James at thirteen months

If you had asked me two weeks ago, I would have said we had another month until walking. James had cruising down, and was occasionally standing without holding onto anything for a few seconds but honestly, he just didn't seem that interested when crawling could get him where he wanted to go.

But then last week he started standing independently for longer and longer. He figured out how to stand up without using anything to pull up (something Alec didn't figure out until after he learned how to walk - if he fell, he would have to crawl over to something he could pull up on). He started squatting with a clear gap between his butt and the ground. This past Wednesday, I saw him do deep knee bends without holding onto anything. It's like suddenly two weeks ago he decided mobility was his new job. So it wasn't really a surprise Saturday morning when I saw James stand up and then take three tiny steps before landing on his butt. Walking at thirteen months! What a prodigy! Well, compared to his brother (14 months) and sister (16 months!) he is.

Speaking of prodigiousness, our baby who disdained all forms of spoon feeding like we were trying to feed him lukewarm library paste? Started feeding himself with a spoon last month, remarkably neatly. Even Katherine, who was a fine motor skills fiend needed to have baby oatmeal added to her applesauce to keep it on the spoon at that age, but he happily spoons the slippery stuff up without a problem. On the not-so-prodigious self-feeding front, he is finally successfully drinking from a straw cup. You would think that a child who has spent literally his ENTIRE life sucking on things to get liquid would, when presented with a straw, think to do more than just look at it dumbly and then try to bite it, but not our special snowflake. I wasn't sure how to deal with this, since the older kids both took to straws naturally and instantly, but (for anyone Googling "How to teach a toddler how to use a straw") finally I switched from the fancy spill-proof strawcups to the cheap Take and Toss type where I could squeeze the sides and push some liquid up through the straw. Once the flow got started, he would instinctively suck to keep it going and got the idea of sucking to get it started pretty quickly. He still can't hack the fancier cups with longer straws, but I found a compromise in the form of these cups, which are small and cheap, but have a screw-on lid that can't be pried off by an enterprising toddler. If only I could find more than the one pack of four, I would switch all of our kid cups over to them.

On the cognitive end, it became incredibly clear when James had passed the 55 week developmental spurt and not just because he started sleeping for more than 20 minutes at a time. He started becoming very interested in putting his nesting cups together instead of seeing how far across the room he could scatter them. He started grouping like things together. He added three new words - okay, baby, bye. He started getting very interested in baby dolls and stuffed animals and now has a cloth baby doll who is becoming his lovey (I'm so pleased - he chose a doll that's easily commercially available and simple to replace, unlike Katherine who glommed onto a mother and baby bunny pair from my childhood. Not merely irreplaceable, but with a small part that's easy to lose!). He's less likely to freak out when he wants something if he can see me in the process of getting it since now he's starting to understand sequences.

At the moment, his main interests are baby dolls, the play kitchen, things that fit together, cars and anything that plays annoying electronic music. He was 19 pounds, 13 ounces last week, continuing to skate under twenty pounds and be our skinny little guy. He's silly and cuddly, and still my sweet baby.

Performance

* Katherine had her end-of-the-year ballet recital last night. She's been taking classes through the local rec center, and while there are many criticisms to be leveled against Philadelphia's Parks and Rec department (and I say this as an employee of said department), it's hard to beat $150 for 9 months of perfectly decent ballet lessons, costume included.

I don't think I'm just being a fond parent when I say I was really pretty impressed by Katherine's class, which was 6 and 7 year old beginners. Watching the classes, which ranged in age from 3 to teenagers, I also started feeling a lot less guilty about not managing to get Katherine in dance classes at four or five when she first started asking. There were talented outliers, of course, but it looked very much like six or seven is the dividing line between "able to listen well to instruction and learn how to dance" and "flailing around to music, sometimes deliberately in unison (or a semblance thereof)."

