Portrait of a two-year old

WMOM - all requests, all the time

Owen has always loved to be sung to. Now he requests the songs he wants to hear by name. And he does it all. the. time. It is useful at night when I'm putting him to sleep. Instead of trying a dozen songs only to have him yell "no song!", now he just says "Sing Uff Magic Ragon song," or "Sing Hit the Road - Jack." Tonight he said "How about Jingle Bells?" and we sang it about a hundred times. It's not so much fun, after I've left the room, when he starts yelling "Moooommmyyyyyyy! Sing! Alleluiaaaaa!" (which is Owenspeak for "Michael row the boat ashore.") It is lots of fun in the morning, when he is generally in a good mood. This morning he asked me to "Sing E I E I O song!" So I sang Old MacDonald and let him fill in the animals. To my great surprise, it turns out that Old MacDonald has a farm filled with chickens, cows, pigs, and triangles!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Owen!

Bravery

Owen has been going to the "ear doctor" ever since his first ear infection when he was just 4 months old. Fortunately he doesn't get ear infections too often, but they still want to monitor him, since even between infections his ears don't clear properly. What this means is that every few months we go to 2 appointments, one with an audiologist and one with an ENT. And Owen hates it. He typically screams at the top of his lungs the entire time, from the moment we walk in the room (he recognizes it right away). He thrashes and refuses to stay still, and I have to hold him as tight as I can so the doctors can do everything they need to without puncturing his eardrums. It is extraordinarily exhausting, both physically and emotionally.

He had his most recent appointments on Monday. I tried to prepare him in advance by telling him we were going to see the doctor, and that the doctor was going to want to check his ears. When we got there this time, he took one look at the doctor and said "no doctor! no ears!" and clung to me and was about to cry. And then the most amazing thing happened. I held him and explained again that the doctor just wanted to put the telephone in his ear and see what Owen heard. And I lied a little bit, and said that maybe his grandparents would be on the phone. And then I watched him be so brave. He didn't protest. He didn't cry. He leaned in against me, his eyes big and his lips quivering, and sat quietly through multiple tests. By the end he even cooperated by pointing to various body parts when the doctor asked him to in quieter and quieter voices. Then later in the afternoon, we went back to the ENT, and he was scared again, and he was brave again. The whole experience was remarkable, not just for his cooperation, but for how clear it was that he was cooperating despite his obvious fear and uneasiness. He has self-control. He can be brave. He is growing up.

Oh, and his ears? Not great, but good enough for now. We'll go back in May for the next round of tests.

The balancing act

Raised by a working mother myself, I know I’m not doing anything new in raising Owen while continuing my career. Until recently, I hadn’t even stopped to give it much thought. I had been warned that in trying to do it all, I might wind up feeling like both a bad scientist and a bad mother. But I’ve actually been quite satisfied, and it hasn’t been as hard as I feared. As I tell anyone who will listen, the two key things that make it doable are a fantastically supportive husband who is a great father, and convenient, high quality daycare. Add to the mix that Owen is a great sleeper (except for his recent tendency to forego naps) and that Harvard has some great new programs for working scientist moms (thank you, Larry Summers), and I really can’t complain.

But let’s be clear: it’s still a struggle. That convenient, high quality daycare is expensive, and we can’t actually afford it. Its hours are strict, so there’s no staying an extra 10 minutes in lab to finish an experiment. We have a few hours a day of time at home when Owen is asleep and we’re not, and those are filled quickly with work we weren’t able to finish during the day, not to mention household chores. And there is almost no time for errands. Even grocery shopping needs to be planned for – I can’t go on my own with Owen while Mike’s in the lab because there’s no way to transport the groceries from the car to the apartment without Owen running into the street. We used to love to watch movies, but we don’t get to go out to movies at all anymore, and we have been so busy that we even canceled our DVD subscription service for lack of use – and didn’t even miss it. I used to love to read books, but now I use my commute for catching up on email, and I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

So, what’s so hard about it? Most of the time, as I’ve said before, being a working mom provides me with a sense of balance. But it is a delicate balance. Adding just one thing, like a snowstorm, or traveling, or one or more of us getting sick, can throw us off kilter for weeks. And trying to do what we’ve been doing lately – keeping our lab work moving forward while we apply for faculty positions in our spare time – is asking for trouble. The winter has been filled with snowstorms, illnesses, and extra work that seem to be conspiring against us. Most recently, Owen has been suffering a not-very-serious (thank goodness) but hard-to-shake stomach bug that kept him home from daycare almost all of last week. It sent us into crisis mode, because we both had important experiments to do, not to mention preparations for upcoming interviews. Thankfully Owen’s beloved Nana came and saved the day – caring for him so we could get some work done.

