Day Care Drama

I've been getting a ton of support from family and friends recently, after explaining the drama we've been going through with the day care facility where I've been sending Sadie since June. Since this has been a fairly big issue for me, and is becoming bigger by the day, I thought I'd explain a little bit here what my complaints about this place are and why I'm torn over what to do.

In May, when my workload began to increase to the point where I needed at least a few days a week to devote to it, I began researching in-home day care facilities in my neighborhood. I visited several places and finally it came down  to two: a very sweet Armenian woman who cares for between 4-5 babies and toddlers, and a slightly larger in-home day care run by a woman who employs a full time and a part time assistant to help her manage as many as 12 kids.

I liked the second day care better. For the sake of the story, let's call it Happy Star Day Care. Happy Star seemed to run like a well-oiled machine, the house was clean, bright and neat, and the environment was loud but happy. They had "dance time" and organized play time. It was also significantly more expensive ($250 per week was what the owner quoted me) than the woman who just worked by herself. We just couldn't justify the expense.

When I called the woman at Happy Star to explain we wouldn't be sending Sadie there, she came down on the price immediately, finally (albeit reluctantly) matching it to what the other woman had quoted me. With the last obstacle now out of the way, I was happy to tell her Sadie would be starting immediately. What began as part time quickly turned into full-time care, as my workload increased even more, and soon it was arranged that Sadie would be attending Happy Star every weekday.

There were the initial hurdles to jump in order to get Sadie acclimated -- we had to figure out a system for making her feel comfortable, finally culminating in me having to lug her bouncer seat with me each day, along with her special napping blanket (it's white and fleecy with a satin border; she rubs her nose against it when she's tired). Oh, and it was understood I had to provide her meals, too. Unlike the other day care owner, who explained that she cooked Armenian food for her kids every day, it was up to me to pack a lunch, a spoon, a bib, etc. five days a week.

Of course, all of this was perfectly fine with me. And I was also okay with Happy Star's very, very long list of policies: don't bring your child in if she seems sick, we're closed for a week during summer and a week during the holiday season, drop her off in the back but pick her up in the front -- but only between 3 and 4:30pm, after that pick her up in the back again, call on a cell phone instead of knocking on the front door so they can bring her out to meet me, etc. etc. etc.

And I was okay with paying the last two weeks' worth of tuition upfront, along with the first two weeks, so that it was a significant chunk of change just to get her in the front door.

Aaaaand, I guess I was okay with their somewhat bizarre payment policy, which was this: cash only, you create a receipt recording the payment, which they then sign. This meant I'd have to go to the bank every 2 weeks and withdraw a large amount of money, which made me a little nervous, and I still don't understand exactly why it's so difficult for them to take a check. But at this point I was still just thrilled that they'd met my terms and that Sadie was going to a great day care.

And the thing is, it IS a very good day care. The kids are clearly happy there -- I've never approached to hear anyone throwing a tantrum, fussing or fighting. The women who work there adore the kids, showering them with love and affection. Sadie is generally happy to be there.

The problem is...well, what is the problem really? If I had to boil it down, I'd say that in order to make Sadie happy, Happy Star has continually expected me to sacrifice my time, convenience, ability to manage my workload, and my good humor.

The first real issue that cropped up -- infamous now among friends and family who have heard me gripe about it a million times -- was the Happy Star owner's repeated habit of pulling me outside when I came each afternoon so she could tell me what was wrong with Sadie.

First it was that she wasn't trying to crawl, as all babies her age should.

Then it was that she tended to look right more than left, which could mean her neck muscles were developing improperly.

Then she wanted me to know that if Sadie's pediatrician didn't agree with her that the crawling thing was an issue, I should probably switch doctors.

More than this, the thing that really started getting to me was the manner in which the owner of Happy Star was delivering these various bits of troublesome news. There's no way to explain this without sounding ultra-sensitive, but she has a way of speaking that sounds decidedly accusatory. Rather than, "Sadie was sleepy today and took an extra long nap," it's, "Sadie was sleepy today!" followed by a piercing look and silence, until I rush to fill the void with excuses. "Well, she didn't sleep very well last night...and I think she might be teething...but I'm sure she's okay..."

