The Texture Of Things

in the last two weeks, the tot has been eating all sorts of previously untried or non-preferred things. before i forget, here are some notes.

brand new:
buttered toast
marshmallows
open-faced peanut butter cracker sandwiches on graham crackers
my little pony fruit snacks
drinking out of an open top cup

with brand new fervor:
muffins
peanut butter cracker sandwiches (homemade)
frozen gogurt

what’s up with the sudden change? those of you who know me in real life may already know the answer to this. for the rest of you, care to make a guess?

ETA: OMFG!!1! Applesauce!

Dear Tater and Tot,

When you are old enough to wonder about these days, I want to be able to tell you about them.

Today, America changed. Today, America saw its first African American President Inaugurated. This is an important moment in our history because it is a first, a door opening for future Americans.

When you ask me where you were when it happened, I will tell you this. We were in our living room, watching it on tv. I had been walking Tater around to get him to settle into a nap while I listened to the coverage on the kitchen radio. Tot, you stayed home from preschool with a cold, so you were kneeling at the ottoman in your rainbow-striped jammies. When I asked you if you wanted to see it, you said yes.

“Barack Obama will become President today. Do you want to watch?”
“Yes.” So I turned off the kid shows and put on a news channel.

We watched a poet and a prayer and a performance and a President, and that was that.

While it was a momentous occasion, I didn’t make a big deal over it, my little ones, because I don’t want it to ever be a big deal that America can elect someone who isn’t white or male or a member of a major political party. I am glad that for the whole of your lives, a President who also happens to be a minority will simply be within normal limits. I am hopeful that by the time you are both voting age, what a person is will not matter as much as what she or he stands for, as it has so often in our past.

It is a good dream to have, for all of us.

Love,
Mama

Most of our lives, we go along thinking, “It could never happen to us,” and for the most part, it’s true. In fact, if you think about it, when we hear scary stories on the news, we may well think, “I don’t even know anyone that’s ever happened to.” Well, now you do.

Our house is filled with products that have been recalled due to the salmonella scare. Sure, many homes have Austin and Keebler peanut butter crackers in the cupboard as snacks, but in this house, pb crackers are on the tot’s plate every single lunch and dinner. They are in my purse for when we’re out and she needs to eat. They are in her lunch bag at the babysitter’s house. Peanut butter and peanut butter products are her main source of protein.

Has anyone in this house gotten sick from them? No. The tot and I have a cold, but that is the extent of any illness here. Still, it feels like every time I turn around I see a packet of crackers in the snack drawer here and a half-packet of crackers leftover on the table there and I snatch them up, feeling relieved that she didn’t see them and open them for herself in a fit of independence. (It does happen from time to time.) I have told her that we aren’t eating peanut butter crackers from packages right now, only homemade ones (which she resists), but she’s 4.5 and really it’s my job to be in charge of shielding her from potentially dangerous things.

I am left with a weird feeling as this story develops. Of all the food contamination scares we’ve had in the last few years, I never really worried about them. They were all detached and distant from my life because I didn’t eat those things. I mean, seriously? Spinach? C’mon. Who the hell eats spinach? But here, this feels a little too close.

The up side to this is that the tot is forced to eat more cheese crackers (which should help desensitize her to cheese flavors) and is being offered more chicken nuggets (though she hasn’t been eating them), but even consumption of those is down right now due to her cold. For now, it’s lots of fluids for us and a big dose of relief that at least jarred peanut butter is considered safe for the time being, if she decides she feels like eating.

Update below.

The last few days of my life with my daughter are evaporating before my eyes. There just isn’t enough time and she needs me so much right now. Of course, she needs me so much because of the impending change, but that’s logic and right now, logic plays a role in the chorus in this production while emotions take center stage.

Going to bed has been ever harder for the tot in the last half a year. Once she had gotten a good routine down for night-night, she’s almost always gone to bed easily. Some age-appropriate nonsense, but all do-able. The occasional struggle. The once-in-a-blue-moon stay awake for over an hour in there, cripes, will she just go to sleep already? Then she hit the age where imagination gets unwieldy and night shadows started to scare her. We developed a few coping strategies (an LED flashlight that can stay on all night and not get hot, a “game” of spraying monster repellent anywhere she deems necessary, and a reminder that monsters are in our imagination so the repellent really works), but those are not enough right now.

