Tag: Sparklet

groomsmaid is in town today with her son, and we spent the day at the natural history museum with her and her family.

on the ground floor, they have one of those penny mashing machines which (for some reason) got sparklet super excited. so, we dug around in our pockets for the $1.01 needed to feed the machine, and let sparklet crank out a spider.

son of groomsmaid saw what she had done, and walked over to her pretty excited himself — she looked at him, looked at the penny in her hand, and gave it to him — then skipped off across the lobby.

maybe we’re finally getting away from demanding restraining orders on her playmates for daring to touch her toys…

and by “play quietly” i mean she stripped down naked, took off her diaper, put all of her stuffed animals to sleep using her clothes (and diaper) as bed sheets, and then used HER bedsheet as their blanket.

i wish i was making this stuff up.

sparklet puts diapers on them. walks them in their strollers. puts them down for naps. pretends to feed them. makes them watch plaza sesamo when she’s tired and just can’t deal anymore — you know, the works.

seriously, at least twice a day she takes it off the shelf and flips through it, along with “My Life as a Furry Red Monster” the autobiography of the puppeteer behind Elmo. the latter has a big picture of Elmo on the cover, and you can almost see sparklet thinking each time:

“i know the book will have pictures THIS time — they’ve got to be in here somewhere.”

after a couple minutes of non-verbal grunting, the lady figured out that sparklet wanted her to take the doll’s clothes off — which she did.

sparklet then grabbed her (now naked) doll, ran to the bathroom, and held the doll over the toilet.

i think she might be trying to tell us something.

today, we had to pick up some spaghetti sauce for dinner — it can’t all be homemade — and i was slightly panicked. either she was going to freak out about not being allowed to put the sauce into her her bag, or i was going to freak out about what would happen if she did.

so we bought a box of pasta (that we didn’t need) so she could drop a good, strong, unbreakable box of pasta onto the concrete fifteen-times-in-half-a-block-on-the-way-home.

these last couple of nights we’ve been able to leave the room while she’s still awake, and she’ll settle herself down.

there is still a bit of a process — she has to have her three sleeping buddies (tiger, kitty and puppy) and we’re obviously still doing three or four books before hand (and a full bottle).

but, when we’re done and walk out, we get just a little bit of a wimper and then nary a sound until three minutes later when snoring starts pouring through the monitor.

for of our three appointments so far, we’ve sat in the waiting room for a collective four and a half hours because — wait for it — they can’t turn the laser on while other appointments happening or the building’s electrical system will collapse.

it seems to me there are a couple of options here: (a) don’t offer the treatment, (b) slap your landlord around a bit and make him solve the problem, (c) move, or (d) don’t schedule multiple appointments when you know one is a laser treatment.

but, Dr. Robert Silverman, MD (Pediatric Dermatology in Fairfax, VA) has just chosen an intriguing “fifth” way — he’s told his staff to no longer process insurance claims for the treatment, so now we’d have to pay in cash and work with the insurance company ourselves.

i’m guessing this is his effort to drive down demand.

needless to say, we’ve already started looking for other treatment options. as exciting as the long slog to Fairfax is, it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

PHOTO CREDIT: The second hour in Dr. Robert Silverman, MD (Pediatric Dermatology) waiting room in Fairfax, VA. Photo © Tiredangrybitter Dad.

oh, and work the remote. and the computer. and get in and out of desk chairs, pushing them back when they’re done. and she’s even starting to try and wipe her own bottom.

and while all of this is great — really, i swear — next week is sparklet’s 18 month checkup, and friends tipped us off that the doctor would be looking for evidence of a 5 to 22 word vocabulary.

here’s what sparklet’s mommy has been rehearsing:

• sparklet’s got baby sign language down for “more”, “all done”, and “juice”.
• she’ll randomly pick up one of our phones and bark like a seal into it — something approximaiting “ai!”
• she’s seriously comprehending in two languages. we can say “give that to me,” “put this in the trash” and “where’s your shoes/ball/socks” in both English and Spanish, and sparklet knows/acts on exactly what we’re saying.
• her first word (“up”) isn’t an object, but a concept — and she knows the different usages between “pick me up and carry me”, “you get up off the couch”, and “put me onto the bed” or “i want into the crib.”

so, while all that’s keeping me from committing “i’m an aweful parent” hari kari, i’ve conveniently double-booked myself during her appointment and won’t be able to join the family for that particular festivity.

