matril | Entries tagged with kids

I wish the title referred to Luke, but his vocabulary is still pretty much the same that it's been for while - limited to very utilitarian words for requests and such. "Open" "Cereal" "Bread" "Up" "Candy" *sigh*

Emma, on the other hand, is accumulating words like a linguistic sponge. Here's just some of them:

fish (meaning Goldfish crackers, spoken in an extremely urgent tone, since she's simply starving for more of these treats)

flowers

floss (she loves the stuff - either she's a future dentist or she just likes the mint flavor)

teeth (loves toothbrushing too...hmmm)

dolly

go

more (many a child's favorite word)

no!! (also many child's favorite word)

And thanks to Luke's potty training:

flush

Luke's had a tiny, harmless cold these past few days, but I've had to keep him home from school nevertheless because he gets this lingering cough that sounds positively tubucular. It's far, far less horrible than the sound of it would indicate, but the school nurse hears just one little hack and she sends him home. So he's had a total of three days of school since the year started. grrr... He's going in tomorrow, and I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed. I've really come to despise the common cold since my son has managed to catch every single strain of it in the past year.

Current Mood: anxious

So today we're starting the Big Step of potty training for Luke - of course we don't expect to see results right away, or even after a month or a year or ten years or - all right, so I'm feeling a bit bleak. The system, which is directed at near non-verbal kids, involves putting him on the potty every half hour, and checking his pants every fifteen minutes, with incentives for pointing to the "potty" picture and saying potty, for having dry underwear, and for actually going in the potty.

Well. It's tedious, to say the least. So far Luke has wet his pants three times and done nothing in the potty. He'll sit pretty willingly on the potty for the full five minutes, smiling pleasantly and repeating "brownie" when I remind him what he'll get if he goes in the potty. But of course he hasn't had a single taste of a brownie. Yes, I didn't expect him to catch on in the first day, but a part of me is thinking "So, this is my life for the next...how long?" Blech. Since the schedule is so demanding, I've been refraining from doing much else. The dishes are piling up in the sink. I picked up a tangled mess of yarn to try to sort out, the kind of mindless activity that I can drop at any moment to get Luke to the potty. Same with a book of Sudoku puzzles. But the result is a feeling of absolutely zero accomplishment, hitting my head against a brick wall at every turn. Add to that the nice little letter from a school district that my husband had interviewed with and was really feeling pretty positive about: "You're very well qualified and skillful, and we were quite impressed. Therefore, we hired someone else." It's all that stupid ugly monster Lack of Experience. Yeah, and just how does he get that experience, praytell? Not from you people, apparently. I feel like kicking someone in the head. I'll have to find an inanimate object instead...I guess...preferably something that will explode.

Current Mood: annoyed

Well, today I'm 25. I can definitely say I never expected to be where I am now at 25. I figured I wouldn't get married until about 30. Not because I didn't want to, but because, well, I'd never even been on a date before I went to college. But things went astonishingly quickly once I met my husband, and here we are with two kids. I'm very glad to have what I have and be where I am, and I hope I continue to be as blessed as I have been. ...also, it'd be nice if Luke learned to talk...just a small wish...

We just got back from vacation yesterday, and what a week it was.
( Car rides, blistering heat outdoors and glorious air-conditioning inside )

Current Mood: tired

Very tentatively, I will venture to state that Emma is talking. Just little one-word utterances, but we've heard some words very clearly: "no" "door" "shoe" among others. I am tentative because I spent a year and half trying to convince myself that Luke's scant language development was going to burst into fluency any day, and it was absolute torture when I realized I was in denial. I'm frankly frightened to allow myself to hope that Emma will follow the typical course of langauge development. I don't know if I can bear to have that hope crushed again. But living without hope isn't healthy either. I mean, I'm still hoping that Luke will figure out that tricky knack of putting two words together, even though he's and year and half older than the age when most children do it. I'm not giving up on him. I just don't know if I can do it all over again with Emma.

On the other hand, my expectations are vastly different now. I honestly don't care if "mommy" is Emma's fifth word or hundreth. Luke STILL doesn't regularly call me by name, so if Emma ever does it at all with any frequency, it will be cause for rejoicing. I wanted my kids to be reading by age four because that's when I did, but now I'll just be glad for it at any age. The other day a friend of ours was babysitting our kids and when we came to pick them up, she was glad to report that Emma had been letting out a constant stream of words. "I bet she's gifted," she said confidently. And it wasn't a jibe at Luke, because she's certain that he's brilliant as well, just through the lens of autism. But I cringe at the word "gifted" because every one of my siblings was labeled as such and I wasn't. I really despise terms of that ilk, mostly from sour grapes probably, but I just don't feel it's very helpful to use such broadly categorizing terms. If I think of Emma as gifted, I'll be disappointed when she doesn't fulfill all of my expectations of a gifted child. On the other hand, it does help to know that Luke is autistic because I understand better why he has trouble with language and socialization. I don't think I'm making much sense here. I just want to be happy with my children, to hope they'll reach their full potential and to do everything I can to help them, and to be able to deal with it if they don't. Yeah, that's all. Just the small little desire to have a perfect life. :P

On the other hand, physical prowess is hardly an issue. Luke was right on schedule with walking; Emma was a little later but she's an old pro now, having pretty well left crawling behind. She's starting to climb too, and she has her brother's example to learn all the tricks about getting up where she wants to. They're both a pair of monkeys.

