13 months

Sibyl is 13 months old! She is a handful now that she is mobile. She gets into everything and most of the time only wants to read books. She says "Mama" almost exclusively, it seems. She also signs "more," "please," and "all done." And she has a great sense of humor.

I left this past Monday for Pennsylvania so I could defend my dissertation. I was anxious about flying into State College so I gave myself an extra day, just in case it snowed. I rehearsed the presentation several times on Tuesday and wandered the town reliving fond memories. It has all come and gone so quickly, compared to the years of writing and preparing data! The actual defense was fun, in a manner of speaking. I flew home Wednesday evening, after defending in the morning.

My mom helped Evan with the girls while I was gone and she spent a lot of time explaining to Iris about the PhD and the dissertation. So when I talked to Iris on Thursday morning she said, "I'm so proud of you, Mommy, that you got your PhD!" Granddad sent me flowers and my boss got me some champagne. I still don't quite feel like I'm done -- especially since I do have some revisions to make.

Flowers from Granddad 

 Iris is doing well -- she has finally recovered from her pneumonia and is SO full of energy.

2016 retrospective

I mean, where to I even begin to look back on 2016? I am not sure I can even put words to how hard it was.


My great joy from the year is that Sibyl was born and showed us her sweet growing self. She learned how to show us her tongue on Saturday, the same day as the Women's march.

What a great way to begin 2017. The march, I mean, but also Sibyl's tongue. I hadn't planned to go to the march, mostly because I am afraid of being shot. Seeing how huge the turnout was all over the world made me wish to be at the march in Denver, though. Instead I took Sibyl to the pediatrician for an urgent care visit. She had been up the entire previous night coughing and with a high fever. The poor baby. Iris had a 3-hour nap on Saturday, I assume she was fighting the same germs.

Fever nap

Three-hour nap

I am scheduled to go to San Francisco this week, two nights away. Just to make sure that I'll feel terrible leaving, Evan managed to incapacitate himself and will certainly need surgery. My dad is here for a meeting on Tuesday and will stay to help.

Knee injury. Will need surgery.

Iris started a new dance class on Sunday. Watching these girls grow makes my heart burst.

My hopes for 2017 are all about reconnecting with my "self" and my "selfhood." Evan gave me a series of six massages for Christmas, one of which I have used already. It would be nice to begin a regular exercise regime and meditation practice. Iris has started listening to a mindfulness for kids cd every night so one easy way to begin is to listen to some part of that with her. She listens to Sitting Still Like a Frog. 

Oh, and I'm defending my dissertation February 15. I can't believe that is happening. I started the PhD program in 2010. What a long road it's been.

fifteen months old

The summer is flying by so quickly. There was a heat wave recently that made sleep extremely difficult. Evan got a portable air conditioner for the upstairs. Luckily cooler weather means that I'm getting more sleep, as long as I don't have any caffeine during the day.

Iris and her juice

I took Iris to the Mordecai Children's Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens on Monday. There is a man-made creek to wade in that she loved. She also met another 15-month old girl named Iris! The mothers were amazed. 

Iris and her juice, again.

Iris is adding new words to her vocabulary every day. So far she says, "Mama" and "Dada," obviously, but her most recent additions are "on" and "up!" She's a little confused about "on" and "open" so she just says "on" when she wants something opened. And, well, she says "up" when she wants down. Her other words are a little hard to understand for the uninitiated. "Gaga" means car or dog; "gugu" means cookie; "dudu" means juice; "nana" means banana, or Nonna (Evan's mom); "baba" is anything starting with a b, mostly bear, or ball.

Her sign language is also pretty good. She uses the signs for "more"; "help"; "all done"; "milk"; "Daddy"; "owie" (or "it hurts"); "birdie"; and "book." And, of course, she points and grunts at things she wants.

Iris and her juice, again.

