Overheard

Eli took a while to start talking. Until a few months ago he communicated mostly through sign language and a few select words like "mama" and "cookie." (You know, the important things.) Now that he's chatting up a storm, I can't get enough of it. If I could bottle every conversation and save those bottles to uncork them and drink them down when he's grown and gone and I'm a lonely shell of a mother with 18 cats and a collection of bird figurines, I would. Since that's not possible, I must do what's second best: videotape what I can and transcribe everything else.

Sometimes the things he says to me are laughable in their no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is, don't-pretend-it's-not-happening honesty. For example, one of his favorite things to do is poke at or pinch my, um, less toned areas. He'll come up behind me and squeeze the back of my upper arm and proclaim "Fun to do!" Or he'll poke at my pooch and say "Mushy" (though it comes out more like "moochy"). Sometimes the proclamations have a slightly bittersweet edge to them, like the times he'll point at that same moochy tummy and say "No baby in there." Thanks kiddo. I knew that. He made up for that one when a few days later he reached up, stroked my face, and quietly said, "Real Mommy." Thanks kiddo. I'm glad you think so.

Some of my favorite conversations happen right after he's woken up in the morning or after a nap. For a long time, when our interactions were mostly one-sided with me talking and him nodding or gesturing or gibberishing, I would go in and say "Did you have happy dreams?" After a while he started answering yes (usually) or no (once in a while). Now, after a good sleep, he'll wake up and sit on his bed and repeat over and over "Had happy dreams." "Had happy dreams!" "HAD HAPPY DREAMS!" (Apparently, this now translates to, "My dreams were fine, come get me woman! I need processed snack foods!") That's okay, I'll take it.

Often, if he's a little groggy, I can get him to lie back down with me and snuggle for a bit. Sometimes the things that come out of his mouth in this setting are especially random, like the time he announced, "Mommy has a penis!" (I don't.) But some conversations are consistent, like if I ask him what his dreams were about he'll invariably say "Teletubbies came to our house." This has been his happy dream for as long has he's been able to talk, and the best thing about it is that it's slowly evolving as his imagination takes shape. What I mean is that for a long time it was just that they came to our house. Then he would talk about them dancing. When I would ask if he danced with them, he'd always say "No. Danced alone." But then recently, maybe two weeks ago, when I asked him that question he said "Yes." And then another day he told me they went in their hole and he went with them.

If you're still reading this, I give you credit. I realize that the dreams of someone else's two-year-old may not be the stuff of Pulitizer Prizes, but here's why I need to have a record of it: Can't you just see his little brain working overtime to go beyond the things he's seen somewhere else? Can't you just see my little guy coming out of his shell through these descriptions? I mean, first he's just talking about these weird colorful creatures, describing them from a distance. Now he's dancing with them. As the mother of a shy, reserved boy, this is huge.

What strikes me often is how much the little tiny things in motherhood are simply magic. There is no way I can ever communicate to him how much a one-minute cuddle and conversation in his bed nourishes my whole heart. There is no way he'll ever understand that I relish every opportunity to pick him up out of his car seat because it gives me a chance to feel him and smell him and sneak a kiss onto that neck. There is no way he'll do much more than roll his eyes if, years from now, I tell him that I used to like to sit close to him while he was eating because the very sound of him smacking his lips and the sight of him happily inserting almond butter sandwiches into his mouth could make my insides melt. The best I can hope for is that the almost paralyzing love I have for this kid makes him strong, and happy, and content. And in being all of that, on some level, perhaps he'll know.

The Key to Life

I'm feeling very literal today. It's Theme Thursday, and the theme is Key. So I present you with... my keys! Seems kind of obvious, I know, but as I was taking the picture I realized how much this group of metal and plastic is a literal key to my life. For example, ignoring the ridiculous number of plastic membership cards, this is the emptiest my key chain has been since high school. I'm used to having keys to an office building, keys to an office in that building, keys to friends' houses (that I would actually use to go over and hang out - imagine the luxury of that), all in addition to the standards: car and home. Right now I have my car key, my house key, and - just for good measure - a key to my sister's house. It took me a while to get used to an emptier key chain, as if a larger number of keys somehow indicates a more useful life. I prefer to think of these as simpler times.

