A Day in the Life of Scout - January 2013

Scout's day (and mine by extension as it SERIOUSLY pisses her off if Mario goes to get her in the middle of the night or in the morning - a holdover from her nursing days!) usually starts between 6:15am and 7am when she wakes up. The two of us get to snuggle for a few minutes on the couch before it's time to get Josh up to get ready for school (which, as you will read below, she loves to do herself). Until January, she still drank a bottle one to three times a night. When she had her one-year appointment, however, and we found out that she is above the 98th percentile in weight (only 50th in height), her pediatrician recommended we drop all night feedings and water down all her bottles to half strength.  (It

Oh how I love those chubby little legs!

was kind of funny/sad to think we were putting our one-year-old on a diet, and I'll admit I was sorry to see her beautiful, chubby baby thighs go!). It took a week of being up with her in the middle of the night for 1-3 hours trying to help her get back to sleep without a bottle, but since then she sleeps through the night almost every night! Halle-freakin-lujah! It's been just about four years since I've had a decent chance of being able to go to bed at night and actually sleep until morning. It's about darn time!

A rare chance to join Circle Time with Josh at preschool. Heaven!

After we take Josh to school (where Scout would dearly love to stay and play with him!), we run errands or go home to play and have breakfast before her first nap. Her most favorite breakfast is scrambled eggs, yogurt, and grapes (although she did have frozen peas for breakfast this morning. Funny kid!). She prefers to sit on the kitchen counter to eat instead of in her high chair.

Ready to go for a run!

After breakfast, we play. Scout loves the slide in the living room. She adores books, especially ones with animals she knows. Particular favorites are dogs, fish, birds, and elephants. She can say dog and fish and she loves to make elephant noises. Brown Bear, Brown Bear is especially fun. We have an old couch cushion in our living room that we use at the bottom of the slide as a crash pad sometimes, but it has become Scout's reading seat. She'll go pull all the books off the shelves until she finds one she likes, then she'll plop down in her reading spot and peruse contentedly. Or she'll bring the book to me and want me to name everything in it for her. Many, many times in a row.
 
She loves her little grocery cart and regularly steals all the towels (and other random stuff) that she can get her hands on and stashes them in her cart. She's kind of OCD about the towels in particular.
 

After her nap, we pick Josh up from school and usually go do something fun. The kiddos love the Children's Museum, new playgrounds, parks, the library, and the grocery store where they get to snack on pizza or corn dogs from the deli while we shop. She loves to play with my phone at the grocery store, but she regularly gets to my grocery list app and deletes things. I had to stop letting her play while we shop because I would almost always get home and realize I forgot something because she messed with my list.


On those days that we go home after school, Scout loves to do anything and everything Josh is doing. She has earned herself the nickname Scoutzilla (as in Godzilla) for her propensity to walk into the middle of one of Josh's activities and destroy everything in her path. Josh inadvertently taught her how to say "Mine!" and she isn't shy about using it! Sometimes, just to get her point across, she'll grab something and run to the other side of the house, turn around and yell "Mine!" 


"Mine!" wars aside, they usually share pretty well and have a good time together. The older Scout gets, the more interesting Josh finds her. It's not unusual to hear them giggling together about who-knows-what, especially in the car. Josh has also taken an interest in her well-being. If she falls down or starts crying, he'll go pat her on the back and ask her if she's okay. It's adorable.  

She LOVES wearing Josh's rain boots.

 
She goes down for a second nap around the same time as Josh in the afternoons, but only sleeps for about half as long. When I get her up, in the mornings too but especially in the afternoon, the first thing she wants to do is go wake up Josh, and if it's not time for him to get up yet I have to carry her screaming downstairs because she's so devastated. When it finally is time to wake him up, I tell her she can go get Josh. "Josh!!!!" she yells as she races up the stairs (as fast as she can crawl, anyway), pushes his door open, and climbs up on his bed so she can tackle him and "tickle" his neck (which usually turns into more of a random beating all over his head or forceful eye-gouging) to wake him up, screaming excitedly the whole time. I'm sure it's her absolute favorite part of the day. He's surprisingly good-natured about it. I can tell you I sure wouldn't take too kindly to being jumped on and punched in the face as my daily wake-up call, but it makes him laugh.


