Baby Hulk ~ Walking

We decided it was official around a month ago, at about 15.5mo. Baby Hulk is walking. He is the earliest walker either Barb (Early Intervention), or Ms. Annie (PT) have ever seen. I don't know about Ms. Annie but Barb has been working for 28 years. Before Baby Hulk the earliest walker she had walked at 18mo. I am so proud of this dude it is ridiculous, but I feel like I can't really talk about it. I can talk about it with my friends with typical babies but when I bragged about how Baby Hulk was his PT's earliest walker, I think I made another mom (Tsunami's mom) feel bad. I didn't mean to! I am sure if Baby Hulk had a heart surgery to recover from and the set backs Tsunami had because of infantile seizures, he wouldn't have been walking so soon. I didn't even think it would make Tsunami's mom feel bad, Tsunami will be 5 this summer and walks, but she got a bit defensive when I was doing my proud Momma bragging. I have kept my Instagram bragging to a minimum because I have a lot of followers who also have a child with Down syndrome, many close in age to Baby Hulk. I know the stress that come from seeing other babies close in age to yours doing things that your baby isn't doing. It makes me nervous. I often start to write something about his achievements in Instagram posts and then end up just posting a picture with no caption because I am afraid it will make someone feel bad. Now I am making more and more friends with all these other parents, friends in real life, friends on Facebook.  But I am excited! I want to shout it from the rooftops!!! Baby Hulk is WALKING!!! But I am afraid I will make someone else feel bad!

To be fair, Baby Hulk kind of HAD to learn to walk. His big brothers do not go easy on him. They wrestle with him, and drag him around, he has to keep up! He climbs on them and pulls their hair. He takes their toys from them and steals their food. They are his big brothers and they keep him on track. He had to learn to walk so he can run, whether he needs to run from them or after them I am not yet sure but I will know soon enough because this boy can move! Ms. Annie hardly had time to admire his perfect crawling before he started walking, and I really think he has his big brothers to thank for that. They don't do gentle just because he is different, or because he is a baby. He is their brother and they will treat him as such. Because of that he will continue to thrive! ...It he wants to keep up!

  But of course, this means more trouble for me...

Baby Hulk ~ And the Winner is...

It is World Down Syndrome Day! March 21st. The 21st day of the third month. Symbolizing the 3rd copy of the 21st chromosome that is Trisomy 21 or Down syndrome. I just can't let it go by without making a post of some kind!

This morning, while the boys and I were in the car taking Mr. Grey to school we talked about what makes Baby Hulk different. He has Down syndrome. He has 47 chromosomes and we only have 46. Well for a 5 and 6 year old this is just not okay! Having more means you win! So congratulations to all the winners out there! Today is your day to celebrate!

You hear this business about children leaving an imprint on you, changing you. Well Baby Hulk, I recently discovered, took this literally. He HAS changed me. Instead of leaving an imprint on my heart... he left on on my ribs. With his butt. I am guessing he did this in the last 4 months of his 9 months on the inside because he had his butt shoved so far up in my ribs I was constantly doing a gangsta lean to try give my poor ribs relief and a few days ago I discovered my ribs don't match! They are warped on the right side where his butt was! Today I understand though. That was him winning.That was his victory lap, his touch down dance. He said "I WIN!" and he left his mark. No one else in here has ever had this many chromosomes and no one else ever will!

Baby Hulk is always winning.

Baby Hulk ~ Great New Steps

I know, I know. This is the most horrible I have ever been at being horrible at keeping up with posts! It has been since his first birthday that I have made a Baby Hulk post, I believe, and he is 15 months old (as of last Saturday) now! That is far too much time with way too much having happened for me to even remember it all! I wish I had at least written it down somewhere but alas, I have failed even myself!

At some point in time Baby Hulk has started crawling a real hands and knees crawl. Now he is such a pro at it he speeds around the carpet like a giant, yet adorable, scurrying cockroach. A better comparison would be a bird. He will tuck his head and scurry across the floor a few feet, pause, look around, and then tuck and scurry again, like a little bird. Run, stop, look, run, stop, look. It is pretty hilarious.

