Category Archives: The Girl

Update!

1. We have an operational phone again! After the spectacular failure with the last live chat thing with Bell, yesterday’s session went off without a hitch, and an hour later the phone rang. It was Bell, telling me they’d fixed things from their end. I was staggered. I’d expected it to be a song and dance and entail a tech here on site being annoyed, and having to argue with head office… but no. So it was a thing on their end and not our wiring, and they fixed it, and it’s all good now.

2. No word from the magazine position I applied for… but the work gods gifted me with my first freelance editing project from the publisher in almost exactly twelve months this week. I am so incredibly relieved. My professional self-esteem was taking a really bad hit, as was my sense of financial responsibility regarding being able to handle my bills and the household bills I used to cover, too. Unexpectedly being a one-income family for a year really hurt us a lot. I’m always going to be bitter about being denied maternity benefits. (The kicker is that if Owlet had been born a year earlier or later, I’d have made more than enough to qualify for the benefit program.)

3. Two days left of school, including today. While I am excited for Sparky, I am also realizing that this means he will be home 24/7 until camp begins, and I get exhausted with both kids home in just an hour after school. I have also realized that unless we build a daily schedule, he is going to want to drift all day from playing Pokemon on the DS to watching videos and playing games on the computer, to watching movies downstairs, all things he does once his homework is done after school and he is free to relax. And while that keeps him out of my hair, it also is way, way, way too much screen time. We need to schedule cello, and perhaps an hour-long block of quiet reading time (possibly concurrent with Owlet’s afternoon nap), and I have a French workbook that we’ll do two pages of each day. We may schedule a walk, too, so we all get out.

4. Owlet has figured out how to sit up on her own (finally — it came very soon after she figured out Real Crawling), is cruising around the house at an alarming rate, and is practising crouching down and standing up again without holding on to anything. Eek.

Owlet: Ten Months Old!

I will never again doubt my mother’s claim that I did everything at nine months — walking, talking, complicated piano riffs (no, not really) — because this past month has been an explosion of development for Owlet.

In the Big Achievements department, she can now:

• Drink from her own handle-less 10-oz sippy cup (which is filled to the brim with water when we give it to her, and she usually drains one every day, sometimes more)
• Clap with actual open hands, not knocking the knuckles of her fists together.
• Crawl! We have real crawling, with all four limbs moving in sequence! Her tummy even lifts off the floor for about half the endeavour! Though she often goes back to the baby army crawl because she can move faster that way. And if she has her druthers, she’d rather be standing, thank you very much. As a matter of fact, she’ll insist on it.
• Hover, as in stand on her own for a few seconds while she lets go of one piece of furniture or hand and reaches for another.
• Cruise around a room with ease, going from bookcase to loveseat to end table to coffee table to chair to cedar chest. I draw the line at the spinning wheel.
• Stand next to someone holding only one hand, and even take a few steps that way.
• Stand for a few moments on her own, usually because she doesn’t notice she’s let go with both hands.
• Stand on her own, not touching anything, and drink from her sippy cup (yeah, this one really freaked us out). We’ve gone from a couple of seconds of hands-free hovering, to standing unassisted, while tilting the sippy cup back to drink from it. I don’t think she realized that she didn’t have a hip resting against the edge of the coffee table, as she usually does. It kind of blew my mind: she had her head way back, with both hands on the sippy cup and elbows up and cocked out, and she didn’t even wobble.

And…

• WALK. It’s only a shaky step or two at this point if she’s on her own, but if she’s holding on to someone’s fingers she motors along with great determination. And she doesn’t hang her weight from your hands either; she’s on her own feet and she lightly uses you as balance when she needs it. HRH built beautiful wooden baby gates in the style of the attic railing (true hinged gates that open and close at the top of each staircase), and they came at the precisely correct time.

Owlet won’t. sit. down. It’s all standing, all the time, or there is shrieking and arching the back and throwing herself around. She loves to stand at one of the little play stations we’ve set up on end tables or low shelves for her. The play stations have a mix of blocks, books, small shaky toys or stuffed critters. I keep trying to teach her the put-things-in-other-things skill, but she’s still too delighted with the taking-things-out-of-other-things part. There’s a big cognitive jump between the two. Books are suddenly more than chew toys (although that is still their primary purpose): they open and close, and flipping pages is lots of fun. She got a wooden swing this past month, and has therefore been introduced to swinging, which, judging from the cascade of throaty giggles, she adores.

