mama musings

Milestones

November 2, 2009

A couple weeks ago I got rearended at a stoplight. A poor mom with her two kids in the car had just started driving when the light turned green instead of when the car in front of her actually started moving. Nobody was hurt, I was on my way home from an appointment so I didn’t miss out on anything, everyone was properly insured, and I got to feel like this wonderful benevolent person simply by staying calm and helpful. It was one of those rare moments in life when being nice is literally NO trouble, but you still get to feel all good about yourself anyway.

If anyone is in the market for new auto insurance, let me give my wholehearted recommendation to AAA. They took care of absolutely everything including making an appointment with a rental car and I didn’t pay a dime out of pocket.

Anyway, California law says that if a child’s car seat is in an accident of any kind, even a silly little fender bender, it has to be replaced and destroyed. This seems like one of those laws that made sense when it started, but I don’t really see how it makes sense now. It’s not like a seatbelt loses it’s effectiveness after you tug on it. But, once again, AAA was awesome and they cut us a check to pay for a brand new car seat. Which worked out perfectly because until then Atti was still using his first new baby car seat.

It was one of those things we kept meaning to get around to, buying a forward facing big boy seat, but there was always somewhere else we needed to put $100. Atti is such a mellow and curious kid, he was completely content to just look out the back window as the world went by. He didn’t even seem to mind crossing his legs when they started to reach the back seat. He’s still so scrawny that he fit the weight safety rating, so we just let it go and go and go.

I’ve read other moms talk about what a big deal it is to look in the mirror and see this big kid sitting where a baby used to be, so I thought I was prepared, but really, the transformation is astounding. My precious little miracle baby is growing up. I don’t know how I can stand it.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, The Good Life

Mama Bear in action

September 28, 2009

Who could discriminate against this face?

I know I shouldn’t blog this…there enough people I know in person who read my blog that this might come back to the source, which really wouldn’t be very productive, but I just can’t hold it in. I haven’t been able to do anything since it happened but pace around the house and say, “A BABY! THEY KICKED OUT A BABY!” So let me try to tell the story while being a little vague to protect the (hopefully) temporarily stupid.

Last week Atti and I were at a playgroup. It’s one of those situations where the parents bring the kids, leave them with an attendant, and then go in the other room to hang out with the other parents while the kids experiment with a little autonomy. Many parents leave altogether and go run to the bank or something until the time is up. We signed up for the multiple week session, and when I signed up I talked to the lady about Atti’s disability. She assured me it wouldn’t be a problem, but I was welcome to attend with him to make sure.

Since then I’ve been pretty disappointed, but it was really important to me to make it work. For a bunch of reasons, but the biggest one was that it was recommended by his therapists that he spend time with typically developing kids to get motivated by seeing how they were able to move their bodies. It’s been challenging for me to see the gap between what he can do and what they can do, but I know I’m doing Atti no favors by sheltering him. So I sacked up and did it. In all the times we’ve gone, I’ve never had one of the teachers ask me about his needs. He just plays near the other kids, sits there for the instruction period, but is otherwise pretty much ignored. I tried not to think much of it because he had me with him and wrangling 20 two year olds is not an easy feat. It’s easy to ignore the one that’s taken care of.

Last week one of the attendants I really like was there, and she shooed me out the door. She promised that she would grab me if he needed anything but told me that I deserved a break and he could totally handle some independent play. I was a little hesitant, but I thought again about my instinct to shelter him, so I let him go without me.

I’m not even kidding – not five minutes went by and one of the other attendants was bringing him back to me. Kids often get brought out for stinky diapers, tantrums, separation anxiety, so I figured he just didn’t handle being alone very well. Until I saw my favorite attendant and she told me she got in trouble by the director. The director came in, saw Atti without me, and just said, “He can’t be in here without a parent.” and made another attendant take him to me.

We finished the rest of the lesson, but the more I thought about that the more it stung. I’ve never even met the director. She’s never even asked what Atti was capable of, she just must have known that on his chart it said DISABLED. I read the rules thoroughly. Not only is it nowhere in the rules that disabled children need a caretaker, it specifically states that they will make accommodations for children with mobility issues. If she had bothered to ask I would have told her that the only help Atti needs is a special chair to sit up in. He is perfectly happy to play lying down while the other kids play sitting. It’s not like I’m asking for something that would change how they operate.

