Cold Spaghetti

The Preface: We have no child safety equipment in our home. None. However, we do not have stairs in our home. My parents have even less safety measures in their home. And they DO have stairs. Big, tall, hardwood ones. With spindles to get caught in, slippery floors to lose traction on, and hard surfaces to pack the punch.

So how do we keep an eye on ever-so-active Kate? And how did we keep an eye on Will before he was old enough to tackle them on his own? This is how: we communicate constantly, keeping tabs on who is watching which child where and providing updates when the situation starts to change. All the time clarifying and updating the who, what, and where.

Somehow, this didn’t happen so well this weekend.

See these stairs? Straight, long, tall, hard, and unyielding?Yup. What you’re now thinking is exactly what happened.

Kate fell down these stairs. From the top, or at least very very very close to it. It is a fall that could have killed her, should have seriously injured her, and in the very least must have decently hurt her. The thudding sound of her body going down these stairs is, without question, the worst sound I have ever heard.
I found her at the bottom, lying on her back, having just hit the bottom floor. Still in her hand were pieces of clothes (freshly washed and folded and placed among our suitcase upstairs) with others lying up and down the stairs around her. It was obvious that she had climbed the stairs alone, rummaged through the clothes, and chosen some to carry back down. Somewhere near the top, it all went very wrong.

I reached her so quickly that she hadn’t yet started to cry. She was in that moment of shock and surprise, the split second before you register pain. She let out the first cry after her eyes met mine. But, surprisingly, her cries did not last long — they were very short-lived, actually. She did have (has) a bruise on her forehead and red marks along the right side of her cheek, but nothing that looked truly serious. No blackout. No vomiting. No strange eye movement. No odd limb positions, pain while moving, or stiffness in walking. Nothing. After a minute of crying, pushing away bags of ice, and fussing over us looking at her head and eyes, she calmed down, pointed outside, and asked for “bubbles.”

It seemed like I was in worse shape… shaking, swallowing back bile, trying not to think about the sounds etched in my head and the pictures they painted. I have never been so afraid.

Some lessons:
— No matter who is watching, supposed to be watching, or assumed to be watching … everything is always on my watch. I am having a much harder time being around while others keep an eye on her and am definitely more nervous over her.
— Kate’s head is a diamond. Nothing is harder.
— Kate will make an excellent addition to the NFL or NHL.
— Kate does not learn well from accidents. The very next day, I stopped packing in a moment of dread and rushed to the stairs on instinct… and found her halfway up the stairs.

To my children: please, let this be the last of your near-death experiences. It’s too much for your poor Mother to bear.

Will was a week or so shy of 16 months when we started to train him to self-soothe to sleep. I felt guilty about it then but was getting desperate for a good night’s sleep… one free of kicks, punches, and pokes. I’m fine with the family bed and have no problem with a 1-year old sharing it… but either because we’re smooshed in the Queen (note to future parents: forgo the crib, invest in a King mattress) or because my children are maniacs out to destroy me, both children go into attack mode during sleep.

Kate gets herself to sleep at school each day, so I know she is capable of drifting off without me. However, when I am around, she seems to forget this. In fact, when I am around, she makes a point to wake up every 30 minutes or so just to remind me that she needs me to fall back asleep. Even this would be okay, if the 30 minutes in between those awake moments were not filled with Bruce Lee moves directed at my tender parts.

I say all of this to relieve myself of the guilt I feel for starting Kate on sleep training. It actually went well, the getting her to sleep part. With Will, the first night involved him throwing a huge temper-tantrum, rocketing his toys out of the crib one by one and finally, when there was nothing else to throw, taking off his pants and tossing them. I remember that when he was too exhausted to fuss, he started to clap to get my attention. (We did the Supernanny “stay in the room without eye contact” method.) He still joined us in the wee hours of the night until he was almost 2 and when he did make this transition to sleeping in his bed through the night, it was on his own schedule. I figured this will be the same for Kate. We have been talking about needing to do something for awhile and decided to go for it. Paul has little patience for being disrupted in his sleep and I can’t handle it alone every night. I just really need her to sleep a few hours on her own. Maybe just for half the night? Four hours? Is that too much to expect from a 1-year old? She is a few months younger than Will was when we started him down this path, but I know this is something she can do because she does it everyday! Please Kate… just go to sleep for us, on your own! I am so sorry, but I can’t fight with you every night.

