Hooray for blogging! And hej da! And happy 4th!

Via Magpie Musing and Lands’ End, we were the delighted recipients of a bathing suit, cover-up, and towel giveaway!

Here’s the reluctant model (the pictures are out of focus since I don’t know how to use my husband’s camera, which was the only one I could find):

Wonderful! Thank you!

+++

We’re off to Europe later today. Didn’t sleep too well last night, unfortunately; had an anxiety dream about competing with Amy Winehouse for a job working in a library. She got it. Baby is aware and possibly excited that tonight, at night night time, we will be getting on an AIRPLANE! and will get to eat SNACKS! and watch VIDEOS! and go NIGHT NIGHT! on the AIRPLANE high in the sky! We’ll see how that plan works out.

Insouciance

A preview?

Oh, but she’s still a little girl:

Jeans

I realized several other things I need to accomplish before going to Sweden (e.g. get a haircut, select books to bring, get wedding ring fixed [ran out of time for this], mail shit) and another was to buy jeans. In the winter here if I wear pants it’s corduroys mostly, and in the summer it’s skirts, dresses, or my one pair of shorts (that I bought a month ago). But the summer in Sweden is more pants weather, and I wanted something casual, and had nothing. My khakis are ruined in several ways. My jeans are all too big. Poor me. I had to go jeans shopping.

Besides the obvious fit requests people make, I needed pants that don’t stretch too much in the waist. I can’t figure out why jeans usually seem to fit fine but then migrate downward all the time. I don’t want to have to wear a belt because that makes me feel like I should tuck in my shirt and tucking in, well, no. I have to pee way too often for that. Thus I was delighted to find a pair that was the right length, a decent color, fit fine on my bottom and did not accentuate my c-sectioned tummy, and had a non-stretch waist that keeps the pants in the correct location. What’s more they were 70% off! 12 dollars!!! Unfortunately, I have also realized since wearing them today that they are probably what everybody is always deriding as “mom jeans” though I’m not too sure. I think these are what I got:

I never wore jeans growing up. I am no jeans sophisticate. I got my first pair my sophomore year of college and have worn them irregularly since. What about you?

Names

This is the person I refer to here as Baby:

But it’s clear that she’s just not a baby anymore. She’s a toddler, sometimes even a little girl. Look at her, comfortable in her chair, eating an apple all by herself, saying “cheese” for the camera. That’s just not very infantile.

In Real Life she goes by “Baby N__a.” New acquaintances try to call her just “N__a” but they soon see that they are in the minority there and cave to the peer pressure. For her first six months or so she just went by “Baby” and sometimes we still call her that. Calling her “Baby N__a” was a conscious move towards using her given name, and I would like to call her just by her first name, perhaps even by her first and middle names, as that’s a nice Southern tradition, at some point.

In this space, however, the name “Baby” feels right still since that is part of what we call her, but then to those of you outside looking in, it might seem too stylized or self-consciously anonymous (I’m just guessing–maybe not). And when I see pictures like that one, well, “Baby” just doesn’t fit.

So what to call her here? Here are some prospects:

Cutie McCuterson (too hard to type, but oh so true)
Princess (bad connotations, but I do call her that)
N (her initial; maybe, but boring)
Toddler (to continue with the theme)
Daughter (goes with Husband, but I still get freaked out saying I have a daughter–that just seems so grown up)
Her actual name (but I just don’t feel totally comfortable with that)
Naomi (the name I wanted to name her but apparently it’s difficult to pronounce in Swedish; also I think if I used it here I would feel bad that we never named her that, since I picked that name out when I was 13 and I’m still a little unhappy we didn’t use it, and maybe that’s why I’ve had all this ambivalence in Real Life about using Baby’s real name)

Or something else? What do you think? How have you handled this?

Beached out

Sooo…back from the beach. You know, a vacation with a small child is quite a bit different from one without. For example, there is no sleeping in. There is a lot less sex. There are scheduling requirements that are not flexible.

Then, if the child in question is also on a special elimination diet, has recently suffered emotional trauma due to having been separated from her mama making her phenomenally clingy and grouchy, has developed a phobia of travel cribs having had to sleep in one at the babysitter’s, and caps things off with a mysterious 103-degree fever, well, it’s really almost not like a vacation at all.

Still, there was sand, buckets, and shovels, which always cheer everyone up, walks on the beach, trips to playgrounds and various non-Western-style restaurants which more easily accommodated Baby’s diet, and eventually she did sleep in her crib, and one morning she even slept in past 6 AM! We did have a nice time overall, even if I did lose that game of Life. But I’m not anxious for our next pseudo-vacation to Europe next month. Sometimes it’s nice to be home.

The best little toddler around

I totally stole the idea for this post

from Christy.

