The pointing. You have discovered that your hands are made, each of them, of five, separate, distinct fingers. That you can touch things with just one finger. We play a game where we hold up a finger and you zoom in and touch it with yours (index finger, always, but either hand) and we say zzzap and you giggle. This is also a fun game for three people: then one person can take pictures. It's ... much more fun than it sounds, i promise. You like pointing at things: buttons, polkadots, that round mole on my shoulder. Knots on wood. Puppy-dog toes. Jewelry.

And with the crawling, every day you are faster and faster, and you have been starting to try and escape the living room where we mostly hang out. And where your toys are mostly. We have another game, in which momma sets up a stack of stacky cups on one edge of the room and puts you on the other edge, and you go over and knock it down. Also more fun than it sounds. But if you escaped the living room i think you would tip over the laundry rack, and i'm not sure there's really a way to baby proof it short of keeping the living room door shut. But keeping the living room door open is absolutely necessary in summer, seeing as how in particular if you get too hot then you scream, and if M gets too hot then he is grouchy, and, well, so am i, so please don't tip over the laundry rack. You tipped over a chair the other day and wailed and wailed. Right now you are under the table attempting to tip over more chairs: but we're smart, they're trapped between the table and the wall. You are foiled! This time. So instead you are banging the chair back and forth like a prisoner waiting for her dinner - but i know you had your breakfast Cheerios.

Still crawling with only your arms, but on softer surfaces (futon, bed) you get up on all fours and bounce back and forth. Also you are easily able to support yourself with just one arm, and reach for stuff, et c., and balance, so we have faith.

The sleeping is going better. Last night M put you down and you - this is day 6 - fussed for ninety seconds, and fell asleep. Ninety seconds. Day 5 was about eight minutes. We are textbook, we are. However we're wondering if we don't want to switch rooms with you, put you in our room, and put us in the kabinett by the toilet. Because right now we can't go to the bathroom at night, really. Which is not that big of a problem - and, also, when we do, you always fall back asleep within a minute - i count - but i think M feels bad for waking you up. And you're next to the outside hallway, there, so you get noise from the hallway as well. However if you were in our room you'd get noise from the street, especially as in summer it's, again, absolutely mandatory to have the window open, and if the people across the way do the same thing this summer as they did last summer then it is going to be very noisy, with very shitty music, all night, every night, with very shitty music, all night, every night, all night, very noisy, and i don't think i'm convinced that would be better as far as you not waking up, when every five minutes they are yelling and screaming and one of them had a really loud laugh. Really loud. Really. Maybe in the fall? I don't know, honey. And it might be a big disruption to get a new room anyway. (Plus i don't know where all our furniture would go; but that is a very small problem. Less small: M swore he would never take apart the bed, it was such a pain to get together. But ... well, whatever.) Sleep: improving. Long and short of it.

Still two teeth. Can't yet bring yourself to a sitting position without assistance. Very much enjoys heidelbeeren, rice cakes, sometimes together. Possibly going swimming outside later today. Cradle cap slowly disappearing but only because your hair is coming in over it. Likes feeding the puppy (because when you feed the puppy, she comes over and pays attention to you). Apparently puppy also likes rice cakes. Puppy very interested whenever we feed you. Knew this would happen. Hee.

Labels: baby, milestones, sleep

Labels: media

Had a discussion (in the dog park, natch) with a nice fellow who turned out to be from Turkey, entirely in German. I talked a little. He talked a lot. In German. (i think he also spoke French, or he asked me if i did; but i can't lay any claim to that language at all any more.) It is impossible to explain American politics, even the party system, even the fucking primary season and the superdelegates and really, i can barely do it in English, so doing it in German is next to impossible.

But many people here - and, probably, many people in the States, for that matter - want to know if it will be easier for us to elect a black person or a female person. And i have to say, i think it would be easier for us to elect a black person. We have been rotten with racism for centuries now. And i think sexism is often more subtle, but also more insidious, and harder to get rid of. Maybe it's just me. But there are words for ethnicities that i cannot even bring myself to type as "something i would never say" but i use the word bitch all the time. And worse: Screaming harpy. Rancid cunt. See? Holy fucking shit, is that ever a nasty turn of phrase. (Um, i save that one for special occasions.)

