Things I could dress up for, but don’t

Saturday was our fifth wedding anniversary. We had a babysitter lined up and had possible dinner, movie, and toddler toy shopping plans, but decided to cancel the sitter and have Baby join us at a family-style Italian place that specializes in serving foods you can dip into garlic butter, preceded by the same toy shopping agenda. Baby so loves to eat, and eat out, and we do enjoy her company, that it didn’t feel like we were missing out. It was quite nice.

Today, though, when Baby and I were playing dress-up, she with my scarves and shoes and me with my wardrobe of unworn Nice Clothes, I was surprised and delighted to discover that I can now fit back into a lot of my clothes from high school, despite still being almost 20 pounds heavier. I was able to get into three prom dresses (apparently I went to several proms, of which I have little recollection), an elaborate burnt velvet number I bought on the street in San Francisco, the dress I wore to my senior year piano recital, an astonishing number of beautiful suits, and several other fun and dressy things. Now that I know I can wear them, some things even flatteringly enough I could actually leave the house in them, it’s a little sad to think that, nevertheless, I won’t. What do I do that requires dressing up? It’s enough to make one consider a fancy corporate job in New York, or divorce and dating, or running for political office, or taking up flamenco, or even attending worship services just to get some use out of these very lovely garments.

Hometown visit

We (meaning me + my progeny) just took a little trip to my hometown to visit with my mother and grandparents. While there we dropped in on various people, 75% of whom were not home for our drop-in visit; we had fun with the other 25%, me doing impromptu slogan translating for their upcoming missions trips to Honduras, Baby investigating their stacks of magazines.

It’s funny; when we talk about social customs in the U.S. in my ESL classes, I always stress to my Hispanic immigrant students that Americans don’t like drop-in visits, but then I myself force people into panics about the states of their houses with no compunctions at all. Mostly I just do this when I am back home and know where everybody lives (my old piano and Spanish teachers, my childhood friend with two little kids, my grandparents’ neighbors, my high school best friend’s parents; that variegated class of people) but I don’t know their phone numbers and even if I did it would be next to impossible for me to coordinate a visit beforehand what with my grandparents’, mother’s, and child’s various schedules. So we pop in.

My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s is mostly stable. She knows who most everyone is and is able to fake very well knowing where she is and what she is doing. She clings to my grandfather; this morning Baby and I were supposed to “sit with” (i.e. babysit) her while my mother and grandfather attended to some business, but she much rathered (I know that “rather” is not a verb, but apparently this is how I would speak this phrase, and in talking about my grandparents I tend to get very Southern, and I think using “rather” in a past-tense verb form like this must be a Southern thing, so I am keeping it for ambiance) go with him than stay with us. But she and Baby equally enjoy a rousing game of peekaboo and had a nice enough visit; Baby impressed my grandparents, as always, with her wide and sustained interest in food. I was reading an article that mentioned that the brain of someone with advanced Alzheimer’s in many respects resembles that of a one-year-old in terms of the lack of transition of memories into the long-term. My grandmother’s social and verbal skills are rather more advanced, however.

Upon our arrival, my grandparents were so excited to get back into the house to visit with us that they apparently knocked each other over in the doorway. My grandfather, who is on blood thinners, broke open a wound on his forehead that he’d gotten weeks earlier in the removal of a basal cell carcinoma. The day before he’d gotten his pacemaker’s battery replaced. My mother is exhausted taking them to all of their various doctors’, lawyers’, business partners’, and so forth appointments, keeping them fed and dressed and medicated, all with no help as they won’t accept any–even (probably especially) from me. And soon she will return to full-time work. I just can’t see how she can do it all. At this rate she will overwork herself and die before my grandparents, and then where will the family be?

Phobias

A few weeks ago Baby started developing various phobias. They have mounted rapidly. I believe they now are:

–Dogs as seen through windows. Dogs in person are fine. This phobia extends to seeing our own dogs through the kitchen door.
–The sound of plane engines (really looking forward to that trip to Europe next week!)
–Mowers and blowers.
–Hair dryers.
–Our neighbor’s A/C unit (you may be sensing a sound theme)
–Vacuum cleaners, steam cleaners, things that look or sound like vacuum cleaners
–Pieces of dirt on the floor that might be bugs. Actual bugs are no biggie.
–Pieces of car or dog fur on the furniture, particularly if they stick to her sticky little hands and she can’t shake them off and she tries to wipe the fur off on her face and it gets stuck there and then she has fur on her hands AND face (look, everybody is shedding right now, and the fur is hard to keep up with).
–Water on the floor. Specifically, water that she just spilled on the floor. Or pee pee that she just peed on the floor.
–Thunder, though she’s mostly over that now. Or maybe we just haven’t had thunder in so long it seems like she’s over it but this phobia is just waiting to rear its head in my parents-in-law’s strange house.

