1 Mother 2 Another

Madeleine’s well on her way to toddlerhood, and nowhere is it more evident than in her discovery of – and assertion of – her own will.

For a kid who can’t talk, she certainly knows how to make herself understood, and will go to great lengths to get her point across if it’s something close to her heart – like walking.

She’s hit this point where she LOVES to walk (see previous entry) and is incredibly upset to find herself in 1) a carseat; or 2) a stroller. After screaming and arching her back to avoid the stroller, for example, she’ll spend much of the stroller walk time pointing at the ground and speaking anxiously to me, just in case I didn’t understand that she really wanted to get down and walk herself.

So I’m trying to allow her to walk as many places as possible – the park, a friend’s house, whatever. We even go for daily walks around the block so she can stretch her apparently restless legs. But even allowing her to walk isn’t always enough for her, and Maddie and I have to find a way to discuss the situation and arrive at a reasonable compromise.

Since she was a newborn, Maddie and I have regularly had dance time together. At first it was Maddie in the Bjorn  while I tried vainly to calm her colicky cries; then we moved on to pure entertainment  with Madeleine sitting in the bouncy chair and me running through my best stuff. And let me tell you, she was a tough critic.

But as she developed, girlie moved from spectator to participant. She’s now a full-fledged dancin’ queen and has definitely earned her shoes. Her heart’s always been in it, and I’ve been fascinated to watch how her dancing style developed as her body came under her control.

When she first began participating she was severely limited, since she couldn’t actually walk or stand up. She loved to bob vigorously, though, and would hiney scooch around the floor with the best of them. We added scarf dancing soon after, and she’d wave vigorously while mommy twirled around her.

Being able to pull herself to standing ushered in a whole new era of Maddie dancing, and she never looked back. 

My daughter loves to walk.

Put her down on a sidewalk armed
only with a toddler’s instinctive knowledge of the nearest swingset, and
she’s off and running. She can go for surprisingly long distances
without collapsing, and adores being given the space to “do it herself”.

My
daughter loves to walk.

She does not, however, like to turn
around and come back.

Against my husband’s explicit instructions and fervent (and frequent) prayers, Maddie’s become a bit of clotheshorse.

Or should I say, accessory mule.

Clothing’s not really a big interest of hers right now, except in relation to how long it’s going to be before she can take it off. Naked Girl reigns supreme this summer. But the past few weeks have seen an astonishing awakening of the Accessorizing Instinct, and I think there’s no going back.

This week’s poll is up and running – or flying, or something.

I want to know how you travel with your child. Do you stay within short driving distances? Do you go for long car trips? Fly when you have to? Is your child’s passport full already?

As always, the poll will be up all week on my homepage, on the right-hand side below the navigation buttons. And you don’t need to be a registered user to vote; simply click and submit to have your voice heard! 

 Last week’s poll was all about what you consider the ideal spacing between children. Interestingly enough, over half of you said you thought 3 years was ideal. Four years separation was a close second in popularity, with the rest of you saying either two years, or choosing to have an only child, was your preference. No one picked a one-year spacing, probably because the night feedings are still too fresh in our minds . . .

The topic’s been on my mind since several girlfriends around me have had a second child in the past few months. And of the four that I can think of off the top of my head, three of them planned a two-year spacing, while Abby’s boys are almost three years apart. My brother and I are only two years apart and I love having a sibling so close in age, but I’m just beginning to forget what the first few months are like enough for me to consider a second child. Honestly, I don’t know how women with back-to-back pregnancies do it. Heck, I don’t know how any woman with more than one child does it!

As Maddie grows up (sometimes against my explicit instructions) and her protective bubble must perforce grow with her, we see more and more that we’ll be less and less able to shelter her quite so easily. And native New Yorker that she is, we’ve put off one of the quintessential New York experiences – riding the subway.

At first she was a newborn and we didn’t want to expose her to germs. Then it was winter, and we didn’t want to expose her to all the extra germs. Then it was spring and summer and she was mobile and content to hit the local parks. And then – we sort of ran out of excuses.