Two things I love about my keys: First, that the big clunky one says VW. I drive a station wagon that we bought before there was Eli, before we even left California to head east and start this family. I love my wagon. But I especially love that it's a VW because in my single California days I drove old bugs. I had a white '66 - nicknamed Pearl - for a few months that was stolen off the streets of San Francisco. (Boo.) I replaced it with a '65 in seafoam green that needed a ton of work, most of which I did myself, again on the streets of San Francisco. There I was, weekend after weekend, at the intersection of Polk and Filbert, re-upholstering the seats or sanding out the rust or replacing the bumpers. One of my favorite memories of that time is when a woman walked past, said hello, and then came back about 20 minutes later with a 12 year old girl trailing right behind. She said to me, "I brought my niece back because I wanted her to see all the things that women can do." I felt pretty good about that.

And then I drove that freshly painted car - christened Opal - down to LA to start graduate school and wouldn't you know it, three days later someone stole that one. (Sigh.) I replaced it with a UPS brown '67 (obviously not the original color, which was beige). That poor car never got new bumpers, never got a new paint job, never got a name. It just got replaced with something else when I could afford it. I think it was a combination of the thefts breaking my spirit and the LA freeways making me wish for a steadier car. But I will forever hold a special place in my heart for VWs, and my station wagon and its key hints at that a little.

So there you have it. A key to my keys.

Massachusetts Gleaming

It's a funny thing about reading blogs: You find yourself fully immersed in the worlds of complete strangers. So much of it is anonymous. I tend to think of it like a long, long hallway of viewing rooms with one-way mirrors that allow you to peek in and see what's going on in other people's worlds. If you're inclined to make a connection, you can press the little button on the wall, speak into the mic, and say a few words, but then, usually, you slink back into the dark silence for a while until you're moved to say something else. In my own little exhibition hall I'm just kind of flailing about, doing my own thing. I venture down the hall every now and then when something compels me to. There is humor. There is the banal. And sometimes, there is tragedy.

Right now there is a mother going through perhaps the worst thing a mother can endure - the loss of her child, Hannah. I came to her blog in the typical way, through a link on someone else's blog, and have cried tears with everyone else who reads her words. I have left comments here and there, but not as many as I wish I had. I find myself returning to her blog time and time again and it was only recently that I realized why I go back so often: I want to know Hannah; I want to memorize her. And now, I want to be part of the army of readers that keeps her memory alive, through thoughts and actions and, quite simply, through life.

Hannah's mom Rachel is very clear on the fact that Hannah simply sparkled. She loved to be fancy. Her memorial service was a festive affair with mardi gras beads and feather boas - what a sight it must have been! The world most certainly sparkled more because Hannah was in it, and it should continue to sparkle more because she was here. With that in mind, I took Eli on a shopping trip. We went to the party store to find ourselves some sparkle of our own.

I've mentioned before that Eli is decidedly not fancy. It's not his style to to make a spectacle of himself in any way. He'll dance, but only until you point out that he's dancing and then it's done. He hasn't yet found a love of costumes or pretend. But boy did he help me find the sparkle that day.







While we were gathering our objects of glitter, something else caught my eye: a rainbow pinwheel of sorts. The reason it caught my eye is that we had been searching for one for quite a while. Another family in our neighborhood had one on their deck for the longest time and it was one of Eli's favorite landmarks on our walks. Sometimes we would just stop across the street from their house to watch it spin for a while. And then one day it disappeared. As two year olds do, Eli did not forget about it. In fact, it became even more a focus of our conversations because it wasn't there. You would think it a relatively easy task to find one of our own, but that quickly proved not to be the case - until we went shopping for sparkles, and then there it was, just waiting for us.

It now sits in our yard, under the shade of a pine tree, next to the hammock. As we put it into the ground, I told Eli that a little girl named Hannah must have wanted us to have a rainbow of our own. We named it Hannah's Rainbow.


Thanks to the magic of the Internet, Hannah is here in Massachusetts. She's in the extra bit of sparkle in Eli's play. She's in her beautiful rainbow as we rest peacefully in our hammock. She's in our thoughts. She won't be forgotten.

I decided to write about this today because Rachel, Hannah's mother, wrote that her own blog has become a source of comfort for her, that the comments from her readers are helping her get through. It seemed to be time to come out from the shadows to show how we celebrated a little girl we never got to meet, but will always remember.