She has a new routine of getting very sad when it’s time to turn on the flashlight and turn out the story-reading lamp. She says she’s afraid. Afraid of what? I ask. She cannot tell me. We spray for monsters and I go to the door, where I’m hit with a long series of delays. “Wait, mama! Don’t go! Wait! I want to tell you something.”

“Tell me one thing,” I say.

She hems and haws and makes up a nonsensical tidbit. I keep my response short and to the point and turn to leave.

“Don’t go!” She closes her eyes and half-cries. “I’m having a bad dream!”

“You’re not asleep, so it cannot be a bad dream. Tell me what you are thinking about.”

“I’m scared!”

“Of what?”

But she can never name what she is scared of. She just wants to keep me there.

A week or two ago, I introduced an incentive program to reduce the incredible stalling and resistance that now accompanies the getting-ready-for-bed routine. If she could do it all and do it cooperatively, I’d lie down in bed with her. I knew this would be a great temptation since a sleeping companion is what she craves during the nights when she has nightmares. It worked a few times, but lately we are back to the resistance, so the first threat of loss of privilege is to lose the incentive. After that, I take away one story at a time, based on how much time she’s wasted. Last night, I saw that I might have the consequences weighted backwards.

She refused to get her jammies on repeatedly, until she lost the privilege of my lying down with her. When it came time for me to leave the room, we had the customary “I’m scared”/”Of what?” exchanges, and I told her to lie down and think happy, sleepy thoughts and I would be back in five minutes to check on her. (I always go back, sometimes in ten minutes, and she is always asleep, so it’s not like she’s having a simple case of the “can’t-turn-my-brain-off-for-sleep”.)

At about seven minutes post-promise, I went back there. I opened the door, and she didn’t stir. I waited to listen to her breathe, but it was so quiet that I couldn’t hear her. I saw her lovey positioned to fall off the bed, so I risked it and went all the way in to her bed.

When I moved her lovey to a more secure position, the tot grasped her more firmly and muttered in her sleep, “scared…. scared…”. Then she opened her eyes a bit, saw me, and sat up.

I couldn’t just leave, so I climbed in bed with her and told her to lie down, close her eyes, and keep breathing. How could I not?

I lay there while she drifted back into sleep and it dawned on me that the reason she cannot name what she is scared of is because she is scared of the unknown. But she’s four, so she doesn’t have the words for that yet. Crap, I’m thirty-five and I can’t always put my finger on it.

I lay there and thought about the presidential debate on tv in the other room. I thought about a baby who is coming, whom we don’t know, whom I can’t love until I meet him, and I thought about the world falling to pieces in a giant clusterfuck made worse by politics and who’s going to be left holding the remains? I thought about all the things that are going to happen and we just can’t know how hard it’s going to be until they get here, and I thought, I’m scared too, baby. I’m scared too.

I am holding on to the few days we have left as a family in this shape, waiting both eagerly and apprehensively for the change that is coming. It is a purgatory I never could have imagined until now.

Update.
I wrote this before anyone else in the house got up. When the tot got up, I asked her if she remembered waking up or me lying down in bed with her the night before, and – for better or for worse – she did not.

Recently, I took a peek at the search phrases that have led people to this blog, and one stood out to me. It regarded a small child’s aversion to the texture of sand. When I read it, I remembered a picture I have on my phone of the tot, playing happily in the sand pit at our local park for the first time. I recall the surge of happiness – sheer glee – I had that she was sitting in the sand and was happy. It was the month she turned two, and I had all but given up hope that she’d ever tolerate this activity that – it seemed – every other child in the world enjoyed and every other parent in the world took for granted. Ah, the relaxing moments sitting on a bench in the shade while the children scoop and dump and shape and smear and dig in the cool sand at the park. Would I ever get to be that parent? I wondered.

Seeing the search phrase popped me back to that time and I realized that I’m not sure I’ve fully appreciated the 30 minutes I can now sit while the tot plays in her sand cart this summer. How did we get here?

Whereas many parents can simply plunk their kid down in the sand pit and watch as the child seeks more information about this new tactile sensation, we did not enjoy such instantaneous success. Sand was just not appealing to her. Too gritty, perhaps? Too wobbly under her feet? Too unpredictable? I mean, this stuff gets everywhere! When I’d take her to the park’s sand pit, until that day in late June, she did not want to walk on it, touch it, play in it, explore it. No no no, no no no bad.

So, looking back, I have some observations about what worked to get her past that early aversion to sand.

