Sunday, November 28, 2010
I don't know if we'll be convincing anyone to come back to our place for Thanksgiving dinner next year
Thanksgiving, a few short hours before all hell broke loose
Wednesday
Things started innocently enough. Around 2am on Wednesday morning, we awoke to the sound of Sadie crying -- as she sometimes does if she has a nightmare or is just out of sorts. I sent Scott in to put her back to sleep, and a few moments later I heard:
"AMANDA I NEED YOU."
I came in to see a miserable baby, covered in puke from head to toe. I changed her clothes and diaper while Scott changed out the dirty crib sheet and her blanket for clean spares; we briefly debated what might be the problem, and I remembered that two days earlier at the indoor playroom, I'd caught her licking plastic balls in the ball pit. A stomach bug seemed the likely culprit. We soothed her, gave her a pacifier, put her down and went back to bed.
A few minutes later, this process was repeated all over again. From that point on we resigned ourselves to a sleepless night. Sadie was up every fifteen minutes, then every twenty, then finally only every hour. (We stopped trying to clean her up pretty quickly -- what's the point of mopping up infant puke at 3am when you know it'll be making a reappearance the minute you leave the room?)
And we seriously discussed canceling Thanksgiving. This, we worried, would be disastrous. Not only did we have his parents, my parents, my sister and her husband, and my elderly grandparents coming over, all with dishes of their own, but our house was packed to the rafters with food. We'd bought a deep fryer, for Christ's sake. There was no contingency plan for shifting the holiday somewhere else -- if it didn't happen at our house, it probably wasn't going to happen.
Thursday
Luckily by 9am, Sadie seemed largely over her illness. She was tired and not very hungry, but her mood was fine. We spoke with her doctor. "Yup, sounds like a stomach bug," he said.
"Is she contagious?"
"Well, could be, but chances are that whatever virus she's fighting, you've already had at some point in your life. You'll probably be fine."
We consulted with everyone in the family, and the consensus was, "Don't cancel Thanksgiving -- we'll just keep the baby at a distance."
"No problem -- she'll probably be asleep by the time you all arrive, anyway."
She wasn't, of course. And naturally, people wanted to hold her and snuggle her. She's going through an especially cute phase right now in which she wants to hug and snuggle everyone, and come on -- are you going to reject a fourteen month old baby's hug, you heartless bastard? I fucking dare you. So she did a lot of hugging, and then passed out, and dinner proceeded well without incident.
Better than well, actually -- it was great. Scott deep-fried a turkey for the first time this year, and after all of my worrying (that we were going to start a gas fire and burn the house down because they showed it on the news and BOILING OIL IS NOTHING TO MESS AROUND WITH, SCOTT, SO STOP MAKING JOKES ABOUT DEEP FRYING COOKIES JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT), the end result was a flawless, juicy, garlic butter-infused bird. My butternut squash casserole and creamed spinach were well received, my mother-in-law's legendary stuffing was as big a hit as ever, and the rest of the family did a heroic job of supplying rolls, pie, homemade cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and everything else we had no time to put together on our own.
We intentionally made and requested too much of everything, the point being to have enough leftovers for everyone. Not a single party walked out the door without a shopping bag of packed-full Tupperware at the end of the night. Our own refrigerator was stuffed so full that we were storing leftovers in the crisper and on the butter shelf. We made plans to hit the market the next day for lettuce and tomatoes so we could eat turkey sandwiches, and envisioned grand plans for eating stuffing for breakfast four days in a row before finally, reluctantly beginning our unavoidable post-Thanksgiving diet.
Friday
We were not as hungry as we'd imagined we'd be. That feeling of fullness continued for me all day, and after a plate of leftovers for dinner I was actually left feeling...kind of gross. The thought of dessert was not appealing, but there was so much food in the house (even after our cleaning lady came and took an entire pumpkin pie home with her) that I ate a couple of cookies, just to clean out some space.
By bedtime Friday night, my stomach was in knots. "I think I might be getting sick," I told Scott, then went to sleep and hoped for the best. The best did not come. It was a long night. I spent most of it in the bathroom and shivering under the covers on the couch with a wastebasket next to me. Two thoughts carried me through:
Thought #1: At least I'm not going to gain any weight this weekend.
Thought #2: When Scott gets up, I am going back to bed and claiming a sick day.
At 6am, he staggered into the living room and looked at me. "What, exactly, were you feeling last night?" he asked.
"Stomach pain...and then nausea."
He sighed, closed his eyes, groaned softly, and went back to bed.
So much for claiming a sick day.
Saturday
This day is largely a blur. Here are a couple of snapshots:
7am: I text my sister to warn her that whatever Sadie had was catching. She reports back that she has already been up barfing all night, thank you very much, so I can take my warning and shove it.
9am: I'm on the couch, willing myself to move, staring dully at the television. Scott's lying on Sadie's play mat on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. Sadie's crawling around cheerfully. "This is what it must be like for babies whose parents are crackheads," Scott says.
10am: Both of our babysitters have politely declined our pleas to come over and take care of Sadie while we lock ourselves in the bedroom. My mom has offered to come over and help, but you can tell she's hoping we'll tell her not to bother. Instead, we put Sadie down for a forced nap and struggle back into bed for another hour.
12pm: I'm not longer throwing up, but I have a fever and have wrapped myself in blankets. Scott emerges from the bedroom in sweatpants and a hoodie, with the hood around his ears.
12:30pm: I feed Sadie the only lunch I can prepare without losing it: cut-up grapes, a slice of cheese and cheerios. So much for leftovers.
1pm: The room fills with the smell of poop, as Sadie smiles brightly. Scott and I look at each other. He says softly, "I can't. I just...can't. Please don't make me." I get changing duty instead.
2pm: From Scott's mother's house comes the report that her husband is the latest casualty.
3pm: Repeated calls to my parents reassure me that neither they nor my grandparents have exhibited any signs of illness, thank goodness. Scott now has the fever, although mine has broken and I'm starting to feel better.
6:30pm: At long last Sadie is down for bed, and we have returned to some semblance of feeling human again. Every time we open the refrigerator to see the tubs and tubs of leftovers, we groan and shut the door again. Instead Scott brings home Chicken McNuggets and fries, which we pick at.
7pm: One final round of calls and text messages reveals that yes, my mother and father are now both sick, and so is my sister's husband, which means that the only Thanksgiving attendees who didn't get ill were my 90 year old grandparents -- who apparently are also superheroes. "I know you feel bad now, but it passes quickly!" we tell everyone, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the fact that they spent their holiday in a germ-infested house of horrors and will probably never be able to look at stuffing again.
Sunday
Feeling much better. Only...
Those damn leftovers.
Screw it. Tonight we're ordering Italian.
Monday, November 22, 2010
The Nanny Diaries, Pt. 2
Monday, November 22, 4:30pm
Note to readers -- before reading this entry, if you don't like spoilers, you might want to catch yourself up here.
Oh my God, Diary.
Right now, I'm wondering something. I'm wondering why our family was cursed when it comes to childcare.
Seriously, what's the deal? Did we piss off an omnipotent nanny in a former life? We've never found a sitter we liked who didn't up and move to another country within three months (it's happened twice now). Our baby was expelled from day care. And now...now this.
When I finally got in touch with Agency Owner, I had a mouthful to tell her.
I'd gone over each invoice, and what I'd discovered had only added to the dismay I was already feeling. To reiterate, we'd previously agreed on a schedule of 25 hours each week. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she works from 8am-1pm. On Thursdays, the days I work at my grandfather's office, that schedule shifts to 11am-4pm.
Our nanny was not only logging each day she'd begun work at 7:30am -- she was consistently tacking on hours to the back end. While leaving each day at 1pm, she was reporting having left at 2:30pm, or 3:30pm, or 5pm.
On one particular Thursday, she still logged having arrived at 7:30 and reported her departure time as 5 -- a total of 9.5 hours of work.
The following day, she reported arriving at 7:30am and leaving at 3:30pm.
The Monday following -- 7:30am, 3:30pm.
Owner was stunned when I told her. "There must be a miscommunication," she insisted. She explained her method of tracking hours: each of her nannies, 30+ in all, are instructed to send her a text message each day when they leave their employer's house, reporting how many hours they've worked that day. Once a week, a courier makes the rounds with invoices, meeting each nanny at her place of business and having her sign off on the previous week's invoice. She claimed it had been a fail safe method for years, that to date she'd never had a problem with it.
"Maybe you can sit down and talk with her about it, to work things out," she suggested.
And me, Little Miss Nice Girl, for once I was not tempted to back down. This was not 30 minutes here and there we were haggling over -- it was hours of extra time. Every day.
I told her I did not want the nanny back to our house ever again. And I wanted our house key returned. The Owner, clearly upset, told me she'd look into the matter and call me back.
The last time ties were severed with a childcare provider, it hit me pretty hard. When Bunny Day Care called me up that day to tell me that they could not longer take care of my daughter, that I needed to come pick her up immediately, my response was tears, humiliation, worry. This time was different. It was on MY terms. We'd been taken advantage of, and that was humiliating, sure -- but this time, it was me calling the shots, bringing the situation to light. I'd felt I couldn't trust her, though I didn't know exactly why, and now that feeling was being validated. I felt almost jubilant.
I walked Sadie to the park. Everything was in vibrant focus. I called our sitter, asked her if she'd be willing to begin full-time nanny duties immediately. She agreed.
At the park, Sadie played with a six year old boy who was gentle and sweet with her, but concerned over her inability to speak. His mother explained that he was autistic, that he himself hadn't begun to speak until he was four year old, that she'd been receiving help through the Regional Center for years and only recently had stopped beating herself up over aspects of life as a parent that she'd realized were simply out of her control. It brought me back to the days when I was sick with worry over Sadie and her development, feeling helpless, powerless, stupid. Now I'd learned that this, along with sleepless nights and teething and potentially unethical nannies, was only one of a bucketful of unexpected curveballs that new parenthood throws at you.
On the way back home, Agency Owner called me back.
"Well, you were right," she said. "And I feel sick about it. Do you want to know how I caught her?"
"How?"
"I got a text from her an hour ago, reporting that she worked from 7:30am-3:30pm today." She paused. "I knew that wasn't true, because you and I had our conversation at 1:30pm, and she obviously wasn't there."
