Friday Haiku - This is Halloween Hangover Town

We were late to school
So was everybody else
Sugar is tiring.

School parties were fun
and the Parade was more so
Wonder Woman rocks

Raggedy Ann flops
Now I can make a yarn wig!
But I am wiped out.

Another "first" day
to be gotten through with grief.
I did it, barely.

Bouncing to beat CP

What do you think, did intervention work on this stroke survivor? Do you see hemiplegia or a little girl having fun? Yeah, I thought so too.  (heart swelling)

I've been meaning to write about this for ages but got far too busy with whining about my head.  However, after suggesting it to someone I figured it was time to share. We started going to this bounce place more than two years ago with the Angel of PT,  Michael Workman, creator of the Bamboo Brace, and our PT spirit guide. Actually it terrified me back when Hannah was a new walker and quite unsteady, but I was assured she needed a place where she could safely fall down, and he was right. Not only did it give her a safe fall, but it gave her a whole lot more, especially one more place where she could do what all the other kids were doing, and just have fun.

When we stopped going with our PT, after aging out of Early Intervention, we just kept going for fun. Especially during the day, during open bounce, when bigger kids were in school, Hannah could bounce on the trampoline floor, and crawl on the floor, and climb the ladder of the inflatable slide using her affected arm to assist her in climbing up, and mostly she just had a great time without knowledge that I considered it therapeutic intervention.

Between divine intervention, Early Intervention, and me taking a lot of time to do stuff like this with Hannah on a regular basis, she just is not all that impaired.  Sure her leg and arm are still smaller in mass and less effective than her unaffected side, but she can do way, way, way more than she can't, and she is mainstreamed at school.  We are hitting occupational therapy the hardest now, and I don't know what we'll be doing to get those gains, but flailing her arms while she jumps seems to have strengthened her shoulder and upper arm enough that she doesn't flex her wrist and currently doesn't need that brace anymore.  I'd like to see her not favor that hand but she does a lot of two handed play, because her upper body is strong enough to move the arm naturally, so that weaker hand is not relegated to waiting all the time.

The Bamboo Brace was the beginning of this, but the bouncing kept it going, we think. We bounce at Jump Around Utah in Salt Lake City.  The owner sometimes laughs when we come in for half an hour before closing, just to get a little gross/fine motor skills work in on the fly, but every time we drop in we are glad we did.  Somehow, we have arrived at a time and place where I can come in with the kids I have with me and just sit down and look at the internet while they play independently. Yep, my child with CP plays independently and successfully in a rough play environment.  Did I picture myself saying that three years ago?  No.

Bouncing is for everybody.  My family and kids' friends can go for a playdate/babysitting event and work up a sweat while getting the ya-yas out.  A friend whose twin boy was eight months behind his sister in learning to walk made huge advancements when his big sister started bouncing with him on their trampoline, so I feel bouncing is indeed universally beneficial to build strength and balance but especially for those of us whose kids are otherwise limited in activities they would naturally do, I can't think of anything better. When my PT explained it to me, he described these benefits: fast movement on a soft surface builds muscle strength, challenges and therefore builds balance, develops the vestibular system which is important for our kiddos with impaired sensation so they better learn where their bodies are in space and relative to other stuff, and learning how to fall.  And, as you saw in Hannah's video, how to bounce back up.

This is not a sponsored post.  I would do a sponsored post, for the right people, but this is just a shout out to some very real folks and places that made our battle with stroke and cerebral palsy a battle we could fight.

K, camping is hard, right?

It was a lovely, family oriented holiday weekend, but it has taken the whole week to recover. Because I was painting a wee picture I chose not to apply sunscreen when the sun finally came out, as I preferred not to get my hands all gummed up with goo that might smear the watercolor pencil. As I result, I love my painting but my face got so burned that my eyes puffed up, one more so than the other and leaving my right cheek extending forward enough to show up in my vision in a manner akin to an extra nose. So I look wacky in the way that I feel inside! Yay, me!

The vista looked like this from our camp.  I didn't include the large number of sheep who paraded back and forth through the valley multiple times a day, guided by medium sized dogs we decided must have been Not So Great Pyrenees since they looked Pyreneesey but were not great in size.

