Turn of the year

And suddenly, it's fall. We haven't started all the most official activities marking fall yet: Given Princeton's ever-leisurely schedule combined with a late Labor Day, we're still hovering in the no-man's-land before the university, the seminary daycare, and Sunday school/church committee meetings begin. Even so, the day we returned from Family Camp it was clear the year had turned. Often summer weather lingers through September--warm, sunny, seeking to deceive with its cheerfulness. This time we started wearing layers in Vermont and haven't stopped since coming home. Daytime still calls for short sleeves, but shorts are a distant memory. Whereas our trees usually do all their turning in October, this year they are already losing their color, bronzy underneath the green, the dogwoods starting every so subtly to transition to reddish. Every tree in the neighborhood seems to have one stray clump of leaves that has plunged ahead into autumn on its own.

And even if classes and church committee meetings haven't started, the professional carousel has revved into gear. Everyone is back in town, hovering, waiting to get started. We've had faculty orientation meetings, Sunday School materials are ready in each classroom, and the pediatrician's office asked which forms they could fill out for the new schoolyear when we went in for Alice's nine-month checkup. We signed Edith up for ballet lessons at the Y, and when we went to the dancewear outlet, racks upon racks of miniature black and pale pink leotards were ready for the fall ballet lesson season, along with the soft little pink ballet shoes that delighted Edith's heart.

She had her first class this morning. While we were waiting to go into the dance room, another waiting four year old made overtures to Edith, then turned and told me, "I can talk to your daughter, and while we're in class, you can talk to my mother." In fact, that's what we did. Edith and Helen and the others all went in readily and sat down as instructed, and I passed a pleasant forty-five minutes talking to Helen's mother while we both knit. She's university affiliated, too, and I suspect that in a few weeks the knitting and chatting will give way to paper grading. Three-quarters of an hour later Edith emerged, told me she had liked it, showed me the sticker the teacher had given her, demonstrated a few moves, and announced that for the first time she's in a class with another Edith.

As the weather turns we're digging in the drawers and finding ourselves lacking long pants for Alice. We will have to dive back into the hand-me-downs from her sister, especially to check again through the smaller sizes. At Alice's nine-month appointment, my mama instinct was confirmed when we discovered that she has only gained a few ounces this summer, if anything. She didn't stopped wiggling on the scale long enough for a precise reading, but it looks as though she has dropped from 40th percentile for weight in June to somewhere between 10 and 20th percentile now. She began at 90th at birth and has dropped steadily, and the pediatrician finally expressed concern, since the idea behind the percentile charts is not to be in any particular percentile but to maintain a roughly steady rate of growth at whatever place in the range. Alice continues to get taller and her head is growing well; she's hitting all her other developmental milestones and seems quite happy. She just isn't getting heavier.

So the pediatrician scheduled her for another visit in six weeks, and in the meantime we're supposed to put her on every food adults struggle to avoid--especially Tom, who is working on high cholesterol. Having slowly rid the refrigerator of artery cloggers this past year, we went out this morning and got full-fat yogurt, butter, and even heavy cream to pour into Alice's soups. (Doctor's orders.) She's supposed to have mashed-up meat, along with plenty of olive oil and avocados. Tom is drooling. I think we're going to have to cordon the refrigerator into separate regions.

Meanwhile we now have a child who is supposed to watch her intake so she doesn't get too heavy, whom we can barely persuade to eat more than a few mouthfuls of anything at a sitting. And a child who happily chows down on anything and everything and isn't gaining weight. What's a parent to do?

(Incidentally, I think some of you may have faced issues of weight gain with your own babies; I'd be interested to hear any experiences, especially as pertains to recommendations for breastfeeding going forward. Our pediatrician is recommending less breastfeeding at this point, which surprised me, since I thought breastmilk was good fatty stuff for babies.)

Meanwhile, a domestic scene to close the post. Who knows how much time there will be for making cookies--or blogging--in the coming weeks?