First Tomato

Sam on Anna's Birthday

2010-09-28T18:23:00.001-07:00

Today is Anna's fourth birthday, and Sam spent much of the day trailing his big sister. He succeeded in climbing up onto her bed all by himself. He also climbed all the stairs at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery this morning - very nonchalantly, as if he climbs stairs all the time, even though we have no stairs in the house for him to practice on.

The great mystery at our house this week is what "a-duh-a-duh-a-duh" might mean. Sam says it all day, and insistently. It clearly means something. We think it might be a general noun - "toy"? "book"? or even something more generic such as "that"? When we point out things Sam might be interested in, he understands when we say "look" and follows a pointing finger with curiosity. If we say, "Oh, isn't that beautiful?" he repeats, "Oh!" in a short, sharp imitation.

Sam is determined to get more teeth than the four he has managed to grow so far. He is looking forward to being able to chew better. With his four little front choppers, he does a mean job biting into toast fingers and peeling apples to chomping into their flesh and prying corn kernels off cobs. He tries to chew things with non-existent molars, fails (because, hey, the molars don't exist) and then bits fall out of his mouth. He uses his dextrous little fingers to pick up any bits that fall and he delicately puts them into his mouth, and the cycle continues.

Sam isn't quite walking but isn't far off. He is able to move from standing to squatting to sitting with great ease and to edge around tables and chairs. He manoeuvres into corners and stands unsupported for quite a while before he notices and then he gently lowers himself to the ground.

I go back to work in such a short time - just six weeks or so - but Sam is uninterested in formula or in reducing his nursing. He's polite about our offers of bottles and is delighted by the action of shaking a bottle to mix in the powdered formula. He just doesn't consider it FOOD. I can't say I blame him, because I don't consider it food either, so I've decided to wait three weeks and see if he's willing to give another try to an adapted schedule. We took another conflict resolution course last week and he only had to join me at lunch time.

Sam is a morning bird, happy to wake at 5:30 a.m. if he can get away with it. He makes sure to wake both his mom and his dad with happy morning crowing, though he rarely succeeds in getting both of us out of bed at once.

His sense of humour is getting more and more defined, too. When anyone laughs, he laughs - and looks around wondering what he has done that is so funny so he can try it again. (He also thinks all applause are for him, even applause on TV.) He loves to pull my glasses off and thinks this is hilarious - this accounts for the rakish angle of my poor mangled specs, when I bother to wear them around the house. He loves it when Anna bangs things or makes them fall on the floor or yells or stomps around. In just one evening a few weeks ago, he figured out how to clap his hands, wave to people, and say "bye-bye" in just one evening, and he was terribly pleased with himself. He grins with delight when he claps or waves. He can also give kisses. He likes to press his forehead against mine and rub noses and then engulf my nose or cheek or whole head in a big slobbery kiss.

Almost a year old already, and we know from watching Anna fly through the last four years that in a blink he will be grown.

Nine Months In, Nine Months Out

2010-08-31T17:23:00.000-07:00

Summer is holding on longer than usual, though the evening crickets us tell us that fall will soon have its way with the world. Today and yesterday were late-summer beach days, with lots of splashing and swimsuits full of sand. Sam sets out to taste every rock and shell on the beach and grins with a sand-encircled mouth. He loves to feel the waves break over his feet and is curious about the undertow that pulls sand out from under him. He would crawl out to sea after his mermaid older sister if we let him.

Last week, several milestones. He showed that he can stand unsupported for at least a few seconds at a time. (This week, he even repeated the feat by standing in the ocean by himself, despite the water's movement.) He climbed three steps at Grandma Carolyn's before being stopped by his father, and he tried to climb the open ladder at home, too - and could probably make it to the top if he tried. (He wasn't allowed to try beyond one step.) On Friday, he also said Anna's name, clear as a bell. He has called her "ayayayaya" for weeks, but the other morning, he was playing in the early morning light in the living room and heard her wake. He bounced excitedly on his bum, and then when she called out "Hi, Sam," from her bedroom, he exclaimed, "Anna!"

He has four words, which he uses on whims rather than on demand, but which he uses meaningfully. He says "Ha-a" for "Hi" and then "Dada," "Mama," and "Anna." He has no word for Moonlight the cat, but that does have designs on her. He sets out to catch her often, but she has been through this baby thing before and always manages to get away. Sam would settle for a chance to squish his fingers through her catfood and dip his fingers in her water, but he gets scooped up by his mom en route to the cat's dish every time he gets close.

Sam continues to love to sing - he and Anna sing together loudly quite frequently - and he today discovered to his delight that he can reach up and play the piano.

Sam is beginning to be interested in food he has to chew and loves to gnaw messily on corn cobs. He has started eating yogurt, his first dairy food. Well, I say "first," but there was the incident at a cousin's wedding in mid-August when I heard him sucking particularly noisily on what I thought was his soother. It was actually an almost-but-not-quite-empty plastic container for a butter pat. And then there was the day he stole my chocolate dip ice cream popsicle. Cow's milk, here we come.

When he is on his own and not being hauled around by the armpits by his sister or having playthings snatched from him (also by his sister), Sam loves to play with toys. He will sit contented for whole dozens of minutes just figuring out how to flip the pages of books (and rip out the title page, if possible). He loves to play with Anna's princess castle, which has lots of little triggers for sounds and lights. He turns the knobs on Anna's play stove. He loves to talk to Anna's hobby horse, Beatrice June, and poke her plastic eyes. Today, his sister went to the park and as soon as she was gone, he lit out for her bedroom to explore her treasures. He hid under the play table and sucked on the beads of one of her necklaces and tried to flip through her books and was so happy and quiet that at one point I lost him completely. Next week, he will have mornings to himself when Anna goes to playschool. It will be an unaccustomed quiet time for all of us. (Possibly for Anna, as well, since we keep her pretty active and engaged.)

What Sam does not wish to do is go to sleep. The dastardly fourth tooth that plagued him for a month finally popped out of his gums, and he has been exploring and testing it with his lips and his fingers and his crackers. Since then, he has had a few better nights' sleep, but he still does not sleep through the night (by anyone's definition) and he now does not want to go to bed at bedtime. He wants to jump in his crib or explore the living room or sing along to lullabies or just arch his back and cry. He wants to chase the cat and see what Anna's doing. But not sleep.

In the daytime, he is down to two naps. Since he was born he was on a fairly regular routine of three cat-naps of about thirty minutes each. Now, he has two naps, and usually one or the other is an hour. When he is awake, he is always moving, exploring, playing. And soon - very soon - he will be walking, too.

It is amazing to think that he has only just past the threshold of being out in the world longer than he was brewing in my belly. What another nine months will bring...

Crawling, Climbing, Curious

2010-08-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

Now that he is almost nine months old, Sam is all personality: happy, goofy, laid-back, fun, curious, and active. Sam mastered crawling all of a sudden one day in mid-July and hasn't looked back - though he mostly uses crawling as a means to get to things he can then climb up on. We see his head and his mischievous grin peeking over the edge of the couch, our knees, the coffee table, the kitchen chairs, and the edge of his crib. And when he sees that we see him, he bounces up and down with delight.

No matter how much his sister mauls him - and she will not give him an inch of space or a moment to play on his own before she hauls him up under his shoulders and carts him around - he comes back for more. He follows her around the house, trying to do whatever she is doing.

He cut a third tooth at the end of July but is still suffering terribly for a fourth. I keep thinking that it will cut through the gum by tomorrow, but several tomorrows have come and gone and several sleep-deprived nights and no tooth yet. This evening, Sam got unusually overtired and out of sorts and couldn't manage to do anything except pull on his ear and bite me (hard) on the arms and shoulders and cry about his sore gums. Poor little pumpkin. And also poor me. I'm hard up for sleep, too.

Sam has now been on his first big trip, to Quebec for his uncle's wedding. The last forty minutes of every leg of the car trip were tough. Sam and Anna both cried miserably. Sam was saddest at the end of the first morning of driving, and when we arrived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, he was still hiccoughing in sadness and his little face was smudged and crusted with snot and tears. Lunch by the St. John River and a crawl around the Beaverbrook Art Gallery cheered him up considerably.

The second leg of the trip, to Edmundston, also ended in tears, but after he was liberated from his car seat, he and his sister loved sleeping in a tent and energetically stayed up until the sun set at 9:30 and then until all my lullaby supplies were exhausted and I was just resorting to singing age-inappropriate, mournful Leonard Cohen songs.

The next morning, he and I woke at dawn and listened to each bird and animal awake in sequence and greet the dawn. Back in the carseat, then, for a long run past Quebec City. Anna got carsick and Sam got restless, but they were really amazingly patient, and it was more than worth the trip. We arrived to playgrounds and picnic spaces and swimming pools and incoming relatives and friends. Then we shared the most lovely cottage on the lake with Emily and her family, adjoining with the other aunts and uncles.

On Friday evening, Sam got to meet his godparents, Thom and Isabelle, for the first time at a welcoming barbecue party at the cottage. He was his happy, friendly self and - we hope - made a good impression.

The wedding day was sunny and clear and full of activity and excitement. Sam wore/ate his first tie and met tons of relatives, all of whom contemplated who he looks like. (The consensus seems to be that he looks a bit like my uncle Regis and cousin Paul - with expressions like his cousin Ryan on his Dad's side.)

The wedding was beautiful, and Anna and Youders outdid themselves as flower-girl and ring-bearer. The kids were tired but mostly good during the perfectly tasteful ceremony in the glorious church. Stephen and I only missed the vows when Sam needed space and Anna needed juice. There were many small babies at the church, so also many parents loitering in back pews with restless little ones.

Back at the reception, Sam was the first party guest to take off his pants, an important precedent-setting move at any wedding. He changed into formalwear for the evening, then - a t-shirt with a tuxedo painted on it. While other guests had cocktails outside, Sam finished up his supper of beets and breastmilk and then enjoyed dancing with his mama to the jazz Thom and Isa had chosen to accompany the cocktails. We had the dancefloor to ourselves.

We didn't make it to the actual dance, though we stayed up well past bedtime, but Sam still slept in his tux. Another important precedent-setting move at any wedding.

Sunday, Sam swam in a lake for the first time and then caught up on some missed naps before we said goodbye to the cottage on the lake on Monday morning and set forth again on the highway. We put in a long day of driving with stops along the St. Lawrence before putting in for the night at a kooky little campground in NB where they played bingo in the communal campground space. We woke and packed up in the pouring rain and drove fast enough to get ahead of the low front. After a leisurely stop in Sackville to visit the swan pond and the Owens Art Gallery, we were home in time for supper. The kids were delighted to be home, though they missed the cottage and lake and all the time and attention they had gotten from their aunts and uncles.

Seven Months Sam, and Counting

2010-07-03T15:57:00.000-07:00

Another six weeks have passed since I wrote here with news about Sam. Six months and seven months are a great age - full of smiles and discoveries and emerging personality. Not many milestones in the seventh month that you can write down on a calendar, but lots of skill-building towards the big leaps that come in this eighth month and beyond...

Tonight, I watched Sam creep backwards in a circle around his vast frustration that he can't crawl forwards yet. He hates going backwards but is happier now that at least he can manoeuvre in a circle. He marks his path with drool, like a snail.

We suspect he wants to, or plans to, skip crawling and go straight to walking or possibly running. He can't sit up from a lying-down position yet, but he is adept at pulling himself to standing from sitting. If I set him down on the floor, he grabs my legs and tries to climb them. If I'm wearing pants he can get a grip on, he succeeds. If I'm wearing shorts, he wobbles around my ankle and reaches for my knee then decides if he can't pull himself up he might as well chew on my shin. With his two sharp bottom teeth, this is not comfortable for me.

Sam also loves to try to climb up on the box of board books in the living room. When he gets hold of a book, he is very pleased, and he either beats on it in an effort to open it or picks it up and chews on the corner. Beating on and chewing on are two favourite ways of manipulating objects. I read him Eric Carle's Very Busy Spider this evening, and he loved it - especially the farm animal sounds, which made him laugh. Especially the pigs.

Sam is still teething ferociously, but his third and fourth teeth are still hiding out in his gums. He is enjoying his first tastes of solid food but only likes purees - he spits out even the smallest lumps with precision. He has a sweet tooth and has yet to taste anything green that he greets with anything less than disdain and a sense of betrayal. If he likes something (applesauce, mango, sweet potato, squash) not a drop gets on his chin. If he's iffy about something, very little gets into his face and very much gets on his face.

He will put anything and everything in his mouth - except the baby crackers we got for him to gnaw on.

Sam still has a great sense of humour. He laughs and jumps with excitement watching his sister play, of course, but he is developing his own little jokes, too. He thinks it's hilarious to reach up while he's nursing and pull off my glasses. He never fails to make himself giggle with that one.

And the phonemes of the English language are set up as an elaborate joke on mamas. After nine months of gestating him and seven months of feeding him every two hours (though he is down to nursing just seven times a day, now!), I left him alone with his dad and sister just two afternoons in a row - just two afternoons, mind you - and came home to find him babbling "dadadadadada" happily. He is keen to express his opinions.

(I should note that I then paid for the two afternoons away from the baby with a blocked milk duct and I spent three days and long nights of full-time effort to prevent mastitis! Not the most fun I've ever had.)

Summer is here, and with it comes beach weather. Sam likes to sit in a puddle of warm salt water, digging in the sand with his hands and feet, tasting the occasional fistful of sand. Sam still responds in a special way to green growing things and to music. He is sitting forward-facing in the stroller, now, and he doesn't miss anything on walks. He likes to sing with his sister and loves the songs we have to mark his days, especially his "Yay, Sam, you ate it all up" song that we sing for him after every meal.

One very special happening since I posted last: the arrival of Sam's beautiful girl-cousin at the end of May. Her big brother got lots of practice taking care of babies by visiting his cousin Anna and playing with "Baby Sam."

Emily and Youdin call Sam "Baby Sam." Stephen tends to call him "Sammy" or "Sammy-boy." Anna likes to draw it out to a sing-songy two syllables - "Say-yam" - or to call him by his full name, which she pronounces "Sam-lee-oll." I seem to call him "Sam-sam" most of the time. He responds to all of these names with delight. He's never ungrateful for attention!

Six Months Sam

2010-05-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

I wish I had been a baby born in November. I am amazed at the wonder in the eyes of a baby whose awareness of the world is blossoming at the same time that the world itself is blossoming with spring flowers and grass and leaves. Sam loves plants. Ever since he was tiny, he would grasp at the green leaves of houseplants. That the world is full of these green wonders is a sheer and utter delight to him.

Sam is six months old today, still a healthy and happy baby, thriving as his world blooms. He sat up by himself - unsupported but un-expertly - for the first time in mid-April, on what would have been his granddad's eightieth birthday. Now, he sits up straight and true for as long as ever you may please. He cut his first two little teeth last week, in a torrent of drool and with two sleepless nights of discomfort. He spent the rest of the week running his tongue and lower lip over the sharp new edges on his lower gums. This week, he took his first tastes of rice cereal and quickly grabbed the spoon from his mom and his sister, the better to shovel it into his mouth.

He has been grabbing for our food for weeks and his reach has been getting longer. I had to pry some arugula from his gooey hand the other day to prevent him from making vinaigrette his first food. He has always been interested in the food we eat - when he was small, if he was hungry and the house smelled good he would cry and cry, hopeful of a morsel. He would open his little mouth like a hungry baby bird, hoping for tidbits. Rice cereal doesn't quite live up to his expectations, but he is not complaining. I think he knows it is just for practice and that the real deal is coming soon. He ate up all the cereal in his bowl tonight without remarking in the least that the rest of us had eaten pizza for every meal today.

I'm happy he's making a transition to eating some solids, finally. He has been a hungry boyo at the breast these past six months, and I've loved the convenience and healthiness of breastfeeding, but six months of sleep deprivation caught up with me after five months and this past month has been a blur of exhaustion and several rounds of colds and viruses. I'll be happy for a week (any week) with a full household free of snot, sneezes, and coughs. Ever since I had a terrible cold two weeks before Sam was born, we've all been susceptible to every bug going.

I'm beginning to think the sleep deprivation is designed to wipe a mother's memory clean of all but the happiest and most pleasurable moments of a baby's first months, though, because the memories of struggle are hard to hold onto - and who would want to hold onto them anyway? The world must be peopled!

Perhaps I am remembering wrongly, but Sam seems to me to have a lot of manual dexterity for a baby his age. He picks things up and holds them carefully and turns them around and around in ways that seem difficult. He still doesn't roll from his back to his belly but has mostly lost interest in rolling compared to sitting up or trying to crawl or testing his weight on his chubby legs.

