We're Really Tired Around Here

Play Dress-Up With Mommy's Shoe

We Like a Cookie!

I Have Subdued this Muffin- it is MINE!!!

Destructo Baby

Let's dismantle the table's centerpiece and smash Mommy's glasses.

The Most Gorgemous Girl in the World

Aaarrgg, That Be a Good Pretzel, Matey!

An Infant's Guide: How to Escape a Highchair

It's My Birthday and I'll Eat What I Want To

My baby girl tried to do every fun thing that she could think of to celebrate her first birthday. She climbed onto the chair and trapped herself under the table many, many times. She put her face in the path of her brother’s back swing and was consequently hit in the face by his plastic golf iron. An attempt was made to tip over the garbage can, and she tried to eat some mulch while out in the backyard. She insisted on crawling on the sidewalk instead of in the grass, even though she didn’t have shoes on, and she scraped one of her toes all up. Tops on the list, however, was the inquisitive sampling of a piece of fungus found outside.

Every day I am more convinced that I am going to die of stress: and I am quite sure that this child is going to be the death of me. During the minute it took for me to address whatever request it was that her brother made that caused me to turn my back, she plucked a mushroom out of the ground and as I again turned in her direction she took a bite.

It is rather unfortunate that I have, as of yet, not been given the chance to purchase, steal or otherwise gain any super-powers through skill, osmosis, or freak-accident. The longer that I am a mother, the more I realize that being able to fly or have laser vision wouldn’t be the wisest choice: having stretchy elastic arms would be, that way one’s child would always be within arms reach.

Needless to say, I called my friends at Poison Control. The other two times I found myself in need of their expertise, I was instructed to give milk to the child so I thought it would be a good place to start. The baby wasn’t interested in drinking milk; she wanted to go back outside and forage some more. I spoke to a very reassuring nurse, named Mimi, who informed me that since mushrooms are so hard to identify they treat them all as poisonous, just to be on the safe side.

Since the child had enough sense to spit out the fungi, Mimi didn’t think that she needed emergency care. (If a child actually ingests a mushroom found elsewhere than the refrigerator or the produce section of the grocery store, they need to be taken to the emergency room and given activated charcoal.) Instead, she cautioned me to be on the lookout for the usual signs: nausea, vomiting, abnormal behavior. Since fungal poisoning can manifest itself in many different ways, depending on the type of mushroom, she couldn’t be any more specific. She also informed me that Poison Control would be in touch over the next twenty-four hours to help monitor the birthday girl.

I’m sure that I do not need to expound upon the tension and anxiety that plagued me over the next few hours. Every time the baby cried or fussed, a great hand clenched and twisted all the organs in my chest. It didn’t help that the picture I found on the Internet that most resembled the slimy fungal antagonist had the label poisonous underneath it. When Mimi called during the afternoon she calmed my fears and told me not to let the incident ruin the birthday: “Write it down in her baby book,” she said, “it’s just going to be a birthday to remember.” Business as usual.

Okay.

We read some books.

I killed a freaky looking cricket (or something) in the kitchen.

Both of the kids fought over toys and grabbed and screamed.

The toddler commandeered the baby’s birthday present.

We ate; I cleaned; we slept.

The twenty-four hour mark has passed now, and the baby is no worse for wear. Poison control has placed their last phone call to check up on her. Another day, another disaster averted. Thank God for that. Now, on to year number two for the little monkey. I am quite sure that it would be foolish of me to hope that it’s not too exciting.

An Infant's Guide: How to Straddle a Bicycle

An Infant's Guide: How to Climb a Chair

An Infant's Guide: How to Mount a Walker

Potty Party

Near the end of last week, I decided that since the baby is usually in the bathroom while her big brother uses the potty it would be an ideal time to stick her on the toilet and see what she would do. The two or three times she sat on the pot last week were mostly spent trying to stick her feet and hands through the potty seat and down into the toilet water. According to her, this is great fun and all attempts should be made to maneuver one’s way around mommy’s arms and thwart mommy’s efforts at keeping potty time clean and safe.

The long weekend was extremely busy, as weekends are wont to be, so she was deprived the practice of using the toilet. As a result, I wasn’t expecting anything yesterday morning when I removed her diaper and sat her tiny-ness on the potty; I was greatly and pleasantly surprised however, when I heard the tinkling sound of a potty-in-use. I couldn’t believe my luck! I judiciously checked my enthusiasm with a cautionary thought: “Maybe it’s just a fluke.”

Every time over the next couple of hours that big brother used the potty, little sister had a turn. Much to my delight she went every time! “Well,” I thought, “wouldn’t it be something if she’s potty trained before she can walk?” I wanted to make sure that she really did know what the potty was for, so I devised a little experiment.

