Aunt Invasion

The only reason why I'm able to update this blog right now is because my unbelievably awesome sister has arranged to have the day off work and is spending it at my house. At this very moment, she is changing my child's diaper. I have somehow managed to convince her that this is a privilege for which she should be grateful. Yeah...I don't know either. All I know is, she's going to be a great mom.

Lately it's been great to see Sadie moving into a new, more independent phase of her life. She's a happy girl these days, curious about new situations rather than terrified. Her days of bursting into tears when someone new enters the room are over -- mostly. She still tends to wig out if she's sitting by herself and a stranger approaches, as she did last week when our cleaning lady walked in (as she does every single week, SADIE) and went right over to her in the Jumparoo to say hi. And I've learned some serious lessons about how easy it is to wreck her happy mood by the simple act of walking into the room -- as if she's suddenly remembering that I exist and now she is PISSED that I'm trying to sneak away again.

For the most part, though, she is beginning to recognize faces of people she's met before and greets them with beaming smiles and excited panting. (Did she learn this from the dogs or what? Is it something babies do? It's a mystery.) She loves both sets of grandparents, her sitter, and today even had smiles for her great-grandparents, with whom we spent a nice hour. She went from Aunt Heather's lap to Great Grandpa Mirk's without so much as a protest, smiling and playing the whole time. This is a far cry -- pun intended -- from the baby who used to panic when someone other than me or Scott approached.

She plays with many objects -- the noisier the better -- but is especially drawn to things that are pointy, made of glass, or plug into sockets. Her new obsession is paper. I don't understand this. The crinkle sound drives her mad with joy, but its sharp, pointy edges present a constant risk. Much safer are the cardboard coasters at my parents' house, which don't crinkle as satisfyingly but which are dual-sided. Her eyes grow as wide as saucers as she flips the coaster from one side to the other, trading it back and forth between hands, trying to decipher the illustration on the front.

Another favorite activity? Playing the piano. I'm kicking myself for not having thought of this sooner, because we HAVE a piano, and I know how to play it, yet I never do because it's pretty old and out of tune and I'm just used to ignoring it most of the time, or using it to prop up picture frames. But a few nights ago while we were visiting with my mother, she suggested we sit Sadie down in front of the lovely black baby grand in their office. As soon as she spotted those black and white keys, it was love at first sight. She pounded away on them until our ears couldn't take anymore. The love affair continued today at the great-grandparents', who have an electronic keyboard. So that settles it -- I'm going to have to get a tuner out to fix up our ancient upright so I can start playing it without cringing.

Let's see...what else is new? Object permanence is a big thing. She understands now that when she's lying down and something is out of her line of vision, it might be behind her -- then she bends her body backward like a giant comma to see if that's where it is. She has yet to start the "dadada" babbling that everyone told us was coming, but you can see her practicing language in her own unique way: contorting her mouth into different shapes and smacking her lips with great satisfaction. My parents have informed me that I was saying "bottle" before I was 8 months old, and I don't know if that's true, but if it is than first words might be coming sooner than I'm prepared for. As if you can ever be prepared.

 

The Contents of Our Freezer at This Very Moment

Check it out.

Baby food

I made more baby food, froze it and then stored it in freezer bags to save space. See all the frozen cubes of pears, avocados, bananas, peas and apples, each in their own conveniently labeled baggie?

Yes, I mean those baggies next to the boxes of TV dinners.

Yes, I'm talking about the ones on top of the vodka bottles.

Why are you giving me that look?

Sunhat

"ALRIGHT, MOM.

You always wanted a little girl, and now you have one.

Sadie in her Sunhat

Now, would you please restore the remaining shreds of my dignity? GREAT, THANKS."

Healthy Sleep Habits, Fictitious Babies

They say that there's no point in trying to hold a baby to a routine; as soon as you figure one out, their habits change. That certainly seems to be holding true for our baby. While she held to a fairly predictable pattern up through the first six months of her life, for the past month she's been enjoying changing things up on us daily.

Her sleep habits were the first thing to change, starting with waking in the middle of the night throughout her growth spurt and continuing afterward. We had one particularly hellish night a couple of weeks ago during which she woke up every hour or two, screaming for me to come in and feed her. See, I'd gotten into the habit of nighttime nursings during the growth spurt because she was so constantly, desperately hungry all the time. Now she was no longer hungry, but still used to having me answer her cries by picking her up and nursing her.

Finally, we had to break her of that habit by doing the Ferber thing -- going in to comfort her every few minutes while she cried, but refusing to pick her up. Needless to say she HATED that, but it was short-lived. After one night of crying, she seemed to remember how to self-soothe; the very next night she slept a full 12 hours. Since then, though, it's been touch and go. Some nights she'll sleep without interruption; the next night she'll wake up two or three times. We go in and put her paci back in her mouth, turn on her musical nightlight and she goes right back to sleep, usually, but the aggravating part is not knowing how soundly she'll sleep from one night to the next.

(We've been having arguments about whether or not to wean her off the pacifier, by the way. Pros: it really does pacify. When she wakes up at night, putting the paci in helps her fall back to sleep immediately. Cons: She needs to have it in order to fall asleep, which means if it falls out she yells until one of us comes to put it back in. Right now we're at a crossroads: do we try to teach her how to put it back in by herself, or do we phase it out before it comes to that?)

