Cool idea -- Muffin tin meals

This seems like a really cool idea -- muffin tin Mondays. But I'm with the couple of commenters who are wondering whether there are enough things their kids would eat to fill a muffin tin.

Sofie eats better than I give her credit for -- aside from her staples (eggs and toast, raisins, lunchmeat and cheese, macaroni, salami) she forages pretty broadly and hits a substantial number of fruits and vegetables. She especially likes oranges, bananas, apples, dried apricots, grapes, blueberries, red peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, peas, and green beans.

Ah, green beans. Someday when she'll older she'll be surprised to find out that there's not a legal requirement that all meals be accompanied by green beans. But since it's the only green thing she'll eat we rely on it a little too heavily.

What she will not eat is our food, especially meat and beans and anything with protein that doesn't come in extremely flat, lunchmeat-like form. So in spite of my protestations to the contrary, all my statements about how I would NOT raise my kid this way, I do, in fact, make two wholly separate meals every night for dinner.

Unless it's the increasingly-rare Chinese-food night. Then she raises to the door when the delivery man comes, screaming "Chicken man!"

My obsessive compulsive toddler

For those of you who feel like I make my kid out to be too entirely perfect, let me point out that yesterday, my little one:

• Had two thirty minute tantrums, one over the wrong kind of diaper being applied (who knew?) and the other over the fact that we were out of oranges.
  
• Spent the whole day yelling "BOOGER!!" whenever her runny nose needed to be wiped.
  
• Spent all of dinner waiting until I sat down then demanding some new food that had to be fetched and cut up, then rejecting it and insisting on something else. Fun, fun dinner games.
  
• Showed her obsessive-compulsive streak in a host of new ways, including stopping after her bath to make sure that all of her froggie-suction toys were positioned with their heads up and their feet down before she'd let me wrap her in the towel. Because it's just much better that way.

She also insists on all these strange routines, like touching each doorknob of the three-door business on the corner when we go on a walk, and immediately fastening the clasps on her high chair after she gets out of the chair after a meal. We call her "Monk" sometimes. True OCs have nothing on two year olds.

We met the lady who owns the business on the corner the other day after Sofie had just rattled all of her doorknobs.

"Sorry about that," I said to her. "I hope that didn't startle you!"

"Oh no," she said. "It did the first couple times but now I just look for the little shadow going by and I know it's her."

We have a reputation. :)

Little consumers

I think it's time for me to think about reading Born to Buy, an interesting book that was detailed in a series of 18 discussion posts over on The Simple Dollar, one of my favorite newly-discovered blogs. I've skimmed the book discussion and thought this looked interesting, but it didn't hit me until today that my kid is already showing signs of being inundated by child marketing.

Sofie doesn't watch television, except for maybe ten minutes of Curious George on PBS once or twice a month. She doesn't watch me watch television, so she doesn't see ads much. But what's getting her interest are catalogs. Boy does she get the concept of toy catalogs! She digs through our recycle bin looking for random Fisher Price or Step One catalogs that come in the mail and then studies them, page by page, until she finds something she really likes and brings it over to me. Usually this thing is a $999 swingset, complete with multiple huge slides and a fort and three or four swings. "Park!" she says. "Park! Side!" (slide)

Now I don't really think she knows that you can BUY the things in these catalogs yet or is asking me to run out and get her one. But she knows these are things one can play with and that maybe she can have something like that one day. And studying these glossy pages full of kids having way more fun than she can even imagine has got to be the first step towards consumerism, I think.

Makes me stop and think a little bit.

****

On other fronts, Sofie's language development is taking a couple of interesting turns. She's starting to use articles -- "A BALL!" she screams in delight every time she sees a ball. For a long time an article was used only with respect to balls, but just in the last couple days she's started applying it to other things. "A truck!" she said this morning at Jack's house. "A car!" Kind of cool. She's still not really working out any short sentences, but hey, my kid uses articles. :)

And just today she started calling herself "me." She holds her arms up when she wants to be lifted into her highchair and says "me! me! me!" and later when we were heading out for her weekly playdate at Jack's house she ran to the door and said "me! me! me!" As if to say, "don't leave without me!" Very cute! I don't know when that development typically happens but I sort of thought this was a while off.

