Thanks...giving and taking.

We have spent the last few days staying with my parents in Buffalo. Really, I must stop referring to Buffalo as home. I've never lived in the apartment my parents have had for the past sixteen years, and I don't even frequent any of the places I used to. Just last night I came to the conclusion that it's just a launching pad for shopping excursions. This can't happen any more, because of Josephine. Not only are we broke, but it's just not fun any longer. It's a substitute, and a poor one, for quality time spent with people I enjoy. Aside from the fact that my home is with Steve and Josie and Beauty, and realizing that it's insulting to even casually refer to a place like that as "home"; it's so wrong it isn't even funny.

Growth Spurts Are Funny

Josephine has grown something new lately. A sense of humour. We've always been able to make her laugh or giggle and shriek with tickles and raspberries and stuff. But now, over the past few weeks, she's grown the ability to laugh at things that strike her as being just too silly. At about four months, sometimes saying something in a funny voice or with a silly face would make her let out a little heh-heh-heh, or perhaps even chortle. Even then, we'd have to do it about a hundred times, or turn ourselves inside out doing it with just the right nuance or amount of energy to produce even mediocre results. But lately, so much is funny! Dropping something and saying OOPS! Putting a rubber duck on my head! Pretending her sock is trying to get away as I attempt to get it on her foot! Picking up one of those Pottery Barn blocks in my mouth and growling and tossing it at her! Eating her Cheerios and saying NumNumNum in a monster voice! Funny! Funny! Funny! Funny! Funny! These things leave her giggling and screeching and shrieking and have tears coming out of the corners of her eyes. She wiggles her body in an effort to say "Do it again!" and the levels of hysteria escalate and escalate and she quivers in anticipation of the next time. She wants very much for something to laugh at again. If once is funny, it's funny for about fifteen times. Perhaps more, but you take your chances. Sometimes the laughter is part of tiredness, and it leads to an outburst of tears. You have to keep an eye on the clock. It's also a very specific kind of funny still - like your sock flying off your left foot is significantly funnier than if it flies off your right foot. Mommy doing somethings are funnier than Daddy doing the exact same things. But it's so great to hear her laugh, because it's her own sound bubbling out of her and it's all heart melting and you want to stop and listen and soak it in; but you can't because you have to keep up with the funny making. It also taught me that you can help, teach and show her laughter - but humour grows on its own and the source of it is unique; and the sound the laughter that comes from it makes is foreign, yet recognizable and I am amazed, once again, at this marvelous little creature that is my daughter.

Have a great day, and find something to laugh at, all the way from your belly. I can't believe what a gift laughter is, and that sometimes four and sometimes ten times I day I get to laugh like I do with Josephine. It makes up for all the rough spots in spades.

Chicken 12, other stuff Zilch

I'm pooped but I'm dying to write. I am so tired this week and I think it's because of all of the changes Josephine is going through.
Although I'm seeing the need to keep her on a bit of a schedule, she's changing her preferences for naptimes and her eating habits. What we had going is gone.

Now that Josephine is crawling, she is crawling everywhere. She wants to explore every corner of the room, and is magnetically attracted to all the dangerous things. How do they know??? She is particularly interested in following the cat, because he's smart enough not to let her catch him. She's on my heels when I dash to the kitchen, so it's so funny to see her resign herself to following me back to the living room; or to wait at the doorway if I'm staying in there for a while to see what sorts of things she should aim for next. Of course she's discovered the dog's water bowl, and after the second time she poured it on herself I figured out that it's better to give the dogs less water more frequently so that there's less to clean up. I'm learning faster these days. She gets stuck under the coffee table, the chairs, the dining room table and the dining room chairs. She bumps her head, but not really hard, and only cries when she sees me watching. When she's crawling determinedly her hands slam down on the floor and are turned slightly inward; and she moves like a Komodo Dragon across the hardwood floor. I'll be in the kitchen and hear "thump thump thump" and she'll be crawling toward the kitchen with this elated smile and will be shrieking with pride and happiness that she found me. Or sometimes she'll be upset that I left, and will crawl at me crying, and it's funny to me because I know it's a real enough sadness, but one that will pass quickly. You can throw cheerios at her, or bread crusts for her to crawl to, like you're feeding pigeons in the park. Or, she'll find a tuft of dog hair or some shredded Kleenex that's been through the laundry and will be just as likely to put that in her mouth. Josephine no longer wants breakfast on the living room floor, which was a nice way to start the day. Putting her in the exersaucer is like trying to put a cat in the carrier to go the vet's.> Whenever she's on the floor, she must be moving. So now it's best that meals are in the high chair, which I'll tell you about.