In the realm of teeth, she’s up to seven, four on top and three below. She’s working on her eighth, the lower right second incisor, and is utterly miserable right now. This poor kid can’t get a break. It has to slow down at some point. Seven within two months? I don’t remember Sparky’s coming that fast.

Owlet’s eyes have gone a beautiful grey-blue, and her hair is coming in nicely. It’s long enough at the sides to start sticking out over her ears in funny little swoops, and at the bottom to start hinting at clumping into thin little waves. It’s still an indeterminate colour, but it’s got a lot of red to it for now. (Red tones and waves… to no one’s surprise, I’m sure.) Her skin is so fair that it turns red about five minutes after we go outside, even when we’ve slathered her in SPF 50 sunscreen and she’s in the shade. I’ve concluded that it’s a response to the heat. She grew out of the awesome little denim bucket hat someone passed along to us, and Nana brought her a new floppy wide-brimmed white eyelet hat this past weekend that we call her chapeau. It covers so much more of her neck and shoulders.

New foods include toast and raspberry jam, salmon, scones, orzo, baby corn, garlic shoots, edamame… I’ve lost track. Pretty much anything except nut products, shellfish, and berries, really. She is so incredibly enthusiastic about food that she wants whatever anyone is eating, and doesn’t turn anything away. We haven’t done cow’s milk yet; still holding off on it. Maybe next month. She’s using that sippy cup like a pro for drinking water, though, after having so much trouble with them. You know what did it? Buying her a sippy cup without handles. We were using two kinds of handled ones, but all she did was get hung up on the handles, either by chewing them or getting them tangled up in her hands. I suspect they stuck out too far and needed too much fine motor control to adjust the cup so that the spout was at the right angle. I bought these Tommee Tippee ones instead, and the very day we got it she had it tipped up to drink from it. The cup is much more secure and doesn’t wobble, since she’s holding it right between her palms.

And oh, the talking. After worrying a bit, she seems to have suddenly switched to the vocal development track after working so hard on the physical development one. So far, the words she uses are: cat, Dada, Mama, mi (milk), mo (more), mmm (her yummy sound), booh (book), awl (owl), beh (bell). She has said “eh” (not “aay” but a short e) and “yeah” for a while now, using them as greetings or general comment. The other day Sparky called her name and she said, “Yeah?” And then they did it again, which was fantastic. She has an interesting “ee-AH” sound for her brother, which is odd; I’d have thought it would be “EE-ah,” echoing the syllabic emphasis of his name. It is also entirely possible she said “nana” and “amma” when her grandmothers were here.

Sleep is slowly approaching something like reliable. About an hour to two hours of nap both morning and afternoon. Generally she’ll go to bed around 7, wake anywhere between one and four, nurse then sleep again, and wake up around 6:30 for the day. That’s a rough average, of course. There are nights where she’s miserable from teething or a cold or the bloody cats wake her up, or the wind changes, or whatever. (Like now. Now we have the ‘shriek and fuss for ninety minutes before finally sleeping, no matter what Mum and Dad do’ thing happening. So much fun.)

She’s figured out dancing! She holds onto the edge of the coffee table and bobs up and down with a ginormous grin on her face. She watched someone drumming on Sesame Street one morning and started banging the table in response, so there’s that connection, too. When we sing to her she sometimes “sings” back with “ah ah ah ah”s. She’s loving Sparky just as much as ever, too. She toddles into his room, dragging whoever is walking with her behind her, and explores his books, toys, and bed, whether he is there or not (if he is, it’s an exciting bonus). He has played with her properly at least once a week, making up games around her and her toys. They danced to the radio one day, which was priceless:

Nursing is leveling off, of her own accord. She is very busy, you see, much too busy to curl up and have some milk. She much prefers standing at the coffee table and munching diced apple or rice rusks. And if she is game for milk we need to pay close attention to the latch, or her sharp little teeth make things uncomfortable. She’s making the sessions she does have shorter, too. Whereas they used to be ten to fifteen minutes, now they’re five to eight. Plus we have also attained the nursing gymnastics level, where baby wants to wiggle and roll and move around while drinking, and when you’ve got 23 pounds of enthusiastic baby trying to multitask, well, it’s frustrating and uncomfortable. I’ve ended nursing sessions because she’s climbing around, and she hasn’t seemed upset yet. I’m bruised and sore from the toes dug into the ribs and abdomen as she climbs over me, I’ve cut another two inches off my hair to reduce the amount of yanking, and I grit my teeth against the pinching when she tries to grab my clothes and gets the skin underneath as well. I forgot how all-or-nothing babies are; they do everything full-tilt, because they have no governors yet.

