First Crawling Steps

I just saw El take a few steps crawling - on hands and knees, not just the soldier crawl.  It may not be the very first time she's done that (she's been working on it for about 10 days now), but it's the first time I saw it, anyway.  I'm going to go get the camera and have it ready for next time.

Hey, it's a big deal.

Hey, Genius, It's Called a Baby Monitor.

It's one of those days.  Weeks.

Baby's having trouble sleeping, as her tummy's bothering her because of the constipation, which led to the diaper rash, which was all caused by carrots.  My fault.  Started her on solids too early, it seems.   To add insult to injury, last night a lone cricket the size of my pinky fingernail made its way into our bedroom, and started chirping at jackhammer volume.  GW and I found him and flushed him out, after much ado, and eventually I got the baby back to sleep.  By eventually, I mean never.  So it seemed.

Sleep deprivation does weird things to a person.  I'm not myself.  I went to a board meeting last night at Av's school, and couldn't put a whole sentence together.  This morning I poured boiling water from the tea kettle directly onto my hand, instead of into the mug.  That kind of stung a little.  Self-punishment?  For what?  Inadvertently giving my baby diaper rash, maybe.  I'm probably reading too much into it.  I do that.

This is El eating the offending carrots.  Seemed like a good idea at the time, to both of us.

And we're dutifully washing them off afterwards.  Because most of them ended up on the outside of her body and the surrounding area (table, high chair, wall, window), not the inside.  And yet they still wreaked havoc on her poor little bowels.  Guess it doesn't take much when you weigh 16 pounds.

My friend E. came over the other day with her two kids, so they could play in the pool with Av.  I hung around outside the pool while El slept upstairs, and I kept going in and out the back door so I could listen for her in case she woke up.  At one point I was racking my brain, trying to figure how I could keep tabs on El without having to constantly interrupt my pool-skimming and conversation with E. to go stand at the bottom of the stairs for 90 seconds.  E. read my mind pretty easily, and suggested delicately (so as not to make it obvious that I've become retarded), "Got a monitor?" 

See?  No sleep.

Babies: A Sensory Journey Through Time (0-6 months)

AGE: 3 days
What they look like: a little mouse, curled up and pink.
What they smell like: that indescribable newborn smell, clean, pure, and lovely.
What they sound like: a mewling kitten.
What they feel like: a super-soft, floppy little sack of early peas.

AGE: 3 weeks
What they look like: tiny, wide-eyed, splayed-limbed, impossibly cute.
What they smell like: still that beautiful newborn smell; especially from the little bald head.
What they sound like: a kitten with lungs the size of a mountain lion's.
What they feel like: just a tiny li'l sack o' sugar.

AGE: 3 months
What they look like: the quintessential baby - beautiful eyes, that adorable toothless grin.
What they smell like: breast milk.
What they sound like: an injured cat.
What they feel like: beautiful, soft, smooth skin. And getting a bit wriggly.

AGE: 6 months
What they look like: a tiny, pudgy version of one parent or the other.
What they smell like: pee.
What they sound like: a fire engine.
What they feel like: a fifteen pound octopus, recently emigrated from Krypton.


AGE: any and every
What they look like:  you, but much cuter.
What they smell like: the sweetest, purest thing on Earth - including when they smell like pee.
What they sound like:  your favorite song.
What they feel like: can only be described in metaphor, and even then not very well.  Like the previous three.

Local Baby Eats Construction Paper; Throws Carrots On the Wall

AP Six-month-old El seems to have her edibles confused with her arts and crafts, reports her exhausted mother, Plain Jane. Her story has brought greater awareness of a common phenomenon experienced in over 90 percent of homes in which a young baby is trying his or her first foods. This reporter spoke with Plain Jane in an interview that lasted nearly fifteen minutes, not because of the breadth of the subject matter, but because Ms. Jane's cognitive functioning is so impaired by sleep deprivation that it was difficult for her to verbalize a coherent thought.

After sorting fact from inarticulate babbling (the mother's, not the baby's), this reporter learned that yesterday, shortly after returning from the grocery store, Ms. Jane put her baby down on the living room floor to play while she quickly put the groceries away. When coughing and sputtering noises sounded from the baby a few minutes later, Ms. Jane ran into the room to discover that little El had located a tiny triangle of blue construction paper, a remnant of a recent project her four-year-old sister had been working on, and promptly stuffed it as far into her mouth as possible. Ms. Jane attempted in vain to extract the bit of paper, which she stated was visible but partially digested, and therefore plastered quite firmly to the back of El's throat. El, for her part, succeeded in fighting off her mother and swallowing the paper; her ensuing smile led Ms. Jane to conclude that consuming her unpalatable find had been El's intention all along. Later, at the supper table, little El pitched her bowl of pureed carrots against the kitchen wall, splattering its bright orange contents in an uncannily accurate star pattern. Ms. Jane claimed to have a great deal of fun cleaning what she described as a "huge" mess, and stated she was glad she had spent so much time shopping for and preparing the food that her baby tossed at the wall and that her four-year-old sat and stared at with undisguised revulsion for the entire dinner hour.

