| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |

Journal Key:

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

3/23/06 (Thursday)

I keep remembering back to what was going on a year ago; a year ago today I was probably at home on bed rest, watching the Muppet Show on DVD. It is incredible how much our lives have changed since then!

Today Cara went about her usual pursuits with gusto. She drank from a glass with great success and also drank from her sippy cup with success. I gave her some shredded cheese and she enjoyed eating it and getting it everywhere, including in her hair. She ate some yogurt and, when it dribbled out of her mouth, she tried to push it back in with her hands.

We went out to the gym, where Cara was good, and also to the supermarket. I let her ride in a cart, and she got herself all tangled up. I strap her into the baby seat, but Cara likes to turn around to see where she is going. She started to get upset, and I decided that she must be stuck somehow. With great difficulty I unfastened the strap and settled her back nicely in her seat, and all was well. I've said before how much fun it is to take Cara out and see people smile at her; conversely, it's starting to confuse me when people don't smile! The woman behind us in the checkout line had a nice conversation with Cara, which is what I'm used to.

Cara is definitely a developing walker; she now will sometimes walk beside me, holding one hand. We walked all the way down the hall to the bathtub this evening, because her daddy agreed with me that the baby needed a special bath to help with the cheese in her hair and yogurt everywhere else. Earlier, Steve had been walking her down the hallway "to Mommy," when Cara happily walked right past me and into my bedroom to look in the mirror.

The peek-a-boo tournament continues. Cara and I have been playing in my bedroom, across the bed. The only problem is that sometimes we both duck down.

3/24/06 (Friday)

I'll keep this brief as George has started the bedtime routine, and that means I'll have to clear out of here quickly.

Our afternoon included another trip to the playground in the park. Cara laughed out loud on the baby swings, and climbed the other equipment with more agility and confidence than she had last week. I think she remembered it, and she seemed to love going down the slide with me. Grandma Emily was with us, and when we got home Aunt Claire was there as well.

Cara joined us for some pizza at supper. The tablecloth will be washed in the morning.

I took a page from Steve's book and pushed her around in a laundry basket; she loved it!!

The most charming moment of the day came during her bath. The Schmutz positioned himself by the rim of the tub, where he could look down and watch Cara splash. She, of course, smiled up at him and talked to him, and then, in a gesture of apparent generosity, offered him her precious washcloth not once, but twice. He didn't know what to do with it of course, but it was sweet of her to try to share.

There has been a lot of eye-rubbing going on, so we think she is tired. When I took her out of the bath, she enjoyed seeing herself in the big mirror, all rosy and cozy. Then, when I took her into the next room, she was so happy to see Grandpa that she chomped right into my shoulder again, in excitement. Once again, she seemed delighted to be getting dressed, loved being played with, and was happy to find the cat nearby. But, at the same time, she seems tuckered out and I think she will soon be sound asleep.

3/25/06 (Saturday)

Cara was a hungry, hungry girl at bedtime. George fixed just a half of a bottle; she finished it and cried for more, so I made a full bottle which she also finished. As we expected, she was asleep before 9; George has the magical aura that allows her to fall asleep. She is clearly in love with him and brightens visibly whenever she sees him.

Something woke her at about midnight. This time Aunt Claire was the first to hear the baby cry, and she carried Cara to our bedroom door. George thought she would go back to sleep without a bottle, but she seemed to be doing a lot of fussing for him, so we made one and, despite her bedtime consumption, she sucked it down as if she had been famished. To compensate, in the morning she showed no interest in the bottle whatsoever.

During the night George worked his sleepy magic once again, and in the morning we figured we had time for breakfast before she would wake, but we were wrong. Coffee was still making when we heard her voice, so we took turns with breakfast and baby-wrangling - lots of peek-a-boo going on - and then dressed our happy little playmate and sent her home.

This morning when Cara arrived we let her wander about a little in the dining room. Maybe it was because we had been a day away from her, or because she was in sort sleeves (which hasn't happened too often in the last few months), but all of the sudden I realized that she was looking like a real little girl, a toddler, and not just a baby. She's becoming her own person! Today she was playing with the full length mirror in our bedroom, and she was crouching down and standing up (no doubt amused that the baby in the mirror had come up with the same idea simultaneously) in imitation of peek-a-boo game that she plays with her Mommy. She also would reach over to one side of the mirror and try to peek around, as if expecting to find the mirror baby beyond the edge.