Of course, one of my excuses was that I didn’t want to have to lug that stroller up and down dozens of flights of stairs in order to navigate the subway, but that makes Mommy look lazy so we’ll leave that one out.

We know she’ll be venturing farther and farther from home as her palm pilot fills up with play dates and toddler classes of some as-yet-undetermined kind, so we decided recently to take the plunge and ride the rails as a family, reasoning it was best to get the first time over with when there was no pressing event to get to.

To that end, last Saturday we hit the subway with Central Park as our destination. 

Yes, I know, been-there-done-that moms everywhere are probably still laughing at me for my naïve expectations that Plan 1 or Plan 2 would actually work.

Or, for that matter, that I still hold out hope of Maddie following any plan at all.

So here I am, back at the old drawing board, but I swear, some of it’s not my fault! For one thing, it turns out my daughter has a cow’s milk allergy. For another- well, I guess that’s the only thing I had no control over.

Where am I now? We’re down to three nursings a day – early morning, naptime, and bedtime. And since it’s not a requirement nutritionally and doesn’t interfere with any part of our day, I almost consider her weaned.

Almost. 

Another first.

And on the one hand, I mourn the passing of an era that won’t come again. Every developmental step her little body takes is one small step out of babyhood, into womanhood. My little munchkin is growing up, and I’m powerless to stop it.

And on the other hand –

SHE HAS A TOOTH!!!!

As Madeleine continues to develop a fascinating personality of her own, a couple aspects are coming to the forefront and I can’t imagine where she gets them from –

The kid is opinionated.

And bossy.

Now I grant you, she doesn’t speak much English. She can say pretty much any word that starts with the letter “B” – ball, bubble, belly button, book – though they all sort of sound the same. And she’s got the “mama”, “dada” “nanana” (banana), “kitty”, and “no no no” down pat. Especially the “no no no” part. Other than that, though, she’ll just lecture on in her own language and expect you to keep up.

And lecture is the operative word here. She’s clearly having a heated conversation – dare I say, argument – with you, and woe be it unto you if you don’t figure out what she wants from you. 

This week’s poll is up and running, and I want to know what you think about additional kids.

What’s the ideal spacing of children for your family? One year? Two years? Three or more? Or are you determined your baby will be an only child? I want to know.

As always, the poll will be up all week on the right-hand side of my home page, just below my navigation buttons. And you don’t need to be a registered user to vote; simply click and submit to have your voice heard! 

The results are in from last week’s poll and we’re all over the map!

I wanted to know when you first began leaving your child with a paid caregiver, be it regular daycare, a babysitter other than Grandma, a nanny, or whatever. The replies were evenly spread out over the entire age spectrum, running from six weeks or earlier all the way up to older than two years!

There are a lot of things that factor in to when you first leave your child with a substitute caregiver, with necessity – usually financial – and your comfort level being the biggest two. While I think the poll answers don’t give us a glimpse into any of the decision-making that went on before baby first got left with “someone else”, I’ll be bold enough to say the poll results tell us one thing:

Kids are pretty hardy, and if our hearts are in the right place as we make these decisions they’ll probably turn out pretty well.

I’m guessing it was just as hard for each of the moms who voted to leave their baby for the first time, whether that was at six weeks or two years. And I’ll also go out on a limb here and say that we’ll remember that first time way longer than our kids will. 

When Madeleine was around 10 months old we began to see small spots on
her face that gradually increased, and at her 1-year visit our
pediatrician confirmed it as an allergic reaction. Since the reaction
was not severe, though, she said we could either try to figure out what
was causing it or simply live with it. As long as Maddie wasn’t
uncomfortable, eating a food she had a reaction to was no big deal.
Most infant food allergies are outgrown by age 2 or so, and consuming
something at her age that she’d have a reaction to would in no way make
her more likely to keep that allergy for life.

