bflynn

Thane at four months

Ask not for whom the baby smiles; he smiles for you

I brought Thane to the doctor for his four month checkup this morning. Statistically, he is doing wonderfully. He’s holding steady, percentage-wise. Thane is 14 pounds and 15 ounces (50th percentile), and 25 3/4 inches long (75th percentile).

At his four month checkup Grey, whom I always considered to be a bonny big boy, clocked in at 13 pounds 13 ounces.

Grey was also born at a pound heavier than Thane.

So to sum up, Thane has grown a LOT in 4 months.

Thane passed his checkup with flying colors. The doctor remarked on how very strong he was. He can stand on his own (if you provide the balance) holding on to your hands in a vise-like grip. He rolls over easily front to back, and frankly is very very close to rolling over back to front. He’s gotten 90% of the way there several times and simply stopped trying when he was on his side. When placed on his belly, he can move by scootching, although there’s no intent on his part to move somewhere. On his back, he moves in circles like the hands of some baby-clock ticking away the brief moments of infanthood. He kicks up his legs and then brings them down to the side. He repeats. Yesterday he turned 180 degrees using this method.

Thane’s gripping and playing is going very well. He isn’t a huge fan of pacifiers, although they will sometimes help when he’s unhappy. But he loves to play with and hold toys. Sometimes in his attempt to reach for something, he’ll knock it onto the floor several times. (Helpful brother Grey will often restore it.) If he can grasp it well, it immediately goes to the mouth. He will hold strongly onto an object once he’s gotten it.

We are still nursing all the time. My pediatrician has given the green light to start adding in solid foods, but there’s no rush. Thane hasn’t started giving me the puppy dog eyes as he watches me eat dinner. He’s clearly thriving on breast milk. Instead of looking forward to each milestone hit, I find myself not wishing Thane any older or bigger or stronger than he is. Already, I miss the little tiny baby. (15 pounds is NOT a little tiny baby.)

Thane’s sleeping is a bit of the good and a bit of the bad. On the good side, when it’s time for bed I go through our bedtime routine of two stories, nurse while mom sings, and placing him in his crib awake. I walk out the door as he watches his mobile and I don’t hear from him again for 5 hours. He goes to sleep like a dream (ha! Get it?!) He stays asleep during the night, waking at reasonable intervals for a bit of a snack and immediately going back to sleep. The other day, we put him to bed at 7:30 and he didn’t wake up for the day until TEN. That’s fantastic! Fabulous! Amazing!

The flip side, though, is that the child DOES NOT NAP. He gets tireder and tireder as the day goes on, but he won’t nap in his crib, or in his swing, or while mom holds him. And towards the evening, he gets understandably cranky. I’d rather put him to bed at 8 or 8:30, but he just can’t be happy being awake then. And he doesn’t sleep unless we do good-night ritual above. All told, I think this is likely a phase and I’ll get him to nap eventually, but it does seem like he lumps all the sleep together. This is less pronounced when he goes to daycare because he sleeps well in the car, so he gets a nap going to and coming from daycare.

Personality-wise, I continue to find Thane a joy. He’s incredibly social, smiling incandescently at everyone he meets. He LOVES to watch other children play. He very reliably only cries when something is wrong (hungry, dirty or tired) OR if he can’t see anyone. He’s extremely good-natured. He “talks” a lot, this happy baby babble that delights my heart. He seems very sweet and good-natured, and possibly a bit less mercurial than his brother.

He already loves to read. Even in the middle of his exhausted evening fuss, he quiets down and pays attention when it is time to read. You can almost watch him drink in the bright pictures, trying to figure out his world.

He does not like loud noises, especially when he is eating. If I speak loudly while I’m feeding him, he pulls off and gives me this accusatory stare. Rubertina at daycare reports the same thing. Also, I am now remembering why I weaned Grey at 7 months. The squirming and thrashing is painful enough in his gummy state. I suspect it was unendurable with opposing biting teeth.

He laughs when you blow on his belly.

Thane is a lovely child. His eyes remain a few shades darker blue than Grey’s. His cheeks are winter-rosy. His skin is exceptionally soft. His birth-hair has mostly fallen out, and after a while of psuedo-baldness, his first real hair is starting to come in, a bit darker than Grey’s. His gaze is arresting — clear and knowing. His smile lights up the world around him.

The good and the mixed

I had a great parenting moment this afternoon.

Grey sat on the potty, pooping, and reading a book. And by reading, I mean pointing to each word and correctly saying what it was.

Caveats there are that he had pictures for reference, had been read the book several times before, and would often make initial-sound mistakes. (Eg. say it was “swim” when it was really “soar”.) So he’s not reading where reading = interpreting a story one has not read before using letters. It was reading = using letters, memory and context to figure out all the words in an entire book.

