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A glowing report

July 12, 2010 in Progeny by J | 2 comments

Simon had his post-op appointment with his palate surgeon today (and the craniofacial department added a post-op for the three-months-ago ear tube surgery as well as an audiology assessment). To be fair, we originally had a more timely post-ear-tube post-op appointment scheduled, but had to cancel when the boy woke up with a fever that morning.

So basically, Simon is doing awesome. Also, he is so clever.

Simon’s hearing is great.
Simon’s ears are clear of fluid. (Also, although he hates having his ears messed with, he let the doctor look in one side without complaining. The other side…not so much, but I’ll take what I can get.)
Simon’s palate is healing well.

Today was a crazy day at the craniofacial clinic. I’ve never seen so many kids in the waiting room, and both surgeons were running late. The first one, by only about thirty minutes, but the second one for over an hour. Clever mother that I am, I had brought no books or toys in the diaper bag.

The waiting room at the hospital has more books and toys than most pediatric places I’ve been, and the toys are great — large cube-like things, about two feet on a side, with various non-removable things on each face for babies to grab. Simon was pulling up to kneel a lot on the cubes, and did a little crawling around the waiting area. I wanted to tell everyone to look at my baby – HE CAN CRAWL NOW. Did I mention he can crawl now?

The books in the lobby: not so much. I can only read board books to Simon in public, since he always wants to rip the pages out of paper books. The only board book I could find was about kids dressing up for a costume party, then going to the costume party and enjoying looking at everyone’s costumes while eating snacks. Seemed kind of banal but tolerable given the situation, except the boys were all dressed as cowboys, aliens, and superheroes, and the girls were butterflies and princesses, and while I’m not that kind of feminist, it made me throw up in my mouth a little. But anyway.

We ended up playing a lot with the mama’s new iphone. Simon can now take pictures of himself (he knows where to touch the screen to capture an image), and when I go to the “photos” section, he can scroll back and forth to look at the different images. He likes photos of himself the best.

The exam room where we waited (for over an hour) at the end of the day had this wonderful toy (we’ve played with it before) with buttons for all the letters and numbers, as well as some shapes, some musical notes, and some basic tunes. It has different modes so you can just press the buttons and hear the name of the thing you pushed, or you can get more advanced and put it in quiz mode, or play a tune of your choice on the numbers one through ten. So Simon likes it because it has buttons, and Todd and I like it because we can make it say funny things:

I F 2 P (I have to pee)
S H L O (It’s a cello)
U 10 Square A Circle Q E D (You can square a circle! QED!)

It’s also good at proofs. QED.

Palate repair rehabilitation, 30% done

July 6, 2010 in Progeny by J | 5 comments

Oh, Simon. You are a trooper.

Over the past week we’ve seen some pretty monumental changes in the little guy. Not simply healing and getting back to his old self, but also learning tons of new (overdue) skills.

A week ago, I noted on Facebook that Simon had started sleeping sitting up in the middle of his bed, not leaning on or supported by anything, and would stay that way for hours at a time. It was astounding, and even more so because of the balance he was sustaining despite his low muscle tone. If he fell over, he would wake up, then sit back up and go back to sleep. A few times, I tried laying him down, but it always woke him up. We just chalked it up to “oh, those crazy kids, what will they do next.” But after two days of the behavior, something just seemed not quite right, so I called the pediatrician, hoping he would confirm it was just a weird phase, all kids did it, and no big deal. Instead, he recommended we call Simon’s surgeon since normal kids don’t sleep sitting up. He was worried that Simon was having trouble breathing lying down, and thought the surgeon might want (another, this would be the third) sleep study.

So I did call the surgeon (well, indirectly, through the nurse practitioner), and they both said that the behavior was Definitely Weird, and that if it got worse, we should take him to the emergency room at the Children’s Hospital and they’d page the surgeon to come take a look at Simon. Sigh.

Of course, the act of calling medical professionals caused nearly immediate cessation of the behavior in question (is it just my kid or is this a thing?), and he’s been sleeping fine ever since. So hey.

Now, I will readily admit that I paid poor attention in Developmental Psychology class (and all my other classes) in education school. I have many justifications for this, and none of them are reasons I would accept from my own students. Development of the toddler brain seemed unrelated to any issue I could conceive of dealing with in the high school classroom.

People! No! It’s always applicable! You never know when you’re going to need that information!

