scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

20.5.08

thirty-three weeks

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

scrawled @ 11:34