morning and realize she’s going off to college and for a brief moment, feel complete unprepared for it, and feel she’s completely unprepared for it.”
It’s not quite synonymous with “taking for granted,” but it’s awfully close.
And I think that’s one reason why I’m trying so hard to write in this silly blog so often. To mark the lines of development; to make a record for later — to make an online baby book.
Besides, what else am I going to write about in my newly realigned universe?
When playing with your child, some common sense is in order. After eating, for example, is not the best time for bouncy play.
That’s fairly logical, but there’s a derivative from this: after eating (up to, say, an hour after), avoid any play that places the child’s head directly above your head.
As a newly washed car is to a bird, so your face, with it’s stupid, wide-open-mouth smile, is to your child…
The Girl has a tendency to pee right after her diaper has been taken off. Perhaps it’s the freedom of being diaper-less; perhaps it’s the air on her bare bottom; perhaps it’s just a sense of the theoretically forbidden; perhaps it’s simply chance. Nonetheless, the Girl likes to pee diaper-less.
And so, what to do? If you’re lucky, you catch it all in the diaper you just put off. In case that doesn’t work out, there’s the hope that you remembered to put a cloth diaper just under the Girl’s bottom to catch accidents. But if both plans fail, there’s only one alternative: put her on the bed briefly while you pull the cloth liner off the changing pad.
Here, a question arises: why? Rather, why now? Because we don’t want the Girl to lie in her mess? Well, she does that until we change the diaper anyway. Really, it doesn’t make sense.
And here’s why: What if the Girl, while lying bare-bottomed on bed, decides, “Now is a good time for a BM”?
The Girl is getting control of her hands. They’re still jerky, and this is a cause of great frustration. “Get used to it,” I say. “Not being able to get your hands to do exactly as you wish is something that plagues us for our entire lives.”
But she has, I think, finally realized that those things sticking out from her shoulders are hers and under her control. So she’s reaching for things. She’s holding things. She’s flinging things, though somewhat accidentally.
And once a little almost-four-month-old gets that ability, where does everything go? Straight to the mouth.