Seven Posts in Seven Days 1: Ann Marie update

This is a post for me and for Ann Marie’s early intervention therapist, Miss Nancy. Ann Marie was enrolled in EI last January after I took her for her 12-month well visit in December and her doctor said, “What do you mean she can’t get herself into a seated position? And she has no words at all, you say? Hmmm.”

Honestly, I blame her motor skills delay on her parents’ forgetting how old she was. “She’s the BABY. Tiny babies cannot sit up! It’s perfectly normal! She’s only a few months old!” we thought, subconsciously. Also responsible: She is the THIRD baby. She does not get quite as much laser-focused attention as, I don’t know, her eldest brother did. Her brother and sister are sort of demanding, as it happens. This is real life. 

At any rate, she scored one point over the qualifying score for motor skills (she could not crawl or get into a seated position or roll over or pull to stand, but her fine motor skills brought her score up) and two points over qualifying for her communication skills. In other words, she did not qualify, but only by a hair. In such cases, children can be enrolled based on clinical recommendation, and that is what we did. Frankly, I was not concerned about her motor skills because she had improved substantially between her well visit and her EI qualifying interview, mostly because Andrew became aware that she was not, in fact, a four-month-old, and we made her try things. But I was a bit concerned about her learning to talk because she communicated non-verbally to great effect, so I was afraid that I would not know how to get her to use actual words.

  

Thus it was that Miss Nancy started coming to our house every Tuesday afternoon for an hour to play with Ann Marie. And Ann Marie was Miss Nancy’s favorite client, if you don’t mind my totally unbiased opinion. And, OK, I’m sure Miss Nancy worked with plenty of adorable kids, but seeing as how she worked primarily with children with severe developmental delays, I do think a pleasant hour playing with a cheerful baby who had a slight speech delay was a nice little break for her.

It probably helped that my other two children were always under some sort of magical spell when Miss Nancy came, and always acted like angel children from another dimension for that hour. Honest to goodness, Nora once spent the entire time playing with some dolls, singing a little song quietly to herself. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was staged. The storybook magic always ended when Miss Nancy left at 4:00 and the children immediately began begging for a show, but it was always nice – if surreal – while it lasted.

Once Ann Marie started walking, we noticed a problem with her feet. They curved in. The orthopedist diagnosed her with metatarsus adductus, which is Latin for “curved in feet,” and prescribed special shoes for the day and boots and a brace to sleep in. I was told to expect that she would need to wear the brace for three years, and we scheduled a follow-up visit for that November, six months away. Well, her feet were noticeably better within two weeks. I know it was two weeks, because we got the brace right away but had to go back for the special shoes, and they were better by then. And by the time Ann Marie had her six-month evaluation for EI, her feet looked totally normal. The physical therapist who had come for a sort of foot consult before I took her to the orthopedist came back for the six-month eval, and she was astonished at the improvement.

But what is the six-month evaluation? In Massachusetts, if you qualify for EI, you get it for a year, with an evaluation midway through to check on the progress. But if you qualify for EI based on clinical recommendation, the six-month eval is a qualifying evaluation, and Ann Marie did not qualify. Not even close. In January, her almost-qualifying scores were 76 and 78. (You need 75 to qualify.) In June, her scores were 105 and 97. So the EI worked, apparently.

You know what else worked? Her shoes. I took her back to the orthopedist in October instead of waiting until November because she had outgrown her special shoes, and the orthopedist declared her cured. Cured! She didn’t have to wear special shoes or a nighttime brace anymore! I’m still pretty amazed by that. Six months is a lot less than three years. So, Miss Nancy, she hasn’t had orthopedic shoes since October!

She also talks a blue streak now, Miss Nancy. I’d list her words, but her vocabulary is too vast. This morning Nora was making her way to the car taking her to school, and Ann Marie called out, “Carefully, Nora!” correct syntax and all. Then while we came upstairs she said, “Can I watcha show? How ‘bout... Mickey Mouse! How ‘bout... Dora! How ‘bout… Phinny Ferb?” (That last one is Phineas and Ferb, and the answer is always no.) Yesterday Andrew asked Nora to get him a napkin and Ann Marie came running. “I do it! I DO IT!” and did it. When she wanted to stir my coffee for me I sent her over to stir Andrew’s instead. Jack said that he didn’t think Andrew wanted her to, and she said “I GOING to!”  She can count to twenty sort of, and she can count to eleven pretty consistently. She can identify “G” and “O” and knows what sound “H” makes. For the counting and letters I concede all credit to her Leapfrog Leaptop.