These phobias are very dramatically felt and can crop up frequently. I don’t always have the most sympathy for her intense fear of little bits of dead leaves the dogs dragged in from the yard, though I try not to show it. Hopefully she’ll grow out of them as quickly as she grew into them.

Insouciance

A preview?

Oh, but she’s still a little girl:

Jeans

I realized several other things I need to accomplish before going to Sweden (e.g. get a haircut, select books to bring, get wedding ring fixed [ran out of time for this], mail shit) and another was to buy jeans. In the winter here if I wear pants it’s corduroys mostly, and in the summer it’s skirts, dresses, or my one pair of shorts (that I bought a month ago). But the summer in Sweden is more pants weather, and I wanted something casual, and had nothing. My khakis are ruined in several ways. My jeans are all too big. Poor me. I had to go jeans shopping.

Besides the obvious fit requests people make, I needed pants that don’t stretch too much in the waist. I can’t figure out why jeans usually seem to fit fine but then migrate downward all the time. I don’t want to have to wear a belt because that makes me feel like I should tuck in my shirt and tucking in, well, no. I have to pee way too often for that. Thus I was delighted to find a pair that was the right length, a decent color, fit fine on my bottom and did not accentuate my c-sectioned tummy, and had a non-stretch waist that keeps the pants in the correct location. What’s more they were 70% off! 12 dollars!!! Unfortunately, I have also realized since wearing them today that they are probably what everybody is always deriding as “mom jeans” though I’m not too sure. I think these are what I got:

I never wore jeans growing up. I am no jeans sophisticate. I got my first pair my sophomore year of college and have worn them irregularly since. What about you?

Speech evaluation (or: as if I didn’t have enough going on)

Baby was recently evaluated for a speech delay and as a result was referred for further, more in-depth evaluation and possibly services to help her speech along. Despite this, Baby does not actually have a speech delay and I don’t think she is at risk for one. So what’s the deal?

You may recall that Baby is growing up bilingual. My husband has spoken his native language of Swedish almost exclusively to her since she turned 18 months old four months ago today. She had some difficulties when Husband abruptly started with the Swedish (at my vociferous behest), feeling uncertain in a world where people can suddenly become incomprehensible. But now she understands everything said to her in either language, and has said one or two things in Swedish, and chatters on in an English-jibberjabber hybrid all day long.

Baby started speaking at nine months and at this point has said perhaps 150 or more words in context, most of them nouns. In daily rotation I’m sure she says around 50 and has, a handful of times, put two words together (“Mama’s book”, “yummy snack”), and on two occasions, three (“my stroller no” when some other kid was playing with her stroller, and “woof woof daddo wah wah” meaning Daddy gave the doggies some water.) She has a few verbs, mostly commands (sit, come, open) and a few adjectives (yummy, hot, wet). Baby knows several letters on sight and can sort of identify if there are two of something. Frequently she says things that strike us as astoundingly insightful, as when she described a bee as “bug airplane” meaning, I believe, “that bug is flying.” We think she is doing great with her speech. But mostly her speech is composed of nouns commenting on her needs and the world around her (snack, book, spoon, etc.)

So why the speech evaluation and the referral to services? Well, as I mentioned we have the bilingual thing going on, and we are soon to go for a rather long trip in toddler-time to Sweden, so I wanted some advice on how to maximize her learning of Swedish (and English for that matter). Though I do have a graduate degree in linguistics, the focus was not on the bilingual education of small children, so while I know some research findings (e.g. it’s best for a child to associate one language with each parent), I had some questions.

So last week I contacted an organization that mainly focuses on evaluating children with developmental delays, but also has a bilingual specialist you can talk to for free. Before I could speak with her, however, they did a routine screening on Baby. They asked questions about her problem-solving ability (“If she can’t reach something on a counter, will she try to find a way to get to it?”) her social skills, gross and fine motor skills (“Can she feed herself with a spoon?), and of course, her communication. I assumed they would be completely impressed, as I am, with her speaking, but, well, not so much. They suggested a home visit for further evaluation, and yesterday the bilingual specialist and another evaluator came and asked me more questions. “Does she use-ing verbs?” “Will she repeat two-word phrases if you ask her to?” Well, no.

Of course, it turns out they were evaluating her against the 24-month rubric, as, once the Babies Can’t Wait people get around to evaluating her, she would be that age then. And bilingual children do typically lag behind, in the early years, in speech production, while they try to sort everything out. And Baby scored exactly on the cut-off for being delayed on the 24-month rubric. So doesn’t this mean, ahem, that she’s actually doing remarkably well? Hm? That wasn’t explained to my satisfaction.

I did get some good information about how to capitalize on going to Sweden (encourage everyone to speak only to Swedish with her, and if they speak English, to direct it only to me). We are also mixing the languages too much, apparently: my husband using familiar English words in Swedish sentences sometimes (e.g. “Var är din potty?”) and me doing my own wildly-inaccurate and fancifully-accented Swedish renditions composed partly of sentences memorized from Baby’s board books in Swedish (my pride requires me to note that this approach did convince one person with a Swedish-speaking mother to mistake me for a Swede at the park the other day!). Apparently I am also doing it “wrong” even when I speak just English to Baby: my sentences are too complex (“Roll the ball to Mommy!” instead of “Roll ball!”) and we should ask Baby to tell us verbally what things are called (body parts, pictures in books, things in a room) instead of asking her to point to them. Okay, I can take these tips. (I refuse to do some of the others, like not responding to her needs if she doesn’t verbalize them. What, do they want her to become frustrated? She’s just a baby!)

Now I wish I’d never made the call in the first place, or once having called, allowed them to do the home visit, but I guess it really doesn’t hurt anything for Baby to do fun activities with nice people (for free) to help her speech develop, even if these people do incorrectly believe my child to be less than amazingly outstanding in every way. And perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised they found a “delay”: as my friend Claudia’s husband said about their own children’s speech evaluation results, when you go into a shoe store, you should expect to be sold shoes.

Things that have to happen before we go to Sweden for our vacation

Yesterday I got an email from my father-in-law asking me if there’s anything he can do to prepare for our trip there, as we leave in 19 days. That means today makes only 18 days left before we go. Two weeks and a half, people! How did I not realize that? I am freaking out! I have so much to do! For example:

1) Solve the riddle of Baby’s possible food and/or environmental allergies and/or sensitivities
2) Make arrangements for the crazy-expensive pet sitter who will come twice a day to keep everyone fed and watered and let the dogs in and out and do the litter box
3) Get out the clothes from the fall for Baby so she won’t be too cold like she was last year. Oddly, summer in Sweden isn’t the same temperature as summer in Georgia
4) Purchase and/or gather and then wrap gifts for Swedish relatives, including but not limited to: father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, other sister-in-law, brother-in-law, other brother-in-law, Baby’s multitude of cousins and second cousins, my sister-in-law’s parents, my sister-in-law’s cousin’s children, my sister-in-law’s friends (Why have I gotten myself into the tradition of getting presents for my not-blood-related-to-my-husband sister-in-law’s family and friends? Why, I ask you?)
5) Find a way to pack all of these gifts, plus our own clothes and equipment, into just two suitcases as Baby does not have her own seat and thus cannot check a bag
6) Try to re-learn the stupid airline rules about liquids
7) Get Baby off the bottle and used to not drinking mostly formula so I don’t have to bring those
8) Select and/or purchase entertainment items for Baby on the plane and find a way to pack them efficiently
9) Freak out about how much it will suck to fly with a toddler, especially one who doesn’t have her own seat (I curse my cheapskateness!) and has a phobia of the sounds of airplanes. I also need to fret about sleep in Sweden with its nearly 24-hour sunlight, sharing a room with Baby, and that goddamn fold-out couch we’ll have to sleep in that folds up with you in it if you shift incorrectly in your sleep
10) Give up being a vegetarian temporarily (I’ve been a vegetarian in Sweden before and it wasn’t pretty, so I am trying to ease back into meat in advance so I won’t make disgusted faces at people’s plates while we are there. That’s just not friendly.)
11) Complete ~80 of work in my free time in order to meet a deadline for an event that will occur towards the end of my trip to Sweden (as I sure as hell am not doing any work while there)

That’s not too much, right? I can do that, right? No problem?

