Sometimes when I’m home with Kaelin, I take her into the bathroom with me because she is at that stage where when left unsupervised, she throws herself enthusiastically at anything with a potentially deadly outcome…staircase, electrical outlets, carving knives…And yes, for my own sanity, I’m going to call it a STAGE.

So I’m sitting on the pot and she’s putzing around on the floor and I let out a fart.   Not a momentous earth-shattering fart, mind you.   Just a regular, glad-I-didn’t-do-that-in-public-but-otherwise-forgetable fart.

And she immediately stops poking at the tile and turns around to look at me with this expression of pure elatedness, like “THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING YOU HAVE EVER DONE.   WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME YOU COULD DO TRICKS LIKE THAT???”   And then the expectant look of “Do it again, PLEEEEEEASE!”

If only she  were always this easy to please.  

On the other hand, perhaps I should be concerned that my daughter thinks the best thing about me is what comes out of my butt.

Today, the house…tomorrow, the WORLD!!! (more…)

So when my daughter learns how to climb the stairs and makes a bee-line toward them  like a moth to a flame  every waking minute of the day, I ALREADY HAVE A GATE to block them off with.

“If we have to choose between the two…I think we should do the painting, it would make the house look a lot nicer.   It needs to be painted.   And it would make the bigger difference.”

“Ok.”

“Ok?   But you said you would rather do the flooring.”

(Shrug)

“But I was going to fight you for it.”

“If you want to do the painting, we can do the painting instead.   I don’t really feel like fighting about it.”

“…Oh.   Well, we could do the flooring if you want to.”

Can you hear that?   No?   Perfect.   It’s called silence.

I’m in my house and I’m the only one home.   I don’t think that’s happened since Kaelin was born.   J took her to church while I stayed behind to catch up on some sleep.  

I’m in my own home and I have no parenting responsibilities.   That never seems to be the case.   I just took a shower and there weren’t any little hands on the shower door, blocking my exit.   I didn’t even have to be on the lookout for little feet  disappearing in a hobble-crawl around the corner.

The only times I escape from parenting are when I’m at work (not my definition of escape) or when my parents take her and J & I go out and about.  

But this…this is quite a novelty.   Right now it’s just me and the (napping) pets and a very. quiet. house.

Ahh…

Something I’m Enjoying Right Now
Wendy’s Frosty

Something I’m Resenting Right Now
Calories in said Wendy’s Frosty

Something I’m Realizing Right Now
The cat’s claws need trimming.   As I think about it, they have needed trimming for some time now.   I have vague recollections of the dog yelping and dragging the cat around by his paw, due to a claw lodged firmly in his lip.   And we did come home a couple of times over the past several days to find the cat hanging from his scratching post, stuck in limbo half-way up the cat-tree.   But now…now the true realization that the cat must have his claws trimmed today has really hit me.   Because now…NOW these very long, sharp needle-like claws are  digging themselves  into my leg.   With the utmost of affection, of course.   But if I were to get up and walk away right now, the cat would come with me whether he meant to or not.

Something That’s Worrying Me Right Now
Kaelin is growing out of her car seat.   This concerns me greatly because the next size of car seat does not physically fit inside our 2-door coupe.   Actually, the current car seat only sort of fits – the passenger seat must be moved forward as far as it can go…fortunately I’m relatively short but I’m the only person who can fit in the passenger seat when the car seat is installed.

So…in the near future if we plan to take our daughter anywhere, we will have to purchase a new car…which means a car payment.   We don’t currently have a car payment and are having a hard time figuring out exactly how the logistics of that are going to work.

Some Advice I Can Give Right Now
You know how sometimes you’re walking around the house and get a little piece of dirt or something stuck to the bottom of your foot…and then you just wipe it off on the back of your leg or the top of your other foot?

Make sure you check first to be sure it’s not a random shard of GLASS.   Because ouch.

One would think that if you spent $80 on a software program – a software program that is specifically designed to create slideshows and then burn them to DVD – that you would have the ability to burn said slideshow to a DVD.  

One would THINK that  pressing the “Burn to DVD” button would result in something OTHER than the complete meltdown and freezing of your DVD burner.

One would be wrong.

So…I didn’t write a 7-month newsletter.   It’s certainly not because nothing momentous happened.   It’s just that I didn’t manage to find the time.   And here I am, already late for the 8-month newsletter.   Tsk, tsk.  

I do apologize, since I know you were all counting down the days and eagerly awaiting the appearance of said newsletters.   WEREN’T YOU.   YES.   YOU WERE.   Ahem…

Anyway, the past two months have changed our lives forever as parents.   Kaelin is growing and developing in so many ways, we’re afraid to blink for fear we will miss the part where she sprouts wings and flies away.