 Perhaps most surprisingly, she has figured out how to say "I don't know" and also it's appropriate usage. As in, "Iris, where's your bear?" To which she responds, "I don't know," if she actually doesn't know. I had taught her the sign for "I don't know" so she also uses that, but mostly just for fun.

A few days ago I had been out for a bit and when I got home I found this baby, below. Everything looks fine, right? Well if you look closer, you'll see her diaper is on backwards. Evan claims not to have noticed that he put her diaper on backwards.

What's wrong with this picture?

As for other happenings, Evan and I went on a double date with some friends last weekend and had dinner at a French restaurant after exploring Hudson Gardens in Littleton. We also had our first visitor from Pennsylvania. A friend of mine from my PhD program was making the cross-country trip to start a new job in California and he stayed with us a night. It was so good to catch up with him and it got me very motivated to keep working on my dissertation.

july fun

Evan's birthday falls very close to Independence Day, so the first weekend in July was full of fun, in spite of Evan's recent claim that, "We never have any fun, ever." This may be true, but I don't think it's for lack of trying. It may also be true that we have trouble prioritizing fun in our family. In any case, I sought to right the funlessness, if just for an afternoon. Evan did his part by eating enough to have extra energy for the outing, and even took extra B vitamins.

Our nanny watched Iris so Evan and I could go out (I haven't mentioned the new nanny yet, right? I'll say more later). We loaded up our bikes and went to South Pearl Street to have a meditative foot bath at the drop-in meditation center and then we rode bikes through Wash Park on our way to dinner. We were both fully relaxed and happy to be out in the summer weather together.


For the Fourth of July, we went to our neighbor's house for a cookout and had a good time being in a new place, and meeting new people. Iris had a bit of a meltdown early in the evening so we went home and made sure she ate and drank well. She still hasn't seen fireworks in her lifetime, this may be a parenting fail.

The weather has been terribly hot and we've all been suffering from the lack of air conditioning in the house. Our rooms are upstairs in the hottest part of the house. Thankfully, Evan installed a portable air conditioner that is doing wonders for us all. Our first night with it wasn't spectacular, however. Iris was up needing milk a couple times and then got cold early in the morning. Hope springs eternal, though. Maybe tonight she'll sleep better.

I hired a nanny about a month ago so that I could actually make progress on my dissertation. She is in massage therapy school and has a daughter of her own. She is great with Iris and is teaching Iris more sign language. I usually work from our home office but lately the work has been more related to dealing with health insurance and oxygen issues, rather than my own dissertation work. I absolutely need the free time to deal with the pile of bills.

growing up

My visit to State College was just long enough to make me really sentimental. I started the PhD program four years ago with a bunch of strangers, whom I now count as dear friends. I miss them. I have started to become much better at just being thankful for the past experiences rather than wishing them back into being. But there are still times when I wish for some remnant of the past to come back into the present. And the truth is, life would be much simpler if we all just stayed in one place. It takes a lot of time to develop a new community and although I have friends here in Denver, Evan and I haven't really reached a sense rootedness.

I got back to Denver on Saturday evening just before Iris went to sleep. She was sort of dazed when I walked in the door. We hugged for a long time and then I took her upstairs to put her to bed. Evan had taken off Monday since we were supposed to be on vacation, so we ended up having a whole weekend together. We took Iris to City Park on Monday for a bike ride and then we went to a Thai restaurant for lunch. By the way, in case you're wondering, most of the high chairs we've used in restaurants are broken, which is a real annoyance when you have an active baby trying to grab your food, not to mention being a safety issue. Iris actually did really well until we were leaving the restaurant and then she cried most of the way home. She was very tired and hungry in spite of eating some of the rice noodle soup I ordered along with the food I had brought for her.

In other news, we started Iris in day care this week.

And then we pulled Iris out of day care.

