April 03, 2006 - 7:18 AM.

Hop, teeth, blog rejections

Yesterday, child took his green checked bunny by the long ears, jounced it up and down on his lap, and announced, "Opp. 'Opp. 'Opp." Daddy captured this moment of brilliance on film.

Child continues to ask for apples and to peel them with his tiny teeth; now he is (finally!) asking for "Na-na?" as well. Of course the only way he will interact with the banana is to hold a short stump of it in his hand, bite off miniscule bitlets of it, and remove the bits immediately from his mouth. Plus he won't hold bare banana flesh -- it must still be encased in peel, but no hanging peel may touch his skin, so we have to peel the banana almost all the way down, trim all hanging peel with scissors, and break off most of the banana flesh, leaving a kind of banana stump in a tiny banana-peel holder for him to grasp. For a child who will voluntarily gather and attempt to ingest bird droppings, he certainly has a lot of rules about presentation. But we are so thrilled about every non-puree he will try that we'll do what it takes -- soon enough he'll be eating it like everybody else anyway.

I swear to god there are blogs I am going to have to stop reading. Every time I read someone confess how they made their baby scream through the night rather than feed or comfort them, or go on flippantly about hitting their kid (and proudly/guiltily claim they're "consistent"), or blame their poor teething/lonely/developing baby for inconveniencing them, or even make angry jokes about their kids being ill too much -- I can't take it. I know people are trying to be funny and popular, and I have absolutely no doubt that all these mothers love their children completely. But I cannot bear it when people court an audience and then either kind of bash their children or defend icky parenting practices that, if these mothers were well supported, they would reject or replace.

Oh! Also 2 new teeth -- top left eyetooth, plus top right premolar (I think). Everybody had a hard weekend, between the teeth for Punie and v. slow action from the 10-day course of prednisone for J. If this doesn't take care of his hand pain, his doctor wants to move from the methotrexate to weekly injectables. I am of course stumping for a return to acupuncture while, at this level of pain, J. is having a hard time hearing me about that. He focuses instead on trying to make my life completely easy, and then I feel guilty about making him focus on me, even though I know focusing on anything BUT the pain is good for the pain . . .

previous - next