November 25, 2010 12:52 pm

Thankful

After some coffeeshop-related Thanksgiving adventures this morning – in which I drove to two (TWO!) different locations to say hi to treasured friends – I returned home to park the car. Wesley had fallen asleep in the backseat, and since he is basically too heavy for me to carry in the carseat, I was looking for a parking spot as close to the front of our apartment as I could get.

As I got nearer to our building, I found one! It was on the other side of the street, so I had to turn around. As I was backing up to get even with the car in front of me, someone in a big SUV turned onto our block and zoomed into the spot I was going to park in.

I sat there.

I glared.

I may have said some bad words.

Fine, I thought. I will find the next closest spot. It was all the way down the block (as opposed to being right in front of our steps), but I found one. I was able to just nose in instead of having to parallel park. Wesley was still sleeping.

I got him out of the car, put on my coat, grabbed my bag and my iced chai, and set off down the block. It was slow going; I had my bag on one shoulder and my chai in that hand, and was holding the carseat by the handle and balancing the bulk of it on my hip and shuffling down the sidewalk one step at a time.

I passed the parking spot stealers (a middle-aged lady and what looked to be her elderly mother) and thought how stupid it was that they stole my close spot and had to walk all the way down to where I parked, and I had to walk all the way up the block to get home, when we could have just switched spots and each been closer to our destination.

I made it to our front door and thought, you know? At least I have a car. At least I am able to park it somewhere.

I was thankful that Wesley was (and is) still napping. (And made it up the front steps, in the building, and up a flight of stairs to our apartment without waking up!)

I was thankful we had a heated apartment to come home to.

I was thankful we had friends to see this morning and that Daniel has a job where we are welcome to stop by and visit.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I’m thankful for you, too.

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November 23, 2010 9:57 pm

Pull to Standing

Wesley would like you to see his new trick:

He’s been great at pulling himself up with our help, so today I started letting him try it himself. He did great!

—–

This morning was a comedy of errors – I decided to skip breakfast so we could catch the early bus downtown (so I could get to work early so that I could leave early) and vaguely remembered daycare telling me to call before we showed up just to make sure they were still open. (It was super cold, kind of icy, and had snowed a weeeeensy bit the night before.) I did not call. I had looked outside and noted that it was sunny and completely clear, so – being from north Idaho – I could not IMAGINE why they would be closed.

We arrived at daycare at 7:45 only to be told that they were closed until 8am. Fortunately, we could wait inside and they just asked us to hang out with the babies until the teachers arrived to take over. I stayed until about 8:05 which meant that instead of skipping breakfast and rushing out the door, I could have just eaten a nice bowl of cereal and caught the later bus and not had to wait at all.

Thank goodness they weren’t planning on being closed all day because I really didn’t have a contingency plan. I could have showed up to the office with him in tow and tried to make it work, or just showed up long enough to get my computer so I could work from home, I suppose, but I hadn’t really thought about what to do if they had actually been closed for real.

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November 22, 2010 3:32 pm

Fluoride Drops

At Wesley’s six-month pediatrician appointment, upon noting his two new teeth, our doctor prescribed him some multi-vitamin drops containing fluoride. We were instructed to give him one dose per day.

Later that week, we picked up the prescription and I sat down to administer the drops. Being curious, Wesley opened his mouth and let me squirt the vitamins onto his tongue.

What ensued was the saddest, most horrible “This is foul! What are you doing to me?!” kind of face I have ever seen him make before or since. He closed his mouth and dutifully swallowed the vitamins, all while looking at me like I was the most cruel person he had ever encountered.

I then decided, hey! I wonder what this actually tastes like? I had tasted his (sugary, grape-flavored) generic Tylenol before giving it to him, why wouldn’t I have tasted the (not-sugary, purportedly cherry-flavored) vitamins?

HOLY LORD it was awful. Truly, truly awful. Like, swamp-water-infused-with-iron kind of awful. I felt so horrible about inflicting that filth on my defenseless baby and I haven’t given it to him since.

I am not really a firm believer in an infant’s need for fluoride anyway, but I am obviously not a doctor or a scientist. KellyMom tells me there’s no conclusive evidence that babies need fluoride supplements. Clearly my pediatrician thinks otherwise, or else he wouldn’t have prescribed them. I am pretty sure Portland does not fluoridate its water. We had invested in a water softener system just to make sure that our water is safe for drinking.

We do give him a vitamin D supplement when we remember, because it’s recommended for exclusively-breastfed babies and it’s colorless, flavorless, and basically unscented. The multivitamin+fluoride drops are none of those things.

I don’t think I’m harming him by not administering the drops, especially since children under 2 aren’t supposed to even be given fluoridated toothpaste, but… why would my Ped prescribe them if he didn’t think Wesley should have them? What to do?

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