When I read Cara her book, Hippos Go Berserk, there is the one spread where the hippos finally do go berserk. I was reading it to her today, and she was a bit tired and was just sitting there watching me read it. But when I got to the page right before the hippos go berserk, she suddenly wanted to turn the page herself. When I get to that berserk page I get very excited and shake the book and make all kinds of crazy hippos-going-berserk noises, including explosions. Cara obviously finds this very amusing, because after I got past that page, she immediately tried to flip back and make me do it again. Smart baby!

This afternoon Evie had a lunch date with a friend, so baby and I did some hanging out together which included the events above. Another thing we did was have a banana, a la George. I broke the banana pretty evenly in half and gave Cara one of the pieces. I finished my half much more quickly, but after a while, Cara also polished off her half--completely! I was very impressed.

Cara may have been impressive with her eating, but she did not do well with her sleeping. We tried to put her down for her nap before Evie left, but she was absolutely not having it. I was confident I would get her to go down once Evie left. But the first thing I did when Evie was gone was put Cara in the car to run some errands; of course, by the time I had arrived at my first destination, she was asleep in the car seat. I had to take her out and wake her up, but she seemed happy enough to be in the stroller, awake. We went into Babies R Us, which was hopping for the weekend, and they were giving out free pieces of cake, so baby got to have some. She liked it OK.

When I got home in the car, Cara was asleep again, but I couldn't just leave her out in the car to have her nap, so out she came again, and woke up. I tried to sweep her quickly into her crib, but it was no good; I ate my lunch listening to her scream, and took her out when I was done eating. It turned out that probably part of her distress was due to the fact that she had had a bowel movement, but another nap attempt later in the afternoon failed just as completely.

When Evie got home (she had some cool books which the baby will enjoy when she's a little older), we were both tired and bored, and baby was crabby because she was refusing to have a nice solid nap, so we decided to pack her in the car again and go off to a nearby dog show we'd read about in the paper. Again, by the time we arrived, she was asleep in the car. We actually managed to transfer her from the car to her stroller without waking her up, and entered the indoor dog show; Cara might have slept through all of it, but we paused by a group of people who were clapping at the dogs and she woke up.

Cara did a lot of staring after that, but I have to admit that a great deal of it was directed at the people, not the dogs. She does love staring at people, especially ones who go by her at a good pace--she swivels her whole body around to try to track them. Eventually we had parked ourselves behind a woman with a big boxer in her lap, and the boxer dog kept looking back at us, and when it decided to stretch its legs Cara and the dog got to meet. We had a nice conversation with the owner, who was from Northern Virginia, and Cara was greeted by the dog, which excited her and got her wanting to meet a giant brown-colored poodle who was also nearby--this meeting did not occur. We are sure she did look at some other dogs, but her meeting with the boxer was a nice highlight.

Back homeward again, with another sleeping baby in the back seat, and we managed to hang about with her in the kitchen and the living room until her bed time. Evelyn is doing the sleepy stuff right now, and Cara is wearing one of her many new sets of pajamas which I bought for her.

3/26/06 (Sunday)

Cara was in her crib, loudly trying to convince me and her father that she really didn't need a nap today, when her Grandma Janet and Grandpa Jim arrived to rescue her. Steven and I were finishing up the baby book, which now has two pages left for Cara's birthday, and her grandma took her out of her crib. We hung around and played for a while, but then it turned out that Janet and I had both been thinking the same thing: it was getting to be time to try the baby out in a restaurant again.

