Shake your Groove Thang

I took Delaney to a Kindermusik Class today, our first. The class is marketed to kids ages 0 (really) through 3. It looked like most of the kids were around her age when we got there, which was a good thing. I didn't want to have the only walker in a class full of nursers. But in an effort to encourage more people to register, they are allowing people to sign up for blocks of 4 week classes instead of the standard 10 weeks. What I didn't know was that the 4 week blocks are inside the current 10 week classes. So everyone in our class was a seasoned 10 week-er and had been meeting and singing for weeks before Delaney and I, the sole newbies, arrived. Not only that, but I didn't get the download they sent via email with the songs and words and activities on it to get us up to speed. I should have called about it, but it's been busy around here.

So we went in green as a string bean and Delaney was a little clingy at first. I'm not much of an introvert (surprise!) and I love to sing even if it's just stringing words to what I'm thinking a la Buddy the Elf ("I'm heeere with my Dad and he wants me to sing him a sooong...."). As I'm trying to extract myself from Delaney's grip and beat on the drum I had been given, I noticed that Laurie the Teacher isn't having much luck getting the parents to sing along with her or after her or whatever she was asking them to do. Parents were singing in those hushy church voices so that their voice was never heard individually above anyone else's. At one point Laurie the Teacher even sang to the parents "It's alright for parents to sing la la la - lala. It shows the children that singing is fun la la la la " (Laurie sings everything a normal person would say. It's like talking to an opera star.) I always try to surreptitiously size up the parents when I go to these types of things, trying to suss out who potential mom friends might be. It doesn't look good for me in Kindermusik. Lots of turtlenecks, a grandma, a couple, and some moms way too young to remember the original Electric Company. I know, it's so superficial. Go ahead and judge me.

I decide I may be on my own in this class and I've already paid my $64 for these four weeks. Despite my lack of song and melody knowledge, I am going to sing my head off in this class because I want Delaney to know that singing IS fun. But more than that, I don't want her to be a wallflower. So I begin to belt it out like Barbra Streisand, songs I don't know about tigers and cats and dancing and jungles. Me and Laurie the Teacher are neck and neck for volume, though she's got me beat with melody. I have no idea where I'm going there. I do sound like Buddy the Elf. Laurie the Teacher looks at me with a quizzical, but encouraging smile. But Delaney loves it. As she sees me getting groovy, she begins to loosen up and takes the tambourine from the quiet kid next to her. I make her give it back, but inside I'm pleased. No breathy singing or hiding behind the big kids for us. I'm raising an extrovert.

Everywhere Signs

A good and wise friend clued me into teaching Delaney sign language to make it easier for us to communicate. I had seen several mothers at the YMCA uses sign language with their children and was always amazed at the ease which with both sides got their point across. Mother, signing -"Logan, come out of the pool right now." Child, also signing - "No. No. No. ". I also knew it required a lot of patience and consistency to make any headway. I am not the most consistent of people but I do love a challenge and I wanted to be able to better communicate with Delaney, as opposed to her whining and pointing and me lamely trying to supply the right answer. I must confess, I also envisioned us discussing the weather and and perhaps the subtle nuances of Big Red Barn in sign language while other mothers looked on in wonder at my gifted prodigy.

So I bought the book and the video, because you can never get all of your information in just one form of media. I watched the specialist, Dr. Joseph Garcia, who I admit turned me off a bit at first because he's a dead ringer for Heraldo Rivera, take me through 30 minutes of why signing was the greatest thing you could ever do for your child and then 5 minutes of showing me actual signs. Lots of hippie-looking moms signed voraciously throughout the video with their young, sometimes very young children and they all happily passed the salt and looked at the airplane with an ease of communication that hooked me right in.

I began signing the simple words first like they advise you to. At this point Deleny is about 11 months old. I made the signs for "milk" and "more" first and waited and watched for any sort of flickering hand movement to tell me she is getting it. When she made her first sign, which was "more", I was on the phone with my father and nearly deafened him. "She signed! She signed for more! Did you see that?" Which of course he didn't because we were speaking on the phone. I poured the entire box of cheerios on her tray, signing more, more, more, while I was doing so. She may have thought I was crazy, but she did look quite pleased with herself. Of course that could have been because of the the amount of cheerios I had suddenly dumped on her.

After that we learned a few more signs - milk, eat, ouch. It got a bit tricky here because a lot of these signs are similar. Take more and ouch for example. Very similar signs, so if you have no context you might think she is in agony, rather than simply wanting another cookie. I chose to think she was being poetic and was telling me she was hurting for more.

At 15 months she has turned a signing corner and a new problem is arising. She rapidly picks up signs now after being shown the sign only a few times. The problem is I don't know enough signs. The "help" sign for instance. Help was incredibly hard for us. We forgo the American Sign Language standard for this word and use a Dr. Joseph Garcia substitute which he says is easier for young hands to produce. You tap your hands to your chest a few times and that's it. So simple. It took an unbelievably long time for Delaney to get it, but I kept at it, thinking if I could just get her to ask for help our problems would be solved. And one day she does it! Tap Tap Tap on her chest when her toy box is closed. I rush over tap my own chest, yell Help! Help! And open the box. We are communicating!