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We actually made it out to a movie a couple weeks ago! And it wasn't rated G! It was Iron Man 3, as a matter of fact. To give a quick, spoiler-free review, I was really impressed, and think it was actually better than Iron Man 2. Rather than do the action movie franchise of simply rehashing what worked before but ramping it up by making it BIGGER! and MORE EXPLOSIONS!, they tried something different and focused on actual character development. I was also impressed that they took what was a racist villain in the comic and completely turned the concept on its head.

****

On a final note on the topic of performing, on a whim recently, did a Youtube search on the Not Ready for Bandai Players, the name that the Champaign crowd gave our cosplay group that competed in the cosplay contest at Anime Central for several years. And there are actually two of our performances on Youtube. Sadly, not our award-winning Ranma 1/2 / Lupin III crossover sketch, but I'm glad to see our Maison Ikkoku/Excel Saga crossover is being preserved. What really surprises me is how non-embarrassing it is to watch them. Not just that the dialogue holds up well and is still funny, but watching myself isn't cringe-inducing. And even more astonishing, all of the comments are positive. Really, a pleasant surprise all around.

Momentous, part two

So the other things we did on Mo Willems Friday was go look at a school for Katherine.

I feel like I should back up here and talk a bit about Katherine's reading issues. I've been on record in the past as saying that I felt that she could read better than she claimed - not that hard, since she claimed she couldn't read at all. And to a certain extent, I think that's still true. But while she ended kindergarten reading simple phonics stories, and made it up to the last level of Reading Eggs in first grade which theoretically would have her at a first grade reading level, this year she's been having trouble going past the basic phonics stage. I found us having to go back to Progressive Phonics and work our way through the intermediate level. I also found that 1) she's still having trouble with letter reversals at an age where she really should be growing out of that and 2), she guesses at words based on whatever letter in the word she sees first and 3) seems to have a lot of trouble with visual discrimination. She has a lot of trouble picking an individual object out of a crowded scene, and was complaining a lot about having trouble reading small print. She made dramatic improvements when I started blowing up the font on the computer when reading and starting planning assignments based on the idea that I couldn't expect her to handle recognizing small things (for example, her math assignments often represent numbers visually by using bars for the tens and teeny tiny weeny little dots for the ones. Life got a lot easier when I stopped asking her to count them).

I did get her eyes checked since her glasses didn't seem to be helping at all, this time at an optometrist who uses the spiffy machine that measures your prescription through space-age sourcery. She does in fact have a large degree of astigmatism in her left eye that the last eye doctor didn't pick up at all (in all fairness, she's not terribly cooperative, which is a big reason I wanted the machine). While the new glasses have helped, she hasn't had any great breakthroughs in reading. Now that we've eliminated eye problems, that leaves neurological issues. And here's where I get out of my depth when it comes to reading instruction.

Enter the school, which I found online through a series of links I can't begin to remember. It's like an online charter in that it's a charter licensed through the state but not affiliated with a school district (and in fact has an online option) but it has physical locations with real teachers. It has a focus on dyslexia and dysgraphia, but isn't only for students with learning disabilities, so Katherine will be able to go there whether she has a learning disability or not, and will have a teacher with training in dealing with reading difficulties. They will also evaluate her, something I had been trying to figure out how to get without having to go through our (urban, cash-strapped, somewhat corrupt) school district. In addition:

- It has multiage classes with a student-teacher ratio of 13:1
- They provide individualized instruction that allow students to move at their own pace
- They have multiple breaks in schoolwork throughout the day and spend a lot of time outside. The branch we visited had a garden and was talking about chickens in the fall.
- Their science and social studies curricula are heavily project based
- The school day is structured with the academic block in the morning and electives like art, music and clubs in the afternoon. One of my biggest worries about sending Katherine to school is what a strong introvert she is, and with this schedule, we could potentially bring her home early a couple afternoons a week if it seems like she's getting too stressed out with a seven hour school day.
- The founder's children are homeschooled (although they're going to the school next year) and in fact go to the same day program for homeschoolers Katherine attends, so we don't have to worry about prejudice against homeschooled chidren. Talking to him, he seemed to have many of the same educational philosophies we do.

