Thirteen Months - Illness and more Illness!

Alice is thirteen months old, beginning her second year of life. The past month and a bit we have all been in the wars with illness after illness. There was the gastro that almost ruined Alice’s first birthday celebrations. Then there was the terrible case of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease which threw a lot of pain and suffering at baby Alice. She screamed so much from the pain of blisters in her throat and mouth that she completely lost her voice, which distressed her even more as she could not cry out for help.

Around ten days before she came down with H, F & M we had taken her for her 12 month immunisations and just as she was recovering from this god-awful virus she also developed some vaccine side effects that had me very scared for my little girl. She coped incredibly well with the immunisations themselves, hardly even a cry and no immediate after-effects, but as we found out 5% of children develop a measles-like rash, fever and lethargy around 7-10 days after immunisation. Of course Alice fell into the 5% and of course I totally blew those side effects out of proportion. When you can so easily imagine the dead weight of your lost child in your arms it becomes harder and harder to convince yourself that adverse events are unlikely and improbable and instead can too easily imagine the worst possible thing again befalling you. If the death of one of your children isn’t a painful enough thing to carry around for the rest of your life, the sense that you are cursed to suffer – that every conceivable thing that could happen will happen to you, well it is hard to maintain perspective sometimes, particularly in stressful situations of high emotion.

When Alice went really downhill again last Monday afternoon we assumed it was the H, F & M but by the time we got her to see the doctor she had developed a full body rash, was pale, feverish and could barely stay awake. Of course I’d forgotten all about the immunisations by this time and thought that she was becoming seriously ill. I could not contain my anxiety, no matter the doctor’s assurances that it would be short-lived and that she would most likely be over the worst of it within 24 hours. By the time I’d taken her from the doctor’s office to the car I had convinced myself that she was the one in a million case who’d die because of her immunisations. I really had to try hard that day to stay calm so that I didn’t stress Alice out any more than she already was. As the doctor had said, the rash did begin to clear the next day, although she was still very tired and irritable. It took a good few more days for us to start to see her cheery old self again. Since her smiles and silliness have returned I’ve been making an extra effort to just enjoy playing with her, ignoring how much the floor needs to be vacuumed and the cleaning washing needs to be folded and put away.

Given that Alice has caught so many bugs since she began in childcare a couple of months ago I fear that we might be in for more illness as the winter draws closer. I know it is unavoidable, and that it is good for her immune system, and that most things she gets will not be serious (or as unpleasant as the H, F & M) but so much of me still wants to pull her out of childcare and keep her at home where I can better protect her. I have to fight this urge daily and can only imagine how much harder that gets when your children start becoming more independent and go off into the world without you. I have to let her have experiences and freedoms, and I want nothing less for her of course, but I also selfishly want to keep her with me always so that I know she is safe. Someone very wise once told me that having a child is like taking your heart and watching it walk around in the world without you – you can no longer protect it from hurt or harm but become just a fairly helpless observer. She couldn’t have been more right. But I know how important it is to let go. Even at this early age, to teach her that she can be safe in the world without me – that the world is not a scary place.

Being so ill has meant we’ve held off on a lot of transitions we were planning to begin making after Alice turned one. Weaning her from bottles and onto sippy cups and trying to cut out overnight feeds (she still feeds at least twice overnight). Partly we have made that rod for our own back because we feed her to sleep and use bottles to soothe her when she wakes during the night. I find it really hard to think in terms of long term gains so I always find myself doing the thing that is going to get the results right now, and feeding to soothe and sleep is one of those things. I really don’t mind feeding her once a night. I know she doesn’t need it, but I’d be happy to do so, it is just that sometimes she wakes and cannot go back to sleep without being fed and cuddled for a really long time, and those nights make it really hard, especially as I no longer get the concessions associated with having a newborn baby that does the same – naps when the baby naps, not having to work, people generally expecting much less of you. I’m back in the world now and I need to be able to function during the day and not be reaching for caffeine and chocolate to keep my energy levels up when they begin to flag. I’m trying to make some healthy changes and build some fitness up so I feel that all of this also depends on me getting a decent amount of sleep each night.

