spicetart

A girl and her cats.

You know it's love when...

...someone TOTALLY squishes you.

This week, in pictures

The de-fuzzer

The de-fuzzee

Ivy's first tink-tonk

Otter feeding at Coyote Point

Scarlett discovers she has feet

Cruisin'

It doesn't take much to make me smile, especially when I look at our gorgeous new Phil & Ted's Double Sport Buggy.  And my kids of course.

Shorts

The weather being so beautiful and warm, I decided to dress Ivy in short-overalls today.  She, of course, looks adorable, but when I was getting her out of the car seat to go get coffee, she looked at her bare knees and said "I need my pants".  I guess she has no idea what shorts are.

Tea for Three

About the Weather

It's days like this that I am so happy to live in the Bay Area.  Today we went for a Toddler Walk (2 blocks in 2 hours), we talked to the ducks that live in the fountain of the office building next door, we shared an ice cream, we bought some Easter egg dye.  Ivy needed a sun hat it was so nice out and didn't have to wear a coat.

And we are even *considering* a move to Iceland?

Here we go again...

2

How did this happen?  Two years old?!

Happy Birthday my Sweet Ivy!!!

Give me strength.

"What's enon!  Mommy! Mommy!"

I have no idea what she is saying.  I get about 85% of what she is saying but 'enon'?  No clue.  I sometimes look into her eyes to see if I can see the tiny demon inside. See this picture?  There's a demon in there somewhere.

Ivy's speaking in tongues again, and squishing her breakfast, oatmeal, between her fingers, spreading it recklessly over the table.  "Dirty! Dirty!"  She complains, she suddenly hates to have dirty hands even though she purposefully made them that way when she squished oatmeal between her fingers.  But now it's my problem.

And then the freak out over the "fly" that's landed on her arm.  I calmly explain that the "fly" is really a piece of oatmeal that she has flung there during her assault on her breakfast.  She looks at me as if to say "You may be right but I'm going to freak out anyway".

The egg gets no better treatment, torn into small pieces and then squished, a fine sprinkling decorating the smeared, dried-on oatmeal.  Some days she'll eat an egg in 2 minutes, and even ask for more.  Today, the egg is the enemy and the breakfast table is the battle ground.

She's taken to storing food in her cheek, and it's not even that it's food she doesn't like or won't swallow, it's just all of a sudden a good place to keep the last of the oatmeal that made it into her mouth.  Twenty minutes after she has gotten down from the table, I'll notice it still in there when she's talking.  Here you have to be really careful.  Calling attention to the cheek food may result in her showing it to me by spitting it out.

The books say that my toddler is engaged in tactile exploration and sensory experimentation, and who the heck would discourage that??  They, however, do not have to clean up my dining room floor.

Watch out Bollywood...

Happy Birthday Ivy!

I know, I am totally lame, I just now am posting about a birthday that occurred 4 weeks ago. Want lamer?  I wasn't even with Ivy for her birthday, I was in New York for work.  It was a great trip if that's any help.

I can't believe this last year has flown by so fast.  It has been the hardest and the most wonderful year of my life.  I was so afraid that I would not enjoy my child, that I would not be able to be selfless enough, that I would be impatient, frustrated and unhappy.  True, those first 4 months were all those things and more (terrifying, anxiety-ridden, miserable, lonely, isolating, deep-down-bone exhausting, you get the idea...FUN!), but now I enjoy about 99.4% of every single moment with my dear Ivy, even the mucusy ones, even the screaming ones, even the sleepless ones.  She has injected my life with a joy I didn't know was possible.  I never could really understand why people had kids, and now I know.

Happy 1 year on this rock my Sweet.

It Is the Mucus That Binds Us

I realized at the ATM today that I have become a mom, not in the physical sense, I am, of course a mom because I gave birth to a human. No, I've become a mom in the wipe-the-baby's-nose-with-my-hand-and-wipe-it-on-her-onesie kind of way. Outside the bank I noticed that Ivy's nose was running, and so that the lovely woman at the ATM didn't think I was a total slacker with one of those snot-nosed kids, I wiped her nose. With my hand. And I totally would have wiped it with my shirt but I couldn't reach down that far, it would have been really awkward. So, away came the hand with a snot-load and where else am I going to put it? Her onesie had to be changed anyway and, trust me, she really doesn't care if I wipe snot on her. Does it make it better that I made sure to NOT use that hand for the entire banking transaction?

Sigh.

