The Trixie Update

[Note] An update has been added to the end of this post.

How short my memory is. It was only last week that Trixie was throwing up with a stomach bug, but it might as well have been the week before because I had completely forgotten what constitutes a real problem when it comes to toddlers.

Yesterday I was up in arms about a less than ideal nap schedule. Today I asked the daycare to encourage her to stay awake if she started acting sleepy. So how did it go? The results are mixed. On the plus side, she did not take a nap this morning. On the negative side, she did puke everywhere around 11:15am. And apparently she was acting tired right before this happened, so who knows, maybe she would have slept had it not been for the inconvenience of projectile vomiting.

I went and collected her and brought her back home. Just in time to discover what frantic pawing at the mouth means. Here’s a hint: It doesn’t mean, “My teeth hurt from teething.” BTW, Jenn, don’t throw your stuff on the couch when you get home.

With Trixie in her third change of clothes for the day, and my second, I foolishly give her a saltine cracker to settle her stomach. This is the part of the story where I tell expectant, concerned readers that hardwood floors are worth a few mild concussions because they are much, much easier to clean up than carpet.

Secure in her fourth change of clothes, Trixie dropped off to sleep a few minutes ahead of schedule at 12:51pm. The household is once again running like clockwork.

[UPDATE 2/15/05 4:05pm] Now the household is running like a broken clock. Trixie has thrown up 7 times total today. We’ve been to the doctor and we’re waiting to see if she can keep water down. If that works we’ll move up to diluted apple juice, otherwise I guess we’ll have a “Trixie goes to the ER” TPOD week.

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At the request of a reader, I pulled together some of visual patterns we tested on Trixie as an infant. However, for liability reasons, the Trixie Update doesn’t recommend using these for children under the age of 12.

The Trixie Update Human Infant Visual Stimulation Design Pattern Kit
Download: (PDF 68k)

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This morning as I was washing dishes, Trixie came into the kitchen carrying a used diaper, flapping in her outstretched arms. I jumped to get it from her, not knowing where she had found it or what might be inside.

Upon closer inspection it wasn’t a used diaper at all. It appeared to be a brand new diaper that she had simply unfolded and brought in to show me. But where did she get it from? “Trixie, did you get this out of the diaper bag?” She nods. Mystery solved and I’ll move the diaper bag off the floor.

About 45 minutes later, I lift Trixie out of her high chair and realize her pajamas are sopping wet. Considering all she had in front of her was a pimento cheese sandwich and a sippy cup, I was pretty confused. What in the hell spilled? And why was it only on her backside and the highchair seat, and not in her lap??

I begin taking off her pajamas and discover her onesie is unsnapped. Then I discover she’s not wearing a diaper either! Trixie has gotten really, really good at zippers, buttons, snaps, locks and the like.

We constantly have to go in and zip her pajamas back up when putting her to bed. We thought she would learn to stop doing it. Instead, I think she learned that unzipped pajamas are a big red flag. Today she must have unzipped, unsnapped, taken off her diaper (sometime right after I changed her because it was totally clean) and zipped back up. It was the perfect crime. Then she even went so far as to bring the evidence directly to me. Diabolical.

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The neighbor’s tabby got into the house today. He’s always hanging out on our stoop, staring and pawing at Trixie through the glass, and today he slipped inside. I had to pick him up to get him out and, man, cats weigh nothing. It was the first time I had picked up a cat in several years and I remembered them weighing a lot more.

It was like getting one of those frosty mugs they sometimes have at the cheap pizza places. You know the ones. They look like they’re made of heavy glass, but they’re actually super-lightweight plastic? And when you pick up your drink the first time you practically throw it in the air because it doesn’t weigh anything close to what you expected?

Picking up that cat today was the equivalent of spilling my drink all over the place. We’re both lucky he didn’t hit the ceiling.

I am so used to picking up Trixie all the time, that by default, and stupidly, I expect most things I encounter to weigh about as much as she does. She not only dominates our household, our health, and our life, she’s moved on to fundamental units that govern my ability to communicate with the rest of the world. In short, Trixie has become my new unit of measurement. She’s remapped my sense of scale and weight. Cats used to be heavy. Now they are about as light as a pair of socks.