First, she had had some positive experiences with sand the summer before. (Before this, her only exposure to sand was at the park.) We were driving to a friend’s cabin in another state, and along the way we stopped at a state park beach. The tot walked in the sand with her daddy and eventually sat in the sand and pawed through it to examine the occasional tiny shell. What was different about that sand? Several things come to mind:

* the beach sand had a much smoother feel to it (i.e., it was less gritty), due probably to smaller overall size of the grains
* the beach sand had a fairly even consistency, in that it was sand and a few small shells, unlike the sand at the park, which has lots of rocks, twigs, leaves, etc., in it
* the temperature of the beach sand was warm, but not hot, unlike the sand at the park, which is cool (and the tot did not like cold)
* we all felt relief to be out of the car – it was a looonng drive – so we were craving different sensory input
* the beach population was less dense than the park is, so we could easily have our own space and ignore other patrons and focus solely on our own experience (and the tot did/does sometimes get overwhelmed by throngs of people)

What I take away from this is that to have success introducing a texture-averse kid to sand is to back up and see the whole scene. What else could be raising the child’s anxiety about the situation? If you can control or change that variable, will the child be more open to the texture?

Second, the day the tot sat in the sand pit and had fun, I had lowered my expectations. I didn’t expect her to play in the sand for more than a few seconds, so I let her keep her socks and shoes on, in spite of the general dread I had about getting the sand off of her when it came time to leave. How much sand could it really be if she was going to hit the sand and immediately bail? Not much, right?

Ha ha ha – WRONG. (Given the success, that’s all right.)

I’m sure it was more than just one thing that led to success, but I can’t discount the possibility that having her feet and some of her legs covered made a difference. Instead of having to manage the sensory input from hands, arms, legs and feet, she only needed to focus on tactile input from the skin on her hands and arms. (And as I think about it, judging from the picture, I’ll bet it was not breezy that day, so that was one less tactile input she needed to cope with.)

What I take away from this is a question I should ask myself more often: what coping mechanisms can we offer to help the child manage on her/his own? If the child becomes overwhelmed by too much of a tactile experience, how can we block some of it in order to prevent the child from shutting down completely? In this case, the solution was – in part – to cover more of the body. Fine. If the tot wants to keep her shoes on in the sand box, I can live with that if the outcome is she plays happily and has a healthy experience. And what I’ve discovered in the last two years is that if I grant her the choice to keep shoes on or take them off in the sand, she will take them off once she’s had a chance to relax and get into what she’s doing. The shoes help her cope at the beginning, and when she no longer needs the shield, she will set it aside. Nowadays, it doesn’t take very long to get to this point.

At occupational therapy, the OT uses a similar coping strategy to get the tot to eat frozen g0gurts. The tot does want to lick it and play with it, but she does not want to hold something that cold. The strategy: wrap a napkin around it. Same thing goes for foods like string cheese. When the OT first offered her string cheese, the tot wanted to join the OT in playing with it, but she didn’t want to hold it. Fine. The OT wrapped a napkin around it, and the tot was no longer troubled by the feel of the cheese. Since then, she will pick the cheese right up without the napkin. (Tasting it is an entirely other matter, however.)

One key thing to remember about exposing a child to a challenging thing in small doses might be that we cannot always control the physical size of the dose; rather, it might be making the dose seem more manageable, or smaller. Time is one such constraint we can (often) control in this way. As in, “Hey, here’s a sand pit. Check it out. Oooh, sand. Okay, you’re done? Fine, we’ll move on to the slides and visit the sand later.” I find if I allow the tot this much control, she will return to it in time, more open to the sensory experience. On the other hand, although the exposure doesn’t last long, the overall desensitization takes a while because the exposures must take place across time.

So, even though the beach was not a small place, by any stretch of the imagination, the dose (challenge) was smaller there for the tot than at the local sand pit because certain variables like texture consistency, temperature, and spatial pressure did not push the tot’s tolerance as far as the park experiences had.

In case a parent of a sand-averse child happens to find this, there are two other points not related to dose size that I want to mention here. The first is the importance of lowered expectations and the second is the importance of role models.

I can’t say for certain that the day I let go of my desire for the tot to like playing in sand played any part in her moving through her issues, but it certainly made it easier for me. And a more relaxed mommy makes for a happier family. At least, in this house I think that’s true. But to let go of that desire I had to accept – truly, deep down, accept – that it’s okay for her to not like a sandbox. In fact, I often have to remind myself that not everyone likes everything. Some stuff she’s just not going to enjoy. Okay. That’s fine. I admit that many of my expectations for her are based solely on cultural expectations – like, all kids like pizza, or all kids fingerpaint. You know what? When it comes to kids, there is no “all.”

