mama musings

Neverending Mama Guilt

February 17, 2010

After naming my child Atticus you’d probably assume that I take him to the library every day, that we lounge around bookstores in our free time, that he’s already worked his way through the entire Seuss oeuvre. Not so much.

Oh it’s a sad fact of life that there are only so many hours in a day, and we all must pick and choose what we’re going to spend our time on. And even the most virtuous non-time-wasters still have to decide what good thing they’re going to have to do without. There’s just. too. much. to do. And for us, for now, the thing that we’re doing without is a ton of time reading books and out exploring the world.

Up until now, I haven’t felt too bad about it. I’m pretty realistic with myself and I’ve learned to say no over the years. I wouldn’t have thought I’d take it so personally that I can’t do everything, but now I’m starting to worry if I’m impacting his development.

He jabbers constantly, way way more than many of his friends, but his ratio of actual words is probably lower. And after last week’s zoo trip it got me thinking that maybe he could do more if I spent more time exposing him to more. Maybe if I was constantly reading to him, or taking him out to explore one new place after the other, maybe he would be able to talk and interact more. Maybe I’m inflicting my homebody-ness on him and he would be better off if I came up with a different approach. So then I get weepy and beat myself up for a while.

But then I have to remind myself that language is not the only issue we’re dealing with, and that’s one that he’ll probably, almost definitely, be able to catch up on, and that it’s far more important to address his physical needs. But since that is somewhat easier for me, seeing as it involves a whole lot of floor time and getting him to crawl around the house – which Gizmo takes care of for me, I naturally tell myself that I’m just taking the easy way out.

I suppose there’s no way to make it out of this motherhood gig without second guessing yourself. I just wish I could get it through my head that I don’t have to do it all, at least all at the same time.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Atticus, mama musings

2 years old

February 4, 2010

Today is Atti’s second birthday, and I’m rendered nearly speechless. I can’t count the number of times someone told me, “Treasure this time! It goes so fast!” but boy howdy, they were not kidding. How do I have a two year old?

In some ways I don’t. He’s caught up on the growth chart, but developmentally he’s much younger. Even aside from the whole not walking part. I had another preemie mom tell me that her doctor explained it took 1 year for every month of prematurity for them to catch up to their peers. So theoretically, by the time Atti’s three he’ll be socially and emotionally caught up. He’s already making big strides. Throwing tantrums like any toddler worthy of the title. Learning to come out of his little shell and play with other kids. Capturing more words every day.

The other day I was bent over cleaning up a mess he made, and Atti came up behind me and surprised me with a smack on the bum. I jumped in the air and said, “You goosed me!” and ever since he’s been crawling around the house saying “Goose, goose, goose.” With just the tiniest bit of a baby lisp.

He’s just blossoming all of a sudden. After working on it for a solid year of therapy, he finally decided he was ready to start waving Bye-bye. But instead of doing it when we asked, he’d crawl off into a corner and practice by himself. I’d find his little legs sticking out from under the table and hear “buh bye. Bye, ba bye.” As he stared at his hand and willed it to move back and forth. I’ve been reading stories to him his whole life, but overnight he went from bored to fascinated and now he throws a fit if he doesn’t get to have as many stories as he commands. He kisses the baby in the book, and turns the pages by himself.

He’s in this amazing limbo state. Part of him is becoming so aware of the world, so keen to interact and discover, and the other part of him is still my baby. While writing this I had to stop three times to give snuggle breaks. He crawls over to me and pulls on my pant leg to check in for a snuggle before he goes back to playing with his toys. He still loves kisses so much that I can motivate him to keep working through therapy by just saying, “Mama has kisses for you! Come and get kisses!” and then he will.

This little guy brings me so much happiness it’s almost embarrassing. Whenever I talk about him with his therapists and teachers, I catch myself grinning like a fool and I can’t wipe it off. I’m so proud of him I can barely stand it. My little champion.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff

Where Atti Stands Now

January 18, 2010

It’s been awhile since I had one of my breakdowns worrying about Atti reaching milestones. When a premature baby hits two years old, they stop adjusting for the prematurity. Most of the time that delay has sorted itself out by then, and when it hasn’t, counting them a few months younger isn’t going to mean a lot.

Now that he’s nearly two, he’s missed pretty much all the milestones I think he’s going to miss. And that brings an odd kind of freedom. I no longer have to panic as another skill whizzes past us. Now I just get to dig in and focus on what he can do. For Atti, I feel pretty confident that his ability right now is as bad as it’s going to get.

And we still have time for things to get a whole lot better.

