If at first you don't succeed...demand applause when you finally get it right

When I first started working in remedial education, I became very aware of the importance of milestones and the point at which children achieved them. When you are helping elementary aged children learn to read, write and complete basic arithmetic, you have to know at which age they strung their first sounds together, at which age tehy strung their first sentence together and at which point counting became automated. There is the question of ear infections and how long they lasted, the question of when the child first picked up a pen and whether or not the grip was right, and lest we forget, how many languages the child learned and at which age the languages were solidified. In that first year of my career one of the most common conversations that I was trained to have with parents was to explain how the fact that a child only spoke their first sentences at age four was a great indicator that they would also be delayed by about two years in reading and writing, or that the fact that a child had severe ear infections in its first two years of life could result in full-blown dyslexia, not just a simple gap in meeting those milestones that are so essential for success in school. These conversations often dealt with me trying to professionally deliver this news while also trying to show empathy while trying to come up with the practical solutions to help the student and the family cope with what was going on.

This conversation is somewhat different when you are the parent and receiving the news about your child's delays in achieving milestones. Maybe it is because I have been on the delivering end of this conversation that it becomes easy for me to recognize the signs when someone is trying to assure me that it really is okay that your child did not started walking independently until she was 16 months old. The line goes something like, "Well the majority of children meet this milestone at 12 months but really there is nothing to worry about. There are children that only begin walking at 18 months. Any later than that and we start to worry but you are absolutely fine... ahem... for now." Sigh... How hard it is to be on the receiving end of this type of euphemistic conversation, especially when you know what the educational implications are of any type of delay in achieving  these milestones. The challenge is to not become depressed by this type of news and just keep loving your child and helping them grow at whatever pace they are setting. There is a choice to be made and I think that it is vital that every parent make the choice to not become bogged down by the milestones, by the details that we have created by gathering statistics and determining averages and using those to judge our children's achievements. My child is no average and I am SUPER proud of that fact!!! It makes me love her all the more.

How did I come to reach this conclusion that milestones need to be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt? As with so many of the things that I have learned in the past two years, my daughter taught me. Not only has she taught me how artificial these milestones can be, she has taught me to celebrate and applaud her achievements ragardless of when she reaches them. And I do mean that she has taught me to applaud her, because when she has been working hard to achieve a task or a skill, she turns to me and she literally makes me give her a round of applause. Not only does she like applause for actually achieving the goal, she loves recognition for her efforts. There is such a huge emotional benefit for recognizing how difficult it is to learn how to pee seated on a toilet, to learn how to hold your breath underwater in a pool or just how to put your toy teaset away after a bout of playing pretend teatime with your mommy (often at 6:30 in the morning). Our latest efforts have been in the toilet training arena and she has progressed so well. In such a short space of time, she has gone from refusing the toilet seat to asking for her necessities and the accidents are at a minimum. In something like a month, we have moved from nappies (diapers) to training underpants to little girl briefs with cute pics on the front. Why do I think this has gone so well? Well, wouldn't you want to poop for someone if you knew that they would applaud you and hug you and kiss you when they heard  your turd drop into the water? Wouldn't you try hard to get the timing of your trips to the loo just right when any accidents were met with an understanding hug and kiss and a, "It is okay baby girl. Mommy loves you for trying and next time it will go better"?

My baby girl has not reached all her milestones quickly or easily but she has taught me so much about what the right setting is for reaching for those goals. She is willing to just keep trying to reach those milestones that are an indication to the professionals of how her future will go. When she doesn't succeed, all she needs is a little applause to keep going and a lot of applause when it is perfect... No exceptions!!!

When you aren't feeling great, demand love and care

So my little one is not the most extroverted kid on the block. Those in the know (namely other parents that I randomly meet at the mall or at the local coffee shop jumping castle) tell me that this is somewhat typical of children of this age. Two year olds are just not that social. They tend to engage in parallel play, where they play alongside each other, rather than engaging directly with each other. Sounds plausible to me... kind of. It would certainly explain why she is happy to play on equipment when kids of her age or younger are on. It would also explain her tendency when older kids get onto the jumping castle - the tendency to get off and go play on the slide. And if there are older kids on the slide and the jumping castle... well then she would rather sit on my lap and partake of my drink and food. But I also believe that a large portion of my child's responses to other human beings is that she is simpy a rather shy little being. Whenever people approach her, she tends to look at them coyly through her eyelashes and buries her head in whichever one of my body parts happen to be closest to her. She will greet people when prompted by dad or myself, and will often even give a beautiful little smile, but all of this from the comfort of my arms or lap.

Don't get me wrong. She is not rude. This is not a little kid who is refusing to interact because she is simply ignoring you. She is very clearly just shy and takes an hour (or three) to warm up to people sufficiently to interact with them. However, through all of her warm-up time she is incredibly sweet and endearing and flirtatious. This is why when she refused to respond to the hostess of the house that we visited yesterday, I knew that something was up!

