Sadie got down to serious business in PT yesterday. This was a really exciting session. Normally I sit out in the waiting room with a magazine, but after five minutes Joy called me in to tell me that Sadie was taking steps on her own.
I didn't catch the best stuff (at one point she toddled all the way across the carpet on her own), but this video catches some of the good moments. My favorite part is at the end, where Sadie, used to hearing us cheer her on every time she walks, reaches her destination and gives herself a matter-of-fact little "woo hoo."
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Chugging Along
Two days ago was Sadie's half birthday; she's past the eighteen month point. Our way of celebrating was to forget all about it until about 10pm Thursday night, at which point I turned to Scott and said, "Oh hey, it's Sadie's half birthday today!" and he said, "Huh," and then we went back to watching "Parks and Recreation."
As Sadie has grown up, I've fallen into the bad habit of pledging that she will do things by a certain point in time. And by "things," I mean walk. Last year I was sure that Sadie was going to walk by Christmas, no matter what. When she got onto the list for a toddler group that began in February, I thought, "She'll definitely be walking by then." Then when all the websites and development books and our pediatrician said that even the late walkers get going by 18 months, I thought to myself, "Well, as long as she's taking steps by then, it'll be okay."
I finally figured out that what I was doing, what I thought of as positive goals to shoot for, aren't positive for anyone. Not for me and Scott, who are nervous enough as it is and don't need any additional standards by which to measure our child as "kinda weird." Definitely not for Sadie, who knows exactly what walking is, exactly when she does and does not want to do it, and will absolutely not be pushed into it one minute before she's good and ready.
So when the 18 month marker came and went, this time it was with a little reminder that in the last few weeks she has made terrific progress, and that the progress is what matters. With increased PT sessions, she gets more confident each time she goes. Confidence at Joy's means confidence at home -- usually, although she still would rather crawl than walk with aid to any given destination.
Today we did a joint PT session with another little girl Sadie's age. Addy can actually get around just fine, and isn't going regularly to PT anymore, but she has speech, feeding and sleeping problems due to bad acid reflux issues as a baby. Joy thought it would be a good idea for the two girls to have a playdate in hopes they'd "rub off" on each other -- that Sadie would be impressed by Addy's fearlessness in the clinic, and Addy would adopt Sadie's tendency to NEVER SHUT UP EVER EVER EVER.
I have no idea if it accomplished either of these things, but it was insanely cute to watch these two little girls sharing a space. Addy was like a tiny little tornado, while Sadie, towering over her, just seemed in awe of her ability to move from the mat to the stairs to the dolls to the kitchen sink in the span of .38 seconds. Sadie must have been feeling a little inadequate, because she used the session as an opportunity to bust out four new words: "sun," "castle," "purple" and "sesquicentennial." Okay, not that last one.
As Sadie has grown up, I've fallen into the bad habit of pledging that she will do things by a certain point in time. And by "things," I mean walk. Last year I was sure that Sadie was going to walk by Christmas, no matter what. When she got onto the list for a toddler group that began in February, I thought, "She'll definitely be walking by then." Then when all the websites and development books and our pediatrician said that even the late walkers get going by 18 months, I thought to myself, "Well, as long as she's taking steps by then, it'll be okay."
I finally figured out that what I was doing, what I thought of as positive goals to shoot for, aren't positive for anyone. Not for me and Scott, who are nervous enough as it is and don't need any additional standards by which to measure our child as "kinda weird." Definitely not for Sadie, who knows exactly what walking is, exactly when she does and does not want to do it, and will absolutely not be pushed into it one minute before she's good and ready.
So when the 18 month marker came and went, this time it was with a little reminder that in the last few weeks she has made terrific progress, and that the progress is what matters. With increased PT sessions, she gets more confident each time she goes. Confidence at Joy's means confidence at home -- usually, although she still would rather crawl than walk with aid to any given destination.
