What a Wonderful World

 And I Think to Myself, What a Wonderful World

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

I’ve heard Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” a million times.  But there are three occasions that stand out in my memory. 

The first was in Venice.  It was September 25, 1994.  I was living in Rovigo at the time and we took the train there.  We had forgotten to change the clocks to standard time from daylight savings; we didn’t even realize until we got to the train station.  I had never been to Venice before.  This is pre EU—another world, another time.  Hardly anyone had a cell phone.  No one had an email address.  Pre-EU meant that all the merchants were Italian, if not Venetian.  (I went back a couple of years ago and was supremely disappointed.  It was like a dirty Disneyland.  All of the vendors were immigrants from somewhere else.  Venice was just another rung in the their labor ladder)

As you probably know, there are no cars in Venice.  It is a labyrinth of canals and bridges and alleys.  In winter when the fog sets in, it’s like trying to navigate through a fairytale.  This trip I watched movers lift a piano through a window from a boat in a tiny vein of water.  Around another corner we saw workers laying high fiber optic cables.  In Venice.

I didn’t know where we were headed; we couldn’t even see the water from our path.  But my friend knew.  All of a sudden I turned the corner and there it was: Piazza San Marco.   I lost my breath.  My senses were inundated simultaneously with the ancient and the contemporary: in the distance, the Byzantine water architecture of San Marco.  In my ear, a tuxedoed jazz quartet played Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”  Shops and cafés lined the shores of a sea of pigeons.  It was so unexpectedly beautiful that I actually cried.

This single scene was like a montage through the centuries.  This was the Venice of Marco Polo, of Casanova, of Othello’s sweet Desdemona.  And yes, of Louis Armstrong.

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

Flash forward to November 16, 2002, St Paul, MN.  My brother is getting married.  As all wedding are, the reception is a perfect reflection of the bride and groom.  We’re at the Landmark Center, the old courthouse building with impossibly high ceilings, almost as high as the young couple’s aspirations.  The lights are dimmed and the tables are sprinkled with purples and oranges and chile peppers. 

The couple is baby-faced and fresh out of law school.  Their first jobs—clerking for the State Supreme court and the Federal district court—might be the pinnacle of success for other mortals, but for them is merely a good start.

They take their first dance as husband and wife, sweeping over the ballroom floor as Louis Armstrong croaks.  They are beaming and dreaming and thinking to themselves, “What a wonderful world.”

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They're really saying I love you.

On January 5, 2010, I walked into the hospital lobby and heard it again.  It must have been a Wednesday because that’s when the harpist comes and plays for the patients.  It must have been that Wednesday because I was discharged on Monday and the boys weren’t back up to their birth weights yet.

Have you ever really listened to harp music?  It’s like listening to water sing.  The instrument itself is so heavy, so burdensome, like a murder weapon.  Its notes resonate sometimes like thick gold mud, other times like dewy droplets on a spider’s web.  Harp music carries you.  It cradles you.

I remember the opening of Waltz of the Flowers with Mr. Gibson conducting and Mrs. Gibson playing the harp.  The opening is all harp music.  The harpist takes her time and chooses her tempos and the twelve of us must all listen very carefully.  We must obey her timing.  It’s the best part of the dance: glowing, full of life.  You haven’t made any mistakes yet.  You are a flower’s life reincarnated.  The harpist carries you to the beginning of the dance and leaves you to dance your six-minute flower’s life.

At some other point in time, I would have loved to have sat and listened, really listened, to these golden notes, to the volunteer harpist playing “What a Wonderful World” in the hospital lobby.  I would have teared up with two-dimensional sentimentalism.  Happy to be happy.  Grateful for her musical offering.

I feel so strongly about how classical music transforms our lives.  I am so sad when people rush by, hardly taking note of how the heavy harp has drenched the air with music. 

It truly is a wonderful world, even on this, the first Wednesday morning of the twins’ lives.  I can appreciate that.  I am up and about.  After nearly two weeks in bed and a c-section just a week ago and I am already climbing flights of stairs.  But today, if I stay to listen, I will lose it.  I will explode into hysterics and they will have to peel parts of my flesh off the ceiling.

This would have been a good time to let harp music cradle me.  I could use a hug.  I bite my lip so hard, so hard, so hard.  I am locking all my tears in my jaw.  Trying not to cry is like putting on a sweater made out of pins and needles.