Division of labor

Now that I’m working more than thirty hours a week at two jobs and use no outside childcare, I am beginning to get a little annoyed that I’m the one who does all the laundry, dishes, cleaning, pet care, most of the yard work and the bulk of the childcare. The other night, when I was working (which I do seven days a week for three to eight hours a day largely when Baby is in bed), I was in the middle of a very mentally-engaging task when the buzzer on the dryer went off. I had to interrupt myself to take out the laundry, bring it upstairs, and put it away so that it wouldn’t get wrinkled (it was my husband’s work clothes).

When the buzzer first went off, I looked meaningfully over at Husband, but he was too engrossed in his computer to notice. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with the import of the dryer buzzer? I got up and didn’t say anything because we’re still celebrating his birthday (at our house you get your way for the entire week before and after your birthday; since Husband was away for one of his weeks for work, this means I have to be nice to him for three weeks total which is, it must be said, something of a challenge.)

It’s not that I expect we should be completely equal like some people, but my only time to work is when Baby is sleeping. He gets to work all day long at a nice, clean office and then come home and sit around (and do homework and fix things and take care of emergency work problems and cook dinner and run errands and care for Baby, but in this post we are being biased in my favor, okay?). I’ve worked in office environments, so I know that it’s not as though they’re entirely free from distractions (people popping by, meetings, the incessant email; one nice thing about working at night is that I don’t get totally irrelevant emails popping up all the time.) So maybe I can’t expect to be free of them, either?

Hm, as I write this I am feeling less annoyed. I am home all day. It’s not like I sit and stare at Baby; I can run the household, too. I don’t actually mind, really. It’s enjoyable to care for my little family. But I do wish Husband would take my work a little more seriously. Whenever I say anything negative about it, he mentions how I didn’t have to take it. The fact that it was optional doesn’t mean it’s not real, though!

What’s the division of labor like at your house? How do you feel about it?

Binding fabric

Wanna know a highly effective way to get a ton of emails fast? Offer a bunch of baby clothes up on Freecycle. Wow, those people are rabid.

I have a few bins of outgrown clothes of Baby’s. I’ve gone through them a few times, but I have the hardest time parting with anything. Toys and equipment I seem to have little trouble lending or giving away, but with clothes, if I can remember Baby in it, or even more so, if I have an adorable picture of her wearing it, I just can’t pass that outfit along. Or if it was a present. Or if it didn’t work season-wise for Baby but it’s very cute, I want to keep it, as they say, “just in case.” As you can see, I have multiple reasons for hoarding a bunch of spit-up stained teeny tiny clothes on the offhand chance I do someday have another baby and that baby is a girl and the seasons match up, etc. etc. The stuff I gave away was composed of vaguely itchy-looking items, any outfit with a character on it (e.g. Pooh, Minnie–I hate advertising for free), clothes I don’t think Baby ever wore, socks and shoes with escapist proclivities making me hate them, and an excess of hats, so I wasn’t too sad to see them go.

It doesn’t really hurt anything to keep the bulk of the clothes, I guess, though it does feel silly to lock them away when others could enjoy them. But there’s just some indefinable quality they have that binds them closely to me; maybe it’s that they’re tangible reminders of a sweet baby past or, I have to admit, little emblems of optimism about a sweet baby future.

A quite distant future, I hope.

What’s your approach in this area?

Unpracticed in indolence

I though my work’s technical problems were over but my access mysteriously went offline last night. This meant I had an evening free to do whatever I wanted. I realized that I haven’t really had that since Baby was four months old and I went back to grad school. Ever since then, even if I did nothing, I really ought to have been accomplishing something, so any pleasure I took in slacking off was mitigated by guilt. At night I did my school work or planned for classes and then recently I’ve been doing this latest gig. But last night, bereft of the ability to accomplish anything but psyched up to be productive, I cast about looking for an activity. I have a craft I am working on but need to buy something for it before I can finish. The downstairs was clean enough and I’d already picked up upstairs. I didn’t feel like cleaning out the laundry room because most of the crap piled up in there is my husband’s and if I accidentally threw away or “hid” (as he put it) something he needs I’d never hear the end of it. So I cleaned the silver. (When I mentioned this to Husband over the phone, he said it sounds like I am turning into my mother.) This ended up taking way longer than I’d anticipated but it was a good activity to do while watching TV. But apparently I just couldn’t sit around and watch TV and read blogs or go get in bed or the bath with a novel; I’m out of practice in relaxing at night (though back when we had regular naptimes I would do those things then sometimes). What do you do at night?

