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The actual sign is the index and middle fingers brushing lightly over the tip of the nose. Use just the index finger and you're signing MOUSE.
Paula turned two thirteen days ago, and I'm still taking it in.
This little squirt who grew in my womb was born as an itty bitty baby, just five pounds, eleven ounces. Her ears, so adorably marked with a little pock behind each one, showed each little vein that ran through them. Light shone through between the veins.
Her little hands were like old man hands, all skinny and wrinkly. And when she was done nursing, from day one, she would pull off my breast so that her mouth remained suctioned closed, and she broke the seal on her lips with a little pucker like a kiss. Then she would raise her eyebrows over closed lids and lean her head back as though to comment that all that milk was fine, but she was done with it for now.
Those first few nights at home I would look at her nestled in the crook of my arm and think that she looked like a little robot or animated toy: how could she moved her limbs like that, so lifelike? She was so darned small, I could hardly see the vivacious and shrieking baby that would emerge, much less the child she has become.
Now Paula's once bald head is capped with an elfish swirl of gold-brown hair. It curls up in the back after getting wet from swimming or washing. Much of the rest of the time it has teased-up, little-girl bedhead.
Those blue-grey eyes turned to hazel for a while, but now they shine a warm, dark amber under the long lashes that were part of my verbal pre-nup with Joel. He knows I only married him so my children could have lovely long dark eyelashes. It's a good thing his genes delivered.
This little girl once no bigger than a doll is now two feet, ten inches tall! She has her cousin Maricela's bean-pole build already. She jumps, she dances, she climbs, she sits on the potty and reads a book. She puts her hands together over her head and imitates the yoga stretches on my exercise DVD.
Best of all my little munchkin, who for so long only communicated with shrieks, who at 19 months had the language and communication development of a six- to nine-month-old baby, now tells me so many things.
She told me she thought the "Five Little Monkeys" book was sad because the monkeys keep getting hurt. After a while she saw the humor in it and began to grin and sign "JUMP BED!" to me when I opened the book, or when she was actually jumping on the bed.
She was playing with a little bell, and when she dropped it she signed SORRY to it and gave it a hug.
She called my friend Jody FUNNY, brushing her index finger over her wrinkled nose.*
Whenever she sees a star, Paula makes the sign and sings this part of her favorite song: how I wonder.
She holds up her hand with the thumb, index and little fingers out, waving it at Daddy when he leaves for work: I LOVE YOU!
We can tell her things, too.
One night she was crying and Joel was holding her. He finally signed to her that her crying was hurting his ears. She stopped crying, opened her arms and wrapped them around his neck.
A favorite game these days is Turtle Tickle, in which I sign TURTLE-TICKLE-TURTLE-TICKLE! Then, with the sign TURTLE (my left hand in a fist, thumb on top as the turtle's head, and my right hand cupping over the thumb to make a little shell), I tickle Paula all over with the tip of my protruding thumb. Tickling has become a major pass-time around here.
After her recent problems with insomnia (not actually a problem for her, more for me), we have moved her to her own bed in her own room. I envisioned this move as a drawn-out process of accustoming her to the new arrangement, gradually priming her for the transition. But it turned out that I put her down there for a nap and she's been going to bed there ever since.
The bed is actually a foam pad and blankets on the floor, but Paula adores it. In our quest to make her sleeping place super attractive, Joel and I took Paula to Ikea the other night to see about buying her a really cool bed. What we came away with was not only super economical but also almost magical in its appeal to Paula: a ten-dollar "igloo" tent. She positively relishes being in her little tent, and to be honest I love it, too.
Lying there on the foam pad with her as she drinks her bottle of water and brushes her fingers over my face, I feel that the white nylon above me is blocking out all thoughts of the outside world. No worries about chores or money can reach me here, no piled-up stuffed animals or un-put-away laundry assail my eye. I love it.
As for my life, so totally disordered by Paula's arrival, I think I am finally beginning to make sense of things again. I am writing more (and not only for this blog). I am also looking into hiring a nanny to come and take care of Paula two days a week so I can devote myself to writing, as well as my mundane obligations of housework and shopping.
I am finally beginning to develop boundaries that I've struggled with my whole life. I am learning, slowly and painfully, that I can't make others happy so stressing about it is pointless. Paula has pushed this lesson on me in countless and often torturous ways.
In the middle of the night after trying for an hour to get her back to sleep, I'm learning it's time to call in Daddy. I just can't keep functioning on so little sleep, and unfortunately on many nights my temper will get the best of me before she falls asleep. So Daddy and I are taking turns, and it's good, even though Paula does cry when the exchange happens. I'm learning.
