12
cutting those nails
Filed under: baby, I'm happy because... | Tags: | January 12th, 2009
We have always had problems cutting Evelyn’s nails. From the time she was about 6 months old she would get very annoyed and upset if we tried to cut her nails when she was awake, and by the time she was 16 months old, she would wake up of pull her hand away if we tried to cut them while she was sleeping. From this time on, nail cutting night involved lots of attempted distraction (a favourite DVD, for example), two adults (one holding her down) and a very upset little girl. Today at the pharmacy I happened to see a musical nail clipper and thought it would be worth trying. When I got home I showed it to Evelyn and she was immediately curious. She let me take her finger and when I cut her nail and she heard the music, she was very happy. When the music stopped she said “Oh-oh” and I was able to convince her to give me her fingers again. We developed a routine where I would cut one part of a nail, she would dance around me while the song played and then I would cut her nails again. Slow, but it worked – and it only took one adult instead of two! As a bonus, the nails fall inside the bottom of the nail clipper so it’s much easier to control the mess.
5
Life as of January 2009 – part 1
Filed under: baby, I'm happy because... | Tags: | January 5th, 2009
So here we are. It has been approximately 6 months since I last did a blog post! This Christmas we were very fortunate to have a break between Dec 24 and Jan 5th so I was able to catch up on a lot of things I needed to take care of. Finally, I feel like my life is more under control. For over 2 years, it has been one thing after another. As you know, in October 2006 my mother passed away suddenly. After I returned from Alberta I had a lot of things to take care of for her estate, including the sale of her condo. By the time that got sorted out, I was on maternity leave waiting for Evelyn to be born. Once Evelyn was born our lives were totally turned upside down. There were problems breastfeeding, getting her to take a bottle, and convincing her to eat solid food, which carried into the fall of 2008. We visited Alberta twice in 2007, once in August to bury my mother’s ashes and again in December to visit for Christmas. After we returned from Christmas, we started apartment hunting and found a place right away. We moved in January in total chaos, not having enough time to even pack boxes. We had to buy the refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer for the new apartment, and as if that wasn’t enough, we also bought our car in the first half of January. I had also sprained my ankle and had recently returned to work so we were pretty worn out. I also had a root canal in January and we had the 2nd worst winter in recorded Montreal history, which meant digging the car out of 1 foot + snowbanks twice a week. By the time spring came, I discovered by taxes became particularly complicated and I had to scramble to get things sorted out at the last minute. During the summer of 2008, we did quite a bit of travelling, including visiting Quebec city with Dan’s parents, a road trip to Ontario, and few day trips with my Dad when he visited. In September I went to a conference in The Netherlands (for a week – the longest I have left Evelyn!) and then in October Dan and I went on a trip to Paris. So here we are – January 2009 already.
I think all of you who read by blog know that I am pregnant again. We are expecting a boy, due May 5th! We are very happy about this. On top of everything else in 2008, I also had two miscarriages, which was particularly difficult for us. We had actually decided to wait and try again (in a few years) the week before we found out I was pregnant this time. So far everything has been fine and we are in the middle of making plans for his arrival. In November we moved Evelyn to a toddler bed. The transition took a bit of work because toddler beds are not particularly common in Canada and we ended up purchasing it on-line. For the first few weeks Evelyn wasn’t too sure about it and she fell out twice, but now she is used to it and likes the freedom of being able to get out of bed when she wants. It’s just as well, since she jumps so hard on her crib mattress I am worried she will break it! We have also moved her to a booster seat so that the other car seat it available for the new arrival. Finally, we think we might work on weaning her. Right now she has 1 bottle of milk just before bed. She hasn’t been too interested in drinking milk from a cup and doensn’t drink from sippy cups (she just wants to play with them and take off the lids) so we will see about that. It has to be something she will be ready for, and we are willing to wait as long as it takes.
Dan has helped me update WordPress and we have been fighting some major comment problems (I would receive up to 300 unwanted attempted comments on by blog each day). As you can see, I am trying a new theme. Not sure about it yet, maybe some tweaking is still needed.