Looking down on the sheep reminded me that people who don't approve of low cost grazing on public lands sometimes call them land maggots, but I enjoyed their chorus of simple conversation.  Hannah said, "I would like to go to the sheeps, please" and was disappointed that the sheeps didn't want her to examine them. It was lovely, relaxing, time out of time, but oh my goodness I AM TIRED.

WTF Wednesday: How Will I Know if the Flavor is Authentic?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Perhaps I shouldn't try to pretend that my life is of Dickensian proportions in any aspect, but that phrase just seems to describe the place my head goes quite frequently.  I think I might always look back on this as a time when my girls were so delightfully lovely, so amazingly situated between babyhood and childhood, so tasty they are very nearly edible, and yet, I will also look back on this month as a time of cleaning up urine with enough frequency that I think perhaps I was cut out to be a medical assistant, after all.  And I always thought I couldn't do that job!   Hannah is suddenly much more grown up now, shouting to all who will listen that she's got panties! and yet she is still so very much just a big version of a baby, being still so capable of treacherous body movements that are intended to harm the person who carries her.  If she can arch her back like that she does NOT have limited trunk control.  It takes skill to do that kind of twist out of a parent's arms while kicking maneuver, I think.  I am behind in every single area of my life.  Each and every one.  It is true that I send out quite a few Christmas cards each year, and I will do so for 2011, but that doesn't mean I have taken the cards received in 2010 off the mantel.  No, not kidding.  My friend doesn't like that I run late all the time but how I am supposed to know that I need to build time in the schedule for someone to knock her bowl of Ramen noodles (with egg, for extra glue-ability) on the floor right when we needed to get out the door.  How?  And yet I am doing something right, because the current most common phrases spoken in our house between the two girls are "you my best friend!" replied to with "you my best friend too!"  (let's ignore that it often devolves into a fight where each girls insists "NO! You MY best friend!!" emphasizing the my and completely ignoring the fact they are really in agreement but if they acknowledged that then they wouldn't have anything to fight about.)


Things of randomosity:

A dream I probably shouldn't tell you about, but I will . . .

Which had me galloping around a room, thinking I am riding a horse, then realizing I am only slapping my own ass as if I were slapping the ass of the horse I rode in on . . . and then eating my birthday cake without using my hands, possibly in the presence of a man with whom I was about to do the deed.  Some of these events have roots in history, but that doesn't mean I can explain how it all came together.

Recently, at my house . . .

My husband spent the dinner hour hogging my laptop again, looking at videos posted to YouTube of seven year old girls operating track hoe / back hoe/ big machine-thingies. I wondered how he got there and he actually started with "truck crashes"  and the internet just led him to the seven year olds driving, really.

Current trends . . .

Claire now asks that her YouTube video playlist (previously limited to Tom Petty, Nick Kershaw, Alice Cooper and the Red Hot Chili Peppers) now has expanded to more age appropriate selections such as "Mana Mana" and Claire can always get the "do do do do" just right.

Poop is now officially funny.

Please stand by . . . or, walk this way

Folks, you've been mighty patient with me, and I thank you for that.  I never finished boasting about Hannah's birthday.  I haven't yet told you of the process of closing out our case with Early Intervention and the bittersweet farewell to the occupational therapist we had for more than two years, and the sixth bureaucratic caseworker in the same span of time.  And of course, having the relationship change between our family and Michael Workman, the Angel of PT, without whose Bamboo Brace we would not be where we are today.  And then I didn't get to tell you about our preparations for kindergarten for Claire, or the choice to keep Hannah in the group of the people on the younger end of her day care class - the ones who are "not quite ready" to be a Busy Bee and so will be Big Ladybugs, at least for the time being.  And how this decision concerns me as it makes me wonder of the wisdom of keeping Hannah, with her late summer birthday, in the cohort that would be her regularly assigned class or might I, instead, hold her back a year so the physical disparities are not so great between her and her classmates and yet leaving her less intellectually challenged.  In her preschool class, no one else knows all their letters (and has done so for eight months) and yet many others can speak more clearly about the letters they do in fact know.  I haven't told you how I worry that the decision I make for this year will not bind us to a certain result in kindergarten - but the choice I make in our kindergarten year will indeed bind us for the rest of her school career.  How will I get that one right?