As for role models, I cannot ignore the positive influence our next-door neighbor children have had on the tot, particularly in the area of sand play. They have a sandbox in their yard, and the kids in that family are not at all bothered by messes, sand in every crevice, or things mixed in with the sand. They have acted as ambassadors, in a way, demonstrating how kids deal with and enjoy sand, even what to do when playing in the sand just isn’t fun anymore.

Would role models alone have made the difference for the tot? No, I don’t think so, just as I find certain advice for parents of picky eaters incomplete. Hey – you might be able to put a new food in front of your children ten or twelve times and find your children will try it and, if the heavens are smiling on you, decide they like it, but that is not my kid. And when I tell you I do it and it’s not enough for my kid – she just needs more exposures and sometimes that doesn’t even matter – don’t smile, nod, and tell me it’ll happen because a kid won’t starve herself, because that is statistically untrue. There are some kids – about 4% – who will starve themselves, however inadvertently. [scroll down past bullet list.]

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. Expose, expose, expose. When something is so hard that she shuts down, contain the challenge and help the tot manage and cope, then let her do it herself and on her own terms. And measure the successes we have with a smile.

No, I have not had the baby yet. That is not the close call.

This morning, the tot stayed home from preschool with the ever-beloved pink-eye. While we were sorting laundry in my bedroom, I noticed a gift box I had forgotten about. In it was a blanket and woobie for the baby. The tot saw the woobie and wanted to claim it. I reminded her it was for the baby and besides, she already had two identical woobies from when she was a baby. I fetched* them from the closet and reclaimed the new ones.

On an aside, I happened to mention that I want to have the blanket and woobie embroidered with the baby’s name, and instantly the tot determined that her woobie needs her name on it.

:sigh:
Of course, child – you can have your name on your woobie, too.

(Look, it’s not like I’m paying for it – my mom does it – so all’s equitable in love and embroidery, in this house anyway.)

So, because my mom was stopping by for other stuff today and because my four-year-old has a one-track mind (she gets it from her father or she’s 4, I’m not sure which plays a stronger role in this) and because I’m just trying to get every loose end tied up before the baby comes, I met my mother at the door with the woobies and blanket for names. I was all, Please take them TODAY. NO WAITING ALLOWED.

Cue HG’s scream of despair.

Why despair? Because we have an agreement that we will not reveal the newbie’s name until said newbie is born.

Happily, however, I had a moment of clarity and did not give the baby’s blanket and woobie to my mother. As a matter of fact, I believe I said, “Oh. I can’t give you these yet because I’m not telling you the name.”

She was, to say the very very least, bummed that I didn’t slip up.** But, for now anyway, our secret remains safe.

Whew.

*Is it just me, or does it seem like the past participle for “fetch” should be “fought”? Just me? I thought so.

**Why do we have this policy? Because the people in our life are relentlessly critical people who take every chance they can get to tell a pair of parents to be why the name they’ve chosen is terrible and why they must change it to – and then they provide a list of “acceptable” names. Keeping the name a secret until the child’s birth does not, as we learned with the tot, prevent all the mean and hurtful statements about the name in question, but it does make it harder to fall prey to their demands to change it to – oh god, anything but that. I highly recommend the method, but I do caution that it doesn’t prevent every possible complaint.

As I read Hedra’s recent post, I was reminded of something. It wasn’t the main point of the post at all – far from it – but her mention of her son remembering a hurt, a broken promise, from two years ago made me remember something the tot told me a month ago.

We were driving to see my mom in the hospital. It was a week or so before the tot’s birthday. I knew at this point that there would be no big family/friend birthday party for the tot because the logistics of it were just too difficult with my mom in the hospital for an indefinite stay. (Turns out it was short, but we couldn’t predict at that point.) I rationalized that hey, she’s four. She had a big party last year for her third birthday where we rented a pony party place owned by the family of a friend of mine. She doesn’t need a big party every year, especially with a sibling on the way. How on earth would we afford that for two kids, let alone just one? So, I chose to let her daycare caregiver have a little lunch party for her at day care on the day after her birthday.

FWIW, even in hindsight, I think this was the right choice, and that’s saying something for me. I often overthink, rethink, and regret the way my choices played out. It’s the doubter and the perfectionist in me. But this worked. She had fun, she had several friends with her, she got presents, and she had a regular “Happy Birthday” cake, song, and dance. She had the birthday experience.

