Attitude

I don't have anything really specific to write today, only that sometimes I lie awake (lay awake? why can I NEVER remember!) at night thinking of all the Thisbe quirks and mannerisms that I have not written down that might vanish at any time and be gone forever. Sigh. Here are a few of my favorite things (besides girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes):

1. You know you're not supposed to climb the stairs without Mama or Dada so if we forget to put the baby gate up, you toddle as fast as your legs can carry you over to the stairs, you put your hands on the bottom step and then you look over your left shoulder to make sure we see you and you laugh your pants off. Then I yell "oh no you don't!" and I rush over to you while you furiously attempt to climb as many steps as you can before I reach you peanut-sized frame and kiss your neck and bring you back to earth. Or rather, to the stained and skanky carpet.

2. You are now walking everywhere. Quickly. You must ALWAYS be carrying something with you as you go. You prefer: black plastic measuring spoons, your orange bib from IKEA, your dollar-sized koala, a column-shaped wooden block, or metal lids from organic baby food jars.

3. If you're in the right mood, you're capable of bringing me the following: lion, frog, duck, giraffe, koala, bunny, monkey, and book. If you're not in the right mood, Mommy can forget about it.

4. You love to look at a set of flash cards I got for you at Walgreens in preparation for our trip to Holden. I'm a little embarrassed of the cards because one might think--one who comes to the house without knowing us really well--that Mommy and Daddy are already trying to home school you, that we are hell bent on teaching you words like "tea kettle," "flamingo," and "octagon." This is not the case--though truthfully if you wanted to bust out with "octagon" in the middle of the grocery store, I wouldn't be SAD about it.

5. Unfortunately, I think you've got Mama's sweat genes. When you wake up from a nap you cry to let us know you're awake and you'd like to be taken out of this god-forsaken crib five minutes ago. By the time I get to your room (two minutes later perhaps), you've been crying intensely enough to have worked up a sweat, your blond hair stained brown at the temples and around to the base of your neck. Walking also makes you sweat. When I finish nursing you there is usually a slick sheen on my forearm where your head has been resting. You're a furnace.

6. At mealtimes you exert strong preferences about food. Rather than spitting it out, however, as in days of old, you now simply feed unwanted food to Luxy. So, for instance, if you have bits of apple and squash on your highchair tray, you will put a bite of apple in your mouth and then take a bite of squash in your hand and dangle it leisurely over the side of the highchair (like someone in a gondola trailing her fingers through the current). Luxy licks the food off your fingers and you giggle uncontrollably. Daddy and I should probably do something assertive and rigorous but instead we shrug and laugh..

7. Have I mentioned that when we say "no," you laugh? Your friend Leo understands the word. When his Mama, Bonnie, says "no" sternly, Leo WEEPS. He gets it. My greatest fear at this point it that you DO get it and you're just, well--unconcerned about our desires. Or, as the nursery attendant informed us on Sunday: "she's sure got a lot of attitude." "It's good to see," she then added hesitantly. And most of the time, it is good to see, dear Thiz, though we might think differently in another year or two.

Photo Shoot

So, we've been a little lax about getting any professional pictures taken of you. We've more than made up for this shortfall, however, by taking five thousand million billion pictures of you ourselves. Nevertheless, guilt finally overcame me. So we hired a professional. Well, kind of a professional. We paid a good friend and recent high school grad, Thomas Dunning, $25 to come over and point his fancy camera equipment in your general direction for an hour. We are, I must say, quite pleased with the results. I'm posting a few of our favs here.

A Summer Day

It's a lovely summer day. Sun and blue skies. Birds chirping. The distant tinkle of the ice cream truck. I mean really, the whole nine yards. Even lovelier is the fact that we seem to have settled into a summer routine. FINALLY. Today, for instance, you woke around 6:45am (having forgotten to wake at 5am to eat. Woo-hoo!). I brought you into the bed with us and you stood and groped and rolled around on us for another 30 minutes. You love to play with the elastic waistbands of our undergarments and to repeatedly pat us while making cave-woman grunting noises. This is one of my favorite times of day: the deep shadowed quality of the room, the smell of our bodies and your body, pale and tender flashes of skin. Sometimes now you'll actually pause for a second or two in your tumbling frenzy and curl against me and let me touch the soft skin just under your jawbone. I call this your coma zone because when I stroke your skin there your jaw unhinges slightly and you get this faraway look in your eyes and your breathing slows and deepens.

Anyway, after you tire of the bed, Daddy takes you downstairs and I get dressed and head to Blue Monday where I write or plan my classes or stare listlessly out the window. Today I was working on an essay about loneliness. At least, I think that it's about loneliness--it might actually be about something very different.

I return home around 10am and wait for you to wake up from your first nap. Then all of us head out for a walk. Today we went to the library. Sometimes we stop for mochas or for a little swing time in the park.

After we walk, we lunch. Today I accidentally gave you Amy's Organic Macaroni and Cheese rather than Amy's Organic SOY Macaroni and (fake) Cheese. Whoops. I was wondering why you were shoveling handfuls of the stuff into your mouth as quickly as possible so I tasted it, thought briefly about what an incredible job folks are doing with soy products these days, and then realized it was cheese. Which we're not supposed to give you until you turn one. Because apparently, on September 3, 2010, the Lactose Tolerance Fairy will come and sprinkle you with Lactose Tolerance powder so that we can safely begin to feed you dairy.

Clearly today is a day of tangents.

