Kid Amnesiac

Today is a day I’ve dreaded for quite some time: It’s Molly’s last day with us.

When Molly first arrived in February, I wasn’t sure if we were a good fit. I didn’t hear her the entire day, and she barely talked to me even when I asked her direct questions; for an extrovert like me, this aroused great suspicion. But I was desperate for regular help and mindful that she is/was quite young (only 18), so I had her come back a second day.

She still didn’t talk to me, but I worked upstairs that day and listened carefully to her interactions with Simon. What I heard was quite reassuring: She sang to him, read to him, and talked sweetly to him throughout the day. As the two of them got to know each other better, I’d hear them play silly games and go outside for walks, and on many days Simon will say or do something new for me that I’ll later discover Molly taught him.

As he shifted from baby to toddler and his moods got more volatile, the tone of their play hardly changed. When Simon got fussy, she kept her cool. If he awoke early and crabby from a nap, I’d hear her rock him and speak in low, soothing tones. It’s not that she has been as good to Simon as I would be, it’s that sometimes she’s been better. I’ve never heard her sound exasperated or lose her patience. She’s a natural.

This has not gone unnoticed by Simon. He adores her. If we ask him who’s coming to see him the next day, his first guess is usually “Mawee.” When we tell him she’s here in the morning, he gets audibly excited and makes a run for the door. When he sees her, his whole face lights up, and then he has to go plant his face in the couch cushions until his emotions are sufficiently under control to begin his day with her.

As perfect as this setup has been, it can’t continue. Molly goes off to college next week to a town a couple of hours from here, and Simon himself begins preschool tomorrow. I’m excited for Molly, as I had a grand four years in college and wish her the best. I’m excited for Simon, too, as I think preschool will be wonderful for him once he settles into it. But I’m also sad that this perfect little relationship is drawing to a close, worried that he will miss her terribly, and upset that I can’t explain to him what’s happening. I know that change and loss are unavoidable in life, but I haven’t mastered my own feelings about these inevitabilities, much less how to explain them to a tiny child.

The thing that’s keeping me smiling today is the most recent thing Molly taught him: “Homo.” That would be “Elmo” as run through the toddler translator. He’s only seen Elmo in a single DVD and in two books we have in the house. He’s seen the Goodnight Moon bunny, Peter Rabbit, or Curious George and the man in the yellow hat much more often, but I guess there’s something about Elmo that has stuck with him. I suppose “Elmo” is much easier to say than “George”, too. Still, I really hope the “l” in Elmo shows gets clearer soon, before the teachers at KIP start to wonder about how Simon’s parents talk at home.

I think Simon has some quality bonding time ahead of him with his Uncle Ian. It’s just too bad that he won’t be back in California sooner.

You see, my friend Ian is a great lover of Danish. Well, all pastries actually. I’ve seen him hike up small mountains in San Francisco late at night to secure one of his favorite donuts from Bob’s, and I’ve watched from a bemused distance as he finds bakeries in every neighborhood in which he or I have lived. When Tartin first opened in the Mission District in SF, I knew Ian would be the first to give me a review. When I had a hankering for brioche in Pacific Heights, I knew Ian would support me against Matt and be willing to wait in a long line to get the goods at Boulangerie. And when we stayed with Ian and Christine in Oakland this past spring, I knew Ian would find a way to get a trip to his favorite bakery on the agenda.

I support his passion, even as I don’t share it. One of the few areas in which we disagree is the donut and most pastries. On the whole, I find them all too sweet donuts too greasy to be enjoyable. Ian thinks this is pastry heresy and downright un-American of me. He’s a big fan of cheese and fruit pastries, while I’d rather have a good bagel. And that’s OK; rational people can agree to disagree. Viva la difference.

My son, however, is clearly taking Ian’s side. A little over a week ago, the two of us were running errands together and stopped at Panera for lunch. I hadn’t bothered to bring a diaper bag with me when I left the house; I just stuffed some wipes and a bib in my bag and headed out the door. That meant that I needed to be sure I got food both of us would eat. I ordered a half tuna sandwich, a cup of corn chowder, and a cheese Danish, hoping Simon could nibble on the Danish on the way home if the rest of the lunch didn’t suit him.

