Comma Dot Comma

Abigail fell out of her crib today. I was washing bottles while she was in the midst of a failed nap. She had just switched from tears to playing, and then there was a patch of silence. Next I heard a heavy thud, and half a second afterward, a shriek. As I raced to the room I went through a mental inventory– was there anything in the crib, other than Abigail, heavy enough to make such a thump? Pacifier– nope. Stuffed animal– nope. It had to be the baby. I opened the door and burst onto the scene. Abigail was sobbing hysterically on the floor but already up on hands and knees, ready to crawl. I scooped her into my arms and spoke I don’t know what soothing nonsense as I felt her arms and legs and brought her into a better-lit room to inspect her for marks and bruises. The baby was unmarked. She calmed down in a minute or so, more frightened than hurt. I cuddled her, changed her, fed her, and rocked her back to sleep for yet another 2-hour marathon nap, during which I was sure she had a concussion and would never wake up. But each time I checked on her, she was breathing and stirring. When she finally woke, she was her usual cheerful self, getting into all her usual mischief. WHEW.

The sad fact is, about a week and a half ago, Dr. G. and I had discussed lowering the crib mattress in case Abi tried to climb out. The sides of the crib were just below her armpit level, and we decided it would be best to lower it even though we didn’t think she was skilled enough to get over such a high bar. But I kept putting it off, hoping for extra help to dismantle and reassemble the pieces. Meanwhile Abi improved her climbing skills. I noticed her trying a new move on the side of the tub the other day: getting up on her tippy toes, doing a little hop, and pulling as hard as she could with her arms. I bet that was her method for getting over the side of the crib. Imagine the dawning surprise as she realized that she was tipping towards the floor with nothing to stop her. Now that’s a hard life lesson! I’m so thankful there weren’t any worse consequences. Note to self: underestimate Abigail at her peril.

One thing I love about Abigail is how much she rejoices in her body. For her, the sound and feel of slamming her arms against a smooth surface is absolutely thrilling. Pulling herself up with nothing but her own strength and a tiny bit of purchase on a door frame– now that is satisfying! Song-worthy, even– she might make up a tune on the spot! She loves to experiment with her tongue and see what sounds she can make, and see how tiny of an object she can pick up off the floor with her pincer grasp, and how high she can climb up her parents. She especially loves to see how tiny of a space she can squeeze through when crawling. Today I had to rescue her from a four-inch gap between the table leg and the chair leg. She is getting very strong, so strong it is actually a little bit difficult to wrest objects (say, a wee toothbrush) from her grasp.

One of the key signs that she is getting tired is a loss of coordination. She bangs into walls or accidentally belly-flops. This morning she grew fussy trying and failing to crawl up and down the length of the futon, a task that is usually easy-peasy for her. It was almost an hour too early for a nap ( I have the most success putting her down 2 and a half to 3 hours after she wakes), but the signs were there. I sat down next to her and asked, “Are you getting sleepy? Do you want to take a nap?” Abi shocked me by crawling into my arms, nestling sideways into her favorite falling-asleep position, and closing her eyes. “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, and took her off to her room, where she tried but failed to fall asleep for over 20 minutes. I gave up and tried again half an hour later, when she was able to drift off in 10 minutes or so and sleep for two hours. She almost never sleeps for two hours. 30-45 minutes is more her style.

That moment on the futon has given me new hope that somewhere in Abi there is a part of her that wants to go to sleep, if she could only figure out how to get there. Now if I could only figure out how best to help her.

Abi gets her feet wet

Originally uploaded by Sweeten

Abigail had two firsts today: her first dill pickle and her first real creek. To my surprise, she ate the pickle spear with gusto. I had given it to her, wrapped in foil, as a distraction while I hurriedly finished a sandwich. When I noticed that she was sucking pickle juice out of a tiny hole she had made, I peeled back the foil and let her go for it. She made short work of it, gnawing salty bites out of the soft side of the spear, not even making faces unless she got a particularly sour mouthful. I tried not to think about how much salt she was ingesting, reasoning that one pickle in nine months can’t do much harm. Salt schmalt!