Having a kid is like having the most interesting field study ever in cognitive development. Very, very interesting, watching her little brain grow and work in new ways. Add that to the list of things I just love about this whole experience.

Playdate with Jack

Sofie visits with her friend Jack every Wednesday morning -- one week at our house, the next week at Jack's house -- so that Jack's mom and I can get a little concentrated time to focus on our part-time writing and editing work. This has been working out beautifully because these two kids LOVE each other. Sofie's so excited on the morning when Jack is coming over that she can't sit still for breakfast, yelling "JACK! JACK! JACK!" over and over. She also loves going to his house, where there are fabulous toys that we don't have.

And for his part, Jack loves coming here, not in small part because have trains!!!!

Here are some pictures of the two of them playing with our new trainset (thank you again, Fran and Amy!!) a few days ago:


Watching the train go by...



Jack lines them up


We love trains!


Taking a break to play with big bird while Sofie digs in the toy box

The immediate forecast: sunny

Miss Sofie has been in the most delightful mood the last week or so. And no, I don't mean that sarcastically! I don't know what's going on, but she's just been extra special sunny and smiley and cuddly for about a week now and I LOVE IT. We've had lots of giggles and laughs, she's spent long periods climbing up on my lap to sit and play with something, and she's developed this funny habit of cheering wildly when she asks for something and I figure out what she wants and get it for her. Like "YAY MOMMY YOU GOT IT RIGHT! GO MOM!" So, so funny.



The absolute height of this cuteness was yesterday, during a diaper change, when I looked down at her smiling face and said, "I love you!" and, little parrot that she is, she immediately said "LOVEYOU!" right back. Awwwwwwwww. I don't know if she actually knew what she was saying or was just mimicking my sounds but my baby said she loves me and I'll take it, either way.

I'm of course fully aware that this phase is probably going to be followed by one which is much less fun, so I'm trying to enjoy and appreciate every second of it while it lasts.

***

Also worth mentioning is that Little Miss no longer likes to hear her bedtime books at night and instead insists on hearing a wide selection of songs. Two of her current favorites are Amazing Grace and Kumbaya. I get a kick out of listening to my Jewish husband sing Kumbaya to his kid at night. How cute is that?

Me, I like the song because it can be strung out forever. Sometimes we make each verse narrate a portion of her day or a part of the going to bed process. "Someone's rocking, lord, kumbaya. (repeat for a whole verse) Someone's singing lord, kumbaya. (Ditto) Someone's napping lord, kumbaya. Oh lord, kumbaya."

Today I was stringing it out even further out of sheer desperation to keep it going until she settled down enough to sleep. "Someone needs to nap, kumbaya." "And I don't mean me, kumbaya."

Fun.

Toddlers are weird, and other news

So today's evidence that toddlers are just plain weird? Sofie, clutching her gloworm (which she has recently named GayGay) to her chest, standing in the middle of the dining room crying big fat tears because I'm trying to get her to stay up and play for a while longer instead of taking a nap at what seems like way too early a time.


"No! Nap! Nap!" she sobbed. How could I be so cruel as to encourage her to play? I'm such a Big Meanie.


So down she went, a full 45 minutes earlier than normal, but what the heck. Apparently she was tired. Except that she's been in there yattering ever since and no actual sleeping has commenced.


***


And what is it about motherhood that makes it so you can instantly sense whether your kid is crying in their room because they're trying to fall asleep or crying because they pooped? I have poop radar. I was sitting in my office fixing a retarded mistake I made on MiniatureQuilter's wall quilt, listening to Sofie yatter and occasionally squawk, when suddenly my brain said, "Oh hey, she pooped. You better go in there." And sure enough.


Poopdar. My super power.


***


No more migraines this week, although I did take a cautionary pill the other night when I may or may not have been having my warning blind spot. Sometimes it's really hard to tell if I'm actually having a blind spot and have ten minutes before the world explodes in my head or if I just looked at a lightbulb. But not wanting to take any chances, I used one of my prescriptions.


Last night I couldn't sleep for some reason, and ended up sitting up until after midnight watching old reruns of Sex in the City. The movie of which is coming out soon, and which I will be at come hell or high water for opening weekend. Or very soon thereafter. I no longer wear fancy clothes or really nice shoes very often, but I can live vicariously through those who do.


This Friday Brett and I have a date. An actual dinner date, with Sofie left at home to play with one of her favorite other-mamas. We debated for a while trying to fit in a movie too but I'm actually dying to just have a long, leisurely, not-in-a-rush-to-get-somewhere-after dinner at a grownup restaurant - in this case Brasa, downtown. With tablecloths that little hands are not constantly almost pulling off the table. Maybe with actual candles. And wine. And - gasp - dessert. It's going to be great.


I should also mention that I had a very nice mother's day! Brett and Sofie gave me several cards (apparently Sofie couldn't decide between two and gave me both) and also a gift certificate to the Quilting Loft, a swanky fabric store in Ballard. We all went out to breakfast at our favorite diner and then had a nice day of lounging around and playing. I even got to take a nap. What more could I have asked for?


That's all for now.

Sofie 1, Mom 0

Sofie's getting better. She woke up not feeling great today but rallied a few times throughout the day enough to get down and play a little. In between these bouts, she cried miserably for SIX HOURS. The previous two days she was too sick and tired to make a peep, but now she's feeling better enough to complain and moan and be demanding. So it was a hard day.

Brett came home to find me having a total meltdown about the fact that she Will. Not. Eat. It's been three days since she had a meal, which wouldn't be so bad if she'd drink the freaking electrolyte formula that's supposed to replenish her systems, but she won't have that either. Or juice. Or anything except minute amounts of water.

I wrestled her into her high chair tonight and laid out a variety of tempting options. Pudding. Jello. Baby food. Bananas. Rice. Ham. Would she have any of them? No. Instead she sobbed and cried and thrashed and sobbed until I pretty much cried too. I feel like I'm starving her. I know it's ok if kids don't eat for a couple days, but not drink either?? How many days of this can she take?

In the end, she ate: one raisin. About ten grains of rice. A quarter of a snack bar. Add in the ten bunny crackers (very small) she ate for breakfast and that's her total consumption for the day.

Of course, once Brett walked in the door, she turned into perky, healthy kid, all smiles and play, making an apparent liar out of me when I tried to tell him how bad the day had been and why I was dissolving into a puddle of goo. "She wo-wo-won't eat!" I sobbed. "I got her pu-pu-pudding!!! What kind of kid won't eat pudding??"

He was bewildered, to say the least. Especially with Sofie happily stacking animals on his knee.

"She cried for SIX HOURS!" I said. "And she's pooping her pants RIGHT NOW! From one raisin!"

They both looked at me like *I* was losing my mind. So I gave up.

Picture books, our friends, our enemies

I've occasionally been accused of making motherhood sound way too rose-colored and perfect in my blog. One mom I don't know particularly well actually got a little hostile about it one day. Which makes me wonder how people have missed the long series of posts about how I suspected my daughter was trying to kill me via lack of sleep. Or the week or two in which she punched me every day. Or about various bad days we've had. But anyhow -- here's a genuine post about something my kid does that truly annoys me.

Miss Sofie -- what IS it about the library books? Why do they instantly turn you into such a screaming, book-throwing little despot??

Sofie loves her books. Loves them so much that she routinely makes me read at least 20 or 30 books a day. Which means we need to have a lot of books around. So we go to the library every couple weeks, pick up four or five music CDs and a half dozen toddler books, and drag it all home again. The books she really takes to, I buy used on Amazon. Thus we are slowly building up a library.

But oh MAN, the struggle to get her to accept any new book is just unbelievably hard. I didn't quite realize how freaking strong the whole "familiarity is good, unfamiliarity is bad" routine was for kids this age. I pick library books she's probably going to like, about kitties and ducks and dinosaurs and babies, with rhymes and enough story but not too many words. Once she gives them a chance, she usually likes at least a couple of them.

"Once she gives them a chance" being the operational phrase there. Because this process takes three or four days. Here's how it goes:

Sofie: Climbs into my lap. "Book! Book! Book!" she shouts
imperiously, pointing to the book basket next to us.

Me: "How about this one? pulls out new library book featuring friendly insects frolicking at a picnic.

Sofie: insistently "No no no no no!"

Me: "Oh cmon, it'll be fun! Let's try it!" opens to page one and holds book slightly out of reach. "There once was a bee named Fred..."

Sofie: goes rigid with irritation, flailing wildly for said book. "No no no no no no! Ugggggggggh!"

Me: tries to turn page, accidentally bringing it into her reach.

Sofie: grabs book and flings it across the room. "Book! Book!
BookbookbookbookBOOK!" Gestures wildly at basket.

Me: quietly count to ten

Then I pull other books out of the basket, one by one, showing them to her majesty for approval, 90% of which she shakes her head at, until I undoubtedly come across the book that we already read 35 times earlier in the day. At which point she happily settles in for reading number 36, and I settle in and try to determine whether I can yet "read" this book to her with my eyes closed.

Note that the book flinging and screaming stage of this often happens multiple times, and goes on for several days until all of a sudden, she's SEEN the library book enough times to concede that it just MIGHT be interesting, and lets me read it.

At which point it becomes her Favorite Book of All Time.

This transformation from bad, unfamiliar book to good, familiar friend happened just today with the library books we got last Friday. I've now been able to read all but one of them to her. That one, alas, she just doesn't seem to like.

Baby games

This morning, as we do every morning, we spent the hour immediately post-breakfast with Sofie playing in her room while I sat there in her rocker slowly nursing a cup of coffee and trying to wake up. I like the first hour of the day -- it's quiet. She wakes up, we go upstairs to read a handful of books ("Book! Book! Book!" is her greeting for me each morning), and then I cook us some breakfast. Then we sit and play (her) and ingest caffeine (me) until we have the strength to really begin the day's adventures.

Except that today, she toddled off into the living room for a moment and I waited, just to see if she was really out there to stay or if she was coming back. And then suddenly, the pink, plastic head of her baby doll was thrust out around the corner to peek at me. Alone. And then pulled back. And then thrust out. And then pulled back.

"Where's baby? Where's baby?" I called loudly, catching on to the game.

Boom! Here's baby, peeking around the corner at me. Much toddler chortlling from just out of my line of sight. Someone is amused by her own machinations. I'm pretty amused too.

So funny to watch her think of these kind of games. She's becoming so imaginative. We're so lucky to have such a sweet, sunny girl in our lives. She rewards us liberally all day long with these huge, delighted grins whenever we get something right -- when we respond to her requests with the RIGHT cup, the RIGHT toy, when we retrieve the committee member who has rolled under the hutch, when we do something she thinks is funny. Sure there are the inevitable toddler storms, but in between the weather is so consistently sunny and gorgeous in Sofie-land that I can hardly believe our luck.

Even when I'm tired -- when a day starts too early and ends too late and all I can think before Brett gets home is how much I need a little break from small people and their needs -- even then, she spends twenty minutes in the other room with her dad and suddenly I'm in there again, pulled in by her bright eyes and her sweet little face and her chubby little belly. I just have to touch her, give her a hug, make her laugh. It's like a drug.

Storms

Sofie is beginning to have tantrums, and I find them very strangely moving. Perhaps because they don't seem all that willful yet -- she's not lying down in a store because I won't buy her some piece of plastic crap, or dissolving into screams because I gave her the wrong toy. Those moments happen a little bit too, but they're not really what I consider tantrums, just flashes of anger and maybe a thrown cup.

The tantrums right now seem like these moments where her emotions just become a storm that she can't manage anymore. Like this afternoon. It was lunchtime and I wanted to put her in her high chair. She had other ideas, but it was close to naptime and I wanted her to eat so I overrode her struggles and fastened her in, which led to some tears, and went into the kitchen to make her lunch and see if she would calm down while I did so.

She did not. She was mad, she was frustrated, she was really really upset, and she just lost it.

I came back from the kitchen when it became apparent that this had been a mistake, and got her out and she just clung to me and cried and flailed for about fifteen minutes. We rocked in the rocking chair. We went into her room and sat in the glider. We tried to sing a song. (Nonononono, she said. I stopped.) I rubbed her back. Eventually she started to calm down, although she still looked shaken up -- for a few minutes she just sat quietly, looking around the room with one hand firmly on my chest as if to ground herself, unwilling to move. Finally a smile came and started to play and it was all past.

But what struck me was what a physical event this was, and how disturbing it was for her. She feels these huge things -- sadness, anger, frustration -- and every once in a while they just get completely out of control and she's lost in a whirlwind. Right now, she wants to cling to me when that happens. I know that won't always be the case, but for now this is what she wants, not to lie on the floor and kick but to bury her head in my neck and sob.

And it feels to me like I have a really important job at those moments -- to hold her, to ground her physically, to keep her safe. To try to name some of it for her ("are you feeling mad? you're pretty upset, aren't you?" or even just "do you feel yucky?"), kiss her hot, sweaty little head and she shrieks, and just try to help her come back to herself.

It's interesting to me also that these tantrums don't bother me. The little flashes of temper sometimes get me hot under the collar, the times when she whips her cup across the room and whines, but not these big explosions. I just feel compassion for her, and feel like holding on to her, the two of us bobbing across the ocean of her emotions as she learns to navigate them safely and come back to shore.

Why silence is bad, and other news

I'm beginning to learn that sudden silences, even when your child is in the same room as you, are a worrisome thing. A few days ago, Sofie suddenly hunkered down on the other side of the ottoman and got very, very quiet. I could see her head. I knew she wasn't hurting herself. And so it took me a few minutes to think, "Hey, I can't see her hands. What is she playing with?"

And sure enough, she was playing with my laptop. She'd opened it up and was most seriously tapping away at various keys, trying to turn it on. Her expression and posture were an exact mirror of mine when I'm on the computer. She was, in a word, engrossed.

Thank goodness she hasn't yet figured out where the power key is.

Tonight after she had her dinner, we were playing in the living room while we waited for Brett to get home. She was messing around with various things on the floor and I was sitting in a chair not three feet away, and yet still it took me a few minutes to realize that what she was up to was not the innocent rolling-around-on-the-floor game that it seemed to be. No. She was pouring a little water out of her cup onto the hardwood floor, then licking it up.

Mopping the floor with her tongue, pretty much.

Blech. Thankfully I'd mopped it earlier so it was relatively clean, and thankfully I don't use anything real harsh on it when I do. But still.

Blech.
Double blech.
Triple blech.

***

We went to the dentist today, all three of us, for Sofie's and my cleaning appointments. Sofie's was mercifully short, just five minutes of leaning backwards on my lap with her head in the dentist's lap so she could get a look-see at her beautiful 14 teeth. Sofie tolerated this for about a minute and a half and then had a fit for the remaining 3.5 minutes, but still it was enough to determine that her teeth are fine and she's doing well.

After that she got to play in the lobby with Daddy while I had my teeth cleaned, where she proceeded to throw about a hundred crayons around the room, play with plastic animals, and plaster her nose against the glass door leading back to the cleaning area in hopes of catching a glimpse of me. She was so cute doing this that the dentist actually stopped work and took a picture of her.

***

Let's see, what else is new with Sofie?

• Suddenly, she makes me blow on each and every piece of food before she'll put it in her mouth. She holds it up to me with a huge grin and says, "fffff! ffff!" (which is her way of making the blow-on-it sound) and then waits until I oblige. If I don't, no eating happens.
  
  
• Suddenly Gloworm, her indispensible night-time toy and the only reason she ever started going to bed by herself or sleeping through the night, is not just a night-time toy but a 24-7 companion. He comes out of the crib with her in the morning now, where previously she just held him up and made me kiss him and then left him behind until naptime arrived, and goes everywhere she does, including out of the house. Today he went to the dentist, to the grocery store, and to the library. This terrifies us because he's inevitably going to get lost, and seriously. THIS THING IS THE ONLY REASON SHE EVER SLEEPS.
  
  So we need a backup. And wouldn't you know it? The thing seems to have been pulled from the market. It's out of stock everywhere -- online, in person, everywhere. Our days are numbered.
  
  
• She's developed a new love of reggae. Bring on the Marley, man. Nothing gets that little behind shaking faster than some reggae beat. So, so cute. I wish I could box up this little kid dancing, with the spastic arm-waving and the booty-scooting and the bouncing knees and the big huge tummy sticking out in the front, and save it for years from now when I need a lift. That and the spinning around in circles until you fall over. If these could be bottled there would be no need for Paxil in the world. Take two baby dance moves and call me in the morning.