He had never been given a Danish before, cheese or otherwise, and yet he seemed to recognize it straight away. His vision was so single-minded, that he didn’t even see the other food laid out before him. Instead, he spent the next 20 minutes doing all he could to dismantle the Danish. First, he licked the cheese part of the top. Then he ripped the pastry edges away from the center to get to cheese core. Once the sweet cheese was fully consumed, he turned his attention to the pastry bits. The edges in particular were tough going for him, but he attacked with a fury and dedication I had not seen before.

I watched, equally delighted and disgusted, as he bit and tore off parts of the pastry, chewed for a while, then took pieces out of his mouth to get some rest, and then put them right back in his mouth to finish the job. By the time he finished, the pastry was obliterated and a sticky coating of sugar and saliva covered his face, hands, and hair, shining nearly as bright as the smile that stretched across his entire face.

Bon Appétit, kiddo. Enjoy it now when we can tell ourselves that all that fat is good for brain development.

Correction: D’oh! I forgot that Ian hate cheese in nearly all forms. No worries, though, as the next day kiddo devoured a cinnamon roll with alacrity. I tell you, he’s not picky. So long as sweet dough and lots of butter is involved, he’s cool.

Much like the airline industry, I am prone to encountering “overbooking situations”. Somehow, I always think that this will be the week when the space-time continuum will alter to accommodate my planned 30-hour day.

Wednesday, I actually planned the following day. And I swear that at the time, this day seemed a bit busy perhaps, but also totally doable. Here it is:

• 7:30-9:30: Simon wakes up, we have breakfast, I shower and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea, then Simon and I play together for a bit.
• 9:30: Molly (the sitter) arrives for the day.
• 9:30: Amy (the physical therapist) arrives for Simon’s First Steps appointment.
• 10:00: Christopher arrives for the morning. He plays with Molly and/or plays with Simon during his therapy appointment.
• 10:30-1:30: I work, eat lunch, and supervise the landscaping in the front of the house and the deck building in the back.
• 1:30-3:00: I meet with my neighbor Lynn to cut down two trees along our property line in preparation for more landscaping work.
• 3:00: Molly leaves for the day; Simon and I play until 5:00 or so when Matt gets off work.
• 5:00-8:00: dinner and play-time
• 8:00: bedtime for Simon
• 8:00-10:00: household organization project continues (I’m overhauling the inside and out.)

HA!

Here’s what really happened:

• 9:00: Simon wakes up Our little sleep champ logged 12 ½ hours Tuesday night.
• 9:10-9:30: No time for planned pancakes. I throw yogurt and granola into a bowl, hand it to Matt, and dash to the shower.
• 9:30: Molly and Amy arrive; Simon is still groggy and slightly crabby. I’m dressed but dripping.
• 9:50: Christopher arrives and seems a bit crabby and clingy himself.
• 10:00: Christopher begins to cry.
• 10:15: I meet with Fairleigh (front yard landscaper) to discuss plans while trying to console Christopher and participate in Simon’s First Steps session at the same time.
• 10:30: Amy updates me on Simon’s progress, gives me written instructions for the next three weeks, and tries to schedule our next session while I rock an increasingly inconsolable Christopher in my lap.
• 10:35: I see Amy out the door and answer a quick question from Walter (the deck guy) as I load Christopher in the stroller to take him back to Shannon’s shop.
• 10:35-11:35: Walk to Mama’s Hip and back, stop to discuss Christopher’s hard morning with Shannon and assure her that these difficult stages are universal and normal.
• 11:35-2:15: Log in to work. Complete single task that was supposed to take 20 minutes.
• 2:15-3:00: No sign of neighbor Lynn, so first round of weed-killer administered using my new sprayer. I learn two valuable lessons at this point. First, add the Roundup to the water-not the other way around! Second, be very careful when you go to empty the pressure sprayer, lest you spray Roundup all over your legs and face. Yuck!
• 3:00-3:10: See Molly off, hang on to cranky Simon, and check to make sure I have the Poison Control number just in case.
• 3:10-4:00: Pay Fairleigh for work, keep Simon from running into the street or poison ivy patch, eavesdrop on Greg (the architect and landscaper) who is explaining to Walter that my deck is now seven inches lower than it’s supposed to be. Uh Oh! Run into Lynn and reschedule our work.
• 4:00-5:30 Escape with Simon to park to play and then to Heine Brothers for some decaf and a Kizito cookie.
• 5:45 to 8:00: Sit looking shell-shocked as Matt makes dinner and plays with Simon before bedtime. Clean kitchen from earlier milk spill. Put in load of diapers. Talk to assistant about author emergency. Talk to author about author emergency. Pour restorative glass of wine.
• 8:00 and beyond. Attend to new bug-bites, collapse on couch, watch “Entourage”, begin new book.

