Saturday, May 31, 2008
The latest stats on Katie
Our champ weighs in at 18.33 pounds and 28.54 inches. She jumped percentile rankings a little, but that percentile thing is weird. I remembered it vaguely from the stats classes I've had and I knew it's a point of comparison. It freaked me out a little, though, when she dropped from the 88th percentile at birth to the 45th at her three month check-ups. A friend finally explained it to me in ways that make sense- unlike Eric's attempt.
Not long after we started at Katie's first day care, her teacher thought she was younger than she is because she was much smaller than the other babies. I hate to say it, but that kinda got to me, because the doctor also commented Thursday that Katie is smaller than her other babies. I usually just rationalize it by thinking that Eric and I were both super skinny until our mid-twenties, so she's genetically pre-disposed to being thin.
As far as comparisons go, though, and I don't mean to insult anyone, but the meaningful way the whole percentile thing was explained to me was that low percentiles are a good thing regarding weight. In Iowa specifically, they have a problem with obese children and I'm hoping that that's what the doctor was referring to. For sure, the other kids in her day care are larger than her.
It's possible, too, that either Katie heard the doctor or that we haven't been feeding Katie enough. We feed her solids until it's crystal clear she's done, but lately, she's been squealing with frustration when her bottle's empty. We never increased her formula because she didn't want the refill we offer. But then, yesterday, she suddenly started drinking two more ounces at each feeding...and so, I think we were holding her back, much like I think we may have been when we didn't change to faster flowing nipples soon enough. Oh, and because I had to take care of my thyroid cancer follow-up, I stopped nursing about a month ago.
So that's how big Katie is. She's tall and thin, like her parents used to be.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
It just wasn't a good day
I could post a series of pictures rather than just this one showing Katie pushing her car seat around. She was all over it: climbing in it, pushing it, turning it over. And I have that on film- or, on my computer. But the important thing is, we, her stupid parents, learned that the laws of physics still apply to our daughter. Let's just say that this image is the moment directly before the rest of the afternoon where she averaged at least one bump, owie or boo-boo the rest of the day. Directly after this shot, as I fidgeted with the camera and Eric watched from the couch, she plunged forward and fell face-first onto the hardwood. She has a busted lip, and I was convinced last night that her nose would be bruised this morning because it was a little wider in the middle after her accident than before. She also has a diagonal cut on the skin between her nose and upper lip.
She was having the best time before the first catastrophe of the day, and that's how it always seems to go. There was one time she was kneeling in front of her rocking chair, laughing and smiling up at us, only to turn around, lose her grasp on the bottom rung of the chair, and fall forward to hit her mouth and gums on the chair. Needless to say, that killed that moment, as it did yesterday. She was gradually blithe again, but it seemed easier each time she sat down hard or slipped or lost her grip on something the rest of the day to get upset. And it seemed there were constant booms and thumps all day, until finally, after our Wal-Mart run overlapped with her usual last bottle call before bed time, her eyebrow was a distressed pink streak from crying the whole car ride home. We sat on the porch swing, enjoying the end of the day, rocking Katie as she downed the bottle in her jammies and red knit cap. I think, though, I'll renew my call for a Katie-sized helmet, this time, can someone include a face mask? She might lose a few teeth, if not.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
More lessons
2. If a baby won't go forward, they'll go up, or backwards, or any direction they want. Katie goes up- she's a climbing fool. We have the canopy over her crib to keep the cats out. Now I guess we'll need it to keep her in.
3. Noses may as well be mouths. Her mouth and nose both blow bubbles, items go in and out of both just as easily, and boogers and food get crusted on both. And actually, sometimes its hard to tell if that's food on her nose or boogers.
4. Freud may really have known what he was talking about when he came up with the oral stage. Everything eventually makes it into her mouth, and she gets really upset when we want to take some of it back out.
5. Your kids can be a lot like you, even when they're only ten months old. One of my professors said having kids really shakes up your position on the nature vs. nurture argument; she wasn't kidding.