And she takes the stairs like a big kid. No more creeping. Sometimes she even alternates her feet while she climbs, although she has to be holding someone’s hand to do that. She can jump, too. Real jumps, both feet off the ground. She runs and climbs. She can get in and out of her crib and can even get out of her crib and make her way upstairs, all by herself. 

She is an utterly charming delight to be around. She has her moments of course, and we’re no strangers to tantrums about wanting or not wanting to wear her “cozy shirt” or some other nonsensical two-year-old problem, but she sure is fun.

And Miss Nancy, if you ever want to stop by for a visit, you are always welcome.

1,2,3... from Maureen on Vimeo.

Frankenbaby

I love it when babies are first starting to walk.

MVI 0323 from Maureen on Vimeo.

MVI 0347 from Maureen on Vimeo.

And here is a bonus video of Ann Marie playing a game she invented, called "Where's the milk?" See, she likes to have a napkin so she can helpfully wipe up her tray, and one dinner she started YELLING YELLING YELLING to get my attention. She HAS to yell, because I tune out the yelling. It's a bit of a catch-22. When I finally realized she was trying to tell me something, I looked over and she had her napkin over her milk cup and was signing "milk" at me. And a game was born.

MVI 0348 from Maureen on Vimeo.

But before you leave me a comment telling me how that is the cutest thing you've ever seen, let me preempt you by telling you that it's only because you didn't see Ann Marie calling us all over to her high chair tonight so she could give us hugs.

Use what you have

Andrew was holding the naked baby, having just gotten her ready for a bath. While I drew the bath, I noticed that this time, Andrew neglected to put a prefold diaper between her and his arm, the way he usually does in this situation. I turned my attention back to the tub and then heard Andrew yelling from the bathroom doorway. “Get me a diaper! Get me a diaper!” he cried out. But it took me too long and Andrew, already streaked with wet down his leg, saw the puddle on the floor approaching the kitchen baseboard. Because our house is so slanty, the baseboard does not actually meet the floor in a few places; for example, the place towards which the puddle was heading. So Andrew mopped it up with the only thing he had. His sock. Which he was wearing. 

Ann Marie's Birth Story

My due date was November 29. On November 30, I went in for my 40-week OB appointment, where I was 2cm and, uh, had my membranes scraped. Possibly this is too much information, so sorry about that. At any rate, I felt pretty weird on Thursday morning (Dec. 1) and thought it was conceivable that my water had broken. You might be wondering how I could be unsure, particularly as television always shows the water breaking as a huge unmistakable gush, but it doesn’t have to be. Just trust me, it’s possible not to realize it.

At any rate, I had a non-stress test scheduled for that day, so I figured I’d just have them check it when I got there. I was kind of hopeful that they’d say, “My goodness, you are 8 cm! You have to stay!” but I didn’t expect it, particularly given the amount of no-pain I was in. (Well, other than the sciatica, round ligament pain, and various other pregnancy ailments. No contractions, though.) So it was no surprise when they told me my water had not broken and I could go home. But I had a nice quiet nap while I was non-stressfully tested, so that was something at least.

Then on Friday, Dec. 2, I still felt really weird. Just… weird. No contractions, no concrete signs of labor, but if I were a cat I would have been fluffing up my birthing nest, or whatever it is cats do when they’re about to give birth. I don’t really know, so I probably should have picked a different analogy. After school I took the kids to buy Christmas outfits/kill the afternoon, and then we went home and had some sort of leftovers or something for dinner. And then I started to feel twinges. Contractions? Maybe? Sort of on the regular? We put the kids to bed, and I informed Andrew that I was having twinges about five minutes apart.

I called the doctor, and she said not to come in until they were two minutes apart. Now, two minutes is only three minutes less than five minutes, and three minutes is not a long time! So it seemed quite possible to us that we’d be at two minutes in an hour or two. I realize it doesn’t work like that, but that’s how it felt anyway. Since we were planning for the kids to stay with Andrew’s parents while I was in the hospital, and they live an hour away, we decided to ask them to drive up while it was still early enough to reasonably do so. That way they could just stay the night and I wouldn’t have to wake my niece up in the middle of the night to come babysit and it would just in general be easier for everyone except my in-laws.