So, tonight, I nursed her, cuddled her, sang to her… and put her in her crib. She started out happy, bounced up and pointed towards our bedroom, signaling that she expected to go back. After a few minutes of quiet fussing, she let us know she wasn’t happy. But it didn’t last particularly long (20 minutes?) and finally, Kate went to sleep. It was hard for me to do — mostly because I feel it was completely wrong. Rational parenting makes sense to me. What other species allow their off-spring to cry themselves to sleep? What would it mean for children to decide when they are ready to leave their parents bed? If we stripped away the need to fit our children into convenient places in our lives and removed all the cultural lessons that tell us to use cribs… if we did all of that, would we ever even consider the thought of not sleeping with our babies? I feel sorry, sad, and frustrated to be giving in to these conveniences.

As I write this, Kate is crying. She was asleep for a little over an hour before waking. Paul is trying to help her but she is pretty miserable. If I get her, she’ll be up again in an hour and then again in another half hour to hour for the rest of the night. She’ll kick herself awake, be cranky, pull on me to nurse, nurse, then squirm and kick and be miserable until I fight her to be still enough to sleep… then wake up again in 30 minutes. This has been my life for over a month and I need help changing it. I’m sorry Kate. I have to believe that, in this moment, I am not teaching things that will cause you to loose trust in the world, in me, or in yourself.

Kate had heatstroke from the Oak Street party we attended Saturday afternoon. She fell asleep in the car on the way home and when I took her out of the seat, noticed how incredibly hot she was… without any sign of sweat. I freaked out in the appropriate manner, woke her to nurse, and applied cool cloths. Once her temp was controlled and she was happy torturing Will with sloppy zerbers, I figured it was all behind us.

Until it happen again an hour later. Repeat performance.

And then again, when I checked on her at 1:30am. This was the point that I woke up Paul to worry with me.

“Paul, can you check the web for what symptoms we should be looking for when a child has meningitis? Look up heatstroke, too, maybe it is normal for her temp to keep coming back? She’s making wet diapers and is nursing fine, so shouldn’t her body temperature be okay now that she is hydrated? Yes, her eyes still look a bit sunken. Should we take her to Children’s just in case? Maybe we should put her back in the shower again. I’m very worried because her temperature is so strange and seems so high. Can you look it up and tell me what you think?”

While he was looking, I feel asleep with Kate nursing beside me. When I woke up with the alarm at 4:30, Kate was fine, sleeping soundly beside me. We got up and got ready for the trip.

Crisis averted due to Mother’s extreme exhaustion.

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week… and Abeona is celebrating all week. Our director, Emmy, along with a parent who coordinates our Parenting Group, organized activities for the week. They put up a great display of bags for all teachers (subs and volunteers included!) where we have been placing love notes, surprises, and assorted pieces of fun all week. Parents came in and subbed for the entire staff on Tuesday so they all could go around the corner for lunch (Paul and I were supposed to be there – but so many other parents came to cover that they even had extra help!) Oak Street merchants donated food for staff, parents have brought in breakfast, and some parents have given gift cards to their businesses. One of our projects has been to write notes to Will’s teachers using his words. It works like this: I ask Will questions, like “What games does Ms. Sarah play with you?” and Will answers: “Chess.” I write down the whole conversation. So, while we were talking about his teacher, Ms. Sarah, with me frantically trying to write his responses, Will picked up a marker and drew a picture. I didn’t think anything of it until we were finished and I got a chance to see his work. Lo and behold! He drew HIS FIRST EVER DRAWING SHOWING REAL PEOPLE. Check it out (above). See those three people, so nicely represented by two lines and a circle? On the far left is Ms. Renee, the teacher in the 2s class and Will’s Music Together teacher, the next is Ms. Sarah, Will’s teacher, and finally, the tiniest one is Baby Kate. I practically levitated over it. Drawings like this are exactly why I had kids.
Continuing on the theme of how wonderful Emmy is, she made email contact with Johnette Downing, a local children’s musician who has several CDs, is seen on Nickelodeon, has written children’s books based on Louisiana culture… and lives right around the corner from Abeona House. Johnette offered to visit the school — bringing CD gifts for the school — and her guitar and talents for a performance. Parents were invited to stop in, too, for the fun. I brought the camera. (That’s Johnette, above.)
I took some fabulous pictures, but since virtually all of them heavily feature kids other than my own, I won’t post them here — save the one of Johnette above and the two of Will hugging Kate after the group performance of Happy Birthday Kate (one picture above, the other in a post below). It’s been a wonderful, inspirational week to be a part of Abeona House.