And full-tilt is her default setting. She wants to do All The Things All The Time, unless it involves sitting quietly. If she has distraction and stimulation, she is thrilled. If she has me, I get boring very quickly. In purely selfish realm, I wish she was more of a cuddler. I have a baby who yanks and pulls and head butts and jabs – all in enthusiasm, I must add, not maliciousness. Instead of cuddles, there are struggles. I’m hoping she mellows somewhat, because I’m a cuddler myself, and the only time I get to cuddle her a bit is when she nurses… which is, of course, becoming rarer. She’s growing up, the way babies do.

Owlet: Nine Months Old!

Today, Owlet waved goodbye to HRH as he got his coat on to leave for work. In the past couple of days she’d been staring at her palm and moving her fingers very slowly, as if she was waving to herself in slow motion, and I thought that maybe she’d be one of those kids who waved to herself because that’s how they see other people waving to them. But no: this morning, without prompting, she looked at HRH, held out her hand, and wiggled her fingers ever so slowly, with a small smile. She had never waved before, even in response to someone else. We were thrilled.

She can do so much. She can play peek-a-boo anytime, anywhere. She can hold her own bottle (although we don’t encourage it, because she tends to bash it around). She can pick very small things up in a pincer grip. She can just about manage a sippy cup, although chewing on it is more interesting right now. She can turn pages in a board book, although she is impatient with books in general when we try to read them to her. She would rather turn handfuls of pages at once, or grab the book to chew it. Her favourite book is a body book showing babies and toddlers doing different activities, with body parts and clothes labelled. She loves to look at babies in any book. But really, the best thing about books is chewing them.

Owlet is developing socially, too. She has started feeding others, for example. We felt special when she offered us Cheerios or bites of her rice rusks… until we discovered that she was also pushing rice rusks at the furniture, her toys, and pictures of people in books. She has figured out the piano/xylophone that once was Sparky’s, after a brief period of just looking at it or watching us demonstrate it, and now bangs away at it both with her hands and the sticks that are attached to it. She is working on clapping; I noticed her making the motion with her hands last week, but with fists instead of open hands. Like knocking coconuts together, heh. Mostly she bangs her fists together a couple of times, then clasps her hands, then bangs the clasped hands on her legs or the table or whatever is in front of her.

Suddenly she’s everywhere. No longer can we put her down and expect her to stay where she is. She wriggles around quite well, despite not formally crawling. The other day she squirmed under my spinning wheel and managed to get herself on top of a treadle, and checked it all out for me like a little mechanic. To occupy her while I’m in the kitchen I give her a plastic mixing bowl of Fisher Price Roll-a-Rounds (I don’t think they make them any more, which makes me sad because I love them) and she digs them out, rolls them back and forth either with me or from hand to hand, and sometimes dumps them all out and watches them roll all over the place with great delight (and then puts the bowl on her head).

The biggest leap forward this month is the standing and cruising. Owlet pulls herself up on everything and everyone. She cruises along the chesterfield and along the coffee table, although the corners of the table continue to defeat her. She can’t get herself up into a sitting position on her own from lying down on her front or back, but if she starts off sitting she’ll get herself over to something upright (like the aforementioned table, chesterfield, chairs, bookcases, adult legs, my hair) and pulls herself up to her feet. I left her sitting on the floor of the living room a couple of days ago, with some toys around her to keep her busy, and went to work in the kitchen for five minutes. The kitchen and living room are essentially one big room, and she was quiet, so I didn’t think to check on her. But then I walked back in and found her standing on the other side of the room, leaning against the chesterfield where Gryff was lying. She was chewing on the tip of his tail and touching the pads of his feet.

Her favourite activity is walking around the house holding on to someone’s hands, which is great for her, not so great on the person whose fingers she is holding and whose back is about to break. Will she skip crawling? Who knows? I am told there are children who walk first and then retroactively apply the self-mobility thing to the crawling.

When we last left her teeth, she had two incisors on the bottom and her top two were taunting us. Well, the top two came in, followed shortly after by her right second incisor (three new teeth within five days, ack). The left second incisor is still tormenting her, but it should be any day now, too.

Just before the teeth came through she was running a high fever, which broke just as the teeth started cutting. I figured it was teething related. Except a day or so later a rash started breaking out, so surprise! Roseola! Sparky never had it, but the timing of the high fever and the rash was textbook. (I mentioned this to our doctor and said I didn’t bother bringing her in because if it was roseola there wasn’t anything anyone could do other than say, ‘Yup, roseola,’ and she said, “I wish more parents were like you!”)

Sleep is undergoing a weird overhaul. When developmental stuff starts happening like crawling, walking, acquiring new social skills and things like that, sleep can often be disturbed because there’s a lot going on in the brain as new neural pathways are established. So naps are all over the place, and night wakings are ranging from one to six per night. Teething and the roseola didn’t help, either. And on top of it all we’re trying to teach her to self-soothe and go back to sleep if she wakes up after a sleep cycle (hers seems to range from twenty to forty minutes), so I nurse her once at night around two when she wakes up after her initial long stretch of sleep, then if she wakes up after that I leave her in her crib while I pat or stroke her back and give her the soother, instead of picking her up to cuddle or nurse her back to sleep. She has let me know in no uncertain terms that she is not a fan of this, but she gets back to sleep within about ten to fifteen minutes.

We’re hearing the beginnings of real words, too. She has deliberately used Mama, Dada, and cat, although not consistently. She also says baba (or bababababa) now and then, usually when looking at one of her bottles. In fact, one night she looked at me after nursing and said, “Dada? Baba?” And I said, “No, kid; Dad is not coming upstairs to give you a bottle. You are stuck with me, and with what you just drank. Now go back to sleep.”

In the glorious world of food, she now eats just about everything except berries, milk, and nuts. She’s pretty much off cereal and mashes (not that we really did them much at all); we only mix up a bowl of cereal if we need to get something into her fast, and we pile diced veggies or meat in it to make a kind of potage or porridge. New foods this month include grapes, peppers, hamburger, turkey, scrambled eggs, Cheddar and Swiss cheese, mushrooms (raw and fried), celery, watermelon, and rice vermicelli. Overall so far, the only things she has really not pounced on and stuffed into her mouth are carrots and avocado, although I can grate carrots and add them to stir fries for her without a problem. We’ve started eating the same thing for lunch: I make macaroni, for example, and fry up mushrooms and a diced chicken thigh, then grate cheese all over it and toss it. Then we each have some. There’s something so very thrilling about your baby eating the exact same thing you’re eating. And now we have to defend our food again, because if you’re eating something and she is not, there is a great fuss made until she too has something, be it a rice rusk of her own or part of what you’re eating.

Nursing has been a bit of a challenge, and I can’t blame her, what with having to get used to three new teeth in such a brief period of time. Her latch is all wonky and she’s slipping down to nurse shallowly again, which is not optimal and is, quite frankly, cumulatively painful. We’re working on it. She’s has also developed a tendency to bite when she is really frustrated and at the end of her rope, which is not fun at all.

Also not fun: Getting one’s legs firmly wedged in the crib when one turns oneself crosswise, lifts the legs, and slots them in between the spindles. That’s what you get for having legs like turkey drumsticks, child! At her 9-month appointment, he doctor wrote down with great glee that Owlet now weighs 10 kg 38 gr (or 22 pounds and 2 ounces) at 28” tall, tracing her leap from ‘oh no, this baby isn’t gaining enough weight’ to ‘holy smokes, this child is plump and chunky and I love it’. She’s in the 96th percentile for weight (no kidding), and the 75th for height. I went back through Sparky’s records and discovered that he didn’t hit 22 lbs till he was a year old. No wonder Owlet has blown past all her 9-12 month clothes. She’s firmly in 18-month size territory right now, although her shape is changing all the time, because her diapers fit differently each week — not too large or too small, just fitting differently as her body changes shape. That plus the mobility thing mean I’m turning to dresses a lot now, to leave her legs and feet bare so she can get a better grip on the floor to pull up or get around, and because then we don’t have to sort through the drawer to find pants that fit her that day.