He still has the most amazing smile and a great laugh. He still laughs most of all and hardest at his sister's activities. Whether she is galloping through the kitchen on a hobby horse or digging in the garden or hopping on one foot or pushing him on the baby swings in the park, he hollers and laughs with happiness. When Anna and Youdin play together, he follows their every move, and if he is being held in your arms, you have to hold him carefully, because he waves his arms and jumps his legs with all his might, trying to join in the games. We're still waiting for Sam's new cousin to be born and to enjoy all the stages of life we have witnessed with him this half-year gone.

Happy half-birthday, Sam. Much growing lies ahead in the next six months!

Four Months Plus

2010-03-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

Sam is four months and a week old, still a thriving and happy baby. Today, he cycled his arms in an effort to make lift-off from his dad's knee as he watched his sister circle the kitchen.

Whatever she does, he wants to do. Walk, run, dance, talk, sing, eat real food, play with toys. Watching a second child learn is different from watching a first child learn, because the second child learns so much from watching the first. He tries to talk like a child, not an adult - hearing his sister gives him more range and more options for self-expression. (Some of them shrill. Some of the quite shouty.)

Sam is more interested in toys and in manipulating objects than Anna. It could be a gender thing - he shrieked with delight the first time he played with Anna's firetruck with its wheels, ladders, and lights - but Stephen thinks it is simply an imitation thing. He sees Anna playing with toys and using objects, and he wants to as well.

Sam can flip from his belly to his back now, much to his surprise when he manages it, but he doesn't get to practise as much as Anna did at his age, mostly because Anna gives him no space at all to roll over.

All the same, I can see that these treasured and peaceful days with a baby who stays where you put him down are coming to an end, and quickly. Already, Sam kicks himself in circles and edges himself to edges. He has a body built for crawling and can already almost get his knees under him. His bum reaches an alarming height and will soon enough propel him forward and then there will be no stopping him. Those few little tasks that are now possible to accomplish with a just-set-down-for-a-moment-on-the-floor baby will soon be gone.

When he can catch up with his sister under his own steam, she will be the one who needs her parents' help to get breaks from a space-invading sibling.

Signposts

2010-03-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

This week, Stephen and I celebrated our eighth anniversary. Tomorrow is my birthday. Next week (St. Patrick's Day, and my grandmother's birthday) marks ten years since I came to own our little house. And Saturday will mark a year since I found out I was pregnant with Sam. (I was too superstitious to try a pregnancy test on my birthday.) A few weeks later, we went through a tough several days of threatened miscarriage and then another week or two of constant follow-up of HCG levels and vague disbelief that anything could work out. A year later, Sam is here after all, almost 16 weeks old, and coming into his own more every day.

After eight years married, our anniversary was all we could have hoped for. Not in a romantic sense, of course. Instead, our day was filled with unromantic events and happenings. Trying to get a wide-awake, talkative, pee-filled baby back to sleep between 3:00 and 4:30 a.m. Getting up with a chain-talking stream-of-consciousness toddler with a yen for yogurt at 6:30 a.m. Contemplating the best ways to prepare our household to transition to daylight savings time. Spelling each other off for morning catnaps (complete with cat). Stephen having his leftover spaghetti and meatballs for lunch commandeered and eaten by Anna on the pretext that "it is good to share, papa." Going skating with Anna's playschool class and helping make sure she only fell on her face and bit her lip once. Getting a whole hour to ourselves (with baby) but foregoing the planned-for "date" at an all-chocolate restaurant for our usual, ordinary coffee place because it has good changing tables and is a comfortable place to breastfeed in public. Using up the non-nursing part of our anniversary-hour-to-ourselves to buy milk and vitamin D (and some on-sale chocolate, for celebration's sake). Preparing a special meal of smoked salmon while the toddler writhed on the kitchen floor crying for smoked salmon and decrying the time it was taking to cook her some potatoes when what she really wanted was smokes salmon NOW, PLEASE, PLEEEEEASSSE! because it is her FAVOURITE!! Watching a Winnie the Pooh video all together (including cat) on our broken-down couch. Putting the children to bed. And finally watching a children's cartoon on DVD - one that we had only seen half of at the movie theatre before having to leave with a not-quite-old-enough daughter.

Just the kind of anniversary we might have hoped for eight years ago.

And as for Sam these days... He is thriving. He is still easy, happy, full of delight. He is getting stronger every day and will soon be rolling over - though he is more intent on moving forward. When he isn't eating his fingers, he is able to hold and manipulate objects better every single day and can now play with toys - a ball with baby grips, a light stuffed doggie with floppy ears, and a schoolbus that he can roll forward and back are his favourite things to play with. He watches every move his sister makes attentively and jealousy and is especially keen to bounce like she can.

Sam still nurses nine times a day. He eats less frequently at night, which is a nice adjustment, but he makes up for it by eating about every ninety minutes in the daytime. He also still takes short naps. A few two-hour naps have given us hope that he might start a trend, but they proved to be exceptions. He can't wait until he can eat real food, though, and gets really cranky sometimes at suppertime when the house is full of the aromas of good food he is evidently too small to eat. He sometimes paws at my shirt and tries to find a way in to his supper. We call this "trying to break into the refrigerator."

Sam laughs more and more, too. Peekaboo is hilarious to him, now, and so are peeks into the mirror with his dad. Sneezes always make him laugh, and when I choked on a cracker last week, he thought that was a hilarious performance put on just for him. Getting his clothes taken off is a guaranteed cause for a giggle. As the temperature cracks above freezing and the sun comes out, he loves walks outside in the fresh air, smelling and seeing the spring as it peers at us from its hideout, just around the corner.

He is eager to communicate and likes to mimic the shapes of people's mouths. Stuck-out tongues and raspberries are a big hit with him. Singing makes his eyes shine. His favourite noises to make himself are a happy hooting owl-baby sound (hoo! hoo! hoo!) and "ngluh! ngluh!" He has never been very ambiguous in his messages. When he's hungry, he says so clearly. When he is tired, there is no doubt. When he is pissed off at his sister invading his space, he yells at her.

Sam also makes special grunts when he wants to play and grunts non-stop until he gets to lie on the floor and kick his legs or jump up and down on someone's lap. ("It's kicking time!" his sister says, and hauls out the playmat and then hogs most of the space on it.) He also loves to arch his back far back and stretch out his strong spine.

Sam is almost big enough for many things he is keen to do, but he is still just "almost" for now - almost teething, almost sitting up, almost ready for his exersaucer, almost ready to taste rice cereal, almost rolling over, almost outgrowing his 3-6 month sleepers, almost able to fend off his sister. In two more months, it will truly be spring and he will truly be past some of these signposts and gazing towards the next things he wants to be able to do.

The Happiest Baby in the World

2010-02-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

Three months old today. Congratulations, Sam!

Sam had such a nice day, he is just telling me as he settles to sleep. He is in his bassinet, stroking the soft seam on the right and the meshy mesh on the left, creaking and drooling and snorting softly as he gets ready for sleep. He tried to convince us that 5:30 was time to get up for the day this morning - no, thank you, it is not. But he was ready for the day when it arrived.

He visited both his grandmas today and saw numerous aunts and uncles and was especially charming - laughing and trying to talk very obligingly. By bedtime, he was pulling himself off my breast to tell me things - happy and important things like "glah-glah-guh" and "om-mmom-glah." He also made a valiant attempt to follow the Vancouver Olympics women's curling round robin and men's downhill ski cross finals.

He seems to have come through the intense part of his three-month growth spurt and is settling in to new routines and a new size of diapers. He literally outgrew size ones overnight, in one of those amazing "didn't these fit him yesterday?" sort of moments that make parents wonder if their diapers or minds are playing tricks on them.

We wanted to jot down some of the special things about Sam in his first three months before we forget them. Some of these we might have mentioned already, but we thought it would be fun to compile a little list of quick memories in no particular order or developmental significance.

When Sam was born, we called him our Growly Bear for the grunts and growls he made, especially when he was hungry. Sometimes he seemed to think he had to hunt down the breast and subdue it with slobber before chomping on it.
Sam rarely cries during the night. He just growls until his mom wakes up - or he chews madly on his hands until the sound of slobbery sucking wakes her.
A great eater and lover of food, Sam often is grouchy at the supper table when the kitchen smells of supper and everyone but him is tucking in to a tasty meal. He can't wait to get his hands on something delicious.
It was impossible to say when his first social smile was because Sam has always been able to smile with his eyes and always defaults to a happy, contented expression when he isn't crying or howling in outrage. He started to turn on the charm on purpose at three weeks, but even though he is the happiest baby in the world, it has seemed hard to catch him smiling wide for a photo. This is partly because he is often photographed with his sister, and this requires wariness in his expression - a survival tactic, I'm sure. Also, he likes to stick out his tongue.
Sam loves to have his clothes changed. When I take off his shirtie, he giggles with delight. While he is on the changing table, he also loves the red wall beside him and since he was very small has loved to talk to the red wall. He loves baths, of course, but he has dry skin and so most often gets sponged down. I often seem to forget to wash my baby. Oops.
Sam gets the hiccups often, and if they last too long, he is outraged by them. He frequently hiccuped before he was born - but it mostly began at about eight months' gestation, about three days after I foolishly said out loud, "This baby doesn't seem to get the hiccups nearly as much as Anna did."
Sam is very tactile - he loves to explore different textures with his fingers and to stroke uneven and surprising surfaces. Nothing makes him happier. He is gaining more ability to manipulate his fingers every day. He still delights in hanging his right hand high over his head and watching himself sway it back and forth.
Now that he is three months old, Sam loves to sit up and take notice, and he also loves to test his feet under him to see how much of his weight they can hold, but when he was smaller, he liked to tuck his feet up under him much more than his leg-stretching sister ever did. Sam preferred to stretch his back rather than his legs, always arching deeply backwards to see what was going on behind him. He has always seemed fascinated by ceilings and ceiling-related architectural features!
Sam's back was so strong and flexible - and he was so squirmy - that he often flipped himself from his belly to his back (inadvertently) in the first few weeks of his life. The first two times, I thought for sure it was a fluke. The third time made me rethink that conclusion...
Sam squirmed in his sleep for the first week of his life. Then he used his sleep time to rest up for full-on activity while awake. Now that he is three months old, he complains if he hasn't had enough time to stretch and kick and sit up.
Sam has always been pretty focused on his food sources when his mom holds him, but with his dad, he enjoys more varied experiences. As a tiny baby, he loved to push his head under people's chins, especially his dad's bearded chin. He loved the texture. He and his dad also love to look in the mirror - and it's fascinating to think about what Sam sees and perceives there. Sam also loves to drift off to sleep on his dad's arm in a football hold, usually while we are eating lunch.
We used to call Anna's arms the "lateral stabilizers" because she thrust them out so forcefully from her body while she slept - but Sam has taken to falling asleep and waking up with his hands behind his head, in the universal gesture signifying "laid-back dude." Stephen thinks this might be a sign of his personality-to-come.

There are so many things we've probably forgotten already - but if others occur to us, I'll jot down another list soon.

Anna often describes Sam as "delighted," and she is right that he delights in life, in people, and in his senses. It's hard not to share his delight on these days of discovery for him - even though it can be a challenge to be delighted on six hours' (interrupted) sleep.

Sam's Birth Day

2010-02-06T16:22:00.001-08:00

Depending on who you ask, Sam was due on November 11 or November 16th. For months, I had schizophrenically switched back and forth between preparing for an early birth and saying I was holding out for a Sagitarrius. In the end, Sam was neither early nor a Sag. But he was welcome, welcome, welcome when he arrived on November 21.

I had hoped to have a natural childbirth after the stressful recovery from Anna's birth by emergency c-section following 17 hours hard labour. I felt confident that the baby I was carrying was in a happy head-down position and keen to drop. But November 11 and November 16 passed with no signs of early labour. Due to my "advanced maternal age" and being "past my dates," I received lots of follow-up from the hospital to make sure the baby was doing well. A biophysical exam at Labour and Delivery on the 13th showed he was doing great - he was just very comfy where he was. On Sunday the 15th, I accidentally poisoned myself with gluten - like the world's worst dose of castor oil - and was violently ill for two hours. We made a trip to Labour and Delivery to make sure all was well and that the baby wasn't dehydrated. Despite intensified Braxton-Hicks contractions into that evening, not even my major purge started labour.

Back to Labour and Delivery on Tuesday, where I was determined not to be induced. My effort to steel my nerve against medical pressure was wasted. There wasn't anything happening labour-wise that could be sped up anyway.

Another biophysical on Friday the 20th - another healthy, happy baby, growing by the day and sucking madly on his fist. I was so encouraged to see him sucking on his fist in utero - after Anna's inability to suck, I was so hopeful I would be able to nurse my new little one. And I was determined not to compromise nursing by enduring labour AND an emergency section, if I could avoid it. And, frankly, Stephen and I just didn't know if we could manage the recovery from a section after a labour with an active and demanding three-year-old to care for at home.

On that morning of the 20th, when there were still no signs at all of labour, and I knew I had been walking, running, and jumping as much as humanly possible to get things moving, we were content to book a section. We thought Tuesday, November 24, would be a great day to have a baby, for instance. That would give us a leisurely weekend to get prepared and a few more days to hope that everything would take its course swiftly and naturally. Our doc was thinking along the same lines.

Except the OR was booked solid. For the whole week.

The options were to wait a week, spending a few exhausting and uncomfortable hours every two days on monitors at Labour and Delivery and risking an emergency section if nothing progressed. Or fasting overnight, arriving at the hospital on Saturday morning, and hoping for an opening in the operating room on November 21st.

Stephen and I had quite an afternoon on Friday, getting ready for the baby to be born the next day. Despite all the many months of waiting, I couldn't get my head around the thought that the baby would arrive the next day. The only thing I accomplished all day was a trip to buy a supply of magazines for reading at the hospital.

We managed a reasonable night's sleep and arrived at the hospital the next morning. The operating room was booked for six procedures already, and no one could say how many emergencies would emerge in the course of the day. We had expected to know by 9:30 a.m. if today would be the day, but it wasn't until 11:00 a.m. that the docs told us they thought we would get in by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and they hooked me up to an IV.

I figured 4:00 or 5:00 would really mean 6:00 or 7:00, but we had enough magazines to carry us through the day, and when word came at 5:00 that we would be waiting until 7:00, we were tired and excited but prepared to wait that final few hours. Our doula, Sylvie, helped the last hours pass before they came to prep me for surgery.

It seemed like we were only in the operating room for moments before we heard a baby's lusty cry on the other side of the curtain - so strong and loud and pissed off to be disturbed it hardly seemed real. He was born at 8:10 p.m., a solid 9 pounds and 3 ounces, almost 20 inches long. We named him Samuel Francis and held him for the first time. His dad and Sylvie cared for him that long first hour while I waited in the recovery room and while Sam made sucking faces waiting to eat. I got back to the room tired and almost as thirsty as the baby, and I fed him and then barely slept all night, I was so excited to see him in the bassinette beside me, and so sure he would wake at any moment, since he squirmed in his sleep constantly for that first week of his life.

We got home on Tuesday, after a short and not-too-stressful stay in hospital, and Anna met her brother for the first time when she got home from playschool. She bounced in the door, nervous but excited, and said, "I love him!"

Anna still asks for her "just-born story" every night before she goes to sleep, and this is her brother Sam's "just-born story."

The Amnesia Bits

2010-02-06T16:00:00.001-08:00

In my two posts since Sam was born, I have painted the happiest picture of our time together, and in truth our time is very happy. But in fairness to other new parents and parents-to-be, I must acknowledge the Amnesia Bits: the difficult bits that we forget almost as soon as they occur because sleep deprivation and nature need us to forget them for the good of the continuation of the species.

For instance, the night when the baby is about six days old when he has been cluster-feeding at a different time every single day and his mother's new milk supply can't get in sync with his schedule, and she hasn't had more than two hours' sleep in a row since the baby was born and is sore from surgery and carrying a baby around, and it's one in the morning and the three-year-old is awake due to the crying baby's crying, and this whole breastfeeding thing seems like a monumentally bad idea, and you try to get your loving partner to come out from settling the three-year-old and to find an all-night pharmacy that will sell him some FORMULA and a BOTTLE and FAST before mama loses her mind.

Hypothetically speaking. You can see how this kind of scenario would be possible. If it happened to me, it slipped my mind almost as soon as Stephen talked me down from the late-night pharmacy search and patiently picked up a bottle and some formula in the morning. (The formula can remains unopened ten weeks later and the bottle has only been used for breastmilk.)

