9 Month Check In

Sadie turned 9 months today.

How is it possible that she's been on the outside for as long as she was on the inside? She's been born for, like, five minutes, and while I'm not positive of the exact numbers, I'm fairly sure I was pregnant for roughly forty years.

Our daughter is the happy light of our lives. Yeesh, that's so goopy to write. But Sadie, one day when you read this, at least you'll know that I really meant it and haven't just been blowing smoke up your ass telling you that you were a great baby. You really are a great baby.

She has a tooth now, one tiny tooth in front, on the bottom, on the lefthand side. She stands by herself, hanging onto the ottoman or her Winnie the Pooh activity table, yelling "AHHHHHH" to make sure we can see her achieving her awesome feat. She talks to us, very seriously, in alien baby garble. She eats food with chunks in it.

She thinks water is funny. She thinks my knee is funny. She thinks when I use her as a gun, yelling "lock and load!" and run around the house pointing her head at the dogs while making "pew pew pew" noises, it's funny.

She loves the shape of leaves against the sky.

She curls into me when we arrive at daycare, looking shy. She does the same when we're out running errands, but then she makes eye contact with the person standing nearest to us and gives them a flirtatious smile.

She wears a sun hat without protest, still hates having lotion put on after her bath, and pretends not to know how to hold a bottle on her own. Simultaneously, she will strike at my hand as it holds the remote control like an angry cobra, pulling it away and hitting a button that causes our entire entertainment system to freeze up and go into convulsions.

She likes Ricky Nelson's "Calendar Girl" and being danced around the kitchen. She likes banging a plastic spoon against the tray on her high chair. She likes sitting in her carseat, furrowing her eyebrows at a set of plastic car keys. She will root around in the cupholders attached to the carseat because she knows that's where a pacifier sometimes lurks. She will find the paci and shove it into her mouth backwards, frown, pull it out and reinsert it correctly.

She never cries when you pour soapy water over her head.

She makes a Stunned and Surprised face when you feed her something she didn't expect to like, like shredded cheese, then looks up at you all, "MOM! THIS SHIT IS GOOD!"

She melts into the baby swings at the playground, smiling as she swings forward to meet you. Sometimes she falls asleep in the swing.

She is the best baby anyone could have asked for.

Baby Sadie and the dogs

Videos

A couple new videos. This one was taken yesterday after we got home from day care. She's finally starting to put it together in her head that in order to get places, you have to, you know, move your legs.

Sadie scoots

This one I took while I was at the dermatologist while she was being especially cute and chatty. I'm sure the other people in the waiting room appreciated it.

Sadie at the dermatologist

Finally, the two of us being goofballs:

Baby Sadie Laughing

Blom Brain

Whenever I consider changing my hair color, I'm reminded of the simple fact that being blonde accurately represents a huge facet of my personality: my extreme absent-mindedness. Why hide this with false advertising, I say? Better that people know what they're up against.

When I became pregnant with Sadie, pregnancy brain combined with blonde brain, and then when Sadie was born and my focus became laser-pointed at her on a constant basis, my absent-mindedness with regards to everything else in my life morphed into something of epic proportions. It is Blonde Brain meets Mom Brain. It is Blom Brain.

So this morning, I didn't have a lot on the docket so I figured I'd take Sadie over to a magic show they're holding for young kids every Wednesday morning through the month of June at a local mall. I knew some moms who were meeting up there, in the "center plaza" area of the mall.

The first thing I did, once I'd bundled Sadie into the car along with the Bjorn and my purse and the diaper bag, was to realize that my feet were suspiciously comfortable. That's when I realized that I'd left the house in my pink, fuzzy memory foam house slippers.

After I'd changed into actual real-person shoes, we arrived at the mall. I put Sadie in the Bjorn and we meandered around. Oh, I should also mention that I'd managed to tweak my back while loading Sadie into the car seat, so I was sort of comically hobbling through the mall with an 18lb. baby attached to my chest and a diaper bag swinging from my arm, with only the vaguest idea of where I was actually going (I figured "the center" was a good bet).

