December and a New Year

The best cupcake ever according to O and her tiny tastes.

Whew. We all made it to 2015 happy, healthy and relatively sane. December was a long month. Dain had to work ridiculous hours and pretty much every weekend so it left us ladies at home trying to keep it all together in the midst of all the craziness that comes with the holidays. Despite a few really trying weeks though everything came together. Olive and I spent a fair amount of time in Rochester with my family, which was really great as she's finally at a point where it's not that stressful to travel with her by myself.  Of course she still has her moments, and I'm constantly reminded that it's never going to be easy with this kid, but it is night and day from even a year ago.

My cookie exchange taste tester. And by taster I mean licker.

Thankfully she has been doing really well with not vomiting, but she still pulls it out at inopportune times. Like sitting at a Mexican restaurant after sampling the (very sharp) tortilla chips. Or pulling up to school after the holiday break. Or at ten o'clock at night after getting herself worked up over not having someone fall asleep with her. It's kind of something we always have to be on the lookout for and prepared to encounter with this kid. Choking, nerves and anxiety, and tears always bring the possibility of vomiting, but that used to be a given with those happenings so we are moving up in the world.

Helping Papa with the guacamole.

Olive has really made a lot of progress in the past six weeks. For one, she has started to fall asleep on her own (usually anyways.) It took almost three years to get to this point, and I should add that to date she has never slept through the night. Not once. Maybe by the time she's four?  From the time she was born, she has never been able to fall asleep on her own, which has been exhausting. We always knew that it would get better though, and it finally has. The last few weeks of December were life changing when Olive started to go to bed on her own without one of us having to be in there with her for an hour or more. Granted she still needs someone to sleep with her in the middle of the night, but it's a start in the right direction. It was honestly the first time in her existence that I haven't dreaded bedtime with her because as all parents know, by bedtime you are seriously ready to clock out for the day and just take a breath without someone crying or whining or kicking you in the back. And then we sabotaged our own success by introducing something new and different and terrifying to Olive: potty training.

Mini M&M aftermath.

Starting on January 1, we decided to start the potty training process. Although I know it had to be done and will eventually be a great thing, I very much regret that decision. I thought I would be so excited not to buy diapers, but I seriously wish we could just go back to the good old days of nice, leak free diapers. So. Much. Easier. Perhaps it is still because I'm in the trenches on this one that I don't have enough perspective, but potty training is horrible. Olive just doesn't get it. There have been so many accidents. And I can't even call them all accidents really because Olive is definitely exerting her power in this whole situation. But we've dug in on this one, and there's no turning back. Because apparently you're supposed to commit to it and never look back despite how much you want to just hang up the towel for a few months. So committed is what we are. Even though we've barely left the house this month and have done an insane amount of laundry. It'll get better right? That's our everlasting motto in this whole parenting business.

The baconator.

Of course the potty training has thrown a kink in those few blissful weeks of going to bed on her own. My child, who has peed on most surfaces of our house at this point and will deny having to go even when she's a second away from peeing in her pants, all of a sudden knows that she has to go potty when she's laying in bed by herself. So it's an hour of her screaming out that she has to go potty, us helping her go, and then her waiting a few minutes before trying it again. A classic power struggle. And Olive is winning. If I spend all day watching for her cues, we can get to the bathroom in time, but it makes it pretty hard to get anything else done around here. My hope is that in the next month or so we can finally make it to the point where Olive knows she has to go and tells us as much throughout the day.

Progression and regression. That's the way it goes. On the eating front, Olive has made some improvements in the past month. She's still doing a good job on mini m&m's. You have to ask her to eat them. And by ask I mean coax. As in, eat three more and then you can go on your climbing wall (or whatever other bribe will be effective in that moment.) But she'll do it without too much of a fight. She has also been doing a good job with meltable yogurt snacks made for babies. She has eaten a few of them in their entirety, which is also big progress for her. Her instinct is still to spit them out when they get mushy, but if you push her, she can do it. It does stress her out though, and she's usually only game for eating one at a meal.

Tubing water while the princess sleeps.

Her biggest progress has been in eating goat cheese, her most favorite food. She has finally started to take bites of it from a spoon using a closed mouth and actually biting down on the spoon. This is something Polly tried really hard to get her to do in Virginia, and she has finally come around to doing it in practice. This has really just been in the last week, but she will take very large bites of goat cheese. Measurable amounts not just tastes. So that's awesome. We're not really sure where to try to go from goat cheese though. She is liking chocolate so we may introduce chocolate pudding again despite her not being that into it in the past.

Our biggest challenge is getting her to bite and chew on her molars. She certainly hasn't improved too much on this. She really doesn't get that she needs to move food to those back teeth to chew. Hopefully this will come to her too because it's pretty clear to us that at some point we need to do another hunger challenge like we did in Virginia. Olive has no incentive to eat. She is not hungry. She receives all her nutrition through her tube so she doesn't need her body to give her those hunger signals. It's good and bad that it's winter right now. In one respect it's good for her to not be quite as active as she was this past summer and fall so that she can put on a little bit of weight, but it also makes it hard to work up an appetite. Hopefully by spring we'll be ready to try to cut back on her tube feeds a little more to stimulate the hunger aspect. There is just no way around the catch 22 of wanting her to gain weight and to feel hungry enough to want to eat. She's clocking in around 24 pounds, 3 ounces so it will be interesting to see what the pediatrician says at her three year checkup next month.

Mastering the toothbrush.

Another area where we have seen major strides is on brushing her teeth. Olive resisted teeth brushing from the get go, which is not really surprising for a kid with an oral aversion. Our pediatrician would ask us if we were brushing her teeth and give us a new toothbrush, but up until a few months ago, Olive would gag if we tried to brush her teeth. We stuck with it though and now she is doing an amazing job at it. She does a little brushing and then she lets one of us get all of her teeth and her tongue, which Polly said is a good way to get her used to sensation on her tongue.

The result of asking a two year old to smile nicely.

On a happy note, we really had a great Christmas. This was the first year that the three of us celebrated with extended family. Her first two christmases were spent with just us at home as we were trying to limit her exposure to germs. So it was incredibly wonderful to spend time with family and return to traditions of Christmases past and start new ones. Olive was excited to be at a party on Christmas Eve and to have so many people around, and we also went on a sleigh ride with her cousins a few days before Christmas, which we are still talking about regularly. We also were fortunate enough to spend time with all three of Olive's great-grandparents around Christmas. And the biggest Christmas miracle is that everyone seemed to be healthy at all of our gatherings, and none of us got sick, which was a nice treat as it seems to come with the territory of large family gatherings this time of year. Plus Dain had nearly two weeks off from work, which was a much needed break for all of us. It allowed us to slow our pace, organize the house a little bit, and tackle the potty training mission, which is as of yet unaccomplished. Next on the agenda is celebrating Olive's third birthday in a few weeks. I swear you blink and they are grown up.