So naturally, a half hour after they left their house, my contractions dwindled and then stopped. They were pretty much gone when the grandparents arrived. It was too late for them to drive home, though, so they stayed over anyway and said they would take the kids home with them in the morning regardless of what was happening on the baby front. We gave them our bed and Andrew and I settled down in the living room.

Somewhere around 1am, Nora woke up crying for me, so I relocated to the recliner in the kids’ room. Then, around 3am a contraction woke me up. “This is really it now,” I thought, foreshadowingly. After I woke Andrew we went in to tell his parents, who had requested that we wake them if we left in the night. “We’re going to the hospital,” we said. Then Andrew asked me how far apart the contractions were, and since I wasn’t really sure he suggested we time them before we actually left.

“Good idea,” I said. So I lay back down on the couch to time them and woke up four hours later. “I think that wasn’t actually it,” I told Andrew.

Andrew’s parents made good on their promise to take the children away in the morning, and I still felt pretty weird, so I parked myself on the couch after breakfast and mainlined episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on the Wii. The sporadic twinges reappeared, but I could never be certain they were actually contractions. We went for a walk around 11am, and halfway through, I had a contraction that was a for-real, I-mean-it contraction, no question. And I thought again that maybe my water broke.  Water-breakage was confirmed when we got home, so I checked in with the doctor then re-parked myself on the couch for a few more episodes of Grey’s.

Meanwhile, Andrew started nesting. In the grand tradition of husbands/fathers having to do SOMETHING, he bustled around the house attending to various chores. Some (packing the hospital bag) more pressing than others (cleaning the coffee maker). After about an hour of this, he came into the living room with a thoughtful expression, gazed around critically and said, “I want to rearrange the this room.” Now by this point, my contractions were quite unmistakable, and about 5-7 minutes apart. I was most definitely in labor. So I asked if he could possibly hold off on rearranging the living room furniture until at least the next day. 

At any rate, I labored along on the couch for about two and a half hours and then decided that 4 minutes apart was damn well close enough, and we went to the hospital. That was at 2:30. In the car, I breathed and silently fretted about how in the heck I was going to walk to L&D which is on the third floor, and also would I have to wait while Andrew parked? I had no experience with this, as I went to the emergency room when Jack was born since it was the middle of the night, and Nora was induced, so I wasn’t in labor yet when I arrived. I did not want to labor by myself in the lobby of the hospital, but knew I couldn’t possibly make it to L&D all alone. But do you know what hospitals have? Wheelchairs! I forgot they have wheelchairs! I tell you, I was never so relieved to see a wheelchair.

The front desk person wheeled me up to L&D while Andrew parked the car. (I didn’t have to walk from the garage either! Those hospitals. So considerate.) By the time Andrew got to my room, I was already gowned and being helped into bed. A quick check followed, revealing me to be at five centimeters or so, and the contractions were ramping up. With both Jack and Nora, I tried hypnobirthing, and made it to six centimeters with each of them before getting an epidural. But the critical thing was that Nora was born twenty minutes after I got the epidural. Since six centimeters seems to be my breaking point, and since I was worried that I might miss my window, and since I was hoping for a repeat of Nora’s quick birth, I decided to ask for the epidural right away. In the meantime, I used my hypnobirthing mp3 file and concentrated on staying relaxed. In order to do so, through every contraction I found myself making a low guttural “Unnnnggghhhhhhhh” sound. I never did that before, but it helped immensely.

At this point, my concept of time failed. The anesthesiologist came, and I seemed like getting the epidural took fifteen or twenty minutes, but Andrew assures me it was less than five. All I know is that I had to sit up without moving lest I become permanently paralyzed for a very very long time. Also I couldn’t say “Unnnnngggghhhhhh.” Well, I probably could have, but I didn’t. Once the epidural kicked in, though, I was very happy and chatty and about forty minutes later I had to push. This was twice as long after the epidural as with Nora, but I don’t think I’ll complain. Especially since Ann Marie was born at 4:27 pm, which was 87 minutes after getting hooked up to monitors. I took all the credit for this, citing my skillful relaxation techniques and general wesomeness. All the nurses were very impressed. Heck, even the people I was wheeled by in the waiting area on the way in said, “Wow, that was fast!” when I was wheeled back out again.

