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.

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.

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.

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.