What is really exhausting us though, is her complete and utterly compelling urge to pull herself up. The coffee table is the main offender, but the dining room table legs are also tempters. She will attempt, countless times, to pull up even though it seems like it's not fun for her. Josephine will be tired, ready for a nap but will stop feeding for another opportunity to get down on the floor so she can start again with the pulling up. It's her manifest destiny - to master standing at the coffee table. It's why I was meant to upholster it. It is her nemesis. It is making me crazy. I wail, really I do. You should hear me. If she were just crawling around and playing with toys, I could, oh, I don't know - eat, have a hot coffee, fold laundry or do other things with two hands - you name it. But with the pulling up stuff, she's either getting herself into a diagonal position where she can't get further up, and can't go down without a face plant so I must help her. Okay, I choose to help her because it's not worth the emotional clean up if she does go down. I try to just assist her, or to put her back in the starting position so she can try again. But you must believe me when I tell you this must happen sixty times a day. I've tried substituting a step stool, an upside-down Tupperware container, a laundry basket and simply moving the table across the room. But nooooooo, Josephine must pull up on the coffee table. She's like, 90% there, but this week has been like a new and extra frustrating version of the Chinese Water Torture.

The other series of events that have changed my life this week are mealtimes. Josie no longer will sit there and eat from a spoon. If, sometimes, I give her a pinch of fruit with yogurt or cereal with my fingers so that she knows that's what is in the bowl and on the spoon, she'll eat it. Really, though, all she wants to do is feed herself. Not with the spoon yet, just with her fingers. Her meals look like a blizzard of tiny food pieces all over her tray. She takes fistfuls of food, half of which make it into her mouth, and very seriously works her way through her meals, with lots of sips of water in between. If the spoon comes near her, she bats it away like King Kong batting at airplanes from the top of the Empire State Building. All the nice foods I pureed and froze in cubes have barely been touched, so I gave up on those and just cook as fresh as possible and feed her diced carrots instead of mashed. Same with peas, corn, squash etc. But her favourite things in the world are chicken, then shredded cheese, then cheerios. The three C's. Tonight I played a game, and chicken won. I offered her in one hand a piece of chicken, in the other cheese. Chicken won. So I continued. On her tray, I'd put chicken next to potatoes, then pears, then Brussels sprouts, then carrots, then cheerios, then her maraca, the bottle of bubbles, then everything I could think of within reach including the very tempting butter knife and a zip lock bag. She even chose chicken over the dangerous things. So I know that her love of chicken is deep and abiding and pure.

So that's what's happening around here lately. It takes all day to get through the day.

Looking In.

I hosted the mommies group meeting yesterday, and while it was fun, I still don't feel like I belong. Everyone's nice, but I still have that outsider feeling that was romantic in high school but doesn't work now. I mean, I have real friends that I like a lot and don’t get to see often enough, yet I see these women every week for two hours. But now that the babies interact more, I don't want to take Josie out of it and I still think I learn things. Maybe it's my worry that these women don't genuinely like me either, and so I feel like I have to work extra hard to make sure I listen more than I talk and ask questions about them and say nice things about their kids. Today a woman from the group, Kimberly, who moved away last month came to visit just me. She had a preemie, Olivia, and was emotionally wiped out during the first few meetings because her husband works out of town four days a week and she cried a lot initially. How brave to share that with us. Because I lived closest to her, I reached out to just be there when she needed a coffee and a shoulder even though I'd never normally choose her for a friend. Well, she is very nice and I'm glad we've stayed friendly. But she bought up that it's hard to really get to know the moms in the group because it's so noisy and distracting. It also seemed to her that other moms had paired up outside the group, and so it was fine that the meetings were mainly for the babies to play with each other and to talk mainly about their development and other mommy related issues. I'm still feeling my way around my new identity, and I feel like so many things in my life have slipped already that I try to work extra hard to have good manners with strangers as a way to present a good front, and that's tiring. And I still feel like I'm not half as gracious as I used to be.