There were a host of reasons that we made this very difficult decision but the main reason was that the teacher(s) were pretty forceful in putting the kiddos down for nap time. By that I mean that, for the toddlers who had trouble transitioning from lunch to nap, the teacher(s) would pin the children down to their mats for long stretches of time and cover their heads with blankets all while the child is crying and trying to wriggle out of being pinned.

I struggled with how to handle the situation. At first I thought it couldn't actually be as serious as I thought it was. And then I realized that if anyone had ever done anything like that to my daughter, I would want to know right away. So then I wondered if I should try to tell the parents. I called a local non-profit that rates the quality of child care centers and told them what I was seeing. They agreed that the behavior was not acceptable. In the end, I talked to the director of the school and she said she'd address my concerns right away and she said that what I was seeing was not appropriate. But we no longer felt like we could trust that Iris would be well cared for in that room with that particular teacher. So now we either need a new day care or we need to find a nanny. Or I'll just stay at home forever.

At one point I had a realization that this is what we would be doing for the rest of our lives -- dealing with unpleasant situations in order to protect our progeny. You might think that I would have already had this realization. Like say, on any number of times we've been in the emergency room.  But for some reason this was a particularly difficult situation, probably because I had developed some rapport with the employees at the day care and my instinct tends to be one of not wanting to rock the boat. I guess it's some stage of growing up when you realize that the only thing that really matters is that you make sure your child is safe. And if that requires boat-rocking, then so be it.

The proposal defense went well, by the way. I'm now ABD, which means "All But Dissertation." Now I just have to write the darn thing.

Oh, and if you're with me in thinking that Evan should write more on the blog, post something in the comments. In addition to being funny and witty, his recent post quelled my nerves while I was gone. He claims not to have time to blog but I think that he might respond to external pressure.

prednisolone baby

Iris was on a steroid burst again. She seemed to handle this round better than the first time. She actually napped. And she was very, very funny when she was playing. Here's a video I took of her walking back and forth, mummy-like.

in retrospect

One of the holidays I celebrate least is New Year's. At least not in the traditional, stay-up-till-midnight way. I can't think of a worse way to celebrate something than to stay up well past my preferred bedtime and then suffer the whole next day for lack of sleep. This year we were all asleep by 9pm, I think. We did actually go to a party and meet some nice people, though. It's just that we left by 8:30pm.

I also happen to love New Year's. I love any excuse to look back and take stock of a given period of time. I love to set new goals for myself and imagine ways I will work to improve my character, habits, or relationships.

For the beginning of 2014, I have quite a lot to look back on. I hope that when I am 83 I will be right in saying that 2013 was the worst year of my life. When something bad or unpleasant would happen to me I used to have a habit of saying, "Well, if this is the worst thing that happens to me in my life, then I will have lived a pretty good life." I guess I still have that habit. But it was hard for me to complete that sentence after May 2013. I still feel traumatized by the three weeks I spent in the hospital with Iris -- particularly the first week in which the doctors didn't know what was wrong with her and they just kept doing test after test and I was not able to hold her or to comfort her. I can't think of how it could have been worse. Add to that Evan's starting a new (very demanding job) and that we (stupidly) bought a fixer-upper of a house.

I'll never forget the look on the doctor's face when he noticed her unresponsive pupils. This was on the night we were admitted to the NICU after having spent the entire previous day in the emergency room. Evan was with us by then and we were talking to the team of doctors about Iris's condition and their plans for future testing since they still didn't know what was wrong with her. Tensions were high and Dr. Wymore was attempting to cool us down and talk through everything we knew up to that point. The nurses were doing their routine checks on Iris and I made sure that I was facing Iris as our huddle gathered. At one point the nurses called one of the doctors (whose name I can't remember) over to look at Iris. I only glancingly paid attention at this point because I was trying to focus on Dr. Wymore and recount where we had been and what had happened. The doctor who had been called over to look at Iris looked up at this point with a very concerned and almost scared look on his face. He didn't want to interrupt our conversation and Dr. Wymore had her back to him. So I stopped us all and asked him, "What -- what is it?"

