Young Baby Young

“But, but, we drove all this way to freestyle with the alligators!”

“Merv, you wouldn’t believe how much money I saved on signage when I left out the silent m and the silent g.”

“The swim-in has been cancelled?!  Unbelievable.  A simple phone call would have been nice.  We swam all this way for nothing.”

“Next they’re going to prohibit us from eating the three-headed fish we caught here, too.”

“Dodging the stumps was going to make my swim all the more challenging.”

“Where else can we possibly go to swim here in coastal Maine?”

“I was hoping to catch a leech or two for this pounding headache.”

It’s the darnedest thing: for a person who no longer works, I seem to have a very busy schedule.  Of course, keep in mind that the simplest chores seem to take three times as long as they used to.  Eating, diapering, and cleaning seem to consume about 80% of our day.

We went to Bangor one day on a mission to find a highchair.  We went to my favorite consignment shop, where I always find lots of things I didn’t even know I needed, and then we circled back to Baby Depot, where we found the perfect highchair.  Emily did an excellent job with an entire afternoon of shopping and driving.  She spends most of her time flashing charming smiles at anyone who so much as glances at her.

We had an excellent time at playgroup, where Emily and Lucie were adorable as they played with a beach ball together.  I’m not sure I can articulate how cute it was.  They sat across from each other and squealed and shrieked as they patted, punched, and squeezed the ball.  Amelia was johnny-on-the-spot with her camera, so I’ll try to “borrow” some pictures from her when she has a chance.

Other awesome activities of the week: lunch with Amelia and Lucie, a visit from Rachel and Dakota, lunch with Lisa and Annika, a few trips to see Miss Sheila at the Y, a jaunt to Grammy Ann’s, some sightings of Grandma Jane, an excursion to Grandma Mary Ann and Grandpa Steve’s….  Phew!  I’m exhausted just recounting it all.

We received another package of fabulousness from Auntie Sarah — she finds the best baby items for Emily.  And she knows to buy a few sizes up so that we never receive things that are too small. 

Developmentally, Emily is continuing to sit on her own and learn about balance; she’s reaching for toys; she puts everything in her mouth; she loves anything that makes noise; her rolling skills are improving; she’s making progress toward crawling, although I think we have some time before that’s mastered.

I told my father the other day that Emily was doing well, but was a little fussy, probably due to teething.  He sassily retorted, “You’ve been saying she was teething since she was 3 weeks old!  When is she actually going to get some teeth?!”

I’ll have you all know that teething is a lifelong journey.  I’m appalled by the lack of understanding you people have shown.  I was, however, pleased to see that the company that makes teething tablets understood that one can teethe at any age:

Ask a doctor before use if pregnant or nursing.  Because a lot of 20- and 30-somethings are still teething?  Or because a lot of 6-month-olds are pregnant?  I don’t get it.

For a few weeks recently, I was fighting Emily every day to take a nap.  I could tell she was tired, but she refused to go to sleep (although kept yawning and rubbing her eyes) until she’d reach meltdown, then eventually she’d take her nap.  I was trying so hard to avoid meltdown, but nothing was working.  One day I decided that at the first sign of a yawn, I would put her in her crib and see what she did on her own.

The lesson learned here was that Emily no longer needs me.  I obviously wasn’t listening very well because she had been telling me, for the past two weeks, to just leave her alone and let her get some sleep.  Instead I was rocking and nursing and singing and patting — when all she wanted was a little alone time!  Now I put her in her crib around naptime and she plays with a few toys for a while (or her feet, which are amazingly fun) and then goes to sleep on her own.  Well damn!  My job just got a lot easier.

The funniest part about this is that she likes to smother herself to get to sleep.  She’ll press her face against her crib bumper if nothing else is available, but ideally she’ll be able to fling The Coward (her stuffed lion from Laura) over her face and nuzzle it for a few minutes.  Being the anxious mother that I am, I tiptoe back in there after she’s fallen asleep and remove all suffocation hazards from her face.  Below is a picture of her sound asleep:

“I am exactly one-half years old today,” she stated proudly.  “I think I look very old indeed.”

Just because.  That’s why we went to Stonington on Wednesday.  Because we could.  It was awesome.  The weather was gorgeous and we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be.  We couldn’t go to playgroup because I was still recovering from a cold; why not jump in the car and do some exploring?

The following pictures don’t capture how nice the day was; regardless, this was the view from Stonington’s pier:

It’s lupine season [that's LOO-pin, not lew-PINE, around these pahts] and they couldn’t have been prettier.  I especially liked the Volkswagen cemetery surrounding the flowers.

I’ve entitled the following picture “Foundations are for Wussies.”  Discuss.

A timed photo.  Tip of hat to Carrie for insisting on more timed photos.  Apparently I need to put a comb in my already-overflowing diaper bag.  Whatever.  Anyway, I’ll have you know that while Emily and I were walking around that day, a nice man asked how old my son was.  The bonnet, the pink shirt, and the lavender shoes obviously meant nothing to him.  Sigh.

Emily was too tired to get out of the car to enjoy Causeway Beach, so I stopped quickly to enjoy the feel of sand before driving on.  The beach will have to be an outing for another day, maybe with friends next time.

After our Stonington adventure, we had an unexpected bonus of seeing Jasper and Annika at El El Frijoles, a Mexican restaurant owned by Jasper’s parents.  We didn’t expect Jasper to be around, and certainly not with Lisa and Annika, so that was quite the treat!

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Here’s what left of the barn [nothing] as seen from our back porch.  This picture was taken a few days ago, but nothing has changed since then.  We’ve had rain for the past few days, thus no building progress yet.

Emily and Lucie often tag a little post-script to the end of emails between their mothers.  The girls are surprisingly funny for their young ages.  Here’s a sampling:

Lucie sends Emily a face-plant and pterodactyl shriek followed by a belly laugh.

Emily sends Lucie a crinkly nosed, open-mouth smile and a kick from her new metallic shoes.

Lucie wants to tell Emily to learn to crawl, it’s great, cat food is tasty!

Grammy Ann and Auntie Tracy insisted that Emily have these shoes.  I have to admit, she gets compliments everywhere she goes.  She loves to be fashionable.  However, this has set the bar pretty high.

At this point in her young life, we still don’t really know who Emily looks like.  It almost depends on who the viewer knows better — people see what they want to see when looking at a baby’s features.  There’s beginning to be a general consensus, though, that Emily has my eyes: 

She’s an efficient eater now.  She’s still primarily breastfed, but it’s no longer a 45-minute marathon every three hours.  It takes her about 10 minutes to eat now.  I applaud her gumption — I wouldn’t have the strength of character to attack these babies after they’ve been filling up for 10 hours during the night, but Emmycakes is totally undaunted by the task and she goes at it with considerable finesse.

She’s beginning to make raspberry noises.  They please her.  It helps that she’s a drooly mess.  Which reminds me: teeth.  I’ve been claiming for 2 months that she’s about to get some teeth, and still there are no teeth…if I keep saying it, I’m bound to be right one of these days.  She has the same tooth buds that she’s had for a while now; they haven’t progressed any further.  She becomes most irritated with me when I try to look in her mouth. 

Emily loves her doggies.  However, she doesn’t understand the term “gentle” yet.  She likes to grab things with her stickymitts and hold on tight…a practice Nathan is none too fond of.  She becomes very animated whenever they walk past her.  She doesn’t like it when they lick her face, but of course that’s the only thing about her that they like.

It appears that Emily will have very blonde hair, although in some lights it still looks brown or even red.  Her mullet, which is still quite impressive, continues to grow.  Luckily, since she doesn’t spend a lot of time on her back, she hasn’t rubbed away a bald spot right above her mullet — that would certainly be a distinct look.  I try to style Emily’s hair for her, either into a babyhawk or with pretty little bows, but nothing stays in.  It inevitably reverts back to the Caesar cut within an hour.  

Emily’s feeding prowess always results in nasty chunks of food being stored in her chins for later.  Thus, baths have become much more frequent.  She seems to enjoy them very much, especially since she gets Burts Bees Apricot Oil rubbed into her skin afterwards.  I also slather her face with Eucerin Cream, which makes her look like a baby Geisha.  I had a dream of slathering her whole body in the cream and then submitting pictures of her to the Michelin company, but Chris put the kibosh to that plan.

Now that Grammy Ann has given her some happenin’ metallic kicks (pictures to follow a little later), Emily’s fashion-forward attire is complete.  People always say, “Little girls are so much more fun to dress.”  It’s true.  I take full advantage of this.  She wears dresses with tights just because it looks so darn cute.  I know that one day in the not-so-distant future she’s going to refuse to wear what I’ve layed out for her, so I’m getting my dolly dress-up time in now.

An un-cute part of her wardrobe continues to be spit-up.  Some days I think it’s getting better, but other days we’re both covered.   Mmm, gotta love the smell of sour milk.  We won’t be sorry to see that phase come to an end.

Another unpleasant aspect of wardrobing: diaper blowouts.  They aren’t as frequent as they were a few months ago, but at least every other day, there’s an incident where diaper contents have been expelled out a leg or up the back.  Since introducing real foods, we’ve learned that carrots in means carrots out.  ’nuff said.

Toys that amuse Emily include anything that is brightly colored and can be put in her mouth.  Books are totally yesterday.  (Yesterday?  Perhaps “tomorrow” would be more like it.)  Musical toys and ones with lights do capture her attention for a while.  Chris is pretty sure she’s going to experience seizures as a result.

Emmy experienced her first blackfly bite near her eye the other day.  Welcome to Maine!