Kathryn
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kathryn" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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03:58 pm
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whine of the day
I think I should only have to deal with one species' urine in any given hour.
Current Mood: wet
Current Music: "Splash, mommy! Messy!"
Tags: lillian, parenting, potty training
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03:13 pm
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This is how it starts
We recorded an episode of Bob the Builder during the Week We Let the TV Raise the Baby. I resisted showing it to Lillian, a LOT. For DAYS. Because it is a boy show.
I bought her shoes that did not stay on securely, that interfered with her ability to run and play, because the only shoes that DID stay on securely were olive drab and navy, or black and silver, or brown and orange. Boy shoes. Mind you, my comfy shoes are white and navy, and I am not a boy.
Months ago, I let her pick out a book at the bookstore. She chose a book called "I Love Trucks." I almost put it back. Because it is a boy book.
What the hell is wrong with me?!!? How can I purge this awful instinct, which if I saw it in anyone else I would rant about it for hours? She's not a living doll to dress up, she's a human being, a strong, tough human being who loves to play rough and hard. Ack.
Tags: gender wars, lillian, parenting
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03:41 pm
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Look at my cute baby!
Look at her! LOOK AT MY CUTE BABY!
You cannot see it, but that dress has little woolly sheepies all appliqued around the bottom!
Picture was taken on Easter. What other excuse can I think of to get her into that adorable dress?
Tags: lillian, pictures, wool adoration
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11:38 am
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adventures in parenting
Lillian was trying to feed me animal crackers. Yes, so cute, but she needs to eat them and I don't. So I was doing what she does when she doesn't want to eat, clamping my mouth shut and turning away (and trying not to laugh). Lily was laughing and laughing and trying to pry my lips apart and shove the animal cracker inside, saying "Noo! Noo! Noo!"
Then she sat back, looked at me, and reached out and pressed my nose and said "Beep!" (We play the nose-beeping game a lot.) Well, I burst into absolutely unrestrained laughter, at which point she hucked the cracker into my mouth and looked quite pleased with herself.
Tags: lillian, parenting
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12:25 pm
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Helicopters vs. submarines
Are you familiar with the term "helicopter parent" ? In a nutshell, it refers to the parent who is always hovering around her kid, ready to leap in and lend a hand. Every teacher has a helicopter parent horror story; you can find dozens of them by googling. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Oh, are you back already? OK. The urge to helicopter around is very, very strong at this age; it's so easy for Lillian to capsize over and hurt herself, and she's so small that she can very easily get pushed aside by larger children who are neither mean nor selfish, just two, and therefore developmentally appropriately concerned only with themselves and with their own happiness. (You can model polite, sensitive behavior for a two year old, and you had better if you want them to ever start being a worthwhile human being, but their boundless, overboiling minds and personalities are literally incapable of internalizing it until they are older.) I love her like I love my own heart, like I love my own skin, and I want her to sail through her entire life, cradle to grave, without ever experiencing anything that so much as makes her brow furrow. . .
. . . but that's not what's best for her. What's best for her, particularly if she's going to be small, is that she learn to push back a little, to hold on to toys when bigger children try to take them from her. If she practices the confidence to assert her own bodily sovereignity now, maybe she'll still have that confidence when she's seven, or twelve, or sixteen, or twenty-two. She needs to know that if she cracks her head or stubs her toe, she can cope with that, either by having a little cry and then recovering or by looking to get the help she wants and needs. She has to figure out for herself that if two people want the same toy, well, something has to give. And she's never going to learn any of that if I'm always stepping in and taking that power away from her.
That's not to say that I'm not there, not watching. Some things are too dangerous to learn about by doing, like traffic, and butcher knives, and drain cleaner, and strange dogs (or strange men). But instead of being a helicopter, I think I want to be a submarine parent, running silent and deep, but constantly with the sonar running to monitor the waters around my child for land mines and enemy ships. Maybe even take them out before she's even aware of them, so that she can feel safe navigating her own waters.