6
So Evelyn has learned a new word in the past few weeks. Whenever I sweep the floor at home I end up collecting lots of bits of dust, bread crumbs, food etc. Evelyn is very interested in them but I stop her from playing with them and say “yuck” to her in an attempt to teach her that some things are not good to touch. Today we met with our new friends Donald and Amy at their garden plot. We’re going to garden-sit for them while they are away for a summer job and we have been taking Evelyn to the garden over the past week. Today when she saw them breaking up some soil to plant a zucchini she pointed at the dirt and said “yuck!” She was very authoritative!
2
the grand tour
Filed under: baby, voayges and vacations | Tags: | July 2nd, 2008
Ok I know. Really too long between blog posts. It’s kind of hard with a 14 month old toddler in the house!
Well the first new development in our lives is that Evelyn has learned how to throw a tantrum. Every time she doesn’t get her way she has a meltdown, throws herself on the ground and cries angrily. Like just now when Dan wouldn’t let Evelyn hold the camera. It’s hard not to laugh, actually, because she’s so dramatic.
We have also started Evelyn on pacifier detox. Evelyn has already shown signs that she is outgrowing the pacifier and was able to go the whole day without using it. She needs the pacifier to sleep at night so we are trying to get her to sleep without it. I have to say it was my fault … I started her using it to go to sleep when I was terribly sleep deprived (Evelyn was 4 months old and still not sleeping through the night) and Evelyn had Jet Lag. Three nights ago I tried to put her to bed without it and she cried for about an hour. I finally gave in and gave it to her. Last night I tried again and she eventually did sleep without it, although she cried for about 45 minutes. When she get really angry and threw her carrot on the ground I came and read her 4 stories and then left her with one of the books and that seemed to have helped. Tonight she went to bed with only a short-lived whimper. I think it helped that she didn’t nap much during the day (only half an hour in the sling). It’s true what I read on web forums … the first night of pacifier detox is the hardest, then they pretty much forget about it.
We have also started very gradually the potty training process. So far we have started doing two things: 1) when Evelyn looks like she wants to poo we take her to the potty so she associates the two. 2) We encourage her to sit on the potty and give her a special toy that’s only for the potty to play with. So far it’s working well except for the fact that when she’s in the process of doing the deed she doesn’t want to sit down. I think it will come with time.
We have been very busy lately. Dan’s parents came to visit in early May and we visited Quebec city with them. Then my Dad came for a visit and we went Vermont with him and right after he left we went to Ontario for the long weekend. We visited Waterloo, Toronto and Ottawa. It was a lot of driving for Evelyn but we managed it. In the hotel in Ottawa we had a beautiful crib for Evelyn (not a playpen, a real, miniature crib) but Evelyn didn’t sleep in it because she was too scared. We turned on the GPS to get directions to the Parliament building and the voice said “Turn around when possible” quite loudly and scared the daylights out of her. So she spent the night with hear head near our knees jammed against our legs and preventing us from pulling up the sheets.
Feeding Evelyn on the trip was tricky, of course, but we made an interesting discovery. Evelyn likes hummus! More surprising still: the hummus we gave her was Jalapeno flavoured! Probably the highlight of the trip was visiting the Farmer’s market in St Jacob’s although it was far, far too busy! Anyway, I think we’re done with road trips for a while.
Also when Dan’s parents were here Dan had an intensive training course in handymanning. Dan unclogged the bathroom sink and installed the gate in front of our exterior stairs.
Evelyn is talking quite well now and says “story” very nicely as well as “up”. She says “doggie” every time she sees a dog (or a picture of a dog), which is about 30 times a day given how many people in NDG have dogs.
We decided to use part of our tax refund to buy a bike trailer for Evelyn. We have gone on several short excursions nearby and then used the newly completed downtown bike path to Park Lafontaine a few weeks ago.
Dan got food poisoning yesterday (from something he ate at a pub) so I came home early yesterday and stayed home today. Fortunately he’s over it how and based on the time it took him to get sick I think it must have been Staph. And this only 6 months after getting Norwalk at Christmas!