Today we did a joint PT session with another little girl Sadie's age. Addy can actually get around just fine, and isn't going regularly to PT anymore, but she has speech, feeding and sleeping problems due to bad acid reflux issues as a baby. Joy thought it would be a good idea for the two girls to have a playdate in hopes they'd "rub off" on each other -- that Sadie would be impressed by Addy's fearlessness in the clinic, and Addy would adopt Sadie's tendency to NEVER SHUT UP EVER EVER EVER.
I have no idea if it accomplished either of these things, but it was insanely cute to watch these two little girls sharing a space. Addy was like a tiny little tornado, while Sadie, towering over her, just seemed in awe of her ability to move from the mat to the stairs to the dolls to the kitchen sink in the span of .38 seconds. Sadie must have been feeling a little inadequate, because she used the session as an opportunity to bust out four new words: "sun," "castle," "purple" and "sesquicentennial." Okay, not that last one.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Sadie Year One (Only Six Months Late!)
The Sunday evening after we brought Sadie home from the hospital, Scott printed out a sign that read "Week 0."
He put it on our big microsuede chair, and next to it he placed our tiny, squishy-faced baby, sleeping and swaddled in a cotton receiving blanket with blue and pink bears printed on it (one of roughly two dozen we'd stolen from the recovery room at Cedars Sinai). Then he pulled out our camera, the good one, and took a picture.
"I'm going to do this every week," he told me, "Until she's a year old. Then I'm going to turn it into a video. When she gets older she's going to love us for this."
"I just have one question," I said.
"What?"
"You know it should read 'Week 1,' not 'Week 0,' right?"
He looked at me with the sage wisdom of a man who has become a self-made expert in viral marketing.
"If we start at Week 1, then the photo we take on her birthday will be Week 53, and that won't look as good," he explained patiently.
"You're really going to remember to take her photo every single Sunday night, from now until her first birthday?"
"Yup."
And he did. And eventually I stopped making fun of him and started helping him. And on her first birthday, we took the final picture. Week 52.
Aaaaand then it took us six months to get around to editing it into a video, but we finally have, and now I'm happy to present Sadie: Year One. Enjoy!
Sadie Year One from Scott Murray on Vimeo.
He put it on our big microsuede chair, and next to it he placed our tiny, squishy-faced baby, sleeping and swaddled in a cotton receiving blanket with blue and pink bears printed on it (one of roughly two dozen we'd stolen from the recovery room at Cedars Sinai). Then he pulled out our camera, the good one, and took a picture.
"I'm going to do this every week," he told me, "Until she's a year old. Then I'm going to turn it into a video. When she gets older she's going to love us for this."
"I just have one question," I said.
"What?"
"You know it should read 'Week 1,' not 'Week 0,' right?"
He looked at me with the sage wisdom of a man who has become a self-made expert in viral marketing.
"If we start at Week 1, then the photo we take on her birthday will be Week 53, and that won't look as good," he explained patiently.
"You're really going to remember to take her photo every single Sunday night, from now until her first birthday?"
"Yup."
And he did. And eventually I stopped making fun of him and started helping him. And on her first birthday, we took the final picture. Week 52.
Aaaaand then it took us six months to get around to editing it into a video, but we finally have, and now I'm happy to present Sadie: Year One. Enjoy!
Sadie Year One from Scott Murray on Vimeo.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Spring Approaching
It's March now, and around this time every year I become obsessed with the concept of spring cleaning. Note that I didn't say I actually clean. I just obsess about it, then feel guilty when I realize it's July and too late for it to count as spring -- it's just cleaning. Then it turns 100 degrees in the Valley for three months and I can barely be arsed to get off the couch, much less clean the house top to bottom.
This time around, I'm giving myself a couple of projects. Scott leaves for a month next Monday, and I'm trying to be realistic about what I can accomplish while he's gone. So much about daily life when he's away is just about maintaining -- maintaining my sanity, maintaining Sadie's daily schedule, maintaining my own health and medical needs and occasionally, my eyebrows and bikini line. Those last two are the first to go if anything goes wrong.