Kate, you’ve been with us for just over 6 months. Your short time with us has been filled with moments of learning. The relative ease of caring for you in those first days shocked me. I had no idea having a new baby could make me so happy. Your sweet big brother and I worked so hard, so hard, for everything… until I had you, I had no idea how sick I was at that time. The guilt of those lost moments with him plagues me. You seem to have inherited your parents warped sense of humor, intuitively knowing what makes us crazy and picking away at those pockets of sanity. For example, while every other baby on the planet is content to sit in those wonderful Bumbo seats, you fling yourself around like a fish until you’ve got enough foot leverage to push, yes PUSH, your little butt out of the seat. Twice we’ve caught you before you landed head first on our dinner plates. You remain blissfully unaware of your desire to destroy brain cells and happily throw yourself around, a free spirit ready for the fall. Having you convinced me of something that I’ve wondered for some time. I am now confident in the fact that I make the world’s most beautiful babies. One might think that being the World’s Most Beautiful Baby-Maker would make me smug. But no, in fact, it scares the pants off me. I fear that the universe will present me with one huge smack-down striking one of you ill or hurt or worse. Josefina (our Peruvian nanny) gave me a red bracelet for you to wear to ward off mal de ojo, but I just can’t get the darn thing to stay on! It is very stressful to be the mother of the World’s Most Beautiful Baby. Please remember this incredible stress I’ve gone through for you when you consider what nursing home to put me in.

Even more than the cats, which you chase around the house in that bumpy crawl, your brother is the light in your day. Dad and I can act goofy, making our voices hit ranges that would embarrass us to tears if heard by the outside world, and you’ll generally respond with a happy laugh. But Will… his mere presence is enough to put you into hysterics. We’d like to believe that the two of you share a special bond of understanding. We’ve heard that older siblings can translate the rough speak of younger ones into sounds that us old people can understand. Granna swears that Uncle Skip was practically mute until Kindergarten because I translated all of his whispers and signals with expert attention. We are waiting for Will to carry on in this tradition. You talk a lot… A LOT… and often say things with such conviction that the neighbors call to ask why we are torturing that poor woodland animal and please, for heaven sake, let it go! It would be wonderful to explain that no, we aren’t performing any sacrificial rituals, but just trying to figure out whether you’d like applesauce or bananas for breakfast. So when you say something like, “AAAAWWWGGGGHHHHHAAAAAA” we eagerly ask Will if he can tell us what you are saying. He takes each request seriously, focusing and clearing his throat to answer: “Baby Kate said ‘AAAAWWWGGGGHHHHHAAAAAA’”. I guess you two have some work to do on that sibling communication thing.

You should know that, at least during my childless days, I lived a life that generally did not accept the notion of fear. Having your brother gave me a decent sense of fear, but it wasn’t until you came along that the overwhelming, crippling sense of fear set in. I used to live in a dream bubble where the risks of the world were muted and dulled; I could convince myself that if we were to fly off a bridge and into water, I could somehow transform into AquaWoman, pulling your brother to safety. Your addition to the picture brought reality into my focus. My cape disappears when bridges are near. The fear of loosing one of you is crushing; somedays I wonder if it has the power to take over. My love for the two of you is unconditional and nontransferable. I used to think I could overcome anything. Now, I am much more aware of the limits to my heart.