We piled into the car and headed over to the diner where we had to wait quite a while for a table for five. Baby took turns being held by everyone, and her grandpa let her walk around a little bit. She headed straight for a crowd of people, and they all looked at her and smiled and laughed, but that was too much for her; she turned around and walked the other way. When we got seated, baby got her own paper placemat and a cellophane packet of crayons as well as a children's menu. I thought that all that would be a waste, but Cara had a great time waving the packet of crayons around, shouting about it, and chewing on it. Eventually it broke open and the crayons were taken away from her; fortunately she had no interest in them. Cara drank from her sippy cup and banged the table with my spoon, and she tried some of her grandpa's eggs and her grandma's French toast. I gave her a little bit of chicken, which she ignored as well as she could. We kept most of the things on the table out of her reach, but Cara eventually grabbed a French fry from Steve's plate. She really seems to like eating things that are large enough for her to hold onto them and bite off mouthfuls. She loved looking around at people. I'm glad it was so crowded and noisy! All in all we all had a great time for well over an hour. When we finished, there was a spoon, some egg, and also rather a lot of drool on the floor around the high chair. Honestly, things could have gone much worse!

One of the things we did yesterday afternoon was to walk out to the end of Lloyd Street to look for deer the way Grandpa George does. To our surprise, there were three of them right there, looking at us! One looked almost as if he might come over for a snack. This afternoon, we tried again. This time, we put Cara in her stroller. We didn't see any deer, but we all had a nice walk.

After Jim and Janet left, we gave Cara her second bottle of the day and she finally took a nap. We got a lot done around the house, which made me very happy as well as tired, and then baby woke up. We went and did the groceries, and then Steve made dinner. Cara and I passed most of the time by climbing up and down the stairs, but she also played with her wire tray in the kitchen. I unfolded its legs and stood it up, and she used it as a walker, scooting around the kitchen.

For dinner, Steve made some angel hair pasta with spinach and a little alfredo sauce. I cut up a little and gave it to Cara in her high chair. She enjoyed plowing her hands through it, waving it around, and even eating it. She went through quite a lot, and she also gnawed her way through a piece of bread. For dessert, each of us had a third of a banana. We weren't sure Cara could eat any more, but she handled it. She ate slowly, pausing to thoughtfully rub the banana across her head and in her ear. We elected to head for an early bath.

Now out of her bath, Cara is absolutely hyper. She ran away in her diaper to chase the cat all the way down the hall and into our bedroom. She was terribly wiggly while we were trying to get her sleeper into her, and now she is just running (well, crawling) all over the house. She and her daddy have gone up and then down the stairs at least twice while I have been writing this, and she is terrorizing the poor cat. She climbed on to the seat of her little car, from which precarious position she was removed by her father. She is making long speeches about something, often to the cat. I really wish that there were some way to translate what she's saying. She's heading up the stairs again.

Steve is a good parent. Among other things, he often tried to explain things to Cara. The other day, they had some sort of exchange which he ended by saying, "And that's why you shouldn't eat toilet paper." Now, he is kindly letting her know that grown-ups don't really climb stairs for fun very frequently.

Last week I bought baby toothpaste. Tonight, we bought a baby toothbrush. In spite of her being ridiculously wiggly, we brushed her little teeth. At least, we got a good swipe at them with a wet brush. I figure that it's enough if she gets the idea and starts to get used to it.

Last important point before I go and start helping to wrangle that baby: Steve reports that Cara saw a toy on the kitchen counter and pointed at it so that he would get it for her. Excellent.

3/27/06 (Monday)

No deer this morning, though a couple of cats drew Cara's attention. The big news today is that we skipped the noon bottle--Cara ate an entire banana and about forty Cheerios.

In the later afternoon we go to Johnson Park again so I can get a run in. It's about 55 degrees outside and should be the most pleasant trip in the stroller that Cara has had so far.

Cara actually managed to make it all day today without a bottle! Her morning one happened, of course, and she just got put down on her night time one, but the two that she usually has during the day were both skipped. In the evening, we sat down to eat dinner and Cara had a little of what we were having: chicken, stuffing, and a piece of bread. She also had some cheese and Cheerios, and though I had to hold the sippy cup at the right angle for her, she did have some juice.

In the evening Evie and I played baby tag team while we did various chores; Cara enjoyed pushing her walker toy around the dining room. Eventually we went upstairs and Cara and I took turns chasing each other up and down the hallway a little. What I did was crawl backwards away from Cara and she came after me. Then once we got to one end of the hall, she turned around and I came after her--or raced her side by side, depending. Cara clearly wanted to have her bath tonight and kept wandering into the darkened bathroom. At one point, when Ev and I were both in the bedroom, Cara would periodically crawl off to the bathroom, and when no one came to get her, she would smilingly clomp back into the bedroom to greet us.