He had Dr. Wymore look at Iris's eyes and finally they told us that the pupils were unresponsive to light, meaning that there might be a hemorrhage in her brain and that we had to have an emergency MRI of her brain. Up to this point Evan had been adamant that Iris clearly was just suffering from reflux and was perhaps sick from a bug she caught on the plane ride. After this we were all chastened and my fear skyrocketed. I can't recall entirely, but it seems that they weren't able to get the "emergency" MRI until the next morning. It was already fairly late in the evening by the time all this started. This might have been the worst of the worst.

One might think that getting admitted to the NICU from the ER would have been the worst of the worst. But the doctor who admitted us managed to keep me incredibly calm and kept saying that everything would be fine. So our ambulance ride to the NICU from the ER (which was at a different branch of Children's) seemed not so terrible. I called my mom and told her she was right to have been worried about Iris's breathing from the start. I told the EMT driver that this was going to be the "I told you so" phone call. [Note: My mother is not the "I told you so" type of person, so she did not, in fact say, "I told you so."] It helped, of course, that everyone who works in the ER and NICU has been trained to be incredibly cool during emergent situations. I think I was probably at my best when the doctors or nurses were talking to me about the moment at hand. I was required to focus on the present and think logically. This kept me from stepping back and totally freaking out about where my daughter was and the pain she was probably experiencing.

A second worst-of-the-worst moments was, of course, when they showed us what was wrong with her heart and explained to us that they would have to do emergency heart surgery. There were many worst-of-the-worst moments, now that I think harder about it.

I am ambivalent as I write, though, because 2013 also held some of the best moments of my life. In April I gave birth to a very strong baby girl. I don't know whether Evan and I have ever felt closer than at her birth. And the doctors at Children's Hospital here in Denver gave her a second life and a second birth. We experienced more love and support from our family, friends, and even strangers than I thought possible and Iris has proven to be an immeasurable joy. She is tirelessly happy and loving and shows empathy when I have cried in front of her. She has an insatiable curiosity and is easy to console.

The year ahead holds much promise. Iris becomes more of a handful every day and seems to have boundless energy. Her new favorite activity is to pull herself up in her crib, test her balance, and then let herself fall back on her bottom and then get up and do it again. She starts daycare in March and will benefit tremendously from the socialization and stimulation. Until then I plan to take her to story times at the local library and we are starting a music class with her than I'm sure she'll love. Evan feels increasingly comfortable and valued at work and has made friends out of some coworkers. He now drives to work rather than use public transportation. That was not in our original plans, but it gives him more time at home with us. He has also been able to get back into his jiu-jitsu routine at a local training center. He is spending more time playing guitar for Iris and reminding himself of his love for literature. As for me, I am still working on my dissertation proposal. I have run into problems with my data but am making progress. I still hope to defend the proposal by May. I have gotten into a good gym routine at the gym across the street but hope to get back into running shape this year. I also hope to work on my musicality by picking up the guitar again.

This was a very difficult year. But I end it in a better place than where I started (literally, and figuratively). Perhaps this has been the best New Year's of my life.

five months old

Iris was five months old yesterday. To celebrate, Colorado is having historic rainstorms and flash flooding.  She seems to have some red in her hair and sucks only her left thumb. She also doesn't make much noise in the morning when she wakes up so I don't always know that she's awake. But when we go in to see her she is all smiles. On Monday we go to the genetics department to arrange for further testing.

Iris at five months

I heard an NPR interview with the author of a new children's book, Wonder, which made me want to read the book straight away. And to have the future Iris read the book. It was inspired by the author's personal experience of not knowing how to help her son behave around another small child who had a facial deformation. I take it that the gist of the book is to emphasize the importance of kindness and that one of the main takeaways is: "When given the choice between being right, or being kind, choose kind." I probably don't think that this should be acted out all the time -- there are some times when being right is really, really important -- but too many people [maybe myself included?] think being right is always the most important thing no matter what.