6. Everything is new again, and again, and again. The exersaucer sucked when we she didn't like to jump. Now, she knows how to have a good time... for a few moments, anyways. The grass, however, is still frightening. But standing at the screen door is endlessly entertaining. And pushing the nose on the lion, instead of walking with the lion, is always fascinating.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The unintended uses of technology
Katie is still terrified of walking holding on to someone's finger with only one hand. It really seems to stress her out. Time and again, though, we see that she's better at balancing herself than she realizes: when she gets up and down from the screen on the sliding door, or that brief moment when she stands alone as she transitions between furniture and the floor.
Communications scholars have a theory, if you can call it that, called diffusion of innovations. In a couple weeks, I'll be much more adept at discussing it because it's on my exams reading list- the whole 500 page book. Anyways, diffusion of innovations scholars realized that sometimes, those they mistook as "early adopters" or even just "adopters" of a technology new to them had actually re-invented its use. I'm wondering if I can use Katie as an anecdote or example of my understanding of this phenomenon, because she has definitely adapted our efforts to get her to trust her ability to walk to suit her needs.
Today, we bought her a walker. Pushing stools and other pieces of furniture around seemed a little too hazardous, so we finally got her one. It has a lion face on it and converts into a bike she can sit on. But, even though she'll push around a stool, any piece of paper or cardboard she finds, boxes, and cans, she's hesitant to stand at the back of this walker and push it. Instead, she pushes it and walks with it in any other direction than its intended use.
She'll walk all around it, push the lion's nose over and over again so it'll light up and play music, and then grab its sides and push it forward that way. Any time we try and get her to walk the way it's supposed to, she takes a few steps and then starts to cry. I think I need to stop letting her see me watch it because that seems to fuel her outbursts. And she loves to actually ride the thing, but she seems determined to push it the way she finds fit, and not the way it was intended.
One of my professors said her daughter made decisions to do things: one day, her daughter just decided to use the toilet. It wasn't a process, but something she had to just decide to do. I think Katie operates the same way. She clearly has a mind of her own...I don't know where she could have possibly gotten that. Even though her independence often manifests in shrieks of frustration because the thing she was pushing ran into something or her bottle ran out before she was done, I hope this sticks around. She's spunky- and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Good night, you moonlight ladies: Twilight and my 29th birthday
Tonight, Dad, Eric, Katie and I went to dinner and we got home around 8:30. It's a beautiful evening outside- absolutely perfect, if you ask me. Katie was pretty serious at dinner, even after trying some delicious garlic mashed potatoes for the first time, so we knew she was getting tired.
Or so we thought. After putting her in her crib, the three of us were on the porch swinging. Eric and I heard her screaming from her room. After rocking her a little bit, she wasn't going down easy. She and I walked onto the front porch, and Eric took out the stadium blanket for the three of us to sit on the front lawn.
Coleridge, I believe it was, or maybe it was Wordsworth- some British white guy writing a long time ago, wrote that words fade like embers the moment the poet thinks them. Sitting outside with Katie and Eric on my first birthday after her birth was magic, which I cannot adequately put into words now that the moment has passed. It was twilight and the sky glowed as it began to darken. Katie was wrapped in the quilt Mom made her and her face was shadowed by the unbelievably bright street lamp, but she sat calmly in my lap. Eric was laying on his side on the stadium blanket, and kids were playing down the street.
Katie watched as our cat Sita tried to jump into the neighbor's tree, and we realized fireflies were out. One landed on a blade of grass near the blanket, and I tried to point it out in the dark to Eric. He eventually caught it, and we leaned toward one another so Katie could see her first firefly. I'm sad to say the bug had performance anxiety and wouldn't do its bit, but we decided it was time to get Katie back to bed.
"Let's go listen to the Beatles, or James Taylor," I said to her, referring to the lullaby mix CD I made her. Eric and I started to try and sing Sweet Baby James to her, but we laughed as we flubbed the words. It was probably the world's worst attempt at soothing a baby.
She was calm, so we decided to go back inside and put her in her crib...that was twenty minutes ago, and right now, she picking up my shoe next to me at my computer, babbling away. She hasn't gone to sleep, but it was a truly magical memory: sitting in the twilight, with my husband and daughter, catching fireflies, and singing badly.
