scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

2.9.08

Eleven months

You will eat whatever we put in front of you but are starting to put fewer things in your mouth for just exploring - so now we can set you down in a playground with wood chips on it and you don't eat the wood chips. Score! (Bye-bye Freudian oral stage and theoretical dependency issues, right? Something like that. Anyway, not everything is going in the mouth, any more.) And then you can watch all the larger kids on the playground stuff, and you can go in the swings and we can pull you slowly down the slide and there are little rocking horses and teeter totters and things, and you stare at the kids climbing on the taller bits of playground and learn and learn and learn.

But you are so funny, now, you are a little crawling mass of id. If there is a nipple you HAVE to have milk. If there is a stacked set of stacky cups you HAVE to knock it over (which is convenient to distract you for a moment: i set up the stacky cups in the opposite corner from where you are, and then i have about forty-five seconds to clean something up as quickly as possible, because nothing will take you off those cups). And, um, if the books are on the shelf, you HAVE to go and pull them off - though admittedly we do keep them on the baby-sized shelf so you can read them whenever you want. Less convenient while visiting, where you also HAVE to pull everybody else's books and magazines off everybody else's shelves. All just as soon as you notice. And Nagymama says you're going to be mischievous but i think that requires the understanding that you're not supposed to do something and the remembering that you're not supposed to do it and i don't think you're quite there yet. You stop when i say No. (usually, this week, in the context of No standing up in the bath, and then you look around at me and sit back down. And i can say that's not for eating and you don't.) So there's that.

Doing well with the one-sided nursing. About every two or three days - whenever it gets really engorged, which is getting slowly less often - i let you nurse once on the right, just to take the edge off, or i'll use the breast pump, which is gentler but less efficient. And once every two or three days is rare enough that i can heal in between so it's not so bad, and i know if i just dealt with the engorgement and didn't get the milk out it would probably go away faster, but i'm playing this by ear and changing my mind every fifteen minutes, it seems like, and you're sure eating enough and getting enough milk on the left the rest of the time, more or less i think, and anyway this is working, for us, for now. Slowly i am healing and the elasticity is coming back into my skin, slowly, so i crack a little less each time, which is JUST AS PAINFUL AS IT SOUNDS, but it's there and it's working, at least.

We are thinking of what to do for your birthday. It's a Thursday so I can be home; but, oh, right, we have to call the doc and reschedule your appointment for the week before your birthday instead of the week after because your great-aunt and uncle are coming and right now you're getting your first MMR shot the day before they visit and that has the chance of putting you in a pretty sour mood, so we'll try and fix that ... mmmkay ... but there will be a zoo visit, i'm sure, and we'll find you some Crayolas, and a nice winter coat and snow pants (absolutely necessary for the playground in the cold, here, disastrously so), and maybe some iTunes. You have two shelves of books, two full boxes and a bin of toys, plenty of clothes, you have musical instruments and dolls and light-up phones and fingerpuppets and spoons and sippy cups and puzzles and a stacking cup set and bath toys and stuffed animals and Lego Quattros (which are even larger than Lego Duplos, but you were playing with Duplos happily in Miskolc so i think we can upgrade) and photos and a ring pyramid and so many things. As of yet, you have no extensive block set or play food, now that i think about it, but you do have nice European wooden toys - a small-scale woodpecker on a stick that goes clickyclickyclickyclick and a big push-toy thing that we are calling a butterfly that, as it happens, goes clackyclackyclackyclack when you walk with it and the wheels go around and right now we have to push it for you and you chase it, but i think when you learn to walk you can push it yourself. You have a (plastic, but) bunny whose ears move when you pull or push him, you have a soccer ball, you have a book with zippers and snaps and buttons and velcro. So maybe we will find you some blocks.

Do you need blocks, if you have a stacking cup set and two full to overflowing bins of toys? We could get you a block set and then theoretically donate some of the toys you don't seem to like so much. If i could find a place to donate toys. Donating clothes is easy: in a four block radius there are at least five or six drop boxes, just next to the recycling bins, and i know they accept "household items," some of them, but i'm not sure that includes toys. I bet it does. Small space living is having us make decisions. Do you need the phone that only rattles, if you have the one that lights up? Do you need the stuffed cat, the big white bear that sheds fur when you touch it, the elephant in an election year? (Um, you may not need the elephant in an election year, though i'm trying to teach you to bite it viciously.) We haven't donated any toys yet, but that giraffe rattle i think you have outgrown. Maybe, too, we'll get you a shape-learning puzzle blocky thing, and donate ... something ... to make room for it. Do you need a shape-learning puzzle blocky thing if you have a shape-learning book? Do you need blocks if we just go ahead and get you a basic bucket set of Duplos? Humm.

Mommy is being paranoid about encouraging your creative development. Clearly overthinking this. Put the coffee down and step away.

Labels: baby, breastfeeding, milestones

scrawled @ 07:46