And then? After that incredibly easy and practically painless birth? I got Ann Marie, the easiest, sleepiest, snuggliest, most contented baby in existence. I realize that her being so easy is at least partially due to my own experience and lack of anxiety about every little thing; for example, I do not spend my days hovering over her wondering if I should hold her, put her down, feed her, change her, talk to her, leave her alone, etc. But it certainly helps that she is happy all the time. True, sometimes she goes “Eh! Eh! Eh!” if she’s really hungry, but mostly she just hangs out. She likes to be held, but I just hold her, so that’s fine. Man, if only I could go back in time five years and convince my new Mom self that newborns are easy! Relax, already!

Another thing that helps enormously is that I seem to have escaped any PPD this time. I am just happy! So happy to have this sweet little snuggly baby girl living with us. And it feels like she’s always been here.

And so we enter the cranky stage

This weekend, I achieved the following pregnancy milestones:

1. The cashiers at the grocery store asked me if I wanted help putting stuff in my car.
2. I did.
3. Near constant back pain. In fact, hold on while I rearrange myself on the couch because ow.
3a. There. That's better. Wait, no it isn't. There is no better.
4. I can no longer bear to walk to church (not far).
5. Seriously, my back really hurts.

Andrew returns to work tomorrow, along with the rest of the world, and I'm a smidgen worried about how I'm going to get through the days without dying. Meanwhile, I'm not even at 40 weeks for three more days, but I'm mentally preparing myself for having this baby at 42 weeks because I just feel like I'm doomed that way. Did I ever tell you I was personally three weeks late? THREE WEEKS. And I'm the youngest of six, so my mother was 43 weeks pregnant with five other children at home, ranging in age from 11 to 2.5.

Let's pause here, and raise a glass to my poor mother. Three weeks late, folks. I said to her this weekend that I don't know how she did it, and she said, "Well, I cried a lot."

But I shall change the subject and discuss the holiday weekend, which was actually quite nice until the back pain kicked in yesterday. Wednesday was a bust because of a variety of things, including Andrew going to bed for the night at about 5pm thanks to a fever, but we did manage to take the kids to see The Muppets on Friday. I had been very concerned that I would not get to see it until it comes out on DVD because of this here baby, but we made it! We even found a 10am showing which was very promising since we figured Nora would be able to stay awake for the whole thing! HA HA HA! We are adorably naive. She enjoyed the Toy Story short at the beginning and then asked if it was over. About halfway through the movie, she started whining kind of a lot and asked to go home, but we are terrible, awful, selfish people, and made her stay. In our defense, Jack - and, fine, WE - were enjoying it immensely, and we only had one car, so it wouldn't really have been fair to make Jack leave. Or us. We did take her out for walks, though, and then she climbed into my lap and went to sleep.

Andrew and I are both very relieved that Jack liked it, because we would clearly have had to disown him. And Nora at least liked the singing chickens, so there's that.

And that's all I have in me because I need to lie down. WOE WOE WOE IS ME.

Well this is convenient

Yesterday, Jack was rooting through the silverware drawer while I prepped for dinner. (I made this crockpot breakfast casserole. I am told it was good, but I certainly couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t even go near it as I very unwisely included broccoli. Here’s a helpful tip: If you start to feel nauseated round about 3:00 most days, it is perhaps not the best idea to cook broccoli in the crockpot from 3:00-5:00. We played outside from 4:00 on or so, and when we came back inside the stench of overcooked broccoli almost killed me dead. In fact, I have to stop even typing about it right now. Blergh.)

Let’s start over: Jack was rooting through the silverware drawer and came across a baby spoon, but a particularly annoyingly shaped baby spoon that doesn’t fit in the drawer very well. We used to have two, in fact, but I think I threw one out. Jack was fascinated by it, and when I told him it was a practice spoon for babies, he said, “We should have another baby.”

Well that caught my attention. We have not yet shared our good news with Jack, but I figured this was a golden opportunity not to be wasted. “Would you really like to have another baby come live here, Jack?” I asked him.
“Yeah!” he said.

“Because they’re so cute, right?” I was concerned that he was mainly interested in seeing the baby spoon in use, so I wanted to check.

“Yeah, they are,” he replied. “We should have lots of babies.”

“How many babies do you want, Jack?”

“Oh, five or six,” he answered.

“Five or six, huh? I said. “Do want them to come all at once, or do you want to have one every couple of years?”

Jack considered this, and then said, “One every couple of years, because we only have one of these baby spoons.”

