IFSP

Introvert/Feeling/Sensitive/Person? No, I didn't have Emmeline take the MBTI.
Introspective First Summer Planner? Nope, not that either. (I made that up.)

This is something I have been meaning to blog about, but didn't quite know how to start. When you're embroiled in something, it's not easy to stop and explain it to others from the very beginning. So, Emmeline doesn't crawl. We know that. She commando crawled a little, before she figured out how to flip onto her behind. Since that fateful day, we have not been able to put her on her belly on the floor - she just gets up to her butt and does her cute butt scoot. For the uninitiated, she leans her weight on her left hand, behind her, while she uses her right foot to drag herself along the floor. She's become very adept at this, and it is her preferred method of locomotion. It works for her. However, she never got all that good time working her muscles (especially her leg muscles) while crawling around.
So, when we took her for her 9 month check up, Dr Martin asked about how she did pulling up or supporting her own weight when we stood her up. I told him she had no desire to do either of those things, and after he tested her out, he found I was right. He recommended I give it a month, and if she was still not supporting her weight on her legs, we would need to consider...other things. I don't remember what exactly, just that the pediatrician was telling me I had a month to get my kid to do something. Right. I felt that it was not a big deal that she wasn't pulling up at 9 months (I mean, some kids don't even crawl until 10 months, I really wasn't worried). I was slightly worried that she wasn't supporting her own weight, but she has run a little behind with all gross motor stuff.
Fast forward to December. Emmeline is now 10, almost 11 months. I realize that she is not going to work this out on her own. She is no closer to pulling up, and is downright scared if I stand her up, even leaning on something. Great. This is when I decide to call the pediatrician. He checks her out, and says he feels that her muscle tone is very low. He gives me a referral to the Early Intervention program here. They meet her, and after playing lots of games with her, chatting with me, and checking her out, decide that she is eligible for services through the county. The physical therapist we met with wrote a detailed, and somewhat depressing, IFSP - Individualized Family Service Plan. Which brings us pretty much up to date.
As of now, I'm just waiting for a call telling us who our physical therapist is, and when/where we will meet for our weekly PT date.
Of course, this all uncharted territory for us. I've worked with a few children with IFSPs before (this is the preschool equivalent of an IEP), but every one of those kids had serious special needs - autism or CP, things that aren't going to go away. This is different, in that it seems Em only needs a little push and practice before she'll catch up. The physical therapist who wrote up her IFSP said she thought Emmeline would easily meet the goals she set long before the goal date. We'll see, and I'll update things here with how the physical therapy is going.

Milepost: Toddler

Emmeline has hit a bunch of milestones lately, although I may be making a mountain range out of molehills, since I get geeky about these things. (It's my job, and she's my kid.) My favorite so far is her newest sign - please. She signs please all day long, anytime there is anything she wants. I think she's signing it the way some kids sign more, like, yes that! But I count it as being polite.

She also went from the phase of "taking things out of things" into "putting things into things" while we were on our trip. Previously, if there was a container with anything in it, those things had to be taken out and flung aside. This included anything in my purse (awesome honey, let's put those tampons back in the purse now), any toy in a basket, all books in shelves, food in bowls/containers. Anything. Granted, this was a way to keep her busy, but a messy one. Then, as we packed up to come home from Buenos Aires, I noticed Em putting shampoo into Shawn's shoe. So, after we boarded the plane, we had about 45 minutes to kill before take off. I found an air sickness bag, and placed a pen top, lip gloss, hand cream, a shoe, and my Petco card into the bag. She spent almost the whole 45 minutes taking the items out, placing them in a neat pile, and replacing them in the bag. Then, Tuesday night, she saw the parmesan cheese shaker I had out from Gracie's visit, and just started putting the toothpicks in - she literally wasn't able to do this activity on Friday night. It took her a while to do all 8, but once she got it, she did the whole group 4 times! I was so impressed. Her fine motor skills kill me.

Of course, with all of this progress toward being a big girl comes the milestone I was really not looking forward to: the Tantrum. I don't mean you take something away from her, and she cries until you distract her with something new. I mean, the full on, screaming, looking at you to see your reaction, hysterical fit. Lucky me, we had one of those for dinner Tuesday night. She wanted nothing to do with the dinner I prepared for her. I ended up leaving the room and letting her cry for a few before I came back in. Hard, but not even close to letting her cry it out back in the day. It's a lot easier when I know that there is nothing I can do to make it better - she just has to get it out. In the end, she ate every bite of dinner and asked for more, please.

Emmeline is getting really excited about seeing other babies, including pictures of babies. She squeals, and grins. When we read one of her books with pictures of babies, she will touch her head if the baby is wearing a hat, or smile if the baby in the picture is smiling.

Physically, she's working really hard on standing. She can hold herself up now for a minute or so without getting tired. Although, I don't mean in the middle of the room - I mean propped on the table, or coffee table or something. I can't honestly tell if she sits down because her muscles are tired, or if it's because she wants to move. Whatever.

It's amazing to think that a year ago, I was weighing my options about being induced, or walking another 7 miles around Tyson's Corner as I strained to feel anything like a contraction. I also was completely convinced that Emmeline was going to be a boy. She's absolutely amazing, and has been from day one!

