Here this is for you but can I have it back now please?

Leah appears to have moved on from needing to HAVE ALL THE TOYS.  She is learning to share.

Sort of.

It started with her blue elephant, which is this super-duper-funtime-learning thing with textures and teethers and crinkly-paper ears and the whole bit.  She loves this elephant.  Recently, we were playing on the floor with the elephant, and she purposefully picked him up and extended him in my direction.

I was mildly shocked.  "Sharing" is a fairly simple word, but the concept of "I have this thing that I really like but I'm giving it to you right now" is sort of complex.  In my completely amateur psychological evaluation, it seemed to me that in order to "share" her elephant, she had to acknowledge that she, the elephant and I were all separate beings (stuffed or otherwise.)

(Stay tuned for the part where I am proven wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong.  But for now, back to the part where I was all Proud!Shocked!Parent.)

"For Mama?" I asked.

"Ababa BABABA!" she insisted.

I'm no fool.  I took the elephant.  "Thank you," I said.  "Thank you for sharing your toys with Mama."

And she immediately burst into tears and started flailing her hands about in what was clearly an attempt to regain possession of her beloved toy at all costs.

A few days later, she was enjoying a frozen teether.  After said teether was sufficiently covered in her spit and slobber, she held it out to me.

I was understandably much less excited to "share" this particular item, but she was rather insistent.

"Amamamamama!" she said, which I assume is baby-speak for, "Goddammit, I'm offering you my toy, this is my most favorite toy and I will be insulted until the end of time if you do not show some interest in it."

This time, she chewed on one end and I chewed on the other, and this by her was an acceptable method of "sharing."

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Ohmygod, that's totally gross.  Ew ew ew ew."  And all of you who are thinking that are totally right.  It's gross.  And, for that matter, it was a frozen teether, so it was very, very cold.  But I'm pretty sure that in the Parenting Bible, it says something like, "If your infant voluntarily shares her toys with you, you say 'thank you' and do not ever, under any circumstances, ever ever turn her down."

(And again, stay tuned.  It totally gets worse.)

By the end of this week, we had this "sharing" thing down cold.  She would play with a toy (wherein "play" equals "cover in baby spit") and then offer it to me with her Hopeful Face on.  I would dutifully open my mouth and say, "Om nom nom!" and chew on the toy for a bit, until she decided the toy was, in fact, hers and she wanted it back.  On several occasions, she would chew on one end of the toy and I would chew on the other end, and we looked like two puppies fighting over a toy.  Sort of.  I guess.

Then something happened.  On Friday, Leah thew up at daycare.  They called me mid-day at work to inform me that my daughter had upchucked in her crib and I needed to come pick her up and take her home.  So I did.  She vomited one more time at home, about two hours after we'd arrived, and then slowly began to perk back up.  By 6 p.m., she was on the floor, orange frozen teether in her mouth, as though she had not just six hours prior been emptying her stomach contents into her daycare crib and forcing them to bring out the hazmat mop.

Then she offered the teether to me.

I looked at the toy.  I frowned.  "No thank you, Leah," I said.

I went back to my Angry Birds.  She went back to her teether.  A few minutes later, she tried again, this time with a sweet, "Gah?" and her head tilted Just So in a way that would make a photographer swoon.

"No thank you," I tried again.  "That's your toy.  Mommy has her own toy."

At this, she became quite upset and began to pitch a fit in that whiny way that only a sick child can manage.

Fine.  It had been a long day and she hadn't puked in four hours.  I got down on the floor and chewed on the teether to her satisfaction.

Two things about this:
1) In case you're wondering, Leah is on the mend and I've not yet gotten ill.  And
2) I believe we've reached a boundary.  Fine, I shared her slobber-covered toy when she was pukey.  But this morning, Leah insisted that I chew on my own hair.  I am all in favor of her learning how to share, but there is something to be said for the idea that you can't share something that doesn't belong to you in the first place.

From Leah, with love.

I have a subscription to "Parenting" magazine.  This is partially because I felt it would be helpful but mostly because I was asked if I wanted to subscribe and get a free issue and I couldn't say no, and then I forgot to cancel it before I had to start paying for it.

But I digress.

I have a subscription to "Parenting" magazine.  I sometimes read it and sometimes forget that I have it, depending on the day.  It happened that I actually had time to read the November issue on the day it arrived (otherwise known as the day I sorted through the mail pile and realized it had been delivered at some time within the past week or so.)  I do enjoy it, do find the articles to be (usually) helpful and (sometimes) interesting, and I especially like that most of the articles are very short.  Clearly this was written for parents who don't have time to sit and read a magazine for an hour.  Well done, "Parenting."

