And you are pulling up on everything and browsing along. You have several different methods of crawling, now, too, to put on display: your army crabble, or "commando" or "leopard" or "tiger" method, in which you pull yourself along with your palms, and/or push with your big toes, with your belly dragging, and can as you choose to stuff held in one or both hands (because crawling and holding on to stuff is pretty impressive); the bog-standard hands-and-knees cross crawl; the sitting-up skooch, which you mostly do in the bath or over very short distances, and apparently called the "bum shuffle" in England; the bear crawl, which is on your hands and feet and the rest of you high in the air, like a yoga pose. You're smart enough to use each in its specific best way: on a high-friction carpet, you cross crawl, when you want to transport a nice toy over hardwoods, you push yourself forward with just your big toes in a sort of modified leopard; et c. You are using the cross crawl more and more often, now that you've figured it out, but are still not as fast with it as with the army crabble.

And when you want to reach the remote controls hidden far back in the crack of the couch, you pull up and reach over and get them.

You might just get to go swimming every day this week. Three out of three so far and more planned for tomorrow. You like looking at all the larger kids, and sometimes there are other babies there too and you watch them just as close. And you kick and you babble and you try to drink the water, that, we try to prevent, and you splash with your feet, and look at floaty toys and seem to want to go get them but i think i started too late with the swimming and now i can't let you go to get them by yourself. You can play in the shallow bits and i can hold you. But putting your face in the water is not happening so much.

Words i have praised you for, in order of appearance: daddy (in context and out of context), kiwi, puppy. (Kiwi and puppy have each been in context exactly once; dada is something you usually say when you're happy.) Things you can point at in the picture books: puppy. Geniuses i have: one. You.

Labels: baby, milestones

so in order to get Austrian drivers' licenses we have to get a physical, pass an eye exam, not faint, get weighed and measured (not to mention, injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected) and they weighed me and HOLY SHIT it is no wonder my pants are falling off. I can has cheeseburger. Shit, i can has ten. Will it come back when i stop breastfeeding? Even a little of it? Please? I feel weird. And i don't know what size pants i need, because i think if i try to buy the littler ones they won't even hit my ankles, and that would not be cool. Um, but one thing i really like and would be very excited to keep, would be the going down a cup size. Also, bastards, could losing more than thirty pounds please make that little half-extra right under my chin ever go away? There is photographic evidence of it still existing as of yesterday. How is that fair? But, now i will never try to deliberately do anything in order to get rid of it, because it clearly won't go with diet or exercise or losing an extra kajillion calories a day. If it is stubborn enough to stick around when i am twenty percent less then i will learn to love it. By god. So there.

If i eat this entire bar of chocolate to feel better about being so damn skinny, does that count as two birds with one stone? ... Bleh. It's getting stuck in my crooked teeth. Stupid nougat.

And my dog is fat and i'm feeding her the rest of the rice, because i'm full and she likes it. And is desperate for attention this week.

Labels: breastfeeding, health

Am trying to decide: there is an archway in E's room, where the crib is, and i'm painting the whole room because it is - well, was - this awful dirty looking yellow, so i'm painting it, um, NaturWeide, which i think means something on the order of "hayfield," very zen though it's a different color with the flourescent lights than i was really going for, oddly greenish, anwyay, this archway with the crib, it wants something else. I was going to put fabric on it - that spray-on-starch method - but i think the wall is too textured, because, well, i tried it, and it came off. But i am looking at the fabrics they have at ikea for ideas (1 2), and at the things that come up when i google murals, and ... i don't know what. Blah. Still also need to figure out what will happen with the low low low ceiling and ugly lights. Something involving more paint will happen with that, too, i think. Um. It's a very small space.

Labels: house

E: (chomp)
me: no, honey, you can't bite any of mama's parts

Labels: mamadom

You like to pull and stand up on the side of the playpen, and hold on with one hand, and with the other hand pull the music box string to make it play Three Blind Mice over and over and over again - it goes for about three or four minutes on one pull, i think - and then you sit back down and go back to whatever else you were doing, usually taking all the toys out of the toybins, or flipping though the big animal picture book, or finding something tiny to put in your mouth. And you couldn't do that before! But you have learned the music box. You can usually sit back down again, but not always - you can if you're hanging on to the futon or the couch or the bed or the playpen or the crib or the Poang chair, but not if you're hanging on to the silverware drawer in the kitchen, which might just be because it was only for the first time today that you pulled up by the three drawers in the kitchen and you weren't quite sure of yourself yet, in there. You are getting better at browsing along furniture, too, meandering your feet in a way that nobody could call one in front of the other but it gets the job done eventually.