I don't remember any of it, of course, but in the first two weeks of any baby's life it is impossible to hold a thought in your head, and if you manage to hold a thought, it is likely to be an irrational one and it would be better for all involved to let it go.

In eleven weeks, Anna has had three overlapping colds. Sam shared the first one, when he was just three weeks old, and we spent five nights sitting up with both kids, each of us keeping one of the sitting upright so they could breathe better. Anna went on to a croupy cough, a reprieve over Christmas, then another bad cough that went away only to be replaced with a different cough and cold two days later. And now Sam has the new cold, though he is not so thoroughly sick and run-down as his sister.

Add to the rotating rhinoviruses the ordinary difficulty of adjusting to a new sibling, and Anna has had a tough time all-round. She adores her brother and her role as a big sister - which she takes very seriously. She plays with Sam on his playmat and sings songs and reads stories to him. She holds him any time she is allowed to. And she's not jealous, per se. She's just confused, and overwhelmed, and inspired to regress in all the predictable ways for a child her age who is faced with a new sibling. She's so precocious verbally it is sometimes hard to remember that emotionally, she's just a three-year-old kid.

The other challenge already best forgotten was my breastfeeding injury of two weeks ago. I managed to sprain my elbow so painfully that it was swollen and immovable for five days. I did this by hiking up and tensing my shoulders while feeding Sam in the middle of the night - and made it worse and worse because I had to feed him every two hours. Fortunately, a massage and some careful work to stretch my shoulders and arms and position myself in the best possible posture healed the injury.

I seem to have been almost housebound for a different reason every week since Christmas - Anna's adjustment back to a regular routine one week, lack of a second stroller until we picked up one secondhand another, a dramatic dip in temperature after mild mild winter days a third week. Then the injury, and the colds, blah blah blah. It has all added up to some serious inertia, but we're beginning to see the light.

In fact, we're the last in our neighbourhood to still have our Christmas lights blinking. This is so we continue to see the light during the long Canadian winter. Stephen unplugged the lights on the front and back deck today, but we'll leave up the festive solar twinklers in the hawthorn bush. They are a great reminder of how much longer the days are getting, week by week. At Christmastime, the solar panels only collected enough light for about three hours of evening twinkling. On these sunny, snowy days, the lights sometimes collect enough sunlight to stay on almost until dawn.

Eleven Weeks

2010-02-06T15:42:00.001-08:00

Sam is eleven weeks old today. With his second cold of the winter scratching at his throat and making his nose run, he has had a few moments of frustration today, and he expresses his frustration pretty clearly. But mostly he has been his active, cheerful self. He's pretty easy on the head, is Sam, and pretty fun to be around.

He has discovered his hands. Today, he spent a lot of time watching himself wave his fist in the air, moving it in all directions. A few times, he accidentally bonked himself in the head with the waving hand. When he eats, he soothes himself with his hands interlaced, as he has done since he was born, caressing his hands and fingers and wringing his hands together. These days, he also unclasps his grip to explore the textures around him, patting the nubbles on my sweater or waving his hand from my bare skin to my soft shirt. He also spends a lot of time trying to swallow his fingers, hands, or entire arms - whatever he finds he can fit in his mouth, and whatever he can soften up with his copious drool. We've wakened more than one night to the sound of his slurping on his fingers. He still doesn't cry at night unless he has to.

Sam is a ravenous baby, still nursing every three hours or so at night and every two hours during the day. While I was feeding him yesterday, Anna looked at him and said, "Mommy, he has got hold of you and I think he is going to eat you all up." Yes, I sometimes think so too. Mostly, I hydrate and lactate all day, every day. And while I still haven't slept longer than 3 1/2 hours at any stretch since he was born, I am grateful for his consistent patterns and good cheer through the night and have nothing to complain about. He eats at 10:30 p.m. or 11, then we're up at about 2:00 a.m. and about 5:00 a.m. Breakfast then starts at 8:00 a.m. The time goes quickly - though nights seem to pass slower than weeks. It is hard to believe how quickly he is growing. Almost three months already!

Today, he was intent on doing something with his toes. It might have been because the feet of his sleepers had striped fabric, and he loves to look at stripes. (I still have all the striped shirts I got to stimulate Anna when she was first born, and Sam loves them, too.) Any time he was sitting up, he tried to fold himself in half to reach his toes, throwing himself forward and grunting. He followed the cat with his eyes for a while today, too, but wasn't quite sure what to make of her.

He enjoys time on a playmat on the floor, doing his baby pushups with his strong, flexible back, or lying on his back and kicking. He is almost always in motion, even when he is eating. He is curious and a close observer of his surroundings. He loves to watch his sister's non-stop activities and is an appreciative audience for her performances of dance and song. He can get hold of her mane of wild blonde hair now and play with it in his fingers. He tries to sing along when people sing to him, too, and shows how much he loves music with big smiles and generous laughs.

People who meet Sam most often comment on how handsome he is - with those big, full lips, that have never lost their milk blisters - and how content he is. He has an easy way about him. He doesn't cry or fuss much, but when he does, his messages aren't very ambiguous. May he always be so blest.

Sam

2010-01-05T15:19:00.001-08:00

No news these past many months has been good news. Anna is now 3 1/4 and has a new sibling, Sam, who is now six weeks old. I'll use this space to tell stories about his early months, just as I did for Anna before him.

Before Sam was born, he was so active I thought I would have a baby who would never sleep. When he was finally born, a healthy nine pounds and three ounces, I found out that he just squirmed in his sleep. This slowed down after about a week, but the first night of his life, I was so excited to meet him and so delighted at the prospect of feeding him, I couldn't sleep a wink. Every time I would begin to doze off, his squirming would convince me he was about to wake up at any moment, and my eyes would flip wide open just to admire him until he might wake.

A gorgeous baby with prominent nose and broad cheeks and gigantic, soft lips, he looked like a tiny little old man - an impression only enhanced by his furrowed brow and constant worry (mostly about milk supply). Sweet-tempered and more likely to yell vigorously than to cry, he was only deeply infuriated by hiccups in those first days. He was a good eater from the first, though sometimes he would yell for half an hour with his mouth at my breast before finally just closing his mouth and eating.

The hospital where he was born had moved to maternity-centred care in the years since Anna's birth, so it was delightful to be able to share a room with Sam and have a nurse to share between us. Visitor restrictions because of the H1N1 flu pandemic meant that Anna couldn't come to meet him and only his Dad and our doula, Sylvie, could come and go from the hospital. We missed having a chance to show him off to others in those first few days, but it was blessedly restful to have limits on the visitation, too, and it meant I could go home with him in record time.

It could be the sleep-deprivation talking, or the little computer chip they put in new mothers that deletes negative memories, but it's hard to imagine more peaceful and joyful six weeks than we've had so far. We are grateful to family and friends for all their help and support and spirit of celebration. More news to come from these special days.

1-2-3-4

2008-02-18T15:30:00.000-08:00

Anna has hit that stage of development that leads children to fixate on their favourite song and replay it until their parents go mad. Anna is on a full-on kick for Feist's fantastic "1-2-3-4." It was bad enough when all she knew was which CD to insist on and which buttons on the stereo to stab at until the song would play. Then, this being an multimedia age, we decided she might like to see the video on YouTube. (Anna doesn't get to watch any TV at all, so we indulge her love for kitties and horses and puppets and goofiness by letting her watch wee bits and snatches on YouTube.)

Now, after playing the song twenty or fifty times in a row on the stereo, she stands at the bottom of the stairs pointing up to where the computer is, humming the tune and doing a special Feist dance. She loves the video, with lots of people dancing to her favourite song in happy colours.

After her daily Feist-ival, she spent the remains of the day eating potatoes (she can eat a whole one even when I can't) and changing the diaper on her doll, who apparently was full of pee for a non-wet-ems type of doll.

Another milestone: she helped her mom make cookies for the first time today. She whisked the dry ingredients and hardly got any strewn around the kitchen, and she poured in the chocolate chips. She was very proud. She brought several cookies to her dad to show off her helpfulness. (Of course, she also memorized the location of the chocolate chips and snuck a handful later in the day when we weren't looking, but that's another story.)

The weather has been dreadful, dreadful this winter, going from bad to worse and back again, and she has been as prone to cabin fever as any of us. When she wants an adventure or just to get out of the house, she takes your hand and leads you to her snowsuit or sits on the floor putting on her boots.

She likes longer and more sophisticated storybooks now -- the kinds with actual stories in them, rather than just short rhymes and rhythms. She tells stories, too, though still not in so many words. She tends to save words for special occasions, such as "cheese" and "shoes" and "kitty" and "eyes" and "yay" and "yippee." Her favourite word is still "daddy," though she throws in a "mommy" now and then when the occasion demands. Her bottle is a "bobby" and her dollies are "babies." She has had lots of opportunity to watch snowplows and salt trucks this winter, and she loves them. She stands in the window saying "vrmm." She can pick pictures of large snow-moving machines out of the tiniest, blurriest pictures in the newspaper before we even notice them.

Anna has extra teeth, too -- at least fourteen now, with two new incisorry types on the bottom. (That might explain some sleepless nights a while back.) We assume she's growing, because she's eating like a horse. Today, when offered her favourite pasta casserole for lunch, she said "yay" after every bite. When I called home from work, I could hear her raucous celebrations.

She's up to so much these days, it's impossible to keep up. We're sure she'll really bloom when spring arrives and she can get out of the house more and enjoy the yard and the world's blooming things and returning birds and sunshine. (Are these possible? Hope so!)

Sixteen months, and whadda ya get?

2008-01-28T16:31:00.000-08:00

Anna is sixteen months today and is making the day last as long as she can by not going to sleep. Her father is taking a turn settling her, but all her "don't-put-me-in-that-crib" sensors are super-special-sensitive this evening, for whatever reason.

When each day is as full as Anna can make it, it is challenging to document her doings -- especially since I sometimes make an effort to hold down a full-time job or complete additional projects. But today is as good a day for a snapshot as any day.

Anna had a busy weekend, with five separate visits, parties, or activities. She had a chance to show off her social skills with other children her age and revealed, again, an odd admixture of Stephen's social style and mine -- quiet and observant for a long while, taking in all the activities from the sidelines (like Stephen) then being bossy when she finally gets in on the action. (We don't know where the bossiness comes from. Ahem.)

Of course, Anna doesn't interact with other children at all if she has an option to go up and down stairs. She has shifted her focus from walking and running (old hat) to climbing, an activity that led her to learn how to climb the furniture and stand in the windowsill over the Christmas holidays. She can climb her high chair in seconds, if the tray table is not there to block her ascent. She also has learned to move kitchen chairs up to the cupboard or the table or the sink to get what she wants to reach for.

Today, most of her climbing took her up to window-level to watch two big trucks from the electrical company repairing a damaged pole outside our house. This was endlessly fascinating, since Anna loves big trucks and plows and says "Vrmmm" happily to all of them.

At 10:30, the lure of the big trucks outside combined with a realization she hadn't been to a party yet all day, and she fetched her scarf and snowsuit and headed for the door. Once outside, she walked to the car and asked to be taken for a drive. With freezing rain in the offing, this was not an option, so we walked up and down the sidewalk, crunching ice pellets under her snowboots, and keeping an eye on the progress of the line repairs.

Later on, Anna would only eat her lunch with her hat and scarf on, just in case an opportunity for a party or other adventure might come up suddenly and without warning. Her diet these days consists of stuck together food -- casseroles -- especially those stuck together with tomato-vegetable sauce. She's still crazy about protein-rich foods like meat and beans and cheese and eats berries until they are all gone. Ketchup is a food group. Gravy can be eaten by the fistful when one is motivated sufficiently. And yogurt is eaten independently, from a grown-up bowl with a grown-up spoon.

Anna was helpful all day -- helping her parents by wiping the table (standing on a chair and swishing with her facecloth) and folding and putting away the laundry (dumping the clean laundry on the floor, crumpling up underwear, and "putting it away" by dumping it on the bedroom floor, just like her parents) and sweeping the kitchen floor (spreading the dirt around with a badly handled broom and screaming if the broom got taken away) and putting away the dishes (standing on a chair by the sink and handing dishes to me to dry -- or tossing them back into the sink if they didn't meet her exacting standards for cleanliness).

She tended her doll carefully today. She dressed her doll in a new outfit and checked her diaper and shared her cookie and washed her face with a cloth. Dolly gets a lot of rides on the rocking horse, usually accompanied by Anna and also dolly's teddy bear. And bunny. It gets a bit squishy.

Anna (and dolly) love books, especially ones with farmyard animals Anna can imitate. Today, Anna also learned from one of her books that kittens like to play with balls of string, so we found a ball of string and woke poor Moon, who was napping unsuspectingly and was roused to a game of chase the string by a delighted, squealing toddler. Anna waves her hands in the air when she gets excited now.

Anna did her yoga stretches in the tub this evening. She usually does them on the living room floor, but she didn't get around to it with everything else that was going on. When she meets someone new, one of the first things she likes to show them is her yoga routine, which is elaborate and runs from downward dog to triangle postures to lying-on-her-back-with-her-feet-in-the-air poses. Just like her mom, she loves to stand on her head, with a little help. And just like her mom, she avoids the "hero" posture, virasana, even though it's usually a natural for kids to flop down in.

Anna understands everything and communicates her needs very clearly, but her poor independent little heart wants words, now, and she is frustrated that they are slow in coming. She's very good at the words she has, but she wants a bigger vocabulary. If vocabulary displaces some of the high-pitched screaming, her parents will be delighted, but we figure we're in for more yelling more often for more months than we are prepared for. Today's new word was "baby," a word that well describes what Anna Sophia is not, anymore.

Close Shave

2007-11-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

One more cute thing I forgot to mention that Anna did this past weekend: She was looking at photos on the mantelpiece of Grandma Marjorie's. Her auntie Sandra asked Anna to point to mommy, and Anna pointed to the picture of me from our wedding. Then Sandra asked Anna to point to her dad, and Anna looked at the picture from the wedding, scrutinized it, and instead pointed to a picture of her dad from his sister Mary Jane's wedding.

Why? Stephen had a beard when Mary Jane got married and was clean-shaven for our wedding, and Anna has never seen her dad clean-shaven! If he ever shaves again, Anna won't recognize him.

Time/Change

2007-11-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

Someone Anna-sized didn't get the memo that the clocks went back an hour on Saturday night. Or she got the memo but can't read yet.

We tried to keep Anna awake a little later last night to begin to align her body clock with the kitchen clock, but at 6:30, which felt to her like 7:30, she felt strongly that her parents were overlooking her needs and had forgotten her nightly rituals, so she grabbed her father's hand, led him to the bathroom door, looked at him meaningfully so he would understand he was supposed to run a bath, then wandered to her changing table to get a facecloth.

She is either a smarty-pants or she is as routine-oriented as her dad!

At thirteen months, Anna is an expert walker and now is willing to sit and play for whole minutes at a time. She loves to sit on anything at bum-level: the crossbar at the bottom of her highchair's support, the baseboard heaters, the cat. Her grandma gave her a little stool to sit on, and she loved to spend happy minutes sitting on it -- for the first hour she had it at home. Ah yes, off and on for that whole hour, she sat by the pots and pans and clattered them happily. Then -- bored -- she picked up the wee stool, carried it to the living room, maneuvred it to the side of the piano, climbed up on it and stood there playing a little "tune" of her own devising and dancing precariously close to the stool's edge.

She learns new things every week. On Saturday, when she hosted a three-hour gallery opening for her father, she learned to blow kisses. (Thank god someone in this family can schmooze.) She has also learned this week that she can get her parents to follow her by grabbing them and pushing them or dragging them in the direction she wants them to go. ("There -- towards the crackers!" "Here, where my blocks are!")

And her repertoire of dance moves expands every day. At first when she started dancing, she mostly bent her knees and bounced her bum. Now, her whole body has got the action. She dances in ways she has never seen anyone dance -- it is all inborn in her rhythmic little person and her happy little imagination. She bounces her bum and moves her arms and bobs and dips her shoulders and head. All it takes is someone clapping their hands or threatening to hum a tune, and she's all a-dance. Her favourite CDs these days have Latin rhythms. Salsa, mambo . . . you name it. She loves music and sings more and more. It is again possible to figure out from her body language and her singing which songs she likes best on any given CD. She likes all the songs good and loud, too!

