I hate it too

I love this post on Swistle, one of my favorite new blogs. This just sums up almost perfectly the way I feel about exercise, especially this bit:

Good: With just one session of running, I have learned things about myself and about my body.

Bad: Those things are that I hate exercise, that I hate the WHOLE EXERCISE THING--the changing in and out of clothes, the sweating, the need to shower afterward, the stretching, the warming up and cooling down, ALL of it. Hate! it!

I've been running for about a month now. Running again, I should say, as I did this fairly regularly until I was about six months pregnant. Since then, though, I've been much less active. And it shows. It's much much harder to run with the twenty or so extra pounds I'm carrying now than when I was lighter, more in shape, and not pushing a thirty-something pound baby stroller up the street at the same time.

But I've been sticking to it. For the last four weeks I've worked out between four and six times a week, for about 40 minutes each day. Mostly running, some walking. I don't always enjoy it when I'm doing it, but I do feel good afterwards, and I'm even starting to crave it. So great! And the end result of this month of Herculean effort? Pounds lost?

One.

Geez Louise. What the HECK do I have to do to shed some weight here?

So my goal now is to keep up the exercise and start adding other small, incremental steps. This month we're continuing to alternate running or walking every day, and starting to work on the food thing, too. Because really, it would help if I didn't eat so much sugar. So that's this week's goal.

Tomatoes in pots, part two

Hey! People are mailing me tomato questions. Cool. :) Here's a couple recent ones:

A recent commenter asked:
Q: I have a tomato plant in a large pot. I was out of town Friday through Sunday and I gave it water on Friday before I left. When I got home it was completed wilted over and fallen on the ground. This caused the stem to bend and break. It has about a dozen tomatoes on it. I staked it up and gave it lots of water, but it doesn't appear to be comeing back. Can I cut it off where it cracked and replant it?Thanks for your help!

A: At this point in the season, you're not likely to get more tomatoes if you cut it off and let the plant start over. Although it would probably regrow, it would take another 75 days (or whatever the growing length is before this particular variety fruits) for it to send up new branches, blossom, and ripen. Plus the new plant would probably be small and bushy rather than tall like the original.

My advice - leave it as it is and see what happens. In years past, I've had big branches laden with fruit crack almost all the way off the plant because they weren't supported well enough, and stay connected to the plant by just a thread. When I've left them in place, most of the time those fruits have still managed to grow red and ripen with whatever little bit of nourishment they can still draw. Your plant won't necessarily look good, but you might get a bit of fruit from it.

And who knows -- maybe a new stalk will grow at the same time and you can have your tomato and eat it too. Nothing to lose, at this point, by trying to have it both ways.

Q: Help, my tomatoes are ripening but they have big, unsightly brown mushy spots on the bottom. What is this?

A: Blossom end rot, the bane of tomato-growers everywhere. Some varieties are more prone to this than others, but I always see a bit of this early in the season. There are a variety of theories on this -- some think it's caused by plants that have been exposed to drought, some think it has to do with too much or too little calcium. Another theory is poorly-developed root systems. What I do know is I see it every year, usually just a little bit on a few plants here and there, but I have seen it take almost all of the tomatoes, all season, from one particular variety I grew last year. That was extremely frustrating.

Multiple theories often abound on how to treat this, but I'm with the people who recommend doing nothing, aside from making sure your plants are well-watered and perhaps mulched if it's unusually hot. Usually, blossom end rot affects just the first few fruits that ripen on a plant. Pull them off as soon as you notice them and throw them away, and pretty soon you'll see tomatoes free from rot. Accept the heartache of throwing away your very first full size tomatoes that have grown ripe. There will be more.

Me, I just tossed my first ripened tomato from the Dona variety because of end rot. None of the other plants are showing any sign of it yet. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Baby communication

Had the neighborhood babysitter over today for a couple of hours so I could clean the upstairs and get some work done on a writing piece that's due on Friday. Things were going pretty well, when all of a sudden I heard a thump-waaaaaaaa! from downstairs. Uh oh.

This immediately led me to a dilemma. I could tell this was a minor fall from the sound of things, and I didn't necessarily want to swoop in like the helicopter mama I'm not and a) make the babysitter feel terrible about something that happens regularly even to Brett and me, or b) make Sofie feel worse on the sight of me because hey, mama is home and she's not playing with me. Sofie does great with the mother's helper concept as long as I stay out of sight.