And you can’t argue with that.

Technology is out to get us

This announcement will come as a total non-shock to many of you who follow me on Twitter, as I recently inadvertently publicly tweeted what was supposed to be a direct message. I blame my phone. You see, I was replying to a DM from someone and forgot that when you reply by phone, it is a TEXT MESSAGE so it replies to TWITTER, not to the person who messaged you. You still need to type the “DM @person” unless you want to broadcast what seems like a weird sideways hint to the entire internet, like maybe a tweet referencing mysterious “home tests” that were “all negative.”

Incidentally, I learned something recently, and it is that cheap pregnancy test strips bulk ordered from Amazon apparently have a shelf life.

Yes, folks, we’re going to have another baby. Sometime in December. I’m tennish weeks along. I’d know more precisely, but I don’t have the exact date of my LMP. This makes me sound like I have a breezy/irresponsible devil-may-care attitude towards such things, but in actuality, I have charts and graphs and observations. I don’t HAVE to remember the date of my LMP because it’s on the chart. You know? The chart? The one Nora found and stole and put somewhere? Else? I’m sure I’ll find it in late December some time.

Yeah, so about five weeks ago I went to the doctor to find out what in the holy hell was wrong with me, because something was not right. Not right at all. And the home tests! Were negative! In fact, I think I deserve some kudos for restraining myself and not googling “early menopause.” Unless maybe I did. Yeah, I probably did. The doctor’s office spends a bit more on test kits, however, so everything was cleared right up. Things were still kind of terrible for a while, though, because the stuff that was not right? Was in my brain. It was like I had post-partum depression early. Partum depression, I guess. So while it was somewhat helpful to know that there was a simple biological explanation and I had only gone mad temporarily, I was still in the midst of it sitting there in the doctor’s office, and the news did not exactly make me jump up with joy. There’s not a lot of jumping for joy when everything about life is totally awful.

I remained in the midst of it until about a week ago, and I have to tell you it feels so good to be ME again. I no longer storm around the house every morning, slamming cabinets and resenting the entire world for not sending in someone ELSE to clean the bathroom for a change and do you think that another person in this house could deign to sweep the goddamn floor once in a while? It was awful. And the worst part of that was how my kids could not even look cross-eyed at me without my taking it as a personal attack on my sanity. They could do nothing right. It felt like they were just pick-pick-picking at me every second of the day. I was just so angry, all the time.

To name one specific example, in the throes of this depression I took the kids to my niece’s birthday party, and I had some trouble finding the location. It was in a play center in an office park, and there was a sign at the entrance to the lot, but no second sign pointing the way to the waaaay back of the lot. I drove around that stupid lot for about five minutes and could not find the place to save my life. I had to call my brother, who directed me back out onto the main road – a BUSY road that I now had to take a LEFT TURN onto – around the corner and back IN to the stupid office park where I found that had I only kept going straight to the back in the FIRST place I would have FOUND the stupid playspace FIVE MINUTES AGO.

I seethed about that for at least thirty minutes. I seethed at the people who decided to put something like that at the BACK of the lot, I seethed at whoever was in charge of signage for not including a second sign, I seethed at the traffic on the busy road, and I seethed at my brother for making me take a LEFT TURN onto a BUSY ROAD. It was an extremely rational and reasonable response to a few minutes of inconvenience, obviously.

When I wasn’t angry at everyone and everything, I was crying from sadness or loneliness or guilty feelings over being a hateful person or a combination of all three. Or else I was dry heaving, and feeling sad and angry and resentful about it. I was pure joy to live with, believe me.

I did consider antidepressants, but I was trying to give my hormones a few weeks to settle down a bit. My doctor and I discussed it, and had I not been feeling better by twelve weeks I would have tried them, because nine months is a helluva long time to feel like that. But the fog lifted during the past week, and I have been in a good mood even though the weather is dark and rainy and cold, I still have to clean the bathroom and sweep the floor, and I continue to spend a lot of quality time dry heaving over the toilet. On the upside, I clean the toilet much more often seeing as I have to stare into it several times a day. (To clarify, the upside there is not that I clean the toilet much more often, it’s that we more often have a clean toilet.)

Best of all, I am once again enjoying my kids. My kids who are not, as it turns out, evilly conspiring to drive me crazy. In fact, they’re actually pretty cute. I kind of like them. Another one seems like a great idea to me.