3.8 or, Plague House Revisited

Dear Corbin,

You started school, and we all got the plague.  You ended up with an eye infection and a nose infection, thanks to a general cold.  Getting those eye drops into your eyes was absolutely awful for the first three days.  Then one night, Dad wasn't done putting Miriam to bed yet, so you and I talked about it and you agreed to lay still while I put the eye drops in.  It was one of those weird moments, that feels almost like a breakthrough in parent-child communications where I manage to say just the right thing and you understand it. I think most of the success came from something that I'm trying to change in how I communicate with you.

I had a conversation with your teacher in which she mentioned that the best time to teach appropriate behavior is when everything is calm.  Which made perfect sense to me once I thought about it a little bit.  Of course it's not the right time to discuss your behavior when you're already upset.  So simple, and yet so profound.  So when I realized that Dad was still going to be with Miriam when we were ready for eye drops, I didn't wait until you were already fighting me to try and get you to cooperate.  Which apparently was the right decision, because it worked like a charm.

Your teacher also compared it to practicing at something until it's in your muscle memory, which also makes a lot of sense to me.  I've been thinking of ways that I can program good behavior into you.  I was confronted with a brilliant example of it the other day.  I didn't hear something that you said, so I asked you, "What are you talking about?" to which you replied, "I'm just talking about Shaft."

What with all of the sickness, we didn't do much this past month.  You did spend a couple of days in Madison with Grandma and Grandpa Lam.  You came home with yet another digger--a cool little metal bobcat.  We christened it the other day playing in the mud in the backyard.  Then you dug a hole, plopped yourself down in it, and told me you were hatching eggs.  You got yourself so dirty we had to change your pants before we went to breakfast.  I call that a good morning.

Love,
Mom


You sending email:

Playing in the hole, day one:

 Playing in the hole, day two:

Month 6 or, Happy Half Birthday

Dear Miriam,

You are half a year old!  You are definitely crawling now, but it took you a while to figure out how to go forward.  You would go sideways or backwards, which meant that you would crawl in a circle backwards.  It was pretty funny.  You are pretty much sitting up on your own, too, although sometimes it looks more like you're kind of perching on one hip.  One day, I put you in the Bumbo chair with a bead maze next to you, thinking that would keep you happy for a while.  Then I heard a thud and a rattle and found you'd crawled out of the chair and fallen on the maze.  Guess that Bumbo recall really does make sense.

I don't know how it happened, but you've established your own bedtime routine.  I had been thinking that we would need to do a lot of work to get you on a good schedule, but all of a sudden you're in the bath around 7:15pm and asleep around 8pm.  You're still up a couple of times at night to nurse and get re-settled, so I think we might still need to do some sleep training around that.  But I'm really happy that your bedtime has become pretty regular.  Although, I did tell Dad the other night that unless we want you to grow up illiterate, we'd better start reading to you at bedtime, too.


Hurricane Miriam was a category 2 hurricane in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Baja California.  It's too bad that you're not old enough for us to get real mileage out of the fact that there was a hurricane with your name on it at the same time you discovered that you could crawl over and chew on the cords for Dad's Playstation.

Aunt Cele (or Grandma Cele, as her grandkids call her) came over to visit us and some other friends.  She brought a rocking chair for your room, which is giant improvement over the folding chair that we had in there.  It's much, much nicer this way.  Now I just have to worry about my entire body falling asleep, instead of just my butt.

We've started you on some rice cereal last month, but then there was a whole news report that rice can be a source of arsenic.  Ugh.  So when we ran out, I wrote down "oatmeal cereal" on the grocery list and sent Dad off to the grocery store.  He came home with oatmeal and cereal.  Which made me laugh.  You're still getting the hang of eating, and I'm still trying to get you to like bananas.

And then, the reason I'm so late posting this for you, we all go sick.  Corbin got really sick, with bad fevers and infections in his nose and eyes.  Dad got the least sick, with just a day of feeling stuffy.  I had a day of fever in the middle of a week or so of stuffed up head and a very sore throat.  You are really stuffed up, which wouldn't be so bad, but you can't sleep unless you are mostly upright.  So one night you slept on me, which meant you slept, but I did not.  The last couple of nights, you've been sleeping in your bathtub, in your crib, so that you're sitting up instead of laying down.  It certainly looks odd, but it's been working.

I realized I haven't told you very much about how you act lately.  You're a happy baby, you smile at us and laugh with us.  Sometimes you're okay playing on your own for a little while, but mostly you want to be with us.  When I get home from work, any time I walk away from you, you start fussing.  It's not because you're hungry, you just want to hang out with me.  Right now your high chair is across the table from Dad's chair, and he thinks it's funny to get you laughing just when I'm trying to feed you.  And, oh boy, do you like being around Corbin.  You're already a menace to whatever he's playing with, because all you want to do is crawl over and play with him.  Yesterday he was crying when we put his eye drops in, and you watched for a minute and then started crying with him.  It was almost as cute as when I come in your room in the morning and you give me the first smile of the day.  That's a pretty good way to start my morning.

Love,
Mom


You still have blue eyes:

 What your room looked like before I hung the painting over your dresser:

Helping Dad fix some headphones: