The Small Family   

So our big, exciting news for this week is that Theo started Survival Backfloat class! It’s not an infant swimming class—it’s actually slightly different. The focus is on conditioning babies to automatically turn over onto their back when they enter the water—whether they crawl in, are taken in, or fall in. It’s a class designed to give a baby who falls into a pool (or other water source) a fighting chance at survival.

Because Grandpa Tom and Grandma Kathy have an unfenced pool in their backyard, I’m a nervous wreck about Theo getting out and falling in the pool. (They have a sliding-glass door out to the backyard, but he can open sliders if they aren’t locked.) So, to set my own mind at ease, I decided we’d do Survival Backfloat classes. It’s a 16-session program: four mornings a week for four weeks. The sessions are one-on-one; Theo gets a 15-minute session each morning with Miss Deborah. He likes Miss Deborah very much...except in the pool! He loves to play in the pool, but he isn’t so fond of working in the pool. So when it comes time to work on his backfloat, he screams the entire time. But it’s a mad scream, not a frightened scream, so I don’t worry too much about it. In the end, the important thing to me is that he learns how to float.

His instructor, Miss Deborah, has been doing this since the 1970s, I believe, and she says it’s extremely normal for babies to scream through their first several lessons. And, in fact, there’s a 21-month-old girl named Zoe who has a lesson with Miss Monica at the same time as Theo’s lesson, and she still screams through the whole thing—and yet she’s floating! We’ve been there for three days now. The first day, Zoe still needed assistance to float (she’s about two weeks through the program right now—her older sister completed it last year and is still floating like a champ this year, at three years old). The second day, I watched Zoe floating on her own for several minutes at a time. The third day, they started working on controlled “falls” into the pool and flipping her over on her tummy...and Zoe rolled to her back immediately every time and retained a float for several minutes each time. Seeing that was enough to convince me to keep at it with Theo, even though he doth protest.

They teach the babies to immediately, upon hitting water, flip onto their back and retain a float for five to fifteen minutes. Babies as young as six months old have even done the program—they can’t walk yet, but they can float! And as the lessons progress, they start working on the baby with clothes on and in situations that would likely happen if the baby were to have a water accident. They basically simulate most things that could happen when a baby falls in (being fully clothed, having shoes on, going underwater for a moment) and make sure the baby is capable of getting himself to a float and maintaining that float position every time.

I’m going on and on about this, but it’s just amazing to me. I mean, here I was worried to death that my little boy would get out and wander into Grandma and Grandpa’s pool (because, like any baby, he heads for the pretty, sparkly pool the minute he’s down and able), and then I find that there’s a way to help him protect himself. I am really, really pleased to have found this resource. I hope it will work, but having seen it with little Zoe with my own two eyes, I’m pretty convinced that in four weeks, I’ll have a floating little boy who is able to (hopefully) save himself until we can get to him if he ever falls into water. It’s obviously not a 100% guarantee of his safety—nothing is—but it makes me feel much, much calmer.

But, moving on to other things... This has been a language-explosion week again! Theo is starting to say “drink” for his juice cup, and he has tried to make the sign for “drink” a couple times. He also said “monkey” the other day, which came out really cute (something like “MUH-ee”) as he held up the stuffed monkey in his crib to show me. He’s developing a bit of an attachment to the stuffed monkey, but even more so to his soy blanket. The soy blanket is sort of a joke to Chris and I. When we went to Seattle in January and stayed with Auntie Lisa and Uncle Chris, we realized we should’ve brought a blanket for Theo to sleep with. Up until then he hadn’t slept with one, so we didn’t bring one, but I had forgotten how chilly Seattle is in January. And thus, we set out on our second day there to buy him a blanket. The only store we could find on short notice and near Lisa and Chris’s house was a rather upscale baby boutique (think Pottery Barn Kids, but fancier). Lots of cute stuff if you have an unlimited budget, but no place we’d normally shop because, well, we’re somewhat frugal. Still, we needed a blanket and they had one that would work at a not-too-horrible price, so we decided to buy it. When we brought it up to the register, the woman said, in a rather haughty tone, “Oh, this is a wonderful blanket. It’s soy, you know.” Chris and I just smiled, but when we left the store we started laughing. “Gimmick!” we cried. “A soy blanket? What on earth does that mean? What makes a soy blanket so special? It just feels like a cotton blanket! They must just call it ‘soy’ so they can mark up the price.”

Well, lo and behold, Theo has fallen in love with his soy blanket. He holds it when he drinks his bop before his nap, and when I get him up in the morning, he will clutch the soy blanket to his chest and drag it downstairs with him many mornings. It’s really cute to see him developing an attachment to a particular item...even if it is the rather frou-frou soy blanket!!

