1 Mother 2 Another

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Maddie has a lovey that works really well for her – Silky. She goes through cycles of need: sometimes she only needs it for sleep time, and sometimes she’ll request it several times throughout the day as she gets sleepy, cuddly, or scared. Currently she’s going through a Silky intensive, and will ask for it at church or after a big play date. We’re so grateful for the thing that right now we don’t care if she’s still carrying it when she delivers her first State of the Union address. In fact, we’re planning on getting one for peanut to use later on, and see if it works as well for her as it does for her big sister.

Maddie’s been preparing for the big sister role- bossiness and mothering come easily to her (don’t know where she gets that . . .) and, while I’m sure it’s a developmental phase every tot goes through, she’s intensely interested in imitating Mommy. She loves diapering any stuffed animal she can get her hands on (Kitty wouldn’t hold still, much to her chagrin), cooking for her dolls in her kitchen, placing them in her toy high chair and “feeding” them, putting the dolls to bed in her toy crib, and so on.

For the first time since Maddie’s been born, Brian and I spent the evening out together last night – from late afternoon until well after she went to bed. Though Gamma’s done a dry run putting Maddie to bed while we were hiding in the basement, this was the first time we’ve both been absent for such a long period. Giddy with freedom, we went to hear a romantic little talk on such topics as camelback contractions and episiotomies.

Yep, it’s time for that labor refresher course.

A few days ago, Maddie had her first encounter with a bona fide bully and I’m still seeing the effects of it.

We were playing happily on the park equipment, getting ready to head home and call it a day, when Maddie climbed the stairs and decided to hit the slide one last time. Since I had followed her up, I wasn’t in my customary position at the bottom of the slide, waiting to catch her. She took off down the slide but got stuck at the very bottom, and in her winter coat was struggling to sit up and get all the way off. At that point, an older girl – three or four years old – ran to the top of the slide and sat down. I told her my daughter was still on the slide, but she smirked at me, rolled on to her stomach, and went quickly down, kicking Maddie in the head with both feet and shoving her off the slide.

Towards the end of my first pregnancy, I had a hard time drinking enough water to satisfy my OB.  When I was sent for a 28-week ultrasound because of a lack of growth (though I sure felt bigger!), it was discovered I was low on amniotic fluid.  Every visit after that, my doctor did a “slosh check” and would pronounce me “doing well” or “a quart low”.  By the end I was drinking 4 liters a day and still barely keeping Maddie in liquid.

I realize that staying properly hydrated is incredibly important for a pregnant woman; getting enough liquid helps everything from swollen ankles to weird cravings, since oftentimes we’re not actually hungry, but thirsty.  But by the third or fourth liter of the day, I was truly hating the taste of water.  I had a deep desire for root beer, cranberry juice – anything to make the liquid more exiting.

After a couple weeks of bad weather and illness, we finally found ourselves back into our normal routine on Thursday, and I have to say everyone’s much happier for it.

We’re not schedule freaks; we don’t have Maddie’s day broken down into “7:30 a.m.: wake up. 8 a.m.: color while waiting for breakfast. 8:15: breakfast.” And believe me, I know people that do that. But we do have a certain routine that we’ve worked hard to cultivate. It provides flexibility for errands or fun days like the zoo, but gives Maddie a sense of what comes next – a sort of comfort in knowing what lies ahead. In broad strokes, breakfast is followed by time Outside – church, the playground, a play date, the zoo, whatever. Then there’s lunch, naptime, playtime at home or running errands, dinner, and so on. The routine is flexible enough that we can imitate it even when we’re not at home – if we’re on vacation, for example, we’ll hit the beach or pool in the late morning during Outside time and stick to her usual order for lunch etc. Giving her built in “retreat” time every day – naptime at home rather than on the run, followed by quiet playtime at home – helps her cope with different people and situations coming in and out of her life.

From the beginning of this second pregnancy, Brian and I had one eye on the finish line and what it would mean to Maddie. Going from being the only child in the center of several adults’ attention to sharing the spotlight with the younger, cuter model would be hard on her, we knew. And since I’m largely a stay-at-home mom she’s pretty used to getting a lot of quality time with me; sharing will be difficult at times, to say the least.