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: lillian, parenting, submarine parent
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12:12 pm
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Lillian's Words
I'm going to attempt to catalogue her vocabulary now, as of almost 17 months:
People:
Mommy, Daddy, Mora (Moira), Weeum (William), baby
Animals:
doggie, cat, Ash (one of the cats), grr (which means bear), duck, baa (for a sheep), meow (for cat), squeak (for mouse), aroo (wolf), owl, pig
Body Parts
eye, nose, ear, elbow, arm, hand, knee, leg, eyebrow, tummy, bellybutton, toes
Other words:
shoe, sock, light, see, outside, slide, thirsty (which appears to also mean hungry), cup, sippy, juice, shake, yummy, la-la (music), num-nums, uh-oh, no, yeah, bubble, bath, bottle, kiss, moon, star, up, down, book, hi, bye, hello, door, diaper, thank you, ball, peekaboo (though it's more like "ka-boo!"), owie, dancing, want, laser (which means mouse, as in optical mouse, because every time she picks one of them up I say "Oh Lily, do not point laser at remaining eye!"), Roomba, hot, all done
That's 65 words that I can think of right now, I'm probably missing some. Mind you, some of these words need the trained ears of her parents to understand. She's not really speaking Broadcast English. But she is using them consistently -- not just reactively, but to indicate what's going on or what she wants.
Tags: lillian, vocabulary, words
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01:49 pm
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Sweatin' to the . .. oh hell I can't complete the metaphor
Lillian had a sweat test today. Why? Why, to test for cystic fibrosis, don'tcha know! Because she's been re-diagnosed with Failure to Thrive! Because she's now down to the FIRST percentile for weight! *sob*
I'm not as freaked out about as I have been, for a number of reasons. One is that my doctors finally managed to get it through my thick skull that nobody but NOBODY thinks we are doing anything wrong. Second is because she's still tracking my own growth curve as a toddler pretty closely. (I was 17 pounds at 1 year, 21 pounds at 2 years, 24 pounds at 3 years. Lily is 16.5 months old and weighs about 18.5 pounds.) Third is because after being examined by a pediatric specialist, the verdict was "Well, her weight IS a concern, but God knows nothing else is, she's perfect." Fourth is because her period of No Weight Gain coincides pretty neatly with her period of Three Bad Colds and the Stomach Flu, during which she barely ate.
The cystic fibrosis test, remarkably, doesn't have me that worried either. She was screened for CF as a newborn, but it is possible for her to have mutations on the CF gene that the gene-screen doesn't test. The odds of that happening are approximately one in a hundred million, but they're not zero. It's also possible that human error caused a false negative; the odds of that are somewhere between 1:250,000 and 1:500,000. There are 5 clusters of symptoms of cystic fibrosis; she has two of them, mildly. And I met a woman in the waiting room at Children's who has two sons with CF, one 13 and one 8, who looked at her, listened to her breathe, asked after her, erm, GI habits, and said flatly "If that child has CF then I am Mata Hari. She got over RSV in a week and a half? My kids take MONTHS to get over RSV."
I'll know the results by this evening. Until then, I'll be sitting over here, not being worried except for all the ways in which I'm terribly, terribly worried.
Current Mood:  NOT WORRIED
Tags: cf, ftt, health, lillian
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08:41 am
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General Update
Wow, Lillian is totally walking now. She started walking about a week and a half ago, and I've just been too busy chasing her to update. She still falls down all the time, but she makes pretty good time. Now I need to get her shoes with treads on them. *snif* my little baby, growin up.
She also has a TERRIBLE cough right now, for like the fourth time this winter, complete with fever and retracting, so we have a doctor's appointment this afternoon, which is super annoying because I'm still trying to go to the Garden Show with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) solarbird. Everyone assures me that it's just fine for little kids who play with other kids all the time to get sick this often, but I feel so bad for her.