And it’s really not a great system. It creates all sorts of conversion problems. I mean, I can tell someone that a cat weighs .326 trixies (t), but they aren’t going to know what the hell I’m talking about. It’s also not a stable standard. Trixie’s getting bigger on a daily basis. This makes a trixie more akin to a fluctuating exchange rate than the precisely defined (and currently more popular) kilogram and pound. Jenn used to weigh about 17.1 t and now she only weighs 4.7 t. Did she lose weight? Did Trixie grow a lot? With this system, who the hell knows?

Still, most of these problems can be overcome by means of wheel chart. Something along the lines of the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, only more complicated. I know it’s not going to be an easy sell. The trixie will have to compete against the madison (m), the olivia (o), the aiden (a) and more. We face a coming crisis of standards that will make us long for the old English/Metric disagreements. I’m afraid we’ll become paralyzed as hannah (h) to jacob (j) to bailey (b) conversions grind our national infrastructure to a standstill. We’ll eventually be forced to fall back on long forgotten units of measure. What a cute little baby, we’ll say. “One stone, and 40 pennyweights??” “Holy crap! I hope you got an epidural!”

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She climbed out of the crib again while I was in the shower. Thankfully Jenn was home. We then caught a glimpse of how she was doing it. It looked like a cross between the men’s rings competition and a wounded gazelle trying to escape a lion.

We’re now keeping the side lowered so she can easily get in and out at will. We don’t want to take the side off entirely because Trixie rolls around like crazy in her sleep — imagine a sack of potatoes in the back of a pickup truck. We’re not sure what we’re going to do next.

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On these pages we don’t normally deal with “emotions” and “feelings” unless it’s something along the lines of… Trixie is upset, and I’m feeling sick from not getting enough sleep.

However, against my better judgement, I feel compelled to address something I discovered recently. Babies screw up your emotional balance. Twice in the past week I’ve found myself completely caught off guard. First, Jenn and I went to see the movie The Incredibles. About halfway through, when the hero’s kids are in danger, I notice a stupid, panicky swelling of fear and love. From an animated movie.

A couple of days after that I was grabbing a slice of pizza and they had the movie I am Sam on the TV. I hadn’t seen this movie before and I was only in there for about 5 minutes. The scene playing was when they were in the courtroom taking away his young daughter. Everyone else is eating pizza; I’m ready to cry.

Now I don’t know if it’s the cumulative lack of sleep that’s battering down my emotional defenses, or if having a daughter has actually rewired part of my brain to respond to saccharine, family-driven events, but it’s annoying. What the hell kind of life is this? The next time I watch Beaches, what, am I going to need a box of kleenex?

This is messed up. And it’s ironic. Guys spend their whole life constructing intricate emotional defenses to the world. But these fortifications all face outward — you forget to watch out for an inside job by a 22-pound saboteur.

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Even though she’s pretty good about handing them to me, I can tell you right now that if we ever have to take Trixie to the hospital because she’s choking on/swallowed something, I guarantee what will show up on the X-ray.

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After taking this trip, I realize that Trixie’s decent sleep schedule exists only because of routine and familiarity. Once you throw those out the window, you get to see what horrible kinds of sleep instincts are still buried in that exhausted little brain.

Our plan was to begin the trip at bedtime, let Trixie fall asleep on the way up, and then carefully move her — still asleep — once we arrived around midnight. Trixie’s plan was to grab a short nap on the trip up, and then have us carefully move her — wide awake — once we arrived. She then proceeded to stay up until 2am.

As for the sleeping arrangements, Trixie slept (screamed) in the Pack ‘N Play portable crib during this trip. It wasn’t ideal, but it’s really the only solution because it just doesn’t work to bring Trixie into our bed. She is a kicker. She’ll also try to peel your eyelids or ears right off your face. In short, letting Trixie in our bed is dangerous, and it only happens when we make bad decisions in the middle of the night.

So for the duration of the trip, Trixie didn’t sleep that well overnight and she refused to take a nap during the day. The only time she actually fell asleep was from sheer exhaustion, and by the time we got to this point she was stumbling around, bumping into things, babbling incoherently, grinding her fists into her eyes and generally acting like she was drunk.

I also think Trixie was getting stressed out from waking up in a new place every time she fell asleep. She falls asleep in the car, wakes up in a strange apartment. Falls asleep in front of the Capital, wakes up in a coffee shop. By Monday she was struggling to keep her eyes open out of fear of where she might end up next. I know I would be a little freaked out. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode for toddlers.