As I walked away, marveling at my momness, I thought about my pre-mom self, who used to be completely grossed out by snotty kids (and they are snotty because they have colds half the year and don't really have a lot of mucus control), I was just sure that that snot and those grubby hands were carrying boat loads of germs and parasites and smudgy sticky goopy fingerprints. Yet now, I love my child and her snot, it offends me not at all. Not like I go out of my way to interact with it, it is just a mucusy by-product of my sweet Tiny. She's not sticky and yucky, she sweet and warm and smells like frosting.

Fever

I am a worrier and what does a worrier do but worry.

Ivy is sick and has a fever and a weird cough and sniffles and she actually fell asleep on Chris which she hasn't done, well, ever? So yeah, worried. It's silly I know, children have been getting sick for thousands of years, have survived famine and drought and horrible disease and infections, and they have lived. They are resiliant, and humans catch viruses (virii?) and get sick and get better. It's normal, it's natural, yep, it's ok.

Still.

I can't help it. I worry.

Silence is Deadly

How do you know when your child is doing something they shouldn't be doing?  I used to think that moms had some kind of magical sonar that picked up on specific "misbehaving" vibrations emitted by their children. But now I know that the way moms know that their children are eating something they shouldn't or are unrolling the toilet pater into a huge pile on the floor or are throwing all their diapers on the floor, the way moms know is the silence. Silence is a dead give away that they are up to no good. 

Sometimes when I am surfing the internet cooking dinner I will suddenly realize Ivy hasn't made a peep for a couple of minutes. When I look over, I see that she is rummaging through my million-dollar-purse, fondling Chris's Nerd the Nerdling cards or has started the climb up the stairs after the cat (who always keeps at least a two-step distance).  It is inevitable, when playing alone for more than 10 minutes, despite our best childproofing efforts, she always manages to find something to play with that I just didn't anticipate.  Who knew she'd love to carry a tampon around in each hand?

The only time the silence is a sign of something good is when she is eating.  It's hard to make much noise when you are shoveling fusili and kiwi in your mouth.

Words.

It speaks.  Sort of.  And it points.  And now it waves.

Ivy learned in daycare that the cat on the calendar is "kitty" and will say "kitty", in a way, and do a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers point at the area of the calendar.  As it would turn out, we also have a cat calendar at home, so even though we have two real lives cats, when we say "Where's the kitty?"  she points in the general direction of the cat calendar, regardless if either cat is right directly in front of her.  We figure she'll eventually realize kitties are everywhere (especially in our house where one of the bathrooms is devoted to our cats).  It figures that her first word would be kitty, she LOVES the kitties, and they will learn to love her once the bald patches grown in.

She also says "dada" which mean "hey look at that thing there, I like it, it is shiny or soft or bright and I want to touch it and put it in my mouth".  The vocabulary on this kid is amazing!

Crazy.

Crazy Baby is 9 months old.  See the tongue?  That makes an hourly appearance.  Crazy Baby now refuses hats, unless they are jaunty.  Or crooked.  Crazy Baby must feed herself, she loves cheese and broccoli.  Like her mom.  Crazy Baby makes dinosaur screeches at the cats, and has learned to say "kitty".  I anticipate she will soon be able to corner the kitty, dinosaur screech at it and pull its whiskers.  Crazy Baby dances to the highchair music and mom hums it in the hallways at work. Crazy baby.

Get Down, Baby!

Ivy has figured out that when music comes on, you shake your booty.  She bends her knees, up and down, no hip action yet, not entirely unlike her father, but she knows when that music plays, she better get to shakin'.  This is a new development, but I have been working on it for a while.  When any music plays (that counts the music the highchair toy makes), I start dancing and tell her that music means dancing.  This child WILL grow up gettin' down.  Unfortunately when we ventured to Ruby Skye for Baby Loves Disco last month, she had not yet aquired this skill, so I had to do all the dancing for her (and with a Sophia Mini in me, I was ready to rock).

Mostly she looked around without smiling, showed off her navel to all the other babies and ate cheese.  Baby steps, mom, baby steps.

Holding up the walls.

Wait.  Didn't she just start crawling?  Don't we get a couple of months before she is standing and pulling up on everything?  No, no we don't.  At this rate, she'll be walking by Thanksgiving.  Good Lord, help us.

At least she takes her job of holding up the walls very seriously.

It won't say tit.

My sister gave me this great Leapfrog Alphabet Pal Caterpillar.  I imagine she got tired of it's incessant chatter and cheerful chipper letter pronunciation.  It has 26 legs, each one with a letter on it.  When you press a leg, it can either say that letter or sound out that letter.  Like the letter 'M' is either "em" or "mm".  Of course, the first thing I do is see if it will sound out swear words, and to my pleasure, I discover that there are some bad words it just won't say.  The brilliant minds at Leapfrog were way ahead of me, they must have programmed it so that if you tried to spell "tit" or "fuck", there is a little girl's voice that giggles and then says "That tickles!"  I have really tried outwit it, and I can get it to say "shit" and many other words that I won't type here (what a mom!), so they were clearly selective in what they deemed appropriate.  Or maybe they figured a 2 year old wasn't going to try to spell vagina.