Then there was the foot-scrape episode. Sadie began returning home from day care with a raw spot on each ankle, which would eventually scab over, then it would happen again. I asked the owner about it: "Have you noticed anything she might be doing that would give her these scrapes?" My question was answered with a blank look and a head shake. "Well, would you keep an eye on her to see if there's something happening?" More blank looks. Then her response was, "Maybe at home she's trying to crawl."

In other words: whatever's happening with her, it's probably your fault.

Eventually the ankle mystery was solved. It was Scott who noticed that when Sadie sits, she absently rubs her leg back and forth across the carpet and in doing so rubs her ankle raw. She was probably doing this both at day care and at home -- but it still rankles that this woman couldn't even conceive that Sadie might possibly have gotten an injury while under her care.

Anyway -- this is becoming a very long post, so I'll jump ahead. Scott and I talked about it a lot, debating the pros versus the cons of Sadie attending Happy Star. The conclusion I finally reached was that if she's happy there, then it's worth putting up with someone who's social skills are less than ideal. We agreed that from now on, if she pointed out things wrong with my baby or my parenting style, I'd nod politely and then ignore her advice. And as long as Sadie continued to love Happy Star, there was no real reason to take her out and begin the search all over again.

And then, last week happened.

I brought Sadie back to Happy Star following our trip up to Washington, and it became clear she was having problems adjusting. The owner reported to me each day that Sadie was crying a lot and missed me. "When she cries, she upsets the other kids," she told me, in that way of hers which gives me the uncontrollable urge to drown her in a sea of excuses on behalf of my baby.

"I think she's teething," the owner said to me on Monday.

"Oh yes, probably teething."

I took her home.

"I think she's getting sick," she told me when she handed Sadie over to me on Tuesday afternoon.

"Oh no! I'll keep an eye on her tonight and tomorrow morning."

On Wednesday, I saw no signs of sickness, so I took her back. "Call me if it seems like she's really not well," I said, then left to tackle a long day's worth of work.

At 11am, I got the call. "Sadie's upset. She misses you. I think you should come get her."

And so I did. And Sadie, if she WAS upset, became fine the minute I got her home. We spent a pleasant afternoon playing. A day during which I did not get any work done. A day after which I had to pull a late-nighter to do the work I hadn't gotten done during the day.

At some point during that long night, I thought to myself, "Isn't the reason I'm paying them so they can deal with her regardless of whether she's happy or fussy?"

On Thursday, I brought her back again. She didn't want to go, clutching my arm tightly and crying for a minute when I handed her over. I felt terrible, but this time I had to say firmly, "I can't come early today. I'll lose this job. I'll pick her up at 3." Then, naturally, I spent all day worrying and feeling like a bad mother.

This time when I picked her up she seemed fine, but I was also sent home with a new list of instructions: you need to start packing finger food; she doesn't like spoons anymore. You need to bring the bouncer seat every day again. You need to speak to her using the same language we do, so she starts listening to us better. You need to begin doing activities with her like we do, so that she likes doing them better with us.

"Play with her. Listen to music with her. Dance with her."

I do, I do, and I do.

What she's telling me, in essence, is that the same activities I do each day with Sadie, that I have no trouble with, are now making her unhappy at day care. And somehow, according to the owner of Happy Star, this is my fault.

I think I'm just about done.

On Friday afternoon, after I'd handed over my giant enveloped stuffed with twenties and was about to drive away with my baby, the owner chased me down and knocked on the window of the car.

"I counted twice, and you're $20 short," she informed me, handing me back the envelope.

I counted it again, while she demurely turned her head away. It came up right on target. I handed back the money and told her so.

She shrugged. "I'm sure it's fine. I counted it twice. Probably the bills were stuck together." She looked at me for a moment before returning inside and even then, even in that moment when I knew completely, utterly and without a doubt that I was right, I still felt as if she were waiting for me to come up with an excuse that would justify the problem. ("I'm so sorry. The bank gave me new bills and they aren't as easy to count as older ones.")  