When Paula and I are at home after another one of those sleepless nights and I'm dying for a nap or at least a break, the TV still stays off until pre-determined TV-watching times. Paula and I both got way too dependent on the TV over the last weeks of severe sleep deprivation. I have put up with persistent whining in the transition back to more reasonable TV usage, but my friend Mary put it right: "You're the parent, Juliet!" Yep. I'm the parent, whining or no.
So happy birthday to my beautiful little girl, my precious child, my tornado of love and need and spirit. I love you now more than ever.
Over the weeks and months of Paula's sleep problems, I have tried a lot of different things to help her sleep better. Lately since she's been waking up saying she was hungry, I decided to try giving her Pedia-sure, like Ensure but for kids, before bed.
Let me put it this way, paraphrasing the words of Lionel Richie: it was once, twice, three times a complete failure.
First time I gave it to her she threw up as I was putting her to bed.
Second time I gave it to her she threw it up after falling asleep.
Third time she threw it up while awake, sitting up and in the car.
I think there's a lesson here: PEDIA-SURE MAKES HER THROW UP. It sure does.
Once we determined that we had one-and-a-half six-packs of the stuff and Paula wasn't going to drink it, I admit I began to think about consuming it myself.
But I stopped before pulling the tab on the top of the can: Why am I craving a chemical-laden "nutritional" drink for kids?
I mean, there are 11 grams of fat per can, and who knows what they put in that stuff. Yes, I tried desperately to feed it to my daughter, but only because there was a higher purpose (my sanity) at stake. But even knowing that the sanity is a lost cause, why turn the proverbial vanilla-flavored gun on myself?
I think it was just a combination of hunger and a desire for nurturing. Let's face it: Pediasure is comfort food in a can. Filling, heavy, sweet. It's like sweetened condensed milk you can drink through a straw.
I passed it by, deciding that I would try to find other ways to fill the growing need for self-care. An insomniac toddler has a way of consuming every ounce of spare energy and the gauge on my emotional fuel tank is pointing insistently to E. But I resolved to try to fill those tanks with something other than vomit-inducing sugar drink for kids.
That was yesterday. Since then it's been more of the same: little sleep, feeling a head cold coming on, wanting to curl up into a ball and make it all go away. I went and got a can of Pedia-sure.
I shouldn't be surprised that it didn't live up to expectations. It just tasted chemical and kind of slimy. No nurturing, no comfort in a can. Phooey.
An to top it all off, it's given me a little bit of a stomach ache. I guess that's the one sure thing.
Last night the doctor on the phone said, "You need to sleep. It's very hard to function without good sleep."
You don't say.
Paula is on some kind of faux-meth-head sleep schedule. If she sleeps at all it's not for more than a couple of hours. Then it's up to play again! Last night after her 8:30-10:00 nap and her 10:15-10:45 nap, we decided to just keep her up.
I cleaned up her playroom and Joel made a little pallet on the floor that she could sleep on if the urge overcame her. I went to bed around 12:30, Paula came in about an hour later and fell asleep next to me.
Because the reality of our daughter's insomnia has become unescapable, our nighttime program will now proceed along the following lines.
"I"
"Y"
(That's Paula lying awake saying and signing letters she knows the signs and names of.)
"Paula, go play in your room. Mama is tired and wants to sleep." Or in something approximating ASL (actually pidgin sign) gloss: GO PLAY OVER THERE. MAMA TIRED WANT SLEEP. GO PLAY! GO PLAY NOW. NIGHT NOW. SLEEP TIME. MAMA WANT SLEEP.
I will then turn my back to her and try to go back to sleep. She may or may not get down from the bed without further prompting and go play in her room. Or she could just lie there pulling my hair and pressing ice-cold hands against my neck. She refuses to get under the covers.
We have blocked off access to the bathroom and the rest of the house, so she's less likely to come back in an hour brandishing a carving knife or eating the toilet plunger.
In the meantime I am so damn tired. I can't decide if I should try to go out today and get some orange juice for the head cold I think Paula and I both have brewing, if I should call a friend and ask a favor, or just call the day a complete loss and forget about accomplishing anything.
I'm tending toward the third option.
The worst part of this is that I no longer feel any motivation to put Paula to bed at all. It just seems like a complete waste of time. This may be the part where she finally learns to put herself to bed, or drives me and her dad absolutely, unequivocally stark raving mad. Stay tuned to find out which one actually happens.