But I’m skipping ahead. What I was reminded of came before the party.

We were driving to the hospital and we were talking about the party, which would take place the following week. I had been telling her about it, narrative style, so she’d know what to expect. “On Thursday, the day after your birthday, you’re going to go to L’s.”

“And I’m gonna have a party?”

“Right. You’ll get there, and you’ll hang out with your buddies, and –”

“And I’ll get presents?”

“–and your party will be at lunch time. I don’t know what you’ll do first. Maybe you’ll have some lunch –”

“And cupcakes!”

“– and cupcakes, and they’ll sing you ‘Happy Birthday’ –”

“Ooh! Can I wear my tiara?”

“Absolutely you get to wear the birthday tiara!”

“And I’ll get presents!”

“There might be some presents for you. It is entirely possible.”

And there was much smiling and happy wiggly dancing from the booster in the back seat.

She got quiet for a second and then she said, “When I was at my party and there was a pony there and I felled off.”

What happened in my head went a little like this:

Uncertainty: What? [Replaying the sounds in my head. I hear Matter of Fact, not Distress.]
Fact-check: She’s right!
Realization: Holy crap, she remembers falling off the pony at last year’s birthday party, when she was THREE.

ALERT! ALERT! RESPOND! SAY SOMETHING OUT LOUD!

“That’s right, tot. You did. Do you remember what else happened?”

Work the narrative, work the narrative.

“I had a party and there was a pony and I felled off.”

It was all I could get from her, but I had the hunch she remembered more than that, so I offered up some narrative to see if she’d fill in any gaps.

“You had a party at K’s grandma’s farm and everyone got to ride on a pony.”

“And I falled off!”

“Daddy put you on the pony and you sat in the saddle. A lady walked the pony and you rode it!”

“And then I slipped and I falled off.”

“You slipped and Daddy was there and he shouted and the lady turned around and caught you.”

“She catched me and I didn’t get hurt!”

Oh good, she did remember that part, but boy, what a long memory for a four-year-old.

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I let this conversation roll around in my head for a while and then I guess I forgot about it until I read about Hedra’s son. When it came back to me, it came as a flash, complete with sensory and emotional information – how warm it was in the car, how bright it was that afternoon, how it was mostly quiet with the windows only cracked and the sunroof open, how tired I felt and how I wished I could just be driving home from picking her up from daycare.

It came with a further-back memory, one from her infancy, when I was fascinated and a little obsessed with what would be the tot’s first memory. When she is older, what will she remember about being little? How far back will her memory go? Would it be happy, sad, or matter-of-fact? Tied to this is my memory of a conversation with the director of the daycare center I first took the tot to when she was 14 months old. I had been concerned about how well she would nap there, how long it would take her to adapt to the disparate sets of rules and expectations, and how hard that would be if she was only there two days a week. The director laughed me off. She said, “She’ll do fine! They can remember so much!”

This intrigued me, naturally, because of my interest in memory. “Really? You think so?”

“Oh, they remember everything!”

This, actually, was not what I needed to hear. For me, having a daughter has made me replay memories from my childhood and it’s driven me to share and grow closer with my mom, but it seems like every time I have shared with my mom a childhood memory involving her, she puts a negative spin on it or is aghast that I would remember her “as such a horrible person!” Which is strange to me because I have never deliberately shared memories that I felt portrayed her in a bad light. They exist, I just didn’t share them. Still, I tend to leave these interactions with my mom with a heaviness in my heart. This pattern with my mom was just developing when my conversation with the daycare director happened, and my core reaction was “Oh no! She [the tot] will remember every mistake I make!”

Of course I overreacted. The tot will surely remember mistakes I make, but not every one. And she will remember good stuff, too, things that I don’t even realize are settling with her as happy moments. Moveover, unlike three years ago, I know this is how it is supposed to be. Every human makes mistakes and wonders at some point if that’s one that’s gonna come back to rear its ugly head later. And every human gets stuff right that means more to someone else than they will ever fully know. The hard part for me when I was feeling too incapable to be an adult in charge of raising a little lump of mush was letting go and being okay with making mistakes.

The lesson I work to integrate into every day is that I cannot always be consumed with my child’s future memory of me because if I am, I will miss the now. I will miss her childhood and my parenthood. I will never be able to enjoy the incredible life that is right in front of me. As a doubter and a perfectionist, this is really, really hard. Thank goodness I have such good motivation.

