sandblower

18 months

2011-07-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard Lyra wake up from her nap and call for Adriana. I went in to my bedroom, and there she was in the middle of my bed. She rolled over, sat up, and asked again, “Ana? Ana?” I told her that her sister was asleep and she shouted, “Go ‘way!” at me over and over, giggling and bouncing on her knees there on the bed. I sat at the foot of the bed, finishing the chapter I’d been reading, and finally she crawled over to me, and climbed onto my lap, straddling my waist. Putting her hands on either side of my face, she looked at me and said, “Mama. Mama. Mama.” And then she let her head drop back and giggled while I kissed her cheeks.

And really, is there anything else I need to remember about Lyra at 18 months? I think if I only remembered that one perfect moment, I think that would be fine. She is mostly a happy little girl. She runs and falls, runs and falls. She can jump with both feet of the ground now, shouting “Jump! Jump!” while she does it. She sometimes eats a lot, and sometimes only wants to nurse. Some nights she sleeps well, other nights she is bothered by new teeth coming in or a stuffy nose or something she ate, and she wakes me up hourly. She doesn’t like strangers to get too near, but she loves to wave and smile at everyone. She requests kisses when she bumps her head or bangs her knees (which are always scraped up). She demands hugs from her sister and then smacks her in the face a second later. She yells “Hide!” and ducks behind a chair, then “Find you!” when you find her. She cries when Adriana gets out of the car at school, and won’t let any of the sweet women who work in the YMCA child watch touch her, but clings to Adriana the whole time I’m gone. Two weeks after Brian hung a bike in the rafters in the garage, she still exclaims “Bike! Up!” every time she sees it.

For Lyra, everything is exciting. Everything is yelling and pointing. Everything is full speed and top volume. And then she pushes her face against mine, and says, “Mama, mama, mama.”

Adriana's chocolate chip banana bread

2011-04-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

Around the time she was two-and-a-half, I started involving Adriana more in cooking and baking projects. But lately she's lost interest in helping quite so much. For the most part that's fine. She plays pretty well by herself while I fix dinner or work on something on my own. It's nice, though, when she does want to help. We work well together in the kitchen. There are times lately when I wonder how on earth Adriana and I are going to survive the teen years when we already seem to clash so much. There's less clashing when we're cooking together.

Earlier this week when the baby went down for a nap, Adriana and I set out to make chocolate chip banana bread, and I discovered that now that she's four, she can do most of the work herself. She still needs me to reach things for her, to read the recipe, and to take things in and out of the oven, but even the hand mixer was fine for her to use (although I did remind her a few times to hold onto the bowl with her free hand.

She liked mashing the bananas,

knows how to grease the pan,

and measure out ingredients.

I knew she could use the standing mixer on her own, but didn't want to get it out. She assured me she would be fine with the hand mixer, and while I did hover quite a bit the first time she turned it on, I quickly figured out she really was fine with it.

She even recalled a valuable (and messy) lesson learned at Christmas time about what happens when you turn on a mixer at full speed just after adding the dry ingredients, and carefully mixed them in a bit with the spatula.

Mixing in the chocolate chips was hard as the batter was quite thick by then, but she did it all herself.

She did need me to hold the bowl while she moved the batter into the pan, and then she spent a lot of time making sure it was just right to make up for my assistance.

Then she set the timer for an hour

and went off to play while I did the dishes. (Wait. What?) She did a puzzle,

decorated some cupcakes,

and helped entertain the baby after her nap.

She was eager to pose with her bread when it came out of the oven.

And then she spent the next hour trying to convince me to cut it before it was cool. It smelled so good that I did have to give in.

We got out a picnic blanket, sang happy birthday and blew out the wooden candles on the wooden cupcakes, and then ate the banana bread. If you are the kind of kid who worries about getting messy, it's best to eat it with a fork.

But some kids don't mind a little chocolate on their hands and face.

So we don't clash nearly as much when we cook, but photography may still be an issue. Upon seeing these pictures, Adriana pointed out that I was supposed to be taking close-up pictures of the food, not pictures of her. I guess she's been paying attention to the recipes I use from Pioneer Woman and Smitten Kitchen. I've promised next time to frame the photos properly and use the real camera, not my phone.

15 months

2011-04-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

Aaaaaaand once again, this is more of an “and-a-half months” post. Because I am outnumbered.

This month we are all noticing how much fun Lyra is. If she doesn’t nap much, I’m not terribly disappointed because she’s fun to play with. Brian enjoys getting to spend time with her. And when I asked Adriana her favorite part of the day a couple of weeks ago she said, “Playing with Lyra at the park. Now she is not just a sister, she is my friend.” And then I died of the sweetness.

Part of the fun we’re having with her comes, I think, from her language development. Someone asked me recently if she had any new words, and I said every day. I’ve been surprised to find Lyra has more words than signs. Some words she only speaks; some words she only signs; much of the time she does both; and she seems to pair signs for animals with the sounds they make. Every day she mimics something new, and seems to understand it. The best thing is probably that, in addition to “mama” and “dad,” she now says “Ana,” and it’s sweet how pleased Adriana is to have the baby say her name. But everything she says seems adorable to me. When spring really arrived at the end of March, I put a sunhat on her, and she told me “no hat,” her first two word combination. She comes into the kitchen signing and saying “eat eat eat,” so I ask her what she wants and she exclaims “Peet-ya!” (At least one kid shares my deep true love of pizza.) She grabs onto her diaper and tells me “Poop!” and then runs away howling “Noooooooooo!” when I offer to change her. She even tries to say “thank you.” That started one evening as she was handing me books from a pile and saying “tank” each time, and I realized that she knows that we say “thank you” when someone gives us something. She was handing things to me, so I wasn’t sure if she was prompting me, or just wasn’t clear on who says what. Now she seems to understand that she should say it to us when we give her something, but when she gives one of us something, she’ll often stand there and prompt us to thank her until we do.

Since Lyra was about six months old, she’s been in love with Adriana’s baby doll--the doll that Adriana herself is very attached to. When it first started I bought Lyra her own doll, one that was safe for younger babies. Lyra poked at it some, but never became very attached. It had a plastic head like Adriana’s doll, but a fat, stuffed body. Finally a couple of weeks ago as Lyra was becoming more and more determined to get her hands on Adriana’s baby, I bought her a similar one. Lyra has become very attached to the doll. She carries it around, and it seems to be comforting for her when she’s upset. She picks it up in the morning with glee, and if I try to take it away from her when I go to feed her she wails “Baby! Baby!” and will not be comforted until she has that doll back. Also? She still tries to steal Adriana’s when she get the chance.

Lyra is attached to Brian in a way that Adriana wasn’t at this age. She recognizes when he’s leaving for work in the morning and runs to be picked up and hugged. When he comes in after work, she runs to greet him. She demands time on his lap, and sometimes even lets him rock her to sleep. When Brian’s parents were here for a weekend, she was particularly devoted to her Grandpa Andy. She constantly wanted him to hold her and read to her, and when he picked her up to hug her good-bye at the end of their stay, she clung to him and cried as he handed her back to me. Now she points to his picture and tries to say “Grandpa.” I am especially amused by this, because it just sounds like she’s saying “damn.”

She eats so much these days, it constantly surprises me. But then there are days she hardly eats a thing. I know that’s normal, and after Adriana I am less surprised by the days where she doesn’t want to eat much. Yesterday I realized with surprise that she had gone seven hours without nursing. She’d eaten plenty during that time, and then nursed a lot in the evening as if to make up for it, but I was definitely surprised by how long she’d gone without, even though I had offered a couple of times. Her sleep’s been mostly awful lately. I bring her into our bed when I go to sleep, and while I used to barely have to wake up to feed her, she now is doing a lot more crying and shifting around. We wonder if it’s teeth and keep sticking our fingers in her mouth to check. I start to think maybe it’s my caffeine, and am careful not to have any after 10 AM. I try to figure out if it’s something she ate, but since she eats everything and eats so differently from day to day, it’s hard to say. Perhaps our bed is too crowded, I think, but then when it’s just me and the baby, she’s still up every hour. I know she’ll outgrow it, whatever it is, but that’s hard to remember at three in the morning when I’m trying to calm a screaming baby who won’t nurse.

There have been some days full of crying, too, which always surprises me. Usually it’s solved by an extra nap, though, and for the most part she’s just the happiest little girl I know, smiling and shouting “hi” as she rides through the grocery store in our cart, running giggling down the sidewalk, and shrieking “wheeeeeee!” in the swing at the park.

Monster party

2011-03-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

This morning, while I was getting dressed, Adriana began talking about getting ready for a monster party. She took my phone and went to make some calls. Then she came back and told me that five monsters were coming; the sixth wasn’t going to be able to make it. The party would start after dinner, and the monsters would sleep over at our house, so she found five blankets that would be good for monsters. We would need to go to the store beforehand, she told me, so we would have all the ingredients for monster chow. And we had to be certain to make plenty of monster sauce for on the monster chow, otherwise the monsters would eat us instead. Oh, and monsters drink only a certain kind of tea, which we happened to be all out of, so we would have to pick up some of that while we were out, too.

Most of her fantasy play is mimicking real life or a story in a book, and this tale seemed to come completely out of nowhere. I asked if they had monster parties at school, and she told me that it was from a book at a friend's house, so when those same friends were over this afternoon I asked about it. My friend knew it was a game the kids had played, but she hadn’t read the book to Adriana. And the book does not feature most of the details Adriana had been sharing.

After our friends left, I started to go into her bedroom for something, and she through a fit because if I went in there the monsters would all leave. They apparently don’t like moms coming to their parties. Of course, I questioned why the monsters were there if the party wasn’t until after dinner, and she told me that three of the monsters had come early to get ready. While I was fixing dinner she pretended to hear knocks at the door and let the other monsters in. And after she had her dinner we went outside to enjoy the nice weather, and she sat beside me at the table on the patio, making garlic bread out of play-doh to go with the monster chow and monster sauce.

I described the monster party to Brian when he came home from work. We questioned her for more details about the monsters and she answered a few of them willingly, but when Brian asked where she’d met these monsters, she said, “Dad, they are just pretend monsters.”

She doesn't say "Duh" yet, but you can totally hear it in her voice.

How weaning (eventually) happened

2011-03-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

After I took the girls for their check-ups in January, I joked with Brian that when the pediatrican asked me whether I’d considered weaning, I nearly answered “Which one?” Because of course our pediatrician was asking about Lyra and of course I wouldn’t have said anything of the sort. The fact that Adriana was still nursing at four years old wasn’t something I was trying to hide, but it wasn’t something I was going around advertising either. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it’s not exactly the norm in mainstream parenting, and I’m not the kind of person who wants to stand out. And so I debated whether to write about this, but it’s such a milestone for us, perhaps particularly for us, that it would be a shame not to. And I think that, because it’s outside the norm, it’s worth sharing.

We went through stages when people would ask me about weaning. The first was when Adriana was a newborn, and people would ask how long I planned to nurse; when she was a little over year it came up again, since it’s very common to wean around the baby’s first birthday; and finally, people who knew she was still nursing when I got pregnant again asked if I had plans to wean. There were times all along when I considered it, even right at the beginning when I was tired and depressed and had thrush, and particularly when I was pregnant and it wasn’t always as comfortable as it had been. But it never seemed like the right time to wean completely, and it seemed as though it would happen eventually.

She got older and began to eat a bit of solid food, and she backed off of nursing a bit then. There was a point sometime before Adriana’s second birthday when I started pushing her to nurse less in the afternoons, because I found it frustrating to stop what I was doing so often to nurse her (and once I was including her more in what I was doing, she stopped asking so much--what she had really wanted was more of my focus). Sometime around the time she was two and a half, I began to refuse to nurse her in public. And because we were always going somewhere, pretty soon she was nursing only around sleep--to fall asleep at nighttime and naptime, and then when she woke up. That was our pattern when I got pregnant and it worked. She gave up napping not too long after her third birthday, so then those nursings were gone (although for the first couple of weeks, I would still lie down and let her nurse for a bit at what would have been naptime--she seemed to need something like that to make it through the afternoon). I pushed to get rid of the morning nursing, which worked for a few weeks, but then mornings got rough and we added it back in. A couple of months later, we dropped it without much effort.

It feels like a confession of sorts to say that after the baby was born I wished Adriana would stop. I was glad it was comforting to her, but the contrast between nursing a newborn and nursing a preschooler somehow overwhelming to me. I was ready to be done, but I also knew it was the wrong time to stop her. It was what she knew to do. It was reassuring to her. And with the adjustment to having a new baby at home (and then knowing that we’d be moving over the summer) it seemed like too much to ask.

There was one misguided attempt on my part to cut her off cold turkey. In June, I spent three nights in the hospital with a stomach bug of some sort. Lyra was in the hospital with me so she could nurse, but Adriana was at home with her grandma. She fell asleep for those three nights without nursing (but cuddled up with Grandma), so on my first night home, I laid down in her bed with her at bedtime, just like I always do, but this time I refused to nurse her. It was awful. Within a few minutes we were both in tears. Finally I nursed her, sad to not be done, sad to have tried and failed, relieved that it was so easy to make it all better again.

After we moved last summer I began talking to her about weaning. I told her that she was the only one of her friends that still needed “mom milk” to fall asleep, and talked about other ways to fall asleep. On nights when she did fall asleep without nursing (because we were in the car when she fell asleep, or because I hadn’t been home, or because she was tired and fell asleep during her story) I would point it out to her in the morning. Sometime before our move, I suggested that when she was four she wouldn’t nurse any more. I tried to talk about it as casually as possible, and it seemed to work. She began talking about it herself. And it went on for several months like that, and then in December one night she told me that she wouldn’t have milk to fall asleep. I got into bed with her, read her some stories, and then we cuddled up together. After about 15 minutes of tossing around, she told me--on the edge of tears, trying to be brave--that she needed milk after all. I assured her it was fine, and she nursed to sleep. She talked about it in the morning, and didn’t suggest it again.

I teased her the night of her fourth birthday about not nursing. She laughed, and said “Maybe when I’m eight,” which gave me a good laugh. But I knew I wasn’t going to cut her off because she had turned four that day. Then one night about a week later, nursing became uncomfortable for me, so I stopped her. She cried and yelled and hit and kicked, and then she fell asleep in my arms. The next night I stopped her before she was asleep. She cried a little, but didn’t throw the same fit as the night before. For two more nights I read her long stories until she fell asleep. On the fifth night she asked to nurse, and I told her that she was four and a big girl, and that I would stay with her as long as she wanted, but I wouldn’t nurse her. And that was it. That was the end.

I had been dreading bedtime. I was done with nursing and waiting for the right time for Adriana. Now bedtime can be so nice. (I won’t say it always is, because, look, she’s four; sometimes she’s going to fight it, no matter how tired she is.) Most nights I just lie in bed with her and read her stories. Sometimes she falls asleep during the story, and other times she just lies in my arms and I rest my face on her hair and feel the moment when her body relaxes and she falls asleep.

14 months

2011-03-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, fine, fourteen and a half months. Because it takes me that long to write a few paragraphs with these little monkeys around.

Lyra is just such a loving little girl. She comes running for a kiss, and sometimes just wraps her arms around my neck in a nice, tight hug. When she hears Brian come in from work, she runs to the door to greet him and raises her arms to ask to be picked up (and actually does the same thing in the morning when she sees that he’s about to leave. And it’s not just with us, but with other people she’s familiar with--her grandparents, her aunts, my friends; she raises her arms to be picked up, leans in for a kiss, crawls onto a lap. Sometimes I’m greedy and I want all those hugs for myself, but I also love that she adores and feels loved by so many other people as well.

At fourteen months, Lyra’s expressive language seems to be growing so fast--both spoken and sign. She says (or makes attempts to say): apple, boo, book, boom, bye, cat, dad, dog, mama, no, sit, woof, meow, moo, baa, quack, and roar. She signs all done, ball, bath, book, cat, cheese, dog, duck, eat, milk, more, music, please, and water. I think “no” is the one that amuses me the most. I thought she was asleep recently, but as I went to set her down, she opened her eyes and told me “no.”

She also does a good job expressing her disapproval of certain things through body language. We’ve entered the world of tantrums, the kind where she arches her back, stiffens her body, and SCREAMS. It’s a little horrifying (as a preview of what’s to come), but also kind of funny, because now we know what a preschool-level tantrum is. Compared to a four-year-old, Lyra isn’t very strong and doesn’t have a very long attention span for her rage. We can hold her while she cries, or set her down, and the anger dies out pretty quickly. We are finding her a little harder to distract and redirect than she used to be. If we take away something that she shouldn’t have had, she remembers and protests, even when we offer something (that we think is) equally awesome.

She’s discovered the joy of being a foot taller than she really is, and likes to push Adriana’s step stool around to gain access to the kitchen counter and light switches. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the sense to not just try to step right off of it, so I’m a little nervous about her climbing on it. She has finally learned to climb down from our bed or the couch safely, which is nice. She’s not necessarily good at it, and often falls as she goes, but at least she’s not crawling off head first.

I feel lucky that Adriana can play independently pretty safely at the park these days. She goes up ladders and down slides, and I don’t have to follow her up or hover right beneath her. She plays games with friends on the play structures and in the sand, or rides her bike without going out of my sight. I don’t know how people do it when their kids are closer together in age and they have to be on top of both of them. Lyra has the ability to climb up all the play structures, but I don’t trust her not to fall right off of them. She runs toward an empty swing with no awareness of the children on the other swings who might bump right into her. She takes off running without looking back, which is completely new to me, as Adriana has always stuck pretty close. She loves playing in the sand (although Adriana wouldn’t touch it for anything at this age), but still hasn’t learned that it doesn’t taste good, and that she shouldn’t throw it.

She is still such a good eater. She eats meals with us, and lots of snacks. I’m constantly surprised by how much food she can consume. She’ll eat pretty much anything we offer her at this point, unless it’s really spicy. She’s got a sweet tooth, which doesn’t surprise me one bit, but she also is a big fan of salty snacks. We were at a friend’s house recently and she was amazed by the introduction of goldfish crackers. As much as she eats, I would sort of expect her to back of nursing a bit, but most days she seems to nurse plenty. Several days a week, though, I’ll realize that she’s going as long as four hours between nursings. At first I was shocked by that and wondered if it was okay for a baby so young to go that long, but then I laughed at myself, remembering that most babies these days are completely weaned by this age. That strikes me as so strange, because she still seems like such a baby, in spite of the climbing and talking and eating. She curls into my arms and is so snuggly and small, and part of me would like to keep her likes this forever. (And then she pitches herself headfirst off the couch or screams because I won’t let her eat the penny she found on the ground, and a pray for her to grow up and get some sense FAST.)

Addiction timeline

2011-03-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

1995: I drink coffee at various poetry readings. Because I am sixteen and all grown up and awesome. Also my hair is black and I have written some very bad poetry.

1996: I realize that I feel like crap after drinking coffee. Decide that drinking hot chocolate or tea instead is charming.

1999: Begin dating a total coffee addict. Commence 11 years of teasing him about this addiction.

2005: Discover chai. OMG CHAI. Chai makes me productive! And happy! And chatty! Wheeeee!

2006: Get pregnant. Give up chai.

2010: Give birth to second child. Discover that a frappuccino in the early afternoon makes me a nicer mother. And a vanilla latte in the morning doesn’t hurt either. But I only drink fancy coffee that I buy when we’re out.

2011: Begin to understand the beauty of Brian having his own espresso machine. Refuse to let him see how much sugar I put in my cup. Also refuse to learn to use the machine myself, so that I won’t drink too much coffee.

March 16
9:00: Brian leaves for work without making coffee. Gives me brief instructions on how to use espresso maker.

9:02: Stare dubiously at espresso machine. Decide it might be a good day to try giving up coffee

9:30: Adriana asks at breakfast, “Why don’t you have your coffee?” When I tell her that Brian didn’t have time to make it before he left, she asks why I don’t just make it. I explain that I don’t know how, and she says, “I do. I could make it for you.”

10:15: Wonder about this no coffee experiment. Consider trip to Starbucks. Decide I don’t feel like getting the children into shoes. Determine that skipping coffee makes me a Better Person.

10:20: Okay, maybe not a Better Person. But healthier.

10:28: HEALTHY!

10:30: Maybe if I’m being so healthy I should go for a run. Could put baby in the stroller and Adriana on her bike and get some exercise.

10:31: Oooh, could run to Starbucks!

10:32: Oh. Right. HEALTHY.

10:35: Do we have any cookies left?

10:40: Maybe the kids won’t notice if I lie down here for a few minutes.

10:41: Oh. They noticed.

10:50: My head hurts.

11:15: Maybe a Coke? I think we have Coke in the garage. That will make me feel better.

11:16: Okay, but all that HFCS and coloring...That’s not healthier. This is supposed to be making me healthier.

11:17: But what about my mental health?