When I have post ideas but not the time or inclination to write a whole post, I will jot a note and save it as a draft with some pithy title. Later it is not always entirely clear to me what I was talking about so these potential gems just go, um, I don’t know, uncut? Even if I can guess my point, oftentimes I just don’t care about that topic anymore. In the interest of clearing out my draft folder, here some are:

Title: My favorite chicken
Text:

Title: Antarctica is not one of the states
Text: Also, there are only 50 states. Hawaii, yes, is one of them. No, Alaska is not part of Canada. Mexico is not in the southern hemisphere, sorry. [FYI I guess?]

Title: It sucks to be a penguin [I was really affected by the March of the Penguins movie]

Title: AWWW
Text:

Title: Sick as a cat
[no text, but I am going to assume it was to be about cat vomit]

Title: Snack station
[God, this one is so old. Back when Baby was just starting to walk, she liked to take snacks at a step stool in the kitchen. Well she sometimes still does it. BORING.]

Title: Bad dog
[no text--I think this might have been intended to be about the time one of our dogs kind of snapped in Baby's direction. That sucked.]

Title: Preposition proposition
Text: We have been working on prepositional phrases. Under the basket! In the box! Out of the tunnel! Over your head! [still true]

Title: Veto power
Text: My father [What on earth?]

Title: The language of word verifications [I've seen some dirty things]

Title: Please try not to pass out from jealousy [the backyard???]

Title: I bite my nails for the good of the family
Text: It’s true! [I think because otherwise I injure them? But it's not true now. I stopped biting altogether suddenly with no cause. Still have to keep them cut.]

Title: I wasn’t a virgin pumper
[This was going to be about the time when I was working at a farm and this goat had triplets and the mama goat didn't want to feed one of the kids so I milked other goats and fed that third goat milk in a bottle. Not a bad story but also not all that long.]

Title: Talar du svenska?
Text: Last week in class I taught a lesson in Swedish.
[This is fully a year old. I can't imagine what interesting I could have said about this. Hence the unfinished draft.]

Title: Everything is a pumping metaphor
[Back when I was exclusively pumping, I would relate a lot of things to pumping. Can't get the job you want? It's like not being able to make enough milk. And etcetera.]

Title: Creams for baby
[Since birth: anti-yeast, estrogen, anti-eczema, triple ointment, and many more; wish I'd posted about it so I would remember them all]

Title: It’s like a playdate that I don’t attend
[Baby's in-home day care experience--she plays with other one-year-old girls, runs around, etc.]

There are more but I will spare you. Do you have drafts sitting around?

Baby fever

I don’t have it; Baby does.

It seems like half the people I know are in possession of babies, especially newborns, these days. When we see them I like to hold them a couple of minutes, maybe make some funny sounds at them, comment on their cuteness, perhaps help coax out a burp, and then I’m done, ready to pass the squalling, floppy things back to their tired mommies.

Not so Baby. She rather insists on getting to hold them, hug them, kiss them, pat them, burp them, love them, squeeze them, ad inifinitum. Why their mothers prefer to hold them themselves, perhaps nursing them, or keeping them in their little car seats, she doesn’t know and finds intensely frustrating. She knows she would be awesome at holding them. She reaches out her arms, indicating, “Just hand him over, he’ll be fine, give him here!” For crawling babies, she’ll follow them around trying to hoist them up, or drag them into her lap. This is especially funny as some of them weigh more than she does. When she has had the brief opportunity to hold a newborn, or sit with an older baby, Baby is, indeed, gentle and sweet, intensely curious, quick with the kisses. It’s darling. But eventually we take the baby away from her, and her disappointment is quite clear. She simply does not agree that, as a one-year-old, she is not an appropriate caretaker for a zero-year-old.

Though I don’t usually post pictures of other people’s kids, one newborn is largely indistinguishable from another, so here is a hilarious picture of Baby holding a (really big) three-week-old, who looks quite alarmed about this turn of events (though honestly Baby was doing a great job holding him; I can’t imagine what his problem was).

In related news, she also enjoys holding kitties:

The siblings of these babies aren’t nearly as obsessed with babies as Baby. Maybe they want to hold them or check them out from time to time, but then they find other pursuits. But Baby is never done with the babies. And since seeing all these newborns recently, she’s been particularly into her dollies. For many of her waking hours Baby will cart around her baby doll or a humanoid-looking kitty cat and a doll bottle with fake milk. She likes to check their diapers and burp them. Perhaps it’s a phase. It makes me even more glad, though, not to have a newborn in the house of my own. Running interference all the time would be exhausting and sooner or later that baby would get toted around by its neck and then dropped; I can just see it. Yet another reason to wait until Baby is three, or four, or never, to have another baby. Baby will just have to wait!