Travelin' Baby

Saturday morning, we woke up, shuttled Emmeline off to a pediatrician's appointment, (which was a nightmare. Awful.) then finally got onto 95 to drive to JFK. Yes, we were flying out of JFK the day after Christmas, which meant we had to drive a fair distance to make it in time for our 10:30 departure. After a painful amount of rain and traffic, we arrived at JFK at 8:30, were hustled to the check in counter, and checked into our flight to beautiful Buenos Aires! This is a picture of what my poor girl looked like by the time we got her strapped into her seat on the plane:

Pretty painful, as was the flight. An 11 hour flight in which Em refused to stay in her car seat. So glad we paid for a seat for her on an international flight. Not like that was expensive or anything. Anyway, she slept some, as did Shawn, Merissa and I. We arrived in Argentina on Sunday morning, and were immediately greeted by how baby crazy the portenos are. We were allowed to skip the line at customs since we had a little baby with us. Strangers piched her cheeks, and told us in spanglish how beautiful she was. Asked how old she was, and what her name is. Luckily, I speak Spanish 101, (nothing higher) so I was able to answer their questions for the most part. Emmeline was a superstar down there - she waved, smiled, flirted and blew kisses to most of the strangers.

We were renting an apartment, so we took a cab (no car seat) from Ezeiza Aeropuerto to Recoleta, the neighborhood we would call home for the next week. The apartment was gorgeous, three bedroom, four bath. Wild. Lucky for us, the woman we were renting from spoke English fluently. She told us there was a grocery store around the corner, so we loaded Em into the backpack and hopped over there. We found that instead of a ten items or under line, they had a pregnant/with child ten years or under line! Awesome! We didn't actually see it until we were done, but I think this proves the extent to which the portenos are baby obsessed. Emmeline wasn't a huge fan of the canned peas and jamon y queso raviolis we gave her for lunch.

I won't do a blow by blow of the whole trip, but here are some highlights:

1) Visiting the Buenos Aires Zoo, and seeing indigenous South American animals

2) Numerous taxi rides with generally cranky cabbies who are 10 times as scary as any NYC cabbie

3) Visiting the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada (famous for many speeches from its balcony by such Argentines as Evita and Diego Maradona)

4) Eating our first alfajores...I don't know how these glorious confections aren't popular here. They are ridiculous - who can resist what is essentially a dulce de leche sandwich cookie coated in chocolate?

5) Riding the "fast ferry" to Uruguay in first class, where we got to ride a bus to a farm where we were the only four people who didn't belong on the farm. They fed us "beautiful" pork, flan, and homemade dulce de leche, along with 7 tons of other homemade food...and showed us their Guinness Book of World Record collections of pencils and keychains. I am not making this up. Swear to you. I also rode a horse. There is photographic evidence.

6) Emmeline taking many naps in our backpack, and also on padded benches at any cafe we could find.

Christmas Part 2

Christmas morning continued on, with lots of baby Tylenol, cuddles, and whining. Emmy soldiered on, through family pictures, and a trip to my parents' house. She opened more presents at Grammy and Gramps' house, and took a nap. That afternoon, the whole family (Patsy, Merissa, Luke, Grandpa Tom, Kathy, Rich, Katie, Alex, Grandma Eileen) came to our house for Christmas dinner. My mom had prepped all the food, and we just used my oven to heat it up. The great part was that since we had ALL of these people at our house, everyone got a turn to hold Em, and try to keep her happy. They also got to help us take pictures and mirrors off our walls, since we were going to have our house painted. Emmeline's fever finally broke at 7, just in time to have a few bites of the dinner she had previously pooh-poohed, and head to bed. By that point, I had already called the on duty nurse with our pediatrician, to see if I should take her to an Urgent Care center. I don't care what the pediatrician says, a "teething" fever should not be 103. She said no, just keep her hydrated, but luckily we were through it just an hour or two later.
Christmas dinner wrapped up around 7:30, and Merissa, Luke, Shawn and I flew around the house moving stuff off the kitchen counter, stripping the bathrooms of personal items, and un-trimming the Christmas tree.
Thus ended our first Christmas at our house. It was exactly what I thought it would be - family, fun, with a touch of frenzy.

Christmas, Part 1

I haven't posted in a while because there's so much to post! I've decided I'll just have to break it up, so here's the first part of Chrismas:

Patsy, Luke and Merissa were all here for Christmas, which was wonderful! On Christmas Eve, Patsy, Merissa and I went to get pedicures and left Em with the boys. The pedicures were an adventure...but when we got back to the house, Shawn mentioned that Emmeline wasn't acting herself, and that he thought her teeth were bothering her, so he'd given her some Tylenol. She was acting kind of whiny, so I picked her up, and could immediately tell she was burning up. Thermometer read 102 axaillary. Awesome. It was 3:30 on Christmas Eve - we were all getting ready for church and dinner with my whole family. Great. We dressed her up, and prepared for a rough evening, packing the thermometer and baby tylenol in the bag; I didn't want to stay home and skip church if she just had a teething fever, and we were going to hold her in our laps anyway, not take her to the nursery.

Church was great, she just sat in our laps and languished. Got to dinner, more of the same, but more whining, because she didn't like what we were feeding her. Also, 4 hours had passed, so we dosed her up again. She didn't sleep very well all night, and was still fevery Chrismas morning, but played along pretty well so long as we kept to the four hour dosing of Tylenol. She opened lots of presents, and really enjoyed all of the babies, books, clothes, and toys she got.