And i - poor Clinton. People put those words on her so much more, and so much more publicly, and so much more often, and so much more loudly, than anything remotely similar gets put towards Obama. And people call her Hillary instead of Clinton and that in itself is disrespectful, belittling. And that is just one example: here are more. This is a thing, too: only Americans feel like they have to like their politicians. I don't need to like my President. I don't need to want to have a beer with it or hang out and watch a movie with it. I don't want its book recommendations, and i don't base a vote on what it likes on its pizza. I don't care if my President likes dogs or cats. I don't care if my President has a really annoying voice. I don't care if my President wears a jacket that doesn't fit right. I don't care who it's sleeping with or what it believes happens after we die. I want a President whose policies i mostly support, whose priorities i mostly agree with. I want a President that is smarter than i am (and that, my dears, that is hoping for a whole lot, that is. Seems like).

He also said Turkei was sehr schoen, und auch sehr freundlich, and we had to ein urlaub machen dort. Und ich glaube er hat rechts. Ich hoffe wir konnen in December gehen. mmm, Mediterranean in December! Yes please.

Labels: politics

and everybody else i know is a good mama, and i am mean and nasty. Which is going around, to be fair. I hear. I gather. Anyway. i am analytical. It's how i deal. To a fault, possibly. It is how i roll. And it is how i learn more about myself, too, for that matter. Hell, it's how i blog. so. Case in point:

wednesday: ... twenty-six minutes (v. (large))
thursday: .... sixteen minutes
friday: ...... fifteen minutes (v. (medium))
saturday: .... thirteen minutes (v. (small (only spit-up, really)))
sunday: ...... nine minutes
monday: ...... two minutes

The v. is only when i am around. She knows. And is frenetic, righteously pissed off. M wanted to help. So very much. He wouldn't have said anything otherwise. Honey, you've got a great papa. And this helps, in a way, it does, and i keep telling myself that in the long run this will be easier. That he's right and it's a teaching moment. And it is getting better. And i shouldn't qualify that at all. Because it is. The Pantley was not working. She helped a little but we were honestly stalled.

What will they say, in a generation? Will we know any more? Will they condemn us? They will. They must. But for what? For doing this, or for not doing it sooner? For other decisions? And why? And when? Or will the whole world have gone to hell with the global warming and the collapse of oil-based Western civilization so nobody will care if we Ferberized someone or not? Will that even be a word? It's all we know to do. There was a show on the BBC about a big family and they had a baby and they gave him all sorts of things: powdered wood lice, mercury - mercury!, leeches, rosewater. Things they used to do are horrifying. Honey, i love you, all i'm doing is my best.

Also, since you're awake when we put you down, you immediately roll onto your tummy and sleep that way now. Which i think adds to the spitting up, but also to the sleeping peacefully afterwards.

Labels: mamadom, milestones, sleep

What to wear? Need a giant flower.

Labels: media

You have learned to roll over in order to get places. Back to front and front to back, counterclockwise and clockwise. Round and round. You like doing it better on soft surfaces - like the bed or the futon - rather than the wood floor, but you can now, finally, because after all this time you've finally figured out that there is a point to rolling over, that it moves you to different places, just like crawling does, that it's not a wasted, boring effort. You can now get over next to Mommy for a nice cuddle. Or squiggle your way towards the cell phone. The poor dog was doing so well at lying down just half a centimeter out of your reach - she's calculated it exactly, so she could sniff your fingers to see if you'd eaten any yogurt recently without you being able to grab any fur - and now you can move, and now she has to pay attention to where your fingers are because they are usually headed for her fascinating paws.

M is reading - has read - the Ferber book. It appears that even though i think i am inherently biased against it there might be interesting sleep facts in it, so it may come to pass that i crack the thing. But right now i'm just not desperate enough to cry it out. Not yet. You are sleeping so much better than so many other kids, and you always have, just because we're lucky, so i never had that gasping landslide of no sleep for months on end, though i've had a night or three of it, and all that i am really trying to say here is that i am happy i don't have to make that call right now. There but for the grace, et c. And even though right now i have a very well foxholed sinus infection and i get dizzy when i stand up and i can't breathe through my nose and is it obvious yet how i am writing this at different times, because you don't still nap long enough to finish one blog entry? When i started this i did not have a sinus infection. Which, by the way, i caught from you, since you were sick first, with the coughing and the sneezing, and you still have your tonsils, of course, so this must be what tonsils do: they make it so that one has a sore coughy throat instead of a sinus infection. I have been drinking so much tea that sometimes i forget something is caffeinated and accidentally have some - Earl Grey, i'm looking at you - and then, ug, i get what feels like no sleep at all. But yesterday i could barely breathe, and today i can breathe, so maybe things are getting better.

So, yes, you had an Official Virus. You were coughing for a couple of days (coughing a lot, like throwing up a lot) and eventually we went to the kinderarzt, though all the baby-manual books say to wait a week we waited, what, four days? First-time parents, haha. (Probably funny to somebody.) And you were coughing loud, honey. I think they could hear you in the street. So we went to the kinderarzt and he said, yeah, it's a virus, and you can't have cough syrup because (a) you're small yet and (b) it doesn't work anyway and you also can't have honey because (a) again, you're small and it might have spores, or something, and besides all the good honey here is the completely not pasteurized stuff. He suggested - these are the actual suggestions from the nice Austrian doctor - that we give you a spoonful of sugar, and put wet laundry in your room (to raise the humidity), and open the windows at night. So we did those things (more or less - a wet towel in your room was all, really, not the entire drying rack, because your room is just not that big) - and you're feeling significantly better, and i know because even though you were perfectly cheerful the whole way through it you haven't had an awful coughing fit since Sunday morning. And, except me, we've all lived through it unscathed.

Also, importantly, you have developed the Pincer Grip: which means we've been feeding you cheerios, multi-grain, and you can eat about five before you lose interest. However you've not entirely mastered the Pincer Grip yet, so sometimes i try to feed you cheerios and you get a cheerio in your right hand and a cheerio in your left hand and you still can't quite get either one in your mouth. And then you open your mouth like a little bird and i put one in for you and you munch on it happily, which means you're also getting better at swallowing lumpy things.

We finally moved your crib mattress to the middle spot. Just in time, too: this morning you'd pulled up from sitting to kneeling, using the side bar. I also moved your changing pad off the washing machine, because you are getting too wiggly to be up so high. You can roll from your back now: and that's the diaper-changing position, that is, and if you'd smacked your head on the faucet or, worse, tumbled on the tile floor, you would have been very angry and possibly hurt, and i would have felt awful, and now there is a small amount of space in the bathroom counter again. And having that small amount of space back on the bathroom counter makes me want to make more space on the kitchen counter, and get rid of the giant coffeepot/kettle of which we never use the coffeepot, and get a much smaller kettle, and get a functional breadbox with a top that can be used for further storage - that's a pipe dream, that one is. Someday you will grow up and you will want a huge, dreamy kitchen, a great expanse of smooth emptiness, and it might take you a moment to figure out why: this will be where that is coming from. My grandmother's kitchen was full of single-use gadgets, cheese slicers, something to zest lemons, strainers, a melon shaper, platters shaped like fish. My mother's kitchen is full to overflowing with things that might come in handy someday, for someone, somewhere. Mine is small, poorly lit, unventilated, and ruthlessly minimalist (especially seeing as how the wok doubles as a salad bowl). We're all reactionary. It is what it is.

Labels: baby, milestones

and you are:

• 8.2kg and 69cm
• 18lb and 27"
• bang-on 75th percentile across the board
• "perfect" says the kinderarzt

You are learning to crawl faster every day, if by crawl i mean army-belly-scooch, at least, in which you use the palms of your hands to pull yourself along the floor by sheer force of will, dragging your tummy and your knees, and picking up all the dog hair that the broom and the vaccuum cleaner won't. So the dog is the thing you can crawl towards most quickly, followed by the remote control. Dog toys are also popular.

It is very sad that when we came back from the States, it became quite clear that you were no longer sleeping through the night by any remote stretch of the phrase. i knew that would happen, but it still sucks for me. And i have been drinking more coffee, as a response to your not sleeping, because momma gets tired. Tired. Often. The night before last (which, to be fair, you may or may not have been teething, and you may or may not have had an upset tummy) you woke up at least a dozen times, and i know because i counted the first six and the sixth was at one-thirty in the morning, and you woke up quite a few more times after that but i was too sleepy to count any higher. Momma needs more coffee, days like that. Coffee and under-eye cream.