The rest of my planned filing/weeding/household organization? I decided it could wait until Thursday. Simon spends Thursdays at Jim and Evie’s for about six hours, giving me time to work for five hours, work around the house for three hours, and run a few errands. With logic like this, what could possibly go wrong?

Sometimes the answer to a problem is right in front of you, but you just can’t see it. Fortunately for me, my path has crossed with someone who has a complementary problem to mine and better vision into a solution.

My problem is that I worry Simon needs more socialization than he’s getting. I’ve made it to a play group every Friday for a month now, but I still haven’t figured out Tuesdays, as my work and childcare schedule hasn’t allowed for it three weeks straight. Frankly, I don’t thing once a week will cut it, especially if Simon is to be ready for preschool in two months.

Enter Shannon. Shannon owns the shop that hosts the Friday play group and is the mother of Christopher, an eighteen-month-old boy and Simon’s favorite in the group. Shannon is worried that Christopher spends too much time in the fishbowl of her shop. She’s also reaching the point where Christopher’s “help” is getting less helpful. She could benefit from some more time to work uninterrupted. I don’t know how she’s managed this long.

At play group just over a week ago, Shannon inquired as to whether my sitter might be willing to take on a second child for a few hours each week for extra money? I asked Molly, and she was game for it. So this Wednesday, Christopher and Molly came over the house to acclimate Christopher to the place and to get the boys more used to being together. Simon smiled the whole time and Christopher cried when it was time to leave. Success!

Besides the day Molly watches the two boys, I might just go pick up Christopher for the odd afternoon myself. The shop is just a few blocks from our house, it’s delightful to see the boys play together, and I know Simon must get bored with just me sometimes. Assuming this all works out, Shannon gets a break, Christopher gets a change of scenery, and Simon gets some company and encouragement to work on his running, jumping, and climbing skills.

I’m sure the plan has some wrinkles I’m not seeing, but right now I’m feeling pretty buoyed by the idea. It takes a village indeed.

Tonight Simon had a play date with his friend Sophie, the very lovely and lively two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of friends.

Simon is just now getting old enough to play with another child, and Sophie is just now getting old enough to adjust her level of play for a younger toddler.

The two of them shared a snack across the kitchen island from each other, then set off to play like mad. It’s the most interactive (and hilarious) I’ve ever seen them. They laughed until they were too tired to stand, and Simon even got a kiss!

Twas a lovely way to start off the month of June and get our album off to a happy start.

Following the advice of our First Steps physical therapist, we are trying to get Simon to spend more time playing on his feet. To quote Amy, we’re moving Simon’s world up off of the floor. To this end, we’ve moved a train table into our living room and put many of Simon’s toys on it, installed a mini-basketball game next to it, and have set up a sand and water table by our front steps.

The results have been mixed.

The train table has been a smashing success. We put all his favorite toys on it, and Simon spends literally hours playing standing up. Yesterday was our first full day of all-standing play, and he capped it by sleeping for 13 hours straight last night. Good boy! Better still, he frequently drops objects, then bends over to pick them up again. Amy has suggested we do this for him to get him out of his single, Frankenstein-like standing pose. And best of all, Simon will periodically break out into a dance while standing. If his bouncing, fist pumping, head shaking moves cracked me up when he was sitting, the addition of some hip action has sent me into uncontrollable gales of laughter.

Basketball has been a modest success. He likes the game and can certainly get the ball in the hoop, but he’s not ready to post up Mr. Fundamental (that’s Tim Duncan, by the way) or drive to the goal just yet. The goal (no pun intended) of this game is to see if we can get Simon to stand unsupported without realizing it. To date, we’ve managed a barely there lean against an adjacent table while putting the ball in the hoop, but he hasn’t gone totally solo yet. Still, I’m buoyed by the progress.