Nap times are even less predictable, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to establish a regular nap routine. Even when Sadie wakes up at the same time each morning, her needs are different throughout the day. Sometimes she exhausts herself playing and wants to nap again after only an hour; other times she refuses to nap for 2 or 2 1/2 hours. Sometimes naps are 45 minutes long; other times they are 90 minutes, and most of the time they fall somewhere in between. Putting her to bed at the same time each night makes no difference; there simply seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Feeding is a little more consistent than napping, thanks to a regular solid food schedule of three meals a day around 7:30, 11:30 and 5:30. But her hunger level varies -- sometimes she wolfs down a double serving, other times she's uninterested in more than a few bites. Interestingly, the increased solids have done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for nursing -- actually, the opposite is true. She's started using me as a snack stand. If I so much as hold her on my lap she twists and wriggles, trying to clamp onto me like a lamprey. If I give in and feed her, she loses interest after five minutes, only to be hungry again an hour later. All of this is why I'm starting to toy with the idea of phasing out breastfeeding, which is something I'll address in another post.

Tending Beds and Cribs

I feel like there's so much to catch up on. Sadie now rolls easily from belly to back, having figured out that if she uses her gigantic melon of a head as a counterweight, it does all the hard work by pulling her over.

She barely fits in her infant tub anymore. Scott's thoughtful and lovely mother brought us over a bathing...ring...sort of a thing. It's like a bucket with the sides and leg holes cut out. You sit the baby in it and it fixes to the bottom of the tub with suckers; that way she never gets so long that she outgrows it. But it also means I need to find a new way to position myself during bathtime; before, Scott had rigged a bathing platform by tying together two milk crates and placing them in our very deep jacuzzi tub, then placing the infant tub on top of the crates.

The tub is deep enough that I have to lean way, way over to reach inside it, which is murder on my back. Just add it to the list of things that give me a bad back these days; I literally can feel myself aging more every day as my body creaks and groans under the strain of lifting baby with one arm while dragging a bouncy seat across the room with the other so I can then twist around putting laundry into the washing machine. Never realized that perpetual back pain would one day become a fact of life. Well...not this soon, anyway.

Aquababy

As she becomes more mobile, she commands more attention. It used to be I could place her in her bumbo chair or bouncy seat and she'd watch me wide-eyed as I moved around the room. Now, she's got to have something in her hands to distract her, or she easily gets bored. And it has to DO things, too -- a simple rubber toy or spoon isn't good enough. It needs to rattle or clack or make music or light up. She enjoys tossing things out of her own arm's reach then straining to pick them up again, and when she can't get to a toy she has tossed across the room, she fusses with frustration. I don't think we'll need to worry about her crawling or walking early -- she's already clearly desperate to get moving.

Now, for a change of topic -- I thought I'd post an update about our vegetable garden, which we were so proud to plant only three weeks ago. For the most part, it's thriving very well. And I can't really express how much of a thrill it gives me to watch it grow -- I think it can only really be understood by someone who, like the two of us, has never had a green thumb or planted a flower or eaten food that came out of our own backyard. These days I come out every morning and look over each plant with a critical eye, noting new shoots, which plants are succeeding against my expectations and the slam dunks which failed in spectacular fashion.

To begin with: the successes. The arugula, after a shaky start, is thriving. Even prettier are the mesclun greens which, after flirting with death, came back strong and are now blooming in that lovely, rosy lettuce shape. They're still delicate, but healthy and I can't wait to eat them. The pepper plants are growing slender and tall.

The tomatoes, alone in their own planter pots beneath steel A-frames, are growing voraciously. The broccoli is growing so fast it almost frightens me a little; we planted them as tiny shoots and the tallest of them is already 6-8" high. But far creepier than the broccoli is our giant bed of zucchini. "Woe to the zucchini grower," sniffs one gardening blog I've begun reading, which notes that a bed of zucchini soon yields so much zucchini that its owner will inevitably start offloading zucchini upon everyone they come into contact with. And sure enough, these plants have already spread so fast and thick that they're on their way to covering the floor of their planter box. I admit, I don't like the look of those wide, flat, horny leaves. Then I tell myself not to be a veggie snob -- they don't have to look pretty to taste delicious, and I've always loved steamed zucchini. Besides, if everyone gets a loaf of fresh zucchini bread for Christmas this year, who's going to complain?

I'm proudest of all of my herbs, those that are thriving. Scott did most of the planting, but the herb bed was all mine. Three cilantro plants died in quick succession, but one last plant has hung on, giving off all sorts of delicious smells. The rosemary, sage and basil chug along bravely. And the Italian parsley, which I had to much of and so planted in three extra pots I had lying around, is thriving and looking pretty.

Now, for the failures. Like I said above, I managed to kill three cilantro plants by the simple act of planting them. (No idea why the fourth survived.) A spearmint plant was my mother's gift to the garden; the notes advised it be planted in its container within the ground, so I did that and it promptly died. The peppermint was quick to follow. My English thyme looked great, then one day shriveled into a dried brown mess of twigs without warning. I did some research and discovered thyme is nearly impossible to kill -- the only way to do so is to overwater it, which, duh, I've apparently been doing. Thyme likes dry soil, not the super-moist soil that all the rest of the plants have been living in.

At any rate, I've got a new game plan now, which involves transplanting all of my parsley from its containers to the main herb bed, then planting thyme and the mint plants in their own containers. I also plan to grow chives in the bed.

I never though I'd admit it, but I think I've caught the gardening bug. We both enjoy watch it it grow so much. We even made out own pesticide out of soapy water and cayenne pepper to spray on the the leaves, and the one time King made the mistake of wandering into the planter boxes to sniff around, I almost took his head off. I think the first time we sit down to eat a salad with food we grew ourselves, we'll be so brimful of domestic joyousness that we may spontaneously explode and emerge solidly in the 1950s where our kind belongs, a la "Hot Tub Time Machine." 

Next time I remember, I'll take pictures and post them for visual reference.

Sunday Adventures

Him: I climbed the Duomo today.

Me: That's exciting! Oh wait. You mean your character in your video game climbed the Duomo today. That's not exciting.

Him: You know, I was going to give you a muscle relaxant tonight, but now I'm not going to.