When I was pretty sure she didn’t have to go, I took her diaper off and stuck her on the toilet anyway. She sat there for a second and then she started to suck her tummy in as if she was trying to force herself to go pee. Over the course of the day, I tried this a couple of times and the result was always the same. Considering the fact that she is still using the potty today, I’m pretty sure she knows what the deal is.

Now all we have to do is come up with some sort of hand signals or learn sign language so that she can communicate when she has to go. And she needs to learn that splashing in the water is for bath time, not for toilet time. It must be loads of fun though, or she wouldn’t cry every time I remove her from the potty and put her pants back on.

Evel And Knievel

The doctor’s office called back- nothing abnormal showed up with the baby’s blood work. Through the nurse’s thick Latino accent I caught the words “urine” and “analysis”: she said that the doctor would talk with me about that at the baby’s appointment next month. Yippee.

At this point I don’t see a reason to worry about the fact that she’s so tiny. She is happy, healthy, and super active. I had to remove the little rocking chair from the living room because she has taken to climbing it and rocking it wildly back and forth while standing on the seat and facing in the wrong direction. Even though she has a great sense of balance she couldn’t resist throwing herself from the chair a time or two and whacking her head on the toys littered around the base of the chair.

Every morning after we descend the stairs to the first floor I make sure to pull the gate across the landing to cut off her route upstairs. This produces an almost otherworldly wail from the baby, as she likes nothing better than to scurry her way up those stairs and sit at the top laughing and clapping her hands while peeking over the edge.

While cooking dinner the other day, I heard a clattering sound under the table where I was stationed. I looked down and there was the baby peering through the slats in the chair; using the training potty as a ladder, she had climbed up onto the chairs and was lying across both of them. That was a new trick, and boy was she proud.

This child is dangerous. She frightens me. If presented with two paths across a room, she will usually choose the obstacle course instead of the clear route. It’s not enough that I have my hands full keeping her brother from riding his bicycle down the stairs, or jumping it off of the couch. Oh, no. I used to think that it was safe to watch old movies with children. It’s possible that I may need to rethink my opinion: believe it or not, he assimilated the bicycle stunts from a two-second scene in Singing In The Rain.

Stop The Ride, I Want To Get Off.

There is something worse than having to take a child for shots: needing to take them for blood work. My poor, sweet little girl isn’t gaining weight as fast as the doctors feel she should be. Even though she was two weeks early she still weighed in at seven pounds, four ounces at birth. Her first birthday is only one month away and she still has not passed the fourteen-pound mark. The pediatrician is fairly confident that her teeny-tiny-ness is a combination of genetics and how active she is. However, with the amount of food the child consumes it just seems odd that she gains only a few ounces every month.

Hence, the command was issued to have blood drawn to check for a reason as to the abnormal weight gain. Keeping in mind the fact that I wanted to get in and out of there as fast as humanly possible, I waited until I thought the lunch hour rush would be over. My timing was a little bit off, however, as one of the phlebotomists was at lunch. Anytime blood needs to be drawn from an infant it requires two technicians: one to do the stick and one to hold the baby’s arm down.

So there I sat, for twenty minutes, waiting in dread and wanting to be at home drinking tea or reading a book, or even plucking my eyebrows. Little Cheekers just straddled my lap and pointed out the lights and watched the cars drive by outside the window while munching an occasional Cheerio. Finally the time came to walk down the hallway of doom and sit in the horrid blue-padded chair of pain and suffering.

As infants, my kids are the type that only needs a stranger to look at them in order to start wailing, but once we were seated and the rubber band was applied to her arm the crying started in earnest. It was my job to hold her other arm down, keep her feet from kicking and to restrain her upper body. I held her tightly while she screamed and wriggled. After what seemed like an eternity the phlebotomist declared that she could not get anything out of the left arm and they would need to try the other. Oh. My. GOODNESS GRACIOUS! I had suggested they try her right arm in the first place!

Lord help me, I thought I was going to start crying myself. There are few things that are more heart wrenching than having your child cling to you in desperation and being unable to relieve their troubles. So the life-squeezing rubber band of sedition was placed on her right arm and the blood was drawn. As if the whole experience wasn’t horrific enough already, the flow was so slow that it took a ridiculous amount of time to get enough for two large and two small tubes. I tried to sing to her and kiss her head, anything to distract her. Nothing worked and by the time it was over she had practically cried herself to sleep. A full ten minutes had passed since we first sat in the chair.

It was everything I had feared it would be and more. Please believe me, I sincerely hope that all of the tests come back normal. Considering how terrible the experience was, how badly she bruised, and how traumatized she must be, I am fairly confident that it will all come to naught and that the whole incident could have been avoided. At least she still loves me.