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.

All I can do is run to the elevator.  I bang on the ‘up’ button and try to escape as quickly as possible.

© 2010 Janine Kovac

Let Them Fall

Today I am happy because I let my kid fall.  Both boys are rolling, but Wagner’s the one for whom rolling has become a mode of transportation.  Toy out of reach?  He knows he can roll toward it.  Brother’s foot smacking him in the face?  He knows he can roll away from it.  Tired of being on the blanket on the floor?  He knows he can roll off of it onto greener pastures.  He reminds me of that meatball that rolls out the front door.

But sometimes it isn’t greener on the other side of the blanket.  Sometimes it’s hardwood.  The first time he rolled, at breakneck baby speed, off the blanket (toward a particularly angular object, to boot), my foot jutted out to cushion the blow.  But the next time he rolled off the blanket, I just watched.  And, as one would expect, he smacked his head on the floor and cried very hard.*

* I actually did not expect this.  Chiara was (is) famous for smacking her noggin loud and proud and not noticing.  So I thought that was just something my offspring can do: hit their heads and not notice.  I was wrong.

But then an amazing thing happened.  He learned how to protect himself.  He doesn’t do it when he’s rolling on the bed or on the blanket, but when he’s rolling on the hardwood floor, Wagner rolls at normal speed onto his side, stops himself precariously balanced on his baby fat, and then rolls veeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeeeey slowly—he even squeezes his eyes shut—onto his back so that he doesn’t hit his head.  Not bad for not quite six months (adjusted, of course, chronologically he’s nine months).

It’s amazing to watch.  Even better, it’s intentional.  This morning I watched Wagner roll to the left from back to tummy and then back to the right from back to his tummy over and over and over for about fifteen minutes.  Each time he stopped himself just before his head was going to bang on the floor and eased himself down.  And then he giggled hysterically. 

The urge to protect our children is primal (and that’s good) but sometimes we take it too far and in preventing them for getting hurt, we actually keep them from learning.

And we keep ourselves from learning, too.  Today my child taught me that he knows a little something about cause and effect and intentional action.  He demonstrated that he knows he can control his destiny.  Today—rolling!  Tomorrow—Harvard!**

I can’t wait to let him fall again tomorrow.

** I’m still a little chaffed about this so I will remind everyone that one of the first doctors we saw when we found out we were pregnant with mono-mono twins insinuated that preemies born before twenty-seven weeks would likely be retarded.  Twenty-seven weeks was, in her estimation, the cut-off point to expect that the preemie might be smart enough to get into Harvard.  (Leaving no lee-way between genius and irretrievably stupid)  Our boys were born at twenty-five weeks, which puts them in the “wool-cap-delivering-for-the-florist” category”*** I know I’m supposed to be in this gratitude phase, but I still have it out for this doctor. 

*** name the movie.  I’ll give you hints if you want them

Giving Back

Giving Back

A long time ago, just a few days before my eighteenth birthday, I had a really bad day.  A terrible day.  The kind of day that makes you take a break from dancing and makes others suggest therapy for you.  The kind of day you still think about twenty years later. 

Some tough months followed that bad day, filled with nightmares and stiff upper lips and when nobody was looking, I screamed at little spiders.  The only advice to which I was amenable was that from my guardian angel; she was the only person who could make me feel better.  That guardian angel was me at some impossibly old age—like thirty.  The old me would comfort the distressed me with fantastic stories of how good things were going to get one day.  Just you wait and see.

The years passed and the screams faded until one day I thought about the distressed me and decided to pay her a visit.  I could see her so clearly, surrounded by eggshells and much shorter than she thought she was.  I told her how great things were going to get: how beautiful Iceland was and how tall she’d feel. 

In the years that followed, I’d go back from time to time and “pay the bank,” as it were.  Italy, San Francisco, a beautiful wedding by the bay.  There were lots of good things to look forward to.  Then one day it seemed like the little girl was now the Iceland girl and didn’t need me anymore.

And then yesterday, my jaw dropped and my shoulders sank and I wept. 

Not for the teenager—she’s fine now.  I wept for the mother of three and her stiff upper lip.  I wept for all the things that didn’t happen but could have.  Autumn 2010 is weeping for Winter 2010.   

January, February, March.  I couldn’t cry then.  There was too much to do.  If I had let myself think for a second about the odds, it would have crippled me.

