Project L.E.O.

Give that girl a hand

2012-02-11T22:31:00.000-05:00

Maia learned to clap tonight! She's attempted it before, but tonight, while Chloë demanded I make "water fountains" out of her squirty bath toys, she not only got her hands to connect, she made noise doing it. She was so pleased, especially when we cheered and clapped with her.

Later, Chloë wanted us all to "nuggle" in our room, so we piled into the bed, the two girls naked except for diapers. Maia didn't want to snuggle; she wanted to stand up and clamber about and, when my shirt eventually rode up, to blow raspberries on me. A particularly loud one sent Eric into paroxysms of laughter. She looked around at him in slight concern, then at me since I was giggling too; then she decided all was well and clapped. I'm not sure if she was applauding herself or us.

Maia Maia, nighty-night

2012-02-09T23:19:00.000-05:00

Maia leans over in the bath to drink the bath water. "No!" I say, but that doesn't stop her doing it. She mouths the faucet, too.

I wash her soft back and her strong legs with a warm, soapy cloth while she stands at the bathtub's edge, holding on with one hand, the other keeping a toy crab in her mouth. She drools. She grins. She lets go and for a second, she's standing there, unsupported. She drops softly back into the water and I take the opportunity to wash her arms and underarms, her chest and feet. I'd play This Little Piggy with her toes, but there's no time; she's moving again, onto her hands and knees to get the magenta cup floating just a bit out of reach.

She sips at the water again, and I say "No!" again, and she looks thoughtful and says, "Buh." She often answers me when I talk to her nowadays, though I don't usually understand her responses. Occasionally I do. This is not one of those times, unless "Buh" means "Oh mother." She splashes at the water with her hands, watches where it goes, splashes again.

I wet her fine, still-sparse hair and her face, and wash her well to get the sweet potato off. Eric asked at dinner if he should bother washing her off, and I said something about getting the big chunks at least, and he took me at my word; there are still sweet potato splotches on her eyebrow, her neck, the top of her ear. She did enjoy being able to feed herself, though. She protests a little as I scrub, but not much; she's too engrossed in gnawing at her cup and crawling after the monster ducky.

I rinse her off and get her delicate bits, and then open the drain. I take her towel off the rack and tuck it under my chin. She sees it and grins, her eyes lighting up, and drops the monster ducky. I pick her up and place her against my chest to wrap her in the towel so we can sit on the toilet and dry her off. Today she twists in my grasp before I've even gotten her fully wrapped up. Is she unhappy and wants me to hold her close? No, she's peering at the shiny knob on the towel closet in the corner and trying to take it.

I try to turn her, but end up drying her face and head and feet in that position and carrying her, monkeylike, into her room. I deposit her on the changing table and keep a hand on her as I'm selecting a diaper and a sleeper. She gets up and starts exploring like a spelunker, arms spread wide against the wall, toes tucked into any cranny, perilously close to the edge. "I'd have thought I'd have intelligent babies," I tell her. "Why aren't you afraid of falling?" I gather her in, hold her high above the changing table, and blow on her as I send her down onto it--quickly, but with a soft landing. She's delighted, but the charm only lasts a second. I manage to get her diaper on her and adjusted properly after five or six of these. Then I'm too afraid, even if she isn't, to stay on the changing table, so she gets flown to the floor.

She picks up a cloth from the laundry pile and covers her head with it. "Where's Maia?" I say, and she yanks it down. "There she is!" I say, and we both grin. When the charm wears off she crawls next door, where her big sister and daddy are playing, and I follow, sleeper in hand. Then it's Chloë's turn for a bath and a good hair-combing; then Maia comes to me again for some milk, at least until she gets up on her hands and knees and finds she can't get her head down to the R.I.N.D.S. satisfactorily, and gives up in favor of trying to reach the lotion bottle. Then it's time for her Sleep Sack and a short book. She's fighting to get me to put her down before I've gotten two lines into her lullaby, so I cut it short and put her down and turn on her aquarium, which is what she wants. I whisper, "Sleep well," and leave her staring raptly, her face blue from the aquarium light. Before a minute passes I hear her I'm-falling-asleep growls, and smile.

Baby you can drive my car

2012-02-07T13:08:00.001-05:00

I miss my car.

Maia is now officially in her big-girl convertible carseat, the Chicco infant carrier a fond but rapidly receding memory as of Sunday. She's 21 pounds and change, and the Chicco only goes up to 22, at least the model we have. Later models go up to 30, and I wish we'd gotten one of those. Also that reminds me that I need to write a letter to Chicco to inform them of my sadness that they don't sell convertible carseats in the US, as if they did, we'd have bought one. The price would make the move we've made--which I'm going to get to in a minute when I'm done with my consumerist rhapsody--even more desirable, but we'd have done it. Heck, we would have bought two when Chloë first graduated. Have I mentioned how much I love our Chicco travel system?

Ahem. So the time has come for both girls to be in big-girl carseats. When this happened with Chloë, we bought one and transferred it back and forth at daycare for about two days and decided this was too much of a pain in the ass and bought a second so we could each have one in our cars. With Maia, of course we're going to have to have two girls in carseats sometimes, but buying another one for each car would effectively remove any spare seating for another passenger, ever, and of course would cost an extra $160 or so. So we decided that we'd get one carseat (same as Chloë's, a Graco My Ride 65; huge, but easy to use and seems comfortable) and install it in my car, as it's the de facto family car and is bigger and nicer than Eric's. That car would then remain with Eric and the girls at home and be used whenever necessary to transport either both girls or just Maia (at least until she's forward-facing). Eric's car would then become the work car: I take it to work every day, and Eric takes it to his work and to gaming. And when we split up with the girls, we revert to our own cars (we did not actually discuss this but I assume Eric knows this and if not he'll find out the first time we do it). So over the weekend we bought a carseat, installed it, and sadly took the carrier bases down to the basement. And yesterday I drove Eric's car to work.

I had a terrible day and I swear it was mostly due to the car. Not that it's a bad car. The driver's side mirror is having some weird feedback with my glasses and the brakes are too sensitive (which I know actually means that my car's brakes are not sensitive), but it's a fine car, drives well, better turn radius. But it's someone else's car, and more, I feel cut off from my own car. I've had that car for nine years. It's one of my last this-is-mine personal spaces. I know it. I love it. I talk to it. On the way to work and back I had this gnawing mostly nonverbal running commentary in my head: this is not my car I want my car this doesn't feel right my car would not do that I want my car dammit where is my car. I talked to Eric's car, but it wasn't the same.

I had no idea I was going to feel this way. I don't consider myself territorial about the car--I don't mind when other people drive it or borrow it. And it doesn't bother me when we go on a vacation and I don't have it around. But apparently part of being at home, for me, is driving my car; and I'm feeling its loss, even though it's in the garage right now, wondering where I've been. (Only it's not, because I told it what was happening the last time I drove it.) (Yes, I know the car wouldn't wonder anyway, because it's a car.) (Anyway, don't think about me like that. Cars that are anthropomorphized last longer than cars that aren't. Fact.) (When parentheses attack!)

Eric goes to work Wednesday and will drive his car. I think I'd better take the girls somewhere that night. Because I don't want them to be bored, you know. And because I miss my car.

Knitting the ravelled sleeve

2012-02-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

Chloë's been having a hard time with sleep lately. She's been very clingy in general, and at naptime or bedtime she firstly doesn't want to go to bed at all, and secondly wants one more story, one more song, one more hug; and then it's "Mama I want hoo; I want hoo, Daddy!" and screaming (which inevitably leads to a request for a tissue, which we can't in conscience refuse) unless we handle it very, very carefully.

So we have been, in the hopes that she wouldn't disturb Maia (who's doing much better; the teeth haven't erupted, but they're very close) and that she'd get over whatever insecurity was causing it. Saturday night I spent more time in her bed than in mine. But it hasn't been helping, and she's been getting shorter and shorter of sleep because she just won't settle down on time and has started waking multiple times a night and earlier in the mornings.

So we agreed we needed to start toughening up again and if possible getting her to bed earlier. Yesterday at naptime I was trying to get her down first, since she'd woken at 6:15 and Maia at 8. We read a couple of stories, and then I tucked her in and told her to sleep well. "I want a song," she objected.

"One song," I said, and sat down with Maia in my arms, and sang her Dowa Do Hah Day, which is how she pronounces "Polly wolly doodle all the day."

I stood up and told her to have a good nap, and she started crying. "I want another song!"

"I already sang you a song," I said firmly. "Now it's time to sleep." But she dissolved into a screaming mess: "I want you Mama! I want another song! I want another story! I want--"

I put my face down to hers and yelled, "No!"

"I want a tissue!" she yelled back, startled.

I gave her the tissue, told her to sleep well a final time, and then left amid her screams. But by the time I'd gotten settled with Maia in the glider, she was quiet. She stayed quiet for the twenty minutes it took to get Maia nursed, changed, and in bed. When I left Maia's room I went into Chloë's to make sure she hadn't choked to death on her own tears. She was lying there, awake but quiet. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Okay. I love you," I told her, and gave her a kiss. She was silent as I walked out. Maia was still murmuring to herself, so I sat up a while before venturing to try to nap myself. Chloë didn't talk herself to sleep, as she normally does these days, but she was asleep when I checked on her again. I worried about the silence. It was what I wanted, but I was afraid I'd broken her heart.

But, as all the parents reading this must already know, she was fine when she got up from her nap, and she started up with the "I want you Mama"s again almost right away. At bedtime, she clung to me tearfully until I promised I'd come in and tell her Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which I introduced about a week ago and have had to tell every night since, and even then was reluctant to go with Eric to get her teeth brushed, even with the new Dora toothpaste. (It's pink. The SpongeBob sample stuff we got from the dentist was turquoise. This is the only reason I can find for preferring SpongeBob.) When I put Maia to bed and went in to her, I laid down rules beforehand: "I will tell you Goldilocks and sing you one song, and then you're going to be ready for sleep with no crying." I've tried this before and she's wheedled and carried on anyway, but this time she didn't argue when I said good-night, even though she's got a cold and was snuffly and obviously uncomfortable.

I made sure she was as cleared out as possible and gooped up with Vaseline and armed with a handkerchief, and then when she woke up extra snuffly around midnight I made Eric bring in some hot water to try to create some steam and rubbed some Vicks on her neck; but I didn't stay, and she didn't try to insist. I don't like that the authoritarian your-feelings-don't-matter route worked better than trying to be patient and considerate, but I guess authoritarian is what a two-year-old needs. Here's hoping she sleeps better with her boundaries re-established.

To remember

2012-02-03T00:08:00.000-05:00

I don't remember Chloë's first year. I mean, I do, of course, in snippets, and when I read something I've written here, I remember it; and I remember it when Maia brings Chloë's babyhood to mind, either by being like it or by being different. (I've heard many parents comment that their two children are "night and day" different. At least so far, mine aren't. There are differences, of course, but nothing I wouldn't expect from the normal variation of siblings.) But mostly, I've forgotten. She's always been this magical and frustrating little girl, and her baby months have slipped away.

It makes me a little sad to think that I'm going to lose Maia's first year too, and that I haven't written as much about hers as I did about Chloë's, just because we've heard it before this time around and also, I'm busier. I'm not that much of a baby person--I find kids much more interesting--but Maia is so sweet, and so funny, and yes, so different from Chloë, the only other baby I've known in this depth, even if I no longer do. I love the feel of her small strong hands on my face, even when she's trying to grab for my glasses; the sound of her breathless "dah, dah, dah...dah bah" that she interrupts nursing to say, as if it's an urgent message for me that won't wait; the smell of her warm head, faintly scented with berry from the yogurt melts she's had, when I'm carrying her upstairs; the sight of her groping her way along my leg so she can stand at the bathtub to watch the water as it's flowing, and her delighted face as I'm whirling her around in the air. ("Can you do that to me?" Chloë asks when I do this. And when I do pretty much anything that makes Maia laugh. I suppose I can't blame her; but I remind her that I did do this to her, when she was a baby.)

She's nine months old. Soon, so soon I'm already planning for it, she'll be a year old, and enter the toddler year. ("Toddler" has felt like a misnomer for Chloë for half a year already.) And she will be even more fun, more outgoing and independent and curious and wiggly; but she won't be this baby anymore. Eric still has a picture of Chloë from Christmas 2009 on his laptop. Quite a while ago, he and Chloë were looking at it, and when he closed it Chloë said "Bye-bye baby," and he felt the truth of this echo in him, that we're having to say good-bye to our babies in order to welcome our toddlers, and later our full-fledged kids. It's a good thing, but it's a little sad, too. So I'm especially glad we've got this blog, to help us remember.

She is here for me by needing me to be here for her

2012-01-30T13:03:00.001-05:00

I looked at the new USDA zone maps yesterday while sorting out my seeds so I could figure out what I needed to get for what we wanted to plant this year. ("Tatatoes," said Chloë, meaning tomatoes. "How about peppers?" I asked. "And carrots? And peas?" "Yes," she said. "And tatatoes.") I'd known that we moved up a zone, from 5 to 6, but seeing it on the map somehow drove it home. Hello global warming. Hello inexorable slide into destruction as the Earth turns into a flaming coal and my children are left to gasp their ways to a dessicated death on the once-fertile plains that will no longer support them!

Which is ridiculous, of course. But somehow the idea got into my brain, and not long after when we were getting ready to go out shopping I found myself near tears. Eric asked what was wrong. While I helped Chloe on with her boots I answered, "I'm headachy, and sorry I got you sick, and worried about the baby,* and OHMIGOD THESE ARE THE END DAYS AND OUR CHILDREN ARE DOOMED."

I clutched my head, knowing I was being ridiculous; and Chloë crouched down and said, "Why are you sad? I am here. We are here for you."

That did make me start to cry. I got a hug from her and we finished our preparations and went to the car. Chloë fell asleep during the drive. We suspected she hadn't actually napped, so we discussed how to handle things so as not to wake her. When we arrived at the mall, Eric went inside to get a few things while I sat in the car, playing with Maia and watching Chloë sleep. Maia enjoyed exploring the front of the car and being swung around (a little) and pushing the various buttons and levers. I held her so she wouldn't fall, and looked back at Chloë every once in a while, making sure the blanket hadn't moved and watching her eyes move beneath her eyelids. And I didn't worry about the future.

*Maia has taken teething very hard. She started with a couple of days of fever, though that's gone now, and is generally clingier than usual. While she does have happy periods and is nursing well, her appetite has plummeted and we can't get through a meal, whether she's eating anything or not, without her bursting out crying and reaching for me as if despair has suddenly seized her too. Fundamentally she's fine, but she's not very happy.

Status report: Maia, month 9

2012-01-27T13:10:00.000-05:00

And our Maia-bird is finally nine months old! Her clothes have been saying it for three months already. I dug out the twelve-month clothes this week, the ones that are suitable. Since Chloë was this size in the spring and summer, we're going to have to go buy a few things, particularly pajamas, though her Christmas and Valentine's hauls have helped with that. I don't mind actually buying clothes for my daughter. It's a pretty rare event.

Maia at nine months is just below 21 pounds, 75th-90th percentile, so her growth has slowed a little...though we still need to go out and get convertible carseats to replace the infant carrier with all haste. I'm sorry to see it go. She caught a recent cold of mine, but has otherwise been in good health...although she had a little fever today, most likely from the same cause of her sudden incessant drooling. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: we've entered teething! I'm pleased, since she's still not keen on purees and teeth would make me happier about giving her real foods. Though lack of teeth hasn't been stopping her, and she's got a fine pincer grasp. Lately she's had apple, banana, grapes, mango (rather insipid, from a restaurant), clementine, bits of bread, vegetable Cheeto-style puffs, plenty of Os and oatmeal, more Stage 3s, pasta, roasted sweet potato, boiled regular potato, and some tiny bits of gingerbread cookie (YES I'M A BAD MOTHER).

She adores Chloë's sippies. If we give her her own, she'll play with it a bit; but what she loves is to motor over to wherever Chloë has left her milk or juice and suck at it with all she's got. We know she's gotten some this way, though it's hard to say how much. Chloë just kind of lets her. Maybe it'll become more of an issue when she's a more efficient thief.

She's been cruising everywhere, and walking while holding our hands, and has started letting go to try to stand alone. She fails miserably and falls after about half a second, but she's trying...oh my goodness is she trying. "It's so soon," I lament, but she doesn't seem to hear me.

She's still Miss Wigglebutt, refusing to stay still for diaper changes (though giving her something to chew on and singing the Changing Maia's Bottom song helps) or keep her socks on, zeroing in on any piece of paper or tissue we happen to leave about. She's still waking up in the night, anywhere between 2:30 and 6:30 depending, and I'm worried that we're keeping her up too late at night; she almost always falls asleep while we nurse and only barely rouses when I put her Sleep Sack on her and deposit her in her crib. I'm going to start putting her down a little earlier and see whether that helps.

She and her sister continue to get along well. She likes to pull Chloë's hair--mine too--and we're trying to get her to stop; but she also likes to go see what she's doing, particularly if we're reading, or crawl on top of her, or suck on the fingers that Chloë readily offers. She likes to be tickled, and flown, and surprised, and to bounce in my arms when I come home from work. I still worry that we're not giving her what we gave Chloë, but I think she's doing just fine with what she's got.

Status report: Chloë, month 30

2012-01-26T23:17:00.002-05:00

Oh, my big funny sweet smart strong silly two-and-a-half-year-old girl. What fun two has been so far, even with the tantrums and the discipline issues and the total insistence on a lack of potty training. It's not hard to focus on the positive when your little girl calls out, "Mama I really like you" (even though what she seems really to be saying is "Don't go") or listens to you tell her to dream about the good things that are planned for tomorrow and adds, "And cats and dogs. And rainbows. And cats. And Olivia."

Chloë starts every morning lately asking to have milk and be buried (sit against the green cushion and have her "friends" and blankets piled around her until she's enveloped by them). But beyond that, it's anyone's guess what will happen. Maybe we will blast off! by counting "ten, nine, eight, teven, eight, fibve, torr, twee, two, one...blast off!" Maybe we will get on a carousel in the kitchen (the bouncer again) and ride around and around. Maybe we will play with the candy game (Candyland) or the Elmo game (Memory, Sesame Street version). Maybe we will play with Legos, or in the winter house, or read the map to get through the cornfield while we see Swiper.

I'm totally digging the imagination thing, though it bugs me slightly that she's mostly cribbing from her shows (is it a problem that we don't let her watch a greater variety?). And the repetition can get irritating. Oh gods, the repetition. But then she does things like insist everyone wear helmets for going to outer space:

Outer Space is very in mode right now. The Purple Planet Dora episode is still tops, and the space book (or books with space in them, such as "The Einstein book," actually titled Starring Lorenzo, and Einstein Too, in which a theater family's misfit son goes to outer space with Albert Einstein) gets frequent rotation, and Chloë's always putting on a space suit or a helmet or finding new rocketships. Or making them.

She's so talkative, so eloquent; I've stopped keeping track and started to accept that she just talks now, like a real person. Even if a lot of her sentences are taken from things we say...but isn't that how most language works? "When we go to the fabric store next time I will see the rabbit," she says, referring to a sign on a gas station. "I didn't mean to talk with my mouth full," she'll say, after answering some question I've asked at the dinner table. "I'll try to remember next time." "Will you sing the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo song?" she says, and when I do, "That sounds like the Rudolph song from my Christmas show." When asked why, she'll say, "Just because."

Though her constant repeating things hasn't gotten any better. She cut herself at the grocery store the other day, and had to have a bandage, and all night, and all the next day, it was "I need another Band-Aid," "I know I need another Band-Aid," "Daddy I need another Band-Aid Daddy," "Mommy, Daddy got me another Band-Aid," etc. She was very upset about this "ow," expecting it to be gone much sooner than it unfortunately will. She hasn't had many bad scrapes or sores.

She made up her first song the other day. Something about "I am Chloë, I am Chloë, I am Chloë, and I am two," and then I think it went into something esoteric, but I'm not sure. I was too busy being admiring.

I drew kites on the tub wall at a recent bath, and she colored in the triangles--surprisingly well considering the medium and her age. She's always asking me to play now, when before she wanted a book, or a show. Even when I suggest baking, mostly she'd rather play. She even beat Eric at a game of Candyland tonight, and me at a game of Memory (two-year-old's edition, in which we put rejected cards down face-up and I gave hints so broad a semi could have driven over them). She likes to play with Maia when Maia will, but if not, she'll play around her.

(You'll see her "winter house" in the background there, the little fort I constructed out of her blanket on a whim and haven't been allowed to take down. Why is it her winter house? I don't know, but I find it a charming name.)

She continues to do well when Maia has demands on me, though I continue to feel that I'm giving her attention more than I am Maia, which worries me. But then Maia has particular ways of requiring my presence that Chloë can't compete with, at least not for the next few months. When we nurse Chloë will hang on my knees, or play with Maia's toys, or ask me to read, or if she's tired or unhappy lay her head on the Boppy while I stroke her hair with one hand, keeping Maia at the milk with the other. I feel very motherly in these moments. A week or two ago, after nursing the three of us played on Maia's floor a while, and Chloë decided Laughing Baby was thirsty, so she gave her some milk:

"Elmo is thirsty, too," she said afterward, and put him to her chest. Then she gave him to me. "Mama, give Elmo some milk." So I put him to my chest. "Mama, you have to open your shirt," she told me, but I refuse to nurse a Muppet, so he went thirsty.

The potty training thing would drive me insane if I let it. She would be potty-trained now if she wanted to be. She just doesn't want to be. She says she likes her diapers, though I prompted her for that answer so it's not trustworthy. But she's so totally ready, and she's got control. She'll wait to poop until she's finished her food, or until we go upstairs to the bathroom (she was reluctant to do this until we made it clear she was not expected to sit on the potty, just be in the room). During naked time at night she'll hold her pee until she gets back into a diaper again, asking for one if it's gone too long.

Her Grandpa and Halmoni sent a package of underwear to help motivate her, and yesterday I asked if she wanted to practice wearing some. She said yes excitedly, and selected the deep blue-green ones (other options: sparkly Ariel, and seahorses and stars), and ran around in underwear for a while, and even sat on the potty twice (and demanded the stickers to go with it). We ended up in the bathroom for something and Chloë said, sounding surprised, "That's pee," as she wet herself. We got her (and the floor) cleaned up and into a new pair (seahorses and stars), and sometime later she said, "Mommy I need a diaper." I put her into a diaper. She peed into it. I sighed. I'm wondering if we should just have a "boot camp" sort of weekend: tell her "Okay, we're getting you potty trained this weekend," and take away the diapers except for at bedtime. The pediatrician suggests a stepwise approach, getting a reward chart and rewarding her for doing her business in the bathroom, and then while sitting on the potty whether clothed or not, and then eventually for doing it in the potty. We'll see. I'm trying not to let it get to me. I think when she decides she wants to be trained, it will take hardly any time at all, so that's a good thing. Right?

Words no other two-year-old has uttered

2012-01-18T22:10:00.002-05:00

In Chloë's Elmo omnibus is an "Elmo goes to the doctor" story. We read it today (along with the babysitter one, which we likened to when she stayed overnight with Memaw and Omi Saturday) after Eric went to work. She dwelled on the part where Elmo gets a sticker (actually, demands one) after getting his shot. Later, in her room, she said, "I want to play doctor!"

I suppressed my snicker and agreed. "I need a check up!" she said. "What do we do first?"

"Well, we need to find out how tall you are. Let's go look at your growth chart," I suggested, and we went out in the hall. "You're three feet and half an inch tall!"

"What next, Mommy?"

"We should find out how much you weigh. You need to stand on the scale." She decided the vent in her floor was the scale. "Wow, you're nearly thirty-six pounds! You're such a big girl."

She beamed. "What next?"

"We should check your eyes. How many fingers am I holding up?" I said, holding up my index finger.

"Seven."

"I am not! How many?"

"One! What next?"

"We should check your ears and nose and mouth. Here, let me look at your ears." I formed a circle with my fingers and peered into her ear. "Your ear looks fine. Let's see your nose." I looked. "Ew, there's snot in it! Open your mouth and say 'ahh.'" She did. "Your mouth looks good."

"What next?"

"Next, you need a shot," I said, and picked up a small tube of Vaseline. "Hold out your arm. This will feel like a pinch." I pressed the tube against her arm. "You didn't cry at all. What a big girl! Here's a Band-Aid, and here's a special sticker."

"A star sticker!" she said, accepting it.

"A star sticker," I agreed. "Now, do you hold someone's hand when you cross the street? Do you ride in a carseat?"

"Yes!"

"Good! Well, I think your checkup is done. You seem very healthy and strong."

"I am very healthy!" she said. "I want a checkup again!"

So we repeated it. And again. I shortened the checkup each time, and each time it became more obvious that there was only one part she was really interested in: receiving her imaginary sticker. The third or fourth time she said "I want another checkup!" I said no. She wailed, "But I want another shot!"

Food and its provenance

2012-01-12T17:01:00.000-05:00

We bought formula for Maia a couple of weeks ago. We haven't quite run out of frozen milk yet, but I'm still not pumping enough, and losing too much sleep to the evening amount I do get, and supplementing a couple of ounces' shortage is annoying with the 8-oz. bags we're freezing to avoid losing more than necessary to the bag, and she has an overnight with the mothers planned that will use up our stock. Eric's given her a couple of half-and-half bottles and she didn't even blink. Traitor.

I'm a little disappointed I'm not able to supply her fully, but it's not like we're switching her over entirely--she's only had a couple of ounces this week--and I decided that the difference between exclusive breastfeeding (other than all those solids she's now consenting to eat, as long as they have texture) and almost-entirely-breastfeeding is not worth losing any more sleep over. Particularly since one of the benefits of breastmilk, the immunologic properties, is pretty much negated in her bottles by the scalding anyway. And it's not like she's been sick a lot. If I hadn't had to throw out the backstock when we discovered the lipase problem, or if I'd been able to stay home another couple of weeks to build up more, or if she'd been my first child so I'd had more time at home to pump, or if I could stay home instead of working--well, then she'd be getting a few ounces more breastmilk every week rather than a few ounces of perfectly nutritious formula. And it's only going to cost us a few dollars before she's old enough to get cow's milk instead. So that's that.

As for Chloë: I made rosemary-artichoke hummus the other day, because I mentioned hummus and she was in favor of it, and a couple of nights ago when Eric was gone for the evening we had the leftovers for dinner, with carrots for me and chips for her (really a chip, until it breaks, as she uses them as spoons rather than food), and grapes and some Morningstar Farms "chicken" nuggets to round it out.

"I like hummus," she told me. "But it's spicy."

"It is spicy," I agreed. "That's because it's made with garlic. But that's part of why I like it."

"What is it made of?" she said, and by now I recognize this to mean "Tell me more," not "I didn't hear you the first time," so I said, "Well, it's made with garlic and chickpeas, and rosemary, and artichokes, and oil, and lemon juice, and a little salt."

"What are grapes made of?" she said.

"Grapes are just made of grapes. They grow," I explained. "You know how we grew tomatoes to eat? They grow like that."

"What are chicken nuggets made of?" she said, pointing to the one on my plate.

I hesitated. "Well, there are two kinds of chicken nuggets. This kind is not really chicken; we just call it that. It's made of vegetables and flour. Then there are the real chicken nuggets, and they're just made of chickens." (I forgot the coating, I guess.)

She nodded knowledgeably and went on eating. I inquired, "Do you know what chicken is? Roosters and hens like in the Our Town book?"

She nodded again and said nothing, so I went back to eating myself. I guess it's not time for the "we eat animals" talk yet.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

2012-01-10T23:03:00.000-05:00

Chloë has entered the much-anticipated "why" (or rather, "Because why?", which I submit is much cuter) stage. Why is Daddy going to work? Why is it too late to make cookies? Why does water run out of the tub? Why isn't the moon in the sky?