Atti has mastered the commando crawl. He races around this house crawling on his belly like a soldier in the mud, winding up in the oddest locations. He seems to be growing unsatisfied with this method, because finally, after years of failed attempts in therapy, he’s discovering his hands and knees. This kid is on a schedule of his own and he will not. be. rushed.

I’ve really been working on his little thigh muscles lately. Lots of stretching and pull to stand exercises, and it is paying off big time. It doesn’t hurt that he spends more and more time playing with friends who stand up and run around, and heaven forbid someone do something that he can’t.

He can’t stand on his own yet, he still needs a lot of support, but what this all means is that he’s going to do it. He’s going to figure it all out, and he’s going to be just fine.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, The Good Life

Mynah bird

December 7, 2009

I’ve been working hard on Christmas stuff and I’m doing fairly well. Christmas shopping is done, Christmas making not so much. But I’ll get to that later this week.

Today is my birthday – 31 years old. I was thinking about doing a big introspective post about how great this year was and how it really changed everything for me, but I think I’ll save that for New Years. For today I want to give you the gift of adorableness that I get to live with every day.

Atti’s a little bit speech delayed as a result of his disability, but you wouldn’t know it based on how much jibber jabber comes out of this little guy all day. He’s got the T and K sounds down, so everything he says includes those, but it’s pretty funny how everything he loves most – kitties, kisses and tickles – can be expressed with just that much skill.

This one is my favorite. I don’t know where he picked this up, it just sprung naturally out of his little positive spirit. It is the best thing ever to be mid conversation and have Atti back me up with one of his emphatic Yeah!’s. He’s very agreeable.

He always says it just like that too – full bodied. Like he’s ready to provide the muscle behind whatever scheme I’ve got going that day.

This kid is pretty darn great.

Filed Under: Atticus, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

Embarrassing mommy moment #1

November 18, 2009

I mentioned the other day that we had a traumatic doctor’s visit? OK. Here we go.

Atti is a bit of a mouth breather. More like, a total mouth breather. It’s a really really common preemie thing for their adenoids to develop faster than the rest of their nasal passages, which can lead to some blockage. They typically grow out of it, but if the blockage is extreme, than they’ll operate.

He’s not in any discomfort, but I think it is impacting his development. He struggles to eat, coordinating all the chew, swallow, breath, through one option is difficult, and I think it’s affecting his speech too. He talks like crazy (must post video of that soon), but it’s really difficult for him to say things that require him to close his lips – like an m or p sound. He still doesn’t say Mama. He calls me something that sounds more like BalBal. But I’ll take it.

All of this was really low on the priority level. It was far more important that we work on making sure he could see, getting his weight up, starting therapy, but now that all that is running more or less smoothly, I felt brave enough to tackle something new. Plus, between my snoring Bear and three snoring cats, a snoring Baby was just one too many things to sleep through.

It took us a while to jump through all the hoops necessary to see the right specialist, and then we had to wait for the appointment to open up, and sure enough, when it was finally time to go to the doctor, Atti had a big fat snotty nose. I called to make sure that it would be OK to bring him, and the person I was talking to only seemed concerned with what Atti would tolerate. So I brought him in, knowing my little guy to be just the sweetest and most cooperative little thing ever.

And he totally was. Until they brought out the camera on a tube that goes down his nose. After a solid week of his mom wiping it raw whenever he got within reach, my poor sweet little lamb turned into a raving beast and it took three of us to hold him down long enough for the doctor to shove the tube down his nose only to be stopped by the torrent of snot trying to make its way out.

The doctor finally gave up and sent us down for an X-ray, and the nurse asked, above Atti’s screaming, if she could give him a sucker. Up until that moment, Atti had never tasted sugar. I described before how I wasn’t really anti-sugar but anti-fighting with my child, and right then it sounded like the perfect possible moment to lift the no sugar ban. Since eating is difficult for Atti, I wasn’t sure what he would do with a sucker on a stick, but he popped that thing in his mouth and went at it like he was built for it.

I carried him to the building next door and waited for our turn at the x-ray, and looked down to discover that I had a bright blue blotch on my white T-shirt, right in the middle of my breast, looking just like a Blue Raspberry nipple.

Finally, we got called into x-ray, and by this time, Atticus was PISSED. He was already sick, he had tubes shoved up his nose, his mom threw away his sucker, and now he had to lay naked on a cold table while a guy who smelled like cigarettes shoved him into the proper positions. When all the x-rays were finally taken, I pick him up and sing him his songs, and finally Atticus decides that I’m going to stop letting people abuse him so he calms down and nuzzles into me. The x-ray tech comes out to tell us we’re free to leave and puts his hand out for Atti to give him a High 5.