Which is why we have been looking at the nine months in a big arc, planning what it will take to make the transition as smooth and painless for her as possible. I am incredibly fortunate (in case I haven’t mentioned it this week) to have my mom living a few blocks away, and more than willing to pitch in with Maddie, so we knew Mom was the logical alternate caregiver for Maddie to get attached to. Over the last few months Mom’s tried out more and more delicate responsibilities with Maddie: long stretches of daytime by herself, putting her down for naps, handling meals, and finally last night the big one: bedtime.

On March 13, someone stood up and gave me their seat on the subway for the first time this pregnancy.

I was 30 weeks pregnant at the time.

The person who offered me their seat was a woman.

This offer has yet to be repeated.

Yes, you read the title right, and no, it’s not ironic. The world indeed is going mad.

As many of you know from a previous blog, my daughter had decided to hate shoe shopping. I finally broke down and ordered a home foot measuring kit, thinking I’d do the measuring myself and go online shopping. I reconciled myself to a few years with a girl who didn’t enjoy shoe shopping. Then this weekend we had a little mini-breakthrough!

We’re definitely sick.

That runny nose turned into quite the gusher, and all three of us woke up Saturday morning with the stuffy head and cough thing going on. So we spent the weekend cooped up indoors, Brian and I taking shifts so we could try to get some rest time to ourselves. Maddie was having a hard time sleeping, which means of course that we all have a hard time sleeping, and she was getting up a good couple hours before her normal wake-up time.

For the past couple of days Maddie’s been running a very low fever. Yesterday she added a mild runny nose to the equation. She’s been clingy and cuddly as well.

All of these things can be explained away by something other than illness, so we’re crossing our fingers. As the weather warmed up here, I anticipated a mild round of allergies, which could be responsible for the mild runny nose. And Maddie keeps complaining that her cheek hurts and sure enough, when I peer in, she’s got a very swollen gum in the back, which would account for the fever and clinginess.

So Maddie and I came home from running errands recently and I gave Maddie over to a few moments of unfettered run-of-the-house fun as I put purchases away. She’s reached that great age where she can entertain herself for rather long periods of time, and combine that with a pretty baby-proofed house and a pretty obedient and docile kid, and I find myself with stretches of 5-10 minutes where I’m comfortable simply keeping her in earshot while I get work done.

A few minutes into my grocery unpacking, and I realize something’s changed. No longer do I hear her little running back and forth, from one place to the next on some busy toddler errand. No, the last time I heard her move it was towards the bedrooms which, now that I thought of it, were suspiciously quiet. No chatting with a stuffed animal, no giving Dolly orders . . . . hmmmm.

A girlfriend of mine recently emailed asking if I’d covered discipline and toddlers on my website yet – she’d hit a new phase of disobedience from her own toddler and was eagerly looking to my mommy focus group to find out what had worked for them.

When Maddie turned a year old, my girlfriend Abby gave me the book Kids, Parents, Power Struggles. I was a bit astonished that I’d have to start thinking about such things at such an early age, but boy was I grateful to read the thing right away. Because the truth is that when you need those disciplining tools, the last thing you want to do is take the time to research, read, and absorb; you need to know immediately. That book gave me some rudimentary tools to deal with Maddie’s emerging personality, and made me feel more equipped to start making deliberate decisions about how we’d raise our daughter – how we’d deal with disobedience, to time out or not to time out, consequences, and so forth.

The book also caused me to look further for more good parenting books, and thanks to some good friends who have already been through toddlerhood and some great been-there-done-that parents at my church, I collected a few that I’ve found incredibly useful.

For a few months now, Maddie’s been developing a new hobby – soccer. We bought a ball for her last summer that’s roughly the size of a soccer ball, though much lighter, and she’s enjoyed rolling it, sitting on it, and so forth, all year now. But a few months ago Brian introduced her to the whole concept of “kicking” the ball and running after it, and she hasn’t slowed down since.

One of the best parts about being pregnant for a second time is getting the chance to have those, “Oh, yeah!” moments over and over again. There’s a chemical released during labor and afterwards called oxytocin – a true multi-tasker of a hormone – that actually has been proven to have amnesiac properties to it, meaning that it helps you forget how bad the whole experience was. Sort of nature’s way of making sure you don’t remember so much that you only have one kid.

