Claire's World
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Saturday, May 24, 2003 ( 11:40 PM ) Greg Griffith Ever since my birthday (May 12) I've been meaning to write about what happened that day, but life since then has seen a couple of trips out of town, a few visits from both sets of grandparents, new paying work and even more potential work popping up. The 12th was a Monday, and since I had spent the weekend celebrating Mother's Day with the Keatings in Mandeville, I got up Monday morning pretty much having forgotten it was my birthday. I shuffled into the sunroom/office, turned on my computer, and sat down to a new week. A few minutes later, I hear the toonk-toonk-toonk of little feet on wood floors thumping toward me from farther rooms. Then Claire appears, and circles around behind my desk. I spin in my chair to face her, and she's holding a big card the size of her head. With a big smile on her face, the kind that's impossible to restrain, she says, clear as a bell, "Happy Birthday, Daddy!" There are times when she says things and does things that make SDG and me look at each other with a combination of frown and smile, a look that says, "That's not normal, is it?" or "Isn't it a bit early to be saying 'telescope'"? At 21 months, she can identify several letters of the alphabet, and recites numbers - one through eleven, and today, not for the first time but for the first time with such confidence, said "16, 17, 18, 19." Things like that keep our brows furrowed more and more often as we think about schools and starting them early, but her ability to do that also makes for priceless moments like being wished happy birthday in perfect English by a toddler who stills drools from time to time. There are a thousand times every day when we marvel at this child, but there are 999 times a day when the strain of both of us being self-employed and working from home shows. But every time it seems that strain threatens to make us question what we're doing, we're reminded of how lucky we are. Every so often, we have an opportunity to see other children her age at play with her and around her. A couple of weeks ago was one such time, and we came away more confident than ever that, despite how hard it's been sometimes, we made the right decision in keeping her out of daycare. The benefits just seem to feed on each other: By not spending every day in the petri dish of daycare, the only illness she's suffered is a day here or a couple of days there with a slightly runny nose or a cough. A day or two of a slight fever. But it's been months since the last sign of a cold, and it was brief. Most other children her age who are in day care are constantly sick, and it seems like all of them have tubes in their ears. Because impaired hearing frequently precedes and sometimes follows tubes, and because daycare kids spend their days around other children with similar problems - instead of around intelligent adults who engage them every few minutes - their vocabularies, compared to Claire's, are pitiful. The words can be counted on fingers and toes. Claire speaks in complete sentences and says "please," "thank you," and "you're welcome." We worry sometimes because she still likes her pacifier. She asks for it often in the middle of day, even though we've restricted it to bedtime, naptime, and long car rides. Sometimes she'll find one lurking in some place we didn't know about, and other times we'll give one to her the way we might click the "mute" button during a "PODS" commercial. But usually when we hold out a hand and ask her to surrender it, she does so instantly and politely. But we see 2-year olds, 28-month-olds, and older, walking around for hours at a time in the middle of the day with pacifiers in their mouths. Claire swings on the swing, looks around and says, "Bird flying... in the sky"... the other kids look down at the ground and say nothing. Claire looks at the floaties and squirt guns floating in the pool and says, "Baby's toys in da water." On the other hand, she's shy around many kids, and doesn't know what to make of the seemingly random and borderline hostile outbursts of many kids who spend all day competing with others for toys and attention. But at least with some kids she seems to take an instant liking, sometimes walking right up to them and touching them or kissing them. Most of them look at her with the same strange mix of confusion and wariness that she often exhibits. For well over a year now she's occasionally woken up from a nap crying, as if she's had a nightmare or was startled awake by something real or imagined. In the past couple of months it seems to have gotten a little worse, with the crying fits more intense and longer-lasting. It was different when she was still a "baby," when inexplicable crying was common, but now that she's more of a gangly and mobile little kid with a long and precise memory and a well-formed vocabulary, it's more confusing for us, and more of a challenge. Dozens of times a day she tells us what she wants, or where she's hurt, what video she wants to see or what book she wants us to read to her, so the fact that she can't explain why she's crying so intensely for so long is particularly frustrating for us. This happened the other day during an afternoon nap, and after a cup of apple juice and some cuddling, she went back to sleep in the little nook that SDG builds for her on the couch in the afternoons. Those episodes are always a little stressful and more than a little distracting, but before we had had a chance to re-heat our coffee and get back into our work routine, she let out a throaty giggle - entirely in her sleep - and we smiled big smiles and gently shook our heads, and everything was better. Not just better than bad. Just better, in the way that only hearing a little kid laughing in her sleep can make things better. I love her more than I ever imagined was possible. -- # |
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