Ninety-two days of dodging bullets.

Yesterday the nurses and I were discussing one of the bitter moms.

“She’s grieving for her pregnancy,” one of them observes and we all nod, as if pregnancy is a living thing that is separate from Mom and Baby.

The funny thing is, she had a pregnancy.  And she had a healthy (albeit tiny and premature) little girl.  Everything is fine now.  Her pregnancy did what it was supposed to do.  But her grief is real.  All grief is real.

Who am I grieving for?  My boys are so healthy, so chubby.  They are off the charts—literally.  We don’t even think of them as six-months (their adjusted age).  They are actually doing things that nine-month-olds do—their actual age.

It’s like I put my composure on lay-away with one of those “take it home today—pay later” plans that they have for mattresses.  I took home heap-big composure and now yesterday was my first sadness installment. 

I can visit all the islands of “What If.”  I can take on all the fear and worry and hysteria from those ninety-two days because I know how the story ends.  And since it’s a happy one, I can flatten the dimensions of time and space and lend today’s optimism, confidence, and composure to that short little mom in the NICU, the Me of early 2010, ‘cause she could sure use it.  And I’m her only hope.

© 2010 Janine Kovac

The New NICU Days

I’m a little shell-shocked right now.  I’ve just come from the NICU, from a meeting of the “Partnership Council,” a non-descript name for a group of medical staff and the occasional parent (me) that makes decisions on all NICU matters aside from specific medical decisions and union issues.  It’s a big deal.  They’re even getting a badge for me.

I hardly recognize the inside of the hospital’s front entry.  I know that I’m in the right place only because I know the front desk security guard.  There are walls where there used to be open space and huge shiny bronze-y colored pillars where there used to be walls.  They are remodeling.  It’ll take another two years.

Looking at the huge pillars, a cynical “so that’s where my two million dollars went”* comes and goes through my brain before I can stop it.

* that was the total hospital bill for both boys, but that’s not what the insurance paid.  Their negotiated share was less than 10%.  I still can’t believe that there’s an actual debate about reforming health insurance.  But that’s a post for another day.

Is it right for a hospital to look so flashy? 

That’s another thought to squash.  After decades of mistrusting hospitals and doubting doctors, eschewing them for yoga and leafy vegetables, I am on the other side now.  My boys owe their lives to this hospital, these doctors, and the miracles of expensive western medicine.  I am one of them, now.  Out of solidarity and loyalty, I must love these pillars. 

I greet the rest of the security guards by name.  The 4^th floor guard, the NICU guard, the one in the elevator coming back from her break. 

Today the council is discussing the new discharge pamphlet (which happens to feature a picture of the twins—our twins—on the cover).  We discuss the wording, what changes need to be made to the Mandarin and Spanish versions, who still needs to sign-off (I’ve already given my seal of approval), when they’ll go to the printer’s. 

At the meeting I know everyone except one nurse.  They all know me. 

Then we discuss the new NICU website that is in the process of being revamped.  I am in charge of taking notes for the group.  The photos of moms and babies on the new site are actual former patients.  I know all of them.  They all know me.

We discuss possibilities, menu navigations, submenu items, the ordering of such items.  For instance, we all agree that “Birth Defects” shouldn’t be the first item under “About Your Premature Infant.”

Then we get to the section of the site that discusses medical conditions: RDS, ROP, PDA, NEC, PHV, all acronyms with which I am already familiar.  The acronyms are misleading.  They look so benign when reduced to three letters, but they are anything but.  RDS is a dangerous respiratory virus (the boys will get 12 immunizations apiece over the next two years to protect them against this virus).  ROP refers to the arteries of the eyes that get blown out from too much oxygen (this is why Stevie Wonder, another NICU grad, is blind, btw).  PDA is the heart valve surgery that both boys underwent.  NEC refers to the condition of an underdeveloped digestive system.  Last week a woman stopped me in the street to tell me about her twins (now twelve years old) who were born at 30 weeks.  The girl was fine ,but her boy had NEC.

I feel my heart in my throat.  I am remembering. 

Now I know why so many intelligent, grateful, generous NICU moms refuse to be a part of the partnership council.

At one point I give my opinion: “We need the ‘what to expect’ section to reflect some of the things that parents can actually do while they’re in the nursery,” I gesture toward the website projected on the wall.  “All the things I did when I was here, every day for so many days—none of that is reflected in what we’ve seen so far.”

