Back in the Swing...

It was back to work for Laurel and I today. After a strange long weekend with house-guests and a burglary, a sick day, canceled plans, and finding a dead body in the river, we were ready. A rush hour ice storm granted us a two hour delay, so Laurel and I got to leave the house after sunrise, for a change. I thought I would get to work early and catch up on my paperwork, but of course, Laurel took the worlds biggest crap right before I put her coat on, necessitating changes of clothes for all parties involved. Then we both took spills on the icy driveway getting into the car. I thought it might be a rotten day, but it got better from there.

Because there were other kids at daycare when we arrived, Laurel immediately went to work greeting her little friends and hunting down her favorite toys. It's a lot easier to leave your baby after a long weekend together when she doesn't even watch you walk out of the room.

The students weren't too bad today. I reread my Fred Jones book over the weekend, and relaxing my jaw really does go a long way towards "meaning business", as he puts it. I'm worried about the midterms tomorrow...I had 7th period all cranked up to play a review game today, and when I put up the first question, it was all crickets and gulping. But maybe I'll ask you to describe how the base 10 number system works, and see what you do.

After school we had an impromptu playdate with my neighbor Stephanie and her daughter Olivia. Olivia quickly gravitated towards the tea set, but there were only a few minor scuffles over tea spoons and saucers. Stephanie gave me an excuse to brew a late afternoon pot of coffee and we chatted in two and a half sentence segments in between scooping toddlers off the stair case.

The whole neighborhood is on edge because of a rash of escalating armed robberies. I called my neighbor Marlene after I put Laurel to bed, while I was waiting for M to get home, and we made plans, as we always do, for rescuing each other from various criminal scenarios. When M arrived home safe and with bounty from the restaurant supply store, I finally relaxed. Not a peep from the babe, and I'll make it to bed before 10PM. I know I can't count on a two hour delay tomorrow, so I'll be ready to get up at 5 and start the whole thing over again.

One thing I have to say, is there may actually be something to my Uncle Joe's advice to say "I get to go to work today" instead of "I have to go to work today".

Oh, and relax your jaw.

Grandparents Day

Laurel and I recuperated from our colds with the help of a visit from my parents. Honestly, I don't know what I would do without them. My mom brought her infamous "B Bag" and my dad helped me dispose of our Christmas tree and took my trash out. They even got us dinner and did the dishes! My nose is still stuffy, but I feel very relaxed going into the week. Here you can see Laurel practicing her geography with my mom. Laurel is really obsessed with writing with a pen or marker right now. However, she does not yet understand to keep the pen on the paper! So, for now, she has to pretend, unless she is strictly supervised. Otherwise, we find pen marks on everything!

Hopefully this week will be better than last week. We have only three days with students, and I will be giving midterms for most of them. Friday is a clerical day for staff, which usually means they promise that we will get to catch up on our paperwork and grades, but then last minute schedule a bunch of pointless meetings. However, rumor has it that it will be a real and true clerical day. I hope so, because I am in desperate need of some time to work on an overdue re-eval.

a Meal with a toddler

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No sooner do I, .....

That child likes to make a liar out of me. Also, M warned me about typing anything related to her sleep. She woke up Thursday night with a fever and a cough, which naturally disrupted her sleep. I took yet another sick day on Friday, but to be honest, I needed the day off, too.

Yeah, I've been going nuts this week. Cursing this working mom crap. Angry at winter. Hating my students. Having a sick kid was exactly what I needed to refocus. Laurel was wandering around this morning, looking bleary-eyed, and rubbing her head a lot. We asked her what hurt. "Gogle gook," she said. I have no idea what that means.Then she brought over a bottle of tylenol and opened her mouth wide like a little bird. So maybe goggle gook means "I have a headache, please bring me some tylenol and put me back to bed"? She napped all morning after that.

I was reading the New York Times this morning and came across this piece on mom blogs. Mom blogs are all the rage. People either are passionately devoted to a mom blogger or they despise her and flame her blog with all kinds of hateful comments. This article is about how mom bloggers seem to attract tragedy, or sometimes the blog is born out of a tragedy. One of the bloggers cited just happened to be a victim of the Tucson shooting.