We usually have an hour or two before Mario gets home, which we often spend at one of the many playgrounds nearby. These two LOVE to ride together in the wagon wherever we're going. The other day they had both had bad naps and were pretty tired. I looked back to see she had snuggled right into his lap and he had rested his head on her. They were both almost asleep. When she's not tired, however, Scout's favorite thing to do in the wagon is antagonize me by standing up while we're moving. She thinks it's downright hilarious, especially while crossing busy streets. Ha. Ha.

What's that, you say? Don't eat the rock?

Silly old lady thinks she can tell me what to do!

All hell breaks loose when Daddy gets home. The minute they hear the door open, they both drop what they're doing and sprint or waddle, respectively, to show him how much they missed him. 


Scout is a strange mix of brass and clingy-ness. And she can sure take a hit. She has no problem throwing herself down the biggest slide she can find at the playground and can certainly hold her own if she's around kids she's familiar with, even much bigger than her, but she is very, very shy around strangers. Like scratch-the-crap-out-of-my-neck shy. Noise of pretty much any kind scares her socks right off. When she gets mad at me (as happens multiple times a day), she runs. Just runs, randomly through the house, as fast as she can, crying and waving her arms. She has the stickiest feet and hands I've ever encountered, no matter how often (or how rarely - I've tried both!) I wash them. Her feet are so sticky she can walk all the way around the house with a DVD stuck to her heel. A DVD! As if it were a scrap of toilet paper.

Flypaper feet.

She loves to build towers. Her most favorite "blocks" are playdough containers and my plastic spice bottles. She's pretty darn good too! She can stack playdough higher than her head.

We taught Scout a few words in sign language around 11 months. One of those words was "more," which sign is made by tapping just the tips of all of your fingers together. Babies aren't so good at that kind of fine motor control and attention to detail, so mine both started saying "more" by clapping. Scout apparently got the idea that clapping at us would get us to do things for her, so for about two months she would boss us around by clapping at us. We almost had to change her nickname from Scout to Duchess.  She would grunt at us to get our attention, then clap very, very imperiously a single time, and point at what she wanted. If it was not delivered immediately, she would stretch out one hand, palm up, and squeal like a very cute little pig until she ran out of breath. 

After a while, she dropped the clapping and moved on to what I call "The Hulk." If she saw something she wanted, she would point at it, then "ask" by flexing her whole body (neck, arms, fingers, everything) and grunting/squealing for a few seconds. It made her look like a body builder flexing, or the Hulk. Now she usually uses words, but if the item she wants is edible she'll just smack her lips at us and then open her mouth expectantly. 

Cup? What for?

She also has the most adorable evil laugh I've ever heard (see above video).


She LOVES to sing. Her favorite is The Wheels on the Bus. And she likes to tell us what part she wants to sing next. She "asks" to sing it by making the wheels motion with her arms. Then she always wants to do the mother verse (sh, sh, sh) next. One of her other favorite songs is one of the first things Josh really loved about preschool - a song called Slippery Fish.

Her other great love is wearing Josh's clothes. Since we try to make kind of a big deal about big boy underwear for the sake of Josh's potty training, she especially likes to wear his underwear and asks me to put them on her anytime she finds them lying around. I'm kind of slow about putting away clean laundry so there is often a pile of clothes on the couch waiting to be folded and put away . . . or pilfered by Scout to be worn or pushed around in her play shopping cart, another favorite. She absolutely hates when I get her dressed, but she loves putting on clothes. I guess she hates when I have the idea of getting her dressed, but if it's her idea it's the most fun game ever. And if Josh is getting dressed, she must get dressed too.

Here she's wearing Josh's underwear and jacket. And how cute is that belly!

She's a great little mimicker - this evening during her bath she kindly found a wet wash cloth and washed as much of me as she could reach (I was not actually bathing with the kids, mind you) while I was washing her. 