In other time-consuming news, we're performing the B-Minor Mass with the Symphony. Now, the last time the Chorale performed this s work, we had 18 rehearsals for it. This time, we have 11 rehearsals, and one of them got snowed out. So we're kind of in the weeds with this. Monday's rehearsal was like masturbating with a belt sander -- "Ow! This is supposed to be fun! I do this for fun! Why does it hurt so much?!" There's just a lot of notes, and a lot of parts -- it's 5 part chorus for most of it, and 6 and 8 part sometimes -- and it's long, like 2.5 hours long.
In addition, we had the brilliant (seriously) idea to split all the women equally into 3 parts for the SSATB stuff, which is good because then we don't have to maintain a huge-ass soprano section for the rest of the season. The problem with this is that the soprano II part is really almost as high if not just as high as the soprano I part, and the alto part is quite low, so for those of us who are floating, the range of the piece covers 2 octaves plus a third. I've forgotten how to transition well into my head voice for choral singing, though I'm remembering, and as a result the rehearsals are very vocally fatiguing for me. I need to practice more, but the only solid focus time I get is when Lillian is asleep, and it's hard for me to sing full-voice without waking her up. What I need to do is knuckle down and practice more when Erik is home, but I value my time with him so much.
I took 2 days off to go to the Madrona Fiber Arts festival and take a two-day class with Nancy Bush and Judith Mackenzie McCuin on gloves, mittens, and other handcoverings -- the history, construction, and spinning of yarn for them. To say that it was a fun class is a complete understatement. I had a hell of a time, I learned an absolute ton, and I am now fired up beyond belief to knit enough gloves to keep everyone I know's hands warm.
I think that's the news from Lake Burning Hand right now. I'll let y'all know if I think of anything else.
Tags: family, health, illness, knitting, lillian, music, singing, spinning, symphony, wool adoration
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06:46 pm
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Now is a great time for all the other parents on my F-list to speak up
Suddenly -- SUDDENLY -- I find myself needing to time-out Lily. Or else do something else to punish her. Seriously like two hours ago she decided that a fun thing to do would be to pinch Mommy so hard she shrieks, and just keep doing it while laughing delightedly. This is obviously a teachable moment or whatever the hell the parenting people say it is, but what should I do? The first time, I said "No" and she did it again and I said "NO" and she did it again and I said "NO! THAT'S IT!" and put her down on the floor, where she wailed and screamed piteously for two minutes until I picked her back up again.
Not ten minutes later she was doing it again, and again we went through three "No!" iterations and then I stuck her in her crib, where she arched her back and threw a full-on tantrum. We had kisses and cuddles after three minutes or so of that, and now she is playing happily on the floor, but what the hell do I do about this? I don't want her to associate her crib with punishment, right? That should be Happy Night-Night place? She's walking (barely) and talking (barely, she has like 20 words), but I don't see a good end to, say, telling her to sit in the corner. I'm not going to smack her, no matter how much everyone swears it's totally OK. But it's also very, very obvious to me that this is the sort of thing that has to have Consequences. Help a mama out!
Tags: discipline, lillian, parenting
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12:56 pm
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I am so proud of my daughter
When Lillian was walking around on Wednesday, she slipped, tried to catch herself on the edge of a basket, and ended up coshing her face on it, badly. She had a big scratch and a welt that I was sure was going to bruise, though it didn't. She cried for about four seconds, and then stood back up and kept trying at it.
She was as sick as a damn dog yesterday, and in the middle of it, still managed to spend some time playing with her little farm, saying "Happy Happy Happy."
We're no longer actively sick today, but we're both still very weak, and yet all she wants to do is run around. She can't, and it's so frustrating to her that she just cries while pointing at the floor. But she can still cheer up to watch Teletubbies, and even signs along with some of it.
and then, when I succumbed to the inevitable and put her down for a second nap only an hour after she woke from the first, she signed "all done hurt." She is so tired of being sick. And yet her amazing, fantastic, utterly indefatigable spirit just keeps shining through. I'm so impressed with the way she can soldier on through adversity. I'm so proud to be her mother.
Tags: family, lillian, love, sick
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07:06 pm
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Twelve is a magic number!
