Parrot

The other day Sadie and I were over at our friends D and T's house for a play date with their incredibly adorable year-old son, and the topic of my cracked-out day care instructor came up. This led to a conversation about baby development. T mused that the time in between nine and twelve months was when the most stuff seemed to "happen," -- the big developmental leaps, the ability to move around, the refining of personality.

Sure enough, in the weeks following that play date, Sadie has been transforming day to day before our eyes in ways that completely astonish me. Her growth from six months to nine, while impressive in little individual ways, was almost a throwaway compared with that she's suddenly done in between months nine and ten. At six months, she sat and fell over frequently. At seven months she...sat longer and fell over slightly less frequently. At eight months, she was still rejecting anything but puree, napping three times a day, and still occasionally falling over.

Now? It's basically impossible to catalog the things that are drastically and immeasurably changing, as she leapfrogs over her past accomplishments every day with new ones.

For one thing, she stands. Like, LOVES to stand. I place her standing up in her play pen, holding onto the top bar, and she stands there, squealing with glee from her new, tall vantage point. She's tall, this baby. She looks like a skyscraper, all weirdly narrow and still going when most other babies stop. She has realized, from watching other people, that moving your feet up and down is a necessary component of walking, but she doesn't quite understand how it figures in -- so when you support her while standing up she lifts her feet in place and stomps them back down again, all, "Am I doing this right?"

And remember all that lunacy over the crawling, or lack of it? Yeah -- last week, she decided she was ready to start. Some babies take months to learn how to crawl; this girl had utterly no interest in it until she hit ten months old and NOW she's not just ready, she wants to master it immediately. So she flips over all the time -- on the changing table, on the floor, when I'm putting her in her carseat -- and commences with the very loud grunting and flailing of limbs as she attempts to move forward. What happens right now is that she actually moves BACKWARD, and please believe me when I say I've been attempting to capture this on video, because this is the kind of shit I'm going to enjoy showing her when she's older.

Lastly, my very favorite development is the parroting. If there's one area in which I never had to do the stupid first-time mom "my baby isn't as far along as ALL THE OTHER BABIES" panic-dance, it's talking. Right from the start, Sadie couldn't wait to start babbling, and now she keeps up a steady stream of conversation at all times, even if it's just to her toys, or, casually, to the air in front of her. 

And now, quite out of the blue, she's begun mimicking the cadence of words and phrases. Not the words themselves -- but the tone of them.  "Uh oh!" is a favorite, that being the thing I sing-sing most often when she drops stuff, because it's more pleasant to the ear than "Really? You had to hurl your pacifier across the room AGAIN? You know that's the last clean pacifier, right? All the others are in the dishwasher. I'm not going to go wash off this pacifier. I've done it five times already. A little dust is not going to kill you. Here you go and this time try not to -- DAMN IT TO HELL WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU?!" And so instead I say, "Uh oh!" and she sings it back to me in the same pitch, smiling sweetly and waiting for me to shriek, "smart girl!" and cover her with kisses, which I do, inevitably, every time.

Gourmet Palate

I've long been meaning to write about Sadie's increasingly bizarre mealtime habits for awhile now, but it always seems like a task too daunting to undertake.

Now I'm finally ready to launch into it, but first, VOX BLOGGING PLATFORM, would you please stop taunting me by advertising for Diapers.com in the sidebar while I'm trying to write my update? How did you know that I am really in need of both an Ergo AND a crate of Earth's Best formula, yet can afford neither one? When did I start pining for ergonomically forgiving baby carriers AND organic high-end formula? How did my life come to this?

Okay, so, the long and short of it is that mealtimes used to be fairly non-eventful, and now trying to pack three meals into the baby has become a focal point of my life.

For one thing, for whatever reason, Sadie has begun carrying on a love/hate relationship with her highchair. She loves to pull on the buckles that fasten her in, but hates the act of actually BEING fastened in. She'll scream with anger when I snap the tray into place, pounding on the plastic like a prisoner rattling a tin cup across the bars of his cell. Then she'll begin to heave herself violently back and forth, with so much force that she is capable of actually MOVING THE CHAIR ACROSS THE ROOM in this manner. She accompanies the rocking with indignant yelling.

The only way of dealing with this is to distract her with finger food. Sadie has only in the past month discovered the ability to pick up food with her hands, and this is currently both a delight and a frustration. She can pick up a piece of cheese or a Cheerio with no problem, and sometimes she succeeds in putting it in her mouth, but more often it slides off one cheek onto the floor (where the dogs make an immediate lunge for it), or it winds up stuck to the back of her own hand, where she can no longer see it. Either way, this failure infuriates her and she starts up again with the yelling and heaving.

At some point, when she's sufficiently absorbed in stabbing at Cheerios, I'll approach her with a bowl of actual food. She's usually pretty good at letting me spoon it into her mouth -- assuming, of course, that what I'm feeding her is to her liking.