She picked that swimsuit out, not me. So if she comes back in 10 years complaining about how I dressed her, I would like it known that I tried to redirect her several times but she would NOT budge. She HAD to have THIS suit.

Yesterday morning the tot and I were on a timeline. We reached the point on the clock when I needed to get into the shower, but I faced a potential problem. I had neglected to intercept the upcoming television show. (The tot and I have a deal: she can watch a show while I shower as long as she has pottied and is generally amiable, and such.) As soon as I saw the story’s set up, I knew this episode would be too emotional for her, but I was unable to convince her that another show would be better. She was determined to watch this particular episode – the story of a young Hispanic girl and her primate sidekick as they struggle through obstacles to return a sad, fallen star to its home.

I knew what would happen if I didn’t come up with something – she would come barrelling in to my bathroom crying, wanting me to get out and change the channel, and that so totally wasn’t happening because every fortnight or so Mama’s gotta shave, ya know?

Now, I often struggle with on-the-spot problem solving, but I saw that I needed to come up with something. The only thing I could think of was that she needed to be in charge of finding another show when this one went inevitably bad. But how to do this in absentia?

Ah, the “LAST” button. Good ol’ Lasty. How could I forget you?

I skimmed the descriptions of the other shows, located one that was more or less safe, and changed the channel there and back. Then I showed her the remote and we spent a quick moment sounding out and reading the word “LAST”. Fortunately the LAST button is easy to find on our remote. I explained how it would take her to the other show if she decided she didn’t want to watch the current show any longer. (She’s had enough experience sitting on and activating other buttons on the remote that I trusted she understood the pointing and pressing aspects involved.) When she seemed to either understand or want me gone or both, I reminded her where she could find me if she needed me, and I was off to sharpen and employ the blades.

For the record, I didn’t actually expect it to work, especially on the first try, but it was worth a go.

Imagine my delight at being nearly done in the shower when in came the tot, not crying but cheering for herself at her great accomplishment. “Mama! Mama! I’m watching [Safe Show Title]! [Insert plot description here]!”

Holy crap. What a lovely shower for me, what a lovely take-charge moment for the tot.

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I wanted to put that story here for a couple of reasons. The first is because I hope for it to be a reminder that my assessment of the tot as “usually sensitive” is based on a pattern of behavior. It’s not like that show is particularly scary or sad or violent; the tot’s threshold just seems to be set a little lower than other kids her age. That’s fine because it’s who she is. So, “sensitive” is not a label she needs to know. When I’m talking to her or about her in public, I try to use less permanent wording, like “Are you feeling shy?” or “When you’re ready you can go play with so-and-so on the teeter-totter.” That said, when it comes down to it, she tends to be a cautious, sometimes reluctant child. (And let’s be honest here, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree, and all. I am also sensitive, so whether it is her inherent nature or learned behavior or a blend is not an answerable question. It simply is, so we just live as we are.)

The second is because I also want to remember a related story from my composition classroom that I might otherwise forget.

I tell this story as a part of the idea generation phase of an expository writing assignment called “Explaining an Abstract Concept.” My students usually have a hard time coming up with an idea – I think the word “abstract” confuses them. Add to that the instruction that they must explain one way of understanding the abstract concept in concrete terms and they feel like tarring and feathering me tomorrow at high noon. So we try to come up with abstract words and then we try to talk through examples of experiences that lead us to certain ways of seeing the terms. Their initial ideas are almost always too complicated and not nearly concrete enough, so I offer them a story about how my daughter (the tot) taught me about what it means to have or not have power.

HG and I agreed early on that we were going to restrict the tot’s early access to the remote controls. How we came to this, I don’t know, but it made sense to us and we were happy with that. The tot, however, reached an age (14 months, maybe?) when she became driven to get ahold of the remote. What she wanted to do with it, I cannot say, but she wanted it soooooo much.

HG and I found ourselves pressured by (especially) our mothers to either let the tot have it or to provide the tot with one that was okay to play with. My mother even went out of her way to ask my extended family members if anyone had one from an old TV set that they didn’t have anymore, specifically so she could give it to the tot.

Something about this didn’t set right with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just knew I did not want it: no, I didn’t care if it had no batteries; no, I didn’t care if any potential choking hazard buttons had been removed – the tot simply would not be allowed to have access to a remote control until she was older.

I found myself one evening at school, getting ready to teach my night class and sharing my frustration with a colleague, who had just had her second child four months before I had the tot. When I got to the part about my puzzlement over what my hunch was trying to tell me, she laughed a big, out loud laugh.

