26 Months

Oops--forgot to give a monthly update!

There's been a lot of changes in all of our lives this past month. We traveled to IL to see Justin's family and then when we came back I started my new job. I have not worked in 2 years so I felt some anxiety about returning, but luckily Henry is already used to going to school during those hours so he really won't notice much of a change. He's getting dropped off about a half hour later and picked up a half hour later, so still only there 6 hours, at the most, 3 days a week. The change for him however is he is in a different room with 2 different teachers. He really panicked when I tried to leave yesterday. It was all of his same friends so that helped, and the new room he's in is so much better with more age appropriate toys (the other room was more for the 18mo-2yr old set). Now there's a Leggo table, a train table, etc. His teachers are just temporary until he get's his permanent teacher in the Fall. I don't like that but this place fancies themselves as a real school and not a daycare so they have assigned school-year teachers they will be getting at the end of Aug.

My job is really exciting. I have a beautiful, large office with an enormous window facing a field of trees and the Triangle off in the distance. I have a very nice boss who has a supervisory license in Marriage and Family Therapy, so I do not have to pay an outside source $300 a month to supervise me! This is a rare perk amongst LPC's/LMFT's. You can throw a rock and hit 5 social workers in this town so they typically get their supervision in-house, but MFT's/LPC's are few and far between--so we have to pay. I can basically make my hours, somewhere between 11-5 or 12-6, MWF, it will just depend on my caseload. I will probably have 10-12 clients. I started seeing clients my second day of work. That's the great thing about my field. I was trained in graduate school how to do the job and so all I need to know when I go to an agency is how to fill out their time sheets and where to turn in case-notes, etc. It's a little more than that but basically you're trained by the second week on the job. I had to pull out my trusty DSM-IV to look up diagnostic codes, but other then that, it's still fairly fresh in my mind. I have to say, I've really cherished being home these two years, but it's not awful to work again and be thinking about other people's problems:-)

Henry goes to bed at 7:00 and wakes between 6:30 and 7:15. He has not been hungry for the last week so pickier than usual about food. This is a pattern we've seen since he's been eating solids. He'll have a week of constant eating and then a week where he barely eats. I think we're pretty good about not pushing him to eat. I've read from multiple sources that if you "make" them eat when they are not hungry, they lose their ability to know when they're full and we are supposed to follow his lead how much/how little he wants to eat. I have to admit, it's tempting to want to prepare something different for him if he won't eat much of what we're eating. But I try to remember he's not eating b/c he's not that hungry and if I hand him something less nutritious but I know he will devour, that really is sending the wrong message. I'd say this is my most challenging parent-issue right now, b/c the thought of him being hungry is obviously upsetting. But I just tell myself that he will let me know, he always does, if he is hungry.

The temperature is so hot in Austin this summer, the swimming pools bring little relief. The water is warm! It feels disgusting to dip into a warm pool when it's 105 degrees outside. The solution is going to Deep Eddy, which is a natural spring fed pool, or Barton Springs (a natural spring) but the water is FREEZING. Henry really doesn't like it. Now he thinks all swimming pools are going to be freezing. We went swimming last week at Mosey's house with all of Henry's friends (Mae, Leo, Lowell, HW, Noah) and he FREAKED out about going into the pool. I have never seen him so upset about something. I was already in the water and reaching my hands out to him, and he was standing barefoot on the hot deck. His little feat were probably on fire and yet that was better than coming in the water with me. He started screaming and taking swings at me and pinching me when I tried to pick him up. It was like I was a monster trying to eat him--that's how scared he was. I suspect the problem was beyond his fear of the water being cold and perhaps something to do with Collete and Noah almost drowning next to us. The pool is 6 feet deep in the center and Collete didn't know that and so she walked off the ledge with Noah in her arms and sunk to the bottom while trying to keep Noah above the water. I felt a commotion behind me and saw Noah's head peeking out of the water and I grabbed him and then Colette swam to the top, coughing and gagging. It was AWFUL. And all this time, Henry was screaming his head off on the boiling hot deck.

In other news, Henry is now so into cars and monster trucks, he really doesn't want to play with much else. Justin even built him a ramp to drive his cars and trucks up and down.

Henry seems to also become more and more affectionate with each passing month. Several times a day he looks up at me and says, "Cuddle, mama?" and that means he wants me to lie down with him and snuggle up or sit in my lap and wedge his way into my neck/arms. He has been doing this with stuffed animals and certain toys too. He will even pick up a cherished car and try to hold it "like a baby" (his words). He will pat it and ask it if it "feels better?". If I am angry at him for some transgression he immediately apologizes and wants everything to okay. He can not handle any anger from me or his dad. He starts to cry and will beg to be picked up. It means we can handle being angry with his behavior for all of 3 seconds. Sometimes he confuses my hysterical laughing with crying (b/c I get teary when I laugh) and he will want to immediately snuggle and caress my face and he will pat my cheeks and say, "Feel better mama?"

He's still a silly dancer and we have a daily dance party. He's still very "easy", follows directions on first prompting (that's so his dad and not me and I have no idea how much longer he'll do this before figuring things out)tantrums last seconds, and I am doomed to have a devil second child.