(She's suddenly become extra-obsessed with her "Cat in the Hat in Space" (actually There's No Place Like Space) book, demanding six or seven readings today. It details the planets, the sun, and moon, and a few constellations. When we went to the window this evening to see if the moon was out, it wasn't but Jupiter and Venus were, and Orion was spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table--I mean, like he is in the book. I pointed him out, and she talked about "Orion the Hunter" a few times afterward. At bedtime she wanted to see him again, and--surprise!--the moon was out. "I thought the moon would be in the 'ky. Maybe it would," she said.)

At the same time she's learning various truths about life, I think she's starting to consider withholding some of her own. Today was her bath night, and she had bubble bath, and bath crayons, and toys, and foam letters. It was a complex bath. Maia stood at the rim, as she does, and helped by gnawing on duckies and then knocking them into the tub. I pulled out a few for her to play with, put the books up on the second shelf instead of on the floor so they wouldn't be dripped on when we put the toys away later, and drew duckies for Chloë which she then added orange feet to, so they could go to the grasshopper (don't ask):

I got distracted by something or other (maybe the thought of the nefarious duckipede) and shortly thereafter Chloë said "Look Mama," and handed me Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, which is a board book we've designated as a bathroom book.

It was sopping wet. "Oh, no!" I said, already knowing what must have happened and considering how to present this conversation. "It's all wet! Was it in the tub?"

"Heth," she said.

"How did it get there?" No answer. I tried prying a couple of pages open, gingerly, hoping the cardboard wouldn't separate. "Did Maia put it in the tub?" No answer. "Did something else happen?"

"Domething happened," she agreed, hesitantly.

"Did you take it from the shelf and put it in the water?" I said.

And there was this moment where I waited to see if she would decide to lie to me. I hadn't presented any anger, but I'd made it clear that this wet book was not something I had expected or wanted. Would she decide to lie to avoid my possible wrath? Would it even occur to her to do so? She's told untruths before, but they've been pretty clearly (a) a case of not understanding a word, (b) not being able to control her language to match her meaning (i.e., "I don't want it! --I do want it!", or (c) being totally silly, never with the intent to deceive.

I'm not sure if it did in the circumstances, and the evil-scientist part of me wishes I had put on some display of anger just to see if that response could be provoked, if she's developmentally mature enough for that. But she confessed, "Heth."

So I told her, calmly, that books are not meant to get wet and only her two bath books can go in the tub. Luckily we have another copy of that book, so it's not a big deal. I wonder how long it will be, though, before her first true lie.

Potty-waiting

2012-01-09T12:36:00.000-05:00

Potty-training is on hold again. Chloë's become totally unwilling to sit on the potty, even as her collection of stickers slowly erodes as she and Maia pick them off (Chloë to restick elsewhere until they don't stick anymore, Maia to attempt to eat). So we're going to lay off for a few weeks and then try again. We've got two extended-family vacations planned in the summer, one with my family, one with Eric's, and we're really hoping we can have her mostly trained up by then. Not to mention we'd like to get her into preschool next year. Maybe peer pressure would do the trick?

It drives me wild that she won't try, since she's so totally ready otherwise. She's completely verbal; she's aware of when she's doing it in her diaper and will tell us; she dislikes dirty diapers (though wet ones don't seem to bother her); she liked trying on the Little Mermaid underwear Grandpa and Halmoni sent her; she can take off her pants and diaper, though she likes to claim she can't when it's diaper-changing time. When it's bath time or naked time she peels them off quicker than a chocolate disappears in her mouth.

Speaking of chocolate: last night she asked for a Hershey Kiss after dinner. I ended up dropping a bowl while clearing the table and barricaded myself in the kitchen to pick up the pieces, so there was a delay before I got it for her, and during it she announced she was going to poop--"But I don't want to go on the potty."

I said, "Well, go ahead, and then when you're done I'll get your Kiss--no, wait, you should be going right into the bath after this. Can you wait until after you finish your candy, and poop then? And then we'll get you cleaned up and in your bath." She said "Okay." I fetched her Hershey Kiss. She ate it and then she ran to her customary window and did her business. Obviously there's some control there.

Baby mysteries

2012-01-07T20:57:00.002-05:00

Maia got a "My Pal Violet" for Christmas. It's similar to, but much less creepy than, another talking puppy that Chloë has. (Had. Is it still around? I haven't seen it in quite some time. Oh dear, I suppose it's possible we may have accidentally mislaid it.) It says some pretty cute things, and has a bedtime-music function and an assorted-songs function, and by "function" I mean "touch-sensitive paw." It's been programmed with her name, favorite animal, favorite color, and favorite food. She doesn't have any of the latter, except maybe breastmilk, but apparently that wasn't a choice because Eric selected bananas. He also selected blue as her favorite color, on the basis that it is not likely to be her favorite color and he wants to see if she can be, well, programmed to prefer it.

This morning Chloë brought it into her room to play with. Chloë likes the thing more than Maia does; it's a good thing Chloë also received a gift that calls her by name (Tag Junior, also by Leapfrog). She pushed buttons and so on, and Maia didn't really notice until "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" came on. Suddenly she snapped to attention, listening and bopping her body to the music, as babies do. It was adorable. The only thing is: I've never sung her that song. Her bedtime song is "I Gave My Love a Cherry," with "Lavender's Blue" for variety. Possibly she's been present when I sang it to Chloë a few times, but she's only been exposed to it in toys, her stroller lion and her aquarium and so on. So where did she learn this preference for it? That'll teach me to think that babies have no secrets.

Chloë the Explorer

2012-01-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

Chloë's been intrigued by the products she's seen and the couple of Youtube videos we've watched that feature Dora the Explorer, and the show seemed wholesome enough, so she got a Dora DVD in her stocking. It's been a big hit. I'm now regretting it, as there's a ton of repetition in it, but it does seem to work well; Chloë's remembering a surprising amount about the different episodes. (She's supposed to; the shows follow a formula of "Inciting incident that requires a quest - Map shows two obstacles to get to the quest - Dora and friends successfully navigate those obstacles and some other problems while asking the viewer to act with them" with Dora and her sidekicks asking the viewer to count, or find something, or say something, or jump, etc.; and the map part of the show always involves several repetitions of their projected path so that the viewer can later inform Dora where to go next.)

One of the episodes involves going through the Milky Way and past the Space Rocks to the Purple Planet to bring some aliens home, and after watching this a couple of times Chloë has been playing "outer space" all around the house for days. Her sleeper is a space suit, her turtle is her helmet (Dora stresses the importance of wearing a suit and helmet; I'm glad she's concerned about safety); a plastic ring is her steering wheel; the Play Hut or her bed is the space ship. It's extremely cute, and much more soul-satisfying for us to watch than her wanting to be Princess Aurora or Belle.

But what interests me most about her Dora playacting is that the character she's most interested in is Swiper, the antagonist. As antagonists go, he's not much; he's a would-be thief, but all that Dora and her friends (and the audience) have to do to thwart him is say "Swiper no swiping" three times. There's at least one episode in which he succeeds, but mostly he's only a momentary threat, another task to perform. But Chloë has been talking and talking about him. "Where is Swiper?" "I see Swiper!" "Swiper is sleeping." "Swiper's mouth is full." "Swiper is playing in the snow." I guess I can see why; she puts herself in Dora's place as the pilot/climber/hide-and-seeker, and Boots is just an echolalic sidekick, and Swiper is a dynamic and contrasting element. Or maybe she's just naturally drawn to the character most closely allied with nefariousness. Though in that case, for my money she should be concentrating on Backpack. Any character who says "Yum yum yum, muy delicioso!" as he eats all the useful but momentarily unwanted props bears watching. Who knows when YOU may be unwanted?

So this is how we're gonna start the new year.

2012-01-02T22:01:00.002-05:00

"What is that?" Chloë says, meaning a Pampers box that's been left in the kitchen, as she seats herself on it.

"Don't sit on it," Eric says.

"It's diapers," I add, and look over from the cutting board to where she's still seated. "Don't sit there."

"I want to," Chloë says.

"Well, too bad," Eric says. "Get up."

Chloë adjusts herself. "My hand is under my butt," she says. I look over again. This is true. So, technically, she's not sitting on the diapers: she's sitting on her hand.

The trouble with Chloë's cookies, Memento-style

2011-12-30T13:21:00.000-05:00

Scene 3
Chloë attempts to climb into her carseat. Normally she can do this easily, but she won't use her hands, so she fails. "You're still holding those cookies, aren't you?" I sigh. I take them from her. She scrambles up into her seat and settles back. She holds out her hands, and I hand the cookies back before I buckle her in.

Scene 2
Chloë sits by the back door while I put her shoes on. "I still have my cookie," she informs me, holding it up. "I have two cookies."

Scene 1
Chloë comes to me while I'm packing the diaper bag so we can go out. "Look Mama, I made cookies," she says. "Do you want a cookie?" She offers me her empty sand shovel, and I take an imaginary cookie and taste it. "Mmm, delicious," I pronounce, and she takes a cookie for herself.

Status report: Chloë, Month 29, and Maia, Month 8

2011-12-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

I walked in the door last night after work. Chloë, standing in the kitchen, looked up and pointed. "Mommy, are you home Mommy?" she said. "Is it snowing outside?" Meanwhile, Maia sat in the opposite doorway and spotted me. By the time I'd put away my bags and taken off my shoes, she was there at my feet, grinning her "Pick me up!" grin. I love my girls.

Chloë grows ever more verbally mature these days: complicated sentences, complicated reasoning, advanced memory. "That is for the water park," she said knowledgeably of Maia's new life vest (...thing; it's not quite a vest proper). We haven't talked about the water park for months. "Mama, what day is it?" she asked a couple of weeks ago, and when I told her Friday, "Are you going to wear your sneakers to work today?"
"We will use more sprinkles at our next Cookie Day," she says. Cookie Day was, admittedly, a pretty big hit with her. She got to wear an apron, just like Mama and Mimi and Addie, and was very, very useful in cutting out cookies and decorating with sprinkles and rolling balls in sugar. Who knew two-year-olds were so good at snickerdoodles?

She's been climbing in and out of the bathtub "all by myself." In the tub, she still lies down to get her hair wet and now helps to soap herself up (bar soap is her newest fascination). Then, when she's all soapy, we turn on the showerhead. I have to use the head on her up close to get her hair rinsed, or she won't do it, but then I replace it and she cavorts under the water until I force her to come out. We're contemplating going to a water park again this winter with some friends, and if it works out I can't wait to see how happy she'll be.

She's been doing a lot of crawling lately, which I think is due to reversion because of Maia getting so much attention for it. (Except for the crawling she's doing in her Play Hut.) She wants to be held, and to "nuggle" quite a bit, too. I'm not sure if it's jealousy or insecurity due to getting to be a bigger girl, or what. I'm happy to hold her, though. And Maia is happy to play with her when she gets down on the ground, or try to steal her sippy.

And for some reason she's been trying to lick people. It's mostly stopped after she got a time-out on Christmas night and a threat of not playing with her cousins if she kept it up.

Now that we're better at understanding her, her unhappiness escalates even faster when we don't. She also gets her feelings hurt easily--if I tell her I don't want to play with the guitar, or to stop saying "No Maia" endlessly ("I was just telling Maia not to pull my hair"), or snap at her to get something out of her mouth (especially when it wasn't). But she's still a happy girl, loving her shows, playing with blocks, wanting to read books and bake muffins and go outside.

She's playing imagination games like there's no tomorrow. Maia's bouncer is a motorcycle. The area by the front door is a park that she drives the Play Hut to. She made imaginary strawberry and blueberry pies in the bathroom out of cups and other toys lying around. She actually cooperated picking up the living room for once when she decided she was taking Tiger (actually a leopard) shopping and piled things from the floor into her cart for him to eat or play with.

She'll recite her favorite color (green), animal (snake), food (banana, though we think tomato is probably the true favorite). She knows how old she is, how to play Ring Around the Rosie, how to sing her ABCs, how to count to ten and occasionally beyond, how to sign "I love you." She also knows how cute and awesome is because we tell her all the time.

Potty training is de-escalating again, and we need to work on getting her to put on her own clothes--and be less frustrated when taking off a short-sleeved shirt, as she has trouble with those. And between Halloween and Christmas candy, she's gotten into the habit of asking me "Mama how much did I eat?" at every dinner, meaning, "Did I eat enough that I can have some candy?" which she'll then ask for by saying "Maybe I can have something after this." And every morning she says "I want some eggnog in my milk." She's going to be a sad, sad girl when the eggnog runs out. (Though we've restricted the eggnog aliquot to once a day and she still drinks milk at other times throughout the day.)

Maia can do high-fives now: put up your hand and say "Baby high five!" and she baps at your hand with hers and grins, probably because we've been so delighted she does it. Now that she's crawling, I've been across the room from her and gestured with my arms, saying "Come here!" and she moves her arms too in windmill fashion, and I can't tell if she's excited or imitating me. Or maybe just mocking.

She's expert at pulling herself up to stand, and can now easily reach the top of the coloring table, to our chagrin when we were trying to wrap presents on it. She's attempted cruising a little bit, though mainly in a specific effort to reach Eric or me. She likes to bounce in my arms, and to sit with her sister.

She persists in disliking purees, but she snapped up some stage 3 chicken dinner Eric offered her, and she loved last night's pre-chewed potato chunks and chickpeas. And she adores picking up her own Cheerios and puffs and yogurt melts and sweet potato chunks. We're going to give away the stage 2 foods and be selective about stage 3s, and move to "real" foods as much as we can--and mash as we can, because prechewing all her food is annoying. (Especially when she gets upset that it isn't coming immediately. As I tell her, milk is the only food my body manufactures on-site; everything else has to be imported and processed first.)

She loves to laugh; she's much more of a giggler than her sister was at this age (or ever, really). She's very happy, even when she's got a poopy diaper, which is actually a bit inconvenient at times. She makes up for it in nighttime unhappiness. I've got more work to do on nighttime feedings, as I've gotten back in the habit of settling her for a nursing and then falling asleep, and if we do that she wakes up every couple of hours after that, which is no good for either of us. Especially if Chloë's waking up with a nosebleed or a bad dream in the meantime, as she occasionally does.

Chloë likes to get in Maia's face when she's eating, and Maia likes to pull Chloë's hair, but they do really well together. They play together on the floor; Chloë lets Maia play with her toys, even her favorites like Elmo and Newborn Baby and her new electronic ones (until Eric and I ruled otherwise). She asks us if a particular toy, or a particular snack, is okay for Maia (generally yes to the first, no to the second). I keep finding her stuffed animals in Maia's crib. I don't think I've ever seen her try to lash out at Maia, even after hair-pulling or similar offenses; she just cries "No do not pull my hair Maia" in a teeny pained voice and waits for it to end. We may have to do something about that once Maia is big enough to understand "no" better. But right now it's very convenient to have such a patient big sister to such a sweet little sister.

Merry Chwitmat!

2011-12-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

We hope your Christmas (or other winter holiday) was as happy as ours. We spent Christmas Eve with some friends (and some excellent pasta sauce) and drove home the long way, looking at the Christmas lights. Chloë picked a place to hang her stocking, and in the morning we went down to see if it had been filled. It had.

She worked hard that morning: she opened her presents, plus Maia's, plus Eric's and mine. After every one she said, "I want to open more presents!"

But she was happy to play when we told her there were no more. Maia enjoyed it too. We went to the girls' cousins' grandmother's for Christmas dinner, and had more family over for cider and cookies that night. "Chwitmat id not quite ober yet," Chloë said that night, and she was right: we finished up with Christmas at the mothers' this evening, with dinner and presents and pie.

She and Maia both got quite a haul this Christmas: books, toys, stuffed animals, clothes, a rocking horse, Duplos, several electronic gadgets (a tablet for Chlo--presumably, as Eric said, the Speak & Spell of 2011. I don't even have a tablet), and the best prize of all, a Play Hut. She and Maia have been crawling in and out of it ever since we opened it up, sometimes with their other toys, sometimes not. Chloë's asked me to go in, but only my front half fits. But it's just the right size for the girls.

We had a really lovely Christmas this year, so lovely it surprised me, somehow. We worked hard for it, but it was worth it. We've seen friends and family, and shared treats and gifts with loved ones, and enjoyed spending time together. And with our toys. As Chloë's been saying to everyone, Merry Chwitmat!

Santa's visit

2011-12-19T01:07:00.000-05:00

Santa was kind enough to visit Saturday to pose for pictures and deliver some Christmas cheer. (Since I had made my fifth botched batch of fudge the night before, I needed it. Not that the visit was for me.) We got Chloë and Maia dressed up and ready. They took a little time to get used to the whole photos idea:

And Maia never did warm up to Santa. I told her it's okay. The first time I remember getting pictures with Santa I cried too. Of course, I was five. Chloë, on the other hand, had no such troubles and was happy to pose, especially once we clarified that we didn't mean it literally when we said "look up."

They each got a candy cane. Chloë devoured hers then and there--which I wasn't expecting--and Maia took her time with hers.

Getting into the Christmas spirit

2011-12-16T23:32:00.000-05:00

Cookie Day was a great success. Chloë and Addie helped cut out sugar cookies and then decorate them. They enjoyed the sprinkles especially. We emptied one bottle and almost ran out of four others (though with two we also used some for snickerdoodles). Chloë was enthusiastic in her decorating attempts, as you can see:

We divided up the cookies between Addie, Mimi, and us. "Cookies for Grandpa and Halmoni," Chloë reminded me, so we put some of ours in the freezer to send later. (There's still a week for the mail to run, right?)

Tuesday we put up the tree, and Wednesday we decorated it. Chloë adored this. She loved when we turned the lights off to see the lit-up tree in the dark, and had great fun hanging "omerats." We'd hand her an ornament and hoist her up on the table and help her place it. "Another one!" she would cry immediately. Then she'd say, "Where mouse?" or "Where my picture?" and we'd have to hunt for the mouse ornament or baby's-first-Christmas ornament she'd put on a few turns back. We had to stop her before the tree collapsed under the weight of the ornaments. It's only a little tree. Though when Eric said that, Chloë immediately said "It is not a little tree," the same way she says, "I am not a little girl," when we call her that by mistake. We told her to wait until she sees Memaw's.

And last night when I came home, Chloë was munching on something. "Mommy I am eatin' a fruit bar," she told me. We buy these from Target (they have a whole selection: fruit strips, bites, ropes, and yogurt-drizzled bars. Chloë likes them all) and I knew Eric had taken them out there to get a few things and to Bed, Bath & Beyond to get a new candy thermometer, since I had ruined my fourth this year trying to make fudge. (That is, I've ruined four kitchen thermometers, but the first three were in the service of finding the right amount of water to use in the bottle warmer to scald Maia's milk. The fourth I ruined earlier this week on my fourth attempt at fudge. If you are so fortunate as to get fudge from us this year, know that a lot of time and effort went into it. If you aren't, don't be surprised.)

I said, "Oh good," or something similar, and put away the milk and my lunch bag, purse, and pump. Meanwhile Chloë pointed at the BB&B bag still on the floor. "Mommy we went shopping," she said. "We bought slippers. We bought a thermometer." I made appropriate mmm-hmm? noises, noting that first item but hoping Eric hadn't noticed, and got us all upstairs to change my clothes (I'm the only one who's required for this operation, but it generally ends up being all of us, or at least three of us, in the bedroom while I'm doing it anyway). In the bedroom we talked of other things, but Chloë was quite interested in her day. "We went shopping," she said. "We bought you some slippers."

"Did you?" I said. "I bet Daddy wishes you hadn't told me that."

"I do," Eric grumbled. This is why I shopped for Eric's gifts online this year.

Turning the tide of indifference

2011-12-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

Maia is already pulling herself up to stand. She adores Chloë's potty, partly because of the stickers on it and partly because it's convenient for hoisting herself up on. "Sit down!" I tell her. "It is too soon!" Crawling is trouble enough. She's already stuffed various overlooked paper products in her mouth, plus a small foam star that she luckily couldn't quite swallow. I think I need to devote more time to cleaning from now on.

We've determined that if I pump every night, and maybe also on those occasions that she ought to be hungry but is popping on and off and looking around at things instead, we may be able to avoid formula. We'll see how this goes. We've also determined--we think--why she's been so indifferent to food up until now. I offered her some grapes recently (well-chewed by myself, thank you) and she loved them, and Eric decided to offer her some banana from Chloë's banana when it looked like Chloë wasn't going to finish it, and she loved that too. She was also interested in applesauce--the real stuff. And she's loved her introduction to finger foods in the shape of puffs and Cheerios. Apparently she just doesn't like purees.

So we're going to work on giving her more "real" foods, and once we get through the stage 2s we've got--if we can--we'll move on to the stage 3s which have good texture in them. It feels awfully early to be moving on this, but she's getting close to eight months old, which is about the time to start introducing things like yogurt and pasta and bread products, teeth (or lack thereof) allowing. It's just that she hasn't been all that interested in food so far, and I haven't been as invested in getting her on it as I was with Chloë. But with the milk shortage, it's now become more important. Let's hear it for food!

Squiggles

2011-12-12T10:23:00.000-05:00

Chloë can draw circles now! And squiggles! She's been good at lines for a while, and would occasionally scrawl across the paper and proclaim it a plane, or a cloud, but when I ask her to draw a circle, or a triangle, she's said, "I can not." But the other day she was doing actual loops and intentional zigzags. She gave me the picture, but I forgot to bring it into work. I'll have to do it tomorrow.

(In all honesty, I don’t particularly admire the pictures she makes. I'm glad she enjoys them and I'm glad that this developmental step has occurred, but the pictures themselves don't move me and I don't actually want one up in my cubicle. That's normal, right?)

She's been very keen on the Christmas decorating. "Mama, want to decorate?" she said hopefully all weekend, even after I told her we were all done. She loved putting the berry picks into the garland on the staircase, and "helping" me put up the snowflake lights. Now she wants them on all the time. She was happy when we picked out our tree from Andersons (a little tabletop tree, which is exactly what it's going to be with the crawling baby and all) and is excited to put ornaments on it.

Unfortunately that won't happen until Tuesday, but that's because today is Cookie Day, when Mimi and Addie and Rae come over to make cookies until dough oozes out our ears. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't say that when toddlers are involved. Anyway, she likes cookies and she likes her family and she likes baking with Mama, so it should be a good night. We're going to make sugar cookies with sprinkles. Usually I make the type of cutout cookie that needs to be iced, but she's not that good at squiggles and circles yet.

Status report: Chloë, month 28, and Maia, month 7

2011-12-05T23:17:00.000-05:00

Maia is crawling now. I waited to post this update until I could say that honestly. Yeah. We'll go with that excuse.

Ahem. So our house is no longer safe. How do other parents handle having a mobile baby and a toddler who likes to play with small toys? Just forbid them all? Christmas Day is going to be ridiculous, between a girl who's discovered she loves presents (I asked her what kind we should get for Daddy, and she said, "A brown one") and a baby who's discovered she loves eating paper products.

Putting that aside, the girls are bright and beautiful and growing up, up, up. Let's talk about:

Motion. Maia's spent the last couple of weeks working on the whole crawling idea. She tried out going backwards for a while. Then doing a roly-poly method that involved sitting, then getting on hands and knees, then swiveling to sit in a slightly different location. Then getting up on hands and feet. She's still doing that and I each time I expect her to just stand up. Now she's doing a slow classic crawl. We don't expect it to last long. The slow part, that is. The gates are back up.

She's started flipping over during diaper changes, and refuses to leave her socks alone. We were in Babies R Us the other day and I looked over and noticed she was sockless. I spent the next five minutes going back up the aisles we'd just gone down because I couldn't find one of the socks. Eventually it turned out she'd flipped it out of the carrier to the bottom of the cart. I suppose that's not the worst place to discover you suddenly need baby socks, but I was still a bit annoyed.

She's in the big tub now, because she started doing her best to climb out of the little one, and is loving it. She plays with the toys Chloë is happy to throw in after her, and doesn't protest when I lay her down to wash her belly and thighs and delicate bits. (Incidentally, Chloë has started getting interested in her bits. I guess it's that age.) It's ever so much nicer this way.

Chloë was overjoyed by the arrival of new boots from her Grandpa and Halmoni. She put them on as soon as we opened the box and she didn't take them off until bedtime, and was reluctant even then. I didn't think much could compare with the enticement of naked time, but these boots did it. She's now big enough to climb up some ladders at the playground by herself, and delights in going across the monkey bars (which is to say, she touches them as I walk below the monkey bars carrying her along before she steps on my chin in her scrabble to get up on the platform on the other side). She loves to "hang," and does it from anything she can: bars at the playground, my chair and desk, Maia's bouncer.

Sleep. Maia sleeps pretty well now; she goes down easily (except a few nights ago when she screamed for two hours, burped, and then murmured herself to sleep within minutes) and stays down for anywhere between six and ten hours. Chloë has started waking up more during the night. We go and ask what's wrong, and usually she says, "I want you to stay." Then either we do, while she talks and pats our faces, or we don't, and she screams. She's also woken up yelling "I don't want that, I don't want that," or "I want a snack," or "The other one," so I can only assume she's having vivid dreams just like her mama. (I think I dreamed the other night that she called my knitting "needling." It sounds so totally like something she'd say, especially since she likes to ask for a needle when I'm knitting with double-points, and I was doing it the other day to make her a hat, but I can't get her to repeat it.)

Talking. Maia is babbling, babbling, babbling. "Ba ba ba ba," she says. "Na na na na. Eh." She's so happy, most of the time, and has this great rumbling belly laugh. Chloë's language grows ever more sophisticated. "I want a bite of your toast," she'll say, or "We are going to the mall to get a present for Grandpa." She's taken to saying, "What did you say?" and "Where did we go?" and I'm thinking she just wants to talk about it, so we say, "What did I say?" and "Where did we go?" Sometimes when I ask her whether she knows something she says yes, and then I say, "Okay, what is it?" she says "Yes" ("Heth") again. I told her it was okay to say "I don't know" when she doesn't know something, so now when I ask her if, say, she knows what a reindeer is, she says "Heth," and I say, "What is it?" and she says, "I don't know." And sometimes she surprises me by what she does know. So sophisticated.

Food. The innovation here is all Maia's; Chloë is her usual food-lovin' self. Maia is still a bit temperamental when it comes to eating solids, but she loves her puffs, and she's taken to trying to steal Chloë's sippy/straw cup whenever possible. We've given her her own, which she's very interested in. Carrots still seem to be her favorite. In the meantime, she's drinking more in her bottles than I'm pumping at work. We'll see how this situation develops. Especially since she's also developed that clawing-at-the-R.I.N.D.S.-as-though-they're-supposed-to-have-handles thing that Chloë went through, she doesn't have to remain a formula-free baby.

(I threaten her with formula constantly. I don't at all mean it, but with the current pumping/eating differential I'm worried that I'll have to actually go out and buy some formula, and then she'll simply refuse to drink it because she's already repeatedly shown herself willing to starve rather than eat the way she prefers. I'm trying to get up the will to pump more at night and on the weekend. I'm really starting to hate pumping, especially with the added scalding requirement, so this is difficult.)

Chloë does continue to get better at using her fork, even cutting her own bites of lasagna recently, and she can hold a small, firm piece of pizza whole in her hands and eat it that way. (She likes to eat them cold for this reason. Eric says it's because she takes after him.) She's been happily consuming her Halloween candy, a piece or two a day, or alternately homemade popsicles ("pockle") when she's been a good eater. She's taken to knocking her fork against her teeth and lips when she's nearly done, which is annoying.

Discipline. This one is all Chloë's. She's definitely more rebellious and challenging these days. "Don't tell me that!" she says frequently. However, she then generally does (or doesn't do) whatever we've just told her to do (or not do), so it's more bravado than anything else. I get impatient with her at tooth-brushing time--she get the brush to try herself, but generally just bats at her teeth a few times and then sucks at it to get the taste of the toothpaste--and try to take it away from her, and she bursts into tears and wails, "I want to brush my teeth!" She also says she wants Daddy to brush her teeth, but she always says that. If she had her way I would be her slave all day until it came to tooth-brushing time. Then come back to sing her songs when I tuck her in.