At three, I’ll take it.

I got an email from work today informing me that due to an expected foot of snow, work is to be conducted from home tomorrow. This would’ve been awesome news a few years ago. I would’ve made it work a few months ago. But with a very active, nap-averse preschooler and an infant… I just don’t know if I can actually get ANY work done. Childcare, remember, is right next to work. I’m not quite sure what to do — just as much work as I can? Work that night when my husband comes home? Not fret about it? Take the day off?

I had a rough afternoon today — great poop moment aside. I don’t really want to stay home tomorrow, since it is actually significantly harder on me to try to work AND tend to my family.

Mendicant monk

I saw a mendicant monk today, watching the churning waters of the Merrimack. He was dressed in brown wool –the tassels of a rope belt just barely visible under heavy cowls. His feet were in sandals, with thick woolen socks as an accommodation to harsh northern climes. I could not see if he was tonsured — he wore a regular stocking cap in the same browns. He sported the wispy beard of a boy who wanted to see what would happen if he didn’t shave.

His long strides made quick work of the old metal bridge.

I have seen him before and wondered. What order is he? What brings him here? Where is he going? What does he think, in his anachronistic outfit. Is it a costume he puts on and feels all cool and monkish, an SCA member walking the ungentle streets of Lawrence? Is he a man so driven by call that he put aside not only fancy clothes, as his forefathers did, but all the clothes of the culture into which he was born? Does his stride with spiritual energy to do work among the poor? Does he like that we all slow down to look at him?

The crow

I have composed this post in my head a hundred times. It starts at the same place, at the same time. I walk out of my office, laying down myself as a worker on my way to daycare where I will pick up myself as a mother.

Between work and daycare are the ravens.

I’ve never quite worked out the difference between rook, raven and crow. They’are all filed under “large black birds that go caw”. They’ve always been around me. In the deep dusky August forests on the slopes of ancient Northwestern mountains, the caw of the crow is the only bird song you hear. I have sometimes wondered why there are no songbirds or warblers among the firs. There aren’t. Just the crows.

My vision of the crows pulls deeply from what I have read. There is, of course, Poe’s infamous raven. But there are also the dark clouds of menacing birds in deserted Hollin (points if you know the source), the attack of ravens in “The Dark is Rising”, the violent menacing swarms of Robert Jordan’s world, the Northwest Indian trickster and the wise bird of Celtic mythology. They swirl together in my mind in a circling upward spiral.

On my journey between places and persons, I watch the crows flock in the twilight. The flock is vast. There must be nearly a thousand birds. Sometimes they blacken the tree by the Merrimack so thickly that their wings are like leaves in summer. Sometimes they perch in strangely even spacing across the roof of the abandoned mill. Sometimes they circle in the wind in noisy motion, gilded by the glow of twilight.

A final answer

Today my mother-in-law called me with the autopsy report on her husband. There was no sign of a return of cancer. It wasn’t the liver function. It wasn’t the morphine. It wasn’t the pancreatitis. It wasn’t the staph infection he’d fought off. It wasn’t depressed vitals. None of the things he’d fought against for years was his undoing.

My father-in-law died of a massive, systemic bacterial infection that affected all his major internal organs except his lungs. It was a very unusual infection, and a sample has been sent to the CDC for analysis.

“That’s great!” I told my mother-in-law.

In the aftermath of death, you find yourself placed in the oddest circumstances, saying things that are just bizarre when you step back and look at it. That said, this is just about the best news we could’ve had without getting him back. Here’s why:

1) No one missed anything. It wasn’t that his doctors were careless. It wasn’t that my MIL should have fought to get him ventilated after the morphine. That wouldn’t have done anything. There weren’t signs that should’ve been heeded and weren’t. This likely had only been going on for a day or two prior to his death, and there really wasn’t any way anyone could have known.
2) Even if we had known it wouldn’t have changed much. Mike had vowed that he would never take antibiotics again. He had a terrible, painful reaction to them — and the amount of antibiotics this would have required might have killed him in their own right. I’m glad he didn’t have to choose not to fight it, but it would’ve been an awful fight. If there was any way for us to have known. Which there wasn’t.
3) It’s not genetic. There is no warning in this to Mike’s sons.
4) This particular infection might have killed a healthy person. I’m not entirely sure that’s *good* news, per se, but once this infection got started, even being healthy wouldn’t have helped him much. This helps remove any guilt about “if only we’d gotten him a little stronger”, etc. It wouldn’t have mattered.
5) It was quick at the end.
6) We KNOW. There isn’t a lingering mystery. That’s actually quite a relief.
7) There is absolutely no cause for guilt. This one was just bad fortune.
8 ) Mike went down a fighter. He must have really had amazing strength and constitution to fight not only all the things that were wrong with him from day to day, but this additional massive infection. It makes me feel like he went down throwing punches to the last.