And before you
ask, yes, I did the slow food introduction thing. I introduced every
new food to Madeleine one at a time, waiting five days between each food
for signs of an allergic reaction. When I told our pediatrician that,
and that nothing happened, she said sometimes an allergy won’t come on
right away. Made me feel a bit better as a mommy, but I still felt like
a bit of a Slacker Mom for not catching it sooner.

So as I said,
we had two choices. Try to pin down the allergy food, or simply let her
live with it. Being the obsessive-compulsive I am, I had to know what
was causing it. So we went to work.

Madeleine’s been practicing sitting on just about everything she can get her hands – er, hiney – on, including Mommy’s head (see previous blog). It’s amazing to me all the skills we adults take for granted, that kids have to actually learn to do. Standing and sitting are something I really don’t put much thought into, let alone find to be fun and exciting activities.

Not so my daughter.

We’ve got a couple things around the house that are kiddie height for her to sit on, and a few more she simply adapts to her needs. There’s the child-sized rocking chair that was my mother’s, dusted off from storage and handed over to Maddie. She loves sitting in it almost as much as she likes rocking her Elmo doll, saying, “Rock, rock, rock, rock,” while she rhythmically pushes the plush toy. 

Maddie’s eating habits are entering toddlerhood, and all I can say is, weird kid.

First off, she’s got an aversion to meat. It’s the whole texture thing, and she likes deli meat and ground beef but can’t stand cooked chicken or beef. She also won’t eat much egg, which used to be one of her favorite meals. Ditto with the avocado – now she picks at it at best.

Which creates a bit of a problem for me. See, Maddie’s not eating much dairy since we’ve discovered she seems to have a mild allergic reaction to it. So she’s not drinking milk, eating cheese, and so on. She’s pretty amenable to soy milk, but won’t drink more than maybe four ounces a day, and it doesn’t have as much fat and protein as whole milk at any rate.

I’ve been so hesitant to say anything, but it looks as if my daughter’s settling into a good, predictable nap every day.

The hesitancy is two-pronged: one, you hate to rub a consistent nap into another mommy’s face.

And two, Maddie might hear me and decide to punish me for being complacent – say, by taking the naptime away from me. 

I’ve been so hesitant to say anything, but it looks as if my daughter’s settling into a good, predictable nap every day.

The hesitancy is two-pronged: one, you hate to rub a consistent nap into another mommy’s face.

And two, Maddie might hear me and decide to punish me for being complacent – say, by taking the naptime away from me. 

This week's poll has to do with getting out of the house without the munchkin.

I want to know - when was the first time you left your baby in a substitute caregiver's charge? And I'm not talking about leaving your daughter with Grandma, or with your best friend who lives next door.

I'm interested in the first time you left your child with a paid caregiver, be it nanny, daycare, or one-time babysitter. Did you return to work and start using daycare at six weeks? Did you wait until your child was six months old? After his first birthday? Still not willing to leave your baby with a "stranger"? I want to know!

As always, the poll will be up all week on the right-hand side of this home page, below all the category tabs. You don't have to be a registered user to vote; simply click and submit to have your voice heard! 

If there’s one thing worse than being sick the same time your child is, it’s being sick when your child is not. I recently went through 24 hours that once again highlighted how nothing in your life is the same after your child is born. Be forewarned – TMI coming up.

Late one night I began to experience what I’ll call Speedy Intestinal Problems, or SIP. This got me up several times during the night, and somehow Madeleine decided to piggyback on that and get me up in the intervening half-hours. Here’s a fun activity: awake to the sound of your daughter screaming at 2:30 a.m. Check her diaper, which will turn out to be dry but will aggravate her mightily. Nurse her for a bit, then realize you need to run to the bathroom. Put her back in her crib so she can scream while you deal with your SIP. Then nurse her some more, same as before except now she’s truly ticked off by your abandonment. Good times.

After a largely sleepless night, I was exhausted and dehydrated. Maddie, however, was fine.