We'll actually negotiate the number of songs sometimes. "You can stay," she says. "You can sing a song?" (We're still working on the right way to ask for things; currently she thinks saying "Do you want me to read a story?" is the way to get me to read her The Very Hungry Caterpillar one more time and "I want more pasta," is the way to get a second helping at dinner) I usually say, "I will stay and sing you a song." Then she says, "Maybe three songs!" or occasionally, "Five!" I say, "Two songs," and she says, "Okay." Wait a minute...I just realized that's me doing the negotiating, not her. Dammit.

But she actually knows some songs now. She can sing her ABCs, although N usually gets left out, and knows "Twinkle Star" with help and bits of "Row Boat" and "On the Loose" and "My Star" and a few others. She'll name the one she wants me to sing, or leave it up to me by saying, "Something." She's a funny girl. They're both funny, happy girls.

Chloë's amazing human body

2011-11-20T21:32:00.001-05:00

Me: And here's the digestive system, which makes food into energy. And here's the brain.
Chloë: No it isn't.
Me: Then what is it?
Chloë: A ladybug.

Me: This is a dinosaur. It's called Tyrannosaurus Rex. It has long, sharp teeth for tearing into its food.
Chloë: Just like me!

You've got to start somewhere

2011-11-15T21:40:00.001-05:00

Maia has finally started showing interest in food. She's been especially keen on...wait for it...green beans and peas. That's right: it took green vegetables to get her excited about solids.

Now that she's showing more interest in food, we've introduced a sippy as well, really more as something to occupy her at the beginning of mealtime when Eric or I am shoveling food into our mouths before we start on her food. Today at dinner, I demonstrated how to drink, and shortly thereafter she was holding it the right way and looked as if she might have actually gotten some water into her mouth.

"Yay! What a big girl you're getting to be!" I told her (she cannot be called "big girl" without modification in Chloë's hearing). "Soon, you'll be able to drink from a sippy without a handle. And then a straw cup like your big sister. And then, you'll be able to drink from a big-girl cup!"

On the other side of me, Chloë spread her arms beatifically. "And then she can play blocks!"

It will do you good

2011-11-14T21:51:00.003-05:00

The girls, they are a-changin'. Maia is now up on her hands and knees and scooting backward. Then she runs into a chair or something and can't quite figure out why she isn't moving, but doesn't get really fussed about it unless she's stuck. She had her first bath in the big tub today, her big sister helping her by providing toys and cheering her on, because a couple of days ago she started trying to climb out of the little one. She didn't succeed, because she can't crawl yet, but she's darn close. She's really into the independent play. Also into the peek-a-boo where I pretend she's scaring me. And pretending that she's eating my face never gets old.

And Chloë has decided that we've had enough of the good side of two; it's time to show us why they call them the terrible twos. Now that she's firmly entrenched in the use of "I" and "me," what we hear all day is "I want X," or "Don't tell me Y." Every other minute she's been crying because we didn't let her have more candy, or three pieces of graham cracker instead of one, or the scissors, or what have you. She's gotten clingy again, asking that we stay at bedtime; when we go she wails "I want hoo," in a pathetic way that rends our hearts unless she starts up this very fake crying that she's also recently adopted and hasn't figured out we can see right through.

So: Maia growing more awesome, Chloë slightly less so. Only not really, because at the same time she's so articulate, and retains things so well, and surprises us with her maturity in questions and thoughts. "Will hoo be in the office when I wake up?" she asks me when she goes down for her nap on Saturdays. "This toy okay for Maia?" she says, holding up something that she wants to bring to her sister. She's so charming. Still jealous, especially when I'm being cuddly with Maia; but we've got a routine now where I come home from work and she runs down, calling "Mommy! Mommy!" and, if I don't grab her right away (usually I don't, because I'm putting milk away and taking off my shoes and jacket), says, "Can I have a hug?" and I lift her up and squeeze her tight. And then she tells me what's on her mind, like, "I ate Ms," or "Maia pooped," or "It is not raining outside," and I'm glad to hear it.

If I ever write a mommy book, it will be called The Milk Diaries. Or maybe The Milk Must Flow.

2011-11-04T09:47:00.002-04:00

Late yesterday I was working on something urgent and annoying that had to go out before I left work, so I didn't get my last pumping session in. When I got home, Maia professed to be hungry until she actually got down to nursing for a few minutes on one side and then ignored me, so I decided to pump the other.

When I was building up stock on maternity leave, Chloë would hang around and want to know what I was doing and prod the pump, and I had her "help" me by pushing a particular button when I told her to in the hope of stopping her from pushing it all the time. Last night she wanted to help again, so she held the pump horn and watched while I plugged in the power cord and got otherwise set up. I turned on the pump. "Push button now?" she said.

"Not yet," I told her.

"Push button?"

"Not yet," I said. "We have to wait for the milk to come."

She looked down at the R.I.N.D.S. and howled, "Come, milk!"

Eric, playing with Maia nearby, collapsed in laughter. "Are you okay, babe?" I said after a minute, when he seemed unable to breathe, and Chloë ran over to him and said anxiously, "Are you okay Daddy?" He said he was, and she came back to me, examined the R.I.N.D.S., and said, "Milk!" so I finally let her push the button.

Speaking of status reports

2011-11-02T22:02:00.002-04:00

"My hand are full," Chloë reports from behind me as I'm changing Maia's diaper.

I half-turn and see that she's extracted most of the tissues from the Kleenex box. "Chloë Leeja!" I say. "You do not waste tissues like that! Now put them back!"

She jumps and cringes, as she does when she's unexpectedly found that she's done something wrong. She puts the tissues back in. She says, "My hand are not full."

Status report: Chloë, Month 27, and Maia, Month 6

2011-11-01T11:36:00.000-04:00

Obviously I'm way overdue for this month's status reports. The mood I've been in these past couple of weeks (through no fault of the girls') I could have just posted "status: lucky to be alive" and left it at that. A couple of days ago I was considering "I was supposed to do this right, but I don't have pictures or patience, so I'm going to serve up some text soup and you're going to like it because I said so and I'm the mommy." However, today I'm feeling human again, despite all the tramping around for trick-or-treating last night. It's still going to be text soup, because that's all I know, but you're going to like it. Because I said so.

This month has been mostly about language for both girls. Chloë has, over the last several days, gradually started using "I" and "me" instead of "Koë." She has also gotten obsessive about "thank you," thanking us for things like "bringing me a drink" and "bringing Maia a toy," and much more precise about "please." This has lead to carefully crafted sentences like this one from this morning: "Mommy can I please have a cookie?" It was so well done and she'd obviously put so much thought into it that I considered saying yes for an instant. Unfortunately for Chloë, an instant isn't long enough for my mouth to open to let "okay" emerge, so she got praise and a "no" instead. I didn't stay for breakfast, but probably she had blueberry yogurt. It's all she's had for weeks, except when we run out of blueberry yogurt. Then it's strawberry or peach.

Maia, in the meantime, has discovered babbling. "Da da da da," she's been saying endlessly. It's highly cute, especially when she's confronted with Eric after an absence and bursts out excitedly, "Da da da da da!" She's been a very happy girl ever since she mastered sitting, though she'd probably be even happier if she could sit up from a supine position. She can push herself up on her hands, and I'm told she can kind of rock up on her knees, but not both at the same time. And she can now roll from her belly to her back--not that she does when she's been put to bed and decided to roll onto her belly and then decided she hates it more than life itself.

We had our nieces for an overnight Saturday evening to Sunday morning, which was fun but very tiring, and Maia was excellently behaved, even when she was very tired because I'd lost track of time trying to get everyone else in bed. I think she liked the stimulation. She loves her bouncer, certainly, which is a great relief. Chloë had a lot of fun at the overnight but woke up screaming twice, once for no good reason--she's been doing that a lot lately--and once for a nosebleed. We made cookies Sunday morning, mainly her and Addie, and when Addie started talking about "Now it's my turn, now it's Chloë's turn," when it came to putting in the ingredients, Chloë got into the act: "Now my turn!" They both ducked whenever I turned on the mixer, and they each got a beater to lick.

We also went outside, Chloë and Addie and Rae, and it was chilly enough I had to break out last year's winter accessories, of which there were luckily enough, of ranging sizes, that everyone's hands and heads got covered. Addie and Rae had a great time going down Chloë's slide. So did Chloë when she could, but she wouldn't push herself in line and with her two cousins leaping from the bottom of the slide to climb right back up the ladder, she didn't get on it very much. She did demand that we go on a walk, and she and Addie ran along the sidewalk while I walked with Rae. She's been loving being outside, and we're going to have to ignore our bodily comfort and go even as it gets colder, I think.

Unfortunately this means bundling Maia up, and she's a simply enormous baby, 95th or higher percentile for everything, 18.5 pounds at her checkup last week. We have "prams" (big fuzzy body suits) for 6 months, and 6-9 months, and one 6-12 months that always seemed a little small on Chloë...but we just put away the 6-month clothes and have some 12-month pants out because they're not too long, though the 9 months are okay too...for now. And they don't seem to make prams any bigger than 9 months at the places we've looked. In the later part of the winter we're going to have to just wrap her up in a lot of blankets when we take her out, I guess.

Speaking of clothes, we went and bought Chloë some long-sleeved pants and shirts the other day, all 3T, which is pretty much the end of the line at Babies R Us. We need to get used to clothes shopping again, and at other stores. But we picked out a green shirt and a sparkly purple shirt and a pink Care Bears shirt, and Chloë found some really hideous purple pants she had to have, and then we went to the boys' section to give my eyes a rest. There we found a rack of hoodie/pants sets with Mickey on them. There was one of a Mickey DJ looking pretty angry that I vetoed, but we both liked the gray with blue Mickey heads. It's been her sweater of choice ever since.

On that same trip Chloë wanted to look at the toys, so we did, and I decided I had to buy Maia a stuffed animal. I've been feeling bad that she has none other than Ugly Bear, donated to her by Chloë who never liked it anyway, and a huge pink rabbit that is still bigger than she is. So I selected a few and let Chloë decide which one to bring home, and Maia is now the owner of a soft brown cow with a jingly bell. Chloë's much more possessive about her toys and books now (and it doesn’t help that Maia is so very grabby with everything) so we're going to have to build up separate collections for Maia of a few things--mainly, "friends" to sleep with and upstairs books. I think we can persuade her that the downstairs books, like the downstairs toys, are for general use.

Maia's still not keen on solids. I did feed her some carrots yesterday; she loves her carrots. And I've offered her a couple of bites of oatmeal and apples, well-chewed, and she was okay with those, maybe because I was holding her at the time, maybe because I was offering her my finger instead of a spoon. Now that she's six months old, it's time to start getting supplementary foods into her. So we'll be working on that this month.

So, in summary: Chloë is awesome and talkative and sleeping restlessly and running around a lot. Maia is awesome and talkative and huge and grabbing at things. They're both playing, sometimes with each other, sometimes separately, and they both give me the most beautiful smiles and wonderful hugs when I come home at night. Status: their grumpy mama is lucky to have them.

Duck, duck, snake

2011-10-24T12:52:00.002-04:00

So I made the ill-advised move last week of deciding to make Chloë a Halloween costume. A coworker loaned me a homemade penguin costume for Maia, which is adorable and which, when I examined it, didn't look too complicated. "Why not make something for Chloë?" I asked myself. "Fleece is easy to work with, and this looks like a bunch of modified rectangles, and I can model it on her sweatshirt and this adorable penguin. What's that? I complain I have no time as it is? Hush, self."

We had discussed costume possibilities and Chloë liked the idea of either a kitty or a duck, and I liked duck better (and thought she would), so I gave it a try and to my surprise was successful. I made a mockup in muslin and had to adjust most of the pieces after I had her try it on, but that's what it was for. The hood took a few tries, and the wings took a second head (Dad's) because my first attempts looked stupid, but it all came together in time for Pumpkin Path trick-or-treating at the Zoo yesterday.

(We didn't get her orange tights or pants in time. I also had Dad's assistance with the bill and the shoe covers.)

We taught her to say "trick or treat" and I at least was expecting she'd need serious prompting to get through it, but she was ready whenever we pointed out the next candy-bearing person. "Tick or tweet?" she'd say (or occasionally, at their prompting, "Quoack") and they would be delighted; then, after prompting, she'd say "Tank oo," and they'd be more delighted still. She went through an inflatable obstacle course-type thing, and though she was a little confused on how to get through parts of it, had a great time. I let her have a little candy while we were there, which wasn't very satisfactory since what she wanted was a lot of candy, but oh well.

However, while she enjoyed the trick-or-treating and the other kids' costumes, they were not the real reason she was trudging along with us (and then riding in the stroller). "Go see snakes?" she asked after every trick-or-treat station, and we assured her that we would, eventually, see snakes, but we had to get there first and hey, she was collecting candy in the meantime. "Go see snakes?" she would say again. Occasionally she'd mention she was willing to see turtles too, or crocodiles. Unfortunately we used the entrance farthest from the Reptile House, plus it's tucked away in a corner. But at length we arrived, and saw lots of green and brown and striped snakes, and the Chinese alligator, and a fast-moving tortoise, and the tuataras, and the crocodile. Finally replete, she consented to climb back into the stroller and be wheeled all the way back to the entrance, suggesting only, "Go to playground?"

We didn't see a playground on the way back (there are a few in the zoo), so we didn't stop at one. But we did stop at the duck pond. Chloe looked at the brown ducks, the black-and-white ducks, the big turkey-looking goose (?) with the red-marked beak. She didn't remark that not a single one was yellow. Nor, I suppose, that none had pirate eye patches or lab coats or grenades or guitars, like her ducks at home. She did seem happy with the costume, which relieved me, since I was half expecting her to complain she wanted to be a kitty. There will be more trick-or-treating Monday night, and she'll be a duck then, too. The candy should be a motivator even in the absence of snakes.

Maia Maia pants on fire

2011-10-20T09:31:00.000-04:00

Maia can totally sit up now! Like a real baby! We got the bouncer out and everything! We're very excited about the bouncer. This is the big one where she sits suspended with her toes on the ground and has a little "keyboard" and some toys and rings for hanging things and so on. We assembled it and put her in it and then sat on the couch for a blissful twenty minutes or so while Maia bounced and explored and Chloë explored with her. She may be having more fun with it this second time around than she did when she was still small enough to go in it herself. Maia seems to enjoy it, and enjoys the attention from Chloë. I had her in it the other day while I was cooking dinner and only looked over at them when I heard Maia laughing at something Chloë was doing. It is the most wonderful sound.

She is decidedly not taking to baby food. I never understood mothers who breastfed exclusively until nine months or whatever, but now I do. She'll eat, yes...sort of...with lots of dexterity and patience on our part. Since I have no patience, I'd just as soon let her nurse and not struggle to get her to eat from a spoon. She doesn't seem to totally have the hang of getting and keeping food in her mouth, and her interest is just not there. Every once in a while she'll be really keen, but mostly she's much happier gnawing on the bib, or her fist, or pulling the bib off (until I wised up and got a tie-on one instead of the Velcro one), or slumping down, or grabbing the spoon, or making her bird calls. She does get some, enough to change the quality of her dirty diapers, but I'm convinced that at her six-month checkup she's going to have fallen from the 97th percentile to the 37th and the pediatrician is going to give us a talking-to. Not really. I need to get out the nine-months box for warmer clothes. But seriously, how does she stay so chubby and content when she only nurses for nine minutes at a time and won't eat solids?

She remains a stubborn baby in her own way. She still won't take a bottle from her Omi or Memaw. At night, sometimes she's okay going down, but sometimes she stays up and cries for an hour and a half. And if I give up and go in and offer to nurse, she beams at me, and she sucks for a few seconds and then breaks off and looks up at me to laugh. She wakes often in the early evening, and I wonder if the noise we make, or maybe the white noise we run, is bothering her. We've got to figure it out.

She digs being able to sit. She likes to play the sit-stand game, and to lounge in my lap while we're sitting in the bathroom while Chloë's on the potty, and to giggle at her daddy playing peek-a-boo, and to gnaw softly at my face. Chloë has agreed to let her play with her duckies at bathtime, so we pop one in after we've got her settled and she promptly lunges at it and stuffs it in her mouth. I bought her a new toy while we were in Seattle, one of the ones with a handle that makes a whirring noise and vibration, and she'll sit in her carrier and pull and let go, pull and let go. I remember five or six months being the time when I started to really warm up to Chloë's babyhood, and I think the same is happening here. But I'm wistful at the same time. I look at Chloë and how tall she is (she can climb up a couple of the ladders at the park by herself now!), and I look at the newborn pictures of Maia and how much bigger Maia is now, and I understand why people sigh about why babies can't just stay babies, even though the diapers and the blowouts and the food issues and the night waking and the crying and the dependence can be, shall we say, wearing. They're so sweet, all the same, and they're so soon gone.

(I do a short chant with Maia while playing with her feet: "So sweet-- such a treat--baby feet!" She's mildly amused, but Chloë will ask me to repeat it again and again until I cry enough. She doesn't ask me to do it to her own feet, though. Her feet are cute, but they're big hulking toddler feet now.)

Affirmation

2011-10-18T13:33:00.000-04:00

Sunday morning Chloë asked for milk, and I decided to give her a treat. When I walked into the living room with her sippy, she looked at the cup and noticed the liquid in it was brown. "Chocolate milk?" she said after a moment, having had it before. I nodded. "Chocolate milk?" she repeated, as if getting used to the idea. She took the cup. "Chocolate milk? Chocolate milk?"

"Chocolate milk," I confirmed, and she finally took a drink.

She wasn't suspicious of the drink; she knew what it was; she wanted me to confirm that I had heard her correctly. She does this a lot these days: seek active affirmation that we understand her. So, we spend a lot of our time repeating what she says. It's good in a way, since it confirms that we understand each other, but it's also a lot of repetitive talking on both our parts. "A back tuck?" she says on our walk. "A back tuck?" until I agree, "A black truck," and then she can continue, "A hite hun!" and point to the white (actually silver) one on the other side of the street. "Goldfish*? Koë have goldfish?" she says on a break at the park, and even though I say, "Sure," and start digging through the bag, she repeats it until I say "Yes, you can have goldfish! But you have to wait!" If she says "A kirle?" it may be enough for me to point and say, "Oh yes, I see it too," rather than having to say, "A squirrel! I see it too," but she's pretty strict.

*I'm not even going to try to transliterate.

And her tantrums come almost exclusively when we can't figure out what she's saying. If I'm totally mystified by a word she's using (for example, last night it was "tiyyi") I'll sometimes try to talk around it in the hopes she won't figure out I can't translate, but I don't often get away with it. Sometimes she can show me, or Eric will know ("chili"), or from context I can grasp it, and if we can keep guessing she'll usually stay relatively calm. But if we give up she generally can't contain her frustration. That's totally understandable. But I wish it weren't so. I love talking to her, talking with her, having actual conversations in our limited way; but sometimes it feels like a minefield. I never know when exchanging information is going to blow up in our faces.

Sometimes identification comes harder because she's seeing things that aren't there. For example, there are animals in the clouds. The handles of our ice cream spoons, when the spoon part is held in the hand, are rocketships. There are snakes in the lines of a chalk drawing. (Okay, presumably she put those there. You should see the "circles" she draws.) It's marvelous, but it's tough.

She's also been waking up early and often lately, and always calls for me. Last night I had brought Maia to bed for her 3:45 feeding because I'd stayed up too late making apple tarts for my department for Treat Tuesday (however, the report is that they are delicious and belong in a magazine, so it was worth it for the ego-boost), and she woke at 5:30 to nurse again, and two minutes later Chloë started calling for me. I sent Eric, and when he said "Mommy is feeding Maia," she flew into a rage and stomped into the room crying. She insisted on coming up and crawled into bed, and so the four of us slept together until about 6:30 when Maia wanted to suck some more because it was there and I got out of bed with her and Chloë ended up following us and plagued me by asking for her light to be turned on and messing with my guitar case and the glider's settings and patting Maia on the head too hard and telling me not to sleep. But anyway. Poor jealous girl. It was kind of sweet for us all to be together like that, but man, was that bed crowded. Still, she got to be part of something everyone else but her was doing, and I guess that's important.

To Seattle and back

2011-10-10T12:59:00.004-04:00

So our Seattle trip went very well, considering. I no longer fear the cross-country plane ride with two children under the age of three. Dread, perhaps, but not fear. --It wasn't really that bad, just draining. Both girls were pretty well-behaved (Maia better than Chloë; five months is an excellent age to fly with a baby) and Chloë had the greatest time at the airport. After getting through security (surprisingly quick considering we had five bags, a stroller to fold--two on the way back--and a carrier) we arrived at the gate and made a beeline to the window, where Chloë stood and watched the planes, narrating for the entire gate: "A plane? Another plane. Another plane! Another plane moving! Another plane! Another plane flying! Another..."

She wasn't excited about the takeoff or her harness, but once she was allowed to get up she enjoyed the view of the clouds and the other planes and the circles and squares on the ground. Maia, meanwhile, nursed quietly during takeoffs and smiled and was charming during the flights. At the end of one flight, while we were sitting waiting for everyone else to get off, a young man paused and said, "Your baby is so good! I didn't hear a thing!" which I translated as "Thank you for not ruining my flight." A later flight unfortunately included a short tantrum from Chloë about her shoes, but the threat of not being able to go on planes anymore quieted her down. Don't think we were bluffing either.

The visit with Grandpa and Halmoni went very well, too. Both girls adjusted somewhat to the time change, so they were getting up at 4:30 or 5:30 instead of 3 o'clock; and there was much playing and being cute and enjoying themselves. They met or re-met family; Chloë got to take a bath with her cousin Aubrey and learn a little more about sharing; they went to the playground near Mom and Dad's house. A lot. First it was with cousins Gabriel and Matthew (who was slightly cranky from lack of sleep; when we talk about the visit Chloë usually contributes with "Matthew crying?"), but then Chloë was hooked. Luckily, Mom and Dad were willing to play.

Maia did a bunch of rolling; she now rolls onto her stomach if she's not sufficiently sleepy when put down, then cries until we come and right her. Though she was working on the reverse this morning, so maybe she'll be self-sufficient in that regard soon. She's also tentatively able to sit, at least for short periods. Also I need to pull out the nine-months pants for her because the six-months ones are much too short.

What do you mean, stop growing?

Definitely not that much.
We have good girls. Well-traveled girls, now. They seem glad to be home and back in their routine, but they did well; I think they will as long as we're all together.

Spelling may take a while

2011-10-07T18:18:00.002-04:00

Chloë has a colors book that is particularly simple, with each color's name spelled out in capital letters. Since those letters are really all she's experienced, she started pointing them out, and at some point Jenny started having her point them out in order. So from the book she has learned "G and R and E and other E and N spell gween!" Learned, at least, as long as the letters are right in front of her.

Today I'm wearing my Alton Brown T-shirt, which, on the reverse, says "SCIENCE! It's what's for dinner!" I was on the floor with Maia and Chloë came up beind me on the couch, and starts pointing at the letters: "S and C and I and E and N and C and E... spell Daddy!"

Yeah, OK, I'll take it.

Status report: Chloë, Month 26, and Maia, Month 5

2011-09-28T13:03:00.005-04:00

Well, the plan was that I'd get pictures uploaded from the camera sometime this week and write up proper monthly reports, but it hasn't happened and it's probably not going to, seeing as we're preparing to fly across the country tomorrow. So I'll try to get to it when we get back. In the meantime, camera pictures and a summary will have to do.

Let's start with Chloë. This morning Eric announced he was starting a cold. I stared at him and Maia, who had been coughing heavily that morning, and pronounced, "You people suck." Chloë, on the bed beside them, said, "No! People do not suck." Chloë at 26 months is active, eloquent, opinionated, joyful. We went to the Andersons store the other day to pick up a few things the local Kroger doesn't carry, and Chloë was what I would normally call badly behaved--running, touching things, shouting--but she was having so much innocent fun I really couldn't be upset, though I did continue to yell and correct her behavior to keep up my societal obligation. Of course the people around us only smiled and talked about how adorable she was, and one old lady said to her, "You bring life," so I didn't even feel like I was providing a public service by restraining her.

She has yogurt for breakfast almost every morning, through her own choice. She picks out her own clothes (though we have veto power) and can take them off herself, including putting them into the hamper, though she still needs help getting them on. "Chloë take clothes off all by Chloë self!" she says proudly. She's still hooked on her shows, particularly the Care Bears movie, and on Sesame Street. We tried her in size 6 diapers today because she's got persistent redness in the diaper area (they're bigger than I thought and she didn't like that, so possibly not useful after all), and she was unhappy that the Elmo picture is much more simplistic than the one on the size 5s.

She's interested in the simple puzzles Eric got her recently and in playing catch; also in taking out the drawers of her toy chest and dumping them out (thank you cousin Addie who showed her how). She likes to play at being asleep, which she now pronounces "tweep" rather than "deep," and continues to find pretend fish everywhere (including in a poopy diaper, which both Eric and I found deeply disturbing). She's LOVED her water table, and asks to go to the park much more often than we take her (admittedly, we don't take her as often as we should). She loves being outside in general. She asked to stay out in the rain the other day, and since it was warm I let her. She's already looking forward to playing in the snow, and to wearing boots while she does it, "just like P.B. Bear."

She still loves being tickled and roughhoused with, and will ask for "one more time" over and over...but if I say "this is the last time," then afterward she'll say "no more," and seem satisfied. She's much more biddable when we warn her what's going to happen. She enjoys the bedtime routine, especially "naked while," during which she jumps around in only her diaper and asks for "evyping," on her bed, and then when we pile all her various blankets and toys on her to her chin, says happily, "Koë buried?" She likes naming all the things we have to do to get ready for bed, and then when we tuck her in she'll say "night night," or "sweet dreams," or "see you in the morning," because she's heard us say them so often.

She's particular about her socks being on right and her pants not being too long, and will say "Socks/pants not okay," until it's fixed. Yesterday we made an apple cake and she got cinnamon in her eye. There wasn't as much crying as I would have thought, but for a while after I'd wiped off the major stuff and was flushing her eyes with Visine she kept saying "Chloë eye not okay." Then she said the Visine "peel punny," and squirmed and giggled, and wanted more when I'd gotten out as much as I could and she was no longer complaining. She's keen on having medicine. So far she hasn't made any serious attempts to get any, but we need to be careful about not leaving stuff out. She's so good, most of the time, but she's started being more grabby and inquisitive than she used to be, and that could mean trouble.

After dinner last night, we sampled the apple cake. I set down Chloë's plate with its thin but substantial slice of cake and its toddler fork in front of her at her coloring table and sat down across from her, Maia on my knee, to eat my own. Chloë looked at her cake and said, "Chloë have more pieces?"

I laughed. "You get one piece of cake."

"More pieces," she repeated.

"Eat what you've got," I advised.

So she picked up her fork, stabbed her piece of cake, and gamely tried to get the whole thing up to her mouth, because I'd totally forgotten she doesn't know how to cut her own bites yet. I apologized and cut the cake into more pieces, and she ate, much more happily.

Then there's Maia. Maia at five months is a very mellow girl, except when I'm changing her diaper instead of feeding her late at night. She likes to sit in her carrier and chew a toy while we're in the kitchen; she likes to look around when we're at the store, unless she's asleep. She's going down around 8:30 and sleeping until between 3:30 and 6:30, which I regard as a most glorious mercy. She generally doesn't wake screaming; she murmurs a bit, and when I come in and uncover the blanket that she's inevitably got wedged in her mouth, she smiles at me. But we'd better get feeding quick.

