Thanksgiving weekend November 28, 2010

For Thanksgiving, we were lucky enough not to have to travel. A’s parents don’t get into Thanksgiving so we always spend it with my parents. Gatitio and his cousins ran wild through my parents’ house and Ella joined in where she could. It is so nice to see Gatito getting along so well with his cousins, ages 7 and 10. Something turned around for them in the last year– I guess it was just Gatito getting older. I feel a little sorry for Ella, so much younger and the only girl, wondering if she’ll ever be close with them. She was trying to join in, that’s for sure, and I have a feeling she’ll be able to run before they’ll be sick of running.

I’m not ashamed to admit that we did our part for the economy on Black Friday. I’ve even already wrapped everything in preparation for Chanukah and Christmas, though a few more things are trickling in. Can’t help it. It’s fun to give presents when you know the receivers will like them.

Then the rest of the weekend was kid-oriented stuff at the nature center, children’s museum, etc. Both are so incredibly expensive to visit for a single time, so I ended up  annual memberships. That way, we aren’t reluctant to stop by for half an hour on a weekend, instead of feeling like we need to stay a long time to make it worth it. I do not mind supporting these institutions, both of which are strapped for cash, but I am so irritated that in both cases, I had to pay an extra 30% for a nanny card. If I were not working, I would take the kids during the week. If my nanny is acting as my agent, taking the kids on my behalf, why should I pay extra? It is like a tax on working parents. The nature center said this is to account for every person who comes in (huh?) but they charge the same whether you have one child or ten, so that does not make sense to me. Harumph.

Pineapple Baby is plugging along. “Pineapple Baby” is #3 in a Google search and comes up on page 6 in a search for “infant car seat blankets,” which is not great but is a lot better than being nowhere at all, which is where I was in that search last week! Thanks to all of you guys who have helped promote on Twitter and Facebook. And it’s not too late to, you know, blog about it or anything, should you feel so inclined. I didn’t write a novel or a memoir like some in our community have done, but I’ve been working awfully hard on this project. Running my own business has been one of the most exhilarating and terrifying experiences of my life (pregnancy excepted, obvs) and I would be grateful for the support!

I’m also offering my readers free shipping in the U.S. on all Pineapple Baby infant car seat blankets through the end of the year. Just choose U.S. postal service first class mail and use promotion code “galloping” (with no quotes).

Doctor, doctor November 19, 2010

The insanity level in my life has reached new heights these days.

I took a half day off from work yesterday to take the kids for their well visits. Gatito’s 5 year aligned neatly enough with Ella’s 15 month checkup. It was slightly crazy to do them both at the same time and I didn’t get to write down height and weight, which I like to do. Gatito is something like 46 inches and 45 pounds. I just remember it was still 97th+ for height and 70-something for weight. For Ella, I remember nothing except that she is the same height and weight as she was three months ago. The height is due purely to lack of cooperation in the measurement– I know her pants are getting shorter. And the weight, I guess, is due to the fact that she started walking. Doctor was not concerned on either account.

The ped has this little routine where he hands babies various things to see what they do with them, but every time he offered her something, she very pleasantly said, “No!” (I’d like to record her saying it because it is the cutest darn “no” you ever did hear!) Finally, the doctor said, “Wow! She’s very advanced. She’s as uncooperative as a two year old!” I was so proud.

At one point, he let Gatito use the stethoscope to listen to Ella’s chest. Being a doctor is not something I dream of for my child (all that school, all that debt, plus the increasing difficulty of making a living at it), but he looked so natural with it.
Later I told him, “You know, someday instead of being a boss of a factory, you might want to be a doctor.”
“No,” he responded. “It’s too much work. And when you’re a new doctor, someone else has to watch you do your job to make sure you don’t mess up.”
I don’t know how he knows that, but I was amused.

Both kids got flu shots. We got home around 5:00 and by the time I was done changing the baby’s diaper, Gatito was asleep. And so he remained until 9:00 p.m. I am not going to deny that it was kind of a peaceful evening, particularly as I had to bake about a thousand cookies for the school bake sale. Ella, meanwhile, toddled around with no apparent ill effects until bedtime at 7:00. At 10:30, just as we were easing Gatito back to bed, Ella woke up. Wheezing. It sounded like she had asthma.