If Sadie's the baby in the equation, then how is it that taking her to day care makes me feel like the child?

 

Back We Go

Someday, when Sadie is older, I'll tell her about how when she was eleven months old, we despaired of her ever learning how to get around on her own.

HER: So I never learned how to crawl?

ME: Well, you could sort of crawl...backwards.

HER: Whatever, Mom, you're totally making that up.

ME: Oh yeah? I HAVE PROOF.

Sadie crawls backward

Full Steam Ahead

My lack of updating is for actual good, valid reasons -- I'm working a lot these days, and it's keeping me incredibly busy, which is great for things like paying the mortgage but not good for logging important milestones in my child's life.

When Sadie was first born, my sister gave me a beautiful baby book. It was filled with pages that said things like, "On the day I was born, here were the top headlines in the newspaper!" and I always mean to go back and Google September 24th, 2009 and then write down all the important news stories, but then I realize I forgot to go to the market and Pepper's going crazy at my feet because she needs to be walked and I need to cook up a batch of baby food because we're down to nothing but three cubes of Wheaty Meaty Stew and instant oatmeal. And then I rationalize that Sadie, if she's interested in such a thing when she grows up, will also have the power of the internet at her fingertips, so really, it's not necessary for me to write it down and....aaaanyway, long story short, I was bad at filling in the baby book and I'm bad at posting updates.

These days are going by so fast, I'm just trying to stop every once in awhile to remind myself that my baby is becoming less of a baby and more of a kid. At last night's anniversary dinner for my grandparents' 50th, my mother looked at Sadie and said, "You can see...she's really becoming more of a little girl." And I was like, "Heh, yeah, that's what a grandmother would say," but then I did a double-take and when I looked for the second time, I could see: yes, she IS becoming a little girl. The baby features are already starting to go -- her cheeks no longer look like she's hoarding golf balls, her hands aren't as fat and dimpled, her hair has grown out.

Last week, Scott and I took her up to Seattle and Vachon Island for a vacation. And by "vacation," I mean that Scott got to listen to me bitch about how vacations are supposed to be relaxing while this was no such thing, and for that I'm sorry, honey.  But really -- I was rushing to meet work deadlines up to the night that we left, packing was a frenzy, in the middle of it we had to go return my leased Volvo to the dealership, and all that was before we even left. Once we arrived in Washington we contended with rain, many hours of travel, and a baby who went through one of the worst teething phases of her life to date. She actually went on a food strike for four straight days, refusing to consume anything but bottles and occasionally some yogurt, and let me tell you, a teething, hungry baby whose gums hurt too much to eat and who is also in an unfamiliar environment, constantly being thrust into the arms of people she doesn't know or  forced to sit in a carseat for hours on end, is NOT a happy baby.

So it was a bit stressful, but I'm also making it sound a lot worse than it was. We stayed in a hundred year old inn on gorgeous Vashon, our quarters adjoining the establishment's well-respected restaurant. That meant live music and conversation being piped into our rooms every evening, which I loved. Scott's sister stayed with us, holding out the fort at night, allowing us to attend our friends' wedding (the reason we were in Washington to begin with) baby-free and to feel privately smug towards all the people who'd brought their kids with them for a nighttime wedding.

From Vachon we took the ferry across the Sound to Seattle, where we stayed with my aunt, uncle and niece. They're incredibly cool about houseguests, making us feel welcome the entire time. Even so, I felt bad walking in the door with a crying, drooling, hunger-striking infant. "We swear she's usually not like this!" has become our constant cry every time Sadie goes through a teething period. All things considered, the plane flights to and from Seattle were remarkably unremarkable. Minimal fussing, she napped briefly both times, and all I can say is, thank heaven for the emergency instruction card because it kept her entertained for most of the flight.

