White light

Thanks to An Offering of Love, every month we have a photo project to take part in, each with a different color theme.

November is: White

So that’s how that works

Until about a week ago, Curly was mostly saying one and two word phrases: ‘big truck’, ‘dog eat’, ‘bye mommy’, ‘want more.’ Occasionally we would hear a 3 word phrase: ‘more cereal please’, ‘I got it’, ‘No want it.’ Without comparing his language skills to his peers, of equal or lesser age, it seemed Curly’s language skills were slooooowly increasing and not terribly shabby. Compared to the rest of the kids in his daycare class, they were largely lacking and it worried us. When would he start using sentences? Pronouns? The word ‘the’? Referring to himself? Expressing himself better? All the other kids were already doing it. We had considered for the 900th time getting him evaluated again. He just seemed so behind.

And then it happened. We had heard stories of people saying ‘one day my kid wasn’t really talking, and then next day, boom! Language explosion.’ We thought it might not happen for Curly. That he would need extra help. But then we began noticing him using 4 and 5 word sentences. Referring to himself with ‘me’ and ‘my’ and us with ‘you’ and ‘your.’ Using the word ‘the.’ Talking, talking, talking. People said, ‘don’t worry, once he starts talking he won’t stop’…and we see now, they’re right.

Things we’ve heard over the past few days: ‘Open the box, mommy’ (‘please’ after coaxing him)’, ‘I need a tissue’, ‘This my hat, not your hat’, ‘Mommy comin downstairs!’, ‘I wanna go [friend] house’, ‘[Curly] get in the car’, ‘Train broken, Ima, fix please’, ‘[Curly] see BIIIG boat!’  He much more consistently uses people’s names, instead of not calling them anything like he used to. He asks ‘what’s that?’ all the time and listens to what we tell him, repeating the words we say much more often. He tells us what’s happened at school when we ask…well, a couple things of interest at least. His pronunciation is still pretty poor, but that’s normal at his age. We are just so relieved and happy to hear what he has to say.

Happy song

All kids do cute things. They come and they go; this one started over 6 months ago and we never expected it to hang on as long as it has, but we love it. The prompting you see here is just so we could capture it on video. Most of the time, we hear this song from across the room as he plays by himself or he’s in the car seat.

Gone!

Just a quick update to say that the daycare director pulled Nutella into her office at pick-up on Friday and said the biter will not be returning. I can’t tell you the relief we feel. It felt really good to explain to Curly that she’s gone and can’t hurt him anymore. Thanksgiving indeed. Thanks for the support, all.

Enough.

3/8/2011
Activity: snack time
Description of incident: Children were getting up off stage to wash hands when child bumped into another and was bit on his shoulder

3/14/11
Activity: free play
Description of incident: Child was playing with a puzzle on the shelf. Another child bit him on the shoulder.

3/15/11
Activity: Free play
Description of incident: Child was playing in housekeeping area and another child walked up to him and bit him on the back

11/11/11
Activity: Free play
Description of incident: Child was sitting on stage area reading a book when another child bit him on the hand

11/14/11
Activity: Free play
Description of incident: Child was sitting on the stage playing and another student walked up to him and bit him

(There were more, but those were the ones I had on hand)

The worst bite of all happened yesterday, 11/14. Through his shirt, drawing blood, as big as a child’s wide open mouth can get, and hard as she could clamp down. Many other children were getting bitten many months ago. Now it is just Curly. She is singling him out. He is passive, gentle, soft-spoken and not as verbal as the other kids. He doesn’t provoke her. She’s picking on what she sees as weak. They say 2 year olds can’t be bullies. We beg to differ.

The assistant director of our daycare sent her home after that last bite. She will not be returning the rest of this week. Her mother finally wrote us yesterday. Daycare was still trying to keep names out of it, but they know and we know. Her mother was deeply apologetic. They have never seen her bite before so they can never discipline the behavior. But they’ve been trying…to talk about it, to get doctors’ opinions, therapists’ opinions. They know her dismissal is now an imminent possibility.  We wrote back that we know it’s not their fault and that we’re sure it’s just as disturbing to them as it has been for us. The director told us there’s a meeting with upper management to talk about next steps. The only next step we really want is for her to be gone and our boy to be safe.

NaBlo No No

Obviously we’re not taking part in NaBloPoMo…just too busy these days. Here are some bullet-y things that have been happening:

• We took a 5 hour road trip to attend Nutella’s sister’s wedding last weekend. Curly does well in the car but he doesn’t sleep. He just chatters and looks out the window and then eventually turns into a zombie. We had a good trip and got to visit a really awesome kids’ museum. Unfortunately, the end of daylight savings time was hard on Curly and he didn’t do well at the wedding ceremony. I had to stand in the back and try to occupy him because he wouldn’t sit in his seat and kept babbling. He was D-O-N-E even before the reception started but as luck would have it, there was a little phone booth room we found that was perfect for napping in. We grabbed his Pe@pod tent, set it up along with the monitor, and he napped for over an hour while we were able to eat a nice meal and chat with people. He did NOT want to be woken up, but dancing was beginning and relatives were going to start beating us over the head if they didn’t get to see him. It took him a while to feel comfortable, but in the end, he was dancing and looking very cute all dressed up.
• Daylight savings time is always interesting. Curly is a great sleeper, but very much adheres to a strict schedule, wanting to go to sleep at 7pm and sleep until 7am. So we’ve been keeping him up to the new 7pm, which feels like 8pm, but he’s been waking up around 6am (yes, we know others have it a lot worse than that!) This has been throwing him off and turning him into a crankypuss. The thing is, he would gladly sleep in most days until between 7 and 8am, but he wakes up because he poops. Yep, he’s a first thing in the morning pooper and that’s his alarm clock. In order to change his schedule, we must change his pooping schedule. Over time, we’ve found out little tricks to help with this- bananas (or better yet, plantains), iron drops in his drink and complex carbs with dinner… grapes/raisins/peaches with breakfast, beans later in the day. The goal is to get him to poop later, at daycare, or in the evening. This morning was the first time it’s worked since DST ended. He had pooped at school yesterday afternoon and we had to actually wake him up at 7:45 this morning so we could get to work on time. Fingers crossed this pattern holds until he can readjust.
• It has been months since we’ve gotten the dreaded call from daycare that Curly has been bitten by a classmate. Then it happened yesterday. And while daycare can’t give us names, Curly told us who it was- the same girl who has been biting the other children now for over a year. Daycare told us months ago that if this continued to be a problem in the 2’s room, they’d have to take further action. I guess we can let this one slide, but I won’t be surprised in the least if it happens again and then sparks will fly. This is bite number 7 or 8…and that’s just Curly’s bites from her, not to mention the other kids.

We’ve seen very few wedding pictures at this point, but here’s Curly enjoying a little snack during the cocktail hour while one of his uncles tries to teach him how to play cards

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