My goal is to blog 2-3 times a week, but clearly that has not been happening lately. Our weekly schedule has gotten a whole lot busier. We’re really trying to amp up our time we spend with Connor working on his physical therapy. He’s finally sitting independently! He even retired his bathtub lounge chair and sits up like a big boy for bath time. He also had a checkup at the pediatrician and she recommended giving him solids three times a day. I may have let her assume I had stuck with her previous recommendation to go up to twice a day…

Look, it’s not that I don’t want to feed my child, but for the love of God, when she said three times a day, I almost asked her if I could just take a bullet to the head instead. When Connor started solids he was pretty cooperative, but as time went on, he decided it was fun to swing his head around vigorously while we desperately try to catch his mouth. Sometimes he seemed to think this was funny. The thing is, he doesn’t complain when the food is in his mouth, he just wants to make a game out of letting us put it in. Meal time stretched into oblivion. But I’m happy to say that while getting three solids in EVERY day has proved to be elusive, we are consistently getting him two, and once he realized we weren’t giving up, he started to become more cooperative. Sometimes, he chows down in a matter of minutes. Especially prunes. Hmmm.

We’ve added a few other things to our weekly schedule as well.

Monday-private music therapy

Tuesday-physical therapy (most weeks, not every)

Wed-group music class

Thurs-swimming

Fri-Mommy lies on the floor exhausted letting baby beat her about the head and rip her hair out just so she won’t have to get up.

And it won’t end there….we are looking at adding occupational therapy (more as a precaution as his fine motor skills appear much more on target than gross motor),  and speech therapy (you’re probably wondering what this looks like with a baby that doesn’t even talk yet. Me too. I’ll let you know.)

Lest you think I’m going to be one of those overscheduling moms that ends up on Dr. Phil, this is all intended to be therapeutic and catch up on his delays. My dream is for him to catch up to his peers so I can be a normal mommy, dump him in front of questionable television programming, and spend all my time in the Macy’s shoe department.

We had a highly amusing moment in swim class the other week. One of the baby skills is blowing bubbles in the water. I kid you not, right as the instructor has us put our mouths under to do so, Connor makes the most incredible bubbles you’ve ever seen. Just not with his mouth.

I’m hoping he will learn to give me a kiss soon. I have no idea at what age kids learn that, but the other day, I thought we were there. I leaned down to give him a kiss, and he immediately reached up, grasped my hair on both sides of my head, yanked my face down to his, and….bit my nose. Soooo, yeah. No more Walking Dead for him.

Which leads me into some thoughts I’ve been having about some of the items that dropped his scores in Boston during the cognitive testing. Apparently, he should know the word “no” by now. But I realized  he really hasn’t had the opportunity to learn it. Not to sound like one of those permissive moms where anything goes, but the reality is we don’t have a lot of stuff to say no to. He’s not as mobile as the average 10 month old, so he doesn’t get into stuff he shouldn’t. And I seem to want to teach him bad habits by snorting with laughter when he’s tearing my hair out of my head or pffting food at me. I’m going to rectify this by placing the following items around him on his playmat: a rat trap, household cleaner, a stick of dynamite, matches, and a machete. Every time he goes for one of those items I will scream NO! And that will be that. I should write a parenting book. There’s more gold where that came from.

I’ve also been busy preparing for the March on Washington coming up at the end of February. I’m working on updating the Faces of TSC booklet which features Georgia families affected by TSC that we share with our representatives and senators when we meet with them. I also started contacting some of the representatives to set up our meetings. This proves to be more challenging than expected as some don’t confirm a meeting until the last minute. There goes our brilliant plan to organize meetings in advance by building. But I’m excited about it. I think this will be a really interesting experience.

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