27
blue eyed girl
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | May 27th, 2008
Having a 1 year old baby is so much better than having a 1 month old baby. I think I’m finally enjoying the time I spend with Evelyn and not having so much stress. As Evelyn is getting older she is starting to understand that we are doing what we can to meet her needs and is now trying to communicate them with us rather than just crying angrily all the time. Evelyn understands cause and effect very well – for example if I open the cupboard door and she sees the Cheerois box, she recognises it and wants to have some. If I close the door and don’t give her any, she is annoyed and if I do give her some she is ecstatic. And if we accidentally leave the door open … well, she’s tall enough to reach the box. Dan was home with her on day and left the door open. He found her taking Cheerios out of the box and putting them on her high chair to eat later!
She’s really getting into eating food and I would say that she even enjoys it now! It’s great. She really likes it when I add pureed cauliflower into the vegetable mix with yogurt and she has developed a taste for pureed carrots. Still working on peas, though.
I have found the best way to keep her stationary during a diaper change is to sing “Old McDonald had a farm” to her because she’s always waiting for the next “animal”. Although if I stick to farm animals it gets pretty boring after a while so we have some exotic additions such as robots, monkeys, penguins, aliens and the like.
Dan’s parents came for a visit and while they were here Evelyn learned to walk on her own! This weekend Evelyn also (finally) started showing some interest in imitating what we say. I said “zoom” when cars went by and she tried to copy that. Tonight she tried to say “pears” and “wow” after I said them, which is really cool.
Despite the non-stop teething, Evelyn is developing a wonderful personality and I am finally enjoying being a mother to it’s fullest. It was a really difficult year but it’s so gratifying to see some positive changes.
1
Evelyn is one year old!
Filed under: baby | Tags: | May 1st, 2008
Last week Evelyn turned one year old. Already!
We had a small party at our place and some friends of ours (and Evelyn’s) came over. We made a sugar-free carrot cake, which unfortunately, Evelyn didn’t eat a bite of. She did enjoy the party once she got over the fact that people were coming to her (our) house. We gave her a rocking giraffe for her birthday present. She is likes it but hasn’t quite figured out how to use it (yet).
Evelyn has been working on walking. If we hold her hands she takes off with one of us in tow and she has taken a few steps on her own but is still working on perfecting her balance. In the meantime, she crawls most places and can reach far too many things already.
We are working on communication but unfortunately Evelyn hasn’t quite figured out the use of language yet. She can make a lot of interesting sounds and babbles to us in her own language, but doesn’t seem interested in copying us or trying to tell us what she wants or thinks. It’s almost like she wants to master each sound first, then will start talking when she decides she’s ready … in typical Evelyn fashion.
The big news is Evelyn’s new tooth. She as two on top and two on the bottom … and two molars! Somehow her mouth has decided to skip ahead about 2 teeth and put out the first molar on the right side, both top and bottom. They are huge and it looks so painful coming through her gums. Now I understand why babies get grouchy when they get their teeth. The ones on the left side are coming out as well.
Evelyn has started to enjoy “tooth time”, i.e. when I brush her teeth, which is a nice change. Eating, however, continues to be both time-consuming and difficult. She really, really likes fresh grapes or fresh pears and will now eat an entire pear on her own!
One of Evelyn’s favourite passtimes is to take all the bowls out of the cupboard and try stacking them in different ways. She has even started to put them away afterward!
29
feeding a picky eater
Filed under: baby | Tags: | April 29th, 2008
So here’s one of my summary things we have learned so far about feeding Evelyn solid food.
Evelyn is picky. I think her middle name should have been “fickle” instead of “Ada”. Her eating preferences change about as often as the surface of Io. Nonetheless she does get a balanced diet as long as we meet a few key criteria.
The main breakthrough to get her started involved feeding her something she was likely to enjoy to start each food group. We initially tried the recommended “cereal first” approach and it backfired … big time. We tried a number of vegetables without any success and finally resorted to fruit as a final option despite the dire warnings of baby feeding “experts”. The key fruit for Evelyn was apple and once she got hooked on very smoothly pureed apple (not too tart, please) we were able to introduce other fruit by first mixing them with apple. The big exception is raspberries and blueberries because she found them too tart unless mixed with an equal portion of something else and it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Once she decided apples and other fruit were ok I chose to go right to yogurt (the cereal was still a failure at that point) because I reasoned it would taste like milk and might be a good base for introducing vegetables and meat.