As for the sand and water table, I’m beginning to wonder if the engineers were drunk when they designed this sucker. The pitch must have gone like this: “When kids play in water, they make a mess. When kids play in sand, they make and even bigger mess. Let’s combine the two so the kids can be covered in wet sand that will stick to their skin and clothes and get all over the house, too. It’ll offer all the mess of a trip to the beach without the scenery. Perfect.”

Perhaps this will get better when Simon has a better idea of what to do with the thing. For now, his play is mostly limited to throwing water out of the table, throwing sand out of the table, throwing sand into the water, and eating the sand. On the plus side, Simon enjoys it and it keeps him standing, so we’re not giving up on it just yet. On the minus side, at his present rate he’s going to go through fifty pounds of sand in about a week.

Pictured at top right, my beautiful boy shellacked with sandy concrete.

Traveling with a baby is a little (lot) stressful, but being with friends makes it all worthwhile. Our first full day in the Bay Area, a friendly bystander in a park got this group shot of all of us–originally a group of five couples, who have now morphed into a group of five families.

Our friend Yun captured many fabulous shots of the two days we all spent together, which can be found in her album. Thanks so much, Yun!

I’ve got over 200 pages invested in this blog to date. My original goal was to post the occasional update and cute picture. Once I got rolling, it took on a life of its own as I became driven to write about my experience being a new mom. Before too many months sped by, I began to think of this as my Baby Encyclopedia. I hoped that I’d always be able to remember or look up milestones in Simon’s life in the blog. It was to be the safety net for my faulty memory.

Predictably, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. I honestly can’t remember when I stopped holding Simon in a cradle position, when we quit ferrying him around the house in his Moses basket, when the Papasan became obsolete, or when we began putting him in his swing to get him to sleep. Nor did I blog about these milestones; I didn’t know at the time that this information was significant enough to document.

It’s a little sad to realize that no amount of blogging can save me from losing some knowledge and memories. Then again, the alternative is to record our every move in a diary. That type of obsessive record-keeping leaves you like the tourist who views her entire trip through a video-camera lens: someone who preserves memories at the expense of actually making them.

On the other hand, blogging has also connected me to people in unexpected ways and jogged my memory on obscure points. Early on, I got a comment from a woman in Phoenix who had Googled “colic” and found Kid Amnesiac. She read our story of fussiness and reflux, felt better, and wrote to thank me for sharing. That was cool! Then when I confessed that Simon’s being mesmerized by TV had tempted me to use it as an  occasional tool, I got a note from a total stranger in Switzerland admonishing me that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against TV for all children under two years of age for a reason. Nothing quite like a good public dressing down! But hey, it was cool in its own way.

And just yesterday, the ultimate treat arrived in my mail box. Remember my little joke about Simon’s “progression in the wrong direction”? Well, the data are in. Yesterday I opened my mail and found a letter from a familiar local address. Suspicious, I opened it to find a piece of graph paper with a post-it affixed. Yup. G. Dewey Beadle, our fabulous physics professor (and I’d call him that even if I didn’t like the alliteration) dug out his records and plotted Matt’s quiz and test scores from 1987. 95% on test 1. 85% on test 2. 80% on test 3. The regression line is an unmistakable downward diagonal. The slope is 8.3 points per quiz. Matt did, however, get an A for the semester.

So there you have it. I still can’t remember when I stopped cradling Simon, but I now can remember Matt’s physics grades from 21 years ago. And no,  Simon still isn’t walking yet. He has, however, begun trying to use his spoon again after a 7 month hiatus, and he has also this week gone down to a single daily nap.

A hearty Happy Birthday to Thomas, son of friends Tony and Katherine. Thomas started the Great Baby Boom of 2006 and was the first baby born to our San Francisco circle of friends. Unbelievably, he’s two today. Wow! Happy Birthday, little boy!

We got the exciting word that friends Kelley and Kaya welcomed their first child, a son named Thaylo William, in the wee hours of the morning of the twenty-second. Later today, we got more of the scoop.

The short version is that Kelley was 42 weeks and 3 days pregnant, kiddo had no intention of budging, and science had to intervene. One day she will be able to use the story of his late and laborious arrival to guilt him into good behavior or at least get a really good mother’s day present from it. Work it Kelley!

In the meantime, we’re pleased to see that Thaylo is cute as a button, and we sincerely hope mom and dad are making use of the hospital staff and getting some sleep. Welcome to the world, Thayo. It’s about time you joined us!!