The permanence of now: What's changed since I've become a mother
This isn't about how I go to bed much earlier these days, or how I wish I could sleep in until 9 or 10 am (although some days, I do wish I could sleep past 7 am). This isn't even about how I don't go out drinking very much, if at all, or how people don't ask me to hang out anymore. These are all changes I'm okay with- I get out enough (now that the weather permits) and I know my social life will pick back up if we move closer to home at the end of the year.
Instead, as we bathed Katie the other night, I finally realized why my dad is still surprised when I wear a dress, or how he seems to think I take care of my thyroid problems like I did when I was 14. Much like the way the elderly seem to just stop changing, like how 75 year-olds can still be racist as shit even though the world has somewhat moved on, I realized that as Katie splashed and laughed in her bath the other night, that that was how I would always see her. My mom wasn't kidding when she says that I'll always be her baby; when Katie goes to kindergarten for the first time, graduates from high school, goes on her first date, leaves for college, all those things- she'll still be my little baby, splashing in her tub and pleased to pieces over the strangest things. She'll still be the stubborn nine-month old who freezes up and lays on the kitchen floor, or starts licking the sliding glass doors up and down (that's her latest antic). She'll still be my sweet, rambunctious booger-nose who slaps the floor as she crawls across our little house here in Iowa.
These, my memories of her as an infant that I will store always in the back of my mind, are what will always stay the same. I have made an effort to cherish every moment with her since not many parents do or get the chance to. But what has changed now that I am a parent, and is the true subject of this post, is my reaction to news and stories involving children and families.
It happened almost immediately after Katie was born. It seemed there as a proliferation of horrid things happening to small children: baby Grace in Texas, things as awful as that. Whereas once, I would've reacted something along the lines of, "geez, that's awful," now, it hits me straight in the gut. It's an honestly visceral reaction to news of neglected or brutalized children. When a father facing charges of embezzlement bludgeoned his wife and four children to death in Iowa City in April, my professors' children were in school with the man's oldest son. My professor and I talked about how having children just changes your feelings about things like this. As he said, a lot of kids in IC were getting away with things they normally wouldn't have, just because their parents were glad to have them around.
So tonight, I pulled into the HyVee (the local ubiquitous grocery store) and finished listening to back-to-back stories on NPR that brought tears to my eyes. The first was about parents in the earthquake-stricken area of China, waiting around their children's schools to find out if they had survived or not. The end of the story really got me; the reporter mentioned that for most of these parents, these were their only children, and she finished with the line, "as they said goodbye to their babies." That was it; your child is always your baby...
But the next story hits home for multiple reasons. As a mother and a graduate student, my research interests involve representations of gender in the mass media. For my dissertation, I want to look at Latino immigrant communities and some interaction with the media. Needless to say, I do not have the same ideas about certain issues as the numerous people back home in Oklahoma who support immigration reform and the mistreatment of immigrants, legal or not.
This second story involved a panic in a California town after an undocumented woman was arrested in a store by ICE. Rumors had gone around that government officials were watching the local schools, and so the principals had to hold meetings with scared parents to assure them that NO ONE had been watching the school, and NO ONE would be arrested on the school campus. The mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles were both speaking out against immigration raids and the inhumane treatment of those apprehended as a result; the San Francisco mayor declared the town a sanctuary for all people and that all city services would be available, regardless of immigration status.
What seems to be forgotten in all the alarmist propaganda that gets circulated regarding immigration post-9/11 is that regardless of status, legal or undocumented, these people are humans like the rest of us. They are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters; they only happen to have the wrong shade of skin color.
Make no mistake; the current fear of an immigrant invasion is aimed at the waves of brown-skinned folks seeking better lives here than what's available in their home countries. But the moment they cross that border, U.S. citizens lump them into the same category as murderers and rapists. The xenophobes out there, like those idiot Minute Men posting themselves along the border, aren't concerned with undocumented immigrants from Europe or Central Asia. If you're white, there's apparently no reason to be scared of you.