You wake up after a night of very little sleep, your throat hurts, your Aunt Flow is in town, your two-year-old daughter is either scratching your face or pulling your hair (depending on which part of you is turned toward her); you put on your maternity pants and find they fit you better than any other pair you own; your kid overturns the dog's water bowl all over your feet and the brand-new angora socks you got on sale and have been wearing for two days because all your other socks are dirty; your hair is beginning to take on a life of its own but said toddler won't let you out of her sight long enough for you to wash it; the house is strewn with dirty dishes, laundry and the remnants of some mysterious thing the dog is dragging around...
And nobody, but nobody, is going to make it better except for you and only you?
When there's no punch line at the end of the joke, it's called life. Today I'm taking it easy and laughing along.
Paula had her ear tubes put in yesterday without incident. Today her ears hurt enough to keep her from wearing her hearing aids, but not enough to dampen her spirits.
The hearing test we had waited so long for came back with slightly clearer results than we had gotten with sound field testing, and slightly better than what we thought we knew before. Instead of her hearing loss falling consistently into the severe range, she has moderate-sloping-to-severe hearing loss in both ears.
This means that for lower frequencies (more bass tones), she can hear them at lower volumes, possibly as low as 50 dB. As the frequencies get higher, she has more trouble hearing them unless they're at higher volumes. This is very common with sensorineural hearing loss. I'll get more information about these results tomorrow from the audiologist.
So Paula didn't exactly surprise us, but what I take from the results is that she is doing very, very well in spite of a hearing loss that makes conversational speech almost inaudible to her without her hearing aids. She is using a lot of new sounds and even making sense of the alphabet, both written, manual and verbal. In the past week or so she has said the words "red" and "feet," (impressive since the "f" sound is high frequency and therefore harder for her to hear; she seems to be learning it by replicating its shape on other people's mouths). She also signed DELICIOUS and BEAUTIFUL. The first was about strawberries, the second about herself.
I don't think I had ever eaten black beans before living in Guatemala. I certainly don't remember them until then.
In Guatemala black beans are what everyone eats every day. Almost every meal you order in a restaurant comes to you with a side of black beans. They almost always come enteros, whole, in the garlicky caldo or broth they were cooked in. The only times I ate black beans refried were when someone made them out of a box. Decant black powder, add boiling water: poof. Refried black beans.
But the vast majority of Guatemalans make their beans fresh every day and do not mash them. The gemlike beans glisten in their jet-black caldo.
The best breakfast I've ever eaten is eggs over-easy with fried ripe plantain swimming in black beans and accompanied by a dollop of sour cream. That was my favorite breakfast, with the possible occasional exception of huevos rancheros, which is basically the same thing but with a tomato pan sauce on top of the eggs. In Guatemala this dish is not spicy.
But the plain eggs, ripe fried plantain, black beans and sour cream is what I ate for my last meal in Guatemala.
It was early on a cloudy morning and we were stopped to eat a few hours away from the border with Mexico. We were still in the mountains and it was October and cold.
The place we stopped was like a million other little roadside eateries held together with chicken wire and force of habit. Most of the other customers were truckers. The light was terrible inside, the unfinished wooden tables grimy, everything totally normal and exactly what we expected after living in the country for four years.
We sat at the counter and ordered without looking at the menu. You ask "Que hay?" What is there? And the young indigenous woman tells you without making eye contact. There are eggs, plantains, beans. Her eyes are politely downcast.
It took us a long time to figure out that menus were more of a formality at many Guatemalan restaurants. My family would enter, get menus and study them for a number of minutes.
"I'd like [what Americans would call] the chicken-fried steak."
"No hay." Eyes downcast. "We're out."
"Okay, how about the chiles rellenos?"
"No hay."
"Que hay?" What do you have?
"Fried chicken with rice and beans and a small salad."
"Okay, we'll have that." My brother would then order a grape soda, I would order a Squirt, my parents colas, and our orders were in.
Breakfast was always easy for me, though. Huevos estrellados con platano frito. The beans went without saying.
That last breakfast in Guatemala I remember how perfectly the beans were cooked, and how delicious the broth was. The little handmade tortillas that came with the meal were just sweet enough to compliment the salty beans. The sour cream shone brilliantly white in that black soup, even in the dim light of the single bulb that barely illuminated the little diner. The eggs were cooked to be pretty by whoever was imprisoned back in that cramped kitchen. The plantains were golden brown, carmelized with a slight crust on the outside and soft and sugary inside.
This is how to eat that meal:
First cut up the beautiful eggs. Mix a small amount of sour cream into some of the bean broth. Cut off a small bite of plantain, swirl it through the caldo and cream mixture. Eat this bite, savoring the contrast of sweet and salt, the softness of the beans, the coolness of the cream and the warm sugar of the plantains.
Next bite is egg, with some yoke, and a forkful of beans. The beans are surprisingly light in texture and they flavor the eggs with that salt, garlic, onion that has had all night over a low, wood fire to mellow. Just plain delicious.
After moving back to the States I tried on a number of occasions to make black beans that tasted like what I ate in Guatemala. I added garlic, salt, onion, cooked slowly for hours and hours. Somehow it has never quite come out the way I remember it. Maybe the lighting is too good in my kitchen.
Now that Paula is eating beans practically every day I have considered trying again to recreate those beans that would magically transport me to the grimy counter in the poorly-lit diner.
But here in the U.S. black beans are too hard to digest. They taste too strong and give too many reminders after you've eaten them. It's just not the same.
The nanny. Sweet girl, just so nice, 21 years old and engaged to be married. Loves kids, has nieces and nephews of her own. I interviewed her Sunday and emailed her later to offer her two days a week with me and Paula.
First thing she tells me when she gets in the car yesterday: "I'm feeling a little under the weather and I think I might be pregnant."
Okay. Deep breath. I think to myself, this might not go the way I wanted it to. I envision her belly big, feet up on my couch, me bringing her glasses of water. Okay.
Then as the day goes on and we talk more, I begin to wonder how I manage to attract people so in need of nurturing into my life. I shrug my shoulders.
She says she was pregnant before, after being raped at 16. She lost the baby. Okay. I pat her arm.
Then over lunch she tells me why she is afraid to learn to drive. Also at 16 she was in a car accident with three friends. She was in the back seat and saw her friend go through the windshield and die. She adds that in March her best friend died in a drunk driving accident - the friend was the drunk driving.
She attended seven funerals in 2005 alone. But none was as bad as the 2001 funeral of her 13-month-old niece.
Deep, deep breaths. Okay. All right.
I'm thinking, how can I keep this from becoming a situation in which I mother her?
But that's one thing I love to do: mother pregnant women. It just feels so good, so right to me. Maybe someday I'll become a doula or a midwife, but for now I just get my kicks taking food to my pregnant friends and listening to their worries on the phone. It makes me feel good to be in that energy field of new, growing life.
So of course I'm looking forward to knowing her through this pregnancy. She and her boyfriend were planning on getting married in the fall anyway, so it's a welcome, if early, pregnancy. I reassured her that they can make it work, to just take it one thing at a time.
But she really wasn't feeling well. In the car she told me her left side was hurting really badly since she woke up yesterday morning. Her back and her left side. Oh crap, I think. Ectopic.
She didn't have shoulder pain, which is good. She wasn't planning on seeing a doctor until next week on a quick trip home to the East Coast. I kept thinking she shouldn't wait.
After a number of gentle suggestions I finally told her I was concerned she might have an ectopic pregnancy. I called an old friend who knows everything there is to know about women's health.
"Get her to the emergency room. Don't wait."
My heart sank. I dropped Paula at my neighbor's house and we drove to the county hospital - the one fictionalized in the television show, ER. This one has much longer waits and a much less sexy staff.
I waited with her and interpreted in my awkward way until her roommate showed up. I needed to get back to pick up Paula and get her to bed. I worried the hospital staff would just shout her name, not come and get her, that she'd wait forever in that awful waiting room and never be seen. She reassured me she would be fine.
This morning I still haven't heard anything. I don't know what will become of our employer-employee relationship. I have no idea what will become of that little life shining dimly inside of her. I just hope the mom's okay, not facing yet another reason to grieve.
For the first time in Paula's short life, she has done what I once thought was impossible. She has slept through the night. Yep. Three times in the past five days. I hardly know which way is up.
The really amazing thing is what I believe to be the key to her newfound success in sleeping. Beans.
The nights that she slept through the night followed dinners of beans. Baked beans, mostly, and some refried.
I have always known that my kid was what some would call a frijolera, a lover of the bean. Pinto beans from a can were one of her first and most favorite foods, although in a fit of paranoia I decided to peel each one before she ate it, and this dampened my enthusiasm for that particular meal. Like so many other phases of parenting, that passed. Soon it was out of the can, onto the plate, into the mouth, end of story.
But I only make beans so often. I mean, you can't eat beans every single day, can you? Of course you can. If you live in Mexico or Guatemala or lots of other kinds of places you can and likely do eat them every single day, up to three, even five times a day. Beans are good food, and this is what my daughter has just now taught me.
Beans really are a magical fruit. It's actually amazing that this little girl, who can produce such loud, ripping, vibrato fricatives in the middle of the night, experiences no apparent intestinal problems with beans. They just fill her up and let her sleep a long, long sleep. Beee-utiful.