Now that Anna has eight teeth through, she is also very independent about her food. She eats grown-up food with gusto, protein most of all, the spicier the better. She's never met anything tomato-based she didn't like. And if her parents want to eat an apple, they can only do so in a dark room with the door closed -- otherwise, the apple will be stolen and gnawed on ferociously, consumed with startling efficiency. Anna is not satisfied to eat with her fingers (like her mother does, since her mother has never had a good relationship with cutlery or society). She now wants to control her own spoon. This results in a lot of soup and yogurt on the floor, on her parents, on her lap, on the cat. We might not give her soupy foods until her motor control matches her control-freakiness.

Verbally, Anna meows. She says "Shh" with her finger to her lips and whispers her garbly babytalk if the cat is asleep and doesn't want to be wakened. She doesn't say a whole lot of words, but she still manages to communicate very well and she understands everything she is asked. She will get a book if you offer to read to her, knock on a door if you step behind a closed one, hide if you say you're going to find her, get her shoes if you say it's time for a walk, get a facecloth from her changing table if you say it's bathtime.

And if you are her parent and are not giving her your full attention, she communicates her displeasure by scooping up the catfood and throwing it across the room. Which is why the cat now sometimes is served her supper on the counter. Fortunately, Moon loves to play with Anna as much as Anna loves to play with Moon -- otherwise, the food-swiping would be an issue for the cat as much as for the parents.

Anna's keen on "helping" when she's feeling less destructive, though -- putting away stacks of laundry (if by putting them away you mean picking up folded laundry, dragging it to the next room, and dropping it behind the furniture), tidying up her toys (if by tidying you mean throwing them in a box and then standing on top of the box), and sorting her socks (if by sorting you mean pulling them out onto the floor, putting half back into their box, and stogging the rest under the furniture).

Anna is still pretty popular with her parents and grandparents and relatives and friends, for all.

Birthday Daze

2007-09-30T16:17:00.000-07:00

Anna has now celebrated her first birthday. For, oh, about three days now. I took the actual birthday-day, Friday, off work in hopes we could have some family adventures, but, alas, it was very rainy, and we barely got a walk in without a drenchin'. But we got a head-start on baking and preparing for the birthday party, and we went to the grocery store. Always fascinating.

Here is a snapshot of Anna at one: She has shifted to one nap a day, but has not yet quite adjusted to getting less sleep in the daytime and so can sometimes get a little wild. (We're in favour of lengthening the one nap, a strategy she hasn't hit upon for herself yet.)

At one, she loves accessories and checks the bangles, earrings, necklaces, shoes, and handbags of everyone who comes in the door. At the end of the day, when her mom gets home from work, it is often hard to tell if Anna is happier to see her mom or her mom's brooch, watch, and (occasional) necklace.

At one, Anna has lots of hugs and kisses for her family, immediate and extended, and she loves spending time with all her grandparents. She has special rituals with each of them and has broken at least one of each of their possessions.

At one, Anna loves to cuddle up with a book and someone to read it to her. She knows what will happen on the next page of her favourite books and makes particular sounds and gestures that anticipate the next page and show how well she remembers the story. She loves to look at paintings, pointing out one colour at a time and wanting it named; pointing out cats or birds or objects she knows in the pictures. (She also likes to explore paint textures with her fingernails, but don't tell her father.)

At one, Anna spends most of the rest of her time following the cat from room to room (and the cat spends her time walking from room to room trying to be followed). Peekaboo has expanded into hide and seek as Anna has become mobile and can sidle down the side of the couch. She is so mobile on her feet, she barely scoots on her bum at all.

At one, her word comprehension is still much better than her ability to speak, and "ga" (which also specifically means "cat" or "dog" when spoken with specific inflections) is her general word for almost all concrete nouns. "Mmm" is her sound for all animal noises.

At one, she carries around shoes and reorganizes her socks. She is a connoiseur of blackberries, raspberries, and varieties of cheese. She holds phones (and remote controls) to her ear and wanders the house babbling into them, but if the phone rings and gets held to her ear with a familiar voice on the other end, she just smiles and laughs. She is still very solemn when she is observing new places and people and very giggly with the people she knows and loves.

She's a lot of fun, though it takes some effort to say so after the ordeal of getting her settled this evening after a weekend of over-stimulation. Her party on Saturday saw all her local family members and some special guests from BC (including a nine-month-old second cousin) gather for lunch and time to admire her in a pretty dress and fancy (clunky) shoes. After the party ended, she woke from her nap and went to the livingroom and cried to see that everyone had gone home.

And today, a long autumn walk along the bay where her forebears lived, and another visit at Grandma Marjorie's, the Sunday afternoon visit that has come to be called "The Viewing." Anna will find the week at home with her dad quite a come-down after all the feteing.

Back to Work

2007-09-10T17:12:00.001-07:00

Today, Anna Sophia's mom went back to work. We experimented with me going to work last week, when I attended a workshop for a couple of days and also spent some time in the office surveying the clutter I had left behind me when I went on leave a year ago.

I came home from a half-day reintroduction to the work world to a happy baby, well-fed, and a not-yet-too-tired-to-make-sentences parent. She had only fallen on her head once, with only a mild abrasion to the cheek and a minor bump on the head. She had enjoyed her lunch so much, I could tell what she ate by looking at her shirt and pants.

Since her first steps, Anna retreated into more tentative wall- and furniture-surfing, insisting on having her hand held for longer trajectories and higher speeds than she could manage solo. But the last few days, walls and furniture have been left behind. Today, she walked from the kitchen to the living room and back numerous times, including one particularly exciting naked romp (during which she was atypically staggery, having lost the ballast of three pounds of pee in her diaper to help her maintain her centre of gravity).

She is also very chatty. We haven't the foggiest what she's saying, but she asserts herself in every conversation, usually with some vigorous nods of the head.

A favourite game of Anna's is the tickle game. She sneaks up behind someone who is crouched down or bending over and tickles them, making a special high-pitched tickling noise so they know they are being tickled.

When she's not walking or talking or tickling these days, she's kissing. She now puckers up her whole face to come in for a big smooch. She still doesn't like to get prickled by her dad's beard and so spends extra time taking careful aim and lining up lips when she's giving him a kiss. (So do I!)

Many kisses -- air kisses mostly -- are directed at the cat. Moon loves being chased as much as Anna loves chasing her, tho' we'll see how Moon responds when Anna is actually able to do some catching. Most mornings, Moon tears around the house, comes to a rest somewhere semi-accessible within Anna's line of vision, and waits to be noticed and followed -- then she tears away as soon as the baby is near. Both Moon and Anna especially enjoy the sofa. Moon goes back and forth behind it and Anna goes back in forth in front of it, and rarely the twain do meet until one or the other is too tired to resist any longer.

Today, she also figured out how to make a sound on the tin whistle, though the piano and the pots-and-pans orchestra remain her instruments of choice. She's been trying for days to get the damn thing to whistle for her. We've shown her how to exhale into it, but she would just grab it and hum a slobbery tune into it and hope for the best. Accidental exhalations, followed by flutey noises, followed by praise and applause from her audience let her know she was on the right track today. So she started alternating humming into it with making it whistle. The slobber remains the consistent element.

She's teething, and we have absolutely no idea what we're doing when it comes to putting her to bed or keeping her in bed at night, but the fact is that she is way, way ahead of us and when we're groggy, we lose even more ground to her nefarious strategies. Here's her logic: If I cry until I throw up, Mom and Dad will have to lift me out of my crib and change all the sheets and by that time I'll have done all the playing I want. Or: If I cry hard enough, Mom and Dad will worry that I'm going to throw up and will lift me out of my crib to avoid the extra laundry. Either way, she gets lifted out of her crib, which was her goal all along.

We suspect that if we come up with a counter-strategy, Anna will prove to already have a new tactic in reserve. When I asked my mother -- ever ready to provide advice when asked -- for ideas, she made several helpful suggestions, but when I said, "But don't you think she'll just try something new to get us to lift her up?" even mom faltered. "Yeah, you're right," she said, "you were like that when you were a baby." Any behaviours Anna exhibits that I exhibited first are cause for Stephen to label our darling chickadee "grandma's revenge."

Baby Steps

2007-08-20T17:38:00.001-07:00

Anna Sophia took her first steps yesterday. She is ten-and-a-half months old. It seems amazing what she has learned in the last two months, in the time since I had to take a break from documenting her life due to the busy-ness of living life. If I can, I will return to this blog and fill in some blanks, but for today I'll stick with the present.

For a week or two, Anna has been at the Wile-E-Coyote-over-the-edge-of-the-cliff stage of standing independently. In other words, she has been able to stand up until she notices that she is not holding on to anything, then she reaches for the nearest support or gently lowers her bum to the ground. The cliff edge of standing unsupported has been getting less scary for her, it's true, and sometimes she has waved her arms in the air and wiggled her butt before realizing she wasn't holding onto anything.

But yesterday morning, we noticed that she was standing around unsupported and aware that she was unsupported and was relatively unperturbed. She tested her balance and tested her weight. She rarely wanted to plop to her bottom and scoot on her bum, and instead spent her time scooting along the edges of furniture, along walls, and around corners. She eyed the cat as though she might be able to catch her this time.

At her Grandma Marjorie's in the afternoon, after yelling at her Aunt Andrea's cat for being hissy and ducking around the edges of the coffeetable, she was well-settled in to the environment. When Andrea came home and sat on the floor with hair and earrings dangling like temptation itself, Anna let go of her mother and walked three or four steps to Andrea. This little march was witnessed by both Anna's parents and by her grandmother and Aunt Cathy and Uncle Frank. Anna was delighted with their response to her accomplishment and knew she had a hit dance move. (Aunt Mary Jane took in a "rerun" later in the afternoon, when Anna went for another little walk to try to snatch her camera from her.)

Today, Anna clearly understands what we mean when we ask her about "walking" and has put on a few more demonstrations of her new skill -- when she doesn't have to get anywhere far away or get there in a hurry. She has also spent a good part of the day just standing around, dancing in place, lifting or lunging heavy objects one would expect to put her off-balance.

In addition to walking, Anna is up to so much these days. She will not eat anything pureed and wants only food she can pick up with her fingers -- preferably bits of whatever her parents are eating. She is lamenting the end of raspberry season, since she has been a little raspberry fiend for weeks, sitting in her high chair imperiously, waiting for us to raid the bushes at her command. She adores potatoes and will eat almost as much potato as her dad at supper. She loves cheese and peaches and rice cakes and toast. She will eat almost anything that has been laced with trace amounts of her beloved yogurt. While she loved vegetables only a few weeks ago, she finds them a challenge to chew and won't eat them pureed, so they tend to sit on her plate and then get thrown to the floor, but we expect this is temporary, since she still likes the taste of them.

Anna loves books and especially loves books with pictures of animals and words that include animal noises. She met a number of farm animals for the first time at the provincial exhibition and was astounded by them. She made special friends with an uninhibited goat who tried to eat her father's t-shirt. Anna sorts through her books constantly, picking up her favourites and carting them to her parents' laps, where she asks us to read them three, or four, or eighteen times. And she thinks about books even when she isn't reading them. We can tell, because she practises her animal noises as though she is telling herself a little story. She tries to "moo" and "meow" and "woof" and "baa," but they all come out as a very cute "ma-a" like the bleat of a little kid. (The goat kind of kid, I mean.) Today, she managed a "mew" for Moonlight and was so excited, she fell over.

She also applauds herself when she succeeds at anything, and she waves at anyone passing by.

Music is her other great joy. She's a big hummer and singer, and she walks up and down the length of the piano keyboard, picking out notes -- confidently, I guess you would call it. Certainly not "delicately." She also has figured out how to work the buttons on her CD player and knows that the centre button will turn off the god-forsaken CBC programming her mother is trying to listen to and will turn on, instead, one of her groovy kiddie CDs. She will then dance, bouncing her bum up and down, tapping her feet, and humming. Anna also thinks grandparents were invented just to sing to her to make her dance. And, who knows? Maybe they were.

Leaps and Bounds

2007-06-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Anna Sophia is learning and growing at such a rate at the moment that documenting it seems like a lot of work, and there's precious little energy left in us after a day of following her around, extracting her limbs from the cat's dish, pulling her out of cupboards and closets where she engages in her never-ending, unhelpful, "reorganizing," and picking bits of food (and non-food items) out of her fingers and mouth and off her clothes.

Fortunately for us, though, her leaps and bounds aren't literal. Not yet. She's still just bum-scooting around wildly and pulling herself up on stuff willy-nilly. She also has learned to wave for hello and bye-bye and has become a pro at a new game, Head Tilt, which was started by her Aunt Andrea, who one day leaned her head down onto an armrest and got a similar head tilt from Anna, who now happily flops herself sideways at all hours (including suppertime when spoons are headed mouthwise) and expects her playmates (or parents or pets) to follow suit. Very cute.

She woke up one morning last week making all kinds of new sounds that exist in the English language (and that should, if they don't), and she has rarely been quiet since. She constantly practices her "b" and "p" sounds (and smacks her lips kissily while eating her yogurt). She learned to blow a proper raspberry -- tongue out and vibrate-y -- yesterday (messily, while eating her yogurt). She also has four "words": "ha-a" (with a dropping sing-song inflection) for "hello"; "ga-a" (with excitement and pointing or arm-flapping) for the cat; "mamamamama" for "mom" or for when she wants just about anything; and "dadadadada" for her dad, or when she has gotten what she wants.

To be honest, it is other family members who credit her with these "words." I, her mother, am waiting for more indication of true understanding. I'll count it as "hello" when she gets the diphthong in "hi" -- though I will admit that she mostly consistently gets at least the context right with her "ha-a" -- something she does less reliably with "mamamamamamamama." Heart-warming as it is to think her first word might be "mama," she doesn't have a full grasp on the concept. Last evening, she woke briefly soon after she had been tucked in and her dad gave her the dregs of her bottle. She drank them down, her eyes lolling sleepily back in their sockets, and just before passing out completely, she smiled up beatifically and said, "mama." Of course, her father is a good mother.

Anna is in a big hug and kiss and cuddle phase. Her bum-scooting lets her carry and cuddle a toy with one hand while steering with the other as she scoots. It also gets her to her parents' ankles where she can climb to our knees and reach up for lots of hugs for dad (who is too fuzzy in the beardal region for kisses) and hugs and kisses for mom. The kisses continue to be the sloppy, wet open-mouthed variety. If mom and dad attempt a hug or kiss without her, she yells at a high pitch and comes tearing across the floor to get in on some group hug action.

Anna doesn't want to be changed at the moment, and her happy naked kicking, which she used to do just to get her ya-yas out, now rattles the room and puts actual holes in her changing pad. Hmm. Her cloth diapers may be more comfortable on the days she would prefer to be naked, but they sure ain't designed for bum-scooters. The cloth all gets pushed to one side as she scoots, and she leaks -- on the very side she is pulling against the ground. We figured this out from the big red soil stains on her butt after a day spent bum-scooting in the yard and garden. She likes to scoot to the edge of the grass, where the soil has been dug out, and carefully remove stones and twigs and leaves from the soil. This is part of her craze for reorganizing. Sadly, it also becomes part of her craze for putting things in her mouth too. Yummy, yummy rocks.

Well -- can't be much worse than the taste of baby formula, which tastes like it has had its mineral content boosted with iron shavings. No wonder Anna is so keen on grown-up food. Her whole body shook with excitement when she first chomped down on her Grandma Carolyn's French bread. And last week she weirdly commandeered her mother's curried split pea dal for her own lunch. Since it was just split peas and spice and was as mushy as her usual baby food, I figured there was no harm in letting her develop a taste for curry. Her parents sure hope she'll like a wide range of foods from different cultures . . .

Anna is sleeping off her Grandma Marjorie's very exciting birthday party from yesterday afternoon, but her nap will soon end. We'll enjoy a peaceful Monday of walks and gardening and naps, and then her dad will tuck her into bed to sleep as long as her still-sore teeth allow.

First Vacation

2007-05-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

It seemed like a good idea at the time: a long weekend getaway to Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, on the warmer-than-here South Shore, in a quiet bed and breakfast, just hubby and baby and me. And it was a good idea, and it was a good vacation. It was just a bit . . . damp. And snotty.

On Thursday night, before our trip, Anna came down with the cold I had had all week. Every time Anna has gotten a cold, she has gotten the same cold that I have had, so I have had to solace of knowing her symptoms a few hours in advance. Thursday night, I knew that she would feel snotty and sore-throated and that she would sleep better sitting up. However, there are few ways to help a baby sleep sitting up without sitting up oneself, so Friday morning found me packed and ready to go, but a little sleepy.