I just continued to fume until the time was up, and on my way out to the car I caught up with my favorite attendant. I wanted to hear more about what happened before I went off on a tear. I could barely even say hello before she was all, “What was that, right? I’ve already called her boss and told him all about it. I couldn’t believe she said that, I was so taken aback I couldn’t even stand up to her.” A little while after I got home I got a call from the director’s supervisor and he was apologizing all over himself. I was so relieved that I didn’t have to convince anyone that what happened was wrong. He promised me that this “would be addressed.”

So in reality, I didn’t even have to make a big stink to stand up for the rights of my child. The people working there took care of that for me, and that’s probably the only reason we’ll finish out our time there. But I just can’t shake this…shock, I guess. I mean, the director is like a cartoon villain, right? She kicked out a DISABLED BABY.

I guess it’s hard for me to come face to face with the fact that Atti is going to face bigotry in his life. He’s so perfect to me, it’s hard to accept that there are people in this world who are never going to see him as anything but disabled.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, baby news, mama musings

Personality vs. Disability

September 15, 2009

Atti in his little red walker. If it wasn’t rented I’d paint flames on the side.

Sunday’s are getting harder and harder around here. Atticus is now old enough to go into the children’s nursery and play with all the kids at church 18 months to 3 years old. Bear and I take turns staying in there with him because there are never enough people to go around, and with a roomful of wiggly bodies and wooden blocks, Atti requires full time attention.

The first few times we’ve taken him went fairly smoothly. He doesn’t exactly play with the other kids. He barely even seems to register that there are twenty other kids in the room. He’s just been busy scoping out the new environment and laying on his back while he entertains himself by staring at his hands moving in front of his face like he’s on an acid trip. Now that he’s a little more familiar, he’s starting to engage more and getting really pissed off to discover all the cool tricks the other kids can do that he can’t.

Yesterday he threw a screaming hissy fit until I held him up on his feet in a standing position. But since he can’t stand on his own, it meant I had to hold this 20 pound kid aloft for an hour.

When my arms finally gave out and I couldn’t hold him suspended any longer, he stretched out on his belly and threw a full body, back arching, screaming, head banging on the floor, tantrum. I just tried to not burst out in sobs as I caught his head before he smashed it in the carpet.

Interacting with typically developing kids is good for Atti. It’s good for him to get pissed off when he can’t do something he wants to do. It’s good for him to see these behaviors modeled so he’ll work towards them himself. But holy crap is it depressing for me. Just the ease with which these kids go from sitting to laying down, or the way they can manipulate a toy with both hands, the way they interact with each other and the leaders, it’s pretty hard to deny how much work is ahead of my guy.

When my turn was up and Bear took over baby duties, I had to run to the bathroom to have myself a little cry and wash up before I went to teach my teenage girls. I splashed some water on my face, touched up the runny mascara, and went off to class where I sat by my friend EmaLee who is the mom of the most adorable little red headed two year old. I told her how hard the last hour was for Atti and she said, “Oh my gosh, that was us during Sacrament meeting! Did you hear Erek screaming? Last week it was so bad I had to go into the bathroom to have a little cry!”

Atticus is now 19 months old, which would make him 16 months old adjusted age. Although we are rapidly approaching that 2 year birthday when they stop adjusting his age, hoping that any prematurity delay will have worked itself out by then. He has such a strong little personality, just as I expected from day one, and it’s hard to know what he can’t do vs. what he can but won’t do. He’s always been a reserved baby, stingy with his smiles, taking his time warming up to people but especially new surroundings. Maybe what looks like a delay next to another kid is just his little personality. Maybe instead of the tantrums being a result of frustration born out of his disability, it’s typical toddler frustrated at the world behavior.

I just wish I had any kind of an answer, about anything at all really. One of the other moms on the panel I did last month told me that a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy is like a diagnosis of bleeding. It could mean anything from a gaping wound to a papercut, and there’s no way of knowing which you’re looking at. I would really love to know what Atti’s ultimate abilities are going to be. Maybe then I could relax and just accept what he’ll be able to achieve. But knowing me, I’d just be even more impatient for him to get there.

Filed Under: baby news, mama musings

Another reason I love my husband

September 10, 2009

Even once we had Atticus, we never really got off the infertility roller coaster. In fact, we started trying for Baby #2 before Baby #1 even made it home from the hospital. Since Atti took eight years to conceive, we knew that time was not on our side. Oh how I laughed and laughed when the discharge nurse gave me a contraception lecture. Yeah, not really an issue, thanks though.