I remember years ago, when I was on the Zone diet, and had converted into a zombie of Zone zealotry (try saying that three times fast!), a vegetarian friend said beans were a good source of protein. Pshaw! I answered, parroting the Zone book, they're full of carbohydrates! No good!
But, my friend pointed out, they have a low glycemic index.
Right, I nodded wisely and let the subject drop. I wanted to seem like I knew all about that but disagreed anyway. Whatever. I had no idea what a glycemic index was, but now I do. And I see why it is such a wonderful dinner for that little bean I call Paula.
I'm sure you already know this, but a low glycemic index means that a food causes a very gradual rise in blood sugar over time. So there are no sugar highs with subsequent crashes. Just a good long stretch of feeling full.
This, I'm sure, is why Paula finally stopped waking up in the middle of the night and signing EAT. "Eeekh," she voices with it. I tried feeding her in the middle of the night a few times, but it really didn't seem to help her get back to sleep. Then I thought I was getting her stomach used to eating at night and refused to feed her on a few excruciatingly long nights. Now I just push the beans before bedtime.
Unfortunately, though, she seems to have gotten back into teething mode today and didn't eat anything for dinner except some "health food" cheese puffs and blueberry yogurt. My hopes are riding on the very high fat content of the cheese puffs to keep us peacefully asleep, at least for tonight.
Joel told me yesterday afternoon that he thought Coco was sick again. She was leaving little drops of blood around behind her. Great. More rectal bleeding from my dog is just what I need right now.
But it turns out she's not sick. She's in heat. Coco, our un-spayed rescue dog, is getting a visit from Aunt Flow. Again, just great.
Because now we have to figure out a way to keep her periodic guest from getting all over our floors - and mopping is not in the picture. Well, Joel did just mop the wood floors (are you supposed to do that? They just really needed it) in the living and dining rooms, and nobody wants to repeat that for another year or two. My idea of a clean floor is one that, as happened last night, got an eight-ounce bottle of water spilled on it and had to be mopped to the sound of my loud and foul-mouthed cursing.
See, my patience with Paula has been pretty good, considering the sleepless nights, my persistent cold and her general lack of vigor due to teething. Even when she is trying to go to sleep and she's holding her bottle with one hand and reaching up with the other to run her little sharp nails across my face, pinching my nostrils closed - nostrils which have found a way to be both congested and runny - preventing me from breathing, then sticking the same little fingers, now covered in my snot, into my mouth, attempting to pry open my lips and teeth to achieve maximum gross-out and minimum respiration, I still have not lost my temper.
But then I have no patience for little things that go wrong from time to time, like when, in the middle of the night I get up to make Paula yet another bottle and I accidentally spill it TWICE on the kitchen floor. Or walking into an errant waste basket in the dark ... Suffice to say that's when I bring out my best quality profanity.
The up side of this, of course, is that unless I use those choice words a lot, Paula will probably not hear them well enough to figure out how to reproduce them. That's my one consolation.
I try to remember to "pray more and swear less," as I have recently taken to repeating to myself. I repeat these words, when I remember to: Is there any Remover of difficulties save God? Say: Praised be God! He is God! All are His servants and all abide by His bidding.
It's a Baha'i prayer for times when you can only think of foul, foul things to say. Well, that's how I think of it lately.
But no amount of cursing or praying will prevent Coco from bleeding all over the floor - and necessitating real cleaning of said floor. So we tried something we saw on King of the Hill, an episode in which Hank's bloodhound, Ladybird, went into heat. We took a pair of Joel's old chones (see Spanglish dictionary entry for men's underwear) and put them on Coco backwards so her tail could wag freely thanks to the particular engineering of tidy whiteys. But let's just say that Joel's waist size is a little bit bigger than Coco's. Not so successful.
This morning - did I mention it was around 4 this morning, as I was struggling once again to either get Paula to sleep or ignore her well enough to sleep myself? - I had an idea. Pull-ups! So now Coco is walking around with low-rise, Princess-motif disposable training pants. I pointed out the low-rise aspect, so important for tail mobility, and Joel started calling her Kelly Clarkson.
So as the world wakes up to a new year, blinks its eyes after a night of revelry and embraces, yet again, the same tired resolutions, we're still mired in the world of teething, incessant toddler hunger and the adventures of our rescue dog. When I told Coco to sit so I could give her her breakfast (that's part of our little dominance routine), she refused TWICE, and I put her food in the fridge for later. I guess she really is on the rag. Or maybe she just doesn't like Kelly Clarkson.
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