Apropos of nothing

Another of Dear Alex's overwhelmed-on-her-first-birthday faces.
Note the fabulous hat, the menacing camera. She really did have a good day - but there sure was a lot of stuff going on. Beautiful Wife and I are pretty quiet people, and I can't help wonder if we should socialize her a little better by routinely making a lot more noise around the house. Then again, I kind of like the quiet, and I think she does, too. It helps her concentrate on all the learning that's going on right now. Dear Alex certainly can make noise when she wants to - she has a shriek that can peel paint (There is a reason we call her lil' screamie)

Two years ago today

Beautiful wife became beautiful wife. I'm a lucky, lucky man.

The thing at the top of the stairs

I have yet to understand her fascination with climbing stairs - in her ordinary life, there aren't any, so the only place she gets to experience them is at the undisclosed location. Today we climbed the stairs four times. She starts at the landing, shouts "up!up!" and commences the climb. If I was less than 3 feet tall it would seem to be an awfully long way up, but with Dear Alex there's no hesitation, never a slip - the only trouble comes at the top, where the Big Scary White Thing lives. Big Scary White Thing is just one of those round bamboo and rice paper lanterns, like 2 feet in diameter that sits at the top of the stairs, for no reason other than I'm too lazy to find another place for it. For whatever reason, Dear Alex is frightened of it - It crinkles occasionally, and moves a little bit from the wind from her favorite thing, the ceiling fan.
She gets to the top of the stairs, then stops. Eyes firmly on Big Scary White Thing, she sidles sidways then crawls rapidly past it, then stops and looks back as if to make sure it's not following her. I've tried to introduce her to this thing a few times, but it always ends in tears. Perhaps if I was a better dad, I'd move it, but I'm also a little curious as to how this relationship is going to work out. She's had no fear of anything else in this house, and has gleefully poked and prodded and chewed every piece of furniture, electrical outlet, cord, drawer, door, and icky-thing-on-the-floor in the place - what magical property is keeping the Big Scary White Thing safe?

Light!

Happy birthday part 1

What can you say - it's a roomful of babies, with their own agendas, busy with their own explorations and discoveries - the expression "herding cats" comes to mind, but even for someone that doesn't generally like babies, it's pretty darn cute. By the time we got to the cupcakes and party hats Dear Alex was more than ready for a nap. Her first taste of sugar went over very well. She loved the icing on the cupcake and ended up wearing a lot of it. A good time was had by all.

Splashy-splashy

Great fun on a summer afternoon when you're almost one - splashing around in a wagon full of water with dad and Beautiful Wife. Thank you uncle S. and aunt T. for the wagon, she loves it!

1 year - one week

The weekend before the big first birthday - Dear Alex with Beautiful Wife practicing her bandy-legged-saggy-butt walk in the great outdoors with her favorite pushy-thing toy. It's a great, simple colorful plastic cart vaguely reminiscent of a Mars rover - no hint of anthropomorphisation, no eyes or smiley faces, just wheels and a handle - At last, good industrial design for baby. It works, she loves it.
(No sound chips or lights, either!)

Back, more or less.

Haven't been writing nearly enough of late, as I've begun working again (which is great news ), and It's really thrown the daily lazy summer routine out of whack. We've also been ramping up for the Big First Birthday Celebration, which has now come and passed without any major bumps - Now Alex is one, and it's been quite a year of development and change for dear baby, beautiful wife, and myself. Naturally, the one-year milestone calls for a retrospective, and a replay of how we got here from there, but that'll take some time, and a lot of thought -
A year ago beautiful wife and I had no idea of just how completely our lives would change. Everything we read, heard, and the ridiculous pre-birthing hospital classes that we dutifully took did absolutely nothing to prepare us for the awesome force that is New Baby. The amount of time and energy it takes right now, to be with her in the now, watching and helping Dear Alex learn about the world is exhausting - not in a negative sense, but it does seem all-consuming at times. She's a very busy little girl, babbling, touching, exploring. But, lots of pix to come, for sure.

I'm the one on the left.

It's only a little scary, how much of a family resemblance there is - I was really hoping that she'd get her mother's good looks, but alas... Very much daddy's girl.

Pink Puppy!

Biiissssht!

So many new words these days - from the very first -"light" - to the latest: Qua,qua,qua!
(what's a duck say?) Dear Alex is on a learning rampage, and it's astonishing the things she picks up - Her favorite stuffed animal (at the moment) 'pink puppy' - so named because it's, well, pink, and kind of puppy-like, got called for a few days ago, just like this - "pink puppy pinkpuppy puppy pink puppy" (three reliable adult witnesses heard it,too) She knows. Outside the window "say hello to the city" there are buses "bus,buuuus" and cabs: "gehca, cas". She's putting it together right before my eyes. Wild. The one that has my attention right now is her latest, most mysterious vocalizing - things familiar and new get a gesture - hand upraised or pointing and "biiiisht! biissssht! bissht!" What means biiiisht? Is it a question, a command? A word that says "What's this?" That's sort of the conclusion that Beautiful Wife and I have come to - "biiiisht!,bissht,bissht!" is a question, and we get to make up the answers -

You will obey.

Look deeply into her eyes... you have no will of your own...

Smiling Baby Syndrome

I got into a conversation with Beautiful Wife a day or so ago about pictures of Dear Alex - we have literally thousands of them to embarrass her with when she's old enough. Not that we'd ever do that mind you, but... We got to trying to pick photos for this or that, and it occurred to me that there's a certain need for people to see pictures of Baby smiling, grinning, laughing, etc. Dear Alex certainly does that, but there's also quite a range of other expressions in some of the pictures of her that point to other things - that quality of curiosity, of consideration, deep thought even - sometimes bordering on brooding. (A trait from dad to be sure) Some of my favorite pictures of lil' screamie are like that - darker, more thoughtful. I have this notion (I'm sure I'm not alone in this) that there's a reason that we don't remember baby-hood. It hurts. From everything that I've seen with our remarkably calm and well-adjusted baby (knock on wood) there are a lot of things that she would not want to remember. So, I'm all for Smiling Baby, but Serious Baby has a story to tell.

Much better, thank you.

After a week of worst dad ever, Dear Alex is feeling much better - It's funny, we got into the routine of waking her up to do the thing with the mask of evil in the middle of the night and first thing in the morning for a few days there, and it seems to have miraculously cured some of the going-to-bed issues that Dear Alex was having.
I got very attached to that time in the dark with her - It reminded me a bit of the way back in time (almost a year already?) when she was little - you know, a baby. It's funny, over the last week or so she's made a very subtle transition from baby to toddler - and if I hadn't been looking so closely at her I would have missed it. I swear that every day now she's a different - but the same - lil' screamie.

Dat! Dat! Dat!

Another of Dear Alex's first words - Dat! Dat! Dat! Daaaaat! We assume she's trying to say Cat!
Cat! Caaaaat! We have two - Emma and Gracie, both adopted, and two very good natured cats, to be sure - no claw marks on Alex yet as she has pounced, pummeled and slapped the cats in an effort to understand how they were like and/or unlike the in-animate stuffed animals in her ever-growing menagerie. The typical reaction is simple avoidance - as soon as the cats hear dear Slappy (from the sounds those hand and black and blue knees make) coming, they vanish. Smart cats, not-so-smart baby. I've been trying to explain the concept of 'stealth' and quietly sneaking up on said cats - but Dear Alex is having none of it. She announces her presence, (Dat! Dat! Dat! Daaaat!) then charges...

Duck!

One of her first few words: Duck! Duck! Duck! I keep wondering about the prevalence of ducks in all things baby - this is just a simple question - What's the deal with ducks? They're everywhere. For example, there's bath tub duck (the surreal inflatable duck shaped bathtub) sticky ducks (duck-shaped suction cups that hold the bath toys) floaty duck (your basic rubber ducky, which we have multiples of, both with holes in the bottom and without) squeaky-duck (which squeaks when you squeeze it) Pictures of ducks, duck tissues, and my favorite:
Hey Alex, There's a duck on your ass.

Worst dad ever.

Well, not really, but sometimes it feels that way. I just got finished making my beautiful daughter cry at the top of her lungs for 15 minutes, by tormenting her with a very scary face-mask. It didn't help to pretend we were playing hide-and-seek ("Where's Alex?") It just made her scream louder. - Over a long weekend at The Undisclosed Location Dear Alex seemed to lose her usual spunky vigor, and slowed down to a (normal) crawl. She got a little warm, and her nose began to run constantly - sheets of snot, actually. Not for the squeamish. Went to the wonderful pediatrician today, and it was confirmed. Dear Alex has a virus - so to help her breathe, we need to give her a nebulizer treatment - okay, I get it, understand, but oh boy does she hate it - Right now, I just gave her the 7 o'clock dose, and it was as though I was flaying her alive while pouring salt water on her for good measure. Wow, amazing screaming - all at the hands of dad. I don't quite think she'll ever know it's for her own good - I'll never get thanked for this one. Dr. L., bless her, told me it was better if the lil' darlin' cried during the treatment - they inhale deeper, and longer than if they're calm. Super. I get to do this again at 11:00pm, 3:00am, 7:00am...





It feels worse than the time I got sunblock in her eyes by accident - you know, squirming, slippery baby, ham-fisted dad. I thought that was bad, but this (the nebulizer) is like willful torment.

Worst dad ever - part two

About half-an-hour after worst-dad-ever rubbed sunscreen into Dear Alex's eyes. She did have an okay time at the beach, and ate sand for the first time.

Bath time for Num-num

I'm fascinated by the variety of appliances and devices proffered to give your infant a bath - At first, it was a fairly simple proposition, a fold-up tub-like device that fit very nicely in the kitchen sink. Dear Alex took to water like a natural, and bath-time was fun-time. She loves splashing around, takes great joy in the play of sound and activity of water and has always enjoyed being wet and naked. The devices have gotten a lot more complicated, and by turns, bizarre. This concerns me somewhat, but I generally go along to get along. We started with the foldy-uppy kitchen-sink bathtub, which Large Baby (AKA Dear Alex) quickly outgrew, then transitioned to scary-inflatable-bathtub (attached to it is 'squeaky duck' mentioned in another post) which lives in our shower to this day. At the Undisclosed Location we have the giant-inflatable-duck bathtub which scared Dear Alex to tears when she first saw it, but now she's fine. It's a little weird, though - we bathe our child in a giant inflatable duck, which quacks "whak, whak, whak whaaaak" when you squeeze it's inflatable orange bill. It definitely gets her attention. My favorite tub, though is a simple blue plastic tub that I got at Ikea for about 6 dollars - non skid on the bottom, rounded and not terrbily ugly. It works. Okay, so there's no duck print, no little fishies, and no real attempt a decoration. That works for me. The only thing missing was a drain, but that was easily fixed with an electric drill. Simple and effective.
Would that there were more baby-related objects so easy.

Moments After the Incident

Not much of an incident, actually, but this picture has to me the quality of a WeeGee crime-scene photo, with all the randomness of real life. It never ceases to amaze me how rapidly Dear Alex can create chaos from order. This is nothing compared to some of the messes I've seen, but it has that quality of begging to be examined - what 'really' happened here? Was it Soft Bear succumbing to internal injuries after bludgeoning Pink Puppy to death over Dear Alex's affections with the wooden spoon? Where did the tennis ball come in?