I saw no kids anywhere. I asked every store employee I saw where the Kids Club was meeting, you know, with the magician. They were like, "Huh?" I had no contact information for the moms I was supposed to meet up with other than email addresses, so I just kept wandering. I accosted a mom at Coffee Bean who looked like she was on her way to something, but she also had no idea what I was talking about. "I'll keep an eye out for you," she offered kindly, probably noting the look of pain and bewilderment on my face.

I think it was about my third lap through the mall that I pulled out my phone and rechecked the invitation. Did I have the right day? Yes -- Wednesday, June 16th. The right time? Yes -- 10:30am. The right location? Yes, it was in the damn center plaza of the Sherman Oaks Galleria --

Oh.

Um...I guess this is the point where I mention I was walking around Fashion Square.

"Let's go home!" I said brightly to Sadie, glad that she's not yet old enough to find her mother lame and embarrassing. On the way out I walked past Coffee Bean mom and sort of kept my head low so she wouldn't ask me if I found the Kids Club. We went to the park instead and I pushed Sadie on the swings for awhile and pretended like that had been my destination all along.

Yeah, I'm a blom.

Hey, Crazy Internet Strangers?

Stop emailing me to tell me that I should take my baby to the doctor because she rubs her nose on my arm, or leaving comments on my YouTube videos chastising me for not having properly tightened the straps on her car seat.

I'm paranoid enough as it is.

Freaking internet.

Saturday in the Backyard

Scott is suffering at Twi-Con today (if you aren't a "Twilight" fan, then you have no idea what this is; if you aren't one, then you have no reason to care), so it's just me and the baby. We both woke up at 5am this morning, along with Sadie. On a freaking Saturday. The funny part is that as we were sitting on the couch, dressed and ready for the day by 5:40, blearily rubbing our eyes, Scott looked at his watch and went, "Wait -- it's only five forty?" Turned out he'd rolled out of bed when I did, not actually looking at the clock. I laughed at him a lot. We've had a lot of early mornings recently, but this one topped them all.

Since I last posted, the teething has miraculously improved. Really, that one awful day was a stand-alone. Her mood remains generally cranky, though, so I think she's suffering from a general malaise, and that's tougher to treat than sore gums. Also, STILL NO FREAKING TEETH. She is the toothless wonder.

She likes to climb all over me like a jungle gym now, hurling herself at incredible speeds towards anything I'm holding in my hand -- a glass of wine, a hot cup of water. The phone. ESPECIALLY my iPhone. When Mac created the iPhone, did they intentionally design it to look like baby crack? Because apparently that is what it most closely resembles. Possibly the only thing Sadie is more obsessed with than my iPhone is the remote control. She picks it up, jabs her fingers at the buttons, and inevitably, sends our cable reeling into some strange outer dimension from which there is no return.

Despite her newfound wiggliness when she's attached to me, she still has no interest in getting around on her own once you put her down on the ground. No scooting, cruising, crawling, pulling herself up. Not even any inching backwards while on her back, which used to be her preferred method of transportation. She just sits. Plays. Gets bored. If it's within her reach, she'll grab it. If it's even three inches beyond her grasp, she'll give it a cursory look and be like, "Nah." COME ON, SADIE, YOU HAVE TO TRY.

Update on the vegetable garden: it was...a semi-success. I choose to look at it this way: this was our rehearsal, and this fall will be our real attempt at growing a garden. We did get some good output from a few plants, mostly the herbs, but also failed spectacularly in other areas. Here is what I know now about planting a vegetable garden:

- Do not plant seedlings too close together. I had no idea how big full-sized plants are. We mistakenly planted six zucchini seedlings inside about 12 square feet of growing space, and what we have now is a tangled jungle of zucchini plants, several of which do not produce at all. Two plants would have been plenty.

