A Bunch of Random Crap; Literally, That's What This Post Is

Her new thing is identifying red lights and green lights. Do you know how many stoplights there are in Studio City? Neither do I, but Sadie is helping to remedy this by helpfully pointing out each one of them.

We've been to the Americana at Brand three times since the holiday season began, and I think we could go every day for the rest of her life and she wouldn't get tired of it. Yesterday morning we met Amy and Narinder, Melanie and Dave for a really nice brunch, because I've been promising myself that I'd start inviting people out for more brunch dates. Afterwards we walked around the Americana, which is what it would look like if Christmas vomited on the lovechild of the Bellagio and Bedford Falls. Narinder got Sadie a balloon shaped like a dinosaur, and there are no words to describe what her mood was like the rest of the day. "Euphoric" comes close.

Okay, now I'm getting into the groove. I was dealing with a lot of anxiety for awhile over the pushing incidents at school, and Sadie's reaction to them. Which was, namely, to not want to be touched in any way by other kids whether it was pushes, hugs or random trips and falls. This is a problem, you know, because toddlers are all about invading the personal space of other people. When I sit and watch the other kids at school I notice little skirmishes happening constantly. Two kids will begin to argue over a toy, and it escalates incredibly quickly. From "Mine!" it goes to "MINE MINE MINE!" and then suddenly someone is smacking someone else. Sometimes there aren't even words first. The teachers intervene, the kids are pulled apart, and not one minute later the whole thing is forgotten and one is playing with the precious toy while the other is elbow deep in play dough.

Except with Sadie, it isn't like that. A kid pulls a toy from her hand, and she stares after them, crestfallen, but doesn't react. A kid pushes her aside on their way to the slide and she reels back in fear, sometimes yelling, "Be careful!" or other times, just bursts into tears.

At least, that's what was happening. Today we went to the Coop, and sat in the bouncy house. I had to be in there with her -- she wouldn't go inside by herself. But as we sat in there, kids came in and kids came out, and they cannonballed into each other at high velocities, and none of it seemed to bother her too much. That all changed, of course, the minute I tried to get out of the bouncy house without her -- she wouldn't have it, and stared at me with tear-filled blue eyes: "Mommy in the bounce house? Come in? MOMMY COME IN THE BOUNCE HOUSE." I'm hoping that means this storm might be passing.

Another nice thing happened, and that was that another of the moms at school chatted with me for awhile about what it's like having a sensitive kid. Her son, Sadie's classmate, is the youngest of four boys and one of the sweetest and most easygoing kids I've ever met. (Footnote: I haven't met many. Kids, that is.) Hearing her refer to Sadie as "sensitive" in such an off-handed way put it into sort of a nice, relaxing perspective. She has four boys, so she would know. Of course, shortly afterwards it put me into a panic. MY CHILD IS SENSITIVE, AND THIS UNIVERSE IS SO HARSH AND UNFORGIVING, HOW WILL SHE COPE??

Aaaanyway. One of the reasons why this post is so incoherent is because Scott has been gone for about ten days now, and he returns tomorrow, and the re-entry is always a little rocky so to be honest, I'm of mixed emotions about it. Here's how Sadie's and my states of mind tend to swing when we're living alone together for more than a week at a time:

DAY 1: Life is normal. Whee!

DAY 2: Hey -- where did Daddy go? I get suspicious looks and some serious attitude from my kid.

DAY 3: Sadie switches from grumpy to extremely clingy, on the off-chance that I, like her other parent, might become prone to long, unpredictable absences.

DAY 4: Okay, now we've settled into a groove. I get adventurous and do a bunch of laundry and cook meals for the following week. We spend the evening giggling.

DAY 5: My back's starting to hurt, and I could really use a full night's sleep.

DAY 6: SO. TIRED.

DAY 7: Sadie is convinced Daddy is never coming home, and when he calls over FaceTime she tends to busy herself with something else. I've crashed out at 9pm the past three nights after drinking too much wine.

DAY 8: When Ana shows up to take Sadie after four days of absence, Sadie is thrilled and I want to hurl myself into her arms and sob with relief. Then I spend the morning in the bedroom in front of the computer, quietly freaking about all the work that hasn't been done and the fact although I did laundry four days ago, I've neglected to actually put it away and now the hamper is already half full again.

DAY 9: Renewed commitment to the task at hand. It's her and me, together in this cold, cold world. (Oh -- and two dogs who need constant attention but haven't been walked in a week). We're both up to the task. We won't cry. We won't back down. We're tough. Invincible.

DAY 10: Oh hey, Daddy's home!

One month later: lather, rinse, repeat.

I Tried

New Things

I haven't updated in a few months, so if you happen to stumble back here upon this site and are wondering what's been going on, there are a few little tweaks and changes, but everything else is pretty much the same. I'll be trying to get back into my regular routine of posting weekly or so; there's never a shortage of things to say, only a shortage of time to ponder which of them might be interesting to other people and which could interest only immediately family members, if I'm lucky.

I went back through my old posts and labeled as many of them as I could. That should make it easier to find particular sections if say, you would like to refer some of my posts to parents who are dealing with physical delays like hypotonia. Or maybe you just want to read the post where I utterly spaz about having a nanny who stole from us, or you want to tsk for a few minutes over my ineptitude over finding other mom friends.Well, now you can!

I'll try to post more multimedia here regularly, because that stuff is what I most like to see on other people's baby blogs and it's much more gratifying than wading through fourteen dense paragraphs of text. As I'm as good as my word, I'm inserting this video of my child playing catch with my Dad. They each seem a little baffled by the novelty of the other.

Shove Me, Shove Me

We're at two years and two months now, and let's see...what's going on in life? My kid's personality has bloomed and grown. Half the time, she's a little blue-eyed angel with a softly glowing halo surrounding her strawberry blonde curls. The other half, she's a crazy shitmonster.

School continues to be interesting. Currently she goes twice a week, from 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon. Any parent of a kid older than one who's reading this post understands why that is totally crazy. As her naptime gets pushed later and later, she's less and less happy about being woken up to go to school. Nevertheless, to school we must go, and by the time she gets there she's pretty happy. That is, until one of the other children looks at her and decides to let out a little anger.

So, yeah. Scott and I are pretty mellow, and we gave birth to a mellow, pacifistic daughter. Sadie does not like fights. She doesn't like people being angry, period. When you scold her for doing something wrong, her response is to yell "HUG, HUG, HUG" at the top of her lungs and launch herself at you until she's sure that you're too overwhelmed by cuteness to hold a grudge. I love this very much about her, and it's something I treasure and want to encourage and nurture.

Okay, that said? Her peace-loving nature makes her a natural target on the schoolyard, and it's already starting to manifest itself in ways that are going to make life tough for her. Other kids in class have learned that if they want a toy that Sadie's holding, she's not going to fight back. She gets stuff snatched out of her hands routinely; if another kid stakes a claim to something wants, she'll wring her hands and look distressed, but it won't go beyond that. Today, she picked up a bracelet and began to play with it, not realizing that another girl had already claimed that as "hers" (Toddler Rule #17: If I played with it within the last 20 minutes, it's mine). The girl protested, and Sadie jumped and literally hurled the bracelet back in the girl's direction, then scurried off to go squash some play-doh inside a garlic press.

Upside? I secretly suspect the moms in my class are jealous of her good manners. "Oh, how cute," they sigh when she accepts a green plastic necklace from another kid with a heartfelt "THANK YOU. THANK YOU FOR THE BEADS." (By the way, she speaks in all-caps now.)

The downside? Well, we've been learning that over the past few weeks. It started with a girl in class who pushed Sadie...just once...just to see what would happen. What happened is that Sadie's lip trembled and she wandered away to complain to the air. After that, it was like open season on the shy kid. She's been pushed a number of times, and when one kid is yelled at and taken away, another comes to take their place.

Last week, I had a gnarly cold, so Scott took her to school. When he came home, he reported that Lady Pushalot had been picking on Sadie, and had received a stern talking to from a teacher. When I brought her in today, I noticed a difference in Sadie's behavior. She walked in hesitantly, looking around constantly. As luck would have it, two boys came barreling up right as we walked in, pushing and shoving each other cheerfully. Her response was to step back in alarm, eyes open wide, hugging her own body. It took her several more minutes to gather up the courage to step into the classroom and make her way to a safe toy.

Watching her make her way ever so cautiously around the room, I found myself thinking about our dog, King. King is ten years old and weighs a whopping eight pounds. He is the size of a very small cat. When he hasn't been groomed recently, he's so short that his stomach fur brushes the ground. When King goes to the dog park, he's surrounded by dogs who weigh literally ten to fifteen times as much as he does.

And yet.

At the dog park, nobody messes with King. He goes about his business, peeing on rocks and whatnot, and if other dogs sniff him he'll respond with a friendly sniff of his own. But if they get too friendly, he's not afraid to give a sharp little snarl -- just something that says, "Dude. STEP OFF." And then they do, and everybody's happy.

So when I watch my daughter in class, I find myself thinking about King, and wishing he could speak Human so he could give my daughter a few valuable classes about standing up for yourself. "Hey -- bald dog. If they get too close and you don't like it, LET THEM KNOW. Don't be afraid. We peaceful little guys have to stand up for ourselves in this crazy, 'roided out world."

But he can't do that, and I can't order her to stand up for herself. So when one of those brawling boys -- let's call him McShovin -- came up to her on the playground today and joyfully pushed her to the ground, causing her to burst into hysterical tears, I felt trapped and hamstrung. I went over to hug her, aware of the temporary hush that had fallen over the yard, but for once I had no idea what to say to make it better. I just kind of stood there, awkward, as a teacher took the offender aside and sternly told him that hitting wasn't okay, that she was going to stop him from doing it.