Baby got tired and whiny as the evening wore on, and we were all a little frustrated trying to get her into a set of her new pajamas. They make the things really snug! Then she almost immediately managed to wet herself and needed to be changed out of her pajama bottoms. But finally she got her bottle and went down.

3/28/06 (Tuesday)

I used to teach a group of difficult students in an alternative-school program, and one thing I made a habit of doing was bringing in fruit for them to snack on. This lead one of them to request bananas one day, saying, "Bananas is bangin'." I bring it up only because Cara apparently feels the same way. I don't know whether she had any bananas with Grandpa, but she ate an entire one at dinner. She also had some bread and some cheese. I tossed a couple of baby carrots into the water I used to steam my asparagus, and I gave them to Cara. I was eating, so I didn't see anything happen, but I do know that we haven't found any of them yet. Next time, I'll try more.

I did a load of laundry today, so a laundry basket was upstairs. I put Cara in it and pushed her around very fast, up and down the hallway. She loved it; she stood up and hung on, and sometimes she waved one hand in the air. She loved speeding toward her daddy, but speeding toward the cat was also good. Steve took a turn pushing her, too. I wonder whether he found it to be as good a workout as I did! One rarely runs while crouched over.

We all went to the gym tonight, and Cara was perfect in the Kids Klub. The girls reported that she was all giggles, no whining at all. They did miss the way she used to laugh, back when she was a baby and snorted all the time. I'd almost forgotten about that!

Back at home, the tired baby had a bath. I was awfully good and wrassled her into her sleeper and her sack and gave her her drops. I've been feeling a little bit useless lately, since it seems like Steve does all of the hard stuff.

3/29/06 (Wednesday)

Cara had her bottle in the morning. Her nap was very desultory: she'd whine a little, then be quiet, then whine a little. She only lasted about an hour and a quarter.

For lunch (no bottle), Cara had sixty percent of a scrambled egg, the edges of a little piece of Italian bread and a few Cheerios. She drank quite a bit of water from her sippy cup.

Afterwards we went for a run in Johnson Park. On this gorgeous day, we ran successfully but when it came time for Cara to get her reward, there were no empty spots on the baby swings! After waiting around for a while, a slot opened up and Cara had her fun. Cara is beginning to develop a tan. I tried putting a hat on her for the run but she wouldn't let it stay on. I think I'm going to have to look into baby suntan lotion.

Cara has spent a lot of time in the stroller today; I took her out for about two hours in the afternoon! We went to the party store to get plates and things for her birthday, but I did stop on the way to let her go on the swings. She loved it, of course, but she also kept twisting around to watch the teenage boys playing basketball. At the party store, I could hear another baby crying. At one point, we were all in the same aisle. The two babies looked at each other and babbled back and forth, reaching out their hands to touch each other! It was adorable. I agree with Daddy, though, about the suntan lotion.

I thought that the seeming breakthrough we had in the party store portended a night of communication with PJ, but no such result ensued. He came over tonight after an absence of two weeks, and both babies had a great time, as did their parents. PJ is really walking now, and Cara, possibly to avoid letting him get ahead, did what may have been the most walking we've seen from her. They both still crawl sometimes, but PJ really can walk reliably.

PJ was playing with Cara's playground toy, spinning the spinning froggy and pushing the buttons. Cara stood up at it, too, and slowly moved over, jamming herself in front of him. Just as he used to edge her away from toys at his house, she asserted her ownership of the playground tonight. They seemed to really follow each other around; whatever one was doing, the other would come over and do the same thing. They didn't seem to talk to each other much, though. Someday they may fight. Cara possibly poked PJ in the face, but I really think she was just doing her finger-offering routine. In any case, we're one baby short of the Three Stooges.

Both babies enjoy waving things, banging things, and sticking things in their mouths. They both sort of catch things sometimes, particularly if things land in their arms, and they both can either throw things or at least let them go in generally the right direction.

| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |