Don’t Call it a Comeback

Tristan has an umbilical hernia.  It makes her already outie belly-button protude even further.  Over time, the hernia will heal.  Now, however, she likes to hold it.

She doesn’t just hold it, though.  She holds it when she’s drinking from her bottle or sucking her thumb.  Almost invariably, she does the latter (suck her thumb) immediately after the former (drink her bottle) because she always does the latter (suck her thumb) when she’s sleepy, which is also often the result of the former (drink her bottle).  It’s a hell of a sight.

This cute, cuddly, little baby-girl grabs her bottle, throws back her head, grabs her umbilical hernia-enhanced outie belly-button, then waddles through the house and, thus, morphs into a little bubba.

Not Buddah. 

Bubba. 

There different…except that they’re both very satisfied. 

As is Tristan.

 

Milestones

Sometime over the last couple of weeks, Marcel began reaching the light switch without getting on a stool or chair.  Just prior to that, Marcel learned to turn door knobs.

Meanwhile, Tristan combined two skills–turning over and putting something in her mouth–when she rolled to her side, pulled her pacifier into her mouth and went to sleep.

The biggest development on the new achievements scale, however, was when Marcel peed in her bed.

This had never happened before because, frankly, my wife and I were conscientious about putting Marcel in pull-ups at bedtime.  This night, however, we weren’t conscientious.

The next morning, Marcel jumped into our bed and got under the covers.  Everything was unusual about this.

Normally, if she wakes up before us, she just calls for us to come get her out of bed.  If she does come into our room, she usually declines getting into bed and, instead, urges us to take her downstairs for chocolate milk and television.  On very rare occasions, she’ll get into bed with us, and she did just that this time.

And when she did, I noticed that her pajama pants did not match her pajama top.

Mismatch pajamas aren’t just rare in our household.  They are nonexistent.  My wife is a stickler for things like that, so when Marcel hopped into bed with mismatch pajamas, not only did my antenna shoot up, but my mouth shot open.

“Marcel,” I queried, “what happened to your pajamas?”

“I changed them,” she responded.  She refused, however, to explain why.  She just got into our bed as happy as could be.  Like mismatch pajamas, Marcel changing her bottoms is nonexistent.

Even as a newborn, Marcel never much minded dirty diapers.  I distinctly remember telling our favorite Argentinian musician how grateful I was for that trait, only to have him educate me on the pitfalls of rarely-changed, over-full diapers.  Warnings notwithstanding, Marcel and I came to learn the consequences of delayed diaper changes the hard way, including Marcel becoming comfortable with wet and soiled underwear…while sitting on the sofa.

So to hear say that she changed herself, unprompted, raised all kind of alarms bells.  I got out of bed to check on her room.  When I entered her room, I found an even more startling thing:  I found a made bed.

Now, my wife is about as anal about makign the bed as she is about storing pajamas in matching sets, but I never seen her teach Marcel how to make a bed and never seen Marcel actually care about making a bed.  I mean, she’ll tell that it’s her job to make the chocolate milk, cook the dinner or plant the flowers.  She does not, however, tell you that it’s her job to make the bed.  But that morning, it was.

And it was my job to unmake it.

When I pulled back the covers, my suspicions were confirmed.  The tell-tale wet spot revealed that Marcel had peed in the bed.  But far from being upset, I was grateful.  Marcel was finally ashamed of messing herself.  And, for the next couple of days, Marcel insisted on going to the potty before the “rain and mud” came.

We’re told we aren’t supposed to shame our children into potty training.  I’m not sure we could if we were allowed.  (She’s way too cute to punish, really.)  But, given the results, I was sure glad Marcel was willing to take up the cudgel.

 

Sins of the Sister

Now that Tristan’s tiny self is here, we can really see how much Marcel has grown since she was an infant. Despite this growth, however, there are some aspects of infancy that Marcel is not quite ready to let go.

For instance, though Marcel was quick to adopt utensils, she still loves to be spoon fed. She requests it with her morning yogurt like other people would ask for granola or fruit. And, frankly, sometimes it’s the only way to get her to eat her dinner.