Pear today, peeled and sliced. Kiwi. Peach. I got some blueberries but then wasn't sure that they weren't a choking hazard, being so round and perfect, and with the blueberry skins that, well, you're still not doing so well with skins, hence the peeled pear, so a post-peeling blueberry is small and greenish and looks funny and you weren't interested. But you've had baby-food blueberry puree, historically, i think.

We went to the big playground in Stadtpark and went on the swings and the slide and there was one of those little very basic merry-go-rounds and you weren't too impressed with the slide, possibly because i didn't let go of you. You like the swings, especially when there is a much larger person swinging next to you, someone who can swing on their own, three or four or five or six years old, and you look at them and look at me and grin because you are so grown up. But the merry-go-round! We haven't got one of those in the park near us so this was your first time and you sat on it and i spun you, just barely slowly, and you were so very happy with it, watching the world go around. And then another baby came over and was sat down facing you and we spun you both - he was from some oncely-French-speaking (?) part of Africa (?) so his mother and I had no words in common at all, but you two could go babababa dadadada at each other and it was very cute. And we spun you and spun you and spun you, and then when we finally got off a group of much larger kids got on and threw themselves around all quickly, like much larger kids do, of course. And you didn't want to go back in the stroller - you've started doing this thing where you arch your back and are impossible to buckle in - but then you fell asleep almost immediately.

Which was good, because you've been napping not so well this week, the tagesmutter thinks you're teething some more, and there have been days where you only took one nap. And those days you have gone to bed extraordinarily early, and been grouchy. And the grouchiness is what tips me over to thinking that no, you're not transitioning to one nap, you're not ready, not the fact that all the books also say that you're too young to be a one nap kind of girl yet. Last night you'd had so little nap that you passed straight on out in your clothes an hour before bedtime and we let you sleep on through, and so sleep on through you did, until six this morning, as usual. Um, so, tonight we put your pajamas on earlier, and even though you'd had two forty-five minute naps today, which is a little short but pretty standard, you still were asleep more than half an hour early.

For me and Daddy, that's kind of nice, but kind of lonely.

Labels: baby, milestones

I keep wanting to go ecotravelling but most ecotouristy places i'd have to fly to, which makes them not ecosound. There is an old-growth forest in Poland, which is probably vaguely driveable, and where we could go camping. But other than that, there's what? And not because of airfare but the whole air travel thing - it isn't ecologically sustainable. It's not. I do so well at everything else on the carbon footprint calculators, with three people living in a tiny apartment in an old apartment building and using public transit and not having a car or air conditioning and eating all sorts of local things but not very much meat, and then i fly for thirty hours and my score lands in the basement. Aargh.

Please more of this.



Also please more Firefly too, but i'll take what i can get.

Labels: media

And now it's your turn: even though delurking week is in January, thousandth post day only comes around once, so who are you, and how did you get here, and why did you stick around? You. The one reading this. I've had thirty-five thousand hits but the only thing i know about you is your IP, and your browser, and your screen resolution, and what country you're from and who your internet provider is, and all those things don't really say very much about a person.

Labels: blogging

- or, well, i got a haircut, rather than doing it myself, because these are not the same thing - and it's short, right, a little bit Rosemary's Baby, so quite short in fact. And everybody at work says it looks great and they wish they could do it but the majority of people i work with are women, and many of them say, verbatim, they wish they could do it but just don't have the face for short hair, and you will never, ever, ever hear a man say that he just doesn't have the face for short hair. Ever. What the hell? The only face you need for short hair is having a face. That thing on the front side of your head, with the eyes and the nose and the mouth, and maybe the ears and eyebrows. Grr.

Labels: people

10. (This reason is new) Now i have a pretty pretty celebrity i can point at. And she was in that silly movie with the hit man, the one with the crumby sequel. Woot! (This is not a proper reason, but works well as filler.)

9. I am very, very happy to be living in a country where i can go to the doctor with my baby whenever i want, and where all the standard vaccinations are covered, for everybody, for free, because we have Government Health Care and i am taking full advantage.