I see nodding.  A note is made.  I get “volun-told.”*  I am now in charge of this section of the site.

* new term coined by one of the nurse’s teenagers.  It means volunteering for something that you are told to do.

We get to the statistics.  For 23 weeks.  24 weeks.  25 weeks.  40% of babies born at 25 weeks have notable cognitive delays and physical disabilities that are detectable at age nineteen.  For now we will use the national statistics although Alta Bates’ numbers are better than the national average.

I am choking on my heart.  I don’t feel like one of them anymore.  I feel like a mom suddenly realizing that if this were Vegas, she would have walked away from the tables rather than play. 

After the meeting I go to the NICU to “make my rounds.”  I’m looking for one mom in particular.  (“Tread lightly,” I am advised.)  The last time I talked to this mother she hung up on me.  She’s in her son’s room.  I know her nurse; the nurse knows me. 

The mom has just finished pumping.  She vaguely remembers talking to me.  Details about my kids round out my profile.  She remembers everything about them.  The three-year old, the twenty-five week twins.  She’s very “with-it” today.  Makeup, nice clothes, strong voice.  Her baby’s going to be fine, she says.

She’s right.  Her baby looked great, over five pounds  I resist the urge to evaluate him by his numbers on the monitor. 

I congratulate her. 

“He looks so peaceful,” I offer.  I don’t know why, but I want to cry for her.

She thinks I should talk to the mom in Room 14.  That mom has a baby like mine.  It sounds like a dismissal.  We don’t shake hands (unspoken NICU rules) but I do squeeze her arm when I leave. 

I don’t go to Room 14.  Not today.


© 2010 Janine Kovac

Testimony for "The Binder of Hope"

At our NICU, we have a "Binder of Hope."  This is collection of testimonies from various NICU parents.  It's meant to give new NICU parents an idea of what NICU life is like.


This is our contribution:

My mono-chorionic/mono-amniotic twins were born on December 30, 2009 at just twenty-five weeks, three days’ gestation.  Michael George weighed in at 1 lb, 12 ounces and his younger brother, Wagner Lee, weighed 1 lb, 9 ounces.  Both were just over a foot long—the size of kittens, not babies.  They were in the NICU for three months.  Now they are eight months old, (or five months adjusted) and weigh over seventeen pounds.  They are in the ninety-fifth percentile for babies born at their gestational age.

            On New Year’s Eve, still tethered to my IV, I shuffled into the NICU for the first time.  The front desk was a collage of Christmas cards, all photos of Preemies Past at different ages.  Some were toddlers, some were first-graders, some were twelve-year-olds.  All were NICU grads.  That’s when it hit me—the NICU nursery is a place where babies go to get well.  After that they go home where they learn to do baby things like crawl and toddle and learn to do kid things like become ballerinas and boy scouts. 

            Being a NICU parent is like parenting on steroids.  Parents “on the outside” can live their entire parenting careers deluding themselves that they have some semblance of control over their children.  NICU parents know better; they are reminded daily that there is no control to be had.  Children go and grow at their own rate.  The most we can do as parents is guide their progress.  We can’t control when our children crawl or read or get married.  All we can do is facilitate crawling or reading or fostering healthy relationships and the worst we can do is hamper progress.  By the same token, there is no control to be had as to when a baby will be ready to go from SiPAP to CPAP, when he will tolerate his feeds or be stable enough to go home.  The most I could do as a mom was visit, change diapers, hold the twins, tell them I love them, and pump, pump, pump.  Oh, and make sure that I was fed and rested so that I could come back the next day to do it all over again.

            Every day for three months, I visited my sons in the NICU.  I’d change their diapers and take their temperature and move the pulse-ox sensor from ankle to wrist and back again.  I pumped every three hours (or tried to).  When the twins were stable enough, I held them skin-to-skin.  I told my boys about the sister who was waiting at home, the daddy who was at work and would visit them later tonight, the grandma who was cooking our meals, and about the doctors and nurses who were taking care of them every second that they were in the nursery.

            I didn’t realize until much later—after the twins were home doing normal baby things like nursing and cooing and grabbing earrings—how much parenting I did in the early days, and what all those diaper changes taught me about my babies.  I knew which cries were grumpy cries and which ones were hungry cries.  I knew how to soothe them (I still use compassionate touch techniques on them when they are fussy).  I knew them as individual people, tiny heroes who had been through more in the first ninety days of life than I had in forty years and who taught me that patience is a skill to practice, not a thing to have or lose. 