11:18: I DON’T NEED CAFFEINE.

11:30: “Adriana? Do you really know how to make the coffee?”

11:32: “First you put in three scoops of the beans. Then you turn it upside down after you grind them. Then you put them in that round thing. And then there’s the rattle thing that doesn’t rattle. Push them down with that. Don’t forget to put in the water. No, you unscrew that thing at the top to put in the water. And then you put it back on tight. Dad says really tight. Okay, and then you let me press the button to start it. Then you get the milk out.”

11:40: OMG COFFEE.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 6)

2011-02-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

On the last day, we had Brian with us. He wanted to rent a bike to ride around Central Park with Adriana, so after finding a place where he could reserve one with a child’s seat on the back, we headed out to show him the Alice statue. It seemed mellower, easier, leaving the apartment with all of us, not just me and the girls. Adriana pointed out various rocks she’d climbed on Thursday, and delighted when Brian helped her climb around. At the statue she was so glad to have his help in climbing up onto Alice’s lap.

We walked down to the zoo again, just to get lunch at the cafeteria, and then we split up. Brian and Adriana went to pick up their bike (and I tried not to think too much about the traffic they’d be riding in on their way from the shop back into the park), and I headed back up through the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because in spite of a half dozen previous trips to New York without children in tow I’d never made it to the museum. I felt free and light with just Lyra with me. She rode in the stroller until we got to the museum, where I nursed her to sleep, and I was free to see the exhibits. Overwhelmed by the size of the museum, I picked photography, Van Gogh, and Degas, and wished to see more, but after a quick trip through the modern art, it was time for me to head back down to meet Brian and Adriana.

We met up at the big playground at the bottom of the park, where Adriana played for awhile, and then we ventured out to find dinner, braving an actual restaurant, in spite of our tired, hungry children. Adriana did melt down a bit at first, but did surprisingly well in the end. And after she’d eaten plenty of spaghetti, she was energized and even walked part of the way back up to the apartment (stopping to see the Lincoln Center fountain lit up at night), before we entered the subway for one last ride.

In the morning, Brian went out to got coffee (and vanilla milk) while I finished packing up our things, and then we walked out to Broadway to get a cab.

“But I don’t want to go home,” Adriana protested. “I am still having fun.”

And I felt the exact same way.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 5)

2011-02-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I woke up with tired feet, and decided that maybe we ought to take it easy on our last day of sightseeing without Brian. I promised Adriana a trip to what I told her was the biggest toy store in the world, a statue that spelled “love,” and a park that her friend Elena likes to visit when she goes to New York. And I figured on taking the subway or a bus, but somehow, once I had Adriana in the stroller and Lyra on my back, walking seemed like a better idea. So we trekked back down Broadway to midtown.

At FAO Schwarz, I told Adriana she could pick out one toy. She selected two sets of NYFD trucks, one for her and one for her friend who was helping his mother take care of our cat while we were away, but then we walked through the costume section, and she saw a tutu--a big pink tutu with flowers on the waist. I watched look from the firetrucks to the tutu, and then she turned to me and said, “But I want both.” And what kind of feminist would I be if I made her choose? Her sucker of a mother bought her both. I blame my parents and Free to Be You and Me for making me such an indulgent mother. I took her to see the big piano, wishing I’d shown her the clip from Big. She was fascinated but decided she would rather not try walking on it, even though there were only two other children playing there.

After some circling around and waiting we made it to the Love statue, having been thwarted on our way to the toy store by police barricades and a motorcade route, because the Obamas were also in town. We finally made it, though, and Adriana had none of the shyness that she’d shown when it came to the piano. She waited for another group of tourists to take their photos with the statue, and then climbed right up onto it and hammed for my camera.

We walked back up to the apartment, stopping at Lincoln Center to check out the fountain finally. We ate lunch in the apartment, and then headed back out to check out Riverside Park. This time I had the good sense to take the subway, at least to get there. We headed uptown on the subway, and entered at the top end of the park. Our friends had told us to check out “the hippo playground” and so that’s where we headed first, not knowing what to expect.

We were both delighted with the hippo fountains. It had been a hot week, and Adriana relished the chance to play in the cool water and climb around on the hippos. I got to sit in the shade with the baby and relax while I watched her. Needless to say, we stayed for quite awhile.

But eventually I knew Adriana would need dinner, so I herded her out. She chose to walk for a while, which surprised me. It was fun to chase her along the pathway with the view of the river. She admired the boats and I felt glad not to be stuck in the horrible rush hour traffic on the road below us. She did finally end up in the stroller, as we needed to make it through the entire length of the park to get “home.”

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 4)

2011-02-27T07:29:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday night, Adriana and I decided that Thursday would be our Central Park day. We walked from our apartment to the southwest corner of the park and entered there. I had promised Adriana a zoo and a fountain and a statue she could climb on, but I’d kept other things to myself, and other things it hadn’t occurred to me were fascinating, but from her point of view of course it was incredible. She marveled over the horses with their feathers and jewels, as well as the rows and rows of pedicabs. I hadn’t mentioned the carousel at all, and we approached it just as it was opening for the day. “A merry-go-round! Can we go for a ride?” she asked. One of the most fun things about motherhood is getting to say yes to things like that. There’s no reason to say no, but the surprise of the carousel somehow makes my yes so unexpected to her, that it’s just thrilling.

After a ride, we continued on to the zoo. The Central Park Zoo is a little bigger and a little more crowded than the Prospect Park one, but it was still great for a three year old. We made a loop through the zoo, and itprobably wouldn’t have been a very long zoo trip for us if it weren’t for the snow leopard. I could not tear Adriana away from that snow leopard (not that I had any real desire to). The leopard was asleep, lying against the glass in its exhibit. Adriana waited patienting for there to be space up by the glass, and then went to sit and stare. As more people cycled through, she moved away, following me around as I read about the animal and its habitat, or sat with me while I nursed the baby, but every time there was a lull in activity, she was back by the glass, examining the tiger. It was very cool to be so close up to the animal, getting to study her paws and ears, the patterns on her fur.

When we finished our loop, we got lunch in the cafeteria, although we probably could have made do with what I’d packed for snacks. Looking back, I may have bought lunch just because there was actually somewhat decent food, which surprised me, since I am used to what’s available at the National Zoo.

Outside the zoo, I glanced up at the clock. I hadn’t mentioned it to Adriana, but it was less than 15 minutes until the next time it would chime the hour. I suggested to Adriana that we sit and wait to hear it, deciding not to mention that the animals would move. I nursed the baby, while she hopped around, and then the clock started to chime and told her to look at it. She stood completely still, totally surprised, as the animals circled around, and she got to see that it was more than just the couple of animals we could see when it was still.

From the zoo and the clock, we headed to Bethesda Fountain, stopping to climb on various rocks and on the sled dog statue. As we stood above the fountain plaza, Adriana observed, “That is the biggest fairy I have ever seen.” As with the wallaby milk yogurt, how could I correct her? Who needs the angel when you have a fairy that huge? I do kind of wish I’d asked what other fairies she’d seen.

I could tell Adriana was getting tired, and, fearing a meltdown, I suggested we head home. But I had promised her a statue she could climb on, so we headed to Alice in Wonderland sculpture. Adriana had never seen the movie or read the story (we started it when we returned home, but it’s still a little bit much for her), but she enjoyed checking out the White Rabbit and Dinah the cat. She declared that this was where she wanted to bring Brian on Saturday when he was finally free to join us sightseeing.

We walked out of the park by way of Strawberry Fields (which I didn’t even try to explain to Adriana), and as we headed back toward our apartment for dinner and I wondered at how quiet the Upper West Side residential streets can seem, Adriana asked suddenly, “Are these houses? Do people live here?” I told her that some were houses and some were apartments, and yes, people do actually live in New York, and then she was quiet down in the stroller, thinking about that, and whatever else three-year-olds think about.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 3)

2011-02-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

Before we left for New York I picked up a book on things to do with kids there. It listed lots of parks and zoos and museums, and offered the very useful tip that the Children’s Museum of the Arts had drop-in art classes for kids one to three-and-a-half several days a week. Adriana has loved the art classes she’s done at home, so on the third morning of our trip, I braved taking the girls on the subway during the morning commute, and headed downtown for the class. I think it was even better than the art classes we have done here. At $22 per family per class it seemed a bit pricey, but it was nice to have a morning with less time on my feet and Adriana really enjoyed it.

The class started out very small: there was a table with play-doh and a table where the kids could draw with markers. A few museum employees were around to chat with the parents (and grandmothers and nannies) and kids while they worked on their art. They were nice and the kids were happy, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with the class. But then a folding screen was taken down and we were able to move further back into the museum. Here there was a sand table filled with soft white sand, some water colors set before mirrors for self portraits, and some sort of goopy stuff. Adriana went straight for the sand, while Lyra crawled around on some beanbag chairs. Shortly after that, the next screen was removed, revealing a table for doing collages, and one for painting with little toy cars, but Adriana was working intently with the sand. A couple of times I pointed out the other projects to her, giving her time warnings, so that she wouldn’t be disappointed if she didn’t get to them, but she was happy pouring sand around in the table.

And then suddenly one of the museum people had a tambourine and was singing, and he led the children and their caregivers down a steep flight of stairs for music time. It was funny to see how quickly the children all followed, even the ones who, like us, had never been there before. Downstairs, he sat before them and led them in songs. Some were songs that all kids know, some were new to me, but he never stopped singing, it seemed, just went from one song into the next. Adriana mostly observed but seemed happy, and she eagerly took a drum for each of us when they were passed out. After music, the kids went into a sort of ball pit to play--an area of the room with walls a couple of feet high filled with yoga balls. I think Adriana would have loved it eventually, but she only went in for about two minutes at the end. I could tell she was interested, but in a new place with so many new people, she just needed time to watch, and then the class was over and we had to go.

I hadn’t packed us a real lunch, so as we left the museum, I gave Adriana some snacks and wandered through SoHo, looking for a place to eat. So many places looked good and interesting, but I knew I needed something casual, fast, and with something that Adriana would willingly eat. I kept wishing for a Mexican place to suddenly appear, but wasn’t having any luck. Just as I was kicking myself for not bringing a picnic to eat at a playground, I spotted Ideya. There was a news clipping in the window identifying it was a good place to eat with kids, and I quickly scanned the menu and spotted beans and rice, which meant Adriana would be happy.

She was happy, and so was I, with a bowl of cold soup and a salad, and after that we felt better about walking some more, so we walked and walked. I took a meandering route from SoHo to Greenwich Village, spotting a few familiar places on the way. Finally Adriana spotted a playground and asked to stop. I remembered the first time we took a trip with her as a toddler, just a weekend in San Francisco, and how our rule was to stop whenever we saw a playground. She needed time to play, the baby needed to nurse, and my back needed a break, so it was perfect. Also perfect, of course, was that it was conveniently across the street from Magnolia Bakery, and I had been promising cupcakes, so after some play time, we each picked out a treat.

It was a very kid-centric day. I went to New York to do a kiddie art class, play on a playground, and eat cupcakes, I thought to myself as we headed back to the subway. And just as I thought that, I glanced up, feeling a sense of vague familiarity with where I was, and realized I was right in front of a bar, where on a previous trip to New York, a work trip, I’d stayed out until two in the morning drinking and listening to music with a friend. Then I had no choice but to laugh at how much things had changed in the six years since that trip.

“Do we need an uphill train or a downhill one?” Adriana asked me as we folded up the stroller to go down into the subway, making me laugh even more.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 2)

2011-02-22T06:44:00.000-08:00

On our second day in New York, the girls and I got on the subway and headed for Brooklyn first thing. Well, first thing is perhaps not exactly accurate. With all of us sleeping a little bit late because of the time change and Adriana’s generally cranky mood, it took us a bit of time to get out of the apartment in the morning, but we eventually made it onto the train. We stopped first at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Although we had the stroller with us, Adriana was eager to walk through the gardens. She liked smelling the herbs in the herb gardens, dancing by the lily pool, and exploring the vegetable garden. There was a children’s garden that was perfect for her: little hedges cut with tunnels for her to walk through, benches shaped like butterflies, and a worm bin to dig in.

After the garden, we headed back up to the Brooklyn Museum--not to go in, but to visit outside with a friend who works there. Some company was doing a photo shoot outside (I’d noticed them setting up when we’d first come out of the subway that morning), so the fountains weren’t on, but we got to watch. I couldn’t figure out why they were bothering to do the shoot outside the museum since they were using a green screen. A couple in business attire strolled back and forth in front of the screen for a while, and then a woman in a pink track suit jogged on a treadmill that was covered in the green screen stuff.

We walked from the museum through Prospect Park to the zoo. I didn’t realize at that point that we weren’t going through the main entrance to the zoo, but I’m glad we entered where we did, because we entered at the Discovery Trail, where there was a rope “spider web” to climb around in, big turtle shells for pretending to be a turtle, and giant eggs to hatch from. Adriana had fallen asleep on the walk there, and waking where there was a place to play was perfect. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got there, so the animals weren’t particularly active and the zoo was nearly empty of visitors. We saw wallabies (and I discovered that Adriana thinks the Wallaby brand yogurt I buy for her comes from wallaby milk; that was so cute that I certainly did not disillusion her) and emus, red pandas and peacocks. The baby baboon had gone to bed for the day, but we got to watch the adults grooming one another, and Adriana was thrilled to see the tamarin monkeys chasing one another through their habitat. I was eager to get on the subway before rush hour, but as we headed toward the exit, I realize that the sea lion feeding was about to happen. It was already four o’clock, but I stopped anyhow, because we got to be right there for it, with only two or three other families. Adriana was thrilled to see the sea lions leaping and diving. It was worth not making it onto the train until after five. And the trains weren’t that crowded in that direction at first anyhow, so we found seats without any trouble.

I’d learned my lesson the night before and prepared her a real dinner at the apartment and gave her a bath, even though the nap in the park meant she wasn’t going to bed for some time. She went out with Brian to bring back take out for our dinner, while I put Lyra to bed, as we began to realize that putting either one to bed while the other one was present and awake was just not going to be possible when we were all in one room.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 1)

2011-02-21T06:35:00.000-08:00

This was written months ago, but it needed to be edited, and I never posted it. After taking a quick pass through, I'm going to upload it, however out of date it is.

There are these moments when we travel, where Brian and I look at each other in horror and wonder what on earth it is we’re trying to prove. It happens early in the trip, as we deal with a tantrum or some discomfort or confusion, and the entire trip seems like a mistake before it’s barely even started.

We went to New York in September and the what-were-we-thinking moment came not too long after we’d made it into the studio apartment we were renting for a week. Brian was there for work for a week, and rather than face seven bedtimes on my own with both girls, we were all there, but I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of our decision as we moved furniture so that the bathroom door could open even when the sofa bed was unfolded, and we dealt with the reality of trying to get the girls to bed when they were in the same room.

But in the morning, once everyone was fed and dressed and Brian was leaving for work, suddenly it seemed fun again. It wasn’t that we were trying to prove anything. It was simply fun to travel and fun to do it with the kids--a new kind of adventure. And with a little apartment and a Starbucks on every corner in a city where I could always find someone who spoke English, it wasn’t a very complicated adventure.

I started out every day the same way--with our typical morning struggles (Adriana is so not a morning person), then Brian leaving for the subway, and a while later, heading out the door with Lyra on my back, Adriana buckling herself into the little umbrella stroller we’d brought, the diaper bag and a bag of snacks hanging from the handles. We’d stop at Starbucks to get a latte for me, vanilla milk for Adriana, and one of those fruit puree packets they’re selling now to make feeding Lyra easy.

Our first full day, Monday, didn’t go exactly as planned. The previous night we’d grabbed some snacks and breakfast stuff at the Fairway a block away from the apartment, but I’d planned on doing the real shopping for the week in the morning. However, when I realized that Brian had left with our only key to the apartment, plans changed: I wasn’t going to buy groceries if I couldn’t put them away. I called Brian and we made plans to have lunch together and hand off the key. I realized that we were only a few blocks up from Lincoln Center, and I figured Adriana would like to see the fountain there on the way to Brian’s office, so we started walking...only to discover when we got there that Gilmore Girls was filming there, and we couldn’t get close to the fountain at all. I used my phone for directions, forgetting I had it set for walking directions rather than transit. And the walking directions it gave me looked so easy--just head straight down 9th Avenue for a couple of miles and I would be there. So I started walking.

The walk was longer than I expected (I should have checked cross streets and gotten it into my head that it was fifty blocks away), but it was fun. Adriana occasionally hopped out of the stroller to walk, and Lyra napped on my back. We stopped to eat carrots and grapes from our snackbag on occasion--usually when we spotted some construction, so we had the entertainment of seeing diggers and cranes at work while we ate. I love just walking around cities, and I got my chance to do that, even with little kids in tow, seeing the different neighborhoods 9th Avenue took us through on our way to the office in Chelsea. Before this life with Adriana and Lyra, I might have planned my walk to take me by certain points of interest. This time we saw whatever was there on our way, which was kind of fun. A huge garage of giant mail trucks wouldn’t necessarily have been on my list, but Adriana was fascinated.

After lunch with Brian, I braved the subway for the first time with the girls, and found it surprisingly easy. We entered at a station with an elevator, which certainly helped, although I think that was the only time we used a subway elevator during the course of the week, and it was nice that our next destination, the American Museum of Natural History, was a straight shot on the uptown train. Since Adriana didn’t need a ticket on the subway, after she helped me unclip my bag so I could carry it and fold the stroller, she slipped under the turnstile and helped me maneuver the folded stroller through it after I swiped my card. She held my hand on the stairs to the platform and bravely sat between two strangers (both women--I think if they’d been men, she wouldn’t have done it) when she was offered a seat. I was also offered a seat but opted to stand, since I had the baby on my back. When we got off the train, Adriana was thrilled with the animal mosaics in the Natural History Museum’s station, and helped me get the stroller unfolded and my bag into it, informing me, “I don’t need to ride. I need to see dinosaurs.” When Lyra woke up from her nap, we did let her ride in it. It was nice to give my back a break and as much as she loves the closeness of the carrier, I think she was relieved to have a bit more space for a while.

I wish I could really know what Adriana thought about seeing the dinosaurs. I don’t know how much she understands when I tell her that these are the bones of animals who lived thousands of years ago, that these kinds of animals no longer exist. But she ran from dinosaur to dinosaur, making dinosaur faces and asking me the name of each one. She liked touching the screens on the computers for more information, and I would read the information to her, but I think most of it went over her head. Still, she kept asking me to read her more and I obliged.

After a long walk and being on a different time zone, one floor was really all we could manage, although I would have liked to see the space stuff. So we picked out some postcards for Adriana to send to her grandparents and a dinosaur magnet and headed back to the apartment.

Adriana napped in the stroller on the way back, which I knew she would do. The problem was that I thought that would lead to a good mood for the evening, and I let her have a bowl of cereal for a snack and planned on going out to dinner when Brian returned. That turned out to be a horrible mistake. Even though she was awake until ten that night, she was not fit for public consumption, and we ended up getting our food to go after experience a horrible public meltdown. It was another time when I wondered whether traveling with a preschooler was a good idea, but it was the last time for the trip.

13 months

2011-02-09T23:57:00.000-08:00

When I called the pediatrician on Wednesday to ask about the rash on Lyra’s face and her fever and he observed that she was 13 months old, I was surprised, because I’ve noticed that they usually they don’t round up like that. Then I realized that she actually was 13 months old that day.

You would think at 13 months, I would be able to know when she was sick, but I had no clue. One weekend Lyra would only sleep in my arms, so I settled down in my bed with her and we slept for two hours. When we woke up, Brian pointed out that Lyra seemed warm, but I pointed out that we’d been snuggled up under a warm blanket together. It took some time before I registered that she really was too warm and just not herself. I had been enjoying how snuggly she was, when in fact she was snuggly because she didn’t feel well.

Lyra is a good eater most days, but it’s sporadic. When she wasn’t feeling well, she was eating a ton, but then she has days when she hardly eats anything. She’s losing interest in most purees and mashed foods, and wants to feed herself instead, which is slower and messier, but also frees me up. She would love to be able to use a spoon or a fork, but she just doesn’t have the coordination yet. After taking a few stabs at it (HA!), she’ll sit with the utensil in one hand, held high, while feeding herself with the other.

She is saying more words now, but mostly she just says “woof.” She says it when she sees a dog or hears a dog, when she’s pointing at a picture of a dog in a book. She says “boo” and “boom,” as well, or at least approximations of them. She does imitate other sounds when she’s in the right mood, which thrills Adriana, who is delighted when the baby complies with things like “Say ‘poop’ now, Lyra!”

Suddenly Lyra is afraid of loud noises. I took the girls to Berkeley to ride the steam train and the carousel, and the train was a terrifying experience for the baby. Our first ride on it, she was clinging to my neck and screaming every time the whistle blew, and only did better the second time because we sat in the very last car, and she could hardly hear it. She cried one day when I was using the food processor, and now when she sees me bring it out, she begins to wail in protest.