Fast forward two weeks later and the child is running around my house beating her chest like King Kong at every obstacle in her path. Is it the sippy cup? Does she want the book? Is her diaper wet? I don't know! Help! Help! Help! In the grocery store, the YMCA, the library, there she is beating her chest with me shoving objects at her, trying to solve the mystery. I don't know the signs for "wait" or "patience" or "slow down". But is it better than whining and pointing? Definitely.

Sleeping in Boots

When Delaney has a missed or even abbreviated nap, it's usually a precursor to a rough afternoon/evening. She had an extremely short nap today due to a bad car-to-crib transition. I stupidly tried to get her boots off before putting her down. In extricating her foot with one hand while I held her with the other arm, I pulled the sock off too and her bare pigs touched my icy cold vinyl ski jacket which caused her to twitch and moan and ultimately wake up and look at me. I spent a good half an hour trying to get her to sleep again but when she picks her head up and smiles at me with an open mouth, I know the sleep boat has sailed.

So we're in for it now and by 4 o'clock I cave in to all sorts of verboten activities to keep her from following me around the house, arms outstretched in full blown whine mode. Sometimes I run from her when she's like this. I know it sounds cruel, but the thing is, when I pick her up when she's in this state of mind, she arches her back and pushes against me so that I almost drop her. I either have to hold her tightly so as not to let go of her or put her down, both of which piss her off royally. It's maddening. She wants comfort but won't be comforted. So we do back to back Baby Einsteins and empty the magical computer drawer (a total nightmare to clean up) and eat too many cookies and drink milk in my lap. But eventually it's all too much and I know I'm just putting off the inevitable.

At 5 o'clock she is the monster again, crying, whining and signing to me for things she thinks she wants but then changes her mind and flings them away. There's this dilemma at 5:00 which was really there at 4:00 too, but I got past it for an hour by giving her cookies and videos. If I put her to bed now, and I know she is acting this way because she is uber-tired, I risk upsetting the whole sleep schedule and she'll be up at 5:00 am tomorrow morning, tired for a nap at 9:00 am and ready for bed again at 5:00 pm. At some point you have to push through it and I'd rather do it now than have the pattern get more established. I know it sounds neurotic, but the sleep schedule is pretty golden in this house give or take an hour. I can put her to bed at 7:00 or even 6:00 but 4 or 5 is going to play games with all of us.

So at 5:00 she is whining and signing that she's hungry (this after the multiple peace-seeking cookies) so I make her a nice grilled cheese and cut up some apples and strawberries and put her in the highchair. She puts maybe a strawberry in her mouth, and then clears the tray with both hands so everything goes flying onto the floor. And I swear she looks at me and raises her eyebrows in a taunting "Did you see that?" look. I pull her out of the chair, and plunk her on the floor, cleaning up the mess while she gamely eats a few of the fallen items.

But soon she starts crying again and I hold her while she signs for a banana. We can make a dinner out of a banana I tell her and cut one up, get a fork because she like to eat them off the fork and stab a piece of banana with it. She flings the fork so the banana goes whizzing past my face and hits the oven, sliding down forlornly. I look at that banana while I feel like that banana. You would think I would learn by now, but no, she makes the eat sign again and I get out some yogurt, leave the crime scene that is the kitchen and sit her in my lap in the living room. And for a few bites she is happily eating yogurt and smiling. Is she toying with me now? Is she thinking "What a dope. What a patsy." Because when my guard is down she flips her hand down on the container and yogurt and spoon splatter over her, over me, over the couch and the rug. My face when this happened must have scared her because I didn't utter a word but she looked at me and howled. I wanted to howl too. I left her there howling while I got a cloth in the kitchen to clean up the mess, and also to take a deep breath. She follows me howling, snotty, covered in yogurt and completely, utterly miserable. I really want to run from her. But I pick her up and and she lays her little yogurt covered head on my shoulder and I slowly decompress. She's just a tired baby. Not a prescient, manipulative beast trying to foil my every move. It's over. I surrender. It's 5:30 now and I've got to get this girl in bed. If we're up at an ungodly hour, then we're up.

I run a quick bath for her and she comes to life again, playing in the bubbles, laughing at my antics. I can have her in bed by 5:45 with little trouble if I can keep this up. An enormous gas bubble escapes her and she giggles at herself. I giggle too because after all, farts are funny. Don't tell Justin. A few minutes later as I'm soaping her hair, like a gator hiding in the swamp I see a flash of brown go by under the bubbles. None of her bath toys are brown. I stand her up in the tub and of course, there is poop everywhere. I have to drain the tub, spray it down, spray her down, re-wash her hair because I'd unknowingly washed it with poop water all the while racing against the clock and the cold air that is in our house due to this uncanny cold spell we've been having. I lost the good mood she had acquired somewhere in that second bath. It ended with her crying, struggling to grab at the poop toys I had placed out of her reach until I could clean them, while I scrambled for the towel to try to keep her warm. My little, tired, poop girl. I stuffed her in some warm jammies, and she collapsed on my shoulder by 6:15. I did make it to the 6:00 hour after all, but I would have sacrificed the hour for a poop free bath. In the future, I will leave the boots on.