            This year our Christmas card will join the deluge of holiday cards at the front desk: a family portrait of me, dad, the sister, the grandma, and the twins who are so chubby, that strangers at the supermarket call them “bruisers.”  Hopefully our story will be a testament to what teamwork between families, doctors, nurses, lactation consultants, social workers, respiratory therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, x-ray technicians, pharmacists, and admin staff can accomplish, a call to hope for the next generation of moms and dads and grandparents who tiptoe into the nursery to visit their own beautiful tiny heroes.

© 2010 Janine Kovac 

And the pictures we included:

Michael

Matt & Michael

Me & Wagner

Wagner

Michael & Wagner

Michael & Wagner

Wagner & Michael

Think Small

WOW!  What a great time we had in Fresno, Santa Monica, St Paul, COR, Chicago, and back home.

Lots of news and I promise to post more regularly.  (I started a second blog, too, a blog-off with my cousin—well, Matt’s cousin—100 posts in 100 days, as a way to get to read more of his stuff and to write more of my own). 

Boys are doing great, rolling over, stuffing toys into their mouths.  Chiara is just a little grown-up all of a sudden and has started calling me, “Mother,” instead of “Mama.”  Tonight at the dinner table she offered to babysit the boys if Matt and I needed some “alone time together.”  Matt—working like crazy and fitting in sleep here and there.

Me?  Well, I’m busy.  Not just with the twins, but writing about the twins.  This summer I’ve been trying to put these blog posts into a book.  What the book has that the blog doesn’t are the “secrets” that Matt and I used to “hope and cope” during the short pregnancy and the NICU months.  Much of the secrets were found in borrowed from positive psychology research, some were divined through cognitive linguistic analysis, which is so much more fun than it sounds.  It’s sort of a “David Eggers meets Gödel Escher Bach.”  Well, not really.  I don’t know what I’m calling it yet, but now I’m working on the book proposal and I’m hoping that posting for all to see that I’m working on the book proposal will help me to continue working on the book proposal.

Back in May I wrote a sort of mini-proposal and sent it to a fancy New York literary agent who expressed a hint of interest at my cover letter and then rejected the project.  I got the agent’s name from my professor and thesis advisor, who liked some of my sample chapters.  He liked them so much that he gave me the name of a second literary agent, this time somebody local: Andy Ross.  Mr. Ross has a website with a section on how he’d like to see your book proposal.  In fact, he suggests following the advice of fellow Bay Area literary agent, Michael Larsen who wrote the book—get this—How to Write a Book Proposal.

So I got the book.  And I was surprised.  It’s quite helpful.  You see, if you want to buy something: a work of art or a pair of pants, you can know whether or not you want the item just by looking.  But a book—to read a book is to know whether or not you want to have read this book.  And nobody has time for that.  So the book proposal is a shorthand way to show what your book is about without actually having to read it.

Reading this book proposal book has brought something else to my attention: the reason you write a [non-fiction] book is to inform others.  I’m really not writing this book for myself.  That was the blog.  I’m writing the book for everyone out there who has had something bad happen to them.  I want them to know that surviving a trauma is easier than it looks.  And since I’m writing this book for other people, I want my message to be as clear as possible.  And I want as many people as possible to know that this resource (my book) is out there.  Writing this book proposal (or rather, reading about writing this book proposal) is helping me clarify my message.

It’s a little bit daunting.  I was hoping I could just write a manuscript and then say, “Hey, look at this book I wrote.”  But apparently that’s not how it works.  So I decided to “think small.”  Bit by bit.  Piece by piece.  Small things add up.  I’ve been trying to write two hours a day since the twins came home and now I’ve got about 200 pages.  Think small.

Next up:  Chapter One -- My Subject Hook

Three Months Old

The boys are now three months old adjusted* (today, July 11^th).  They are HUGE.  Weighing in at 13 pounds 6 ounces, Michael is seven times his birth weight.  Wagner weighs 13 pounds, or eight times his birth weight.  They are both 24 inches, or twice as long as they were the day they were born (six and a half months ago).  They are doing great.  And we’re still doing a lot of work to make sure it stays that way. 