She was similarly gung-ho about the creek. One hard thing about living in a desert city is that we have to drive quite a ways to find anything resembling the typical lush creek bed with trees and grasses and flowers. Today’s journey was an hour and ten minutes to the Seven Springs trail that runs along Cave Creek. It’s our favorite springtime hike. For a few years in a row we did a 10-mile wildflower loop hike through the area.

Abigail is not a car person. She will entertain herself for about 20 minutes, and after that, she begins to pull restlessly at her restraints and it is hard to keep her happy. We popped her in the carseat right after an afternoon nap and a bottle and a diaper change, hoping to stack the odds in our favor. But after the usual 20 minutes she started fussing. I went through my arsenal of all her favorite toys and all her favorite things from my purse and was able to occupy her until we got to the windy dirt road, when the scenery and jolting took over for me. At the trailhead, we let her crawl around in the back of the car for awhile before putting her in the carrier with her dad.

We hiked in about a mile and a half, I would guess, pointing out flowers and a red male cardinal and a black lizard and a hummingbird. Abigail would lean as far to the left or right as she could to catch a glimpse of me walking behind her on the trail. Whenever she succeeded, she gave me her most high-wattage smile. We stopped for a dinner picnic in a sandy, rocky area along a fast-trickling section of creek (which was disappointingly low already!). She sat on her dad’s lap while I fed her and he pried tasty rocks out of her fingers. “Abi, this is what you are supposed to do with rocks,” he advised her, tossing progressively bigger ones into the water. “Toss, clunk! Toss, clunk!”

Then we went exploring downstream a bit, looking for a wading spot. A turtle had staked out a nice section of creek and we decided to join him. Abi wanted to get into that water herself– just looking didn’t cut it by any means. First I bent down with her, set her feet on a rock, and let her dabble her hands in the water and feel some of the long strands of algae growing there. Then I saw a perfect Abi-sized rock across the stream. I waded across with her,sat her down on a rock like a loaf of bread, and let her squish her toes in the pea-gravel creek bed until her feet turned pink from the chilly water. She didn’t say anything but she had this internal, pleased expression the whole time. Back in the carrier with dad, she babbled and sang on the trip home until the late hour and the comfy seat lulled her into peaceful silence.

We got back to the car at around the time we usually begin her bedtime routine (6:30 pm), with an hour of driving ahead of us. We thought surely she would nod off in the carseat. But no– she was too cheery for that, and instead played and babbled happily the whole way home. When we finally freed her, she couldn’t get enough cuddles. She patted, hugged, and kissed whoever held her, sometimes holding both her mom’s or dad’s cheeks to zoom in for a kiss on the lips, as if to thank us for a marvelous afternoon.

The most puzzling thing about Abigail is her difficulty with sleep. She has a whole category of behavior we call Failed Nap. As her awareness and mobility increase, she has ever more opportunities for Failed Nap. She had an epic fail this morning, after waking up at 5 to eat and not falling back to sleep afterwards (she generally wakes around 2 am for a bottle and then snoozes till six or six-thirty). She was slowing down and ready to sleep again around 8, and after a long walk, a breakfast, cuddles, singing, and rocking, she was calm and heavy-lidded in my arms. As she started to cross the barrier into sleep, she was suddenly furious– scrabbling around, kicking, crying and pushing away from my body to wake herself up. It’s as if she hates the feeling of falling asleep, which I cannot fathom at all. It’s one of the most enjoyable feelings there is, if you ask me. But she doesn’t share my view; she does all she can to fight it. Sometimes she can keep herself in The Zone of sleepy wakefulness without ever crossing over, for as long as Dr. G or I will hold her. This time I got her back to sleep and waited for some deep breathing before I laid her in the crib. Abi was standing up, crying, within the count of three. Back in my arms for one more attempt, then I decided to put her in her crib to work it out on her own. Sometimes that works. The intervals between sobs grow longer and longer and the sobs themselves become fainter and fainter, and stop almost without my noticing. Not this time. She cried for awhile, then she babbled and played, and then she cried some more, ramping up instead of down.