And So It Happens

There was a point yesterday afternoon where I was unsure whether I was at long last losing my mind, or if my daughter was the possessor of super-powers. My son had decided to make yesterday one of those rare days where he clambers up onto the couch and settles down for a nap; my ten-month-old daughter sat on the floor with her teething blanket watching a video, so I thought I would take the opportunity to go upstairs to check my email and shut down the computer.

It was only a couple of seconds before the baby noticed that I was gone, and I heard her crawl over to the steps and start banging on them with her little open palm. She does this frequently, as she has decided that the stairs are great fun and she likes to climb up and down, up and down, on the bottom step. She had only once managed to mount the second step.

Over the next minute or so I could hear her smacking and happily jabbering which perplexed me a little bit because of late she has been suffering from acute separation anxiety to the point that I can rarely go to the bathroom without actually taking her in with me. I turned off the computer and swiveled the chair just in time to see her proud smiling face peek around the corner from the top of the steps.

I made reference earlier to the fact that I thought I might be losing my mind, because when I saw her at the top step I became instantly confused and wondered how I could have forgotten that I had brought her upstairs with me. I figured it was out of the question that a tiny person, weighing a mere thirteen pounds at her ten month check-up, would have been able to climb three steps onto a landing, make a ninety-degree turn, and scramble up an addition ten steps. Being fairly certain that I had not brought her up myself I naturally concluded that she must be capable of flight.

After making a couple of frantic phone calls (mainly to re-assure myself that men in dark suits wouldn’t be knocking on my door to take my children away because of some perceived neglect) and fervently thanking God that my daughter didn’t tumble down the stairs and break all of her bones, I decided it would be a good idea to watch her in another attempt so that I could see how she had managed to get safely to the top looking so proud of herself. She may have only been able to mount the bottom step at breakfast, but now she was zipping up those steps like she’d been doing it for weeks, chattering and shaking her head around, with her pants falling down the whole way up.

Changes... Changes...

There are some changes that are good and don’t interfere with a person’s everyday life, like changing into clean underwear every day. While giving my kids lunch yesterday I looked out of the window and saw a vehicle with the words “Parking Enforcement” stuck to the side idling in the middle of the street while the driver alternately contemplated our car and looked down into his lap in the posture of someone writing out a violation.

Shortly before, the garbage men had hauled away our trash, so I decided to go outside and put our empty cans away while working up the courage to approach the gentleman and ask him what the problem was. Turns out I didn’t have to approach him at all; he watched me drag the garbage cans away from the curb before indicating that he wanted to speak with me.

When we first purchased our home fourteen months ago there was some confusion about how the parking on our street worked. Our house is on a corner lot and on the side of our home people park facing the “wrong” way because the wooded hill on the far side of the street negates people being able to park there at all; in front of the house cars parallel park on the opposite side of the street and angle park on the side our home sits on. We were mindful to watch how our neighbors parked their own vehicles and mirrored our own parking after theirs. We live in a city, so it isn’t unusual to see a police car cruise down the road. Never having gotten a parking ticket before we assumed that we had a solid grasp on the parking situation.

Well. Without going into boring details it would seem that our car was not twenty feet from the corner, nor was it parked at the appropriate angle. Even though there was nothing gracious about his attitude he graciously voided the ticket and made me solemnly swear to move my car twenty feet from the corner (about halfway down the block). I really don’t see what this new parking scheme is going to do other than lose us one parking spot on either side of the corner, I mean, there isn’t even a stop sign there! But I suppose rules are rules even when they don’t make sense. Being forced to take a whole different approach to parking in front of a person’s own home is the type of change that isn’t life changing, but it can seem like a huge nuisance initially.

I put my daughter in a long sleeved dress yesterday and she found it challenging to crawl on her hands and knees because her knee would pin down the dress and she was unable to move her arm forward. So for the whole day she had to change her crawling style from hands-and-knees to hands-and-tippy-toes. She looked like Spider-Man grasping the floor with her fingertips and toes while her rear-end stuck up in the air! I tried in vain to get a picture to post after we got home last night from a day at Nana’s, but she was cranky and in no mood to be tortured by the camera. Even after she was out of the dress and into her jammies she still crawled that way.

About once a year my husband decides to appease me and shave his beard off. He usually does this in the summer time so that his face can get a chance to breath. This year the whole face-shaving ritual came a little early. He came downstairs last night (after he had splashed water all over the bathroom and left a layer of tiny little hairs on the sink) without the beard.

