Measuring Up – 1

Jessica walking Amanda to school.

As I was working on my last post “Some Things Take Time,” I began to ponder these next two posts on measuring up. It’s such an important topic that I took my time writing this, wanting to make sure that I communicate it as clearly as possible.

Does Your Child Measure Up?

Most of us have seen charts that measure a child’s developmental stages from infant to toddler. These charts help us as parents to know when our baby should be rolling over, sitting up on his or her own, crawling and the like. We need to be informed, because we spend more time with our children than the medical professionals do and we might notice something out of the ordinary that they never saw.

It’s important that our children get the professional care that they need, but that is not what these posts are about. They are about addressing the kind that parents do with one healthy, normal kid against another. Pride, not the interest of the child, drives this kind of comparing.

Let me use a short scenario. Dad takes his son Jimmy at age 2 ½ to his very first day at playgroup. While there, Dad meets the father of another boy named Johnny who he finds out is the same age and has a birthday in the same month as Jimmy. Both dads are standing proudly by watching their boys at play. The boys run up to their dads, telling them excitedly about something they had been playing. Johnny is speaking in full sentences, but Jimmy is not yet able to. Up until that moment, Jimmy’s dad had thought his son was a bright spark, but now he begins to wonder.

What would you say to Jimmy’s dad? I’d love to hear from you, but I might not respond to comments on this post as there is more that I want to say on this topic in “Measuring Up – Part 2.”

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Some Things Just Take Time

Purple Play-Dough in Her Hair (18 months old)

My previous post was about how parents can help children overcome their fears. I mentioned that using games was a key in helping Amanda overcome her fear of shadows. Today’s post is about a fear that Amanda had that took her two years to finally outgrow. That was the fear of getting water on her head or in her eyes. It started with her very first head-to-toe bath.

Amanda was not my first child. I was very used to the routine of checking the temperature of the bath water. I was also used to the task of supporting the baby’s head with one hand while washing it with the other. Despite all my best efforts, she would scream and carry on as if she was being mishandled. Sometimes the other members of my family wanted to know what I was doing to her.

Bath-Time (about 1 month old)

I would try to calm her fears by singing to her or making a game out of bath-time, but nothing worked. By the way, I didn’t wash her hair every time she took a bath. I only washed her hair whenever it was necessary. As soon as she was old enough to hold a facecloth over her eyes, I let her do that to try and help her feel more in control of the situation.

I still remember the first time she didn’t cry. She was two years old. She and I both verbally celebrated her achievement. After that, she began to out-grow her fear and the crying happened less and less often.

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Yikes! Pinworms!

The other day I mentioned that Amanda had a nosebleed episode at night just before she went to sleep. Nosebleeds can be quite common in children, so we didn’t let it worry us. We just kept an eye on her. The day after, she had another nosebleed incident and she also complained about a swollen lower lip.

She had been to the doctor about a week prior to the nosebleeds. We had her checked because she had been complaining about her stomach and discomfort in her private areas. We had noticed inconstancy with her urine and constipation. It seemed to the doctor that the constipation was the only thing causing the other problems and so we had nothing further to go on.

With these latest developments, I had a feeling that she was in fact showing signs of having an illness, but what it was I did not know. I went on to Google and typed in her symptoms and came across this fantastic website called (PBC) Pregnancy and Baby Care. I went on to their "Toddler" page.  The sore lower lip helped narrow down my search and what I discovered is that Amanda most probably had pinworms. One of the symptoms mentioned on the site was that toddler’s infected with pinworms can have behavior changes. Amanda was particularly stroppy these past few days and she got into trouble for her bad attitude a few times. Now we just blame it on the worms! (If only we could always blame our negative behavior on something/someone else!)

My husband went to the pharmacist and now we are all on de-worming medication. I know it’s not the nicest of topics, but these things happen even to parents like us who insist that everyone wash their hands regularly, especially after going to the bathroom and before eating.

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