The SIP continued during the day, making me very leery of eating, well, anything. Which, because I’m hypoglycemic, had an unintended side effect:

SIP= dehydration=not eating=hypoglycemic migraine. 

As we strive to beat the heat this summer, we’ve broken down and gotten ourselves one of those kiddie pools for the back yard.

I’ve always been resistant to them; they kill the grass, they get dirty, they take up space, and you have to empty them after every use or it’s simply an incubator for those West Nile mosquitoes. But I found one that seemed to solve some of those problems and with the heat, the reduced family hours at our local Y, and Maddie’s love of all things aquatic, I broke down and bought it.

Listen up – if you have five feet of available outdoor space, go buy this thing. It’s probably on end-of-season sale now. 

Here's your daily reminder to check out Monday's entry entitled, "Mommy Tips Survey". Post your best mommy tip in the comments section for a chance to win a free gift! It's up all week.

Madeleine’s been getting more and more comfortable with other kids; between playing in the nursery before church, and hanging out at the park every day with other toddlers, she’s starting to understand that there exist other small beings than herself, and they get to play with stuff too.

And since I’ve been making a couple friends at our park, I thought it was time to hit another first: The Play Date. 

In yesterday’s blog I talked about practical issues you need to consider that you may not have thought of, like picking a pediatrician and installing the car seat.

But there are lots of parenting issues a couple may not be aware need discussion, that can really test the marital ties in the midst of sleep deprivation and three days in a row of Chinese takeout. So here’s my biggest piece of advice to expectant parents:

Have lots of fights with your spouse.

You’ve got many decisions to make about what sort of parent you’re going to be. Some of them are already half-made based on your upbringing and seem so obvious you assume your spouse agrees with you until it’s 3 a.m., you bring the baby in bed with you, and your husband freaks out, saying you’ll make your 2-week-old son a mama’s boy. Trust me, it’s better to at least start these fights now, when you can play the old hormone card, than after the baby comes and you’re both so sleep-deprived you can’t remember your husband’s name. Here’s a list of topics to get you started: 

Ok, listen up parents-to-be. Here’s the blog you will want to print out and put up on your refrigerator.

I’m not going to tell you all the stuff to buy for baby, or how to pick an OB, or epidural vs. natural childbirth. There are tons of books already written about that stuff, and frankly, it’s not as important as what we’re going to talk about today. Well, ok, so it is, but this is important too.

I’m going to give you a list to get you started on After Baby Comes. Yep, these fun nine months of pregnancy, preparation, and progesterone-induced puking will come to an end and when they do, you’ll be too sleep-deprived to get cracking on staying ahead of the Parent Curve. So read on, and get going.

This week’s poll we’re doing something different.

Instead of a poll, it’s more of a survey, and instead of a pre-written answer you click on and submit, you write the answer yourself, with a chance for a free gift!

Here’s my question: What’s the best mommy tip you’d like to pass on to other moms?

Do you have a tip for organizing your nursery? A trick for making homemade baby food? A secret for getting out poop stains, or soothing a screaming toddler in the middle of the mall?

I want to hear about it. So write up your tip in the comment section of this entry.

Be sure to include your email address, because here’s the added bonus –

I’ll narrow the tips down to a few favorites, and my girlfriends and stay-at-home-dad guy pal Graham  – my Mommy Focus Group that I turn to for help – will select their favorite tip. The winner will receive a FREE pressed puff from Pure Me (see my previous blog to understand its awesomeness), courtesy of the inventor of Pure Me, a fellow mom.

You don’t need to be a registered user to submit a tip; you can submit as a guest. But registered users will be much easier for me to get back in touch with, so if you submit as a guest be sure to publish your email so I can find you! And you can post as many tips as you want, but please post each one separately.

My girlfriends may publish tips of their own, but don’t worry, they know they’re exempt from winning the prize.

You’ve got until Saturday to submit here, so get to it! The winner will be chosen later next week.