When we arrived at the house she was reluctant to respond to the charming lady in any way. She then proceeded to walk laps around the pool and in the garden (she LOVES gardens)... with me in tow. She would not venture out on her own to complete her laps and would not respond to the advances of the adults or the two children there who were trying to engage her in play. She was tempted by the blocks and the funky Pooh train that played unique tunes for each character but she was not interested in anything for longer than two seconds. Eventually she simply refused to move away from me at all. I started to realize that this little being was starting to heat up. I had no thermometer - no scientific way in which to rpove that my child was not well but there was one simple measure - she was adamant that she wanted my love and attention, lots of it, with no concern for where we were and who was watching. She would do nothng else but sit on my lap and cuddle. She tried to sleep but that wasn't really the purpose of the situation. She felt bad and didn't care who knew it. There was no forcing herself to play because there were social obligations to be met. There was no forcing herself to be friendly just because we were visiting people that she had only ever met once before and wanted to make an impression. She only knew how to be herself - a sick self that wanted to feel better - a self who knew that to be cuddled and kissed by mommy was going to go a long way to make herself feel better.

Even after we got home, all that little girl did was lie in my arms. She insisted on 'miminhos' (a Portuguese word that has no perfect translation but is probably equivalent to TLC) and would not move off the couch. There was no need to be anything but who she is and to request all that she required from the people who could provide it. Such wisdom!!! Where does it come from and when do we lost it?

You're never too old to jump on a bed

I had a bit of a late start in getting married and becoming a parent. I had in fact always sworn to never get married and to absolutely never have children. As a result I had my fair share of conversations with people who were parents claiming to have learnt a lot from their children. Their greatest life lessons in fact were learned from their toddlers or babies or other appropriate form of offspring. Much like most life-sworn single, childless adults, I would roll my eyes and pretend to believe them. To me it came to sound cliched, annoying and something that was said specifically to irritate me (:-) because when you are single and childless, you really do believe that the world revolves around you).

And then I got married and had a beautiful daughter. I am far from being a 'natural' mother (how I envied those that are) and had to learn how to look after this little being. While dealing with postnatal depression and the need to be back at work to keep my mind occupied, the last thing that I was willing to notice was how much I was learning from this little being. There was too much of my old, single, childless self still in place to notice the power of what I was experiencing. Too much of the old me to allow the changes to happen that would make me into the changed person that I have come to be.

My daughter is now 26 months old and so much has changed that it is hard for me to keep up with all that is going on. The depression is gone, as well as the denial about who I was becoming. I am back at work and every morning I battle with the very real draw to be a stay-at-home mom whose sole focus is her children, her husband and her home. And then reality kicks in...usually in the form of my loving husband who just laughs at me and reminds me that I will go off my bracket at home. I need the intellectual stimulation that my career provides me, the fulfillment of helping others learn (I am a remedial teacher in a high school). I am currently  trying to work out what my next degree should be - or if I should try to earn more than one degree at the same time while pondering the perfect moment at which to get pregnant with our second child.

So what does this all have to do with my child? Well I have now started to become very conscious of the lessons that my daughter has started to teach me. Consider the lesson for today - you really are never too old to jump on a bed. Can you remember the last time that you jumped on a bed? I certainly can't. Actually, it is entirely possible that up until this evening I had never jumped on a bed. See, I was quite a boring child who wouldn't enjoy anything physical. Some of this had to do with the combination of my overprotective mom and my chronic asthma, but I do think that there was just the innate bookworm in me that preferred the stillness of the escape into the world of the written word. This made me into a tentative child who worried about getting hurt and thus resulted in the very distinct possiblity that I never did something as simply as jumping on a bed.

Anyway, back to the present. After a full day of teaching, a meeting that lasted 75 minutes and a drive home behind the world's slowest truck on a one-lane road, ever, I got home to my child. My commitment to her has always been that my first hour home after work is given solely to her. She chooses the activities that we participate in and she guides the hour. Today our hour was composed of 'having tea' with her plastic, brightly coloured tea set, colouring in the Pooh colouring book, drawing rocket shops on the cover of said book and then jumping on our bed. But it was not enough for her to be jumping on her own with me watching. I had to join in. With a ceiling fan dangerously close to my rather long hair (and I am not even a tall woman), I gave myself over to the child in me and jumped with my child. We jumped and collapsed and jumped and collapsed until the collapse was complete. I could move no more but I also had a huge smile on my face. The rather long day was a thing of the past, the painful colleagues were forgotten and my admin duties for tomorrow are a vague notion in the back of my mind.

Here is what I am hoping my daughter learns from our hours together - that her needs and wants matter, that I will listen to her and follow her lead in the pursuit of fun, that spending quality time together where she is my sole focus is vital to me. What did I learn from her today? That even when you are pretending to drink tea and eat cake with it, it is essential to take a moment after each 'bite' to savour the food. That when you are drawing, a curvy line can become whatever you name it to be, even a rocket ship. That even when you are in your mid-thirties, there is a way to safely jump on a bed so that you are not decapitated by the ceiling fan. It is all about the willingness to let go!!!