Atti gave him a High 5 all right. And then he grabbed the radiologists hand and bit him.

He may look sweet an innocent, but don’t be fooled!

I’m standing there with my child on my hip, covered in his snot and blue raspberry drool where a nipple would be, while the radiologist lectures my under 2 year old about biting. I wanted to fold my arms together and blink really hard like I Dream of Jeannie so the whole thing would go away.

Instead I mumbled apologies, sprinted away as fast as I could and just thought, if nothing else, this will make great blog fodder.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Atticus, mama musings

5 years

November 13, 2009

As of today I’ve been pecking away in this space for five years. It feels like it couldn’t only be five years. I’ve lived lifetimes since then!

I started this blog just after we left New Hampshire and moved to California. I hadn’t found a home in our new location, I was so very sick, and I felt this need to communicate with someone. I’ve also always felt ….haunted, maybe?…. by the need to write, but so terrified by how much I wanted to be good at it that I barely wrote anything at all. I found myself at this moment in my life where everything I was doing wrapped up, and I was left with this wide open future and no idea what I wanted to do with myself, or was even capable of doing. I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have much of a career, and the broadness of my open life was almost claustrophobic.

2005 was a trying and yet wonderful time. We were so desperate to have a baby, but by then that wasn’t even the central issue anymore. I was so sick, and we had no health insurance to make that change. I spent my days on pain pills, and if I did one thing in my day – cooked dinner, put the slipcovers on the couches, took a shower – that was a productive day. The posts back then were few and far between, and I think that’s because I was in too much pain to put thoughts together, but also because I was surrounded by some of the greatest friends ever. There were so many people who took such great care of us then.

By 2006, health insurance kicked in and we started trying to get me healthy. That sucked, and I am loathe to think about it too much. It was a really tough time. But this is the year that I really started to discover myself. This was when I did most of the work on my craft book that didn’t go anywhere but was tremendously educational for me. This was when I started to appreciate how essential creation is to my identity and accepted that no vision of my future could be complete without it.

Of course, as soon as I realized what I needed to be happy in my life without children, children became a possibility. Doesn’t it always work that way? Again, looking back my first reaction is always, “Boy, what a hard year.” A move away from beloved friends, miscarriage of a hard won pregnancy, failing to make a place in my new community, a fire threatening our beloved home, but then, also, beauty. Finding healing in the hard work of my hands, getting pregnant with Atti and staying that way, communing with this new little life in me.

2008 was the year everything changed for us. In the very best ways, even though it came at such a cost. Nearly two years later I can’t really even write about that time when Atti was in the hospital, or the fear I’ve had to learn to walk with as we work towards his future. It’s so terrifying and heartbreaking to think back on, but it was just so wonderful to have him, none of it seemed to matter.

I think that is the biggest gift that blogging has given me. I look at the big events of all these years and when you add it all up, I should be in the red. I shouldn’t be joyous when I’m dealing with miscarriages and moves and prolonged chronic illness. The life that I’ve been given is ridiculous and hard and even sometimes ugly in the big picture. But somehow, it doesn’t really feel that way. I have a record of all the little tender mercies, all the oases of beauty that sustain me, all the loving kindnesses of supportive readers, and when you add it all up it so outweighs the big hard things that I am happy. Truly, profoundly, almost unbearably happy.

I can’t thank you guys enough for being here through it all with me.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

Play Group

November 11, 2009

We went to our first, honest to goodness, at the park playgroup today. It went better than I was expecting, but not as good as I hoped.

I was really scared to death to go, up late last night stressing and then spending all morning thinking through contingency plans. Trying to come up with ways to keep him involved with the other kids, prepared for whatever terrain we’d come across, able to play with all the equipment, if it weren’t for the fact that the other moms are such wonderful, supportive, positive friends of mine, I probably would have just kept to my house.

Atti was a big fan of the swings, but the slide didn’t do anything for him. Of course, he could only go down if he was on my lap, so that takes a little of the thrill away.

I brought his little walker, hoping that he’d try to use it to keep up with his little friends, but instead he just got pissed off. He recognized that the other boys could do things that he couldn’t and it made him MAD. Head banging, full body fit throwing MAD. Which is good. I know him. This little guy is just so durned stubborn that he’ll get mad and then he’ll get to work. As we keep up with the playgroup, I think he will start using that walker more, and it will really aid his development.

But for today, I can’t really describe the pit that opened up in my stomach as I watched my child realize he was different.