My favorite thing these days is her kisses. If she sees Brian and me kiss, she makes a kissy face. She points to stuffed animals and says “mwah!” and then will lean to kiss it when I bring it near her. She chases after our poor cat, saying “mwah tat.” She raises her arms to Brian to be picked up so she can kiss him when he gets home from work, and when Adriana will allow it, she wraps her arms around her sister’s waist and raises her face for a kiss. And best of all she runs toward me from across a room, smiling and making kisses, and then leans her face against mine.

My work here is done

2011-01-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

"I can't eat pig because I can't eat Piglet because I like him, and if you eat the mommy or the daddy pig, then the little piglets will be sad. And really not the mommy pigs because all the baby pigs have to line up on her belly for their milk. I can't eat cow because I need the cow to give me milk for vanilla milk and cheese and yogurt and ice cream, and it can't do that if you eat it up. I can't eat chicken because then the kids at school would be sad if the chickens were gone, and the feathers taste bad too. I can't eat fish because they are slippery and get away and make funny faces. I can't eat bears because they might eat me first. So I'm a vegetarian."

Is it bad parenting to just tell her it spells "smartass"?

2011-01-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

“What does this spell, Mom?” Adriana was holding up an index card on which she’d written out E-D-A-D. She likes to string together random letters and ask me what they spell. Sometimes she does hit on a word or an acronym, and I tell her when she has done that. Other times I will try to pronouce the word for her, if it happens to have any vowels in it, which makes her giggle, and sometimes remind her that not all letters make words.

“That spells ‘edad,’ the Spanish word for age,” I told her.

“I know Spanish?” She exclaimed happily. “Like Elena? Okay, what does this spell?” On the back of the card she’d written out N-M-A-F-r-F-E. (And yes, the R was in lower case.)

“I don’t think that spells anything. It’s just letters.”

“I think it might be Spanish. I think you just don’t know Spanish like me and Elena.”

“Oh, then what does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she told me. “I don’t know how to read.”

12 months (Or, OMG HOW HAS IT ALREADY BEEN A YEAR?)

2011-01-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

I woke yesterday around 3:30 in the morning, with Lyra in my arms, and realized that a year ago I had been up with Adriana in the middle of the night, realizing that I was in labor. Watching Lyra sleep, I was amazed that it’s been so long, but as I studied her silhouette in the darkness, bent to kiss her cheek, leaned my face against her hair, I also realized that life without her is already a distant memory.

I lamented to a friend recently that now people were going to start chastising me for calling Lyra a baby, but she is still so clearly a baby, with her chubby cheeks, the way she reaches for me, the way she calms down when I carry her on my back or rock her in my arms. But she’s also growing up, becoming more kid-like every day. I realized one evening a couple of weeks ago that she was stacking two blocks on top of each other. I was stacking the little alphabet blocks into towers for her to knock over, and I noticed that she was trying to imitate me. She could stack on block on top of the other pretty easily, and occasionally she managed a third, but usually after two (and definitely after three) trying to add a block would cause the whole thing to topple. She began stopping at two and then lifting the bottom one while attempting to keep them stacked. She couldn’t keep them balanced for long, but it was fun to watch her experiment with it.

She is also beginning to work out the art of making mischief. I try to redirect her attention from something she’s doing, such as opening a door on the buffet or pulling cookbooks off the shelf, but a few minutes later she’s back at it. Only this time she’s not just doing it for the sake of doing it. Now she starts to do it, and then looks at me and giggles, waiting for me to come stop her. She grabs my phone and makes she she has my attention before she tries to run off with it.

Lyra’s sleep leaves something to be desired (note the above, where she was sleeping in my arms; that seems to be the only way she’ll sleep much these days), but I know she’ll get better at it eventually. Some days she’s down to only one nap, which is quite nice--it breaks up our day a little bit less, and it means she goes to bed at a decent hour. She is developing a good appetite, and we are often amazed at how well she eats, although her intake of “real food” doesn’t seem to have inspired her to cut back on her nursing at all.

She signs “music” all the time, and “milk” and maybe “all done” on occassion. She says “ma ma ma,” and “da da da” and seems to mean them to refer to us. She’s spent the past month pointing at the Christmas tree and making a “T” sound, but she also did a bit of that looking at fish when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium last week.

The aquarium was so much fun. Adriana’s been there several times now (as well as the ones in San Francisco, London, and Barcelona, but we all agree that Monterey is the best), and we always enjoy ourselves, but we didn’t take her until she was two, because we didn’t think she’d really appreciate it sooner. Now we realize that we probably didn’t need to wait. Lyra pointed at the fish, and ran around to the different exhibits. She watched other kids, and enjoyed the toddler play area. We had forgotten to grab the baby carrier on the way out the door and I didn’t have a stroller in the car, so she spent most of the time walking. She refuses to hold hands most of the time and tends to wander, so my mother-in-law tied one end of her scarf around Lyra’s chest, and then she felt as if she were roaming free and ran around with so much glee, that we were just happy to watch her.

I remember this age being a lot of work with Adriana. When they’re one they can do so much, but they don’t have any common sense yet. That means I’m constantly hearing the baby screech because she’s shut herself into a bedroom and can’t let herself out or making her sit down on the sit-and-spin or in the bath, fishing little things out of her mouth or reminding her to be gentle with pretty much everything. It's a little easier this time, because I've been through it before, so I was more prepared for it and I know it won't last forever. And also because there are still the sweet little baby moments--nursing her in the arm chair while she holds a fistful of my hair for security, her funny chuckle when we play peek-a-boo, snuggling her when she’s all wrapped up in a towel after her bath. It’s hard to believe that she isn’t the tiny little newborn I’ve been seeing in the pictures I’ve been looking at from last year, and it’s hard to understand that that little lump in the photos is this funny, adorable little girl napping beside me while I write this.

One Day

2011-01-01T20:21:00.000-08:00

Today I finished reading David Nicholls’s One Day, and I have a confession: it’s the first book I’ve read since Lyra was born. I'm telling myself that it's perfect to finish a book for the first time the day before she turns one, but mostly it seems shameful in a way to me, someone who considers herself an avid reader--I was the kid who was admonished to put down my book and go out to play--but somehow I just haven’t been reading. I would say it was that I lacked the brain power after having a new baby, but I did a lot of reading when Adriana was an infant (mostly the New Yorkers that I hadn’t read while I was pregnant, if I recall correctly) and this wasn’t exactly an intellectually demanding book, so I think it’s just that coping with an infant and a preschooler has left me drained. I haven’t had the energy to read, at least not anything new. When I’ve wanted something to read, I’ve wandered over to the bookcases, looked guiltily at the books I was given last Christmas, and then picked up something familiar, something I’ve read before that doesn’t require a lot of concentration.

Of course, it helps that One Day was the perfect sort of book for me. I will read any book that promises me a love story, and this one reminded me of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book I’ve picked up over and over again, since I first grabbed it randomly in the little bookshop near my office in Glover Park before I headed to the airport on a work trip to Iowa. They’re not written in the same style and are very different books in most ways, but it was a love story that followed a couple over a long time. I’m not entirely sure why it is I like that, but I fall for it every time. I liked that I basically knew where the story was going, but that it took a long time to get there and that in the end it did actually surprise me, but didn’t totally baffle me with where it went.

Mostly I’m glad I finally just picked up a book and started reading again. I began a couple of days ago t while I was nursing Lyra to sleep, and then began sneaking away to read more when Brian was playing with the girls. Today Brian took Adriana out on her new bike, and I read while I nursed Lyra to sleep, read while she napped, read while she nursed after her nap, and then put her in her high chair and fed her while I finished the story. It felt good to be immersed in the story, to wonder when I’d next have a chance to settle down to read, to see a new book on my nightstand when I settled into bed.

Now I have to read the other books I was given this Christmas. Then I’ll start on last year’s books.

Bath time!

2010-12-30T20:33:00.001-08:00

I say all the time that Lyra loves the bath, but here is photographic evidence. We don’t always bathe the girls together--Lyra loves to splash, and Adriana isn’t always a big fan of that, so sometimes it seems easier not too. But Lyra is always eager to get in with her big sister, and some nights Adriana asks that they have their bath together. Those nights, Lyra usually comes out first, and I get her ready for bed while Brian washes Adriana’s hair. But tonight, after I did that, Lyra hung out in the bathroom while Adriana continued to play. Brian came out to tell me something, and a few minutes later, we heard Adriana screeching. We ran to see what was going on, and then Brian sent me back out for my camera

“How did she even get in there?” I asked after I snapped a couple of pictures.

“Head first!” Adriana told me. And Lyra just sat in there looking pleased with herself.

Going places

2010-12-29T08:15:00.001-08:00

Adriana was playing with a little toy plane from Lyra’s Christmas stocking, and looked up at me.

“Mom, we haven’t gone on a plane in a really long time.” I agreed, and we decided that the last time we’d flown anywhere it had been our trip to New York back in September. “But that was a long time ago. Mom, let’s just GO SOMEWHERE.”

I know that urge. I’ve been expecting it myself, although I think for me it will wait until January, once we get through the girls’ birthdays. Last year, that urge had me planning a trip to Spain soon after Lyra was born. The year before I was shopping for airfare to London as soon as we got past the excitement of the holidays. It’s funny to hear Adriana expressing it, even though I know she loves to travel. She protested coming home when we were getting ready to leave New York (and a couple of weeks ago wondered aloud why we couldn't just go live there), and asks periodically when we will go back to DC or London.

“Maybe we’ll take a plane the next time we go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I told her.

“But let’s go some place NEW, too, okay?” That made me happy--I like that she wants to see new places.

“I think we’re going to Boston in the spring,” I told her, explaining when she asked that it was north of DC and New York, that it was where the ducks from Make Way for Ducklings lived, and how many months were between now and May.

“I think we need to go to the library. We need to get the ducklings book again. And maybe some books that tell us everything we can do and with maps. And then we’ll know everything when we go to Boston. And we can go to Paris after that.”

Sounds like a plan.

Not like the other

2010-12-21T22:58:00.001-08:00

When Adriana’s first Christmas rolled around, I expected the whole thing to just blow her away. I expected her mind to be boggled when we brought a real live tree into the house. I expected to be shooing her away from pine needles and ornaments and lights constantly. But none of it happened. She didn’t like the way the tree felt, so she didn’t touch it or anything on it, and at the time I attributed her matter-of-factness about the tree’s presence to fact that everything was new and unexpected for her, so having a tree in the house wasn’t actually all that unusual.

Because of that experience with Adriana, it didn’t even occur to me to expect Christmas to surprise Lyra this year. But Lyra is a very different child. It’s her first Christmas and she’s pretty much exactly the same age Adriana was three years ago, but she is not just taking this all in stride. When she saw the tree on top of our car she pointed and shouted, and then kept on pointing. When it was in the house she toddled right over to it and kept patting the branches. As soon as I put the lights on it, she was tugging on the cord and tasting the bulbs. There are a few soft ornaments down at her level that she keeps taking off and bringing to me. For the first few days, even when she was playing with other things, she would occasionally turn and point and exclaim “Oooohhhhh!” Now it’s been over a week, and she’s not quite as amazed, but she still is excited to see it every morning when she gets up.

It has me rethinking Adriana’s initial reaction. When Adriana enters a new situation, she has a tendency to sit back and watch. When I signed us up for Music Together this fall, I knew that Adriana wouldn’t participate the first few classes. It took a month or so before she wasn’t sitting against the wall or clinging to me for most of the class. Lyra, on the other hand, watched the other kids intently, grabbed at instruments, and was climbing into the teacher’s lap the very first time. Maybe Adriana wasn’t just taking the tree in stride; maybe she just needed time to soak it all in. And of course she didn’t mess with the tree. This was a kid who had to be coaxed to crawl on grass, wouldn’t play in sand until she was almost two years old, and freaked out the first time she tried finger paints. Pine needles were too new and strange a texture for her, and since she never put anything in her mouth (not even food, it seemed) my worries about her swallowing needles and gnawing on lights and ornaments were totally unfounded.

I’m glad that now she loves the tree and the decorations, and I’m happy I know her a little better now, so I can know what to expect. Every kid is different, and I have my own example right in front of me. It’s strange to think that babies have their own personalities so soon, but I have evidence of those little personalities right here.

My very own Chicken Little

2010-12-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

As we headed south on Grant Road toward Adriana’s school this afternoon, I pointed out the low clouds in the Santa Cruz mountains to her. “Aren’t the clouds on the mountains pretty?”

“Those aren’t clouds.”

“Yes, they are,” I told her. “They’re just--what are they?” I have to remind myself sometimes not to correct and instruct, and remember to just listen and explore and see what happens.

“That’s where the sky fell.”

“The sky fell?”

“Yeah, the blue sky fell. The sky is gray today. The blue fell off of it.” I was sort of surprised. It made sense to me that a low cloud was fallen sky in Adriana’s view of things, but this wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

“But that’s not blue right there. That’s white and gray.” I wasn't correcting, just testing.

“That’s because it’s the puff of dust. Because the blue sky fell and then the dust flew up when it hit the ground. Look! A GARBAGE TRUCK! Hey, are we almost to the diggers and the new houses?”

One little phrase

2010-12-13T13:57:00.000-08:00

I watched this video last week when there was a link posted to it on Facebook. Most of the time I end up following one of these links, I have to admit I skip through it, jumping over most of the talking, so that I can hear the music. This one didn’t have any whole songs in it, and most of the music was background for the talking, so I listened, and I’m glad I did, if only for one line pretty early on:

"If you're very lucky, you get one little phrase that gets into a consciousness, and somebody else down the line will hear it and it will help them to understand their lives at a certain moment."

I guess that’s the point of all art. We listen to music, read stories and poems, view paintings and films, and sometimes it speaks to us in some way. It helps us to understand something. But I liked the way he said it, and hearing it made me think of the songs and stories that have touched me in that way. There are songs I have listened to over and over for just a single line in them that meant something to me, and others where it’s not any specific lyric that’s important to me, exactly, but the whole feel of the song. There are stories that immediately have gripped me, that I’ve related to, and others that I’ve come back to reread years later, when I remember that there’s something in them that might be important to me. Sometimes it’s an entire novel, sometimes it’s a stanza in a poem. One time I picked up a book I had read once before and flipped through it until I came to a passage on the lower half of the right-hand page, where I had somehow remembered it was. I suppose it had stood out to me the first time through, given that I knew where to find it, but it wasn’t until a year later that I needed that passage, that it connected to my own life. And there are a dozen other things I can think of: a painting in a museum, a picture on a photoblog, a handful of books, poems I’ve copied into journals, songs I’ve listened to over and over, waiting for that one important line, that expresses exactly what I need to hear at that moment.

Outsmarted

2010-12-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

We do a lot of pretty ridiculous role playing around here. Adriana loves it and it’s the best way to keep her from arguing when we need her to do something, so we are constantly saying, “Let’s play haircut!” Or shoe store, or dentist, or jacket store. And it’s completely silly, but it helps with the stubbornness, so we do it. But it doesn’t always work.

Me: Time to brush teeth! Let’s play dentist.
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Adriana! Time for your dentist appointment.
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Ring-ring! Ring-ring!
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Ring-ring!
Adriana: Mom. I’m busy. I’m not going to answer. Just text me.
Me: But you don’t know how to read.
Adriana: It’s a pretend text. I’ll just pretend to read it.
Me: [Rolling my eyes right back at her.]
Adriana: Text me.
Me: Okay, I’m sending you a text reminding you of your dentist appointment. Ding! That was the text arriving at your phone.
Adriana: Hmmm...I have a text. Oh, it’s from the dentist....Ring-ring!
Me: Hello, dentist’s office.
Adriana: Hello, this is Adriana. I need to cancel my appointment.

11 months

2010-12-09T22:07:00.001-08:00

Lyra is only eleven months old, but even Adriana is telling me, “She’s not really a baby anymore.” Just after reaching 10 months, Lyra took her first steps and her walk quickly developed from zombie to drunk elf to ZOMGWTFHOWISSHESOBIGALREADY. She still staggers around and falls down a lot, and still continues to crawl much of the time, but she scampers after her sister through the house as best as she can, a big smile on her face. Most of her stranger anxiety seems to be gone, which is convenient because as she toddles around, she doesn’t have to worry about whose leg she grabs to pull herself back up after a tumble.

We’re begin to think we might have a lefty on our hands. My mom was left-handed and Brian’s father is ambidextrous, so it’s definitely a possibility. When Lyra eats finger foods, she mostly uses her left hand, and that seems to be the hand she uses to pick things up, even when it seems to us that her right hand would be more convenient. When she goes staggering around the house clutching a random object (a block! a spoon! a Target receipt! a magnet! a package of dental floss!--all great finds when you’re 11 months old), it’s in her left hand. Wondering which hand she would use to draw or write, I tried handing her a crayon the other day when Adriana and I were drawing, and she took it in her left hand....and then chewed on it.

She eats what seems like a lot to me, although Adriana certainly messed with my perspective on that. She hasn’t mastered a sippy cup yet, but she likes to be offered one, and will also take sips from my water glass (with help, of course).

Lyra babbles a lot now, and so much of the time it sounds like she’s talking because of her different sounds and the inflection, but the only real word so far seems to be “mama.” She repeats sounds when asked (when she’s in the mood)--b, d, f, m, and s. She likes to pretend to talk on the phone. It started when she would grab my phone or a toy one, but she’ll do it with a block or another toy, or even just her hand. She holds whatever it is up to her ear and shouts vowel sounds. Sometimes she does seem to approximate “hello” (ah-whoa), but that might just be my imagination.

The phone trick seems almost like sign language to me, and I know I need to start being better about signing with her. Lyra does a little bit of signing, but nothing consistent yet. She’s had “milk” off and on for a few months, and I swear she signs music. Today I started noticing that when she was looking at and exclaiming over the cat she was patting her cheek, which seemed like a start toward the sign for cat.

For a while I thought we might have a better sleeper on our hands this time around, because Lyra seemed to sleep better on her own in the cosleeper than Adriana ever did, but now Lyra seems to sleep for extended periods of time only when snuggled up with me. As she’s struggled with a few minor colds this fall, she’s spent lots of time sleeping in my arms, which means I end up with a sore back and shoulder some mornings, but I haven’t been too inclined to do much about it, because waking up to find her still in my arms, my cheek on her hair is awfully nice.

She is a lot of work now: she doesn’t nap as much as I might like, and she gets into everything. I’m lamenting the fact that she’s no longer a tiny baby that rides in a stretchy wrap on my chest and sleeps most of the time, because I really do love the newborn days. But she’s fun now, even as she’s knocking down a tower of blocks that Adriana has worked so hard on or pulling bags of cornmeal and sugar out of the kitchen cabinet that didn’t latch properly. And when she was a newborn I couldn’t ask her for a kiss and have her lean in sweetly to give me one the way she does now.

Story time

2010-11-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

It was probably over a year ago Adriana started memorizing books and then "reading" them to me. I was charmed when she could recite all of Madeline. Now she does some of the memorization, but what she really loves are books she (thinks she) can actually read--counting books, mostly, although Sandra Boynton's Blue Hat, Green Hat, with clearly labeled pictures does the trick too.

The other night I got both girls into their pajamas and Adriana offered to read Lyra a bedtime story. Lyra loves the attention from her big sister, and Adriana relishes being in the role of teacher (and having Lyra cooperate with her, which doesn't usually happen). My favorite part, though, is when Lyra is putting her hands on the pages and Adriana admonishes her that if she covers up words, she won't be able to hear the story. It's kind of funny to hear myself as I sound to them.

2010-11-07T22:25:00.001-08:00

I had forgotten what it was like to have a sick baby. Not that Lyra is very sick, but this weekend she seems to have come down with a cold. Last night I somehow couldn’t figure that out, and spent all night trying to get her to nurse when she woke up, letting her lie on my chest, wondering why she wouldn’t just eat and sleep instead of fussing and tossing around. But one look at her stuffy, runny nose this morning and I knew what was going on, and I understood that she just needed me. Adriana has already reached the age where she doesn’t need much when she’s sick. She just wants to sleep and be miserable in peace. I mean, if I want to snuggle her, she’ll let me, and so I do a fair amount of that, because it makes me feel better at least. But Lyra needs a lot right now, just with this little cold. She is my Amazing Velcro Baby today, constantly at my side, reaching to be picked up, holding onto my jeans and creeping after me, only napping for any decent length of time when she’s in my arms. It leaves me sleepy and with a sore back, but it’s also kind of sweet. Except for the bit where she seems to prefer my hair to kleenex.

Grilled Mermaid, a story by Adriana

2010-11-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I told Brian that I couldn't think of anything to write, and he joked that I should let Adriana write something. And then as I was going through my Google Docs, looking for something I'd started but never finished, I found this story that she dictated to me, which is so much better than anything I can think to write at this moment.