Over all those years I’ve done all the charting and graphs and measuring of mucus viscosity and waving burning sage over my womb, but right now the easiest thing for me to do is use one of those ridiculously expensive ovulation predictor kits. The kit cost me about $80 used off of ebay, and that’s at a discounted price to get over the mental ickiness of knowing someone else’s pee was inside a plastic wand that touched the inside of this contraption. But after eight years, you’ll deal with the ickiness and the cost just for a measure of convenience.

The predictor measures your hormone levels on a scale of 1 to 3, and on Monday it declared that this was the big night, complete with a little LCD picture of an empty womb with a little egg floating inside and a big fat flashing ‘3′. The big night does not come around every month, so this was a red letter day.

As luck would have it, Bear and I got in a **HUGE** fight on Monday. He’s a big muckety muck at work, work that is very important and has been steadily encroaching upon our family time for years now, I took umbrage to how it had been encroaching, blah blah blah, same fight couples around the world have been having since the first caveman wanted to go back out for another try at the mastodon while cavewoman whined about how she never gets to leave the cave anymore.

The problem with this is that we do not have one of those feisty marriages where people have a little fight and then enjoy the making up. We have a ridiculously sappy shmoopy woopy marriage. So when the blue moon shows up and we actually get cranky with each other, it takes us time to mope around and feel our feelings before we’re ready to come back for more ridiculous sap.

To make it through eight years of charts and graphs and doctors and the big fat ultrasound wand, you have to do all you can to protect your relationship from clinical insensitivity. It’s all too easy to wake up one morning and realize that you can’t remember when it happened but somewhere along the way your loving act of intimacy morphed into a medical procedure no more remarkable than a throat culture. It takes a careful balance to get the timing of optimal conception lined up with all the warm loving feelings that are supposed to be there. So on Monday, after the fight, when I discover that The Big Night was upon us, I called Bear and told him, “I don’t really know what to do. I’m a three.”

He didn’t have a ready response, being sensitive to my feelings and letting me make the call, so we dropped the subject and went on about our day. I brought it up a couple more times throughout the night. “What do you think Bear? I’m a three.” “I don’t really know what we should do, I’m a three.”

Finally he put his hand on my face, looked me in the eyes with all his earnest devotion and said, “I know I can’t get you back down to a zero tonight, but I’m hoping you can at least get down to a two.”

Wait, what? “What do you think I’m talking about?” “A three means you’re really mad, right? I wasn’t really familiar with the scale, but I figured it must be really bad if you assigned a number to it.”

Filed Under: infertility is evil, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff

2009 Year of Pleasures #35

September 8, 2009

Bear is such a good dad.

Filed Under: baby news, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

Separation Anxiety

September 3, 2009

I’m sitting here typing this in the house all by myself. It’s so quiet I’m having trouble being productive. I have had two back to back all day marathons of doctors appointments*, so Atticus spent last night up at Grandma’s and then ended up getting stuck there when my Sister in Law started showing signs of going into labor. Bear ran up to take baby duty over, Grandma and Grandpa divvied up daughter/grandbaby responsibilities, and the whole family is holding their breath waiting for this little girl to make her way into the world.

*more on that another day.

When Atti was born and in the hospital without me, the hardest part was the intense loneliness I felt. People often tried to comfort me by reminding me that I shouldn’t miss him too much since he wouldn’t have been here yet anyway, but that did me no good. If I had managed to stay pregnant longer he might not have been *here* but he was still with me. Being at home while he was at the hospital was just agony. There were times when I felt that separation so keenly it felt like a death.

Prior to my week away last month, the longest I’ve been away from him was a measly 16 hours. Once. An anniversary dinner and hotel stay and then right back to baby as soon as we woke up the next morning. Because of his disability we have 8 hours of nursing care allotted to us every month and I’ve never ever used it. Not because I’m some ridiculous martyr, but because those first few months of distance made such an impression on me that I can’t help but be greedy for him. I want to drink him. I feel a literal, physical pull on my heart when I’m away from him.

Atti has developed a few new behaviors as a result of our time apart. After talking to me on the phone every night, now he freaks out if the phone rings and I don’t let him talk on it. Which of course is just him listening to the other person while he licks the phone and breaths heavily. The receptionist at the dentist office didn’t seem to enjoy that too much.