For months, I have been hearing of all the teeth my friends' babies are getting and for months I have had the pleasure of receiving many a gummy grin from my toothless wonder. That ended a couple of weeks ago (2/15) when Darling Husband stuck a finger in his mouth (probably to retrieve something he wasn't supposed to be eating) and felt a little tooth poking through! I was actually really sad about it! There is no oh yay how wonderful! A tooth! I know it is that way for some but for me it was just rubbing it in that my baby, my last baby is growing up. It is saying goodbye to those sweet gummy smiles I love so much. Just this past Saturday (3/1) he cut his second tooth and then the biting began. That first one came in so nicely we didn't even know it was happening! No drooling, no fussing, nothing! Nothing until just now actually. As I was beginning this paragraph on teeth Baby  Hulk cruises on over, and starts trying to climb up onto the couch with me. I pulled him up and he went straight for my shirt. I see the time, 11am, naptime. He wants to nurse to sleep. I put him to my breast and there isn't even a test suckle, just straight to the chomp! I pull him back and say "no biting" he looks at me like there is something wrong with me and starts wiggling, trying to get back to my breast. I try to latch him back on again and this time he bites so hard I yelled. And then told him no. I think my yell along with the no really upset him because he has never cried when I have told him no before! But he starts wailing and of course what have we been doing to sooth his crying? I nurse him! So what does he want? The boob! I feel so bad for making him cry that I bite the inside of my mouth hoping he is just giving me a test bite and will maybe bite twice and then start nursing but nope, he bites, bites again, bites again and then bites HARD! All while still crying. So then I start crying because I am sad that he is crying and of course it HURTS!!! and then Lumpy who is my sweet sensitive boy, starts crying because Baby Hulk and I are crying and we are all just a snotty crying mess! I finally just wrapped him up in a woven wrap and jiggled him to sleep, tightly tied to my chest. I have no idea what I am going to do when he wakes up if he keeps this biting thing up! I do not remember it being this horrible with the big boys. I guess it is a good thing one of the new things he is doing is drinking from a straw. Before that I was his only source of hydration!

Okay, happy thoughts! No need to dwell on that! I got him to sleep so we will deal with these new teeth when he wakes up!

Next on the exciting new list of things that I can remember! My baby is almost walking!!!! He is walking really. I think he would have it down by now if he really wanted to but some days he just doesn't seem to care to try! Then he will have days like today when he just practices all by himself! He has been going down the hall where we have 3 steps to the sunken in back of the house and he climbs the bottom step, turns around sits on it, bottom on the step, feet on the floor, then he stands up and takes a few steps, plops down and crawls back to the step to do it again. Tuesday though, that is how I know he is holding back. Tuesday we had our Early Intervention Birth-3 annual review. We were all sitting on the floor in my living room discussing all Baby Hulk can do, and what we would like to see him doing in the next year. Well all these people around in his space and none of them were paying him any attention! He decided he would force us to pay attention to him when he stood up, from the middle of the floor, with nothing to hold on to (that was new!). Then he walked probably a good 10 steps across the living room to Barb, (one of the EI ladies we see weekly) climbed into her lap and then patted her on the breast and said clear as anything "boob". We all cheered and he got lots of kisses and the attention he had been craving.

I am most proud of his walking and his few words. He says "dat" (that) when showing me things. He says and signs "all done" when he finishes eating, he still wont say "Mama" but says "Dada" pretty often. Well... he yelled "Mama" at me duriing the nursing fiasco but it was like the first time in 3 months he has said "Mama" with meaning and always when he is stressed out about something! Darling Husband gets "Dada" for play! Clearly "boob" is a new word, I was going for "nurse" and using the ASL sign for "milk" but  his brothers call nursing "the boob," "do you want the boob, Baby Hulk?" Oh well. I am still proud of him. Also I like that he obviously listens to his brothers. I am sure I will not be happy about things they teach him eventually too but for now their interaction makes me happy. A lot of his words go with a certain routine. Like "dat" came about from a frequently played out scene. He gets something he shouldn't have and puts it in his mouth. I say "what do you have?", he pulls it out and shows me and I say "can I have THAT?" So then he started taking whatever was in his mouth out and saying "dat". Then after he hands it to me I would say "thank you". Thank you is another more recent word that he now says after you have taken something he hands you. I am all for a polite baby!

I really do need to get better about making these posts, if not for you, then for myself. I need record of all these amazing things he is doing! Especially with how quickly it all seems to be happening! I have the worst memory when it comes to things like this. If I don't write it down I forget. I hate it but I need these blog posts and photographs to stimulate my memories!

Sleeping Russell ~ Just a Day at the Kite Races... maybe?