One day after gymnastics, I went to Minnesota. And there was a lake with no music but there was a boat, so I went in the boat. It had pink and yellow stripes on the sails. And then I went fishing with a fishing pole. And I caught a mermaid with a blue tail and a mermaid with a purple tail. And then I got on my scooter and I scooted all the way to Mark's house. And Mark was there and Mama and Baby Lyra. And everyone was hungry so I made dinner. I made roasted mermaid quesadillas. Do vegetarians eat mermaids? Okay, then Mama eats something else. Mom eats a samosa. And Baby Lyra just has mom-milk. She is not big enough for mermaids yet. And then me and mom and baby sister all went home on mom's bike. And we got vanilla ice cream on the way, and sing the lamppost song and the spider song. And then I was home and I was really tired and grumpy so I got to skip my bath and go to bed.

Someone needs to get his own iPod

2010-11-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

Brian: What was that you were saying about there not being too much Josh Ritter in this playlist?
Me: What? It’s not all him.
Brian: You’re right, it’s only every third song or so.
Me: Whatever, dude. You know you like my boyfriend.
Brian: Your boyfriend?
Me: Yes, I’m going to marry him.
Brian: I thought you were going to marry Jon Stewart.
Me: I am. I’m going to marry both of them.
Brian: And you think they’re going to be okay with being brother husbands?
Me: Um, yeah, because that’s the main concern about this plan?

Oh, right: THIS

2010-11-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

There are certain things I forgot about life with a baby, things that I was better off forgetting, things that when they roll around with Lyra, I say “Oh, right: this.” Tonight (this whole week, really) I am being forced to remember that when babies are working on new skills their already poor sleep habits get even more bizarre. Lyra’s really excited about cruising, so although she seemed to go to sleep at eight this evening, now it’s after eleven and I am blessed again by her company. The poor girl is so tired, and she comes to me to nurse and almost fall asleep, but she keeps waking up again and wiggling away from me, down to the floor where she can grab hold of a little table to push around, or pull up on the edge of the couch and wobble down toward the other end in hopes of getting to pet the cat (who is so not entertained). And so I think she is happy and I try to go about my business, but if I leave her sight for even a moment, it is the greatest tragedy one can imagine, and she drops to her knees to crawl after me and then collapses to the floor in tears, until I pick her up to try to nurse her back to sleep and start the cycle over again. Oh, right: this. What was I going to write tonight? I can’t remember, so I am jotting down this paragraph while standing at the kitchen counter and Lyra walks back and forth, balancing herself along the cabinets.

Princess

2010-11-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

In the Halloween pictures I posted the other day, Adriana was dressed in a princess dress. When we walked into Old Navy to look for costumes the week before Halloween and I saw the fairy princess dresses, I knew that we would be coming home with that one. She carried it around the store lovingly, and put it on as soon as we got home, declaring herself “Rosy the Princess,” because there was a little rose at the waist.

Up until now, I have been pretty determined to avoid the princess thing with Adriana. She has never had one of the “Daddy’s Little Princess” shirts that are everywhere I go. I have never used “princess” as a nickname. I never bought anything that had the Disney princesses all over it. The only books about princesses she’s had are The Paper Bag Princess and a Tony Ross story. But suddenly the Princess Plague has hit our house.

II suppose it actually started out kind of slowly. Friends with little girls a bit older dress up in princess dresses. Other little girls would bring princess stickers to pass out at school on their birthday. I bought some disposable diapers that were pink, and discovered when I opened them that they had Sleeping Beauty on them. At my midwife appointments, the nurses would give Adriana a sticker, and if they were out of Winnie-the-Pooh, a princess was always her next choice. And then it was her own friends who were dressing up as princesses.

Then this fall, we are suddenly All Princess, All The Time. I thought I would be appalled, but it was charming to see how she was figuring it all out. Without princess movies or princess books, she is just gleaning what she can from friends and from me. The first time she started talking about wanting to be a princess, I asked her what she knew about princesses. “They wear fancy dresses and are smarter than dragons,” she told me. In that case, I could totally handle having a princess on my hands.

In spite of that answer, she’s still working out what exactly being a princess is all about. She asks questions along the lines of ‎"Can princesses drive garbage trucks?" and declares, “Princess eat burritos and ice cream everyday.” I answered of course to the first question, and thought that if princesses got to eat like that, I might want to be one, but as it turns out, she thinks that I was a princess back before I was her mom: She found a pair of my high heels while we were moving, and asked if they were mine back when I was a princess. Not long after that she asked, "Mama, when you were a princess, were you a magic fairy princess, or just a regular princess?"

The cuteness of it has eased me into the whole idea of this insane princess thing that seems to overtake most the little girls we know. Because I certainly can’t bring myself to argue with her when she shouts out "I am the strongest monkey princess in all of Eagle Park!" or casually informs me, “I am not a princess now, but when I grow up I will be. A rock star princess.”

Obviously.

10 months

2010-11-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Each month when I sit down to write about Lyra, I can’t help but peek back about what I was writing about Adriana at the same age. I so often think that they have different personalities, but most of what I wrote about Adriana at ten months holds true for Lyra as well: she’s cruising, clapping her hands on cue, and sitting longer for stories.

These days Lyra loves to stand up, and pulls herself up constantly on my jeans or the furniture or Adriana’s hair. She lets go and balances quite well, and when she applauds herself she hardly ever loses her balance anymore. Until this past weekend, Lyra showed little interest in walking--she would take a step or two while holding the couch if she thought she might finally get the cat, or step carefully from the bathtub to the toilet to try to splash in it--but other than that she wasn’t cruising. Then while we were in South Pasadena for Halloween, she began moving herself along the furniture, and when we got home she discovered that the felt pads on the legs of our small end tables make the tables glide easily across the floor and she can move about upright quite easily by pulling herself up on them and pushing them around.

Lyra seems fascinated by music, moreso than Adriana was at this age, although perhaps I’m not remembering correctly. I just told someone the other day that Adriana didn’t cruise much, but according to my blog she did. I signed up for a Music Together class with both girls, and Lyra in particular loves it. She adores watching the other kids, of course, but she also is thrilled by the music. She likes to pound on the drums and shake the rhythm instruments. Her stranger anxiety isn’t nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago, but it is definitely still there. But even on the first day of class, she was willing to go to the teacher when she sang. When we put on the CDs at home, she pulls herself up and bounces in time or claps along. She is soothed by singing or by music being played.

Lyra loves water. She comes crawling to the bathroom when she hears me running the bath. If I'm not bathing the girls together, she loves to stand next to the tub while Adriana's in it, splashing. When it's her turn, she crawls around chasing after toys, and then lies back calmly while I rinse her hair. A couple of weeks ago she lunged for a toy and ended up face down in the water. I pulled her up quickly, and she choked and sputtered for a minute. I waited for a moment, sure that she would cry as soon as she caught her breath, but instead she laughed and hurled herself face first into the water again.

Her sleep is unpredictable. While Adriana's nighttime sleep was erratic at this age, I think her naps were at least fairly consistent. But Lyra is always being forced to nap on my back while we shop, or picked up during the nap when it's time to go get Adriana from school. She does seem to take a late nap a lot of evenings, around six or seven, which means she is often up until ten o'clock. Adriana was a night owl, too, until she gave up her nap last winter, so even though I enjoyed having both girls asleep by eight, this isn't totally foreign to me. And most nights I’m honestly not sure how well Lyra sleeps. I know she usually wakes up around midnight and then I bring her into bed with me. After that I’m usually not sure whether she wakes up or not. She does seem less dependent on nursing to fall sleep initially, though. Brian is able to get her to go to sleep more easily than he ever was with Adriana, and sometimes to get her to sleep even I end up rocking or bouncing her on my back.

My favorite time of day with Lyra is morning, I think. Some days she nurses and then falls back asleep for a twenty minutes or so, and I'm awake beside her when she first starts to wake up in earnest. She stirs and then her eyes slowly open. It takes a few moments before she turns and sees me, and then she smiles and crawls closer to me, to play and snuggle. If Brian's still in bed, too, she crawls to him as well, pulling on his nose to get his attention.

Unlike Adriana at this age, Lyra seems to be a good eater. Of course, because of my experience with Adriana, my expectations are low, so when she eats even a few tablespoons of food, I think she's an awesome eater. She'll eat pretty much anything we eat if I run it through the food mill, and she is getting the hang of finger foods. I think I'll be disappointed when she moves entirely to feeding herself, because the way she stretches her neck forward with her mouth open, a little bird waiting to be fed, so adorable.

These days so much changes so quickly that I am often thinking of the little things I'll miss: the sight of the fat diapered bottom crawling away from me once she begins to walk, the way she grins up on me when she pulls up on my jeans, the way she plays with my hair while she nurses. Everyone loves to tell me “It all goes so fast,” and it’s a cliche, but I always know they are right, but there are instances when I am just completely in awe of the sweetness of all of this and I wish I could slow it down.

Halloween 2010

2010-11-01T10:08:00.006-07:00

My in-laws get an insane number of trick-or-treaters. Last year, there were 1,992 according to the official tally, although Brian and his dad kept trying to come up with ways to push that number over 2,000. This year we had three different ways of counting--number of candies handed out, number of water bottles given away, and a tally counter that Brian bought just for this purpose. All counts came out the same, but there was no need for trying to skew the numbers anyhow, as there was a huge jump in our total: 2,324 this year. And I had predicted a lower turnout due to it being a school night.Adriana picked out a sort of fairy princess costume this year. It has a little rose at the hip, so she declared herself Rosie the Princess. Like the butterfly costume that she wore for two years straight, I think this one will see plenty of use even though the holiday has past.

Lyra isn't yet big enough to wear the monkey costume Adriana wore at this age, so she was a little pumpkin, just like 98% of other babies celebrating their first Halloween. She wouldn't wear the hat though.

We took the girls around to a dozen houses. Although we'd rehearsed several times, Adriana never once managed to say "trick or treat" when someone opened a door, but she accepted their candy nevertheless. Brian accepted candy on Lyra's behalf.

With the World Series still going on this year, my in-laws humored me by setting up a radio by the front door. And I carved a Giants pumpkin, which remained intact this morning, despite Brian's dire predictions that it would be promptly smashed by Dodgers fans or something. I think it looked pretty good.

Nine months

2010-10-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

I keep saying that Lyra is becoming more “interactive,” but this time I swear it’s true. She’s begun to sign “milk” on occasion, and she waves to people, in addition to the smiling she always does when anyone talks to her. She has begun to play peek-a-boo, pulling a blanket or her dress up over her face (not always very successfully), and waiting to hear “Where’s Lyra?” before popping out.

She is an excellent crawler and this point, going anywhere she wants in the house very quickly. She can pull herself up to standing easily now, and is experimenting with cruising, although she only takes one or two steps at a time that way. All her activity has caused her to slim down a bit, I think. At her check up she weighed in at 18 pounds, 7 ounces, which puts her in the 42nd percentile, down a big from the 80th percentile she was at a few months ago (although she’s stayed up there for her length), but the doctor wasn’t concerned. She’s about a pound and a half lighter than Adriana was at this age, but that’s about the difference in their birthweights too, so it seems normal to me. Lyra is just a smaller baby, which I never really realize until seasons start to change and I find that the clothes Adriana was wearing at this age are still a bit too big--something I didn’t suspect would be an issue with both of them having January birthdays. But at least we live in California, so Lyra’s got some time to grow into all the cool weather clothes I have stored away.

She eats well, and instead of just giving her mashed or pureed fruit, I’ve been putting more of our foods through a little food mill that I bought. Mashed avocado or pureed zucchini were fine, but she would rather reach for a nibble of my peach or open her mouth wide to invite me to give her another spoonful of the garlicky stew I’ve prepared. Of course, she also puts everything she finds into her mouth--leaves and pebbles and big chunks of a couple of rubbery toys that Adriana leaves around--requiring me to be much more vigilant with her than I was with her older sister, so having a kid who likes to eat has been sort of a mixed blessing.

Lyra’s sleep is...not great. She does at least fall asleep more easily than I remember with Adriana. Lyra passes out in the carrier on my back or in the car. She even falls asleep sitting up in her high chair, which I know never happened when Adriana was a baby. But staying asleep seems more of a problem. Some of that is my fault: naps are interrupted frequently because Adriana and I have plans. And sometimes I don’t mind that, because if she doesn’t get in a long morning nap, she’ll sleep for a solid three hours in the afternoon--which is heavenly on the afternoons that Adriana is in preschool. But nighttime sleep is hit or miss these days. She had been going to sleep earlier, and now she seems to enjoy a thirty-minute nap around six or seven in the evening and then stays up until ten. I’d been spoiled by the early bedtimes, and just need to adjust my expectations. I thinks she is a more wiggly sleeper than Adriana was, so I wake more as she rolls about in bed, and I think I cause her to wake up when she was just moving in her sleep, because while I am still half asleep and sensing her movement I automatically try to feed her, which wakes her.

Lyra responds to music in a way that I don’t remember Adriana doing at this age. Now Adriana loves music--she plays her little guitar, and asks me to put on her Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell CD or to play Simon and Garfunkel in the car, and makes up silly songs--but was she like this as a baby? Lyra is obviously soothed when we sing to her. I signed us up for Music Together, and at the first class Lyra loved crawling around after the other kids, and climbed right onto the teacher’s lap and reached for her mouth as she sang.

She is a mama’s girl like her sister, reaching for me all the time, but she adores her older sister. Brian gets up with Adriana in the morning, and once Lyra hears that Adriana is awake, she is not content to snuggle in bed with me, even when I’m pretty sure she’s hungry. So as soon as I hear that Brian has Adriana relatively calm, I set the baby on the floor, and listen to her hands smacking the wood floor, pat-pat-pat, on her way out to find her older sister.

Eight months

2010-09-10T05:49:00.001-07:00

In the past month Lyra became actual work to take care of. I guess she had been work before, but not the kind of work that I’d noticed. But she crawls now and her sleep is erratic and she is busy and alert so she nurses for about a minute before getting distracted and losing interest, only to be fussy and hungry ten minutes later. Without someone keeping a close eye on her, she gets into things we wish she wouldn’t--taking toys that Adriana doesn’t want her to have, or tipping over the cat’s water dish, or chewing on my sandal that I left by the door, or pulling open drawers seemingly only so that she can then lean on them and make them slide in, all the better to pinch her fingers or land face first on the floor.

She started crawling a couple of weeks ago. She’d been experimenting with it since six months (and at six and a half months had crawled a couple “steps” at Adriana’s gymnastics one day--I think the mats made it more comfortable and easier), and I was sure she’d be crawling by the time she hit the seven month mark, just as Adriana did, but we had another couple of weeks of rocking with hands and knees being tentatively lifted from the floor, followed by face plants (which got louder but seemingly not any more painful when we moved into our new house with hardwood floors). We had a few days of watching her crawl a little bit here and there, and then there she was across the room, and I would hear her thumping after me if I set her down and walked away for a minute.

The crawling is hilarious to me this time around and I need to take video. Lyra actually seems smaller to me now that she’s crawling. She is definitely a smaller baby than Adriana was (I can tell from the hand-me-downs that still don’t fit), so it may be in part that it’s funny for me to see so little a baby moving. But the size difference isn’t that huge and my memory of Adriana’s size at this age is not really that clear, so I think it’s just seeing how small Lyra is compared to Adriana now. At any rate, I am regularly amused by the little baby crawling around after a toy that has rolled away, or the cat, or her big sister. When there’s something she really wants--like following her sister out the open door--she puts her head down and crawls determinedly as quickly as she can. When she comes to find me she crawls to find me and then sits back on her knees to look up at me and give me a huge four-toothed smile. When I have to set her down when she is upset, she crawls after me, crying “ma ma ma ma.”

For the record, I don’t really think the “ma ma ma” babbling is actually intended as “Mama.” Lyra has two sounds she makes, “ma” and “ba.” “Ba ba ba ba” is her contented chatter as plays with a baby doll or chews on the spout of a sippy cup or sits on my lap at the park while I talk with my friends. She switches to “ma ma ma ma” when she is upset.

Stranger anxiety has emerged in the past month, taking me by surprise. Did I not hand Adriana to people as easily as I do Lyra? Or is Lyra really just that much more upset by strangers? Because I don’t remember handing Adriana to someone to have her immediately burst into tears the way Lyra does. Lyra is still a happy, social baby, smiling at anyone who speaks to her. But I handed her to a man she’d never met before when we were at a baby shower a few weeks ago, and she became instantly fussy. The next week, Brian’s parents were in town, and she cried when her grandpa picked her up. But that right there is the main theme of the stranger anxiety: it’s men. How does she know? Is it their deeper voices? A different smell? I just know that she seems to know, that I can hand her to another woman to hold and she’s fine, doesn’t even need me in her sight (usually).

Although she’s more work at this age than she was a few months ago, she’s more fun. It’s fun to have a baby who likes to eat (she grabs for food out of my hands now in addition to always leaning forward to accept what I’m spooning into her mouth), even though that means thinking a bit about having food for her and cleaning her up afterwards (and, ahem, afterwards). The sister relationship is growing nicely. Adriana is still sometimes obviously jealous of and other times understandably bothered by her sister. But she is very good about bringing toys to the baby and tells me how to take care of her. Adriana is likely to yell “Lyra has a choking hazard,” at me when she sees Lyra with something small, and usually responds to my suggestion that she take it from her (if it were one of Adriana’s toys that Lyra had, you know she would just take it back) by yelling “Mom, Lyra has a choking hazard!” Which...fine, I guess I won’t let the three-year-old care for the infant. But there are times when they are so sweet together. Adriana lies on the floor letting Lyra crawl all over her back, and she asks if I will put Lyra in the swing at the park so that she could push her baby sister. They splash together in the bathtub and giggle at each other in the back seat of the car.

Memory and wonder

2010-07-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

Lucy Kaplansky’s The Red Thread and Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints are joined in my mind to Adriana’s babyhood. The first week or two after her birth I couldn’t listen to music. The experience of her birth combined with first-time motherhood left me so overwhelmed that music seemed like too much--which seemed strange even at the time, since we always had music on before she was born. A week or two later when I was finally ready to open up my senses again, those were the albums I was drawn to, and now when I hear those songs I am suddenly immersed in the memory of cradling my new baby and the new rituals of our life with her.

Last summer, Adriana found a bottle of Burt’s Bees Buttermilk Lotion. She asked me to put it on her after her bath, and as I rubbed it into her skin, I was instantly, unexpectedly transported back to our place in Alexandria, with he pale sunlight of winter was shining through the bare trees into the bedroom where I was dressing her.

I walked into our living room early one morning last week with Lyra in my arms. Instead of the cool, grey mornings we’ve had, it was brightly sunny, and as I set the baby down on the living room floor with a toy so that I could go pour myself a glass of orange juice, I remembered coming out for my juice on a similarly sunny morning when Adriana wasn’t all that much older, and seeing her and Brian sitting together out on the deck, while he had his coffee and she played with the same pink elephant rattle I had just given to Lyra.

The memories are physical, involuntary, and yesterday I began to wonder what I will associate with Lyra’s infancy--what music, what scents, what light--but right now I can only guess and hope. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to hear Patty Larkin or Josh Ritter without recalling my second baby’s first few months. Perhaps I will remember the way my hands smelled after pitting cherries for Adriana and mashing a mango for one of Lyra’s first foods. Instead of the faded winter sunlight, I want to recall the light that filters through the trees while the baby rolls on a picnic blanket in the with her older sister playing nearby, and the way the sunlight squeezes in around the blinds in my bedroom as I wake up from a nap between my two girls.

Maybe I’ll remember the way Lyra’s silky hair felt tickling my neck while she slept with her head tucked under my chin, just as her sister did, or maybe it will be a totally new memory--the way it feels to go down a slide the baby strapped to my chest while Adriana sits in my lap. Instead of the sound of the baby crying as she wakes and drawing me away from what I am doing, I will have the sound of the baby’s cry followed by the reassurance of my older child as she rushes to comfort her, or even better, their giggles as they look at each other while I give them dinner.

I close my eyes and bask in the memories of just a few years ago, and simultaneously try to imprint forever in my mind what our year so far has been.

Morning people

2010-07-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

I am normally the first one up in the morning, but not too much later, while I am still having my juice, I hear Lyra wake up. Sometimes she fusses a bit, but mostly she just coos and babbles, and I go into the bedroom and find her lying in her bed (or sometimes in mine, if that’s where she ended up) gazing at her hands or playing with her feet. I say her name softly, and she turns to look at me and smiles. It is the most perfect thing, that first baby smile of the morning when she is happy to be awake and glad to see me, a wide smile that crinkles her nose and shows her two teeth, and I pick her up and it might be the very best moment of the day.