At the risk of committing the sin of editorializing, this reporter may have sensed a note of sarcasm in Ms. Jane's statements. This reporter may go so far as to speculate that Ms. Jane's expectations of her children's eating habits might be a tad unrealistic. If so, this family's story should serve as a cautionary tale to all babies, who ought to consider spending more energy helping their parents understand that the more effort and thought put into a meal by the parents, the more flavor and fun it extracts from the food. Non-edible items are far more interesting and tasty, and should never be denied even when the parent might mistakenly view the item as "dangerous" or "a choking hazard." These are deliberate falsehoods perpetuated by a parent-friendly media. Or so claims a certain highly articulate baby who made these statements while her mother wasn't listening, and asked to remain anonymous.

The Six-Month Mark

El is 6 months old.

I know everyone says this, but it seems to have happened in minutes. The older you get, the faster time goes by. I'm already forgetting what she looked like, sounded like, and felt like when she was days old - I need my pictures and video to remind me. Reference points help, too, like looking at her on her changing table. When she was tiny, she looked like a little mouse lying there. If her head was close to the top, her feet only made it about halfway down - of course, she was always curled up in a little ball, too. And she would stay where you put her. Now, she fills the thing out, and the moment you put her down on it, she splays out her legs and flips onto her belly, reaching for whatever she can hook a finger around.

It amazes me how babies are in constant motion. I read recently, or somebody told me, about a man who tried moving like a baby for a whole day or something. Meaning constant, vigorous motion, like lying on your back on a bed, raising both legs all the way up and pounding them down onto the mattress as hard as you can. Repeat a hundred times. I think the guy broke a couple of small bones, maybe slipped a disk. No wonder babies need to nap all the time.

She's so happy. GW and I like to brag to each other that for all our faults and failings as human beings, the two of us make some really cute babies.

So let's catalog El's accomplishments. At the point I'm writing this, she's 6 months, 11 days. She's going through this period of intense change, and her sleep and mood reflect it. Lots of waking up, lots of resisting sleep. At the same time, she's learning to fall asleep without nursing and has very little problem with it. That's mostly at nap time. Still two naps a day, one long one starting 2-3 hours after she wakes up in the morning, and a shorter one in the late afternoon. Sometimes her mood is a little strange these days....kinda full-moon manic. It's because she's soooooooo high on herself, as she should be. She's learning to sit up, drink from a bottle, and crawl - she can now do the soldier crawl to retrieve something she wants, and of course she can roll from one end of a room to the other faster than you can say, "Where the hell's the baby?" She's tasting food - pureed carrots, smushed tofu, watermelon, apple. She's now using her thumb and first two fingers in a pincer grip, instead of just the whole-hand grasping thing babies reflexively do. That one is the most significant, because it means she can pick up tiny objects now and get them in her mouth, which is dangerous, of course. Plus it's happening about a month earlier than I expected, so I'm having to mend my crappy-housekeeping ways a little earlier than I'd planned.

Those are the major milestones. There are other things flying under the radar, like emerging separation anxiety. I'm delighted with everything. She's the last baby I'll ever have. I was, and am, equally obsessed with the minutiae of Av's behavior, but that's because she's my first. So I've got a really good excuse for both. If/when they have babies of their own, perhaps they won't think their mom a total dork for writing all this down.

Av-isms: Tough Questions

1.) Why don't flies go to school?

2.) Why don't cats have lips?

3.) Why isn't it polite to show your bottom in public?

4.) Why does everybody poop?

5.) What is God?

Daddy's A Funny Guy

So Av got new roller skates today. Her old ones were the wheels-under-a-platform kind that you strap over your sneakers. Said sneakers have gotten too big for them. So she's graduated to the ones that are like ski boots on wheels. The ones Mom and Dad have to fork out some real bucks for. At least the grown-ups won the polite battle at Toys-R-Us: Av wanted the ones with Disney Princesses on them; Mom and Dad wanted the ones that cost twenty dollars less for twice the quality. "They have red swirlies on them!" I pleaded. "That's almost pink!" In the end I won because I busted out the big guns: These Skates Or No Skates. Harsh, you say? Or no, you probably don't say, if you're reading this circa 2010 when nobody has money for Disney skates.

So we get 'em on home, put 'em on her feet and set Av up in our newly cleaned out garage. We open the garage door, because it's been six hundred degrees out every day for the past month, and it doesn't take more than a few seconds for enough heat to build up in the closed garage to cook a turkey. GW perched himself out there on a bench, holding the baby, and watched me help Av try to get the feel of her big-girl skates on a hard surface. I probably looked like a moose with a broken leg trying to teach a drunk chicken how to do the cha-cha. Av had fun, but it wasn't long before she commented on the heat and wanted a break. I certainly wasn't going to argue. GW, who hadn't said a word the whole ten minutes we were out there because he was concentrating on keeping his head from catching fire, looked around the inside of the garage. He later told me he was thinking about how closely the shape of the garage resembled the inside of an oven. "This is what toast must feel like," he said. I got the family inside before anyone started actively hallucinating.