The Small Family   

August 16, 2009: E-I-E-I-O!

In case you’re wondering about the title of this week’s post, I’ll start with that. One night, I was singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to Theo in the bathtub as we worked on his floating. (We lay him on his back in the tub to practice his back float...which conveniently makes it quite a bit easier to wash his hair, too!)  The biggest hurdle with floating now is getting him to relax, so I was singing to him to try to make him relax more. And then I noticed that he was singing back to me: E-I-E-I-O! (Well, it sounds more like “ya-ya-yo,” but I got the idea.) And he’s been singing it all week whenever I sing a verse of “Old MacDonald.” It’s so cute! I even got it on video for y’all to enjoy.

Speaking of video, we don’t have a ton of pictures this week, but we have THREE new videos posted! Just go to the Videos page of our site and scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see three new videos: Floating with Theo, Theo at 16 Months, and I Fought the Law. (The last one is a clip of Mr. Strong-Willed repeatedly attempting to climb onto the kitchen table, set to the strains of the classic Bobby Fuller Four hit, “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won).” J

Speaking of Mr. Strong-Willed, he started out this week by thwarting not one but two baby-proofing attempts. The first involved said kitchen table. We have a set of vertical blinds on our sliding-glass door that Theo is obsessed with. And they’re a no-no because we really don’t want to have to replace them if he destroys them. But after literally a hundred (at least) times of telling him no and redirecting him away from the blinds, we got tired of the battle. So Chris got the bright idea to push the kitchen table over against the sliding door so we can pin the blinds behind it. (We tried fastening them to the wall first, and Theo quickly outsmarted that attempt.) It is indeed a good idea, but Theo very quickly figured out how to climb onto a kitchen chair and from there climb onto the table and crawl over to the blinds, which he then gleefully plays with.

Later the same day, I took him upstairs to the den. I left him in there playing while I went to the bathroom for 60 seconds. When I came back, he had succeeded in breaking through Chris’s newly installed drawer straps (designed to hold his desk drawers shut) and was happily pulling things out of Chris’s desk drawers and throwing them on the floor. My gosh, that kid is fast! I have to admit, I was kinda impressed by it all.... J

But on a more productive note, we had a major attitude change with regard to floating this week! About halfway through the week, Theo suddenly decided that floating isn’t torture, and he is now floating on his back without wailing. He’s still tense enough that he can’t float for more than six seconds or so without someone guiding him back up, but it’s a MAJOR improvement. I am now able to just hold onto the edges of a hoodie that he wears in the pool and support him that way—he does the rest. One of the videos we posted shows his progress from this week. We are so proud of him! Miss Deborah agreed to teach for one more week this summer, so we’ll be continuing lessons this coming week, and I’m hoping that he makes even more progress. He has had 4 1/2 weeks of lessons now. This past week, I spoke to a father whose 18-month-old son wasn’t floating at all at the end of four weeks of lessons. Halfway through Week 5, the father said it was like flipping a switch—the little boy just started floating on his own. And I saw him nearly graduate—he only missed one tiny part, so he’s going to do a few more lessons and then retry. (They have to do a deep-water fall, which just means they fall in a little deeper and have to surface and right themselves into a float. The little boy did that, but it took him longer than Miss Deborah would’ve liked, so she wants to work with him a couple more times.)

We had a fun weekend, too. Saturday we hosted a Game Night for a few of our friends. We used to do Game Nights more regularly, but once we had Theo, for a while it was hard to do stuff like that. But we really miss hanging out with our friends and playing games and stuff, so we decided it was long past time for another Game Night. So, we lured Kim and Dave, Amber, Suzanne, and Jason, Janeane, and Emma over for a BBQ and Singstar (a karaoke-type game for the PlayStation). Chris BBQed hamburgers and hot dogs, and we had a good time visiting while Theo and Emma played. (I think the highlight of Theo’s evening was getting to play in the dirt while we ate outside. The kid loves rubbing dirt all over his hands! Hmmmm, future landscape architect, maybe?) And Emma was a great accompanist when we fired up the Singstar game—she played Theo’s little piano and drums while we sang.

I’m not sure which performance was my favorite. Chris did a hilarious rendition of a Lifehouse song—sounding much like he was passing a kidney stone while singing. (Yes, quiet Chris will do karaoke—can you believe it?! He’s actually pretty good.) Suzanne did an amazing job on a Cyndi Lauper song, but then failed spectacularly when duetting with Kim on an Extreme ballad. Chris’s and my version of Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was so bad that people were asking when the song would be over! (Thankfully, we had Amber on our team to help us win back some points after that disaster.) Dave spent much of the early part of the night refusing to sing and complained mightily the whole way through Starship’s “We Built This City”...but then was crestfallen when his turned ended early: “But I wasn’t done singing yet!!!” We ended up karaoke-ing until 1a.m., and Dave was a willing participant in the later part of the evening.  We didn’t manage to coax Janeane or Jason into singing, but I have high hopes that next time, they’ll succumb to peer pressure and join us. J

Sunday Theo and I drove out to Folsom to attend a baby picnic in honor of two babies: Janeane and Jason are expecting a son sometime in the next month or so, and Janeane’s childhood friend, Heather, is also expecting a baby just three weeks after Janeane. So, they had a joint “baby picnic” pool party. Theo and I had a great time. Not only was it a fun, relaxed gathering (I’m usually a little nervous when I don’t know people at something like that, but everyone was really nice and friendly), but Theo was in a really calm, good mood...surprising because he hadn’t had a nap at all. He got to show off his floating skills in the pool, and he enjoyed exploring the house and yard and just generally playing.

So that’s it for this week. Next week will be another busy one. Theo and I are meeting up with some friends on Wednesday (Janeane and Emma, Kim, and Carrie and Cooper—Carrie’s two-year-old son) at the park, so I hope to get a lot of cute pictures of the kiddos. Theo has float lessons through Thursday, and then Friday he gets some playtime with Grandma Diane while Chris and I go to an appointment. And then Saturday we head down to the Bay Area for Chris’s high-school reunion, and Grandpa Tom and Grandma Kathy get to babysit Theo. So, stay tuned for lots more pictures and stories next week!