Happy First Birthday, Audrey!

Audrey is one today. Today at 1:09 pm, pacific time, to be exact. I will probably be at mom-baby group at that time, although our group days may be numbered because most of the babies are so much younger and Audrey's favorite thing to do is to dash off into nearby rooms where she is not allowed to go, meaning that I spend the whole group chasing her down. She is now a full-fledged toddler, though she still looks too tiny to be walking around and getting into things.

Motor-skill wise, walking is the big thing. She still scoots across the floor when she wants to move fast but she walks well and only starts tripping and falling when she's tired. She can climb stairs (although getting down is more challenging) and can go down small slides at the park by herself. Verbally, she's making lots of sound that might be words, but they're still in "baby", so we don't understand most of it. Sometimes she gets frustrated because she'll walk up to me and say something like "Bob" and I won't respond, so she says, louder, like maybe I'll understand her if she speaks up, "BOB!" Socially, she's still the same social butterfly. She feels it's her job to greet everyone and make them feel welcome. She waves and smiles. For all I know she's saying "Hi, my name is Audrey, what's yours?"

Her sleeping is getting a little better, she still wakes up a couple of times a night but only eats once. We've run into a few people who said 13 months or so was the magic "sleeping through the night" age, but we're still dubious since people have been telling us since 6 months that she's supposed to be sleeping through the night. Oh well. She's napping now but may be up soon - I think I hear her moving in the crib on the other side of the wall. Happy Birthday, Audrey!

First Conversation with Audrey

So today, Audrey and I had our first two-way conversation. She is now 11 1/2 months old, and has a few words that are intelligible, at least to Paul and I. She says Da and Dada for Paul, Mei-mei and sometimes ma-ma for me, and Ah-da for herself. Also sometimes "up" and "eat." Today at lunch, however, I was feeding her turkey and vegetables, which she did not want. She showed me she did not want them by trying to sweep them off her tray onto the ground. I said to her, "Okay, so you don't want your turkey and vegetables, what do you want to eat?" And she looked right at me and signed "milk."

She is now also walking about 90% of her movement time, as this 10-second video clip shows...

Mother's Day

It started out as a typical day - Audrey is teething, so she had been up it felt like every 20 minutes last night, and she woke up for good at 4:30 am. After some grumbling on both of our parts and a valiant attempt to put her back to sleep by Paul (he had her all the way asleep in his arms but she woke up as soon as her head touched the crib mattress), we got up. It was only 5:30, too early to even go get a bagel. So, we did what any sane, sleep-deprived parents and baby might do...ate a banana apiece (even Audrey had a bite of mine, a big concession since she dislikes bananas) and walked to the playground.

I've been going to the playground with Audrey in the morning after breakfast, and it's nice at 7:30 am or so - still cool, hardly anyone there, so I wanted to show Paul her new playground skills. So the three of us walked up stairs, slid down slides, and Audrey showed Paul her "crawling-through-the-tunnel" abilities - truly an independent skill since the tunnel is too small for mommy or daddy to fit through...

After playtime, we came back to the house and Audrey went down for a nap (playing with mom AND dad is exhausting!) and Paul made me vanilla and cinnamon waffles with berries and powdered sugar. After eating two and reading the front page of the paper, we decided to go back to sleep. As I write this, Paul and Audrey are both still sleeping - Audrey's going on 2 1/2 hours, Paul on 2...I was able to get back to sleep for about 20 minutes, but then I was up. I'm trying not to do anything chore-like (wash dishes, fold laundry, etc.) because I figure, as the Family Circus cartoon so aptly pointed out this morning, how many chances do I have NOT to do those things?) Anyway, despite the veneer of tiredness, a nice mother's day so far!

Picnic at the Park

Just a quick post to say that in the past few weeks Paul and I have been trying to go over to our local park with Audrey for a picnic dinner at least once a week and hope to keep doing this until it gets too hot in the evening to sit outside.

We take our towel and pack an easy dinner - usually tacos - and just go sit in the grass. The park is nice because people are almost always there to have a good time -to spend time with their family, play with their dog in the dog park, celebrate a birthday or some other occasion...only on rare occasion have we seen people having some sort of negative interaction in the park. And there is plenty of grass (well, relatively, this is Tucson) and plenty of trees.

Audrey loves it because she can make a big mess and it doesn't matter. Tonight she grabbed some of the beans for the tacos and stuffed maybe 8 in her mouth at once. She lost a bunch of them when she started chewing but then picked them up and ate them again. She also got into (literally) her sweet potatoes and carrots, and then finished up with two whole strawberries and a whole grape. I took pictures but deleted them because it looked like she was bleeding as the strawberry juice dripped down her arm. So instead you get a picture of her commandeering the avocado before we opened the container!

Audrey, 9 months

So I feel perhaps that I'm part of a new trend here. Instead of filling out the traditional baby book for Audrey, instead I (and other parents who blog about their kids) will have the "Baby Blog," an intermittent recording of baby's accomplishments, archived on the Blogspot server, at least until Blogspot goes out of business or otherwise tells bloggers they need to move their content somewhere else.

