To judge from the very serious, quiet baby in the arms of the swimming instructor at the Y, I could honestly say that Lauren was clearly having the time of her life. She took the entire experience in quietly, mesmerized, calm.
I knew that she was happy because she was so serious. Two seconds before I had been trying to console an angry and frustrated baby who didn't seem to understand that she could not simply dive into the pool like her sister. In earlier lessons she had been content to remain on the edge of the pool and splash, but today she was having none of that. It was time for her to learn to swim too, thank you very much.
The instructor noticed my struggle and offered to take her into the water. Neither of us knew what that would lead to... stranger anxiety? Fear of the water? ...but what we got was the calm, serious, content 9 month old who has finally gotten her way.
Lauren has always been this way, pushing us into things before we are fully ready for her to experience them, basically leading us to her next big developmental milestone instead of the other way around. Whether this is because she is eager, or we are forgetful of when these things occur, or a little bit of both, we have often had these episode of extreme frustration and unhappiness on her part and a sudden giving in on our part, only to realize that the thing she was asking to do was not beyond her comprehension at all.
The baby looked awful small in the big Olympic sized pool. It was a small thing, in the scheme of things. But to Lauren her first swim was another stride towards independence. And it's a long road indeed.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
These shoes were made for walking
...not, as Lauren might have you believe, for eating.
When we last expressed dismay to the pediatrician about our apparent inability to keep up with Lauren's developmental pace, and how we found the difference in the 3.5 year old, who knows enough not to eat marbles or pencils, but does not know enough to keep them out of the reach of her sister, and the 8 (going on 9) month old, who is actively figuring out her world orally and kinetically, to be more than daunting, the woman laughed and said cheerfully:
"Well, the first one, you know, you worry about whether she is developing correctly and whether you are feeding her the right food and reading the right books and taking her to the right school and so on. The second one, you're just trying to keep alive."
To all you second borns out there, I know this sounds as though we parents don't worry about all that other stuff, but the truth is that what really happened is we experimented alot on your older sibling to find all that right stuff that we just practiced naturally on you, and that is why she is the way she is. So it goes both ways. Trust me.
In any event, I don't remember Sydney ever being so fascinated with, say, flushing the toilet or learning how to disembowel an entire roll of toilet paper, but I rather suspect that is because she was never allowed near the toilet or the toilet paper in the first place, whereas Lauren has a freer reign for lack of parental resources. Which leads us, her parents, to see an ever deeper side of babyhood; a far more complicated endeavor than people probably give it credit, and makes it a pity that none of us really have any memories that far back. What greater joy could there be than first discovering you can stand up on those two feet your were only recently trying to eat? What could be more fascinating than a helium balloon attached to a string? What greater disappointment than to finally find a choice morsel in the fact of a used tissue only to have it snatched away? .....well, maybe some things are best left to the far reaches of our memories, after all.
So far Lauren has both been kept alive and up with proper feeding and care and is growing into the cute babbling baby stage which is both endearing and way too short. Soon she'll substitute "dadadada" for "daddy" and will quit eating shoes in favor of wearing them. Just like her sister...only different.
When we last expressed dismay to the pediatrician about our apparent inability to keep up with Lauren's developmental pace, and how we found the difference in the 3.5 year old, who knows enough not to eat marbles or pencils, but does not know enough to keep them out of the reach of her sister, and the 8 (going on 9) month old, who is actively figuring out her world orally and kinetically, to be more than daunting, the woman laughed and said cheerfully:
"Well, the first one, you know, you worry about whether she is developing correctly and whether you are feeding her the right food and reading the right books and taking her to the right school and so on. The second one, you're just trying to keep alive."
To all you second borns out there, I know this sounds as though we parents don't worry about all that other stuff, but the truth is that what really happened is we experimented alot on your older sibling to find all that right stuff that we just practiced naturally on you, and that is why she is the way she is. So it goes both ways. Trust me.
In any event, I don't remember Sydney ever being so fascinated with, say, flushing the toilet or learning how to disembowel an entire roll of toilet paper, but I rather suspect that is because she was never allowed near the toilet or the toilet paper in the first place, whereas Lauren has a freer reign for lack of parental resources. Which leads us, her parents, to see an ever deeper side of babyhood; a far more complicated endeavor than people probably give it credit, and makes it a pity that none of us really have any memories that far back. What greater joy could there be than first discovering you can stand up on those two feet your were only recently trying to eat? What could be more fascinating than a helium balloon attached to a string? What greater disappointment than to finally find a choice morsel in the fact of a used tissue only to have it snatched away? .....well, maybe some things are best left to the far reaches of our memories, after all.
So far Lauren has both been kept alive and up with proper feeding and care and is growing into the cute babbling baby stage which is both endearing and way too short. Soon she'll substitute "dadadada" for "daddy" and will quit eating shoes in favor of wearing them. Just like her sister...only different.
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