Vol. II.9 - One Year (archived)

Milestones

In case anyone failed to notice, I’ll just mention that it has been over six months since my last journal entry. In fact, the previous entry was written during Month 7, but never edited and posted until recently. There were times when I started an entry in my head but never got the time to sit down and act on my thoughts. There were other times when the mere idea of coming up with a creative description of our place on the map of life zapped all my energy. Mostly, my excuse is that I was far too busy being a mother to write about it.

Life has just been one transition after another. With a baby, it always is. Their routines and abilities are constantly changing, you are constantly adapting… Just baby-proofing the house is one long series of adjustments. Frankly, I don’t think it much matters whether you child-proof your house as you go (“Oops, he can reach that already…”), or get a head start (“Sweetheart, we need to actually implement our child-proofing plans…”). Because either way you end up redoing it once the kid has outsmarted you. (“Great. He has out-proofed the child-proof locks.”)

In all this transitioning, you find that many a milestone passes by without your remarking just when it happened. Some milestones are discrete jumps. Either your baby can stand for several seconds, unsupported, on his own two feet, or he cannot. (Liam can.) Either he is toddling across open spaces without holding onto anything, or he is not. (Liam isn’t.) Other transitions are harder to pinpoint: Is he talking? Exactly when does that unintelligible babble that means something to him become coherent chatter that mean something to us? There is no first word, per se. Instead, there is a growing conviction, a constant searching for further evidence, that a particular phonetic sequence and its variations have been assigned a specific meaning in his mind.

Liam has uttered something that sounds very like a repetition of my words to him on too many occasions to pass off as mere coincidence. He does fairly well with the d-words. Duck, dog, daddy, all-done, and “drop-drops” – the medicine we give him from a dropper three times a day, and which seems to make him feel very important – have all gotten frequent attempts at pronunciation. Too frequent to deny, too inconsistently formed to pin down. But just the other evening we witnessed an episode that I prefer to look fondly back on as his First Word Event. Liam looked Chesney (whom he knows perfectly well is a “kitty”) straight in the eye, made a mental connection of some sort among the various furry, four-footed animates with whom he likes to interact in his life, and pronounced, “Gog!” To further evince his thinking, he then crawled over to the night-darkened window and began banging on it in that manner he has when he is excitedly watching the dogs fetch balls for their owners. To a mother, his thought process might as well have been a running digital ticker above his head.

What other mile markers have we passed? When did we get from there to here, and how? If I were sitting down to answer those questions two months ago, my journal would have been full of data on the minute details of daily life: foods consumed, foods possibly reacted to, behavioral incongruencies which may or may not be linked to foods… Sigh. I’ll let you in on a little secret: That is the real reason I have not written anything in months. It’s not that I was so consumed by those questions that I could not enjoy my baby; but they were all-consuming. I was tired of being consumed by them, tired of trying to make sense of them; and I was very much afraid that if I opened my mouth to write about life, reams of data and confused analyses would have flowed out. I refused to allow these issues-with-a-capital-I, that as a parent I had to deal with and was unable not to deal with, to permeate every part of me. So instead, I put away the computer, stuffed my whirling thoughts to the hinder parts of my brain, and sat in the floor with my baby and his blocks… or took him outside to push his little red wagon across the grass… or helped him find the square on his shape sorter. I lived life instead of analyzing it.

In retrospect, once a problem has a solution, everything about it becomes clearer. I can now say that in general, things took a major turn for the better at six months, right at the time of my last journal entry. In specifics, the waters were still boisterously murky, with ups and downs in Liam’s behavioral patterns that tossed us around quite a bit. One week he would be sleeping and napping beautifully, and the next he would spend two hours in his crib and never sleep a wink. One week he would be happily eating sweet potato, and the next we had a fussy baby with strange bumps all over his tonsils that baffled the doctors. The obvious conclusion: try not feeding him sweet potato and see what happens. Looking back with perfect hindsight, it saddens me to think that the poor little man was denied his favorite foods because we were afraid they were upsetting him. It is with tremendous relief that I am now able to say that sweet potato has nothing to do with any of his physical difficulties – bumpy, rashy, or otherwise.

At the very end of the year – on New Year’s Eve, to be precise – we finally found a doctor who had answers for us. But let me first tell you, with the clarity of hindsight, that we were on a dark and descending path those last three months or so. Liam was getting fussier and fussier. He always acted ravenous. He would gorge himself at meals until his tummy was ready to pop, and then he would come to me an hour or two later and cry for milk. He was waking up four and five times in the night asking for food. At first we did not give it to him, because we thought there was no way he could want more an hour after his last snack – especially seeing as he ate all day long. Then we would give in and fix him formula because nothing else we did seemed to offer any comfort. He would chug and guzzle at the cup like he had not seen sustenance in weeks and then keel over sound asleep again.