As she did so, another of Sadie's teachers came up to me. "I want you to tell McShovin that it's not okay to hit Sadie," she said.

"You... want me to tell him?"

"Yes."

She led me and Sadie, still hiccuping with tears, back over to McShovin. He was standing there with the other teacher, looking at Sadie with mild curiosity.

"McShovin, Sadie's mommy has something to say to you."

He didn't want to hear it, and he turned away, but the teacher brought him back to us. His mother was sitting twenty feet away, engaged in conversation with other moms, and I wasn't sure if she could overhear our conversation, but what I did know was at that moment I was being stared at by two teachers and a wide-eyed little boy. Most importantly, my own daughter stood there in silence, looking at her accuser, waiting to see what I would say. And that's why I took a deep breath, looked this kid in the eyes, and said loudly enough for everyone on the schoolyard to hear me:

"McShovin, DON'T. PUSH. SADIE."

Well. I can't say for whom it was more cathartic -- Sadie, McShovin, or me, a thirty-three year old woman who spent more years than she cares to remember getting picked on, taunted and just plain overrun by schoolyard bullies who were always far too intimidating to talk back to. Will it change anything? I hope so, but I'm not sure. If there's one lesson we soon learn as kids, is that relying on your parents to fight your battles only works for a very finite amount of time. But it felt good to do it. And it felt good when, later on, we rode home in the car and I said, "Do you remember when McShovin pushed you today?" and she replied, "IT'S NOT OKAY."

King would be proud.

Packing

Things I'll be taking with me on our Hawaii vacation this time around that I have never taken with me on previous trips:

• Five dresses. FIVE. I am not a dress person. Every time I buy a cute summer sundress in Hawaii I come back to LA and think, "This dress is tiny and strapless. I have no business walking around with a strapless bra on anymore." And the dress gets shuttled away to the back of the closet. But this time? All I can think is that if I only have to worry about putting on one garment each day, that's, like, two other garments that I don't need to worry about putting on. And so the dresses are coming out to play. I can wear a bathing suit underneath them, and if the suit is dirty, well, Hawaii is just going to have to deal with either visible bra straps or my unsupported bosoms.
• A carseat that has a telescoping handle and so doubles as a stroller. File this under "things I never knew existed and will use probably once."
• An iPad containing thirty episodes of "Yo Gabba Gabba" and also, for good measure, "Bubble Guppies."
• Just say that out loud. "Bubble Guppies."
• A bag filled with cheap, tacky crap, the sole purpose of which is to amuse a toddler for ten precious minutes at a time. Said cheap items include a booklet of Lisa Frank stickers, a yo-yo, a set of plastic car keys with Disney princesses on them, and Post-Its.
• A base tan, because my old philosophy of staying the hell out of the sun has been difficult to maintain this summer. 
• An attitude of grim determination as I ready myself for a five-hour plane flight, which I'm POSITIVE will be followed by ten days of sheer bliss as Scott, Sadie, Yayo, Yaya, Auntie Kate and I enjoy spending time together in paradise. 

See you in September, y'all.

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily

Yeah, I can't keep up.

I get now why moms keep blogs throughout their kid's first year. It's freaking boring. Nap, eat, poop, nap, make a funny face, nap again.

But I can't keep up anymore. Every time Sadie does something awesome I think, "I should put that on the blog." But then she does something else. And then fifty more awesome things. And then she says, like, forty-six words in a row, and sings the words to "Don't Stop Believin'" and writes out Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on her place mat in blue crayon.

I'm just kind of following her, in awe. Occasionally I stop to take video, but she's too smart to fool now, and immediately stops whatever cute thing she's doing to give me a look like "Bitch, please." Oh yeah, swearing is another thing she does. That's my fault. She knows "crap" and "Oh, shit." I can't tell her not to say them, because that only makes her say them more. I can't punish her for saying words that, to be honest, Mommy says all the time and couldn't stop saying if my life depended on it.

Then again, I'm probably failing all of the mom classes, and I don't worry about it anymore. I don't helicopter -- I don't have to, because I have a weird kid who enjoys sitting in one spot at the park, sifting sand through her fingers and occasionally noting, "I found trash." I fully endorse getting kids drunk on planes for overseas flights. I gave her a sip of my wine tonight because I thought it was funny. She asked for another sip but I said no, so please don't call CPS on me.

We have an amazing kid. She is hilarious, insightful and wise. When we have conversations over her head, she retains bits and tosses them back at me days later. When I sing a song in her presence, she remembers the cadence and the melody, even if the meaning of the words themselves are lost on her. Similarly, she can read a familiar book to herself and speak the lines exactly the way I say them. She is paying attention, all the time.

The thing I like best about being a parent is teaching her something new and watching as she files it away in her brain to retrieve for later. I taught her that the man on my Labyrinth tee shirt was named David Bowie, and now she knows that David Bowie is his name. She asks me what something is in passing, and I'll answer her absently: "shampoo." The next day she'll ask me again, but by the time I answer "shampoo," she'll have focused on something else. But the third time, I'll pause and point to it, wait until she's really paying attention, and I'll say, "this is shampoo. It's called shampoo." And wonder of wonders, the next time she sees my bottle of shampoo, she knows that it's called shampoo. And will, forever, until the end of time, know that this thing is called shampoo. That blows me right the hell away.

Sure, the responsibility wigs me out. Wouldn't it wig you out, too? It should. Everything you say is of ultimate importance. You can tell them anything, and they will believe it. If you tell them that a wind blew the door closed or that Tootie from "Yo Gabba Gabba" lives under the bed and snuck out to slam the door before running back under the bed to hide, these explanations are equally plausible. One may cause more nightmares than the other.

I'm going to stop trying to catalogue everything that happens, and just settle back to enjoy the ride.

Moms Baffle Me

I think I'm flunking Mom Friends 101. Warning: this is going to be a bitchy post.

First, let's get this out of the way: I have several absolutely fantastic mom friends -- and one good Dad friend. Sadie has a semi-regular playdate with her buddy Sam, whose parents have been friends of ours for years. We get together and gripe about feeding issues and in-laws and debate how one ought to amuse a toddler on long car rides, and all of that's great. Tomorrow, however, they will become parents to TWINS, in addition to their two-year-old. So our lazy, pleasant afternoon play dates are going to have to be put on hold for awhile.

I have a few other mom friends here and there -- but getting together with them is tough. One just scored a full-time writing position and suddenly she has no spare time anymore, for anything. Our weekly walks around Lake Balboa are no more. Another works in Santa Monica and lives in Hancock Park, which is hell and gone from Studio City, especially in traffic, so play dates have to be carefully coordinated days in advance. A third is great for get-togethers at the LA Zoo, but she and her husband and their daughter went to Europe for most of the summer.

All of this has made me realize an ugly truth: I am not good at making Mom Friends.

A lot of new moms complain about not having mom friends, but eventually they go and find them. I wanted to find some, too. So when Sadie was a few months old, I joined several internet meetup groups for new moms. I went to a couple of meetups. I hated them. These moms were SERIOUS about mommying. They wanted to discuss cloth diapering and sleeping in the family bed and the benefits of homeopathic medicine (hint: there are none) and the difficulties of having two year old twin boys WHO ARE STILL NURSING. Me? I just wanted someone to talk to about what good movies were out (even if we had no time to go see them) and how I couldn't wait to start getting manicures again, and is it really so terrible to have a glass of wine at four in the afternoon, if you're stuck at home and your kid is being extra screamy?

So, the meetup was not my scene. I began scouring kid-friendly places for groups of women who seemed cool, like the kind of women I'd LIKE to spend time with. I had no luck, until one day at The Playroom, I hit pay dirt. A group of women in their 30s, all with nice hair but food and spit-up on their clothes, were chatting and laughing and occasionally checking their email while their cute little kids played in the ball pit. Hey! I like to check my email while my kid plays in the ballpit, too!

I started talking to them immediately, and we hit it off. One, a woman named Michelle, introduced herself as a casting director. It was so refreshing to talk business rather than bottles. These women were like me -- they had help once in awhile so they could work and have their own lives, but they also loved being moms and spending time with their kids. When they left, Michelle gave me her phone number and told me to text her to set up a park play date for her daughter and Sadie.

Of course, I waited three days to text her. I didn't want to seem desperate.

When I did, it took her a day to respond. We finally set up a time and place, but as it often happens with baby play dates, it felt through -- Sadie had a bad morning and her nap ran long. I canceled and suggested we reschedule.

I never heard from her again. Sigh.

Being broken up with by a new mom friend feels bad, but it wouldn't be the last time that happened. I think my desperation is starting to show. When Sadie hit it off with another girl who attended the same physical therapist, I pretty much overwhelmed her mom with invitations to come over and play. We did a couple of times, but I haven't heard from her in months.

My mother-in-law swears that the preschool years are the era in which you start making your lifelong mom friends. I'm skeptical. I've met most of the moms that Sadie will be going to preschool with -- they're the same moms whose kids are in her toddler group right now. A couple of them are nice; others are, to be perfectly blunt, snobbish and unfriendly. I've yet to find a connection with any of them.

So what to do? My new tactic is just to wait for my pre-existing friends to start having kids already. Come on, girls -- we're all in our 30s now. Don't leave a bitch with a toddler hanging!

Growing Up as Hard as She Can

I see my little baby, and she isn't a baby anymore. She's a kid now.

A kid, with a full vocabulary and the ability to carry on conversations with herself. "Where's paci? I don't see it. Oh! There she is. Hi, paci," is an exchange she might commonly have with an inanimate object, one of many.