He’s also gotten so much more motivated to be wherever I am. During the morning I usually set him in the middle of our main living room, on that red circle rug that is so ubiquitous in the photos I take of him, and let him roll around and work on crawling and play with his toys while I spend some time connecting with my online world. He’s developed into a really good independent player, so I usually had as much time as I wanted. Now I have twenty minute bursts while he inchworms his way from the carpet to my feet and slaps the base of my chair until I pick him up. After a few minutes of songs and snuggles I put him back down on the carpet and he starts the journey all over again. He’s getting to be pretty darn quick.

At therapy we’ve been making fantastic strides towards his walking skills. He spends a lot of time in a gate trainer, which is basically a high tech version of those walkers that people had to stop using in the 80’s after one too many babies took a tumble. He sits in a seat that supports his weight and then steps with his legs to make the contraption move on the wheels. He wasn’t doing much with the gate trainer prior to the trip, content to let his therapist move his legs for him. Now I’ll sit five feet in front of him and offer him kisses, and he marshals all the concentration available to him to make those feet move and get to his momma.

I wonder sometimes. If we get to have another kid, will I be so connected to them? Is this the magic of motherhood? Or did something happen in those first few days, standing there in my hospital gown, looking at him in his isolette, me fighting for life to get back to him, him fighting for life to get back to me. I remember standing there feeling this *intense* spiritual connection to him. Like, so intense it almost had mass, kind of connection. I felt like what we had been through together united us, physically, chemically.

I certainly hope I don’t have to go through such a gauntlet again, but today, it was totally worth it.

Here’s a little something to help all the sap go down a little easier.

Filed Under: baby news, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

End of summer doldrums

August 26, 2009

I came back from that conference so inspired in so many directions, but also buried under all the stuff that comes with being away from home for a week. Piles of laundry, a floor covered in cat hair, a baby with separation anxiety, a garden that is threatening to give up the ghost altogether, and I kind of wanted to implode with the tension of it all. I felt so overwhelmed with what had to be done, and what should probably be done, and what I wanted to get done, that I kind of went into a little bit of a funk.

Don’t we all go through those periods when we feel like our juggling is totally out of rhythm? When we feel like we’re doing everything halfway and not really getting anything done right and disappointing everyone in the process? A span where you just feel like you suck at life? Yeah, that’s hit me big time this week.

I went back to the doctor’s on Monday, and bawled my head off like a crazy person. Luckily I have a really great doctor so she listened to all my concerns and just came up with the next step. All it takes is one doctor calling you crazy, and it ruins you for life. Every time we’ve done a test and had it come back clear, I feel that old worry creeping up on me more and more and more. So far we’ve discovered that I have a heart murmur, but it appears to be a “functional murmur” which apparently means that I just get to live with it. We did a pulmonary function test and after all these years of different asthma medications, it turns out that I do not in fact have asthma. I’ll go on to see the lung doctor in a few weeks, but for right now it’s looking like whatever is wrong with me is going to stay that way. So I need to start a workout program that is pretty much on the level of physical therapy.

I spent yesterday thinking about everything I have on my plate, everything I do for Atti, for my family, for myself, thought about what I could let go of, and I wasn’t willing to give up anything. I can’t exactly slack off on his therapy, I’ve tried giving up crafting and it doesn’t work, and I’m finally writing after a lifetime of guilt about it. Plus I need to find a way to exercise every day. And maybe feed my family something that doesn’t come in a bag.

But instead of falling back into that trap of being overwhelmed and getting nowhere, I decided to follow the example of my doctor and just focus on the next step. How could I fit in as much as possible, TODAY. Without worrying about a whole new structure to the rest of my life or trying to fit in every good thing every single day, what can I do right now. And yesterday turned out to not only be a really really great day, a day I enjoyed but also a day where I felt like I was doing a much better job at life. And best of all I came up with some creative little multi-tasking solutions that really will change the structure to the rest of my life. I don’t think I could have entered problem-solving mode until I could just stop being scared by the size of the problems.

There is so much about parenthood that is overwhelming and stressful, but man, when you figure something out, it is the most powerful feeling in the world.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings

2009 Year of Pleasures #33

August 25, 2009

This picture blows the lid off of any pretense I may have cultivated that I actually maintain basic levels of personal hygiene, but I just couldn’t resist. Three day unwashed hair or not.

Atti is such a fun and happy little guy, he’s the world’s easiest kid to entertain. Boop his nose and he’ll laugh for days. We’re always inventing one goofy game or another that we forget about by the next day, but this game seems to have staying power.