It is ALSO the number of unsupported steps that my brilliant daughter just took down the hall! In a row! she stood up, staggered down the hall, overbalanced, and sat down flat on her butt.
Then she took two more. And four more. And she just keeps doing it!
I am so proud I could spit!
Current Mood:  proud
Tags: development, lillian, walking
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12:46 pm
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Life as I Know It is About to Change
Lillian took her first unassisted step today. I mean, it was more like a pivot followed by a fall, but she let go of my hands to take a step towards her Kindermusik teacher. and did so, and then plowed face-first into her arms.
*snif* she's growing up so fast.
Tags: gross motor development, lillian, walking
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03:25 pm
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Cutest Game Ever
Me: Where is mommy's nose?
Lillian: *points to my nose*
Me: And where is mommy's ear?
Lillian: *reaches around my head and points to my ear*
Me: And where is Mommy's eye?
Lillian: *points to my eye*
Me: And where is Mommy's mouth?
Lillian: *puts her fingers in my mouth"
Me: "And where are Mommy's kisses?"
And then Lillian grins and leans in and kisses me wetly right on the mouth.
Tags: development, games, kisses, lillian
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09:21 am
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Good and Bad
Good: Flight yesterday from SEA to STL on-time and pleasant.
Bad: flight yesterday from STL to CDR cancelled.
Good: Old friends of my family's put us up for the night in St. Louis, complete with facilities for Lily.
Bad: The next flight they can put us on is tomorrow.
Good: Because they are prioritizing empty seats on flights today for soldiers home on leave who got fucked by the massively huge weather delay.
Good: We can rent a car one-way with no drop fee!
Bad: It's a five-hour drive.
Good: But ONLY five hours.
Bad: Lily woke up every two hours all night long.
Good / Bad: As I type this she has been asleep for four hours and shows no signs of waking.
Good: I have coffee and OJ and a shower and my husband is a rock star and the car we are renting will have a GPS and a five-hour drive is not SO bad in the scheme of things.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Tags: airports, coffee, driving, family, flying, lillian, soldiers, st. louis, travel, weather
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04:26 pm
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Two Hands Three Balls
You sick freaks, this is about my daughter. Get your minds out of the gutter.
My mother-in-law bought Lillian this for christmas. The astute among you may notice that it has three plastic balls, red yellow and blue, with rings to rest them in at the top. A little push will make them go through and ding the xylophone chimes, but that's not the point of this story.
For the past half an hour, Lillian has been obsessed with holding all three balls at once. She can't do it. It's flat impossible. Holding one of those balls is like palming a basketball -- she can do it, but only barely. So she can get one in each hand, and then she's just screwed. That doesn't stop her from trying, though. After about six iterations of pickup-drop-pickup-drop, she started brainstorming alternate locations for the third ball. Candidates included:
- Crook of one elbow. Works well until the arm needs to be straightened, then the location vanishes.
- Balanced between the two balls in each hand. Elegant but unworkable due to instability of two curved surfaces in tangent contact.
- Tucked beneath chin. Effective for sitting, but when crawling, causes an inability to look where one is going, resulting in cat collision.
- Behind one knee. Similar outcome as the elbow experiment.
At this point, she noticed the rings to rest the balls in at the top of the xylophone. Perfect! She had the red ball in one hand and the yellow one in the other, so she put the red ball in the ring at the top, picked up the blue ball. Success! Then she put the blue ball in its ring next to the red ball and picked up the red ball, then went back to get the blue ball -- hmmm.
OK, no, we've solved this problem! Put the red ball down in its ring. Grab the blue ball. Now that that's accomplished, go back for the red ball -- wait.
O WAIT I HAS ANOTHER HAND! Put YELLOW ball in ring, grab red ball! HOORAY! BOTH BLUE AND RED BALLS! BANG BALLS TOGETHER IN EXULTATION! Now I just need to grab the yellow ball and. . .
. . .fuck.
At that point, she threw all the balls away in disgust and demanded to nurse. Poor kiddo. I'm so proud of her for trying so hard though.
