Journey to Mei Mei: A rough couple weeks

Sorry for not posting in ages. It's been a hard and busy month. Michael and I each had a Grandmother pass away this month. We're both sad but we have many happy memories of the long, full lives they had. On a positive note, Alsyon did great with the travel to California and all the activity surrounding my Grandma's funeral. It was nice for the rest of the family to meet her and she handled everything really well.

She had her first babysitter on September 29th and survived that as well. We had a high school girl that lives only a couple blocks away come for the evening so we could go to the Air Force Ball. She came over the weekend before just to visit and get Alyson used to her. It went really well, hardly any cying and she let the babysitter put her to bed without trouble.

Then the very next week I started her in a Mother's Day Out program on Tuesdays and Thrusday mornings for just a couple hours because I'm having such a hard time getting my schoolwork done and we want to ease her into the idea of other caregivers before she starts a 3 day a week day care when I go back to work sometime in the spring. We started out slow and built up to a couple hours.

Well, things haven't been right since. Alyson has only slept through the night once since we started the program and she has become a velcro child. Things had been going great in the attachment and bonding department but we must have tried too much too soon and she's getting insecure again. She cries at the drop of a pin and she won't let me out of her sight without a complete meltdown. I feel terrible about it. We decided to keep trying short periods of time at the program in hopes that she's just suffering from average toddler seraration anxiety.

Things have gotten much better as of today. She only cried for a minute when I left her and she came to me with open arms and a smile when I picked her up, then she started to cry when she remembered that she was mad at me for leaving ;-) That was a vast improvement over the first couple times when she didn't cry or reach out and wouldn't make eye contact with me.

I took her to the doctor yesterday convinced that she had an ear infection or something to account for the waking 3 times a night crying and general discontent but there's not a thing physically wrong with her. It's all emotional. It's hard to remember that she's only been with us for less than 5 months. It feels like she has been a part of us forever. She still has a lot of grieving and adjusting to do.

Since today went so well, we're going to keep trying the mom's day out program. I think stopping and starting again later could be even worse at this point. I think if we're consistent with our routine and continuing doing all the things that are recommended for forming secure attachments, things will get better. This afternoon has been so much better already, hence my ability to post this at all. She's playing with Michael and Andrew right now and not flipping out about the fact that I'm in another room. This is such a relief!

So it's all a work in progress and we'll take it day by day :-)

On to some pictures...

I'm having some issues uploading pictures to blogger so here's a few for now, I'll have to do the rest separately. They'll be out of order but oh well :-)

These are from Michael's end of the year squadron picnic. I'm guessing this was Alyson's first time in a bounce house. Very fun! Then Andrew got to go for a boat ride in Michael's coworker's boat. (Guess who wants to buy a boat now?)