In general, it feels like someone switched the baby to eleven. She’s slightly manic, quick to push and push and push and suddenly start crying if things go wrong or not according to her plans, or she just overwhelms herself. Gone are the days where she’d watch and think about things. Now she throws herself in, and damn the torpedoes. It’s exhausting for everyone. I’m looking forward to things settling down a bit when this round of developmental overdrive is, well, over.

Friday Photo Post

You need some pictures, just for the heck of it.

I should save some of these for the nine months old post, but hey, let’s live dangerously and assume we’re going to have more fun pictures to use then. Half of these are from our Easter visit, and half are the last couple of weeks here at home.

Owlet got a classic board book in her Easter basket. You can see how into it she is already:

Last summer Sparky climbed to the bottom branch and hung out there. This spring, he was halfway up the tree:

Sparky and his cousins were making pirate hats and taping them onto their heads while playing before Easter dinner. So they made one for Owlet and taped it on her. It’s certainly the most… unique Easter bonnet I’ve encountered. Very Queen Mum:

Last week we had crazy warm weather, so out came the new summer clothes, and Owlet snacked on half an “ah-full”:

Owlet’s new party trick, as of yesterday: pulling up on people, using their fingers to balance herself as she walks to the nearest chesterfield or table, and cruising along the furniture (eek!):

And finally, Owlet today, just sitting and looking lovely:

Minutiae

Stuff keeps happening, and I don’t have a heck of a lot of time to write it down.

1. I got my first royalty statement yesterday. It freaked me out a bit because I wasn’t expecting it. It came in two parts and was essentially a bunch of numbers and terms I didn’t understand, and I tried to read it while juggling a fussy baby, and no one should ever do anything that requires attention and rational thought while juggling a baby. Eventually I figured out that it was for two different editions of the book. One said I’d made back 1/5th of my advance (in just one month!) and the other said I’d made almost an entire mortgage payment, but it was being applied to more of my advance payment. So I’m about 2/5 of the way in to paying back my advance, after which any money made goes into my pocket. I’m a bit boggled by this. In a good way, of course.

Yes, it’s my first royalty statement. It’s an interesting sensation, because previously I’ve done all my book writing on contract. I like it. I’m looking forward to my next one.

2. Owlet had roseola. We thought the fever, crying a lot, refusing solids and nursing constantly was due to her upper teeth (more on that below) but no; the fever broke, and a day and a half later she developed the rash. I thought it was a teething-related diaper rash, because she’s essentially been a waterfall this past week and the rash started on her bum, but then it spread to her legs, and the next day it was on her arms and face. It wasn’t itchy and there were no other symptoms. It’s pretty much gone now. I didn’t bother with the doctor because it happened on the weekend, her receptionist isn’t in on Mondays, and by the time I got an appointment it would be over (as it is). Also, it’s a virus, so there’s not much we could have done anyway. This is the second time Owlet has come down with something five to seven days after we drive home from visiting my parents; I think she’s picking stuff up at the rest stops, probably from the changing tables. I’m going to carry antibacterial wipes or spray to wipe them down before we use them from now on. Even better, with the weather warmer, we can change her in the car or on a picnic blanket outside.

Sparky had the sudden fever last night, and a couple of hours later I started with the body aches, sore throat, and hot/cold thing. He woke up this morning with his temperature just about normal again, so off he went to school. HRH handled him this morning and took him to the bus stop, for which I was deeply grateful because I could barely move. I napped with Owlet this morning, and woke up feeling much better. I don’t know if what we have is connected to the roseola or if it’s something else, but I am so tired of everyone being sick.

3. The teeth. Urg, the teeth. All four up top are swollen and descending. Now those two centre upper incisors are so close to being through. We can see the actual teeth through a very thin layer of skin.