Despite that, she's not very steady at the R.I.N.D.S.; if she's tired she'll settle, but mostly it's a few minutes of sucking, then popping off to stare at her hand and murmur "gtscha," then another thirty seconds on, then off to gaze lovingly at Eric or Chloë or the picture of the baby on the diaper boxes stacked behind the glider (they contain size 9-18 month clothes), and so on. I don't know how she's maintaining her superchubbiness on this kind of a feeding scheme, but she is. The baby food can't be helping much; she's had several fruits and vegetables and rice and oat cereal, but only an ounce or two a day, and sometimes she's not interested. She does love to sit in her chair with us at dinner, though.

I've started wearing my hair up in the evenings and weekends because she's at the grabby stage. Chloë has also commented "Maia got Chloë hair" several times, though she doesn't seem as annoyed as me. She loves to grab and bat at and chew her toys, or a blanket, or her socks and feet, or my face. She likes to suck on my nose and chin; when she does it I squeal "Noooo! I need my nose to smell dirty diapers with! I need my chin to keep my mouth on!" and she grins. Last night she wasn't terribly hungry and so we cuddled a little before bed. She reared up and started toward my face with an open mouth, and I swear she was doing it so I'd protest and make her laugh. She likes to laugh. We play the usual baby games, tickles and "flying" and sudden movements with funny noises, and she'll often start to laugh during it. It's a wonderful sound.

Chloë continues to like to hold Maia, though often she asks while she's watching a show, and by the time I've got Maia in her lap she's staring mindlessly at the TV again. So I take her away. Chloë protests: "Have Maia!" and I say, "But you're watching your show," and she insists, "Chloë have Maia," and plays with her for a few seconds before turning back to the TV. If I've got Maia with me when I come to her room in the morning, she says, "Hi Maia," or "Good morning Maia," first, and climbs into my lap so she can get closer to her sister. She also keeps asking for Maia's baby food, and tends to act up if I'm turned away to feed her (I sit between them, with Eric on Maia's side) and dinner isn't particularly yummy. But she's doing pretty well. We were supposed to go shopping together the other day, just her and me, but when we got in the car she said, "Where Maia?" and when I said she was in the house with Daddy, insisted, "Maia come." So we went shopping, just her and me and Maia.

Sound off

2011-09-22T21:56:00.005-04:00

Eric: Chloë, stop touching things on the counter! [Chloë continues to touch things.] One...
Chloë: Two?
Jenny: Bad things happen when Daddy gets to three.
Eric: That's right. What happens when I get to three?
Chloë: Four.

Take it all in

2011-09-21T15:32:00.001-04:00

Maia has started trying to eat her feet. I don't remember Chloë doing this until seven months or so. (She's also in nine-months pajamas, which I don't remember Chloë doing until six months or so.) I don't understand how someone so chubby can get her toes in her mouth so easily, but she does. She tried to eat my pasta last night, too--she was fussy in the booster at the table so I stopped her feeding of pears (so far: sweet potatoes, bananas, apples, rice cereal, oat cereal, and now pears; it's time to break out something with more color in it) and pulled her into my lap, but then she just tried to get everything in her mouth: the pasta, the plate, the tablecloth, my napkin, her discarded bib. In her bath, we used to dip a washcloth in warm water and drape it over her, but now she goes bare because when we try she sucks the washcloth dry, or at least gives it her best shot.

She slept through the night, going down after an 8:30 feeding with a short wakeup at 10, and getting up at 5:30. I didn't get the full stretch of sleep because Chloë was awake from 3:30-4:30 asking serially for a some water, a tissue, her blankets, some nose medicine (Vaseline). On the last one I told her to go to sleep because I wasn't coming back again, I was going to my bed to sleep. I crawled into bed and heard her call plaintively, "Daddy? Chloë have Daddy?"

Anyway, Maia woke at 5:30 this morning and I nursed her in bed on one side (read: slept another hour until the alarm went off), then took her to the nursery for the other. She wasn't terribly interested, even after spitting up all over my pajamas, so we had some belly-to-belly time instead. What a sweet way to spend time on a Wednesday morning: rocking in a chair with a happy baby on me, our skin warm from the contact, the room quiet except for her burbles and my responding gabbles. I remember a time around a year ago when Chloë was lying with me in that chair, and I rocked her and thought, I have to remember this, how it feels to have her weight against me, the soft warmth of her skin, the fine tickles of her hair against my face. There is a lot about the day-to-day of my girl that I forget, but I have to remember this. And I do. And I will remember this morning with Maia, too. It was nothing special--or rather, it was nothing unusual; but I must remember, and I will.

Gratitude

2011-09-14T13:22:00.001-04:00

"Thank you Mama for Chloë eat mac and cheese," Chloë told me yesterday. "Thank you" has been a long road with her, but suddenly, she's not only saying it spontaneously, she's elaborating. "Thank you for give Chloë napkin." "Thank you for going to Memaw house." "Thank you for singing a song." (This last was to the Care Bears movie, not me.) She's full of gratitude. Though never for things like M&Ms or popsicles, but I suppose that's because her mouth is full.

I'm finding myself grateful these days, too. I'm grateful I have my two wonderful girls, and we have no worries about them other than that Maia's tear ducts are still exuding muck. (The pediatrician says she isn't prepared to be concerned until about nine months.) I'm so happy that they love each other, as much as they can at their respective ages. I'm waiting to hear about a possible opportunity at work, and it's making me anxious, but I'm glad that regardless of how it turns out, I've got a secure job and it's allowing us to have this life. I'm grateful that the Care Bears songs aren't always stuck in my head.

And I'm grateful that I get to watch Chloë, and later Maia, learn so fast and become so much. It is amazing how she grows, and absorbs, and understands, and remembers. There was a morning a few weeks ago when Chloë was unhappy, with some crying and wanting to be held off and on. When I was about to leave for work, I picked her up again, and she looked at my hair, which was wet, and said, "Maia try to eat Mama hair?" I told her gently that no, my hair was wet from her tears, and marveled that she was able to look at an effect and try to deduce its cause.

Eric's been telling Chloë "Say 'I love you Mama,'" since she was about three weeks old, but recently she's actually started doing it. Since she still doesn't use a personal pronoun it's clear she doesn't totally understand this, but we've talked about what love means, and we say it to her often, and when prompted she'll say "I ove hoo Mama" obediently. The other day when Eric was leaving for work, he kissed her and said, "I love you Chloë," and she responded spontaneously, "I ove hoo Daddy," and he nearly didn't get to work because he melted all over the floor.

And I’m grateful for the moon, which Chloë continues to love. Last weekend we spotted it waxing in the sky as we were coming home from Borders (our last trip ever) and Chloë was delighted. A few days later, we saw it on the way home from Joann. Or rather, I did, and pointed it out, but Chloë could never quite manage to see it, and when we got home it was too low on the horizon. She nevertheless talked about it for the rest of the week, asking if the moon was "gassy" (we haven't figured that one out) and dwelling on how she saw it, or didn't see it, in the car. A few days ago she woke at 4:30 to talk to me about a firetruck we saw the other day. I told her to go back to sleep and used the bathroom before I returned to my own bed, and spotted the nearly-full moon out the window. I went back and took Chloë to see it. She pointed, and stared, and said, "The moon is not gassy? The moon is full?" I said yes, it was full, and took her back to bed.

Last night Chloë had a hard time getting to sleep. She wanted to see the moon, but it was too early. She woke not long after Eric got home, and since it had risen by then then he took her to a window to see it. She was pleased, and chattered perplexingly about "Chloë like black moon," and went back to bed without protest. She woke again just before I went to bed. I went in and tucked her in again, then brushed my teeth and said good-night to Eric, and then, as I always do, checked on both girls, Chloë first. She looked asleep, and I whispered, "I love you, sweetie." She didn't open her eyes, but she murmured, "Ove hoo."

Prizes

2011-09-02T11:35:00.001-04:00

Maia laughed at me last night. We were hanging out in the living room while Chloë ate her prize of the day, a cookie ("Mmmmm. Cookie."), at her little table while Maia lounged against my knees. I hoisted her up to "fly" and started making faces at her, and after a little while she giggled. My prize of the day.

We traded in the plastic kitchen/shopping cart/food Chloë's Memaw and Omi had given her for a water table. Since it's the end of summer, there weren't any in the stores we visited, so we ordered online. It arrived yesterday, and once I got home from work we took it outside. Chloë loved it...so much that she forgot to eat the grape tomatoes I picked and put in a bucket for her. In fact she sent Eric inside for her yellow bucket because the red one alone wasn't enough. Instead of talking about the Care Bear show at night as is usual, she talked about playing with the water table again. I know what I'm doing when I get home.

Status report: Maia, Month 4

2011-08-29T22:27:00.003-04:00

What a beautiful thing a happy baby is. The smile, the contented gurgles, the almost-giggles when her belly and hands and toes are kissed...the lack of crazy-making crying. Maia has been happy a lot this past month, and that makes all happy.

Her four-month checkup went great, with her big sister holding her hand for her shots, and she's been cleared to be started on cereal. "You may have to," the pediatrician added, because she's 95th percentile on head, height, and weight. Why do we have such huge babies? The six-month pajamas are mostly okay on her, but some were too short (the Circo ones), and the okay ones don't have a lot of room in them. It's time to break into the nine-month clothes box. (Ha! Like I've got them all organized and labeled!)

Sleep has gotten a lot better this month. She now takes one or two naps during the day pretty regularly, and at night will have a last feeding somewhere between eight and nine and get a change, pajamas, and bed in the crib. We're still working on sleep training, so sometimes this involves forty-five minutes of crying and intermittent checks on her, and sometimes it requires only one or two checks before she grumbles herself to sleep, and sometimes she goes down silent and smiling. And sometimes she's already asleep, but that's okay too. Once I started forcing myself to stay awake for her first nighttime feeding, she slept longer intervals in the wee hours, so evidently I've only been depriving myself by trying to nap through that feeding. Ah well.

She does a lot of grumbling and growling at the bottle, and some at the R.I.N.D.S., but she's doing well on both. We did start her on cereal a couple of days ago, and last night she had her "Oh, this is how you eat!" session. At the beginning the food we spooned on her tongue got deposited on her lips as she moved her tongue in vague confusion; at the end she was moving it to the back of her mouth and lunging forward to get the next bite. We're giving her one more day of cereal, and then she can graduate to something fun, like squash or carrots or bananas. Chloë was interested in her cereal and wanted to have some, to the point of telling me not to give Maia any more the other day, so that's another reason to put it away for now. Not that I think she'll be less interested in the squash or carrots or bananas, but maybe we can convince her that her own big-girl versions are tastier.

And last night she slept from eight-thirty to three o'clock. Yay semisolids!

She's sucking and chewing on everything now, and much more interested in toys than she was last month. We have a dragonfly/butterfly (I'm not sure which) that we stole from Eric's mom when Chloë was this age, and Maia adores it. She sits happily in her carrier in the kitchen while we're making dinner, squeezing its crinkly wings and chewing its soft body. She loves her Winnie-the-Pooh mobile and the toys on her little bouncer. She watches Chloë's shows with her, though she's very easily distracted by a toy or a face or a "It's a baby!" with a kiss.

She's such a contented baby now most of the time. I love spending time with her, and I feel guilty that I don't get to do it as much as I did with Chloë...though I'm not positive this isn't better, since she gets Chloë too. She's a little confused when she gets put in Chloë's lap, or held upright to "stand" and hugged hard by her, but she seems to like this not-quite-so-huge bigger person in her life, and Chloë seems to like her. It's all good.

Status report: Chloë, Month 25

2011-08-26T22:25:00.005-04:00

Chloë caught the bug too. "Koë neck hurt," she announced the other day, feeling at her neck. We've given her baby ibuprofin (which she loves-- "Koë have medi in mouth?" she asks regularly) and are trying to keep her warm and snuggled and rested. I told her the other day I was sorry she was sick. "Koë sick?" she said, and looked intent. "Koë not two any more?" I hastened to assure her that I'd said sick, not six, and she was still two.

I've marveled this past month at how big and grown-up she's getting. Her two-year checkup proved her to be thirty-four pounds, just under three feet tall. She's in 3T clothes mostly, with some 4Ts fitting fine (and others, like the pants Mom sent, too long, but she wants to wear them anyway so they get rolled). She's been jumping up a storm lately, and has started balancing on one foot, which I think is ahead of her age for motor skills. Apparently the jaundice had no serious lasting effects.

Playing pretend has developed and blossomed this month. She likes to feed me and herself pretend food, and plays "water park" all the time: on her bed, on our bed, on Maia's blanket, on the couch. She offered me a fish from the water this morning, and when I complained it spit in my eye, ate it. "Candy fishy," she explained, which relieved Eric and me both. Occasionally she'll go "shopping," usually for jelly beans. And today after watching the Care Bears movie, she wanted to chase butterflies, which is what Secret Bear did at the beginning of the movie. I didn't mention that real butterflies should not be caught; there's time to tell her about that later. So we chased butterflies by running around the house, pointing at imaginary butterflies. "What a pretty butterfly!" I said when she decided she'd caught one and proudly showed it to me in her empty hand. "Sparkly," she added.

Bathtime is marvelous these days, except for tonight when she was punished for not picking up her toys when told by not being allowed to have bath paints. But normally, she helps undress herself (including taking off her diaper now, useful when she's on the potty), settles into the tub with her duckies and watering can and paints, plays for a while, helps scrub herself, lies down to have her hair washed and rinsed, and stands still to be rinsed with the shower head afterward. It's wonderful. I hope it lasts a while.

She's definitely fond of sparkly and pretty, and of her hair and jewelry adornments. Also of big cheesy grins. Her cousin Addie smiles the exact same smile sometimes. Where do toddlers learn to do this?

She seems to be starting to have a better understanding of numbers, as the sick/six thing shows, though she's still weak on anything higher than two. We're continuing to work on that and on her letters. She stopped at Kroger the other day to point out some lit-up A B Cs on a cookie display. If you ask her what B stands for, she'll tell you "bath!" or "ball!"

She's been doing very well with Maia; she continues to like to hold her and talk to her, and always wants to know where she is. During Dad's visit last weekend they were going to go for a walk while Maia and Eric stayed behind (because I had the stroller in my car and I was at work). Chloë loves walks, but Dad says that before they'd gone more than five feet down the sidewalk she wanted to know where Maia was, and insisted on going back inside to be with her. She likes it when I stand Maia up, and will come close and compare heights, and then hug her. "Two sisters," she says.

She's been a real couch potato lately, probably because in the last month either Eric or I have been sick and so we've been more lax about the TV, and has learned how to turn the TV and DVD player on and off. But she's also enjoying being read to, and we're getting into the longer books now, the Berenstain Bears and Olivia and P.B. Bear and Dr. Seuss. We picked up I Wish That I Had Duck Feet at the Borders sale, and she tells me, "Chloë want to have whale spout. Whale spout on Chloë head." And she can tell you that Big Bill Brown can only wear one hat. (I also recommend Pirate vs. Pirate, which I also got then and is great fun to read aloud.)

She usually picks her own breakfast these days, and occasionally if we're uninspired we'll ask her what she wants for dinner. Usually her answer is "pasta," but sometimes she'll say "pizza," or "grilled cheese," or "cheesy pasta" (and once, "oatmeal"). Her memory is amazing. (Also her appetite sometimes.) She's loving the tomatoes; she's going to be sad when tomato season goes away. But then, that will make it apple and squash season, and then orange season, and I think she'll be all right. She's all right all over.

Erudite

2011-08-18T16:37:00.002-04:00

Eric caught my cold, unfortunately. The girls so far are okay (and Maia at least is probably immune). Eric's been eating a lot of chicken noodle soup, and Chloë has asked for a taste repeatedly, but always after he's started eating. So he's had to deny her, but tells her why. The other night at dinner she said knowledgeably, "Daddy eat noodles because Daddy sick." I'm not sure if she actually said "because" or not, but that was the clear meaning. We had some canned chicken in the pantry from the farmer's market, so I made up some chicken soup of her own so she could eat it with Daddy. (Did you know I once promised myself never to personally serve my child meat?)

She's started calling me Mommy sometimes instead of Mama. In particular, when I do something she doesn't want, such as finger-combing her hair, she's started saying "No, Mommy," instead of just "No." But when she calls for me, it's usually Mama--as she says herself: "Chloë say Mama Mama Mama in the morning."

We bought her some bath paints recently, which was a horrible mistake. She loves them. She's clamored for a bath all day, every day, since we introduced them. "I think you need to wash your hands," I told her one night when she said she was all done at dinner.

"I think Chloë need to take bath," she replied. (Note: she does not use personal pronouns yet.)

(She's also started playing "water park" all the time. Her bed is the "old water park," her blanket on the floor (to guard against hurting herself if she falls out, though she hasn't recently) is the "new water park.")

Dad is coming for a visit today (actually, should be there now; I'm leaving work in a few minutes) and she's been looking forward to it. I told her last night "Grandpa will be here tomorrow." We often talk at bedtime about what the next day will entail, and so she responded, "Chloë wake up in the morning, Mama go work, Mama come home, Grandpa come home?" And then, "Chloë have bath?!"

Ahhh, dahhh, zzz

2011-08-13T22:11:00.003-04:00

Eric says that Maia giggled the other day. She's certainly a smiley girl. I've had her on the verge of a laugh myself, with belly-raspberries and peekaboo and saying "Boooooo" when she's cooing and saying "Ahhh." I don't think Chloë was this effervescent this early, but I also don't remember playing with her this way this early--not personally, that is. I think Eric did.

Now that we've gotten out of the newborn stage, I'm finding myself enjoying the baby phase possibly more than I did with Chloë, probably because I know what I'm doing more this time around. I like holding Maia; I like having her near me in the kitchen or the bedroom. I like that she'll sit in the carrier and watch, or play with a toy or her hands, while we're making dinner or doing dishes. (She lasts longer if I put her somewhere my back isn't to her all the time.) I like having her sit in the booster seat with us at dinner rather than relegated to the swing (anyway, she's started to twist about so we have to strap her down in it now). I like holding her in one arm while the other is curled around Chloë while we're reading. I'm at least entertained by the fact that she'll squall when I put her in the swing at dinnertime but smile and gurgle when I put her in the chair. I like her development into a real person.

What I don't like is the sleep issue. Theoretically, she should be able to sleep for at least six hours every night. The most sleep I've gotten in a row is four hours. Usually, she gets to sleep, wakes up an hour later, goes back to sleep, stays down for three or four hours, and then rouses about every two. Part of the problem is that I've been relying on nursing to get her to sleep more this time around, probably because I have a 6-7 AM wakeup call every morning and don't want to mess around with what sleep I get, so she expects to nurse all the time, and when I've been woken up twice already I tend to just give in rather than try to rock or bounce or outwait her. I'm trying to decide whether to try the Ferber method, which we did with Chloë, or stick with the gentler approach we've been taking so far. I'm not going crazy with sleep deprivation, but I'm not excited about continuing this way, either. It's a developing situation.

Making a splash

2011-08-09T12:13:00.000-04:00

Playing pretend has branched out. Predictably, from food we've moved onto...water. First the sky portion of Maia's quilt was a pool, which Chloe splashed in, jumped in, and caught a fish from to bring to me. (It slapped me in the face with its tail, so I tossed it back.) Later, she borrowed a (green) kitchen towel to spread carefully on the living room floor and put her inflatable ring on as a boat, which she then sat in. Ducky and Oppy swam a little. More fish came out ("candy fishy," she explained, which was good since I wasn't thrilled about the idea of a stack of pretend fish stinking up my living room as they pretend rotted). She laid down in the water and said, "Chloë hair get wet. Chloë shirt get wet." I told her that she'd need to get a towel to dry off, or let the sun dry her, and she looked up at the overhead light and stretched her arms up to it, basking in the sun. I know it's only been a few weeks, but so far, two-year-olds are the awesomest thing ever.

Feed me

2011-08-08T14:48:00.001-04:00

Chloë ate a ton of peanut butter toast this weekend--I think she had something like four slices altogether, plus another this morning. This morning Eric said for the first time that we need to make sure she gets enough vegetables. She's been eating well at breakfasts and dinners but not so much at lunch lately, and we don't generally serve vegetables at breakfast so that limits the possibilities. However, she also ate a ton of tomatoes this weekend (we bought a pint of yellow cherry tomatoes at the farmer's market Saturday that are nearly all gone, plus there were our tomatoes and pasta sauce) and she'll eat those any time of day, so it may be tomatoes for breakfast for a while here. I've got a couple of plants in pots in the backyard, and they look like they never produce anything, but in fact a couple get ripe every day; it's just that whenever one even nears redness she picks it and stuffs it in her mouth. (She's learned that it's best to put the tomato entirely into her mouth before biting it, to cut down on her shirt changes.) Hey, it's summer; she needs to enjoy them while she can.

(Also, the imaginary food game gets ever more interesting. Yesterday she handed me some pretend cheese to put on some pretend pasta. I sprinkled it on and tasted it, and offered her a bite. She refused, because, she said, it was spicy cheese and she didn't want spicy cheese.)

And Maia has decided that nursing for more than ten minutes at a time is for suckers. So to speak. She sits down with me readily enough and nurses for about five minutes. Then up pops her smiling face. She gurgles. She grins. I wipe her chin. She nurses again for several seconds, then stops, and smiles, and repeats. Eventually I get tired of it and switch her to the other side, where the same thing happens, and then I give up. The only exception is when she's tired, when she'll actually settle down. It's much faster than nursing used to be, but I worry a bit over whether she's getting enough, and particularly whether she's getting enough hindmilk (the fatty stuff). Still, she's moving out of her 0-3 month clothes and into her 3-6 month clothes right on schedule, so I'll try to trust she knows what she's doing.

The new winner

2011-08-07T16:50:00.002-04:00

"Mama shirt have tear in it from Chloë eye."

(And don't look like that. She was crying because she didn't want to take a nap.)

Why, why, why

2011-08-05T14:10:00.000-04:00

Chloë finally seems to be understanding "why" questions. It's been so wonderful to be able to communicate with her, and now that we can ask her about her motivations, communication gets ever more interesting:

Jenny: Chloë, why is this piece of pizza on the placemat?
Chloë: Mmmm...Chloë put it there.
Eric: (chokes with not-silent-enough laughter)
Jenny (teeth gritted against a grin): Please put it back on your plate.

Chloë (looking at a picture of Elmo holding a long, gray stick): Elmo hungry?
Jenny: Why do you think he's hungry?
Chloë: Elmo have knife.

A smorgasbord of delights

2011-08-02T10:09:00.002-04:00

Chloë did breakfast this morning. Clad in her diaper, her blue sunhat, and her matching blue handbag, she paraded past where I was changing Maia's onesie on the floor. "Chloë go shopping," she said brightly. "Chloë get ice cream, popsicle, banana." She showed me her bag, zippered shut.

"Ooh," I said. "Can I have one?" She said yes, so I said, "I'll have a popsicle. Mmm, chocolate." I gobbled it up. She took one too, though she wasn't as noisy about eating hers as I was about mine.

"Chloë go shopping again," she said. "Ice cream, popsicle, banana."

"Could you pick up some apples for me?" I said.

"Yes." She handed me what I think was an entire bag of apples. I took one and said, "Wow, this one's huge!" I took a bite. "Mmm, yummy."

She took one too. "Huge!" she said. "Mmmy." Then she decided she wanted another popsicle. Those bananas never did get touched. She did offer her upside-down hat to me, saying, "Pasta?"

"Thank you," I said, picking up a foam X from the floor and using it as a fork. "Ooh, delicious."

"Chloë get cheese," she decided.

"White cheese?" I said. "Swiss? Or cheddar, the yellow kind?"

"Yes." She thought. "Spicy cheese."

"Spicy cheese would be good," I agreed.

But she didn't go; she got interested in the pasta in her hat again. "Chloë need fork. Chloë need spoon." I suggested she look in the bin of toys. "Spoon?" she said, holding up a foam 1. I agreed this would do nicely, and she dug in.

The downfall of please

2011-08-01T12:31:00.004-04:00

I've had a tenacious cold for a week, and so far have had success in keeping it to myself. (Knock on wood.) I wondered vaguely the other day why colds last so much longer than they used to. Partly it's because I'm older; partly, I think, it's because MY CHILDREN DO NOT SLEEP. Ah, children, the first best form of birth control:

Last night I laid down with Maia at about 9:30 and, after getting to sleep, coughed and hacked so much I was having dreams about being a series of mini-storms lost on the ocean, with a vague idea that I had an identity and senses outside of the coughs/gusts but unable to find either. (Partly this is because I'm reading a book that contains a sea-battle.) Maia woke me up sometime in there to re-latch. I woke again when she attached again and got up when she finished, around 1, because the coughing was nauseating me, and decided to sleep in the glider. I got settled there (with the electric kettle, bless Eric) and went to sleep around 1:30. At 3:15 Maia woke up to eat. At 3:30 Chloë woke up with a minor nosebleed, and I went in to help her with Maia still attached. At 3:45 Maia went back to sleep and so did I. At 4:30 Chloë woke up with what seemed like a bad dream and I went in with Maia in my arms. At 5:15 Maia woke up to eat. At 5:45 I put Maia in the bassinet and went back to my bed. At 6:30 Chloë woke up and dragged me out of bed. We climbed up on her bed and she actually went to sleep again for a few minutes with her head on my leg, and then again when we cuddled together on the pillows, but that didn't last long. At 7 Maia started mewling.

I got her, changed her diaper and onesie, and went back to Chloë. She was demonstrating an oppressive amount of energy by jumping all around the bed refusing to lie down for the diaper change she requested (she knows she needs a diaper change and clothes on before going downstairs), and when I yelled at her I realized I was not capable of dealing with both of them that morning, so Eric woke up a little early and took charge of Miss Energy while I fed Maia. At least she behaved for it, instead of popping on and off and grinning innocently at me as she's been doing lately. She fell asleep afterward--I was jealous--and I put her in the swing downstairs and went back up to change clothes for work.

Chloë came up to investigate what I was doing--"Koë check on Mama"--and watched me get into my work clothes. "Mama going hork?" she said.

"That's right," I said. "Come on, let's go downstairs."

She walked to the doorway of our bedroom and stopped. "Mama carry Koë," she said. "Pee."

Since she had seen Maia with me every time I checked on her in the night, this was pretty predictable, and mostly I'm happy to carry her if it will make her feel better. But I felt lousy. I shook my head. "No, sweetie. I still don't feel good."

"Pee. Pee. Pee," she repeated. "Koë tay pee." And my heart twisted, because--and here's the point of the story; this wasn't completely gratuitous whining, honest--she's only recently started really applying "please" with the understanding that it's, well, a magic word. If she asks for something and doesn't say please, we generally wait to respond until she does; once she does, we almost always get her whatever she wants with all speed. She knows that when she says "please," we say "yes." Thus, "Chloë say please" really meant, "But I obeyed your rules."

And here I was, refusing anyway. We've worked so diligently to get her to say "please," teaching her that it will get her what she wants. But now that she's learned it, she also has to learn that it doesn't always work. What kind of a crappy lesson is that to teach a child? A useful and practical one, I suppose, but it seemed like awfully sad policy to me while sick and sleep-deprived on a Monday morning. I didn't carry her, but I held her hand as we walked down the stairs, and thanked her profusely when she pulled my work shoes out of the rack for me, and hugged her good-bye as tightly as I could while trying to avoid breathing on her. She skipped off to read one of her new books (from the Borders liquidation sale) with Eric, and I wished she had stopped to wave good-bye to me, as she does most days. But you don't always get what you want, even when you ask, and I hadn't.

Our daughter the genius...the evil genius.

2011-07-29T12:28:00.000-04:00

Act I

Scene: a warm summer evening. Chloë is carrying water from the kiddie pool to the concrete path just below the back steps and dumping it there. Carrying and dumping, carrying and dumping.

Mama: Where do you think all that water goes?
Chloë (looking around at the steps, tomato plants, garbage can, and fence nearby): Mmm...in gaba cayyn?
Mama: In the garbage can? That's a good answer.
Chloë (mischievously, looking up at the sky): Adahay up to ky?
Mama: All the way up to the sky? That's a very good answer.