Our perfect day

Well day one alone was an absolutely lovely day. I decided that the way to keep things from feeling overwhelming was to just keep things simple and also have some special adventures that we don't do every day. So we did! She had a playdate with a neighbor girl for two hours while I tidied up the house to my liking, we played silly games and laughed half the day, Sofie took two great naps including the first one she's taken in her crib in a week, we visited with Grandma and Grandpa on their porch, we went shopping for new pans, and (best of all) we ate dinner outside on a gorgeous summer night at a great little cafe nearby. This was our special adventure part - just us two girls having a little night out.

And it was fantastic! Mama got to enjoy a small glass of wine and some wonderful seared scallops, and Sofie really seemed to love the idea of having her dinner (two jars of organic baby food) outdoors. It helped, of course, that she was a PERFECT LITTLE ANGEL. And that she spent half of dinner finding new tables full of people to wave at and get to wave back. And that she looked just adorable in her little denim overalls and new shoes. And then we shared one tiny scoop of ice cream and headed home to an early bedtime that actually worked!

This eating out thing may be the answer to how to handle the baby alone. I must say, coming home after dinner and having a) no dishes to wash, b) no high chair to hose down from Sofie's dinner and c) no kitchen to clean was pretty freaking awesome. The only jobs I had to do were get her into her jammies and into bed.

I think we might just eat out tomorrow too. Budget schmudget.

Single parenting

Trying to spare Brett a bad case of end-of-summer-and-I-never-went-camping blues, I've given him a parenting furlough this weekend so that he can escape to eastern Washington for some man time. Scratching, belching, and reading conspiracy literature around a campfire are all on the agenda. Just to show that he hasn't lost his whimsy, though, he took Herschel with him.

Sofie and I are having our first weekend alone. I'm about 96% fine with being a lone parent for a weekend and 4% nervous, which is a fair enough equation. As long as she sleeps, we'll be just fine.

And the sleep, thankfully, has been improving a little of late. For several days she utterly refused to nap this week, but it's sorting itself out and she's been sleeping well at night throughout. Brett's developed some newfangled way to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night that involves just pushing her back down onto the mattress when she starts to sit up. Sounds awkward, but apparently she accepts the suggestion just fine and rolls over to go back to sleep. I'm going to have to try that tonight.

I'm also going to use these three days to try to back her bedtime up a little earlier. She used to stay up almost until nine; recently this has moved up a lot to about 7:45. Now I'd like to get that backed up to around 7:00 or 7:30, little by little. From some things I've read recently, one of the primary causes of bad napping during the day is a too late bedtime, which that book defined as anything later than 8:00. Yikes. So we're working on that.

Updates to come.

Milkiness

I was a remarkably calm new mother, in retrospect, with one big exception - breastfeeding freaked me the heck out. I used up all the energy I didn't spend holding a mirror under the baby's nostrils in the middle of the night by obsessively worrying about milk. Was she getting enough? Was she gaining weight? Good god, was it supposed to hurt this much?


To be fair, though, breastfeeding and me, we got off to a rough start. I ended up with a caesarian birth, and between the normal effect of surgery drugs and the fact that I might have been a little trigger-happy before, during, and after labor with the morphine clicker they gave me, my milk was exceedingly slow to come in. Poor little Sofie didn't get hardly anything for the first four days, and then things started working. But in the meantime I developed quite a complex about how this was going to ever work.

I never did make enough milk; Sofie always had to have a little formula too. For months I felt horrible about that. I tried everything in the book to fix it, including a punishing regimen of 22 nutritional or herbal supplements a day mixed with endless pumping, but it never changed one lick.

Finally, though, I just relaxed. Sure it would've been nice if formula never touched her lips, but that just wasn't the case. At worst she had half milk, half formula. These days, now that solid food has taken the place of several milk feedings, she has almost no formula. Things have evened out. It's hard to remember now why I was so uptight about it, or so scared that she was going to starve, or why I let it affect how I felt about myself. Like I wasn't a real mother if I couldn't provide all the milk my little girl needed.

Here's two things no one told me which would have made a big difference -

• Your baby will most definitely survive being given a little formula. There are many wonderful lactation consultants out there doing everything they can to make breastfeeding more widely accepted and easier for new moms to figure out, but there are also a lot of scary lactivists who make you feel like crap if you use formula. Don't listen to, read, or even make eye contact with them.
  