Anyway, after lunch Daddy goes and works at the St. Olaf library. Sometimes I call him on his cell phone and I feel like he is a secret ops guy because he whispers so quietly into the receiver. While he studies, you nap. Usually for about an hour.

At 4ish we are all reunited again. Today I will spend some time getting pizza toppings in order. At 5 we will go to the Cow for beer or wine and a relaxing game of Try Not to Let Thisbe Eat Popcorn Kernels, Bottle Caps, or Other Bar Detritus.

We will bring you home and I will read you "Goodnight Moon" and "Open the Barn Door"--an unfortunately named "Peek and See" book that features little doors that you can open and shut with farm animals hiding behind them. You might say "duck." More likely you will begin to nose at my bosom. I will feed you and put you in your crib.

Daddy and I will momentarily contemplate "getting some work done" or "reading something highly educational" but then will give up and pour ourselves some wine (mine in a wine glass, his in a mug) and we will watch some senseless television and listen to the sounds you make readying yourself for sleep that come to us, crackly and breathless, over the monitor.

Cousins

On Friday, Uncle Nels, Aunt Meghan, and Cousin Nora all came for a visit. We had a delightful time. You and Nora didn't exactly know what to make of one another though you did enjoy many of the same pursuits: banging puzzle wooden puzzle pieces together, sucking on spatulas, and helping to unload the dishwasher. Nora, being 6 months your elder, is also capable of a variety of other tricks: walking capably, signing "up" to get out of the highchair, saying words like "no" and "uh-oh," etc. It's also clear that she understands a lot more of what is said to her than you do. Although mostly the two of you interacted by taking things away from one another, it was sure fun to see you both together in the same room. Taking a picture of two mobile children is practically impossible--above are a few that succeeded in capturing you both as more than just blurs.

Note: I gave you both rubber scrapers to chew on. You immediately dropped yours and grabbed Nora's. She grabbed it back and gave you a little nudge with her foot. I managed to catch your graceful fall on film (above).

For Realsies, Part Two

For Realsies

At one point does one proclaim to the world that a baby is officially walking? Probably only after the baby has achieved a certain amount of balance, a certain trust in her lower limbs, a certain obviously recognizable ability to get from point A to point B while remaining upright. Are you, according to this definition, walking? Well, not exactly. But almost.

10 steps in a row tonight. But more importantly, you finally GET it and you WANT it. Up until today, your ability to take steps depended on your lack of intentionality about the whole endeavor. You did it randomly, mindlessly, haphazardly. Tonight, you realized you could WALK places and now you're on fire. The main problem is that now you get so excited to try that sometimes you don't fully get your balance (while upright) before taking the first step. You then look as though you're at sea during a hurricane.

I'm posting a photo and a video. The video doesn't show your full range of capabilities--a measly 4 steps when you're capable of 10--but I think you'll get the idea. The photo shows you at the end of a parade of steps; you began next to the wicker basket that sits behind you in the photo.

Also, I am becoming more and more aware of my identity as an obnoxious mom. Because seriously, if a bumper sticker existed that said "My Baby Took 10.5 Steps Today," that shit would be plastered on the back of my Honda. I guess that's the way I roll.

At the Seams

Two weeks have gone by and there is far too much to say in a single post. I will do my best.

On the way out to Holden, you were a champion traveler. You took a few more steps at the bus station in Wenatchee (before ceasing to take steps altogether once we arrived at Holden) and you tolerated heroically the sketchy Pack N' Play at the Apple Inn in Chelan which featured holes in the side netting which looked (I kid you not) like cigarette burns. During the course of the trip, you developed the ability to kind of say "kitty." Mostly, you developed the ability to imitate Grandma's intonation of the word "kitty." "It-ee!" you said to the kitty in the "Dick and Jane" book. "It-ee!" you said to the photo of the bear on the ferry boat. "It-ee!" you said to the man stumbling down the road in too short running shorts. Later in the week, you said something that sounded a remarkable amount like "cougar." Your aunt Martha will swear by this verbal development. The rest of us remain doubtful.

Though most of your sounds have come and gone and the jury is still out on whether we consider any of them your official "first word," you certainly saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt a variety of things at Holden, including, to name a few:

1. Lentil soup, smoothed to paste in the Cuisinart.
2. Deer.
3. Hummingbirds.
4. Swallows.
5. Martha and Sam singing "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."
6. Candles lit and glowing in a box of sand.
7. The coil of a baseboard heater--which left blisters across your palm.
8. Grace and Sonia, who taught you where a nose is located.
9. Warm, fresh bread, broken into fingernail-sized pieces.
10. Grandma Dot and Grandpa Mark, who showed you Ginny's corner.
11. Uncle John's face, contorting into silliness to distract you during Vespers.
12. Buckskin, Copper, Dumbell.
13. Cool mountain water in a black plastic sled.
14. Grandma Ricki trudging up Chalet hill with a pile of clean cloth diapers slung over her arm.
15. Auntie Anna kneading bread on the other side of the silver counter.
16. Gin and wine stained voices drifting down the hall.
17. The metal edge of a school bus window.
18. The soft knit of a Grandma Dot lavender sweater.
19. Chippys (chipmunks) eating leftovers from a white ceramic bowl in the grass.
20. Railroad Creek, rushing always behind every word we said.

We are both glad and deeply disappointed to be home. Today, you were bursting with energy, wanting to crawl everywhere, touch everything. You took five steps in a row. You attempted many more. It's as though everything you absorbed at Holden has become pure energy, pure growth inside you. You are bursting at the seams.