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.

The anti-crying-it-out sleep plan

So Audrey is almost 8 months old now, and has been going through an extended phase (since just before 6 months) where she has wanted to eat at least every 3 hours at night, sometimes much more than that. This started off because we went to see my parents over the holidays, and then went on to a family reunion in California. Both of these situations promoted a lot of "Audrey in bed with us" because she was just starting separation anxiety and we were in strange places, so it was easier for all if she slept with us. After we returned to Tucson, we worked on getting her back into her crib for the night, but she resisted, and then I got sick, meaning I didn't want to be getting up multiple times in the night to feed her, and so we were back to square one.

A little more than a week ago we decided to try a quasi crying-it-out plan - she would be in bed with us, but after eating, mom's restaurant would close down and she would have to sleep. This worked for a night or two, but then she wised up and just started crying for long periods. Like pretty much 3 hours straight one night. We couldn't stand it. So goodbye "cry-it-out-in-bed."

Last Friday, we decided to try something new, what I'm calling the tag-team plan. How it works is this: since she's been used to eating mostly all night, we don't want to cut her off completely (even though she can probably make it through the night without eating, as evidenced by "many other babies" everyone is always telling us about). Anyway, I decided I can handle 2 feedings, one at midnight (or later) and one at 4 am (or later) after we put her to bed (usually averaging around 8 pm). The tag-team part is that if, after I put her down at 8 pm, she wakes up anytime before midnight, Paul is on duty. He will go in and calm her down, walk with her (if he has energy), rock with her, and ultimately put her down and hold her hand until she goes to sleep. I then sleep as much as I can from 8:30/9:00 pm to midnight-ish, and then I feed her the first time when she wakes up after 12 (she tends to prefer 12:30 am). Then if she wakes up between the end of that feeding and 4 am-ish, I perform the same walk-rock-hand-holding maneuvers that Paul did before 12. Then if she wakes up after 4 am (give or take, I am not super-stickler about this and will feed her at 3:45 or whatever) she gets another feeding, hopefully to last her until at least 6 am.

So far it is working well. There is definitely less crying, especially after the first couple nights when she woke up quite a bit and stayed awake for longer than 20-30 minutes (the duration of a feeding or a quick-ish settling down). Since we are generally holding her when she cries, it is much easier to settle her down vs. having her in the crib crying and getting more and more worked up. Because neither of us is "on" all night, we are able to get more sleep - I might wake up at 11 if I hear her cry and Paul doesn't, but then he'll go settle her down and I can go back to sleep.

Our hope is that we can work down to one or no feedings overnight, and Audrey seems to be working toward the one-feeding goal too. The other night she woke up just once, at 2:30, to eat, so we'll see how it continues to go. Paul and I decided that "consistency is key" - we both try to do the same things to settle her down, and we follow the same tag-team plan so she knows who she's getting based on when she wakes up. The big challenge on the horizon will be Paul and I going on our belated "Valentines date" on Saturday - we'll see what effect that has, although it may not be too bad since it might just delay her bedtime (or mean she gets a "bonus" feeding when we get home at 9:30 or 10 pm). Keep your fingers crossed for the continued success of the tag team and Audrey's continued cooperation with our efforts!

Renewing Vows and Unanswerable Questions

Just to be clear, the two parts of today's title are not related - I just have two short topics I am thinking about so I figured I'd put them in one entry.

On Valentines Day, Paul and I renewed our wedding vows while holding Audrey, who was content to try to dismantle the two roses tied together with ribbon that they had given us. The renewal ceremony was held at a Lutheran church on the southeast side, and most of the people participating were from that church, but a few, like us, had read about the ceremony in the paper on Thursday under "alternative things to do for Valentines Day" and called the church office on Friday to RSVP.

The service was at 2 pm, and Paul's story is that he got so frustrated with me complaining that I had nothing to wear (that fit, anyway) around 11:30 am that he took Audrey and sent me out to buy something , anything that I felt looked decent and not to come back until I had something. It took me almost 2 hours but I managed to get a black skirt. I couldn't even find a whole outfit. But I put the skirt together with a shirt I already had, fed Audrey, and we got in the car and went to the service, making it just in time.

My story is that although we made it to the service, I forgot my camera so we have no pictures of this event. We ended up waiting a bit anyway once we got there because they were waiting for one more couple who had RSVPed. The service was nice although I did have to get up and walk around with Audrey when the pastor made his remarks - a sort of mini-sermon, but still too long for Audrey to sit through. After several readings and the remarks, we got up to renew our vows. The church was octagonal, and had an octagonal alter rail around the central altar, so we spread out around the alter, facing our partners. There were 13 couples, and the pastor had specifically admonished us that we were to say our vows to our current partner and not to someone we happened to be standing next to as we circled the alter. One couple had been married 50 years that day, so they stood up on the alter with the pastor and he read the vows for them. The men went first, with the pastor saying "I, Don" which Paul quickly changed to "I, Paul" then..."take you, Roberta" to which Paul promptly repeated "take you, Roberta" I started laughing as Paul pressed on, repeating the vows and slipping in "Kay" in a few spots so he could assure me that he was renewing his vows with me, and was not in fact marrying Roberta.

After the service the ladies of the church had made a variety of valentines cakes - one looked like a mini wedding cake but others were heart-shaped with jam and the best one, a low-sugar chocolate cake. They were all very tasty, and people admired Audrey who of course put on her most charming looks for them. As I told Paul, I wanted to renew our vows because it was a sentimental thing to do on Valentines day, but also because I knew there would be a story. Or in this case, at least two.

Now, to close with the unanswerable questions. There are two, right now. One is "How's your dissertation going?" and the other is "Is Audrey sleeping through the night?" The short answers are "Slowly" and "No" and I don't really want to get into either!