"She left at 1pm today." I listened to her go on for awhile, telling me how she'd called back my nanny and asked her about the discrepancy. The first excuse given was that she'd sent the text at 1pm, but that it hadn't come through until 3:30. The second was that she'd "forgotten her glasses" and mistakenly typed 3:30pm instead of 1.
She doesn't wear glasses.
She maintained her innocence, claiming that my mother and I were setting up a new company, requiring her to work extra hours, all of which had been approved.
Ultimately, the excuses were meaningless. I don't believe she's a bad person. I believe she's a lazy person who chose to take advantage of an opportunity when it presented itself. Each week, when she wasn't called out for the previous week's fudged hours, she saw an opportunity to fudge a few additional hours in the week to come. Each week, my own laziness prevented me from checking that email which would have alerted me to the fact that I was being ripped off.
At any rate...she's gone. She has a new wardrobe full of my old clothes and a stomach full of pralines and peanut butter to remember us by, but still I feel sad. She genuinely adored Sadie, and Sadie liked her, too. She was never anything but nice to me, even when she was scamming me right under my nose.
We're still changing the locks.
Note to readers -- before reading this entry, if you don't like spoilers, you might want to catch yourself up here.
Oh my God, Diary.
Right now, I'm wondering something. I'm wondering why our family was cursed when it comes to childcare.
Seriously, what's the deal? Did we piss off an omnipotent nanny in a former life? We've never found a sitter we liked who didn't up and move to another country within three months (it's happened twice now). Our baby was expelled from day care. And now...now this.
When I finally got in touch with Agency Owner, I had a mouthful to tell her.
I'd gone over each invoice, and what I'd discovered had only added to the dismay I was already feeling. To reiterate, we'd previously agreed on a schedule of 25 hours each week. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she works from 8am-1pm. On Thursdays, the days I work at my grandfather's office, that schedule shifts to 11am-4pm.
Our nanny was not only logging each day she'd begun work at 7:30am -- she was consistently tacking on hours to the back end. While leaving each day at 1pm, she was reporting having left at 2:30pm, or 3:30pm, or 5pm.
On one particular Thursday, she still logged having arrived at 7:30 and reported her departure time as 5 -- a total of 9.5 hours of work.
The following day, she reported arriving at 7:30am and leaving at 3:30pm.
The Monday following -- 7:30am, 3:30pm.
Owner was stunned when I told her. "There must be a miscommunication," she insisted. She explained her method of tracking hours: each of her nannies, 30+ in all, are instructed to send her a text message each day when they leave their employer's house, reporting how many hours they've worked that day. Once a week, a courier makes the rounds with invoices, meeting each nanny at her place of business and having her sign off on the previous week's invoice. She claimed it had been a fail safe method for years, that to date she'd never had a problem with it.
"Maybe you can sit down and talk with her about it, to work things out," she suggested.
And me, Little Miss Nice Girl, for once I was not tempted to back down. This was not 30 minutes here and there we were haggling over -- it was hours of extra time. Every day.
I told her I did not want the nanny back to our house ever again. And I wanted our house key returned. The Owner, clearly upset, told me she'd look into the matter and call me back.
The last time ties were severed with a childcare provider, it hit me pretty hard. When Bunny Day Care called me up that day to tell me that they could not longer take care of my daughter, that I needed to come pick her up immediately, my response was tears, humiliation, worry. This time was different. It was on MY terms. We'd been taken advantage of, and that was humiliating, sure -- but this time, it was me calling the shots, bringing the situation to light. I'd felt I couldn't trust her, though I didn't know exactly why, and now that feeling was being validated. I felt almost jubilant.
I walked Sadie to the park. Everything was in vibrant focus. I called our sitter, asked her if she'd be willing to begin full-time nanny duties immediately. She agreed.
At the park, Sadie played with a six year old boy who was gentle and sweet with her, but concerned over her inability to speak. His mother explained that he was autistic, that he himself hadn't begun to speak until he was four year old, that she'd been receiving help through the Regional Center for years and only recently had stopped beating herself up over aspects of life as a parent that she'd realized were simply out of her control. It brought me back to the days when I was sick with worry over Sadie and her development, feeling helpless, powerless, stupid. Now I'd learned that this, along with sleepless nights and teething and potentially unethical nannies, was only one of a bucketful of unexpected curveballs that new parenthood throws at you.
On the way back home, Agency Owner called me back.
"Well, you were right," she said. "And I feel sick about it. Do you want to know how I caught her?"
"How?"
"I got a text from her an hour ago, reporting that she worked from 7:30am-3:30pm today." She paused. "I knew that wasn't true, because you and I had our conversation at 1:30pm, and she obviously wasn't there."
"She left at 1pm today." I listened to her go on for awhile, telling me how she'd called back my nanny and asked her about the discrepancy. The first excuse given was that she'd sent the text at 1pm, but that it hadn't come through until 3:30. The second was that she'd "forgotten her glasses" and mistakenly typed 3:30pm instead of 1.
She doesn't wear glasses.
She maintained her innocence, claiming that my mother and I were setting up a new company, requiring her to work extra hours, all of which had been approved.