I also haven't told you how delightful the two girls are to be around.  Fart jokes aside, they have lovely manners and they are wonderfully loving to each other (excepting the odd and oddly lethal sounding disputes over the toy of the moment).  I think they truly miss being in the same school even though they didn't play together on a daily basis there.  Hannah was given a chance to select a sucker from a large jar as bribery for allowing a medical assistant to weigh and measure her, and she took two - so she could give one to her sister - and then wouldn't even open hers until she saw big sis later on and could present it herself.  I haven't told you how joyful Claire really is - even in the roughest moments.  Case in point - the new kindergarten schedule has us waking so, so, so early  (compared to last month, that is) and when I went to wake her she threw her arm around my neck and said "Mommy!  Mommy! Woo-woo-woo!!" (the traditional family way to praise someone about virtually anything).   At 7:40 a.m.!  I think she likes kindergarten.

I haven't told you how discombobulated I am to not have to consider the dog when I want to slip out the back door unnoticed, or I start to pour water in her bowl until I realize her bowl is no longer needed.  We failed to adequately recognize the extraordinary effort she put into cleaning the floor, and have had to increase the mopping schedule considerably and we still are not up to Sophie's standard of cleanliness.

And finally, I haven't told of Hannah's extraordinary progress in gross motor skills generally and in foot function specifically that led her treating physician to decide that she didn't need to wear an AFO, and we'll re-evaluate in six months but it looks quite as if this is a child who might not spend her childhood in braces.

And so we say goodbye to footwear like this:

And hello to cheap footwear from Target - every girl's dream.

Walk this way, please!

They say it's your birthday . . . you're gonna have a good time!

My baby left babyhood.  Those of you who find me sentimental, well, overly sentimental, should perhaps skip this post.  I am going to wax sentimental, and I won't likely wane.  May I introduce my daughter, Hannah Rose?  We've been working on saying "pleased to make your acquaintance" and formally shaking hands (mostly because it is a nice OT type maneuver to get that hand to turn thumb up) but also because it is fun.  I remember when Claire had just been born and I asked Lord Honey if he had been practicing saying "and have you met my daughter, Claire?" in his mind, in anticipation of introducing her to someone.  He was baffled that I might practice such a thing, but I was excited.  I wanted to say "my daughter" far and wide and frequently.  I liked that daughter so much I wanted a second child and hoped mightily to get another daughter.  And fortune smiled on me, and I got this daughter.

 

Have you met my daughter, Hannah? Born on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, and under a lucky star.  As much as we could say we were unlucky that she had this annoying metabolic disorder, and more unlucky still to have had a metabolic crisis and a stroke in her first two days of life, we were lucky that Claire's lucky and unlucky c-section birth set in motion a need to have another c-section, and that having had Hannah delivered by c-section meant she was still at the hospital when her temperature dropped and her blood sugar tested low and after feeding didn't work she was eventually given a glucose IV (coulda been faster, like oh, say, STAT, the way it was written in her chart, but still) and that administration of glucose put an end to more damage occurring then and there.  So the luck and the unluck combine, the yin and the yang, the peanut butter and the jelly, and you still get a lovely girl, a lucky one, my daughter.

Some say she is lucky to have me, but I think I am luckier still to have her.  Go back and look at that first picture here.  Go on, I'll wait.  She is airborne.  She is brave and bold and funny and strong and beautiful and wicked smart.  And best of all, she is mine.  She says "I got you, Mommy! I got you!"  I got her.

She worships her sister, and who wouldn't.  Claire is so sparkly she competes with the sun.  Really, she does.

Look at that muscle tone!

Admire the hand placement.

Even at a birthday party where three-year-olds get amped up on Costco cake and become increasingly irrational, who wouldn't smile with a daughter like this one? Costs of renting a bounce house facility for a private party - more than some say is appropriate for a toddler.  Seeing her airborne?  Priceless.

Still here, barely, and fully in flux

Where Have We Been?

Eating Cupcakes, Nearly Naked

Because it is HOT and we like cupcakes.


We've been watching these people do stuff like this:

To be fair, Lord Honey found Hannah on the climbing wall after she disappeared at the door of the day care, with two feet and her good hand on the wall, so he told her to use Righty too and she did and she stayed up.  Stroke victim?  I don't think so. 