- Deadhead plants before they flower and go to seed. Now I understand that flowering is the final stage of a plant's life, and they have to be regularly clipped and pruned to prevent this.

- Cool weather plants shouldn't be planted in mid-spring. I had to throw out a lot of lettuce plants today.

- Herbs can be touchy.

- You really shouldn't forget to mulch.
 

Shut Up, "Two Days Ago Me"

Seriously? I was complaining about a whining baby? Shut up, me. The good part is just getting started. Sadie spent yesterday screaming her head off. Drooling, chewing her fingers, desperately rubbing her nose against my shoulder, snotting, falling into an exhausted sleep and then waking up to do it all over again. We had a steady flow of visitors yesterday, and each one sent her into paroxysms of rage and shrieking. I guess she doesn't like people to witness her pain.

Still no Infant Tylenol in the entire state of California, it appears, so we finally called her doctor and got okayed to use a low dosage of Chidren's Tylenol syrup instead. That's been helping, a little bit. Today she's supposed to spend the day with my dad and my sister, hanging out at my parents' house while I help my mom organize some office files for a few hours. I almost canceled that after yesterday's crying marathon, until --

Well, really, it was the craziest thing. There we were, Scott and I, sitting on the couch with Sadie around 6pm. She'd play for a minute or two, then a wave of pain would hit her and she'd burst into hysterical, furious, tired sobs. We'd soothe her, walk her around, distract her with toys, and she'd eventually stop crying, only to start up again. We were literally counting down the seconds to her bathtime so we could give her a bottle and put her to bed.

The doorbell rang and it was my dad, ready to take me to a Dodger game (Scott was on baby-sitting duty last night). I let him in and got ready for another round of, "Why have you introduced this horrible STRANGER into my house?" yelling. But instead, Sadie was fascinated. She wanted to stare at his face and pull on his mustache. She almost smiled. We put her in my father's arms and she sat there peacefully until it was time for us to go.

I guess what this means is that my father has magical child-calming powers. Which is why, today, I'm headed over to my parents', baby in tow, feeling only mildly guilty about the fact that I'm dropping a miserable nightmare baby on my well-meaning family members. And if it turns out badly, well, sorry guys. Mom needs a break.  

Getting Creative

Can I just say, as an aside, that it's miraculous how a three-hour nap and a giant crap can improve a baby's mood?

I had to get creative in two ways today, because the universe is making it difficult to meet my child's simple needs, which really all boil down to: change my diaper, feed me some food I like, keep me entertained, and let me sleep. (The Four Commandments of Child Rearing?) To begin with, she seems to be teething again. The last 24 hours have been pretty miserable. I'm constantly being treated to a fussy half-cry-half-whine that most closely resembles the sound an airplane makes when, just before take-off, the pilot takes it up to full-throttle. It's hard to listen to that all day.

The last time she teethed and things got really bad, I was able to treat the problem with an occasional dose of Infant Tylenol. This time around, guess what? Every freaking bottle of Infant Tylenol in the United States has been recalled. Guess what else? Infant Motrin has been recalled, too. Guess what a third time? All the generic brands of these two medicines has flown off the shelves and is nearly impossible to find.

After visiting two markets and a drugstore with no luck, I've turned to more conventional home remedies: cold teethers, frozen washcloths, and Orajel. Okay, so Orajel isn't a "home remedy." It's a freaking remedy, and I'll take what I can get right now.

The other problem is a little more unique: we've been trying to figure out a way to get Sadie to drink more water. It might not seem like a big deal for a baby to drink water considering she drinks five bottles of formula a day, but she also eats a lot of solid food and trust me, the water helps to keep everything moving at a nice, brisk pace.