There was an article in the November issue written by a dad about middle-of-the-night wake-ups.  "This will be interesting," I thought.  "I will read this, and I will learn something."  Because I do, at least once a night, have a visit with my daughter who has woken from her slumber and is demanding food or attention or a warm body to snuggle with.

The article, titled "Our Finest Hour" (Page 58 of the November 2012 issue, for those of you who want to follow along in your books at home), proposes that a baby crying at night is "like an opera - it starts out quiet, and then crescendos into a dramatic aria."  And this particular father gave it some thought and decided that when he only woke when the child reached the aria, he was missing the best part.  And so he started getting up early, before the child's predictable cry, in order to hear the start of the opera.

This melted my heart.  I'm reasonably certain I "awwww"'d out loud.

The guy gets up on purpose at 4:15 every goddamn morning to hear is kid wake up, and then he feeds his son, and then, he says, "We just hang."

I would not be outdone by some hipster dad.  I COULD HANG, TOO, DAMMIT.  So Leah and I had a middle-of-the-night "hang" session one night because she woke up, had her midnight snack, and decided she was not, in fact, interested in going back to sleep at all, thank you, and further, she had some things she wanted to talk about.  I thought, "I'll try that 'hang' thing.  It'll be fun."

Yeah, no.  I mean, it was, for about 20 minutes.  But our "hang" session was three hours long.  It included two diaper changes and two failed attempts on my part to put an end to the party before she finally consented.  The next day, I required three cups of coffee (in comparison to my usual 1) just to get through my work day.

"4:30 a.m. is a gift," this article concludes.

I'd like a refund, por favor.

All your toys are belong to me!

Earlier this week, I happened to arrive  at daycare to pick Leah up at the same time as "Keaton's" mom.  Keaton is a couple of months younger than Leah, and I picked up from an overheard conversation that he is not a first child.  I therefore observed Keaton's interaction with his mother as one might observe mice in a lab: In a controlled environment, I was hoping to learn something that might be useful in my interactions with my own child.

Lo and behold, after Keaton was all suited up in his jacket and secured in his carrier, Keaton's mom presented him with two toys.  "Which one?" she asked him, and Keaton smiled and, after a moment, chose the toy in the right hand.  "Yeah, I thought so," said Keaton's mom, and she smiled at me, and I smiled back, and off they went.

Well, I can do that, I thought.  I can present two options.  My kid can make a choice.  Surely this is not that difficult.

So today, as I was making blueberry puree and was home alone and thus needed my child to be occupied, I presented Leah with two toys, one in each hand, just as I'd seen Keaton's mom do.  "Which one?" I asked her, and she assumed the same happy expression I'd seen on Keaton's face when faced with this question.  I dared to hope as she got a knowing glint in her eye...

...And reached out with both hands, one for each toy.

So there you have it.  My daughter believes she can have everything she wants.

After giving it some thought, I've decided she's smarter than Keaton after all.

It's fine. We'll just never clean again.

Leah has been enjoying a period of perfect bliss.  Once she got over her initial belief that the outside world sucked donkey balls and she hated everyone and everything that was not a warm, fuzzy swaddle and a mommy snuggle and DEAR GOD, MOMMY, do not let anyone else hold me or I'll scream my head off, she has been a reasonably happy baby.  She no longer fears strangers (or grandparents), rides in the stroller are full of win, and it's totally fun to go out to Target and sit up in the cart and smile and babble and giggle to herself.  Oh, and bottles?  We're so over throwing tantrums about those.  Now she prefers to watch all bottle preparation so that the instant it's ready, she may snatch it from your hand and shove it into her mouth.  Everything is new and interesting and worthy of being gummed (if possible) or at least oggled with a wide-eyed stare that can only be seen on the face of someone who has never seen This Thing before.  

That period, unfortunately, is over.

The world is still pretty awesome and worthy of being explored with the same wide-eyed stare, but we now have "fears" and "dislikes."  Green vegetables are a definite "dislike."  I've attempted to explain to her that if all she eats is carrots, squash and sweet potatoes, she's going to start turning colors and smelling funny, but so far this logic eludes her.  (Or maybe she really wants to be orange.  I don't know.)

As for fears?  One day, I was home alone with Leah.  She was in her Jumperoo, happy as a clam, and so I thought to myself, "I know.  I'll vacuum."