Ultimately, the excuses were meaningless. I don't believe she's a bad person. I believe she's a lazy person who chose to take advantage of an opportunity when it presented itself. Each week, when she wasn't called out for the previous week's fudged hours, she saw an opportunity to fudge a few additional hours in the week to come. Each week, my own laziness prevented me from checking that email which would have alerted me to the fact that I was being ripped off.
At any rate...she's gone. She has a new wardrobe full of my old clothes and a stomach full of pralines and peanut butter to remember us by, but still I feel sad. She genuinely adored Sadie, and Sadie liked her, too. She was never anything but nice to me, even when she was scamming me right under my nose.
We're still changing the locks.
The Nanny Diaries
Monday, November 22nd, 9am
Dear Diary,
I've been feeling ambivalent about our nanny lately.
On the plus side, she always shows up early. Like, sometimes really early, like thirty minutes early. Better early than late, right? Besides, I've reminded her several times that while arriving early to beat traffic is totally fine, I can only afford to have her on the clock for five hours -- so if she arrives at 7:30 instead of 8, she'll only be paid through 12:30 instead of 1. And she always says that's fine.
She's really nice like that.
Also, Sadie likes her a lot. She's patient and has no issue dealing with Sadie's frequent freak-outs and meltdowns. That goes a long way. And she tolerates the dogs.
On the minus side...well, there's the food issue, of course. The simple fact is that she eats a lot of our food. She worked her way through an entire jar of peanut butter in a week. And there was PralineGate, the episode in which she broke into of a box of pralines my Dad had brought me back special from a business trip to New Orleans. I was secretly pissed about that, Diary. But when you think about it, wasn't that really my fault? I never specifically told her there were foods she shouldn't eat. She's watching my child for five hours a day; she's entitled to the contents of my refrigerator. Right?
And...well, there's other little things that bug me, to be honest. Like the day I let her sift through three bins of clothes I was planning on donating to Goodwill, and offered to let her take something if she liked it. When I returned home, she'd cleared out everything but half of a bin. I mean...it was fine, I'd told her she could. But still, it seemed a little odd that she'd take everything. (And remark, five minutes later, that she really liked some of my shoes.)
I guess when you get right down to it, the truth is that there are some things about her that don't sit right with me. Like all the times when I've come home at 1pm -- the baby is never napping. This makes no sense. Lunchtime is at 11:30. Naptime is at noon, and typically runs 90 minutes. The baby is always awake when I get home, yet the nanny claims she took a nice long nap each time. How is this possible? She never has a good answer for me, but I feel bad grilling her over small details.
Besides, she folds my laundry for me and unloads the dishwasher. I don't really want to mess with a good thing.
Nevertheless...I feel like maybe it's not working out with her. I've given this a good two-month run, and I think that for the money we're paying her, we could find someone better. I'll feel bad about it, because she's so nice and she means well...but it's my daughter we're talking about here.
Monday, November 22nd, 1:30pm
It all started with a phone call.
"I'm thinking of replacing [Nanny]," I told Scott.
"Okay. Why?"
"I don't know...just a feeling I get. I'd like to hire [our current babysitter] instead; we vibe better and I find her more trustworthy and capable in general."
"Fine with me. Talk to Owner [of the nanny placement agency] and let her know. Oh -- and while you're at it, you should take a look at the invoices they've been sending us recently. They seem...high."
I should stop to explain here. The nanny's job is to report the hours she works to the owner of the nanny placement agency. She, in turn, bills us at the end of each week for the previous week's nanny fees. She sends us a copy of the invoice a day earlier, Thursday, so that if there are any discrepancies we have time to raise them before our credit card is charged for the full amount.
Each week we receive a copy of the invoice, but I'm notoriously bad about checking them. Why bother? We worked out a deal long ago that I'd hire our nanny for 25 hours each week, with a flexible schedule so that if I occasionally need her to work more hours, we can work that out between ourselves. Other than the occasional deviation (she sometimes works an extra 30 minutes here and there if I'm running late, and there was that week when my back was hurt where she worked some extra hours to help me out), the schedule is pretty solid. In fact, she can't work late -- she has to leave no later than 1:30 in order to be at the bus stop to pick up her son from school by 2:30 every day. The only exception is Thursdays, when she arranges for a neighbor to babysit her son so she can work an 11am-4pm shift for me instead of the typical 8am-1pm.
I went to the computer and pulled up the record of invoices I'd been copied on each week. The total was included right there in the subject line -- and every week I'd breezed past it, not really looking, assuming that if it was a couple of numbers off, that just accounted for the occasional extra 30 minutes or hour worked.
The weekly salary we'd agreed upon was $300 -- 25 hours' worth of childcare at $12 per hour. And the first invoice was, indeed, for $300.
But slowly, through the weeks, the total had increased. To $320, then $350. $380.
Once it reached November, it increased even more. $400, $420.
For the past two weeks, she'd reported having worked an average of 37 hours a week. My invoice from the previous week alone was $486 -- 50% higher than our agreed-upon weekly budget.
"WTF?!?!?!" was basically my reaction on seeing this. Here I'd been sulking over a few stolen pralines, a pilfered jar of peanut butter, and in one week she'd managed to report nearly $150 worth of stolen hours.