She is developing patience. She isn't very good at it, but she's trying doggedly to get better at it. As I make her dinner, she hangs on to my knees, burying her head in the leg of my jeans, begging please and suggesting, "Dinner's ready!"

She tells us what she feels like eating. When we tell her no, that we're out of watermelon or that a cookie comes after dinner, she shrugs it off and eats what's on her plate -- or doesn't eat it, and asks to get down to play. Her appetite is healthy and she has passed the picky phase that saw her eating butter noodles with Parmesan cheese for weeks on end.

She's a brat, but we're working hard not to spoil her. It's easier said than done.

I have a philosophy now when it comes to raising her, and when I stumbled upon it, it felt comfortable and right. The philosophy is: allow her to fit into the life that we already live, and avoid molding our lives around fitting her needs.

This sounds like I'm saying that I make her eat sushi-and-sake dinners, take in an 8pm Friday night showing of "Cowboys and Aliens," and leave her to her own devices while I check my email. That isn't case. (Okay, so the last one is partly true.)

What is really means is that I use this philosophy to stop myself when I realize that I'm spending too much time trying to guess what Sadie wants and what will keep her happy. I need to be better about deciding what the routine is, telling her exactly what that routine will be, and then expecting her to go along with it.

Take, for example, the process of getting ready in the morning. We eat breakfast, change her diaper and put on her daytime clothes, then move her into the bathroom where she brushes her teeth on the sink and I comb and brush her hair. On any given morning, this simple routine might be ambushed for a dozen different reasons. Perhaps today is the day that she re-discovers a book on her bedroom floor at the exact moment that I'm trying to move her to the changing table, and she demands to be able to bring the book up with her. Perhaps she would rather put the toothbrush aside and instead, put the cap on the hairspray bottle and take it off half a hundred times.

There are ways to keep her happy throughout the process, and I've learned them all. Swap out a forbidden toy with a safer one. Distract by singing songs, by making funny faces in the mirror, by promising "five more minutes and we're done." It didn't take long for Sadie to figure out that all it would take was a passing whine and her mother would contort herself into any position necessary to fix the problem.

One day I asked myself: "what would happen if I didn't fix the problem?" And instead of trying to fix it, I just let it happen. The whining continued, but it eventually wore itself out. Occasionally, it did lead to bigger fights. One toothbrush war in particular ended with blood shed on both sides, as I forcibly wrangled a toothbrush into her mouth while she screamed bloody murder and tried to stab the pointy end into my eye.

But by and large, the tactic worked. Go along with the plan, expect her to do the same, and make occasional -- but infrequent -- concessions to her changes of mind along the way. What I want her to do is to see that Mommy and Daddy are PEOPLE. We are not robots, designed for the express purpose of giving her happiness and new toys and occasional bites of their delicious pumpkin pancakes. WE ordered those pancakes. Because we were hungry, and IHOP sounded good, and you live with us now so you were lucky enough to be included on the trip. That in an of itself does not mean you have a right to grab the pancakes off of our plates, push a piece into your mouth, declare it "too much," and let the pancake molecules rain out of our mouth onto the IHOP floor.

My hope is that as I get better at applying my new philosophy, Sadie will come to understand that she is not the princess in the throne room, seated with a long line of admirers come to pay respects. I want to teach her that she has the ability to affect the feelings of people other than herself. I know that this is something that kids her age are only just beginning to comprehend, but I see the beginning of it in her and I want to encourage them. A boy cries at Target behind us and she turns to me and whispers, "Baby cry."

"Yes, the baby is crying."

"You hear that?"

"Yes, I hear it."

She focuses harder. "Why baby cry? Baby sad."

"Maybe he's sad. Maybe he wants his mommy to hold him instead of his daddy. Maybe he's tired and needs a nap." I watch her face, as she struggles to understand why another baby would be upset when she herself is not feeling upset, and what that might mean.

At home, I ask her for a hug and she pushes me away without another look, more interested in the new toy we've just bought. Then she catches sight of my face, which I have exaggerated to look extra sad. "I feel sad," I tell her. "It makes me sad that you didn't give me a kiss."

Instantly she leans forward and blows me an exaggerated kiss, followed by a bright smile that shows she expects everything to be better, now that Mommy is happy.

Water Baby

It's been a pretty hectic last couple of weeks. We've been thrown headlong into the terrible twos -- which feels pretty damn unfair, considering that Sadie's still almost three months away from actually turning two. We can only hope this means that by 2 1/2, she'll have gotten over the hump and transformed into an emotionally stable young lady. Which I'm so sure will happen.

I am finding myself lacking in the energy needed to catalog the many tantrums that we've weathered recently, and they're probably not too interesting to hear about anyway, so I'll stick to the positive stuff.

Sadie likes water.

No, seriously. If this summer has taught us anything, it's that our child has an almost alarming love of large bodies of water. Whereas my greatest fear used to be that my child would choke to death on a grape while I was distracted by something funny on television, my fear is now that she will sneak out in the middle of the night for some moonlight swimming in our neighbor's pool. Which is why we ordered her a "float suit" off Amazon.

We've taken her to swim class several times now; each time the only problem has been trying to keep her out of the pool before class starts, and removing her from it after class has ended. The first two classes, she was content to float around in our arms, splashing and pretending to kick.

I say "pretend" because this is what happens when you instruct Sadie to kick:

Me: Sadie, kick! Kick your legs! Kickkickkickkickkick!

Sadie: *halfheartedly kicks one leg*

As Scott pointed out, she has no incentive to keep kicking. It's not like if she stops, we're going to drop her.

Once you've taken a couple of warm-up classes, the instructors require kids to put their heads under water. I don't remember much about being a very young kid, but I do remember this: putting my head underwater for the first time was terrifying. Because of this, the instructors tried to ease us into it by teaching us to dip first our chins in, then to blow bubbles with our lips, then FINALLY work up to dampening the rest of the face. For big wusses like me, the process took weeks.

At this school, there is no working up. You just dunk them, and that's that. Ava, a girl in Sadie's toddler group who loved swimming until the fateful 3rd class, got dunked and now won't get anywhere near a pool. "No more swim classes for us," her mom told me, sighing and shaking her head.

Yet when the instructor approached us and showed me how to dunk Sadie, I resolved to give it a try. If anything, Sadie is too comfortable around water. Scaring her would be difficult, but it would teach her the important lesson that water can be dangerous -- and maybe it would stop her from hurling herself into pools every time she saw one.

I gripped her by her upper arms, facing me, and swam backwards while pulling her forwards. On a count of three I told her, "We're going under, close your mouth!" She completely ignored me, her mouth hanging open like a fish. I dunked her anyway. One...two...

When I pulled her up, her eyes were huge. She coughed and sputtered as the instructor showed me how to raise one arm, which apparently helps clear the water somehow. I waited for the screaming -- but it didn't come. Instead, she whined briefly, and then...she smiled.

And that was that. We went under maybe a dozen times. Each time, she ignored my instructions and kept her mouth open, ending up with a faceful of dirty pool water. Each time, she burst up blinking and shocked, like she couldn't believe what had just happened, then instantly recovered and got ready to do it again.

Tantrum? Oh sure, there was a tantrum. When I tried to get her out of the pool, at the end of class. So much for teaching her respect for water.

Since then, we've gone to the beach and we've gone, twice, to the public pool at the park nearby our house. If you asked me to write a list of places I felt comfortable saying I'd never need to visit during my lifetime, "the public pool" would fall right between "a train station in India" and "the men's bathroom at the beach in Santa Monica." Now, having been there, I can say, THANK GOD FOR THE PUBLIC POOL. They've got a little wading area for young kids, with a fountain and a foot of water in it, and we spent the majority of this past weekend there.

We know now that swimming lessons for our water baby will be crucial. I'm thrilled that she loves water as much as she does -- her dad and her grandfather share the same love, and when she gets older they will swim, bodysurf, snorkel and even scuba together. But for now she's just a skinny little toddler who has no fear of jumping in the deep end.

At the Beach

Photo taken by my mother.

Social Tendencies

I wish I had more pictures with which to illustrate this post, but the photos I take with my iPhone tend to be uniformly terrible.

After a pretty quiet winter, we've had a wonderfully social spring. There's something about not socializing that makes you (maybe just me) quietly paranoid that all of your friends have gone off to find someone more fun to spend time with. That's one reason why, as most of you guys know, we like to throw giant barbecues right around this time of year, so we can see everyone all at once and be like, "Oh, right! Friends! Eat our food and never leave us again!"

No barbecue this year, but now that we have Sadie, it's made more sense to spread out our visits and do it often. Things we wouldn't have bothered to do a few years ago -- going to the beach, going to the pool, having people over, social daytime visits that don't involve getting smashed on margaritas -- are finally appealing.

Spring began with a trip up north to visit my Mills friends, which I wrote about a little while back. That was like the spring kick-off tour. I felt like a vampire slowly crawling out of her coffin and blinking in the sunlight that is interaction with people her own age. We drank wine and ate homemade vegan risotto and stayed up past my bedtime.

After we came home, I started lining up play dates for Sadie. Aside from seeing our friends David and Tara and their son Sam, who's almost two now, we also had an afternoon with Addy, a girl Sadie's age whom we met through physical therapy. One afternoon soon after, we went to the LA Zoo with my friend Birge and her daughter Nova. A few days later, we were at Scott's best friend's house hanging out with their two kids, and another pair of friends and their young daughters.

