Baby Steps!

My daughter can walk!

Sadly, we did not get a video of the official *first* step, because we just don't happen to have a camera trained on her at all times. Her first step, immediately followed by her next few, happened earlier today when she was trying to distract me so I wouldn't realize it was nap time. I was distracted, but not so much that we skipped the nap.

So this is actually like her sixth step and then some. Still pretty cool in my opinion.

It's an Off Schedule Day

Lizzie is a fantastic sleeper. I've always been a big fan of sleep myself, so I'm not terribly surprised my daughter inherited that trait. After all, I spent most of my time sleeping when I was pregnant with her.

I am suddenly concerned the next kid will be constantly sleep deprived...

Not really, of course. If sleeping a lot while pregnant was the real answer, expectant mothers everywhere would spend nine months in a self-induced coma.

We've made getting Lizzie proper sleep a priority her whole life and I think a big part of the reason she sleeps so well is that we keep to a very regular sleep schedule. This not only has the benefit of a well rested, healthy, happy child, it also makes the days more predictable and easier to manage.

Today, of course, is a totally off day. Lizzie had a fever yesterday afternoon and most of the night, her first one ever, and she's still recovering. I'm not sure what she really needs at this point because I have exactly no experience with how she reacts to being sick. Plus, I had an appointment with my OB this morning and had to take Lizzie with me (even if I could have left her with Sarah, I wouldn't have risked her daughter catching whatever bug got Lizzie yesterday), which meant running about. Running about is never good for the schedule. Result: everything is totally off and I'm not entirely sure where to go from here.

Lizzie's normal schedule runs like this:

7:30 - wake up
7:30-8:30 - breakfast
8:30-11:00 - playtime
11:00-1:00 - nap
1:00-1:30 - lunch
1:30-4:00 - playtime
4:00-5:00 - dinner, bath, and bedtime routine
5:00 - sleep

Now, it's not exact. Sometimes she wakes up a little early or takes a half hour or so to actually fall asleep at night. Some days she only naps for 45 minutes instead of the full 2 hours. But in general, that's how it goes.

Yes, really, that's pretty much our day every day. Yes, I know how lucky I am that I have a 15 month old who sleeps 14.5 straight hours overnight and then takes a 2 hour nap in the middle of the day. And I'm still here complaining about being off today.

I suck and you hate me and every parent who reads this post is never going to speak to me ever again. I get it. Hell, I have the super-sleeping baby. I take a little hate in exchange. ;-)

The downside to having a child who sleeps this much and this regularly is that when she's off, it really hits her hard. So here's today:

6:30 - wake up (after a super crap night of feverish irregular sleep)
7:30-8:30 - breakfast
8:30-9:30 - playtime
9:30-10:00 - nap in the car on the way to OB's office
10:00-12:00 - stroller and car seat playtime at the doctor and on the way home (she's a very active kid and does not like to sit still; this did not go over well)
12:00-3:00 - nap
3:00-4:00 - "lunch"

Um.... now what the heck do I do? Normally, if she wakes up a little early, I just ignore it and hope she's back on track by the next morning. If she takes a really short nap, say 30 minutes or less, I start the dinner, bath, and bedtime routine a little early to make up some of the difference. Or if she takes a long nap, I start dinner, bath, and bedtime a little late because I know she's not going to fall asleep again so soon after waking up.

Alas, today is just screwed up all the way around. I'm pretty sure she woke up early because her sheets were totally soaked with sweat from the fever last night and she can't have been very comfortable. No biggie, we just changed the sheets and moved on.

And the nap in the car didn't worry me, because I knew she'd be going down for her nap late if she took one at home at all. I mean, it was entirely possible she'd fall asleep in the car on the way home from the doctor too, meaning there would be no nap once she was home and at that point I was going to be grateful for that 30 minutes of extra sleep she snatched on the way down.

But she didn't fall asleep in the car on the way home, so she took a great nap in her crib once we were home. In fact, as you can see above, she napped for an extra long time. After a three hour nap, I'd normally push her bedtime back by about half an hour to compensate without depriving her of extra sleep she clearly needed.

But cumulatively, I'm at a loss. I mean, she just woke up and had lunch an hour and a half ago. I suspect that if I try feeding her dinner in a few minutes and then put her to bed, she's just going to fight me. It's not like she had a lot of playtime today to wear herself out with. But she was so sick last night and though she's in good spirits today she still looks a little pale. She's clearly got some more recovery to do.