This assumption turned out to be right but it took a lot of patience to get there. We mixed apples with yogurt at first to get her used to it and soon she would eat plain yogurt. Around the same time we tried sweet potato as her first vegetable and she started to like it very quickly. So now we had fruit, yogurt and sweet potato as “safe” foods in which to mix others. So we started adding all kinds of things to these three bases and it worked most of the time. We tried a lot of tricks to get her used to the taste of other foods, for example we would start with mostly fruit and add a bit of egg yolk. Once she got used to the taste of the mix we would add more egg yolk and keep increasing it until she started to get annoyed, then back off a bit. Or we would do the “double dip” approach where we would take a spoon of meat/veggie mix and dip the end in fruit.
With respect to grains, she already had preferences for the kind of cereal we gave her so it took a lot of testing to get the right one. She wouldn’t eat cereal flakes mixed with water at first so we would just add 1 teaspoon of dry cereal to a tablespoon of fruit or sweet potato and she started to get used to it. We can now give her cereal mixed with fruit and half an egg yolk in the morning and she seems to enjoy it. Also because she wanted to have control by feeding herself Cheerios were a good choice since and she usually has some twice a day.
For lunch and supper she usually as a mix of vegetables and meat (with yogurt or fruit added as required) followed by fruit puree with or without the rest of her egg yolk. Today she ate puree zucchini, potato and sweet potato mixed with cooked whole green lentils and small pieces of beef. Yes I know that sounds revolting… but she happily ate it as long as there was enough yogurt mixed in! This was followed by pureed peaches mixed with half an egg yolk and then some cheerios and slices of grape. Ending the meal with finger foods is nice because I can relax and let her do the work and if she doesn’t finish them they can be saved for later.
At first I felt really guilty giving her these mixes since I felt like I was giving in to her demands and that she was eating too many sweet things. However after a few weeks of self induced purgatory of trying to give her vegetables and meat without either yogurt or fruit, I have decided that it’s ok to respect her preferences (to some extent) and that I also need to preserve my sanity. So maybe by giving her apples first in the beginning we have developed her sweet tooth but I think it’s more likely she already had that preference and wasn’t willing to budge. Evelyn’s doctor is very impressed that we have managed to get her eating the foods and portions she is supposed to have for her age in only 2 months so I would say it has been a big success.
8
stop the snow, please!
Filed under: that sucks | Tags: | March 8th, 2008
I am officially sick of winter. Today they are expecting 30 cm of snow with 80 km/hour winds and there’s another storm coming on Wednesday next week. It’s 6:15 AM on Saturday and Dan is moving the car again! Please make it stop!
7
I think I might have accidentally deleted some comments recently. The problem is that my comment system is being totally spammed these days and I get 100 comments each day. Sometimes when I clean them out I actually delete something I want to keep. So if you made a comment recently and it disappeared, I apologise!
Evelyn has been pretty good lately I am happy to say. She has been much less difficult at mealtimes. I have found that if I mix yogurt into vegetables and / or meat she is quite willing to eat it. And I also found out she just doesn’t like the barley cereal I was giving her and is quite a fan of oatmeal. Also after a month of working on it she will now let me brush her teeth! She has also stopped rolling over during diaper changes (for the most part) which is a relief. She still really likes to eat crunchy things and isn’t interested at all in trying to eat pieces of food that are soft (e.g. strawberries, steamed carrots, rice, pasta) so most of her food is still puree but she will eat pieces of grapes, cheerios and sometimes toast. And she’s totally hooked on Mummums so I have to ration her to only a few a week. She screams when she sees them.
We switched to flat diapers a month ago and now that they have been washed about 6 times they are working very well. The fitted Kissaluvs were indespensable before she was eating solid food but now the flats work quite well for the job, which is great since they are 1/3 of the price! Evelyn is getting some bad diaper rash though and it’s been hard to clear it up. Attempts at giving her “diaper free” time have generally ended in disaster!