One of the better evenings was last Saturday. My old friend Matthew and his wife Sarah (who read this blog -- HI, YOU TWO, WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE BURGERS AND ELMO) were in town for a wedding and brought their 18 month old son Zachary over so we could fire up the grill. In retrospect, this was kind of a foolhardy idea -- I'd already forgotten that 18 months is smack in the middle of the "let's see if I can crawl up on THIS dangerous object" phase of life. How neither of our kids managed to walk into a flaming hot grill is beyond me, but we stayed emergency-free. And even if something had happened, Sarah is a doctor, so we'd have been totally good.

I am what they call a "casual mom," by the way.

I used to be afraid of little kids, especially ones who could walk and talk and judge you with their eyes. Now, I like them okay. I still like my own the best, though.

Separation Anxiety

I am fortunate enough to have a husband who works, and unfortunate enough to have a husband who travels frequently. Sometimes, they're even home at the same time and then things really get awkward. (Sorry. I have a secret love of Mormon housewife blogs and sometimes I unintentionally pick up their wryly serene tone.)

Really, though, it's tough. Tough on me, but much easier than it used to be, in the times before I got used to how it felt to have a partner share your home and then leave for a week or two and then, just when it was beginning to feel like a new sort of normal to live on your own again, have them walk back in the door, only to leave again a week later. Now I'm used to that hectic-ness, and look forward to one day not having to deal with it quite as often as I do now. Then again, my mom copes with the same thing because my dad still travels regularly for work, so maybe it's just a lifestyle to get used to.

A lifestyle for adults to get used to. I'm starting to understand that for a kid, it's much harder.

My memories of Dad traveling when I was a kid are hazy. He'd be gone for a week, to Dayton or Oklahoma City, and when he'd got home, if I was lucky, I'd get a present, so that was cool. I don't remember it being tough. But I see it becoming tough for Sadie.

She's a hop, skip and a jump away from 2 years old now, and old enough to understand the passage of time. She's also at a point where routine is everything. It has always been important, but now it's crucial. We have a routine for meals, a routine for saying goodbye when Ana arrives in the morning, and a very long routine for going to bed that involves EXACTLY THREE STORIES while sitting on Mommy's lap and then walking around the room saying goodnight to every single object she has ever owned or will own, ever.

Daddy is a big part of that routine, and now he's not here. (He also doesn't read this blog, or else he'd guilt-trip me into infinity for saying this.) He gets home right around her bedtime, too late to really hang out together, so usually he gets up with her in the morning and fixes her a bottle. He checks his email while she sits in his lap and watches "Sesame Street." I get up a little bit later, but not too quickly, because I know this is their hang-out time and it's important. Also, I really like to sleep in.

Okay, now that I've become maudlin, here's a quick rundown of what our week has been like with Scott out of town.

Monday: Nothing out of the ordinary. We meet my friend Birge and her daughter Nova at the zoo. Sadie seems to be starting a phase wherein she wants to do crazy things like lie down on the dirty ground outside the orangutan house and declare that she's "sleeping." Scott's not there when I tuck her in, but that happens often, so I chalk up her behavior to a typical toddler phase.

Tuesday: Up at 5:45 am. WTF? She's begun to suspect something's amiss. Ana arrives and she whines, wanting to stay in my lap, but is easily diverted by the promise of taking the dogs for a walk, and a moment later toddles off hand-in-hand with Ana. That night, she gets into one of her cranky moods which can only be appeased by torturing the dogs and running around in circles until she falls down and cries because it's my fault.

Wednesday: Up at 6:30. When Ana walks in the door at 8:30, Sadie bursts into tears and orders her to leave. To say that this is unusual behavior is like saying that Cookie Monster rejecting an Oreo is unusual behavior. Fuck, even my analogies have Muppets in them. We drive to my parents' house for dinner, and she threatens a meltdown the whole way Her angelic behavior with my parents lasts until approximately 30 seconds after I've put her back in her car seat for the drive home, after which she fusses and cries for almost the entire hour that it takes to get home.

(Wednesday night addendum: She wakes up at least four times. That I can remember.)

Thursday: Up at 5:45. There is not enough coffee in the world. When Ana arrives, Sadie looks at her, looks back at me, and HITS ME ON THE ARM as hard as she can. I'm starting to get that she's mad at me. Thursday evening I take her to visit Marcia and Mirk, my grandparents, whom she hasn't seen in a month or two. She's good for about 45 minutes and then she crawls into my arms, closes her eyes and refuses to look at anyone. Bedtime at 6:15.

Friday: ???? Oh, right, Scott's home! Thank God.

Summer Plans

I used to secretly judge parents who lined up nonstop classes and activities for their very young kids. I used to secretly judge parents for a lot of things, come to think of it.

But now, being the primary guardian of a toddler, I do so no longer. Kids this age are very active, require constant supervision, have nonexistent attention spans, and will burn through every toy in the house and begin whining with boredom by 9am.

I didn't realize just how reliant I was on organized activities for Sadie until last week's toddler group. The director reminded us that beginning in July, they will institute a pay-per-class option until the fall semester begins in September. We've opted out of the pay-per-class, since there are plenty of cheaper options out there and her spot in the fall toddler program is already reserved, so we don't need to worry about her losing her spot.

What I do need to worry about is how I'm going to fill a new blank spot in our schedule: Friday afternoons. "Winging it" is not an option, I'm sorry -- the park has already lost its appeal, and if we stay home all day then we both wind up wanting to kill each other.

So, for anyone interested, here are a few of the classes and activities I'm going to be doing with my under-two-years-old daughter this summer. No mockery allowed.

Gymboree
Ah, Gymboree. I've avoided you for so long, and now that I've finally caved, I can see that you are going to be like sweet, sweet crack for both me and my child. Gymboree involves a giant, padded, multi-room playspace and a teacher named Roxanna who speaks with an EXTREMELY LOUD VOICE and SINGS EVERYTHING AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS. She instructs the children LOUDLY for about 45 minutes, as they climb stairs, throw balls, play with bubbles and shake a big, colored parachute around. Remember those parachutes from when you were a kid? I'm glad to see they're still around. Oh, she also shakes a frightening little clown hand puppet named "Gymbo" in the faces of frightened children.

Swim Class
I refuse to think of this as a "class," and it's definitely not a "lesson." It is, however, held at a swim school. It's pretty much just a bunch of moms in a pool, holding their kids' heads above water and instructing them to kick. Sadie couldn't care less about the kicking part (She's all, "what are you gonna do if I don't kick? Drop me? I don't think so.") but she adores being in the water, and a mere half hour of pool time exhausts her for the rest of the morning. So this is a definite once a week "do."

Library Storytime
We've actually been doing this for the past six months. It's a reliable time-killer, with a librarian leading maybe a dozen kids in stretches, songs and book-reading. The library is right next to the park, so on the days when Sadie doesn't feel like sitting in one spot for 30 minutes, we can escape to a place where she can stretch her legs, run around and pick up one communicable disease or another.

I've also begun compiling a list of non-organized activities that are fun to do, but require more time management and attention, since there's no teacher or instructor taking charge of things. For now, they include Kidspace, the Zimmer Museum, and the LA Zoo. AKA places I never had any interest in going until the day I gave birth.

Land Escape

A few months ago, we decided that the six giant eucalyptus trees in our front yard had to go. Those six, asymmetrically planted behemoths that dotted the northern border of our otherwise featureless lawn were starting to get out of hand.

This was a tough decision. Neither of us are tree haters. In fact, my left-leaning, vegetarian-embracing education taught me that trees are inhabited by the souls of nature's wisest, gentlest guardians, so cutting one down was tantamount to throwing your grandma into a stump grinder.

Nevertheless, the damned things had to go. They were old, old and bushy. Not bushy in a harmless way, but bushy in the kind of way that tangles itself in electrical lines and hangs big plugs of leaf matter onto your roof, as if to grin and say, "Man, any of us ever catches on fire, you guys are SCREWED!"

The neighbors didn't like this idea of cutting the trees. That bothered us a lot, because we have a deep seated need to be liked and accepted by our neighbors. So we waffled a lot about it. At one point we were just going to trim them; another time we'd decided only to cut down a few and leave the others.

But then this winter happened. And every time a wind storm arrived, and we watched these big, rickety trees sway back and forth against our house, I'd imagine one of them tipping over and crashing into my daughter's bedroom at 3am. "Everyone in the neighborhood new one of those trees would go, sooner or later," someone would tell a news reporter. I WAS NOT GOING TO LET THAT HAPPEN.

So we removed the damn things, every one of them. What we were left with was a boring grid of lawn, dotted with large brown splotches where a tree had previously been. No flowers; few plants. One sad little concrete walkway, leading up to an equally sad stoop, both painted dark red so that, from a few blocks away, they might convince someone that they were brick.

It was time for a change.

So we did it. And we did it right. We researched many landscape designers, settling on one company that our neighbors highly recommended and who really seemed to know what they were talking about. (Eco-Landscape in Valley Village in case you're wondering.)

One thing we kept in mind as we worked out the design was: Let's Do This Once, and Let's Do it Right. In other words, we wanted to respect our budget, but we also wanted to get the most possible out of that budget. The wishlist we presented them with was enormous.

It included brick pathways, extending from the (real brick) front stoop down to the driveway and then also down to the street, finally curving around beneath Sadie's window to create a little bricked sitting area.

We asked for them to figure out a way to widen our narrow driveway without compromising the design, and they came up with a warm, rusty flagstone that blended beautifully into the brickwork.

We asked for as many California native plants as possible, and where those wouldn't work, we asked for plants requiring minimal water. On top of that, I begged them to avoid all of those archetypical desert plants -- cactus, spiny, pokey stuff -- that to me, send more of a message of "get away, I will stab you" then one of "Welcome to our home."