Despite sleep challenges, we had a great trip and I’m ready to hit the road again. Trixie, however, is still catching up on her sleep.

Oh yeah, the title? Trixie Standard Time, of course.

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We’re still working on the concept of toilet-training when Trixie lets us. Her interest in the subject comes and goes. She’ll get into it for a week or so, and then be indifferent for 3 weeks. We recently got a new potty for her to use. It’s larger, and — it takes batteries. It’s got a light-sensor built into the seat that chimes when ’something’ passes in front of it.

At first I was skeptical. Once the toilet is activated, an insanely bright, red LED shoots out and lights up the whole basin. Trixie immediately took to this new light-activated laser potty, and wasted no time poking around for hours in the glowing, pulsing basin. It was hard enough to keep her hands out of the toilet before. Now there’s a light show in the bathroom.

Oh sure, I know, you probably already have a laser in your toilet. But does yours make noise? When this one first turns on, it sounds like Microsoft Windows starting up. It’s a nice little chime, and while it doesn’t explicitly ask, “Where do you want to go today?”, you know that’s what it’s thinking.

Trixie gets into the whole process for the most part. It’s a great celebration when something actually happens and the toilet always keeps you informed. Chime — chime — chime — chime. However, Trixie has figured out how to game the toilet. If she shoves her hands in the basin while she’s sitting down, it will also chime, and that’s excellent, just excellent, hygienic behavior that bears reinforcing. She also totally gets into the “bye-bye” part when we transfer the potty basin to the REAL TOILET. She knows all about the flushing, and likes to make sure that everything is really gone.

This chiming, laser-potty is insane, and I’m sure this is just the beginning of a vicious potty marketing cycle. I know the way Fisher Price works. This time next year there will be potties that sing to kids, greet them by name. It will make us wonder how we ever got along without talking laser-toilets.

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In a word, No. A lot of readers have recently asked about whether Trixie is finally talking. I’ve been hesitant to address the issue because there’s not much to write about and I’ve had my head in the sand. She just doesn’t do it, beyond the occasional Ma-ma and Da-da.

Words aside, Trixie is pretty vocal. She does a lot of moaning and mmm’ing when eating because she likes her food. Jenn and I don’t even hear it anymore, but apparently it’s pretty loud. We rediscover this every time we eat with other people. There’s always this moment where I look up and see that everyone has stopped eating and is staring at Trixie in slack-jawed disbelief. Some parents are embarrassed by this sort of thing — I look at it as taking the pressure off me. As long as Trixie is around, no one is going to walk away from dinner commenting on my dining habits.

Aside from mealtime mmm’ing, there’s plenty of humming that moves up and down in pitch, frequent sing-song la-la-la/ba-ba-ba, ecstatic screeching and the perennial favorite, ballistic screaming and yelling.

However, none of these verbalizations really translate into actual words. I’ve gotten to the point, I think, that I just don’t care anymore. We’ve worried enough about it for months, and the axiom that every child develops at her own pace is pretty comforting.

One reason not to worry is that there’s nothing wrong with her cognitive skills. She understands plenty, and has readily followed directions for months and months. We can ask her to go get her shoes if we’re going out, or to go dump some empty bottles in the recycling bin. Most recently, we can tell her to go get something to drink if she’s thirsty and she is able to go open the fridge and get out her milk or juice cup (depending on preference) which is now kept on the bottom shelf.

Many readers have suggested sign language as a way to bridge the language gap. We’ve tried. It took her forever to decide to even wave “hi” and “bye”. The only other thing she’s picked up is from a kids show where one of the characters celebrates Autumn by acting like a tree with out-stretched arms. This she can do. Trixie can sign “tree” no problem. “Trixie, tree!” Boom, arms go up. Also if she sees a tree, or we point out a tree, arms go up. This proves valuable in situations where Trixie needs to warn us that a tree is about to fall, or if she wants to climb a tree or if the squirrels are in the tree again.

I’m sure she’ll talk when she’s ready. As stated, I’m trying not to worry about it, but it doesn’t always work out. Today it caught up with me in a pet store while searching for kittens. Instead we got a giant parrot who kept loudly mocking us, “Hello!? How are you? Hello!” I wasn’t amused. We’re not going back until Trixie can bury that bird under an avalanche of profanity.

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