Love that kid!
This letter is going in the mail Monday morning. I sure hope he replies or we'll have a disappointed 5 year old on our hands.
Elsa seems to be doing everything early. She got her first tooth at 4 months. Now she has 2 big front teeth on the bottom and their sisters on either side are coming in plus more on top. Through all this teething, she remains the smiley-est baby in town. She smiles so much that people comment on it. Even people that see her a lot. She has a way of grinning from top to bottom. She put on that bright smile, her eyes light up and she'll look away bashfully while she straightens her legs and throw herself up somehow. It's hard to describe but delightful to see.
The big news that finally got me to sit down in front of a computer in my non-working hours was that she started crawling. It's not perfect cross crawling but she can move from one place to another. She'll be on her hands and knees and move one hand/knee step and throw her chest on the floor in the direction she wants to go and then bring her hands and knees back underneath herself. Today she managed to pull out the dog treats which made Pluto pretty happy. Yesterday she was snacking on weeds while we worked in the garden. We kept plunking her back into the middle of the blanket but she managed to get to the crunchy weeds.
As for eating, she seems to have gotten the hang of that finally. She's not the enthusiastic chomper that Mathilda was but at least she's opening her mouth and getting food down with only minimal weird faces. So far she's had rice cereal, millet cereal, yogurt, avocado, bananas, summer squash, sweet potato, carrots, peach, mango and possibly something Nick gave her without my supervision.
Which reminds me that I need to go get a sweet potato out of the microwave and package it up for future meals.
Ciao
<conversation>
Mathilda: "What kind of phone is this?" asking about her friend Sam's toy cell phone.
Me: "Cell phone, I guess."
Mathilda: "Oh. So you use it to sell things."
</conversation>
Today was her 4 month birthday and 4 month checkup. It was no surprise to learn that she's perfectly healthy. She smiled at everybody and was declared a "happy baby" by the pediatrician, Dr. Lee.
She is such a sweet baby. Very smiley and charming. She has a way of smiling at people and them looking away like she's bashful. It's adorable. Sometimes she looks at me with an expression like we are sharing some sort of inside joke. I can't help but smile at her whenever I look at her. Lately I've been giving her lots of raspberries on her belly. That definitely makes her giggle. Speaking of which she had graduated to really cracking up. Mathilda in particular can really make her laugh. Watching the two of them together is heartwarming. Mathilda is a sweet and wonderful big sister. She has seemed entirely comfortable with the whole baby thing but she has just recently started sucking her thumb, which is something she never really did before. We're not telling her to stop. I'm assuming it will pass.
She said that her teachers had told the kids that if they didn't take their naps that the leopard-caun was going to tell the Easter Bunny not to come. Pretty weak. It sounds like something I might say in one of my weaker moments.
So I just ripped off the satin baby blanket binding that I had started to sew on to this baby blanket I am making for a friend. I had made several beautiful blankets before for myself. I went to a shmancy fabric store to buy some cute flannels and the selection was kinda limited but I found some adorable pink flannel with bunnies and circles. If I can figure out to upload a photo from my photo, I'll post it. Anyway, I wanted to have different colors or patterns on either side. The store owner suggested I try this supersoft organic cotton for the other. I should have listed to my gut that was telling me, "Hmmm...it's soft and organic but it's stretchy...how well is that gonna work you beginning sewer you." So I asked the owner about working with that material and she says that she hand bastes first before sewing. Hmmm...point of hesitation #2. Again, I suppress it like the good consumer that I am and buy the fabric along with fabric to make a skirt even though I don't have a pattern and I get pretty good instructions on how to wing it.
This project is cursed. First I come up a cute bunny applique that I want to sew onto the organic cotton side. It's stretchy and the applique does some odd crinkling but I can live with. Then I go to sew the sides together and the stretchy material stretches out past the flannel, so I call the store to ask for help and lady tells me, "Hand baste it." Hmph. Okay. I pull it apart and hand baste it again like a good girl. Then I go to sew it together and I get weird wringles on the edges, parts where it folds over. It's not a nice clean edge. I contemplate pulling it apart again and pressing the edges first but decided that I can camouflage that stuff but putting a satin baby blanket binding over it. Good idea, right? Well, I guess when you try to hide crap with more crap, it just makes more crap. The binding wasn't long enough so I had to finagle some pieces together. Echhhh...I'm aggravated. I just pulled off the binding and am just about to call it done and send to my friend so that it doesn't haunt me.
I wish I had a sewing fairy godmother who would tell me how to do this stuff. Poop.
Yeah, so now she's 10 weeks old and I've finally gotten around to posting here again. I have plenty of excuses...damn good ones too...we moved 1 week after she was born. Well, other than being mom of a newborn and a 4 and 3/4-year -old, moving is my main excuse. I have some others but they are on the weak side.
I have fleeting moments of brilliant ideas about what to write but I never seem to remember them later when I have a spare moment. This particular moment finds me at the computer furtively trying to log something before Elsa wakes back up from our inaugural experiment in putting her down to sleep by herself. Until now, she has been very much of a "hold me constantly" baby. She's a wonderful, sweet, beautiful baby but she loves her some cuddling. Experiment thwarted. She's waking up. I swaddled her, nursed her, stuck a pacifier in her mouth, sang lullabies in the rocking chair in a dark room and laid her down carefully in the co-sleeper. Her routine until now has been holding in a swaddle while she sleeps until we go to bed. Not viable. I'm more worried about her sleeping alone for daytime naps. My whole plan for making the return to work tolerable was to spend most the time working at home and Elsa being able to nap alone is vital for that to be a real option.
About Elsa: very bright eyed, strong (she could lift her head up almost right away after being born), very calm. We're seeing lots of smiles right now, she loves to play the tongue game where you stick your tongues out at each other. This evening she was using her hands to swat at the toys hanging on her gymini play mat thingy. We were at a kid's birthday party today and all the moms were passing Elsa around and commenting on her wonderfulness. I was so proud. I was also thrilled to have a couple people tell me how great I looked for a new mom. These comments were especially well received since I'm feeling frustrated about not fitting into my regular clothes. I broke down and bought some new clothes, 2 sizes bigger than normal. I was almost in tears at one point trying on jeans. It's funny how these types of changes make you realize how hot you were before and how even then you could find faults. Getting older is like that. If I knew how hot I was at 23, I would have done a few things differently. I'm actually not sure if that's good or bad.
Anyway, point is, Elsa is a sweet little elf of a baby. She got her first vaccinations a couple days ago. One of the vaccinations was for Rotavirus and is oral. The nurse was telling us how most babies spit it out and that's okay. Our girl sipped it and didn't seem to mind it at all. What a champ! The shot wasn't as well received but hey, anything other than a howl would just be weird. We are following the Dr. Sears Alternative Vaccination schedule with more frequent visits but fewer shots at each visit. This reduces the amount of alumimum that their little bodies must process and also allows you to more easily identify any allergies, etc. Our pediatrician, who looks about 15, was fine with this strategy. I'm reminded how lucky we are to live in the Bay Area where things like this aren't perceived as freakish.
TTFN