We've been going through a rough patch, a busy patch, a heat wave, and a period of extreme change and growth.  I had dental surgery to pull a tooth, implant some bone sand (that has an irritating way of coming up from the depths when I am not expecting it, and place an implant.  Claire had one of her crowns become uncomfortable necessitating a trip to the emergency dentist who prescribed antibiotics that have Claire living on the potty and jamming up the works with toilet paper (and now I know why parents count out squares of paper - and it is not about saving money as they always claimed, but preventing the need for plunger use).  Hannah has become an actual chatterbox, and Claire is about to start kindergarten.  I fired our hippotherapy provider and Hannah ages out of Early Intervention in about two weeks.  I think she is ready, but am I?

and in the midst of all that other stuff

Claire is eerily like me.  She asked for her treat after dinner tonight.  Daddy asked what she wanted and she told him to pick something.  He presented something (a nice something) and she said "Good try, but take that back. Bring me the other one."  She is still planning to rule the world.

Hannah is in love with the bus.  Her group is not really in full summer camp but they get to do water play two days a week at school and they have 8 field trips spread throughout the summer where they get to join the older kids, and they ride the school's bus to get there.  From the first step on the bus, Hannah has been over the moon.  The morning after her first trip, her first words of the day, spoken with her face up close and set to max intensity and her eyes locked to mine, were "go bus."  She has said it every day since then, innumerable times.  If she is introduced to someone, she says "go bus."  If I offer her the phone she says "go bus."  I am pretty sure she is dreaming of the bus. "Hannah go bus.  Car-car go bus.  Mommy go bus.  Daddy go bus."  Sometimes she gets hit with a wave of glee and jumps in the air while her arms flap about as she squeals "B bus!"

The girls tackled Mars.

I am, despite my new haircut, which is indeed cute,

absolutely capable of making a fool of myself in public, such as tossing toilet paper at a basket at the day care summer picnic to try to win $100 off my tuition,  I didn't win, but look at that Charmin fly!  I am a natural when it comes to tossing toilet paper.  The statute of limitations has long since run on all those spitball incidents in grade school.  Really, I am a lawyer, I know these things.

Hello, is that you?

Are you still here?  God help me I don't know why you are here, I haven't been.  Maybe you are still here because you heard that I've gotten a little cuter lately?  I can tell because the Jiffy Lube man touched my bare leg today (he pretended he was removing the paper protecting my car's interior from greasy boots) and he left a grease streak across my very white knee, as he smiled his toothless smile at me and told me how much he enjoyed giving great customer service.  His gums do the talking while his fingers do the walking - I was just so impressed.  It is rare that I need to use Goop to clean my legs after I run errands, but some days you just know fortune favors you.  Really, I got a sassy new summer haircut, bought a couple of floral summer dresses at Target and I am CUTE!  I know the man without teeth thought so because he was so willing to share his stories with me, impressing me with how-to tips on getting small animal body parts off engines (milk and tomato juice) and other things too powerful to share here in such a public forum.  Well OK, he did (conspiratorially) sneak two coffee packets off the free drinks cart and tell me the secret to solving corrosion on battery terminals using only black coffee.  But that is all I am going to say about that.  I bet he could get those teeth back if he wanted to.  And his grease looked so . . . dark . . . on my knee.  Ah well, perhaps I'll just stick with the husband I have.   He also thinks I am cute.  I know because he pinched my derriere.   And he didn't leave a stain on my new dress when he did it. 

How did I get here? Letting the days go by, you say?

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Letting the days go by . . .

I can't stay awake anymore to blog my every thought . . . what happened to those days last year when I posted three or four times a week? Not that there are no things to post about, oh no, not here. Big stuff happens here. Ahem. Are you sitting up and taking notice? A certain toddler made a poo-poo in the potty. And this just in: farts are funny to little girls! Claire farts and then laughs maniacally, saying "I'm just a tootin' machine!" Hannah toots and says "toot" quite softly with a big smile on her face. Both know how to say excuse me, they just don't choose to. This is how I'll get them back for the flatulence of pregnancy - by memorializing their gas for all time on the internet! But more than the simple fun of farting we are seeing exponential growth in communication and understanding with Hannah and depth of analysis in Claire. I don't quite get how Hannah learned to copy her sister pretending to be asleep while she gets taken out of a car seat, but just like her sister, only the smile gives her away.  How could a child whose body works unevenly learn to falsely hold all her limbs slack until I have her tucked onto my shoulder to carry her in and then she giggles to tell me the game is over. We seem to be in one of those spells where the whole world changes moment by moment, each little girl learning something new about every 15 minutes. Frankly, I am a bit dizzy with all this activity.