Act II

Scene: another warm summer evening. Everyone is lounging around after Maia's bath, which Chloë helped with and enjoyed immensely.

Chloë (poking at Mama's pants): Mama pae het?
Mama: Yes, they're wet. That's because someone was splashing during Maia's bath.
Chloë (starting to giggle): No.
Mama: Was that someone Chloë?
Chloë (coyly): No.
Mama: No? Who was it, then?
Chloë: Uddah Koë.
Mama: Some other Chloë splashed me?
Chloë: Hah [yeah].

Act III

Scene: same evening. Chloë lies on the bed, at her leisure, as her Daddy changes her diaper.

Chloë (for no discernible reason): Ha. Ha ha. [She considers.] Hahahahahahaha!

Status report: Maia, Month 3

2011-07-27T21:28:00.002-04:00

And so we come to the end of the fourth trimester. I've heard the newborn stage described this way, and it feels pretty accurate; in the first three months babies are still doing pretty much what they were doing in the womb--eating, sleeping, eliminating, hiccuping, and sucking on their hands. But in the last few weeks, Maia has started becoming less of a lump and more of a baby. Hooray!

She likes the swing better than she did, and she also likes sitting in the carrier or the Boppy or the booster seat (propped up with a blanket), watching while I peel carrots or Chloë plays with her balloon or we eat dinner. There's a teddy bear I got when Chloë was born that Chloe never really took to, and Maia loves looking at it. We put it in the little tray on her swing and she sways back and forth, back and forth, staring. In the booster seat, we put toys on the tray, and she's started batting at them a little.

She coos sometimes, and if she's a little more agitated--if she's been left alone a while or it's getting on toward feeding time--the coos get louder and more raucous, and then turn into bird trills.

She's starting to drool some, and she's snorfly almost every morning, though it doesn't seem to be sickness. I don't think she can have gotten allergies this early. Chloë is amused when I drop saline into her nose and then use the big blue bulb on her; Maia, not so much so. We're going longer between feedings now, two and a half hours or so, though it varies, and sometimes she wants to stop after twenty-five or thirty minutes instead of the full forty. It's odd, at least compared to Chloë's utter ravenousness at this age, but as long as she's happy, I certainly don't have a problem with it.

Oh, Dad. You're not going to play that one, are you?
The crankiness of last month has gone away. We've been giving her baby Zantac, which has helped, but recently she's also been scream-free a couple of nights we forgot or had no chance to give her the evening dose, so I'm thinking she's outgrowing the reflux. She still wakes up frequently in the night; I think the most we've gone is five hours between feedings, and only the once. Once I'm over the cold I've got and a little caught up on sleep I'm going to do my best to try taking her into the nursery for night feedings instead of nursing her in bed. (I keep saying this.) She's moving toward regular napping, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, though she's not at the stage where we can put her down for a nap yet.

She adores her baths. She seems to know when we're undressing her for one; if she was fussy or agitated she calms down and waits for her onesie and her diaper to come off. I take advantage of these times to tell her about all her baby parts and kiss them, or deliver raspberries. She grins and moves around in a way that suggests she would be laughing if only she knew how. She's an awful cutie. I think we'll keep her.

Yes we know the muffin man

2011-07-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

Chloë's two-year checkup went excellently. We warned her ahead of time there would be shots, but in fact there weren't, just a finger-stick to get checked for lead. She's 75th percentile for height (not quite three feet), 98th for weight (a little over 34 pounds), nearly a twenty-inch head. She was very good, and even talked some despite the doctor being a stranger, and got a sticker for her pains. We asked about her frequent nosebleeds and got some saline gel to try and sooth the irritated patch on her septum that's apparently causing the trouble.

"If it doesn't work, we can try other things, including cauterizing that spot," the pediatrician said, "but we don't want to do that if we don't have to." We agree. And Chloë's quite happy to get "med" for her nose, especially if it will help the nosebleeds.

The guidance for two-year-olds they sent home with us mostly seemed reasonable, but I was slightly annoyed by the nutritional guidance. Most of it I took no exception to--avoid soda and diet foods, lots of fruits and vegetables, eat at the table as a family, encourage water--but there was also, below "Eat whole-grain bread" and "have a protein source with every snack and meal," the line "no more than 1 serving of starch." Seriously? Now we're advocating the Atkins diet for toddlers? Are they not aware that

-carbohydrates are the best source of energy;
-starches (not highly-processed ones, sure) come with other healthful things like vitamins and fiber,
-excess protein can be harmful;
-starches usually are protein sources anyway;
-dude, human civilization was predicated on starches;
-children are meant to gain weight, not lose it;
-seriously, your plan is that every day growing children should have one piece of whole-grain bread and then nothing but vegetables and pure protein? Seriously?

I worry a bit about Chloë's weight--though the pediatrician says she doesn't--but I will put her diet up against anyone's. Also, I will give up hearing Chloë say "Koë make muffin with Mama," when someone beats me to death with a steak.

Dear Chloë, year two

2011-07-26T00:04:00.001-04:00

My best Chloë-bear,

Superlatives! Exclamations! I don't even know how to start this letter, I'm so full of how wonderful you are and how much fun it is to be your mom. You are two years old, equal amounts baby and kid, your own marvelous amalgamation of wonder and learning and joy and frustration and almost frightening understanding. It's amazing watching you learn. I didn't know your dad and I knew this much, didn't know the world held so much until I started seeing you gather it all in.

You are so so so much more fun as a toddler than a baby. Which is not to say we didn't have good times before you were one; we did; but this last year has been many times more awesome, and just as full of transformation. You started out the year not quite walking, not quite talking. Now you climb out of your bed every morning, walk down the hall, and say, "Koë wake. Mama wake? Maia waking no. Daddy waking no." Sometimes you're wearing your green cotton bracelet, which I made for you because you wanted to wear green socks to bed all the time, which wasn't practical because you only have one pair and you already sleep so fiery hot that adding socks would probably have resulted in scorch marks on your bed. I love how you want things now, how you've developed opinions and desires. Admittedly your biggest desires are often for candy and ice cream, but I can't really blame you there.

One of your other big loves is water. You are such a water baby. Bathtime has slowly evolved from a bit of a trial to an enjoyable ritual. You love the bubble bath and your bath toys, even if you like to play with the water itself best. You have eleven duckies: First Ducky, Pirate Ducky, Camouflage/Devil Ducky, Grenadier Ducky, Mad Scientist Ducky, Cowboy Ducky, Rock Star Ducky, First Mate Ducky, Snowman Ducky #1, Snowman Ducky #2, and Reindeer Ducky. Recently you offered to give your sister First Ducky, but that didn't last long. You also have Scrubber Ducky, and have just recently started actually using it. It's marvelous how much you can do, and how much you want to. In just the last week or so you've started lying down in the water and consenting to be rinsed off with the showerhead, things that horrified you a month ago. We went to Kalahari, the water park, last month. You had a marvelous time--you're still talking about it--and it's gotten you to be more adventurous both with water and with slides. We put your own slide into your kiddie pool for your birthday, and while you were a little hesitant, especially before I got smart and put you into your life vest because your head kept going under water, you loved it. We bought you knockoff Crocs specifically so you could stomp in puddles after rainstorms, and though you're always a muddy mess afterward, you love it so much I adore taking you out to do it.

The other big love is your new sister, Maia, who's just about three months old now. I'm so very proud of how you've handled having a new sister. You've been a little jealous, certainly, but only a little. Otherwise you've been pleased to help fetch and carry diapers and onesies, to rock her in her carrier while we're getting ready to go out, to look at her in pictures, to help push her stroller. You try to help burp her after feedings. You love it when she grabs your thumb. You squalled when I pushed your hand away the other day because you had a rash and I didn't want it to spread to Maia. That same day I put her in the crib while you and I were in the bathroom using the potty, and you said, "Maia wait, Big Sister done on potty." I can't wait to see you being a big sister as Maia grows and becomes more fun to play with. (Also, having you two play with each other instead of separately demanding attention from us is going to be great.)

I love the way you talk. “Koë,” you call yourself. When I told you your full name recently, you repeated it: “Koë Eeja Nydah.” You say “Hee book hight bear?” and we read the book, right there. “Mama carry hoo down da dair?” you say, and I carry you downstairs (after correcting you by saying “Say 'Mama carry me.'”) “Koë ball down at bama makket no,” you say, and I agree that no, this time you didn't fall down at the farmer's market. I'm intrigued by the growing tenacity of your memory. Exasperated sometimes too, of course. You seem to remember the show you haven't seen since last Christmas. You surprised me the other day by commenting on how the snakes we saw at the zoo had moved. You got a set of “P.B. Bear” books recently, four titles, and for three of them you can say the real title with a reasonable amount of accuracy, but Fly Away Kite is “ducky book” because there are ducks in it, and ducks are probably your oldest love.

You have a large ("huge!" as you would say) vocabulary, and use it constantly. Every day it's a continual stream of narration: "Chloë wake up." "Chloë sit on potty." "Maia cry. Maia not happy." "Plane outside? Motorcycle outside?" (Please note: you are not getting a motorcycle anytime soon. Quit asking.) "Mama go work?" "Chloë stomp in puddles other day." I love how you can meaningfully answer questions now. If I ask you what you had for lunch, you can tell me: "Cheese, peas, mmm....strawberries." Or "Milk Os" (though I'm not sure you weren't just remembering breakfast on that one). Or your favorite, "Mac cheese." Your favorite foods are always said with a blissed-out inflection. If I give you a fruit snack you run to your dad and report, "Mama gave doop nack," in this ecstatic monotone on the level of "Mama is going to stay home and play blocks with me while my favorite show is going and tickle me and give piggyback rides AND feed me chocolate." Or, more simply, "Water park."

You love to jump and run and climb, and turn upside-downs and be tickled and rough-housed with. You just started to say "That tickles!" and you might have gotten it from your the utterly evil talking puppy, but it's cute nonetheless. Whenever we do something you like, you say "One more time?" which you've now shortened to "More time." And we tickle you or throw you over our shoulders one more time. And you say, "More time?" And we say "NO," or "Say 'again,'" or "Maybe later." But we usually do it one more time anyway. You're persuasive like that. By which I mean a lethal combination of cuteness and nagging.

You get frustrated easily, and scream a lot, and I don't really blame you. You want to do so much, and you haven't quite learned it all yet. But you're working on it. You obey us really well, all things considered, and you can understand what we say and try to take our suggestions. You can point out colors and numbers and letters, and animals and the sounds they make, and people you know, even some you've only seen in pictures. You're doing so well. I know you'll keep on learning and growing.

You watch your “shows” nearly every day, and while in the beginning you would narrate them, now you sit and watch, narrowly and solemnly. Sometimes you try to sing along, and your quiet attempts make my heart ache (in a good way). One of your favorites, “Classical Baby: The Dance Show,” has a jazz rendition of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” that involves hippos doing household chores. It's not how I would have choreographed it, but you like it. You stare at it and at the end of the sequence, when the hippos are eating their homemade pizza and the daddy hippo suddenly throws up his arms and suds from their earlier encounter with the washing machine appear, you whisper, “Bubbahs,” and I'm always surprised that you sound so young while your perfect focus is so old. Or perhaps it's not. Heaven knows I don't have that kind of concentration. You bring that focus to almost everything you do now. It's a beautiful thing. You're a beautiful you. I'm not really afraid of the terrible twos, not yet anyway, not knowing how eager to please and happy to learn you are. I would say I expect you to get still more awesome next year, the way you did this year, but that's asking an awful lot. Even asking you to stay this awesome is asking a lot. But I bet you can do it, and I'm looking forward to it.

Love,
Mama

Chloë's second birthday

2011-07-24T23:47:00.004-04:00

Chloë is two! She is the best two-year-old ever. Her birthday was Saturday, and went very well, all things considered (especially how much of a stupid wreck her mother was over the cake). The day started with pasta and sweet peppers for breakfast--her request--and a green helium balloon, and then a trip to the farmer's market. It was hot and she was tired, and as we walked back to the car I told her, "We're going home, and you can play with your balloon a little. Then it will be naptime, and then it will be your birthday party." She was walking slowly, and I offered to carry her. She lifted her arms without a word, and as we walked toward the car she said, "Go home. Play with green balloon. Night-night. Then birthday party."

When she woke up, there were other balloons to play with, too:

Because her aunt and uncle had to leave early, we made with the cake and ice cream right away. Her cake was chocolate with vanilla frosting:

And she was very excited about eating both cake AND ice cream. She's still talking about it.

She got plenty of lovely presents: dresses, sparkly T-shirts, her own lotion, a Magna Doodle (only not called that), a "Happy Birthday" book, jewelry and hair stuff, an Elmo video, a stuffed snake, and a plastic kitchen/shopping cart/food set. (Also the tricycle and slide from Grandpa and Halmoni a few months ago.) Her cousin Addie helped open presents, but I think in future she'll be just fine doing them by herself.

The eighties called. They hope you enjoy their jewelry and hairbands.
And then the kids went out back to play in the pool and the sprinkler and the slide. (This picture is actually from last weekend, but it's the same setup.) Her rash turned out to be some random viral thing, not contagious and not a problem, so she was cleared for the water.

It was a great day. I was a little surprised she didn't ask for another birthday party again yesterday, but then there were still balloons and new toys to play with, and an evening with the cousins to recover from. She was a little disappointed there was no pasta for breakfast, but life's tough when you're two.

Rash activity

2011-07-22T09:02:00.001-04:00

Chloë has had a rash the past couple of days. "Ringworm," Eric said, looking at the round red rings. We didn't worry overly much about it; ringworm is harmless. When it didn't go away, we put some antifungal cream on it. Those patches went away, but in the meantime it spread. A lot. Last night we gooped her up with the cream all over and sent her to bed.

This morning she woke up and the spots we'd gotten were gone, but new ones had sprung up everywhere. "Not ringworm," Eric said. "Ringworm doesn't show up or go away this fast." So he's going to put in a call to the doctor. In the meantime, if it's not ringworm we've probably spread it all over her body by applying the apparently useless cream. Poor kid.

Eat and sleep, eat and sleep

2011-07-20T12:20:00.000-04:00

We bought Chloë a new booster seat for the dining table. Her previous one has been strapped to the same chair since she was about three months old and she's used it, first with and then without the tray, ever since. When we realized that Maia was in fact getting close to being able to sit in it (when does she grow? How does she do it?), we further realized that a new one must be purchased, and it would be nice if the new one didn't have the annoying bumps and straps that the current one does that get in Chloë's way.

So the new one is a little lower, a little flatter, with the straps and sides removed, and she can climb into it herself. This is a big improvement, and makes her feel very proud. She can remove her own bib, too, and is getting much better at using her fork so her hands aren't always the food-encrusted blobs they used to be. Mealtimes are much less messy than before. Of course, with Maia a little over a month away from potentially starting on solids (really? When did that happen?), it's a very temporary reprieve.

In the meantime, Maia continues to do well with her bottles and to nurse to sleep almost every night. I find it so annoying that I can't remember how we did bedtime in Chloë's early months; but I don't think it was quite like this. What particularly frustrates me is that if I nurse her to sleep in the glider, I can often pick her up and put her in the bassinet for the first part of the night, but only if I fall asleep with her. If I stay awake in the chair to read, even if I wait until she seems dead to the world to move her, she wakes up. You wouldn't think that being drowsy and grumpy would make me a better lay-the-baby-down-er, but apparently it does. Or else when I'm sleeping something gets in the milk that makes her sleep harder. I can't imagine what would happen if we were bottle-feeding only. Would we be insane with sleep deprivation? Buying D batteries weekly so she could sleep in the swing? Or would she have decided it wasn't worth taking advantage of us over and started to stay asleep when out of our arms?

At any rate, I can't wait until we can start getting her to sleep by herself a little more. We were doing great for a couple of weeks, but she seems to be regressing, which means I'm getting less time in the evenings to do things and she's getting less sleep. She does seem to be lengthening her time between feeds, going two and a half hours or so much of the time, and that's a good step. Someday I will sleep four hours in a row again.

Squeaker

2011-07-18T09:36:00.001-04:00

Chloë had a good visit with her grandpa this weekend (sadly, he has now gone back to his home in the computer), climbing all over him and dragging him around to play blocks or color or read or watch shows. Saturday a couple of our friends came over with their kids, and the three of them played in the backyard in the pool, and then on the slide, and then on the slide into the pool (and Dad watched them and, in some cases, doused them with the hose). Chloë's head went under water her first couple of slides because she goes down on her back, so we put her life jacket on her for some extra height, and she was happier after that.

This weekend she also reverted to a previous bad habit: namely, squeaking. Not long ago, she started putting an upward, questioning lilt on all of her sentences; and then she started pushing them up to horribly high, fingernail-on-chalkboard squeaking. I don't know why. We tolerated it and then, when it became apparent it wasn't a momentary thing, corrected it. She was cured, I thought, but then it came back. So we're back to correcting her. With luck, soon she will relent.

Potty training take two

2011-07-11T15:59:00.000-04:00

Restart your engines, ladies and gentlemen: potty training is back on the table. Chloë has been all about her "Elmo's Potty Time" show (which she calls "Elmo Potty" and we try to call "Potty Elmo" to avoid saying things like "Yes, after breakfast we can watch Elmo potty") but declined to actually do anything with her potty, which has been sitting lonely and forlorn in our bathroom for months. We've been talking up the virtues of underwear and being like Elmo and no more diapers and being a big girl for a while now, but she's always refused when we ask if she'd like to try the potty, even though it's pretty evident she's ready to start toilet training. With Maia still pretty new in our lives, we decided we were going to give her until her birthday before we started getting serious about getting her on the potty.

Lately the Potty Elmo craze has died down and she's started asking after her other shows. But the other night, we tag-teamed her in her bedroom, talking about her potty and her diapers and Elmo and big-girlness until I kind of expected her to say "ENOUGH ALREADY," but instead she agreed that maybe she would like to sit on the potty. Especially when I threw in a sticker. Our agreement currently stands thus: every time she sits on the potty, she can have a sticker to put on the potty's lid. If she actually does anything in the potty, she gets an extra-special glittery moon sticker (moons are still very, very big with her--we made some cheese crackers the other day and she was insistent that they had to be moon-shaped--and seem appropriate in this case anyway).

No extra-special glittery moon stickers have yet been awarded, but there's a steadily growing collection of other stickers on the lid of the potty. She's very keen on these. She'll say "Koë need sticker now," instead of "Koë sit on potty." After deciding she's done and carefully placing her sticker, sometimes she'll ask to sit right back down on the potty. We've taken to telling her that she doesn't get a second sticker for these second tries, and she sits anyway, so that's something, but this sticker idea may turn out not to have been so brilliant as I'd hoped.

We know it's going to take a while for anything to happen. When I noticed her grunting a few times over the weekend, I asked if she was pooping, and she said yes, but when I suggested we go up to the potty she was firmly against it. "Koë need diaper on," she insisted. I got the impression last night, in fact, that she thinks the idea is to go in her diaper and then sit on the potty, so we'll have to be sure to put her on the potty at times other than when she thinks of it. I think this is what they call a work in progress.

Well, you can't argue with that.

2011-07-10T09:12:00.001-04:00

[Chloë shrieks.]
Mama: What was that?
Chloë: Koë screamed.
Mama: Why did you scream?
Chloë: Koë not happy.

Silly symphonies

2011-07-09T11:58:00.001-04:00

I've been pulling out some of the silly songs I made up during Chloë's babyhood for use with Maia. Of the half-dozen or so I thought worth remembering, one is for baby exercises, and goes like this (with appropriate accompanying movements):

Baby arms go up, baby arms go down
Baby arms go all around
Baby arms go in, baby arms go out
Baby arms go all about
Baby arms do the wave, the wave, the wave, the wave
They do the Macarena, the Macarena
They clap clap clap, they clap clap clap, they clap clap clap clap cheer!
They pull you up here
They put you down there
Baby arms go everywhere!

Don't you judge me.

Ahem. Chloë heard me chanting this with Maia and loved it. I don’t know whether she has a dim memory of me doing it with her or if she likes seeing me waggle her sister's arms all over the place or what, but she'll request it when the three of us are sitting together. She laughs when I try to clap Maia's hands together and they're curled tight (which they always are). Then she says, "Do Koë." So I take her wrists and go through it with her. When we're done she sayd, "Do Maia." It's the cutest thing. I'm not sure where she picked up "Do" as a verb, at least in this context (is this the same as "Chloë do" or not?) but then I don't know where she picks up a lot of her words.

Surrender

2011-07-06T13:09:00.001-04:00

So Maia has not liked being deprived of the R.I.N.D.S. while I’m at work. Last week, she took one bottle late Wednesday, and then none on Thursday and Friday, and we worried. Each night when I came home I nursed her, and I think she figured "Hey, if I wait long enough, Mom will come back." We tried different bottles, different locations--and when I say "we" I mean "Eric," because we figured my trying to offer the bottle would only make matters worse. We discussed offering formula. Saturday, we tried nursing half and then offering the bottle. Nothing worked. We decided that we must have a serious standoff, no R.I.N.D.S. allowed until she had successfully taken more than one bottle, no matter what, until she cracked. Or we did.

So early Sunday morning, Chloë and I went to the park and played on the slides and the swings while Eric stayed home with Maia and offered a bottle every half hour. Chloë and I came home for napping and lunch and pumping, me avoiding the room Maia was in whenever possible. We went out again to shop at various places, which included having a snack in the car on a ninety-degree day (yes, I kept the AC on) since I didn't think we'd be welcome in the store with fingers sticky with grapes and trailing goldfish crackers.

And Maia accepted a bottle, perhaps sensing that we were serious. (It probably also helps that people other than Eric had tried and failed to get her to take a bottle, so he knew it wasn't his technique causing the problem and was more confident.) Then she took another one. We nursed for the night, and Monday and yesterday she's taken her bottles quite competently. I think she may not be taking as much as she ought--two and a half or three ounces at a time--but she's eating, and that's what matters. The siege is over.

Demurred

2011-07-03T09:20:00.001-04:00

I've mentioned before that there's a moment at the beginning of most nursing sessions when I hate my own skin and everyone else and realize that everything in my life has been a big mistake and I'm trapped in it forever. It happened with Chloë, and I didn't think about it much. It started up again with Maia, and after I realized my dissatisfaction with my life and my second child mostly stemmed from those moments, it occurred to me that maybe I should do something about it.

I started with the Internet, of course, and came upon something right away: D-MER, Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex. As far as I can tell, this is exactly what I've got. Essentially, the milk ejection reflex (which happens a short time into a nursing session and makes the milk actually flow rather than being sucked out) is coupled with a bigger-than-it-ought-to-be drop in dopamine levels, which causes various negative feelings until they level out again, which takes a few minutes. A couple of sites I read regarding it say that simply knowing that it's physiologically caused can help, and I've been finding that that's true. Now I get Maia settled, start feeling lousy, and then remember that it's because we just started nursing, and I'm usually okay. Sometimes I persist in feeling lousy, but it's gotten a lot better.

I mentioned it to Heather at the midwives' at my six-week checkup, wondering whether (a) they'd heard of it and (b) they had any other suggestions. She'd never heard of it. She was concerned, because we'd already discussed my increased risk of PPD ("If you think it's coming on again, we want to treat it pretty aggressively, because that works out better for women than if you don't fix it the first time") and wanted to know if I just wanted to go right back on an antidepressant, which I didn't. She promised to look it up and check with a couple of lactation specialists to get any advice they might have. A few days later she called (well, had a nurse call) and suggested counseling, because "a pill won't help; you can't take on every time you breastfeed." (I bet I could, but they'd have to make the pill first.)

I don't think this will help, so I'm not going; I'm doing okay now, there's a much more tenuous link between D-MER and cognition than PPD and cognition, and their previous recommendations for counselors have worked out poorly. At this point it's just something to put up with. Between this and the lipase problem, though, I'm starting to wonder whether I'm actually (physically) cut out for motherhood.

On clothes

2011-07-01T18:19:00.000-04:00

It's a household of girls, we're interested in clothes, right? Maia doesn't care much yet, except that she seemed to violently object to my pajamas this morning. She's had very little spit-up so far, but she made up for it today in one huge vomit that got her left side, my right side, and one of the rocker's arms. She seemed quite happy both before and after, but I was less than pleased, especially since it meant hopping into the shower when I was supposed to leave in ten minutes. This is why I don't put on my work clothes until just before I leave in the morning.

Chloë, on the other hand, gets ever more opinionated about her clothes. Her Big Sister shirt (but the one without the stain on it; oh, no, we can't wear a shirt with a stain on it--which is an extremely unfortunate attitude in a toddler, especially one whose favorite dinner is pasta) and her bee shirt are her favorites, and she'll ask after them for days after they've been worn and put in the wash. I've been trying to get her in dresses once in a while, and she'll sometimes allow me to put them on her, but then she insists on getting out of them again. Mom recently sent a couple with sparkly bits on them, and since Chloë adores "parky" on her clothes, we may have better success with those.

And as for me: Hooray, I'm wearing jeans for the first time in nearly a year! Well, I had maternity jeans, but that's not the same. These are the stretchy ones and they're tighter than usual, but still: I can wear jeans for Casual Friday again!

Maia's birth story

2011-06-30T17:54:00.003-04:00

Maia's birth was much faster and less annoying than Chloë's. As the attending midwife said, "First babies don't just fall out." It had a bit of a run-up in medical advice and family politics, but otherwise was nice and uneventful.

At my 39-week appointment, the midwife, Amy, who had delivered Chloë, talked to me about being GPS positive, which you'll remember from last time meant I would need antibiotics during delivery to prevent possible serious infection in the baby. She checked me and found that I was 3 cm dilated, 80% effaced. "Your body's ready to have this baby," she said. She went on to say that since I was clearly on the cusp of active labor, it might start at any time and things were likely to happen very fast, and in that case the baby was at more risk of infection if I didn't get at least four hours' worth of antibiotics before she was born, and controlling the start of labor might be the best thing. She concluded, "So, should we strip your membranes?"

I was nonplussed, and wasn't excited about being induced before my due date. (I looked up stripping membranes later and it's not exactly induction, more encouragement, but I didn't know that at the time and she didn't explain.) Amy said that my next appointment should be scheduled for my due date and we'd talk more about induction then, if I actually made it to the appointment. It was clear she didn't think I would.

But I did; five days later, on April 26, I went in and talked to a different midwife, Heather. She, too, was concerned about GBS, though she wasn't as strongly in favor of induction as Amy had been. She said, "At this point I could go either way. In a week, we'll draw the line and say 'You have to have this baby now,' because outcomes get worse after 41 weeks. Right now, it's your decision." Eric and I discussed it and decided to schedule an induction for the next day.

I was ambivalent about this decision, since I've been inculcated in the natural-childbirth school of thought and also wasn't sure whether insurance would cover the induction itself (they did). Also nearly changed my mind when told we should be at the hospital at 6 AM. But we showed up almost on time, after having sent Chloë to spend the night with the mothers, and got checked in.

Getting registered and set up and settled in took some time (especially since the first nurse couldn't get an IV in me, instead "blowing up" my vein which gave me a horrible bruise for three weeks afterward) and I didn't see the midwife on duty, Sue, for an hour or more. She told my nurse, Midge, to get me started on antibiotics and then an hour after that I'd get Pitocin. "We'll increase it a little bit every half-hour until you're at about two to three minutes between contractions," she told me. "And in a while we'll break your water, and that should help get things going too."

So they started the IV at around 8, added the antibiotics at 9, and started Pitocin at 10. "How long was your first delivery?" Sue asked. I told her 20.5 hours. "Oh," she said. "Well, this will be much faster. We're aiming for before 6."