The scream of terror she emitted when I turned on the appliance was as though I had opened the gates of hell and let the soul-eating devil monsters out to get my child.  

So (because I'm not a complete bitch), I turned it off and scooped her up, and she proceeded to whimper like a puppy left out all night in the rain, and stare over my shoulder at the Vacu-Terror.  Even though it was off.  And unplugged.

Five minutes later, I took this photo.  Guess what she's still staring at?  Yeah.

Other attempts to vacuum have been met with similar results.  If I try to do it when she's napping on a Saturday afternoon, she wakes up and alerts me to the arrival of the zombie apocalypse.  Put her in the bathroom with the fan running, I thought, and that will mask the noise.  But no.  The monsters are still coming and she is still scared and no stupid fan is going to fool her.

She also seems to have a distinct fear of long-sleeve shirts.  I believe it's because she thinks her tiny little fingers are going to get lost inside the sleeves and, Dear God, what will she do without those?

For the sake and sanity of everyone in this house, I sincerely hope she moves on from all of this, and the sooner the better.

 

You haz betrayed my tiny trust.

We've started giving Leah vegetables.

No... no, that's not right.

We've started pushing spoonfuls of rainbow puree into her mouth.

It's quickly become clear to me why so many children hate vegetables: It's because as children, their parents, in one form or another, at some point before the poor little memory began, spent an insurmountable amount of time and energy forcing unspiced vegetable goo down their throats.  Preference?  Pfffft.  Babies don't have preferences!  Give them ALL the vegetables!  Give them pureed carrots, pees, squash, sweet potatoes, hell, give them spinach!  Give them beets!  Introduce your baby to flavor!

Except the fatal flaw in this logic is that some vegetables, with no butter or salt or pepper or spice or anything added to them, do in fact still taste like the dirt they were grown in.

In an effort to earn back some of the Hippie Karma we lost when we decided to use disposable diapers and formula, Dan and I are making our own baby food.  (Also, it's about a gazllion times cheaper to steam and puree a bunch of Farmer's Market carrots than it is to buy the jars in the store.)  This is mostly a good idea, except that I'm now sitting on a bunch of pea puree that I can't justify giving to my child because she cries every time I attempt to feed her the accursed bright green goop.

But wasting is no good, and I'm certainly not going to eat it, so this week I decided to get creative.  On Wednesday evening, I prepared oatmeal (adored by child) and carrots (tolerated by child) and a a couple tablespoons of the detested green peas.  I fed her two spoonfuls of oatmeal, for which she opened up her mouth like a hungry baby bird.

Then I blitzed her trusting face with a spoonful of mixed carrots and peas.

Results were mixed.  On the one hand, she ate all of the oatmeal and about 3/4 of the pea-carrot mixture.  On the other hand, by the time we were finished, the look on her face clearly implied that I had just declared a dinnertime war that may continue for years to come.

I've given her a break and introduced sweet potatoes, which may outrank the oatmeal as Most Favorite Food Ever.  Squash is next on the list, but it occurs to me that maybe we ought to introduce a different color before she starts turning orange.


 

Well, that should make for an interesting poop.

I understand that people don't want to hear about my baby's poops, and so I make a conscious effort not to post about them.  And you should therefore know that this post is not actually, in fact, about Leah's poop.  It's about the thing she ate that ultimately came out in her poop without having been the least bit digested.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Bad Parenting jury... my daughter ate a Band-Aid.

This is actually the end of the story, and nothing even remotely interesting happened after it, except that the next morning she did, in fact, poop out one tiny little bandage that had previously been at the tip of her left pointer finger.

Although I promised not to tell other people how to parent their kids, I can and will tell you that should your child ever consume a Band-Aid (or, in our case, Target store brand "flexible bandage"), it will likely not bother the child in the slightest and will go through the system unobtrusively in about 12 hours.

How I know this for a fact: Witness one lively, smiling, completely unharmed Leah Danielle Bush, who not only survived eating the bandage but also the wound that warranted its placement in the first place.

Leah's "first boo-boo" will go down in her personal history (read: "baby book") not as a self-inflicted wound, but rather as an accidental nip of her fingertip by her well-intentioned daddy as he tried to clip her fingernails.