You know what I liked best, surprisingly for me? The babies. They seem attracted to me, and each in turn comes over and crawls up me and I have a special game and song for each one and they seem to like it. Matthew likes to go upside-down, Ella likes to have a stuffed animal bumped against her nose and to hear "boop boop" and Saatia likes funny little songs, and Lily likes twisty head motions and funny voices. I think I'm the only mommy in the group who plays with the other babies. The others just supervise their own or spot for bathroom breaks or snacks and talk generally. I like the other babies more than I used to, and more than I thought I would.

Finding myself using terms like "these women" is what I don't like most. But I haven't found the right qualifier before using the term friends for them.

To know us is to love us...

Those of you who love Steve and me, especially in our natural habitat will enjoy this:

Every Saturday in the paper, there's a column of reader's tips, where old ladies write in to tell you that you can scrub your pots with soap slivers wrapped in onion bag netting and save money, in order to win a twenty-five dollar prize for the best tip. I read them aloud in a cranky old voice, and we try to guess the age of the writer, and make smart ass comments. I mean, some of the tips, like, "If you get a run in one leg of a pair of panty hose, cut off that leg, and wear it with the half of another pair you've done the same too - you get two whole legs and extra tummy control!" make me laugh years later when I think of them. So last week, the prize winning tip was, "If you're in a wheelchair or on a scooter, you should carry a whistle and a sign that says "Help" or "Call Police", because if you just wave at people, sometimes they only think you're saying hello and wave back, or for if you're trapped in a bathroom stall.". I'm sorry, but HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Okay, I do understand the necessity and I realize this must have happened in order for this person to have written this, but I had to think back over my life to think if I ever passed a person who might have been "not waving but drowning" (there's a poem I read once - wait, I found it: http://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/smith/). So, on Sunday morning, when I put Josephine down for a nap and Beauty woke her by trying to get on the bed, I asked Steve to take Beauty out of the room and shut the door. Well, for whatever reason, three years after buying the house, the bedroom still has a doorknob only on one side. Of course, I got locked in the bedroom with a sleeping baby, and couldn't yell or knock hard to have Steve let me out without waking her again, and she really needed to nap because my parents were due to arrive within the hour. I mean, he was in the next room, but he does have significant hearing damage from too many years of loud music.

So, there I am, scratching, whispering as loud as I dare, wiggling the knob stump, occasionally going over to the vent between the two rooms and getting down on my knees and pressing my face up to the grill and whispering from there, for oh, what felt like ten minutes. Then I hear Steve get up and go downstairs! I thought I'd be trapped for longer and I really needed to let Josie nap so I couldn't risk calling louder! I dared to actually tap at the door as I heard him come back up the stairs. He passed the door - He. Is. So. Deaf. I was truly gnashing my teeth - and I've never known what that meant, but I think now it's that noise you make when you bare your teeth and suck air in and out through them. And then he turned around, as if finally thinking that he should check on that extra noise coming from the bedroom door - maybe he's never heard gnashing before either - and opened the door as if he'd never heard me making noise and was surprised to see me standing there. When I pointedly explained that...well you can guess that I was a bit huffy and went on a bit...Steve just looked at me and said, "You should carry a whistle and a sign that says Help."

Where does the time go?

Josephine crawled yesterday morning. Proper, cute-baby-in-a-commercial crawling. And we had to spend the day at the doctor's office, mommies group and then napping. Today she's back to scooting. What would have happened if the day wasn't so overwhelmingly exhausting?