If you're brown, though- watch out. Then, it's perfectly okay to separate fathers and mothers from their families, place them in detention centers, and deny access or information to their family members who have no idea about the status of their mothers and fathers or if they're even still in the U.S. We sure do like to crow about family values in this country- evidently, that doesn't apply in this situation. So-called "compassionate conservatism" appears to only apply to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants- certainly not to impoverished workers from Third World countries.
Moreover, the human rights violations are only one part of immigration in the U.S. that's poorly, poorly misunderstood. First, since the U.S. began regulating immigration in the 1800s, the "fears" and "threats" have always been the same: an alleged invasion by people of allegedly poorer character and moral standing who are taking the jobs of white folks (re: white men), draining social services, and introducing all sorts of social ills into society. And God forbid someone speak a language other than English. But the fact of the matter is, the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and any one from any Latin American country except Cuba has been the target of immigration exclusion for every reason imaginable- and for every single reason we seek to reform immigration today.
These "security threats," seemingly waiting to cross our Southern border this time, illegally and via coyote rather than legally, from Saudi Arabia, and on a plane, have all been conjured and imagined in the past: the Chinese were a threat to Labor in the 1800s, so we had the Exclusion Acts in 1882. The Japanese were excluded next under the Gentlemen's Agreement (talk about shady diplomacy). Mexicans and Mexican Americans, first easily exploited labor in the booming agribusiness of the early 20th Century American Southwest, were suddenly taking the jobs of returning GIs. As a result, all stripes of Mexican Americans were deported. Throughout the Cold War, we used the same excuses for exclusionary and draconian immigration policy; the worst came when the U.S. denied asylum to Latin Americans from countries ravaged by civil wars funded and supported by the U.S. government. Anyone who praises Ronald Reagan should know better, or has little understanding of the Iran/Contra Affair. Nevertheless, hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of Gautemalan, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan refugees were denied asylum by the U.S. government, who could not admit that the governments they backed in Central America had done anything wrong, much less murder droves of their own citizens. To admit these refugees would be to admit the U.S.'s collusion with murderous regimes in the effort to secure our imperial legacy.
And now, for the Bush administration to admit that undocumented workers do not themselves pose a security threat, but serve to keep fresh the idea that we are threatened as nation, would be to confront the hypocrisy of neoconservatism in this country.
If only it were about securing our country and saving our social services and infrastructure from plunder; but look no further than the White House for the epicenter of moral erosion. If only immigration reform could be enacted fairly, justly, and humanely; instead, families are ripped apart, robbed of their basic human right to live with a sense of security. Instead, we criminalize families based on anecdotal and inaccurate tales of over-bred Mexican women, uninsured drunk drivers killing American citizens, all of whom supposedly reap the benefits of the same social services necons would take away if given the chance.
This, as a parent, I find outrageous, repulsive, and apprehensible. To think that my child and I might live in fear from simply crossing a border- that, I might add, was drawn as an act of empire and in effect, crossed them- breaks my heart. That our country can be so cold and depraved to the livelihood of other humans, anywhere in the world, is deplorable. And that we live in a country that seizes upon a factory, detains workers, separates families, and shows no concern for the welfare of the most vulnerable sectors of society is reason for outrage. They stole social security numbers? What this means is, they're paying into a system from which they will not benefit. Who really loses there? It's certainly not me, especially given that our government's current spending will ensure that there will be no social security benefits for me to draw upon when and if I retire.
Scholarly studies overwhelmingly refute and contradict every common epithet regarding undocumented workers: they are less likely to use public services, although they pay taxes into the system; they are less likely to be jailed or commit crimes warranting prosecution; they do NOT take jobs from other workers. And let's not forget, those weren't Mexicans using legally-obtained visas driving planes into the Twin Towers.
It may seem circuitous, how I go from musings about Katie to ravings about the inhumanity of American immigration policies. The point is, just like I will always see Katie as my infant, and I will always remember the big-toothed silly baby girl, even when she's thirty and starting her own adventures, we tend to see the moment we occupy as permanent. We sometime can't see past our own faces. And right now, this country fails to understand that history is literally repeating itself: we are falling prey to a government using our fear of compromised national security to target a largely beneficial community for expulsion. We can't understand the fear with which these immigrants live, fears of being separated from their families- of mothers being riven from their children. How can we stand for that? How can we let that happen? Finally, as a nation of parents, how can we change the seeming permanence of the moment?