Combine that with the famous Pregnancy Memory (also known as the Black Hole), and everything old is new again. Every little milestone I’ve hit with this pregnancy, I think, “Oh, yeah! I remember this feeling!” and it’s so instantaneous, so familiar, that you can’t believe you ever forgot that feeling. I’ve had it with the bad – lower back pain, fatigue, Dog Nose – and with the good – feeling the baby move, hearing the heartbeat at the doctor’s office.

Maddie’s going through this language phase that’s incredibly cute for now and while I don’t think it’s deliberate, I’m afraid it soon will be.

She’ll say something that’s either not completely intelligible or so outrageous that you aren’t sure you heard her completely – for example, she’ll say, “Maddie have ice cream!” This is outrageous in our household because she has yet to ever try ice cream, so you’ll say, “What did you say?”

“Maddie have ice cream, please.”

“Do you want ice cream, Maddie?” you ask, still not able to believe that’s what she’s saying.

“O-k,” she’ll agree, as if you’ve thought of it yourself and she’s surprised and pleased by the offer.

I remember very well the first time I laid eyes on a pair of pregnancy panties. I was watching the movie She’s Having a Baby and they did a humorous montage of how life changed with her pregnancy. As Kevin Bacon folded laundry, he held up a pair of delicate, lacy, obviously pre-pregnancy panties. He then held up a pair of those ginormous, white cotton, high-waisted pregnancy undies. You know exactly the kind I’m talking about – those shapeless, unattractive underpants that we used to call spanky pants as kids; the kind Mary Catherine Gallagher wore on Saturday Night Live. The message was obvious – pretty underwear is a thing of the past once you get pregnant.

I vowed that this would not be me.

So when I became pregnant with Maddie, I had this underlying fear that at some point the pregnancy police was going to come along, wrestle me to the ground, and force me into a pair of spanky pants. “You’re going to be a mother! Shame on you! Where’s your granny panties?” That sort of thing.

When we found out that Brian was losing his job, he and I decided I’d add a few more hours to my work schedule each week. With this being Brian’s first official week of unemployment, my extended schedule has kicked into high gear and I find myself back in the workforce a bit more.

On the plus side, I’m able to work just fine – I’m not due until the end of May and have no reasons not to teach. I’ve got a loyal client base that quickly snapped up my extra hours, and I enjoy my work a lot. Brian’s got the time to cover a few more shifts with Maddie, and frankly she adores him so much she hardly notices I’m not there.

On the down side, I definitely notice she’s not there.

This past Sunday at church, Maddie hit
another first – and not a good one.


Maddie was playing happily in the nursery when one of her friends
started crying. Usually when this happens Maddie’s ok, but
this time for whatever reason she began crying as well – you
know, the old toddler crying snowball effect.


After a few moments, Maddie’s friend calmed down, but
Madeleine starting asking for Mama. I think she realized for the
first time that I was not ten seconds away- that she was alone in
there with people who, while nice, were Not Mama. With this
realization, of course, the crying simply escalated. One of the
workers came to get me, and I immediately came down. By the time I
arrived Maddie had calmed down a bit, and I was greeted at the door
by a tear-stained, hiccupping daughter being cuddled by one of the
workers. She leapt into my arms, I ran to get Silky out of her bag
– the nursery workers hadn’t known about it – and
the tension drained out of Maddie’s body.

Last fall Maddie and Gamma and I made our first official foray into that venerable female institution, Shoe Shopping. Madeleine had a wonderful time, running around the store, trying everything on, and looking at all her shoe choices in the mirror before picking a couple of pairs. Mom and I were convinced we’d done a proper inaugural job and Maddie was officially a Shoe Shopper.

Fast forward to this year.

I’m once again cautious of jinxing
things by mentioning this, but Maddie’s been sleeping like
the Olympic Gold Medalist in Extended Sleeping recently, and
I’m wondering if anyone else has gone through a similar
phase.

Her sleep’s been pretty solid since
about 15 months. Up until then she’d go through a phase of a
week or two when she’d wake up crying, needing me to go in
and hold her, a couple times a night. Then she’d sleep well
for a few weeks, then back to the disruptions. But around 15 months
her sleeping really leveled out and now even if she wakes she puts
herself back to sleep pretty quickly. Only if she asks for me do I
go in these days, and usually it’s a quick snuggle and
she’s back to bed. And these instances occur maybe a few
times a month. In general, though, she’s a twelve-hour
sleeper with a decent nap taken uncomplainingly for about an hour
each afternoon.