Now that we know this, it really feels like we can start healing. The last of the mysteries are resolved. With that resolution comes the laying down of all the might have beens and would have dones that linger at the edges. It doesn’t make it hurt any less, or make us miss him any less, but it puts our mind at rest.

Hens are too fluttery

There’s a line in Miss Buncle’s Book (which is lightly set in the depression in England) where she writes about having read that there was all this economic trouble but that she didn’t really understand it until her dividend checks came in at half their value, or not at all. I think there is an element to that for all of us. Bad news happens all the time, and it has little day to day effect on us, until some part of it does suddenly touch our lives and draw us up short.

Happily, my little “moment” today isn’t big or important. It has nothing to do with my job or employment. I just got a notice from E*TRADE (where all my non-401k retirement savings are) that they’re completely eliminating all their nice cheap index funds. As they say:

After long and serious consideration, E*TRADE Securities has made the decision to discontinue our family of proprietary index mutual funds.

Of course, pretty much all of our IRAs are in said nice cheap index funds.

2 years ago, no one would even have considered that this would ever happen. I suppose it isn’t all that surprising, but somehow I never realized the ways this might affect me.

Also, I have my reports set up to tell me about my earnings since I bought into the fund. In a rising or even volatile market it’s a good reminder that while I might be down on the day or the quarter, I’m still up since I bought them. Right now, not such a good idea. It makes it too easy to see how much lower they are than their purchase prices…. in 2002. Ouch. And now they’re making me lock in my paper losses.

The trumpet player is mine!

What moment did you make your parents most proud?

I know mine. I was in 8th grade, and playing my very first season with the Pacific Northwest Youth Orchestra. When I auditioned there was a senior and a sophomore also on trumpet. I was thrilled, THRILLED to just be accepted.

The music for the season was picked expecting a very good first trumpet, a quite competent second trumpet and an extremely green third trumpet.

The senior dropped out before the first rehearsal. I never met her.

The sophomore stopped coming at some point, but only formally dropped out way, way, way too late.

We were playing Cappricio Italien by Tchaikovsky. For those of you who can’t automatically hum a few bars, the piece starts out with a big solo trumpet fanfare. Just trumpet. No strings. No one else. It is as bare and bald an entry as a trumpeter might ever hope to make. And midway through the season it became clear that the only person left to play it was little old 13 year old me.

I can just imagine what must’ve been going through the mind of my conductor at that point. It was too late to change the piece. They couldn’t bring in a ringer because they HAD a trumpeter. It was just about as unforgiving a situation as you could be in. I’m personally responsible for at least one box of Tums, I’m sure. Heck, it was unfair to me. What pressure for a girl barely into her teens! I’d been struggling with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” a scant two years prior! Not only did I have to learn a very difficult part, but I had to learn the first (instead of second) trumpet part. But they decided to make the best of it. (Not that anyone SAID this to me, mind.) The local trumpet teacher gave me free lessons and devotion. They encouraged me and taught me and crossed their fingers. By the time the concert rolled around, it was clear that I COULD play the part.

Playing it in a room for your teachers and orchestra members is one thing. Sitting in your folding chair in the high school auditorium while your orchestra conductor lifts her baton, and opening your first ever orchestral concert with a difficult solo? Not so easy. I remember noticing my trumpet teacher surreptitiously had her trumpet out. I don’t blame her. There was every chance I was going to either freeze or botch it. No one knew whether I was capable of pulling this off — least of all myself.

I remember the look in my conductor’s face as she lifted her baton. I’m pretty sure she was chanting some internal mantra version of “Come on… you can do it!” And down came the baton. I was ever so slightly behind the beat on that first note, but out it came, clear and clean. And the rest followed. And we were well into it. And I was totally and completely hooked on the life symphonic.

Of all the moments in my life, I know that was the one where my mother was the proudest of me. She knew how hard I had practiced and worked. She knew how difficult a thing was being asked of me. She knew how possible it was I would fail. She said that she wanted to stand on her chair and shout “The trumpet player is mine!”

I played plenty of big solos and hard pieces after that. But, truth be told, there are few pieces in the symphonic repertoire that expose the trumpet more than that first one I played. That was the day that I learned that I could exceed against great odds, and rejoice in the struggle.

I’m renting my house from BofA

I hear a lot about the wider world. I listen to NPR so religiously my son thinks that his phone number is 800-909-9287 (the pledge number for WBUR). I read the Economist over my Honey Nut Cheerios every morning. No day is complete without various other news sources as well.

In the last year or so, it is possible I might have heard one or two stories about home prices and the economy. Perhaps you’ve heard one or two too?