Completely random

Did you know that you can buy loose cubic zirconia? For less than $50 I could have 500 of them! I have no idea what I would do with them, but I picture myself pouring them out on the bed and rolling around in them. Or maybe putting them in a jar on the windowsill. Or maybe letting Eli use them for craft projects (because glitter is for "other people").

If I had an extra $50 I might just do that.

Hey, Universe, it's Enough Already!

The year: 1993.
The place: Union Street, San Francisco

I had just seen Sleepless in Seattle with one of my closest friends. As we strolled down the street we had a deep conversation - as deep at 26 year olds can get - about signs. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks had respected the signs that the universe threw at them, and look what it got them. True Love. Happiness. Surely we just needed to open our eyes a little wider and all things wonderful would be ours in no time.

I don't think that conversation put us directly on a path to utopia, but I do subscribe to the philosophy that nothing is a coincidence and that there are times when the universe is trying to tell me something.

This might be one of those times.

We are coming dangerously close to the one year anniversary of this family's quest for another member. Basically, we finish out this cycle and we're there. Along the way, the obstacles have been so plentiful they've been downright comical. We got off to a great start (for a month), followed by a rude halt caused by a gazillion little house guests. How do you fit a gazillion guests in your house? It's easy when they're PINWORMS! Blech. Not my happiest memory. Since the drug doesn't mesh with pregnancy, we waited a cycle. Then we continued on our merry way with other less disgusting obstacles like a very poorly timed business trip for David and a less-than-ideally-timed glassblowing weekend away for me. (With some fancy footwork we managed that one.)

A few more months of fruitless trying and then a letter from my OB saying she'd be leaving her practice permanently to improve maternal health services in Zambia. I can think of no one better suited to the work - and that fact is also why I adored her as my OB - but it does make it difficult for her to see me through another pregnancy, doesn't it? Oh well, no matter, I've been through worse (ahempinorms) and carried on. I could always find another OB.

After the basic fertility tests, we made a decision that the very slightly increased chances we would have if we pursued IUI and IVF were not worth the financial or emotional costs. The only intervention for this family would be acupuncture. I found the guy - you know, the one they write newspaper articles about because of his success rates; the one everyone knows someone who went to him - and started treatment. Month one: No change. Month two: Craziest temps ever. Month three: Acupuncturist gets a detached retina and is out of commission for two months.

Huh?

HUH?!

Universe, I could deal with the worms. I could deal with the poor travel timing. I could even survive without the woman who brought my perfect son into the world. But, this. Are you kidding me?

(And to top it all off, one of the things I keep thinking about when we consider raising Eli as an only is that he's perfect. No developmental troubles, save for a few sensory things we can handle; no medical issues; he's - dare I say it -easy. Of course Autism is one of the potential problems I mull over and worry about. And so as I settled in with my lunch and my Tivo remote to see what wise words Oprah had to offer me today, should I have been surprised that the episode she chose to re-run was the episode on severe Autism? Probably not.)

I find myself in a strange position now. I have always prided myself on listening to my inner voice, respecting the signs that have been put in front of me. If I'm being honest here, the signs are telling me one thing: Stop. Just stop. It's enough. Quit while you're ahead. Bloom where you're planted. Love the one you're with, and all that.

And yet somehow I can't. Not quite yet.

What a long, loud trip it's been

My poor kid. Torn between his love of trains and his discomfort with the very sound of them. This is a pretty typical visit to the train station for us, watching all the suburbanites take their daily trip into the city. And it just so happens that trip is this week's theme over at Tracey's Theme Thursday. Head over there for more takes on trip.

Sensing Change

To the untrained observer, there is nothing remarkable about the photo of Eli at the top of this post. Your run-of-the-mill, happy-go-lucky two-and-a-half year old. But to me, there is something very important about this photo, taken just 10 minutes ago. What? Eli's shirt.