In the last few days I have had to explain super heroes, plumbers, super hero plumbers, people who beg for money, homelessness, why brothers kill brothers (we watched the Lion King) and I've spent quite some time on how to pronounce S.  No wonder I am so tired!  We found ourselves sort of narrating the Lion King movie to explain things to Claire and to help Hannah keep any attention on it (actually it is OK if she is attending to other things, but I know she is tracking some of what she sees because she frequently mentions "bad guys" and I have to assume this comes from the movies.  I hope so, anyhow.)

. . . brothers don't always kill their brothers.  It's just that particular brother who is bad.  No, that is not why I don't talk to your uncle much.  No, I don't think either of your brothers will do anything like that to each other.

. . . it was a misunderstanding.  He didn't mean to break his Mama's heart and go away.


. . . and here the rains are coming so now the plants come back, and then the animals that eat plants.  See, now the prey have come back and the lions can eat their friends . . . well, the lions can eat.  Pass the popcorn, honey!

. . .

I am unnerved by many rather grownup behaviors that keep turning up around here . . .

Hannah took her first turn through the house in her big sister's toy high heels without crashing to the ground.  Her skinny little legs looked rather adult and Lord Honey took note that the shoes were high enough to tighten her calf muscles.  I am not entirely certain this is what her physical therapist meant when he said he preferred it if Hannah used a variety of types of footwear.

Claire keeps putting scantily clad Barbies on top of the toy piano. 

In two months Claire starts kindergarten. 

How did I get here? 

WTF Wednesday: The boys in the band

Ah now, Hannah, let's sit down and read this Touch and Feel book, HIgh Five, with Julius and his Friends. You can read and do OT at the same time, wheeeeee.

Whoa WTF is that guy?

A bad guy you say? I think so too.

H, a fan of A, B, and C and a nice B-A-T-H

This post made it into the drafts folder about six weeks ago and never got further out than that. See what I mean about being a blogger who doesn't blog?

Doesn't she look all fresh and dewy? And yes, she is the same color as the bathtub, I can't really deny that. OK, there is a drool driblet on her chin. There often is. My husband is in denial. I tell him it is no longer age appropriate to drool, this means something else other than baby-ish-ness. She is two years, nine months and three weeks of age, roughly. We'll talk about this later, along with the lisp she has developed when she says "s" sounds. However, I don't think there is another child in her day care class who has complete mastery of the alphabet - upper and lower case, as she has for three months. So bite me, stroke, drool, and the horse you rode in on because we are here to kick your whoseewhatsee (this is a family blog, except when I feel like saying something more colorful). Please get some popcorn and enjoy the show.

Hello my lovelies!

I owe you guys, big time.  I have been a bad, bad blogger.  A good blogger may be many things, but most importantly - she blogs.  At least she shows up and posts appealing pictures.  A few of you have kindly, as requested, sent me the post that got away (it was very big, very juicy, really outstanding in every way - just like the fish that got away . . . except I didn't see it skipping off into the sunset waving the finger) and the nice thing to do would have been to say thank you by actually putting the post back up.  But since the last time I posted I have attended many weddings (three), had work keep me in the office until after 10:30 one night last week, I have taken the girls out for fun and wholesome activities involving fresh air, live music, and food from many cultures of the world  (we had one meal with food from the cuisine of El Salvador, Thailand, Vietnam, and Sudan) and we became so unfortunately full that we had to skip the churros (Basque churros, not Mexican churros) and the baklava of Bosnia (that really and truly was unfortunate as Bosnians really do know something very special about pastry).  So I have excuses, and they are many and varied.  But you didn't come here for excuses.   Let's give give you a look at what you really came here for.

Eoster: behold the power of a candy filled egg accompanied by plastic tat in large quantities

It may have begun as a Pagan celebration. Bells might fly from Rome to give French kids chocolate. I will possibly go to hell for giving out Easter cards with a cartoon style drawn bunny handing Christ on the cross a decorated oeuf saying "have an egg, you'll feel better." I suspected the Peeps and Hallmark folks had a hand in blowing this whole thing out of proportion. I don't know why I fell for it for all those years before I had kids but now I know: Easter was created by occupational therapists.