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Week 224: Cast, Brace, and Math May 13, 2008
Mandy finally got her cast off earlier this week, and I'll let you in on a little secret: small children are terrified by strange men attacking their leg with huge (relatively speaking) buzzsaws. Fortunately the ordeal passed quickly, and we now have the cast sans Mandy for a souvenir. Mandy seems happy to be without it, but she still kind of drags her right foot a little and points it outwards more than she should like some kind of extra in a zombie flick taking place entirely in a nursery. The doctor says that will correct itself, though, so we only have a limited amount of time to finish filming.
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That was really the least of our worries upon returning home from the doctor's office, though. While there, he poked Mandy a few times and pronounced that she had a "shallow hip" and that we should do something about that if we wanted to avoid surgery in the next few years.
Now, if you're a parent, you may have some idea of the reaction this got from us, especially if your child has ever been diagnosed with anything more than a mild fever. Really, there is absolutely no middle ground on the Continuum of Parental Concern --everything pretty much occupies the extreme poles, as shown in this xkcd style graph:
The doctor assured us (or rather, Ger, since I was blissfully grinding away at work) that the treatment was simple, though: six months of strapping Mandy down into this brace like a slightly inept and very gender confused James Bond every time she goes down for a nap or sleep. The doctor mumbled something about how some babies take to it just fine, while others get "slightly aggravated." The nurse standing behind the doctor reportedly rolled her eyes at this, presumably because she knew that once again it's all about the extremes, and toddlers don't get "slightly" annoyed any more than one could get a slightly gargantuan or a little bit frenzied.
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Fortunately Mandy once again proved herself worth of the "World's Mellowest Baby" award and protests not a bit when we strap her in. In fact, through some kind of Pavlovian conditioning, she has actually started to smile and giggle when we pull out the brace, paired as it is with perusing a few books and lying down for a snooze. She's so awesome.
Sam is also awesome, but for different reasons. It seems that whatever clock is ticking away insider he has decided that it's time to really get on board with this whole numbers thing, so that she is constantly counting things. Leaves, people, fork tines, fingers, dogs, cars --whatever. Or sometimes she gives the things a break and just counts to herself. She's mastered the concept of a base ten number system, because after getting over the stumbling block of the teens she has figured out how to just keep going. The other day while we were driving in the car, for example, she counted aloud from 1 up to 78 before getting bored of it. She has also started to wrap her head around basic subtraction and addition, as evidenced by how I've spied her with her head bent over a pile of Cheerios, moving one or two in or out of the pile at a time and muttering to herself as she revised her tallies.
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And, come to think of it, she seems to be hitting the same milestone with letters and words. She expresses lots of curiosity about what words say, and the other day when she was on the floor playing with some toy letters she commanded me to "look LOOK" at something she had done. There on the floor were the letters "S-A-M-M-Y." So she had either spelled her first word all by herself or just thrown the the whole alphabet of letters up into the air and gotten VERY lucky.
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Parenting
Tags: Amanda, Mathematics, Parenting, Samantha
Comments
Posted by Ger on May 13, 2008 5:17 PM:
You forgot to mention that Mandy also got her first haircut this week, while sitting in a little car & watching Elmo on TV. And our lovely Mother's Day brunch. Yum!
Posted by David Morris on May 14, 2008 8:14 AM:
Hmm...kind of reminds me of the common probability reference of monkeys typing hamlet. If my math is correct, I am 99.99% sure Sammy knew what she was doing rather than randomly guessing (unless she's been at it since the big bang) How old is she now? I think quite a bit younger.
I'm sorry to hear about Mandy, glad to hear she is adjusting to the brace.
Posted by Marla on May 14, 2008 11:50 PM:
I'm told I had one of those brace things when I was a baby too. Don't remember it, so I'm sure Mandy will be fine too. Guess some things haven't changed too much in the last 30 some years!
Posted by Marla on May 14, 2008 11:55 PM:
Cool about Sammy too. While I never taught her to count to more than 20 (preschool did the rest), I did teach counting by 5's and 10's. And as for letters, Emma was reading those beginning phonics books by the age of 3, so I am sure Sammy is on the same track too! Is that starfall.com she's looking at on the computer?
Posted by Jamie on May 20, 2008 7:02 AM:
Yeah, I remember being amazed when you guys brought Emma over one day when she was around three. She picked up a book she had never seen before and started reading it. She's scary smart, but personally I welcome our new Emma Overlord.
Posted by Jamie on May 20, 2008 7:07 AM:
Oh, and yeah that's Starfall.com on the computer. She loves that site. If anyone has suggestions for similar learning sites that aren't big advertisements for toys/shows, then I'd love to hear them.
Posted by josh on May 24, 2008 12:30 AM:
My 15 month old was born club-footed, which meant various casts, minor surgery, and another contraption for him to wear on his feet to position them correctly. We were honestly horrified when we first saw it, but it seems to be a little easier than what Mandy was shown strapped in. He didn't take it so well, however. He cried nonstop and wouldn't eat for a couple of days, scaring his parents even more than before.