Gatito kept saying, alarmed, “I didn’t hear anything when I listened to her today!”
(I think he was trying to say that perhaps the problem was that she was empty?)

After dithering for a few minutes, I realized urgent care closed at 11:00 so off we went. Turned out to be croup, totally unrelated to the flu shot. The urgent care ped, trained as an ER doctor, administered an intramuscular shot of steroids, and 40 minutes later, she was fine. (I have to say that beats the heck out of steroids administered via nebulizer, which takes several days to take effect.)

Crazy, crazy day!

Introducing Pineapple Baby November 11, 2010

When Ella was born last year, I began the quest I’d never satisfactorily fulfilled with Gatito. I was looking for a safe way to take her out in the cold of a New England winter. I knew that puffy coats and snow suits could compress in an accident, leaving the straps of the car seat too lose and unsafe. I saw practically everyone using a very cozy looking infant car seat blanket that threaded through the straps of the car seat and went behind the baby, but everything I read said that 1, the baby could overheat and 2, the fabric could bunch up and again interfere with the fit of the car seat straps. And friends told me it was a pain to install and uninstall.

I became, well, perhaps just the teensiest bit obsessed with finding exactly what I wanted. I saw infant car seat coverings that used elastic to attach around the top of the car seat with a hole for the face, but these acted more like wind blockers than warmth providers, and some of the reviews said that when the baby turned its head, its face would disappear underneath the blanket.

Sure, I could have (and did) just tuck a couple of blankets around her, but they were messy and as she grew, she could kick those off. I just wanted an infant car seat blanket that attached to the seat but went only on top of, not behind the baby. Finally, unable to find what I wanted, I commissioned someone to make one for me to my specifications. I went through a few modifications to get it perfect and then my sister suggested I sell them.

It’s been a wild ride over the past year, but I am proud to announce the  grand opening of Pineapple Baby infant car seat blankets. If you have a baby in your life or are looking for a great gift, I hope you will check it out.

And I would be incredibly grateful if you could help me spread the word to your real life friends, your bloggy friends, and your social networks. Thanks, once again, for your amazing support over the past six years. What would I do without you guys?

Homework October 14, 2010

So, I had the surgery and it seems to have gone well. I can stand, now, so that’s something. My leg is still kind of gimpy, but functions. Apparently the swelling of something-or-other is pressing on the nerve that was being pressed on by the disc and when that goes down, I will really get my leg back. In the meantime, I’m woozy and stiff and sore, a little worse off than yesterday, but a million times better than I was before. I attempted to work from home today, but ended up taking a couple of monster naps interspersed with the prescribed walks around the block instead.

***

I wanted to talk to you about homework. In kindergarten. Personally, I am anti. But Gatito’s teachers assign it every weeknight. The sheet they sent home on the first day indicated that parents should be doing the homework with the kids and I am really anti that. I already had 19 years of school and accompanying homework, thankyouverymuch. I believe that kids should do most homework by themselves and just ask for help if they need it. Even kids that I don’t think should be getting homework yet. It should be about independence. And if the homework is too hard for them to do on their own, it’s too hard.

We get home every night around 5:45, and we have about an hour before the bath time routine starts (at least for Ella) to cook and eat dinner, practice viola, play, and now, do homework. The first few weeks, the assignments were simple, mostly writing letters and numbers, and he was finished in five minutes. A few times he did it before we got home. Addition followed, then pattern finishing. They started sending home readers filled with three letter words about dogs named Nip who were hit by vans. (Seriously.) Then they discovered that my child is a secret reader and started sending home more advanced books, but we were still coming in under ten minutes.

Last night, he took out two sheets of homework and I immediately knew we were in trouble. I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help asking him whether everyone gets the same homework. He said they did, and I know it’s for the best that he thinks that. The first sheet had about 30 pictures and underneath each, the first letter of the word they represented. He was supposed to fill in the last two letters. So he had to recognize the picture, figure out how to spell it, then write it. Times thirty. It was an appropriate challenge for him in terms of level, but there was just so much, I didn’t blame him for being overwhelmed. And there was another sheet! This one had several paragraphs of challenging reading followed by five or six reading comprehension questions. So again, first the challenge of reading, then figuring out the answers, then writing them down. It was not a pretty night in the GC household and it took 45 minutes to get through it.