UPDATE: sparklet had her 18 month appt. and is still as impressive as ever — he’s 30 lbs. and 34 inches, both puts her above the 97% threshold.

the pediatrician did NOT yell at us about her vocabulary (for all the reason’s above), but said if sparklet doesn’t have 10 words by 21 months, we should probably think about getting a professional to help her jump start the language process.

however, with “up” it seems to be a sustained usage, and in all the right contexts — daddy, pick me up; daddy, stand up and come here; daddy, help me get in the cabinet full of empty carbohydrates.

what i don’t understand is how far we’ve come with everything else, and yet we’ve still got a vocabulary of one.

for comparison (and, in no particular order):

• she understands the concept of “cheers!” and will seek out people’s glasses to clink unprompted;
• she can gracefully dismount from our gigantic 28″ tall sleigh bed, and invariably land on her feet;
• she can climb a small step ladder, stand at the top with no hands, eat a sandwich, and descend the latter — all without falling;
• she can both climb and descend stairs, unassisted;
• she can open certain doors, and close them in our faces when she doesn’t want us to follow;
• she can grab our hands, lead us over to the refrigerator, decide what she wants to eat, and hand them to us to prepare;
• she can pause and un-pause the television, and has a clear understanding of when and why she’d want to;
• she gets upset if the cat’s food bowl is empty, pick up the bowl, march into the kitchen, and wait at the food drawer for us to refill, returning it to the proper place once it’s full;
• she will help load the washing machine, and start the cleaning cycle;
• she’ll ask to do a somersault, put her hands and head on the floor, and wait for us to roll her over to her back;

i guess she’s just been focused on other things.

of course, we get another two weeks of people looking at us like we beat our children, but it’s a small price to pay for dermatological happiness.

the bad news is that she’s got some kind of an ear infection, which means that she’ll get her first ever dosing of antibiotics. she’s not contagious, according to the doctor, which is a darn fine thing considering her bff’s birthday is tomorrow.

i see lots of Plaza Sésamo and Fraggle Rock in her future.

UPDATE: sparklet no-likey the antibiotics. well, actually, she loves taking them — they just don’t stay down for long. i wonder how long this cycle of futility is going to last.

UPDATE #2: we think it started off as an ear infection, and then became the flu — namely because i got the flu about three days later.

she’s been snoozing much better since we started the last round of sleep training — which we sorta had to do after a month of sleeping with her in our room (houston, costa rica, williamsburg) because the putting-her-down process was getting dreadfully long.

so, starting about four days ago, we’ve been giving her a bottle, reading with her, saying good night, and then walking out when the bottle ran out (with a mandatory smooch on the noggin’, natch).

we won’t talk about the first night, but by last night we had just four minutes of fussing before she settled down and put herself to bed.

it’s pretty incredible how quickly babies adapt.*

* = don’t try this at home. results not typical. professional driver on a closed course. before attempting sleep training, please check with your doctor about possible side effects (on you, not the baby) from sleep training. the author assumes no responsibility for, well, anything.

today, i got home from work with sparklet under one arm and three packages under the other. i tossed my keys on the hall table, the packages on the couch and then dropped sparklet down on the floor.

she immediately ran over to the hallway, grabbed my keys off the table, ran back to the couch, and started trying to saw the tape open on the box — just like she had seen daddy do with packages all December long.

kinda make ya proud, doesn’t it?

after being missing and presumed dead for the last week, el pato seems to have dragged himself all the way from costa rica to an amazon.com distribution center in campbellsville, kentucky where he (rather intelligently if you ask me) UPS’ed himself the rest of the way to D.C.

amazing.

he also appears to have brought his girlfriend along with him — her name is Tica, which also happens to be the friendly, national diminutive for Costa Rican females.

