On the same page

We had a parent-teacher conference on Friday. One of Ms. B's first questions: "Um, do you say no a lot at home...?" So if we're imagining it, Edith's teachers are, too.

We also found out that Edith likes to rock the cribs of her classmates while they're sleeping--whether in imitation of the teachers' soothing motions or in an effort to wake up the sleepyheads for more fun and games, I'm not sure. Finally, we learned that she has a reputation for being "nosy," butting into staff conferences by crawling under the table and popping up in someone's lap with a huge smile. (Apparently this is considered endearing at 8 months old, but I hope we aren't hearing similar reports when she's two.) Even now, she looks old enough to know better.



Edith also helped her cousin Santiago celebrate his first birthday this weekend, in the company of all her other cousins, too. The 2005 gang had great fun at Edith's music table. Happy Birthday, Santiago!

At least it wasn't 911...

Edith called her Uncle Peter yesterday. He was in seminar, so he couldn't answer, and by the time he called back, Edith had forgotten what she was going to say. So we'll never know what confidences she was going to share with him.

In addition to the redial button on the phone, Edith has discovered the power button on the television. But she's not particularly interested in the images that appear when she hits it, so I think we're okay. Evidently Edith is not a Comedy Central fan.

She prefers her own brand of humor. She is coming out with syllables that sound awfully like "no" and "yep," which can make for some funny conversations:

G to T: It sounds like you're doing a good job teaching your adult ed Disciple class.

E: No.

G: What? Daddy's not doing a good job? Yes, he is.

E: No.

G: How do you know? Have you ever attended a Disciple class?

E: Yep.

G: Edith, I don't think you have. Do I have to worry about your telling falsehoods now?

E: Yep.

Arts and literature

Very glad to see this blog has prompted a mini-book discussion. Please continue! Thanks to Ashley Borders, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue is next on my list.

Edith did, in fact, have roseola. Just call me doc. (Note that in The Spirit Catches You, the sick child does much better when her parents diagnose her than when the pediatricians do.) Fortunately, Edith now seems fever-free, spot-free, and si Dios quiere, ready to return to school tomorrow.

In the meantime, she indulged this afternoon in a little watercolor work.


I had given her a single color at a time, but evidently I was stifling her creativity, because I turned my head at one point, and she promptly grabbed the ice tray and dumped all of the colors onto her tray at once.

"Hmmm...have I mixed my green hues adequately?"

No, Edith hasn't gone in for nude modeling, though I'm taking advantage of the arts theme to put this photo here. This is the typical outcome of an attempt to change her diaper these days. The second you take off the diaper and reach for a wipe, she flips over, pulls up, and tries to grab the letters off her wall. She can get the L, but not the E yet. (For any safety watchdogs who might be reading, rest assured that I do not usually back away from the table while changing her and did so only to snap the photo. You will see the ready hand of her spotter in the lower left-hand corner.)

Edith does have her more helpful moments. When we were visiting her friend Julia last week, she watched the various adults push Julia's stroller back and forth to keep her from crying. Edith really wanted to push the stroller, too. So I held her at waist height and she rocked the cradle, with only the slightest bit of help.

On the subject of safety watchdogs: I understand that carseats are a wonderful improvement in automotive safety of the last several decades. I know they save lives, and I know that it is VERY VERY important to buckle your child in properly on a car trip. That said, I think the carseat has become one of those flashpoint issues in modern parenting. Maybe because it's one of the few issues on which one can't overdo it (no such thing as buckling the child in too much) and for which there is one right way, it has become the do-or-die crusade of paranoid, officious people who are uncomfortable with the gray areas that abound everywhere else in child-rearing.

We received a mass email this weekend from the director of Edith's school, addressed to all the parents. She was writing to inform us that she had been very disturbed to notice parents driving away from the daycare center without buckling the straps on their child's carseat, or worse yet, with parents holding the child in their laps in the backseat. She wanted to warn us that we were endangering our children's lives and that even if we live nearby and aren't driving far, we should remember that most accidents happen near home.

Let's define "nearby." Edith's daycare center is on our street, a dead-end, residential side street. The daycare center is at the dead end. The rest of the street is seminary married student housing. Most of the children who attend the daycare live on this street or the adjacent one.

From our living room window you can see the daycare center across the street. It is probably 100 yards away. We usually just carry Edith to and from school. But if it's raining hard or is frigid out, we'll sometimes drive the three buildings down. Yes, we are among the guilty who have driven away with our child in our laps. The speed limit on the street is 25, but you'd be hard pressed to get up to 15 before you arrived at your front door. I'd like to know the likelihood of a high-speed crash on this street versus the likelihood of my dropping a squirming, 20+ pound child while carrying her, her bag of supplies, and an umbrella.