And that's when I got on the phone.
To be continued...
Dear Diary,
I've been feeling ambivalent about our nanny lately.
On the plus side, she always shows up early. Like, sometimes really early, like thirty minutes early. Better early than late, right? Besides, I've reminded her several times that while arriving early to beat traffic is totally fine, I can only afford to have her on the clock for five hours -- so if she arrives at 7:30 instead of 8, she'll only be paid through 12:30 instead of 1. And she always says that's fine.
She's really nice like that.
Also, Sadie likes her a lot. She's patient and has no issue dealing with Sadie's frequent freak-outs and meltdowns. That goes a long way. And she tolerates the dogs.
On the minus side...well, there's the food issue, of course. The simple fact is that she eats a lot of our food. She worked her way through an entire jar of peanut butter in a week. And there was PralineGate, the episode in which she broke into of a box of pralines my Dad had brought me back special from a business trip to New Orleans. I was secretly pissed about that, Diary. But when you think about it, wasn't that really my fault? I never specifically told her there were foods she shouldn't eat. She's watching my child for five hours a day; she's entitled to the contents of my refrigerator. Right?
And...well, there's other little things that bug me, to be honest. Like the day I let her sift through three bins of clothes I was planning on donating to Goodwill, and offered to let her take something if she liked it. When I returned home, she'd cleared out everything but half of a bin. I mean...it was fine, I'd told her she could. But still, it seemed a little odd that she'd take everything. (And remark, five minutes later, that she really liked some of my shoes.)
I guess when you get right down to it, the truth is that there are some things about her that don't sit right with me. Like all the times when I've come home at 1pm -- the baby is never napping. This makes no sense. Lunchtime is at 11:30. Naptime is at noon, and typically runs 90 minutes. The baby is always awake when I get home, yet the nanny claims she took a nice long nap each time. How is this possible? She never has a good answer for me, but I feel bad grilling her over small details.
Besides, she folds my laundry for me and unloads the dishwasher. I don't really want to mess with a good thing.
Nevertheless...I feel like maybe it's not working out with her. I've given this a good two-month run, and I think that for the money we're paying her, we could find someone better. I'll feel bad about it, because she's so nice and she means well...but it's my daughter we're talking about here.
Monday, November 22nd, 1:30pm
It all started with a phone call.
"I'm thinking of replacing [Nanny]," I told Scott.
"Okay. Why?"
"I don't know...just a feeling I get. I'd like to hire [our current babysitter] instead; we vibe better and I find her more trustworthy and capable in general."
"Fine with me. Talk to Owner [of the nanny placement agency] and let her know. Oh -- and while you're at it, you should take a look at the invoices they've been sending us recently. They seem...high."
I should stop to explain here. The nanny's job is to report the hours she works to the owner of the nanny placement agency. She, in turn, bills us at the end of each week for the previous week's nanny fees. She sends us a copy of the invoice a day earlier, Thursday, so that if there are any discrepancies we have time to raise them before our credit card is charged for the full amount.
Each week we receive a copy of the invoice, but I'm notoriously bad about checking them. Why bother? We worked out a deal long ago that I'd hire our nanny for 25 hours each week, with a flexible schedule so that if I occasionally need her to work more hours, we can work that out between ourselves. Other than the occasional deviation (she sometimes works an extra 30 minutes here and there if I'm running late, and there was that week when my back was hurt where she worked some extra hours to help me out), the schedule is pretty solid. In fact, she can't work late -- she has to leave no later than 1:30 in order to be at the bus stop to pick up her son from school by 2:30 every day. The only exception is Thursdays, when she arranges for a neighbor to babysit her son so she can work an 11am-4pm shift for me instead of the typical 8am-1pm.
I went to the computer and pulled up the record of invoices I'd been copied on each week. The total was included right there in the subject line -- and every week I'd breezed past it, not really looking, assuming that if it was a couple of numbers off, that just accounted for the occasional extra 30 minutes or hour worked.
The weekly salary we'd agreed upon was $300 -- 25 hours' worth of childcare at $12 per hour. And the first invoice was, indeed, for $300.
But slowly, through the weeks, the total had increased. To $320, then $350. $380.
Once it reached November, it increased even more. $400, $420.
For the past two weeks, she'd reported having worked an average of 37 hours a week. My invoice from the previous week alone was $486 -- 50% higher than our agreed-upon weekly budget.
"WTF?!?!?!" was basically my reaction on seeing this. Here I'd been sulking over a few stolen pralines, a pilfered jar of peanut butter, and in one week she'd managed to report nearly $150 worth of stolen hours.
And that's when I got on the phone.
To be continued...
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Miss Independent
It's like a switch flipped. One day she was a clingy baby, venturing out only for short periods before coming back to check in with me.
This week, she became a resident of Independence, Missouri. Her favorite movie became "Independence Day." Her favorite Kelly Clarkson song is now...you can guess.
She went from slow and cautious to blindingly fast. A few hours ago I caught her straying into the bathroom, the one that has no safety lock on the toilet, so I walked after her to catch her. Hearing me approach behind her, she hit the gas pedal and kicked it into high gear, moving her limbs as fast as I've ever seen her. She tried to outrun me, and she came closer than I would have put money on.
