Our Stubborn Snowflake

On Wednesday we have an appointment smack dab in the middle of a Bug’s naptime. Normally this would irk me, but this is not a normal appointment. This is one in what may be a long line of appointments in which we figure out what is going on with the Bug.

Today the Bug is 18 months old. There are certain milestone points and 18 months is one of them. I can’t actually tell you what the 18-month milestones are supposed to be because I’m not paying much attention to them. He hasn’t yet finished up his 12-month milestones and so the 18-month ones seem moot, really.

The Bug has never been a particularly easy baby. I see all babies as falling somewhere on the spectrum between a Sack of Flour and a Hot Mess. Bug has always been firmly on the Hot Mess side.  His excursions towards Sack of Flour rarely last more than an hour or so. Our response to this has usually been something of a shrug. He is a stubborn, eccentric, willful and sensitive kid. And we are his stubborn, eccentric, willful and sensitive parents. It didn’t mean he was Wrong, just that he was Hard. Sometimes I want to say to other parents attempting to commiserate, “No, you don’t understand. He’s Hard.” As if this will somehow explain it. But it turns out there may be an actual name for whatever he is, something besides “hard.”

It’s surprising how strong the Nothing Will Be Wrong With MY Kid imperative is. You can know rationally that it may not be the case, but then somehow it sneaks up on you anyway. The response for most people, from what I gather, is a reassurance that he’s just operating on his own personal time frame. That he really is just Hard. And that’s certainly possible. I am not quite that optimistic, though. I like to go in with the worst expectations possible.

I am not too clear on how the process works. I know I’ve made a number of phone calls and filled out a bunch of forms. We have our Wednesday appointment and I think we will get an official determination of whether he’s eligible for services. But I don’t think it will come with a diagnosis. We are back at the pediatrician’s office in a couple weeks and we’ll see if she has any more referrals. And in March we start bringing in the big guns, unless the waiting list opens up before that. There is no shortage of big guns around here, so in that respect we are lucky.

It’s also lucky that I was nearly 5 months late getting the Bug to the pediatrician after our move. Had I taken him in on time it would’ve been too early to matter, none of his delays would have been significant enough to merit any attention. I was just starting to get worried by the time we brought him in. And I didn’t start actually worrying until the pediatrician asked me those milestone questions. Until now we’ve been able to answer the milestone questions with cavalier confidence. “Sitting? Oh yeah, he’s been sitting for months.” “He crawls like a champ.” “Lots of babbling.” “Pulls himself up all day long.”

The question that killed me was if he could point to and identify body parts. It was kind of like the time I took a vision test a few years ago and told the nurse that the machine was broken because the letters were all fuzzy. It was beyond my comprehension. Based on where Graham is right now, I wouldn’t expect that kind of thing until he was… I don’t know, 3?  Words are pretty much beyond him. The idea of words going with things, we’re not even close. Paying attention to me, listening to my words and watching my movements simultaneously, mimicking them, all the things he’d need to do to be able to point to his nose when I say “nose”, they just seem so far off in the distance that I had no idea it would be possible. Not to mention that he only started pointing this past week.

Part of that is the weirdness of infancy and toddler-hood, I guess. When your baby has just learned to roll over, you know that soon they will be crawling but there’s so very much that must happen before that, you seem safely insulated from it. You just focus on the present and the future fades in the distance. We’ve definitely had that going on, even though the present has been basically the same since the Bug mastered his walking and running skills.

There are times I find this turn of events something that was foreseeable. He’s always been difficult. On the other hand, he’s always been so freaking adorable that it doesn’t seem possible. That, I know, is that parental exceptionalism coming in. But seriously, how could something be wrong with a kid who’s this cute?

And it’s possible that there’s nothing wrong. Even if there is, it may be months before we know much about it. Even then, he’s still so young that there’s no certainty on where he’ll go from there. The thing that keeps me grounded and not really upset or worried or concerned is that whether he’s Hard or Something Else, he’s still our same Special Snowflake. Our Special, Frustrating, Hard, Adorable, Smart Snowflake.

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