I know this is a litigious society, and a daycare director no doubt lives in fear of being blamed for anything that might happen to a child under her care. But let's not lose all perspective, eh? The director should read The Spirit Catches You. Consider fleeing your home on foot, carrying your babies through tiger-infested mountains for a month, drugging the babies with opium because if they cry and give you away, soldiers will kill you all. Then get back to me about the carseat.

Silver linings

UNFORTUNATELY, our swinging nightlife has come to an end. We have arrived at the stage where we have to take bedtime seriously or suffer the consequences. All of the sudden I'm noticing how many interesting events seem to happen at 7 or 8pm.

HOWEVER, enforced evenings at home with Edith going down early have given me time to read pleasure books again. I'd been out of the groove in which you're always half living in the book on your bedside nightstand, wondering during the workday what will come next. It's great to have that back.

UNFORTUNATELY, Edith is sick again. For about 24 hours now she has run a very high fever...with no other symptoms. She's a little less energetic than usual, but she does play and babble and eat and nap. The only common baby disease to which this pattern seems to correspond is roseola--in which case her fever should break tomorrow and pink spots should emerge shortly thereafter. Or not. It's so hard to diagnose her. We'll see what happens.

HOWEVER, the pleasure book I'm currently reading is Anne Fadiman's account of the cultural barriers between Hmong refugees to the United States and the Western medical establishment, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Thank God that for all my dislike of the medical establishment (apologies to my many doctor friends--we can talk about it), I at least can communicate my concerns about my daughter to doctors clearly in a common language, usually understand what they're trying to do for her, and can more or less negotiate the barriers between them and us. And my daughter, thank God, is not an epileptic infant on complex pharmaceutical cocktails. Just a feverish baby on Tylenol.

UNFORTUNATELY, we have once again paid for a week of daycare that Edith won't attend.

HOWEVER, it's so wonderful that she is cared for at a place where I'm sad for her when she doesn't get to go. She was suppoesd to finish her snowflake art project today. I hope she gets a chance next week.


And so to end with a few unrelated recent photos:


Edith was handed down a sweater from her cousin...that I made. At the time I had no idea a daughter of my own would soon be wearing it.


For the Chapel Hillians, please note that we are training her already (and doesn't she look long and leggy enough for the team?). As long as basketballs have tags, though, she's convinced that palming the ball is a snap.

Physical progress report

Edith stood unsupported several times today for about 3-5 seconds at a stretch. She also stood up without pulling up on anything: she just pushed up off the floor with her hands. I don't know what any of that means, but it was exciting.

She meanwhile is surprising us on the sleep front. Last night she slept through the night. She does this once every five or six weeks, and it is totally unexpected and absolutely heavenly. I never quite realize that I'm walking around in a state of semi-sleep-deprivation all the time until one of these nights of unbroken sleep, when I wake up feeling relaxed in a way I'd forgotten.

She followed up her night of unbroken sleep today by taking her longest nap on record (since naps became discrete units in an otherwise wakeful day, that is): 3 hours and 45 minutes. I actually woke her up at that point, because we feared she'd be up half the night otherwise. But though she went to sleep a bit later than usual, she did so eagerly. Usually I have to nurse her into deep sleep before I can put her down. Tonight she nursed awhile, then pulled off and threw her head back, arching impatiently as if to tell me to put her down already. I did, and she nestled in and conked out. Maybe all this physical activity is taking it out of her?

Thirty years ago, in Manhattan

Edith is the daughter of a historian, and as such, I want her to understand the subtleties of human continuity and change over the ages. So today we visited Manhattan so she could swing on the same swings her mother swung on thirty years ago. (Well, not quite thirty years ago, since I was still at the hospital resting up from being born.) But we celebrated my birthday together by visiting the old neighborhood, Edith in the baby backpack--as I used to be in the baby backpack on rambles around Greenwich Village with my mother.

This was Edith's second visit to Manhattan and a considerably more interactive one than when she was four months old. In fact, the minute we emerged from Penn Station onto 7th Avenue, she craned her neck to look up at one of the buildings and let out an impressed, "Ohhhh...." Every time I caught a glimpse of her in a glass window, she was craning her head to look at the buildings, the signs, the people. She was fascinated. She kept up a steady stream of chatter about it all day and continued to rehash events for several hours when we got home. My girl's a city girl.

We were accompanied on our celebratory day by my friend Laura and her infant daughter, Julia. At one point in the afternoon a couple of passing men looked at us and the babies and whistled, "When Sally Met Amber, huh?" The Village may be a tamer place than it was in the mid-1970s, but it's probably still the only neighborhood where the logical conclusion about two young(ish?) women with two babies is that they're a lesbian couple and family.