Friday, May 9, 2008
Anything but reading: The current state of things
Anyways, this week marks the end of my third year here at Iowa. Nothing ever turns out the way I expect, which is fine, I suppose. Iowa has certainly been no different. Three years ago, I was graduating from OU with a wonderful advisor. We hadn't bought our house here in IA yet, and gas wasn't so expensive. Two years ago, I had just had my thyroid surgery and Dad had bought my ticket to Peru (come to think of it, I had just had a big online slugfest with a psycho doc student from Columbia with whom I was supposed to spend the whole summer- talk about disciplinary misunderstandings). One year ago, I was sooo ready to have the baby.
And one month ago, I hated school. I hated it deeply. But these landmarks from the past three years mark the twists and turns our lives have taken since then. When I was graduating from OU, I had already met some of my current colleagues and fallen deeply in love with the idea of such deep comradery. Today, those are some of the same people that drove me to dislike school so much; they embody everything wrong with academia.
Two years ago, I had a kick-ass dissertation topic pinned down. As a trade-off, I ended up studying with a professor different than whom I had originally come to Iowa. That has had it's ups and downs. More importantly, as my advisor said, that dissertation topic would have guaranteed me a job at a prestigious institution- whatever that means. And, unlike my peers, my plans to travel to Peru were sidetracked by a cancer the surgery was supposed to prevent. Instead, it discovered it. The surgery, and I believe this whole-heartedly, is how I was able to get pregnant. I just don't think were working right before. As a result, I can say the third year in Iowa has not only been the best here, but it's been the best ever.
That brings me to what a realization I had a few weeks ago. My wonderful advisor at OU gave me a lot of great advice, namely, that I was coming to Iowa for an education and to leave all the personal drama behind. Like a prophet, she told me I wouldn't meet my best friends here and that I would confront problems as a woman that a man would never have to consider.
That's what's happened. It wasn't long before the group of people I came in with fell out of love with one another. Universities are full of dysfunctional people, and we're truly no different. Mix dysfunction with low self-esteem and you have a group of people with poor social skills and overwhelming tendencies for passive-aggressiveness. To say our social arrangement in the department has shifted would be an understatement. While I have met some wonderful people, they have not turned out to be who I expected. That's my poor judgment more than anything. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, right?
I find two things in tension here at Iowa: a sense of connection, and morbid individuality- no, self-centeredness. What I mean is, my cohort, those I came in with, are held in relation to one another. This has never been announced, and I honestly think it's a figment of someone's overactive imagination. But, unbeknownst to 6 or 7 of the 9 of us, we are all held to the same invisible standard. We are compared to one another in some of the most cruel and petty ways, without regard to context. We have all been lined up on a literal track that we did not know existed. We are constantly surveilled and evaluated. We are now, more than we have ever been, docile bodies.
The nasty twist is, the standards against which we are judged are elusive, unfixed, and set regardless of individual circumstance. To be less enigmatic: my peers who set some ridiculous standard have gone through the past three years unimpeded by anything other than stupid romantic problems with people they met on the internet. They have turned in trash, which someone else then turned into gold. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to work alone (this applies to many people here) as we deal with say, losing whole summers to cancer. No one else came back four weeks after having a baby and a c-section and jumped in as if nothing had changed. My friend's wife had a baby over Thanksgiving break our first year here. You would never have known it had we not seen his wife or received the emails after she delivered a beautiful baby boy.
But, as I so often do, I misdirected my simmering discontent over such bullshit to the whole enterprise of academia. To be fair, this shit is pervasive- it hangs like a shroud over the third floor of the journalism building. It took on a universal appearance due to the departmental politics at OU. The result: I lost faith in what I was doing. I saw no worth in getting my PhD...and teaching white, upper-middle-class white kids with senses of entitlement DID NOT help.