I was suddently very grateful for the lack of tragedy in our lives. For all the concussions and vandalism and burglary and traffic accidents of the recent past, we are all alive and healthy. I was in a terrible mood last night because someone stole the porch lights off the side of our house. Luckily my dad came to the rescue and put some new lights up. And then packed Laurel up and took her home with him.

I have a good dad.

M canceled his camping trip and we instead stayed at home and ordered a pizza and ate it right out of the box, both of us sitting in the armchair together with a blanket over our legs. We had a heart to heart about living here and life dreams and where we want to go in the future and what we should do with all the anger you feel when someobody screws with you or your stuff.

I have a good husband.

And even as I'm typing those words, a whole flood of other kind acts starts washing over me, and even though I'm sitting alone at the dining room table I suddenly feel like Patti and Karen and Sarah and Stephanie and my mom and Leah and Caveman and Marlene and David and my great aunts and the executive director from the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh are all sitting here giving me a giant hug. And then I feel like I'm at the Academy Awards making a babbling speech where I suddenly realize there's a whole lot of other people to thank, and the music is playing and I'm chased off stage.

So now I will tell you a funny story about Laurel. She is in that stage where she likes to find things and bring them to us. Or alternately, she likes to take things from us and stash them places. There are blocks and pacificers and pieces of toy trucks hidden in the pantry. When she finds crumbs or old cheerios on the floor she puts them in the little sauce pot on the bottom shelf, that is, if she's not hungry at the moment. On Thursday morning, as I was getting dressed she ran off with my glasses. I'm terribly blind without my glasses. There is no possibility of me being able to drive or function at work whatsoever without them. So picture a half dressed mama and daddy chasing a half dressed toddler yelling, "Where did you put them? Where are the glasses? Go bring the glasses to mommy!" And picture also Laurel running around with excitement because we don't usually have time to play chase in the morning and isn't this fun! And when we finally caught her and asked her again, she said "dadish" and pointed at the record player, and of course they weren't there.

Eventually, I found them under the radiator.

First words? And other milestones?

An ad popped up on my browser today for a service that turns your blog into a soft-cover book. It reminded me that this blog serves as a Laurel's baby book and therefore I must be diligent about recording all the little milestones that pass by in the course of ordinary days. And so, I will record....

As a linguist, watching Laurel's speech develop has been a fascinating real-world example of things I learned from textbooks and lectures. I don't remember the first time she said mama, although I think she said dada first. She uses the word baba to mean milk, or bottle at this point, but it used to mean nursing. Miss Sue heard her say "crackers" the other day when she pulled her lunch box out at daycare. I heard her say something that really sounded like "record" as a request to put on a record (we have a record player in our bedroom and it's become a comforting ritual for us all to listen to a record both in the morning when we get up and as we're getting Laurel settled in the evening). But it's hard for me to say that she actually talks. It's more babbling, with the occasional syllable that sounds recognizable. She says something all the time that sounds like "gogle-gloock", and looks at me with a serious expression, blue eyes wide and blinking and waiting for me to get it. But I don't know what it means.

Her receptive language is obviously far more developed. She points to her nose, eyes, mouth, fingers, toes and belly on command. She can follow a single-step direction like "put that in the garbage can" or "give that to mommy". She likes to mimic nursery rhymes, and she pretend reads her books.

As for other milestones, she's getting better about using her potty chair. We don't have a reliable way for her to communicate when she wants to go, although if we happen to go upstairs, she will just go and sit on it. But I put her on it when she gets up in the morning, after naps and before the bath tub and she very often goes. I've had a couple of dry diapers in the last day or two, which I consider a true victory.

She is also, thankfully, sleeping all night. A few weeks ago she started to reliably sleep for 6 or 7 hours at a time. Technically, this is the definition of sleeping through the night. However, a baby who goes to bed at 7:00pm and is awake 6 hours later...well, you do the math. So, while it was an improvement, it was not awesome. I was still getting up twice a night with her, before the 5 am alarm, and that does not make for a very happy math teacher. During the last few days, she has started to sleep 10 or 11 hours at a time. That, dear readers, is awesome. I've had three solid nights of sleep in a row and feel like I'm starting to recover from a long illnes.