… which, i guess, explains what he was doing for the last week.

at dinner tonight, she spent 10 minutes stacking and restacking our hands. sometimes her hand would be in the middle, sometimes on top or on bottom.

at night, when we’re putting her to bed, if our hands come off the small of her back too quick, she’ll reach behind and slap them back into place.

well, she’s a girl who knows what she wants …

this weekend we opted out of yet another social event — our fourth missed halloween party / birthday party / playdate in 10 days — out of an over-abundance of caution that viruses (viri?) aren’t a heck of a lot of fun and probably shouldn’t be shared with friends and neighbors.

so, we did what we could to keep sparklet’s mind busy while her body adapts to the time change — even if it meant carving month old pumpkins a week after the passage of Halloween rendered them seasonally inappropriate.

p.s. i absolutely love the picture, above — there is something special in the annual slide towards winter, and in eeking out every last drop of sunlight with your friends before running inside for dinner.

turns out it’s not a hemangioma — it’s a port wine stain.

the good news is that you can remove a port wine stain with a handful of painless laser treatments right away, as opposed to waiting four to six years and hoping that it goes away on its own.

the other good news is that it’s just your average birthmark, it’s not genetic, and not accompanied by anything like Sturge-Weber syndrome or Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome — diseases that are much icky-er to deal with.

the final good news is that i was a Russian studies major, and i think that anything you share with Mikhail Gorbachev is pretty freakin’ cool.

two notable developments.

first, we got an official diagnose from the doctor on sparklet’s mental state, when she was careening around like a lunatic, trying not to get measured:

wow, she really hates not being in control — doesn’t she?

(yup, thanks for the newsflash.)

second, sparklet got four vaccinations — bringing her total lifetime count of shots up to thirteen — and had two vials of blood pulled by D.C. to test for lead and tuberculosis.

there was a lot of screaming and yelling, but it quickly subsided once the needles went away — enough that she was clapping along to the music in the car ride home.

no harm, no foul.

sparklet was so enraptured that she refused to give the bucket to the guy behind the counter to check out. now, if only we had some mulch to put in the bucket …

we left right before nap time so she’s sleep on the way, but she threw up around mile 65, let forth a massive poo around mile 120, and then we finally gave up at mile 175 (Potomac Mills) because we just couldn’t stand being in the car any longer. (she never napped.)

the one thing i love about IKEA is because it is a lot like taco bell — try as you may, it’s really hard to walk out of there spending more than half at what you’d spend at any of their competitors.

seriously, we got sparklet her birthday presents — a table/chair set and a 6-foot long alligator/crocodile (i can never tell the difference, especially when fake) — and all together they cost $0.37.

oh, if you see sparklet, don’t tell her what we got her for her birthday. don’t want to ruin the surprise.

UPDATE: in the small miracles department, sparklet slept through the night after skipping her afternoon nap on the way back from williamsburg. i’m not sure the 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep is worth the pain of cranky daytime sparklet, but it’s a hypothetical that i’m willing to explore 🙂

we had a nice window of largely uninterrupted overnight sleeping between month four and month nine, but it’s been some variation on the 10pm/1am/4am wakey-wakey-eggs-and-bakey theme since then.

in a feeble attempt to demostrate parenting leadership, we’ve launched on a campaign of sleep training.

(fwiw, i have no idea what that means either, other than it makes us feel better that we’re doing something.)

there seems to be two big problems:

first (in the immortal words of our pediatrician) if you wake up every night at 1am and eat a sandwich, pretty soon you’ll be up every night at 1am looking for a sandwich.

so, as of last Friday, no more overnight sandwiches for sparklet.

the other issue is some kind of separation anxiety from mommy — whenever the lady sparkler leaves the nursery over night, baby sparklet is awake 5 minutes later (or less) screaming for company.

ironically, daddy leaving the room seems to have no such effect.

this, of course, is one of those double slaps in the face. first slap? she doesn’t care if daddy leaves the room. nice. second slap? i’ve become “the closer,” and am now on baby duty each every time she wakes up during the middle of the night, because realistically i’m the only one that can get her back down.

it’s like rain on your wedding day. or a free ride when you’ve already paid.

crazy.

sparklet likes flicking people off — a lot.

she does it dozens of times a day, even though we’ve only been called on it a handful of times — comments from strangers like “bet you can’t wait for her to pick a different finger” or “that must make you nervous to walk her east of 14th street.”

yup, and yup.

putting her to bed the last couple of nights has been awesome.

of course, even better will be the “I’m tired so I’m going to stand and wail in the crib” phase, and the “I’m tired so I’m going to destroy this room” phase.

awesome.