No matter. Stephen was driving. We made the boat in plenty of time, and Anna loved her first trip on a ferryboat -- it provided classic people-watching. She seemed less distressed than I felt by the collective ugliness of the Maritime people I call my own. She just found them all interesting. Ah, to be innocent.

Anna travelled well in the car, alternately playing and sleeping. Friday evening, a warm welcome at the B&B, where a two-year-old was already in residence (a good omen that the place was baby friendly), a lovely supper out and about in Mahone Bay (I love paying people to cook for me), and a sleepy baby who drifted off at her usual bedtime, allowing her parents to read their books. (Books! Imagine.)

Anna woke for her bedtime bottle in wonderful humour, but with a bit of a fever. And that began a long night. She couldn't sleep lying down. She woke every time we set her back down, and I ended up letting her sit up to sleep all night. Without the props and places to go that we would have had at home, we got precious little sleep as we tried to make sure Anna could sleep as much as she needed to.

And so, Plan B. When we woke, sleep-deprived, to pouring rain, we decided that if we were to enjoy our day of touring around Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, it would be best to spend the night in Halifax -- an hour closer to home, and among family at Aunt Gen's.

This plan, generously accepted by Gen and Pete, allowed us to spend as many hours as we wished wandering the galleries and tea shops of Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, keeping ourselves and the baby as warm and dry as possible. Anna's production of snot and drool was prodigious, but the rain was less prodigious, so the day was very pleasant. Anna is easy to be around, even when she's under the weather, under the weather.

Late afternoon found us in Halifax, where Anna was more than happy to find herself in Gen and Pete's cozy livingroom where she could bum-scoot around the floor and where there was furniture to be climbed and overturned. Her uncle Danny came over to play, and soon Gen and Pete arrived home, with more aunts and uncles (Cath and Phil!), and a plan for supper that also included cousin Mark and Amanda (and Anna's wee second-cousin-to-be).

So, with ten at the supper table, we found ourselves at an impromptu party, and there's nothing Anna likes better than a party. She stayed awake until she couldn't stay awake and missed as little as possible. She woke again at 10, with a stuffed nose and sore teeth and a bad attitude resulting from her severely overtired state, but she only yelled for half an hour and then slept through the whole night. Her dad and I had a wonderful nine-hour stretch of sleep, a big treat.

We didn't manage to organize ourselves to leave on time to make the boat and so opted to take the bridge home, a long but leisurely drive. Anna got lots of extra sleep to chase away the remnants of her cold.

As interested as Anna was in seeing all the sights and visiting new people and places, she was never more excited than when we drove in the driveway. She recognized her very yellow house right away and kicked and shouted excitedly. Once in the house, she scooted around to see all her toys and familiar favourite spots in the house, and she chased the cat with great glee. Moon, for her part, chased right back.

So while it didn't exactly meet the ideal of the original idea, the first vacation was much better than it seemed like it was going to be at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning in Mahone Bay, with a warm, sticky baby in my arms and a fear in my heart that I had proved a very irresponsible mom for taking a sneezing baby anywhere outside her house.

On the Move

2007-05-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Anna Sophia hit the seven-month mark and her first tooth made an appearance above surface. She purses her lips around her still-sore gums, and she hums and hums.

Anna spent the weekend trying to propel herself forward, mostly overbalancing onto her face. She tried "creeping" flat on her belly but could only go backwards -- and then yell when she realized that she was farther and farther away from her goal.

On Tuesday, we finally had to name whatever it is that Anna is doing to get herself around the room "crawling." It's kind of a bum-scoot with a lean-over. It involves one foot flat on the floor, knee up, and one foot in front with the knee down. It looks weird, but it gets her where she wants to go. Mostly, she wants to go where the cat is. Barring that, she'll settle for the catfood. We have had to move the catfood.

We have given up on having furniture. There were so many head bumps on Tuesday alone that we put away two chairs and a coffeetable. When she kicked up the attempts to climb up on things, we had to move the piano bench and . . . umm, I don't really remember what furniture we had anymore, now that we sit on the floor so much. The piano legs, the couch, the remaining chair, the bookshelves, and parents' legs and bodies remain to be climbed. And there are always walls to be scaled. Now that Anna can get into previously inaccessible parts of the room, she spends a lot of time banging her hands on the baseboard heaters, enjoying the sound, and then trying to climb the walls. She definitely knows that the climbing will get her standing, and standing will get her walking, and walking will get her running, and running will let her catch the cat and rule the world.

(Earlier today, she tried to climb her aunt Emily, but she kept sliding down the bump in the belly that is her little cousin.)

Meanwhile, the cat is alarmed at the lack of furniture and even more alarmed that the baby is turning up in places the baby has never been before. Cat and baby have clearly negotiated some kind of detente, though, since they seem quite comfortable angling around the edges of each other's prescribed territory, and kitty more and more often waltzes past baby (though healthily just out of reach). She likes to live dangerously.

Bouncing Baby

2007-04-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

As we've met other parents of children under one, we've noticed a sad phenomenon. So many new parents believe their children to be the most gorgeous, the most adorable, the most active, the most advanced of all babies ever born in the history of the world. And the phenomenon is sad because these parents are all so clearly suffering delusions. Because we have the most gorgeous, the most adorable, the most active, the most advanced of all babies ever born in the history of the world. And we can only shake our heads with sympathy at the other poor, poor deluded parents.

Hee hee.

Of course, as parents we are finely attuned to Anna Sophia's individual baby superpowers, but we know that if she were a different person from whom she most definitely is and who she is most definitely becoming, we would simply attune ourselves to a different set of superpowers. I hope. Sometimes we're so busy being attuned to Anna's busy being, it's hard to tell what we would think under different circumstances, if we were able to think straight at all.

These days, Anna is teething hard but very slowly. There must be teeth in there somewhere, but they aren't showing themselves. She is drooling in buckets. She is then climbing into and out of the buckets.

She is still desperate to walk and is trying to decide if crawling is worth an investment of energy. She no longer stays in one place when set on the floor. She bounces on her bum, reaches impossibly far in front of her, grips the floor with her feet, and either spins in a circle or pulls herself forward or tries out a crawling position or faceplants, depending on her mood and her sense of adventure. She can boogie her way over to her toy basket and empty its contents one by one onto the floor (an activity she also likes to apply to laundry baskets and any shelves at baby level). She is still most adept at spinning in a circle where she sits, which usually leads to a ring of toys just out of her immediate reach, with her sitting in the middle of the ring still trying to decide if crawling is worth an investment of energy. She has faceplanted just often enough to make her wary.

If her parents are nearby, we automatically become jungle gyms. If we sit next to her, Anna grabs pantlegs, pulls herself up to standing, and bounces and dances. Or faceplants. If we sit or lie on the floor next to her, she climbs over whatever part of us is closest. She tugs and pulls our parts, and she hangs over and balances on our parts.

Anna is only still while sleeping. And she prefers to save her sleeping for the night-time rather than daytime naps, though she likes to wake in the evening long enough to check out American Idol. She was a Sanjaya fan, but he went home last week, and we were surprised last night to find Anna inclined to support Blake. Perhaps since this season of Idol is so boring, Anna will soon choose to sleep through the night??

Anna loves adventures outside, now that spring is in the air. She has greeted many upstart crocuses and six early tulips in the garden. We've been enjoying "field trips," adding to our usual destinations (Confederation Centre Gallery or Confederation Centre Library or Mavor's at Confederation Centre) some new, scenic locations around town. And one day this week, we went to the greenhouses around the corner to buy fresh green beans (Anna's favourite of all her favourite vegetables) and to look at all kinds of blooming flowers and seedling plants. Anna hummed to them very happily. She also tried to grab them and rip them to shreds. (She seems to understand an alarming amount of what we say to her, but "Gentle" is still a concept beyond her, um, "grasp.") We also visited the bunnies that live in the greenhouse. They were at it like, well, rabbits. I decided it would not be age-appropriate to explain this aspect of spring.

Happy Easter!

2007-04-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

In some climates, in some parts of the world, Easter might fall in springtime, but here, where springtime exists only as a state of mind and our closest approximation of "spring fever" is a warmish reddish rash from friction burn where we tried to scrub off a layer of mud, Easter has brought a blizzard. It's a real blizzard -- the one they've been forecasting all winter but that has never materialized.

Anna's first Easter brunch with grandparents Ledwell will be, if we are lucky, Easter late lunch with Uncle Patrick and Aunt Tara, who are within walking distance and are still young and strong.

We're determined to make it out for turkey dinner at Grandma MacInnis's. We're told the turkey is in the oven and that it would have died in vain if we don't make an attempt to get there.

Only two logistical hurdles to face: digging out whatever has blown in since Stephen dug out earlier this morning, and getting Anna into baby leotards to keep her legs warm in her Easter dress. Given that she resists all and any clothes, I'm not sure what army will be able to get her into leotards. Come to think of it, I can't think what army would be able to get me into leotards, but -- really -- if you can't apply double standards to babies, who is left to apply them to?

Anna is happily watching the snow breeze past the window as she scoots back and forth in her non-saucer shaped exersaucer. It's called an "intellitainer," but we refer to it as the "intellicizer" when we don't refer to it as "the contraption."

Anna's up to her old tricks but is adding new ones. On Thursday, she decided her favourite new game is to grab hands or arms or anything she can and use them to pull herself to standing. She did this again and again and again on Thursday, and not only is she able to do it with ease, now, she is able to look proud of herself for doing it. Very proud of herself. The girl knows an accomplishment when she sees it. On Friday, she showed off her new skill for her uncle Danny, home from Halifax.

Her parents are proud, too, but most days, we look at each other and say, "Hoo boy. We are in so much trouble." We can barely keep up with her now, when she's barely mobile at all. We aren't sure how we'll catch her when she manages to walk, a goal she has decided is more interesting (and possibly more attainable) than crawling.

Right now, she can mostly launch herself forward and backward from sitting, either bonking her head or narrowly missing bonking her head. (We surround her with pilllows and our own selves, so mostly she bonks her head on pillows or legs.) She loves to try to crawl over her parents -- we are obviously obstacles to getting where she wants to go. As usual, where she wants to go is wherever the cat is. Which is never far away, because Moon loves to be near the baby. While the baby naps, Moon naps -- on the changing table.

Anna's other favourite toy, for when the cat is out of sight, is a stainless steel bowl and a rubbery ball. Who knew that what she most wanted to play with was a bowl from the kitchen? We thought all baby toys had to be created by teams of baby psychologists with theories about how many whizzbangs and gadgets and colours and questionable baby-fied representations of major works of cultural importance could be safely fit into ten inches of plastic to create a genius.

Anna is sitting in her intellicizer full of whizzbangs dangling her feet and happily sucking on her finger. There's drool everywhere. Do you think she's doomed to a life of non-genius?

A Whole Half Year

2007-03-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Anna will mark six months on the "outside." She had her six-month check-up with the doctor this morning, and was called by Doctor Kathy "the most independent six-month-old I know." We know, too.

She is growing and thriving on all the measurements: height in the 75th percentile, weight in the 50th, head in the 95th. This percentile business is not particularly meaningful except as an explanation of why her feet reach the bottoms of her sleepers before her belly fills out their width, and why baby hats are laughably tiny on her huge noggin. It has its own atmosphere and satellites. (The atmosphere some days is mostly methane. The satellites, we suspect, are us.)

By all other measures, she's well beyond her age. At least we, her parents, aided and abetted by her adoring grandparents, assess her as extraordinary in every possible way.

She can sit up, unsupported, and play with toys all the live-long day. (Her mother even cavalierly leaves the room for whole minutes at a time and leaves her sitting up.) She figures out how new toys work in minutes. She eats her sweet potatoes and rice cereal and carrots as though she had a full set of teeth (except for the chewing part). She loves books, also to eat. She loves the phone -- to eat, to listen to, to push buttons on, to yank from her parents' hands.
She loves to pull blankets over her head until someone says "Where's Anna gone?" at which point she pulls down the blanket to show a big giggly smile and to hear a happy "Peekaboo." She loves her new sitting-up and looking-outwards point of view in the stroller without the infant car seat attachment. She gazes at the world with a frightening level of knowingness. And sometimes she (almost) catches the cat, who continues to be a careful playmate, strutting in front of the baby but keeping a safe distance.

Anna is still a striver. Desperate to crawl, she pulls herself onto her belly from a sitting position and then shrieks with unhappiness as she flails her arms and feet and scratches the floor with her fingernails, all to no avail in getting her forward. She reaches for whatever is in front of her and rocks on her belly and bends her knees, but she can't coordinate her actions. God help us when she can. Nothing will be safe from her. (Please, no one tell her about the rolling-across-the-floor option, or the bum-scooting option!)

Getting her dressed is a huge ordeal now, because she is so busy and so strong. She pulled a diaper out from under her bum one night and waved it in the air while her sleepy father was trying to change her. The fewer pieces the outfit comes in, the better. Pants and socks make her cry -- if you can get her into them at all. "I'm ready for the rodeo," Stephen laughed one day after wrastling her into something or other. If only her long legs and feet were better accommodated by one-piece suities . . . Grandma Carolyn might have the best idea -- she just yanks off the baby's outer clothing as soon as she gets near her and lets her eat her toes in peace.

Beyond clothes, Anna's "new look" this week is the nose-squinch, the first sign that she might be related to me and my family. Previously, she had two smiles, the close-lipped impish grin and the big toothless open-mouthed show-offy smile. This week, she added a brand-new smile with an open mouth and a squinched-up nose (and a little laugh created by inhaling and exhaling through a slightly stuffy squinched up baby nose). The nose-squinch was, of course, perfected by her aunt Emily when she was a baby. (Emily famously used her nose-squinch "ph-mile" to charm and distract grown-ups so she could put her arm into their whiskey glasses.)

What Anna loves best in the world is to be praised. "Yay" and "Hooray" are her favourite words. Applause is her favourite sound. What a little diva. The praise is obviously spurring her on to great accomplishments -- and, uh-oh maybe that's what swelling her head?!

Happy Anniversary & Bonne Anniversaire

2007-03-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

By luck or by design, I've managed to work a few major life milestones in before society-dictated "deadlines."

Friday, Stephen and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married three days before my 30th birthday -- not, as some suggested, because I was desperate to get married before I turned thirty but, instead, because I was desperate not to have to endure a thirtieth birthday party, so we had a wedding instead. It was a great day.

Our first year married was tough, with two miscarriages and the death of Stephen's ancient old hag of a cat, Neruda. The next two years, we celebrated the time we had together as a couple to enjoy each other's company, but we were saddened that no baby was on the way. Last year, we were at the trepidatious end of my last trimester, nervously hopeful of a happy ending.

We got our happy ending in September, and, as I said to Stephen on Friday (as we prepared for an evening out! with dinner! and a movie! and a wonderful sitter, in Auntie Cathy, for Anna to enjoy!), it was our fifth anni-versary but our first Anna-versary. Our beautiful, smart, funny girl.

As a gift, we bought ourselves (or, err, Anna) a ridiculous contraption of a play centre with literal bells and whistles. It takes up the entire of the available floor space in the living room. But when Anna tested the floor model at the store, she shrieked with delight, and we were sold. All our proclamations that we would not be materialistic parents distracting our baby with noisy contraptions melted away as she found first the bells and then the whistles and then sounded them all at once.

Today, on my thirty-fifth birthday, with a five-month-old unadjusted to an early change to Daylight Saving Time and brightly and noisily working the bells and whistles, I realized that I had met the other society-imposed deadline for having babies before you're 35.

Tune in another time, not my birthday, to hear me bristle and rail against arbitrary dates designed to put social pressure on women and to make us feel guilty and/or inadequate, too old or too young. Don't get me started on pregnancies being called "high-risk" the instant a mother turns 35. Just don't. It's my birthday, and I'm putting politics aside to read cookbooks and talk on the phone.

Playing Catch and Playing Catch-Up

2007-03-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

I keep checking this blog to see if there's anything new about Anna Sophia, and I am always disappointed there are no new posts until I remember that I'm the person supposed to be posting. I'm sure I'm not the only blogger who secretly hopes that someone else will have uncovered something shocking and thrilling and will have revealed it to the world (or to the audience of six interested family members) in a breezy and engaging literary style while no one else was looking.

At this stage in her growing up, everything Anna's world changes so fast, it is difficult to document - but at the same time, her growth and her learning are so constant and so incremental that they can slip past, day by day, until you one day realize that, gosh golly gee, she's five months old, and she's begun eating rice cereal and sipping from a sippy cup like an expert, and she's "talking" with new sounds every day, and she's growing like a thing that grows in both her length and her weight, and she can sit up without help (but with close supervision!) for a few more seconds every day.