This week, the project I've committed myself to is converting the old, ugly card table in our kitchen into a crafts table for Sadie. She's discovered the joy of Play-Doh and coloring, and Ana is the one who discovered that if you put her in her high chair and adjust the height to the level of the card table, it makes a perfect surface. Today I'm going to Lakeshore Learning to buy a cheap plastic tablecloth, some coloring and stickerbooks, watercolor paints and brushes. I'm also hoping to find some flat, wide shelving units to hold books and paper, and maybe a couple of bins for art supplies. I know she's too young right now to use things like scissors and glitter (I shudder to imagine, actually), but that time is right around the corner so I'd like to be prepared for it. I'm also hoping to find some sort of shelving unit or board that I can use to display her finished work.
One reason Ana, our nanny, is so great is because she has crazy amounts of energy and is always driving me to find new ways to entertain Sadie. Other nannies would march her to the playground every day, or sit on the floor with her toys and play with her on the play mat. With Ana, I'll come home to find them making animals out of Play-Doh or using wooden blocks to learn her ABC's. That's the biggest reason why I want to get this crafts table done -- I think Sadie's going to surprise me by how quickly she'll be ready to start using it and how much fun she's going to have with it.
Today we had a tiny triumph: usually I hide in the house if Sadie and Ana are also home, so she doesn't see me and yell for me. Today by accident I walked into the living room while Ana was there by the door, holding her. I told Sadie I was going to work and kissed her goodbye, and naturally she learned into my arms saying, "Up!" But after Ana explained that I was leaving, and I told her I'd be back later, she seemed to understand that. She even said "bye bye" to me as I left, and didn't cry at all. It made my heart so glad to know that she's past the phase of being upset by my leaving her, at least with Scott and Ana.
If I get really ambitious during Scott's absence, I might even try to tackle touching up the paint in Sadie's room. There's a really ugly gash on the wall where her crib is, which is from her damn animal nightlight. I don't know why Fisher Price designed this thing to have an arm which sticks out four inches from the side of the crib, but it does and so we can't put the crib flush against the wall; this stupid gap exists there and eats up many, many pacifiers. And the arm rubs away the paint on the wall.
This is part of a larger project of reconfiguring Sadie's bedroom. Currently we have a guest bed in there, which -- I don't know why it's in there. It never gets used. Awhile back we bought a pillow-top for the mattress to give it padding, but it has no way of staying on the bed, so when you sit on the bed the pillow top sloooooowly slides off onto the floor. I don't use it to sleep on, because Sadie and I wake each other up if we sleep in the same room, and we don't often have houseguests, so it just sits there and takes up space. This weekend we're moving the bed into the garage and transferring the rocking chair from the family room into the bedroom. I plan to put it in the corner next to her bookcase, add a pillow or two, and make it a nice cozy reading nook.
This is necessary, because Sadie has decided that she no longer wants to go to sleep. I'm surprised it took her this long to figure out that going to bed sucks, but now that she knows it, she screams her fool head off for at least two or three minutes once we put her in there. I've begun easing her slowly into a bedtime frame of mind by taking her into the bedroom and reading some books with her with the lights dimmed and her nightlight on. This would be a lot easier to do if we didn't have to worry about constantly sliding off the bed onto the floor.
This time around, I'm giving myself a couple of projects. Scott leaves for a month next Monday, and I'm trying to be realistic about what I can accomplish while he's gone. So much about daily life when he's away is just about maintaining -- maintaining my sanity, maintaining Sadie's daily schedule, maintaining my own health and medical needs and occasionally, my eyebrows and bikini line. Those last two are the first to go if anything goes wrong.
This week, the project I've committed myself to is converting the old, ugly card table in our kitchen into a crafts table for Sadie. She's discovered the joy of Play-Doh and coloring, and Ana is the one who discovered that if you put her in her high chair and adjust the height to the level of the card table, it makes a perfect surface. Today I'm going to Lakeshore Learning to buy a cheap plastic tablecloth, some coloring and stickerbooks, watercolor paints and brushes. I'm also hoping to find some flat, wide shelving units to hold books and paper, and maybe a couple of bins for art supplies. I know she's too young right now to use things like scissors and glitter (I shudder to imagine, actually), but that time is right around the corner so I'd like to be prepared for it. I'm also hoping to find some sort of shelving unit or board that I can use to display her finished work.
One reason Ana, our nanny, is so great is because she has crazy amounts of energy and is always driving me to find new ways to entertain Sadie. Other nannies would march her to the playground every day, or sit on the floor with her toys and play with her on the play mat. With Ana, I'll come home to find them making animals out of Play-Doh or using wooden blocks to learn her ABC's. That's the biggest reason why I want to get this crafts table done -- I think Sadie's going to surprise me by how quickly she'll be ready to start using it and how much fun she's going to have with it.
Today we had a tiny triumph: usually I hide in the house if Sadie and Ana are also home, so she doesn't see me and yell for me. Today by accident I walked into the living room while Ana was there by the door, holding her. I told Sadie I was going to work and kissed her goodbye, and naturally she learned into my arms saying, "Up!" But after Ana explained that I was leaving, and I told her I'd be back later, she seemed to understand that. She even said "bye bye" to me as I left, and didn't cry at all. It made my heart so glad to know that she's past the phase of being upset by my leaving her, at least with Scott and Ana.
If I get really ambitious during Scott's absence, I might even try to tackle touching up the paint in Sadie's room. There's a really ugly gash on the wall where her crib is, which is from her damn animal nightlight. I don't know why Fisher Price designed this thing to have an arm which sticks out four inches from the side of the crib, but it does and so we can't put the crib flush against the wall; this stupid gap exists there and eats up many, many pacifiers. And the arm rubs away the paint on the wall.
This is part of a larger project of reconfiguring Sadie's bedroom. Currently we have a guest bed in there, which -- I don't know why it's in there. It never gets used. Awhile back we bought a pillow-top for the mattress to give it padding, but it has no way of staying on the bed, so when you sit on the bed the pillow top sloooooowly slides off onto the floor. I don't use it to sleep on, because Sadie and I wake each other up if we sleep in the same room, and we don't often have houseguests, so it just sits there and takes up space. This weekend we're moving the bed into the garage and transferring the rocking chair from the family room into the bedroom. I plan to put it in the corner next to her bookcase, add a pillow or two, and make it a nice cozy reading nook.
This is necessary, because Sadie has decided that she no longer wants to go to sleep. I'm surprised it took her this long to figure out that going to bed sucks, but now that she knows it, she screams her fool head off for at least two or three minutes once we put her in there. I've begun easing her slowly into a bedtime frame of mind by taking her into the bedroom and reading some books with her with the lights dimmed and her nightlight on. This would be a lot easier to do if we didn't have to worry about constantly sliding off the bed onto the floor.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Age of Reason
As Sadie grows more certain of what she does and doesn't want, and more inclined to battle it out when faced with an unpleasant task, we've had to adjust our own ways of dealing with her in order to maintain order and sanity.
When she was younger, the solution was easy: distraction. If she fought over getting into her stroller or having her diaper changed, a toy dangled over her head or an airplane passing overhead would instantly snap her out of stubborn mode and before she realized it she'd already be doing whatever it was we wanted her to do.
Nowadays she's far too smart for that. Give her a toy and she'll bat it aside with a look that says, "Do you expect me to forget that you just rubbed my wet hair down with a towel when you KNOW I hate that? How stupid do you think I am?" Try to put her in her stroller when she's determined to play at the park for another 20 minutes, even though it's 60 degrees outside and we're both freezing, and she'll scream loud enough for everyone at the park to whip their heads around to see what poor child is being tortured.