Because her throat was so sore Alice also went off all of her solid food, which worries me a little. She is not a great eater compared to all the other babies her age I know. She refuses to eat anything off a spoon at the best of times so she never really gets a good volume of food as she picks around on her plate with her fingers. I’m trying not to put any pressure on her as the last thing I want is to create a general food aversion but god dammit I just want her to eat! It makes me so happy to see her eat a good meal, it just doesn’t happen very often! We continue to offer her lots of food, whether she eats it or throws most of it on the floor in disgust, but I have to admit it gets a bit demoralising after a while when you go to so much effort to prepare food for her and she won’t have a bar of it. I can’ t help but take it personally! There are a few favourite things she will eat most of the time – scrambled eggs, sultanas, rice snacks, carrots, but I don’t want to get into the habit of only offering her things that are her favourite, so I’m kind of at a loss as to how to proceed from here. How do you get a reluctant baby to eat?!

She’s become super playful over the last few weeks when she’s been feeling well. She’s figured out how to play peek-a-boo and will often take a piece of clothing and put it over her head to hide from you and thinks it is the funniest thing ever when you act surprised to see her after she pulls it off. She’s also taken to hiding around corners and then peeking around the wall at you. It is so cute and she grins like mad while she is doing it. Her other favourite game is putting her hands on her head and then you copying her or vice versa. Sometimes she just comes out and does it while she’s in the middle of something else and Leslie and I then have to race to copy her. It’s kind of fun for us too and she enjoys it so much. She’s beginning to put her hands over her eyes now as well and we are trying to teach her other parts of her face to put her hands on. 

We are really beginning to notice her interest and affinity for music. She absolutely loves to dance and bop around and it makes my heart melt so much to walk into a room to find her sitting there rocking from side to side to the song from one of her toys or the radio. She doesn’t care how good the song is either – she’ll begin to dance even to something silly that we are singing to her! She loves to stand up against the TV stand where our stereo speaker sits and dance right in front of where the music comes out. I’ve been trying desperately to capture her bopping on video but she always stops by the time I get out my phone and switch it to video mode! She’s becoming really hard to photograph as every times she sees the phone or camera now she just takes a dive for it and throws a big tantrum if she can’t have it. It’s making it hard to get stuff like blogging done as I can’t use any electronics in her presence without her stealing them off me, and if I refuse, her going into a crabby baby rage!

Another of the cutest things she does at the moment is go into her room, pull all of her books of the shelves, and sit quietly turning the pages. I’ve been doing things in the kitchen once or twice and realised everything has gone really quiet. I’ve rushed into her bedroom to see what kind of mischief she’s up to and she’s just been sitting there reading. I find those moments just extraordinary. Not just because I’m so happy she loves books but just noticing that she’s beginning to choose which things she wants to do rather than just do whatever is put in front of her. Her intentions and actions are becoming so much more deliberate, which is a huge developmental milestone, but also means she has very strong opinions about what she would or would not like to do! Having her nappy changed or being dressed and undressed are about the worst things we can do to her right now. It is really becoming quite impossible and she is really strong and twisting and contorting to get away from you. We’ve found only one thing that keeps her still and calm while being changed at the moment and that is a slowly-deflating helium balloon left over from her birthday party. Because it is on its last legs it is kind of floating down low in the middle of the room and if we put it beside her change table she’ll look at it and play with it for long enough for you to get the job done. She loves balloons and always points up when she sees them. She knows the word ‘balloon’ now too and when you say it she will look up to see if she can see one.

She has a few words in her vocabulary now – mama, dada, cat, nan, hiya. I can tell that she understands a lot more of what I say now though. She listens really, really hard. We read lots of stories at home and at the library and I talk to her all the time about what we are doing so I hope that I am providing her with a really language-rich environment that will help her learn to speak.

We’ve just started playgroup with a few mums and babies from my mothers group and Alice is loving that. They have soft climbing equipment and she’s quite brave about crawling up on top of things, which surprised me! She’s also attending lots of her friends’ first birthday parties at the moment. We’ve had one every weekend, and next weekend we even have two to go to!

I really hope that she stays in good health for the coming months as I want the chance to have some real fun with her now that she’s understanding more. I’m going to try to plan to take her to the Botanic Gardens while Autumn is still here and the leaves are all crunchy on the ground. I have very fond memories of doing the same thing when I was a child so I’d love to see her crawling about in the leaves. She’s still not walking – doesn’t really have any interest in being upright at all – but she’ll get there, and I’m not exactly in a hurry to have her able to run away from me at any opportunity, so I’ll happy have her crawling around for a while yet!