We've had a few days of bright and warming weather and have been able to pop out of the house on unplanned, unscheduled adventures on a whim - tra la la - so today's return to the deep freeze and wind chill and to the ignominy of snowsuits and the indignity of car seats and cold drives in the car was disappointing and tiring for both Anna and her mom.

Restricted as she is to the indoors and her playmat, Anna is making the best of it. She rolls and kicks herself into circles so she can end up somewhere other than where she was put. She sits up and scrutinizes her surroundings. She rolls balls back and forth with her dad, playing "catch" and even kicks at the ball if it comes close to her foot while she's standing up (supported). She knocks over towers of blocks. She makes designs on the bookshelves that her body can't quite carry out - yet. She shrieks with absolute glee when she sees the cat and even has a special vocalization just for her furry friend. She hopes and hopes she will be allowed to pet the kitty, and once a day or so, kitty obliges by allowing a flank to be rubbed with a drool-covered mitt. Once this week, kitty miscalculated and got her tail good and grabbed, but both she and the baby were so surprised that they startled each other into quick extrication.

Man, are we going to be in trouble when this baby can move much farther than the inches she can manage now.

Every day, she is more reachy and more grabby and more stretchy and more strong. She wants to drink coffee, but her father says "she can't until she's two." She loves to wave around, tear up, or eat the flyers from the paper. She uses sweeping motions to clear off any surfaces she can reach (leaving us worried she might be the kind of neat freak that we are decidedly NOT). She initiates her own games of hide and seek and peekaboo by pulling a blanket over her head and then pulling them off with a sly grin and a giggle. She's all personality, our Anna.

But soon she will be all personality and action. God help us all.

Baby Human Tricks

2007-02-13T16:00:00.001-08:00

Anna is up to new tricks -- every day, it seems.

Trick 1: While getting a clean bum, lying on her changing table, she rolls onto her side, crosses her legs, arches her back, throws her head back, and reaches over her head to knock the vaseline off the table and onto the floor. Then she giggles at the clatter and looks for other items to toss. She has become a perfect sculptor's model for torsion. In art history, they didn't explain that the development of classical statuary, from straight up and down to contrapostto, followed the patterns of baby human development.

I urge you all to attempt to change a baby who is lying on her side with her legs crossed and her back arched all the way back. Anna's dad, who can paint eyeballs onto angels on the heads of pins, throws his hands up in the air in despair when dealing with our dervish.

I should never have told her that the vaseline is made from "dinosaur trees." It just spurred her on.

Trick 2: While standing around at her grandma's house, supported under the arms by her Aunt Andrea, she loosened up her formerly rigid knees and lifted her right leg like a high-stepping horse on parade. And forward she stepped. She kinda only "stepped" in this way with her right leg, which means she mostly spun in a circle. Practising pivots for basketball, perhaps?

Trick 3: Yesterday, while I was folding the clothes on the bed, I propped Anna against some pillows. From a position leaning back on the pillows at a 45 degree angle, she pushed her elbows back and raised herself to sitting. She toppled over when she got overexcited because of the praise being lavished on her for her strength and ingenuity -- but she went on to repeat her little sit-up six or eight times -- until her father came into the room to see, and then she wouldn't do it again. She was too busy gazing adoringly at her father.

**

Today, we also played with her little toy drum and little toy xylophone, but her movements aren't quite subtle enough for those toys, yet. She can grab the little toy mallet and aim it at the instrument well enough, but she hits it with an almighty, unmusical force, then draws the mallet back and bonks herself on the forehead with it.

Anna still always wants to do the next thing. She's very reachy, grabby, and lean-forwardy this week. In yoga, pushing too far forward suggests a preoccupation with the future, and I guess babies have to be future-oriented to some extent -- but we're all enjoying the moment, moment to moment, too, and we hope she'll enjoy her journeys as much as her destinations.

A Good Day

2007-02-08T09:04:00.000-08:00

Some mornings, Anna wakes up and it's as though she has done weeks' worth of developing during her sleep. This morning, she got up early with her Dad while I slept peacefully through the news I had stayed in bed as a pretext for listening to. I missed some of the action, but I can still attest that she ran the full repertoire of her tricks -- rolling over this way and that, holding her bottle by herself, laughing and giggling and babbling, trying to chase the cat, kicking and grabbing her toys, drinking water out of a glass, trying to pet the cat, drooling on anything inanimate enough to get into her clutches, testing her gag reflex with her fingers and thumb (still works!), throwing and then reaching for her jangly soft blocks, trying to lick the cat.

She was so happy and so pleased with herself -- not frustrated that she couldn't do more, just excited by what she was accomplishing. What a sweet little butter bean.

In fact, she only managed to do one thing to break down her mother's resolve: she looked beautiful and glowing in her little suitie. Now, I've been resisting very strongly the enforced Wearing of Pink for Girls. I try to put her in other colours when we go out in public. But I'm more resistant to buying new clothes than I am to avoiding pink, so the pink hand-me-downs come out fairly regularly, for all. And, to the great amusement of anyone who knows my convictions, Anna looks fantastic in pink. All shades of pink. All patterns of pink. She just sits there, looking stunning. In pink. Of all colours.

The Further Adventures of . . .

2007-02-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

Anna Sophia is growing and changing faster than we're able to keep track. She continues to be a bright and active baby who only cries when she knows she's starting to fall asleep and might have to miss something. As she goes through life, she will discover . . . that she's not missing much. Her parents live boring lives when she is asleep and tend to fall back on DVDs of Corner Gas for entertainment. And let's not even mention American Idol.

As I write, Anna is lying on her back on her play mat with one hand in her mouth and a toy mirror between her feet. She intermittently kicks her toys or grabs them with both hands or dandles them between her feet. She sometimes rolls over onto one side to look at Moon, the cat, to see if she's still asleep.

When the cat wakes up, she walks and jumps around and around the room for the baby's entertainment, but she knows to stay just out of reach. Anna wants to pet the cat more than anything in the world. The few times she has succeeded, she has been gentle, but Moon is wisely wary and is enjoying the time she still has left to be in control of the situation.

Anna is never satisfied to do what she already knows she can do and is always keen to do the next thing. She doesn't bother to roll all the way over, except when comfort requires it -- she's too busy trying to sit up. And if she's propped up in a sitting position, she's launching herself forward over her feet into a crawling position. As always, what she loves best is to stand up and hold her own weight. She still can't do much from a standing position, but nowadays, rather than just standing rigid, she experiments with bending her knees and leaning forward as far as she can. Leaning forward is a big theme in any position. When we sit at the piano, she tries to play it with her head. So much for those long, elegant fingers.

This week, Anna is eating everything in sight, whether it is food or not. Everything goes into her drooly mouth. And everything gets chewed. She doesn't suck her thumb, she gnaws on it. The soothie is rarely used for sucking -- just for chewing. She can pull it out of her mouth and put it back in, now, but she usually likes to put it in sideways or backwards, the better for mashing between her gums. On Friday, she discovered that it was particularly fun to put her soothie in her mouth and pull her bottom lip over the bottom edge of it and then chew. She has done this several times since.

Anna is fascinated when her parents drink from a cup or eat real food. She makes a grab for cups, especially, and has great success with glasses of cold water. She likes to steady the glass in her little hands and gum the edge to sip as much water as she can get. I've decided that it isn't too horribly unhygienic to share my glasses of water with her in this way, considering everything else she chews on. I've tasted her fingers, for the sake of science, and they don't taste like distilled water in a clean glass. They taste of floor.

Funnily enough, while she was sucking back a glass of water at lunch today, I decided to see if she wanted to drink a little bit of her formula from her glass. Nothing doing. She pushed it away (and spilled the whole sipful in the cup all over her sleeper, something she never does with the water). Her look clearly told me that glasses are for grown-up drinks, not baby drinks. Bottles are for baby drinks. I had made a categorical error. Luckily, she knows I'm still in training, so I got off with a reprimand and an order to launder her wet sleeper.

The Failure of Philosophy and Science in the Face of Baby

2007-02-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

Anna Sophia makes a liar out of me. Not that it takes much. Lying is an inherited, endemic family trait -- tho' we usually like to think of it as "storytelling" at best or "embellishment" at worst.

For all my claims that Anna was not eating well last week, she is growing normally, healthily, beautifully. What she wasn't doing well last week was making a transition. This has happened before -- the week before making a big jump in her eating or sleeping or any other big change to her regular routine, she hardly eats at all, and she fusses about her food, and she resists all interventions -- then kaboom, she suddenly starts to eat everything in sight. Anna woke up on Monday morning and started to eat like a ravenous animal.

It turns out that babies dissolve the part of your brain that is capable of making rational assessments on the topic of Baby. (People who generalize this brain deterioration and claim that women become irretrievably irrational when they get pregnant and give birth can go directly to hell, but I will grant that when it comes to the topic of my baby, my ability to think logically might be a little bit compromised.)

I acknowledge that last week, my concern about Anna's eating was illogical. And by illogical, I mean based on faulty logic. In fact, I mean based on two contradictory premises. My thinking went a bit like this:
Premise 1: She's putting on weight, which should mean she needs more food, but she's not eating more food, so I really should be worried.
Premise 2: She's not putting on weight, even though she's growing, which should mean she needs more food, but she's not eating more food, so I really should be worried.

I'm not sure how I managed to hold simultaneously on to the thoughts that she needed more food to grow and that she was growing so much she needed more food.

For what it's worth, I still insist that my concern over her eating last week was Justifiable. How could it not be when I went to such lengths to justify it?

(Ah, grasshopper, the tautologies grow more taut.)

Stephen, the type who bases conclusions on evidence rather than logic, was no less tripped up by last week's lack of appetite. He hypothesized that Anna was not eating because the calcium build-up in our sterilizing pot tasted bad and was turning her off. He stopped using the pot, she started eating better, and -- voila -- hypothesis proved. In his mind, anyway. Never mind that he ignored a number of important variables in the experiment: for instance, the fact that her soy formula tastes like ass with crushed up vitamins, anyway.

Four Months Old

2007-01-28T08:19:00.000-08:00

Today, Anna Sophia is four months old -- by the calendar. She's a bit older in lunar months. But we seem to have lost track of weeks, and so lunar months as well. We know for sure that winter has arrived, because it is making it harder to traipse about with stroller and baby. Sometimes, the snow slows us, sometimes the wind that steals baby's breath.

It would be impossible to chronicle all that Anna has learned in her first four months. By the time we register one learning or one change, she's striving for the next.

She now tracks the cat's movements in fascination and adoration and has, a few times, petted her fur quite gently. The cat, in turn, sniffs Anna up close and jumps over her head when she's playing on the floor. Every day, though, there's more reaching, and you can see the wheels turn in Anna's head: "I want to chase that cat." And in Moon's head: "I want to be chased, as long as I can move faster than whatever is chasing me."

This morning, Anna's dad and I took her upstairs for the whole morning, a change of scenery she seemed to enjoy, albeit from the comfort and safety of her playpen (politically correctly renamed as a "play yard"). She looked at her dad's new painting, with approval, and she probably swallowed four months' worth of her peck of dirt. We haven't spent a whole morning together upstairs since Anna was born, and we mostly had to vacuum the wood floors up there, which we also have not done since she was born.

Now that she knows she can turn herself over, she doesn't bother to try very often. Instead, she is putting her energy into trying to sit up. If you lie her down on an upward tilt, on your lap or any other surface, she strains to lift herself upright. And if you set her down sitting up already, she smiles and smiles -- though we set her up sitting in her "play yard" this morning and she stretched forward as far as she could (paschimottanasana in yoga), fell onto her belly, then flipped onto her back. She was ricocheting more than causing the flips through her own effort, but we praised her anyway.

When she's getting changed, Anna now likes to immobilize the parent who is changing her by hanging on to one of our arms with her bare feet and holding on to the other with her hands. She then tries to eat our sleeves.

There is no adjustment of pipes that will turn off her faucet of drool these days. No washer we can install. Her fingers and thumb are constantly in her mouth, and any slackness in her sleepers gets yanked on so she can get as much fabric as possible to suck on. Her cheeks are also starting to redden up. These are all signs of teething. Stephen likes to tell Anna (while she watches, transfixed, as we brush our teeth) that if she had taken better care of her teeth, she'd still have them.

I have a strong suspicion that Anna's teething process will be as long and drawn out as her birth -- a sign here, a sign there for weeks and weeks -- then a big, painful production. I've warned her that she can't reasonably opt to have her baby teeth surgically extracted from her gums.

Crazy Going Slowly Am I

2007-01-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how often, in thinking about Anna Sophia, the words that spring into my mind are that I'm "absolutely crazy about this baby." And it's equally amazing how infrequently I stop to reflect on the presence of "crazy" in my phrase-of choice. But there's little doubt that there's a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of insanity thrown into love for a pre-verbal infant.

We're very lucky. According to everyone, we have a "good baby." Also according to everyone, we have a baby who is very clear in her communications about what she wants and what she needs, preverbal or not. But "everyone" is not as attuned to the particularities of Anna's emerging personality. And "everyone" isn't spending a ridiculous number of hours a day at home, cut off from intellectual endeavours, with nothing analytical to do except to dissect those particularities.

In other words, it's impossible to avoid a certain amount of obsessiveness. It's impossible not to go a little bit crazy about the baby. My obsession, when it gets the better of me, fixates on Anna's objections to eating the amount that most babies her age, weight, and activity level would eat. She's only four to six ounces a day under the average, and "everyone" is again right to observe that she's thriving, strong, and extremely busy and alert. Still, there are weirdnesses in her food choices.

The weirdest thing is that no matter what time she wakes in the morning, no matter how hungry she is when she wakes, she absolutely will not eat more than ten or eleven ounces before noon. If she wakes with an empty belly at 4:30, she still won't eat again until 10:30 or 11:00. If she sleeps the sleep of the just until 7:00 a.m., same thing. This means that if she doesn't eat enough on Monday, she can't make up for it by eating more on Tuesday, because the number of hours in any given day always turns out to be finite, and her ability to stay awake is equally finite, and she'd prefer to sleep than eat almost any time.

Most days, she eats enough. But if she's equally tired and hungry on a particularly busy day, the tiredness will almost always win, and she'll go to sleep with too little food in her belly.

I know she won't starve herself, but the day after she has eaten too little always goes badly, and no amount of rational discussion about changing her feeding schedule seems to persuade her to eat a little bit more to even out her eating. Hence, obsession.

For all of those who suggested I should calm down about her food intake over the weekend, thanks, and of course I'm fine by today. But Monday with a hungry and restive baby (after Sunday with an over-tired and unwilling-to-eat baby) was not an easy day.

I have almost always let go my obsession of the week by Wednesday evening, after a coffee with other moms with babes ranging in age from three to ten months. Collectively, we've been through it all. Each baby has his or her own crazy-making features and his or her own joys, and all of these are fun to share and are inherently reassuring. Today, rather than coffee at a coffee shop, we got together at a mom's house -- ten little people. Some stander-uppers, some sitter-uppers, some lyer-downers, some crawl-arounders. As they circulated and watched each other and ate and spit up and farted, we could all see that our obsessions were futile.

Anna, still a lyer-arounder but fascinated by crawlers and stander-uppers, particularly enjoyed lying on her back, kicking vigorously, watching the other babies with her wide, wide eyes. She made a sincere effort to lick or chew anyone or anything who came into range. And if they stayed just out of range, she gently patted them on the leg, or the arm, or the bum, or whatever part presented itself. I did not offer her any food, so she did not have to yell at me that I was ruining everything. She did not need to spit it out or refuse to swallow it. And, in the course of the afternoon, she did not starve to death.

Anna has had issues with food since she was born, and this is why I worry. I still find it hard to accept sometimes that she couldn't breastfeed and I couldn't provide food for her from my body instead of from a tinny-tasting can full of sucrose, soy, sunflower oil, and vitamins.

Stephen, on the other hand, puts forward the perfectly reasonable proposition that Anna might just have his appetite and metabolism rather than mine. And he won't eat before noon, either. Between Anna and Stephen and "everyone" else, I'm clearly outnumbered. I might just have to find something more productive to fixate on.

Stuff and Nonsense

2007-01-16T14:40:00.000-08:00

Last week, Anna did manage, finally, to roll over. She rolled over twice from her belly to her back (Thursday, I think) and soon was able to do it proficiently enough to be captured by camera. She rolled over once from her back to her belly, but I missed this. I was peeling five pounds of potatoes for the family brunch in her honour and only heard the shriek of surprise when she found herself stranded on her tummy. I took a picture of her on her belly in the middle of the kitchen floor. Anticlimactic, but still worthy of applause.