I suppose we could skip dinner, since she's probably not hungry. But I don't want her to wake up hungry at 3AM either. Maybe a light dinner, half a bottle and two cubes of sweet potatoes instead of a full bottle, three cubes of sweet potatoes, and some ravioli like I'd originally planned?

And then bedtime might just have to be a fight. I'm kinda spoiled in that we rarely have to fight with her to get her to sleep. (Yeah, there's more of that hate coming my way. The post isn't even live yet as I type this and I can already feel it.) Or maybe I'm borrowing trouble. Maybe the fever has left her so beat she'll just drop off like normal in spite of virtually no activity all day.

This being a mom thing is tricky. Why don't kids come with troubleshooting instructions?

Halloween Is Too Much Effort

I haven't been interested in Halloween in a long time. I think the last time I actually got into a costume and went trick or treating, I was still in elementary school. Maybe middle school. I don't remember exactly when or why I lost interest in trick or treating.

In high school, we got to dress up on Halloween at work, so I got a costume to wear solely to get out of wearing my lame teal smock. I think I even remembered to wear it to work one year. I did go trick or treating my freshman year, but I didn't wear a costume and it was really more of an excuse to hang out late with my boyfriend and some of our friends. We just walked around the neighborhood and every now and again one of us would go up to a door and try to get someone to give us candy. We weren't even pranksters or troublemakers.

Clearly we missed every possible point of the holiday.

My freshman year of college I put together a crap last minute costume with random bits from my closet and walked around the dorm with some friends of mine. Then some idiot kicked open a door right into one of them and might have broken her toe (I remember she was hurt, but I don't remember the specifics. Hell, I don't even remember which friend. I'm pretty sure it wasn't me.) and that pretty much put an end to our evening.

My first senior year, a coworker made me a really awesome holocaust cloak. I worked the graveyard shift at Walgreens and Halloween morning actually ended up being my last night there. I got to stalk the aisles and scare the crap out of unsuspecting customers at 4AM. It was kind of nice.

Sadly, I don't have it anymore. Oh what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!

Later, when Lee and I had way more free time than we do now and were significantly more careless with our money, we celebrated October 31st with a dinner at The Meting Pot. We called it NaNoWeen and we went there because it was likely to be the last time either of us got to have a long, leisurely meal with conversation not centered around word counts and plot canyons and stubborn characters until NaNoWriMo ended.

Even though we were almost never home on Halloween, I also always picked up a bag of candy at Walmart just in case some stray trick or treaters
happened by. Which they never do, by the way. We've lived in apartments for the last decade. Even apartment complexes where children live don't ever seem to get trick or treaters. I guess all those kids get driven over to someone else's neighborhood or the mall or something.

Candy for me! See, I don't have to go trick or treating. I get a whole bag of candy I picked out myself instead.

Costumed against my will
two years ago

Two years ago, I was costumed against my will by some friends of mine who are far more interested in the holiday than I am. Well, not really "against my will". It's not like they tied me up and painted my face or anything. But I had no plans regarding wearing a costume when I got to Kalayna's house and somehow I left in a wig and cloak.

That is about the extent of my life's Halloween participation, and I think it's totally fine. I'm not opposed to the holiday. I'm not against it or anything. I'm just not interested.

Except now I'm a mom.

Look! I'm dressed up as the
mother of an adorable baby!

I got away with just putting Lizzie in a cute onesie last year, because she was eight weeks old and clearly too
young to go anywhere or do anything festive. People actually appreciated the fact that I wasn't using my newborn to scam a bunch of free candy. Yeah, I was totally just being conscientious. Not lazy at all. I was thinking of others.

But Lizzie is now one year old. It's not like she's going to remember this Halloween or anything. But people kept asking me what she was dressing up as, assuming I had a costume all picked out for her already because OF COURSE she would be dressing up for Halloween.

Um... I confess that I sort of knew we were going to have to start celebrating Halloween and stuff with her, but I figured it wouldn't start until she could actually say the words "trick or treat". Apparently not.

So she has a costume. It's a black cat costume. I tossed out the completely wrong, highly whoreish dress that came with the costume and replaced it with a plain black shirt and skirt. I got myself a hat, wig, and cloak so I can be her witch. We are officially doing the Halloween thing this year.

Then I started looking into what it is people actually do for Halloween these days, because they clearly don't trick or treat in apartment complexes. Apparently people do EVERYTHING for Halloween. For WEEKS. There are events at every mall in town, the parks, and even the zoo. Haunted houses and corn mazes abound. (I seriously don't understand the draw of a corn maze. But then I don't particularly like spending time on farms, so that might have something to do with it.) And apparently no one actually trick or treats on Halloween anymore. Neighborhoods have signs that announce what day and time the trick or treating will take place, because it can't be on the actual day of the holiday anymore for some reason.

Look, I broke down and got costumes dammit. Why does the rest of it have to be so freaking complicated?

At Least The Bots Seem To Like Me

My hit count jumped to 30 in the first 24 hours this blog was live. I was not expecting that. It felt very nice to wake up this morning and be told by Blogger that this new blog of mine had been viewed more than two dozen times. I've had blogs I've actively promoted before and I've only once ever had that many hits in a day. And that day I blogged about something all controversial and had crazy people fighting with each other in my comments.

Of course, then it occurred to me that most of those hits were probably bots of some kind.

At first, that thought kind of bummed me out. But then I realized that, given all the evidence in the science fiction entertainment world, robots will someday rule the universe and we puny humans will be a) batteries, b) pets, c) skeletons in the robot versions of natural history museums or d) sliced up and converted into robots ourselves (depending on your science fictional evidence of choice) this is actually quite good for me. The bots seem to think I'm interesting. Perhaps that means they'll keep me around for entertainment purposes.

On the off chance that any of you are real people, please feel free to do the Google Friend Connect thing over in the sidebar. My "legion" of devoted fans looks kinda lame with just one member. Especially since my legion of one is my husband, and I'm pretty sure he only clicked on it because it looked *really* lame as a legion of none.

Of course, now there's pressure to write something interesting in this space, what with 25 bots, a friend or two, perhaps a few random strangers, and my husband checking in on me.

I had several thoughts over the course of the day about what to blog about. I've read a bunch of books lately, some that I loved and some that I hated and even one that made me cry myself to sleep. (For the record, I'm not usually all that weepy.) I could have done a book review. But that seemed kind of a nerdy way to start out and while I freely admit I'm a nerdy girl, it didn't feel like the right beginning. Plus, I tend to overthink my book reviews and I didn't really have time for regular thinking today, let alone overthinking.

I intended to make Dutch apple squares for Rosh Hashana this week. I planned to bake them on Monday night, and that didn't happen. I planned to bake them on Tuesday night, and that didn't happen either. I planned to bake them this afternoon and thought that then I could blog about baking them, and that really didn't happen. No baking meant no blogging about baking.

I ended up getting pizza for dinner and adding apple wedges to the order. Fried takeout apple wedges that may or may not contain actual apples pretty much sums up how I suspect my "sweet new year" is going to play out, so it actually seems to have worked out.

Happy 5772, by the way.

I also considered blogging about my daughter. She's learned how to stick out her tongue. She sticks her tongue out at me. I stick my tongue out at her. She giggles like it's the funniest thing in the history of the world. I spent most of the day trying to get a picture, none of which came out, but it was fun nonetheless.

Alas, then she fought me at bedtime for an hour and a half before she finally fell asleep, screaming at the top of her lungs like I was torturing her whenever I left her alone and then beating the crap out of me when I went into the nursery to try to comfort her.

Between her screaming and me screaming, I'm surprised none of my new neighbors called the cops. Either I have really understanding neighbors or people screaming and crying for 90 straight minutes is business as usual around here. Not sure how I feel about that.

Needless to say, by the time I sat down at my computer, I didn't think she was all that cute anymore and was in no mood to blog about her.

And so I am left with nothing to blog about, except this rambling post about nothing and everything and I decided that would work. If nothing else, it gives you a pretty accurate snapshot of my day.

So, assuming you're not bots, or that you're bots capable of conversational interaction, I pose this question: who the heck are all of you people? What brought you here to my random new blog?

Come now, don't be shy. I spent my day sticking out my tongue at a one-year-old, agonizing over what to feed the blog bots next, and wondering why all the people of Pontypandy don't just lynch Norman Price already and get it over with.

Seriously, would a village that small need that many firemen if they didn't have a pint-sized arsonist running around?