He was passing whole chunks of food in his diaper. (“Hmm… Looks like we fed him eighteen bites of zucchini and twenty-two of squash…”) He developed this terrible, intermittent diaper rash. On a good day, his whole bottom just looked a little red wherever his feces had touched it. At its worst, it looked like someone had sat him in a plate of acid. There were absolute holes in his bottom-cheeks that poured blood the moment you touched them. And it seemed that protein either caused or exacerbated his condition. Any time we fed him animal protein – goat’s milk or cheese, chicken, beef – he got worse. We backed off the protein, and he got a little better. Was it coincidence, a cycling problem that had nothing to do with what we fed him, or did the protein really contribute to his rash (which word I use for lack of a stronger one)? Probably it was a little of both.

Need I say that by the time we reached our first bloody bottom, I was freaking out? I knew there was something very wrong with my baby. I felt like he was trying to go through a growth spurt and could not get the necessary nutrients. He was crying all the time, and although I had grown accustomed to it, deep inside a voice said to me, “This is out of character for your child, and you know it.” When my mother told us she was personally acquainted with a specialist who thought he could help Liam, we arranged an emergency visit.

The man is an environmental doctor, specially trained to cope with allergies and other chronic conditions triggered by pollutants, pesticides, chemicals, and other toxins in our environment. His diagnosis of Liam was complex in its details, but very simple in principal: Liam’s body was carrying too large a load of toxins and it did not know how to cope with them. I won’t go into detail. One day, I am certain, I will write a book. I took it all in, I assure you: All the whys and wherefores and what-nows. But at the moment, it suffices to say that we have found a solution to our problems.

We took Liam home that New Year’s Eve and had a song-and-dance celebration. We were free to feed him whatever he wanted, within specified guidelines. (Bring on the sweet potato!) We put him on some prescribed medication to rid his body of the toxin load and address all the specific issues. Within five days, he was sleeping twelve hours through the night, turning down food before he reached the bursting point, napping beautifully, and not crying. He was just so happy! When Damian came home from work at night, instead of rushing to Daddy and clinging with clutching fingers until he was put to bed, Liam would look up with a big grin and go right back to the project he had chosen for himself, just the busiest baby in the entire world. Damian’s mother saw Liam about eight days after the visit to the specialist, and she kept saying, “You are different today. You’re in such a good mood. You’re so different.”

He is not a new baby. He is the baby I always knew he was, because I knew him. I knew that all the fussy, cranky, crabbiness was just not him. His body was trying all along to tell us that something was wrong, and we finally found someone who could interpret his signals.

The pediatrician, incidentally, confirmed what hindsight told me: Liam had virtually stopped growing. At his twelve-month checkup, he had grown only half an inch since the prior appointment. In three months, his height had fallen from the 75^th percentile to the 25^th. I had noticed that he was still wearing the same pants he had been wearing for weeks and weeks, and that furthermore they were falling on the same place against his legs and had to be rolled up the same amount. According the doctor’s scales, he had gained only one pound in three months, and I can tell you from my home weighings that it was all gained in the two weeks since the visit to the specialist. He has shot up a good quarter inch in the past month. We now have every indication that he is progressing into a happy, healthy babyhood.

I look back on the milestones that I did somehow manage to record in my calendar, even as I was trying frantically to notate records of foods and symptoms in order to make sense of life, and I smile. “Remember when it was an event for him to pull himself to his knees and pull books out of his basket?” I ask Damian last night, and he laughs amiably. Today, I will get Liam up from his nap and he will cruise from his baby-height activity table (Which he absolutely adores, by the way. Get your one-year-old kid a 15-inch-high table. He will thank you.), past the glider, to his book basket without ever dropping to his knees. He will reach in and begin throwing books over his shoulder, never even looking, like a bunny busily digging in the dirt. Then he will move over to his dresser, open the drawers himself, and begin to send clothes flying out behind him in a fashion even more reminiscent of dirt piling up outside a rabbit’s burrow. He may even feel like putting them back when he is done.

More important than walking, or talking, or even the ability to throw books behind his head – although those are all important, because they show that he never lost any real ground in his mental and physical development – more important than all the little milestones that make me smile, I draw a relieved breath for that milestone on New Year’s Eve. That milestone that gave me a happy baby. Nevermind the whys or the hows of what was wrong and what works. I’m just grateful that we reached it, and that we can move on into Liam’s second year having found a solution to a year-long problem.

Excuse me. I have a happy baby to be with.