We see the pediatrician once a month (she took the babies off of preemie formula and gave us the green light to travel—C-O-R here we come!), a county nurse makes monthly home visits (she thinks that Michael is babbling on a six month level**) and every Tuesday we have an Infant Development playgroup organized by the NICU (which the twins have slept through 6 out of 8 weeks). 

One week there’s the physical therapist.  Another week there’s a speech therapist.  Week 3 is mediated by specialist who helps organize play and I can’t remember what happens in Week 4 because I had to take Chiara to her first ballet class.  (She enjoys it, but she’s much more excited about the “Princess Ballet Workshop” that starts tomorrow because the dancers learn tap.  And they get snacks).

Then the cycle starts again: physical therapy, speech therapy, play therapy and mystery therapy.  The twins will go for a full year.  It’s really a way to facilitate their development and catch the snags before they turn into delays. 

I know what you’re thinking, speech therapy for an infant?  At this age, speech therapy consists of listening for “social sounds” in their noises and looking at their breathing patterns.  The boys are doing just great—Michael is a little conversationalist—but if they weren’t, we’d get some clues from how they breathe and then do some exercises to help them breathe better.

Our big thing to work on now is grabbing toys, but the twins don’t really care about that.  They are far more interested in faces, particularly Mama’s, Daddy’s and Chiara’s.  They are transfixed by Chiara’s face. 

And why shouldn’t they be? 

She shows them her princess collection. (Inspired by Cousin Maria’s princess collection.  Also inspired by Cousin Maria—sleeping in underwear instead of pull-ups and sleeping without a shirt on.) 

She shows them photographs.  (“This is me with my Mommy and Daddy.”)

She reads them books and makes up stories. (“This is the story of when Pooh Bear died.”)***

She gives them advice.  (“Don’t worry.  You aren’t going to die for a really long time.”)

She helps with baths.  She picks out their clothes.  She puts IKEA bowls on their heads.

For awhile every time one of the twins would cry, she’d come running, “Mama!  Mama!  They’re starving!  My brudders are starving!”

Another time we had them in their respective rockers and every time one would make a noise, Chiara would get up from her chair at the table and pull the electronic dangly toy that sings “If You’re Happy and You Know It” in odd tones.  Each time she’d run to the rocker, pull the toy and run back to her chair just in time to hear the other twin whimper.  After running back and forth several times, she finally exclaimed, “I’m doing all the work around here!”

And she LOVES to help with the diaper change.  It gives her an excuse to check out all the bits and pieces that she doesn’t have in her own underpants ([giggle] “It looks like a chicken!”)

But the best was the other day—both boys were LYING (that one’s for you, Mom!) on our bed.  It was right before the late afternoon nap and they hadn’t quite settled in yet, so they were making those non-committal cries that make you think, “Should I pick them up or what?” 

Chiara climbed onto the bed and sat between them.  She put a hand on the chest of each baby.

“It’s O.K.  You’re O.K.” she said in a soothing voice, “I’m right here.”

It’s good to be a parent. 

There’s other good stuff—my mom was here for two and a half months, pulling truly heroic shifts, back when there were six night feedings between midnight and 6 a.m.  My sister, Jackie has been here the last month, playing taxi and reading books, changing diapers and washing chickens. 

And now my stepmom is here helping us hold down the fort.  The night shift has gotten markedly easier (now the 6 feedings span between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.)  This week a million cousins and grandparents are coming in for next Saturday’s baptism (well, five grandparents, two aunts, two uncles, and three cousins).

We’ll check in sometime after our whirlwind tour ’10: Fresno, Santa Monica, El Paso, Austin, St Paul, Chicago, and COUSIN-O-RAMA! 

*adjusted

** She’s wrong.  She has mistaken Michael’s babbling (“ah-goo”) for multisyllabic babbling, but real multisyllabic babbling has two characteristics.  1) Anyone can babble in vowels, so they don’t count.  It has to be two different consonants, like ba-da or doo-ba.  2) Developmentally, it has to happen after reduplicated babbling, like ma-ma, ba-ba, da-da, you get the idea.  If it happens before then, it’s just an accident; it’s not a milestone.  

*** In case you’re wondering, in this story—a Chiara Original, as far as I know—Christopher Robin finds Pooh Bear drowned in a pool of water. 

Until next time, enjoy these pictures!