**

A lot has happened recently. For one, we moved. The house is still in shambles but we're in a house! Soon we [Evan] will install the kitchen cabinets and by next Friday I hope that the contractor we hired will have the counter top finished. Evan is planning to install all the doors and the baseboard very soon, too. As soon as that is complete we can actually move the big furniture in and decide what to do with all the books. 

My dad, Nelson, and brother, Miguel, helped us move last weekend in intense heat. There is no way we could have done it without them. They worked very hard and even had time to do some tree trimming.

Miguel in a tree. Dad in background [little blue speck].

When Evan is not working on the house he is working at his job. He left yesterday for a business trip to Ann Arbor and from what he reports back, the trip is going very well. He returns tomorrow and has pledged not to work over the weekend. I have reserved Saturday morning for a family outing. We are going to attempt to take Iris out to breakfast in a cute neighborhood I used to frequent.

I said long ago that one of my goals was to run a 1/2 marathon in October. Well, I have sorely failed at preparing for that goal. I am running, which I'm happy about, but it's been difficult to carve out the time. And I still haven't started running with Iris in the running stroller, even tough that's what it's for. The idea of running with the oxygen tank makes me a little nervous though it shouldn't.

My main goal should be to actually do work on my dissertation. This has still not happened. We have a sitter starting tomorrow who has been hired explicitly to help me get work done on the dissertation. May I actually use that time for the said purpose.

new crib night

The baby monitor arrived yesterday in the mail so Iris slept in her big-girl crib last night. I got almost no sleep. We had been keeping her in her bassinet, which had been in our room with us (actually on our bed). It is much easier to check on her when she is sleeping right next to us so last night was pretty sleepless for me. I hope that I'll learn to sleep better with her in the other room.

The big event of the day for Iris is that she started lifting her head forward as if trying to sit further forward (or up) in her bassinet. I have been worried that she won't keep up with her physical development because of the surgery. We're supposed to be doing tummy time with her but keep an eye on her pain cues.

I have been successful in incorporating walks into our daily routine. Yesterday's walk was quiet and cool. Today's was much hotter. I also was also able to read some of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. This is the book my book club is reading this month and I am very hopeful I'll be able to attend the June meeting. This is the same book club I was in back in 2010 when I was living in Denver. A couple of my girlfriends from high school are in it as well as some of their friends. I really look forward to getting involved again.

I've been getting many compliments about what a good job I'm doing with Iris. While I (of course) appreciate the positive feedback, I really don't think I'm doing anything that anyone else wouldn't do. I had planned to be home with Iris during this time even before we knew of her health issues. Confronted with this new reality, we are responding the only way we know how... I think. That said, it would be very easy to wallow in self-pity. I have found it tremendously helpful to hear from those who have had similarly difficult experiences. I generally enjoy reminding myself that I am not at all that unique; in the case of Iris's recent health issues, I doubly enjoy knowing that our story is not all that unique.

It also helps to remind myself that none of this is permanent. Soon Iris will have grown out of her reflux  (cross your fingers) and she will not need the various meds and oxygen anymore. That will be a happy day. A year out (for the digoxin), but a happy day.

In my limited free time I have done some perusing of available jobs nearby. After living at Children's Hospital for nearly 3 weeks, I had in my mind that perhaps I'd try to get into hospital administration rather than higher education administration. I miss having a job (outside of the house) quite a bit. I have decided to take a leave of absence from my PhD program. This means that instead of defending my proposal in August I will take off the the fall semester and hope to defend in the spring semester. After I defend my proposal I will be ABD (all but dissertation) and I will then (only) have to complete the dissertation itself and defend it.

Today was a two-vomit day. I keep trying to tie it to a particular medication. Really, I just want her off of all of them.

Tomorrow's goals: walk, nap, call opthamology for appointment (I keep forgetting that one), write Anne a letter.