One Friday, I hit bottom and a few days later I realized what was wrong. I had lost sight of my advisor's advice. I had conflated the personal drama with the task at hand, and that was never to be an academic, a scholar, a professor. My goal in getting my PhD was to be a writer who had an education, to make a difference from a knowledgeable point of view.
And then I met with committee members who are in other departments. When I told them how I was feeling about this whole endeavor, they gave me encouragement that my department does not offer. Tellingly, neither of them come from families of professors...but besides that, they both gave me pep talks, reminded me that my dissertation was my own, it was my work and that I could do something kick-ass with it. More importantly, they reminded me what my degree could do, or rather, what I could do with my degree. And, they reminded me not to lose hope.
Make no mistake- I still plan on fucking some shit up (no excuses for language because that's what I'm going to do). As some feminists have written, I have to find ways to work within and against the system. I have some preliminary ideas on how to do just that, and sadly, it may not take us closer to home like we wanted, although nothing's certain. The weather will be warmer, though, and that's a start.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
A sleeping baby and a cup of coffee
So I made some coffee and plan on napping myself because Katie and I have a long, busy day ahead of us. She's back to MWF at day care before she starts at the new place in June. The last time we spent all day at home like this, there was a foot of snow on the ground, it was below freezing, and we couldn't easily leave the house. But I feel like a load has been lifted since I finished grading my students' papers Monday night- the papers were generally unremarkable, if not awful altogether. Refer to my post on NCLB for my thoughts on why that is.
Speaking of NCLB, I had an epiphany yesterday in the car on the way home. One of my students has complained that the testing format in the class I TA for does not accurately reflect her knowledge of the course material. My first thought was, can anything reflect your knowledge? But sarcasm aside, other students have said the same thing to me last semester. Here's the thing, though: my course is a pre-requisite for those seeking journalism major status, and a gen-ed for everyone else. It had a reputation for being the easier of the two pre-reqs. Then, my supervising professor, clean from the research demands of tenure at a Research I university, had the time to reinvest himself in his teaching. As a result, he changed the testing format of the class, and now the tests are all essay.
In their essays, the students are given a concept that we've discussed at length in lecture and the discussion sections and they have to apply it to two of the historical cases that have also been identified in the question and obviously, been discussed in class. They can't just regurgitate information; they have to show that they understand the material. This is very, very different than a multiple choice test which can hardly gauge understanding but is very good at indicating memorization.
And that's the thing: these students are so adept at regurgitating information that our testing format is foreign to them. In order to perform successfully on our exam, they have to be able to identify and define the key concepts (a phrase eerily similar to one repeated over and over in my very first graduate-level theory class), and then apply it to the cases stated. In this way, they demonstrate their comprehension of the concept, which is drastically different than rote memorization. That is to say, memorization is not the same as comprehension.
My professor has filled the essay questions with prompts like "evaluate," "compare," "assess," and "analyze." You don't see those words on tests on which you have to fill in little bubbles, particularly since these terms evoke subjective responses. And because subjectivity is often conflated with bias and opinion, two buzzwords in any journalism curriculum, students shy away from analysis. The result, as evidenced in my student who couldn't provide her own analysis when she came to me for help and I quizzed her on the material, is recitation of facts without any interpretation as to their significance.
But it all makes sense in it's own sad way. Why would students be able to write good essays of any sort when they simply haven't been asked to do so? For them, assessment of their knowledge of the subject material comes in standardized tests and it's corollary, standardized answers. If there's a set of acceptable answers out there, why rely on your own abilities to reason and interpret to construct an answer? This conjures all sorts of critical theory that demonstrates how the concept of objective knowledge and inquiry has been used to oppress...but I won't go there.
So the weather outside is beautiful. Instead of going stir-crazy in the house like the last time Katie and I were here together, we've got to get the oil changed today and I really need to clean the floors. Katie put a petal from the ornamental tree out front in her mouth this morning, so it's time to clean. There are pens and papers all over the floor from Katie getting a hold of things while sitting on our laps as we try to study. We might go for a walk. I may find time to read while Katie plays, and we'll make dinner while we wait for Eric to come home.