8. Better living through chemistry, man. (Dude. Dude! Dude.) Not that i think traditional medicine is wrongheaded - i just think, well, i can have both. This is the twenty-first century, not the Dark Ages.

7. I am well acquainted with the scientific method, and a lot of my friends are scientists, on top of that, and holy shit are we ever not in this for the money. (Meaning: They been tested. They safe. They are there to help, and they fuckin' work. I know the process.)

6. M is on board. This wouldn't stop me if he wasn't, but does make it easier, because first, i think he's pretty smart, so i'm not second-guessing myself, and second, i don't have to sneak around and trick him.

5. I like to travel. My friends like to travel. (I saw G between Norway and Slovakia, in the Czech Republic. N stopped here between Myanmar and Azerbaijan.) I live in an international city. People move around a lot. The likelihood of me, or of E, now or later, going to a place where things are endemic, or coming in contact with a person who has recently been somewhere where things are endemic, is very very very high. I'd like to not worry about that. Plus, she can go to whatever schools and camps and other things sound interesting and not be disallowed or have extra paperwork or special waivers. Small perk. Baby not referred to as - or, anyway, that much less, as - "germ factory," "snot machine," "walking biohazard." Small perk.

4. My friends are also starting to like to have babies. Diseases are communicable. I would feel like awful shit if somebody got sick with something (like the real people who NEED herd immunity, newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised, already sick, have had actual negative responses to other vaxes, allergic to eggs, whatever, et c) and it could be even vaguely our fault. This is the only reason to feel weird about other people not vaccinating. All the other reasons are completely invalid to apply to any other family making any other decision, ever. But E is still too small to get the MMR shot, for instance. So if somebody else infects her i will be royally pissed off, because that is a preventable thing. If it was just their kids they were putting at risk, fine, no big. And while it mostly is, it isn't just their kids. And they are piggybacking on everybody else being immune and they are betting on there not being an outbreak, hoping that not too many other people will make the decision they have made, and that is not very socially responsible, is it? No, no it isn't. Y'know, modern society. Leviathan, Rousseau, and a little bit Socialist, but that's okay, that's just how reason number four likes to roll.

3. With the autistic spectrum known and diagnosed in my family, i already know we are at an elevated, preexisting risk. But i also know what to look out for, and i know the early signals, and i know that early intervention can - can, not always does - work wonders. I also know that autistic spectrum disorders are things that can be lived with, and if my choice is between a live personbabychild with autism, or a sad and empty freedom after a not entirely unlikely (given the fact that measles and other infectious, preventable, vaccine-prevented diseases are on the RISE in certain countries like, oh, for instance, the U.S.A.) bout with something awful and infectious, i will choose the healthy-and-living but-with-an-autistic-spectrum-disorder every fucking time.

2. (But, the ASD's in my family aren't the regressive kind, they're the right-off-the-bat kind. Plus, i have a girl.)

1. (And really, this is the only reason.) Because i knew a kid with polio. And the kid i knew was lucky enough to live through it.

We are getting every shot, every oral vaccine, every sticker, every immunization i can get my paws on, any vehicle, any disease. I get the flu shot every year. If i could stab myself with cowpox i would in a heartbeat because that shit scares me - smallpox still exists. And we have found this way, this power, to prevent it! Like gods. If i could talk a doctor into malaria preventatives, or - what is it, that they give you before you go to the tropics? Tuberculosis. Typhoid. Anything. Everything. And i will tell anyone about it, anyone at all.

Labels: health, mamadom

You pull up on things, and it has become your new favorite - all the time, you are pulling up, on the futon, on the crib, on my pant legs. On the hair on Daddy's knees, which makes him wince. Most of the time, or some of the time, you can sit back down again, and you aren't really browsing along furniture very efficiently at all yet so if you want to move, you sit, and crawl, and then pull up again.

And, you are crawling. The classic, hands-and-knees, real proper crawl. Still not very quick with it so you usually crawl for a few feet and then sprawl out, land on the tummy, and do your army thing. Soon we hope your belly will be picking up that much less dog hair - Mommy can sweep every day and there is just always more of it, always, more, and more, and some of it is in singles and some of it is in clumps, and even just after i sweep there is more. Just after i vacuum. Mop. Anything. Even after we Furminate the dog, after we go to the park and pull everything off her that we can pull off, there is more, and we just try to minimize the dog hair that you actually eat. I don't think it is a losing battle, really, but it borders a little bit on the exhausting and a whole lot on the ludicrous.