And Ivy likes it, mostly because it's antennae light up.  I wonder how long before she tries to make it say tit?

Two words

Unlike how we eat, savoring every morsel and waxing poetic about the burrata at A16 or the butterscotch pudding at Town Hall or a plate of Sweetwater oysters with a bottle of Sancerre at Hog Island...unlike all that, when it comes to feeding Ivy, two words are our mantra.

Keep shoveling. 

There's about a 6.5 minute window during which food can be shoveled with Ivy's cooperation.  When that window closes, the cajolling, airplaning, goofy faces and attempted shoving-while-laughing starts.  This results in a mess and a cranky baby.  I usually stop feeding her when she exhibits the "enough" sign but sometimes there's that one more spoonful of avocado I want to get down her...you'd be amazed how many places a tiny hand full of avocado can touch in under a minute.

Toofs

Boy, am I going to miss that gummy smile.  Especially when the day comes when she bites me, I know it's just a matter of time, really.  Two toofs have broken through and are getting bigger everyday.  I even have toof proof.

What I love most about this picture is getting to draw arrows on it a la John Madden.  I clearly must do this to all my pictures from now on.

It Crawls

This could and should be a title to a horror movie.  I am just as scared that it is not a movie but the newest developmental milestone.  This morning Ivy crawled about 5 feet (inch-wormed, actually) and proceeded to open the cabinet that houses the DVD player and Tivo.  Guess it's time to baby proof.

TV Rots Yer Brains

If television rots your brains, I am in real trouble.  But if it is too late for me, is there hope for Ivy?  She doesn't really watch the TV when it is on.  Sometimes she will glance at it, usually if something loud or bright is on, but for the most part she is much more interested in finding a way to put the whole paper towel cardboard roll in her mouth. 

But would she watch BabyFirstTV?  Finally, a channel just for babies!  They have been feeling so left out, but now babies can sit in their rooms and watch their own little TV and their spongy brains can absorb, uh, stuff.  Some people have actually claimed that these types of television shows are educational, that they teach little brains about, uh, stuff, and that you are actually making baby smarter by plopping him in front of the tube.  Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to babies watching a little Baby Einstein, but let's not pretend that it's educational; mainly, those shows give mom and dad some time to do a few things that that need to be done.  I also don't think that a little TV is detrimental to an infant, even though it is not recommended by the American Association of Pediatrics that babies under 2 watch any TV.  And even if it is a wee bit harmful, I watched loads of TV when I was young and look at me!

And I just read today that people have more TVs in their house than people.  Yikes.  But really, who needs friends and bike rides and farmers markets and baseball games and wine tasting and coffee on the benches outside of Peets, who really needs any of that when you have the television?  Maybe it is not harmful to baby, but there have got to be better ways to entertain a person.  I will try to remember this the next time I sit down for the newest episode of Project Runway.

What Ivy Eats

I had looked forward to feeding Ivy since she was 4 months old.  I wanted to wait until she was 6 months old, according to most experts the best age to start solids, but those last couple of weeks were hard.  I imagined a look of delight on her face at the first taste of pasty rice cereal, and utter pleasure when the first banana crossed her lips...and that's what sort of happened.  At first she wanted more more more.  She opened her mouth wide and I keep shoveling it in there with joy.  My little foodie loved eating, even nasty cardboard-like rice cereal.  Avocado, sweet potato, acorn squash!  My baby loved them all!  Then she started to get picky.  Nope not in the mood for that, ew, that tastes nasty today, water in my cereal instead of breastmilk?  No thanks.  That even produced the "yuck" face pictured below.

I was sure a food lover like myself would pop out a foodie, I mean, how could my daughter not appreciate a beautifully roasted, then pureed, then food-milled acorn squash?  I confess that I didn't really truly appreciate food until I was well into my 20s.  I mean, I ate food and enjoyed a good burrito like anyone else, but I didn't start obsessing over summer tomatoes and the perfect meatball sandwich until I was in college.  Even then, I truly didn't enjoy cooking until I moved to LA and discovered Whole Foods and Gelsons, yet I did expect that my baby would have a refined palate at the age of 6 months.  A sure sign her palate is not yet that sophisticated: she actually eats the rice cereal and she also loves chewing on paper.  Sigh.  I guess we have a ways to go.