My friend, another mom in the class, talked to the teachers about it today. Apparently her son and mine were the only ones to get the giant fill-in-the-blank worksheet and Gatito was the only very special snowflake to get the reading comprehension on top of it.  The teachers said if we feel it’s too much in the future, we can have them do only half or keep it for two days, so that is a big relief. The last thing anyone needs is for homework to be a stressful thing in kindergarten.

Then today’s homework came home and specified that kids should do it with parents. Grrrr. One of the questions was to name three kinds of apples you can eat in the Fall. So there I am spelling out M-A-C-I-N-T-O-S-H, etc., for Gatito to write down. HUH? Also, and this amuses me, they sent a brand new, freshly sharpened pencil in his homework folder. Somehow we could never find one and he was kind of making a mess with a pen (especially last night), but I am trying to picture exactly what the teacher was thinking about our parenting/organizational skills when she slipped that in!

Homework aside, Gatito is having a great year. He is totally comfortable, and why not? Eleven kids with two teachers in the same environment as last year. And he is clearly learning so much. (The one thing I like about his homework is that I get to see what he’s doing.) Forget grouping by ability– they do reading one on one. They are kind and nurturing and that school is worth every single penny. I wish he could stay there forever. I wonder how a child like mine, who hides his abilities until he is caught red-handed, is going to fair in a 22-kid public school classroom next year, even in the fancy school district to which I hope to move. In a class of eleven, it took two weeks for his teacher to figure him out and start stepping up the challenge. (I stayed out of it and let things take their course.) How long will it take with double the kids and half the teachers, and will they even care?

***

I’ll end with a funny story:

Gatito was in the bath when he asked, “Mom, do you know what Africa is?”
“A continent?” I ventured.
“The video at school said Africa is all of the above!” he told me.

Oh, how I did laugh. And then fail miserably at explaining what it meant. Heh.

I’m okay! October 14, 2010

Wheelchaired in to the hospital at 5:30am on Tuesday and walked out on my own two feet at 5:30 pm. Thanks for all the support. Back shortly.

Oh hello there October 10, 2010

Wow, it’s gotten really hard to keep this space up. Is anybody there? How the heck are you?

I am… well, I am having spinal surgery on Tuesday.

It’s not really as dramatic as it sounds. I’ve been having back problems of varying degrees all year, from minor to can’t-get-out-of-bed, and even some pain free days or weeks interspersed. Then, two weeks ago, a day after my chiropractor miraculously cured me after I could barely get out of bed one Sunday morning, my right leg was sore.

It felt like I strained a muscle in my butt and calf. Sciatica, apparently, but four days later, this weird numbness set in and walking was agony. Yet walking was part of the prescription for curing sciatica. Sitting was fine, though, and that level of agony didn’t seem right. I was starting to get scared when my leg started weakening.

I spent the weekend writhing in pain, moaning. Last Tuesday, I made my way to a neurosurgeon. He happens to be a conservative one who does not rush to surgery. But he was concerned about the rapid downward trajectory of my symptoms and particularly concerned about the “foot drop,” the lack of strength in my leg. He guessed a piece of my disc had broken off and was pressing on a nerve. If it was a large piece, he wouldn’t hesitate to recommend surgery. Waiting and seeing was no good– my best chance of a full recovery was to do it within a month.

An MRI the following day revealed that it is, indeed, a large piece. Surgery is scheduled for Tuesday. I’ve done almost no research and I haven’t sought a second opinion. I’m not looking for someone to tell me surgery is not necessary. Not when I sometimes have to crawl to reach the bathroom in the middle of the night because my leg doesn’t work. He’s one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and has also operated on my mom. He says he’s done this procedure 4,000 times and that recovery is quick: I may even be able to come home that same day, and many patients are walking a mile the next week. I just hope he doesn’t slip.

Keep me in your thoughts early Tuesday morning, would you please? I promise I’ll come back right away and let you know how it went. I might get to Twitter first, though, so you can always look for me there (or in the sidebar on this page).

I’ll be back.

Well visit August 31, 2010

“Any concerns?” the nurse asked when we arrived.

“None,” I answered confidently.

“What does she eat?”

“Blueberries and bread,” I answered, confidence wobbling a bit.