After that, there wasn't much to do for a while. We looked at the readout of my contractions, which were unnoticeable. Upon first getting hooked up, it turned out I was in fact having contractions at ten or twelve minutes apart already, but I wasn't feeling them, and didn't for a few hours. I shifted positions every so often and read or knitted. Eric played on his phone. We talked. We got me to the bathroom regularly, which was an ordeal since I had to bring the monitors and the IV stand with me. Midge came in to check on us a few times. "Is there anything I can get you?" she said. "Most of my patients are more needy than this; I feel like I'm neglecting you." I asked for some juice to make her feel useful.

Somewhere around 11, Sue came in to break my water. "I thought we wanted to avoid that because of GBS," I objected. I was also kind of creeped out by the whole idea, though I didn't say that part.

"You need at least four hours of antibiotics, and you've had two," she said. "I'm watching your progress, and I don't see you having this baby before one." She got out the water-breaking tool, saying ,"Some women don't like this because it makes the contractions come. But they have to come."

*WARNING: GRAPHIC GIRL CONTENT* The water-breaking tool was basically a long crochet hook, and she inserted it into me and started sawing back and forth, which really creeped me out. After what I thought must be longer than necessary, there was a little trickle between my legs, and she removed it, saying, "Fluid nice and clear. Good. It's just trickling now, but in a while you'll get up and there will be a gush," she told me. *END WARNING*

She left, and I started crying a bit because the procedure had made me feel awfully vulnerable and I was still ambivalent about all this intervention. On the other hand, delivery before dinnertime was a happy thought, and I recovered quickly and had lunch, such as it was. Since I had said I might think about an epidural, Sue had put me on a clear-liquids diet plan, so I had some juice and some sorbet and nothing else. (They provided broth and gelatin as well, but the broth was chicken and the gelatin was "varied flavors" flavored, so I passed on both.)

I started noticing the contractions, first more as involuntary motion in my muscles than anything else. Midge felt at the top of my bump and explained that she was feeling for the strength of the contraction. "Press your nose," she said. "That's a soft contraction. Your chin is a medium, and your forehead is a strong one." Then I started feeling a bit of pain. Then I started staring at the clock during them--ostensibly to time them, but really because the staring helped steady me. Midge asked how my pain level was. We'd discussed this at length when she first came in, and she made it clear that she was in favor of drugs but could happily help me do natural techniques if I wanted. We'd also discussed her pain scale, in the first actually helpful description of the 0-10 scale I've heard. "0 means no pain," she told me. "1 means it's there, but it's no big deal. 5 means you're antsy in your seat, starting to think you can't tolerate it. 10 is your arm being torn off. 5 is when we'll start talking about pain meds. But we can get something for you anytime you want it. Just tell me."

As I got up the scale from 0 to 3 and 4, I started, as I told Eric, thinking about the breathing techniques we'd learned in our birth education class last time--not necessarily relying on them, but thinking about them to distract myself. Then I started actually using them. Midge watched me through one and counseled me for the next-- "Slow, deep breath in for the count of five," she said, and counted for me. "Then slow breath out."

I was still going back and forth on the pain meds issue, but I was also starting to have trouble keeping control during contractions and wanting to vocalize--which is not the same thing as needing to scream, but is the step before it, and I remembered how awful it was with Chloë. So at this point, around 2:15, we asked Midge to call Sue to check my progress and help advise me. Sue came in and checked. "You're at about six centimeters, and your cervix is tissue-thin," she said. "I'm actually not going to leave the floor until your baby is born, just in case. But this is the perfect time for some medication if you want it." When I still couldn't decide, she suggested that I try some Nubain, "To get you through the worst of it," since I was coming up on transition (seven to ten centimeters), and I finally said yes.

Midge left with the order to get the Nubain, and so did Sue, after telling another nurse or technician (I don't remember) to get the delivery cart into the room, just in case. I lay in the bed, on my side, through another contraction or two, squeezing Eric's hand, and started vocalizing--an "Aaaaaaaah" sort of sound, fairly controlled, though it was getting more difficult. Now that I'd made the decision to get some pain relief, I was happy I'd done it, and complained about why Midge was taking so long.

Then, in the middle of another contraction, the pain turned into a sudden stuttering urgent need to push, and my focused vocalization turned into a wild uncontrollable wail that I probably couldn't reproduce now if I tried. Eric says when he heard it, he thought, "Okay: now an hour of the hard stuff." I was pushing, though I knew I probably shouldn't since no one else was in the room, and just as the contraction ended Sue and Midge and a couple of other people burst in.

"What changed?" Sue demanded.

"I'm actually feeling the need to push," I said, apologetically, because I knew I was supposed to have gone through transition first and what had happened to it?

"That’s what I thought," she said in satisfaction, as people started scurrying around. "We were at the end of the corridor, and I heard you and said, 'That's a baby coming.' Nothing else sounds like that. Let's get you on your back and into the stirrups."

"Nooooo," I said, because another contraction was starting and the idea of rolling over and putting my legs up was totally ridiculous. But Midge and whoever else was in the room--I totally don't remember--started moving me, getting me and the bed set up quickly and smoothly, and I cooperated because I knew dimly that they were right and I couldn't possibly deliver a baby with my legs shut tight like they were. *WARNING: GRAPHIC GIRL CONTENT* Also, I had had the classic I-need-to-poop feeling during the previous contraction and wasn't convinced I hadn't, and figured that if I had and I moved they could remove the pad from under me and clean it up. (They didn't.) *END WARNING*

"Remember, use the cries for efficient pushing," Eric said, remembering last time when I'd been told I was spending too much energy screaming and not enough pushing. I did my best, though it felt like everything was so urgent and happening so fast that I wasn't able to focus and figure out how.

That contraction ended and another started. "This is it!" Sue said encouragingly. "This is your baby coming!" I was panting and feeling a wild need to push with all my might. "Here it is!" Sue said. "Push!" I pushed, a long, long push, and felt a sort of weird scrambled feeling down there, and wasn't totally sure whether I had just delivered a baby or not, but was still feeling an adrenaline-fueled need to do something, sort of a panic but without the actual panic--"Keep pushing!" she said again, and I pushed, and felt the "ring of fire" start and expand, and then, all at once, Maia was born.

Sue held her up, limbs sprawling, weakly mewling. "Do you want her?" Midge said. I was still panting, my heart racing, feeling like I couldn't get a grasp on what had just happened to my body, and didn't answer right away, so she said again, "Do you want her?" I gasped, "Give me a minute." So Eric got to hold her first. In a bit, when I was enough calmer that I thought I could hold her without dropping her, she came to me, the umbilical cord slapping cold against my lower belly. She had a funny ridge on her head, sort of Klingon-like, and a burst blood vessel in her left eye. Sue said the ridge was normal, from pressures in the birth canal, and the blood vessel wasn't surprising. "She'll probably have a bruise later on because she went through so fast," she said. "It's a good thing I ordered the delivery cart just in case."

Maia was pretty alert, so we tried nursing right away. When she was done, the nurses/technicians took her and started doing the usual procedures--cleaning, weighing, administering medicines, and so on. Sue pulled on the cord, cut now, to get the placenta out. I could feel it and pushed to help get it out, though she hadn't asked me to. In the meantime, Midge was throwing away the Nubain, which she'd had in her hand when she ran in. "That was what we call a slam-dunk baby," Sue said, partly to us and partly to the nurses, as she was sewing me up (I got a second-degree tear, same as last time). "I've got two more births today and they're both going to be just like that!" It was less than half an hour after she'd pronounced me six centimeters.

One of the technicians helping take care of Maia turned out to be the same one who'd wanted to watch while I had Chloë. Her name is Monica, not Martha. Eric mentioned it, and she remembered us, and was pleased he remembered her. She and Midge went to help me out of the stirrups and sit up. "Chin to your chest," Monica instructed me. I obeyed, though I thought that was kind of odd, and Midge said, "No, no--no epidural. She can move."

"Oh, that's right!" Monica said, as they helped me up. "I always forget that about natural births."

Before long, Maia was measured and cleaned and wrapped up, and I begged for food (should I have another baby, I must remember to pack some snacks), and we all started feeling life slow down a little, though we weren't over the speed of the birth. Or at least Eric and I weren't. Maia was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. "Here I am," she seemed to be saying. "You'll have to deal with me on my terms." She's still saying it, and we still are.

Words...

2011-06-28T20:11:00.002-04:00

Chloë: "Koë need more surp for pa-cake dipping."
Eric: "That's a big sentence."
Jenny: "I think that's seven."
Chloë: "Eight, nine, ten!"

The trouble with lipase

2011-06-27T21:01:00.002-04:00

I've been pumping milk for the past several weeks, here and there, to build up a back stock for when I go back to work. The midwife at my six-week appointment pointed out that all I really need is enough for the first day, but it was very nice last time being able to send frozen packets along to the mothers' or aunt's with Chloë at will without having to pump extra, so I pumped enough for a decent bagful in the freezer and was quite pleased.

Then, when we realized we needed to reintroduce bottles to Maia and figure out what size meal she needed, I pumped a test bottle in the wee hours and we tried it that night. Maia refused it, howling and shrieking. After a couple of attempts, Eric noticed the milk smelled a little off. I pumped a completely fresh bottle and she still refused to take it, so that didn't explain the bottle troubles, but it did present a concern of its own. Milk usually stays good around forty-eight hours, at least twenty-four, and this had been twelve. We tried it again the next day, and again the early morning milk smelled and tasted off.

Eric did some research and found out that some women produce milk with too much lipase in it. Lipase breaks down fats and causes rancidity, and an excess makes that happen much more quickly than normal. It doesn't technically spoil the milk, but it makes it taste nasty enough that no baby will drink it anyway. He also read that scalding the milk, on the stove or in a bottle warmer, will deactivate the lipase and save the milk, without causing quite as much destruction as microwaving it would do.

I was somewhat skeptical that this was what was going on, since I didn't have this problem last time and felt vaguely that I was being criticized. But it made most sense to proceed as if this were true, so we bought a bottle warmer and I started scalding all my pumped milk. Then I thawed one of the stashed aliquots to verify, since lipase will continue to work when frozen, if more slowly. It smelled and tasted awful.

So, we're throwing out the entire back stock. Luckily we--Eric--caught this in enough time that I'll have just about enough time to pump enough for my first day back at work without being crazy about it. I'm also going to have to bring the bottle warmer to work with me, which will be a pain (and too bad for Eric, since it would be very useful for him--I don't know why we didn't think of buying one last time; they're pretty inexpensive and very fast). But it's better than the alternative. I do wonder what's causing it, though. One possible cause is diet. It better not be the chocolate.

Status report: Month 2 (Maia)

2011-06-27T11:28:00.007-04:00

Two months? Really? No wonder the 0-3 month clothes are fitting so much better. Maia's' two-month (really eight-week) checkup last week went very well; she was 11 lb, 3 oz, which is perfect, 50th percentile. She's also 50th percentile for weight, and 95th for head size. I guess our kids are just that way.

She was furious about her shots and let us know, and then slept. A lot. Which was a change. Like Chloë, she hasn't been doing as much sleeping as the books say she should. She also gets very cranky at night and usually about half an hour after feeding, though that half-hour is usually pretty pleasant these days. She looks around, smiles, follows faces with her eyes, puts up with her sister's kisses and prods.

But the crankiness, oh, the crankiness. Nights have been especially bad, high-pitched screaming that usually only gets stopped by a cork (i.e., the R.I.N.D.S.). It's bad enough and inconsolable enough that we're considering it night colic. The pediatrician suggested that reflux might be causing it, as she also much prefers being upright and in motion, never, ever refuses a R.I.N.D.S., and I have my suspicions that she doesn't actually need to eat every two hours so much as she needs to suck on something, and she won't take a pacifier. Or a finger. Or a bottle, we've discovered. (More on that later.) We got a prescription for baby Zantac; we'll see whether it works.

We're having no issues with the R.I.N.D.S. this time around, at least as far as the direct interface goes. We have discovered, though, that she won't take a bottle. She did a few weeks ago, when we left her with the mothers for a few hours for our anniversary dinner; but Eric's been trying to get her to take a bottle for several days now in preparation for my return to work, and no dice. Our parents and the doctors say that when she's hungry enough, she will; which seems heartless but there's really not much we can do, since I must return to work and it's not close enough to come home every two hours, and I doubt they'd let me bring her to work with me. She'd bring down productivity too much.

(That's Chloë's doll. She'll get her own, but it'll have to be when I've got time to make one, which is not going to happen while we're nursing every two hours and walking the halls with her at night until bed.) My plans for a summer quilt for Chloë are also scrapped for now. I'm pleased I finished Maia's before she was born. Maia's slept under it a few times and seems to approve.

She goes to bed with me around 10-11, usually nursed down. The bassinet has been much emptier during her first two months than with Chloë's. She's still waking up mostly every three hours, though we've had a couple of four-hour stretches. I'm wondering if nursing her in bed is part of the problem, but she's still awfully little, so I'm not sure. She sleeps when she sleeps. And usually with her hands in the air, for some reason.

I think her birth hair is starting to fall out; I've been seeing fine strands here and there. Her eyes are still blue, but very dark; I suspect they're at least going to be like Chloë's changeable eyes, if not fully brown. She's mostly able to keep her head up now, and has kind of rolled over--not true rolls, I think, but it indicates some trunk strength, which is good. She is a sweet little girl.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Status report: Month 23 (Chloë)

2011-06-24T13:22:00.011-04:00

Chloë the almost-two-year-old! Eric says, "Where did the time go?" I'd say mostly into diaper changes, but Maia's got her beat.

But Chloë is a happy, running, talkative--oh, so talkative--girl, big and adorable and getting ever more clever and funny. Yesterday morning she was watching my morning ablutions and said casually, "Lotion on mouth no?" (her syntax for "no lotion on mouth," an injunction we've drilled into her since she frequently asks for lotion because she likes to spread it on her face and hands). "No," I agreed. "Lotion on forehead? Lotion on cheeks?" she went on. I concurred that these were okay. "Have lotion? Please?" she concluded, and I, having seen the general drift of this conversation, dispensed some from the bottle I'd already picked up.

She hardly ever asks to be picked up anymore, but she's done it several times lately I was holding Maia. But mostly, she's been a great big sister, wanting to see her and kiss her and know where she is. I'm afraid I've been so focused on the jealousy aspect that I've been overlooking her love for her sister. Recently she wanted to see the pictures on my phone, and when I set the slideshow to run drove me crazy with her refrain of "No, no, no!" After I yelled at her about it and drove her to tears, we worked out what she was no-ing, and it turned out she wanted to see only the pictures that had Maia in them.

She's still a good eater, but becoming more picky--no, that's not the right word. Lunches are in fact usually pretty small, but then she often eats whatever's left over as an afternoon snack. She simply has definite opinions about what she wants now. That's really what's characterized the last month or two, I think. She knows what she wants, and she can tell us (mostly), and if she doesn't get it she gets mad. No huge tantrums, but plenty of small ones--but mostly, she's still a happy girl.

The water park was a huge, huge hit. She still talks about it constantly, and mentions the slide she went down with Mimi or the sunscreen she had to put on or that she went in the wave pool with Omi and Mimaw or the closet she and Addie played in. It also cured her hesitation on her slide at home--we got it out the other day and she went up and slid down, up and slid down, endlessly. It didn't cure her of being a water baby, though. We went to the farmer's market the other day, which is located right by the river, and spent more time stopping along the walkway looking at the river than actually at the market.

Playing hard at Kalahari unfortunately didn't cure her of waking up at 6 AM, but it did help her sleep hard. She's still a somewhat restless sleeper, and unfortunately a frequent nighttime nose-bleeder. She can't seem to keep blankets or sheets on at night, but she sleeps so hot it doesn't seem to matter.

Her vocabulary and usage, and understanding, continue to amaze us. Her record sentence so far is six words: "Milk fall down on blue pants." Then there was the following conversation the other day, while Eric was combing Chloë's hair (yes, he's the one who does it; I used to but he decided to be all smart about breaking out his own comb instead of the baby ones we had and she likes his better):

Eric: Your hair is getting so long now.
Chloë: Koë hair get long?
Eric: That's right.
Chloë: Koë get big?
Eric: Yes, you are.
Chloë: Koë huge!

She has a shape-sorter, has had for a while, that she wasn't interested in. But recently she started playing with it, and now she can easily fit and name all four shapes--circle, square, triangle, and star. She's working on non-rainbow colors, and adoring her Potty Elmo video--I'm starting to suspect for the music, though she's interested in Curly Bear, who's just learning to use the potty, too. "Koë baby nope?" she just said. "Koë big burl?" And yes, she certainly is.

Kalahari

2011-06-19T23:44:00.006-04:00

And we're back from Kalahari, the water park, where we stayed for three-ish days with the mothers and Eric's sister's family. Chloe had a fabulous time, in the kiddie area or the wave pool with Daddy or me or Mimaw or Omi or Michelle. She started out timid, but by the end was going down the slides by herself, slipping down on her back and lying there in her life jacket waiting for a hand up so she could go again. Whenever we took a break, she'd willingly accept a drink or a snack or a diaper change, but pretty soon she was tugging at somebody's arm to go back into the water.

She got to spend a lot of time with her cousin Addie, which I think both of them enjoyed. Addie tends to be a bit bossy, as befits her role as eldest cousin and four-year-old, but they played in the water and at the kids' playground, and in our room in the mornings, and giggled together a lot.

Maia continues her schedule of feeding every two hours, but with a ratio of seven adults/teens to four kids, I got to spend a good amount of time away from her (which sounds terrible, but hey, I like being in the water too). She seemed to like the humidity and warmth and white noise while we were there.

Hey, how come I don't get to go on the water slides?
This was our first real Snyder family vacation with the girls, and I think it was a success--we all had a good time, and the community of extended family is always nice, and the scramble of coordinating schedules and preferences wasn't too bad. I was happy we went, for all of us but particularly for Chloë. We played hard, which I think is how this sort of vacation should be, and spent today recovering--after a disagreement on whether the concept of "having a bath in the morning" exists, Chloë's hair finally no longer smells like chlorine. Hooray!

I gave my love a cherry

2011-06-15T15:42:00.003-04:00

Man, only two weeks left of maternity leave. This last week we've been trying to get a few things done, plus getting ready for the water park trip. In the meantime, the girls continue to grow up.

Chloë talks herself to sleep these days. It's hilarious to listen to her. "Mama Daddy Chloë Maia. Monkey jump. Dolly baby jump. Dolly baby sleep. Pooh bear sleep. Wait a minute! See you in the morning? Bye-bye Mama, bye-bye Daddy, bye-bye Maia, bye-bye Chloë. Bye-bye milk." She announces whatever happens to her and whatever she sees, and apparently whatever crosses her mind: "Someone coming downstairs." "Mama go potty now." "Go see Mimaw Omi Addie Raegan? Aunt Angie? Grandpa Halmoni? Grandpa Nana?" "Chloë watch Potty Elmo other day." (It is amazing how serious the actors sound on that show.)

One of her favorite words lately is "give." Our friend Nancy came by a few weeks ago to meet Maia and brought a present for each of them; Chloë's was a fuzzy duck with accompanying blanket. She picks up the duck and announces, "Incy gave ducky." (She can't do Ns to start with but seems to be okay with them in the middle of words.) When I let her have her favorite snacks, blueberries or fruit strips, she invariably walks out and tells Eric, "Mama gave blueberry/fruit snack." It's a good thing I hadn't given her anything I didn't want him to know.

Maia, in the meantime, has discovered the baby in the mirror and is starting to spend more time alert and not crying, which is nice. She's spending almost no time in the bassinet at no time, which drives me crazy, but I think the same thing happened with Chloë. I don't know if that's a result of my lack of patience or their habits. Ah well. I'll take the quiet time, and the solitary sleep will come eventually.

Where have all the cowgirls gone?

2011-06-09T22:23:00.004-04:00

Where did my chicken-legged little baby go? Sometime while I wasn't looking, Maia has started packing on the weight, especially in her thighs, and gotten bigger all around. Even though she's six weeks (and a day) old, I've been thinking of her as newborn, "0 months," because all of her 0-3 months clothes were so gapingly huge. Not so anymore. They're hardly tight, but she no longer swims in them, and she's moved up to size 1 diapers. And her legs and arms are no longer scrawny. It's good progress, but it startles me.

And where did my Kayyee go? Because that's how Chloë was pronouncing her name up until, I think, yesterday. Suddenly, today, she's Koë. (Ls are still on our wish list, along with Ss, Fs, and THs.) Was it because her Aunt Karolyn was here for a visit, and Chloë called her "Aun' Kayyo"? Sometime soon she's going to stop referring to herself in third person, and Eric will be relieved, and my heart will twist because it will mean she's really truly her own person, and not just mine. Is that selfish? I wish I had more time with her. Jealousy cuts both ways.

Can't touch this

2011-05-31T09:16:00.001-04:00

Yo, homies.

Status report: Month 1 (Maia)

2011-05-29T22:45:00.004-04:00

Maia's first month has been a blur of feedings and diaper changes. And more feedings. The feedings are going fine; she seems to be healthy and happy, except in the evenings and also, when she's not feeding. Ahem. I am a little biased on this topic. We're leaving Maia and Chloë with their grandmothers for a few hours tomorrow to celebrate our anniversary and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, not having a baby attached to me that long.

Maia came into the world smoothly, after an induction and a happily short labor with an extremely precipitous delivery--her father didn't have to catch her, but possibly only because the midwife decided not to leave the floor after I was six centimeters dilated. She was born mid-afternoon and met her sister, one grandpa, and two grandmothers not long after, and has been meeting more people all month. We woke her up more than we apparently had to her first couple of days, for feedings, to make sure she didn't get jaundice the way her sister did. I miss that lost sleep. Ah well.

Her sister has been and continues to be fascinated by her; she's been kissed and prodded and her hands and feet touched and examined more than any baby not in the hospital probably ought to, but it's all been in the name of love, or at least interest. She's just started smiling, and half the time it's at Chloë rather than at us.

We're all starting to settle into the routine, or at least the routine until I go back to work. We feed every hour and a half to two hours; she sleeps sometimes, often on Mama or Daddy's chest, sometimes through Chloë's "indoor voice," sometimes not. She gets cranky in the evenings, and prefers to be on the move. Eric and I expect to get plenty of exercise if this keeps up. She likes to be shushed (apparently it mimics the sound of my heartbeat in the womb) and swung back and forth, but isn't keen on her swing unless she's already mostly asleep. She does like baths, as long as she's nice and warm and not slipping down--sponge baths were bad, but the new baths in the tub are great.

She's starting to grow into her skin, filling out and looking less like Gollum and more like, well, a baby. I can see her sister in her, and sometimes have to remind myself that this is an entirely different baby. It's not so hard to remember when she screams; her scream is different. People say she looks like me; the technician at the hospital, who was the same one who helped out at Chloë's birth, said to Chloë when she first visited, "I don't think Mommy and Daddy make babies that look like Daddy." But Eric's mom and some other people say they see him in her. That's only fair. I don't see either of us in her (I didn't with Chloë either until relatively recently). I see a baby of ours, and that's all. That's enough.

Chloë - Status report: Month 22

2011-05-24T23:34:00.001-04:00

Chloë's twenty-second month was punctuated by the arrival of her new baby sister Maia, and that's been the big story of the month: working out how life with a baby sister works. She's been a champ mostly. She was so patient while we were in the hospital and she stayed first with Mimaw and Omi and then with Grandpa and Halmoni--though Grandpa tells me she was getting sad and bewildered by the end. She hangs on my legs whenever I'm nursing Maia, and tends to ask for food and drink and books and hugs more often during those times. It's heartrending and also slightly annoying to see her plead for a hug when I'm in the middle of nursing the baby and she knows quite well by now that I'm not going to move for the next forty-five minutes unless it's an emergency.

She's definitely jealous, but she's also our "big helper," fetching things and putting diapers in the diaper pail and being pretty good about our constant injunctions to be gentle around the baby. And she seems to like Maia herself (though I'm not a hundred percent positive that this isn't because we praise her whenever she shows signs of affection); she's always asking to see or hold her, and likes to kiss her head and stroke her hands. She's started chanting "Dubuduba Maia" in the car (when she tends to babble nonsense, for some reason). I vaguely wonder if she's using it as an epithet, the way I say "Oh brother," but it's adorable anyway.

She seems to have developed a favorite color: green. She has a pair of green shorts, and now that it's finally warm enough to wear them, she's obsessed. "Green pants?" she asked multiple times. "Green pants icky?" she said sadly when we convinced her that they were in the wash and couldn't be worn. We went shopping recently and bought her a bunch of 3T summer clothes (also bathing suit and hat and life vest in anticipation to a water park trip with family later this summer), and looked almost desperately for more green shorts, but there were none. Today we went to Target to get, among other things, blackout curtains for her room, and after she picked out the ones she liked (green) I spotted a pair of green boy's shorts. I pulled the 3T size off the rack and waved them at her, saying, "What do you think?" She responded, "Green pants!" and started to pull down the shorts she was wearing.

She's become more interested in her clothes recently; she often picks out her pants or shirt, and often her socks. She likes playing with her jewelry box and the bracelets and earrings ("ingy") inside. One thing I've noticed is that her memory is better than it used to be, and it shows up with the jewelry--she keeps her earrings in a little bag, and if I ask her where they are, she can tell me if they're in the bag or on her bed or what. She can take complex instructions now ("Put down your sippy, then pick up that green ball beside your coloring table, and put it in the box."), but is also showing more willfulness. She has a hat and sunglasses and hairclips and various other things, but it's anybody's guess as to whether we could actually get her to wear them for appropriate lengths of time; it's all we can do to get her to wear them long enough for pictures.

Her language continues to develop at an astounding rate. It's incredible how quickly she picks up words and their meanings, just from hearing two people talk--I mean, I know it's not just us, she hears other people and watches TV and such, but still, it's amazing. She's up to four-word sentences ("No go see Mama," "Chloë have some yogurt raisins?") and is game to repeat pretty much anything. She discusses the people she sees ("go see people?" she said excitedly when we mentioned a shopping trip the other day) and when things fall or roll, and who's coming down the stairs, and what's going on in her shows, and what she's doing, and what we're doing, and on and on and on.

She's fascinated with computers and cameras; as Eric said earlier today, while he videotaped her turning somersaults ("tumbling"), it's difficult to capture the native Chloë because when she sees a camera, she wants it so she can look at the pictures. She wants everything these days. She's constantly saying "Chloë have some-a?" which is her way of saying "I have the munchies." If we have something, she wants a bite. If we bring out something new--a pen, say, or an old toy she's forgotten--she wants to hold it and play with it. At Target we stopped in one of the toy aisles to look for tricycle pedal blocks (no luck) and she wandered to a nearby stand of cheap toys. She picked up several things in turn, squeezing them and saying "Chloë have yellow ball?" "Chloë have red ball?" and just "Chloë have?" when she couldn't identify the object (it was a mold for sand at the beach, so fair enough). We didn't respond to these requests, if they were requests, and she didn't object when we walked away without any of them, but I don't know how long that will last.

Now that it's warmer she's finally been able to go outside more, which has been great. She still likes walks and just wandering around the yard; she loves the sidewalk chalk she got for Easter; and Grandpa and Halmoni bought her two early birthday presents: a tricycle and a slide. She's too short for the tricycle (thus the need for pedal blocks) but loves being pushed around on it, or even just pulling it behind her as we walk. She loves the slide, too...theoretically. We've gone to the park several times lately, and while she talks excitedly about the swings and the slide, she's had a hard time actually using either one on her one. On our last visit she finally used a swing by herself for a couple of minutes, and was eventually coaxed into going down a baby slide by herself. (She likes going down the really big slides on Mama's or Daddy's lap, though.) She hasn't yet gone down her own slide. We're thinking we may need to have her cousin or her friends model for her.

Eric's been talking a lot lately about how big Chloë is, and how sweet, and how autonomous. Having Maia around as comparison helps, of course, but she really is seeming way more grown-up and more a person than she used to be, even than last month. She can do and say and understand so much, and she has her own little quirks, some adorable and some maddening, and she's so loving and so fun to be around when she isn't driving us crazy. But we'll take the crazy, and the love. We're all about both of those in this family.