It’s just my job to teach him that different doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, The Good Life

2009 Year of Pleasures #44

November 10, 2009

We’ve been avoiding giving Atti any sugar, not because we’re evil parents who hate childhood, but more because I wanted to put off a fight as long as I could. This poor kid has me forcing so many things that are good for him, if he knew that sugar existed in the world, getting him to eat the few bites of spinach I can cram down his throat would only be that much harder. As long as he was unaware of sugar, it was one less thing I had to say no to.

I finally broke my prohibition the other day during a super traumatic doctor visit (more about that later), so when Bear made homemade Snickerdoodles this weekend, I figured I could be a nice mom and at least feel okay that there was no corn syrup involved.

Atti’s a fan.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

A case of the crazies

November 9, 2009

My little miracle baby will be two years old in February. I kind of can’t handle it. I am so in love with this little kid, I want four more just like him. Which of course is kind of a problem.

The story is long and tortuous, so for all the readers who haven’t been here since the beginning, I’ll give you a nutshell version. I have endometriosis, Bear has male factor infertility, between the two of us we have a less than 5% chance of conceiving. Atti took us eight years, multiple surgeries, drugs, miscarriages, blah blah blah blah. The thought of opening that door again makes me physically sick, but the chance of reward is so. very. great. *

We’ve actually been trying for baby #2 since before Atticus even made it home from the hospital. With my condition, time is not my friend, and the chances of another pregnancy are much greater the closer you are to the last one. Of course things haven’t worked out that way and it might just be for the best, I kind of can’t even imagine how I would handle a newborn and Atticus at the same time. It would be like having twins except one was four times the size of the other one. It might make sense, but it still doesn’t do much to quell the panic I feel when I think about not getting to have another baby.

* Let me just say here for the benefit of any new readers. NOBODY SAY “JUST ADOPT”! I have many many friends who are foster parents and adoptive parents. There is no such thing as “just” adopting. How you get your family is a very personal thing and varies by a MILLION different variables. This is the way that we need to pursue right now. Thank you for your concern, and rant over.

I was kind of ignoring making any really proactive efforts, raising my baby, happy in my marriage, hoping and hoping and hoping that nature would take it’s course**, when finally my disease just wouldn’t let me live in denial any longer. The pain gets pretty darn intense. Like, can’t function, need to stay in bed because you have no strength in your legs but the pain is too much to stay still so you wander from room to room clinging to walls. Like, I was trying to describe the pain to Bear and he said it sounded like when he had a kidney stone. That kind of cuts through any attempts to pretend that things are just going to work out.

** HA! Yeah right!

I went to the doctor last month all geared up for a fight. Again, nutshell for new readers – I have a long unpleasant history with doctors who don’t take women’s pain issues seriously. Including being forced to see a psychiatrist who promptly told me to get a new doctor and have a nice life. So even though I have a folder full of medical records including pictures of my diseased organs, I haven’t really had reason to believe that I’m going to walk in and find someone who’s going to help me out. On my first visit I would have rated this new doctor about 75% good news, but since then I’d have to bump him up to 85% dream come true. Of course, I haven’t had to ask for pain pills yet, so that might make a difference.

After a little bit, but only a very little bit, of arm twisting, he put me on the medication that has proven the most effective in the past, plus he put me on a new medication that makes almost all the side effects go away. It’s been pretty awesome. The last time I did a course of this drug therapy I gained 40 pounds, was a total crank monster, and had night sweats and hot flashes that rivaled all my 50+ year old lady friends. This time, none of that.

Except on the first couple of days after the shot. I get one shot a month and for the few days after that I am just ridiculous. RIDICULOUS! Saturday night I made Bear put all the dinner preparations in the fridge and go to the store to get me chips and salsa and green olives. And then I spent all day yesterday crying. I’d sit there sobbing and saying, “I know this is totally unwarranted, I recognize I’m being irrational, but I can’t he-he-help it! :sob:” I cried because Bear wrote an email I really liked. I cried because my favorite podcast is having a live show. I cried because Atti cried.

I just keep reminding Bear that living with me in this state should make him extremely grateful I’m so even keel when left to my own devices. I never feel like I get enough praise when I get through a regular bout of PMS without him noticing. Maybe now he’ll see the way things could be and buy me presents of appreciation.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, infertility is evil, mama musings

2009 Year of Pleasures #43

November 3, 2009

Atti’s had my cough for the last week or so, but today he woke up with a big snotty nose, a warm forehead and then threw up his morning bottle all over me.

That part wasn’t exactly pleasurable, but having a sweet snuggly boy who just wants his momma? That’s not such a bad gig.

I’ll be spending today on the couch, holding this little guy while he watches as much PBS as I can stand. Luckily I just bought a couple of new books to keep me from losing brain cells to Barney.