Bedtime at our house is probably the most exciting part of the day. Most kids need to wind down for a few minutes before bed, but mine get wild and crazy. I mean WILD AND CRAZY. We try to get ready for bed about half an hour before bed time so they'll have plenty of time to play before it's actually time to sleep. They wrestle, do gymnastics (Scout trying to do a forward roll is one of the cutest things ever), jump, run, yell, and generally wear themselves out. Scout's favorite part is trying to give Josh a good-night kiss, which invariably turns into a giggling wrestling match.

    

Bedtime crazies!

Meet Josh. I can't wait to.

 

(Sorry the title resembles something from a Train song. I wrote it and then realized the similarity, but it fits.)

I neglected to mention something momentous that happened in October. That’s okay, though, since I neglected it on purpose because it deserves its own post. (Note: I say “I” a lot in this post. “I” mostly means “we,” as Mario has been fully invested in all of this.)


I have a beautiful, loving, kind, and thoughtful son. Joshua changed my life forever long before he was actually born. Many of you know that for a time during pregnancy, our doctors were worried there was something seriously, as in fatally, wrong with him. By the time he was born, those fears had mostly been put to rest, but the whole experience changed the way I thought about a lot of things, my role as a mother being one of them.
 


He was born happy and healthy, and he developed very normally for a time. Except for nursing. But, although that issue might be quite intimately related to many of his current issues, that is a story for another time. Possibly never, but another time nonetheless.

He said his first words, “Hi, Dada!” at 12 months. The next week he started saying “eye.” And then he stopped learning new words. By 14 months we started teaching him baby sign language because he was so frustrated that he couldn’t communicate his needs to us verbally. At his 18 month appointment, his doctor recommended we start speech therapy because he hadn’t learned one single new spoken word at a time when his vocabulary should have been exploding. So we did. We continued sign language and started bribing him with fruit snacks, at the suggestion of his speech therapist, to make sounds. Any sound at all was cause for celebration. After a few months, we tried to wean him off the signing to encourage his verbal development, but when we stopped teaching him new signs, he started making them up on his own.

He finally said “mama” about two weeks before his second birthday. It was one of about 6 words he knew, although he could sign about 20. For a few weeks when he was around 2, he stopped talking completely (it was my fault - with his therapist's blessing, I was trying to speak Spanish consistently in the home - but that’s a long and irrelevant story).
He still doesn’t know how to say “I love you.” I’m not sure he knows what it means. This evening I told him that the marbles he was looking for were on the table. He didn’t understand what that meant. If he still doesn’t understand the word “table,” is it possible for him to understand a word like “love?” I’d say probably not. Sometimes it’s hard to stop myself from crying when I’m trying to teach my three-year-old words like table. Or cup. Or marker. Or sister. 

 
 
I had to wait two years for him to call me mama. For him to call me anything at all, actually. I have no idea how long it will be before he can tell me he loves me. I try to not let that bother me. Most of the time I’m successful.
 



This is something I think about pretty much every moment of every day. I spend most of my free time trying to think of ways, or doing research to find ways, to help him develop his speech, his verbal understanding (also slightly deficient, although it is difficult to measure in some ways because of his speech delay), his motor skills (somewhat deficient), his social skills (severely hampered by his lack of speech. It’s hard for kids to play with someone who can’t talk to them), and his emotional health. And I spend most of my time with him (as much as we both can handle, anyway) trying to use the things I’ve thought of or read about or his (many) speech therapists have recommended.  
 


And may I just say that all of this is so frustrating because, according to experts, “ infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. Children, within a few years of birth, understand [their native language] without being explicitly taught.” Well, experts, you can kiss my butt.
 




Don’t get me wrong, we have plenty of fun. If you’ve read any of my blogs, you know we are big on fun around here. One of the things I worry a lot about is helping him progress without him realizing that we’re working on something. It’s pretty tricky because he’s incredibly sensitive to my wily ways, but I just have to keep thinking of new ways that we can practice talking and other skills.
I work hard on teaching. Actually, we work hard on teaching. It takes him five minutes to put on his socks in the morning. And it’s not for lack of teaching on my part. We work endlessly on naming things he can’t remember (like table) and making sounds that give him problems (like “p”) and calming down and using words when all he wants to do is slap me in the face (which sometimes happens) because I just don’t understand what he is trying to say.
As frustrating as I find all of this to be, I cannot imagine how frustrating Josh’s entire life must be. He starts to cry when I get out his socks. Every single day. But what can I do but help him once again to try to learn to put them on himself? Even though all I want to do is put them on for him and save him the distress (and many times I do), is that really what he needs? 

 









He is a very emotionally fragile little guy, and I’ll be perfectly honest: it irks me to no end that he whines and cries ALL DAY LONG about anything and everything. If he rolls a toy car and it doesn’t go exactly where he wants it to go. If his stuffed toy giraffe won’t stand up. If I talk to him when he doesn’t want me to. If Scout touches any of his animals. If I look at him when he doesn’t want me to. Don’t get me started on our potty-training communication (which potty training, by the way, we are still working on and it’s been 9 months). But what would I do if no one, not even my own mom who spends every moment of the day with me, understands what I am very plainly trying to say? What would I do if I couldn’t make any friends because no one can understand me? What would I do if other kids took advantage of me and were mean to me because I can’t talk? What would I do if my extended family thought I wasn’t worth the time to get to know or spend time with because getting to know me is a little more work? What would I do if I lived in a world I had no control over and felt like was steam-rolling me every single day?


I’ll tell you what I would do. I would whine and cry all day long because that would suck.


One day in Alaska, Josh and I went to the library, as we often did. We were doing puzzles near a mom and her son. The mom was fairly young, and the little boy was two. I know he was two because he told me. We had a conversation, me and that boy, because his mom wasn’t paying any attention to him and he was lonely. As I was chatting with him, my silent-except-for-grunts-and-whines two-year-old by my side, I started to get mad. I try every single freaking day to lovingly help my son talk, to help him reach his potential. He is the focus of every single day. And this mom who couldn’t care less has a son that I am having a conversation with. Where is the fairness in that? And then I thought, what if my little Josh had been sent to someone who didn’t care? Who didn’t try every single day? Whose entire life wasn’t him? What if, indeed. I don’t want to know what if. And so I work and pray and think and research and we get through it together, me and Mario and my little man.
 
This is not to say that Josh is stupid. He can put together a 24-piece puzzle rated for 5-6 year-olds. He has an amazing memory. He has a handful of books memorized that he can recite to me (in his own way) at the drop of a hat. He can tell me how to get home from the store in the car. He has a great sense of humor. He is kind and sensitive and loving and incredibly brave in his own way. 

 
He just can’t tell you about any of it.
 




But what of this momentous October happening, you say? Well, Josh qualified for a special pre-kindergarten program for disabled children. My son is classified as disabled because his verbal communication is so far behind. That’s a sobering thought. As if I needed more sobering on the subject of his development. 
  


Anyway, he started in October. He goes to school five days a week for three hours. There is a 2:1 student:teacher ratio in his class. He has one-on-one speech therapy every week.  

 There is someone besides me and Mario who is invested in his progress. And I find it hard to explain how that has changed everything for me. I have felt positively suffocated at times by the responsibility of finding some way, any way, for Josh to catch up so he can make friends and interact with his family and have a full and happy life in every way. 

 


 

And now it’s not just me. I have a whole team of teachers and aides and therapists who are actually trained in how to help kids just like Josh. 
  








And the best part is not that I feel better about his future. The best part is that it is actually helping. He is still far behind where he should be, but he is steadily closing that gap. 

 


From time to time I get tiny little glimpses of the Josh that is obscured by his difficulties, the Josh I haven’t actually met yet. Once in a very great while, he will make a simple little joke or answer a question in a way that I didn’t teach him, and it gives me hope that someday I will get to ask him how he is and get a real answer. Someday he’ll come running up to me and tell me something he’s excited about. Someday he’ll tell me a story he made up. Someday he’ll tell me what he dreamed about. Someday he’ll tell me what’s going on inside that amazing little brain of his, because I’m just dying to know.
 
Heck, maybe even someday he’ll tell me he loves me.