Birthday girl. September 29, 2007

Things have finally settled down on the “Maddie front”. We’ve decided to simply stick with Penda for the duration of the three months and with a little more fine-tuning, she’ll be more or less “just right”. This is the right decision; she really likes Madeline, and Madeline really likes her… when we get home from school in the afternoons the kid is happy and playful – this says a lot.

This past weekend was the big birthday bash! On Thursday September 20, Madeline officially turned ONE YEAR… however, her birthday was not a special enough day, because mom and dad had to work and in fact, in the evening, mom had a back-to-school event. So it was dad and the girl together for the evening. At the time of her birthday, Maddie was just coming out of her viral infection and her diarrhea was just clearing up. What a good birthday present!

The party on Sunday was a long time in the making. We started planning it a few weeks before (I have to say, however, that it was mom who did most of the “planning”, while I provided most of the “logistical support”. She sent out e-vites, the response was really good, and we expected about 35 people to show up.

Our big gift to the girl was a big inflatable kiddie pool that holds about 5 inches of water. There’s a little kids’ store about 3 km from our neighborhood that has just about any toy or baby item you could ever want (with the correspondingly high imported Dakar price, of course). The pool is a sight when everything is said and done and all of the bits and pieces are blown up. Needless to say, Madeline absolutely loves it (and so did the other babies and toddlers at the party).

The big logistical feat in preparation for this party, however, was the transformation of our front yard into a beach. For over three years now, we have endured this ratty area of weeds and mud that has always looked like crap. Ba has repeatedly tried to do something with this area, to clean it up and make something of it, but to no avail. Not even the grass will grow there, mainly because about 3 inches beneath the surface is natural sand.

To prepare for the pool party, we transformed this space into a little beach by driving to a real local beach and filling several large containers with sand (any big container we could find, including boxes, the trash can, and Maddie’s stinky plastic laundry basket). It was comical until we almost got beaten up more than once by locals who claimed that gathering sand was “prohibited” (INTERDIT!) and then tried to charge us CFA10,000 for the privilege of getting it from “their” beach. Whatever. In the end, we paid nothing and had enough sand to cover the area. It looks nice and with the umbrella and pool, adds quite a nice touch to the front of our apartment space.

Other big preparations for this party included having Penda make an incredible amount of bissap, bouie, and gingembre juice, and decorating the apartment inside and out with little prizes. All in all, the preparation for your one year-old’s birthday party is a lot of fun.

But… it would be foolish to claim that the party is for anyone BUT the parents. Definitely it’s not for Madeline – she couldn’t care less about the date and can play with her toys and other babies anytime, right?

I would be lying if I denied that I was really glad when it was all over. All of the hype and intense preparation to make things “just right” created an air of stress in our household that, at times, was not fun. For example, even though we had done all of this prep work beforehand, Sunday still found us running around like crazy. The castle cake that Amy had planned so perfectly failed to come out of its mold in one piece, necessitating a plan B which involved making a few dozen cupcakes instead. I filled the pool on Sunday morning only to discover a half hour before the guests arrived that the water was almost too hot to touch, so I had to drain the entire thing and start over. Despite setting up “social spaces” with chairs out on the balcony and in the front yard, it was so hot on Sunday afternoon that everyone crammed inside the living room where the air conditioning as blasting. Etc, etc…

But it was a fun and necessary event that we will always remember. Madeline (sort of) blew out her first “birthday cake” candles and had her first taste of chocolate frosting. What a treat! Though she was much more excited by the crowd of adoring admirers than the novel taste of chocolate. She had a great time and that’s surely the most important thing.

Now that she is over one year old, Madeline is exhibiting the classic behavior problems of a toddler. For example, she knows how to throw a good temper tantrum that could rival anyone’s, walks without even thinking about it, and even runs from time to time (or tries to, though it usually ends up badly).

Sleeping at night continues to be the big challenge for Madeline and I am at the point where any other parent who tries to give me advice on this issue is not risking physical assault. She’s back to getting up 2-3 times every night, and frequently wanting to be up and active for 2 hours at a time. Not acceptable! Two nights ago, driven to the absolute edge of our sanity (especially for Amy), we started to let her just “cry it out”, with the 10-minute intervals of going in and patting and shushing her. The first night, she responded fairly well, while the next night was not so great. As always, her sleeping “project” remains a work in progress. Stay tuned for the next chapter in this wonderful nocturnal saga…

A rough few weeks… September 23, 2007

What a crazy past few weeks it has been in Madeline’s household. Though Madeline had her FIRST BIRTHDAY on Thursday (and we are having the big bash today, special blog to follow!), it has been a less than ideal September so far.

The fun began on Monday, September 10, when Laye told us after we got home from school that she had to take her maternity leave starting immediately. This really threw us for a loop, obviously; we knew that we’d have to find someone to take Laye’s place for three months but hadn’t planned on dealing with this until the middle of October. Laye is due to have her baby in November. But apparently her pregancy is not going especially well, and this is very upsetting to all of us involved. Laye is definitely family to us. To make a long story short, there is a real danger that her baby may be delivered up to 1.5 months early, and she needed to stop working immediately.