I have to go through your clothes again, because the adorable farmer overalls that fit you last week are about to be too small now, so today will be the absolute last time you wear them and then they'll go in the donating bag. The bag that also holds, now, the pajamas that were gigantic on you, like, yesterday. They were far too big, far too big, and now they barely fit over your head - this is one of the ways clothes get too small, they get too short in the limbs or too short in the length (in the case of onesies and overalls) and quite often the head-opening gets too small, and the way you wail when things are on your head, if the head-opening is just a little too small it is a Very Bad Thing. There was at least one shirt that said it was supposed to be eighteen months, i think, except the neck bit wasn't stretchy enough so you hated putting it on and fought, every time, trying to get it back off your head, and you're stronger than you look so it's quite a struggle, getting something on when you want it off, so that shirt, the orange one with the lizard on it that was really pretty cute, and the brown one with the white flowery henna-y pattern, too, actually, and several others that just didn't have enough stretch in the neck, Gone. All gone. Somebody else whose kid has a smaller head can have them. Not us.

Your hair is growing, slowly. Veerrryyy slowly. And you still have just a little bit of cradle cap underneath, high up in the front. Just a square inch, maybe two. So the area of it is going down, because it's not just your head getting bigger.

You have figured out how to play peek-a-boo on your own, with the blanket, with my shirt, with a towel. You hide and then very quickly come out again and grin and giggle and Mommy melts, and you never hide for more than a second, and it is the cutest thing i have ever seen, not least because i love the print on the Ikea duvet, but that really has very little to do with it, who am i kidding. And we have a sort of a pull ladybug toy - the one the nice people at Austrian Airlines gave us - that you pull on this leafy tail thing, and then it goes brrrrrr and wiggles, and you have figured out how to make it go.

Other things you have figured out: you are a fan of the carbohydrates. Like mama. Pasta, rice, potatoes, bread, anything you can grab and stuff in. When you are full of babyfood puree and water and then if we put pasta in front of you, spirals or ziti or shells, you will put them all in your mouth, by god. We take the skins off the potatoes for you, i don't think you can quite do the skins yet, but you'll get a big lump of potato, no sauce, no gravy, but i think it still tastes like paprika and onion and garlicky salty sausage, and you put it all in your mouth and your little baby cheeks bulge out even more and you grin and there are little bits of potato between your fingers and crumbledy smears on your shirt and you are so happy.

And what i mean when i say, you are so happy, is really, and so am i, little love. So am i.

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

dude, woot.

Labels: travel

These are the lullabies i know. Because there will be no and-down-came-the-baby. Horrifying.

Don't worry about a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right. Singin: don't worry about a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right. Woke up this morning, smiled at the rising sun. Three little birds sit on my doorstep - singin sweet songs, melodies pure and true, saying, this is my message to you. (Bob Marley)

Summertime, and the livin' is easy: fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high. Your daddy's rich, and your momma's good lookin, so hush little baby, don't you cry. One of these mornings, you're going to rise up singing, spread your wings, and you'll take to the sky. But until that morning, there's nothing can harm you with daddy and momma standing by. (That would be Gershwin.)

I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and for you. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. I see skies of blue, clouds of white, the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night - and I think to myself, what a wonderful world. The colors of a rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, sayin, how do you do. They're really sayin, I love you. I hear babies cry. I watch them grow - they'll learn much more than I'll never know. And I think to myself - what a wonderful world. (Louis Armstrong.)

Lay down my dear daughter, lay down and take your rest. Lay your head upon your momma's breast. I love you, and (this one has verses, in which we cycle through everyone we know) loves you the best - And I bid you / she says / he tells you / et c. good night, good night, good night. And I bid you good night, good night, good night. (The Grateful Dead, slightly modified.)

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. Black bird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free. Blackbird fly. Blackbird fly into the light of the dark black night. (The Beatles.)

And, tonight, this. But you were asleep before the jester even made an appearance. Playing myself Tracy Chapman to remember. Somehow i am sad and nostalgic and i think it is because i am missing my Quakers because we were going to see them this weekend and now we can't, probably, and it makes me lonely.

Labels: mamadom, media

You can pull up on things. You can sit by yourself, stand by yourself, when there are things to pull up with. You have learned to crawl a little bit, and slowly, and not far, but once or twice you have gone a little ways with the classic off-handed belly-off-the-floor crawl. Which will, once you get it down, be much quicker than your palm drag. We have to move the crib down again.