Six month stats

2010-07-22T07:21:00.001-07:00

For the record, because at some point I will want to know and willl check here first because it’s easier than digging out the baby book, at Lyra’s six-month checkup yesterday, she measured 27 inches long and weighed in at 17 pounds 2 ounces (85th and 68th percentiles). She is the same length that Adriana was at this age, but more than a pound lighter. She was wearing nothing but her diaper last night when I mentioned this to Brian, and we looked in amazement at her neck folds and chunky thighs, and wondered how big Adriana had been exactly. We concluded that Adriana had chubbier cheeks. That explains the missing 18 ounces on Lyra, right?

Chatterbox

2010-07-16T08:03:00.001-07:00

“Fleet Feet is a funny name. Mom? Did you hear me, Mom? Fleet Feet is funny. It starts with the same letter and it rhymes. It starts with F like firetruck. Do you remember that firetruck we saw this morning? It didn’t have its lights on, but the guy waved at me when I waved to him. Do you remember that, Mom? And firetruck starts with F. Those white flowers start with F. Except those white flowers are jasmine. Mom? Mom? Those flowers are jasmine. Jasmine starts with J. It goes ‘juh juh jasmine’ so it starts with J. Except sometimes G goes ‘juh juh’ like gentle. But mostly it goes ‘guh guh.’ Like Grandpa. Grandpa Ted starts with a T. The Ted part. And Grandpa Andy has an A. My name starts with A. And so do Abigail and Allegra and apple. Let’s buy apples at the store today. The honey apples like in Minnesota. I like honey. Only Dad squeezes the bear right in my mouth, though. You say no. We could put honey on apples. That would be good, don’t you think, Mom? Maybe we could have apple tea with honey in it. If you can have apple tea. I don’t know if there is a thing called apple tea, but it could have honey. In London do they have apple tea? Abigail and Allegra both have G in their name! Guh guh. I don’t like to draw the G. I make you do the G for me. Someday I will write the G. Sam has an A in her name, but it is not her letter. Right, Mom? Her letter is S. Like snake and snail and shoes. But shoes only sort of starts with S. It doesn’t sound like Sam but it has an S. Starbucks starts with S. Mom? Can we go to Starbucks? I need vanilla milk. Are you listening, Mom? This is the sign for A and this is the sign for S. They are kind of the same. And I start with A and Sam starts with S. M for mom is kind of the same, too. See, Mom? This is M for Mom. Your letter is M. Like milk. M is for Mom and milk and Mary and Mark. Big Mark and Little Mark. And Mountain View and Minneapolis and Martinez and moon and Menlo Park. All those things have M first. You have two Ms. M O M Mom. I can write your whole name and my whole name and D A D Dad. And Lyra except you have to help me with the Y. But I can make it in the bath. Lyra starts with L. London starts with L too. I saw Starbucks by the firetruck. T is for truck and Ted. I wrote Grandpa Ted on his birthday card, but you had to write Grandpa and I wrote Ted. Right, Mom? I could have vanilla milk and you could have a treat. Mom? Mom, the moon isn’t purple. You like purple, but the moon isn’t purple. Except for in that book. Then that boy makes it purple. That boy is too silly. Are you listening, Mom? Is that so silly? I am silly too, so I want vanilla milk.”

First food

2010-07-10T18:07:00.001-07:00

People have been asking me for a month or so whether I’ve started Lyra on solid foods. I’ve told them I was waiting until six months, as I thought pretty much everyone waited that long. I did discover at a moms group that several of the women were trying their babies--who are slightly younger than Lyra--on some foods, but I decided that was because they were first-time moms and it was a novelty for them. I, on the other hand, learned the last time around that feeding babies is messy and you have to think about what to give them and if they like it you have to keep doing it and if they don’t like it (which was the issue with Adriana) then you have to keep wondering what you should try and when, and . . . no. No, thank you. I am very open about being a slacker, and exclusively breastfeeding fits quite well with my slackerness: I keep the baby with me, and when she gets hungry I feed her, and I don’t have to think about it.

And then Lyra turned six months old, and Brian started asking about it. So I bought a box of rice cereal this week and we tried it out on her this evening.

It seems funny to me to call this “solid” food. A little bit of brown rice ground into powder and mixed with breastmilk? That's solid? That’s food? Seriously?

But she seemed to like it.

Six months

2010-07-10T18:00:00.000-07:00

When Adriana was a baby I would say every month, “This month is better than last! I want to keep her this age forever!” And I am doing the same thing with Lyra. Six months seems just about perfect to me. She is sitting up and smiling and cooing. But she’s still not going anywhere (at least not too quickly) or making any mischief (at least not intentionally).

It wasn’t until right at six months that Lyra was sitting up well (and she still can’t get there on her own), while Adriana was sitting well at about five months. But Lyra already seems more mobile than Adriana did at this age. Lyra rolls everywhere, and wishes she could crawl--pushes up, but can’t get her knees under her, and just ends up shoving herself backwards. This mobility is enough that we now have to be strict with Adriana about little toys on the floor. For the most part she’s been quite good about keeping pop beads and doll shoes and various little bits of Hello Kitty-themed plastic off the floor. She’s been dismayed, though, to find that Lyra can get her hands on bigger toys. Adriana has always been pretty good with younger children and toys: she knows that if they take something she doesn’t want them to have, she can usually trade with them for something she is willing to share. But that’s apparently a lot to ask when it’s her own younger sister in question. It just seems unfortunate to me that this issue is coming up at exactly as Lyra has reached an age at which she objects to having a toy taken away.

Lyra has continued to be one of the happiest babies I’ve ever met. She seems very social, always smiling when she sees people, and taking an interest in board books with photos of baby faces. She’s been somewhat fussier the past month as her first two teeth came in. I was surprised by Adriana’s first few teeth; she would just wake up in the morning with a new one. Lyra’s teeth, however, hover below the surface of her gums for several days, and she is vocal about her discomfort. Luckily, she has an older sister who likes to bring her cold teething rings, so most of the time she is still very smiley.

Most awesome sous chef ever

2010-06-14T19:14:00.003-07:00

Brian was out so I was the one giving Adriana her bath. I got out the conditioner.

Me: This smells sweet. You're going to smell like a jelly bean when we're finished.

Adriana: I like jelly beans. We should have jelly beans for dinner sometime.

Me: That sounds like wishful thinking. Jelly beans aren't for dinner.

Adriana: Yes they are! I had them for dinner in London.

Me: Don't be silly.

Adriana: But I did! With Abigail!

Me: Oh, you mean beans and toast? Those are baked beans, not jelly beans.

Adriana: But...jelly goes on toast.

***

Adriana was watching me pull vegetables out of the refrigerator.

Adriana: What are we making for dinner tonight?

Me: Ratatouille, and I think some bulgur.

Adriana: Bulgur?

Me: Yes.

Adriana: No.

Me: Yes. You like it. It's been awhile since we had it, but I know you like it. It's like rice.

Adriana: Bulgur?

Me: Bulgur.

Adriana: No. I don't like bulgur. Bulgur is yucky. I don't think bulgur is for eating.

Me: Of course it is. [I get the bag from the refrigerator and hand it to her.] You see? It's a grain, like rice is. We boil water and pour this in and then just let it sit.

Adriana: And...it didn't come out of anyone's nose?

2010-06-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

Adriana and I both sometimes have bad reactions to mosquitoes, with the bites swelling up to . . . well, a ping pong ball would probably be an exaggeration, but still. They get big. They make you look deformed. Especially if you end up with two on your face, the way Adriana did this week--one on her right eye and one on her left cheek. I gave her some benadryl on Wednesday night to help bring down the swelling, but by the time I was taking her to summer camp on Thursday morning things still looked pretty bad. But in a way it was a nice test because I could begin to divide other mothers into three categories:

Those who look appalled when you compare your own child's appearance to that of Sloth from Goonies.
Those who find the comparison apt and funny.
Those who don't know what you're talking about.

Guess which are my favorite.

Adriana's birthday greetings for Great Grandpa Ed

2010-06-07T12:19:00.002-07:00

Brian's grandfather is turning 96 this week. Adriana made him a card and dictated this letter to me:

Dear Great Grandpa Ed,

96 is a big number. I go to gymnastics on Wednesday. Wednesday is your birthday. I go to summer camp all by myself. Next year I get to go to a school with rabbits and chickens and turtles and a dragon. I like chasing pigeons in Spain. I have a blue scooter and a baby sister. My favorite things are mermaids, butterflies, bicycles, cupcakes, pink and yellow, vanilla, climbing things, and my mom. I don't like juice.

Happy birthday.

Love,
Adriana

Five months

2010-06-02T20:15:00.003-07:00

Lyra is ever the happy baby. She smiles at anyone who smiles at her, and chuckles when I bounce her on my lap. We tickle her, too much probably, because we like to hear her laugh. She isn't a baby who never cries, but when she does, it's usually not for long and she is easily soothed with singing or snuggling or milk.

I don't remember noticing Adriana become social, although I do recall that she would smile at herself in the mirror. Lyra does that, of course, but she also just seems fascinated with people in general. She watches everything we do, and loves it when people talk to her. At the library last week Adriana got out a board book with photos of baby faces, and Lyra seemed to be paying attention to the pictures and smiling back at the babies in the book as we showed it to her. And I've noticed that when she is nursing she wants my attention. If I am reading or writing while she nurses, she keeps stopping and fussing and wiggling and grabbing at my face, but when I stop everything else and just look at her and talk to her, she settles down and looks at me and nurses.

She wants to move, and can roll easily across a bed now, so I am careful where I set her down. When I set her on her playmat she occasionally reaches up and pulls on the toys, but she usually rolls over onto her belly and lies there kicking and wiggling, as if swimming. She grasps my fingers and lets me pull her up to stand, and she can sit unsupported for a few seconds before she topples over to the side.

Lyra's sleeping and eating are starting to become more organized, or would be if she weren't the second child and always being toted somewhere. If we're just at home, I can predict pretty easily now when she'll sleep and for how long and when she's going to need to nurse. But we go out to the park or need to get errands done before we meet a friend at the library or have to go to preschool, and so the sleeping baby is woken up as I take her down to the car or she nods off to sleep because I am walking quickly with her in the wrap, or I know she's tired and would probably fall asleep if I would just let her nurse for comfort but first I have to help Adriana get ready.

Lyra already adores her older sister. It's hard to feed the baby when Adriana is in the room, because Lyra keeps turning to see what Adriana is doing. Adriana jumps on our bed, and Lyra watches with big eyes and her mouth open in delight, squealing when Adriana bounces closer. And no one can get the baby to laugh more easily. Watching their relationship form is one of the best parts of this.

Mommyblogs are not complete without poop stories

2010-05-19T20:47:00.002-07:00

One really doesn't need to write about poop on the internet. I know that. But this morning I told my dad this story over the phone, and I realized that even if it's the kind of thing only a mother and grandfather find quite so hilarious, I needed to write it down. And if I'm writing it down, I might as well tell the internet about it.

During snack time at Adriana's preschool, the teacher always reads the children at least one story. A couple of weeks ago, the story was called Not Just Chickens or something like that--all about animals besides chickens that lay eggs.*

That afternoon, Adriana was using the bathroom and afterwards as she examined the contents of the toilet**, she said. "What will hatch from my poops?"

"Nothing," I told her, and began encouraging her to flush and wash her hands.

"But my poops look like the same shape as eggs! And eggs come out chickens' bottoms and poop comes out my bottom!"

"Nothing will hatch."

"But if they do, what will they be? Baby poops? Or baby Adrianas?"

And I gave up on trying not to giggle.

*On a non-poop related note, when the teacher read that platypuses are the only egg-laying mammals, one little boy volunteer that mammals were animals with hair, and I was quite proud when Adriana said it meant animals with "mom milk." And I was amused when she pointed out that platypuses aren't the only mammals who lay eggs, because fairies do too.

**When do they stop doing that? I am so over the conversations about her waste products.

Barcelona with babies

2010-05-14T16:18:00.001-07:00

I walked down the street in Barcelona toward the flat we were renting for a week, and spotted one of my favorite people, waiting with her husband and chidren. We hugged and then spent the next three days together. We nursed our babies and played with our three-year-olds. We ate churros and drank thick Spanish hot chocolate on Las Ramblas. We drank too much sangria at lunch and laughed all the way home. We caught up on gossip and struggled to put into words the way we feel about putting our careers on hold to have this time at home with our children while they are young. And then we hugged again as she and her family left to return to London.

I slipped onto the enclosed balcony and looked out the window in the middle of the night, watching the rain come down and laundry blowing on the lines, noticing flats around the courtyard that still had lights on. In the morning when the rain had stopped, I stood there again and watched a little boy across the way playing on a balcony and spotted his mother just inside folding laundry. I sat on the balcony with Brian, drinking the hot chocolate he had brought me while he had his coffee and we planned our day. And I sipped wine and wrote in semidarkness while I listened to Brian read a bedtime story to Adriana on the couch behind me.

Adriana chased me on her scooter as I hurried back toward our flat. She let me lift her onto the trunk of a statue of a wooly mammoth and then mugged for the camera. Adriana fell asleep on Brian's shoulders, leaning down to rest her head on his. She stared with amazement at the magic fountains and yelped with happiness when we got close enough to feel the spray of the water.

Adriana and Abigail jumped and danced in the doorway of a closed shop on a Sunday afternoon in L'Eixample. The chased pigeons on the Place de Catalunya. They stood on the balcony of our flat, watching swallows circling and swooping above. The rode side by side down Passeig de Gracia on their fathers' shoulders.

Little Toby toddled down Las Ramblas, ignoring the living statues in favor of the flower stands that had pots of flowers at his level. He smiled and waved at young women sitting around him on the metro. He peered eagerly at Lyra lying in the travel cot and told her "Hiya."

Lyra napped on my sweater in the grass in the Parc de la Ciutadella. She smiled at old ladies on the metro. She nursed on a Renfe train, in the cafe at Parc Guell, on a patio along Las Ramblas, on the floor in the corner of the aquarium, on plazas and in pizzerias and tapas bars, and in my wrap as I hurried down the street.

Little traveler

2010-05-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Adriana was playing with a toy plane, making it fly to Minnesota and North Carolina (we visited both last summer), and wanted to know which was farther away, so I found a map for her to look at. And then we decided to count how many places on the US map she'd visited. She's up to 9 states now:

create your own personalized map of the USA

I've made it to 35, but I've had a few more years to travel than she has.

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

Four months

2010-05-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

At three months, Lyra was sick with some sort of virus that left her feverish and me exhausted, and I kept thinking of what I should write and never actually put anything down. So now it is a week past four months, and here is everything I can think of all at once, so that I can just post this and not forget what this age is like:

Lyra smiles back at anyone who smiles at her, and we easily coax big, toothless baby grins from her. I've managed to get a few chuckles out of her with little tickles, and one day when it was hot and I turned on the ceiling fan, she sat in her chair laughing at it for five minutes straight. She's been rolling over for several weeks now, mostlly from her back onto her front, though she can go the other way too. She holds up her head easily when I have her in a wrap on my chest, looking around at everything. She doesn't sit unsupported yet, but she grabs my fingers as she lies on her back and lets me pull her to sitting, and seems to like it when I set her sitting on the bed and let her fall gently to the side. She likes to be snuggled against me in a wrap and falls asleep easily that way, but after being wrapped up and dragged around with Adriana and me all day, she always seems glad to be set down, stretching her arms out over her head, straightening her legs, then grabbing her toes and rolling to the side. She studies one hand, opening and closing her fingers, while sucking on the other. It has seemed all along to me that she coos more than I remember Adriana doing, but she has lately become much more vocal, making lots of sweet little baby noises (that are getting a bit louder than they have been in the past). And we have reached the perfect stage of nursing, where she looks at me while she eats, sometimes pulling away to smile at me or to make her funny baby sounds, and she seems happier when I pay attention to her while she eats, so when we are alone I sing to her and we focus on each other's faces and it is perfect and sweet and lovely.

who knew what this would be like

2010-04-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Adriana must have been eight or nine months old. I nursed her to sleep for her morning nap, and sat on the deck in the sun to write. I listened to Gillian Welch and watched hummingbirds come and go from our feeder. I don't know why that memory stands out so clearly in my mind. I suppose because it wasn't just one morning: when she was that age, that was my normal morning routine. I am thinking of it right now, on a pleasant spring morning. I got some time to snuggle with Lyra and get some housework done while Adriana slept in. She woke up happily and came into my bedroom, babbling cheerily about a dream she had--something about an underwater rocket from our house to Abigail's and purple butterflies out the window--and then left pushing a laundry basket of her clothes to be put away. When she came back she was dressed and asking nicely for her breakfast. She ate and we played with the baby a bit and read a story, and now Lyra is sleeping and Adriana is putting together a puzzle, and here I am at the kitchen table, writing and listening to Patty Larkin and watching a bee drifting around the lavender out on the deck.

Once upon a pair of wheels: an addition to Lyra's birth story

2010-03-07T03:49:00.000-08:00

As we were driving over Highway 17 on our way to Año Nuevo to see the elephant seals, I reminded Brian that the speed limit past the reservoir is only 50 miles per hour, even though the road is wide and not too windy there. As he eased up on the accelerator, I apologized for my backseat driving, and he told me that that kind of reminder is a good thing. So I confessed that on the way to the hospital to have Lyra, I had really had to force myself not to backseat drive. Because as we'd headed up 101, there hadn't been a ton of traffic, but the two right lanes hadn't been moving as quickly as they might have, and I had spent the time between contractions wondering why he just didn't move over and get there faster. He explained that he'd been nervous and Eva had been following us in her car, and it seemed better to move a little slower.

"I kind of knew that. That's part of why I didn't say anything at the time. And also because I was pretty sure I couldn't say it nicely, so I just kept my mouth shut."

"Okay, you have to add this to the birth story," he told me.f

"You mean admit that I always want to be a backseat driver, even when I'm in labor?"

"Yes."

Consider it done.

Elephant seals at Año Nuevo

2010-03-06T04:14:00.001-08:00

For the first month of Adriana's life and then Lyra's I compared myself to an elephant seal. Somehow I had retained knowledge from a fifth-grade lesson and field trip to Año Nuevo that the mother elephant seals lie on the beach and nurse their babies for a month straight, not eating anything. I did at least get to eat (this time around I consumed ridiculous amounts of chocolate milk and peanut butter toast), but it felt like I did nothing but nurse for that first month. Oh, and I remembered that once the mothers go back to sea, the pups that remain are called "weaners" (and that the ones that manage to nurse from more than one mother and get extra big are called "super weaners"). In fact, now that I think of it, I probably only remember the thing about the weaners from the fifth grade. I probably picked up the bit about the nursing eight years ago when we visited the Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery on our honeymoon (which I actually enjoyed a lot more than Hearst Castle).

At any rate, I've been feeling a special kinship with elephant seal cows, so when one of Brian's former colleagues who works as a docent at Año Nuevo offered us an "after hours" tour of the beach, I jumped at the chance, figuring that there had to be a way we could manage the hike with a toddler and an infant. We checked a couple of children's books about elephant seals out of the library to help get Adriana interested, and Brian put her in the frame backpack carrier (which had been sitting unused in our closet for at least a year) to confirm that she was willing to sit in it and that he could manage her weight now. It was rainy the morning of the tour, and I read that San Mateo County was closing beaches due to the tsunami watch, but it was supposed to be clearing up by our tour time, and Brian called the visitor center to check that they were still open, so off we went.

As it turned out, the rain was a very good thing, because the sand on the dunes was wet and easier to walk on. Our drive over the hill was very wet, but it was beautifully sunny as we turned to head up the coast, one of those gorgeous days with spectacular views that made me marvel that we are so lucky to live here (and lament that we no longer live at the beach), and we found that we didn't need all the layers of clothing we had brought. I was glad to have a maternity fleece with me, as it fit neatly around Lyra, who I was wearing in a Moby wrap.

The elephant seals were fantastic. Federal law requires that people stay at least 25 feet away from the seals, but they were everywhere, even up on the dunes, so it was sometimes hard to stay that far off. Most of the cows have already gone back into the ocean, so we didn't get to see any nursing mothers. We did still get to see lots of the weaners (and I did not giggle every time our guide said that--not loud enough that i could be heard, anyhow), including getting to watch one play around in the water. We got to hear the belching of the bulls and the funny squealing of the pups.

With the cows gone, many of the pups seemed a little bit lonely: one was snuggled up to a bull (who probably simply hadn't noticed the pup was there), and others were piled on top of one another in cuddle puddles.

We got a few good looks at the funny faces of the males, and the cute faces of the weaners.

Adriana handled the walk pretty well. She liked being in the backpack for a while, but she did want to get out. She had one meltdown that was partly hunger related and resolved relatively quickly with the help of a chocolate Clif bar. She did pay some attention to the elephant seals, but when we did let her out of the backpack for a bit, she was mostly interested in writing letters and building in the sand.