Another example can be found in her relationship with the stairs. I notice other children push their parents away when it’s time to climb stairs. Those children relish showing off this form of independence. Not Marcel, though. In fact, she gets indignant if I hold out one hand to help her with the stairs, instead of reaching out with two to pick her up and carry her.

The worst example, however, is the pacifier. For over a year, we tried to ween Marcel off pacifiers because day care prohibits them and her teeth we’re getting a little bucked. We started small.

First, we only denied her during day care hours. That meant she could work the hell out of her pacifier until we pulled her out of the car in the day care parking lot and that that pacifier was waiting for her in her car seat when we picked her up.

Then, we started to deny her the pacifier as soon as she left the house in the morning and hoped to expand it further until there was no time for pacifiers, at all. Moreover, all through this progression of denial, we constantly peppered her with exhortations and challenges to withdraw from pacifier reliance. We pulled out everything from “You don’t need a pacifier!” to “Pacifiers are for babies!”

Ultimately, though, the only thing that got the pacifier out of Marcel’s mouth, was the fact that we ran out of them. (If we didn’t lose them, then she chewed them up.)

Unfortunately, this doesn’t run them out of mind. One particularly funny moment–or heartbreaking if your Marcel–came after a particularly tough day. By this time, we had gone months without a pacifier. It had been so long that I had forgotten about their power. Instead, on this day, I only remembered our recent tools of comfort and succor.

The problems started when we discovered that the corner store had run out of Marcel’s favorite snack. The next problem came when we didn’t find her neighbor and best friend, Ciglali, playing in front of the house. Worse, neither cousins Nilo nor Eva could be found and my wife, unusually, would not be home for hours. Eventually, Marcel began to whimper incessantly. Finally, Marcel just dropped her head into her eyes and wailed, “I want my pasie!” I had to chuckle at that but ended up holding her in my arms until her mother came home.

With episodes like that, I flinched a little when my wife suggested it was time to get Tristan some pacifiers. I had hoped that we would never have to bring another pacifier into the house. Not only could we avoid backward steps with Marcel that way, but we could avoid the problem with Tristan, altogether. My wife, tired of being a human pacifier after only two weeks however, insisted. So I sat Marcel down for a little chat.

I wanted to explain that Tristan needed a pacifier. That Tristan needed a pacifier because she was a baby but that big girls, like her, never needed pacifiers. I tried to explain to Marcel that she would be the perfect person to pick out a pacifier for Tristan, though, because Tristan was just a baby and knew nothing about pacifiers but she knew all about them.

That’s what I tried to explain. What Marcel heard was “Blah, blah, blah, PASIE! Blah, blah, blah, PASIE! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, PASIE, blah, blah, blah, PASIE!” I knew this because every time that I said the word “pacifier”, her eyes got big and she excitedly asked “HUH?!?”

Nonetheless, we piled into the car and headed for the drugstore. It was in the car that I realized that our little talk was a failure because, in the car, Marcel started talking about her pasie. So I tried to reiterate my point.

“We’re not going to get a pasie for you, Marcel. We’re going to get a pasie for Tristan. It’s Tristan’s pasie, not yours.” That’s when she reiterated her point.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

I called my wife from the car to change her position, but she was firm. According to her, she and Tristan needed Tristan to have a pacifier. So I kept going to the drugstore. When we got to the drugstore, amazingly, there were stickers immediately inside the store, right at Marcel’s eye level.

I didn’t even notice them on my way to the pacifiers, but they were the first thing Marcel saw and she grabbed some as she trotted behind me. More favor came in the form of sippy cups–the brand she uses and more–which were hanging right next to the pacifiers in the drug store. In these stickers and in these sippy cups, I had bargaining chips and Marcel fell for it.

“What do you want Marcel, stickers and sippy cups or pasies?”, I asked.

“Stickers!,” she replied and, being no fool, she added, “and sippy cups!”

With that, we grabbed our booty, paid for it and headed home. At home, somehow Marcel got that bag and started rifling through it. She showed her stickers to her grandparents and marveled at her sippy cups. Then, she noticed the pacifiers. My wife must’ve opened up the pack because one was loose. She grabbed it but stopped when she spied me spying her.

“What are you doing Marcel?,” I queried.

“Testing it for Sister.”

With that, she popped the pacifier into her mouth and ran away.