Balance

Balance - one of the bigger challenges of parenting, in my opinion. But before I get into that, check out Zach's balance:

Pretty good, huh? He's able to stand on his own for a while now, and was even able to swing a golf club and bat while doing so. He has fallen down a few times, and at one point I thought we were going to have to take another run to the hospital! He fell while holding on to the bat, and instead of letting go, he landed on his hand/arm and the bat handle funny. I immediately started thinking "is this the same cry he had when he broke his leg?" and "oh boy, how are we going to explain this one at the hospital?!?!?" But fortunately it wasn't serious - whew. I wonder how long it will take before I stop panicking and thinking broken bones every time he falls?

Scott also got Zach to take one step a few times - slow progress, but we're headed in the right direction. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, Scott is much better at pushing Zach to try new things. It looks so painful when he walks holding on to our hands... he tries to avoid putting his left heel down, and puts as little weight on the left leg as he can.

Which is where my struggle comes in - it's been difficult, to say the least, to find the right balance between encouraging Zach to do things on his own and just doing it for him. While I am very aware that the more he does for himself, the quicker life will go back to "normal", I am already weary of the whining, crying, and screaming that often goes with making him do something himself. It's no different from plenty of other parenting decisions we've had to make along the way - whether to take the easy way out to make the short-term better, but then suffering the consequences in the long-term. I would have said we were pretty good at doing what's best for the long-term, but this particular situation is proving to be a challenge, for me at least.

In other news, we went to an apple orchard/pumpkin patch on Saturday. Zach's desire to go on outings is still missing - if you'd heard him you would have thought we were taking him to the dentist for a root canal or something. Once we got there he was fine, of course, and had fun directing us where to go through the pumpkin patch. Scott did most of the toting... this kid is heavy; we need to get him walking soon!

We also got him a train table, something we'd been thinking about doing anyway, but now seemed like a particularly good time to get one, since he can stand leaning against it to play. He's had lots of fun with it so far, mainly playing with his cars on it. The picture shows him playing with his trains, but soon after I snapped it, the train tracks came off and the cars came back on.