• They tell you in childbirth class that breastfeeding will hurt a little, but they don't really prepare you for how utterly excruciating it can be if your little one isn't real skilled in the whole latch-on arena. Oh. My. God. While it would have terrified me to get the straight poop from someone about what this might really be like, it also would've helped to know this is normal. Instead, I kept reading things from La Leche about how "breastfeeding only hurts if you're doing it wrong!" Oy. Shame. Guilt.

All that stuff about how wonderful breastfeeding is for you and the baby is certainly true -- but for most women, it won't feel wonderful or blissful for at least four to eight weeks after you start. (There are exceptions to this, including my good friend K, who had a lovely time right from the start with her first baby.) In the new mother's group I was a part of at the beginning, all of us were agonizing about breastfeeding at the six week point. When, when, when was it going to get better? Was it EVER going to get better? Every single one of us.

Shortly thereafter, it did get better. Almost overnight.

I sit here now, on the eve of Sofie's eleven month birthday, amazed to realise that my sort of half-assed milk supply has quietly trucked along for almost a whole entire year, and that the pain and agonizing has been over so long that I can hardly even remember when nursing was a source of anxiety for me.


Now it's such a peaceful, loving part of our day that when she suddenly stopped nursing for a couple days this week, I was incredibly sad that she might be weaning herself. I'm not quite ready for this to be over. I know that a lot of babies, especially girls, lost interest somewhere not long after their first birthday and end up weaning, but eleven months seemed too early to me. But after two days of a nursing strike, she started back up this morning like nothing had ever been wrong. (Teething? Tummy ache? Who knows.) And I breathed a secret sigh of relief for however many more weeks we get to continue.

Our nursing days are numbered now, in that the rest of this baby period will zoom by with the ferocious speed that has already taken away her tiny baby grogginess and her goofy, toothless smiles and her first efforts to roll over. One day I'm going to lay down to sleep and wake up with a toddler who wants to do everything herself and who will be pushing away from mommy rather than holding so, so close. And that's natural and normal and fine.

But a few more months of babyness and milkiness would be nice. I love feeding and comforting her. She scrunches up close to me and I stroke her head while she drinks and her skull feels like an eggshell nestled in my palm. It's fitting and perfect that this is the first and last moment of each day, us together in this quiet embrace.

I love that we've made it this far and are still going. We're actually going to make it to the twelve-month mark, when at first I didn't think we'd make it six weeks. But here we are. And that's good.

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.

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.

Half full, half empty

There's an interesting debate raging over on Surburban Turmoil that started up when the poster had the nerve to say that stay-at-home-mommyhood was... gasp... not that hard. The comments started out polite and devolved into sniping, as these things often do.


But it's got me thinking. I relate to a lot of things people on both sides of the debate are saying about being a stay at home parent.

On the one hand, I have many, many moments where I'm surprised to find myself thinking how easy this is. A large portion of my day involves napping with my daughter, spooning applesauce into her eager little baby-bird mouth, walking in the sun, playing on the front lawn, rocking her while we listen to songs on her French CD, or meeting up with the occasional buddy. I have many heartfelt moments where I can't believe my luck -- this is the most fun I've ever had, and honestly most of the individual moments aren't that difficult.

I even - dare I say it? - get to read a little bit, now that she's able to crawl around. We spend a part of most morning in her gated-off playroom, where she happily explores her toys at my feet while I sit in the rocker and read or blog. This doesn't last long, but it does a lot to recharge the batteries for a long day ahead.

On the other hand, while the individual moments are easy, the days can be quite exhausting. There's little down time. I'm busy from six a.m. until about nine p.m. most of the time, with maybe a half hour to myself somewhere. Even the easy activities I listed above have unseen complications: napping peacefully is proceeded by an hour and a half of feeding, clothing, changing, and holding her while she shrieks and cries about not wanting a (yawn) nap! Feeding her involves fighting off the cat who's trying to steal her food when I'm not looking, wiping oatmeal off the walls when she flings it, and trying to dig all of the day's discarded cheese/apples/gunk out of the crevices of the high chair. Walking or playing outside involves careful preparation (is she hungry? dirty? wet? about to be any of these things? is it going to rain? do we need to take x, y, or z?). Meeting friends is a highly time-sensitive operation that only the other moms of kids this age understand. Nap times are wildly variant, so scheduling outings is tough. Add in housework and laundry, errands and shopping.