It's been a while since he has had anything good to say and then tonight our tiny conversation was so completely all over the place I really have no clue what could have been happening in his dreams!

Sleeping Russell says:

"Have you found the gate?"
"What?" I ask.
"Did you find a spot for your kite?" he asked.
wait.. I thought we were talking about a gate "...No?"
"You'd better hurry up and find one or you'll be stuck inside forever."

I think it happened something like this...

Baby Hulk ~ Happy Birthday (in photos)

good morning birthday boy!

ready to tour Olympia

then the tour ended abruptly when he face planted off of the step

tofu and rice for dinner

poor baby nose!

the problem with baby led weaning, no smashing, only sensible eating

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY HULK!!!

Baby Hulk ~ Happy Birthday!

It’s hard to believe it has been a whole year since I first looked into the eyes of my new baby and instantly knew he was different. I knew my life had been forever changed. I’d had my life all mapped out since middle school. I would have 3 children by the time I was 30, a boy and two girls, I would be a young cool mom, not one of those cool moms who provided their children with booze or anything, but still the cool mom. Well clearly my plans took a detour after Mr. Grey when baby number two, Lumpy, ended up having a penis.  I mourned the life I had planned and moved on, not the girl I had hoped for but the detour ended up not in the least bit unpleasant and we were still headed in the same direction to being our big happy family! The next time I thought not finding out the sex of baby number 3 would make it easier when I ended up with a third boy, girl or boy I would be fine.  I had learned that the sex of my child didn’t really have much of an effect on my plans anyways, and by now the thought of a girl kind of scared me. Then my plans took an even bigger and completely unexpected detour.

Forget the third penis, this baby had a third 21^st chromosome! I mourned big time what I thought was the biggest detour possible.  This was a detour onto some abandoned highway in the dark, full of bumps and potholes that I couldn’t even see coming, and totally in the opposite direction from where I had planned. I was right. But it wasn’t a bad thing! These bumps and potholes have forced me to slow down.  Because of Baby Hulk I have slowed down. I am better able to appreciate things. Baby Hulk has made me realize I can’t stop things from happening. I have always had issues with anxiety, but I have embraced that my life now is very different and I have adjusted. I was afraid of all the doctors appointments.  Just calling and making appointments usually stresses me out horribly. But now it is just something I have to do! Then I was afraid to go to the appointments knowing they could bring to light something terrifying. In the first year of his life he had to have two ultrasounds of his heart to check for defects, we checked his thyroid three times, he had a hip ultrasound to check for hip dysplasia, two visits to the ophthalmologist to check his vision and look for things like cataracts, or a misalignment of his eyes.  I’ve taken him in needlessly quite a few times for colds (thanks to two big brothers in school) and had them look at me like I am crazy because my “soooo congested” baby’s oxygen levels are at 100%. Then there were the few times I did take him in for something more, like an ear infection, pink eye, and croup. The ear infection got scary when the doctor saw the petechia on his nose (from him crying) and sent us straight to the lab for a CBC, I didn’t understand why he wanted us to do that until about an hour after I got home. I finally put things together, the doctor had called the spots a rash, one of the signs of leukemia is a rash. I managed to freak myself out for about 5 minutes and then noticed I had missed a phone call. I checked my voicemail; it was the pediatrician telling me the lab results came back normal.

Things could change, bad things can happen but life is always like that. Baby Hulk has taught me more and more that you just can’t dwell on things, the negatives, and the what-ifs. You have to live in the here and now.  My baby is healthy. It is as simple as that! His physical therapist says he is the highest functioning baby with Down syndrome she has ever worked with. The unknown is now so exciting to me! I wonder what could happen today. What new and amazing thing will my baby do?

Thinking back on when he was born I am actually thankful for the experience we had. Sure there are things I wish had been different, maybe if I had found out ahead of time I could have had time to come to terms with my new life before he arrived. That way I could have just looked into those eyes and felt that instant love instead of my stomach falling through the floor and utter despair, then maybe I would have been able to avoid the guilt I felt for NOT being able to experience that. For feeling fear instead of love when I first looked into his eyes. Luckily those feelings have passed too, now my negative feelings are more about silly things, like the fact that in all the chaos of his birth no one did his foot prints. I don’t have anything to look at and say, ‘look how tiny his feet were!’ When I realized a month later that I didn’t have them, I of course made some of my own but he was bigger by then, it just isn’t the same! But compared to other parents' experiences, ours was great. I’ve heard stories of people being told their baby will never talk or walk or be able do anything for themselves, or the parents who had a prenatal diagnosis, and within the same breath of informing the parents their baby had Down syndrome, their doctor asked when they would like to schedule termination. And of course these babies have grown and gone on to do amazing things.

No one ever told us Baby Hulk wouldn’t be able to do things. I think they just said that he may experience some delays in areas but there isn’t a way to just look at a baby with Down syndrome and say, “oh this one won’t do much," and yet people do it anyways. Someone in the special care nursery at the hospital even found an employee of the hospital who had an older son with Down syndrome to come in and talk to us. I don’t think it did much to help, I was really in a fog for the first couple of weeks of his life, but it was a wonderful gesture and I think it did help Darling Husband. I am so hard headed I probably would have taken someone telling me he couldn’t do certain things as a challenge. Oh yeah? Watch this! I kind of feel like one of those crazy pageant moms as it is. I have changed so much of my life for this little boy. Weekly visits to the physical therapist, weekly home visits with Early Intervention. Because of them I am looking so much more into other things, like buying toys, instead of, oh this toy’s music isn’t too annoying, or this toy is fun colours, I think, how could Baby Hulk benefit from this toy developmentally? Just last week I totally rearranged the living room so he could get to the couch because he wanted to pull up on things. My living room does not look as good, the coffee table is beside the couch instead of in front of it so I can’t put my feet up anymore but as soon as I did it Baby Hulk was crawling across the living room and pulling up on the couch, and 4 days later he is already trying to let go and stand alone!

This year has been so exciting and different, and rewarding. Baby Hulk has slowed us down and opened our eyes to this great big adventure. He challenges us to do better and be better. While I am sad he is growing up so fast, I can’t wait to see where he will go! Happy 1^st Birthday to my Baby Hulk.

Baby Hulk ~ My Baby Ate Cat Puke

How I felt when I realised what had happened

Yup. You read that right. My baby ate cat vomit. I. I just. I don't even... Let's start from the beginning:

Today Lumpy had a special guest come to his school. The Reptile Man. This guy comes in with bins of snakes, turtles, and even a gator. It was really neat. It was after Lumpy's actual school time right at lunch. Other smarter moms brought lunches for their kids. I didn't even think about it what with the fact that I am a horrible mother as this post already implies. Lumpy got to take fun pictures with some of reptiles so he was begging to see them all the way home. I told him I would put them on my computer and we would look at them after lunch.

Lunch was made, Lumpy scarfed his down and went to watch Mighty Machines.  I was still feeding Baby Hulk. Lumpy ran in to inform me the cat had puked. I groaned and told him I would clean it up when Baby Hulk was done since I couldn't exactly leave him alone while he was eating. So 15 minutes later Baby Hulk is finally finished and I have totally forgotten about the puke. I cleaned him up and got him dressed because he has to eat in the nude or all of his clothes would be ruined, even with a bib. I sit him down with his toys, hand him two toy plates to bang and go sit down on my couch to pull up the pictures for Lumpy. Then I look up, Baby Hulk is sitting next to the vacuum cleaner, what is that bright orange thing next to him... Then it hits me. I run over hoping I am wrong. My cat is bulimic. She gorges and then barfs. It was a pile of only partially chewed soggy cat food. Maybe he hasn't seen it. He looks clean.... he looks up at me and smiles his big open mouth smile..... there are chunks.... chunks of orange... in his mouth!!!! I snatch him up and run to the kitchen. I think I performed some sort of water torture on him and I actually stuck his mouth under the running faucet. I stuck my fingers in and made sure all particles were washed out. I took off his now soaking clothes and sat him down on the kitchen floor where I could see him and went and cleaned up the puke. While I was cleaning Baby Hulk barfed on the floor. I ran in and looked at the green puddle. I saw no orange chunks. I wiped it up and smelled it... yup... I smelled my baby's barf. Smelled just like lunch. No cat food smell at all. I'm really hoping he just got it in his mouth and didn't actually swallow. Just to be safe I forced him to nurse. Breast milk is magic, I just hope some of it's magical properties work on cat vomit in baby mouths.

It was possibly the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me. I wanted to cry and vomit at the same time.  Not Baby Hulk! He kept his gummy grin on his face. Even while I essentially waterboarded him. On another note... I think this means my baby is not longer a vegetarian. Why couldn't he have done it with dog food like both of his big brothers?