Anna still can't call up the ability to roll over at will -- she's still catching on to the theory of momentum and finds rolling easier when she's on her blanket on a folded yoga mat. She works her way to the edge, and hey presto she's upside down or upside right in no time.

Last night, Stephen and I decided to stay up late for the first time in yonks, and Anna decided to wake twice through the night for the first time, like, ever. Today, we were all tired. While Anna took a long nap, I read her Tarot cards, where there were few surprises. The cards said she's daddy's girl but is more insecure about her mother's affections. She's very independent and intuitive and influenced by her environment. She is frustrated at the delays in reaching her goals at present. In her future, she feel pulled between romantic attraction to the raffish and the rational, but she will seek harmony in love above all and will love the world she discovers through her senses. Of course, the final card basically said, much will be revealed later, I'm only a baby.

Hmm. My hope in writing this post was to seem less flaky as a mom than the earth welcoming might have portrayed me to be. Perhaps revealing that I read my baby's Tarot cards while she's napping is the wrong strategy?

Anna's music pick for this week is the zunior.com Our Power Solar Compilation, featuring a great acoustic track by those In-Flight Safeties and a new favourite by Great Aunt Ida. Guaranteed to put baby to sleep in eight tracks or less, and all for a good cause.

Of course, we're beginning to wonder about Anna's musical taste, considering that when she's fussy, the only thing that settles her is her parents' singing Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" as a duet, with vocalizations of the guitar riffs. [*shudder*]

Earth Welcoming

2007-01-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

Our families are Roman Catholic, and, sadly, the Catholic initiation of babies is inadequate to baby girls who would like to live and grow on the earth. Among other things, it lacks connection to the earth and soil. For another, it rejects women's leadership.

For our Anna Sophia, we asked a special gift: a more inclusive welcoming liturgy to help her be welcomed into the community of people of all faiths and no faiths who similarly seek justice, wisdom, and compassion. We asked my aunt, Genevieve Mullally, and she enlisted the help of her husband, Peter Mullally, and their friend Pauline Dalton to create an Earth Welcoming for Anna Sophia, which her family shared in this morning. Here is the liturgy they created.

Earth Welcoming for Anna Sophia
January 14, 2007

Welcome and introduction
[One special part of the welcome was that we lit a candle for Anna Sophia, floated in a bowl of water that brought together water from the book where Anna's mom's family played and fished and the lily pond where her dad's family played.]

Song: "O Beautiful Gaia" (Gaia, a Greek word for earth)

In the recesses of our being we hear the call…the first and deepest call…
the call of Earth, through water and wind, forest and farmland, inviting
us to become one again with all that lives. We are called home
to our place within the Earth community. We are called on, into the
ongoing relatedness of creation.
(Copied from Song Lyrics booklet from the CD O Beautiful Gaia)

O Beautiful Gaia, O Gaia calling us home,
O beautiful Gaia, calling us on.

Fraîche rosée du matin, O Gaia tu nous appelles
Fraîche rosée du matin, rentrons chez nous.

Soil yielding its harvest, O Gaia calling us home
Soil yielding its harvest, calling us on.

Waves crashing on granite, O Gaia calling us home
Pine bending in windstorm, calling us on.

Loon nesting in marshland, O Gaia calling us home,
Loon nesting in marshland, calling us on.

Repeat 1st verse.

Reading: "The Four Elements"
(adapted from a reflection by John Seed and Joanna Macy in Earth Prayers)

What are you? What am I? Intersecting cycles of water, earth, air and fire, that’s what I am, that’s what you are.

Water: blood, lymph, mucus, sweat, tears, inner oceans tugged by the moon, tides within and tides without. Streaming fluids floating our cells, washing and nourishing through endless riverways of gut and vein and capillary. You are that. I am that.

Earth: matter made from rock and soil. Earth pours through us, replacing each cell in the body every seven years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we ingest, incorporate and excrete the earth, are made from the earth. I am that. You are that.

Air: the gaseous realm, the atmosphere, the planet’s membrane. The breathing in, the breathing out. Breathing out carbon dioxide to the plants, breathing in oxygen that keeps each of our cells awake. The dance of the air cycle, breathing the universe in and out again. That is what you are. That is what I am.

Fire: fire from our sun that fuels all life, drawing up plants and raising the waters to the sky to fall again replenishing. The inner furnace of your metabolism burns with the fire of the Big Bang that first sent matter-energy spinning through space and time. You, Anna Sophia, were there, I was there, each of us was there, for each cell of our bodies is descended in an unbroken chain from that event.

Shared blessings

[Everyone present lit tea lights from Anna's candle and offered their blessings and wishes, from a wish for health and happiness to a wish for discovery to a wish for a love of animals and shoes!]

Family litany Response: You are with us.

[Everyone present called to mind their name saints.]

Salute to Anna Sophia

[An earth prayer adapted especially for Anna Sophia, celebrating her roots in the soil where she was born and the way she will grow and move in her future.]

Closing song: We Rise Again (composed by Leon Dubinsky)

The waves roll on, over the water, and the ocean cries
We look to… our sons and daughters… to explain our lives.
As if our child could tell us why
That as sure as the sunrise, as sure as the sea,
as sure as the wind in the tree

We rise again, in the faces of our children
We rise again in the voices of our song
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean
And then, we rise again.

When the light goes dark, with the forces of creation, across a stormy sky
We look to… reincarnation… to explain our lives
As if our child could tell us why
That as sure as the sunrise, as sure as the sea,
as sure as the wind in the tree

Pet Sounds

2007-01-12T15:07:00.000-08:00

One of the most common questions I get from a certain type of people (cat people) is, "How is your kitty adjusting to the baby?"

Now, our cat, Moon (a.k.a. Moonlight, Moon Unit, Moonie, Chicken Monkeyface) has acquired, undeservedly, a Bad Reputation due to her rambunctious nature, her terrorization of her cousin kitty when they were both kittens, and her tendency to bounce of the walls and sit on the kitchen table when people come over to visit. Moonlight definitely has energy and personality to burn, so we were curious to see how she would react to Baby.

She knew something was up while I was pregnant. She used to sit on my lap and massage my belly, and given the gestational activity level of Anna-to-be, Moon must have felt a kick or two or seventy. Moon also undoubtedly noticed shifts in furniture in "her" room -- the spare room, which became the nursery. And, finally, a month before the baby was born, we set up the bassinet and lined it with tinfoil to pet-proof it, to give tin-averse Moon the message that while the bassinet was on her usual jump-and-play route, it was out of bounds. Moon only jumped in the once.

When we brought Anna home, we kept Moon out of the bedroom for a few nights, so we could see how she reacted. She was great. She jumped into the bassinet once, sniffed the baby carefully, decided she was Hers, and jumped out. She then became the baby's protector.

When Anna cried, Moon would find Stephen or find me and tap us on the back of the leg, as if to say, "Human Person, your small bald kitten is crying." (She might, of course, have been saying, "Human Person, you loved me first, so pay attention to me instead of your small bald kitten." We aren't expert cat translators.)

When we brought Anna home from one of her adventures, Moon sniffed her carefully, to make sure we had brought home the right baby.

When we set a stool beside the bassinet to help Bad-Back Daddy manipulate the baby in and out of the bassinet, Moon decided this was her sentinel post to observe the baby and make sure she was okay. This was very cute.

Then, when we woke one night to find Anna the Active bouncing the bassinet alarmingly, we set up the crib. "Aha," thought Moon, "this new piece of furniture has not been lined with tinfoil and must, therefore, belong to me." She jumped in and fell asleep. We scooped her out. And she avoided the crib for a week or two.

Until . . . Anna started to encroach on more of Moon's territory. Sitting on Stephen's lap in the morning while he drank his coffee! Lying on the floor in the middle of Her livingroom! Snuggling up to Jane in bed in the morning! Moon did what any cat would do. She strategically communicated messages about her territory. When, and only when, the baby showed up in part of Moon's territory, Moon stalked off to the bedroom, hopped into the crib, and looked at us menacingly until we got the message. As soon as we showed we had registered her concern about her territory (or as soon as we moved the baby), out she hopped.

Although . . . Moon might still have designs on the birdie mobile over the crib. She's making no promises.

Anna, for her part, now notices the cat and tracks her movements. So far, she hasn't grabbed out for Moon. She will. Neither cat nor baby has been declawed, so I'm guessing they'll be pretty evenly matched.

Motor developments

2007-01-10T06:09:00.000-08:00

While much of Anna Sophia's development and self-discovery is joyful both for her and for us, Stephen and I have been surprised at her palpable frustration when she can't do something she desperately wants to do. We've known since she was born that she would prefer to be a grown-up and wanted little to do with this whole baby business, but she can express her desires in so many new ways, now.

This week, Anna discovered the top of her head, first with her right hand, then with her left. This has allowed her to do a lot of ear-flapping and hair-rubbing with her hands. Even more excitingly, it has meant she has added one more motion to the set of motions she needs to turn herself over from belly to back or from back to belly. When she's on her back, she throws her arm into the air, presses her foot into the floor, and arches her back, and with one side of her body thus launched straight up into the air, she balances, in a poised state of frustration. She hasn't figured out yet how to thrust her topmost hip forward to give her the momentum to roll. Seeing her struggle to figure this out is fascinating and more hilarious for her parents than it is for her.

On her belly, she makes a special yelp which starts out kind of excited and playful but quickly gets more frustrated as she struggles to turn over. Actually, on her belly, she has trouble deciding between attempts to roll over onto her back (where she seems to know she will get stuck -- see above) or to move forward. She pulls one knee up under her and starts to press to roll -- then she yanks up the other knee and tilts herself facefirst onto her chin.

Anna spends more time on the floor on blankets now, since she can't be left in her carseat. She used to like to sit and watch the goings on. Now, no sooner is she set in the chair than she leverages her strong, long feet against the seat, arches her back into the air, then makes her body rigid. When -- if -- she allows herself to bend in the middle again, she slumps into the bottom of the chair with her feet hanging over the end. Not safe, not comfortable, just disconcerting.

Since I am ever helpful, I describe Anna's new movements to her using their Sanskrit names from yoga and explaining their yogic benefits. "Yay, Anna! You're practically throwing yourself from the changing table to the floor by doing setu bandha sarvangasana, the bridge posture. Aren't you strong!" It's going to take a lot of yoga superstrength and centring to catch this baby when she starts to move. When people ask if yoga helped prepare for childbirth, I can now tell them that's not the half of it.

Lasagna Revelation

2007-01-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

Anna fights sleep, but she invariably loses. She is sleeping now. But I hope her fight was worth it. Today, in her attempts to stay awake, she managed to work in one more half-ounce of yummy yummy soy beans, one more giggle for her papa, one last attempt to roll over. (As of today, she has all the actions figured out that would allow her to turn over. She just can't put them together fast enough to get any momentum going.)

May she not seek to cram as much into every minute of the day as her mother, her grandmother, or -- god forbid -- any of her great-grandmothers. Oh, the long line of over-achieving women. Oh, the long life and long days ahead for daughters of these.

It's not the overwork that has been a big deal for me as much as my tendency to make things complicated -- or, in the worst cases, Complicated. This came home to me last year most clearly in what I came to refer to as the Lasagna Revelation. Simply enough, a friend invited us for dinner. Since I'm hard to feed due to celiac disease, I asked what was on the menu and what I might be able to contribute. "No problem," she said. "I'm making lasagna with brown rice noodles."

Lasagna, I thought to myself. Gee, that's a lot of work. I worried about my friend undertaking such a big project and having to add the complications of catering to my special needs -- checking ingredients, avoiding cross-contamination, the boring details of my kitchen life.

Lasagna, as it turned out, was not a big project at all. It is perfectly possible to make lasagna with some nice ground beef, some good quality bottled tomato sauce, layered with some brown rice noodles, and topped with some grated mozza. Pop it in a pan, heat to bubbly, and voila. Imagine my surprise at the lack of complication to this generous and kind meal.

This set off my Lasagna Revelation. I got home from the dinner and sat in the kitchen and cried. "Stephen," I said, "I didn't know lasagna could be so easy." He quietly (and mostly supportively) laughed as I burst into tears.

Why? Because I realized that lasagna, for me, really is a big project. Here's how I make lasagna.
First, I till the soil. Then I add compost and allow it to warm gently. Then I plant the tomatoes, the zucchini, the eggplants, the herbs. The garlic is already in the ground from last fall. We tend the vegetables, sporadically, interpreting "organic gardening" to include a harmonious relationship with weeds. At the end of the growing season, we harvest the tomatoes, the zucchini, the eggplants. I prepare some plain whole tomatoes and some tomato sauce for the freezer and freeze it in freezer bags. I make pesto and freeze it in ice cube trays.

At some point in the winter, I decide to make lasagna. I thaw the tomatoes or tomato sauce. Chop onions, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, red pepper, mushroom. Let them all simmer to a rich homemade sauce. I wash, stem, and chop a pound of spinach. This is a lot of spinach. I grate three kinds of cheese.

Then I make the lasagna. Sans ground beef, it is still basically tomato sauce, layered with some brown rice noodles and some spinach and cheese, and topped with some grated mozza. Pop it in a pan, heat to bubbly, and voila. But my lasagna required more than a year of careful tending in the lead-up. Delicious, of course. But, let's face it, Complicated.

It's more than gardening that went into that year of careful tending. It's always more than gardening. It's a whole lifetime's worth of complex, interrelated values (often expressed as Issues) that I can't escape, that I contend with every time I try to do something as simple as making supper or as challenging as making and rearing a baby. This does not mean I ever really live up to the ethical standards that I set for myself -- this is part of what makes it all so Complicated, with the rationalizations and the shifting priorities and the self-flagellation. But I do, truly, love the complexity of systems and value my part in that complexity, whether it makes things taste better or not.

A lot of the complications I create will probably, similarly be around food. With celiac rampant on both sides of Anna's family, she's likely to need to eschew wheat from the earliest age. I want for her to have passions and passionate values and expressions of them. I just hope they are not too complicated.

(My Libran friends who have made it to the end of this post are saying to themselves, "Sister, you don't know from Complicated until you try living on the scales." You are brave Librans, all. Help my baby!)

First Christmas

2007-01-03T11:50:00.000-08:00

With just one final family gathering to go before the last of the aunts and uncles "from away" head for their various homes, I think we can say that we have survived Anna's first Christmas. Santa kept it simple, with some lovely little musical instruments, and aunts and uncles were wonderfully generous with practical, needed gifts to make the house baby-safe as Anna gets moving in the coming weeks.

Anna's gift to all was her happy presence. She was much in demand for social engagements, and her parents have obliged as often as possible.

Stephen and I are coming to terms with having given birth to a baby girl who is more outgoing than both of us put together. Anna Sophia loves to be around people, to watch what they're doing and hear their conversations. She also loves to be the centre of attention. More than once, she basically fell asleep -- her little body going very, very still and her breathing relaxing to its sleeping rate -- but conserved just enough energy to keep her eyes open to see what was going on. By noon on Christmas day, she was slumped in her father's arms, refusing to even blink in case she might not be able to get her eyes open again.

Since she was born and still today, at three months old, the two things people notice first about Anna are her bright, alert eyes that take everything in and her incredibly strong little body -- especially her legs. She has been able to support her own weight for weeks, but she "stands" with support for longer and longer times now, bouncing or sliding whenever she possibly can.

In her house painted with bright primary colours and hung with vivid paintings on every available surface, it's not surprising that she's observant. She hasn't figured out that she can see as much with her eyes casually open as she can with her eyes wide and her eyebrows raised, so she has a look of constant surprise. As much as she likes to be surprised by objects, patterns, and colours, she still loves people's faces the best. And if their faces are making funny noises, all the better.

Stephen and I are trying to figure out how we will parent a person who is showing signs that she could turn out to be laid-back, socially well-adjusted, and athletic. Based on our own experiences and personalities, we're better prepared for a misfit with an aversion to organized sports. I will know how to console a child hurt by emotional bullies who tell her she's "too smart for her own good" or that her unfashionable clothes make her look ridiculous. I will know what to do to buoy up a child's confidence when she gets picked last for softball. I don't quite know what I'll do if she wears mascara and is a rugby star. I'm not close-minded. I'm just allergic to mascara and suffer from Post Traumatic Gym Teacher Disorder.