Really, I think the only way I could make this is a better school is if it were Quaker, but if it were, it wouldn't be a public school, so I'm willing to accept the tradeoff (especially since they have a strong emphasis on teaching conflict resolution).

I admit, there are parts of homeschooling I will definitely miss. When it's going well, it's a lot of fun. I really love how free our days are, and I will miss being able to give Katherine hours of free time to do her own projects. She does the most wonderful, creative things (one of my favorites: when building a hotel out of blocks, she figured out how to make a functioning revolving door), and I hate the thought of her losing the time and energy to do as many of them. I worry that being around people all day will be hard on our little introvert, and how hard it will be for our shy girl to meet a school full of strangers.

But she's also expressing unhappiness with her reading abilities, so it's time to get help. And while homeschooling is great when it's going well, when Katherine is being rebellious and Alec is screeching for help with a computer problem and James is insisting on climbing all over us and the laptop, it makes me want to put my head through a wall, and that's what homeschooling looks like here more often than not. So I'm excited for a good affordable school to send Katherine to so we can get at least one kid out of the house. I'm really looking forward to see how she'll develop when she can finally read well.

Momentous week

It was a big week last week. First, there was James's birthday (30.5 inches, 19 pounds, 10 ounces at his appointment Monday. Finally managed to surpass his 9 month weight by two ounces!). Since his sister had to get to her ballet lesson by 6:30, we had a low-key party that mostly consisted of presenting him with cake, which he found quite pleasing. The sad part is this is the most elaborate party we've ever had for our childrens' first birthdays. had to leave for a conference the day of Katherine's birthday, so she didn't even get a cake until a couple weeks later when we were in Michigan. Alec got tacked onto the end of the song at Katherine's fifth birthday party, the poor middle child.

The other big social thing we did was go to Mo Willems reading on Friday night! Katherine is passionately devoted to the Elephant and Piggie books and has been begging to meet him for over a year. One of her earliest coherent stories was "Piggie Breaks Her Leg," written in kindergarten. Baby's first fanfic. *sniff*

Anyway, I highly recommend trying to go to a Mo Willems book signing the next time he's touring if you have a young Willems fan in your life. He gives a great presentation that is as appealing to children as you could imagine from reading his books. In the q&a, he gave one of the best answers to the question all artists hate, "Where do you get your ideas?" His was "Every month, an envelope comes to my house, and reading the papers inside gives me all sorts of wonderful ideas. That paper is my mortgage." He reiterated in several questions that it isn't about ideas, it's about the work you put in, I think because he wanted to remove the idea that art is something only special people who receive magical idea seeds can do. He started out by introducing himself as an author/illustrator, then asking the children how many of them drew and wrote stories (all of them), and told them that meant they were author/illustrators too. He got his start copying Peanuts comic strips, so he's tremendously encouraging of children using his characters to develop their own stories. Despite the fact he had been signing for nearly two hours, he was very kind and encouraging to Katherine. And he finished his presentation by having teachers and librarians raise their hands, then having the audience clap for us because we're so underappreciated.

So needless to say, we thought it was a great evening with a great author. Totally worth keeping the children out way too late. I would highly encourage you to go to a signing of his, but he just announced that he's taking a year-long sabbatical, so there isn't going to be an opportunity for that for over a year. Well, poop. I can't blame him, since he's been publishing 3-4 books a year for a long time, but I'm not sure how to break it to Katherine that the next couple Elephant and Piggie books coming up are the last for quite a while.

We did something else even bigger last Friday, but I think I will save it for its own post. More tomorrow.