The best new milestone that I can think of is her desire and ability to play. She loves to be chased and to hide under the covers. We play tea party and pour pretend tea into her cups. She makes the same sound I do when pretending to fill up the cups.

She's also starting to be kind of helpful around the house. She does whatever I'm doing in the kitchen, so if I'm cooking at the stove, she grabs a pot and stirs vigorously. But she'll actually help with the chores, too. Yesterday we mopped the floor together. She will put things away if I tell her. The other day I took her downstairs to the laundry and she was helping to toss the wet laundry into the dryer.

Snow Day!

School was canceled today. Of course, the announcement came rather late in the morning, after we had already answered our 5:00am wake up call (which comes in the form of an alarm clock, as well as a toddler). The three of us bundled up and went outside to tackle the sidewalk and driveway.

Today reminds me of last winter when Laurel and I were snowbound for half the winter. We ventured out when we had to, but for the most part, we spent January and February snuggling upstairs in her cozy nursery. I think being cooped up in the house every day would drive her crazy now. She went through all the downstairs toys before I even gave her breakfast, and moved on to trying to figure out how to hold the picture she colored up on the fridge with a magnet.

Laurel conked out for an unusual morning nap, so I am lingering over a cup of coffee and searching online for recipes that use lentils (we have a five pound bag).

Not smug at all....

Stupid autofill. I have nothing to be smug about. Life is kicking my butt all over the place. But right now I am once again snug in my bed, not smug as I wrote yesterday.

Today I looked up and Laurel was sitting in this drawer. She is a goofball, but also very interested in helping...she helped me put the wet laundry into the dryer, and put her books away when I told her to. And she peed in the potty. Her babbling is sounding a lot more conversational. She definitely said Elmo, cheese, and record today (she likes Bin Iver too).

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I can't stop listening to For Emma. Forever Ago

That has nothing to do this photo. For Emma, Forever Ago is the name of a not-so-new Bon Iver album that we happen to have on vinyl. It's been in heavy rotation since we moved our record player up to our bedroom. There are a many awesome things about January and being tucked all smug in my bed listening to records is one of them.

Making the family holiday visit rounds is another one. This weekend we traveled down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a little Camp Manzi fun.

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Lunchtime and a Promotion (?)

Lunch rolls around early for me. School starts at 7, and I've taught four classes and homeroom by the time the bell rings at 10:35 and my lunch starts. I can not handle sassy teenagers on an empty stomach, so I stocked up on Luna bars and frozen burritos and keep them at school in case I don't have time to pack a lunch. However, thankfully, I live with M and he doesn't just pack a lunch, he makes it pretty and delicious. These lunches are packed in the bento tradition, which in Japan is traditionally rice or fish with small cuts of vegetables. You can read more about it here. M's version this week was made up of what we had on hand...but he made use of the fancy waffle cut blade on the mandoline. At first, I thought it was kind of a waste of time...I generally just slop some leftovers in a tupperware and call it a day. But I have to admit, it was really fun to eat, and more fun to show off. You might be wondering how M has time to make such elaborate lunches with all of his other commitments. Well, I'm not really sure, but he has also managed to make a batch of soap and is milling some wheat berries that he sprouted and dehydrated. (And it's only Tuesday!)

In other exciting news, Laurel is trying out the young toddler room this week. Basically they send the kids upstairs to the toddler room for a couple of hours at a time to see how they handle a new room and a new schedule. She loved it. Today I went to pick her up at 3 and she was sitting at the table having a snack with all the "big kids". Then she showed me her new coat hook and mail box. She even took a nap on a cot today. But one of the changes we have to make is to send food that she can eat herself. So bento is a perfect approach to packing her lunch. For anyone who is searching for foods to give to their toddlers visit this website for some great ideas. The blogger has a four year old and tons of ideas for foods to give a little one that are not goldfish crackers or cheese, which I must admit, I fall back on from time to time. I think the only thing you need to be cautious about for the under 2 crowd would be choking hazards...nuts, chewy dried fruit, etc.

Christmas 2010

Enjoy!