I'd better get prepared to be as ready to learn from Anna as I am to indoctrinate her. I'm sure that next Christmas, when she's more aware of the goings-on and when she's fully ambulatory on those little legs, will be a great learning opportunity.

Dedication

2006-12-16T06:30:00.000-08:00

Anna Sophia attended her first poetry book launch yesterday, December 15. It was a command performance for a book that is dedicated to her, The Taste of Water, by Frank Ledwell, her grandfather. Not many eleven-week-olds can say they've had a book dedicated to them. That's some pretty quick turnaround on printing and launching.

Different Parents

2006-12-08T06:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been surprised when people describe me as “calm” or “laidback.” I’ve never perceived myself as deserving either of these descriptors. I’ve always suspected I’m inexcusably bossy and uptight. I’m equally surprised when people think I’m “organized,” when in my cluttered mind, I’m constitutionally unable to set a priority. And I still remember the shock of being described as “sanguine” when I was nineteen and realized that I apparently gave off a general air of nonchalant happiness after all those years of adolescent angst when I perceived myself, and expected others to perceive me, as “moody” at best and “morose” at worst.
I still suspect those who know me best -- Stephen especially -- know that I’m frenetic, bossy, uptight, disorganized, and moody. But new parenthood is providing a whole new mirror, and I have to admit that I’m a different parent than I thought I’d be, and this is a great relief.
I started to find out early. First of all, it took such determination to be able to get pregnant and stay pregnant that I learned a motivated self-discipline I had never asked or expected of myself before. It took a very strict diet, regular exercise, and a committed yoga practice, and all these enriched my life.

Having discovered willpower, I worried I would be one of those mothers who imposed my will on a baby. All those bossy instincts that I try (unsuccessfully) to either suppress or direct towards useful activity . . .

I let go my worry about imposing my will after about sixteen hours of labour. I thought a nice, unmedicated vaginal delivery would be the best start for my baby. Anna had other ideas. She thought it would be best to be born by c-section. All of a sudden, I learned a lesson in setting priorities: get this baby born without her needing to express distress to be born the way she wants to.

I never thought I would be a mother who would bottlefeed my baby. I was determined to breastfeed, and I thought a nice steady diet of breastmilk would be the best start for my baby. Again, Anna had other ideas. Soon after she was born, I discovered reserves of calm I didn’t know I had when Anna, who couldn’t latch at all, turned purple and shaky with crying every time she caught sight of my breast. And I was able to let go my determination to pump milk for her when I realized that the infernal mechanical contraption extracted more tears than milk from me (making me more “lachrymose” than “lactating”). Anna needed a mom who was more sanguine than morose.

I was worried that as a mother, I would “go soft,” somehow, and relinquish values and desires and dreams and even my sense of identity and self. And I have definitely gone soft in some ways -- but not in the ways I expected. I’m still determined to maintain my sense of independent identity and activity, to set an example at the very least. (Thanks, Stephen, for helping support this determination.) But the joyous flipside of needing my independence is that I want the same for Anna, and so I don’t need to feel any smothering possessiveness about her. She is so amazingly her own self, her own person already. This bodes well for her independent identity and activity -- and it makes us, her parents, love and appreciate our babysitters!

There are so many ways I give in. I give in to the pleasure of cuddles and kisses and games. I have gotten so tender-hearted at the thought of suffering, anyone’s suffering, that it would be unbearable if I didn’t use it as a motivation to crank up the active compassion response.
As an oldest daughter, I am so touched every day to be experiencing what I now realize my parents must have experienced all those years ago, to feel what they must have felt for me, and I know now in a way I didn’t know before just how fortunate and blessed I am.

And perhaps we all have different parents than we, or they, might think.

Nicknames

2006-12-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

Of all the nicknames we use for Anna -- Honeypie (and other Beatles allusions), Anapestic (and other plays on words with an “an-” prefix -- Patrick suggested “anaerobic,” considering her activity level), Monkeyface (and other nicknames more usually applied to the cat), Chicken (and other of my favourite poultry-related terms of endearment), Pavlova (and other famous Anna’s, to the exclusion of tragic ones like Karenina) -- I like the “-pants” range of nicknames best: Smileypants, Crankypants, Gigglypants, Stayawakeypants, Askyourdaddypants, and, best of all, just plain Annapants.

And the distinguished award for being the first to call Anna “Anna Banana” goes to writer J.J. Steinfeld, who met her on the street on an early adventure.

Anna’s granddad had been put on notice by Grandma Carolyn to avoid the obvious banana reference. Rhymes come cheap. Free verse will never last.

He has been very accommodating and has reformed his ways. After a lifetime of never calling his own children by the names he collaborated in giving them, he now suggests not spreading around nicknames for Anna, because they might stick.

As far as bananas go, I’m aware of the grave risk of putting our baby girl in yellow and having her branded forever, but the risks of yellow must be balanced against the risks of pink. The “girls must wear pink” law of Western capitalist and consumerist despots is more severely enforced than I had even predicted.

What a relief that Anna looks best in solid purples and whites.

Remembrance

2006-12-06T06:17:00.000-08:00

Today, Anna attended the annual memorial service for fourteen women murdered in Montreal, for local women murdered since that time, and for women around the world murdered because they were women. This service always touches me. The first memorial services for the Montreal Massacre took place in 1990, my first year at university. I remember participating in those services with a deep knowledge of what was lost with the loss of any young woman’s life.
Today, the urgency of eliminating violence feels absurdly important as I look at a baby girl and wish her for her the best possible life -- free of violence and full of choices.

Anna has attended four feminist events in the first ten weeks of her life. She has met her Member of Parliament, her Premier, and the provincial Minister Responsible for the Status of Women. Two events marked memorials of women who died by violence and efforts to prevent violence. Two events protested cuts to Canadian women’s organizations and the inexcusable gutting of the mandate for federal Status of Women programs.

I sincerely wish Anna was born at a time when women’s equality goals were already achieved (as the Harper government claims them to be). I had hoped that more of the work of achieving equality would be completed before she was born, much as I had hoped that the house would be clean and comfortable and safe. I guess we never accomplish what we set out to do during our pregnancies.

The first question we ask about babies is their sex. The first thing we do is ascribe them a gender and a set of ways of demarcating gender so we know how we’re expected to treat them: pink for girls, blue for boys. Frills for girls, plains for boys. Gentle tickles for girls, roughhouse kisses for boys.

At ten weeks old, Anna has never witnessed violence. She came close at the Public Health office, where our hearts sank to hear a two-year old boy tell his mother, “Wait for me, you idiot.” He did not say it jokingly. It was unbearable to think how he had learned so young to call his mother that or what the future holds for him and the people in his life. I hope that Anna does not have to experience his violence -- or anyone’s -- as she gets older.

At ten weeks old, Anna knows already some of the high expectations placed on girls. I shock myself with how easily, casually, automatically even I reward her for looking pretty and praise her for being “good.” I can only hope that I am as enthusiastic when she uses her voice to express her feelings and needs and that I reward her for her strength and intelligence and independent spirit. I remind myself every day to celebrate the ways she challenges me and the world, since there will be plenty to celebrate as she gets older.

At ten weeks old, Anna has met an amazing number of people who plan to love her like the dickens, and her capacity to accept their love and turn it into all kinds of goodness is incredible.

At ten weeks old, Anna has met dozens of women and men working together to eliminate violence and discrimination against women and others, and I am grateful to them all for the example they set.

Updates for Aunties & Uncles

2006-11-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

Big "A," little "a," what begins with "a"?

Anna is a busy baby and keeps us busy, but this has been an especially challenging week, since Stephen's back has been spasming any time he tries to lift or change the baby. I've explained to anyone who will listen that patriarchy put his back out. The crib and changing table are designed about eight inches too low for a man of his stature. (See, little grasshopper -- patriarchy causes pain for men, too.)

It's just possible that I'm in withdrawal from work and am over-applying feminist analysis to people and objects closer to home. But, lucky for Anna, she was born at the same time that her federal government declared that women are fundamentally equal already, so the federal Status of Women ministry doesn't need to have women's equality in its mandate or to fund women's organizations for advocacy. Anna and I have been to one protest already and will attend another this week. It's never too early to indoctrinate the young. We will carry a banner that reads, “Stephen Harper Makes My Baby Cry.”

So, where was I before the rant?

You'll be happy to know that Anna continues to have strong opinions and a sense of justice. One nurse had forewarned us that she was trying to lead a Babies' Lib movement from the nursery of the hospital. She's a very laid-back baby -- except when she's not, and then she yells at us. It isn't frequent, but it is always justice-related. She rails against the injustice of wet diapers, hunger pangs, unacknowledged sleepiness, and bad parenting.

Bad parenting occurs when we fail to distinguish a yell demanding one thing from a yell demanding another -- if we mistake hunger for a wet diaper, for instance. Bad parenting, in her estimation, can also consist of paying less than 100% of our attention to her 100% of the time.

The sleepiness issue is a bigger problem, since she yells if she's tired but hates to miss anything interesting, and so she fights sleep with every ounce of energy she has left. Fortunately, this fighting only takes place during the day-time. She's well on her way to sleeping through the night -- she slept ten hours at a stretch last night, which I thought was a bit of a gyp since Stephen was supposed to be on night shift and I was on morning shift. He slept through while I staggered out of bed at 6:00. Not early by Anna’s granddad's standards, but I had been on night and morning shift for the two previous nights. And it's Sunday morning, for pete's sake.

You can tell when Anna's fully asleep because of her position: the Duffy sprawl, as Dad called it. Arms a-flail. Stephen now refers to Anna's arms as the "lateral stabilizers," as in the phrase, "lateral stabilizers fully deployed."

She's thriving on her all-bean diet, our little vegan baby -- she's on a soy-based formula since being unable to breastfeed. We would call her "fartface" as a nickname anyway, because we're like that, but she earns the title. She loves to eat and when she has fully satisfied her appetite gets a look on her face -- mouth agape and milk-covered, eyes half-lidded -- a bit like Homer Simpson after a beer. We call her our "sloppy little milk drunk" on these occasions. Then we put her to bed.

Her personality and tastes are emerging more and more with every day. Last time I wrote, she was able to tell us her favourite albums. Now she can tell us her favourite songs. She's still fond of Rose Cousins’s If You Were For Me album (especially "Dance If You Want To"). But her preferences led to some heartache recently, when we tried out an album of soppy baby lullabies we'd received in a book bag at the hospital. She loved it. Cheese-a-rific keyboards and all. To her credit, she cried when a bunch of children belted "Frere Jacques" out of key. But she loves the "Snuggling Song" -- "This is the snuggling song / The snug as a bug in a rug-a-ling song." Ugh-a-ling song.

Thanks to Laurie's lovely “un-shower” last week, attended by many friends and family members, we've diversified the lullaby collection a little and only have put the snuggling song in lower rotation. We’ve been overwhelmed by all the presents, good wishes, and love from family and friends.

Anna slept for a while at Laurie’s party for her, but she woke in time for cheesecake and was very charming. She still loves to play with people more than toys. She loves to look into a person's face, and she's got a killer smile. (She had to work on it. For a few days when she was five weeks old, she could only smile on one side at a time -- then finally she got both sides coordinated.) This week, she's learning to laugh, which is pretty cute. Her favourite game is tongue-sticking-out. She sticks out her tongue at you, and you are expected to stick your tongue out at her. For at least half an hour. Funny noises and raspberries optional but preferred. Diatonic and pentatonic scales and arpeggios sung while forming raspberries guaranteed to inspire the attempts to laugh.

A true Island girl, Anna was also wonderfully social during the sad occasions around her mother’s godmother's wake and funeral last week. On Wednesday, she had the happy surprise of meeting her Aunt Emily, home from northern Quebec, and she came to the wake and slept so peacefully that she was able to stay almost all afternoon. She had a babysitter during the funeral, but she came out again for the family reception that night. It was a good thing to have new life at gatherings that marked the end of a life. And though it was a very sad occasion, it was good to get together with family that doesn't gather nearly often enough.

Anna is a very contented, friendly baby. We love her, of course, but we also like her a lot and find her great fun to be around, with her strong and active little body and her curious mind. She loves to sit in her chair on the kitchen table while I cook (as long as I stick my tongue out at her often), and she scrunches her nose when I wave things under her nose for her to sniff. She loves to go for walks in her stroller or in her carrier, and she looks around intently until the rhythm of the motion lulls her to sleep. We try to take our walks in French, to give her a little taste of a second language. Turns out her mother needs a pocket dictionary, thanks to lapses in vocabulary -- what is the French word for "sidewalk," anyway?

When Anna Sophia wakes today, we'll do our regular round of Sunday visits, with Grandma Marjorie first and then today, for special, supper at Pat and Tara's to belatedly celebrate Grandma Carolyn's birthday.

All About Anna

2006-10-29T05:59:00.000-08:00

Dear ones living “away,” it has been a while since I gave you updates about Anna -- really, most of you don't know much about her except that she was born. Mostly, she does baby stuff -- eating, sleeping, growing, fussing, pooping, staring at walls -- but she does it all very well and very cutely. The verdict from her grandmothers is that she is perfect. It's a lot to live up to, but she's trying her best.

Anna only wakes once per night most nights, a boon to her parents who are exhausted anyway. Stephen does the late-night shift most nights, to let me recover more swiftly from my surgery. I get up early in the morning if Anna wakes early, and I let Stephen sleep in. He's still working part-time, afternoons only, and may only return to work full-time if it’s absolutely necessary.

Anna is very bright-eyed and curious. She loves to look around, enjoying contrast and colour and people's faces. She even responds more to paintings with faces in them than she does to paintings of flowers or landscapes. (Maybe this is just because the ones with faces are mostly her dad's paintings!)

So far, her favourite music is Rose Cousins' s new CD -- especially "Dance If You Want To" and other songs in 3/4 time, perfect for waltzing. She enjoyed her introduction to her uncle Danny and In-Flight Safety, too, though it was perhaps more sophisticated. The big singles made the biggest impression, since Anna is a melodically minded one-month-old. Stephen says she likes the hip-hop beats, but he's kind of kidding. She certainly seems to want to dance.

She tries very hard at everything she tries and obviously wants to have a grown-up body that will do what she tells it. She tries to move her head and stretch her legs in rhythm with songs. It does not always go well for her and sometimes results in her head bashing into one of her parents' collarbones or chins. A few times, I've caught her trying to sing. It's hilarious. She just tries out her voice on a steady pitch and makes a sound that is different from her other vocalizations. She can only change the pitch on inhalations so far.

Perhaps only a parent would call it "singing." We ascribe a lot of developmental successes to her when, really, she's happy just to stare at walls. Yesterday, she was a little closer to the wall of her crib, though, and she discovered that she could not only see it, she could also touch it and feel the texture and scratch it and make a sound. This delighted her for an hour or more.

She is often very happy to sit somewhere or lie somewhere and amuse herself. At the end of the hour, she's usually fussy for a bit, and we try to guess why. The tricky part is determining where the line is between being tired and needing to lie down and being awake long enough to be hungry again. She doesn't like to sleep during the day. She hates to miss anything. She usually stays awake either all morning or all afternoon. Evenings, she cranks unmercilessly for a couple of hours before bed, no matter how good a day she has had.

We try to take her on adventures every day; otherwise her mother is cranky at the end of the day, too. Yesterday, she had baby yoga with her mom and then her parents carted her off in her stroller to see the sights around Charlottetown. She fell asleep and we stopped for hot chocolate and to read the Globe and Mail at Mavor's (good stroller parking, close proximity to art galleries, changing tables in both the men’s and women’s washrooms, and many escape routes). Other days, the adventure is usually just a walk in the stroller. She screams blue murder at the prospect of wearing a hat (having inherited her father's and her Ledwell uncles' enormous noggin), but after that, she settles in the stroller and struggles to stay awake to look around as long as she can. She usually falls asleep by the time we get to the Tech Centre on University, lulled by the ka-thunk ka-thunk of the sidewalks on Prince Street.

Today's adventure will be a visit with Grandma Marjorie and then a visit with Grandma Carolyn and Granddad Frank. Given the end of daylight savings time, we expect this to mean she'll be awake and happy for Marjorie and awake and cranky for the Loyalist crowd.

Home at Last

2006-10-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

Today, we brought home our new daughter, Anna Sophia. Stephen and I could not be happier or more excited. She was born, healthy and happy, on September 28. We can’t wait to get to know her.

I am recovering from the surgery required to separate the baby from me. Stephen is mostly going back and forth to the drug store. No matter how well we were cared for at the hospital, there’s no place like home.