I tilt my head way back like I’m going to sneeze, and then as I bring it forward I say “Loooooooooooooooove…” and then he brings his head forward to meet mine as I say “Bump!” and then we both roll around with the giggles.

“Love Bump!” “Love Bump!” All I have to do now is say the words and he’ll still collapse with laughter. Plus, I think this is a good trick to have in my pocket when he gets so big he doesn’t want to cover my face in slobbery kisses.

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

The big conference

August 20, 2009

I suppose after all that talk before hand I should probably talk a little bit about how it went, right?

Not to get too grandiose, but I really do think that last week was one of the most productive and inspiring weeks of my life.

My panels went really really great. Other than wishing there were more people in attendance, I couldn’t have asked for anything more. But what made it so great is how receptive people were to what I had to offer. All week I was surrounded by brilliance. PhD’s, internet celebrities, and incredible talent, and – maybe this sounds ridiculous – but it really thrilled me, Stay At Home Mom and Craft Designer, to be so included and respected. And heard.

When the circles you run in are essential your child, the people who teach your child, and the people inside the computer, I think it’s human nature to think of yourself as nothing special, with nothing very special to offer. This conference made me see that, first of all, we all see ourselves that way, and then also, the rest of the world is not as far away as I think it is.

Growing up, my parents were realists to the point of pessimism. They never really told me how they got that way, but I think somewhere along the way they had to have had some dreams crushed because every time one of their kids started getting carried away in their dreams they would remind us how hard the world was, how many people want to do [fill in the blank], and the only way to be happy and safe was to do something that would always be needed. A nurse, a dental assistant, and if I *had* to go to college then be a teacher. It must have been an endless source of frustration for them to have a passel of creative kids.

I started working as a Craft Designer by accident. I was too sick to work a regular full-time job and I was making stuff without even realizing it. Creating is a bodily function to me, just like circulation or breathing. It is so essential to me that for most of my life I didn’t even realize it was so essential. It was just there. You don’t notice you’re breathing until you stop. I think if I had been aware of it at all I probably would have heard my mom’s voice in my head and not pursued it.

That’s how writing has been for me. One of my secret most heartfelt desires was to write, but I was terrified I’d suck, which of course everyone does at the beginning, and I was convinced that since it was so competitive to get a book published, than it wasn’t worth all that effort anyway. This week there were publishers and editors there that were so supportive and interested in what I had to say, it just made me realize that that world is not as removed as I had always been told. I’m sure it is competitive, but not insurmountable, and I just have to get to work so that I can push past the part where I suck. I learned that I do have something to say and that there are people in the world who want to hear it.

So now I have one more thing to do in a day.

Deseret News
Salt Lake Tribune

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings

The Long Form

July 24, 2009

I don’t really know if it’s because I’m a mom now, or because I’m getting older and (hopefully) maturing, or just a new attempt at mindfulness inspired by this wonderful craft blogging community, but for the first time in my life I’m actually attempting to sync up with the rhythm of the world around me.

I’ve never been an outdoorswoman. I’ve never really been one to watch the seasons change and marvel at Mother Nature’s chaotic order. Or seek out that version of order in my own life. But now, now I’m trying to be aware of time. Aware of what I’m missing when I get caught up in my own head. Aware of the tender mercies and spots of beauty presented to me with every new morning.

It doesn’t help that I really don’t care for summer. I’m a total wimp about the heat, I’m a dark-haired red head with red head skin that does not appreciate the sun, and I’m afraid of deep water. Summer doesn’t have a ton to recommend it to someone like me. But I’m trying.

So we’ve been busting out the grill whenever we can bring ourselves to face the heat of the backyard, lounging on the outdoor couch, eating warm tomatoes from the vines, making homemade lemonade, and I’ve been trying to pay attention to the rhythm of these summer days and follow their example.

Summer is long slow languid days, and so that is what I’ve been working on. Long, slow, projects that I get to work on while reclining.

Hand binding some quilty projects – with the bulk of the fabric pushed as far off to the side as I can manage so that none of it actually touches me.

Knitting projects on a small scale – so none of the knit actually touches me. It is hot here, y’all.

And stitching stitching stitching until my eyes go as crossed as my stitches. I can’t put this down.

It makes for uneventful blog material when I go weeks without finishing any projects, but working on those long-term projects just seems to fit with the flow around here these days.

Filed Under: mama musings, Stuff I Make, The Good Life