She suddenly crawls all over the house. She explores without caring if I'm in the room. This morning she pulled herself up on the seat of her highchair and stood there, trying to figure out how the harness strap works, for no less than thirty minutes.
The time is fast approaching where she won't need constant care and attention, the way she always has. Yesterday we went to the park and instead of sticking close to me and studying the sand, she powered over to a group of kids and accepted their invitation to play with their trucks. She didn't even look to see where I was. After they left, she wandered over to two three-year-old girls playing near a big stone tortoise in the center of the sandbox. They totally mean-girled her, sitting down in front of the tortoise and explaining sternly, "You can't play with us. You're just a baby. This turtle isn't for babies." I gently tamped down the instinct to strangle them both with the shoelaces of their pink sneakers and instead led Sadie away, but she clearly couldn't have cared less -- she shot them both a big grin as we left.
Who is this kid? She can't walk yet, and is still probably a couple months away from doing so, but for the first time, her physical limitations don't seen to bother her. She's losing her shyness in the name of exploration and fun. After a bad period last week in which she threw a lot of tantrums, she seems to have shaken off the drama and realized that life is more fun if you just find a new toy to play with.
And if that toy happens to have lived under the couch for the past three weeks and is now covered with dust bunnies and cricket parts, then all the better. If it actually is a dead cricket, then triple word score.
This change is much-welcomed, because winter means launching into the preschool shuffle. This deserves a post of its own, because not only is it already time to worry about getting Sadie into a desirable preschool toddler program (I can hear my mom's eyes rolling in her head as she read this), but I'm actually late to the party in not having worried about it up until now.
But we'll get into that another time. For now, PT continues, morning nanny continues (can't wait until that ends -- I don't love getting kicked out of my own house every day, plus taking conference calls from my car sucks), and we search every day for new places to play and new things to explore. Tonight it's over to my parents' house, where Sadie will torture my mother's dog, drink out of his water bowl, and probably get some sort of poop on herself.
This week, she became a resident of Independence, Missouri. Her favorite movie became "Independence Day." Her favorite Kelly Clarkson song is now...you can guess.
She went from slow and cautious to blindingly fast. A few hours ago I caught her straying into the bathroom, the one that has no safety lock on the toilet, so I walked after her to catch her. Hearing me approach behind her, she hit the gas pedal and kicked it into high gear, moving her limbs as fast as I've ever seen her. She tried to outrun me, and she came closer than I would have put money on.
She suddenly crawls all over the house. She explores without caring if I'm in the room. This morning she pulled herself up on the seat of her highchair and stood there, trying to figure out how the harness strap works, for no less than thirty minutes.
The time is fast approaching where she won't need constant care and attention, the way she always has. Yesterday we went to the park and instead of sticking close to me and studying the sand, she powered over to a group of kids and accepted their invitation to play with their trucks. She didn't even look to see where I was. After they left, she wandered over to two three-year-old girls playing near a big stone tortoise in the center of the sandbox. They totally mean-girled her, sitting down in front of the tortoise and explaining sternly, "You can't play with us. You're just a baby. This turtle isn't for babies." I gently tamped down the instinct to strangle them both with the shoelaces of their pink sneakers and instead led Sadie away, but she clearly couldn't have cared less -- she shot them both a big grin as we left.
Who is this kid? She can't walk yet, and is still probably a couple months away from doing so, but for the first time, her physical limitations don't seen to bother her. She's losing her shyness in the name of exploration and fun. After a bad period last week in which she threw a lot of tantrums, she seems to have shaken off the drama and realized that life is more fun if you just find a new toy to play with.
And if that toy happens to have lived under the couch for the past three weeks and is now covered with dust bunnies and cricket parts, then all the better. If it actually is a dead cricket, then triple word score.
This change is much-welcomed, because winter means launching into the preschool shuffle. This deserves a post of its own, because not only is it already time to worry about getting Sadie into a desirable preschool toddler program (I can hear my mom's eyes rolling in her head as she read this), but I'm actually late to the party in not having worried about it up until now.
But we'll get into that another time. For now, PT continues, morning nanny continues (can't wait until that ends -- I don't love getting kicked out of my own house every day, plus taking conference calls from my car sucks), and we search every day for new places to play and new things to explore. Tonight it's over to my parents' house, where Sadie will torture my mother's dog, drink out of his water bowl, and probably get some sort of poop on herself.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
8 Days Left
I haven't had much time to update because of the insanity of the last few weeks. Scott has been in Baton Rouge and then Brazil for work (I'm not allowed to say what he's working on; I actually posted an update about him on Facebook last night and it got him in trouble, so let's just say he's working on a certain franchise that involves pale, angsty teenagers) and so I've been pulling single parent duty with Sadie.
Since then, we've been engaging in a giant one-upping contest every time we talk to see who's life has been more difficult. In his corner: crazy odd hours, time changes, jungle locales, no internet, slippery moss-covered rocks. In my corner: tantrums, a re-fi that refuses to go through, a course that needs to be written with no time to write it, and in the middle of it all, a pinched nerve in my back.
