Month: April 2005

If The Shoe Fits…

Sarah Carolyn

Carrie is rapidly becoming more and more mobile, and summer is coming and with it opportunities to stand outside. On the ground. Where there’s dirt. So, I thought I’d look into getting her some shoes. (Not that I have anything against dirt, but her choices are barefoot or shoes. No socks in the dirt, please.) These are my current favorites (although there are so many designs I like it was really hard to pick one!)

The only thing is, I can’t figure out which size to get. I tried some on her the other day. The 0-6 month size should fit lengthwise, but her chubby little feet won’t go in them. The 6-12 month size fit over her feet, but extend a good inch or so past her toes – they’re like baby clown shoes. I have no idea how fast baby feet grow – if I get these now, will she even be able to wear them in a couple of months, or will they still be huge? I suppose it doesn’t matter if they’re big, since she’ll grow into them eventually, but I don’t know what to put on her until then. Or maybe I won’t really need them until she grows into them anyway.

And I thought buying shoes for myself was hard!

Six Months Old!

Sarah Monthly Updates

Dear Carolyn,

20050424_sitting_up.jpgI can’t believe you’re already six months old. It feels like we just brought you home yesterday. Then again, it feels like you’ve been part of our lives forever.

You’ve learned how to roll your way around – you even do little baby rolling k-turns to get to things you want. Another new trick you’ve learned this month is how to get up on your hands and knees and rock back and forth. You think this is the coolest thing ever and get a huge grin on your face every time you do it. You can also sit on your own for short periods of time, but then you’ll reach for something and topple over. Diaper changes are becoming quite the challenge, because every time we put you down on the changing pad you immediately flip over, grab the edge of the dresser, and hang on for dear life so we can’t roll you back. You are very strong.

We’ve started feeding you solid food just in the past two weeks. So far you’ve tried rice cereal, pears, and sweet potatoes. You really like to play with the spoon – especially when it’s full of food! Most mealtimes end with food everywhere. Thankfully, you don’t mind getting cleaned up after. And on the subject of cleaning, you’re really getting into baths lately. You sit up in your little tub and splash the water, and chew on your rubber ducky until I drag you out. I think you’d play in there for hours if I let you!

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You’re still pretty fond of all the toys you loved so much last month, but there’s a clear new favorite: the clip end of your binky holder. That part ends up in your mouth more often than the binky itself. It must feel good to chomp on: you’re definitely teething – next month there might be a tooth or two to write about!

20050424_thumb.jpgAt this point, you’re mostly sleeping through the night. Sometimes you wake up once to nurse, but other times I wake up at 7 and you’re just starting to stir. You go to bed sometime between 7:30 and 8:30, so you’re generally sleeping about 11 hours straight! Now I should start going to bed at a reasonable time too…

You don’t “talk” as much as you used to. Before you used to say “ah-goo” and “ah-boo” a lot. (It was really cute – sad, but cute – when you were upset and you’d say “ah-boo, ah-boo, ah-boo” over and over.) Now you do a lot of vowel sounds and fake coughing, and lots of raspberries (especially while eating.) I keep asking you to say “mama”, but you just look at me with a mischievous little smile.

I think you’re going to be a total girly-girl. Not only do you like getting dressed up, especially in red, but you think that the phone is the best thing ever invented. I’ve been encouraging you to figure out how to crawl by putting the phone just out of reach – I think you’d do anything to get to it. Occasionally, when you manage to reach it, I’ll put it on speakerphone and call Daddy at work. We leave him funny messages with you doing your little fake cough. To be honest, you’re fascinated with anything electronic – the remotes, the phone, the laptops – I think it might be that particular shade of silver-grey. Or maybe it’s because we don’t let you put them in your mouth.

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Sometimes I wonder how I got to be so lucky, to be your mama and watch you grow. I cherish every moment I spend cuddling you in the rocking chair – even the ones at 3 AM – because I know all too soon you’ll be too big to want to snuggle. I hope it doesn’t all go by so quickly as these first six months have!

Love, Mommy

Spring Cleaning

Sarah Crafts

Hallelujah! I can see the floor! Well, at least part of it, in my craft room. It helped a lot that I took out a bunch of stuff that literally just got shoved in there while we were cleaning out Carrie’s room, baby-proofing the living room, frantically tidying for company, and so on. There’s actually a lot more stuff that doesn’t belong in there, and once that’s out it might be possible to put away the things that do belong in there. The spinning wheel and wool, which used to live in the living room and which I will someday have the time and skill to use, are now going to live in the corner of my bedroom. I can’t stand the thought of them being in the basement. That’s where all the spiders are.

I’m also knitting a bit again. I’m past the halfway point on the baby poncho I started a couple of weeks before Carrie was born. I’ve been sneaking in a few rows whenever Carrie’s playing on the floor – I figure if she’s engrossed in exploring a toy, it’s not like I need to be constantly interacting with her, and I can do my own thing as long as I’m keeping an eye on her. Anyway, I only have about 75 more rows to go on the body of it, and then a collar and fringe. (I thought about leaving the fringe off, but I think Carrie will enjoy playing with it.)

More Food

Sarah Carolyn

Sweet potatoes weren’t such a big hit tonight. Although, once I mixed them with some rice cereal and milk Carrie was a little more receptive. Maybe they’re just too strong a flavor for her little taste buds? It wasn’t a total rejection, I just think she was shocked at the new taste. And maybe it was initially a bit thicker than it should have been. That’s the only downside to making my own baby food – it’s a guessing game about how thick to make it.

We’re leaving Carrie with my parents tomorrow for several hours to go take an infant CPR class, and I think we’ll leave them her beloved pears instead of making them deal with a sticky orange mess!

(I’m really nervous about the CPR class. I know it’s important, but thinking about all the scary things that can happen to a baby is going to be hard. I’d better bring some tissues…)

We Bought A Convertible!

Sarah Milestones

Carseat, that is. Carrie’s outgrowing her infant carrier, and even if she weren’t I really can’t tote her around in it anymore because the seat plus the baby weighs easily 30 pounds. Carrying that in one hand, around knee level, just isn’t all that great for my back! Since I’ve taken to leaving the seat in the car and just toting the baby around anyway, we decided to upgrade sooner rather than later.

So, we bought a Britax Marathon. Not a cheap seat, but she ought to be able to use it until she’s around 4 or 5, at which point she’ll be safe in a belt-positioning booster seat. It does take up a lot of the backseat of the wagon, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

I’m going to miss a few things about the infant seat. Mainly that, in a pinch, I could snap it into the stroller or carry it into the house and let her continue napping when she fell asleep in the car. Now I’ll have to interrupt naps to get her out of the car. Also, the sunshade was really useful, and there isn’t one on her “big girl” carseat. Oh, and in the winter, we didn’t need to bother with coats because we had a nice toasty carseat cover. I will definitely miss that this winter!

Plus, it means she’s getting bigger, and we all know how I feel about that. Can’t she stay small just a little longer?

Mother-guilt

Sarah General

(Warning: this rant really has nothing to do with anyone who reads this blog, and it’s probably not even worth reading. Heck, it’s probably not even worth posting, but I wrote it and this is my journal. So there.)

There are times when I just need to take a step back, take a few breaths, look at my peacefully napping daughter and realize that, well, gosh, I must be doing everything wrong because she’s so healthy, happy, and perfect.

I suppose everyone has an opinion about everything, and if I go read someone’s treatise on the internet about how starting solids before a baby turns at least 6 months old guarantees that she’ll have lifelong allergies and wean early and it makes me feel guilty, it’s probably my own fault. If some stranger in the diaper pail aisle of Babies ‘R’ Us lectures me about using “plastic” diapers and single-handedly destroying the planet just for my own convenience and I let it get to me, I suppose that’s my own fault too. And if I allow well-meaning comments from someone about my baby’s inability to sleep through the night if I don’t put her to bed (because I’m nursing her and bottles just aren’t a substitute for that) to undermine my confidence that what I’m doing works well for us, that’s my fault as well.

It’s obviously all my fault that my baby is thriving.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect people to keep their opinions to themselves. I certainly don’t. Unsolicited advice given in the form of “this is what I did when my kids were that age” is perfectly acceptable, because I can choose to ignore it. What annoys the living daylights out of me to constantly be bombarded with “you must do this” advice. Especially the kind that’s phrased in such a way as to imply that not doing whatever it is will have serious, far-reaching consequences.

The bottom line is, every choice I make will have consequences. And I’m sure there will be things I do that if I had known more I might have done differently. But I’m declaring here and now that I refuse to feel guilty about making any of those choices, because I am making them as best as I can. And if in 20 years Carrie’s in therapy because she wore “plastic” diapers instead of cloth, so be it.

Food, Glorious Food

Sarah Carolyn

We introduced Carrie to pears yesterday. (Carrie, meet Pears. Pears, meet Carrie.) I think it would be fair to say that she absolutely loves them. This afternoon, I mixed two tablespoons of pears with a tablespoon and a half of rice cereal and maybe an ounce of milk. I totally expected to toss half of it when we were done, but I was too lazy to put some in another bowl for tomorrow. Well, we were practically scraping the bottom of the bowl by the end of her meal!

I have to confess, I tasted it – Denis thinks that’s weird because it’s my milk…but then again, what’s weirder: my milk or milk from some cow I’ve never met? – and I can totally see why she couldn’t get enough. It was pretty tasty. (Have I totally grossed everyone out yet?)

Anyway, it’s pears and rice for a couple more days, then either sweet potatoes or apples since I have both on hand. Or carrots, although I think I’ll save those for later. And then on to…bananas? Squash?

Actually, at one point I was trying to figure out what order to have her try new things in, and I was tempted to do it alphabetically: apples, bananas, carrots, dates, eggplant, fennel, grapes, horseradish, ice cream, jerusalem artichokes, kale, lima beans, mandarin organes, nectarines, olives, pears, quince, red peppers, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, uniq fruit, vegetables, watermelon, ‘xtra tasty berries, yellow squash, zucchini. My mom, my cousin and I had a lot of fun brainstorming that list. We couldn’t think of any produce that starts with ‘I’, ‘V’ or ‘X’, though. And no, I’m not really going to give my 6-month-old horseradish, there’s no need to call CPS.

The Planet Sleeps

Sarah Music

Carolyn’s music library is pretty big already – she has three Baby Einstein CDs, a Veggie Tales CD, two lullaby CDs given to her by the cast of Anything Goes, and two more lullaby CDs from my parents. One of the CDs from my parents, The Planet Sleeps is absolutely amazing. We play it every night as part of her bedtime routine, and sometimes before naps as well.

I don’t think I could ever tire of this album. When I’m rocking Carolyn to sleep and it’s playing, I think of all the other mothers around the planet rocking their babies and singing them lullabies. It’s a common thread in this world of differences, the desire of mothers everywhere to provide peace and security for their children. It’s too bad we can’t always see past our differences to realize that.

My love of the album doesn’t stop me from making up my own words to some of the songs, though. The first song, Chi Mi Na Mr-Bheanna – which is one of my absolute favorites – ends up becoming something else entirely when I have to stumble down the hall in the wee hours of the morning: “Oh, jeez, it’s four in the morning now; oh, jeez, it’s four in the morning now; oh, jeez, it’s four in the morning now, why won’t you go back to sleep?” (Actually, those words were a collaborative effort with Denis. Just to give credit where it’s due. And to share the blame for using “jeez” in a song.)

Rockin’ Good Times

Sarah Firsts

This morning as I was getting Carrie dressed, she rolled over on the changing table (yes, I had a hand on her, and no she didn’t fall). Then, to my absolute amazement, she pushed up on her hands and knees and started rocking back and forth. She gave me this huge grin, like she was saying “Look Mom! Look what I can do!”

My little baby is growing way too fast! Pretty soon she’s going to be crawling away at top speed.

Post-Musical Blues

Sarah General

I’m feeling rather quiet lately. I don’t have rehearsals to take up my evenings anymore so I have a lot more time – but I’ve been wasting it on the computer all week! I need to remember what to do with my life without a musical to rehearse. Especially now that Carrie’s usually asleep by 8, I really ought to be able to recover my lost knitting time and do something productive.

I think a huge part of my crafting blahs are because my craft room is a disaster. I may as well nail the door shut, because the thought of trying to recover the place is totally overwhelming. Even if I took all the things out of there that don’t belong, there would still be too much to fit since I had craft supplies in the living room which I moved out when we baby-proofed. And it’s not as though – even if I thought I had the energy – I could devote a whole day to cleaning it out. At most I could probably do a 30 minute chunk a day, with Carrie in her entertainer, but it would take me that long just to clear enough stuff from the doorway to get into the room. I need one of those shows that organizes your stuff to come and do it for me!