Great Un-noted Milestones

I was just sweeping through the house, picking stuff up, collecting laundry, and righting it after a day of being subjected to our use when I noticed something. Something important. Something momentous. And something so utterly uncelebrated by me as to potentially serve as the focus of therapy sessions years hence: Hallie peed on her potty tonight. For the very first time. And received no fanfare, no ballyhoo, and most importantly no Mo Willems Time to Pee stickers for doing so.

Quel hureur and shame on unmindful mamas!

The scenario went down like this: around the witching hour of 9:00pm, Hallie began to lose it and needed to go up to bed. Sharon got the bedtime meds and bottle ready and took her own prenatal vitamins. I headed up the stairs--with Hallie walking, and not crawling, up them, and holding onto the bannister like a big girl. This is no mean feat in our home, which features boxed in winding stairs worthy of the hardy early 19th-century Swedish workers who built our home (and violated, a priori, all building codes in force not much less than two centuries later). I celebrated this, of course, because I noticed it.

What I did not notice was that, after stripping Hallie of her pants and diaper (Hallie had previously removed her own shirt and socks), I asked our girl to sit on her potty to brush her teeth and pee. Brush she did, but I didn't think she did number 1. This is none too surprising because we've been putting her on the potty for more than a week now, morning and night, sans diaper, and asking her to pee. So I didn't make much of it, and when she got off, raced around the bathroom a bit, and then headed, naked tushie and all, down the hall to her room and flopped onto the bed, I took it in stride. I got out her diaper, her jammies, and we began the typical night time ritual.

But, just now, I noticed what before went unacknowledged by me (in yet another demonstration of inept mama-hood): a teeny, tiny, trickle of pee. Her very first use of the potty (unless one counts drumming...she does quite a nice solo on the lid).

I wonder if it's possible to give her a sticker tomorrow in reward for what she did today? I also wonder if she'll repeat her act. I certainly hope so, and this time I'll be armed with the marching band and all.

In other milestone notes: on Sunday morning, Hallie strung together her first spontaneous three-word sentence: "One red ball." She has uttered three-word combos before ("How are you?" "I am fine" and any imaginable combination of words from Mo Willem's Pigeon series). But never before has she spontaneously said anything that consisted of three distinct and completely articulate words. One red ball, indeed.

Finally, in other milestones: we have officially been put up against a wall by the ped and are stripped of our maternal control over Hallie's feeding regimen. Our ped, who, as it turns out, does not live with Hallie and has not witnessed the extent to which her eating issues are not mostly behavioral, is convinced that he has no proof that her responses are allergic. (This is the same ped who refused to refer us to an allergist to begin with and for whom her neither her phenomenal growth only after being taken off of cow milk, nor the famous fourteen week cold that never went away while Hallie was on pediasure and nutren jr., apparently is not nearly empirical evidence enough to convince him that Hallie was responding negatively to dairly). He thinks that we're the problem, not the solution and will hear none of our side of things. So, against our better judgement, we've decided to let Ami, our nanny, whom he has charged with allowing Hallie to 'graze' (how one grazes on Stage 2 purees is not only beyond our grasp but also beyond Ami's) on a variety of foods. Why have we gone along with this? After answering, curtly, 'I'm simply not sure', I will elaborate: both Sharon and I are convinced that a component of Hallie's issues is not allergic, per se, but related to her delayed gastric emptying. We both think that she probably can tolerate small amounts of some foods--fruits and veggies in particular--but we're not sure which foods or how much. So what we have Ami doing is feeding Hallie more liberally from a diet of available (and lord knows we have more than enough rejected jars of various baby foods to do this without going out and purchasing a thing) fruits and veggies on a rotation. We'll see how this goes, but it kind of kills me to take a kid who seems to be doing better than ever before and muck things up. That said, it would be nice to choose from a broader diet of foods and there is a strong chance that her system has matured some and might be able to tolerate a wider variety of things.

So far...hard to tell. She ate a jar of sweet potatoes with gusto at brunch (since we were at the ped's through the late morning and she never did get breakfast) and seemed okay. She had some apple/blueberry later on in the day, and did urp a few hours later---ruining the potential for adding another notch for a vomit free day to our belt--up a few mouthfuls when I returned home at 6pm. But she went down okay (meaning that she thumped on the wall of her bedroom with her feet for a while but did not vomit) tonight. So the jury is still out on this. We'll see.

Otherwise, like I said, Hallie is doing great. She is pooping well (which is critical), is quite happy and giggly and talking up a comparative storm for a really quiet kid. And she's gained more weight. At the official weigh in this morning she was 29 lbs. 12plus ounces, and this is great. I suppose we need to experiment in the way that we are when Hallie is doing well, and doing well she is. Yet the empathetic, paper-towel- and vomit-averse part of me hates to muck things up. Like I said, we'll see.

And speaking of seeing, I do promise to get some pics up soon!