One

One year ago today, we got up and went to the hospital at the remarkably civilized hour of 9 to have a stubborn baby curled in a ball at the top of my uterus extracted. At this point, it was all pretty much old hat: the coldness of the operating room and the lovely warmed blankets, the sting of the numbing shot before the odd but not painful administration of the spinal, followed by rapid numbness, the weirdness of having your innards jostled. Really, the only real difference has been when the numbness would reach the nerves in my chest and make it feel like it was hard to breathe, and when I would throw up. In this case, it was after the baby came out. I was lying there after the spinal, feeling a little worried because I still had some feeling around the edges and hoping they wouldn't start before I was completely numb when I smelled something burning and realized - oh, cautery. They've already started. It wasn't too long at all before James appeared and expressed his displeasure at his eviction. We were shocked at his weight - 6 pounds, 15 ounces, a good two pounds lighter than his siblings, and he was wrapped up and given to B to hold. Then the breathlessness and nausea hit, so I closed my eyes and thought very hard about breathing until it eased. Eventually, the jostling of my digestive system stopped, which relieved the nausea and after a while longer, they closed me up. B told me later it took longer to close me up because they were having trouble finding all of the sponges, to the point that they had to empty the waste basket onto a mat to recount them. Thankfully, it was found on the floor, but I don't really mind them taking the time to make sure they weren't leaving anything behind that didn't belong there.

At that point, I was transferred to a gurney, had James tucked in next to me and was taken to recovery, and actually got to get to know our new baby. He was a lot like he is now - calm, cuddly and a good sleeper. He was long and bony then, and while he has a nice layer of fat, he's still pretty skinny now. He has just about the same amount of hair too.

I can't believe how fast this year has gone. There have been parts of having three children that have been very hard, but as babies go, James has been a dream. He gave me a chance to finally get breastfeeding right, and he remains passionately devoted to nursing. He wasn't planned or expected, but I wouldn't give him back for anything.


Happy birthday, baby boy.

James, 9 to 11 months

My tiny newborn baby is turning one in less a week. I refuse to acknowledge this as any sort of reality. He's still a baby, dammit.

It's really no wonder 9 month olds don't sleep. They're far too busy developing skills in all directions, from crawling to eating finger foods to making detailed macrame sculptures. Most of the past two months can be summed up as acquiring new skills, then enhancing them:

At 9 months, James started crawling, in a hesitant and awkward sort of way. At ten months, he suddenly discovered speed and we actually had to start putting up gates to keep him from getting away from us. He still does a hilariously awkward crawl when he's on tile though, because he doesn't like the cold on his shins. So he attempts to crawl by putting his weight on one knee and the opposite foot, which doesn't really work at all.

9 months, he started pulling to stand. At 10 months, he started travelling.

At 8 months, he started clapping and waving. At 9 months, he suddenly found the entire world applause-worthy and felt the need to greet everyone like the Queen of England (he also discovered separation anxiety at 9 months, so while he's always been friendly when approached but not outgoing, he's turned into our shy guy. He's still quite adorable when he hides his face in my shoulder and coyly smiles at people though). At 10 months, he added to his fine motor/social skills with pointing. He also started trying to scribble on paper (specifically, his sister's schoolwork) or the Magnadoodle.

At 9 months, he got interested in peek-a-boo when we played it with him. At ten months, he started playing with us, by standing at the coffee table and lowering himself until his face was covered, then standing back up, or by covering his face with a handy blanket. Cutest milestone ever.

At 9 months, he started occasionally saying "Mama" and "Dada" to us as appropriate. At ten months, he started waving to us and saying "Mama!" or "Dada!" whenever we came into the room.

At 9 months, he was 29 inches tall and 19 pounds, 8 ounces. Since then, he's had two week-long bouts of stomach flu, in addition to an ear infection, so I'm desperately hoping that he turns out to weigh more than that at his one year appointment. Fortunately, when he's not puking for a week at a time, he's an excellent eater. He was even begging me for bites of lentil soup the other day and flapping his arms in excitement between bites. Apparently our baby likes soup with kale.

He acquired four more teeth in the space of about three days at 8 months, bringing the total to 8. He hasn't produced any more since, but he's clearly working on some. He still has very little hair. What little hair he has looks like it's going to be blond.

He's still a baby for another week. Our sweet, happy baby.

Moved

So we moved over the weekend, four weeks ago. And then into the week, pretty much like, forever. That was fun. And then we all got sick! The good times, they just keep coming, I tell you.

