Eric and I have a brief time at home in between the sing-along at the Family Resource Center and our retreat with the Quaker meeting tonight, so I thought I'd try to do a quick e-mail while he gets in a few minutes of all-important exersaucer time.
We've had a very busy schedule lately. We joined a program called ACTS ("All Children Connected to Succeed"...I know, the acronym doesn't quite work, but we'll forgive it). It's a county program that sponsors play groups, parent support groups, today's sing-along, and a thing called Parents as Teachers, where an early childhood teacher comes to your home for an hour every month, teaches you about child development, and shows you developmentally appropriate activities. Turns out the closest site for the program (they have 11 in the county) is the Black Child and Family Institute, two blocks from our house. So I just bundle Eric in his stroller and we head down there. He loved his first time at playgroup last week, and today he thought the sing-along was just swell. There were only two kids there, Eric and a 15-month-old named Natalie, but Natalie's mom and I sang with gusto and acted out all the songs, much to the amusement of the babies. Many kids' songs involve jumping around, flapping your arms like a chicken, and barking like a dog, sometimes all at once. Eric enjoyed playing the tambourine and participated in all the clapping-related activities; he's a very good clapper. "The Wheels on the Bus" left him cold, but "Old MacDonald" made him laugh like a loon.
Eric also started swimming lessons last week. He was the only baby who wouldn't get in the pool. Every time I so much as dipped his toes in the water, he cried, and he almost never cries. So we spent most of the hour sitting on the side of the pool wrapped in a towel, watching the other moms and dads bobbing cheerfully in the water with their happy tots. I think he was just too tired to deal with the stimulation; the class is, alas, at exactly his usual morning nap time of 11 a.m. Hopefully he'll experience a schedule shift that will allow him to enjoy it.
I think he'll like it better tomorrow; his new swim diapers arrived in the mail today, and I'm sure their stylish good looks with give him confidence. I bought him cloth swim diapers because the disposable ones are so pricy! And the cloth ones are very cute. He has a green one and a blue one, both printed cheerfully with fish. They're imported: the care instructions appear to be in Swedish. Hopefully I won't ruin them the first time I run them through the wash. I'm not sure how they do laundry in Sweden.
Eric is having a very good day. Some days, he's just in a terrific mood. This morning at the chiropractor, he was happy and laughing with everybody. Then he and I went to the food co-op, and as I was getting him out of his warm fluffy (as I call his snowsuit) and getting him settled into the cart I was chatting with him and all the people in the checkout line were smiling at him. One of the co-op staffers came up and said, "I saw you come in and just had to run up and see the baby," and he smiled at her. Then she said to me, "Are you happy every day?" I was taken aback for a minute, and then I said, "Yeah, I pretty much am," and she said, "I could tell. I watched the two of you come in, and I thought to myself, 'That's one happy mom.'"
To which I must say: Thank you, Zoloft, for giving Eric back his happy mom. I have upgraded my condition from "depressed" to "recovering from depression." The Zoloft is working great for me, and I've also been doing many other things to improve my mental health and reduce stress, including paying these two wonderful people a ton of money to clean my house yesterday. They did such a job! I knew right away that the house looked good, but I keep spotting things and thinking, "They cleaned that?" I had them do a deep cleaning in my kitchen as a one-time thing, and they even washed the windows and cleaned out the crumb tray in my toaster. In the bathroom, they cleaned all of David's damn hair out of the tub drain so it's no longer sluggish. They were amazing.
We hope to keep having them come every two weeks, but I don't know if we'll be able to afford it. But we think that if we can't afford to have them come and do the regular housework, it would be great to have them come every few months and do the kind of thorough cleaning they did yesterday, and then we could do lighter cleaning in between. The house is fabulous! And we used them coming as an impetus to clear a bunch of stuff out of random corners where it had piled up: Eric's swing that he doesn't use anymore, boxes of outgrown baby clothes, even a bag full of leftover decorations from our baby shower last April. So I am feeling good about the house.
I've also signed Eric up for daycare at the Family Growth Center (not to be confused with the Family Resource Center, which is the site that hosts both the ACTS program and the PAT program I spoke of above). The Family Growth Center is free respite care; they have two sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, of 2 1/2 hours each, and you can use one session per day, up to two sessions per week. It's great daycare; they have a 1:1 ratio for infants and the teachers are wonderful. After we visited and checked it out last week, Eric went for the first time on Tuesday morning. He did OK; they said he was kind of quiet, not really playful, but not fussy either. Actually, what they said when I walked through the door to pick him up was, "You have the world's best baby!" But we knew that.
I have just put Eric down for his nap. For the last few weeks, putting him to sleep looks like this:
A couple of weeks ago, I started figuring out that he actually went to sleep better if I just put him down instead of rocking him. Rocking is interesting, and an opportunity for social time, so he tries to stay awake for it and then gets fussy because he's tired. The other day, I put him down for a nap, came downstairs, and listened on the monitor for seven minutes while he fussed lightly and dropped off, and felt bereft. "My baby doesn't need me!" I wailed to Scott and David later. There's a voice in my head saying, "Su, you should be reveling in your freedom and independence!" To which I testily reply, "I didn't become a mother because I wanted freedom and independence!" Damn it.
I was beginning to get worried because Eric wasn't sitting up. I kept seeing babies much younger than him who sat up just fine, but Eric never did. He seemed to have good control when he was in my lap, and he occasionally held himself up, for instance, when I was trying to put him on his back to change him, if he wanted to get to the buttons on my shirt or something, but if you tried to get him to sit up, in about two seconds he would have scooched down, flipped over, and started scooting after something or other. "He can sit up," I kept telling people. "He simply chooses not to."
Turns out that was true. The other day my folks visited and brought Eric a new toy--a shape sorter bucket--from his Great-Aunt Alice. Eric sat for at least half an hour playing with it, complete with leaning over to the side to pick up blocks when he dropped them. Now he will sit up and enjoy it if you set him on the floor, and he holds himself up without leaning against the back of his high chair, too. I have heard that babies that wait to try a skill often then master it very quickly, and that seems true of Eric and sitting up. He skipped right over the propped-on-hands, droops-over-after-one-minute stages of sitting directly to Sitting Mastery. I'm so relieved.
Eric and I watched the Teletubbies yesterday. Well, I watched it. I am beginning to understand the Teletubbies; it's a bit surreal and confusing at first. There are little stories the whole text of which might be, "One day in Teletubby Land, Dipsy was wearing his hat." Accompanied by a visual of Dipsy. In a hat. And then the baby in the sun laughs.
Then we watched a few minutes of Mr. Rogers. He showed us a video of how tricycles are made. It was actually quite interesting. The guy who made the handlebars was a real pro.
Eric's love affair with cloth continues. When he gets sleepy, he likes to hold a piece of cloth in his hand and put his thumb in his mouth. Any cloth will do: a burp cloth, a blanket, the hem of my skirt if he's on the floor and I happen to be walking by. If he doesn't have anything else, he will pluck at the crib sheet until he manages to raise a wrinkle, and hold onto that, which is no mean feat since crib sheets are designed to be super-tight specifically so babies can't work them loose and suffocate themselves.
When he puts his thumb in his mouth now, he tucks it into his cheek. I guess he bit himself once too often with his very sharp little teeth.
OK, I need to go make formula and start boiling water for spaghetti. Let me finish by telling you one more thing: day before yesterday I took our dog Juno to the vet because she had goopy eyes and wasn't eating; I thought she had an infection. Turns out what she probably has is cancer. She had a biopsy yesterday, and we'll get the results next week. If she does have it, I think we will probably go ahead with chemotherapy; dogs tolerate it well, have a high remission rate, and enjoy a good quality of life. Her life expectancy will still be short: another year, or, if we're lucky, two. Hold us in the Light that the biopsy is negative.
Next entry due January 31
Posted by Su Penn at January 18, 2004 03:50 PM | TrackBack