The landscapers went away and came back with a beautiful plan. We looked at that plan. We said "oooh," a lot. And, to make a long story short, we eventually told them that our lawn was their playhouse and they should treat it as such.

That was three weeks ago, and since then they've been working their asses off in our front yard every single day. Sadie is so used to the sawing and the machinery and the truck engines now that they don't even wake her up from her daily nap.

Today, they finally finished the hardscape and put in the plants. And this...this is pretty close to how it's eventually going to look. It looks like a real garden.

When you look at this picture, imagine a table and chairs sitting on the brick beneath Sadie's front window. The oval area directly in front will be seeded, and grass will eventually fill it in. The purple plum will become a pretty, sweet-shade giving tree in the corner, and the Sycamore, in a few decades, will tower over most of the other trees on our block.

Table Manners

I knew that ONE DAY there would come a day when mealtime did not equal food all over the table, the dogs licking particles off the floor, and a giant food-ring all over her face.

I just hadn't realized that that day would be (sniffle) TODAY.

Happy.

I freaking love being a mom.

I looked around the other day and wondered what felt so weird. Then realize what it was: I'm fulfilled, dammit. I never knew what it was like to feel like I had everything I wanted. I don't know how long this will last, but while it does I'd like to hold onto it.

I used to worry that having kids would be a drag -- that it would cramp my style (ha), make me unable to fit into my jeans, turn my hair gray, distract me from the other things in life that mattered: having a job, maintaining friendships with the people I love, having a little time out of every day for myself. b

But the opposite has been true: my life is more fun now that I have a kid, and in ways I never thought it would be. Sure, I always imagined that going to Disneyland with my child would be a good time. But what I didn't realize is that the simple acts of everyday life would be made fun and interesting because I now see them from my daughter's perspective.

Sadie finds wonder in everything. When we checked into the hotel last weekend in Sunnyvale, she became fascinated by the pattern on the carpet. "Many, many grapes," she explained to us in the sort of hushed tones you'd reserve for meandering around, say, the Roman Coliseum. And when we're in the car and she asks for "More fingers," I know it means she wants me to reach into the car seat and pretend that my hand is gobbling her up so she can grab my fingers and shriek with laughter, a game that amuses her for miles.

Last year was hard. Life was impossible to predict, and it felt out of control. I wanted routine and I couldn't find it. Sadie wanted to do so many things she couldn't, and it made her frustrated and afraid when I wasn't there to take care of her. I had no regular exercise routine, no job.

Now, I finally feel that for a short time at least, we have achieved normalcy. Ana came into our lives, took my daughter by the hand, and sent me away to go do other things for a few hours a day. I started being able to do things like get my nails done every once in awhile. (It's amazing what a manicure can do for sanity.) And most important for my own sense of well-being, I began doing regular freelance writing again -- work that I love, that makes me happy, that I am good at and want more of.

Last week, my old friend Aaron came into town for a visit. We didn't have a lot of time (we never do), but I gave him a ride into the city and we chatted on the way over. When he asked me how things have been going, I struggled for words. "Things are...I'm...it's good. It's all really good."

What I meant was, for the first time possibly in my entire life, I can't find anything to complain about. And while I'm sure that will change soon enough, for now I'm going to close my eyes and enjoy it.

Dark Demons

I've been thinking back on my past a lot recently. When I look at my baby girl's face, so constantly full of joy, with her little gap-toothed grin and the way her cheeks take over her entire face when she smiles, it reminds me that one of my greatest worries is that she will struggle with the darkness that I suffered when I was a kid.

I suffered two especially devastating periods of depression in my life. The first began around age 14 and lasted through my junior year of high school. I constantly thought of suicide. I screamed and fought with my parents and then had sobbing breakdowns in my room. I thought of my own head as being a black, dark and unsettled place. I sat alone and wallowed in my misery often. If I were that kid now, with the attention that has been brought to teen depression and the medication that is now available, I think I'd be able to speak up and to help myself. But back then, I stayed silent.

The second bout occurred in the second semester of my sophomore year of college. It was motivated by several things, including the end of a romantic relationship and my perceived loss of several of my best friends. I wrapped myself in a cocoon of self-pity and misery. I told everyone that I was so over college, when in reality I was so depressed that I couldn't even begin to see a way out of it. (On the upside, I wrote some of the best poetry of my life.) Eventually I chose to drop out of school, making a decision that for better or worse has influenced the course of my life.

I know that depression is hereditary, but also that it is shadowy and unpredictable. It can skip over one sibling and strike another. And because depression is something that we so often hold inside, it can be difficult to tell how badly someone is suffering. My parents always made themselves available to me, and in many ways we've had an open and honest relationship with each other. But when I was a teenager, something inside of me kept me from telling them what I was truly going through. Through my own pride, I never felt like asking for help was an option.

This is what scares me about having a daughter. I've always been a private person who finds it difficult to talk frankly about what I'm feeling, especially if those feelings are ugly and complicated. Will she be similar? Will she learn how to paste on a pretty, smiling face when inside she's hurting terribly? Will she feel obligated to feign happiness in order to make others happy?

It wasn't until my late 20s that I learned how to cope with my depression, but I did eventually learn. And these days when I start worrying about her, I remind myself that there are ways around it. What I will teach her first and foremost is that wallowing in self-pity is pointless. Sure, we all do it -- moping and being moody is practically required when you're a teenager. But I want to teach her that there are things we can do to mitigate the misery. Like going outside and being active, even if it's the last thing we feel like. Or spending time with other people, when we'd rather be alone. Most of all I want to teach her that some days, life just feels blue and when it does, it just does . And on those days you've got to just ride the wave. Hide under your covers, write furious poetry, eat some chocolate, cry and feel bad. Because eventually it will pass, and the blackness will diminish, and you will feel okay again.

Sleep On It

For Scott's birthday we said to hell with it and drove up to Sunnyvale to make nuisances of ourselves. Sunnyvale is the home of one of my dearest friends from college; she lives there with her husband. By awesome coincidence one of our other best friends was also visiting with her boyfriend for the weekend, so the six of us got together for dinner on Saturday night and brunch Sunday morning.

Sadie held it together fairly well. I'd been worried about two things: the five hour car ride, and the sleeping arrangements. During the day her tolerance for riding around in her car seat is around 30 minutes. We strategized as well as possible, timing the beginning of the trip right around her nap time (with a swim lesson earlier that morning to tire her out) and then stocking the car with toys, a couple of new books and snacks. For sleeping we brought her pack and play, a portable crib that worked brilliantly when we took her to Vancouver over New Year's.

A lot changes in five months.

The car ride, unexpectedly enough, went smooth as silk both times. She napped on the first leg, then we'd stop for lunch and a leg stretch, and pop her back in for the second half. I sat in the back seat with her and kept her occupied by switching out books and toys, singing songs, and playing games.

Sleeping...that didn't turn out so well. She wanted nothing to do with the pack and play, and when she was put in it, she screamed nonstop. On Friday night it took about an hour to get her down to sleep -- mostly because we kept picking her up and trying to soothe her. At home we'd be more likely to let her cry it out, but when you're staying in a hotel the worry that you're driving other people crazy takes precedence.

What finally worked was allowing her to pass out in bed with us. She squirmed and fussed for awhile and eventually draped her upper body on my chest, face up. It looked incredibly uncomfortable, but she was deeply asleep in minutes and Scott was finally able to sneak her into her crib where she slept the rest of the night.

Saturday was even worse -- it took an hour to get her to sleep at our friends' house, and when we got home around 11pm she'd woken up and was furious that we were trying to get her back down into the crib again. We couldn't get her to sleep no matter how hard we tried. At last, around midnight, I begged Scott to come let her sleep in the bed with us since it had worked well the night before. (I love it when he's too exhausted to argue with me.)

So she slept in between us. At some point during the night, she managed to maneuver herself into a position from which she was able to kick us both directly in the face. I don't understand how she did this -- it was too dark to see. All I know is that in the morning we were both equally grumpy from having endured a night full of face kicks. Scott's theory is that she's a ninja.

So after all that she was tired and fussy and ready to go home by Sunday. (In the pre-baby days, we probably would have talked ourselves into staying another night, but this time it definitely wasn't an option.) She only napped for an hour on the car ride home and by bedtime she was the very definition of "overtired." She screamed bloody murder when we put her to bed, and then she slept for 14 hours with another 3 hour nap today.

Oh -- the other bed anecdote I forgot to mention? We discovered on Sunday morning that Sadie was allergic to the detergent on the hotel bedsheets. She woke up covered head to toe in a bright red rash. We treated it with an Epsom Salt bath and a shitload of Aquaphor ointment, and she's better today. SEE, COLLEGE FRIEND? I SAID IT WASN'T SCABIES.

Just for Me

The list of words she's mastered has reached into the hundreds, with new ones every day. She knows piano, picture, purple and puppy. She knows wagon, waffle, water and window. She counts to ten (who cares if "two" gets repeated twice and five comes after eight?). She knows her colors (who cares if blue and red are interchangeable?). She sings the alphabet song (LMNOP might be a garbled mess, but at least she's trying!). Here are some of the other things Sadie says:

1. It used to be that I would habitually greet her each morning, as I walked into her room, by saying "Oh, hi." Somewhere along the line, she picked it up. Now when she rounds a corner and sees me making dinner in the kitchen, she says, "Oh, hi."

2. We have been working to teach her the concept of possession -- something she now understands and takes very seriously. "Mama beads," she says wistfully, when I walk her past the necklaces hanging from the mirror on my vanity.