Her tastes are getting pickier, you see. She used to love oatmeal mixed with fruit puree every morning, but now it bores her and she ignores the spoon when she sees it coming at her. When she does finally accept it, she chews with the greatest amount of ennui she can muster. Even a spoonful of yogurt, her favorite food in all the world, doesn't do much to spice it up.

What she wants is variety and excitement in her meals, and it's all I can do to keep up with her. Pureed avocado and banana are no longer acceptable, but mashed with a fork is okay because she can scoop the food up and play with it. More ends up being flung to the floor and rubbed into her hair than winds up in her mouth. Pureed vegetables of any other kind are decidedly NOT okay. Meat is barely tolerated, accompanied by much coughing and protest.

In an increasingly desperate attempt to get her to eat homemade food -- and more determined than ever not to resort to jars except in emergency situations -- I've branched out into some trial-and-error baby food recipes. With some, we've had great success; with others, not so much. The three ice cube trays full of mashed potato, peas and carrots sit sad and untouched in the back of our freezer, since potato is apparently the devil, waiting for the morning when I'm hungover enough to throw the whole shebang into a frying pan and turn it into poor man's hashbrowns.

Here are a couple of recipes that have actually worked:

• Wheaty Meaty Stew: credit Scott for coming up with this dish's catchy title. (And thank goodness Sadie likes it, because it would really make me sad not to be able to say "Wheaty Meaty Stew" several times a day.) This could also be called Everything But The Kitchen Sink Stew, because it contains ground beef, rice, spinach, squash, celery, carrots and about a million other things, all cooked together and run through the food processor. The result is a toxic sludge with tiny orange chunks floating in it that Sadie thinks is utterly delicious.
• Turkey Apple Stew: I took a bunch of cooked chopped apples and pureed sweet potato, and added them to ground turkey and some rice. Sadie was good with this one until she accidentally inhaled a mouthful into her windpipe. She's a little more cautious about it now.
• Cheesy Turkey Pasta: That's what WholesomeBabyFood calls this dish, but I tend to think of it as Turkey Vomit, because when you combine cottage cheese and ground turkey and steep the whole thing in chicken broth, guess what it looks like? It also contains pastina, which is a kind of pasta that resembles coarse sand, and a dash of garlic powder and dried basil for good measure. The whole thing looks so disgusting I can't bring myself to sample it, but so far it's been a huge hit.

And so it goes. I understand now more than ever why people give up on this whole baby food making thing and turn to jarred food -- it's so much easier to simply buy a jar labeled "lentil chicken pasta stars" than to cook up a batch yourself. And I don't know honestly how much money we're saving by doing this -- organic food isn't cheap, and sometimes when I see baby food at Ralph's being advertised for $4.00 for 5 cans, I wonder wistfully if it wouldn't just make more sense to start jarring it. Yet at the end of the day, I love making food for Sadie. It's a therapeutic activity that makes me feel good  -- and there are few things more satisfying than serving her a homemade concoction, then seeing her face as she processes the new taste and then opened her mouth wide for more.

Development/Delays

Oh, what fun infant day care has been! In the space of less than two months, it has transformed me from a confident, knowledgeable mother to a helpless, shivering bundle of nerves -- convinced that the only thing that might prevent my child from growing into a developmentally-delayed pile of goop is the possibility that she might first expire from relentless chest colds picked up from other children.

We knew it was only a matter of time before Sadie got sick. We've been incredibly, remarkably lucky thus far -- up until last month she's never had so much as a single sniffle, despite my sometimes lazy cleaning habits. (I once caught her wrapping her mouth around Pepper's tail stub, which is about an inch long.) Then she began day care, and within two weeks had caught a mild cold.

She threw it off with ease, but last weekend we threw a barbecue to celebrate the 4th of July, Scott's birthday and the (amazing) fact that he's lost over a hundred pounds. That was a loud, noisy, hectic day, and she'd been running a low-grade fever a few days earlier, though she seemed recovered by the time we threw the party. Apparently not. She returned from a sleepover at my parents' house that same night with a rumble in her chest, and by the next morning it had turned into a full-blown chest cold.

I had never realized before this point how completely sad and pathetic a sick baby is. Oh my God. Between the hacking and the coughing and the chest burbling, she would cry and sleep and cry again. It sucks not to be able to explain to your baby why she feels so bad, and to reassure her that she'll be better soon. Besides, my secret worry was that things might get worse.

Panicked, I put in a call to my pediatrician's office, then I called back again, and left multiple messages, until I got a frosty call back from the nurse on duty, all, "YES, CAN I HELP YOU, IRRITATING WOMAN?" She warmed up a little when it became obvious I was just a nervous first-time mom, and reassured me that as long as Sadie wasn't running a fever and still had an appetite, there was little need to worry.

She was right, and Sadie was on the mend the next day. It's taken her awhile to shake the cough, though, and she's still napping more than normal. When she baby-babbles, she sounds like she's picked up a pack-a-day habit. She sounds like Bonnie Raitt.