Current Mood: Proud
Tags: ball, cats, development, fine motor, gross motor, lillian, mary, toys, xylophone
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11:00 am
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OH MY GOD
Lily is giving Thor (the cat) kisses ON THE NOSE and it is the CUTEST THING EVER
Also, in most bizarre subjects ever to share a post, I just learned that what separates durum wheat and hard winter wheat from soft spring wheat is the number of chromosomes. Spring wheat is diploid. Durum wheat is tetraploid. Winter wheat is HEXAPLOID. Hexaploid, people! I didn't know that was possible!
ETA: And strawberries! Strawberries are OCTAPLOID!
Tags: bread, cat, chromosomes, kisses, lillian, polyploidy, thor, wheat
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04:28 pm
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I knit woolly pants for Lillian!
So we're using cloth diapers for Lillian, and one of the options you have with cloth diapers is to use straight cotton (or bamboo, or hemp) diapers with a wool cover. If you treat the wool with lanolin, it's fairly waterproof -- plus, the lanolin neutralizes the ammonia in the pee, because long chain fatty acid (lanolin) + a base (ammonia) equals soap! So you don't have to wash them if they just get damp, because the pee turns into soap and then you can just dry the wool out. I probably wash my wool covers something like once a month, but we don't use them very often.
But all my wool covers are shorts, for summer. (Summer is the BEST time for breathable wool covers; they are, believe it or not, much less hot than plastic.) So I bought some ridiculously bright wool yarn and knit her a pair of "longies," or woolly pants diaper covers for winter. I knit them ribbed so she could hopefully wear them maybe even into next winter, though I will have to add onto the legs for that to happen. I ran out of yarn and had to improvise at the bottom, but I don't think it looks too bad:
What a cutie.
Tags: diapers, improvisation, knitting, lanolin, lillian, soap, wool adoration
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12:14 pm
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Because it is That Time of Year
Submitted both without comment and without expectations:
My Wish List
Lillian's Wish List
Tags: christmas, kathryn, lillian, wish list
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11:26 am
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strong evidence that it really is just sleep deprivation
Last night, Lily slept in her crib all night long. She cried for about an hour in the middle of the night, and Erik got up a couple-three times to pat her and reassure her, but I didn't even wake up all the way. I woke up when Erik woke me, at nine o'clock, because Lily was awake. That was another nine hours of sleep, only semi-divided.
This morning, I was drinking my tea while I heard Lily playing in the recycling. I considered stopping her, made the decision that she could make a mess but wouldn't get hurt on anything in the recycling, and kept drinking my tea -- until I realized she'd been REALLY quiet for a while and I went to check to see if the baby gate into the TV room was closed.
It wasn't.
There was a slice of fudge in there.
Guess who found it?
Fudge was EVERYWHERE, all over the table and all over one of my knitting books. And I was still in my jammies and had been trying to figure out how to shower anyway.
Two days ago, this would have completely destabilized me. Today, what I did was to run a lukewarm bath in our Big Red Bathtub and have both of us get in -- I mopped the fudge off her and then washed myself off too. The whole thing was pretty funny, honestly. What a difference two nights of mediocre sleep makes.
Tags: fudge, lillian, nervous breakdown 2007, parenting, pictures, sleep, sleep deprivation
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07:08 pm
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La La La La
Man, there is no way to launch into this entry that doesn't sound like a complete drama whore calling out to customers.
OK, so I lost it yesterday, told Erik that I was having fantasies about hurting myself badly enough that they'd give me a nice calm place to take a rest. (It was a bad morning; I had to change clothes 3 times before noon. Then I was out of clothes. I had poop in my hair until 4.) Erik called the Microsoft CARES people, which are the emergency oh-shit-I'm-freaking-out people, and read my IM transcript to them. The CARES lady was of the opinion that I probably should see someone before the sun set. So that is how we ended up at the Overlake ER so that I could get an emergency psych consult!