The baby always cries when men she isn’t used to seeing all the time try and talk to her. She took one look at daddy and totally freaked. It took him a little while to convince her that he was indeed her very own daddy. The poor kid is already having some separation anxiety issues after being left with her auntie last weekend. Now I can’t even leave her in a room with her daddy, whom one would think looks like the man with a scar down the left side of his face and bald patches strewn throughout his otherwise long hair by the quality of the baby’s earsplitting scream.

I'm In The Market For A Third Eye

My son has taken to having swashbuckling adventures around the house; he wields his made-especially-by-Daddy pirate sword of cardboard and tinfoil as he roams the house in search of unsuspecting teddy bears and swarthy felines to stab or force, at sword point, to walk the plank. The only pirates he has seen in action are The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, courtesy of Big Idea. They don’t do much stabbing, although they do make Jonah walk the plank in Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie. I suppose it’s in a young boy’s nature to understand a sword’s purpose. Since there is no ship in sight he has begun to train the cats in the art of carrying a human from one point to another on their backs. This training has so far been largely unsuccessful, sword or no sword.

While I attempt to keep tabs on these exploits with one eye I am forced to watch my little girl non-stop with the other as she seeks entertainment in another way: climbing. My son was never much of a climber as a baby. My daughter, on the other hand, absolutely refuses to go around an object when she can go over it. As a matter of fact, she hunts for things to climb on or use to pull herself into an upright position. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for her still wobbly legs or her pirate brother who is forever weaving in and out of her path. Every other minute there is a “thud” or a “wump” to investigate. She just can’t be stopped and is forever falling, rolling, or tumbling over something. It would seem that she isn’t the type to let a few boo-boos stop her from getting back up on the horse.

Behold, The Power Of Cheese

After my son was born I always (half) jokingly said that I hoped to one day have a nice, quiet little girl who would sit once in a while to give me a break from my constantly on-the-go little boy. My daughter will be nine months old in a couple of days and it seems unlikely that her personality will develop into a child that sits still and watches what is going on around her.

Even though she is still doing the army crawl it only takes a blink of the eye for her to warp to a new location where she can find something to get into. We have no way to put a gate across the three bottom steps, so she is already playing on the bottom step and trying to climb them. In her little world the cat’s food and water dishes have become an all-you-can-eat self serve food bar for the hungry baby. Mom is a little late getting my lunch - no problem! I’ll just help myself to some of this dry stuff in the shape of a chicken leg. Tastes just like Cheerios! The trick is to swallow it before mommy can fetch it out of her mouth.

Of course there are times when she participates in relatively safe activities like chasing the cats or playing with her brother’s toys, although the safety of the latter activity is quickly being called into question. She has gotten to the point where she dislikes it when her brother takes a toy away from her: she has been observed swatting at his offending hand in frustration.

Regardless of the fact that she is very task oriented and likes to stay busy, her maternal instinct is sharpening. She delights in feeding her father and I Cheerios from her tray and often becomes insistent if we show disinterest toward eating them. I could quickly become fat by being handfed by the baby because she has such a wonderful giggle when I eat from her hand that I could let her feed me all day and not tire of it.

Food is a powerful thing. I almost wept at the beauty of a ham sandwich the other day. The cross-section of it was mind-blowing: a thick layer of green, crispy lettuce so fresh that it sparkled with water sat beneath thinly sliced white cheddar, extra sharp, decorated with yellow mustard and topped with ham betwixt two slices of soft potato bread. I tell you, it brought a tear to my eye.

Sick & Sick Incorporated

Thank heaven my toddler’s temperature has returned to normal. He is still congested beyond allowable snot levels, but what a huge improvement a couple doses of antibiotic can make. He and I are now vying for the most-congested-person-in-the-house award. Unfortunately, my baby has contracted this virus and is congested, running a fever and seems to have a bad headache. It’s so hard with babies because they cannot communicate exactly what is bothering them. When they cry with pain I’m always afraid that something horrible is wrong with them and that I won’t know until it is too late. Isn’t that terrible?

I sat the baby in the tub for the first time last night. She has a lovely mesh bath seat that she sits in when I bathe her, so I thought that it would be fun for both of us if she could splash around in the bath water for a change. Usually her brother is waiting impatiently for his turn, and since the baby still can’t anchor herself well when sitting her bath time tends to be a little abbreviated. It is so neat to watch a baby explore and experience something new. She slapped the water with her open palms and seemed surprised at the resistance they met from the water. The droplets of water that clung to her face displeased her at first, but she was having such a grand time splashing that she stopped minding them. I do believe she could have stayed in until she shriveled up; she cried something fierce when it was time to get out. But because she is such a happy sort of baby, she soon forgot what it was that she was upset about.