That’s the usual now, after several months of “sleep training,”– aka get a routine, help the baby calm down, let baby cry herself to sleep. From the ages of five months to almost eight, she gradually reduced her crying from 45 minutes down to five or ten, with no crying at all at night. Then she got really good at sitting up and crawling, and instead of resigning herself to sleep, she started prowling around the crib like a caged animal. The crying would go even longer than 45 minutes, and when I’d check on her, she would be standing or sitting, piteously watching the door and crying, nowhere near sleep. With two naps and a bedtime to contend with, Abi was clocking in a lot of hours crying, and sleeping only fitfully afterwards. We decided to can the let-her-cry technique. Now she does her restless struggling in my arms instead of the crib. Once in awhile she will slip effortlessly into sleep and stay that way for an hour or more. Not for me, not this morning. I had to leave and let Dr. G rescue her. She finally zonked out with him at around 10, without even a whimper, and slept till noon.

That started a chain reaction of late bottle/late lunch/missed bottle/late nap/late dinner. A wacky day, but none of that stopped her from the serious work of being a baby: inspecting any new object in her path and performing a number of experiments on it. She squeezes it, then shakes it, then knocks it together with another object. If she has two of the same thing, she sees if they fit together or stick together in any way. Next she puts her mouth on it, takes it out, turns it around to look at it from every angle, and tries to rip or dismantle it as much as possible. If she can get it into bite-sized pieces, she concludes the study by attempting to eat the pieces. Toilet paper! Yum.

Abigail and I have a favorite cuddle spot: the lounge chair in the backyard. We usually go out in the morning before breakfast or in the evening before bed, when it is shaded. Today we did both. I lean back in the chair with my knees up and she leans back on my knees, facing me. Abi laughs and pats my face and chest and then leans forward onto me, stretching her arms as far around me as they will go. Together we watch the birds or the neighbor’s windmill spinning. She takes a break from cuddling to crawl to the end of the lounger, lean over, and inspect the bricks. Then she climbs back up on me with a kiss at the ready. Today we played a new game in the morning– a modified version of pattycake that ended with tickles. I threw her arms into the air at the “Abi and me” part, then stuck my face into her armpit to tickle her. Giggles galore. She, instead of clapping her own hands, initiated a repeat of the game by grabbing mine and clapping them. We played Tickle Pattycake probably five times, with her guiding my hands for the clapping part. Abi remembered the game this afternoon as soon as we got settled on the lounger, clapping her own hands rhythmically and then picking mine up and clapping them to get me on board. We did four or five rounds Pattycake/Tickle/Giggle/Big Hug before Abigail spotted the wet garden hose and I lost her to splashing in the puddle on the deck. She was surprised when I turned the hose on a trickle and it got her hair wet as she picked it up. She looked like a little skunk caught blinking in headlights, except with a dark stripe down the middle of her head instead of a white one. A very cute, blue-eyed skunk, holding the end of a hose.

Abigail’s Grammy left at noon today. It is always sad, how Abigail and her relatives invest so much in getting to know each other, and then after a few days they have to leave. But Abigail is blessed to have so many visitors who love her dearly. We have house guests on average twice a month, and it is always the same: a very studied, cautious, getting-over-the-shyness phase, followed by a cuddly, joyous phase, followed by an afternoon of fussiness when the loved ones depart and it is back to just the two of us, and she has to fend for herself occasionally after having become accustomed to constant attention. Ah, wouldn’t it be nice to live near relatives who could just drop in whenever!