“That’s it?”

“Well she puts almost anything in her mouth and chews it up, but she spits it back out… I guess I should’ve given that as a concern.”

When she left, I called the nanny. I can’t believe I hadn’t asked recently, but I guess she seems so robust and healthy and there’s so little time in the morning and evening hand-offs and I’m more focused on getting a picture of their days.

Turns out that, while she doesn’t eat a huge quantity, she eats– and swallows– everything with the nanny. Meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. The only thing she *doesn’t* eat? Blueberries!

When the doctor came in I said, “I’d like to revise my answer, please!”

Kids are so weird. G was similar– while he had a varied diet with us, the quantity was tiny, and meanwhile he would eat tons with his nannies. I guess it’s a good thing I work– at least she gets a balanced diet 5 days/week!

***

I don’t know why I feel pride that my kids top the chart for height. It’s not like I can influence that. And It’s not like it’s any great advantage to be abnormally tall as an adult. And yet, weirdly, I am. At 12 months, Ella is 31.5″ long (99th percentile), 22lbs (75th), and has the teeth and fine motor skills of an 18 month old.

And she’s a definite righty. The doctor gave her the little plastic thing to stick on the ear light. She took it with her right hand and plopped it right on. Then he gave it to her left hand and she fumbled and fumbled until she gave up and passes it over to her right hand to finish the job. Interesting, because I couldn’t tell whether Gatito was lefty or righty till he was over 3.

Mah baby is ONE! August 24, 2010

We took last week off from work and spent a few days in New Hampshire, where A’s family has a cabin. We have always noticed that Gatito takes great developmental leaps on vacations, and the same proved true for Ella. Somehow or other, she started that week as a baby and ended it as a toddler. A toddler who doesn’t toddle yet, but still.

She’s been saying words since she was seven months old, and she continues to slowly grow her vocabulary. Cat is the most frequent word. And she says agua water agua water, which is awfully cute. She hits her head and says uh oh. She signs, too: milk, wash hands, bicycle, please, believe it or not, and the cutest possible sign is baby. There are many distinct signs whose meanings I do not understand, like when she crosses her arms and wiggles the fingers on one hand. What baby? What exactly are you trying to say?

She’s a dental genius, from what I’ve been told, sporting 12 teeth (4 of which are molars– she’s skipped over the eye teeth for now). She’s incredibly active, always wiggling and very difficult to hold. She’s gotten very good at crawling and has lost all inspiration to walk, as far as I can tell. I figure she is waiting for a business trip I’ll be taking in October. She’ll be almost 14 months then, which would still be early by her brother’s standards!

She sleeps like a clam: legs out in front of her, folded at the waist, her head on Watermelon the monkey (named by her brother– there’s a bunny named Cantaloupe, too, but she doesn’t much care for her). Can you imagine not just being able to touch your toes with your legs out in front, not just being able to stretch so far forward that you can put your stomach on the floor, but having that actually be the most comfortable position in which to sleep?

She is absolutely gorgeous. Her hair is still thin but is starting to come in and it positively shines in the sun, as though it is spun from gold. Her eyes are a deep and sparkly blue. She still has her big cheeks, but not as big as they used to be. She is long and lean– she was in the 99th percentile for height at her 9 month appointment, and I expect to hear the same at her 12 month later this week.

She has the absolute sweetest temperament. She smiles often– a brilliant smile that cannot help but engage friends and strangers around her. She’s getting a little shy now, and she might lay her head on my shoulder, but she’ll usually still manage a little smile to win people over. She has a way of looking at people, too, that seems to get their attention. She’s really looking, you know? And she has this way of sticking out her lower lip, particularly when she’s hanging from A’s arms (which is the best way to describe how he carries her, with one arm, facing out), combined with smiling eyes, that gives her a perpetual air of amusement. She has a terrific sense of humor, but the no one can make her laugh like Gatito. God, when he gets her going my entire body fills up with the joy of it.

Happy birthday to the best baby in the world. May you always be as sweet and funny and happy as you are now.

December 13, 2008

August 2010

Pee Lot Ease August 19, 2010

Pilates is the only exercise I’ve ever really liked, except maybe spinning, but I haven’t done it since maternity leave. It was a combination of the time– was a lot easier to leave A at home at night to put one kid to bed than two– and the money. It’s just expensive– even the cheapest mat classes.

