Kid Amnesiac

The vast majority of the time, Simon is an easy toddler to take care of. He eats and sleeps well, and his disposition is sunny and social. Last week, however, was on the tough side. Every day but Wednesday (a Camp Whitworth day) he was off his game in at least one respect, and Friday he was crabby nearly the entire day.

I didn’t work on Friday, so I had planned a lovely mama-baby day for us. We’d start at the playgroup at Mama’s Hip, then come home for lunch and a nap, then hit the JCC pool once he woke up. After our swim-date, we’d have time for dinner and play with papa, and a family wind-down session with books and music would end the day. What could be better?

According to Simon, just about anything. He spent most of the day whining and yelling. I never could figure out what was wrong; all I knew was that everything I did was wrong. I picked him up the wrong way at the wrong time. I chose the wrong toys. I made the wrong food. I read the wrong books. I went about changing his diaper all wrong. I’m pretty sure I even looked at him the wrong way most of the time. The single thing I got right was taking him to play group, but even that ended poorly when I (wrongly!) wouldn’t let Simon run up and down a busy street without holding my hand.

It was maddening, and my nerves were frazzled from a bout of insomnia the night before. At times like this, I wage an internal war between doing/saying what I know to be the correct things and giving into my frustration and doing/saying what I know to be the incorrect things. Friday, I tell you, my internal reserves were low, and I gave in to baser instincts, like yelling at Simon to just be quiet, more than once. I may have even told him to shut up. (I sure hope not, but I can’t remember.) I’m not proud of this or excusing myself in any way. In hindsight, it’s clear as day that I lowered myself to his level and was something of a toddler myself.

On the other hand, there are some upsides to days like these. They make you a bit less judgmental about the public parenting of others. They make you appreciate the good days more. And in this instance, some crabbiness helped me to solve an emerging sleep problem of Simon’s.

For the past week or two, Simon has woken up after two to three hours of sleep many nights. Unlike his previous partial arousals, these times he’s wide awake, lucid, and unhappy. We got into the habit of picking him up, bringing him into our room for a bit, and then putting him back down. When this happened once a month, I didn’t think too much about it. At four times a week, it began to emerge as a new and unwelcome routine.

Most nights, after the crying would begin, Matt would suggest we let Simon work through it on his own. I’d half-heartedly agree, then insist on intervention the minute the crying went past five minutes and/or escalated in tone. Friday night, though, I was so tired from Simon (and, frankly, of Simon), that once I put him down for the night, I had no desire to see him again for at least 12 hours.

So when he awoke howling at 10:05, I was more willing to try Matt’s suggested course of inaction. I let it go. At 10:14 the crying reached a crescendo and I got ready to go get him. And then, just as abruptly as it began, it stopped. We repeated these non-actions when Simon awoke unusually early the next morning, letting him be unsettled and cry until he dropped back to sleep and woke up happily babbling at his regular waking time. The payoff was that Simon slept in late Saturday morning, had a terrific day, and got himself back to sleep when he awoke during his Saturday nap and again that night pretty easily.

It just goes to show you that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing you can do for everyone. And that there’s some value in even the most annoying of days.

Simon has uttered what sounded like sentences in past, but I could never tell. Today, however, clear as day he took one look at his new toy (pictured) and carefully enunciated:

“That’s the bus.”

Yup, it sure is. Looks like mama picked a winner.

Best of all, it’s a maple bus made in Vermont by a family-owned and operated business. They make trains, too, so at least one shopping dilemma has been solved.

Within a day or so of my purchasing Happy Baby Things That Go, I snapped some pics of Simon reading it. Then I got a new Elizabeth George novel and started consulting with landscape architects about my back yard (my back yard needs a landscape magician, I’ve decided), and never got around to taking said pics off my camera. Tonight, my mother reminded me that it had been a long while since she’d seen new pics; the poor thing is stuck with a photo from way back on June 1. Clearly, I’ve been negligent.

You know that you are suffering from world’s-most-photographed-child syndrome when you feel guilty about going two weeks without publishing new pictures of your child! What a little emperor I run the risk of creating over here…

Regardless, a sample pic is at right; more are in the Gallery. May everyone dream sweet dreams of buses tonight.

Simon has now been in the First Steps program for nearly three weeks, and we are seeing some progress on the walking front. It is, however, s-l-o-w progress, and I’m beginning to wonder if he’ll qualify for preschool when it begins this August 14.

On the plus side, he spends much of his day standing, he walks with us, a push-toy, or the furniture often, he squats and bends down all the time, and he’s been a stair climbing machine. On the minus side, he still butt scoots and crawls a lot, he doesn’t stand unsupported or get himself to standing alone, we’ve struggled to get him to walk holding onto a common object, and he’s only let go to walk solo three or four times.

The first time he took some steps alone was was last Thursday. He and Amy were walking together, each holding on to a “hand” of Baby Bunny. Simon got so excited about his errand that he let go of Baby Bunny and went for it. Alas, he pitched forward and fell down, thus putting a strain on his previously perfect relationship with Baby Bunny.