We have finally got most of our place sorted out after the move and it’s quite well babyproofed so we can relax a bit (just a little bit) with Evelyn tearing around. Evelyn is still crawling at the speed of light and pulling up on everything. We have practiced walking holding her hands and she is getting better at standing up on her own for a bit but she isn’t ready to walk just yet without us. That’s ok by me, there’s no rush! Her cousin Zoe just started walking from what I heard which is great!
This winter has been horrible, just horrible. We are close to breaking the record for snowfall and it seems like it snows twice a week now. Unfortunately this is the time we decided to finally get a car and it has been a lot of trouble to move it when they are plowing the street, which is … at least once a week. So we are constantly digging out the car, moving it and moving it back again. Plus there are not enough parking spots on the street. It’s a real pain in the ass. And we have had two parking tickets already although I am going to contest one (long story). BUT – having it to get places with Evelyn has been really good. We just can’t wait for summer!
We went to the Old Port for the “Montreal En Lumière” festival last weekend and took Evelyn on the ice slide! She enjoyed it. It has been a Montreal tradition to have the ice slide since 1885!
24
#27
Filed under: that sucks | Tags: | February 24th, 2008
So yes, I had my first (and hopefully last) root canal. When I was 10 weeks pregnant I went for a dental check up and the dentist I was seeing at the time made a comment about one of the fillings he had done for me 2 years ago. He couldn’t take any X-rays of course but he said something like I would have to come back and have it looked at again. I remember when he did the filling that he had a LOT of trouble seeing it since it is the last upper molar. Anyway I had somewhat forgotten about it given what happened within the following weeks and it wasn’t until our trip to Alberta last August that it really started to hurt. In June I saw another dentist (a much better dentist, actually) and she knew something had to be done about the tooth. So I went to get the filling replaced in September and the new dentist warned me that it wasn’t looking good. In November she replaced the temp filling with a permanent filling and tried to use a pin to hold it in place but the problem was that so much of my tooth was gone at that point that the pin didn’t do it. The filling came out that week. I went back and they put another temp in and told me to get a root canal on tooth #27 (either that or take out the tooth).
So I made the appointment in January for insurance reasons and had two appointments. First I think they examined the tooth and killed the nerve and the second appointment they put supports in the canals of the tooth. The first appointment was very stressful because the endodontist had to clamp the tooth to isolate it (the tools they use are veeery small and you don’t want one of those going down your throat by accident). The only problem was that there was only 1 wall left on the tooth and he tried for about 20 minutes to clamp it without success. Finally after about the 10th different clamp he was able to isolate it well enough to do the surgery but I know they were getting ready to extract the tooth if the couldn’t get something to work. I think he had to either clamp on the gums around the tooth or way under them because it really hurt after the freezing wore off. After that the rest of the first appointment went quite well and I was quite relived how easy it seemed.
Three days later I ended up with an infection but fortunately they were able to prescribe a prescription by fax and it worked to clear it in 2 days. It was incredibly painful. So I went in for the second appointment and I realised that the first one was a cake walk to what happened in the second one. He had to put so much freezing that it actually made my left eyelid numb! I saw the X-ray afterward and it was very high up and right below my sinus cavity so it was really, really hard to reach. Anyway lots of funky stuff went on and it was pretty tense there for a bit. Afterward the assistant told me that most dentists wouldn’t have even tried given how difficult it was, so I am very, very blessed to have had such a good dentist for that part. They put in a temp filling and so far it has felt fine.
Now I am waiting for the post and crown which will cost $1300-ish dollars but unfortunately most of my dental work quota is used up so it’s going to come out of my pocket. But it’s worth it to keep the tooth!
Let this be a lesson to you all – take *very* good care of your teeth or it will hurt a lot and cost you either a tooth or lots of money (or if you are really unlucky, both). Also get yourself a good toothbrush, one of those ones that cost $6 and have the raised bristles at the end to clean behind your molars (between them and the gums at the very back) since that’s where the infection came from in the first place for my tooth. These have small heads to let you brush far back since the larger ones won’t fit there.