The back was the worst -- the timing really blew. And how did it happen, you say? Well, the version I've been telling people is that I twisted wrong putting Sadie into her carseat. And that is what first caused the pain, but in reality it probably had to do with the fact that the Sunday previous, Halloween, I lost my keys in the sand at the playground while we were at the park. I had no way to drive home, so I walked the whole mile and a half with Sadie in my arms. This after I'd called a cabbie, who took one look at my kid and told me firmly that he was not driving us anywhere without a carseat, which, DUH, but through my sorry tears it did not occur to me that I was going to have to transport not just myself, but her too. Then I called AAA, who came and jimmied my car door open, causing the alarm to shriek and everyone on the playground to wonder why I was trying to steal a 2008 Mazda, but still no keys and no way to start the car. So, we walked home, met the locksmith, paid him a fucking fortune to open the door, only to have me dump out the diaper bag and find my keys buried in a pocket which they had not been in the first 20 times I thought to look. Oh yeah, and then we had to walk back to the park to pick up the car. So, yeah. Back problems. Not a surprise.
Fortunately, Scott's mom and my mom were total champions, coming out and bringing me Icy Hot and helping to bathe Sadie for the three nights that it took me not to cry in pain every time I tried to pick her up. That's only been the beginning of our adventures these past two weeks -- another big one was the trauma of Daylight Savings Time ending which -- would you think that would be a big issue for a 13 month old kid? Because I didn't think it would be, but I was very, very, very wrong.
The first night, she thought 5:30pm was 6:30pm and by 6:30 she'd passed her normal bedtime by an hour and was completely freaking out. She woke up all night and at 5am the next morning. The next night it was hourly wake-ups, then rise and shine at 4:45. I thought my body was going to give out. Finally when she woke up the next morning at 5, I changed her diaper, gave her a bottle and put her back into bed -- and blessedly, she slept for another 2 hours. Now she finally seems to be back on schedule, although she's still waking up multiple times in the night. I think she misses her dad just like I do.
In other news, she's pointing at everything these days. Just randomly pointing, because she likes to do it. She'll point at the ceiling but look straight at me, like, "Hey, look up there!" and then when I do, she'll stab me in the nose with her finger and laugh. Little bastard. She points at the dogs and yells at them in Baby Babble, and she's figured out that a doggie says Woof, or rather, "Wowowowowow." There's been a lot of "wowowowow" in our house recently. Oh, that reminds me -- Pepper has regressed to puppyhood for no particular reason and for the past two weeks has been crapping on the floor. Yeah. It's been that kind of a November.
I haven't had a moment to breathe and watch bad TV for days, so excuse me now while I go do that for awhile.
Since then, we've been engaging in a giant one-upping contest every time we talk to see who's life has been more difficult. In his corner: crazy odd hours, time changes, jungle locales, no internet, slippery moss-covered rocks. In my corner: tantrums, a re-fi that refuses to go through, a course that needs to be written with no time to write it, and in the middle of it all, a pinched nerve in my back.
The back was the worst -- the timing really blew. And how did it happen, you say? Well, the version I've been telling people is that I twisted wrong putting Sadie into her carseat. And that is what first caused the pain, but in reality it probably had to do with the fact that the Sunday previous, Halloween, I lost my keys in the sand at the playground while we were at the park. I had no way to drive home, so I walked the whole mile and a half with Sadie in my arms. This after I'd called a cabbie, who took one look at my kid and told me firmly that he was not driving us anywhere without a carseat, which, DUH, but through my sorry tears it did not occur to me that I was going to have to transport not just myself, but her too. Then I called AAA, who came and jimmied my car door open, causing the alarm to shriek and everyone on the playground to wonder why I was trying to steal a 2008 Mazda, but still no keys and no way to start the car. So, we walked home, met the locksmith, paid him a fucking fortune to open the door, only to have me dump out the diaper bag and find my keys buried in a pocket which they had not been in the first 20 times I thought to look. Oh yeah, and then we had to walk back to the park to pick up the car. So, yeah. Back problems. Not a surprise.
Fortunately, Scott's mom and my mom were total champions, coming out and bringing me Icy Hot and helping to bathe Sadie for the three nights that it took me not to cry in pain every time I tried to pick her up. That's only been the beginning of our adventures these past two weeks -- another big one was the trauma of Daylight Savings Time ending which -- would you think that would be a big issue for a 13 month old kid? Because I didn't think it would be, but I was very, very, very wrong.
The first night, she thought 5:30pm was 6:30pm and by 6:30 she'd passed her normal bedtime by an hour and was completely freaking out. She woke up all night and at 5am the next morning. The next night it was hourly wake-ups, then rise and shine at 4:45. I thought my body was going to give out. Finally when she woke up the next morning at 5, I changed her diaper, gave her a bottle and put her back into bed -- and blessedly, she slept for another 2 hours. Now she finally seems to be back on schedule, although she's still waking up multiple times in the night. I think she misses her dad just like I do.