(Aside: Up to this point, I had been biting them off, which sounds disgusting but is apparently a completely socially acceptable way of taking care of an infant's fingernails.  It's one of a bazillion things that people don't give a lot of thought to until parenthood is staring them dead in the face and some consideration has to be given to the fact that you will be completely responsible for tending to the activities of daily living of a very small and helpless being for the foreseeable future.  Tiny fingernails are scary.  Much scarier, in retrospect, than dirty diapers - because caring for them carries the potential for actual bodily harm.)

It bled a bit, and as we as first-time parents have no concept of how much blood an infant can lose before it becomes an Emergency, when it bled through several pieces of gauze and a first Band-Aid, we loaded her into the car and drove her to Urgent Care.

It should be noted that:

a) Leah giggled the whole way and
b) Her finger had stopped bleeding by the time we were in front of a medical professional.

Nonetheless, the doctor put a Band-Aid on the "wound" (though I suspect it was more to make Leah's parents feel better than to appease the actual patient) and told us to watch for infection.  But likely she would be fine.

Which she was, except that the trip to the clinic meant she had missed dinner, and so she was hungry and, at some point in the hour following our clinic visit, she sucked that little bandage right off her finger like it was a sugar-coated gumdrop, and down the gullet it went.

Truth be told, my first thought was that we should load her back in the car and take her back to Urgent Care, but no.  No no no.  I made myself give her a bottle and put her to bed, consumed foreign object and all - not because I wasn't actually worried.  I must've done a Breath Check every hour that night.

It was because, God help us, we are not going to become Those Parents.  I appreciate that Dean East Urgent Care indulged us once in six months; I was not going to press our luck by adding a second visit within  six hours.  Not for this.  Maybe for a fall down the stairs, but hopefully we won't ever have to put that to the test.

 

I did not actually fall off the face of the Earth.

Dear Jeff Vogel,

As much as I enjoy your wonderful book, I have spent the better part of the last two months questioning exactly how you managed to write it.  And I came to the conclusion that either a) you had a very understanding wife who said, "Oh, yes, by all means, spend two hours every night behind the locked door of your office and pay no attention to your screaming child; I'll take care of her," or 2) You gave Cordelia a very effective sedative every night.  If a) then your wife should get the credit for writing Poo Bomb, and if 2) can I please have some?

(There is an option D, which is that you are simply quicker, better and wittier than I am, but I would rather not acknowledge that as a possibility.)

-

As most of you have no doubt noticed, this blog went to shit at the end of May, when I returned to work.  In stark contrast with all reasonable sensibility, one does not, in fact, get more hours in the day when one procreates.  There are still only 24 or them, which must now be spread even thinner than they already were.  This either means less time for sleeping, less time for the child, or less time for enjoyable freetime writering-things.  As I quite enjoy sleeping, and as I sort of feel that letting Leah cry while I lock myself in a closet with my laptop for an hour would be bad form, my freetime has suffered considerably.

Fortunately, now five months old, Leah has what can probably be called a semi-regular, mostly consistent bedtime routine that has her asleep by 8:00 each night, which means I may have earned some of that freetime back, if I'm not too ungodly exhausted to do anything but go to sleep myself.

Rather than backtrack, I'm simply going to pick up the ball from this point, because it's likely that trying to rehash everything that's happened since May would be a complete shitshow.

Instead, you should all know this: I have the best baby ever.

There.  I said it.  I have a GOOD BABY, and I would really like to tattoo it on my forehead or get a T-shirt for every day of the week proclaiming just how incredibly awesome my child is*.

When I returned to work, Leah started day care.  When Leah started day care, she became a social butterfly.  She has no fewer than three little boyfriends, all of whom are adorable and - as I've told her many times - all of whom have cooties.  She has found her voice and progressed to uncontrollable inflection, and if you want an opinion on just about anything, she will give it to you (and then grunt at you when you say things like, "Oh really?" or, "Is that so?")

I can only conclude that my returning to work brought her out of her shell as she was exposed to the idea that she is not, in fact, the only baby in the universe, and there might just be someone out there who understands the language she speaks.

She is well-behaved in public unless she's hungry or needs to have her diaper changed, which I can totally understand, because I'm an absolute bitch if I haven't eaten and, hey.  Who among us doesn't like to have a nice clean behind?  The bottom line is, with a few noted exceptions, we don't have to fear taking her out in public or leaving her home with a baby-sitter.

Stay tuned for the latter six months of her first year, when I promise to try to update at least monthly.

"Try."  Nice word, isn't it?








*This opinion is one part Proud Mama Syndrome and two parts I've Been Told I'm a Lucky Bitch By The Whole World.