Now that the teething has passed, Sadie's gone back to her usual happy self. Today I took her over to my parents' and she was the happiest baby you've ever seen, giggling at all of us and showering us with kisses. And why wouldn't she be happy? She's got all the love she can handle, from aunts and uncles to grandparents and great-grandparents -- all within the span of a few days. If this keeps up, she's going to start getting a big head.

Parrot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gourmet Palate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a couple of recipes that have actually worked:

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

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

Development/Delays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HER: I want to talk to you about Sadie.

ME: Okay.

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

ME: .......Right.

HER: She needs more activity.

ME: Activity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Months.

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

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

Summer

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

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

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

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

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

Videos

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

Sadie scoots

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

Sadie at the dermatologist

Finally, the two of us being goofballs:

Baby Sadie Laughing

Blom Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

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

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

Yeah, I'm a blom.

Saturday in the Backyard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Herbs can be touchy.

- You really shouldn't forget to mulch.
 

Shut Up, "Two Days Ago Me"

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Oh.

As you guys know if you've been keeping up to date with my incredibly boring sleep-related blog updates, Sadie was driving us both batty with the random 5am wake-ups, at which point she always wanted to eat before going back to sleep for another 90 minutes if we were lucky.

It was what finally encouraged me to start considering making the switch from breastfeeding to formula, something I wasn't especially inclined to do otherwise -- everyone kept telling us that formula fed babies sleep longer. To which I wanted to say, "But you guys don't understand. She always slept FINE up until six weeks ago. Hunger isn't the problem. The problem is...crap, I don't know what the problem is. Babies are weird."

Making this switch -- even considering making this switch -- has inspired a deep-seated guilt that I wasn't prepared for. Because why would I feel guilty? Fewer than 20% of American mothers are still breastfeeding their children past the age of six months, and here I've been going for seven and a half. The reasons for this guilt are many, and I won't go into them in too much detail -- not because I don't want to, but because I don't feel like I should have to, and the fact that I still do is all kinds of messed up. Let's just say that it can be difficult to be a modern American mother and speak the word "formula," if you aren't prepared to deal with a lot of raised eyebrows and tsking.

So anyway, we talked about it a lot and I cried a couple of times and ultimately I came up with this ABSURDLY complicated gameplan for weaning Sadie which involves not just slowly increasing the number of bottles she takes per day, but also decreasing the amount of breast milk in each bottle while upping the amount of formula, which by the way MUST BE ORGANIC and kind of smells like fish and the first time I sniffed it I thought, "Sadie is going to HATE this stuff and she will never forgive me for not letting her nurse until she was three years old like the crunchy mothers say I should do and OH MY GOD I AM A BAD MOM."

Okay. Well. This week, we implemented The Plan.

The Plan, I should mention, involved not just introducing formula into her diet, but also discouraging her 5am wake-ups by trying to allow her to cry herself back to sleep. We've been prepared for a very rough week, in other words.

Here's how it went:

Monday: Nursing, bottle, bottle, bottle, nursing, bed. She couldn't get enough of the bottles. By the end of the day she was like, "Oh, what? Boobs? No really, I couldn't drink another drop." And then she slept through the night without a peep.

Tuesday: Repeat of Monday.

Wednesday: Repeat of Tuesday, with the exception that I made the stupid error of skipping a feeding mid-day because she didn't seem hungry. Along came the 5am wake-up, finally, at which point it was like a big flashing light in my head said: YOU IDIOT, SHE'S BEEN HUNGRY THIS WHOLE TIME. THAT'S WHY SHE'S WAKING UP CRYING AT 5AM.

So, duh. There you have it. We've been beating ourselves up for making the switch to formula, convinced we were doing it for purely selfish reasons, only to discover that Sadie is fuller, happier and sleeping better all around. I kind of wish I'd done it sooner, except that I don't, because every time I think about the fact that I won't be sharing that special time with her anymore, those silent 5am feedings where she falls asleep in my arms in the rocking chair while the world sleeps, it makes me want to cry a little bit more.

Ack. Sleep. Where?