I am getting to the point.

I feel like I might vaguely remember learning or hearing (or perhaps I am constructing a false memory to explain what I’m observing with Simon) that when kids are restricted in one area of development (like, say, having their arms restrained so they can’t feed themselves, move forward, or play with toys as they were accustomed to), they can compensate by developing in other areas. Of course, I wouldn’t know because I was paying poor attention, which I now regret.

Even if that’s not generally true, oh my goodness look at the neural pathways on Simon. Not only has he learned how to crawl for real (he previously just did a really fast army crawl), but also his receptive language and fine motor skills have…improved.

He used to be obsessed with Todd’s putting a jingle-bell ball into a stacking cup and twirling it around, but if we tried to get him to copy us, he would just throw the toys. Now, he’s putting every toy into every other toy and twirling them around. He stacks, he nests, he balances. He experiments with sizes and shapes. Small objects can fit into bigger ones but bigger ones don’t go into smaller ones. The orientation of non-spherical shapes matters when you are using them as construction elements. And so on and so on.

He also responds appropriately when we ask him questions like:

Do you want to dance?
Simon kiss mama?
May I have a turn?
Where is Mama’s nose? Hair? Mouth?
And of course “Do you want your bottle?”

“Bottle” in fact is one of three signs Simon uses (the others being “all done,” which he only sometimes uses correctly, and “dance,” which he always uses correctly). He talks about his bottle a lot, and I think frequently he’s just talking about it, not asking for it. For instance, I always change his diaper before giving him the bottle, so today, I said “Let’s go change your diaper,” and he signed “Bottle!”

And lastly, my favorite thing: he gives spontaneous kisses just to be affectionate, or to thank me for doing something he likes: taking him to the fabric store, to the airport, dancing with him in the coffee shop, or playing Flying Boy.

He is a wonderful baby.

Do Not Buy This Book

October 27, 2009 in Progeny by J | 2 comments

Book Review: Salmonella (by some author whose name I can’t be bothered to look up because his book is that dumb)

Last week, Simon and I went out looking for toys. Big kid toys, like trucks, trains, puzzles, and balls. Evidently, by nine months of age (i.e. in 2.5 months, so we need to start practicing), he’s supposed to be able to look for a ball that has rolled out of sight. And we don’t have any balls. (Beeman, this is not an invitation to make an insult, just saying.)

We went to several resale shops (because I refuse to pay full price for toys) none of which had toys to our liking, but one of them had books. I ended up buying three, two of which are great, and the other one was Salmonella.

Now let me explain how we ended up buying this stupid book. Simon was cranky. I was holding him rather than carrying him in the Bjorn. It had started out cold and rainy that day and had turned warm and muggy and we were both wearing far too many clothes. And Simon was, as I mentioned, tired, wiggly, and sad — so sad that when we got ready to check out, everyone let us go to the front of the line. It wasn’t the time to linger over purchases.

And judging this book by its cover, it looked kind of clever. Salmonella — like Cinderella, but with microbes. I flipped it open and glanced at a random page. There was a phrase about Salmonella the protagonist scrubbing the floor where something germy (that might contain actual salmonella), I don’t remember what, had accumulated. Seemed clever enough.

It’s not clever. It was just that page that seemed clever, and that was probably by accident.

Essentially, the author took the story of Cinderella, changed a few key plot points to shorten the story enough so that toddlers would sit through it (and to avoid copyright infringement?), and changed the names of the characters to microbes.

Here are my main complaints:

