I love this.

Am I Mom Enough? A Motherhood Wish List

I hope I raise a child who says “thank you” to the bus driver when he gets off the bus, “please” to the waiter taking his order at the restaurant, and holds the elevator doors when someone’s rushing to get in.

I hope I raise a child who loses graciously and wins without bragging. I hope he learns that disappointments are fleeting and so are triumphs, and if he comes home at night to people who love him, neither one matter. Nobody is keeping score, except sometimes on Facebook.

I hope I raise a child who will stick up for a kid who’s being bullied on the playground. I also hope I raise a child who, if he’s the one being bullied, fights back. Hard. Oh, and if he’s the bully? I hope he realizes that his mother, who once wore brown plastic glasses and read the phonebook on the school bus, will cause him more pain than a bully ever could.

And I hope that if my child turns out to be a colossal screw-up, I take it in stride. I hope I remember that he’s his own person, and there’s only so much I can do. He is not an appendage to be dangled from my breasts on the cover of a magazine, his success is not my ego’s accessory, and I am not Super Mom.

Read the full list…

The Peanut had his qualification appointment for early intervention today. Four women showed up, played with him, talked with us, watched him eat and after two hours presented us with their recommendation.

Both the Chop and I have talkative families who love food, so I never really considered that our kid would have any sort of speech or feeding delay. When he wasn’t that interested in other foods, we just assumed he was picky – the Chop is picky – and when he refused to eat things, we just assumed he was strong-willed (which he is, lol).

He tested above his age for social, motor and cognitive skills, but qualified for the program with his adaptive and communication skills… ie, food and words. We wanted him to qualify, because the program looks awesome – if the women who showed up today are any indication – but it’s still a tough pill to swallow.

This is a most fascinating article. And yes, it’s from 2006 – but it is highly relevant.

We are so lucky to be alive in this day and this age. We haven’t cured cancer or AIDS (yet – I do believe one will be cured in my lifetime), but we’ve made such amazing strides in medicine and those strides have saved millions of lives.

The Peanut has not progressed with eating the way other kids have. There’s no way around trying to describe it – he doesn’t eat much of anything, he doesn’t really feed himself and what he does try to eat, he mostly spits out after absorbing whatever liquid comes out. The Chop and I have tried for months to change this with no success, so at his most recent well visit, our pediatrician gave us the numbers for specialists.

One scheduled us for an appointment in six weeks (sigh), one had no openings and one scheduled an intake appointment almost immediately – which happened today. She came to the house, filled out reams of paperwork, talked to us and watched him eat.

And for the first time in weeks, I feel a huge sense of relief. The hardest part about wondering if your child might have a problem is everyone else in your life disagreeing. He might be picky, it’ll take time, just give him some space, etc., are just a few of the responses we’ve heard when discussing his problems with eating. But he’s our child and we know that something is not right.

The intake person thinks he’ll qualify – he has to score low enough in a particular category to qualify – and if he doesn’t, she said, we can use clinical opinion to make the decision that he needs to be in the program. It’s a great program, largely covered by the state and our insurance (we have to pay $1500 a year, but a private program can be upwards of $1500 a month) and she is going to request to be on his team (of course he charmed her – my son has lady killer skills), and we’re ready for some help.

He’s so smart in other ways – the intake person loved interacting with him – but his complete un-interest in food is a problem.

The Peanut decided to cap off his bruised head (ugh, it goes down his nose and slightly affects his eye area) with a split lip, which he got by walking into some bars at the playground. Ugh.

When we first started going to the baby gym class, the Peanut stuck close to us. He sat in our laps during the warm up and the introduction; we carried him willingly to do the group activity and during free play, he usually stayed wherever we set him down. These days he’s off like a rocket the minute the door opens. He’s uninterested in staying on the big red mat, choosing instead to walk and crawl up and down the gym equipment (he loves the wedges). The warm up and introduction go as usual, with the teacher pointing to him and waving. He smiles and watches, but stays where he is. There’s obviously way too much for him to explore to waste time with us.

Today his teacher (whom he just adores) set up an obstacle course on the mat. Several hula hoops and rings to crawl through, all while on top of big blocks. As the other toddlers milled around, some banging on the blocks, others refusing to move once placed on top, we grabbed the Peanut and placed him at the beginning. He looked at us, turned and proceeded to crawl perfectly through the entire obstacle course, before jumping down and going back to his wedges.

We were shocked, but clapping, and we grabbed him again. Like a mouse to cheese, back through he went, not once veering off course or getting distracted. His teacher was impressed, and the Porkchop and I smiled a little and shrugged, noting that it must be all the playground time he gets.

Granted, once we left we talked about it nonstop and gave ourselves high fives. Whoop, whoop, parental pride baby!

I love snowy days when the sun is shining and it’s cold, but not so cold that going outside without a jacket for a few minutes isn’t OK. We went over to our friend’s house to meet her new puppy – who spent half the time trying to pull him down to wrestle – and Ollie was more interested in stomping around in the snow.

Our house is so close to a main street, he’s far more interested in watching cars; she lives in a wooded area, set so far off a main road that it’s almost silent when you’re outside

I can’t wait until my parents move into the lake house up north. He’s going to go crazy for the lake AND the silence.

Some friends of ours were over last night (seriously, did you think that I ate all that crap by myself!?), and this morning, the boys had a ball playing together. They were both incredibly sad when they departed, but we parents had stayed up until past three and the boys were up at 6 and 7. Oy veh. Parenthood means you aren’t supposed to stay up late. Why do we keep forgetting that??

I took the Peanut to the park today to play with two of his little friends. One is an adorably precocious girl, a month younger and full of attitude; the other is a little moppet of a boy with silky hair and clumsy feet. The three of them don’t quite play together yet – more around and next to each other – but when we first arrive and they see each other, they all smile.

At this point we recognize that we are picking our son’s “friends” for him, but it’s nice to see that the ones we pick, he actually does like. We met them both in a baby gym class we do once a week, we three mothers being entertained by the helicopter parenting going on all around us. All of us are transplants to the area and have felt it quite hard to “friend” other women around here, as it’s a surprisingly cliquey group, and newcomers are not easily welcomed.

When I first moved north a couple of years ago, I complained to my cousin about this exact problem, and she told me that once we had kids, everything would change. Your kids will force you to meet people, she said, and when they’re young, it’ll be easier for you to steer them toward the kids of the people you want to be friends with.

Who knew she was so smart? ;)

The Peanut is not the best eater, a fact that surprised us, especially considering the Chop and I were both great eaters as kids. Now the Chop has some strong dislikes (onions, anything pickled, etc.), but in general, we eat lots of different things.

The Peanut, on the other hand, is currently subsisting on a diet of milk, water, oatmeal, cereal, yogurt, some pureed fruits with veggie mixed in, the occasional cracker, guacamole when he feels like it and a couple of chips. He is largely uninterested in feeding himself, aside from crackers, chips, a french fry when we’re out and most recently, a slice of apple with lunch.

Every week we go to the grocery store and pick out a few things that we think he might be interesting in trying to feed himself. Flatbread, pears, frozen pizza, hard breadsticks from Italy, carrot sticks – basically anything that might take on the approximate size and heft of a chip, if cut correctly, lol.

He tried pizza this weekend. Only a couple of bites, but we don’t sneer at progress.