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.

Blom Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

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

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

Yeah, I'm a blom.

Saturday in the Backyard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Herbs can be touchy.

- You really shouldn't forget to mulch.
 

8 Month, 1 Week Check-In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aunt Invasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tending Beds and Cribs

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

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

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

Aquababy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Up Fast

Here I was all set to take advantage of the 1 hour nap Sadie now reliably takes from about 4:30-5:30 by cooking up a week's worth of pork chops and vegetables -- until I realized I'd forgotten to defrost the chops. And these are ridiculously huge Costco pork chops, we're talking like 2-3" thick pork chops that are going to take hours to defrost, so while they're floating in a sinkful of hot water, I'll post here.

This past week, Sadie's been grappling with a growth spurt that she's been due for for, oh, quite some time now. I don't think she put on any weight through a month-long span, and now suddenly she's eating like a starving man (or a starving baby, I guess) and is suddenly bursting out of all of her 6-month clothes. This made for a few very fussy days during which I was basically tied to the glider because she wanted to feed every hour ON TOP of three servings of solid foods.

The solids themselves, by the way, are sometimes well received and sometimes met with horrible grimaces and choking. This one time? Scott tried to feed her apples and I walked out of the room for like thirty seconds and the next thing I hear is "HONEY SHE'S CHOKING I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO." By the time I'd rushed back into the kitchen yelling, helpfully, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE'S CHOKING? IT'S PUREE," she'd already regurgitated up an entire mouthful of apple mess back

Sadie eating bananas

onto her bib.

All of this nonstop feeding has finally helped me understand why so many women give up on this breastfeeding thing around now. It's definitely more difficult than it used to be; she's more distract-able and consumes more; meanwhile I'm producing less because she sleeps through the night so regularly. I've been determined to keep going through the end of the first year, but I find myself fantasizing about weaning her onto a permanent diet of water and mashed avocado, her new favorite meal.

In other news, we finally got a rollover last weekend. Two, in fact -- both back to belly, the hard way to do it. It's funny, but since then she's become overall much more mobile, rolling this way and that (though she hasn't achieved the full roll again since that one day) and trying to push herself up on her arms and to fit her legs beneath her, the first signs of learning how to crawl.

She sits very, very well considering the prohibitive size of her massive cranium, and also handles it gracefully when she inevitably pitches over to one side. I'm so proud of the sitting that I can't help but show it off to everyone, like I did yesterday when we went over to my grandparents' for Seder dinner. Sadie wasn't at her best -- it was six already by the time we got there, and her bedtime is now reliably 7:30, but she put on a good face and impressed everyone with her sitting and grabbing skills for a good half hour until Scott took her home and put her into bed.

Jumparoo

Sadie in the jumparoo

Cause and Effect

She learned it today.

She's been blowing raspberries for awhile now, randomly and thinks it's hilarious when I blow one back at her. But today, she figured out that blowing raspberry = return raspberry. We blew them back and forth at each other and cracked up instead of me changing her diaper. Possibly the best 20 minutes of my life thus far.