One bonus of going on this "after hours" tour was that when we were heading back we got to see the fog coming in, and, since we were walking straight toward the hills, we saw the nearly full moon rising between the peaks and disappearing quickly into the clouds above, and when we turned to look behind us we got to see a spectacular sunset.

The drive home was gorgeous, too, or at least the part from the reserve back down to Santa Cruz. Everything is so green from all the rain, and the hills to our left were deeply green in the twilight, looking gorgeous against the clear, dark sky with the moon glowing white over everything, making it bright enough still that we had a view of the ocean to our right. I wish I had a picture of that, but instead I will have to just hold on to the peaceful feeling the colors and the light gave me.

Two months

2010-03-05T08:45:00.002-08:00

I read somewhere a description of life with kids: the days drag on and the years fly by. I thought that was true with one, but it is standing out so clearly to me now with two. Each day I am going back and forth between two people who need me, trying to balance and juggle those needs, while trying to have fun with them. And at the end of each day we have had fun, but I am tired and watching the clock and wondering if I'll ever be able to get anything more done than just keeping us fed and moderately clean. Still, I'm also shocked to find that it's already been two months. I see the brand new babies of friends, and Lyra, who was 11.5 pounds and 23 inches long at her checkup on Tuesday, seems so big, and I find myself missing having a little baby. I remind myself of that while I try to keep Adriana out of trouble while she helps me in the kitchen at dinnertime, and I catch myself wishing that Lyra were big enough to be carried on my back, instead of on my front, which makes cooking awkward. Then I chide myself for wishing her bigger, wishing away this time with my tiny one.

Lyra spends so much more time awake now, and I know I said that when I was writing a month ago, but at least now she seems more happy about waking up to the world around her. We get big smiles now--beautiful gummy baby smiles--when she is in the bath, when she is eating and pulls away for a moment to look at me, and sometimes when she's just awake and happy. She coos, too, which is interesting and fun for me, as Adriana never did much of that.

There are times when she fusses and cries, of course, and, as with Adriana, I wonder how on earth parents of colicky babies manage to cope, because after five minutes of crying we are usually in a panic, because clearly something must be horribly wrong. Even though the solution is always the same, we still can't quite remember it at first, so I try feeding her again and we change her diaper, and maybe even her clothes, because what if there's a tag or a seam somewhere that's bothering her? And then we rock her and bounce her and start over again, until one of us remembers that Oh! The last time this happened, putting her in the pouch worked! So we get the pouch and drop her in and within a minute of being held close and tight like that, she is content again.

In that way she is very much like Adriana. I remember someone commenting to me when Adriana was only a few weeks old that she seemed to be a very needy baby, always wanting to be held, and even at the time I marveled that that would seem like a very big need. I mean, if being held is all that it took to make her happy, I thought I had it pretty easy. I get the same feeling with Lyra. Yes, she needs to be held a lot, but now with Adriana not wanting to be held some of the time when I would love to hold her (and, of course, demanding I hold her at times when it is highly inconvenient for me), it seems more important to snuggle Lyra while I can. We do still keep commenting on the differences between the two girls, though: Lyra loves her bath and coos when she is happy and awake, as I've said, but she also loves "tummy time," which Adriana generally seemed certain was a terrorist plot, and when I had a dentist appointment last week, Lyra willingly took a bottle the first time it was offered, while we tried for months to get Adriana to drink from one before giving up and wondering why we'd even cared.

Not that I'm going to be giving Lyra a lot of bottles. Nursing is still one of my favorite parts of this stage. I mean, Adriana is still nursing a little bit, too, and that's nice, but there is something special about cuddling a little baby when she is hungry, watching her close her eyes and relax in my arms, feeling how tiny and warm she is, that I can't really explain. I get a little less of that this time as it is, since half the time I'm nursing I'm also reading Pooh stories to Adriana or helping her put together a jigsaw puzzle. And that just makes me appreciate mornings like today, when Lyra and I were the first ones up and we snuggled together in the arm chair while she ate, even more.

Lyra's Birth Story

2010-02-23T13:04:00.006-08:00

I believe that when I wrote out Adriana's birth story three years ago, I established that I am prone to Oversharing On The Internet, as well as Using Many, Many Words. So if you read that one and thought it was perhaps a bit Too Much Information, may I suggest some alternative use of time on the web? Because, look, some things just don't change.

On New Year's Day, Adriana was ill, and spent most of the day throwing up and sleeping. By dinnertime seemed fine, but I knew we had a rough night ahead of us because of how much she'd napped. I tried to go to bed at a decent hour, but as I lay there in the dark, telling Brian what needed to be done before the baby's arrival (and determining that I would be ready to go into labor by Wednesday night, giving me five full days to get everything accomplished), I began to panic a bit, and it was close to midnight before I slept. And at 2:30 in the morning Adriana awoke demanding food.

I knew her body needed to make up the calories she had missed out on during the day, so I was sitting on the kitchen floor with her while she ate a banana and a slice of bread with butter, when I realized that my Braxton-Hicks contractions were seeming a bit stronger. I glanced at the clock when one came. When the next one hit 10 minutes later I wasn't suprised, and the next one was exactly 10 minutes after that. I thought about my labor with Adriana, about how I had gone for several hours before finally admitting I was in labor. I wasn't quite ready this time to admit that that was going on, but I knew it was a possibility. Adriana finished her snack and I got back into bed with her, but she wasn't interested in sleeping. I watched the clock while I snuggled with her and rubbed her back. Finally at 4, with the contractions coming anywhere between seven and ten minutes apart and Adriana insisting that she wasn't sleepy, I decided to wake Brian. I was tired and if this was really labor, I needed to rest while I could.

Brian got up with Adriana and told her that when she was tired she could get back into bed and cuddle with me. She insisted I sleep in her room, and I couldn't see any reason to argue. I got into her bed and tried to doze while listening to Brian quietly telling her stories on the couch. I think I slept, and I definitely got some rest, but I also couldn't keep my eyes off the clock for a good part of the time. I would close my eyes and try to doze, but I kept peeking up at the clock, memorizing when one contraction had started and anticipating the next one. By 5:30 they were coming steadily seven minutes apart and I gave up on sleeping and got out of bed.

Adriana had fallen asleep on the couch beside Brian as he told her stories. We started to get ready. I had begun to pack a hospital bag a few weeks before. I had managed to put in a few of the things I would need after the baby arrived--a going home outfit for the baby, a couple of receiving blankets, and a tube of lanolin--and I set about adding in the things I would need during labor, as well as other things for after the birth. It occurred to me at that point that although I'd made plans for Adriana's care while I was in the hospital, I hadn't actually done any packing for her, so I grabbed another bag and threw in her special blanket and doll, her current favorite book, and enough clothes to get her through in case I had a c-section again, although if we were gone that long the plan was to have her stay at home for most of the time.

At seven, we started making phone calls--the doula, to give her a heads up that we'd been needing her before too long (Brian told her the contractions were "seven to fifteen minutes apart," and I corrected him sharply), a local friend with whom we planned to drop Adriana off (who was just back from Christmas with her family in Europe with two jetlagged children of her own--who better to offer an extra kid to?), and the friends who would be caring for her until we were back at home. We then spent a little less than two hours packing bags and tidying the house, stopping every five minutes so that I could breathe through contractions and Brian could apply counter pressure to my low back. Because I was having back labor, just as I had with Adriana. At one point I thought about consulting Dr. Google about this--did it mean the baby is posterior? Is all back pain in labor really back labor?--but I stayed away from the computer, figuring that this time I knew more about what I was doing, and I was feeling the contractions in my belly as well, which hadn't happened with Adriana.

We called Eva, our doula, again, this time to ask her to come over. My friend Trine offered to have her husband come pick Adriana up, but I wanted Brian to drive her over. I couldn't imagine Adriana walking out of our house without us willingly, even with the father of one of her friends, and the idea of Brian buckling her into their carseat and watching her drive off seemed similarly traumatic. (It turned out that Trine thought Brian was leaving me home alone in labor.) I woke Adriana and told her what was happening. We'd been over and over the routine for a few days; sometimes she would ask me to tell her what would happen, and sometimes she would recite it herself: When Mama goes to the hospital to get the baby, Daddy will take me to play with Matilda and Baby Nora, and then Helen and Sami will come get me and I can play at their house and sleep there, and then Mama and Daddy will come get me and we all go home with Baby Sister. So she cooperated well with getting dressed, although we were fighting a bit (as usual) about brushing her hair when Eva let herself into the apartment.

Before too long, Eva was really encouraging Brian to get going with Adriana. I knelt down to hug her goodbye and tell her I would see her soon. Everyone had told me how big she would seem once I had the baby, so I tried to memorize the feel of her little body. And then she went out the door with Brian and I began to cry, because there she was walking out the door in her little blue sweatsuit, with her special blanket and baby doll in a backpack, brave and happy, and I was the one who was scared and crying. Eva hugged me, and another contraction hit and I had no choice but to move on, because I had learned with Adriana, and even before that, when I'd had a miscarriage, that the only way to get through contractions is to focus on them.

I did find this time, maybe because I was actually admitting I was in labor, that I could use imagery to help myself relax, but it wasn't that I was ignoring the contractions. I would stop talking, stop whatever I was doing, and breathe deeply and let a relaxing image fill my mind. So I guess I wasn't focusing just on the contraction itself, but I wasn't exactly trying to get my mind off of it--just let my body relax enough that I could cope with the discomfort. Leaning forward seemed to help, too, so I would lean over the table or the bed or the arm of the couch and while either Eva or Brian pushed on my back, and I would close my eyes, take deep breaths, and focus on one thing. Then the contraction would end and Eva would give me some water or Recharge to drink and we would talk casually until the next one hit. Sometimes they came very close together. "Shit, another?" Eva exclaimed in surprise at one point while Brian was taking Adriana to Trine's. And that contraction was hard to get through because that was somehow extremely funny to me, and I was laughing instead of focusing on the pain.

Eva suggested I get into the shower, but I was hesitant, and she said we could go to the hospital instead and maybe try the shower there. I dreaded going to the hospital at all, but I also thought it might be better to get the drive over with--the sooner I did it, the further apart the contractions would be, so the fewer I would have to have between home and Kaiser. I also remembered that the midwives had clinic hours in the afternoon, which meant if I arrived too much later I would have an obstetrician attending me instead (I was not thinking clearly enough to realize that there were no clinic hours on Saturdays). So Brian loaded our bags (and the infant seat, which I'd meant to install before the baby came) into the car, and I arranged myself uncomfortably in the passenger seat. As we pulled out of our parking place, I remembered that I was supposed to call the hospital to tell them we were coming, so that they could have a room ready for me. Brian stopped the car in the middle of the parking lot and called. After a few minutes of him talking to the nurse on the phone, I got frustrated and told him to just drive while I took the phone. I grabbed his cell phone and immediately moaned into it as another contraction hit (Brian laughed about that later). I gave the nurse the information she needed as Brian headed up towards the freeway.

We pulled up in front of the hospital just before 11, and Brian grabbed one bag out of the car while I leaned against the car through another contraction. Someone saw us and came out of the hospital with a wheelchair, but I had just spent nearly 20 minutes sitting down and didn't want to have any more contractions in that position, so we waved him away. Eva came up from the parking lot and we went up through the hospital to Labor and Delivery, with me stopping to lean against the wall for contractions a few times on the way.

Once we were in our room, the nurse I'd spoke to on the phone gave me a hospital gown and a specimen cup and sent me into the bathroom. Brian and I looked at each other, and he said something about our having just given up control of the situation, but I went into the bathroom with Eva and I did as I was told, and Brian went to move the car.

When he got back, the nurse was trying to put the external fetal monitor on me, and I was giving her a hard time about it. She explained that it was policy to do continuous monitoring, and that I would have to sign a form in order to avoid it. The midwife came in then, and, after she and Eva greeted each other in surprise, since they knew through a mutual friend, we told her that we didn't want the continuous monitoring. She asked that we let them get "just one good strip," and sent someone to get the form for me to sign. The nurse fitted the belt around me, and then we could hear the baby's heartbeat. I did like the sound, but the belt was uncomfortable (which I didn't remember from Adriana's birth, but I had been in labor for 24 hours by the time I got to the hospital with her, so I was pretty out of it--and I got an epidural not too long after I arrived so it hadn't been uncomfortable for very long) and I was glad to have it gone after the nurse had entered all my information into the computer and she had her strip that recorded my contractions and the baby's heartbeat. The midwife, Sheri, checked my cervix, and declared me six centimeters.

Another nurse drew some blood, inserting a heplock into my wrist at the same time, just in case I needed an IV later. They put a rubber glove over that hand so that I could get into the shower without getting it wet. The nurse had a few more forms for Brian and me to sign, but soon after that the room was down to just Brian, Eva, and me. Eva started the shower for me, and I went to stand under the hot water. I was in there for an hour, trying different positions on the shower stool, standing and leaning against the wall, and holding onto the bar on the wall to support myself during squats. That bar was exactly what I needed--it gave me something to grip as I did a series of squats through each contraction. I must have looked ridiculous, but suddenly the only thing that made sense to do during contractions was to raise and lower myself, just as we had in my prenatal yoga class. I joked between contractions that my quads would be killing me the next day and that I would have bruises on my back from the counterpressure, until I couldn't even joke between contractions anymore. Brian brought me more of my Recharge, and I looked at him as though he were crazy, because he was handing me something yellow in what appeared to be a specimen cup, and he told me what it was so that I would drink it. Something about the way I was gripping the bar was bending the heplock in my wrist, so that it was hurting, and I found myself focusing on that instead of the contractions. I began sitting down between contractions and caught myself nodding off a few times. Eva and Brian chatted with one another and took turns pressing on my back, and for the most part I tuned them out and usually wasn't even aware who was the one supporting me.

There were times in the shower when I considered giving up on natural childbirth and requesting an epidural. I never mentioned it out loud, and instead talked myself silently through it, reminding myself that I wouldn't be able to move, that the last time I had had one I had also ended up with a c-section. Sometimes that wasn't quite enough. Sometimes I would have to ask myself, "Do you really want to have to admit afterwards that you gave up?" And it was that worry, the worry about the injury to my pride, that kept me going. ("Women have their own kind of macho," Brian said, when I told him about it later.)

Once I was out of the shower, Eva offered to go get Sheri so she could check to see what kind of progress I was making. Brian and I both hesitated. It was only one o'clock, so I hadn't been at the hospital all that long, and we were remembering labor with Adriana, and how discouraging it was after several hours of labor, some of it very intense, to discover that I'd only gained one centimeter and hadn't actually reached transition. So we resisted the idea, but only for a little bit. I was hopeful that something was happening, and it also just seemed like something to do. Sitting there waiting for the next contraction to hit, and leaning against Brian through the pain was actually kind of boring. I wanted something to happen. I suppose I hoped she'd tell me I was fully dilated and that I was going to have a baby any second now.

Instead she told me I'd progressed one centimeter.

She offered to break my water for me, telling me that that sometimes would make things progress more quickly. I declined, not wanting to have any unnecessary interventions. I went back to sitting on the edge of the bed between contractions and experimented with different positions to get me through them. I tried listening to music, but several songs into the playlist I'd made of relaxing music, I gave up. I liked the music between contractions, but during I found that it distracted me from focusing on the contractions when they hit. I put the iPod aside and just perched on the edge of the bed, standing and hanging on Brian during each contraction. Half an hour of that and I asked that Sheri break the bag of waters. I wanted things to progress, and again, it just seemed like something to do.

Around two o'clock, I started wondering how long labor would go on (which strikes me as funny in retrospect, given how short the labor had been compared to my experience with Adriana) and was back to considering whether I could actually manage labor without an epidural, Sheri checked me again. I was dilated to nine centimeters and feeling the urge to push. She told me I could bear down a bit with contractions to see what happened.

For the next two hours, I pushed with contractions. It was harder work and I already felt tired, but it also was exciting and a bit energizing. My memory of those two hours is hazy and scrambled. I know I was surprised to find that, as much as it was a relief to feel that something was actually happening, time was also moving more slowly: sure that I had been pushing for an hour, I looked at the clock and discovered it had only been ten minutes. I know Eva and Sheri were having me move around to try different things. I knelt on the bed and leaned against Brian, and then the back of bed was raised up so that I could lean face-first into it, and I tried that, as well as the hands-and-knees position I had already tried laboring in. Finally, Sheri had me try sitting and leaning against the back of the bed. I resisted, but she and Eva seemed to think that this would help, and I did what they suggested. I know that at one point someone confirmed that the baby was posterior, but that later on they said they could see her turning. And I know that at some point I became very noisy, basically yelling my way through contractions. I felt a little silly when I was resting, but then another contraction would come and I was grit my teeth and yell through it. And then, as many of the contractions ended, I would protest that I couldn't do it. Brian, Eva, and Sheri would tell me that I could, and sometimes that informed me that I not only could I do it, I was doing it already. I still hadn't full dilated, but Sheri was holding my cervix back, which also helped me focus my pushing.

Soon they were telling me that they could see the baby, that her head was "right there." "She's right there," Sheri kept promising me. Eva looked and assured me that this was true. But then it went on and on. Finally I gave up listening to them when they told me so. But there came a point when someone told me the baby was almost there, and I started to say that they'd been telling me that for well over an hour when Brian interrupted me.

"A bunch of people just came into the room," he told me. Until then we'd been attended just by the midwife and the same nurse with her obnoxious fetal monitor (she didn't try strapping it to me again, but would periodically use it to listen to the baby's heartrate). But suddenly there were half a dozen more people in the room, and we began to realize that now they were serious. I felt myself become self-conscious for a moment, but contractions and pushing left room for no other thoughts in my mind, and soon I was able to tune out the fact that they were there, focusing just on the sound of Eva's voice.

Eva was the one coaching me through the last stages. "Don't yell with the next contraction," she ordered me at last. "I want you to put all your energy into pushing, not yelling." And she had me grab onto my knees and pull them toward me as I pushed, and not yelling seemed like the hardest thing ever. She told me I was doing great and to do the exact same thing for the next contraction.

"I can't," I told her. "It's too hard. I can't do this anymore." I was exhausted and the burning feeling that came from all the pushing seemed like too much.

"You can," she assured me, with Brian echoing her. And then she told me. "You are going to pull on your knees and not yell, and I'm going to count to ten and you are going to push the entire time I am counting." At that moment I wasn't thinking about the fact that I had told her when we first met with her about hiring her as my doula that I probably needed someone to boss me around during labor, but looking back it seems as though I was right, and that she was good at doing exactly that. Because when the contraction came a moment later, I pulled my knees and didn't yell, and pushed as I listened to her count to ten.

"She's right there," Eva said again.

"She's not, she's not," I said. "This is too hard. It's taking too long." But another contraction came, and Eva counted, and I pushed. And then I rested for a moment and protested again.

Everyone reassured me again that I could do this, and someone asked if the baby had a name. I hesitated, not sure if we should tell anyone before she was born, but Brian told them, and several people in the room were saying "Lyra!" as I pushed with the next contraction, and then something changed and the burning feeling was gone and Sheri was telling me that I could reach down and feel the baby's head.

I don't remember pushing any more after that, but a moment or two later, Sheri was lifting a wet little Lyra onto my belly, and my hands were on her and I was holding onto my own little baby.

I was in such a haze, then. I didn't hurt anymore and I had a baby, and I felt so good.

Brian got to cut the cord, and I heard someone saying that the baby had been born at 3:57. I was given an injection of Pitocin to help deliver the placenta. I asked to see the placenta, and Sheri asked me if I wanted to keep it, and I told her happily that I was not that much of a hippie. But then it's even more of a blur than the end of the labor. We were covered in towels and blankets while I marveled at how tiny Lyra seemed, and someone laughed and said that she was a big baby, and Eva told me that yes, she was small compared to Adriana, but she was not a tiny baby by any means. Everyone in the room was guessing that she was at least eight pounds, and when they finally took her from me to weigh her and she was eight pounds one ounce. I had some second-degree tears, and Sheri stitched those up while I chatted with her and Eva (and asked if I could go home soon), and Brian stayed close to Lyra while she was examined in the corner of the room. I felt exhilarated and almost drunk--I couldn't stop talking and I kept asking to hold the baby again and apologizing for all my yelling and wondering when we could go home. (The answer to the last one was that I probably could go home that evening if I wanted to, but it was a much better idea to stay the night and get some rest, and they would discharge us first thing in the morning.) I kept asking to have the heplock removed and was told that it needed to stay in until later that night, in case I hemorrhaged and needed blood; I assured them I had no intention of hemorrhaging this time around, but that was disregarded. Eva got me drinks and snacks, and I realized how thirsty I was. The baby was cleaned up a bit and then wrapped up tightly and we had a chance to nurse. More and more people cleared out of the room, and I asked Brian for his phone, so I could call our parents. The nurse who had come in to give Lyra a more thorough bath knew exactly where we'd gotten the name, which I thought was nice, even as I wondered whether my baby needed to be scrubbed so thoroughly right then.