I feel busier than when I worked, I suppose because any leisure time has to be so carefully planned for and compressed. But it's also too easy, I think, to wax rhapsodic about how people at work get "down time". Working parents have it as hard if not harder, I think, in some ways. On the plus side they can go to the bathroom by themselves, eat lunch for an hour with friends, maybe take a walk, and occasionally just take a breather in the midst of a difficult project. On the negative side, the day doesn't end for them either when they get home.

Brett comes home wiped out from a difficult job and then has about ninety minutes before his daughter goes to bed in which he needs to a) play with his daughter, b) try to connect with me a little bit while eating dinner and c) take out the garbage or some other task.

Neither one is easy. But whatever the sacrifices, financial or personal, I'm making to be home with Sofie for these few years, I feel thankful every morning that I'm able to do this. And I'd have to say the 'easy' outweighs the 'hard' for me right now. Or, possibly, the truth is that overall the whole experience of being home with her is so meaningful for me that I don't mind the hard parts so much. I'm finding resources in myself I didn't know I had, depths of caring and patience, outpourings of fun and attention and goofiness that my daughter soaks up like a sponge. I can't imagine doing anything else right now.

Vocabulary building

Sofie's added another word to her vocabulary -- "book." I'm inordinately pleased that her first two words (aside from mama and dada) have been "cat" and "book." If she follows that up with "Can I have a nice glass of red wine, please?" she's covered most of the major pleasures in life.

Should I be worried?

Sofie likes to pull our books off the bookcases up in the master bedroom and play with them on the floor. But yesterday, I found her carefully leafing through The DaVinci Code, page by page.

Isn't she a little young for hack, pseudo-religious, poorly written thrillers?

On power struggles

I've recently passed what felt like one of my first real challenges in parenting, in which I had to figure out how to handle something better for both my sake and Sofie's.

Sofie has recently developed what seems to be a real aversion to diaper changes. Where she used to either love them (when she was very small) or at least tolerate them patiently, now she cries and howls and tries to turn over as soon as we put her down and all but climbs away if we let her. It's messy. It's difficult to deal with. And it's deeply, deeply annoying.

This threw us both for a bit of a loop at first, because the change was so sudden and she was so fierce about it. The whole situation quickly deteriorated into what may be the very first power struggle of my relationship with my daughter.

The doctor, earlier this week at her nine month appointment, asked if she's starting to show any temper or interest in getting her own way.

"Yes, diaper changes have become a little slice of hell" I told him.

"Well, that's going to get a lot worse," he said, "before it gets better."

The first few times she balked at a diaper change, it was new and not that bad, but it soon got under my skin. She'd wait until I got her diaper off, then wriggle free, often with disastrous results -- either she was dirty and would get it everywhere (clothes, walls, furniture), or if I decided to let her go for a moment before getting the new diaper on her she'd pee on the changing table. Arg. And the struggle wasn't good for either of us. She'd be upset, I'd be upset, and it was just an all around awful experience for us both.

When we could, Brett and I would change her together, one person holding and one person wiping and changing. But I had to come up with a better way to handle this on my own, pronto, because most of the time I'm alone with her.

So I thought about it a bit, and I realized that this doesn't have to be a power struggle unless I agree to make it one. It sounds strange, but changing my attitude and response to it solved the problem almost overnight. I decided one day that I was not going to struggle or engage with her -- I was simply going to gently and firmly be the one in charge. My goat, so to speak, was no longer going to be gotten.

And what do you know, it worked! All week we've had diaper changes that, while not perfect, are much easier to handle and don't dissolve into unpleasantness. When I lay her down, she starts to wriggle over and I gently hold her shoulders in place and tell her that no, we're going to change her diaper. And then I wait, and when she's still, we proceed. After a couple days of this she hardly even resists anymore.

I think the fun of resisting was probably seeing how riled up she could get me, and now the enjoyment of that has gone out of it because I'm not playing anymore.

This strikes me as a realization that's going to be pretty useful as she moves into toddlerhood.