James at 16 months

You know, I can totally understand how people wind up with children a little over two years apart. It's this early toddler stage. They're just so delicious and adorable; they still have that baby sweetness and even the meltdowns are cute. But they're also getting more independent and self-entertaining and aren't nearly as much work. I can completely see how you can look at your 16 month old and think, "I could handle another one."

Then, of course, 18-23 months hits and if you're unlucky, you're already pregnant and stuck with morning sickness, a constantly tantrumming, bucking toddler and a feeling of dread because you're not sure you want the kid you already have, let alone another. But 16 month olds? It's easy to want a dozen of them.

Cognitive:

James is at that ideal state of sweet and inquisitive. He's at the "he thinks he's people" stage of imitative behavior; he tries to put on his shoes, pretends to comb his hair, chats on the phone and tries to change his baby doll's diaper (well, diapers. Baby requires two diapers for some reason, which I am required to change. A mother's work is never done). He digs happily in his sandbox for a long, long time. He demands books be read over and over again, and then sits and pages through them on his own. He loves dolls and stuffed animals. He also loves the cats, who sadly don't share his devotion. My days feature a lot of "Be gentle with the kitty James. Gentle. Yes, very nice. No, we don't pull the kitty's tail. Yes, gentle. Gentle. GENTLE. GENTLE JAMES, GENTLE! Oh, for God's sake, Sonya, just run away already."


Long-suffering Sonya

In the visual spatial realm, he can stack cups (although he much prefers knocking them down), correctly order nesting cups and sort shaped blocks into the correct holes of the shape sorter.

His communication skills are coming along very nicely. He's adding new words almost daily: Mama, Daddy, Alec, Katherine, kitty, doggy, egg, duck, dino, peekaboo, hi, hello, thank you, bye, night, uh oh, again, woof, milk, shoe, please, where's James. He just mastered the world's cutest elephant trumpet. He's also remarkably good at getting across complex desires. Recently, for instance, he managed to communicate to me that he wanted to wear his shoes but not his socks.

Physical:

His walk is still at the "drunken sailor" stage. He's not running, per se, but he can still get up a good speed. He's mastered getting down off the bed feet first. Hilariously, when we started putting him to sleep in a crib recently, he would try to use the same method to get out of it. He still hasn't caught on to the fact that the little matter of the bars on the crib are keeping him inside, no matter how many times his legs go through the bars. He hasn't figured out yet how to apply this technique to going down the stairs, although he's been crawling up the stairs for several months.

James continues to be an excellent eater, happily eating most of what we put in front of him. Despite this, he also continues to be a skinny guy. He continues to be a very very devoted nurser as well. I don't foresee weaning any time in the near future, not with the giant grin he gives me every time I start to lift my shirt. His hair is coming in thicker, but is so blond that it's hard to see. It's also starting to show some curl, albeit in a very wispy way.

And of course, he continues to be absolutely adorable:

The horrifying Mommy blogger

*We went to see Despicable Me 2 Tuesday evening. Fun! And that's just about the extent of my review. It was as funny and utterly predictable as the first movie, didn't scare the kids too badly and was a decent way to spend an hour and a half.

Although there was one bit that was much more funny to B and me than it really deserved. The homicidal chicken kept making us think of this episode of the hysterically funny Monster of the Week, a webcomic retelling of the X-Files (which frankly I find much more worthwhile than watching the series ever was). We just kept whispering to each other "Eaten by chickens: think that happens."

* I have not historically been given to discussing the contents of my childrens' diapers, for which I hope you are duly grateful. So it should say a lot that after 8 years and three children, I changed the most colorful diaper of my parenting career today. It wasn't just the blueberries he had eaten; it was more the multiple crayons he had managed to consume on the sly that gave it that spectacular rainbow edge.

Kudoes, James. I thought I had seen everything the toddler alimentary canal could throw at me, but you proved me wrong with your Amazing Technicolor Dreampoop.

* Heck, as long as I've strayed into stereotypical Mommy blogging overshare topics, here's a conversation Alec and I had this weekend. I was trying to get him to put on underwear by being silly: does it go on your nose? Does it go on your elbow? And so on. Finally, I finished up with, "So where does you underwear go?"
"On my head!"

And so it did. He put his arms through his shorts for good measure too. I hadn't thought about it before, but there's a definite resemblance between the sense of humor of a four-year-old and that of the sort of drunk who finds it hilarious to put a lampshade on their head.

* And finally, James has become the horrifying Uh-Oh Baby:




If he is in fact portending our doom, at least he's doing it cutely.

Gone fishing

* We got back from a two-week trip to Michigan last week.  Goodness, vacations in Michigan are much more pleasant in the summer.  Instead of ice and sub-freezing temperatures,  we had lovely weather in the mid-70s and low 80s, and lots of time at the beach.

We started out stopping in Ohio for the night, went up to my mother's for a couple days and saw 75 percent of the Champaign gang, went up to B's parents and saw lots of family there.  Then we vacuumed approximately 2.5 beaches worth of sand out of our car and reversed the trip - back down to my mother's for a few more days, another night in Ohio, then home.  It was a lovely vacation all around.

* Unfortunately, we got back to a house that was 90 degrees, which is particularly unfortunate because I set the thermostat to 80 before we left.  Hello, broken air conditioner!  Hello, hellishly hot weekend where the indoor temperature never went below 90 degrees!

This is where moving has paid off, because our new landlord had a repairman out the next day and the ac was fixed by Sunday.  But it was awfully sweaty until that blessed event happened.  It's been over a decade since I've lived through high temperatures without air conditioning, and I didn't miss it one tiny bit.

* We saw Monsters University in Michigan.  It was cute, and for a movie where scaring is the main plot point, it was remarkably non-scary.  Even our resident scaredy-Katherine was unphased for the most part, only having to cover her eyes a couple times.  I will say that I like that it didn't follow the typical collegiate sports underdog plot and resisted the easy ending, but mostly it was an entirely unremarkable, inoffensive Pixar movie that didn't break any new ground.  GORGEOUS animation though, natch.

* One lovely part of being back is that camp has started.  Three days a week of only one kid!  This is giving me a preview of what the fall is going to be like when Katherine is in school.  I have to say, I'm liking it a lot so far. I love my daughter, but I've always said I'm a better mother when I'm given the chance to miss my children.

To sweeten the deal, I've been contemplating looking for Friday daycare again.  Of course, I'll have to figure out how to pay for it, which I'm still investigating.  There are legitimate ways to make a supplemental income on the Internet, but I need to find out how much work for monetary return they would require and whether it would be worth it.  The sanity points gained from getting more days off together won't mean much if I spend every evening working feverishly.  So we shall see.

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?