Audrey is now a little over 9 months and her development is proceeding apace. She can do three signs in conjunction with appropriate activities (milk, potty, and more) although her use of "more" has dropped off rapidly since grandma Mary left and she now has only an audience of mommy at meals. She also responds to commands - she pulled the pig's tail in a barnyard book when asked on three separate occasions for me, grandma, and grandpa. This also has more practical applications - when asked, she can often sit back in her highchair to make it easier for me to feed her, or sit up/back on the potty so she doesn't get so engrossed in the bathroom linoleum that she falls off the potty onto her nose. She has also started pointing, which can help some with communication too - she can point in a direction she wants to go, although she's not quite to the stage where she can point for "I'd like some toast rather than the apples."

Motor-skill wise, she is walking well with support - one of her favorite games is to hold daddy's hands (or if she's feeling brave, just one hand, using the other to grasp the wall or furniture) and walk around the house. Her balance is good and she can "cruise" along furniture, though she still takes the occasional tumble. She has also started "scooting." I wouldn't even call it crawling, and I'll have to get a video of it - basically, from seated, she walks her hands forward so she is up on her hands and feet and scoots forward a couple of inches and sits down again. It's not very efficient but she can cover a few feet when motivated. The big thing though is that she can now go from her belly up to a seated position. She doesn't like to do it, since it's a lot of work, but now she is no longer stuck on her belly when she starts to scoot/crawl and doesn't quite make it.

I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of for the moment!

Jessica's wedding

Departing from the usual Audrey musings, I want to tell you about Jessica and Sean's wedding that Paul, Audrey and I attended last Saturday. It was held at the beautiful Triangle L Ranch in Oracle, Arizona, about an hour north of Tucson. Paul and I agreed that it was the best wedding we'd been to in some time, despite the fact that we knew almost no one there except the bride and groom.

Their wedding reminded me:

• That you don't need a lot of words to have a lot of meaning

They got married in the Quaker tradition and the marriage ceremony is silence, exchanging vows, more silence, speaking by those moved to speak, more silence, and an embrace by the couple at the end.


• That potlucks mean fabulous food if you move in the "good potluck" circles

Jessica definitely moves in the good potluck circles.


• That walking along a path illuminated only by a string of white lights is simultaneously romantic to adults and magical to babies

The Triangle L ranch hosts an annual arts event called "Glow" where they have art viewing by night. Being there at the ranch made me want to come back for that event.


• That carrot cake by committee is the best carrot cake ever

I was on the "cake team," making the icing for all the cakes, and a perk of this was getting to do the taste test a month or so back - we (the four cake bakers and I) tasted 3 carrot cakes, took notes (yes, we are grad students) and picked the best features and ingredients of each to meld into a new recipe. As Paul said "This cake is awesome."


• That Audrey loves a party

She was even dancing with one of Jessica's aunts and allowed herself to be held by another aunt for about 3 songs as Paul and I did our first swing dancing in almost a year. I was totally wearing the wrong shoes for it but it was fun.


• That sometimes staging a picture gets you a good one

Jessica and Sean were going to formally (at least semi-formally) cut the "display" cake but everyone was dancing so they just decided to cut into it and let people eat between dances. I saw them after they had cut about two pieces and said "You're not going to cut the cake? How about cutting it for me and I'll take pictures?" So they said OK and I took a picture of them "cutting" the cake they'd already cut. They didn't feed each other cake, but one of the pictures of Sean eating cake looks like Jessica just fed him a piece and it's one of my favorite pictures from the wedding!

This one is about the potty

So if you're not into reading potty stories, don't read further. To respect Audrey's privacy, no photo illustraton is available.

So as Audrey nears 9 months, there are many things she can do. Her grasping is getting better, she's still working avidly on crawling, and is considering bagging the whole thing and moving right to walking. She is strong enough to stand for a while now, and working on her stability so she can simultaneously hold onto the edge of the coffee table and pull all the magazines and coasters off of it.

But the potty - a couple of weeks ago, two moms at our mom & baby group talked about elimination communication, or EC. This is like early potty training, where you look for cues from the child, and give them "potty opportunities" or "pottytunities" as I have been calling them (I think this is what the main EC book calls them). There is no pressure to train completely, the idea is just to keep kids in touch with their bodies and save yourself a few diaper changes too. At group, both moms had kids who were just a few weeks older than Audrey, and had been doing this with them since 3 or 4 months. Both kids had small potties they could now sit on (before they can sit, you hold them over or stand them in the sink). They say EC works best if the kids wear cloth diapers, so they can tell immediately when they are wet or dirty. But Audrey is in disposable diapers, and we're probably not inclined to change this plan. Despite this, the "stay in touch with your body" message made sense to me.

So I bought a little white potty (Audrey chose this color over hot pink). I had noticed that in the morning, whenever I changed Audrey's overnight - and pee-filled - diaper, I would go to wash my hands after, and 9 times out of 10, she would have pooped in the new diaper by the time I got back. So the morning after I bought the potty, I went in to wash my hands and took Audrey with me and sat her on the potty. I washed my hands, came back and made the cuing sound (pssss) and let Audrey hang out on the potty, exploring her new surroundings for a few minutes. I finally decided she wasn't going to do anything, but when I helped her off the potty, she had pooped! First time sitting on the potty!

After that, I put her on the potty at least a few times a day, most days. Sometimes she didn't do anything, but often she did. She may less than 9 months old, but she got the idea of the potty pretty quickly. So we're nowhere near the "diaper-free baby" but I have avoided changing some poopy diapers, which is always a plus. And I like to think Audrey is becoming more aware of her body. Maybe someday soon, she'll say "pa-pa" for potty (don't worry, Paul is da-da :-) and we can go for a pottytunity on her say-so.