A very nice sweet social worker saw us -- all three of us were there -- and she listened to me talk, asked me about the hurting myself thing, I told her that I didn't really want to actually get hurt as much as I just wanted a rest and saw that as a possible means to an end. She said "It sounds like this is less about suicidal ideation and more about creative problem-solving," which made me giggle. She very neatly zeroed in on the crux of the problem, namely that while I am OK with getting help, I am not OK with needing help, and therefore I'm only psychologically capable of asking for help when I don't need it, which doesn't really work. Having identified that disconnect -- and honestly, she did it with all the precision and skill of a trauma surgeon looking for an internal hemmorhage -- she lined out the various options that the hospital could offer me.
"There's urgent psychiatric evaulation, which I think I can get you into tomorrow. There's ongoing outpatient therapy, which can be either two hours a day, three days a week, or five days a week from nine AM to three PM, sort of a Therapy Day Camp option. And then, there's sleep-away camp, inpatient hospital care. Sleep-away camp is usually very short stay, two to five days. Our primary concern is the safety issue, yours and Lillian's. What do you think you need?"
I told her that I thought I was probably OK to go home, that I didn't need sleep-away camp, but that I was very interested in her professional opinion. Lillian is very important to me and I didn't want my pride to compromise her safety. She went and talked to the on-call psychiatrist, showed him her notes, came back and said "We think you need to see the urgent psychiatrist tomorrow, and that you're safe to go home today if AND ONLY IF you can get the night off. Dad, can you take the baby?" Erik stepped right up to the plate and volunteered to be on duty all night long, sleeping in the nursery with Lillian.
I slept for ten hours, thanks to heavy-duty earplugs. Lillian was up screaming for two of those hours in the middle of the night, refusing milk or juice from a sippy and pointing frantically at the door that I was on the other side of. That says pretty definitively that she doesn't desperately need to eat in the middle of the night, she just wants me.
Today, I went to see the shrinky-dink. He was a great guy, very personable, and when I told him "I want to know if you think that all I need is some sleep and a break, or if I need a little somethin-somethin to help level me out, or ongoing counseling, or what" he was pretty eager to help. I told him the whole situation, including my history of depression, and he said that in his opinion, I might have an underlying thingamabob going on, but that it was impossible to tell underneath the military-grade sleep deprivation. When he found out that I hadn't had more than two and a half or three hours of sleep at a shot for two months, and haven't been getting eight hours of sleep regularly since May ("See, seven months of that is just too much for --" "Oh, no, Doctor. May of 2006.") he said "I'm truly impressed that you walked in here of your own accord,then. I'm amazed that you aren't on the verge of a nervous breakdown every single day." ("Yeah, Doc, about that.")
So, basically, his diagnosis is sleep deprivation so severe it's causing personality and mood disorders, and he gave me three options: 1) Just flat quit tending Lily at night, letting her cry it out; 2) Hire a night nanny; or 3) spend a week at sleep-away camp. He has a 3-year-old, and two years ago they had to move to brutal Ferber cry-it-out because they were going mad, so he had a lot of sympathy but strongly recommended the first option.
"I want to make it clear," he said, "that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with children wanting to sleep with their parents. I don't think it's harming her or anything. But it's killing you; you can't take much more of this without there being severe and possibly permanent consequences. You need the sleep. It will suck for all of you, and it will be a harsh awakening for her, but she'll be OK."
So, that's what we're going to start doing. Not lookin forward to that, let me tell you. The other half of the plan is that every day, my next-door-neighbor has an hour of shuffling kids around in a minivan that she has to do (she has to drop one kid off at school and pick the other one up) and she has offered to take Lily along for that ride, so that I can get an hour to myself EVERY SINGLE DAY.
So, there you are. I still feel kind of doofy going to the ER because I couldn't handle one perfectly sweet little baby, but the shrink was very clear that this was definitely an urgent situation and that being poleaxed by this level of sleep deprivation has nothing to do with weakness or anything else, that it would happen to anyone, even Supermoms or Marines.
Current Mood: better
Tags: depression, er, erik, lillian, nervous breakdown 2007, parenting, sleep, sleep deprivation
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