On Wednesday, Jonah and I had a playdate with another mom-baby duo. We went to a lovely public pool, surrounded by redwoods. Really two pools, a big lap pool only a few feet deep, and a smaller, round pool only about six inches deep. Perfect for sitting and splashing.
Today, said mom-friend called to let me know that she has come down with the chicken pox. Turns out she’d never had them, and her husband recently had shingles, which can give chicken pox to anyone who contacts the lesions — provided that person hasn’t had the pox before. Not that many people know this, so I thought I’d give the deets.
It’s all a matter of hours. Apparently, she was contagious 24 hours before the blisters appeared. As far as she knows, she had a fever on Thursday, blisters today, so Wednesday could have been early enough that she wasn’t blowing viruses (viri?).
Now, we wait. 10-21 days incubation period. On the upside, supposedly the infection isn’t as bad when babies get it, and conversely much worse to get it in adulthood. My friend will certainly be suffering.
In other life-is-unmanageable news: The housecleaner we used to have, who used all organic green super-eco cleaning products, was diagnosed with cancer, which sucks.
But we still need a clean house, so I tried a new, supposedly green, service. They did their uber-dooper deep clean today. I left the boy home with the babysitter in the afternoon, went to S.F. for a work meeting. Came home to a boy covered in rash. Contact dermatitis from crawling shirtless (in this heat wave we’re having) on the freshly-cleaned hardwood floor. Yeah. Fun times.
In sleep news, the wheels are sort of coming off the bus. We’ve had two nights this week where he cried repeatedly — each time we’d rock him to sleep or almost sleep and as soon as he hit the mattress… A process that takes anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. And we’ve had nights where he wakes up 1-2 hours after falling asleep and has to be held and rocked back down again. We are not doing CIO for the time being. We figure he already knows how to sleep through the night, which was the key skill we wanted him to have, and even with all this cry-protesting, he’s still also having 10 hour nights (amen), so we’re muddling along, and trying to believe that we aren’t encouraging new bad sleep habits to form in the process.
Tonight I went out for dinner/drinks with a subset of the moms group moms. Was pretty fun, and funny how we had to keep challenging ourselves NOT to talk about our babies — but of course we did and it wasn’t so fun when everyone was talking about all the milestones their babies are hitting, that Jonah hasn’t (communication and walking/standing stuff). There is one thing he has over the rest of them, though: The boy can hold and eat stone fruit all by himself. I’m sure there’s a Nobel category for this?
It’s possible the others can’t match his love of books. Oh, they may turn pages, sure. But do they demand to be read to? Not that it does anyone any good to compare.
Today I held him in my lap and held Freight Train in front of him, and he turned the pages and made little sounds. I’m sure he was mimicking the noises our reading to him makes.
The nanny played a game with him where she tented several of his board books around the edges of the rug in his room. She reports that he belly-scooched from book to book, flipping through each one for a period of time before seeking out the next.
This is good, she said, since he’s probably not going to be a track star.
Yeah, well. I do worry a little. We’ll just wait and see on that, too.
In other milestones news, I maintain that he has said his first word this week. Appropriately, in context, several times.
The word is: “Whoa.”
Said to the things that impress him. He’s mellow that way.
11 comments for “a pox on all our houses”