About two hours after the birth, I was seated in wheelchair and Lyra was placed in my arms and we were wheeled up to the maternity ward. Brian went with the baby while the pediatrician in the nursery examined her, and a couple of nurses got me settled, while I explained that I needed food and to have my heplock removed. And finally it was just Brian and Lyra and me in the little hospital room, all settling in for the night, and everything seemed so easy.

Me, Lyra, and that awful heplock.

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T11:19:00.004-08:00

And, for comparison's sake, here is Adriana 0n her first Valentine's Day:

One month (and a few days, because honestly, I have TWO now--nothing happens on time)

2010-02-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Coming home with a new baby a month ago seems so far away. Was it only a month? Really? But then again, I can't believe it's been a month already. Lyra seems so big already, so much sturdier. We all seem to be getting used to having her here. We are finding a sort of a rhythm--albeit a chaotic one--as a family of four, and it's hard to remember exactly how things worked before she was here.

In some ways, she is very much like Adriana. I suppose all newborns are mostly alike--they sleep, they eat, they poop. Lyra looks looks like Adriana did as a baby, with chubby cheeks and her head of wild, dark hair. Like Adriana, she's happiest when she's being held snug and upright, close to us in a pouch or wrap. She doesn't seem to be as big a fan of being swaddled as so many newborns I know. If we swaddle her up in a blanket, she usually fights her way out of it quickly and then calms down. And like Adriana she so far seems to refuse to be very regular in her eating and sleeping patterns. But there are differences, too: Adriana screamed about baths for at least the first month (enough to traumatize Brian enough that after the first few baths, he didn't give her another for a good year and a half). We put a fussy Lyra in the tub when she was a week old or so, and remembered that my friend Lyndelle had suggested making Adriana more warm and secure in the bath by putting a washcloth over her body. I did that and Lyra instantly calmed down, but I think it was just being in the water that was calming for her. Now popping her in the tub is the quickest way to make her a happy baby. She waves her arms and legs around while I pour water over her, and just generally seems content.

She is spending more time awake now, and she seems unhappy about it. I had forgotten how much new babies sleep, and spent the first couple of weeks wishing Lyra would wake up more so that I could see her eyes and maybe interact with her a bit. But now that it's happened, I'm unsure what I was thinking. Interact? She doesn't do much when she's awake. And when she is awake she's mostly fussing for something. Still, we do get to spend some time playing with her little hands and feet and tickling her cheeks and chin to get her to make funny faces.

She is growing well. She has been a good nurser from the beginning, but I was still anxious about her weight gain, so I put her on the scale when she was two weeks old, since we were at the pediatrician's office for Adriana's three-year check-up. At that point a baby should have regained her birthweight, and since that was all I was really hoping for, I was pleased to see that she was 12 ounces over. She still seems like a little baby to me, having been born three inches shorter and almost two pounds lighter than her sister, but Lyra is finally filling out the clothes that fit Adriana at birth. And I can already see her emerging from what a friend called "the potato stage:" she tries to hold up her head (and is sometimes successful; she gives little smiles that at this point I think are real; and I watched her eyes track the cat all the way around the edge of the cosleeper last night--all little things, but things that weren't happening a month ago. Then I watch Adriana jump off the couch and give me my line in the game she wants me to play with her and it's so strange to remember that she was a little lump like this once, too, and to imagine Lyra in a few years as an active, creative little girl. I'm looking forward to that day, but for now I'm mostly enjoying this feeling of having a newborn again. This time I am so aware that it's not going to last long.

Three

2010-01-16T07:25:00.002-08:00

Sunlight and singing

2010-01-15T18:51:00.006-08:00

Lyra Noelle

January 2, 2010

3:57 PM

8 pounds, 1 ounce

19 inches

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i

like you better than everything in the sky

--sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere

with such a silence and such a darkness

noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year--

and if what calls itself a world should have

the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such

sunlight as will leap higher than high

through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearerness)everyone certainly would(my

most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

-e.e. cummings

Blog? What blog?

2009-10-17T14:30:00.003-07:00

Since it's been three months since I last managed to post something, I thought I'd hand over the story telling to Adriana. I've been trying to transcribe some of her stories as she tells them to me (when she'll let me get away with it), and this is one of my favorites of the ones I've gotten so far.

Once upon a time Adriana and Douglas and Sam and Elena and Matilda and Jacob all ride on their bikes to Eagle Park. And they go on ladders and slides. And then they dig in sand. And Adriana has red shovel and Matilda has yellow shovel and Sam has blue shovel and Elena has purple shovel and Jacob has black shovel and Douglas has pink shovel. And they dig big hole and make big tunnel. And then climb down tunnel. And at bottom tunnel there cave. And in cave there little monkey. Little like hummingbird. Little blue monkey. So little. And monkey want us paint cave. So we paint pictures on walls. Butterflies and balloons and elephants. And we paint those things on walls. And then little monkey give us mangoes. And we eat mangoes and then we climb out tunnel and find all the moms. And moms give us pizza and bath and then we go to bed. The end.

All fall down

2009-07-17T07:01:00.001-07:00

Last night at 9:30, when all the other two-year-olds we know had probably been in bed for sometime, Adriana was still running around naked after her bath. All day long she'd been practicing a little stunt from her gymnastics class, and I was trying to get her to demonstrate for Brian. She never really did, but we learned two important things about her philosophy of falling:

Brian warned her, "You'll fall on your head." She explained to him, "No fall on head, daddy. Fall on bottom. Fall on head hurt."
Somehow she ended up standing on his hand, playing a game they were making up on the spot. She would jump off, and he would lift his hand just as she did, getting her a little further into the air than she would on her own. She would fall (onto her bottom!) and giggle and do it again. At last she did it and landed on her feet. We applauded her, and she said, "Ana no fall. Ana do one more time and fall." And this time she made sure to fall. It's more fun that way, you know.

I'm sure our downstairs neighbors just love us.

Not so sly

2009-07-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Upon hearing Brian turn on the bath, Adriana shrieked, "No take bath! I hide." She had been sitting with me on my (unmade) bed, and she pulled the sheet over her face and laid down, leaving her hair and hands sticking out. When Brian came in and saw what she was doing, he asked loudly, "Where's Adriana?"

She popped out from her hiding place. "Here I am! Peek-a-boo!"

Monologue

2009-06-27T07:57:00.001-07:00

From the backseat of the car:

"Baby no walk. Baby no talk. I help give baby bath. Dry baby off. Comb baby hair. Baby wear PJs. Baby have mom-milk. Ana gentle with baby. Give baby kiss. Want baby NOW."

It's going to be a long six or seven months, but at least Adriana seems excited about getting a sibling.

Dat word

2009-06-24T13:16:00.001-07:00

One afternoon, Adriana and I sat in front of the fan, reading stories and trying to stay cool. When we finished one book, I was feeling silly, so I scooped her up into a big squeeze and gave her a noisy kiss on the cheek. "Smoochies!" I said to her.

She pulled away and looked at me. "Mom! Day dat word 'gain."

"What word? Smoochies?" I gave her another kiss, and she giggled.

"I wike dat word." And she pushed her face against mine. "Moo-mies!"

First memories

2009-06-13T16:31:00.002-07:00

When Adriana first brought me the picture of her friend Sam and asked for a story, I was surprised by how much she remembered about last Christmas. I told her about all the children visiting Santa, and she obviously remembered not wanting to be left alone on his lap. And then she told me that Santa brought her a stroller for her baby doll, and that after Christmas, daddy threw the tree off the balcony (better than tracking needles all through the apartment when dragging it out the front door). I was surprised that she remembered so much, but it's obvious that certain things make strong impressions. Brian and I talk sometimes about what will be Adriana's first memory, and it's tempting to think that these fun memories she has of Christmas will be the ones that stick.

Recently we had a borrowed alphabet book that had a picture of an x-ray for the letter X. We read the book over and over, but after a few days, she stopped me from turning to the next page. She studied the picture and said, "Ana get x-ray."

"You did have an x-ray. Do you remember that?" It had been a couple of months since that had happened, and she hadn't mentioned it since, so I was surprised to hear her say something about it.

"Ana sit on table," she reminded me. And then her voice turned worried as she turned to face me, reaching out to grab my arm. "Mom stay with Ana."

I told her that she had been a big girl, and yes, I had stayed right with her the whole time. And I reminded her, just as I had at the time, that Curious George had had an x-ray too. She nodded and let me go on with the book, but as long as we had that book, we had the same conversation whenever we reached that page, and sometimes she would bring me the book just so we could look at that one letter together.

Then we returned the book, and we didn't talk about the x-ray anymore until this past week, when she wanted to read Curious George Goes to the Hospital. We reached the part of the story in which George is getting the x-ray. The man with the yellow hat was given a yellow lead apron to wear, and at that point Adriana said, "Mom wear blue one." She was right. I was given a blue one when she had her x-ray. I was amazed that she remembered that little detail, but it had clearly been an important event, even though she was so good and calm and seemed totally unfazed by it as the time. We went through the conversation about the fact that I didn't leave her several times, and I did my best to reassure her, as she seemed so worried. Later that day when she wanted to read the story again, though, she didn't comment at all on the x-ray. I hoped that she'd gotten the worry out of her system, but on Thursday when an unexplained limp she'd had over the weekend returned, I began to worry. Everything looked fine, but her limp was so noticeable and she was complaining that her leg hurt, so I was leaning toward taking her to the doctor to have her take a look. But I worried that even though I was certain it wasn't broken, the doctor would want to do an x-ray to make sure, and it would be more traumatic this time because this time she would be healthy enough to panic.

Luckily the doctor quickly realized that the pain and stiffness were in Adriana's hip and diagnosed her with toxic synovitis--some inflammation in the hip probably caused by a virus. No x-ray was necessary, and we were sent on our way with instructions to give her some Motrin if it seemed to be bothering her.

But then I ran into another one of Adriana's memories, but this one didn't surprise me at all. On Sunday I had given her some Motrin to help with the pain, and when she didn't want to take it, I promised her that she could watch Elmo on YouTube afterwards. When we got home from the doctor's office, I told Adriana she could have some Motrin for her leg, and she agreed. But as I came towards her with the medicine, she took a step back, and said "Elmo" in a very firm voice, making sure I knew exactly what would come next.

29 months

2009-06-11T19:52:00.001-07:00

It's like we have an honest-to-goodness little person around here. I mean, Adriana's only three feet tall and can't quite break 27 pounds, but the way she interacts with us, with the world, seems every day less babyish, less, toddlerish, almost more like a real kid.

Her vocabulary continues to grow, and her pronunciation is improving to the point that people other than her parents can understand her. She is shy at first with most people, but eventually she warms up and it's hard to stop her from talking. S sounds and K sounds still come out as Ds, Ls are replaced with Ws or Ys, and R is pretty much non-existent. She still often tries to use only one syllable for some words--"baby" is just "bee"--but she is attempting longer words. I am charmed by her pronunciation most of the time: "chey-ees" for cherries, "eh-deent" for elephant, and "wah-mey-on" for watermelon. I've been trying to get her to say her whole name, and she'll repeat it after me, syllable by syllable, but then when I ask her to say her whole name she grins and says "Ana Roof!" She does continue to sign a bit, but usually only for emphasis or when she thinks we don't understand what she is saying (I wasn't home one evening and when whining for Mom over and over didn't work, she tried signing it, to make sure Brian really understood what she was asking for). I do occasionally ask her to sign when I don't understand what she is saying, and even if it's not a sign we've used before, she'll attempt it. Sometimes that's useful, as when I didn't understand that she was saying "telephone" and she held a hand up to her ear. But sometimes she just wiggles both hands around in front of her and grins at me.

She is also starting to sing. She's always liked to listen to music and be sung to, but she has never attempting to sing along, either with me or with a recording. But about a month ago she started requesting particular songs more often, and while she still doesn't sing along with me, she does sometimes just begin singing on her own. Usually she just picks one or two lines of the song and belts them out at full volume with little attention to tune (she does have good rhythm, though). She also fills in lines to songs, so that whenever we sing her current favorite, "Little Red Wagon," she likes to pick who fixes the wagon and with what tool. Or food. That wagon gets fixed with a lot of french fries and ice cream, although maybe that's because her knowledge of tools is limited. After hammer, wrench, and duct tape have been used, it's clearly time to try something more creative. Along with the singing comes dancing, which she's always done a certain amount of, but now she makes up little dances to go up with little songs that she makes up. "Happy food dance! Happy food dance!" she sings, as she stands on her step stool to eat a meal (which she prefers to sitting in a chair, and I don't think it's worth a fight), bopping from side to side. Or she stands in the kitchen, bouncing up and down, making her sign for noodles with both hands and singing "Noo-oo, noo-oo, noo-oo," as I make ravioli for lunch. After using the potty at her friend Jacob's house the other day, he taught her the potty dance, and soon both of them were scampering their feet and punching the air with their fists, chanting "Adriana go potty!" over and over and over.

Her sleep and eating have improved immensely lately, much to Brian's and my relief. I think the eating in in part a growth spurt, and in part the fact that I have pushed her a little bit towards weaning, and that the sleep has improved as a result. I was tired of being asked to nurse for a few minutes every hour, especially in the afternoons, so one day when she asked, I told her that she could nurse this once, but after that, no more until bedtime. She accepted this deal, and when she asked a little later for some more and I reminded her of our bargain, she nodded and didn't ask again. Suddenly our pattern was nursing when she woke up in the morning, once more between that time and nap, and then again at nap. The same pattern followed in the afternoons, with wake-up and bedtime nursings, and one in between. And then she dropped the mid-morning nursing on her own within a week. The mid-afternoon one is still there a few times a week. I realized that while our mornings are pretty busy, with gymnastics and school and whatnot, in the afternoons I am busy tidying the house a bit and fixing dinner, and Adriana was often asking to nurse in order to get my attention. Once I started including her more in what I was doing, instead of trying to get her to play by herself, she stopped asking nearly as much. I do think she was getting a fair share of her calories from milk, because the weaning coincided with a much greater food intake--she eats three full meals every day now, plus snacks. And as a result, she wakes only once most nights now, usually sleeping from nine to four, and then going back to sleep until seven or eight. At first this seemed to limit her napping, but now she is back to regularly sleeping for at least any hour in the early afternoon, which is a relief. We can get her to bed earlier if she doesn't nap, but I'd rather have the break during the day while Brian's at work.

One of Adriana's favorite activities now is cooking. Now she helps cook dinner most nights, pulling her step stool into the kitchen to observe what I'm doing. I measure out rice and water, and she pours them into the rice cooker and then pushes the button to turn it on. As I cut up vegetables, I push the stems and peels aside, and she moves them into the trash for me. She picks the leaves of the herbs off of their stems so that I can mince them. She takes a turn mixing ingredients or whisking eggs, and I guide her hand as she grates cheese. She seems to feel proud when she helps, and when she isn't eating at dinner, just reminding her that it's something she helped prepare makes her more willing to eat a bit more. She loves to have treats--french fries, cake, and ice cream are favorites--but for the most part she is a very healthy eater. She eats lots of vegetables--chard, eggplant, asparagus, zucchini, and bell peppers are gobbled up, but I think she would live on blueberries and cherries if I would let her. She already has broader tastes than I have, though; she has lost her willingness to eat spicy foods, but she does go for mushrooms, olives, and goat cheese--three foods that I have never been able to develop a taste for.

Adriana's imagination has just exploded in the past few weeks. She plays games of pretending, informing me that I am a baby, and she gives me a bath, puts me in pajamas, and tucks me into bed. Or, when she catches me reading on the couch, she wraps a throw around my waist, tells me I am a bird and she is a mom bird, and flies off to get me some bugs to eat. She began bring us a pictures of one of the little girls from play group and asking us to "Read Sam," so we would tell her stories about her adventures with Samantha. First I started with true stories: the picture was taken the day some of us took the kids to the Stanford Shopping Center to see Santa, so I told Adriana about all the children waiting to see Santa, playing ring-around-the-rosy together, and eating lunch at the Peninsula Creamery. Soon, though, the picture was a jumping off point for any number of adventures, with Adriana providing most of the details. "Once upon a time, there were two little girls, named--" I say, and she shouts "Ana and Sam!" and so it begins. "One day, Sam and Adriana decided to," I continue and pause, waiting. And Adriana picks whether the two girls go to the park or the beach, and continues to fill in details from there. They often climb trees and ride their bikes, and french fries and cupcakes make frequent appearances in the stories. In one of my favorites, the first one where Adriana totally took over the story and filled in all the details, she and Sam rode their bikes to the park where they climbed a tree. They climbed and climbed, and when they got hungry they ate apples in the tree. Finally they climbed so high they had reached the moon. My friend Mark was there, living in a sand castle, and he gave the girls french fries and ketchup, and then made a vanilla milkshake for them to take home to their moms. They flew home in a blue rocket. Sometimes I do try to take control of the story. Adriana began one recently in which she and several of her friends were digging a hole at the park and it was so deep they fell in when they tried to make it bigger. I took over, sending the children on an adventure through the tunnels until they reached a gigantic tropical cavern. I described birds and flowers and waterfalls, and a gigantic, ferocious looking beast that was playing a sweet melody on a flute, and just when I had another one of these beasts enter, Adriana decided she'd had enough. "The children turned when they heard a noise, and they saw another one of the beasts coming toward them," I said, and she interjected. "With plate of cupcakes!" Which wasn't exactly where I was going with the story, no, but who am I to argue?

Little Baby's Santa Cruz Adventure

2009-05-15T14:02:00.001-07:00

The thing about doulas is they are right and you should do what they tell you to do. Even when you had your baby almost two and a half years ago. When I wrote about Adriana's favorite doll last month, our doula, Pam, commented on the post, telling me to have a spare or two. But did I listen to her? Of course not.

On Saturday we went to Santa Cruz for the day. We ate at Walnut Avenue Cafe, walked around downtown, rode the carousel, played on the beach, and stuffed ourselves with sweets. It wasn't until we were getting in the car at the end of the day that I noticed that Little Baby was no longer with us. We hadn't taken the doll to the Boardwalk or the beach, so I assumed that it been left in the restaurant that morning, and since the restaurant was closed, I figured I had no choice but to head home and call in the morning to see if they had it. I worried about it all the way home, rolling my eyes at Brian when he asked, "Am I a jerk because I don't think this is such a big deal?"

After a bath and a story, I laid down with Adriana to nurse her to sleep and she asked, suddenly, "Little Baby?" (Well, more like "Yih bee?")

"Little Baby decided to stay in Santa Cruz and play a little more. She wanted more pancakes, and to ride on the merry-go-round some more. She'll be home in a couple of days," I lied, without even thinking about it. I watched Adriana's face crumple and she reached toward me for a hug. "Little Baby," she wailed in my arms. It was funny to realize that for the most part she cries because she is angry, frustrated, or hurt. When she cried out of sadness it was a very different thing. I assured her over and over again that Little Baby was having a grand time in Santa Cruz, and finally Adriana settled down to nurse.

It was when we were lying there in bed that I realized that I had seen the baby after brunch: we had walked down to the end of Pacific Avenue to show Adriana how to whisper at the Parabola. She had set Little Baby down on the bench there while we were playing. Since we'd gone from there to the car to head to the Boardwalk, that was where the doll had to be.

Last known sighting of Little Baby.

As soon as Adriana was asleep, I was on the phone to the Jamba Juice right there by the bench. A young man told me that no one had brought the doll into the store, and then he humored me by going out to check, but the doll was no longer there. I gave Lulu Carpenter's a quick call too, but no one had brought the doll inside there, either.

What was I to do? C'mon, I clearly had only one choice: I went online and ordered an identical doll and checked the box for two-day shipping.

For the next couple of days, Adriana would ask for Little Baby, and we would tell her stories about what her doll was doing: eating more mouse-shaped pancakes at Walnut Avenue; riding the carousel at the Boardwalk, eating ice cream and candy at Marini's, and building (and stomping on) sand castles at the beach. "She'll be home in a few days," we promised. Soon Adriana was telling us about what Little Baby was doing.

When we got home from our playdate on Wednesday afternoon, there was a small box in front of the door. Adriana ignored it and went inside to play. I slyly opened it in the kitchen, put the doll back out on the doormat, and then knocked loudly on the door. Adriana came with me to see who it was, and when I opened the door she cried, "Little Baby!" She grabbed the doll, and carried her into the house with glee. She sat on the floor to study the doll, which is when I noticed that this doll's eyes were blue instead of brown. Adriana didn't seem to care though; she was just pleased that the baby had found a new hat while she was on her adventures, since her old one had been lost months ago.

We went out to dinner that night, and Little Baby came along with us, although I was nervous the whole time that she'd get lost again. But Adriana was so glad to have her lovey back, that I couldn't say no, especially when she kept saying, "My Little Baby come back!" She was so happy , and I was so pleased that I had pulled it off, that she thought this was really her favorite doll, back after a little adventure in Santa Cruz.

After she'd had her bath and we'd read a couple of books that night, we settled into her bed.

"Want my new little baby," she told me, searching for her doll among the blankets. Maybe I'm not as sly as I thought.

Spring break

2009-04-13T15:39:00.002-07:00

Looks like somebody wasn't ready to get up after all.

Good thing it's spring break and I could let her sleep in.

27 months

2009-04-11T14:33:00.001-07:00

I remember reading somewhere that the period from 18 to 22 months was a challenging age. That was reassuring to me at the time: I wasn't the only one struggling with how to parent my child at that age, and there was a light at the end of the tunnel. And it really was true. Around the time Adriana reached 22 months, things did seem remarkably easier. I feel that in the past few weeks we've reached another challenging age, and I am starting to wonder if these things go in four-month cycles. There are more days lately when I feel my patience wearing thin. I wonder if it's just me--am I not eating right, not getting enough sleep--or if it's something about Adriana. It's probably a little of both, although I think there's more of the latter. She's testing limits right now, and getting frustrated with them. She pours a cup of water on me--because she wants to see what will happen, because it might be funny, because she can--and then throws a tantrum when I refuse to give her the cup back. She puts on her shoes when I ask her to do so, and then kicks them off as we are about to head out the door, smiling her most charming smile as I grit my teeth because we needed to leave five minutes ago. They are nearly all just little things, but over the course of a day they start to add up and by Friday afternoons I am usually watching the clock, counting down until Brian gets home.

It's a good thing she's cute and clever to make up for her shenanigans. She gives me a tight-lipped smile, sticking out her chin, when she knows she's been mischievous. She bounces and moves from side to side very solemnly when we ask her to dance. She throws kisses to people when she says goodbye. She knows nearly all of her letters (X is usually confused for a K), and shouts them out when she sees them. She surprised me by spelling out "Petsmart," reading the letters on the big sign out from the of store, although she did call attention to the 'A' several times as she went along--it is her letter after all. She recognizes numbers and will point to the one you ask her to, but she doesn't label them the way she does letters, instead just pointing them out as "number" when she sees them.

She talks constantly. It's not exactly that I wish she would stop talking, although the thought has crossed my mind when I've heard, "Mom, now!" a few too many times in one afternoon. Even though she likes to have what she says repeated back to her, she is usually content to babble to herself, and that's what she does as she rides on the back of my bike or in the car, and when she is drawing or playing with blocks on her own. She labels everything--"blue car, white car, purple truck," she says as we walk through a parking lot--but she is also really beginning to speak in sentences now, more than just the three- or four-word commands she's become an expert on. "I put my new shoes on my feet," she told me a couple of weeks ago, and when I looked she had indeed put her new sneakers on. Each word is it's own exclamation, so instead of a natural sounding sentence, there's a very staccato feeling, but she is very excited to be telling me everything, so it is fun.

I've been particularly interested lately in watching her friendships develop. At this age they are mostly too young for anything beyond parallel play and fighting over toys, but she does take an interest in what the other children in playgroup are doing. And they do interact beyond the little squabbles: she runs to greet her friend Samantha with a hug when she spots her at the park, and when her friend Douglas comes over to play they go straight for her bed, where the alternate between jumping and snuggling down to pretend they are sleeping.

She seems so grown up these days. Part of it is that she's just getting big. Her pants all seem a little too short, and she outgrew her shoes rather suddenly a few weeks ago. She fell asleep in the car on the way home one day recently, and as I carried her snoring up the stairs, I realized that even with her head resting on my shoulder her feet were dangling all the way to my knees. But it's also her personality. She remembers more things, and talks to me about the things we've done. She gets herself out of bed after her nap a lot of the time, instead of crying for me. There are times I miss having her as a baby, but this imaginative, funny little girl is a pretty good replacement.

Lovey

2009-04-06T15:10:00.001-07:00

Adriana has two baby dolls. One is about ten-inches long, and has a plastic (but phthalate free!) head and limbs and a soft body. The other is completely soft, with a stitched on face. When I bought that doll at Christmastime, I thought it would be a nice toy for Adriana to snuggle with, since it was so soft. But the first baby is by far the favorite. She does like the second baby--its shirt and diaper are easily removed, so it is good for really playing mommy. But Adriana is nearly as content to mime a diaper and outfit change with the doll she calls Little Baby. I think soft face that so enamored me is actually what turns Adriana off. She has definitely shown a preference for dolls that look more like real babies; at the little school we go to, she shuns the Cabbage Patch Kids and dolls that look like older children in favor of the dolls with baby faces. Plus, its smaller size makes it perfect for cradling in her arms to pretend to nurse, or to have tied to her with the scarf that she likes to pretend is her own little Moby wrap. And so it has become Adriana's constant companion.

I did try to encourage a "lovey" at one point, maybe about a year ago, offering Adriana a stuffed monkey that a friend had given me in college. Adriana does adore the monkey, and he has been a favorite at times. But she has never been attached to him the way she is attached to Little Baby. The doll comes to the grocery store and the farmers' market, to the doctor's office and to friends' houses. It has played hide-and-seek in Dolores Park and listened to stories at the Red Rock story hour. When we get into bed at night or naptime, Adriana makes sure she has Little Baby, and she holds the doll to her chest for milk as she rolls towards me to nurse. In the night when she wakes up, she sits up and finds Little Baby again before settling back down to sleep. It's sweet to peek in at her and see her sound asleep with her doll clutched tightly in her arms.

I do live in a bit of fear of losing Little Baby. When we're out and about with the doll, I constantly check to make sure Adriana still has it in her arms or that it is peeking out of the pocket on the diaper bag. It has become a family joke to place the blame for missing items on the cat, and Adriana accepts this for a lot of things, but I think if Little Baby were to disappear, there would be trouble.

Diaper bag packing FAIL

2009-04-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

As we were leaving the farmers' market, Adriana announced that she had a dirty diaper. I knew I had exactly one baby wipe in the diaper bag and that I would have to be efficient, but when we got back to the car it seemed her announcement had been premature. Still, she was a bit wet, so I put a fresh diaper on her and we went on our way to the park. But as we were leaving there, she made her announcement again, and this time it was clear that she meant it. There weren't any families we knew at the park, but I headed over to one group of moms and explained my situation, and they laughed and one gave me a few wipes. And then we headed over to the restaurant for lunch so I could use the changing table there. And so I was standing there in the restroom with Adriana on the table when I discovered that the diaper I'd put on her at the car had been the last one in the diaper bag. Hedging my bets, I put Adriana's pants back on her and headed back out to the table outside where Brian and his parents were waiting for us. I explained what had happened and we all laughed, and Brian headed up to Longs to buy a pack of diapers.

Everything was fine until Adriana announced, "Pee."

"Should I take you to the potty inside?" I asked her.

But then the expression on her face changed. "Pee," she said with more urgency. And then my father-in-law pointed out the growing puddle beneath Adriana's chair.

Honestly, I think these were the kind of mistakes I was supposed to make when she was a few weeks old. Shouldn't I know to check what I have in my bag before leaving the house by now?

Guess what she hears me say a lot

2009-04-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

Whenever we read The Runaway Bunny, Adriana points out the mom and the baby on each page. She'll make other comments about some of the pictures, too, but those vary from day to day. Except for the picture that shows the mother bunny as a mountain climber, climbing to her little bunny who has become a rock high above her; when we reach that page, Adriana tells me the same thing every time:

"Baby," she points. "Mom. Baby! Get down!"

I guess she knows what happens when babies climb up too high. And I suppose I should be glad I only have to pluck her off of the kitchen table and the back of the couch, and occasionally climb up a tall play structure at the park when my baby is making me nervous.

2009-03-31T21:37:00.000-07:00

There are certain things I look forward to when it comes to Adriana growing up. For instance, I'm excited about her new interest in toilet training, and it will be nice when I don't have to have an eagle eye on her as she climbs things at the park. But it will be a sad, sad day when she figures out that simply because she runs to a tree and turns her back to me, she is not actually hidden.

Portrait of the artist

2009-03-16T20:26:00.001-07:00

Adriana loves to draw. The MagnaDoodle I bought last fall for a long car trip was a fantastic investment, and crayons and paper can occupy her for a long time--she often sits in the kitchen and draws while I fix dinner in the evenings, and when we flew to Florida last month, she spent more time drawing on the flights (and in restaurants and in her great-grandfather's house) than pretty much anything else.

She'll bring one of us her MagnaDoodle, or hand us a crayon when we're sitting with her while she draws, and ask for a picture of a flower, a monkey, or herself. Brian and I are not exactly artists, but our skills are enough to impress a two-year-old. But I found it frustrating to constantly get these requests. Even if we were sitting together, and I wasn't using the crayons to occupy her so I could get something else done, I wanted her to be the one drawing. Who cares if she can't draw a cat? She can scribble, right? So I draw her the giraffe she asks for and tell her to put on the stripes, or make the main part of the requested 'A' and she can put the line through the middle. But then she is back, asking me to draw a picture of her in her flower shirt holding her baby doll, or a monkey holding a balloon in a tree.

Now I think all that watching was good for her. On Saturday night, Brian's parents babysat while he and I went out to dinner. When we got home and were sitting around talking, Adriana got out her MagnaDoodle and began to draw. er scribbles have changed a great deal over the past few months. Instead of covering a piece of paper in one color, she changes color often (making sure to tell me with each change what color she is using). She went from short little marks to longer scribbles to very specific little "designs"--she makes rows and one-inch high scribbles, for instance. But now we were seeing another change. She carefully used the "pen" to make a potato shape and drew a lot of lines coming out from it. Then she erased it and as she started again, I asked her what she was drawing. "Ana," she said. And there was the potato shape again. She drew two squiggly lines out from the side. "Arms," she told us and then "Wegs," when I asked her about the two squiggly lines that came from the bottom. The two lop-sided circles inside the top of the potato were eyes, of course. And then she made a similar, smaller drawing right beside her--her baby, she told us.

It's such a funny little milestone, and yet it was the one I've gotten most excited about in a while. Putting on her own socks and shoes is quite nice, but this, to me, showed more than just an improvement in her coordination. It somehow made her seem more grown up, in spite of her footed pajamas.

26 months

2009-03-15T08:01:00.002-07:00

I have always thought of Adriana as independent. She seemed to want to support her own head from a very early age, and she refused almost all solid foods until she could feed herself. Watching her and comparing her to other kids at the park, I felt that, even though she wanted me right with her most of the time, she didn't reach for me for help as often as some of the others reached for their caregivers. But I think her need for independence has become even bigger lately. Her lack of true independence means she compensates by exerting her authority when and where she can. "Ana do," I hear many times a day, whenever I attempt to help her with something she wants to do herself, which is pretty much everything. She picks out her own clothes each day (and heaven forbid her cupcake dress is in the wash when she wants to wear it--which is several times a week--or I offer her white tights instead of pink) and does her best to put them on herself. If I try to pick out what color hair bows she wears or try to put her shoes and socks on for her, it's a crisis. She tells me what she wants for breakfast and lunch, although, strangely, given her unwillingness to let me feed her as an infant, she mostly wants me to feed her now.

Sometimes her independence makes me nervous. She wants to climb up on a step stool to reach things, rather than having me get them for her. And at the park she terrifies me as she tries to imitate children several years older than she is. As she tried to stand up on the rails of a seesaw at the park, I put my hands out near her, spotting her, ready to catch her if she fell. Every time I got nervous and actually put my hands on her, she said, "No, Mom," in such an exasperated tone that I felt that I was gaining insight into our relationship ten years into the future. But at the same time, I'm excited to see this independent personality emerging.

She's also a bit of a bossy personality. She continues to talk more and more, and has definitely mastered the imperative: "Mom read book," and "Mom sit down," and other such orders are frequently heard around our house. "A three word sentence," my friend's husband commented one day at the park as Adriana directed me to push her in a swing. "Yes," I said, "but I'd rather it were four, with a 'please' at the end." He suggested that I should just be glad that she wasn't already tagging "now" onto her little sentence. The next day she ordered me to read her "monkey book" and I told her I needed to finish what I was doing, and she grabbed my leg and said, "Mom, please read monkey book, NOW." Okay, fine, it was, "Mom, pwee wee monk book, NOW." But I understood exactly what she meant. And I did as I was told. She knows so many words now, and she will try to say most things you ask her to say, provided that she is in the right mood and that the word is no more than two syllables. Even on the two-syllable words, the second half is mostly slurred, but she is making the attempt. If you ask her to say anything longer she smiles and tells you, "No."

A couple of weeks ago, her speech therapist ran though some sort of language inventory with us. At this point I am not really concerned about her speech at all, but it was good to hear that, according to this particular index, she has the language skills of a 22-month-old. I don't feel that I'm rewriting things to say that I wasn't incredibly concerned from the time we began the evaluation process last summer--I wished she would talk and figured getting her evaluated couldn't hurt and it might help. I honestly don't know how much the therapy has helped--I have a feeling this would have happened naturally, when she was ready--but the therapy is fun for her, and I am just glad she is talking. Even if it is to boss me around.

Sick and wired

2009-03-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Adriana had a runny nose. There were a few sneezing fits and her eyes were watery, so I assumed it was hay fever, since there seem to be so many blooming plants all of a sudden. Sunday I decided it was a cold. And Monday, as we struggled awake in the face of Daylight Saving Time, I decided again that it was just spring allergies. But, whether it was a cold or allergies, I didn't think a trip to the doctor was entirely necessary. Still, not sure if the rattle I was hearing in her breath was coming from her chest or her throat, I called the doctor's office and they told me to bring her in. I sent Brian a quick note to let him know the plan. He didn't think the doctor's trip was really necessary. I was ambivalent--whenever I call the advice nurse hoping for reassurance, they end up telling me to bring Adriana in. I picked up the phone to cancel the appointment, but called Brian's mom instead. She suggested I just go to the appointment for the reassurance, even if things were fine. Figuring that maybe we could at least get an antihistimine if the doctor thought it was allergies, I decided she was right.

And so I was surprised when the doctor, instead of telling me it was just a cold and to give Adriana plenty of fluids or agreeing that it did seem like hay fever, looked at Adriana sitting there with her dress off and expressed concern over her breathing before she'd even listened to her chest. But I think it was good that I was surprised. That surprise meant that instead of worrying or panicking I just accepted what the doctor said, as she pressed her stethoscope to my baby's back and then ordered some Albuterol treatments and a chest X-ray.

Adriana was amazingly good throughout it all. In fact, her good behavior was part of what had me and my mother-in-law concerned: while Adriana is good about sitting for stories, she is not ordinarily a kid who just wants to sit in the rocking chair and snuggle for an hour. She is not the kind of kid who lies quietly on the floor when she is set down--she either demands to be picked up or goes off to do something else--but on Monday I would find her exactly where I had left her. The frighteningly good behavior continued at the doctor's office. She sat quietly on my lap for the exam, and then patiently let me hold the nebulizer mask over her face while she received Albuterol to open up her lungs. She looked passively at the little teddy bear gadget on her finger that monitored her blood oxygen saturation (which, how on earth do those things work? I swear they must be magic) and stroked my arm with her free hand. She is normally a bit shy in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar faces, but this seemed particularly unusual. She did seem more energetic after the treatment, which brought her oxygen saturation up from 95 to 97 percent, and actually walked down to get her x-ray instead of insisting that I carry her. She sit perfectly still on the table for her x-rays, as I reminded her about the X-rays Curious George got. And back upstairs, she sat quietly for another Albuterol treatment, which brought her oxygen up to 98, while we waited for the doctor to come back with the X-ray results.

We ended up with a diagnosis of bronchiolitis in Adriana's left lung (which is often caused by RSV and can be a serious issue in babies, but is less frightening in toddlers), and we were sent off with a nebulizer to continue Albuterol treatments for the next couple of days. Realizing that I hadn't eaten in hours and that I couldn't get the nebulizer and Adriana both home on my bike, I called Brian to meet us downtown for dinner and a lift home. Adriana had a fit of energy then (Albuterol can make kids hyper), and it was good to see her back to her normal self as she did a few laps in front of the doctor's office--up the stairs then down the ramp--and then insisted on walking the block and a half to the restaurant for dinner. But at dinner she grew quiet again and ate only a bite or two of her pasta, and by the time we got home we discovered she had a fever. And because we were at home she fought us as we tried to give her the Albuterol, but eventually with snuggles from me and a Curious George story from Brian (and the promise of a "special sticker" afterward--one of the Curious George ones I've been hoarding for when we get to the bribing stage of potty training) she settled down and then went to bed without much fight.

After that I was totally drained, and yet I felt as though I imagined the Albuterol was making Adriana feel--tense and wired. The whole day was catching up to me, from the early wake-up, the shorter-than-usual break I got when Adriana took only a brief nap, and of course the craziness of what had happened at the doctor's office. None of it ended up being a big deal. Yes, she was having a bit of trouble breathing, but it wasn't a crisis by any means. Still, I had been hesitant to take her in at all, and had expected to be sent home with a pat on the head and a roll of the eyes at my first-time-mom anxiety, and had ended up holding my baby's hand for her first X-rays. I sat in the arm chair, stunned. I sent a message to a friend describing how I felt after my day. He suggested that I needed to go sledding, and as silly as that sounded (especially since I am in the bay area, not on the frozen tundra of the upper midwest) it really was exactly what I needed: the exertion of tromping uphill in the snow, the exhilaration of flying back down on a sled--just the simple physicalness of it--to help with the tension I was feeling.

Instead I went into Adriana's room and listened to her breathing, which was no longer as shallow as it had been, and then climbed into my own bed...and then went back to listen to her breathe a couple of more times before I finally managed to fall asleep.

Recipe: Sweet potato coconut soup

2009-02-23T21:42:00.003-08:00

While Brian likes to point out that "no one cares what I had for lunch," I feel compelled to post recipes from time to time. You care what I had for dinner, right?

This is based on a recipe from Fresh Food Fast by Peter Berley. For a while I was doing it with tofu instead of beans (about eight ounces, just cubed and tossed in with the liquid), but then Brian and I realized we don't really like tofu. We usually have it served over rice, and if you serve it over brown rice, that healthiness combined with the beans and the different colored vegetables should probably let you justify any number of chocolate chip cookies for the rest of the week. I mean, orange veggies, leafy greens, whole grains, legumes? SO HEALTHY.

Also, this soup was one of the first real foods that Adriana ate. She tried a bit of rice cereal at seven months old, and then turned up her nose at most solids (especially purees). But just after her first birthday she chowed down on this. Apparently I just wasn't offering her interesting enough flavors.

Sweet Potato Coconut Soup with Black Beans and Chard

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium onions, chopped

2 small or 1 large sweet potato peeled and diced (one-inch)

1 tablespoon ginger, minced

4 cloves garlic, crushed

1 jalapeno, minced

2 teaspoons ground coriander

1 (15-ounce) can black beans

1 (15-ounce) can coconut milk

2 cups water

1 teaspoon salt

1 small bunch chard, center ribs discarded, sliced thin

juice of one small lime

handful of cilantro, chopped

Heat oil in large pot over medium-high heat. Saute onions 3-4 minutes, until softened.
Add sweet potatoes, ginger, pepper, garlic, and coriander. Saute 2 minutes, stirring constantly.
Add beans, water, coconut milk, and salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
Stir in chard and simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
Stir in lime juice and cilantro and serve.

Baby's first joke (I think)

2009-02-19T11:30:00.000-08:00

Adriana came and found me while I was folding laundry.

DAD-WHERE? She asked, something she wants to know pretty much every day.

"Where do you think he is?" I asked. Usually she replies WORK, but this time she just repeated her question. "He's at work," I told her.

DAD-WHERE? Adriana repeated.

"Work," I said. We went back and forth a few more times, and finally I said, "I don't know, where is Dad?"

MOON, she signed.

"Dad's on the moon?" I asked. She nodded, and then giggled so hard she had to sit down. For the rest of the morning as played with her baby or read books, she would stop every now and then, sign DAD-MOON, and collapse in a fit of giggles. Pretty soon I was laughing too, and I didn't even get the joke.

Head and shoulders, scabs and toes

2009-02-17T21:34:00.001-08:00

I don't think of Adriana as a particularly clumsy child. In fact, I think she's quite well coordinated for her age. But she is an active little girl and takes her fair share of tumbles. As a result, her knees are frequently a bit banged up--one of them always seems to have a scab.

Still, I thought she knew what her knees were. She points to any body part you ask her to, her knees among them. She follows along when I sing "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes." But the other day she pointed to a scrape on her ankle and told me "knee." I guess she was less clear on what exactly her knees were than I thought.