The art contains too much clip art as background images and is not interesting to look at.
There is nothing about the microbes except for their names that would suggest that they’re microbes. They are all shaped like people — no flagellae or pseudopodia to speak of. Salmonella, the protagonist, is smaller than the prince, Prince Polio, which is, of course, inaccurate. The microbes don’t do anything consistent with their nature. Salmonella doesn’t infect anyone. The royal messenger, one E. Coli, isn’t sitting on a pile of human waste. It’s not that hard to find out information about germs and weave it into your story. I am a chemistry teacher with typing skills and access to Google, and I can figure it out. Seriously. (I mean, I could take the story of Cinderella and change all the names to names of birds and call it L. atricilla, but if the characters don’t fly, don’t have beaks, don’t eat insects or scavenge, is it worth it to have gone to the trouble of looking up about six bird names and contacting a publisher? I would submit that it is not.)
The microbe names are unimaginitive. The queen is “Catherine Cold.” I’m sorry, but “cold” isn’t the name of the germ — at least say Rhinovirus and teach toddlers some Greek roots.
Personally (and perhaps reasonable people can differ on this, maybe maybe?), I find the story of Cinderella really condescending toward women, as though all they are hoping for in life is to magically find Prince Charming, which will happen in a moment of love at first sight and be sealed with a magical dance/kiss/moment. Little/teenage girls on some level internalize and believe that drivel, which does them no favors as they learn to navigate Real Life on Their Own. Furthermore, little boys don’t need to read books like this that make them think this is all girls want in life or that they will know which girl to marry by how well she dances (as is the case in Salmonella).
Lastly (most importantly?) microbes reproduce asexually and don’t need to mate. Furthermore, Salmonella (a bacterium) and Poliovirus (a virus) cannot, even if they wanted to, mate. This is a well established fact, and I feel it was overlooked by someone’s editor, who may or may not have thought he would “ever use biology in [his] line of work.”

In conclusion, Salmonella is a poorly conceived and lamentably executed piece of “children’s literature,” written and illustrated by a lazy person who may be mysogynistic and has no science background or interest in plot or in using the internet to do a modicum of research.

Toy update: we now have balls. One is filled with orange swirly glitter that moves, and one is that mesh soccer ball that everyone has because babies can grab it and throw it across the room. Yes, we paid full price for them, and no, he does not look for them when he chucks them away.

Grabbing: A Perpetually Charming Skill

August 31, 2009 in Progeny by J | No comments

[Editor's note: J actually wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but there have been any number of good reasons why it hasn't been posted until now, including J's not having become familiar with WordPress yet and thus relying on your anonymous Editor to post things, the existence of the Scramble and/or Wordscraper games on Facebook, and possibly the raising of the child described herein. My apologies in getting this to you so late; please do not see this as reflecting poorly on Simon's development.]

A few weeks ago [which would now be about a month ago --Ed.], Simon discovered that his hands are useful tools. Previously, he had been keeping his thumbs tucked tightly into his fists, thinking, I guess, that they were useless vestigial appendages. Then one day, all of a sudden, grabbing started.

It started with grabbing my hands. As I was rocking Simon before his nap, he got really interested in what my hands were doing (which was ”just sitting there”) and grabbed my fingers and flailed them around. This, of course, had the added benefit of derailing the nap-prep, much to his delight.

Then he started face-grabbing, also while rocking. On days that I wear my glasses, this is especially entertaining for him.

At his last physical therapy appointment, his therapist held him all scrunched up in her lap and showed him how to touch his toes, and it was like a lightbulb went off. Prior to that, he had shown no interest at all in flexing his stomach muscles, and would just lie around with his legs straight out. But, literally, the next day after she showed him this new skill, he was all about the toe-grabbing. All day long, all the time.

At the grocery store, I’ve taken to letting him pet the produce we’re buying, just to show him what food is and get him interested in it. Last week, I was absent-mindedly holding a peach up for him to touch while I looked over the vegetable display, looking for something Todd would eat. I looked down, and the peach had little gouge marks cut out of it. I figured I had just picked up a bad one and was ready to put it back when I realized there were bits of peach under Simon’s nails.

And now, he’s into grabbing toys. He’ll pick up cups from the stacking-cup display and wave them around. The other day I saw him grab one with one hand, then hold it with both hands, and eventually transfer it to the opposite hand. Clearly this boy is very advanced.

The most popular game by far is bopping the stacking cups. We have two sets of seven, one of which sits higher than eye-level when Simon is sitting in front of me on the floor. He is perfectly content to spent twenty or so minutes bopping the cups with hands and feet, trying to get to them before I have a chance to stack all seven back up for him. He also likes to grab them and shove them in his mouth.

In other news, he has started up the most mellow bedtime routine I could imagine. After his bottle and a few minutes of rocking, Todd and I kiss him and put him in his bed and leave the room. I’ve spied on him to see what he does, and it consists mainly of looking around for a few minutes, sometimes with singing, settling his arms straight back by his bottom, crossing his legs at the ankles, and gazing dreamily off at nothing until he falls asleep. Sure beats the days when we had to stand over him breathing on him and holding the pacifier in his mouth indefinitely.