“It’s because you know it won’t work anyway!”

I stared, blankly I’m sure.

“Well, it would work for a while,” she said, “until your daughter realizes that it doesn’t do anything. If it has no power (batteries or buttons), then it has no power.”

I continued to stare, blankly I’m sure.

“Why else would she want the remote to begin with?”

Of course. At fourteen months, she had no idea what the remote control did; she only cared about what it stood for: power. And what else is a toddler after but power?

What else are any of us after but power?

As I drove home that night after class, I thought about power – the power in my home, the power in my family (immediate and extended), the power in my world. I remembered what one of my earliest graduate professors had said about power – that it’s transient, it shifts, it’s like energy in that it changes shape and location but is never destroyed.

In the beginning of our family, HG and I held most of the power. (Not all of it, though. A newborn has a lot of power, if you think about it. We offer it up to a baby when we agree to feed on demand, when we begrudgingly stay awake with a little one in the wee hours of the night, and so on.) We made the rules about what she could play with, about when we would leave the house or stay in, about what food was offered, about what she wore, etc. Most of these things she didn’t have an opinion on for a long time, and her drive to get the remote was the emergence of her desire to have a say in the decisions that governed her life.

I realized something that I often forget since that night. If we are going to raise a child to feel comfortable in her own skin, in her world, we have to be aware of the way power shifts between us. We have to be reasonable about letting her have power when the time is right, or close to right, like yesterday. And the shift can come in steps and stages. She’s not going to go from being a kid with little to no power and/or little to no desire for power to an adult prepared to wield it if she doesn’t have some practice first. Letting her practice, get it right and mess it up is a cornerstone of parenting.

Needless to say, of course, is that releasing power is hard, even when you know it’s the right thing to do. It wasn’t hard to hand the tot the remote yesterday, though, because she was more than ready and I was finally there, too. When she figures out how to change it from the Weather Channel to anime or teenage soap operas, well, that’ll be the real test, won’t it?

We are gutting our house of months and months of filth and years and years of disorganization, and hopefully when we are done, the tot will have her own room and Dos will have a room and those rooms will be clean.

Shut up. A girl can dream.

Along the way to utopia, we decided to buy the tot a new chest of drawers, except we can’t find anything we like that is not made of fiberboard, which I do not (NOT!) want. So, the old dresser needed to go into the new room (yellow) until we can find something and until HG gets Dos’ room painted.

And because I can’t just move a dresser without cleaning and rearranging the drawer contents (Hey – I’m nesting. Back off.), I found a lovely little prize in the back of the sock drawer. It was the page of notes that I put together to take to the doctor for the tot’s 12-months well-child check up.

Seeing as how I don’t really keep a baby book, like, at all, I thought I’d put the info here. As I find more of these gems, I’ll add them as well. Hidden gems, because this is exactly how I kept all my notes about the tot – jot them down, shove the paper somewhere where I won’t lose it.
A ha ha, ha ha, hm.

On this page of notes, I had included a blended list of gross motor, fine motor, and social skills to date; the list of words the tot could say; a layout of her ideal/daily diet; and questions I’m sure I didn’t ask because there are no answers listed.

“cruises, crawls, points, pulls self to standing, wants to climb higher, tantrums, walks with your hands for balance, claps hands, can sit down from standing, stands briefly, has taken steps.”

What’s interesting to me is that I could swear up and down that the tot never crawled until after she walked, and we certainly don’t have any video of her crawling, but I wouldn’t have written that if she didn’t ever do it. Also, tantrums? That’s adorable. She’s four now – whatever I thought when she was putting up her miniature protests at 12 months, I don’t know, but my definition of “tantrum” is seriously different now.

“Hi
Duck
Dada
Wow
Mama
So
Bal. ([for] Balloon)
No
Sock ([pronunciation] ~sahz or ~sha)
Baby ([pronunciation] ~bebe)
Shoe ([pronunciation] ~shets or ~sha)
That ([pronunciation] ~dat)
Got it
Did it”

As soon as I saw this list, I remembered two things.
1. Although the list is in no particular order, “Hi” was her first word and “Duck” was her second. For a while, “Duck” meant “Toy” and gradually became just “duck”.
2. When she said “Wow”, she used her whole face. It was a big sound and her face matched the connotation. “WOW.”