None of this is the major concern, though, because apparently what I should be worried about, according to the woman who runs Sadie's day care, is the fact that her lack of mobility is a HORRIBLE THING and this, truly, is what I should be worrying about. 

I mean, here's the thing. She loves to stand, can do so if supported, and struggles to get up on her feet when you pick her up under her arms. She sits, rolls around, all of this.

But she doesn't try to get from Point A to Point B. She doesn't scoot, cruise, walk or crawl. She doesn't try to pull her legs up underneath her when lying on her belly. She doesn't really lie on her belly, period -- at least, not for longer than the time it takes to grab whatever toy is in reach so she can roll back over again and play with it. If you take the toy out of reach, as I've said before, she immediately loses interest in it, or else she kind of fusses in its general direction before shifting her attention elsewhere.

I'm sure, as a day care operator, it's got to be annoying to have to deal with a baby who is going on 10 months old and still won't go after something that's out of reach. But really -- to the point where she had to mention it to Scott when he picked her up last week, and then AGAIN to me on the phone today? This was, in essence, the conversation we had:

HER: I want to talk to you about Sadie.

ME: Okay.

HER: And I understand you are a first-time mother, so you don't know. You don't have anything to compare.

ME: .......Right.

HER: She needs more activity.

ME: Activity?

HER: She needs to learn how to crawl, and she is not crawling.

ME: I know she isn't...but don't some babies just learn late?

HER: (in a very patient voice reserved for mothers who need to be told not to put Mountain Dew in their baby's bottles) I understand you are a first-time mother. But some babies, their muscle tone isn't good. And there are exercises you can do to help her learn how to move. Have you talked to her doctor?

ME: Well...at her nine month checkup, she didn't seem to be concerned about it. And I know some babies just get a late start...

HER: I think you should talk to her doctor. Because she won't crawl, and she won't hold a bottle.

Okay. Nothing inspires unease like hearing your child's day care instructor say, in the sort of tone your auto mechanic might tell you that your timing belt has snapped, "She won't crawl, and she won't hold a bottle." I mean, we've had the bottle discussion before. I'm working with her on the bottle thing. She KNOWS how to pick up a bottle; she just decidedly doesn't want to DO it. Now my worry is that my daughter's obstinance is going to get her expelled from day care.

"Attitude problems. Issues with authority," they'll write on her report card. And it will go on her permanent record.

I know I'm being overly dramatic here, but...yeesh. I went ahead and talked to our pediatrician (that office sure has been getting to know me well the past couple of weeks) and she sounded...unconcerned, to say the least. What she did do was refer me to a service that sends physical therapists to the homes of children who have physical developmental delays. She also mentioned that because it's a state-run service, it's free of charge but that Sadie might not even qualify and oh, even if she did, it could take months for them to fit me in for a consultation.

Months.

Like, presumably by the time I got in to see them about my non-crawling daughter, she'll already be at the stage where she's not only crawling but also walking, jumping and running.

Faced with the choice of whether to spend the next few months agonizing, or simply not worrying about the whole thing, I think I'm going to have to opt for the latter. Of course, if my daughter winds up flunking day care, sending her down a lifelong path of failure and confidence issues, she'll have nobody but me to blame.

Summer

With the arrival of summer came babyhood on a whole new level. Sadie eats food off our plates (today it was tiny bits of cheese, mushrooms and sausage off our pizza at Costco), gives wet sloppy kisses to everything around her, and now understands a lot of what I say. "Hungry," "bottle," "sleepy"...I think I'm going to have to start watching my swearing. Shit.

Here's where we are in life right now. Sadie starts daycare full time starting next week. It's worked out so well having her there part time that I've kind of gotten spoiled. The more she's away, the more work I can do, and the more work I can look for. I've had more work in the past month than in the past two years combined, all of it very welcome and rewarding. I've been writing for a living for years now, but now I finally feel like a professional writer. I'm also helping my mother out with a massive-scale filing project one day a week.

All in all, there's a lot to do, and while putting a nine month old baby in daycare five times a week may sound like a lot, the truth is that we still spend a lot of time together. I'll drop her off in the mornings, then pick her up around 3:30 every afternoon. That way we still have all afternoon and evening to spend together, playing at home with the dogs or sitting in the shade under our orange trees in the backyard, or running errands. She's now old enough to sit in the shopping  cart instead of in the Baby Bjorn, looking around at everything and everyone.

Meanwhile, now that I've got mornings to myself, I have a giant laundry list of stuff I'd love to get done that's been put off since I first got pregnant a year and a half ago. Like, for instance, organizing the closet. Arranging a garage sale. Donating to Goodwill. Pulling out all the failed plants in our vegetable garden and preparing to seed in late summer. Dust under EVERYTHING, because the dust bunnies have begun banding together and forming a rebel army.

Well, I was going to update more, but Her Royal Highness just woke up from her afternoon nap. I'm the court jester, so I'd better get ready to do some entertaining.