The crawling is cute, though.

We went to the zoo for Mother's Day and while you kinda liked the flamingoes, the big hit was the aquarium tunnel, with catfish and little sharks swimming above your head. And the place we had lunch, too, with the painted ceiling. But you liked the fish. Tigers, meh. Elephants, you could care less. And you slept through the baby polar bears, and the little gray koala i don't think you noticed at all, but you did like the giant pandas even if the baby panda (who is, by the way, already pretty big himself) was too far away to be interesting. Giraffes and hippos and rhinoceri and bison, also too far away and too drably colored to be interesting - that was the nice thing about the flamingoes, they were very close up and very (very!) brightly colored. Um, i maybe also liked the flamingoes. But aquariums kind of just make me hungry. (Completely unrelated note: wild salmon, now also available with Marine Stewardship Council ocean-friendly certification! Fucking woot, we've been eating nothing but "polar dorsch," and i have no clue what that translates to in any sort of familiar way.)

Your clothes are getting too small. Again. When you nurse, your feet hang way off the edge of the IKEA POANG chair, and you kick and push off the arm, and that wakes you back up sometimes. Comfy chair, though, even if you have thrown up on it three times in a week ... i wonder if they make wipe-downable cushions. I wonder if they'd be sticky in summer if they did. Meh.

Labels: baby, milestones

dear No Impact Man,
you are inspiring: and it is possible, indeed, to do laundry with no electric dryer with two adults and one baby in cloth diapers and a dog in a five hundred square foot apartment, and we're not having too bad a time of it. We got kinda creative with a corner (the previous inhabitant had a bookshelf there). However we have a front-loader washing machine, so our stuff happily comes out of the washer pretty dry. also, dear No Impact Man, i think you are contagious, but that's cool with me. Somebody had to talk M into cloth diapers for me, and also into eating less of the scary meat in this country (because i will not cook a chicken that has a still-attached neck), and also it's Local Austrian Asparagus Weeks at the moment and that kicks ass, and he's also learned, shockingly, to live without an air conditioner, so thanks, No Impact Man.
Cheers,
liz

PS. Apparently my trackback is busted. Oh well.

Labels: house

we have found seven (7) ticks on the dog in under a week.

We're going to need a better tweezers. Tick removal device may be worth the money after all. (Furminator sure is. I'm just sayin.)

Labels: dogs

variations on a theme:

• Red beans and rice
• Cassoulet
• Pasta e fagioli
• Chili

things other people think are funny:

• Mister Hanky
• Napoleon Dynamite
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• My Cousin Vinny

things you could get me for mothers' day:

• Chocolate
• Flowers
• Kitchen herb garden incl. basil, coriander, et c
• Breakfast on the weekend from the anker in suedbahnhof
• A nap
• Dinner
• um, apparently, food of any kind

Labels: random

In which you scooch forwards, pushing off inspiredly with the tips of your toes. In which a busload of Japanese tourists has also proclaimed you the cutest thing ever.

You've started doing this very annoying, very cute thing in the middle of the night, around three or four in the morning: you decide that you have slept Enough and you are Ready To Play, Now. And you won't nurse back down (or if you do, you wake up after five minutes) and you won't lie still in your crib without crying, you want to play. And nothing will dissuade you. But Momma and Daddy want to sleep at three or four in the morning. So: momma calls for suggestions. So far we have attempted nursing you down (which doesn't work) and bringing you in our bed in a sleepy, half-reasoned attempt to model sleeping, which works after what seems like a very long time.

...

oh, great: there's a thread over on the mothering - dot - commune about this - and, hell, it's all over the internet, now that i look. so maybe you're going through a "developmental spurt" and "mastering new abilities" and "it's a phase." Will try sleeping on chair in yr room. Am v. tired. Time to toss some Jiffy Pop into Mount Doom and watch the fireworks.

Labels: baby, milestones

• Five mushy brown bananas
• One-third of a can of coconut cream (after two cups of coffee and a nice fish curry)
• About a cup of milk
• One egg
• Bisquick to appropriate consistency

Mix with fingers and/or fork. Fry-up. Crispier is better. Caramel. Mmm.