Eli is developmentally on-track and perfect in every way. Like every human on this planet, though, he has his challenges: For him, smells are a particular struggle, as are (to a lesser degree) touch, visual stimuli, and sounds. To put it succinctly - but also to vastly oversimplify it - he has Sensory Processing Disorder or Sensory Integration Disorder. This is a very wide umbrella that covers so many symptoms ranging from hypersensitivity of the senses to hyposensitivity to the senses to difficulty with the sense of movement or with the sense of one's own position in relation to the world. For Eli, it means he reacts very strongly to certain smells - often to the point of gagging, sometimes to the point of vomiting - and can't stand to look at various foods. He doesn't like loud sounds, he's not a fan of finger paints (or of many other activities that require messy hands). He is also sometimes more aware of the tags in his shirts than the princess was of the pea. And since he began having a say in what he wears he has flatly refused collared shirts.

We didn't think much of most of the things I just listed; he is two, after all. Wouldn't you expect him to have some very strong preferences, especially ones that make little sense to an adult? But the gagging and refusal to even look at some dinners was making for very tedious meal times. When I saw an advertisement for a seminar on picky eaters I signed right up. The nutritionist who led the group was wonderful and talked a lot about offering reasonable portion sizes and about exposing young eaters to as many foods as possible. Even if they wouldn't eat it, let them see you eating it. I raised my hand: "What if your child won't even let you eat most things in the same room as him?" She asked: "Does he get gaggy, too?" When she said that, it was as if the heavens had opened so the angels could sing. This woman got it. I said "Yes," she said, "talk to me after," and a plan was hatched.

A couple of weeks before this a friend of mine who is an elementary teacher suggested that Eli might have some sensory issues and said I should look into Early Intervention. Not having a clue how it worked, I thought I needed to go to my pediatrician for a referral. So I made an appointment and hunkered down to wait a few weeks. It turns out, as I learned from the nutritionist, no referral is necessary at all. Just call, say you'd like your child evaluated, and they will come. So I called, said I'd like my child evaluated, and they came.

The evaluation was pretty straightforward. In order to qualify for services, Eli's sensory woes had to be delaying his development in one area or more by at least three months. Of course this wasn't slowing him down in the slightest with his language or cognitive development. He did, however, score a little low on "self care." Apparently, the fact that he doesn't show interest in getting himself dressed or undressed and the fact the often chooses not to use a fork puts him behind other kids his age. That (with a couple of other low scores) qualified him to work with an Occupational Therapist (OT).

So for the last couple of months she's been working with Eli once a week, trying to develop his central nervous system and to desensitize him to various tactile, auditory, and olfactory sensations. She gave us the details of a "sensory diet," which requires me to spend 15-20 minutes every two hours or so stimulating his proprioception and vestibular system. What it really amounts to is me helping him to bounce, march, crawl, or roll. Big movements. Being at the playground counts, so we try to make it there every day.

Eli is also very lucky to be part of an Early Intervention playgroup where he spends 90 minutes a week with 9 other kids and 5 OTs having all of his senses stimulated while experts work through the rough spots. For the first several weeks they gave the kids cheese as a snack because it's one of the things that tends to trigger Eli. Last week I watched him through the one-way mirror as they asked him if he wanted crackers or apples. His response? "No cheese this week!" You can't put anything past my boy.

In the fall he'll start Hippotherapy, which is basically work with an OT while he's on a pony. How fun is that?! But the smells of the stable and the texture of the horse and the movement of the ride - these will all be fantastic for him.

There are some days where I feel like all of this is much ado about nothing. I mean, he'll grow out of it, right? But what I always came back to was the worry that he wouldn't outgrow his trouble with smells and I'd have to send him off to school, knowing he'd end up in the stinky cafeteria. Knowing that if the smell bothered him enough, he'd get sick. And knowing that if he got sick, he might be embarrassed or - worse - be made fun of. That was enough to cause me to request the help.

And, as you can see from the picture, things seem to be working. He still has plenty that he doesn't like but look at my boy in his collared shirt! Just look at him! What a little man.

It has been on my mind since I started this blog that I wanted to post some details about all of this. When Eli first started having trouble with smells I googled the heck out the problem and came up with nothing. I didn't have a name for it so I stuck to search terms like gag, gagging, smells, etc., and the only thing I found was an old post to a message board - probably four or five years old - from a mother with the same problem. Sadly, no one had responded to her question. So my hope is that if someone else has the same trouble we do and they're not sure what to call it and not sure where to turn with it, they'll come across my post and know immediately that they aren't alone and that there is something that they can do. So I'm putting out there to the blogosphere, and even if it forever stays with "0 Comments" just below it, I won't care. It needed to be said.