I've been holding off about blogging again about Sadie's sleep ups and downs, because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking "tonight's the night she'll grow out of it. Tonight, she goes back to the baby she was six weeks ago. I know she's capable of sleeping 12 hours in a row -- she used to do it all the time. Damn it, where did that baby go?"

Well, I finally had to admit that it's not going to happen on its own. As we were warned by our doctor and pretty much everyone else, Sadie's sleep is no longer as peaceful as it once was. And as we muddle through the process of trying to change her now erratic nighttime patterns, our perspectives on how to respond to her constant wake-ups are changing too.

It all started right around the 6-month growth spurt, which I detailed a few weeks back. Sadie was waking up multiple times during the night, always ravenously hungry. When the growth spurt petered out, the habitual wake-ups continued, and it wasn't until I realized she wasn't actually hungry anymore that I was moved to do anything about it.

Thus followed a couple of very painful nights in which we practiced a modified version of the "cry-it-out" method of baby sleep training, which, depending on who you ask, is either a lifesaving invention or child abuse. Call it what you will, but Sadie responded well to it. After only a few nights of going in periodically to pat her reassuringly and replace her pacifier each time she woke up and cried, she figured out that tears weren't going to get her picked up and nursed, so she stopped crying.

Well...sort of. The wake-ups decreased, but they didn't cease entirely. And as of late, they've fallen into a distressing pattern: Wake-Up #1 comes right as we're getting into bed, around 10:30 or 11. Wake-Up #2 hits right around 5am. Wake-Up #3 is usually an hour and a half later, at which point she's up for the day and Mom is bleary-eyed yet again. Also, I'm not talking quick wake-ups; its no longer possible to make her fall instantaneously back to sleep just by putting her pacifier back in her mouth. When she's awake, she sometimes wants to be awake for awhile. And I admit, this is really my fault -- I'd gotten back into the habit of nursing her multiple times at night, just because it's the quickest way to get her to fall back asleep.

I mean look, we're not complaining over here. She's been an absolute dream of a baby, and we're lucky that we got to brag about her sleeping abilities for as long as we did. We definitely deserve a healthy helping of Sleepless BabyCake at this point. But that doesn't make the waking up any easier, and so last week we once again resigned ourselves to employing Cry-it-Out, aka CIO, aka The Ferber Method, aka The Fastest Way to Get Attachment Parents On Your Butt.

Here, in brief, is how the method works: when your baby wakes up and cries, you first wait a minute to see if she'll put herself back to sleep. (If she's anything like Sadie, she never does.) Then, you go in to check on her. Soothe her by replacing her pacifier or patting her chest lightly, but don't speak to her or pick her up. Leave the room, let her cry for three minutes, then go back in and repeat the same actions. This time, let her cry for five minutes, then ten, then every ten minutes until she gets tired enough to fall asleep on her own.  The idea is to help your baby understand that while you aren't going to pick them up, you're still close by.

First, we tackled the 11am wake-up. Night #1 was a resounding failure. The first time she cried, expecting me to pick her up, Scott went in there instead, and she was REALLY not happy to see him. Something in her panicked shrieks yanked me to my feet and down the hall, where I vaguely remember SHOVING my husband out of the way so I could grab the baby before she could be any more traumatized, despite the fact that I was half-asleep as this was going on.

Night #2 worked better. This time I was the first one in there, and although she was mad at me for not picking her up, I only had to go in one more time before she stopped crying and fell asleep. Night #3, she woke up again but quickly fell back to sleep once her paci was back in place. By the next night, she was sleeping soundly and since then it seems she's managed to drop the 11pm wake-up entirely.

So. Now. It's time to move on to the 5am wake-up. This one is going to be a toughie, and Scott and I both know it. In fact, we made a pact today that beginning next Monday, we will resign ourselves to getting no sleep between the hours of 5-6am for several days straight, because I know Sadie is not going to like having her 5am feeding phased out. Once again, this is my fault. I hate getting up early, and so when Sadie wakes up, the only thought going through my head is, "MUST GET HER BACK TO SLEEP IMMEDIATELY." So I nurse her, and she falls asleep in the rocking chair, and then she goes back into her crib and I back to my bed and we both sleep for another hour or two, and that's all well and good, except...

