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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

3/2/06 (Thursday)

It was a long, ugly Thursday here in Edison. All day it was icy and rainy, and baby barely got out of the house. She and her Grandpa George and later her mommy were feeling a little bit of cabin fever, I think. I got out of school early (although the weather turned out to be not really that bad) and was home with Cara by two. She had her bottle, and then she was high-maintenance and a little bit cranky. I got myself a piece of toast, and I let her eat half of it. She didn't want me to feed her little pieces; she wanted to feed herself little pieces, so that's what she got to do.

I figured she was hungry, so I gave her a bowl of yogurt. She enjoyed it, of course. I do hope, though, that she decides it's not really necessary to exclaim anything just as the spoon is entering her mouth. I have mentioned before that she does a cute thing by putting her head over to one side. She did this and smiled up at me from her high chair, and I turned my head to the other side and smiled at her. She thought that that was funny. The next thing that she thought was funny was to put her head to the side as the spoon entered her mouth. Oddly enough, this was not messy. I laughed the first time she did it, so she clearly decided that it was a great joke and repeated it at least three more times. She is, as my mother points out, a baby with a sense of humor.

Trying to get Cara to wave at me, I was saying "bye-bye" to her. She didn't wave, but I'm pretty certain that she said "bye-bye" once or twice. Janet said yesterday that she was trying to repeat sounds, and I think it's really starting to happen.

We had a laundry basket upstairs tonight. A few days ago I gave Cara a ride in one by sitting her down, lifting the other end, and pulling her around really fast. She liked that. Steve put her in and then pushed the basket up and down the hallway and into Cara's room slowly, and Cara got to stand up and wave her arms. She looked like she was on a float in a parade or was a general commanding an army. She also could have been the prow of a ship. She enjoyed that very much, and later returned to the basket and pushed it herself to ask for another ride. Seeing her slowly bearing down on Shelby was quite humorous.

Standing is really what all the cool people are doing these days. Cara enjoys standing in her bath, waving a squeegee around over her head and exclaiming things. She lets go of the tub pretty frequently, so it's very exciting for us, too. I'm willing to let her fall down in many situations, but the tub is just not one of them. I didn't see it happen, but Cara stood up in her room today without holding onto or pushing off of anything! Her progress is really amazing.

A few notes:

Shelby and Cara are both frustrated because neither one of them can open the kitchen cabinets.

Cara would probably get much farther in her efforts to pet the cats if she could do it without screaming at them. It's just a suggestion.

3/4/06 (Saturday)

It's been a few weeks since we had an overnight. Cara is much more confident now in her ability to get about, and so she is much more interested in exploring. Rather than focus on her toys, she spent much of the evening roaming around. She had a happy reunion with the mirrors on the closet doors and discovered the great view of the outdoors at the glass door to the deck. To enhance her mobility, I guess, she has found she can keep both hands free by carrying an object in her mouth, like a cat. Perhaps she has taken lessons from Shelby and Buster. One day we will have to tell her about pockets. In the meanwhile, the Sigmund Freud finger puppet, an odd favorite toy, was carried around like a soggy kitten for quite a while. Later Grandpa George demonstrated its proper use by making it play peek-a-boo with Cara from behind a large pillow.

As always, her visit began with some intense love from Great-grandma Emily, who can still lift a baby up from the floor into her arms. While I fixed a bottle, I left the two of them downstairs with the snack-trap cup. When I came down, Emily was helpfully extracting Cheerios from the trap and feeding them to Cara!

In the course of her day, Cara did manage to grab a handful of Schmutzie's fur once or twice; he is steadfastly tolerant of her intrusions, and simply walks away, with dignity. I think he can tell she is important to us, and I am always there to protect him.

Around 6:30 Cara ate about 3 ounces of yogurt, a few spoonsful of sweet potatoes, and one tiny morsel of roasted chicken, a tender bit of breast meat. She chewed on that for quite a while, until it either dissolved or she swallowed it, and we figured one piece was probably enough.

Here, as at home, the tub is a major attraction. Cara likes to "walk" while I hold her upright, and she liked to walk right up to the tub and peer in. She was fascinated and squealed happily when George began filling the tub with water. The last time I gave Cara a bath, I was able to leave a lot of irrelevant things on the rim of the tub. Now she is a much more active bather, and every last item was removed to the safety of the sink. She crawls, she stands, she reaches and pulls things in to join her in the water. Here too, she has found it convenient to carry a thing in her mouth, so she spent some time upright, chomping on a rubber duckie like W.C. Fields with a cigar.

But Cara herself was a sleepy little duckie. I had noticed it earlier, when Claire's friend Moira stopped by; instead of showing friendly interest, Cara had burrowed her face into my shoulder. Now, in the bath, she began to rub her eyes, and when I lifted her out she came willingly. George fixed a bottle while I got her dressed, and then her bedtime routine was well underway before I had a chance to send my usual evening report. George gets her to sleep without crying by lying down beside her on the sofa in the dark. When she's sound asleep he can lay her carefully in her pack'n'play crib and tiptoe upstairs.

She woke once during the night, at about 2:30. We had a bottle ready and waiting, but she really didn't want it and took very little. I tried first, but it was grandpa who got her back to sleep at last.

This morning she slept until about 8. She was a little groggy when I picked her up, but cheered up quickly. She had little appetite for her bottle and drank only a couple of ounces, but wanted to play instead, which she did until Grandpa George whisked her away home.

Foolishly, Steve and I had made plans to go south and see Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jim today. I think it was foolish because we were taking the poor baby out of her house again after her big night away. It didn't occur to me until we were already in the car, but from now on we will either wait until Sunday or have people come here.

Cara was pretty good, all things considered. She did require constant attention in the non-baby-proof condo, and she enjoyed pulling CDs off of their shelves and tangling herself up in wires. Cara has a good time with her Aunt Sarah, but she's not sure she's ready to be friendly with Uncle Jim. She didn't want to let him hold her, but she did let him show her a book. We had pizza, and Sarah and I fed Cara some. I gave her water from my cup. There was no dribbling that wasn't funny dribbling. We brought Cara's car, and she rode it around. In trying to get off of it once, she fell and gave herself a good clunk. I'm fairly sure she's gotten off of it successfully before, so I think that that was merely a symptom of fatigue.

Cara had only had a short nap in the car after her interrupted night, so I think that some of her crankiness was just because she was tired. I gave her a bottle around six thirty, and she fell asleep in my arms. We took her home and she slept in the car; now both of her problems are solved. She has had a good sleep and she is at home. Everything is smiles.

3/5/06 (Sunday)

Cara woke up in the middle of the night, something of which I have little to no recollection of. She then slept well past 8:30, when Evelyn went up and woke her.

Today was a lazy day at home. We took a lot of pictures of Cara, most of them having to do with a red balloon which Ron delivered to us (it was a present from PJ). Everyone in the house loves balloons--Cara because of the floating and the shiny, the cats because they like to chew on the ribbon (which they did--the balloon has already had reconstructive surgery). Cara and Shelby had some of their longest interactions today because they were both going after that balloon, and Shelby's usual cowardice was somewhat offset by her desire for the ribbon.

Cara did go down for a nap around mid-day, and Ev and I both managed to eat lunch, and I started painting this sailboat-shaped wooden frame with canvas stretched over it that is eventually going to hang on the wall in PJ's room (along with some clouds). Then we took Cara out for a few errands, and she was good.

We are able to play with her much more often in the dining room now (it's where her walker and ball popper are, as well as the keyboard), so her smaller toys seem to be migrating down there. Evelyn tells me she plans on putting away some toys so that Cara can re-discover them some time in the future and she won't be bored.

Ev and I actually attempted to watch a DVD this evening, and though there was a little noise interference due to Cara banging her plastic keys against the glass-topped coffee table, and we had to watch her, etc., it kind of worked. Maybe tomorrow we'll watch the rest of it!

As Evelyn has said already, the baby rules have changed and now Cara is very much interested in putting objects through things or into things, and seeing how her different toys interact when she bangs them together. This has manifested itself in one particularly humorous act, in which Cara crawls over to the baby gate with some toy or other and proceeds to either stick it between the bars of the gate or under the gate and, hence, down the stairs. Usually a lot of loud clattering results, and eventually Daddy or Mommy have to go down and clear up all the wreckage that has accrued on the stairs and on the floor of the dining room.

Tonight was bath night, and afterwards I was holding Cara in the bathroom and we were looking in the mirror. She made a stunning realization, which was that when she waved her arm, the baby in the mirror waved its arm as well. I could see her figuring this out. Then she was distracted by my chest hairs (I had been the one bathing Cara and had taken my shirt off to do it--otherwise, clothing gets soaked), which she decided she wanted to pick up and perhaps put in her mouth. She expected it to be as easy as when she picks crumbs or puffs off of the floor, but it wasn't, and fortunately she wasn't very good at grabbing my hair or it would have been a much more painful experience, instead of a very funny one.

Ev and I are both working more actively on trying to get Cara to repeat words, because every once in a while she really seems to be trying. We are probably both going to develop the parent's auditory hallucinations: the baby will say something which actually sounds like "gurbabballooo," but it will travel through our parent brain and we'll turn to each other and say "She just said 'I love you'!"

3/6/06 (Monday)

It's a fairly high-stress day. Steve and I both seem to be getting sick. On top of that, the baby has not slept through the night in quite a while. I am strangely overworked (and underpaid? nahhh) this week. Just to add to the fun, Buster the cat has a pronounced limp. This makes her much easier for Cara to catch, which I, for one, think is unfair. Shelby is doing just fine.

My new plan of attack is to feed Cara more food. She takes a whole bottle when she wakes in the night, so I'm hoping that, if she's not hungry, she'll be more obliging. In pursuit of my goal, I gave her plenty of yogurt and cinnamon-raisin granola, in addition to a bowl of lo mein noodles. The noodles were fairly messy; her lap was full of them, and when we picked her up we found them in places where they really could not have gotten without defying the laws of physics, like the one stuck to the seat of her pants. She enjoyed everything very much and capped it off with Cheerios, puffs, and juice.

Cara climbed the stairs again! I went upstairs for a minute and she headed up after me. She got up one stair. I stayed behind her and she went up a couple more. She doesn't always put her knee up first; half of the time, she just puts her foot right on the next stair and pushes up. She got halfway up the stairs and got distracted by the railing. She grabbed it and stood up, and she wanted to climb on it, but back the way she came. She was standing on nothing and I had an awful time getting her off, because she was hanging on determinedly, unaware of any logistical problems.

Cara had a happy evening after her big dinner. She cruised and crawled, banged her new measuring cups and shoved them down the stairs, then banged other things. Before bed, her daddy let her splash her hands in the sink to wash them. This was a lot of fun, especially when he let her have the washcloth and she slurped up water from it and then waved it around messily.

3/7/06 (Tuesday)

All that feeding I did did no good whatsoever; baby was up before one. however, it's been a nice day. Cara's getting more and more confident on the stairs, which (as many people have of course predicted) is very scary. Steve says that she didn't do it with him while I was out this evening, but with me, this afternoon, Cara stood up and grabbed the railings, then was perfectly ready to step out into space.

I usually try to keep non-baby things out of the journal, but this is a family affair that will affect us all: Cara and I took Buster to the vet today, and she has a broken leg! It's just one bone broken in her foot, but she will get a cast up to her hip. For the next six weeks, we're supposed to keep her from jumping and climbing. We're told it's best to keep her in one room. This will be very difficult. Cara was good at the vet; she watched the doctor carefully and talked to him throughout the examination. She was also very friendly to all the nurses we met in the hallway. I'll tell you, you haven't lived until you've taken a cat and a baby somewhere together. The only thing more exciting, I guess, is taking two cats and a baby. Weirdly, no one cried on the trip to the vet. Buster, I guess, always has been the quieter cat. Cara was laughing in the back seat, possibly because she could see poor Buster.

This evening Evie was off to the gym, so I had baby for an hour or so. I tried to pay some bills, which didn't go so well, because Cara was fairly high-maintenance at first. I discovered after a while a bottle in the fridge with a few ounces of formula still in it--which explained why she was acting as if she was hungry. Lately, what with all the solid food we've started feeding her, Cara doesn't finish every single bottle we give her. She also is grinding her teeth a lot. I don't even understand how she makes the noise that she makes, but it sounds loud, crunchy, and disturbing.

I resisted giving her the remains of the bottle and tried solid food instead. We had some cinnamon-raisin granola, but it very quickly became apparent that Cara really didn't want to be in her high chair. So I took her out and we did some further feeding from the kitchen floor, without a bib. When Evie came home she found me plastered with baby food on my shirt and on my pants--baby is thorough. But she did eat her granola and also quite a bit of apple juice. Evie has been diluting it, but this time I did not: Cara made some funny faces, but she couldn't seem to stop drinking it.

We also had some yogurt while we were on the kitchen floor. For some reason, after every spoonful of yogurt that I gave her, Cara felt it was necessary to raise her arms and violently flap her hands around a little. After the fifth or sixth time it was very funny--for me. Cara seemed to think it was all part of the process.

She did go up the stairs leading from the living room to the upstairs hall. She paused to hold onto the railing a little on either side, then continued up to the top. She's actually quite confident, but only because she has no inkling of how dangerous the whole thing is. She has had the ability to climb stairs for a while, but seemingly had no good reason or desire to do it. That may be changing.

Cara also had to put her measuring cups down the stairs, and when her Mommy got home she had her bath. She seems to think that one should have one's bath standing up. Cara and I had a disagreement about this. I did eventually manage to get soap on most of her, though at one point I ended up with her cruising on my shoulder and slapping my back. Now I have put her down and Evelyn is already making the bottle which we know she will want in the middle of the night. We have tried just letting Cara cry in the past in the hopes that it will make her realize she shouldn't be getting up, but it doesn't seem to have worked. We hope that whatever is making her wake up now will pass, because Ev and I are starting to get a little punchy and dazed during the day, not having had a full night's sleep in a long time!

3/8/06 (Wednesday)

Today was Grandpa George's birthday (yay!). Yesterday, as I neglected to realize, Cara was eleven months old! Fortunately, even though we did not celebrate this milestone, Cara slept through the night for once (yay!). Today, Cara's South Jersey grandparents came up to play with her and take her to the swings (if I can get my act together, I'll put up some pictures they took). She is really starting to fill out that swing seat! I missed seeing my parents, and then also was not around for when Buster came back from the vet with her big cast and the plastic cone around her head. Buster is ensconced in our game room with her own water dish, food, and litter, while Shelby remains in the basement for the night. Shelby is afraid of Buster. This, now that I think about it, is really not surprising--Shelby is afraid of pretty much everything, and seeing her sister come back with a weird cone around her head is understandably disturbing. Hopefully they will grow used to each other again.

What Cara's participation in all this will be, I don't know. We certainly aren't going to let her crawl up to Buster and start waving her leg around. During the day we will probably try to keep the door open but with our pressure gate across the doorway.

Anyway, that was our main excitement for the day, but in the evening Cara got to go visit her friend PJ. PJ had some nice new toys from his birthday, one of which we helped assemble (a little ride-on trike toy--cute). They wandered around for a bit, and did have some interactions. Cara, for instance, took PJ's sippy cup and sucked on it, but was unable to drink anything because she didn't tilt it back far enough (a problem she has with her own cups as well, as we've mentioned before). Ron also managed to snap a very embarrassing picture of me imitating Cara's arm-flapping--if I'm lucky they'll email me a copy.

Well I'd better go see about those pictures. Good night!

Oh, by the way, I am told by reliable sources that Cara actually went down the slide with her Grandpa Jim while at the park. Ha!

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