I Can Walk Up The Slide In My New Shoes!

Yeah, not really. She fell over the side and went bumpo in the sand. But she's okay. Just another minor speed bump in the life of a toddler. Still had lots of fun going down the slide today. It was unseasonably warm.

A Historic Moment

As I write this and sit up late on my computer because I can't sleep because I have a migraine, I listen on MPR to John McCain's concession speech. Wow, I can hardly believe it. It was almost too much to hope for, but we finally live in a country that can elect a black man to be President. Can I get an Amen?! Dr. King's gotta be havin' a party in Paradise.

Now this is a world I'm happy to bring a child into. Not another one, mind you. Don't get any ideas. I already have the perfect tot. But how cool is it that she'll grow up and learn in her American History that when she was less than 2 years old, we elected a black man to be president. And she was part of it. That's right, she voted. Hey, she has the sticker to prove it.

Amen.

Spider Girl Checks Out the Climbing Wall

I Can Fly! I Can Fly! I Can Fly!

(to the tune of Peter Pan music). This is Lily playing on a bouncy jet at a park near Mary and Jack's. What a happy girl! We had the park all to ourselves, so we tried out everything. Yes, I'm going backward in time, do not attempt to adjust the horizontal. We have control over the vertical.

Stage 2: Runny Poo

For 1-2 weeks. Well, been through one week. Oy, messy. Stinky. Poor baby, you can tell when her tummy hurts. Not too bad on the diaper rash. Can't go out anywhere because she's contagious as long as she has diarrhea. I cheated today and took her to Nordstrom this morning and got her some big girl shoes. She's been squished into her leather shoes for a while and we haven't been able to get out, so I wanted her to have some good walking shoes. Got some hot pink Stride-Rites. Why are they as expensive as adult shoes? Can someone esplain this to me? No make sense. Tiny.

So Halloween sucked. Better luck next year. I want to go to ZooBoo and to at least one event with my SAHM group. I was just so looking forward to doing Halloween stuff with her. WAH, says the Mommy.

After a Day of the Vomit Virus

These are blurry because they were basically taken in the dark. I'm lying on the floor in Lily's room and everyone is finally sleeping. Although Cocoa peeked when the flash went off. Phew, we made it. Poor Lily. After the second barfing this morning within an hour, we called the triage nurse at her clinic (which wasn't open yet) and she said Lily had the "vomit virus" that is going around. Ew.

I think I might have had that a few days ago, only I never actually vomited, just felt on the verge of it all day. Had to walk to Walgreen's with Lily in the stroller (about 3 blocks) to pick up some presciption anti-nausea meds. But enough about me.

My poor baby threw up about 6 times, I think. I lost count after we had to change her outfit for the 3rd time. All we could do was try to keep her hydrated, which meant giving her a few teaspoons of Pedialyte (baby Gatorade) every 5 minutes. For 4 hours, then if she had stopped vomiting, we could double the amount of liquid we gave her. But we couldn't give her anything else to eat or drink. It was heartbreaking watching her throw up and cry in bewilderment. We decided John would stay home, because we weren't sure how labor intensive this would be. It was not as bad as it could have been (said like a true Midwesterner). She did stop throwing up after noon. Took a long nap (I napped with her) without any barfing and then we started giving her more liquid and she kept it down. At about 7 in the evening we gave her some crackers and she was so happy! Every time one of us ate something today, she cried because she wanted some and we couldn't give it to her. So it was great to finally have her own crackers again. And she kept them down, no more barfing.

We don't know if she gets milk tomorrow morning or not, or if I should take her to her ECFE class. We're just glad to get through the day. We'll call the nurse in the morning to figure out what's next.

Notice how she's wearing the same jammies she wore this morning. Only because we had to do a load of vomity laundry.

It All Started With an Innocent TP-ing

This morning: 7 a.m. Miss Lily decides the hall needs some new decor. She looks a bit wan. Should have been a clue...She threw up a few minutes later. That was the first one.

Playing on the Deck at Jack and Mary's

Here's cousin Amanda walking Lily up the stairs, while cousin Emily messes up her Dad's hair. Then of course we have the "walk towards me now" picture, and the camera wouldn't go off fast enough! And then the cutie walking around after stealing some of Daddy's pizza.

I Eat It

Lily actually picked two apples by herself. Then she tried to eat one. She doesn't have quite the tooth power to do that yet, although she can eat bites after we cut it up. But I thought, how great, she got to go to an apple orchard this young and this was my FIRST time ever. I guess it's a midwestern thing. Next year I'm hoping we get to go pick blueberries with her. She would love that, and make a big mess.

Goin' On A Hay Ride

Actually, it was a hayless ride, which was good for me because I'm allergic to hay. So the top pic is us in the wagon, about to be pulled by two big draft horses into the apple orchard. The bottom pic is the fab tire swing they had at the orchard. Lily loved swinging in it with Daddy.

Mom 'n' Lily in the Hammock Chillin'

This is at Jack and Mary's the weekend we stayed there for Jack's 70th birthday party. It was great weather, and although I had a headache (the patch on my forehead is a cooling gel) I still had a great time, and so did Lily. They are right on the lake and it's just beautiful there.

Hey, Look, I'm the Dog. I'm Chewing This Ball.

Of course I know how to use a spoon.

I Can Suck My Own Toe!

And man is it funny!

Thrift Store Cuteness

Okay, so the coat is a little big. But so cute! And the hat is just fairy-tale princess cute. We got these at the thrift store Savers in Eau Claire, WI when I spent my birthday weekend at Mary and Jack's. It was a great way to celebrate, cuz I love thrift stores. We found clothes, books, toys, and even a new Halloween costume for Lily.

Exploring

After lunch, I kind of let Lily loose to see what she wanted to explore. There's a lot of open space on the second floor of the Children's Museum, and big windows, so first she had to climb up on the window ledge and look out. In the top shot you can see in the background the church down the block where Mike and Sue got married.

She carried her bear around a lot this trip, which was very cute. And yes, she climbed up all those stairs, and was very proud of herself.

Fun Mirror!

Ball-O-Rama

Here's Lily playing in a new exhibit at the Children's Museum, all about balls. It was pretty fun, especially the part just for toddlers. She hasn't really figured out how to throw yet, but she likes picking up the balls and moving them around.

Dog!

Lily finds the perfect toy at her ECFE class: a big stuffed doggie. She's doing well in the class playing with the other kids, but is sometimes clingy and has to come climb on me while the mommies are having their discussion time. But I see her picking up things from watching the other kids, like how to ride the little push cars and scootching down the stairs on her butt. We didn't get to go this week because we were both sick with colds and so I didn't want to spread our cooties. I really missed it.

Pillowcase for Lily

This is a pillowcase I made for Lily for her crib. We noticed that when she naps with us on our bed, she likes having just a little bit of pillow, so this is actually an airline pillow, from back in the days when they let you keep them. And it's pretty flat, not fluffy at all, so I think it's safe. I used fabric scraps from the nap pillow fabric and just did it. Didn't use a pattern, just looked at the pillowcase already on the pillow and figured out what I wanted. I'm so proud of myself!

And she likes it. In fact, last night she was lying sideways all on the pillow and sticking her leg out of the crib. She does that, sticks limbs out of the crib. It's funny, I can't really tell her to "keep her arms and legs inside the ride at all times," so we just make sure she doesn't get stuck.

The Word Butt

No, I did not plan this. But isn't it funny? Find the two butts.

I was trying to get a picture of Lily from the front with that shirt on and so I'm following her around with the camera because of course she keeps turning around, and we got into my craft room, yet another magnet area in the house (we love magnets), and it was only after I snapped this shot that I realized Mr. Smarty Pants Dad had been spelling stuff the evening before. So, no, Lily is not spelling yet. But she has a cute little butt.

Lily Marie Photo of the Day

For some reason the way Lily is standing here reminds me of my grandmother Marie, who Lily is named after. I see Grandma in early pictures here, although wearing fancier clothes. Or maybe it was just a swimsuit. Anyway, it's cute. Lily is standing at the window making room for Cocoa to get in beside her. They like to stand at the window together and look out.

Good Day

Today was strange weather for Fall, too warm and humid, but really breezy. When Nora came to watch Lily, I took Cocoa for a long walk down by the Mississippi River and it was really nice. I haven't walked her without the baby for a long time, and I used to do it almost every day so I miss it. Took pictures of some fall colors and walked about 3 miles and felt great. No headache. Always cause for celebration.

Which reminds me, my birthday is coming up quick! Run to the stores, get me stuff! Just kidding. This year I decided I wanted to spend time with family for my birthday and asked Jack and Mary if we could spend the weekend out in Eau Claire. They graciously agreed. Well, of course, they get to see Lily, duh. No, but I really love going out there. It's peaceful and quiet and beautiful and Mary takes care of us like we're in a bed and breakfast while Jack provides the comedy. Steve will be there, too, which makes me happy. He's a sweetie and a good hugger and wonderful with Lily. I think we did a great job picking godparents.

I saw Sue Nystrom (Lily's godmother) this Sunday at my art group, which I haven't been able to go to in ages, and she was so great with Lily. Even though Lily hasn't seen her in a couple months, she was captivated by Sue's playing with her, kissing her bear and making silly noises at her. I even got to do some art because Lily slept through about half the meeting. And then she was very good walking around the Scrapbook Store, looking at all the pretty colors but only trying to grab a few of them.

St. Paul Classic Ride General Mills Team Photo

Notice Lily right in the middle! I'm hoping we get a bigger picture, but at least you can see all of us. I heard from Mike today, which always makes me happy. It sounds like he's got access to some really interesting fiction in Singapore that you just wouldn't see here. Book jealousy.

This week was difficult for me. I had a headache the whole time (brought on by the monthly hormone rush and crash) and couldn't take painkillers after Tuesday. This morning I woke up and called my neurology clinic and they scheduled me for an "infusion" which is not narcotics but a cocktail of other stuff that helps you relax, get sleepy, fights the nausea, etc. While waiting for my appointment time I tried to sleep, layed on ice, heat, and cut out some fabric pieces that I need for some upcoming projects. I hate just laying and thinking "my head hurts," and I didn't feel up to watching TV or focusing my eyes on something as small as print in a book. The treatment worked pretty well, I feel much better and just slept all afternoon into evening when I got home. John stayed home today so he could pick me up after the visit (it takes 2.5 hours) and his boss is really nice about it because she also gets migraines. Anyway, I got up and ate something, took my evening pills and read the paper to see what movies are out. Also washed some baby dishes. Trying to do what I can. I'm glad it's the weekend now. Now I'm going back to bed. Better day tomorrow, I hope.

It's almost midnight and I can hear the screeching brat next door mouthing off as usual to one of her friends. You can hear her all the way down the block. This is the one who never graduated high school and has a 2 year-old now. And is still living at home, of course. With alcoholic Grandpa. Ooooh, I try not to think about it, how messed up this kid will be. His mom is just getting to be a fatter and louder version of her 13-year-old self. I just hope she's not pregnant again. I think I would lose a little faith in the universe if that happened.

On the bright side, I found a stay-at-home-moms group through Meetup.com in the Twin Cites that meets a lot. They always have something going on on their calendar, so whenever I want to get out of the house, I can find something. I've met several moms and it's been really fun. Okay, now I'm really going to bed. Seriously. Stop it, I'm going.

I finished the nap pillow!

I started this pillow when I was pregnant, and I finally finished it this week. It feels like a huge accomplishment. The petals were easy and fun--because I am a fabric pack rat, I love little pieces of lots of different patterns, and that's exactly what I needed for this. Every petal is different, top and bottom. The big middle part was much harder to sew. My seams are crooked, and my edging is even more crooked, but it doesn't matter now. It's cute and unique and Lily likes it and I made it! But I think I will stick to smaller things in the future. Or non-round ones. Round is hard to sew.

Pffft! I look under my butt at you!

And another thing. I have been trying to register Lily for an ECFE class for two weeks now and I kept getting the runaround and I finally had to channel my sister Wendy and open up a can of Whoop Ass. I was SOOOOOO mad. I don't like getting mad but I could not waste any more time and they were being stupid, so I had to leave a very IRATE MOMMY message. I said exactly what I wanted and told them to call me back to tell me I got it. Oh, suddenly I got service! Someone called me back within 5 minutes and gave me what I wanted. Of course, she didn't apologize for the crappy treatment I had been getting, because no one apologizes anymore in the service industry. Well, I got what I wanted for Lily. I just hope I don't have to be like that a lot when I'm "advocating" for my child. Why is it called advocating now? Why isn't it just parenting? Jesus, I'm crabby.

Lily do? Lily do?

disclaimer: crabby mommy. probably PMSing. Lily helps by reorganizing my purse.

Oh, for cry-eye. Today we had a new teacher come out to see Lily as part of the ECSE program she's in.

(She qualified automatically to be in this school program because of her birth weight. I can't remember what the acronym stands for, but basically it's to make sure she's not falling behind in her development. It's nice because it gives us an idea of what she is expected to be doing skill-wise at her age. Because she's doing so well we only see the teacher once a month. We were supposed to get the same teacher we had last school year but for some unexplained reason we got a different one. She came this morning and I wasn't thrilled. )

This teacher wants us to work on language skills with her, I guess. She didn't give us a goal sheet like the other teacher did, or really discuss it too much, just spent the time trying to get Lily to play the games she wanted her to play. I thought she was a little pushy with getting Lily to play her games, especially since she's a total stranger to Lily right now. Lily kept turning around and clinging to John, which I totally understood. And then the teacher was talking during play, only talking like a cave person..."Lily put in? Lily do." Oh, Lord. I'm not going to talk to her like that. I just don't believe that's required for her to learn language. Then she'll talk like a cave person, for Chrissake. Every time I come up against a situation like this, where I think the teaching is ridiculous, I have to remember that children have been growing up and acquiring language for thousands of years, and their parents didn't have to talk like babies to get their babies to talk. If that makes sense. Then she did some singing and I thought it was gonna take all frickin' day to get through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, more like Twinkle right into the end of the universe and down through the black hole into nothingness. Jeeeeeeez. Then when we did Itsy Bitsy Spider she said the normal hand movements people do for the spider were "too complicated" for small children. Oh brother. Barney called, he wants his pea brain back.

Not Sleeping So Good

I'm up right now because Lily is. She took 2 2-hr. naps today and was still tired enough to conk out right after 9pm. Then she woke up at 1am-ish and was inconsolable and kicky in our bed. So we resorted to milk in a bottle. She drank half and I think she'd drifting off to sleep again. I'm falling asleep writing this, and John is snoring holding her in the chair. I hope she isn't getting sick, just growing tall. Come to think of it, Wendy and I were very tall in elem. school. We commended respect... Zzzzzzzzzzz

This photo is of us at the Babytalk World's Biggest Playgroup, that we went to this week. I found a SAHM (Stay-at-Home-Mom) on Meetup that has calendars of events, and I got to meet up with a gaggle of them at the MOA for this event and cruise over there together. It was fun to have a group to be in for the event, we all sat together on the playmats they had set out, and got to play with toys

New Stats: Big Girl

• She's 20 lbs, 5 ounces, so she's finally broken the 20 lb. barrier! Which is good, since we just started using a new car seat because she was too long for the old one and her legs were getting squished up against the seat. So now she's facing forward in style.
• She's 30.5 inches tall, which is 1 inch taller than she was three weeks ago when we put up her growth chart on the wall and measured. It seemed like was reaching more things (that she shouldn't) and it turns out we weren't imagining it, she's growing!
• She's in the 50th percentile for height, and the 20-something percentile for weight. We still need to make sure she is getting plenty of fat. The doctor suggested putting butter on some things we feed her (neither of us use butter except for cooking). But she's drinking enough milk, all cow's milk now, no more formula as of about a week ago!
• Next goal is to get her to drink the milk from a sippy cup and stop using a bottle. She drinks water fine from the sippy cup (no juice, we are anti-juice for her), but milk in it is a new idea. We tried a little today and she only took a couple sips. It's a start.

Sweetie is 15 months old today

And so she had a 15-month checkup and got two shots and a blood draw to check for a couple food allergies. Not a fun time for Lily. We stopped in the gift shop on the way out and bought her a Grover plush doll (from Sesame Street). Grover is so much better than Elmo. She liked him right away and slept on him in the car. She was kind of cranky the rest of the day and went to bed early at 8 instead of the usual 9pm. I hope she sleeps through. She has been waking lately a lot during the night and has two BIG teeth coming in up top. And they're widely spaced apart. So maybe we'll dress her up as a hobo for Halloween. Heehee. Anyway, here's a sweet photo of her sleeping in with Daddy on Saturday morning last week. I love how she has her hand tucked under his chin. And one sock off and one sock on. And bedhead hair.

Classic Baby

Here's a couple more pics from the ride last Sunday. The top one is of us before we started the ride. We're hanging out with the General Mills participants, who took a team photo. Lily is right in the middle of the photo, I can't wait to get a copy! The lower picture is about halfway through the ride, at Mounds Park, where we stopped to snack and feed Lily and give her a chance to walk around. She had a good time. And she was the only who stayed dry in her cozy little sidecar, with her blanky and bear. We got rained on and not a little. I was drenched until we got home, at which point I took a long hot shower. I'm still glad I did it. I never got off my bike to walk up a hill, which felt like a huge accomplishment. Especially since I haven't ridden in basically 2 years. And there's some butt-kicking hills on that ride!!

St. Paul Classic Ride today

We did the 30-mile ride around blocked-off streets of St. Paul (and suburbs) today with Lily and she did great. She had such a nice little nest in her sidecar, I wanted to get in there. Especially after it started pouring rain on us and I wasn't wearing anything rainproof. I'll post more pics later but I ache everywhere right now and must collapse into bed.

Oh how very unfortunate

One side of the Rooftop Artpark looks down into a parking lot. Usually not too exciting down there. Today, however, a different story. This was the last day of the Republican National Convention, happening just down the street from the Museum, and so the hours at the Museum were curtailed and streets were blocked off. And so here we have some police officers suiting up in riot gear. At first I didn't want to take a picture because I thought they might look up and see me and then arrest me for being a terrorist. I almost wore my Minneapolis Police sweatshirt today, too. But these guys turned out not to be too aware of their surroundings. I stood there with Lily a good five minutes while she was trying to eat plants by the bars, and not once did they look up. THEN one guy looks around, but not UP, and stands on one side of the dumpster in the corner of the picture, and takes a piss against the wall!! Nice! I declined to record that moment on camera. But I did share this little viewing event with the Children's Museum staff, because I thought they might want to pass it along to the IDIOT police that there are children up above who can see you. And as one of the staff members pointed out, this was especially bad behavior for a public servant. I mean, maybe I should feel a little sorry for him, I thought of Wendy having to do riot duty at the WTC G-8 in Seattle and how much it sucked. But Wendy would have never peed in an alley. And I was just flabbergasted at how unaware of his surroundings he was. DUH! Try to set a good example for the kiddies, bozo.

Mommy loves to paint the baby

We went to the Children's Museum again today, and I painted Lily's face again. I love doing that. I hope she'll want to get her face painted for Halloween at the General Mills event. This is in the sand area on the Rooftop Artpark, a recent addition. It's not really a sandbox, but more of a sculpture with tile and cermic inlaid. Isn't this shirt the cutest? I love it.