...we're going to start formula soon.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to get up every morning at 5am and warm up a bottle, feed it to her, then put her back to bed and try to get back to sleep myself. There's just no need for it. I know she can sleep in until 6:30 or 7, because she used to do it every single freaking morning. Sorry, kid, but both you know and I know that you don't really need that 5am meal.

Ooh, I'm dreading this so much. As much as Sadie balked at the 11pm Ferberizing, (and the Ferberizing that came before it) I can't imagine what her response is going to be to the news that the nice warm meal she's taken for granted so many dark mornings in a row will no longer be forthcoming. Something tells me the paci is not going to help with this one. All we can do is pray nobody calls CPS on us as we lie in bed, gritting our teeth and checking the clock to see if it's time to go back in and pat her again.

Cross your fingers for us. 

 

Daddy's Girl

Scott's been out of town for the past week, working. He only just returned yesterday. It's the longest trip he's taken since Sadie was born, and it was rough on both of us, but we know we have to get used to it because this is only the beginning of what will be a year full of business trips for him and double parent duty for me.

In preparation, we set up a webcam on the computer and Scott taught me how to use Skype. (Yeah, I realize I'm about the last internet-savvy person left on Earth who has never used Skype, but something about the idea of being on the phone while looking the other party in the eye has always made me feel weird. Like awkward phone pauses aren't awkward enough?) So every night he'd call and I'd dutifully hold the baby up to camera and Scott would go, "Sadie! Sadie! Sadie!" and Sadie would ignore him and kick the keyboard instead because anything that has buttons on it automatically becomes her favorite thing in the room.

I'm kidding. She actually only got interested in the keyboard after she was done grinning her head off at the sound of her dad's voice, even though I don't think she ever put it together that the image on the computer screen was him. And that was a running theme this whole week: hear Dad's voice, freak out with excitement. You'd be surprised how many ways Scott's voice has been recorded in this household. One night as I changed her diaper, the phone rang and the outgoing message began to play. The instant she heard him say "Hello..." her head whipped towards the door and she began to squirm and smile, looking for his face. I felt really bad until 5 seconds later when she forgot all about it and got interested in the stuffed dog on her changing table instead because she has the attention span of a hummingbird.

At some point when I wasn't paying attention, Scott became Sadie's favorite person in the whole world. Watching them together is so much fun. He walks into a room and her whole face lights up with joy. He approaches and she squeals with anticipation. He picks her up, flips her upside down so he can munch on her belly, and while I'm having silent heart attacks imagining her being dropped on her head, she's having the time of her life.

It all brings back memories of spending time with my dad when I was a kid and how, when he wanted to, he could become the funnest person who has ever lived. A simple day of hanging out on the beach, or walking around the campus at UCLA, or rolling down grassy hillsides across the street from the mall, always transformed into something special when it was just the two of us. He'd point out something interesting, or teach me an important fact (a tendency from his teaching days that he's never been able to shake, which later in life made me and my sister roll our eyes as we anticipated a "Dad lecture") or, more often, make a game out of whatever we were doing.

Ever since the day we learned we were having a daughter, I've hoped she would share times like this with her own dad, that they would become best friends. I just didn't realize it would happen so quickly. I'm not jealous -- not when I still get to be the person who comforts her the best, the only person she'll tolerate drying her off after a bath or putting her into and taking her out of a carseat 20 times as we run errands. She's still my girl. But now, she's daddy's girl, too.

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.

 

The Contents of Our Freezer at This Very Moment

Check it out.

Baby food

I made more baby food, froze it and then stored it in freezer bags to save space. See all the frozen cubes of pears, avocados, bananas, peas and apples, each in their own conveniently labeled baggie?

Yes, I mean those baggies next to the boxes of TV dinners.

Yes, I'm talking about the ones on top of the vodka bottles.

Why are you giving me that look?

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.