But perhaps my favorite new entry in the language explosion is “Read it!” He said it to me twice yesterday morning—each time, he brought me a book and said, “Read it!” Of course, I happily obliged, since I’m happy to see that he likes books...although his attention span for most of them is currently about two pages, and then he walks away and moves on to bigger and more exciting things. Ah well, it’s a start. And I think it’s quite cute when he happily says, “Read it!”

He has also started stacking things, I’ve noticed. Blocks, Tupperware containers, and the like—if he has more than one of an item, he will often stack it. I think this is some sort of normal developmental milestone for babies his age, but it’s just really neat for me to see these things unfold in my little boy!

I also noticed yesterday that he is using his toy cars correctly now. Not that there’s really any incorrect way, but he now makes them drive along the floor, and he makes a car motor sound as he pushes them along. I had done that a couple times for him, and I guess he caught onto the idea. Clever boy!

Also on the cute side of things, Theo has started hugging. Usually it’s his toys (he gives wonderful hugs to his stuffed animals), but occasionally Chris and I receive a hug too, which is really wonderful. I’m not a hug person in general (I know that sounds awful, but there are hug people and there are non-hug people in this world, and I’ve always been one of the latter), but I looooove to get a good Theo hug!

We all woke up grouchy Saturday morning, so we decided a day trip would do us good. Besides, it was going to be 105 degrees (or thereabouts), which is just quite unpleasant, so we decided to head for a cooler region. There is a hands-on children’s museum in Sausalito (across the bay from San Francisco) called the Bay Area Discovery Museum, so we decided to check it out. What a find! Theo is too young for some parts of it (hands-on art studios and such), but they have an amazing outdoor play area with all sorts of Bay Area–themed things for kids to explore, and he loved that. And they have an entire building dedicated to kids under 3 years of age, and he thought that was super fun. It was basically two large rooms of tons of things for toddlers to explore. They have different texture spots on the floor for toddlers to crawl around on and explore, and they have climbing areas for older toddlers. They also have tons of animal puppets and musical instruments—Theo was fond of the maracas, the tambourine, a wolf puppet, and a mallard duck stuffed toy. And they have lots of things to explore on the wall, which is great for kids Theo’s age, who tend to toddle around by hanging onto the wall quite a bit. In particular, they had these disks with different insects pictured on them. When the baby pushes on the disk, it makes the insect sound. Theo was entranced by the cicada—I think he must’ve pushed it probably thirty or forty times! They also had a pond with lilypads that is made out of whatever they make waterbeds out of, and once he got the hang of it, Theo thought crawling on that “bouncy pond” was pretty exciting.

Outdoors, he liked the rock box (like a sandbox, but with pebbles—which he kept trying to eat!) and chasing the birds. He desperately wants to watch the birds, so it’s pretty cute to watch him toddle over to them as quickly as his chubby little legs will take him, and then stand and watch in awe, as if normal, everyday black birds are the most incredible sight ever. (Makes you wish we all had a child’s awe, doesn’t it??)

After a couple hours at the museum, we decided it was time to go to Chris’s and my favorite San Francisco “play area”—the Ferry Building! That’s our favorite place in SF to go for lunch because it’s pretty casual and easy to go to with a baby...plus the food is mighty good, and there are a lot of choices. This time we opted for Taylor’s Refresher. If you’re a fan of The Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” you may have seen the Napa location of Taylor’s profiled. Anyway, it’s been a few years since we ate there, but we were not disappointed. It was the best burger I’ve perhaps ever eaten, and Theo heartily approved of the French fries. (I had to stop for a couple oysters first, though. Can’t leave the Ferry Building without eating those. Someday, Chris will summon up the courage to try one, he says.)

All in all, it was a good day, but Theo had a mighty tantrum in the car on the way home. All the way from Davis to Roseville—forty miles of screaming. Oh, it was lovely. I don’t blame him for being sick of sitting in the car seat, but yikes...that was a lot of screaming! And Theo only knows one volume (deafening), so Chris and I were rather pleased to finally pull into the garage and release Theo from the car seat so he would stop screaming. J

We took it easy Sunday—just stopped at the consignment store, where we found a couple things I’ve been looking out for. One is a small, sturdy tricycle of sorts for the backyard—a steal at $8.50! And the other is a child’s workbench, complete with nifty plastic tools (including a “working” power drill!). Those sets are usually mighty expensive, so when I saw it for $15, all in working order, I snatched it up. I’ve been on the lookout for something like that for awhile. Hopefully Theo will like it.

So that was our busy but fun week. More of the same next week—plus a meeting with Theo’s new pediatrician on Monday. I’m curious to see what he recommends in terms of transitioning Theo off formula and onto some sort of milk or milk substitute.

Stay cool, everyone. We’ll be sweating through a heat wave here!