You can click your tongue against the roof of your mouth. This will not be very convenient, it's not really a sound in English, and we don't use it to mean anything, but we do it back at you and you smile big.

Someone is coming later to take a big suitcase of your too-small clothes away to the Ukraine. Someone is a cleaning lady, a friend of a friend, and we are donating as well a few toys you've never liked (maybe someone else will) and that blue and orange baby swing, newborn rocking chair thing, that you liked very much but are now far too big for. A Ukrainian baby will enjoy it for us now, and learn to coo and kick and giggle and grin.

Four teeth now. You have started objecting to the tooth brushing and it's a hard thing to do - there you are screaming and then you do this closed-mouth yell so that we can't get in with the baby toothbrush. I think it hurts your gums when you're teething so of course you don't want us to. Smart girl.

I cannot believe how big you are. If we hold you up with your hands and tap on your feet with our feet you will move them, slow, unsure, and again not very far. I think you are a genius, so you are waiting until you are absolutely safe, and then one day you will stand up and run. And then ask politely for a glass of apple juice.

Labels: baby, milestones

me: your mom would be horrified that they call this "sweet corn"
m: she'd be more horrified that you're putting garlic butter on it
me: that's not garlic butter. It's onion cheese

Labels: food

peachy stuff like this

quiche but not like this

red white and blueberry yogurt thingies - get clear plastic cups for pretty

A large number and variety of bagels

coffee, applejuice, lemonade

Labels: food

and you have now been outside as long as you have been inside.

Here you aren't eating everything, since everything would include green peppers, and tortillas, and i think proper fresh soft tortillas would do you just fine but the papery ones that come wrapped in plastic aren't so great, and everything would include - well - shellfish, which we don't eat very much of, so - and honey, which we also don't eat very much of - so basically when we have egg and cheese sandwiches, you can only have the cheesey parts. Yesterday you ate our veggie schnitzels and you ate our cucumber salad and you ate our bread (and you also ate your babyfood puree stuff). This morning i suppose you didn't crunch my granola as there's milk in it - but you ate a lot of Daddy's vanilla yogurt. The tagesmutter says you are eating everything at her house too. Still avoiding uncooked/unprocessed cows' milk until you are a year, but strawberries are yummy and citrussy things are yummy. I found some nice dairy-free sorbet so when you wake up and, well, also when Daddy gets home to see the fun, we'll feed you some nice cold things.

Good hot day for it.

Maybe he will want to take you swimming first anyway, as it's a good hot day for that too, and we've already been to the pool twice. That's twice, today. And it's €2.50 to get into the pool for adults (kinderfreibad, so kinder sind frei) but it's €3.40 bus fare to get to the free parks or the Donau since it's too far to walk. And apparently when i was a baby my lips turned blue, and yours got a little purpley but you were having so much fun! This is why we went in twice: because you get cold so quickly but you enjoy it so much, so we can't really stay for long but it is too entertaining to not maximize.

Also entertaining: you waved at me in the mirror on the elevator. I think every time we go in the elevator i wave at you in the mirror - well, it's just that sort of elevator - and so that is totally a sign! you know a word and it means Hello! Kinda. Total genius baby. And you played it off like it was not a big deal at all and i don't know if you're ever going to do it again and you made it look so natural, like you've been doing it forever, that i didn't quite realize immediately that you just waved at me in the mirror but you did. Before you went all smiley. And i don't know when a repeat performance will happen.

And at the pool you pulled up to standing, all the way to standing, on your stroller. You've been doing this thing where even though you're still doing the army-tummy crawl, you stay still for a moment and go on your hands and toes and stick your little bum as far in the air as it will go and you get very excited about this, your perfect yoga pose.

Your new tooth has not come in yet but the tagesmutter thinks it will soon and since she is magic and usually right, one tends to believe her. Especially because at lunch you didn't want Cheerios, you didn't want rice cakes, you didn't want anything you had to chew, you wanted cold babyfood potatoes and zucchini. Though you did want to feed yourself with the spoon. Which you can do - again, like you've been doing it forever, like it's not remotely a big deal - but you can't quite reload the spoon yet. So we will have to develop a strategy for letting you feed yourself and somehow get more food onto the spoon. I think a second spoon is in order.

Labels: baby, 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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