Music to my ears

2011-05-22T21:06:00.003-04:00

Chloë has started to sing. It's very short, hesitant phrases now, reminding me of when she first started to laugh. One of her favorite shows is Sesame Street's "Going Green," known in our household as "Green Elmo." We have this whole coding scheme for her videos. There's Number Show, Monkey Show, Sky Babies, Water Babies, Color Babies, Flower Babies, Big Bird, Elmo, and Green Elmo. Oh, and Snowman Show, by which she means the Baby Einstein Christmas video, which we stopped showing her long before she could say either "snowman" or "show" (and don't let her watch now) but evidently she remembers it.

Ahem. Anyway, Green Elmo contains a number of songs on the subject of saving the Earth. One of them contains the line "You and me Earth, we're best friends," and I heard her softly singing "Hue me Errr," after it came on. I sang it for her, and she beamed at me and said, as she does lately for anything upon which she looks favorably, "One more time?" We did the same thing with a later song. I love her baby singing. I sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when we were working on dinner (after a ridiculous meltdown about whether she could have the entire pancake or just a bite) and she loved it. I can't wait to share my favorite childhood songs with her.

(Not music to my ears: Maia's crying whenever she isn't eating or sleeping. For a while she seemed simply to be hungry all the time. Now she's just cranky all the time. I caught myself thinking tonight during dinner, which she slept through, how nice it would be if she never woke up. Which I didn't mean literally, of course, but...yeah. Silence is nice.)

A new era begins.

2011-05-20T08:43:00.000-04:00

"Mom! Can't you see we're busy discussing policy?!"

On communication

2011-05-19T22:19:00.004-04:00

Last night I went into Chloë's room to put her blanket back on her, as I often do, and discovered that she was lying right next to the edge of the bed, having moved the blanket barricade we erected when the bed rail turned out to be a bad idea. (She loved leaning on it and climbing over it and basically daring it to turn on her. We figured we'd better move it before it did.) I didn't want to risk waking her by moving her, so I fetched a spare pillow and put it down on the floor beneath her, just in case. In the morning when she fetched me and we returned to her room, she pointed to the pillow and said, "Bloody nose."

I examined the pillow. It was clean. I examined her nose. It was also clean. "You had a bloody nose?" I said, doubtfully. (Note: no one ever told me that so much of my conversation with my toddler would consist of repeating what I think she's just said.) She nodded. Then she said, "Mama help."

This didn't seem to be a request for assistance, rather a report on past events. (Note: conversing with my toddler has also taught me that way more of communication than I thought is nonverbal.) I said, to be sure, "I helped you with the nosebleed?"

She nodded. "I didn't help you with a nosebleed last night," I told her. "Are you thinking of some other night?" She wasn't too sure about that one, but I was satisfied in my own mind...except that I don't know what connection the pillow had to a memory of a nosebleed. In any case, I moved the pillow, and she was happy (until the next time she found some miniscule crumb or thread on the floor, which she always picks up and hands to one of us with a concerned expression, as if to say, "Get your housecleaning act together, people").

Hey jealousy

2011-05-15T10:58:00.005-04:00

Everyone in the house other than me is sleeping. I should be sleeping, too, theoretically, but this morning Eric let me sleep in until 9:30, which gave me something like a reasonable amount of sleep (after eleven hours of trying. Part of the problem is that I forgot to put Maia in a nightgown for bed, and also decided to be serious about putting her in the bassinet rather than with me, so when she unwrapped herself from her blankets she was cold) (also, she's currently happily asleep in the crib but tends to go down hard in the bassinet. Maybe it's just not comfortable enough?), and I don't get these alone moments often. Perhaps I should be doing something with this one other than being online? Oh well.

Chloë is becoming shorter and shorter of sleep. She routinely wakes up between six and six-thirty in the mornings, and her naps have been shortening from two hours to between one and one and a half. Sending her to bed later hasn't helped, so we're going to try earlier in the hopes that she'll at least be better rested, if not any later in rising.

She's whinier and shorter-tempered than she used to be, though I can't say for sure whether that's from the lack of sleep or the jealousy. Last night Eric said to her, after pulling her off of me so she wouldn't continue to trample my feet and climb on my legs and pull pillows down on me while I was nursing Maia, "I know you're jealous." She repeated anxiously "Chloë jealous? Chloë jealous?" and rubbed her nose, as she does when she thinks she's got another nosebleed (she's had several lately). Eric told her, "Jealous is a feeling, like happy or sad," but she kept repeating and rubbing. I told her "Jealous has nothing to do with your nose," but I'm not sure she understood.

She does continue to like to look at Maia, and kiss her head or investigate her fingers, but I'm not convinced that this isn't partly because we praise her for doing so. I don't suppose that's entirely a bad thing, though. I have to interrupt my time with her so often to go pick up Maia or nurse her, and I'd hate it too if I were Chloë. Heck, I don't like it myself. Last night after a midnight feeding I sat up a while to rock Maia to sleep, and after some creepy-looking eye-opening and shutting with only her whites shutting and lots of limb twitching, she woke up and wanted to nurse again. I put her down and went downstairs to where Eric was working on grading to complain. "Why am I so much more impatient the second time around?" I wondered.

"I think it's because last time you had PPD, and your brain wouldn't let you go in that direction," Eric said.

"Well, which one's better?" I grumbled. Maia had been crying all this time, and I started hearing some blanket-rustling that wasn't her, so I started back up the steps, saying, "I better go get her before the daughter I actually like wakes up." Which is not to say I don't like Maia. I'm finding myself much more fond of her than I was of Chloë at this age--again, probably due to the PPD that time and the lack of it this time. But at one in the morning when I think I'm fully due a simple hour of sleep and being denied it, I'm not much better than a nearly-two-year-old who just wants some time with her mama.

I want some time with my oldest daughter, too. (And also my pillow. Pity Chloë won't sleep with me. She says she wants to when I try to take a nap, but her "Chloë sleep" really means "Chloë lay down by Mama and pull the blankets away from her and chatter incessantly and, if the chatter gets no response, poke at her.") I'm not seeing how to get it yet, much, since Maia nurses mostly every 1.75 hours, but I'm going to try. And we're going to try to get Chloë more sleep, and if possible, some patience. And keep on going.

The parrot and the banshee

2011-05-11T21:34:00.000-04:00

Chloë is a regular parrot these days. She still can't say S or R or L or TH or W or F, but she's evidently gained enough of a grasp on language that she's able to start repeating what we say--so when I say to her, "You like playing in water, don't you, sweetie?" she says back, "Water don't you sweetie?" Or rather, "Howah doh hoo teevie?" I would love to know how she decides what consonants to substitute when. Why does "there" become "bear" and "that" become "dat"?

"Maia Maia Maia" is a frequent refrain these days. She hangs on my legs while I'm nursing Maia and pats her sister's head, or kisses it, or points at her long, slender fingers and says knowledgeably, "Tingah." She's also started pointing at random things and saying "Maia!" so that I'll correct her with "That's not Maia, that's Mama!" or "That's the couch!" or "That's the Boppy!" She's not excited about my unavailability when I'm behind the Boppy (for that matter, neither am I), but she's dealing with it pretty well. She delights in taking diapers to the trash for us--usually saying "Baby diaper?" when accepting one, and calling "Diaper in garbage!" as she runs back. She's up to four-word sentences on occasion. Her aunt says she misses this stage in her own daughter, and I can see why. It's so interesting to hear Chloë's thoughts coming out as speech. I wonder whether having words to put her thoughts into speeds them up or slows them down.

Maia, on the other hand, is mostly pretty quiet. This is not, happily, due to unnatural sleepiness such as Chloë had when she was this age, just that she hasn't fussed much except when she's had an exceptionally yucky diaper or when we haven't attended to her nutritional needs immediately. Kid loves to eat. At her checkup it turned out she'd gained seven ounces in five days. She generally falls asleep about every ten minutes of a feeding, and a full forty-minute feeding lasts her a little under two hours unless she has a sound nap, so if I didn't wake her up she'd be eating pretty much, oh, constantly.

She has had a few opportunities to exercise her lungs, though. She cried herself to sleep, or maybe to resignation, on the way home from her checkup because I just didn't want to sit in the pediatrician's for an extra hour to nurse her. And the other day Eric was trying to soothe her while I finished something up--or just sulked at the prospect of yet another feeding an hour and a half after the last, I forget which--and her cries turned to what sounded like actual screams. All was forgiven once we were settled and the R.I.N.D.S. was in place, but I was fairly alarmed. I never heard this before. Her cries don't sound like Chloë's did, either. I can't say I remember exactly how Chloë sounded, but this wasn't it. Maia has this burst of particularly demanding vocalization in the middle of every cry that Chloë didn't. I'm having this feeling that it's a good thing Chloë is the oldest, because otherwise Maia might run her right over.

A mother's memory, refreshed

2011-05-03T16:27:00.006-04:00

I forgot how warm a newborn's head is.

Miss Maia is doing well, settling into home life, I think. Mom and Dad are here for another day--they arrived the day she was born--and have been a huge help in keeping the house running and getting us all a chance to take a breath and sort out what this new life is going to be like.

Labor and delivery were delightfully short and uneventful. I'll post a birth story later...hopefully less late than Chloë's. It'll also be shorter. I must say, I'd forgotten how annoying those hospital beds are, especially when you've got an IV in one arm and three hospital bracelets in the other. Also, how many different nurses you get in the course of a two-day stay.

Nursing is going well this time. It's still in the hurty stage, but Maia's weight is about where it should be, according to her pre-discharge and first-checkup measurements, and she's happy to latch on and stay there, except for a penchant for drifting off for five-minute naps and then waking up, ready for another refreshing drink, just when I've gotten up and am trying to use the bathroom or get a snack or a glass of water. I'd forgotten how thirsty nursing makes me. Also how sleepy. And how, when everything is quiet, you can hear the milk moving through a baby's tiny body as she drinks.

Also, I'd forgotten that moment at the beginning of nearly every nursing session where I feel awful and everything in the world is hateful. Ah well.

I've been told I can start lifting Chloë again, which is good because she's been very annoyed about being denied. She likes having a baby around to kiss and point at and say "Baby baby baby baby baby baby baby" to, but she's not so hot on being forbidden to climb on me because she's in danger of squishing her sister. I've been trying to have one-on-one time with her when possible. Having Maia around makes me notice how grown-up Chloë is, so loose-limbed and tousle-haired and talkative. And fun, except when she's being whiny, but I can understand that at a time like this.

We've been tense as Maia has gotten yellower, but we discussed jaundice at her checkup yesterday and the pediatrician had us go get a bilirubin level, and she's fine. We're going back later this week for another checkup, just in case, but I think she's doing fine. Everything is so much easier this time around. I know about changing diapers and clipping nails, and while I dislike the nighttime wakings as much as ever I know exactly what to do during them. I'm a little concerned about Thursday, when we wake up and have no Grandpa and Halmoni around, but every other family of four is able to deal with it; we will too.

Welcoming the Competition

2011-04-28T20:00:00.003-04:00

Maia Verity Snyder
Born 27 April 2011 at 14:51
3.54 kg (7lb 12 oz), 52 cm (20.5 in)

Status report: Month 21

2011-04-25T15:49:00.003-04:00

Chloë the 21-month-old is full of energy and words. “Dahhhhhhhhh!” she calls as she’s running down the hallway. “Dada sleeping. Dada wake?” she says hopefully in the mornings, and slides off her bed to dash to our bedroom when I say “Yes, you can go wake him up now,” if it's a reasonable hour. "Outside! Shoes on?" she says when we so much as hint at the possibility of going outside, and runs to the shoe rack. "Chloë tumble, naked while!" she says happily as she tries to turn somersaults on her bed in the time between clothes and pajamas.

She's so big! So tall! So smart! She's growing more clever, I think, or at least more facile with her words and actions. One day I was giving her a snack of cheese and crackers and she said "Wash hands?" (which she still loves to do) while I was preparing them. "Not until after you finish your cheese crackers," I told her, handing down a piece of cheese. She handed it back and said, "No cheese crackers. Wash hands now?"

"Now" is a notable recent addition to her vocabulary. (So are "coming," "time out," and "magic missile.") Mostly she uses it to make demands (e.g., "You can have more chicken after you eat some of your potatoes." One bite later: "Chicken now."), which are increasing in number. She seems to have gotten the hang of either/or questions, too; before if we said "Do you want grapes or strawberries?" she'd either nod if she wanted the strawberries or say "No," if she wanted the grapes; now she'll say "Dawberry" or "Grapey."

She gets frustrated very easily, such as when she's trying to play "peeky-boo" and a corner of the blanket is stuck under her or not falling over her face as she wishes it, but her meltdowns usually don't last long. Yesterday, at Mimaw's for Easter, she was exceedingly unhappy when she had to leave the house tricycle to go inside for dinner, and that was a lot of crying for her: a few minutes of inconsolable sobbing, stopped suddenly when she touched her cheeks and said, "Tears?" and then, seeing her Aunt Michelle start up the staircase, "Mimi upstairs?", her little voice catching on the remnants of her sobs. This is often how her fits of crying end.

She says "Chloë make?" hopefully whenever I mention making a meal or look through my cookbooks. When I say yes, she pushes the chair we have in the kitchen toward the counter and asks to be lifted up, and then when I'm getting things ready says anxiously "Chloë do," over and over until I hand her a measuring cup of flour and ask her to dump it into the bowl, or tell her to push the 'on' button of the scale. Then when we're done, she cries because she can't do any more. She runs to help when she hears us open the dishwasher, and asks "Turn on?" whenever we close it.

She continues to be a stellar eater. She'll eat an entire banana for breakfast and ask for more. She also asks for candy pretty often now, though it's almost always without actually naming candy--we just know what she means because she tends to specify what she wants otherwise. We keep it in a drawer in the pantry, and she goes over to it and says "Have some?" or "Have couple?" because we'll usually say "Yes, you can have some chocolate," or "You can have a couple of jelly beans," when we consent. She got an Easter basket from her Mimaw, which will keep her well-supplied for quite a while. I may steal the Milky Way egg, though. I'm not so sure about caramel for toddlers. She does very well with chewing things in general, though--she can now eat raw carrots, and whole grapes ("Bite," I told her anxiously the first several times I let her try this, and she looked at me as if to say "Duh, Mother"). Also, the other day she had raw garlic, and then the marinated spinach salad the garlic was going into, and asked for more of both. Eric winced and said, "I'm going to make you some bland food."

She's been enjoying drinking water from a Dixie cup the last week or so, and so proud of herself. She's improving with her fork, and we're now encouraging her to use it whenever possible. She loves dipping waffles or pancakes in syrup or chicken in barbecue sauce or pretty much anything in ketchup, and while she favors using her fingers she's now pretty good at stabbing food with her fork to dip--that is, when she doesn't try to dip her fork directly. She's already pretty good with a spoon. She doesn't understand the concept of cutting things with it, but that's okay. We introduced her to ice cream--well, to ice cream in her own little bowl--and she needs to have it in pieces that she can scoop up to eat it successfully. She's very keen on ice cream. She and I had some the night of my birthday, after a special run out to the store to get it, and almost every day since she's asked "Eye keem?" We say, "Not until after dinner, and not every day," but it doesn't stop her from asking.

She can name the baby in Mama's belly, and knows that the quilt I was working on until yesterday is Maia's. She kept saying "Koë banky" anyway, and wrapped it around herself while I was finishing the binding, but she didn't object when I put it away when it was finished and had her snuggle in her own quilt. We bought her an I'm-a-big-sister book, Best-Ever Big Sister by Karen Katz (we have two other Katz books she likes), and it's at currently the top of her to-be-read list, crowding out even Elmo and Green Eggs and Ham. At naptime and bedtime I routinely ask "What book do you want to read?" and she routinely says "Big Sister." Then, when we finish, she says, "More," or "Again." It's a different story depending on whether Mama or Dada reads it to her, since we modify it differently--for example, Eric skips the "I can poop in the potty" page, while I read it and explain that she'll learn to do that soon. Because she will. Right?

She's started trying to brush her own teeth, especially in the mornings when I brush mine (we only routinely brush hers at night), and wants to hold the floss holder when Eric flosses her. She also wants to brush her own hair, which is less successful since (a) she tends to stroke the flat part of the brush against her head and (b) her hair is a tangly flyaway mess most of the time anyway. Baby brushes are just not cutting it. Combs and my brush (the kind with small balls at the end of the bristles) work much better, but she doesn't like the pulling. So half the time the back of her head is a nest of frizz. She can also climb into the car into her carseat--well, mostly; she needs a boost to get turned around, at least in my car--and likes to click the carseat harness together.

She's definitely fully settled in her new room, though she still occasionally wants to go into the nursery for a change or to jump in the crib (we just say no, and she accepts this). The singing I used to do for ten minutes or more to get her settled for sleep is now down to one or two songs, if any, and she glories in having a bed that's also a playspace. She loves when I sing "Pop Goes the Weasel" and make her monkey dance around her and "pop" into her face or the air. She slides out of the bed expertly, though climbing up still mostly causes her to ask for help (though she can do it herself if she's determined enough). She's been waking up early, and so very tired by the time bedtime rolls around, but we're not sure what to do about it. For now, I'm going to bed earlier so as not to lose sleep, and trying not to worry about it. She's still happy and energetic and smart and so very, very cute; a few hours of lost sleep won't hurt her any.

Last days

2011-04-20T15:50:00.000-04:00

Chloë's been waking up early and often this week. She often cries, possibly in her sleep, around midnight or one, and then wakes me up with screaming around four. Then she comes into our room at around six-thirty, which is hour before her usual wake-up time, saying "Chloë wake!" I pull her up in bed with me and have her snuggle down in the hopes she'll go back to sleep and I can have my usual extra hour. She snuggles, but she doesn't sleep. Instead, she says, "Mama wake? Dada sleep. Chloë wake. Mama wake? Mama up! Chloë up! Go down? Mama glasses. Baby crib [referring to the bassinet]. Baby sleep? Dada sleep? Mama sleepy? Go down!" until I have to get out of bed before I throw her out. I don't know what's causing it (the early waking, I mean; I know what's causing the chattering). Does she know these are her last days to have Mama and Dada all to herself?

I am now more pregnant than I've ever been, at least if we assume my LMP due date is accurate. (Since I was still breastfeeding at the time and my cycle was still getting back to normal, I'm more inclined to trust the ultrasound's, which is five days later.) Yesterday evening I kept thinking "This time last pregnancy, I was in the hospital." Then I started having crampy contractions and began to panic, because I've still got a few things I really want to get done before I have to drop my life in order to have the new baby. Luckily they must have been Braxton-Hicks...or else the pure force of my ire when I told Eric I felt funny and he began making faces at me convinced my body to hold off a while.

I don't feel ready for this second baby, not quite yet. I even avoided the crackers on the dinner table on purpose. Setting aside the projects I want to finish (nothing vital to the baby--we've got carseats installed and clothes washed and the bassinet set up and, aside from one piece from the midwives that they can fax in, my paperwork in place), I've been thinking about my labor and delivery and early days with Chloë, and regretting all the things I did wrong. Luckily there was no lasting damage to her, and if my only problem is a bad attitude going into labor I'm doing fine, but I still feel I've got a bad precedent. Maybe that will only make it easier for this time around to be better. I know a lot more this time, after all. And I don't think I'll really have to let the pieces of my life scatter and pick them back up afterward, which is kind of how it's feeling on this side of things (being understaffed at work, and then having my sole true peer go on vacation for a week because it's his last chance until after I get back from leave, doesn't help).

As far as the medication during labor debate goes, I've settled on a strong, firm "I'll wait and see how I feel." If I get to the hospital and am doing okay, then fine. If I get to the hospital and am panicky and despairing, I'll get an epidural and take a nap. At least while I'm at the hospital Chloë won't wake me up early.

Chloë do

2011-04-19T13:39:00.001-04:00

Chloë spent this morning while I was prepping for work running up and down the upstairs hallway, shirtless, saying "dah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah," as her pounding footsteps jolted her. Every once in a while she'd stop and say brightly, "Koë hak [walk]," or "Koë coming," or "Koë go!" and take off again.

The letting her help bake thing was a mistake. Now she wants to help cook and bake everything. This would be awesome if she could hold a measuring cup steady or were allowed to get near the hot stove or could be told there's nothing more to do without getting upset. Actually, it's still kind of awesome, just also a bother. I made bread the other day and had her dump in flour and yeast and then push the buttons on the scale. She liked the buttons. She told Eric and me proudly later, "Koë make beh [bread]." She was most unhappy last night when she couldn't help with the mac and cheese, but consoled herself by eating the leftover chopped onion out of the measuring cup.

Yesterday she decided she wanted to drink from a real (Dixie) cup, and spent about ten minutes at the table taking drinks of water with a look of fierce concentration and then setting it down to grin delightedly when she didn't spill any. Eventually she started trying to stick her fork and her fingers in the cup, which meant it was time for dinner to be over.

Now that I'm near the end of my pregnancy (one week! Or so), picking her up has become rare (and uncomfortable...I wonder if lifting weights would be any use during labor; it feels like it). But I've been asking her to sit down with me, and now she'll ask me to sit down so we can snuggle. It's very sweet, and makes me feel better about the upcoming postpartum stage where I'm not supposed to lift anything over ten pounds or so. We still read a lot, she picking out books (usually it's Tickle Me, My Name is Elmo, which I am so sorry I picked up at the bookstore) and then willing to put them back but generally unable to unless I help her make space in the bookcase. I think she'll be willing to help fetch diapers and things for her little sister. I'm looking forward to seeing how big a helper she can be.

Three-word phrases and four-syllable words

2011-04-13T10:56:00.001-04:00

Chloë's most recent word is "incubator." We have the AAP's Your Baby's First Year book, which lately has seen most action when Chloë wants to look at the drawings of babies in it. One of the pictures is of a preemie in a NICU. Usually I skip over it because it's not very detailed and therefore not interesting, but the other day I decided to stop, for whatever reason, and explain that this was a very small baby in an incubator. "I-koo-bay-tuh," she repeated. I blinked. I said, "That's right. You were in one once, but only for a very short time." Later she was able to repeat it to Eric when I prompted her. I doubt it's going to stick in her mind, since it's not a word that's going to see common use, but I was impressed anyway.

And she's been working on her three-word phrases lately, which thrills me no end, though I admit it's cute when she uses two sentences in the place of one ("Koë more. Do more") because she can't figure out how to fit everything she wants to say into two words. I've heard "Mama go down," "Bird fly up," "Chloë help Dada," "Push garbage can" (Is that really a three-word phrase, since "garbage can" is essentially a single word?), "No pokey nose." She says this last one a lot...then does it anyway. She's definitely approaching two years old.

Our daughter the frood

2011-04-10T12:12:00.003-04:00

Chloë is having a weird relationship with baths lately. She doesn't ask for them as often as she used to, but she still asks (always complete with sign). Then, when we say "Bath time! With bubbles! Time to get naked!" she wails, "No bath! No bath!" and tries to run away. It's not the naked part. She loves being naked; that's why we say it. It's a special part of the day, being naked "for a while" after getting out of and before getting into her pajamas each day. And when she actually gets into the bath, she's okay. Yesterday she was clutching three of her ducks to her chest, saying triumphantly "Tree ducky!" She still hates having her head wet, but there's nothing we can do about that. Her Mimaw coaxed her under the shower head at a recent sleepover, but that doesn't work for us unless we want her collapsed in sobbing terror.

At the same time, she's gotten inexplicably interested in her towel. There are two that are hers alone: A big rectangular one with butterfly wings and antennae and a square one with an embroidered frog, both hot pink and hooded. She's taken to requesting them whenever we're in the bathroom (the current one hangs on the door) and carrying them around until she forgets about them. She is, after all, not even two. But overall she's awfully interested in where her towel is.

Cookie monster

2011-04-03T20:49:00.004-04:00

Chloë helped make her first batch of cookies today. They were oatmeal cookies, the Quaker Oats recipe but with cinnamon chips added. She was a bit perplexed at first when I dragged the chair up to the counter and started pulling out ingredients, but she was delighted to help dump in sugar, flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, vanilla, oats, and cinnamon chips. Also got some tips on the fine art of cookie dough tasting--that is, that it's better to get a dollop on your finger after the dough is all mixed than get lumpy dough spread across your knuckles.

She got a bit anxious when there was nothing more for her to help with--"Koë hep," she cried--and even more so when the oven went off but the cookies weren't quite done. "Koë cooky!" She was appeased when I promised she would have a cookie as soon as they were baked. And she did, or at least part of the one that we all shared to determine whether they were truly done. She wanted more, but I told her she could have another tomorrow. We'll see whether she can hold out until after breakfast.

The peak

2011-03-28T22:32:00.001-04:00

This is it. I've reached the epitome of pregnancy. Barefoot, in a maternity tank top that nevertheless doesn't cover my belly, sciatica shooting down one leg, nerves frazzled from listening to my toddler scream "Mama! Stay!" after leaving her at bedtime because she wouldn't lie down, spoon in one hand and carton of ice cream in the other. This baby can come; there's nothing more left for me.

Status report: Month 20

2011-03-27T23:05:00.007-04:00

Chloë has been spending a lot of time this past month looking out of windows. She prefers to be outside, but with the weather as cold as it's been, she hasn't had much opportunity. She likes to see the people walking by, and the cars, and the birds, and the planes, and the squirrels, and the flowers. There are three patches of crocuses in our yard, just slender purple spears, and for the past few days she's wanted to look and poke at them whenever we went by. Today they had started to bloom, and she was delighted. "Flower open!" she said.

We continue to be amazed by her vocabulary and usage. I had thought reading the same set of books over and over was going to have driven me crazy by now, but it's actually very interesting to see how much she's picked up over the months. She has a little slider-box "opposites" book (which she calls "Oppy," just like her octopus), and first we would just say "open/closed," then "open box/closed box," as she seemed to understand more. Today Eric was reading it with her and she pointed and said, "Close box," and when prompted could relate that the other side was "open."

She's got her colors mostly down, though we're working on brown, black, and white, and is slowly working on the letters that she still can't really pronounce. I've been going through storage boxes for clothes and things for the new baby, and left a pile of laundry in the now-empty nursery. She was in there the other day and brought me the newborn insert for the carrier, saying proudly, "H." It took me a minute to realize it, but she was absolutely right.

We're slowly working on numbers, too. She can count along with Eric, sometimes up to ten, though she often gets lost past five, and clearly doesn't understand what most of the words she's saying actually mean. But she'll pick up the balloons her Grandpa and Halmoni bought when she was born and, after telling me "heart balloon" and "circle balloon," will parade around with them, saying "Two balloon." She gets a sippy of water for bedtime, and when, as is often the case, we've forgotten to take it down to the kitchen by the time naptime and its accompanying milk come around, she'll sometimes take one in each hand and say happily, "Two sippy."

She also recently learned how to drink from a straw, and as a result we got her a couple of straw cups. Her first successful venture was with milk, so now she requests "straw milk." We're working on the concept that juice and water will work with a straw, too.

She is now happily established in her big-girl bed. It's our full-sized spare bed with the frame removed and a bed rail removed, and she's just able to climb in and out of it herself if she's motivated. We've caught her wandering into the hallway a couple of times at night. Never after we've gone to bed, so far as we know, so far. She's been a restless sleeper lately; we don't know if it's a growth spurt or a response to the new bed or our anticipation of the new baby or just one of those things. She does go back to sleep pretty easily in the night, though sometimes that's at the cost of me lying down with her and then waking up a couple of hours later and realizing that her plastic aquarium soothed me to sleep probably before it did her.