Fortunately, we've discovered that with a lengthened attention span and greater clarity and force of will comes another skill: the ability to reason and to be reasoned with. This is truly a surprise to me; I never would have thought a 17 month old kid would be willing to bargain or negotiate. But as I'm quickly learning about my daughter, she's nothing if not attuned to her own best interests.
It started with the eyedrops -- I began showing them to her before applying them, explaining what they were and what their purpose was. Once she understood, she began to tolerate them, albeit reluctantly. I soon began applying this to other things, combining them with another tactic: allowing her to process what it is I'm asking of her and letting her come to her own decision about whether or not she's okay with it.
So now, instead of forcing her into her high chair at mealtime, we get the food ready while she's watching Sesame Street, then show it to her and say, "Sadie, would you like to eat some dinner?" We might offer her a piece of food, just to show her what the goods are. After a minute of consideration, she's MUCH more likely to acquiesce and move to the high chair on her own than she would be if we just grabbed her hands and tried to walk her over.
This worked well at the park yesterday, too. I gave her her usual five minute and two minute warnings that we were going to leave, and then, when the time came, I asked her if she was ready to go home. She paused, considered, then actually replied, "Yes." Miracle of miracles!
Even more impressive, Scott has successfully bargained with her. ("When you finish dinner, then you can go snuggle with Mommy.") I plan to try this tonight with her bath. ("If you'll get out and let me dry your hair, we'll sit down on the couch afterward and watch Elmo's World. Maybe this will be the episode where he successfully matures beyond his irritatingly narcissistic existence and develops the ability to refer to himself in something other than the third person!")
When she was younger, the solution was easy: distraction. If she fought over getting into her stroller or having her diaper changed, a toy dangled over her head or an airplane passing overhead would instantly snap her out of stubborn mode and before she realized it she'd already be doing whatever it was we wanted her to do.
Nowadays she's far too smart for that. Give her a toy and she'll bat it aside with a look that says, "Do you expect me to forget that you just rubbed my wet hair down with a towel when you KNOW I hate that? How stupid do you think I am?" Try to put her in her stroller when she's determined to play at the park for another 20 minutes, even though it's 60 degrees outside and we're both freezing, and she'll scream loud enough for everyone at the park to whip their heads around to see what poor child is being tortured.
Fortunately, we've discovered that with a lengthened attention span and greater clarity and force of will comes another skill: the ability to reason and to be reasoned with. This is truly a surprise to me; I never would have thought a 17 month old kid would be willing to bargain or negotiate. But as I'm quickly learning about my daughter, she's nothing if not attuned to her own best interests.
It started with the eyedrops -- I began showing them to her before applying them, explaining what they were and what their purpose was. Once she understood, she began to tolerate them, albeit reluctantly. I soon began applying this to other things, combining them with another tactic: allowing her to process what it is I'm asking of her and letting her come to her own decision about whether or not she's okay with it.
So now, instead of forcing her into her high chair at mealtime, we get the food ready while she's watching Sesame Street, then show it to her and say, "Sadie, would you like to eat some dinner?" We might offer her a piece of food, just to show her what the goods are. After a minute of consideration, she's MUCH more likely to acquiesce and move to the high chair on her own than she would be if we just grabbed her hands and tried to walk her over.
This worked well at the park yesterday, too. I gave her her usual five minute and two minute warnings that we were going to leave, and then, when the time came, I asked her if she was ready to go home. She paused, considered, then actually replied, "Yes." Miracle of miracles!
Even more impressive, Scott has successfully bargained with her. ("When you finish dinner, then you can go snuggle with Mommy.") I plan to try this tonight with her bath. ("If you'll get out and let me dry your hair, we'll sit down on the couch afterward and watch Elmo's World. Maybe this will be the episode where he successfully matures beyond his irritatingly narcissistic existence and develops the ability to refer to himself in something other than the third person!")
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