See, Edith, it's worth going to the city--some things are only found in New York.


Outside Mama's first home. There was still a doorman, dressed like the one who used to let Mama wear his hat, but he looked much too young to have been there thirty years ago, so we didn't ask if Edith could wear his.


Headed into Washington Square Park with Edith and Julia.


Edith swings in Washington Square, soaking up the flavor. I'll have to ask Bestemor whether all the other care providers in the park in 1976 were nannies, or whether there were still some mothers among them.


Edith rides a cement turtle that may well still be in the middle of a crawl across the park begun over thirty years ago...

I thought it was toddlers who...

...dumped the dog's water bowl over themselves.

got their fingers caught in the VCR.

tried to eat the dust-covered broom.

danced so enthusiastically to the music they were making on their LeapFrog music table that they pitched over backwards, clunking their heads.

drank soapy bath water.

did chin-ups on the oven door handle.

bounced up and down in their cribs demanding to be picked up, such that they brought their chins down hard on the rail (twice).

tripped over their own toys.

brought the aforementioned music table down on their hands.

stood up on the changing table and pulled the decor off their walls.

refused to have a diaper changed or clothes put on without a back-arching, torso-twisting, teary struggle.

***
The hard part of this thing has come sooner than I thought. While many people find early infancy the most daunting, all along I'd been imagining it would be early toddlerhood. Big enough to be into everything without the stability to stay upright or the cognitive skills to understand "no" or to remember what caused them problems the last time. And very few communication skills.

I didn't realize you could get all that--and more--even before toddlerhood. Edith isn't walking, but she is into everything, and it's exhausting. Moreover, she's too little to be taught what it's not a good idea to be into; all the experts recommend distraction as your only disciplinary technique at this age. Add to the package a newfound preference for mom (accompanied by piteous wails when the object of her desire is removed as much as two feet) and the introduction of nighttime awakenings every 2-3 hours, and let's just say it's a good thing I'm biologically programmed to find her cute.

Edith's teacher also noticed the sudden leap in physical activity. "She's so mature!" she exclaimed at the end of Edith's first day back from Christmas break. "Is that what you call it?" I asked dubiously.

I confess I am happy she finally discovered the bookshelves, though. We were steeled long ago for her to start pulling volumes off the shelves. She not only didn't touch the books, until yesterday she had never even pulled up to standing on a bookshelf, although pulling up is her favorite current activity and the house is full of bookshelves. She opted for table legs, oven doors, and smooth walls instead. Combined with her lack of interest in even the shortest of baby board books, we were joking about our dumb jock.

But this weekend she found the shelves and proved she knows what she's doing: she went first for a set of looseleaf photocopies Tom had stuck down low, rather than anything bound. When she did move on to books, she went for Foucault. She referred to him yesterday and then again today. Obviously she's learning all she can about the sources and nature of power. Let the battle of wills begin.

Bullies

Edith started learning about school bullies yesterday. It's an important lesson. From her daily report card:

"We tried giving Edith some Cheerios this morning, and she did a very good job getting the few that Maya didn't steal from her into her mouth."

Edith's urban, cynical side

I fear this post may lose us some of our gentle readers. But this onesie, a Christmas gift, gave us a kick.

Digital Christmas

Emelank Blogspot has come of age! While Edith herself is still a good 20 years shy of the mark, her blog is taking it to the next level, thanks to our new digital camera. Recent Christmases for me and Tom typically have yielded a couple of outfits, two or three books, a few new CDs, and in my case, a pair or two of earrings. This year we discovered that having a baby changes what is under the tree not only for said baby but for the parents, too. Never technology junkies, we received a digital camera and a video camera--and are tickled pink by them. I also received nursing wear and a mom-and-baby yoga video. It's all about the kid anymore.

So for the last time on this blog, I apologize that pictures will follow once the film is developed. Pictures of our holiday up through Christmas morning, that is, when the digital camera appeared in my stocking. In the meantime, here are some pictures from Christmas afternoon forward...

Tom and Edith on Christmas Day.


Edith and her Great-Grandmother Opal shared many happy hours during Christmas week.


Edith loved her Christmas spinach (though she also bit the head off a gingerbread man when her mother wasn't looking).


Hamming it up in Bestemor's big bathtub.


Classic toys are still the best: Edith made a beeline for the Fisher Price popper, reading the tag to make sure it was for her.


Mom-mom and Pop-pop gave Edith a toybox just in time to prevent chaos. While Mom and Dad appreciate the order it brings to her room, Edith likes it best for its pulling-up and drumming-on-the-lid potential.


Edith shares a drink of water with Mom-mom. She has mastered the sippy cup but has yet to figure out chewing.


All the excitement wore her out.