She loves being a "helper," handing up dishes to be put away or picking up crayons or scrubbing her table with a paper towel, and Eric sometimes rewards her with a couple of M&Ms or a jelly bean; I just tell her "Thank you for being such a great helper" and she seems pleased with that too. She continues to be an excellent eater variety-wise, but has started showing some typical toddler variation in how much she eats in a given day. Some days we can't feed her fast enough; others she refuses all but a few bites at every meal. She's usually happy to accept raisins or fruit or Goldfish crackers. She asks for "Ms" sometimes, and we usually let her have two or three at a time, up to maybe six in a day. We're getting more lax about what we give her; we went to her friend Ellie's birthday the other day and she devoured an entire chocolate cupcake pretty much as fast as I could get my fingers and the paper out of the way.

She's showing a little shyness and stranger anxiety, nothing big. She's now started waving at people she sees around the neighborhood or in the store, saying "Hi people" or "Hi girl." A friend of Eric's came over today while she was napping. When she woke and I fetched her, I told her that Dada's friend named Ray was here, and she practiced waving and saying "Hi Ray." But when we got downstairs she retreated to a corner until I coaxed her halfway into the room, by enticing her with the "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" video. (I've decided I love Youtube.)

She's very much a mama's girl at the moment, which is inconvenient for my lower back (even with Eric taking over as much lifting duty as he can) but very sweet. She doesn't mind me going to work in the mornings, but she does need to know where I'm going. We went to the post office the other day and I went in by myself to mail a package. When I got back Eric told me Chloë needed a kiss from Mama, and when I went to deliver said kiss noticed her face was wet with tears. "She started screaming as soon as you left the car," he explained. But she's okay with me leaving her to watch her show while I use the bathroom, or with Dada while I fetch something from outside, as long as I tell her I'm going.

(They're clip-ons, Mom. The ones you bought me way back when. I put in earrings one day and she stared and prodded at them and wanted some of her own, so I pulled these out. Then she dropped them and broke one, and while I was able to fix it, we haven't told her that yet.)

We're having some slight issues with rebellion, but definitely nothing serious yet. We've had a showdown or two in which we (or at least I) felt kind of stupid insisting that she do something that really, in the long run, didn't matter, just because we didn't think we could let her get away with refusing. We're still feeling our way through these--I suppose we'll get better with practice. We gave up on potty training for now, expecting that the new baby will cause trouble enough without trying to force her into it when she's showing absolutely no interest. We continue to talk about the potty, and how Mama and Dada wear underwear instead of diapers, and I show her the Elmo potty song clip on Youtube sometimes, so we'll see in a couple of months if that has sunk in. In the meantime, she's started requesting "diaper change" sometimes, and reporting if it's a "poo" diaper (mostly...sometimes she lies, or maybe doesn't realize), which is helpful.

She continues to love TV and books and coloring, more than playing with her numerous toys most of the time. She's also taken to running back and forth around the house, or stomping in place like Fred Flintstone trying to run away, and adores jumping--ideally on her bed or ours, but the couch is good, too, and so is the floor. I played ring-around-the-rosie with her a couple of times (except without the falling-down part, because I'm too lumbersome at this point) and she has great fun with that, or when Eric or I dance with her or around her. She's funny, and she loves knowing that she's funny; she'll say or do something and Eric will laugh, and she'll immediately say "Dada ha?" Which makes us laugh more. We laugh a lot. We agree that she continues to get awesomer all the time.

Working things through

2011-03-21T21:08:00.002-04:00

I've been frustrated and anxious lately off and on, partly as the pregnancy hormones ebb and flow and partly as the cleanliness and functionality of the house does. (The bathroom sink drips, but I haven't been able to get it anywhere near our priority list, nor the paint the garage needs. The kitchen sink is leaking, possibly because we're having problems with plumbing in the basement. We had to have our furnace motor replaced. Box elder bugs are getting in. And so on. Whenever we manage to sell this house, we're just going to rent for the rest of our lives.) Someone once told me that her first pregnancy was all about waiting and her second was all about scrambling to get things done, and that's how I'm feeling too. With my projects behind and the house falling apart and the vacuuming happening maybe once a month with only one kid, how are we possibly going to keep this household running with two? I know people do it. They do it with three, four, five, more. I have my suspicions about what we're doing wrong, but working on the problems is taking time. And I don't have time. This baby is due in a month.

We went to our friends' two-year-old's birthday party on Saturday. Chloë had a great time playing with the balloons and the rubber duck favors and the unfamiliar toys and kids. I knitted, and commiserated with another woman due about the same time as me but more miserable--she's shorter, and I've been gifted with good pregnancy mojo; people at work keep telling me I only recently started looking pregnant, and aside from Chloë-induced backache, I haven't been having any real chronic problems, just acute ones. Eventually the noise and crowdedness got to me, and it was driving me crazy on both my account and Chloë's that we had no plans for dinner. So we left early, stopped at Panera Bread for dinner (note: their kids' grilled cheese sandwich is made with American cheese; Chloë turned up her nose at it), and went home, where Eric and Chloë went straight to bed and I sat up a little while to appreciate the quiet. I didn't do any work. Sometimes you can't.

Last night I laid in bed with Chloë, singing her a few songs ("Emmo dhong," she always requests, and "mohr Emmo," whenever I stop to draw breath. Luckily the songs from her Elmo DVD are very short. The theme song goes "La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's world/La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's world/Elmo loves his goldfish, his crayon too/That's Elmo's world!" Which is pretty sad when you think about it) and then talking about her day, which we've been doing lately to get her settled for sleep, which she persists in calling her "long nap." First we talked about Saturday's birthday party and about the walk we'd had with her cousins Addie and Rae, and how she had been allowed to ride Addie's tricycle ("A-ee. Bik. A-ee. Pee," because Addie has asked her to say "please" to ride the bike), and about the garter snake we saw on a different walk a couple of days before that ("Daw. Nake!").

And then we talked about the shopping we had done that day, and the shows we had watched and the coloring we had done, and I told her she had been a good girl, doing what we asked her and staying out of trouble, and I was glad she was a good girl and a happy girl. "Happy. Gul," she repeated. And then, "Mama. Happy?"

I wasn't quite sure whether it was a question or a comment. "Yes, mostly Mama is happy too," I told her. When I'm with her, it's not a lie. I haven't yet figured out how to fully integrate the happiness of being Chloë's mama with the happiness I had in my pre-Chloë life, which I think is part of the running-of-the-household problem, and I know that that conflict is going to get worse when the new baby comes. With luck, I'll get it together before they reach high school.

Green Eggs and Ham

2011-03-14T16:41:00.000-04:00

We had a video call with Grandpa and Halmoni Saturday morning, because Chloe had been indicating she wanted to see them. (She and Eric were looking at something on his laptop today and she said "Ganpa? Ha-ee?") It was a very nice call, and included a reading by Grandpa of Green Eggs and Ham. We have our own copy, and she asks for it nearly every day, but she was delighted nonetheless. "Ganpa," she said to me several times when we read it Saturday night, and Sunday night, and this morning. She likes to say "Nooooo!" when Sam says "Would you eat them ____?", and especially when the narrator changes his mind at the end and says "Say! I like green eggs and ham!" (Eric and I have agreed that he says this only to get Sam off his back, since restraining orders presumably don't exist in Dr.-Seuss-land.) When we get to the last page, she flips to the very end with a picture of Sam holding his platter and looking rather smug, and says, "Book over?"

I love the way she says her two-word phrases. Each word is very distinct, like listening to a computer recording read off numbers ("Your prescription number is. Five. Seven? Seven? Three." etc.). I admit hearing "Geen? Ham?" is getting slightly old, but it's charming nonetheless.

A mishmash of things maternal

2011-03-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

Being a woman pregnant with a daughter (and having another daughter) is depressing this week. Because of current politics, I mean. Otherwise, it's pretty cool. My late pregnancy is pretty mellow so far, other than a pinching pain that the midwife says may be the baby's head pressing against my nerves or may just be general tendon/muscle aches. Either way, it could go and I wouldn't mind.

Also, the hiccups. Our pregnancy book says that babies don't mind hiccups. That does not appear to be true with this baby. She's had hiccups several times today, and she's been particularly active. She's a very squirmy fetus to start with, but today's particularly bad. At my last checkup the midwife confirmed that she's head-down, but I already knew that; the hiccups tend to reverberate in my hips and pelvis and thighs. Hiccups are actually more annoying down there than when you've got them in your airway, it turns out.

I've been doing a little research into how to avoid another OP (face-up) labor, since I'm pretty confident that was the major source of my troubles last time. What I've read says that OP babies are more prevalent in modern times because women have more opportunity to lean back and lie down. Hmmph. So the advice is not to lean back in my chair or lie around with my feet up, but to stand straight and do exercises on my hands and knees. It's also not terribly confidence-inspiring in general. Oh well; I dealt with it before, I can probably do it again. Especially if I get more sleep this time around.

In the meantime, I'm keeping up the gentle reminders to Chloë that there's a baby in my belly, and that it will come out and live with us in a while. She repeats "baby baey" obediently, pointing to my belly (or sometimes kissing it, which is adorable beyond words), though I don't know what she really thinks about that. She does seem to be happy to leave the nursery behind, though. She told me last night she had a dirty diaper, and I carried her into the nursery to change it. "Nooooo!" she screamed, and pointed to the door.

"Do you want to be changed in your room?" I said, and she nodded. We've been changing her on the bed, so I grabbed one of the waterproof pads we inherited before she was born and have never used and brought it along to change her on her bed. I'm so glad she likes the new room, and isn't clinging to the old. We'll see how it goes when a new baby moves in. With luck she'll have forgotten, or won't care, that that used to be her old room. She seems happy with the little reading corner we've got on her bed, and the way she can jump on it, and the moon light and the box of blocks, and the dozen or so stuffed toys that can stay with her on the bed. The other day she took delight in stacking them, carefully, beside the bed rail until they reached their angle of repose and started tumbling down. Then she started sitting on her sock monkey and saying "Munky! Hide!" Then she jumped up and down. Then she made her monkey and her dolls jump. Ah, my little girl and her puppet minions.

The unbearable bigness of being

2011-03-06T20:57:00.004-05:00

What a big girl our girl is! Chloë is so much fun at this age. I know, I say that at every age. But seriously.

-She's been playing with the Swiffer for days. "Keen mohr [clean more]?" she says, and grabs it, and pushes it around. Likewise, she took the wet paper towel I used on her drawing table this morning and started to clean the table herself. Then the window, part of the bookcase and the back of my chair. "Keen mohr," she wailed when I tried to take it away.

-Everything is two-word phrases now. When we came home from shopping today and I set her down in the kitchen, she asked "Tee Emmo [see Elmo]?" Then, when I started unzipping her coat, she said, "Ju down," and set her sippy on the floor so I could remove her arms from her sleeves. Then she said, "Shoe off," and lifted her feet before I could ask her. "Stay Mama," was her request at bed tonight, after we refused to let her delay bedtime by "go potty." (Potty training remains at a standstill. But she does come to us and tell us when she's got a poopy diaper.)

-After her bath tonight she started to go into the nursery, then corrected herself and headed for her new, big-girl room. She's now entirely moved in except for a couple of pictures on the wall, and has had no trouble adjusting, except that she's a little harder to get to lie down when the bed is big enough we have to chase her.

-She loves, loves, loves Elmo at the moment. I'm not sure exactly how that happened. But she has a Sesame Street "Color Carnival" book with him in it, and Elmo diapers, and now an Elmo show. It contains a segment with three girls doing a clapping game that starts "Down down baby, I can do karate." She turns to me with the biggest smile whenever I start singing it and says, "Emmo! Kap!" and claps her hands.

We went to Costco Saturday and I found a duo of Elmo/Ernie and Elmo/Grover books, and of course we had to get it. She's asked me to read them a dozen times or more since then, though that might be because she keeps interrupting me when I try to read them to say "Emmo!" or "Hakking [walking]!" or "Grober? Heah?" because there's one page in the one where Grover has a frog on his head.

-We were making dinner tonight, taking turns at the stove, and while I was sitting for a while Chloë came barreling in and hugged me. "Can I have a hug?" Eric said, sitting down in anticipation. "No," she said. Eric sighed and said, "I should have seen that coming," and got up again. In a moment Chloë turned in his direction and said plaintively, "Hu'?" He turned and crouched, and she ran against him and threw her arms around his neck.

-At Kroger today Eric and Chloë were walking the corridors while I got milk. I heard Chloë say something about "ubber ducky," and looked over. She was pointing up to a yellow thing, and I thought it was another duck like her Duck Number One one at home, which she's started calling "rubber ducky," probably because Ernie and his rubber ducky show up in the Elmo DVD. Eric looked over at me and indicated he wanted to get it for her. I thought that was odd, since we're trying to be conservative about increasing the size of her duck flotilla, but I nodded. He handed it down and he and Chloë walked over to me, whereupon I discovered the thing was a yellow bath scrubber with a duck's head and tail on it, small-size for kids, and she was really saying "scrubber ducky." "I couldn't help it when she put that together," Eric said, helplessly.

Tickle monster

2011-03-04T09:55:00.001-05:00

Chloë has really started enjoying being tickled these last couple of months. She giggles and collapses and then presents herself so we can do it again. And now that she's got words, she's started asking for it. The other day I was tickling her feet, and her ribs, and her armpits. When I stopped she said, "Ticky more?" raising her foot. So of course we did more, until my fingers started to cramp. On a different day I was doing something similar, and then we stopped because we were in the kitchen and I was sorting bills or something. Not long afterward she raised her arm in the air, and I couldn't figure out what she wanted--a high-five? To be picked up? "Use your words," Eric told her. She got annoyed, and eventually said, "Ticky," whereupon I realized she wanted me to tickle under her arm. "I would have done that right away if you'd said it sooner!" I told her, over her giggles.

She likes to tickle me, too--particularly my belly. She's fond of it in general. I've told her that there's a baby inside and when it's big enough it will come out and live with us, and while I'm not sure she really understands that she remembers it. Sometimes she points to my belly and says "baey [belly], baby," and then to hers and says "baby?" I tell her no, there's no baby in her belly. She points to Eric, and I say no, there's no baby in his belly either unless there are at least two significant things he hasn't told me.

This morning she woke up (in her big-girl bed! She's not completely settled in it--witness this morning's four-thirty wakeup--and we haven't moved all her things to the new room, but the transition is going well) and wanted a story, which I flopped back on the bed to read because I'm all creaky and achy when I get up now. When we finished, she pulled up my pajama shirt--well, it wasn't far to pull since it's not a maternity shirt--and started to tickle my belly, saying, "Ticky baby."

Don't count on it

2011-03-02T21:13:00.003-05:00

Chloë's still working on her rebellious streak, including taking great joy in running away when it's time to put a diaper or socks or pajamas on and refusing to come back when ordered to do so. She's also working on her numbers. How do these come together? Witness tonight, after her bath. Chloë runs over to the window where she wants to "ook hindow."

"Come back here," Eric says. No response. "Come here now." Nothing. "Chloë Leeja! Come over here!"

Still nothing. So he says threateningly, "One..." intending to count to three, whereupon he'll go forcibly pick her up and deposit her where she's supposed to be.

"Two," Chloë says happily. "Dhree." All threatening manner is derailed when the two of us burst into laughter and then Chloë joins in, pleased that we we're amused.

I'm considering revoking his Grandpa privileges.

2011-02-26T21:19:00.002-05:00

Maybe you can't see it here, but what Chloë has just put in her mouth is broccoli. Broccoli dipped in ketchup, to be exact. She got the idea from when her Grandpa was here, and tonight, entirely unprompted, that was how she wanted to eat her broccoli. I suppose I should be grateful I'm no longer in my first trimester and can handle the idea without my stomach going into violent revolt.

Status report: Month 19

2011-02-24T16:28:00.005-05:00

"I really like this age," I said of Chloë the other day.

"You say that at every age," Eric said.

Which I suppose is true, starting at about six months, anyway. I can't help it that kids get more awesome as they get older. (Don't tell me when this starts to reverse. I don't want to know.) Chloë at nineteen months is subtly different from Chloë at eighteen months, but the differences are there, and yes, I like her better now than I did a month ago. Why shouldn't I?

Nineteen-month-old Chloë really, truly does not feel like a baby. She's off her bottles and doesn't wake me up with crying. Well, she does occasionally, like the other night, when I think she might have been having a bad dream. She woke up screaming around 4:30, settled in my lap for about fifteen seconds to rock in the chair, and then told me "sleepy," and "nap," indicating she wanted to go back to her bed to sleep.

But in the mornings it's "Mama," and "up," and when I come in she doesn't immediately want a drink or to be held; she wants to talk. She's so tall; she can scramble up on the couch, and walk up and down the stairs by herself (if she's not arrested in her tracks by the sight or sound of a dog, or Mama downstairs, or Dada upstairs, or Ganpa in the living room). She's pretty good, though not perfect, about staying with us in stores. She loves to color and to splash. She wants to play with or eat specific things, or see specific shows, or rock with Dada instead of Mama. She needs to work on some self-confidence, since she's still a pushover with other kids and asks us for "hep" more often than she actually needs it, but she still knows who she is and what she wants.

(Come to think of it, she stopped waking routinely in the early morning around the time we stopped giving her bottles. Now she doesn't even want a drink most of the time, and if she does water or juice are often her choice.)

She's starting to get rebellious, running away when we try to put her diaper on, then repeating "Here?" and "Now?" when we tell her to "come here now" until I want to either scream or laugh, depending on how tired I am. She's learned what "burp" means (though she applies it to gas at both ends). Whenever she does it I say, "Say 'excuse me,'" and she says, "No?" with a grin. She did actually say it once the other day and I made sure to praise her profusely. The rest of the time I fight not to grin back, because she's so cute when she thinks she's being annoying. Mostly she's still a good girl, but we're waiting in trepidation to see what comes these next few months. She screams sometimes when she doesn't get her way, but we haven't really been seeing what I'd call real tantrums yet. Though she did get upset during dinner prep tonight when she thought I wasn't going to give her another piece of raw onion.

She reliably identifies herself as "Kha-ee" now, even in photographs, where before she was "Baby." When we try to impress on her that she's being bad by calling her "Chloë Snyder," she often repeats "Nye?" but I'm not sure she realizes that's part of her name, too. She does understand "name," as in when Eric asks her "What's my name?" She understands so much. And has started repeating it, too--it's time to start watching our vocabulary.

Her own vocabulary continues to expand. Strawberries have featured heavily this month--Eric bought a box that smelled really good, and after that Chloë would run to the fridge and yank at the handle trying to open it, saying "Dobby?" She's still keen on asking for yogurt, though not necessarily on eating it. She knows "napkin" and "heavy" (mostly "heavy book"), and "diaper" and "nipple" (because she noticed hers one day and thought they were "ows"). We're trying to work on "thank you," and she'll sign it sometimes when prompted but has only tried to say it once or twice. We'll keep working on it. She's still good at "please," and when she asks for something if I wait with my eyebrow lifted, or Eric says, "And...?" she adds "Pee!" with a good grace.

We've started working on letters, numbers, and colors this past month. She knows A, B, D, E, I, L, M, N (at least, we think so...she may also be mixing it up with M; it's hard to hear the difference), O, P, R, T, and sometimes Y. She routinely mistakes the C for a moon. A lot of things are moon-shaped, it turns out. She knows one and two and five fairly well, probably mainly because we count body parts a lot, but is still shaky on three and nearly nonexistent on four. And she likes saying colors (I never knew that "purple" was such a cute word) but is iffy on their application.

She's doing a lot of "X"/"No X" these days. It started with the kids in glasses in the Little People book. Then it was our glasses. Then it was the Little People balls--she now knows that they're only on that one page, and she delights in flipping through the book, looking up at me and saying, "Balls? No?" at each spread, until at last we arrive at the schoolhouse page, when she waits for me to exclaim, "Balls!" Which of course I always do. If she's wearing socks and I'm not sometimes we'll discuss this, she pointing alternately at my feet and hers until I get tired of saying "socks...no socks...socks...no socks..." I have a bruise on my arm from a really bad blood draw a couple of weeks ago (for glucose testing--no gestational diabetes here), and sometimes she'll push up both my sleeves, or my sleeve and hers, to point and say "Ow?" at mine, and "No?" at hers. And there's in/out and up/down, too. At her bath tonight, Eric and I were both reciting, "The scrubber is in the water...the scrubber is out of the water!"

She's starting to get into two-word phrases. Her first and best is "More please," but she's also doing "flower baby and "sky baby" and "water baby" to indicate her different videos, and "see Mama," "read book," and "Ganpa bye-bye?" She's still saying this last one, though he left Monday. It's like my ceramic pumpkin that she took a fancy to a few weeks ago. She wanted to play with it, and I let her. Then she brought it into the bathroom, and of course at some point she dropped it and it shattered. I got it all cleaned up without injury to either of us, and explained a bit grumpily that the pumpkin was broken and it had gone bye-bye and that she should not poke around in the garbage where the pieces were. For a while after--and she's still occasionally doing it--she would look at me at random times, or when something else turned up broken, and say "pumpkin, broken."

Dad was in the area for a business trip last Thursday, so he came for a weekend visit. It was a very quiet visit, if you don't count the constant "flower baby" video watching and litany of "Ganpa. Mama. Dada. Kha-ee." Chloë certainly enjoyed herself; she was more boisterous and smiley than usual, grinning and contorting herself in weird ways and running here and there. She and Dad made up a game in which Dad would pretend to sleep, Chloë saying "jeepy" (sleeping/sleepy). Then Chloë would point and say "Hwake!" and Dad's eyes would pop open. She would ask after "Ganpa" whenever he wasn't around, including at bedtime, but when we summoned him she wouldn't go to him for a hug. She would blow kisses, though, or her version of it: clapping her hand to her mouth and making kissing noises behind it. I guess the "blowing" part hasn't sunk in yet.

She's still doing the sleepy/wake game with us, and still asking after him, especially when we go into the spare room. She goes to the bed and says "Ganpa" because while he was here and she wanted to play on the bed, I would say "No, that's Grandpa's right now." His memory is definitely lingering more than it did on previous visits, much like she still remembers "Ha-ee" from Mom's visit, which makes me happy. Her memory in general is improving, which is pretty neat to see in action, even when I want to tell her to give it a rest with the pumpkin already.

(Of course, now we have to get her to identify the spare room bed as hers, because the next big project is to move her in there before Maia comes. We're going to be taking the bed off its frame and moving my stuff out this weekend.)

She's taken an interest in my belly lately. I don't know for sure that she's noticed it's getting bigger, but she likes to tickle it and blow raspberries on it and kiss it, more than she did before. We tell her that there's a baby inside and it will come out soon, but we've been telling her that for months and no baby has appeared, so I'm not sure she believes us. She nods when we ask if she'd like to have a baby live with us, which is a good sign, though I'm kind of expecting her to enjoy the baby for a couple of hours and then say "baby bye-bye," or something similar. But I can't really imagine what she'll be like in two months. Even though she's not growing as fast as she was the first year, she's still learning and changing so much every day. I'm finding myself trying to drink her in, to actively enjoy her and remember that she won't always be like this, even if she does continue to be more awesome. I'm also afraid of missing out on her when the new baby comes. But that's my problem, not hers, and I think she's going to be a delightful big sister. She is a silly, happy, growing, learning girl, and we're proud of her.

This toddler thing is in the bag.

In

2011-02-17T11:40:00.000-05:00

Chloë didn't want to try the potty this morning, but she came in with me while I brushed my teeth. She went to her basket of bath toys, extracted her favorite blue cup, and said, "In." She's been saying "cup" for a long time now so I waited to see what she was talking about. She put it carefully on the floor, pulled out her favorite duck (her first one, with the blue bow), and placed it in the cup. "In," I agreed.

She was dissatisfied with the tight fit of the duck, and kept saying "Hep," so I suggested a smaller duck and pulled out Mad Professor Duck. She took it and placed it in the cup, where it fit perfectly. Then she removed it and put her sippy of juice in instead. "In?" she said, looking up at me.

"Yes, the juice...cup...your sippy...is in the cup," I said. I was relieved when she took the sippy out and put her toes in instead.

Labors of love

2011-02-15T22:15:00.006-05:00

I'm sitting here watching my belly move under its own power. Dude, there's a baby in there, I think. And then: dude, it's going to have to come out! Dammit! The idea of labor was much more academic the first time around. Not that I'm living in dread of it this time; I know what it's like, but I also know I got through it and got over it, and I can also reasonably hope that this time will be better or at least shorter.

I'm also contemplating pain medication. I'm wondering if I got brainwashed last time into thinking that natural childbirth was the ideal for no good reason. After all, no one ever talks about natural appendectomies. I still think the idea of a needle inserted into my spine and left there is pretty darn squicky, but then Nancy used Nubain and said it was great, and that doesn't sound so bad. We'll see. I've still got a couple of months to think about it.

In the meantime, Chloë continues to be awesome and funny and ever more like a kid than a baby. Today we went to a quilt shop I'd just heard about, and on the way out she wanted to stomp in a puddle while looking at the moon. (And talking about it. "Moo'? Moo'? Moo'. Howah [water]. Howah! Pa [splash]! Moo'? Moo'? Dahr [star]? Moo'? Ka [car]! Howah. Howah. Moo'? Moo'? Moo'?") She had a fabulous time. Eventually I said it was time to go and tried to take her hand, and she screamed "Nooo!!" and then "Dada!!" (like he would have been on her side) and had a meltdown while I carried her to the car and strapped her in and removed her shoes and socks because they were sopping wet. At home she had to be instantly read a couple of books, including the Valentine's Day book she's owned since yesterday and read about six times already, before I could make dinner.* During dinner, she commented that her eggs were broken (she was eating an omelet). We started bedtime preparations a little early because she was so obviously tired--she was hiccuping, and while on the potty was trying to call out letters she knew from the box of bath foam letters, but the hiccups were interrupting her, and this was totally hilarious. Then she burst out laughing when I pulled her shirt off. Such a giggly happy funny girl. I hope the new baby won't seem too boring in comparison.

*This happens in the morning too. I stumble into her room bleary-eyed and am reading books before I know what I'm doing, because how can you resist a one-year-old in a panda sleeper holding out Goodnight Thumper and saying "Book. Book," and then calling "Dupah!" in imitation of the way you do it, but with an adorable high baby voice instead? And then your spouse laughs because the book doesn't actually have that in it, just a line about "Then Thumper heard something. He listened closely. His mother was calling for him. It was time to go home" and you put the "Thuuuuum-peeeer!" call in yourself, so it's entirely your doing that she now calls "Dupah!" every time you read that page and also at random times during the day?

A farewell to bottles

2011-02-11T23:12:00.004-05:00

Chloë has gone without bottles for a week now. We started out eliminating the morning bottle, then the naptime one. She objected to those, though not very much, but then she settled into it; and so last Friday we gave her a sippy cup instead of a bottle at bedtime. "Bowah!" she said, to inform us we'd gotten it wrong.

"It is milk," we said, and she drank it. And she's drunk it every night since.

I hadn't expected this final step to be so easy. But she's been happy to drink her milk--she says "mok" now, when it used to be "bowah" for bottle and before that, "babul"--and then proceed with the rest of the bedtime ritual. Maybe it helps that we now read during the milk-drinking, so she's not wholly consumed by the drinking process itself. Maybe she's just a big enough girl that this wasn't a big deal. Either way, I'm pleased, and impressed.

I'm not feeling all teary about her no longer being a baby, either. I mean, I get maudlin about that sometimes, but not because of the bottles or lack thereof. It's because she's so tall now, and helping to put her clothes on, and obeying (or disobeying) my instructions, and asking for yogurt or cheese or strawberries, and loving her boots and the moon, and reminding me to put on my socks.

(And still calling Daddy a monkey.)

So Chloë is off of bottles. Her dentist should be happy. We bought more sippies today, along with some bigger sleepers and socks and a set of three squirty ducks for the bath. I stopped at the clearance rack and looked at all the very small clothes until Eric cleared his throat and asked me to remind him what we had actually come to Babies R Us for. Maybe it helps that I'll soon have another baby, though I hope she won't be on bottles much for a while.