Then Sunday night, he went to cruise from the ottoman to the couch. He was holding on to Dirty Dog at the time and I was reaching for Dirty Dog to provide a common object. Only I did not yet have a hold on Dirty Dog when Simon took three little steps to me. Since he wasn’t bent over or trying to run, he wasn’t leaning forward and he didn’t pitch forward; he walked just fine…for three steps. As he had no idea what amazing feat he had just accomplished, he was not even a little emboldened to try this new trick some more. He’s taken similar steps at least twice since: once for Matt and once for Amy. But he’s not wild about it, and once he realizes what’s going on, he sits himself right down.

I suppose I had to expect progress to come in, to use a cliche, baby steps, but man oh man oh man, these baby steps are  leaving me impatient and hungry for more.

If Simon could write a book report, his for Happy Baby Things That Go might read something like this:

“Bus. This the bus. The bus? Yeah, the bus. Whas zis? Bu-pu? Ooooh. The bus.”

There’s more going on here than this report may demonstrate. Owing to his emerging fascination with all things wheeled, I picked up Happy Baby Things That Go at Borders Sunday night. I knew he’d like it, but I was and am truly delighted at how much he likes it.

His first order of business was to frantically turn pages looking for anything bus-like, to emphatically point to all these vehicles, and to emphatically proclaim “the bus” with a slight lisp at the sight of all of them. Once he calmed down, he began flipping between the inside cover page, where miniature pictures are located, to the page where each miniature’s respective full-size counterpart was located. He’d point to the small tram, call out “the bus!”, then flip to the main page in the book, point to the bigger tram, and explain that it, too, was “the bus.”

His second order of business was figuring out what all these non-bus buses were. Like the big passenger airplane. “The bus?” “No, honey, that’s an airplane.” Simon now calls this the “bu-pu”, either his attempt at saying “airplane” or “Airbus”, but we’re thinking he doesn’t know about brand names just yet. And what about the farm bus (tractor), or the sea bus (boat), or the rotorcraft bus (helicopter)? Matt and I easily spent thirty minutes saying the name of each item over and over and over again.

By the end of the evening, Simon could point to the rocket, the airplane, the motorcycle, the helicopter, and-of course-the bus when asked. Two days later the sight of the book still brightens his eyes and deepens his dimples, to say nothing for how much it makes Matt and me smile.

It would be too much to say that we are seeing an explosion of language, but we are certainly noticing a distinct increase in what Simon understands and how he can communicate with us in recent weeks.

The only real new words he says are baby, bunny, Bubbie, and bus. Added to the old repertoire (yes, no, mama, daddy/yagi/papa, cat, dog, light, ball, what’s that? and a few others that enter and exit his lexicon), we have a regular rotation of about 15 words. Probably average for a boy his age in terms of expressive language.

His receptive language, though, has developed much faster. About a week ago, Matt had Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? open to the back page, where the gallery of animals described in the book all appear. We read this book pretty often, but it’s not a daily standard like Goodnight Moon or My First Mother Goose. So when Matt asked Simon to show him the sea turtle, I thought he was joking… until I saw a little finger hover over the sea turtle. In turn, Simon showed us the black panther, the red fox, the panda bear, and the sea lion, then got stumped by the water buffalo and began pointing at random.

Wow! My boy has been paying more attention than I gave him credit for. In fact, once I started to pay attention myself, I could see that Simon is increasingly absorbed by the details in books. He loves the butterflies in Peter Rabbit, the little house on the hill in Each Peach Pear Plum, and the glowing embers in Bear Snores On.

It’s not just a matter of adding vocabulary words, either. He’s clearly got a better memory and a better grasp of grammar then he did only a few weeks ago. It used to be that when someone made for the door to leave, Simon would wave bye-bye. Then he began to wave as soon as keys and coats were picked up. But last week he began waving at my mother as soon as she said she should get going and before she got up or did any of these things. Matt and I also made the terrible mistake of mentioning Molly and Grandma by name on days when Molly wasn’t coming and Grandma was off on vacation. Both times he went to the window and looked out, eagerly awaiting their appearance coming up the front sidewalk and visibly disappointed when they were absent. The age of spelling out key words has dawned.

Simon also getting better at telling us what he wants using non-verbal gestures. Last week, on a day that Simon slept in unusually late, I told our sitter Laura (Molly’s replacement last week while she was away at camp) to expect to him to eat lunch late. As Simon has been cutting his two-year molars, Laura didn’t think much about the fact that Simon had his fingers in his mouth. After waiting for Laura to take the hint, Simon opted for a more direct route: He pulled up on Laura’s jeans, dragged her into the kitchen, walked (holding on to her pants-no news here) all the way to the high chair, then turned around and lifted his arms to be picked up. That got his point across quite effectively!

The very next day, at nap-time, my mom sat down in the glider with Simon to read some bedtime stories. Simon fussed, so mom reached for a different book. Again taking matters into his own hands-literally-he leaned against the glider’s footrest and pointed up meaningfully to his crib. He didn’t want to read; he just wanted to sack out. A point made all the more clear by the fact that his afternoon nap stretched to three hours.

These advances, small though they seem on the surface, are making our days together easier and more enjoyable in equal measure. It’s less of a strain when Simon can tell me what he wants and when he understands more of what I say. And as someone who finds beauty and interest in the small details of nearly every aspect of life, it’s enthralling to be able to share some of these with my young son.