4. The concert was wonderful. We had just about a full house. There was birthday cake at the intermission, and the audience sang happy birthday to us at the end, and the music went really well. The end of the Wagner was particularly magical, and the Beethoven felt like a train that just wasn’t going to stop or slow down for anyone. (I suppose the term for that would be ‘inexorable,’ wouldn’t it. Which is particularly appropriate for the Fifth.) As usual, there was easy stuff I flubbed that I’d never missed before, and hard stuff that I didn’t expect to get that I managed on the fly. Sitting in the back is hard; I can’t clearly see the conductor, or the principal’s bowing, so I end up listening to the orchestra for a lot of my cues. (I’m good at using aural cues for my entrances; in fact, I trust my aural cues more than my counting.) I mentioned that to my teacher this past weekend and she said, “Sitting at the front of the section is easy; you need to be a really good cellist to sit at the back,” which was really nice to hear. And the second half of the concert was a challenge because I couldn’t get my endpin to a comfortable height; I was slightly off all the time, and that played havoc with my intonation. But all in all I’m happy with how I did, considering that I missed just under half the rehearsals and have had no more than a hour or so a week to practice. Our next concert is July 1, of course, and it will have a Northern theme: Finlandia, Peer Gynt, the Ruslan & Ludmila overture, and so forth.

5. Sparky outgrew his bike before learning to ride it properly. He’s a perfectionist, so if he doesn’t think he can do it right or if he’s afraid of falling or failing or whatever, he just won’t do it; he says there’s something else he’d like to do instead, or says he’s tired, that sort of thing. We got the bike out the other week, put the seat and handlebars up, and no go; he’s just way too tall. HRH’s parents will be buying him a new one as an early birthday gift.

6. Sparky has also become a Pokemon fan. The kids at school know all about it and they’ve been playing Pokemon on the playground at recess and lunch, so he kept coming home with all sorts of facts and exciting information. So for the trip down to see my parents at Easter I dug out my DS and the sole Pokemon game I ever played, and he was thrilled. He is taking very good care of it, is having lots of fun, and learning valuable lessons about not hitting buttons when you don’t understand what they do (he accidentally released his starting Pokemon instead of putting it a storage box and was devastated, so we restarted the game from his last saved point), and saving often so you don’t lose a whole day’s activity.

7. We have daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths in the garden. The crocuses are over. And we already have tiny buds that will be flowers on the crabapple tree we planted last year in front of Sparky’s window. We’re getting another tree for this year’s Earth Day tree giveaway that our city does, and we’ll plant it in front of Owlet’s window.

Baby’s awake. That’s all for now.

Owlet: Eight Months Old!

Did you blink and miss the first eight months? Sometimes we think we did.

The big news is that Owlet is Sleeping Through the Night. In casual medical parlance that means five or six hours between eleven PM and six AM. Well, she was doing that, with two wakeups… and then suddenly she wasn’t. She was sleeping ten or eleven hours straight. Which is just fine with us, thank you! Sleep maturity is a wonderful thing, and it happens differently for every child. It’s also not permanent; it will fluctuate and shift according to developmental stages and external circumstances and stresses. But for now, we are very, very happy. At the moment I’m still sleeping in her room, because when she does wake up after those ten or eleven hours, hoo boy, she is hungry and cranky and has a very wet diaper that she detests and wants out of right now. The extra time it would take me to wake up enough to hear her over the monitor, stumble out of bed, get up the stairs and into her room just isn’t worth the screaming right now. Roughly, the night goes like this: She sleeps about ten hours a night, from six-thirty or seven to fourish AM. She feeds somewhere between three and five, then goes back to sleep till six or seven. We’ve had our hiccoughs, of course, like the night where she was up every two hours, or the other night where she refused to go to sleep for two hours and insisted on nursing sessions and cuddles and rocking, but as a rule, this is the new normal (for now).

She’s been sleeping on her tummy, though we do put her down on her back. We put her down drowsy or only in a light sleep most of the time, and she can usually fall asleep on her own. Other times she hyperextends in a stretch backwards while being put down and wakes herself up completely and is not happy about it, or knocks about in her crib for a while, wiggling around and babbling to her stuffed animals or her blankets before falling asleep on her tummy. Sometimes she squirms while she’s asleep and wakes herself up because she’s gotten herself stuck across her crib. (Which is kind of funny, although not at all from her point of view.) Unlike Sparky, who needed to be rocked and soothed to sleep for pretty much every nap and night, but was fine once he was asleep, Owlet falls asleep relatively easily, but wakes up a lot more often than her brother did. Naps are still tricky, although they’re starting to resolve into one nap both morning and afternoon, anywhere from an hour to ninety minutes long. (Except when they’re not.)