One new sign of Abigail’s trust is if she decides to share something with you. It started with food: she would offer me her sippy cup, or take the spoon from my hand, carefully turn it around, and aim it at my mouth. It has since it spread to any object or activity she particularly enjoys, and any person she is feeling friendly towards. Bouncy balls and stuffed animals and washrags and bits of things she finds on the floor are all on offer. She is especially beamy when you accept the item, do something with it (eat it, squeeze it, sniff it) and give it back to her. Ah, reciprocity!

Her language development is continuing apace. This morning she crawled up to me with one foot bare and I asked her, “Where is your sock?” She sat up, looked behind her, and put her hand on the loose sock. Later, I asked her where her baby doll was and she set off on a search for it. Looking at a photo of a bottle of milk in a book, I asked, “Where is the milk?” and she pointed to it. She is also employing her sign language more often, and claps on cue when anyone says “yay” or even “good job!” She deserves a lot of yays and good jobs.

Grammy has noticed that Abigail is always on the move, more so than any of her own children or other grandchildren. Even sitting on the rug, interested in a book, Abi wants to change position seven times, waggle her bottom in the air, clap her hands, try to stand up, and generally keep her whole body in motion. At nap time, she can go from eyes closed/totally limp in one’s arms to standing up, trying to climb out of her crib, in less than three seconds. Yes, I timed it. She did that twice today, once with me for her morning nap and once with Grammy for her afternoon nap. She’s been like that since before birth– hence the nickname Miss Wiggles. Dr. G and I just assumed that babies were kind of that way, because we have no one to compare her to. We didn’t know she was so… special. It’s kind of funny when I consider how much the two of us enjoy just lying around. That phase of life is clearly over.

I missed my Miss Wiggles a little today, as I was off in a different part of the house working while she played with Grammy. Every thirty minutes or so, I would hear her call me: “MA! Mamamamama!” and she would come crawling in for some cuddles. There is no better work break than that beaming, drooly face peering around the edge of the couch and coming in for a kiss.

Abigail’s Grammy, my mom, arrived today for a short visit that she timed to my grading deadlines for the English course I teach. In theory she will babysit for two days while I slog through piles of essays. I showed Abi pictures of the two of them together beforehand. It still took a little time for Abi to warm up to Grammy when she arrived, but what finally did it was the gift of a new baby doll. After the initial delighted examination, Abi would hand the doll to Grammy and Grammy would kiss and cuddle it, then hand it back. Abi would flap her hands excitedly and give the doll back to Grammy for a repeat. Ten or more repeats. Finally the sight of all the love and kisses lavished on a fake baby inspired Abi to crawl over for a cuddle herself. In like Flynn! Well, not really… Abi got grouchier as the afternoon wore on into evening, having refused both a bottle and her dinner. It took a picnic of rice puffs in her play area to restore her good spirits and her acceptance of her beloved Grammy.

They went off together to practice moving from the side of the tub to the toilet to the toilet paper holder. Exciting times! Abigail is starting to get interested in climbing, but she has only the foggiest idea of how it’s done. This morning I watched her try to climb into the bathtub by raising first one leg, then the other, though her knee was still a good five inches shy of the rim. I had to laugh at that chubby little leg scrabbling at nothing. Tomorrow Abi and Grammy are going to see what kind of climbing they can accomplish on carefully stacked sofa cushions. It’s something to see my mother crawling around on the tile with Abigail. I’ve done a bit of tile-crawling myself recently, and I have to say it is not so comfortable on the old knees, and I’m a generation younger. But love is ever a great motivator.

We had a marathon day today, leaving the house before nine and not returning until after two pm. And that was after Abigail had woken an hour earlier than usual, before 5:30 am, and missed her morning nap. But despite one serious detour into tears, she did great, helping me teach in Superchurch. I have volunteered for a few years as a Sunday school teacher. We call it Superchurch– kids of all ages are together in one big group for most of it, like an adult church except rowdier and with more games and prizes (Though I’d enjoy adult church even more if the pastors and elders threw out tootsie rolls and gave high fives at regular intervals). The advent of Abigail has prevented me from serving in Superchurch for almost a year. I kept her home for the first four or five months during flu season, and by the time she was ready to go to the nursery, her stranger and separation anxiety had set in. She only lasts about half an hour before they flash her number in the sanctuary for me to come get her. Not compatible with a 9 am to 12 pm Superchurch commitment. Dr. G. likewise has a 9 am to 12 pm commitment running the church soundboard, so he can’t rescue her either.