Current Mood: confused

My poor little baby is sick. Emma's had a runny nose for a week or so, but now it's branched out into a full-fledged cold, with a nasy cough and requisite crankiness. I wonder if it's related to the anemia. :(

I'm writing the fourth novel in my (entirely, hopelessly unpublished) fantasy series. One of my characters has undergone a subtle corruption, and is now heading over to the side opposing the heroine. It was pretty tricky to write, and I don't know if I pulled it off convincingly. It was also pretty painful; I'm fairly attached to these characters and I don't like seeing them in pain. Yet I torture them nonetheless. :P Also, I'm a little nervous that the corrupted character and his corrupter show marked similarities to Anakin and Palpatine. Well, not nervous really, because there's nothing that could come across as plagiarism. It just makes me think that if I ever do get the stuff published, and someone asks if I just so happen to be a SW fan, one of whose favorite characters is Anakin, I'll give a little smile and say, "Why, yes...how did you ever guess that?" Heh.

I'm tired. I'm probably coming down with Emma's cold. Blech.

Current Mood: bored

After my soul-baring entry yesterday, I'm fortunately it a more buoyant mood today. I felt like jotting down a little amusing lexicon of the made-up words my husband and I have use around each other; their meanings have just kind of sprung up without ever being explicitly defined, and it's like a little mini-dialect that only our family shares. Whee! (I'll probably add more as I think of them.)

( Lexicological Adventures )

So Luke is still coughing today, but I think it's not as bad or frequent as yesterday. Perhaps he'll get in one more day of school before the weekend. He'll be missing school on Monday, but for a nicer reason - my husband is graduating! :D

In other news, my father-in-law called up to wish my husband a Happy Birthday on Saturday, and ended up helping to fix whatever was wrong with our computer. Not only that, but when my husband mentioned in passing that I'd really enjoy Photoshop, his dad said they had a bunch extra copies lying around and he'd be glad to send one to us. Consider it a birthday present for both of us, he said...my birthday's not till July, but never mind. :D It came yesterday, and as soon as I get it installed I'm going to be in trouble. If I don't practice self-control I'll spend hours making icon after icon after icon...

Current Mood: chipper

...and why, oh why, did you have the start celebrating your birthday at two in the morning by waking up and screaming for two straight hours? Sigh...I absolutely refused to nurse her back to sleep, because I don't want her thinking she can continue waking up like this and get rewarded for it. My husband thinks I'm being stubborn; I hope I'm being wise. But as sleep-deprived as I am right now, I'm wondering if he was right. Blech. Of course Luke woke up too, and wouldn't go back to sleep unless one of use was with him. He's going to be thoroughly exhausted at pre-school today.

So spotty sleep resulted in a bunch of odd dreams. I dreamt I was visiting Jurassic Park, where some of the dinosaurs resembled giant toy trucks. A scientist said they had acccidently mixed the DNA with some truck formulas. I responded that that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. Also I disapproved of letting a child work the computer systems. Seems I've taken to Deconstructionism in my dreams.

Well, sleep deprivation aside, I'm glad that my baby girl is one year old today.
( Waxing nostalgic )

Current Mood: sleepy

I've had these lyrics from Children of Eden running through my head a lot lately:

I used to think it was
The spark of creation
Or was it just a defect in me?
A flaw in my nature?
And now look what I've done
I've passed it to my son...

( So I was thinking... )

Current Mood: hopeful

Because if they weren't, it would be really hard to keep being patient with them. As it is, I'm barely containing my frustrations. Emma will be a year old at the end of the month. SHE DOES NOT NEED TO WAKE UP TO FEED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ANYMORE. Yeah, I'm a little sleep deprived. She wakes up screaming at 1:00 and absolutely refuses to calm down unless I feed her. I know she doesn't need it at her age; Luke didn't when he was one. In fact, he pretty well weaned himself. I should have known I wouldn't get so lucky with every child. Emma is definitely going to fight being weaned. But I'm exhausted. I can't go that much longer if I want to maintain any semblance of sanity.

But on the other hand...she took her first step yesterday! Absolutely adorable, lunging forward and then immediately falling to her knees again, because after all, crawling's so much easier. You see I just can't stay angry at her. That's how she gets away with so much.

And Luke...simultaneously going through the usual stubbornness of a three-year-old and the frustrations of being autistic. So not only does he want his breakfast a very particular way, but he wants to do it himself and yet can't communicate any of the particulars because of his language delay. It's hard to keep my sympathy and compassion going when his ear-piercing shriek makes me want to tape his mouth shut. Yet...there he goes, singing "Row Row Row your Boat" without knowing any real words but getting the notes exactly right, and charming me so much I can't stay mad. Lucky for both of us. If only there were a language made up of musical notes; he could be fluent in it.