She’s made some great physical leaps forward, too. I woke up one night to feed her and found her raising herself up onto hands and knees, then lowering herself back down to her tummy, then lifting herself up again and rocking back and forth on all fours. In other words, she was prepping for crawling. She’s been slow getting that lovely round tummy off the ground, and really, we shouldn’t be surprised. She’s become very stable when sitting up, too, and can reach in all directions to grab things. It’s so much easier to get her dressed to go out then sit her on the floor by the front door while I put my own coat and shoes on, instead of lying her flat on a blanket somewhere. She’s also been working hard on pulling herself up to standing position using the arm of the settee or someone’s fingers (not being pulled up, using them as leverage). She loves to stand, and has been doing it with flat feet some of the time instead of on tippy-toe. She pulled herself up using the bottom bar of her crib a few days ago. I had to take off her socks and roll up her pants so she had a better grip with her feet, but she did it. She bounced on her feet, looking very pleased with herself, considered cruising, got as far as moving her hands over, then decided that maybe that was enough and let go with one hand. She swung down and pivoted because she was still holding on with the other hand, and sat down on her bum, boom! She was very pleased. And then she was immediately overwhelmed by the experience and begged to nurse and nap.

Teething has begun again. This past week has been rather cranky on that front, although she’s still one of the most tolerant children I’ve encountered regarding teething pain. She’s generally her usual happy self just quicker to grizzle, but sometimes she just can’t be happy any more because things hurt too much, and then she cries in frustration because she doesn’t feel like she usually does. She caught my finger in her mouth today and I could feel her upper incisors like pencil erasers stuck on the front of her upper jawbone, the poor thing, so we are desperately hoping that it cuts soon.

New foods this past month include peaches, pear slices, shredded roast chicken, Greek yoghurt, peas (again), carrots (also again), fried tofu, pizza crusts, spaghetti, and, oh my, yes, CHEERIOS. Cheerios are the gods’ gift to babies, and she adores them. We introduced the sippy cup, too, which is a wonderful toy. I’d forgotten how hard it is to teach a baby to lift it up high enough to get the liquid inside to reach the mouth. She got to taste a slice of smoked turkey from the deli, too, which she gobbled up, though sliced meats aren’t high on my list of good things to feed tiny persons just yet; they’re too high in sodium and nitrates.

The new section we can add to this month’s report is words. Owlet starting saying “Mahm’a” last week, and she has a very similar sound that’s more of a “meh” that I think means milk (she’s back to sticking her tongue out and lapping like a little cat when she wants to nurse, too, which is when she usually says it). Sometimes she stuffs her hand in her mouth when I think she gets hungry, which may be a version of the fingers to the mouth sign that means “food,” but I can’t tell if that’s associated with hunger or the teething at this point. Yesterday she very clearly said “MOE!” at lunch, when I was too slow loading rice and squash on a spoon and handing it to her. I got excited and kept asking, “Do you want more?” when I got the spoon back, but all I got was impatient hand banging on the tray or big grins because yay, she was eating, and oh goodness she loves to eat. I listened to her quietly say, “Mama, Mama, Mama” over and over to herself via the intercom while she wiggled about the other night, and it was a wonderful feeling.

Playing peek-a-boo continues. And she made up a game in which she puts things on top of her head. Bibs, washcloths, small toys, socks… it wasn’t a game at first, just something she did matter of factly. Then she noticed us laughing, and now she does it with a smile and a peek at us if she knows we’re watching. She sometimes still does it matter of factly on her own, though, as if she’s testing something.

We’ve given up on any clothes marked 12 months or smaller. However, most of the 12-18 month size clothes we have are summer dresses, mainly sundresses at that. So I think I’m going to need to find a few long- and short-sleeve basic t-shirts to wear under them. And that way we don’t have to worry about wiggling pants that are too long and too narrow over her cloth diapers, either. Bless stretchy leggings, for they have been our salvation…