But I refuse to grade my students' finals today. I'm prolonging my peace and putting that off until tomorrow, so I can praise and smile at all the answers from students who get it, and shake my head and rub my neck from all those who simply want the fact pattern and the ill-gotten A.
Monday, May 5, 2008
The Terror of the Grass
Spring comes late to Iowa. In fact, Katie and I took our first walk only three weeks ago. This should be shocking to everyone in Oklahoma, who have enjoyed spring since Christmas practically. This is probably the latest I've seen things bloom here- the trees have yet to fully leaf and our Oriental Magnolia out front still has blooms on it. My tulips haven't even all opened yet- those that bother to grow at all, that is.
There's some disjunctive process of spring going on, though. While my forsythia went straight to leaf, my phlox are kinda blooming first. My rose bushes are finally starting to green, and I saw the first blades of my lavender plant. My day lilies, however, are full. No stalks have come up yet, but its only a matter of time. It's like the plants are all trying to make up for the late start. They've eschewed full blooms for the leaves. I was really looking forward to my forsythia blooming, namely so I could take a picture of Katie next to the bright yellow flowers.
I was reminded today, though, that this is Katie's first spring. They try and take the babies outside at day care but more often than not, the whether doesn't cooperate. Eric and I loaded her up in the stoller this afternoon and went for a long walk. When we got home, we spread the blanket covering her during the walk on the grass so she could finally feel the grass.
Katie didn't know what to do. She'd crawl to the perimeter of the blanket and once her hand hit the grass, she'd recoil. She simply would not touch the grass or go beyond the blanket. In fact, she leaned as far back as possible to avoid getting off the blanket. As Eric said, it was like she was touching thorns. We sat outside with her for a good half hour, sitting on the grass. As long as her hands weren't touching it, she was fine. But she just didn't know what to think of the greenery. I told her she'd be rolling down hills before she knew it.
The video is really the best footage of her disdain of the grass.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
We've come a long way, or, You can't put the cat in your mouth
Despite everything, despite screeching from pain and fear when Daphne took her for a ride on her tail and starting scratching her, Katie still loves the sight of that cat. She still squeals when she sees her. Now, I think Daphne's come around; Daphne doesn't leap off like she used to when Katie starts chasing her around the back of the couch.
Just now, Daphne kept pacing coyly around the couch with Katie in hot pursuit. Daphne finally sat on Eric's lap, and Katie tackled her. At day care, they've been trying to teach the babies "gentle touches" because there's a smaller infant in the room. I've been trying to follow up at home, getting Katie to stroke the cats softly rather than what she normally does: pull on a chunk of their fur or poke at their toes. When Katie tackled Daphne a few moments ago, with the cat sitting in compliance, I took her hand, saying, "Gentle touches, Katie, gentle touches." As she stroked the cat's fur, she giggles. It makes her laugh for some reason.
It wasn't all peaceful, though: after pulling her hand away, she immediately proceeded to start feeling Daphne's fur with her mouth. Our response: "Katie, you can't put the cat in your mouth." This isn't unusual. She's put Sita's ears in her mouth before. Nonetheless, it didn't turn into a wild West show which means, we've come a long way in baby-animal relations around here.
Also, Katie's been hesitant, if not fearful of letting go of both of our hands while we "walk" her around the house. Not only did she start pushing the stool around yesterday, she's getting excited to let go of our fingers to walk using only one hand. And, by accident, she's stood for a few seconds by herself. Once we planted her down and let go. She freaked and sat down. Today, she was walking along Eric's leg that was hanging off the couch. I yelled out, "Eric!" and realized it sounded like she was getting hurt or something. Instead, she was standing on her own and didn't even know it.
It's only a matter of time, I guess. Whatever baby-proofing we have left to do better get done. I just feel like our house is a big death trap, though: stairs, books on shelves, papers hanging off tables with heavy objects sitting on top of them (like Eric's 100-pound textbooks)...
Anyone want to buy us a crash helmet and lots of padding so I can sleep at night? Ugh. If she hasn't woken up at least once, I start waking up around 5 listening for her to start moaning. She'll be off to college, I'm sure, and I'll still be listening for her around the house.