So I waited. And listened. And assumed that if there was a real problem the sitter would call for me. And sure enough, Sofie calmed down in a few minutes. And our sitter did a nice job comforting her and trying to help. It was hard, though, not swooping in to pick her up and comfort her myself.

A half hour later, I was in my office trying to get a few last minute things done before the end of the hour, when I heard Sofie fussing and then the sitter say, "Sofie, why do you keep banging your head on my chest?"

Oops. Banging the head on the chest is Sofie-language for "Gimme breastmilk and gimme it NOW." Sorry, kid, you're not likely to get anything from a 13 year old no matter how hard you bop her with your forehead. At this point, I stepped in to take over and ended their playdate a little bit early.

After her mothers helper sessions, she's always really tired. When she finished eating, we went across the street for a few minutes to visit Grandma and Grandpa, but after ten minutes or so, Sofie started waving and saying bye bye to them, her new signal to let me know when she's ready to go home. Buh bye, she says, in her little baby voice, then looks expectantly at me. Let's motor.

So home we came for a little more milk, and then she curled up in my lap, stuck her hand down my shirt in that comfort-seeking way babies do, and fell asleep in about five seconds.

She's really starting to pick up on both verbal and nonverbal ways to let us know what she needs. Over the weekend she started signing for milk a lot (although she still prefers the head-bang method), and I think she's also signing "more." She's figuring out how to use a wave to communicate an intention, and she's starting to occasionally say things that sound a lot like some new words. This year of silence is going to be over soon and the floodgates are going to open on a new verbal toddler, and I just can't wait to see what she's going to have to say.

Vacationing with kids

We're up in Mazama, a little town in the east Cascades, staying in a cabin at Freestone Inn for the weekend. Our plan was to come up here, do some hiking, visit the Blues Festival, and generally relax -- but plans changed a bit when Sofie came down with a whopping case of croup the night we arrived. Big barking cough and a little bit of wheezing, and an off and on fever.

Luckily, we were pretty familiar with croup -- the neighbors told me all about it, and the cough it causes is pretty unmistakeable. She's had a pretty mild case of it, after that first night, but we
ve still mostly been hanging out at the cabin and taking it very, very easy. She's in very good spirits and playing normally most of the times. Crying makes the whole cough much worse, so we're doing our best to keep her calm and happy.

It's still been a pretty nice weekend, if a different one than what we planned. She and I have spent a lot of time on the back porch of our cabin, watching the chipmunks plan world domination and listening to the breeze in the fir trees. Brett's gone to a few shows at the blues festival, and we've taken a couple small walks around the property here. No hiking, but that's okay. And we bought the new Harry Potter while we were here, so I'm working my way through that.

It's been kind of hard to decide between the urge to get S0fie home to her own bed and the urge to not put her through the misery of a very long car ride, but in the end we've decided that keeping her comfortable is better at this point. We've delayed our departure until Monday because she's not handling the car well and we've got a four or five hour drive home ahead of us, so we're hoping by then that the fever will be gone and she'll be able to be more comfortable in the car.

Pearly whites

Sofie examines a toothbrush on her first visit to the dentist:

Moments

I'm not sure I fully understood how much I could love someone until I saw my husband jumping around doing exaggerated mock-karate poses, complete with loud "Hiiiii-YA!" sounds, while my infant daughter bounced in her crib, eyes wide, chortling with laughter.

Or until I sat my 10 month old down in front of a collection of her stuffed animals and said, each in turn, "Where's Froggy? Where's Franklin? Where's Mr. Giggles?" and watched her solemnly swivel her head to fix each requested animal in her gaze. So smart, her. She sat in the middle of them like she'd called a committee meeting, agenda in hand. Now we need to discuss cookie stealing. Has anyone been taking mine?

Or until I see her eyes light up each day when we go to visit Grandma and Grandpa on their porch after we take a walk. It's a memorable moment watching your parents abandon their dignity completely to make that silly noise when you flap your finger between your lips -- bibblebibblebibble -- and suddenly all three of them are doing it together, with wild abandon, neighbors and mailmen be damned.

Or until I took the little one to her first level three class at Gymboree yesterday, the 10 to 14 month class, where's she's the very youngest one there and one of the only ones not walking, and she momentarily lost her confident swagger and stared with shy awe at the Big Kids who can do so much more than her. And she clung tightly to me for most of the hour, until finally she stepped up to help a set of toddlers roll a six foot long foam cylinder across the room, all of them standing in line behind it like little log dancers, trying to stay upright. And what do you know, she made it.

In a few weeks her baby posse will be in the level three class with her - she's the oldest of her friends and moves up first, but they'll catch up. And a few months after that she'll be the biggest kid there again, probably one of the first to walk, the one outrunning everyone else and stealing everyone's toys with her superlocomotive powers. But for now she's the little one, and her sudden vulnerability makes me want to just smooth her forehead with kisses for the whole hour.

First foods

I've recently signed up to do some writing for a great local nonprofit that's trying to lower the incidences of childhood obesity. As part of that, I'm doing a lot of research right now and coming up with a proposal for a series of articles I'd like to write and publish on their web site. This is both something I'm passionately interested in myself -- Brett and I talk constantly about how to develop healthy eating habits and activity patterns in the Niblet (to resurrect an old nickname) -- and also a great chance for me to do some fun writing outside the blog. Very exciting.

My friend Kate and I were talking about the mechanisms of early childhood obesity. It's hard to imagine, when you have a young baby, how any baby could become obese. Most kids under twelve months will eat until they're full and then refuse another bite. This has been true here - we just cannot make The Niblet accept another spoonful after she's done. How, then, would you load a kid that age up on so many extra calories that they ended up tottering towards obesity? How did the little kid in the picture at the left get to that size?

We figured it would have to be via drinks - loading your babies up on juice and other high calorie drink options that they'd suck down between meals. Or possibly higher-density foods provided during meals. But still, we thought it'd be really unlikely that you could get kids to eat that much.

Turns out, we were wrong. Sure, juice and sugary drinks play a part. But a lot of it is that parents are feeding their kids abysmal diets, even right from the very beginning.

Boy some of the statistics I'm finding are shocking and depressing. Take a gander at this data, from a 2002 study of 3000 infants and toddlers:

• Between 25-33% of 6 month olds ate no fruits or vegetables on any given day. When I first read this, I made some mental allowances for this, because six months is pretty young. A lot of babies are barely getting started on solid foods at this age, and when they do start most of them probably start exclusively on cereal for a while. Maybe that's all there was to it. Alas, read on.



• 10% of 4 to 6 month olds ate dessert or sweets every day. Ok, so the same six month old who never eats a vegetable has been eating dessert every day since he was four months old? So much for assuming no vegetables was due to a slow start on solid food.



• By 12 months old, 13% of babies eat french fries every day. Oy. Here's where my brain began to hurt. I can see the occasional nibble on a french fry. The Niblet tasted one when we were in Port Townsend at a restaurant a few weeks ago. But daily?



• By 15 to 18 months, french fries were the most commonly consumed vegetable of all the babies tested.



• By age two, 60% of toddlers in the study ate some kind of pastry every day. Again - that's Every. Freaking. Day.

I know there's a lot to this - lack of education about nutrition, economic disadvantage and the fact that fast food is cheap and easily available, cultural differences, working parents who don't have time to lovingly craft their baby's every meal. But at the same time, to some degree it seems like parents who are feeding their babies -- BABIES, mind you! -- McDonalds nearly every day or stuffing donuts down their two year old's mouth on a daily basis -- DAILY! -- ought to be liable under the law.

Obviously, I'm going to have to dump the outraged tone before I turn in my first article, which is -- are you ready for the excitement? -- 800 words about juice. Pulitzer, here I come.

We're working harder than ever now to make sure The Niblet gets her vegetables and fruits. She's always had some, but there were days when it was easier to give her lots of oatmeal and applesauce and not find a way to get more variety in there. That needs to change, and she also needs to start getting a lot more practice in feeding herself and in sampling new tastes. So the last two days, I've been giving her a little taste of almost everything we've eaten. And here's what she ate today:

• One bowl of oatmeal, standard baby breakfast
• Several handfuls of raspberries, at both lunch and dinner (see picture documenting this for posterity)
• Two broccoli spears, dark-green ends only. We made a bunch days ago for dinner and she's been eating the leftovers two at a time ever since. She LOVES broccoli. Is this normal?
• Two sugar pea pods, sampled and thrown on the floor.
• One large pickle from the side of a sandwich plate at lunch, which we were surprised to find she liked and ate most of
• Two bites of couscous, off my dinner plate
• Tiny bite of salmon, soundly rejected with much face-making
• One adult-sized, full-fat, plain yogurt - standard baby dinner around here
• One miniscule bite of yellow bell pepper, which she immediately spat out in disgust and then burst into tears. Oops.
• One corner of a teether biscuit that she then threw on the floor.

Green. Red. Yellow. White. Calcium. Fiber. Protein. Vegetable. Fruit. Dairy. I think we covered most of the bases. So far, she's an adventurous eater - I hope that lasts.

Raspberry delight

Mmm, raspberries are yummy.

Mother's helpers

This week we took the big step of having a couple of our neighorhood kids come in as mother's helpers to play with Sofie for an hour or two in her room while I was elsewhere in the house. Both kids are 12, both are babysitter certified by a local hospital that offers first aid, CPR, and babysitting safety classes, and both are kids we know very, very well. Neither is old enough to care for Sofie alone yet, but they're just fine for an hour of playtime.

It went fantastic! Sofie seemed a little puzzled about why kids she didn't know were showing up to play with her, but she happily spent an hour knocking over their block towers, rolling her big green ball back and forth, and showing them her book collection.

And me? The first day I deep cleaned the kitchen for an hour, and the second day I used the treadmill downstairs, and still had time for a shower. This mother's helper thing is pretty darn great.

I came down after my shower to find Sofie fast asleep in the arms of the girl who was watching her that day, all wrapped around her chest like monkey. To say that it was adorable was an understatement. Sofie is probably a quarter of her babysitter's weight, and the girl looked a little bit trapped under the massive bulk of this baby who'd decided she was a suitable mattress.

"Is this okay? We were reading books and she just fell asleep." the girl asked nervously. Like maybe I'd be mad that she wasn't playing with her for the whole 90 minutes she was in charge of her. Like maybe I was expecting her to wake her up and continue to roll a ball around.

"Of course!" I said, scooping the baby up so that she wasn't pinned to her chair anymore.

We're going to make this a weekly routine, in between their many camps and team sports. Definitely money well spent.

Tomatoes!

Look - the Glaciers, the earliest-ripening of this year's crop, are turning red! In just days we'll be carving up the first tomato of the season. Hallelujah!

I don't usually post links...

But oh man -- this is such a beautifully written post, over on Her Bad Mother...

Sleep Mysteries

Oh cruel, cruel world. I think Sofie's growing out of her morning naps. Is that possible at this tender age? For months now she's gone down for a morning nap like a little lamb, almost exactly two hours to the minute after she's woken up. The last two weeks, though, it's gotten harder and harder to get her down, and it's been slipping later and later when she finally does sleep -- three hours after she wakes up, three and a half.

And then there's today, when I've finally left her playing in her crib for a while in hopes that she'll conk out at least a little bit before our new mother's helper (neighbor boy, Drew) comes over to play with her for an hour. Because honestly? He's only twelve. Sure, he's babysitter certified and CPR certified and has already done a little bit of babysitting; he's prepared. But I bet he'd rather not have the screaming, fussy, overtired baby from hell for his first visit to our house. I find that hard enough to cope with, and I've got several decades on him.

With the increased time between wakeup and nap in the mornings, we've started rearranging our schedule a bit. That used to be dead time - nothing happened until the morning nap was over, because by the time you feed the baby, have breakfast yourself, and read a few books she'd be back asleep. Now we get up, have breakfast, and go out for a run or a walk. It's the only time of day I can stand to exercise outside now that it's routinely topping 80 every afternoon, and it's a good way to start the morning. I'm enjoying the revved up feeling I get from exercising first thing each day. This could be good.

But still. Couldn't she just hold on to the two-naps-a-day routine a little bit longer?

Anyone reading who can comment on when the moving-to-one-nap switch happened for your kids?

Fireworks are not as bad as sneezes

Last night around 10:30 we realized that hey, we actually CAN see the fireworks from our house, just not from the window that seems like the most likely candidate. Last year we tried looking out our topmost, south-facing windows and were disappointed to find that if we stood on the blanket chest and strained way to the left we could make out the tiniest bit of the Elliott Bay fireworks behind the trees across the street. Not comfortable or rewarding enough to make it worth it.

However, last night as we were lying in bed watching something on television, I stood up and opened the blinds on the east-facing window next to our bed, and realized we had a really great view from there, because the sight-line was just between a pair of trees and thus much more open. We could see about half of the display - the lower fireworks were out of view because of the big hill we live on top of, but the really high-up ones were perfectly framed in our windows.

Wish I'd realized this a little earlier, but we enjoyed the last two or three minutes of the show.

Sofie, bless her heart, slept right through it. Like a log. Our little princess-and-the-pea girl, who wakes up screaming if we so much as sneeze or flush a toilet, happily snored away while not one but two big city shows went booming off around her, and didn't even stir when the next door neighbor set off huge, eardrum-bursting, home fireworks right outside her window. The whole room lit up in bright acid green and the noise equivalent of a marching band came through -- but hey, it wasn't a sneeze, so nooooooo problem here.

Who can understand them?

Book lust for the toddler set

If her appearance were not enough to convince anyone that Sofie is our offspring (see here for proof), her attitude towards books would be the clincher. Boy, does this kid love her books. It's both nature -- it's hard to say which of us owns more books; probably Brett owns more, but I read more of them start to finish than him -- and nurture. I've been reading to her daily since she was around three months old, and although she was lukewarm on the concept at first, now she's hooked.

Hooked to the point where sometimes I'll be reading in her playroom while she plays with her blocks and I'll look up to find her absorbed in the pages of a book on the floor. She's imitating us, certainly, but she does this of her own volition all the time. It tickles me pink to see her "reading" so seriously.

Lately I've taken to leaving a book she really likes in her crib at night. When she wakes up, she'll spend some time quietly leafing through it before she asks me to please get my butt out of bed and pick her up. I enjoy finding the animal book open to a new page each day -- one morning it will be open to the picture of the kitty, one morning to the picture of the elephant. Clearly she's been spending some time with it. Sometimes I watch her before she knows I'm awake and she's just so absorbed in what she's doing.

Truly, she may be the world's coolest kid.

We walk up to the Greenwood Library once a week and get books and music for her - four or five new picture books and a few CDs from their generous collection of kids' music. This is a great way to try things out and see what she likes before buying. The ones she really gets interested in, I pick up used on Amazon. Slowly, we're building a great little library by adding these favorites on top of the already sizeable collection of books we got at her shower.

She has certain books she loves above all others. I've taken to reading with her facing me, holding the book in front of me classroom-style, so I can watch her face while we read. She reacts to her beloved books with the same full-body, toe-curling, arm-waving joy that I've blogged about before. She pays close attention, watching for certain pages whose pictures she loves. When they appear she explodes in merriment.

Here are a few of her favorites, for anyone shopping for great kids book for the under-one set:

• I Like Cats, Patricia Hubbell - this is a big picture book that is Sofie's absolute favorite. We read it probably six times a day. If you have a baby less fixated on cats, your mileage may vary.
• Where's Spot? Eric Hill - classic lift-the-flap fun that always gets a laugh out of her. It's taking frequent applications of tape, however, to keep the flaps attached to the book. For some reason, the lion always gets a laugh out of her, but the monkey falls flat. Who knows why. Maybe lions are just funnier.
• That's Not My Monster, Fiona Watt - the best touch and feel book ever. This was her second love among her books, after "I Like Cats." She "reads" this one herself very frequently, and loves to touch all the textured parts.
• Maisy's Morning On The Farm, Lucy Cousins - I bought her a bunch of other Maisy books after she got hooked on this one, but this is the only one she's really, really in love with. I thought it was because of the farm animals, but then I noticed that the delight starts with the picture of Maisy on her tractor. Maybe she'll be asking for John Deere toys next.
• Funny Face, Nicola Smee - the old mirror-on-the-last-page gag is eternally pleasing to babies. We've had several versions of these books from the library, but this is the current favorite and the one I bought.
• Animal Strike at the Zoo! It's True! by Karma Wilson - ok, this one may be more my favorite than hers, but I love the effortless and funny verse in this one. This was another library book we had to go buy.
• First 100 Animals, Roger Priddy - photographs of animals are much more popular than illustrations. We don't read this as much as open it at random and touch various animals.
• Over in the Meadow, Jan Thornhill - another great verse book that's a pleasure to both read and listen to.
• Bright Baby Animals by Roger Priddy - this is her favorite read-in-the-crib book. Mr. Priddy is doing good business at our house.
• Bright Baby Colors, also by Roger Priddy. Ditto.
• Squishy Turtle and Friends, again by Roger Priddy! I didn't realize that until I looked up the links for these. Hats off, dude.

Why I only post pictures

I think I may be doomed to never completely finish a blog posting again. I have many things I start to write down - thoughts on Sofie, food, life, books, updates on the garden - but before I get all the way to the last word Sofie needs me and in they go to the limbo of the saved-but-unposted entries. Of which I now have something like six.

Oy.

So the pictures, they'll keep coming. But the words, they may be a while.

(Postscript several hours later - of course now that I posted this she's taking a monster nap today and I'm getting all kinds of things posted! Oh well.)