Catch Up

The flight was fun, and Sparky was thrilled with it all and very well behaved. Apparently he handled it all like an old pro. (Genetic memory?) Owlet travelled decently on our drive down to join him at my parents’ place, but needed me back there with her for the second half of the trip. Coming back was easier (though I expected it to be harder balancing two bored, cranky kids) because Sparky entertained her by just being himself and giving her company. There’s a whole different rhythm to travelling with a baby that I’d forgotten about — you stop every ninety minutes to two hours just to get out of the car and feed them, give them a change of environment, that sort of thing. Good thing she’s half on solids now, because nursing was pretty much a washout as there was way too much to look at. Naps go right out the window, because you gauge your rest stops by if baby’s sleeping, and inevitably they wake up five minutes after you pass one and the next isn’t for another hour… but all things considered, it went well. Sleeping went okay at my parents’ house, too, after the first night where she spent all but the first hour or two in bed with us. The last night she did her usual two wakeups to nurse and went back to sleep in her own bed each time. Of course, back home she was all off again, waking up every hour or so the first night and finally spending the last few hours in bed with me. And there was no morning nap the next day, despite trying twice. But it’s okay; we’ve been going with the flow and are slowly settling in, riding out the bumpy bits that are appearing at odd times.

We had a lovely trip. The weather was great, and the kids were cheerful and well behaved. We saw my cousin and his family (who are moving to BC this summer, so we won’t get to see them often any more). We ate piles and piles of my mother’s delicious food. On Sunday Sparky went with Nana to the aircraft museum where my dad works so HRH, Owlet, and I got to do a quick run to the used baby clothes store and score some stretchy leggings that fit her because suddenly none of her pants are big enough. (PSA: Just give up on buying 12mos size clothes, people. Grandma recently bought two gorgeous 12mos tops for Owlet, and one barely fits, while the other — the one I like more, which figures — doesn’t at all. Both looked plenty large enough, so I give up.)

She’s not the only one whose clothes need replacing. Thank goodness the weather has turned and the boy is wearing splash pants and his raincoat, because his snowsuit is shot. Today we had to send him back to his room twice because both the original pair of pants and the second pair he tried to put on were too short. At least Owlet has boxes of summer dresses waiting for her, which I may switch her into early and put leggings and long-sleeve shirts underneath.

In news about me, I have a fully functional Mac mini again, thanks to the tireless efforts of HRH and the Mac tech at work in combining the one with the failing logic board and the slower, smaller one. They maxed the RAM, which pretty much balances out the slightly slower processor. I have a new to me monitor as well, thanks to Molly Ann. It is such a relief to be able to sync my phone and back stuff up again. The only down side is that the optical drive in the Ariadne mini burns CDs only, so my stack of DVD RWs isn’t much use to me any more. In other news, my client finally got back to me after I sent them a formal message about invoicing them for the work I broke my back to get them on deadline day and to which they didn’t respond at all, and I think I’ve been sidelined. Their reason for not responding to me for two weeks was that they were moving, and the things they asked for quotes actually needed more work, and if they needed me they’d let me know. Whatever. I just wish I hadn’t turned away the project from my publisher because the new client indicated they only needed approval and a purchase order number for the important book-length project before I started on that. It would have been tight time-wise, and frustrating because I’d have been working on the rickety, crashy laptop, but I’d have had work and money by now.

I miss cello dreadfully. I remember now that there was a gap of no-cello-at-all when Sparky was born because I either couldn’t fit practice time in or couldn’t practice because he’d wake up. The location of Owlet’s bedroom and the small footprint of our house means that I can’t practice upstairs or downstairs while she’s asleep, and she only sits and listens to me for about five minutes if I plunk her in a chair upstairs and practice with her right there. Having to drop my private lessons to every two weeks and then stop entirely has depressed me and is eroding my skills, and doing orchestra only every two weeks because we can’t afford the gas to get me out there is awful. I’m walking out of every rehearsal pretty demoralised because I just can’t stay on top of things, and we’re playing stuff that demands a lot of focus and precision. I think I’m going to try to make every rehearsal from now till the concert (which is is ONE MONTH, peoples: April 14! mark your calendars!), just to make sure I absorb as much direction as possible. Part of me wants to give it up to eliminate the stress, but then I’d be giving up the one thing left that I have to get me out of the house sans baby, and also the one cello-related thing left in my life at the moment, and I’m too stubborn to do that.

Our bulbs are poking their wee green heads up in the gardens, and we are very much looking forward to actually gardening this year. Go spring!

Okay, baby’s awake. Off we go on errands.