3. A signed poster from TAM6 hangs above our living room couch -- one of my most prized possessions, a gift from my Mom. The poster includes images of Phil Plait, Richard Wiseman, Adam Savage -- all geeky white dudes with glasses. Occasionally she'll glance up at the poster, point to each picture, and identify each one as "Daddy."

4. More than two of anything equals "many." When she gets tired of pointing out each individual Poster Daddy, she will sometimes sweep her hand in a gesture of inclusion and finish with, "Many Daddy."

5. While she pronounces most words remarkably well, there are a few words whose incorrect pronunciation she clings to stubbornly. For the longest time, strawberries were "shaw-shees." Upside down still comes out as "Uppa-sown" so regularly that we're starting to pronounce it that way too. She still insists her own name is pronounced "See-hee."

6. If asked to do something she doesn't want to do, like turn off Elmo or eat a final bite of chicken, her response is typically the following: "No? No? No? Okay." The final "okay" does not signify resignation, but rather signals her satisfaction that you understood her: "I have no interest in this chicken. It tastes like butt, and at this moment I'd like to go back to watching 'Abby's Flying Fairy School,' so let's put an end to this farce. Okay."

7. Come to think of it, "okay" serves as an all-purpose punctuation mark to any statement.

8. She has a canny understanding of how useful inflection can be. She doesn't just ask for a cookie -- her eyes grow wide, she half-smiles and her voice lifts into a hopeful question to which she can't help but provide her own answer: "Cookie? Cookie? Okay."

9. While she understands that the Magic Word is "please," (as in, "Cookie?" "Sadie, what's the magic word?" "PEASE."), we still have to remind her every time she asks for something that it helps to tack a "please" onto the end. The exception are the two commands "up" and "help," which have been corrupted into "uppease" and "heppease."

10. She celebrates when we pull into our driveway with "we're home!" and when we walk in the door she greets the dogs with "Hi, guys." She calls each dog by name with love and affection in her voice. Right before initiating a one-sided wrestling match with whoever is closest.

Whirling Dervish

Sadie is now a toddler in the most literal sense of the word. Typical parents must go through something similar when their children hit 12 months -- a refusal to sit in a stroller, to be carried, to even so much as sit down.

We went to the zoo yesterday and she wanted to walk around the entire place. Do you understand how large the LA Zoo is? She's drunk on her own power.

After dinner, she now goes through a lengthy period during which she decides to careen wildly around the house in circles. Watch the video below, and now imagine that it's on repeat for half an hour each evening. Not that I'm complaining! It's a fun time at our house right now.

Nothing to See Here

I'm in the middle of a blog redesign. I always hated how that picture of Sadie just sat off-center up there in the heading. And while I'm sure I could figure out how to re-center it if I searched the internet long enough, I never liked the template well enough to make it worth the effort. So check back here soon and hopefully the blog will look a little bit sleeker and more stylish.

Work At Home

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Ana comes to take care of Sadie from 8:30am to 5pm. Those are the days that I reserve for writing gigs, bookkeeping for my grandfather's business, and getting the occasional mani/pedi.

The other days it's just me and Sadie, and if Scott's out of town then that goes for the weekends, too. But lest anyone think that those are days of idle pleasure, today I ran across a schedule that I wrote out one particular Monday morning that I think sums up the tone of those days pretty well. I'm reproducing it here, so that later in life I can look it over and ponder how in the world I managed to ever be this productive without the aid of some meth and a case of Red Bull.

Amanda and Sadie's Routine: Monday, February Whatever, 2011

7:30am: Breakfast

8:30am: Play and housework* (Start laundry, dress Sadie, brush hair, straighten house)

9:30am: Snack

9:30-10:30am: Nap #1**

10:30am: Call physical therapist, complete to-do list***, return emails, laundry

11am: Trader Joe's

12pm: Lunch

12:30pm: Play outside

2pm: Nap #2, Amanda cook vegetables

3pm: Mall or park, snack

5:30pm: Dinner

6pm- Bath****

 
* Yes, I subcategorized my to-do list.
** This list made me nostalgic for the era when she took two daily naps.
***This is in reference to a completely different to-do list, a weekly to-do list. Yes, I am a nerd.
****I didn't have a chance to write down the last item on this list: Put Sadie to bed, eat her leftovers for dinner, watch "Chuck," and collapse into bed by 9.

Good Monday

Sadie has officially been scaled back from weekly PT sessions to once-monthly. AND we got Bin Laden.

MOTORIN!

Sadie is 19 months old now. Around the 18 month mark, she took her first independent steps. She promptly stashed this skill in her pocket and took it out again only on very rare occasions.

"So I did that," she seemed to say. "Why should I bother doing it again?"

She still whined and hesitated each time we prompted her, "Walk walk, Sadie!" She still reached out for my hand before taking a step. She still burst into annoyed tears if I refused to do so, and would fall to her knees to crawl after whatever it was she wanted. Walking simply wasn't a skill she was interested in refining.

I guess I'd always figured that on the day she finally walked without our help, she'd never ask for it again. This wasn't the case. I can understand why. It takes tremendous effort for her. She struggles to lift each leg then plops it back down again, giving the impression that they're made of cement rather than skin and bone. Keeping her balance is difficult. She has a long way to fall.

So we've continued to be patient, and to prompt her while letting her figure it out at her own pace. (I remind myself that while most kids her age don't have this problem, the twelve month-olds at the park are looking at her and thinking, "Looking pretty steady there, stretch. What's your secret?")

Then this weekend happened. Beginning with Friday, really. We went to Balboa Park with my friend Liane and her daughter Sophie to see the ducks, and Sadie walked a lot holding my hand. Then after nap time was school, which always seems to motivate her. She spent a good fifteen minutes walking up and down a ramp in the outside playground, with the help of a couple of the teachers (she's a class favorite). Then Teri brought Addy over for a play date, and the two girls played in the back yard for the rest of the afternoon.

Then, yesterday. What happened that clicked in my daughter's head? I'll never know exactly what it was. Sadie and I met Grandma and Grandpa (my parents) at UCLA and spent the morning walking around campus, looking at the Bruin statue and splashing in the inverted fountain and counting steps and eating fries at the food court and rolling down grassy hills. There were birds and squirrels and people singing and dancing and laughing everywhere. Sadie could barely stand being in her stroller. She mostly walked between us, holding our hands, chattering constantly.

After we came home that afternoon, I tried to take her for a walk in the stroller and she complained the entire time, demanding to walk. Once we got home, she got out of the stroller and that was it -- she took off across the room like it was nothing.

And she hasn't stopped since.

Egged On

Yesterday I was in a hurry to finish my post because Sadie went from peacefully reading books to herself in the bedroom to crawling over to yank on my leg and ask to be picked up. Because she regularly has conversations with herself, this is verbatim what I hear when Sadie wants to be picked up:

"Up? Up? Pease. Up pease? No. Hold on. Yes. Okay. UP UUUUUUUUP."

"Hold on" is one of those expressions she picked up because she hears it so often, not because we tried to teach it to her. As you can guess, waiting is not this kid's strong suit, but it's hard to complain when you have a kid that effectively scolds herself to be patient.

What I wanted to add was that we really had a great Easter Sunday, thanks to our parents, who regularly make it clear to us that as grandparents go, Sadie couldn't be luckier.

Scott's mom, Sandy, is a fan of ceremony. Whatever the holiday, you can bet she's put hours of time and effort into making it special. When we got to her and Carlos's house, they greeted us with a green felt Easter bucket and instructed us to allow Sadie to search the living room for Easter eggs.

If you'd asked me first, I'd have assured you that 19 months old is too young to hunt for eggs -- I mean, she only recently learned what an egg is, much less grasp the concept of what it means to collect them. Sadie proved me entirely wrong. While she was a bit confused at first, the minute we led her over to an egg, then allowed her to "find" it and lavished praise upon her for picking it up and placing it in her basket, she couldn't wait to find the rest. She walked around the living room, the basket in one hand and my hand in the other, finding eggs on bookcases, on top of tables, behind picture frames. She LOVED it.

At the end, she was rewarded with a crazy giant Easter basket, but really that was a gift for me. Or my stomach, anyway. All Sadie wanted to do was hunt for more eggs. She settled for a giant breakfast of homemade croissants, berries, eggs and bacon. Sandy even made a "Mona Cake," which is a Catalonian Easter tradition, since Carlos is from Barcelona.

When we got home, Sadie passed out. Two hours later she woke up in full sugar withdrawal, so to distract her we took her to my parents' house, where we celebrated Easter in my family's favorite style: relaxed and nontraditional. She played with some new toys, then Scott went out and brought us back Italian food for dinner. In short, Sadie spent the entire day with some of the people she loves most in the world: Yaya, Yayo, Grandma and Grandpa. Thanks, guys, for showing us a fabulous Easter Sunday. Some people say Easter is about Jesus, or zombies, but for us it's about gorging ourselves on comfort food and appreciating our awesome, unique family.

A Million Little High-Fives

The hitting phase seems to have passed...at least for now. The lesson we've been teaching her is that hitting animals and people isn't okay, but that when she feels the need to whack something (don't we all?) there are other things she can hit instead: the floor, the couch, or even our hands. Now I could just get her to stop throwing sand...oh well.

Scott left yesterday for a three week business trip. We were both feeling sad and trying to hide it as we spent the day at his mother's house for Easter brunch and my parents' for dinner, since it's right near the airport. Scott's afraid he's going to miss something momentous in Sadie's development, and while I don't think he has to be afraid that she's suddenly going to discover a love of the high jump, she is changing so much from one day to the next that three weeks from now, who knows who she'll be?

It's a Hit

She's into hitting these days.