Labels: food

This morning i put you in a pair of light brown Old Navy overalls that clearly stated they are "size 12-18 months." They are not too big. Neither is the don't tickle me shirt that still fit me when i was two. Your shoes this morning were twelve monthers. The striped onesie and the Fair Isle sweater were nine and a particularly roomy six months, respectively. Maybe your legs are just long? You've got a checkup in a week at the pediatrician and they'll weigh you and measure you (though really, if i wanted to know, i could measure you as easily here) and the size seventy-four/nine month things, they are not remotely too big any more. The sixty-twos are notably small and have been retired for donation.

Remember: send the monkey pajamas to L, send the Deutsch onesie to A. And C wants a wooden paci holder (and i should ask about the Ergo newborn bit). Just as soon as the seventy-fours are too small (that onesie hasn't got much life left in it as far as we are concerned, you and i).

The sleeping is going well. Sometimes you skip the third nap, and then it is grouchy time until you go to bed a little on the early side, but on the whole, going well. You can fall asleep being just cuddled, post-feed, instead of having to fall asleep while nursing. This doesn't sound like a big step, but it ... um ... is. So there. Haven't cracked the Ferber book yet (though i'm sure at some point somebody in the moms' group is going to want to borrow it, or borrow the Pantley, or whatever. Baby reference library: not a bad thing). Your morning nap is pretty well sorted out, as well; i almost don't have to fight you for it. The afternoon nap is a little harder. And it's the evening one that if you can tough it out, you always try to avoid it. Those are not easy days, yet.

At moms' group today you watched the other babies crawling - a couple of them can, but you're not the only one not rolling back-to-front, yet, either - anyway, you watched, and i think you are a genius but i think you will crawl soon. If you have bare feet or if you have shoes on (socks = too slippery) then you can inch yourself forward, pulling with wet palms on the wooden floor, and pushing with your toes. You can't inch anywhere on the little play carpet. That big bobbly tummy has too much inertia. But if i put you down for twenty minutes or so you can move a good thirty or forty centimetres. We might have to move the dog's water bowl. Is it kosher to say you're inching yourself along by centimetres? Somehow it doesn't seem right. But there you go.

Working, still, on the food thing. On days when you take three naps you can sit in the high chair - oh, because we got you a high chair - and you can eat dinner with us, you with something baby-licious, and watching us eat ours spicy as well. If we are eating something that can be made baby-friendly then i always have grandiose plans to leave you a few noodles, or something, and you got the broccoly, but then you haven't been taking that third nap reliably and so you go to bed just barely before we eat dinner, and then you only have eaten whatever else you've had in the day, prune jam or unsweetened yogurt or bits of half-stale Kaiser roll. Yesterday we went out for dinner and you had some of Daddy's roast beef. (Um, didn't like it. Judging by all the spew. I don't think you like things with fibers.) Always you and the bread. There are some rice cakes with your name on them in the pantry for as soon as i remember them. Also a big lovely box of Cheerios for as soon as you develop the pincer grip. We have learned that the dog does not want to eat mushed-up bananas, though. Baby led weaning link for convenience. Because you're getting Real Food for Big People, and also real food from a (organic, friendly, salt-and-sugar-and-nitrates-free) baby jar. Because, hey, we eat things that are fresh (tonight: red pepper and carefully selected ocean-friendly MSC-certified fish (it is important to me that it be MSC-certified, because i like fish and want to continue eating it for my whole life, and so we are trying to keep the oceans healthy for you, which means finding something other than nasty farmed dirty shrimp to eat the cocktail sauce that R left in the fridge with and we'll see how well it goes with breaded cauliflower but i bet it will be better than it sounds - i think i am accidentally, now that i have the option of being, i'm on some sort of non-ocean-friendly fish boycott, and i like that i have the option of being that but at some point momma is going to need some more deep rare slidey tuna and i need to not think about it any more, in an effort to stave off that day) and asparagus) and things that are jarred (tonight: coconut milk and chili noodles) and, well, i don't know that there's an argument for giving you exclusively one or the other. And if there was i think i'd ignore it, at this point, because it's 10:25 and that's bedtime for momma.

(Daddy's been asleep for an hour already.)

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

*not very factual on motorcycles either

:anmut: :annika: :chin: :dooce: :ewok mama: :food: :little frog school: :lj: :longform: :low odysseys: :natalya: :rich: :salon: :slate: :this is how: :unique yn:



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