But we're completely out of the old house and slowing shoveling our way through the new. I am no longer at the stage where I begin to wonder if a box of matches might be a better solution. Mind you, looking at our garage still gives me heart palpitations, but hey! We have a garage to shove our shit into again! That's almost worth moving for in and of itself.

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So I've been working on the above opus for two weeks now. And then poor James got sick and threw up for an entire week, and then our sadistic bastard government took an hour away from us. And I have several posts I want to write, but none of them seem to append well to what I've written out so far. So let's see, here are a couple random tidbits before I finally shoot this post and put it out of its misery:

- We did our annual corned beef and cabbage dinner Sunday, but this year we roasted the vegetables. Wow, what a difference. I've had various roasted vegetables for years, but they've never seemed worth the time it took to do all of that chopping and then the two lifetimes you go through waiting for them to be done just to get slightly crunchy potatoes anyway. But recently, I discovered the joys of cruciferous vegetables roasted at high heat until they blacken around the edges and caramelize. Bonus if you roast them with some garlic and put on some parmesan cheese in the last five or ten minutes. Doing that to brussels sprouts recently had Katherine and I standing over the pan filching sprouts to eat with our fingers because it seemed like putting them on plates would take too long.

- I'm not sure why, but after nearly four years of sewing, I'm getting the urge to knit again. This isn't a problem, except that I have a bunch of sewing projects in the hopper that I also really want to do. Fortunately, we're getting into the stage of advanced babyhood where I have both more time for projects again AND the brainpower to accomplish them. I think maybe I'll try making each of the kids a new sweater for next winter. Child-sized sweaters are small and quick, so they're not too much of a commitment. Now I just need to do things like try to remember the password to my Ravelry account and reassemble my modular knitting needle kit, since it has proven to be irresistible to small children who like to pop the needles out of their spaces and scatter them about the room.

- And finally, I will leave you with what Katherine told me yesterday: "You know my dance teacher? He doesn't know anything about undersea volcanoes! That's a little bit upsetting." Why yes it is. Why are we paying for dance lessons if we can't even find a dance teacher with an adequate knowledge of oceanography?

Updates, part 1

So here's something hysterical - at the beginning of the year, I was contemplating trying to write here every day for the entire year. Heh. That's one of the problems with going to Michigan at the turn of every year - I put off New Year's resolutions until we get home, then we're all tired and discombobulated when we get home, and then suddenly it's February. That, of course, isn't why I flaked on any semblance of writing regularly - it has a lot more to do with my falling asleep on the couch every evening - but it doesn't help.

Anyway, lots of stuff is happening. For starters, we're moving. There are two main reasons: 1, we hate our landlord and 2, I do an insane amount of driving between Alec's preschool and Katherine's homeschool program. It's looking like Katherine is going back to summer camp this summer, so I'll be driving the same distance five days a week instead of two. And we managed to find a house that would take three miles off of a 9 mile drive, which is significant when it comes to city driving.

I also like the way the house is set up better, even if it's a bit smaller than our current house. Our current house is three stories with living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, bedrooms on the second and a family room and extra bedroom where the garage used to be on the ground floor. The drawback of this is that there's very little storage space, and while there's lots of living space on the ground floor, it's cut up in a way that makes it inconvenient to use. So instead, we shove all of junk down there and live on the upper two floors. I liked it a lot better in our last house, which was all of the significant rooms on the first floor and then a large family room in the basement, along with a utility hallway and the garage, which is where we shoved all of our junk, keeping it nicely out of sight (see, I don't care so much what we do with our crap so long as I don't have to look at it). We spent our most of our time in the family room, but the living room was there as a nice place to sit without toys all over the place.

The new house is a similar configuration, but larger. It has a large family room downstairs, along with an extra little room that I think would be a good place to set up school stuff, and a very large utility hallway big enough to serve as overflow toy storage and a place to set up messy art projects or ride tricycles on rainy days. The kitchen and our bedroom will be smaller than our current house, but I can live with that if the places where we spend the majority of our time is larger and if we have more storage space, which it does in spades. Another advantage is that we'd like to move James in with Alec, but currently Alec is in the smallest bedroom. It wouldn't be feasible or fair to have two kids in there when Katherine is alone in a bigger bedroom. Moving gives us an organic way of shifting her to the smallest bedroom (and she, in fact, highly conveniently declared entirely on her own that she wanted the bedroom we would have chosen for her).

So I anticipate we'll be pretty happy in the new house once we're in. Of course, we have to survive to that point, which is a dicey proposition. I'm theoretically looking forward to packing as a chance to do some purging, but mostly I dread the entire moving process. It's likely we'll be able to get some people from church to help this time, which is such a lovely prospect. I even have a friend from church that's going to come over and help pack, for which I'm so grateful. That still doesn't change the fact that moving is hell.

At the movies

We saw The Hobbit when 's parents were visiting for Christmas. I was both looking forward to it, because it was my favorite Tolkien book, and a little afraid to see it, because it was my favorite Tolkien book. I had a hard time figuring out how they were going to stretch it to three movies and was very afraid of what violence they might do to the plot to achieve that end.

Well! First, it's been years and years since I've read it, so I had a comfortable vagueness about the actual event of the book going, which I think helped a great deal. Periodically, a scene would pop up that I remembered from the book and they always went about how I thought they should. A lot of the extra stuff is showing what Tolkien was telling, which is just fine with me because it makes no sense not to take advantage of a visual storytelling medium. I'm told the rest of the additions were from other Tolkien, and they all seemed to fit the movie pretty well.

I can see all the reasons that people didn't like The Hobbit - too long, boring, shifts in tone (well, except for the accusations of making extra plot up out of whole cloth because all of the additions were drug up from some portion of Tolkien) - but I loved it anyway. I wasn't bored, I thought they did a great job of capturing the humor of the book, yet giving the plot and the character development a great deal more weight than the book does.

So did anyone else wonder if Radagast the Brown started out brown, or if he just became that after too many centuries of not bathing?

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Speaking of movies, I've mentioned more than once Katherine's sensitivity to scary things, and my indecision on how much to push her on the issue. I finally decided to leave her alone, both because I don't remember seeing scary things as a child doing anything other than give me something new to terrify me in the middle of the night (I still have nightmares where I'm stuck in a theatre and Sweeney Todd is about to start) and because I decided her life will not be any poorer for not being able to watch horror movies.

And in one of those rare moments, my parenting strategy has proven to be the right one! Over Christmas, Katherine asked to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas and the first two Harry Potter movies. We gave her space and lo and behold, she matured enough on her own to be able to handle more scary stuff, probably much faster because we didn't make her watch anything traumatizing.

We're so excited. This might be the year we can introduce Star Wars!

Filking

Every baby we've had has had different songs sung to them. Katherine heard a lot of Lydia the Tattooed Lady. Alec heard Union Maid, Alice's Restaurant turned into Alec's Restaurant, and Alouette, sung as Alexander. Nothing says love to your baby like singing about plucking them. For James, rather than something pedestrian and cliched like Sweet Baby James (mostly because I don't really know the lyrics well), lately he's been hearing variations on the Harvey the Wonder Hamster theme song from the short-lived Weird Al tv show:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the Wonder Hamster,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't squeal,
He just runs around on his hamster wheel,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the Wonder Hamster!
Hey, James!

It's a big hit, plus The Wonder Hamster is a good baby nickname. Then Katherine came up with the dog variation:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder doggie,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't bark,
He just runs around all day in the park,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder doggie!
Hey, James!

Finally, to avoid species confusion, I came up with a proper human baby version:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder baby,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't poo,
He just jumps around in his jumperoo,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder baby!
Hey, James!

Katherine would like to point out that he does in fact poo, copiously. To which I can only respond that he bites too, but I've included the biting line in every version to try and get him to take a hint.