Good luck, and speak up!

Last week’s poll certainly revealed to me that I’m not alone in the “Less Ain’t So Bad” school of grooming these days.

The poll focused on how your grooming habits have changed since becoming a mommy, and almost half of you said you try to look presentable and shower daily, but don’t spend as much time in front of the mirror as you used to. Most of the rest of you admitted to showering a couple times a week and combing when necessary, while one brave mommy (God bless your honesty!) said she’s happy to get out of the house without her breast pads showing, and with the spit-up blending into her fabric.

This topic came to me a couple weeks ago while I was showering one evening. I was hacking away at nearly a week’s growth of leg hair and thinking how different my standards are now than they were a year plus ago; I’m happy to shower twice a week and find time to shave maybe once in those seven days. As I realized how embarrassed I’d be to admit that to a lot of people (ironic, since I’m confessing it in cyberspace), I became defensive in my inner monologue, reasoning that there’s just no time with the baby! 

Maddie and I are in the habit of hitting the park every morning as part of our routine. She’s made a couple friends (so have I!) and is starting to look forward to seeing familiar faces on the playground.

Since it’s been so hot here – six days of around 100 degrees – Maddie only makes a cursory nod at the swings before heading off to the sprinkler rainbow. One of her friends, Naomi, is always amply stocked with water balloons, and the things fascinate my daughter. She loves to squish them in her hands, drop them and watch them roll, chew on them; you name it, she’s done it. And when she drops it or squeezes it too hard and it breaks, she stares at the ground in honest bewilderment, uncertain where the thing mysteriously disappeared.  

It seems my daughter’s been shopping for a personality recently, and I’m not sure but I think she’s been just haphazardly throwing whatever’s on sale in the cart.

Is it just Maddie, or is this a phase everyone goes through? These random things start emerging that make you scratch your head and wonder: is she watching German t.v. behind your back and not understanding the subtitles? Are you walking in your sleep and doing really weird things she’s trying to emulate?

For there seems to be no rhyme or reason to these idiosyncrasies popping up every few days. Here’s just a smattering of the Greatest Hits she’s collecting:

This week is World
Breastfeeding Week  and the subject seems to be everywhere. The
morning shows, the evening news, nighttime newsmagazines, all seem to be
talking about breastfeeding.

Granted, there are a few hot items
to cover right now. Babytalk, a magazine for parents, ran a
picture on the cover of a mother nursing and had 25% of its readers,
mostly parents, complain and call the cover offensive. CNN ran an article 
about it, if you’re interested, or you can simply hit pretty much any
parenting blog – try Dot
Moms or Daddytypes 
to read a couple takes on it – and get a good summary. One magazine
subscriber was so offended she ran the cover through a shredder, lest
her 12-year-old son see it and be inflamed with lust.

This, of
course, is coming hard on the heels of the national ad campaign that
likened not nursing to riding a mechanical bull while pregnant, so
harmful is formula for your baby. And it’s in the midst, too, of some
pretty high-profile protests by self-styled “Lactivists” staging
nurse-ins to promote breast-feeding in public. There's a great article
profiling the whole "nursing in public" thing; click here to
read more.

And as the battle of the boob heats up, I can’t help
but feel sorry for the people caught in the cross-fire: the new mommies.
On the one hand you’ve got moms telling you it’s going to cause your
child irreparable harm if you don’t nurse, and that you should be proud
of nursing and willing to flaunt it in public; on the other, you’ve got
people with the legitimate complaint that the recent baby boom in major
metropolitan areas like New York has resulted in the takeover of, well,
everywhere by new families; it’s not enough now to have a kid-friendly
space – it has to be kid-centered. (Click here 
to read a good article on that tangent). Stroller Manifestos banning
babies from bars at 2 a.m. are being posted in local clubs (well, duh, I
say) while defiant mommies are sitting down in the middle of Victoria’s
Secret to protest the removal a couple months ago of a nursing mother
from a store.