Normally I keep Abigail with me, strapped in her super-comfy ergobaby carrier, during the first 30 minutes of church (the singing part). Then I take her over to the nursery, give her a bottle, and sneak back in for most of the sermon. But today Superchurch was short a teacher, and the director asked if I would be willing to do it with Abigail. So I popped her in her carrier and she stayed with me through prep, set-up, recess, and the beginning of the service. She loved being up front where she could see all the kids, and even clapped her hands when they did. Then I dropped her off in the nursery with a bottle. Half an hour later, as I was taking a little girl to the bathroom, I ran into our director in the hallway, trying to console a wailing Abi. Poor girl! TWO poor girls, really. Heidie was at her wits’ end– when the nursery folk couldn’t find me they just gave the baby to her. I put Abi back in the carrier for the rest of the lesson. After cooing and smiling as she watched children hit balloons with colorful water noodles, she nodded off. Neither my commanding teaching voice, nor the children cheering, nor the four-song set of the very loud worship band, nor the chaotic leave-taking at the end of Superchurch woke her. She slept for over an hour, as little girls came up and carefully caressed her limp leg or arm and adults side-hugged me and sighed at her sweet sleepy face.

Soon thereafter I found out what had probably made her cry so hard (apart from the separation and sleep deprivation). The kind ladies in the nursery said that though they tried several times, Abigail would not drink her bottle. When Abi finally woke, I discovered that the bottle still had a plug in it, which I had neglected to tell them about (it’s hard to see if you don’t know it’s there). Poor Abi must have tried and tried to get milk out of that sealed bottle. It must have been nice to feel that milk flow into her mouth the second time around, because after she ate she flirted with just about everyone, and had a grand old time throwing puffed rice cereal around the restaurant we visited.

For reasons unknown, Abigail has stopped calling her father “dada.” She addresses him as either “mama” or “baby,” to his exasperation. Until Abi came along, I had this idea that babies either knew a word or they didn’t. But really, each word Abi adds to her vocabulary must be tested in context after context. Sometimes she gets it right, sometimes not. For example, she first associated the word “bye-bye” with the front door. Anytime we went near it, she would wave and say “bye-bye.” Then her usage widened to the whole front yard– any window facing the front got a “bye-bye.” I’m not sure yet if she’s figured out that the word goes with leave-taking, but she did say bye-bye recently when she and I were leaving a room while her dad remained behind. I can see the logic in her use of bye-bye, but the dada thing is a mystery. It was her first word, and the one she seemed to know most firmly. After talking to her dad on the phone a few days in the row, she would even say “hi, dada,” when I took out the cell phone. I had a brief spell as “dada” about a month ago, the weekend we quit breastfeeding. Abigail had just started consistently calling us mama and dada, and when the nursing stopped, we were both dada for a few days. Ouch!

She is so cute with the word “baby,” which she enunciates perfectly. She picks up her favorite stuffed lamb by the ears, shakes it, nuzzles it, and says into its face, “hi baby!” Then she tries to bite its eyes off. This morning, according to our usual ritual, I brought her into our bed for a slow wake-up after she started calling me at 6:15 am. She considers it a personal challenge to wake Dr. G each morning, starting with pats and escalating to beard-pulling. She says “pat-pat” whenever she pats someone (and also when she claps, and when I am patting her dry during a diaper change). This morning it was, “pat-pat-pat-pat” until Dr. G. cracked an eyelid open. “Hi, Baby!” said Abi, and threw herself into his arms.