Remember when I said last time that she'd turned into an angel? Yeah, not so much. Lately she's been delighting in pushing my buttons, and that includes taking whacks at my face and chest because nothing gets my attention faster.

I can always tell when it's going to happen. In Scenario #1, I pick her up against her will, either because it's time to do something else or because she's misbehaving. She gets angry, and hits my chest as hard as she can. In Scenario #2, I lean in to give her a kiss or otherwise provide her access to my face, she gets a mischievous glint in her eye, and the next thing you know she's bonked me in the nose.

In the words of Tina Fey, I will not have that shit. So we've implemented the Time Out Chair.

The Time Out Chair is the saddest thing you've ever seen.

Isn't that sad? It's sandwiched between the china cabinet and the computer desk, possibly the most boring spot in the whole house. Friday was the first day I had to use the Time Out Chair for hitting. I put her into it and set the Timer App on my phone to beep in 90 seconds.

She didn't like the chair, but funnily enough, what really freaked her out was the sound of the timer going off. She wanted to tell us about the "noise" for the rest of the evening.

Yesterday, I had to use Time Out again. This time she was throwing her pasta on the ground so the dogs could eat it, and repeated warnings only made her throw it more enthusiastically. This time she knew what was coming, and whined the entire time she was in the chair. "Up peese," "Mommy," "Daddy," "Hug," anything she could think of. THIS KID IS EIGHTEEN MONTHS OLD. I can only imagine the psychological torture she is going to inflict upon us when she gets old enough to slam her bedroom door.

You know what, though? I think it's working. Today when I came home I picked her up. She hugged me, and when I asked her for a kiss, I saw that glint in her eye as she wound-up for the pitch. She literally stopped herself mid swing. "Good girl," I told her. And later she made up for it by biting her cookie into a crescent shape, showing it to me, and proudly saying, "Moon."

Walkie Walkie

...is what Sadie says when she wants to get up and go. So this is what happened last night right after she announced her intention to Walkie Walkie. I'm glad I pulled out the iPhone when I did, because I've never seen Sadie walk more than a couple of feet at a time and suddenly...well, see for yourself!

What We're Into Now...

I thought it might be useful to share with this blog's few regular readers Sadie's current obsessions, entertainment-wise. If your kid has/had their own random obsessions that you bust out to cure a bad mood or shamelessly exploit to occupy them for five minutes while you brush your teeth, I would LOVE to hear them.

"Elmo's Song"

Sadie knows this song so well that her way of asking for it is "Elmo la la la."




"Elmo's Ducks"

Elmo's Song has recently been surpassed by this video starring Elmo, a catchy tune, and four ducks that yell "QUACK" at regular intervals. Toddler crack.



"Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown

I don't think it will come as much of a shocker to any parent that Sadie needs this book read to her at least three times before she'll deign to go to bed. When she's done with "Moan," as she calls it, her next request is inevitably:

"When You Give a Mouse a Cookie" by Laura Numeroff

If you don't own this book yet, I highly recommend you go out and get it. It stars a hyperactive mouse whose personality suspiciously resembles a two-year old. Sadie likes to yell out certain words in this book while I'm reading it to her, and she always mimes "sweeping," "washing," and, bizarrely, "mustache."

"SoundTouch"

This is an iPhone app, and it can reliably be used to occupy Sadie's attention for a solid 15 minutes in the morning while I'm making her breakfast. GET THIS APP. It categorizes illustrations of animals, instruments and common household items, then when you touch each one, it shows a photo of that thing along with the sound it makes. So if you press the tiger picture, it shows a photo of a real tiger along with the tiger's roar. You're also treated to the sound of "TIGER!" being delightedly shrieked in your ear.

So, people? Any recommendations of your own?

Big Girls Don't Cry

A running theme throughout the past few months has been the overall difficulty of dealing with a kid this age. Months 15, 16 and 17 were marred by nightly wake-ups, daily tantrums, and a general exhaustion (hers and mine) that, by the end of every evening, usually manifested in tears.

This month we've emerged into something resembling...well, I don't think it would be an overstatement to describe it as UTTER HEAVEN. It's as if a large percentage of the hard work we've been doing has paid dividends all at once. For one thing, the sleep schedule has stabilized -- it's 6:30pm to 6:30am, every day. She's not teething anymore, so she doesn't wake up from discomfort. With Ana's help, we moved her daily nap back from 9am-11am to roughly 11:30am-1:30pm, so she's less tired in the afternoon and evening, and thus less cranky.

What's really gratifying, though, is the gradual phasing out of the tantrums. (FOR NOW, that is. I might be doing all of this for the first time, but I'm not naive enough to think that she's left the tantrum phase behind at a year and a half.)

I've cataloged her tantrums on this blog exhaustively, so suffice it to say that anything and everything used to set her off. I've tried hard to be consistent in my method of dealing with the tantrums: namely, I don't. I sit nearby and wait them out. I stay quiet and, beyond telling her once that I'll be ready to talk to her again when she's done screaming, I disengage totally. Usually she cycles through them within 5-10 minutes, but I remember one epic tantrum in which she and I sat on her bedroom floor for what seemed like FOREVER. She wanted her blanket, which was hanging over the side of her crib four feet away, but she REFUSED to crawl over and get it -- she wanted me to bring it to her instead. We had a showdown. She almost won by sheer force of lung power -- I swear my ears were ringing afterward.

It seemed like such a silly fight to be having. I could have ended it easily by just handing her the blanket, and believe me, I wanted to. Was it petty on my part not to give in to her? I don't think so -- because what she knows now is that screaming for things doesn't work. So she's found other ways to get what she wants, they work much more effectively, and things are more peaceful all around.

That said, she threw a whopper this morning, the first in a couple of weeks. I was in my usual morning haze, eating a bowl of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Puffins (if you haven't tried them yet, you haven't lived), and Sadie was playing across the room with her toys.

"Mama!" she yelled, showing me a toy that she hasn't figured out how to use yet (it's this one, if you're wondering). "Mama!" is Sadie code for "Come over here and do this for me." I told her I was eating and that she could bring me the toy, or she could be patient and wait for me to finish. She didn't like either of those options.

After the screaming had scaled down to mere sobs and sniffles, she did something she's never done before. She crawled over to me, laid her head in my lap, grabbed my hand and put it on her back so I could rub it. I stroked her hair and told her that I loved her and that next time it would make more sense to BRING ME THE DAMN TOY, GOOD LORD, CHILD, I'M RIGHT HERE AND IT'S NOT THAT HARD, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU, IT'S SEVEN IN THE DAMN MORNING.

Of course, I said it very sweetly. I want to encourage that sort of behavior. Forever and ever.

Hoping for Coping

Sometimes I think back to when Sadie was a little younger. One of the hardest things for her has always been coping with the waves of feelings that would come over her when she was upset (as Joy dryly put it, "This girl goes from one straight to eleven.") There was never a ramping-up period -- if anything upset her then her mood went from Fine to Utterly Catastrophic.

As she gets older, learning how to speak has helped tremendously. She can't always go after what she wants, but she is now very good at asking for demanding it. Still, it's been hard when she gets frustrated or angry or disappointed and instantly dissolves into a miserable mess. To snap her out of it, we employ a variety of tricks -- distraction, singing a song, bargaining, reasoning. Sometimes they work like magic, other times not as well, others not at all.

More recently, she has decided not to waste time waiting for us to help her snap out of an episode and has put her mind toward ways to figure it out by herself. The ways in which she does this are utterly fascinating to me.

This morning, Scott left for work as he always does. Sadie saw him off with a cheerful "Bye bye!" She climbed up onto the couch by our front window, and when she did so I thought maybe what she wanted was to see his car drive off...like maybe it was something she did with Ana when I left in the mornings. So I opened up the window, and as Scott's big silver sedan pulled away from the curb I pointed it out I said, "There goes Daddy's car -- bye bye, Daddy!"

You've never seen a face fall so fast in your life. I guess she'd already reconciled herself to the fact that Daddy was gone, and by pointing it out a second time I'd caught her unaware -- she absolutely crumpled, and burst into tears. I felt terrible, and all I could do as she wailed for "Daddy" was to tell her I was sorry and I knew she was feeling sad, but that he'd be home from work later tonight. She cried for a minute longer, and then she kind of sucked it up, and repeated several times, "Bye bye, Daddy." Then she came over to me and -- by the way, she never does this -- gave me a hug and kiss as if to reassure herself that I was sticking around.

I've noticed this coping method a lot. When she doesn't want to let something go, she copes by telling it "bye bye." If she can't say good-bye to something, it become relegated to a terrible purgatory in which it's still hovering around, but she can't have it. She gets upset and cries and asks for it over and over -- but if we just wish the water in the bathtub bye-bye, if we can wish Daddy and Ana bye-bye, then those things have been sent to their proper places and will be okay until we see them again later.

Parting from a beloved object is a different skill from being able to see something but unable to touch it, but equally hard for her. Again, she's developed ways to cope. For awhile, the flowers that sat on the dining room table while she ate dinner were a source of crazy frustration for her -- she wanted to grab them, and didn't understand why she wasn't allowed to. "No touch" is a command she learned early on, and she mostly respects it, but it's never fun to hear.

So she learned instead that when you like an object but can't touch it, it's okay to blow it a kiss instead. The more forbidden an object, the more feverishly she sends air kisses in its direction. This coping method was put to the ultimate test a few hours ago when we went to the library for weekly story time.

Story time is a mixture of listening to books and singing songs, and Sadie always starts out shy and then gets more adventurous. After about ten minutes she'd shaken off the initial hesitation and began standing up and craning her head to check out the other kids. (We were on the floor down in front, her favorite spot). That was when she spotted a little girl sitting directly behind us, sitting on her nanny's lap. She was holding an Elmo doll.