Then this morning, poor Nana came down with the bug. And Mike had to work all day. So my long list of things to do got put on hold (yet again). I never even had a chance to get out of my pajamas. But lucky me – I got to spend the entire day with Owen. We read books (“more Sam book!”), made artwork with crayons and stickers (“Mommy help please!”), rolled around on pillows and blankets on the floor (uncontrollable laughter), watched youtube videos (“more cows!” “more dinosaurs!” “more Barack Obama!”), and sang lots of songs (“more happy know it!”). At dinner, Owen ate two big bowls of applesauce all by himself with a spoon, for the first time –thanks to Nana’s teaching. And then I put him to bed, like I do almost every night, rocking him and singing to him and feeling the weight of his head and the wet warmth of his drool on my left shoulder. And that's what we working parents mean when we say "it's all worth it."

Maybe this time it will open?

Owen has been working on a project lately. A little over a week ago, he took a set of keys and started poking it in the grating covering the hot water pipes in our hallway. He has since spent hours and hours testing every key on both of our key rings in just about every "keyhole" on it. When we bring him home from school, he starts saying "Owen want keys!" before we even get in the door. He doesn't even stop to take off his coat before he picks up where he left off. His patience is amazing. He just keeps trying and trying, and has yet to be put off by his lack of meaningful progress. Occasionally he'll say, "help please" or "open it," but only in a hopeful tone - never frustrated. I'm not sure whether he just enjoys doing it, or if he thinks there's a huge reward at the end, but either way, his diligence serves as a noble example of persistence in the face of a challenge!

Happy 2009!

Hope you're celebrating New Year's Eve in style!

Happy Boxing Day!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We did - lots of food, friends, and family. Owen is a big fan of Christmas, as it turns out. You might think he'd be a fan of the toys, but mostly it's because he loves CHRISTMAS LIGHTS and JINGLE BELLS. He says goodbye to the Christmas lights whenever we leave the house, and I think we'll be singing Jingle Bells until St. Patrick's Day.

Owen's first haircut

It's been a few weeks now, but I thought you should all know that Owen got his first real haircut. His beautiful curls were getting, well, less beautiful, with the growing length and especially the dry winter weather. I found myself longing for the humid summer air to come back and make his curls all bouncy again (proof that motherhood makes you selfless). We put it off as long as we could because trying to imagine the logistics of cutting all that hair off of a squirmy toddler with scissors near his eyes was pretty scary. In the end we took him to a pro - and I'm glad I didn't try it at home! It was a surprisingly emotional experience. I confess that I ran around him trying to catch the curls in an envelope as they fell (proof that motherhood makes you crazy).

From austin

The magic ner

Owen is fascinated by things that move, flash lights, or make sounds. Wheels (or fans or anything that goes "round and round"), cell phones, Christmas lights, and computers (which he calls "ners") are some of his favorite things. And of course, because he's almost two, "favorite things" are things that you'd better be sure he doesn't catch sight of unless you are prepared for him to claim ownership of them. Given that we use all of these things frequently, keeping them out of his reach is sometimes a lost cause. So, we try to find ways to teach him to use them non-destructively.

We have had some success of late in instilling in Owen a proper respect for ners. He has always been fascinated by ners, because we spend so much time at them, they often have pictures of him on the screens, and his grandparents appear to live inside them. But he knows about the buttons, and loves to bang away at the keyboard. He has actually taught us a few keyboard shortcuts we had been previously unaware of. But how to make him stop banging away indiscriminately? A few days ago it occurred to me that we could combine his love of computers with his love of letters pretty easily. So I opened up a blank Word document, hit caps lock and made the font huge, and decided to try an experiment. "Owen, can you hit the 'O' button?" And he did! So I pointed to the screen and showed him the O that he made appear. He was amazed. "OK, now can you hit the 'W' button?" And he did - and then looked up really fast to see the W on the screen, and looked at me with complete wonder. We continued with the E, and by then he was ecstatic, yelling "yay, screen! yay, screen!" I had to point out the "N" for him, but he still hit it himself. On his first attempt at typing his name, this is exactly what came out:

O W E , N N N

not bad, huh? And now he is so impressed by the magical screen that he's much more gentle with the keyboard.