I have this bad habit of rethinking decisions that have been made. In October of 2007 we found a great house for $350k in a town I’m happy to live in. By December of 2007 we were moved in. At the time, I was proud of myself for not buying at the top and waiting until house prices had declined. The house had originally been offered for $409,000. A bargain, no? I keep wondering if buying then was the right thing to do.

But here’s another way of looking at the equation. House prices have stood up decently where we are. According to Zillow, our house is now worth $329,000. That’s not bad in this market. We’re still above water. But I’ve been thinking about that $21,000 difference. Between 2000 when we got married and 2007 when we moved, we rented. Our first apartment in Roslindale was $1200 a month. The lovely three bedroom place on Cliff street was $1500 a month. If we lived in Cliff Street for the 14 months we’ve lived in our current place, we would’ve spent $21,000 with no equity returned to us. We lived there for three years. 36 months times $1500 a month is $54,000 that we spent on housing, with no equity returned to us for our expense.

There is, of course, lots more complexity to it. Our mortgage payment is larger than our rent was. Rent didn’t include interest. Rent wasn’t federally tax deductible. (It is state income tax deductible here in MA.) I didn’t have to pay the water and sewer back then, nor did I pay real estate taxes.

But I don’t think we should regret our decision. Paying your mortgage while your house declines in value is a lot like paying rent. You may not get equity, but you do get a place to live. And hey, assuming you have a fixed rate mortgage, at least you won’t get any rent increases. How good the landlord is is entirely up to you.

The woes of the sinus cavity

On Friday, I thought about bringing the boys in to the doctor. But Thane didn’t look so bad and I’ve sort of gotten used to the Varsuuvial flows of Grey’s nose, so I didn’t. Then Thane got worse over the weekend. I figured I’d bring them in Monday. Oh yeah, President’s Day. The office was closed.

He looked a little better Monday (and/or I was in denial) so I attempted to go to work. My daycare is by far the most forgiving I’ve ever seen regarding sending kids in less than 100% healthy (note: this is a double edged sword since it goes for ALL the kids in the daycare) but even they sent Thane home with me at noon yesterday. Of course, I brought Grey home too.

Diverting for a moment from my thesis of snot, I’d just like to report that we had poop successes yesterday involving timely self-reporting. WIN!

If you know me, you know I am not a morning person. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It is telling of what a profound effect parenthood is having on me; I felt like I got to sleep in this morning when no one woke me up before 7:20 am. Then I had to wait over an hour for the doctors office to open. But blessed be! They could see us today! This morning, even!

I generally like our pediatrician. He’s a no-nonsense, no-BS sort of guy. He’s the sort who tells you what’s what and doesn’t tapdance around it. OK, most of the time I like this. But this morning, I got quite a lecture on how six weeks of snottiness is about three weeks more than I should’ve let it go. Also, that I should’ve brought Thane back in when the last round of antibiotics didn’t solve the problem. (In my mind, it meant that it wasn’t a bacterial infection.) I feel divided on this. I’ll promise you this much: my parents wouldn’t have taken me to the doctor for this. Thane is snotty. He’s really congested. He’s not running much of a fever. He’s sleeping a lot and doesn’t have a great appetite, but chances are excellent he’ll recover on his own. In my world, winter = snot. The way I was raised, the degree of sick you need to be to stay home from school was some combination of a 100 degree fever, vomiting and exciting rashes. The bar for going to the doctor was even higher — usually requiring the suspicion of a strep infection (a very common problem in our household — my sister even had her tonsil out because of it). By the standards I was raised by (successfully, I’d point out), Thane’s illness is barely worth a get-out-of-school-free pass. But yet my pediatrician was disapproving that I’d waited so long.

Then there’s the third hand, where we’re all responsible for trying to keep health costs low and not go to the doctor every time we get the sniffles. On the fourth hand, the doctor is a doctor and I am a parent and he knows more about health than I do, EVEN when I research stuff on the infallible internet.

Also, he chastised Grey for playing too forcefully with a toy. I did not feel like the world’s most competent parent. (I also thought the toy was good for it.) But Grey was really being pretty good, I thought. Cue worrying about whether I’m becoming one of those parents who doesn’t notice their child’s behavior isn’t acceptable, instead of a parent who acknowledges that there are limits to the obedience a sick 3 year old can be expected to display.

Lessee… introduction, three paragraphs support, mandatory digression… oh yea. Time for conclusion.

Thank heavens for antibiotics. Yay antibiotics! My husband comes home tomorrow. Yay husband comes home!

Postscript: On the plus side, sick babies sleep LOTS

I have pictures!

Soon, apple, we shall rule the world! Muahahah!

According to the photographic record, my eldest never wears clothes and all his underwear have either a) super heroes or b) dinosaurs. This is actually true.

http://tiltedworld.com/brenda/pictures/February2009/index.html