“Side dishes”

My husband does the bulk of the dinner planning and preparation and with him out of town I have been left alone to fend for myself. Normally when he’s gone I’ll eat mostly junk food but I lost enough weight being sick for others to mention it and I have been trying to capitalize on that momentum by eating well. Usually, when my husband is here and my input on dinner is requested, I can only think of what my husband derisively terms “side dishes”: baked tomatoes, stir-fried carrots, spinach salad, that kind of thing. In the middle of summer I’ll say, “Oh! We should bake some butternut squash with maple syrup!” and I will be rewarded with a Look.

While he’s gone I have been able to eat only only these things, however, which makes me happy. For dinner on Monday night I had sauteed okra and a salad, and last night I had roasted potatoes and garlic. Can you suggest some more “side dishes” for me to gorge on in his absence? Perhaps a light summer soup? Remember I’m vegetarian, often vegan (mysteriously, I can’t seem to give up ice cream or brie). As soon as he gets back it’ll be back to protein/starch/veggie for me, or the one-pot curries and things he’s so fond of, but if I can suggest more tantalizing “side dishes” then maybe he’ll start to see the light! I mean, why not eat a big bowl of broccoli dipped into ginger miso dressing for dinner?

Review

I am finally feeling halfway decent! I’m not all better, but close enough for government work.

Husband is off on his work trip for the week. He hates to travel for several reasons, not the least of which is missing me and the baby, but also because he just isn’t that happy with his job. He loves his actual work, when he gets to do it, but the bureaucracy and ineptitude of his work environment is very difficult for someone as smart and pragmatic as he is.

Here’s a tip. Don’t watch “Flightplan” shortly before a cross-Atlantic airplane trip with your little girl.

Baby hasn’t been napping too much lately. Instead, she sleeps in and goes to bed early. I’m encouraging this as it allows me more time in the evening to do my work-from-home job. By the way, it’s not too easy to spend the whole day keeping up with a one-year-old and then spend several hours in the evening battling technical difficulty after technical difficulty. My job isn’t actually that hard except for the lack of appropriately technological resources, making me do lots of time-consuming and obnoxious work-arounds. I wish I hadn’t taken it, but the challenge of addressing these problems, if not the work itself, is motivating for now.

Almost a year ago I learned about a totally fun piece of toddler play equipment and started hunting for it everywhere as it is no longer produced. I almost drove two hours away to get one for fifty bucks when I decided to forget about it. Today I picked one up for $2.50 at a thrift store. Awesome!

It is crazy-hot here and we are trying not to overheat. We try to do the park in the late afternoon. It’s already 95 degrees here by 9 AM sometimes so the morning doesn’t work. We try to stick to playgrounds with shade. Also, our play area in the yard is in the shade and on the deck we have an umbrella and a baby pool and the most totally awesome thing: a misting fan! Helps so much. For really hot (or rainy) days we go run around Wal-mart or Target. This will seriously occupy us for up to 1.5 hours. I’m lucky to have a kid that stays close, though, and doesn’t take everything off the shelves. Some afternoons we go to outdoor pools as guests of various friends. In the morning we go to the library, the indoor pool, activities, friends’ houses, our backyard, run errands, play at home. Lots of drinks. Oh and cool baths, which is especially helpful as Baby drinks a ton of water in the tub. My bigger problem than heat here is actually mosquitoes. Yesterday Baby played in our little pool for a while and though I defended her constantly, she has like 13 bites today! But bug sprays scare me.

Today I brought the potty chair to the (hardwood floor) living room and let Baby go naked and play for a while. She peed four times in the space of an hour! Not once in the potty, though. However, she is now apparently able to sense that she has to pee. The second time she peed, she said “pee pee” and pointed a minute or so before peeing. I encourage her to go sit on the potty but she got distracted. The fourth time she was on the stepstool in the kitchen washing her hands when apparently the urge struck her, causing her to become quite upset, as she had discovered by then that she didn’t like the sensation of peeing on herself (especially her feet) and getting the floor wet. I suggested that in the future she could avoid that by sitting on the potty. She’s not ready yet, though, but at least we can take advantage of the hot weather with this helpful naked time. I was potty-trained at one, but then I lived in China and had split pants, making it much easier. I’m considering making Baby some split pants to use around the yard and the downstairs.