“Bfast bottle 6 oz.
Bfast II:
1/2 serving cereal
1/2 jar fruit (incl. iron)
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

Lunch:
1 – 1.5 jars veggies
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

*occasionally a snack 1/2 serv. cereal

Dinner:
1/2 – 1 jar veggie
1/2 – 1 jar fruit (incl. iron)
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

*occasionally a snack 1/2 serv. cereal

Bedtime bottle 6 oz.

**Doesn’t take all the milk I offer in a day”

And I’m sure that, like the milk, the food amounts shown were what I offered – not necessarily what she consumed.

What I want to remember from this is that at 12 months, she was still on iron supplements twice a day, and I thought by 12 months she was down to once a day. I guess that wasn’t until 15 months. The iron supplements were in response to her severe anemia, discovered at her 9-month well-child check up. When they do a CBC, the hemoglobin number should be between either 9 and 11 or 10 and 12 – I can’t remember. The tot’s was 6.4. The specialists said if it had been 6 even or below, they’d have transfused her instead of putting her on oral supplements.

While no parents wish for their child to be sicker than s/he actually is, I do wish that I would have asked them to consider a transfusion anyway. I know, though, that I never would have pressed for a transfusion because it sounded too scary to me at the time. I couldn’t allow myself to think of my wee baby going through something that I imagined would be like the vivisection scenes from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

And, of course, I couldn’t know at the time how trying months and months of delivering and coercing the consumption of supplements that taste like a mouthful of rusty nails would be, nor could I know at the time what potential influence those iron supplements at the same time we were finally getting somewhere with the introduction of solid foods would be. In short, if it happens with Dos, I am determined to research transfusions before just jumping in with oral supplements.

Srsly.

I’m going to leave off the questions, mostly because they are cryptic, but I will add that the other day I was going through baby clothes, and I found the outfit the tot wore on her first birthday. I mis-remembered that as well. Whereas I had thought it was a size 9-12 months outfit, it was not. It was a size 6-9 months, and it was baggy. Size 6-9 months. Thinking about it now, that sounds about right.

This week, the tot has gone from not pedaling her trike to pedaling her trike everywhere. She has had this trike for over a year – what the hell happened this week that triggered the change?

In the beginning I thought she didn’t pedal because she didn’t get how it worked and/or her legs were too short to reach. In some ways that was true, but she grew and still she didn’t pedal.

A couple of weeks ago, HG chased us outside, put the tot on her trike (complete with parent handle bar), and we went for a walk around the neighborhood. The tot was clearly excited, so I blew off the fact that she cannot steer. She just does not get it, which surprised me since she knows left from right. Watching her that day, I thought the missing piece of that puzzle seemed to be hand-eye coordination.

The next week, I took her with me to a local camping and hiking store so that I could buy into the hysteria. We were just barely through the door when the tot saw the bicycles and insisted on riding one. I took her to a miniature bike (12″ wheel, with training wheels), and she climbed on. She desparately wanted to ride this bike, but she could barely get the pedals to turn. She simply didn’t have enough mass or strength to make it move, so I pushed her around the aisle, much to her delight. In that moment, I thought maybe the missing piece was not hand-eye, but power, and perhaps the struggle for forward motion interfered with her ability to steer.

BTW, she had her first in-store, public crying tantrum fit when I told her (for the fiftieth time, as we were leaving) that no, we were not taking the bike home with us, but maybe she’ll get one for her birthday. She really wanted that bike. She still reminds me of it any time we talk about bikes.

So then yesterday, actually, the day before yesterday, I took her for a short walk and on the way up the driveway, she started pedaling – really pedaling. What she figured out that day escapes me. Was it the coordination or simply the knowledge that she can do it – she can make her body do it?

Whatever it was, yesterday something clicked in both her head and body. We were at the Occupational Therapy Center for an evaluation (more on that in another post), and at the start of the session, she was encouraged to play in the indoor playground. One of the things they offer there is a path and a huge choice of wheeled things to ride on. The tot hopped on and tooled through the place like she’s been doing it for a year. First a strange two-footed pedaling device, then a trike, then a two-wheeler with training wheels. What’s more is she steered. Accurately. Without crashing.

WTF? Where is my daughter and what have you done with the pod?

We got home, and she started up on her trike like she’s preparing for a cross-county ride. The transformation is amazing and awesome, but weird.

I foresee a lot of outdoor time this summer, don’t you?

At the very least, this experience is a good reminder that whenever I get frustrated with the tot being stuck at a level of competence in something, or when I completely give up and say something like “So she’ll go to college in pull ups – I’m fine with that”, she bursts through it. Her pace is not my pace, and I need to remember that. She’ll get it, by and by.