Fortunately, Laye started bringing her best friend ‘Penda’ to work with her a week or so earlier. We thought that Penda was here to simply help Laye with her work but now it’s obvious that Laye brought her to be her replacement. Penda is probably not the person we would have initially chosen to replace Laye but she has been really good so far, and Maddie has really taken well to her. And each day that goes by, we realize more and more what a good nanny she is; this is especially the case after interviewing four other nannies, and finding that none of those four would come close to making the grade for us. After a rough first week of being sad and depressed, Maddie is now ‘firing on all cylinders’ in the afternoons and in a very good mood each day we get home from work. Amy and I have taken turns staying home from work a few times in order to show

Penda how to do all of the little things around here – there is still come fine-tuning to do, but generally things are smooth.

As if all of this weren’t enough, Madeline became quite sick the same week that Laye left us. She had a high fever on Wednesday (fortunately one of the days that I was staying home with her and Penda), and we took her to Dr. Moriera on

Wednesday evening. Right away we took her downtown for a blood test and the results indicated no malaria, but an abnormal white blood count, indicating a viral infection. We’d never seen her so under the weather, obviously feeling terrible and stricken with general malaise. But we were assured by Dr. Moriera that she would be fine.

Her fever subsided the next day, but then she developed terrible diarrhea and a bad rash that we learned (on a follow-up visit with the doctor) were very normal side-effects to a viral infection for a person her age. She was simply a miserable baby, and made everyone around her miserable. Poor kid! Nights were awful (little sleep for any of us), and daytimes eternally fussy. The way we left things with Dr Moriera four days ago: if her diarrhea didn’t clear up within three days, we’d have to bring her back in. But it did, and her rash only lasted two days, so right now she is back on track! What was scary about this whole episode was that Madeline had never really had a high fever before. But all is well.

The one thing that Maddie did not seem to lose any interest in was the cat – she was feeling so bad that she didn’t want to read, eat, or sleep – but Hobbes really helped her through this. What a good feline friend!

On Thursday we didn’t do much celebrating for Maddie’s first birthday. It was an especially busy week at work for mom and dad, and in fact, on the night of Maddie’s birthday, mom had back-to-school night and wasn’t around. But today is the big fete. We’ll have lots of kids playing this afternoon on our petit plage downstairs in our front yard. Madeline’s big birthday present from mom and dad? A huge swimming pool, complete with blowup toys and things that spray water all over the place. You gotta see it to believe it!

Coming up on 1 year. September 8, 2007

Madeline has been walking a lot lately! It’s hard to really say when exactly a baby hits milestones like walking. It’s been gradual. But we are officially saying that she started walking on Tuesday September 4th when she took 47 consecutive steps (and really enjoyed herself in the process!) Of course, she has been taking steps off and on for some time now (remember the very first one in the Blockbuster on Burnside in Portland?), but has not quite gotten it together, or gotten enough sustained courage, to actually walk. Last Monday (September 3rd) we got home from school and found her taking 4 or 5 steps at a time… and she really has it now.

Interestingly, as she has gotten closer to walking (but not actually doing doing it), she has been sleeping much better at night. I hardly dare type these words…. but each night since she started walking, she has either slept all the way through until 4:30-5:00 am on her own, or done so having woken up only once around midnight, and easily gone back to sleep by herself in her crib with a little rocking and “shushing”. So this has been a real victory for all of us! I don’t know if walking and sleeping are in any way related, but Maddie’s little friend Maya (who is within 2 days of sharing the same birthday as Madeline) started walking in earnest last week, and ever since has slept through the night on her own (she never did before). Thus, for more reasons than one we are certainly rooting her on to start walking as much as possible.

We’ve finally managed to get the apartment as baby-proof as possible, and I feel secure that it is reasonably safe. Senegalese outlets are already baby-proofed in a sense (the plastic cover closes automatically when not used, like European outlets) … and I even reinforced the heavy but unsteady shelves of the big bookcase in the living room with heavy screws. We are ready!

No real news on the substitute nanny situation. Laye brought a friend of hers to work on Monday who helped her with her

chores and to help take care of Madeline. I don’t think there is an implication that Penda is the woman who Laye wants to replace her during her maternity leave. I just think that Laye needs a bit of help these days getting things done and providing quality care for Madeline at the same time. Penda is bright and cheerful and is a nanny for a family in Yoff for two days of the week. She and Laye have obviously worked out a payment system independent of us. So now, for three days a week, Maddie has two “African mothers”. What a spoiled little kid!

We are starting to plan the one-year birthday party now, as it is fast appoaching. Probably we will do a Sunday afternoon family and kid affair at our apartment. Something tells me a drunken all-night debacle would be inappropriate!