Unfortunately, she has developed an intense hatred for sippy cups. When you bring one to her mouth she turns her head away, all, "No THANK YOU ma'am." Scott discovered one day that she likes having water squirted into her mouth via squeeze bottle, which was fun for awhile, but also insanely messy. Also mock me all you want, but the idea of showing up to her new day care next week with a giant Arrowhead bottle with a squirt cap is just too embarrassing to contemplate.

"Yes, this is how she drinks water. Yes, I'm aware this is for adults. Yes, that is spilled water all over the front of her onesie. You'll probably need to change her clothes four or five times a day."

It's unlikely they'd cotton to my other method for hydrating her: wetting down a washcloth when she takes a bath and letting her suck on it, like it's her idea to drink water rather than mine.

In desperation, I've turned to the internet for help. Turns out people have all sorts of inventive methods for getting their kids to consume water, from putting ice cubes in a mesh bag that hangs from the baby's neck to feeding it to them from a spoon. Since I don't have the mesh bag and we own enough stuff, I tried the spoon option. And hey, what do you know? She was all about the spoon. Sadly the spoon is not a long-term solution, but if I have to instruct the day care employees to spoon-feed my kid water, well, I'm guessing they've heard stranger things.

I Suspect...

That having trained myself to hold Sadie in my left arm, while also being left-handed, I have really set myself up for failure.

8 Month, 1 Week Check-In

I'm soooo behind in updating. It's been a busy couple of weeks and there's a lot to report.

Starting next week, Sadie's going to be in day care 3 times a week. I think this is going to be a good thing all around. We've just lost our latest babysitter to the Peace Corps (she's moving to Central America for the next two years to build latrines -- and what have you done lately?) and after doing a little hunting to find a new sitter, I came to a realization: having Sadie at home all day, with or without paid help, isn't an ideal situation for either of us.

For one thing, it means I need to leave the house to work. Our house is small enough that the office and the living room are essentially two ends of the same room; the nursery is too small to play in, so when Sadie and the sitter are playing in the living room I'm about fifteen feet away. This ensures that I get no work done, so it forces me to leave the house and work elsewhere. While that can be a good thing, it's also a costly habit -- when you use a restaurant or cafe's free wi-fi, they expect you to patronize their establishment, every time. The idea of having an empty, quiet house three times a week is very tempting, in no small part because I've been booking more and more work recently and desperately need more hours in the day to complete it all.

But it's not just a selfish need. I think it's going to do Sadie a lot of good, too. She spends a lot of time with adults, aside from the occasional playdate. Frankly, I suspect that after spending so much time rolling on the floor with King and Pepper, she may actually consider herself a dog. Going to a place where there are other kids in other stages of life, crawling and walking and playing and talking, can only be good for her. We found a place only two miles away, run by a kindly Armenian woman who serves her kids borscht and swears they love it; Sadie was entranced by the three well-behaved toddlers who already attend. I feel good about leaving her in the care of this woman, who reminds me of Penny, the French woman who used to watch me and my sister when we were young and would regularly make us butter sandwiches and macaroni in tomato and cheese sauce.

One reason I want Sadie to start watching other kids is because she isn't doing the things kids her age are generally doing by now, which is starting to crawl and pull themselves up on furniture and in other ways experimenting with getting around on their own. She pretty much sits, and reaches for what is within grasp, and when she can't get to it she fusses, but she still hasn't figured out that it's within her power to go get it herself. And no, I'm not freaking out that she'll NEVER get there, but on the other hand, it can't hurt to have a little visual demonstration, courtesy of other kids.

What she lacks in getting around-ability, she makes up for in other ways. She's already figured out clapping, waving, and has a full vocabulary of nonsensical baby babble. She "talks" pretty much constantly, "dada" being her favorite word, and often sounds for all the world like she's speaking a fully realized language that happens to bear a close resemblance to English. No endless "da-da-da's" for this one. It's more like, "a-blah-ya-yo-dah-dum-ggg," spoken in a conversational tone to me while she's on the changing table or to Pepper while she's yanking her ear.

More later, but now I've got to go make Her Highness a bottle.