In other news, she's pointing at everything these days. Just randomly pointing, because she likes to do it. She'll point at the ceiling but look straight at me, like, "Hey, look up there!" and then when I do, she'll stab me in the nose with her finger and laugh. Little bastard. She points at the dogs and yells at them in Baby Babble, and she's figured out that a doggie says Woof, or rather, "Wowowowowow." There's been a lot of "wowowowow" in our house recently. Oh, that reminds me -- Pepper has regressed to puppyhood for no particular reason and for the past two weeks has been crapping on the floor. Yeah. It's been that kind of a November.
I haven't had a moment to breathe and watch bad TV for days, so excuse me now while I go do that for awhile.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Regional Center, Part 2
Against all our expectations, Sadie was approved for PT assistance from the North Valley Regional Center. Hooray! But not so fast.
Both the assessor who did the workup on Sadie a few weeks ago, and Joy, her physical therapist, warned me that the Regional Center has become a place of last resort -- a resource for people who don't have health insurance, or whose plans don't cover things like PT. Hurt by budget cuts, they've essentially become useless for families whose insurance plans already cover PT in some aspect, and we're lucky enough to fall into this category.
In order to qualify Sadie for in-home PT through the Regional Center, we'd first need to petition to our insurance company that in-home would benefit her more than the current out-of-office PT she has now. Only then, if that plea were rejected, would the Regional Center then come in and potentially help out (although we'd first have to champion her case with them.)
This might become a point of concern for us, were Sadie still having troubles with weekly PT. Fortunately, over the last two weeks she's radically improved. She no longer cries and throws tantrums, and although she doesn't much care for Joy (the mean lady who has the cool toys but won't just let her sit and play with them like she wants), she'll cooperate with Joy's attempts to get her to move around. Two Thursdays ago I sat with them while she practiced walking; last Thursday I snuck out into the waiting room mid-session and she didn't even notice.
Joy, who works with a lot of referrals from the Regional Center, has a lot of irritation towards their new policies along with the ever-growing pile of bureaucratic yellow tape that applicants now must wade through. After our last session, she told me frankly that she suspected by the time we set up PT through the Center, Sadie would already be on the tail end of her PT. She feels that Sadie's moving along at a great pace, and I agree.
Talking to our case worker today made me sad, because she really sounded regretful that they most likely wouldn't be able to help Sadie to any great degree, and all I wanted to do was reassure her that her regret was misplaced. We're lucky in many ways: we have a good insurance plan that has covered her PT sessions. We've seen improvement rapid enough to see for ourselves that the PT is working, and to know that within a few months, she'll catch up to other kids her age. We also know that if worse comes to worst and Sadie does require further therapy, we have the financial resources to cope with it.
While the case worker gave me the option of bringing Sadie in for an eval (number two, if you're keeping track), I ultimately told her that I would not be scheduling one at this point. Instead, I'm going to do more of what has been working: giving her reasons to be active every day, helping her practice her skills, taking her to the park and to baby gyms and bribing her with goldfish crackers.
The video below is footage I took today. Sometimes I have to remind myself that four or five weeks ago, she couldn't crawl four feet across the room to pick up a toy.
Both the assessor who did the workup on Sadie a few weeks ago, and Joy, her physical therapist, warned me that the Regional Center has become a place of last resort -- a resource for people who don't have health insurance, or whose plans don't cover things like PT. Hurt by budget cuts, they've essentially become useless for families whose insurance plans already cover PT in some aspect, and we're lucky enough to fall into this category.
In order to qualify Sadie for in-home PT through the Regional Center, we'd first need to petition to our insurance company that in-home would benefit her more than the current out-of-office PT she has now. Only then, if that plea were rejected, would the Regional Center then come in and potentially help out (although we'd first have to champion her case with them.)
This might become a point of concern for us, were Sadie still having troubles with weekly PT. Fortunately, over the last two weeks she's radically improved. She no longer cries and throws tantrums, and although she doesn't much care for Joy (the mean lady who has the cool toys but won't just let her sit and play with them like she wants), she'll cooperate with Joy's attempts to get her to move around. Two Thursdays ago I sat with them while she practiced walking; last Thursday I snuck out into the waiting room mid-session and she didn't even notice.
Joy, who works with a lot of referrals from the Regional Center, has a lot of irritation towards their new policies along with the ever-growing pile of bureaucratic yellow tape that applicants now must wade through. After our last session, she told me frankly that she suspected by the time we set up PT through the Center, Sadie would already be on the tail end of her PT. She feels that Sadie's moving along at a great pace, and I agree.
Talking to our case worker today made me sad, because she really sounded regretful that they most likely wouldn't be able to help Sadie to any great degree, and all I wanted to do was reassure her that her regret was misplaced. We're lucky in many ways: we have a good insurance plan that has covered her PT sessions. We've seen improvement rapid enough to see for ourselves that the PT is working, and to know that within a few months, she'll catch up to other kids her age. We also know that if worse comes to worst and Sadie does require further therapy, we have the financial resources to cope with it.
While the case worker gave me the option of bringing Sadie in for an eval (number two, if you're keeping track), I ultimately told her that I would not be scheduling one at this point. Instead, I'm going to do more of what has been working: giving her reasons to be active every day, helping her practice her skills, taking her to the park and to baby gyms and bribing her with goldfish crackers.
The video below is footage I took today. Sometimes I have to remind myself that four or five weeks ago, she couldn't crawl four feet across the room to pick up a toy.
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