Fuck.

"Elmo. It's Elmo. Elmo. ELMO."

"Yes, I know. That's Elmo. He belongs to that little girl."

"It's Elmo. IT'S ELMO."

She was moving fast, and I busted out the magic phrase: "You can look, but don't touch."

Oh, the rage. The indignance. Was I KIDDING her? There was a perfectly nice, lovely Elmo doll within two feet of her, and she wasn't supposed to touch it? "EH-HEH-HEH-ELMOOOOOO." She began to cry.

I picked her up quickly and removed her from the other kids. We stood in the back as song time commenced, and she calmed down right away, but I had already pretty much written off library as a lost cause now that she'd zeroed in on Elmo. I decided to give it one more shot, and once everyone was lost in a nice loud chorus of "I Like Shaking (My Hands, And You Shake Along Too Parents, If You Know What's Good For You)", I sat her back down.

Although we were facing front, she whipped her head around and I could see her eyeing Elmo with laser-like intensity. If I'd been that other little girl, I'd have been genuinely afraid.

And then...

Sadie put her hand to her mouth and said, "Mwah." Blowing Elmo a kiss.

"That's so nice, Sadie."

"Mwah. Mwah. MWAH."

She proceeded to blow Elmo kisses throughout the rest of story time, her eyes shining with love but resigned to the knowledge that this particular Elmo, for reasons beyond comprehension, was not for touching but merely for admiring from a distance. And I watched with hidden glee when, a few minutes later, three toddlers got in a near fist-fight over a toy truck that one of them had brought and did not want to share.

My kid's growing up.

Taking Those First Steps...

Sadie got down to serious business in PT yesterday. This was a really exciting session. Normally I sit out in the waiting room with a magazine, but after five minutes Joy called me in to tell me that Sadie was taking steps on her own.

I didn't catch the best stuff (at one point she toddled all the way across the carpet on her own), but this video catches some of the good moments. My favorite part is at the end, where Sadie, used to hearing us cheer her on every time she walks, reaches her destination and gives herself a matter-of-fact little "woo hoo."

Chugging Along

Two days ago was Sadie's half birthday; she's past the eighteen month point. Our way of celebrating was to forget all about it until about 10pm Thursday night, at which point I turned to Scott and said, "Oh hey, it's Sadie's half birthday today!" and he said, "Huh," and then we went back to watching "Parks and Recreation."

As Sadie has grown up, I've fallen into the bad habit of pledging that she will do things by a certain point in time. And by "things," I mean walk. Last year I was sure that Sadie was going to walk by Christmas, no matter what. When she got onto the list for a toddler group that began in February, I thought, "She'll definitely be walking by then." Then when all the websites and development books and our pediatrician said that even the late walkers get going by 18 months, I thought to myself, "Well, as long as she's taking steps by then, it'll be okay."

I finally figured out that what I was doing, what I thought of as positive goals to shoot for, aren't positive for anyone. Not for me and Scott, who are nervous enough as it is and don't need any additional standards by which to measure our child as "kinda weird." Definitely not for Sadie, who knows exactly what walking is, exactly when she does and does not want to do it, and will absolutely not be pushed into it one minute before she's good and ready.

So when the 18 month marker came and went, this time it was with a little reminder that in the last few weeks she has made terrific progress, and that the progress is what matters. With increased PT sessions, she gets more confident each time she goes. Confidence at Joy's means confidence at home -- usually, although she still would rather crawl than walk with aid to any given destination.

Today we did a joint PT session with another little girl Sadie's age. Addy can actually get around just fine, and isn't going regularly to PT anymore, but she has speech, feeding and sleeping problems due to bad acid reflux issues as a baby. Joy thought it would be a good idea for the two girls to have a playdate in hopes they'd "rub off" on each other -- that Sadie would be impressed by Addy's fearlessness in the clinic, and Addy would adopt Sadie's tendency to NEVER SHUT UP EVER EVER EVER.

I have no idea if it accomplished either of these things, but it was insanely cute to watch these two little girls sharing a space. Addy was like a tiny little tornado, while Sadie, towering over her, just seemed in awe of her ability to move from the mat to the stairs to the dolls to the kitchen sink in the span of .38 seconds. Sadie must have been feeling a little inadequate, because she used the session as an opportunity to bust out four new words: "sun," "castle," "purple" and "sesquicentennial." Okay, not that last one.

Sadie Year One (Only Six Months Late!)

The Sunday evening after we brought Sadie home from the hospital, Scott printed out a sign that read "Week 0."

He put it on our big microsuede chair, and next to it he placed our tiny, squishy-faced baby, sleeping and swaddled in a cotton receiving blanket with blue and pink bears printed on it (one of roughly two dozen we'd stolen from the recovery room at Cedars Sinai). Then he pulled out our camera, the good one, and took a picture.

"I'm going to do this every week," he told me, "Until she's a year old. Then I'm going to turn it into a video. When she gets older she's going to love us for this."

"I just have one question," I said.

"What?"

"You know it should read 'Week 1,' not 'Week 0,' right?"

He looked at me with the sage wisdom of a man who has become a self-made expert in viral marketing.

"If we start at Week 1, then the photo we take on her birthday will be Week 53, and that won't look as good," he explained patiently.

"You're really going to remember to take her photo every single Sunday night, from now until her first birthday?"

"Yup."

And he did. And eventually I stopped making fun of him and started helping him. And on her first birthday, we took the final picture. Week 52.

Aaaaand then it took us six months to get around to editing it into a video, but we finally have, and now I'm happy to present Sadie: Year One. Enjoy!


Sadie Year One from Scott Murray on Vimeo.

Spring Approaching

It's March now, and around this time every year I become obsessed with the concept of spring cleaning. Note that I didn't say I actually clean. I just obsess about it, then feel guilty when I realize it's July and too late for it to count as spring -- it's just cleaning. Then it turns 100 degrees in the Valley for three months and I can barely be arsed to get off the couch, much less clean the house top to bottom.

This time around, I'm giving myself a couple of projects. Scott leaves for a month next Monday, and I'm trying to be realistic about what I can accomplish while he's gone. So much about daily life when he's away is just about maintaining -- maintaining my sanity, maintaining Sadie's daily schedule, maintaining my own health and medical needs and occasionally, my eyebrows and bikini line. Those last two are the first to go if anything goes wrong.

This week, the project I've committed myself to is converting the old, ugly card table in our kitchen into a crafts table for Sadie. She's discovered the joy of Play-Doh and coloring, and Ana is the one who discovered that if you put her in her high chair and adjust the height to the level of the card table, it makes a perfect surface. Today I'm going to Lakeshore Learning to buy a cheap plastic tablecloth, some coloring and stickerbooks, watercolor paints and brushes. I'm also hoping to find some flat, wide shelving units to hold books and paper, and maybe a couple of bins for art supplies. I know she's too young right now to use things like scissors and glitter (I shudder to imagine, actually), but that time is right around the corner so I'd like to be prepared for it. I'm also hoping to find some sort of shelving unit or board that I can use to display her finished work.

One reason Ana, our nanny, is so great is because she has crazy amounts of energy and is always driving me to find new ways to entertain Sadie. Other nannies would march her to the playground every day, or sit on the floor with her toys and play with her on the play mat. With Ana, I'll come home to find them making animals out of Play-Doh or using wooden blocks to learn her ABC's. That's the biggest reason why I want to get this crafts table done -- I think Sadie's going to surprise me by how quickly she'll be ready to start using it and how much fun she's going to have with it.

Today we had a tiny triumph: usually I hide in the house if Sadie and Ana are also home, so she doesn't see me and yell for me. Today by accident I walked into the living room while Ana was there by the door, holding her. I told Sadie I was going to work and kissed her goodbye, and naturally she learned into my arms saying, "Up!" But after Ana explained that I was leaving, and I told her I'd be back later, she seemed to understand that. She even said "bye bye" to me as I left, and didn't cry at all. It made my heart so glad to know that she's past the phase of being upset by my leaving her, at least with Scott and Ana.

If I get really ambitious during Scott's absence, I might even try to tackle touching up the paint in Sadie's room. There's a really ugly gash on the wall where her crib is, which is from her damn animal nightlight. I don't know why Fisher Price designed this thing to have an arm which sticks out four inches from the side of the crib, but it does and so we can't put the crib flush against the wall; this stupid gap exists there and eats up many, many pacifiers. And the arm rubs away the paint on the wall.

This is part of a larger project of reconfiguring Sadie's bedroom. Currently we have a guest bed in there, which -- I don't know why it's in there. It never gets used. Awhile back we bought a pillow-top for the mattress to give it padding, but it has no way of staying on the bed, so when you sit on the bed the pillow top sloooooowly slides off onto the floor. I don't use it to sleep on, because Sadie and I wake each other up if we sleep in the same room, and we don't often have houseguests, so it just sits there and takes up space. This weekend we're moving the bed into the garage and transferring the rocking chair from the family room into the bedroom. I plan to put it in the corner next to her bookcase, add a pillow or two, and make it a nice cozy reading nook.

This is necessary, because Sadie has decided that she no longer wants to go to sleep. I'm surprised it took her this long to figure out that going to bed sucks, but now that she knows it, she screams her fool head off for at least two or three minutes once we put her in there. I've begun easing her slowly into a bedtime frame of mind by taking her into the bedroom and reading some books with her with the lights dimmed and her nightlight on. This would be a lot easier to do if we didn't have to worry about constantly sliding off the bed onto the floor.