But I have what my chiropractor calls an unstable back, and since I fell last December (remember how I slipped on the ice at work and broke my nose?) it’s been hurting on and off. So… back to pilates I will be going. I try to tell myself that I will be using the money I am saving by canceling cable (yeah, finally!) or switching Gatito to a private viola teacher (rather than through music school– long story), but the truth is there are a lot of other uses for that money. Like we’ve just been advised to up our home and life insurance coverage.

But it seems important to not be in pain so much of the time, so let’s just hope it helps!

That darn cat August 18, 2010

So the cat is kind of ruining our lives.

He wakes us– mainly A– up every night, several times. He wants food, but he wants to be escorted to his food in the kitchen. We used to solve this problem with a bowl of dry food in the bedroom, but after his last life-threatening bout of constipation, he can no longer have dry food at all. If we lock him out of our room, he bangs on the door and howls. If we lock him in the basement, he somehow escapes. I have no idea how. It used to take him awhile, but now it’s nearly immediate.

He has always misbehaved. He has had litter box issues forever, for instance. We are the people that have paid a pet behavioral specialist for advice, over the years. Since his brother (aka the good cat) died last Fall, things have gotten more complicated. He pees on beds, so we have to keep the doors to the bedrooms shut all the time. He’s also gotten increasingly aggressive. He and Gatito have never gotten along. Since birth, Gatito was not interested in him and the cat had a more active dislike. They had a few run-ins– just hissing– over the years. But the annoying thing is that the cat doesn’t avoid these situations– in fact, he places himself right in the middle of them. I’ve thought about getting another cat to keep him company, but curing our crazy cat seems like a lot of responsibility to put on any potential new cat.

We love him, though, and his saving grace is his sweetness with Baby Ella, who loves him. Cat is, by far, her most reliable word. Under extremely careful supervision, I let her pet him, even letting her be not so gentle in the way an almost one-year-old can be, just to see what he will do, and every time, he patiently tolerates or walks away. Sometimes he even rubs up against her. (Meanwhile, if Gatito reaches out to pet him gently, he hisses.) You can usually find the cat hanging out on a bench in Ella’s room. Rightly or wrongly, we trust him to take naps in there with her and he sometimes stays when we put her down at night, meowing to come out (and begin harassing us) an hour or two later.

It’s kinda too bad, because if he were a danger to her, we’d have an excuse to do something. It is frequently tempting to do something, but we do still love him and feel we’ve made a lifelong commitment to him, so we’re stuck with him.

My mother is a big advocate, lately, of doing something about that cat. Every freakin’ time she comes over, I hear this: “The cat was being so friendly, so I was petting him, and then suddenly he hissed at me.” I ask why oh why she was petting him, but that never leads anyplace good. Given their relationship lately, I decided to ask our next door neighbor to feed the cat on our trip. She’s not really an animal person, but I figured that was good because she wouldn’t try to pet the cat. And we’ve been taking in her mail for the past seven years. So we’re at dinner when we get the call from the alarm company: somebody claiming to be my mother set the alarm off and didn’t know the password and the police are on their way. Why oh why did she feel the need to check up and make sure my neighbor was feeding the cat she doesn’t even like?! Without telling/asking me! I reached her at my house, where she reported that the cat was near her purse and she was afraid to approach him to pick it up and leave– after the police arrived, of course. Aggghhhh!

The thing I’m worried about at the moment is when we put our house back on the market in September. He was basically fine the whole time it was on in the Spring, but I did hear reports of him hissing at people from afar. Then, right before we took it off, a realtor decided to pet him. All was going well until she decided to pick him up, at which point he hissed and scratched her (but apparently did not break the skin). This same realtor came back the following week. I’m sure he recognized her, because I received a call that her clients liked our house, but that the cat would not let them go upstairs. He stood on the steps and hissed. So that was awesome. I am kind of praying that, if we put up a sign advising people not to pet or pick up the crazy cat, that they will be able to control themselves and the cat will be able to control himself because if not, I really don’t know what to do. I looked into boarding him at a comfortable place, but the rates start at $23/day, which could get out of hand pretty quickly.

Anyone want to foster a crazy cat??