- Julianna and Grandpa Sander
She is eighteen months old, and I have no idea of her weight or length, because we haven’t been to the doctor in that long. (Halleluiah!)
She fell asleep in church this morning—her little cheek just plopped down against my chest, and when I looked down, she was conked out. She got heavy after a while, so I shifted her into cradle position, where she flopped both arms and her jaw into the great white beyond. Her olive skin—she has her daddy’s Italian coloring, so if she puts a toe outside, she turns brown, even if it’s in the shade—was smooth and unblemished. (Well, except for doughnut and yogurt debris.)
She goes by many nicknames in our house. She’s Angel Baby, Miss Mischief, Your Majesty, the Drama Queen. She has no words, but she communicates eloquently. After all, she has The Stare on her side—not to mention The Bounce and The Turned-Away-Head-With-A-Sidelong-Peek-To-See-if-you’ve-Figured-What-I-Want-Yet.
Her three favorite people in the world are Daddy, Alex, and Mommy—in that order. She’ll do marvelous things for Daddy, but if I try to get them out of her, she stares at me with half-amused eyes as if to say, “What are you thinking?” And whatever Alex has, she wants. Whatever Alex is doing, she wants to do. Wherever Alex is, that’s where she wants to be. The sun rises and sets in his laugh. She loves to tackle and lick him. We’ll be sitting on the bed reading naptime stories, and I can see it coming by the look that sneaks onto her face. She thinks I don’t know what she’s up to, but I do. I usually let her get away with it because it makes Alex giggle. She launches herself at Alex, landing full-body on him, while he falls into hysterics and naptime gets pushed back by five minutes of horseplay.
She loves music. I know, every child “loves music.” But her life is surrounded by music. Her early months she spent with me at church, either beside me or in someone’s arms, listening to me play and sing. Now she likes to sit on Daddy’s lap during lessons (or choir, or any old time he’s at the piano) and lunge for the keys. And at church, I sit her on my lap while I play flute, and she tips her head back 90 degrees to watch me, wide-eyed and bemused.
Two nights ago, Christian was in the basement practicing the Malotte “Our Father” for a wedding. Julianna crawled over to the stairwell and pulled up onto her knees on the spindles. Then she rattled her cage, grunting “more! more!” whenever he paused to correct a mistake. When Alex came flying by and dashed down the stairs, she howled her outrage.
Since she learned to crawl, she has discovered that doors open and close, that trash cans have fun things inside that can be strewn everywhere, and that some things on the floor or the ground are worth the risk of putting in your mouth. (Repeated experiments, however, have not made sand and rocks taste any better.) She loves to put her hands in the water and swish them around. She loves to honk noses. She has learned that we will make noise as long as she holds on, and if she pulls our heads from side to side, we’ll waver the pitch accordingly. Crawling opened up her universe in more ways than just the physical. She shows no signs of stalling out developmentally the way she did after she learned to sit unsupported.
Her “social” schedule is crazy—she’s up to five therapies a week now, or soon will be. It wears her out. Therapy is an odd term, one I’ve always associated with recovering from something, or fixing something. For her it serves a different purpose. I’m not sure “therapy” is the right word. It’s more like her life’s training. She’s not tuned in to the great cosmic radio waves, so she has to be taught things that other kids just stumble upon by accident. That means that it takes more energy to parent. But it also prevents me from being lazy, as I tended (and tend) to be with Alex. Or I should be honest—it doesn’t prevent laziness, but it does discourage it.
In public, she gets wide-eyed and observant. But her real self is noisy and a bundle of energy. How could she not be, with Alex as her #2 favorite person in the world? She learned early to defend herself by shrieking when he overdid it, and it’s a skill she has honed to the point where we now have to make sure we yell at the right child.
The first months were quite difficult, I’m not going to gloss over the truth. But even in the most trying times, she is so stinking cute that it’s impossible not to love her. Madly. Desperately. The lose-your-head kind of love that you think is going to happen with the man (or woman) of your dreams—the kind of love you thought you experienced with Mr./s. Right—but which reaches a whole new level when you have a child, and tumbles into even more passionate territory when you have a child who doesn’t fit the “perfect child” mold.
Gene Speichinger, a wonderful man at church whose grown daughter has DS, told us when Julianna was born that “she’ll be the love of your life.” And oh, how right he was.