As of about two weeks ago, she started crawling.   She figured it out one day and hasn’t stopped since.   Actually, it’s kind of an odd looking crawl, because she’s mortally afraid that if her left knee touches the ground a land mine will go off.   So she more or less does a 3-legged hobble around.   It seems to work for her though, as she is quite mobile.   More mobile than, say, we’re comfortable with.   Let’s just say that I’ve embarked on a new exercise plan…it’s call “Chasing Kaelin and removing things from her little fingers.”   I do approximately 10,000 reps per day.

She pulls herself up on everything that she can get to, including tables, chairs, toys, the fireplace, my leg, and the dog.   She has also become quite good at cruising around said items to get closer to whatever else she wants to be hanging on to.   She habitually locks me in the shower in the mornings by pulling herself up and leaning on the shower door.     I can’t open the door without knocking her backward and she seems to derive great joy out of my predicament.   Or maybe it’s the charades I go through in the attempt to get her to  move that she finds so entertaining.

They say that babies go through a period of  interrupted sleep patterns (i.e. no sleep for parents) when they are learning to crawl, or walk, or when they are teething.   Kaelin  is currently in the  process of all three of those events.    The  day after she started crawling, she also began cutting one of two teeth that are now quite visible in her mouth.   Our nights haven’t been the same since, and we currently finding ourselves crawling into bed while it’s still light outside out of sheer exhaustion.   Only to be awakened an hour later by She Who Formerly Slept Through the Night.

She holds her bottle now.   Well, sort of.   She does hold it, but spends more time twisting it around and popping the nipple out of her mouth so that milk shoots all in her hair, than actually drinking from it.   Baby steps.

We went swimming with her this month for the first time.   As long as it’s not too cold, she seems to equate the pool with a giant bath tub, and can’t get enough of it.   She adores baths and starts bouncing up and down when she hears the bath water.   Sometimes we forget how mobile she is and look down with surprise to find that she has made it accross the room and is now standing by the tub looking in with great enthusiam, in about 2.3 seconds.

She says “Mama” now.   And she says it a lot.   Unfortunately, she seems to think it’s some kind of curse word, as she only uses the term when she’s exceedingly displeased.   J has been trying unsuccessfully to get a “Dada” out of her.  

The letter “D” is just not in the picture right now.   “Baba,” however, is a favorite, and comprises most of her vocabulary for the time being.   She recognizes certain words, like “Puppy,” and looks around for the dog when she hears it.

She absolutely adores books, and enjoys being read to for long periods of time.   Unfortunately, “Go, horse, go; Go fast, go slow,” isn’t exactly thrilling best-seller material, so it can get a bit tedious after a while.  

Her other favorite toy is Baby Tad, who is the biggest  wimp around.   She loves to push him over, trample and body slam him – to which he responds, “I LOVE YOU,” “Let’s snuggle,” and other  passive phrases.   It’s a co-dependent relationship in the making.   We’re just glad she’s the dominant partner.

She’s a very affectionate child.   She gives great hugs and huge, sloppy, open-mouthed kisses.   It’s very cute.   I often think about how cute it is afterward, as I  wash all the drool out of my hair.

So…crawling, pulling up, cruising, teething, talking and attempts at walking –  much of which occurred  within about a week’s time.   It seems that every time we sneeze, she’s picked up a new skill, or a new way to most effectively get into things we would rather she stayed away from.

We’re expecting her to finish her doctoral dissertation in about a month.   After that, she has plans to be the first woman president.   Watch out, Hillary.

While pregnant, I didn’t suffer from the binge eating and cravings that I hear are so common.   No, throughout the length of the pregnancy, I ate pretty much as I had eaten before – with the occasional allowance for an extra morsel of chocolate during the day.

Then I had the baby.   And everything hit me.   I was constantly starving.   If I didn’t get to eat lunch by 11:00am, I would start chewing my arm.   I ate larger portions, more frequent meals and I regularly started craving chocolate and sweets – which I consumed in an almost unchecked manner.

While I was breastfeeding, this didn’t really seem to be an issue.   I didn’t put on weight.   In fact, I lost my pregancy weight in about two weeks.

But about three months later, I stopped breastfeeding, due to the effect a bout of food poisoning had on my milk supply.   And then it all came down around my ears.   My eating had become more than a caloric desire…it was a habit.   And habits are hard to break.

The other day, I got a larger size sandwich than I usually do, under the theory that it would fill me up so I wouldn’t be a victim of the mid-afternoon sweets cravings that plague me just about every day.   While on my way to the vending machine a few hours later, I realized the flaw in my plan:   I don’t eat because I’m hungry.   I eat (junk) because I want to.   Because I get temporary gratification out of cookies, chocolate and other sweets that are forbidden on any reasonable diet.   And like a cocaine habit, no amount of rice cakes or salads are going to meet that need.

I’ve gained weight.   I hate it.   My clothes don’t fit and I hate looking at my reflection.   And yet, I’m afraid to commit to doing something about it because I fear failure.   Truth be told, I hate exercising and have never been able to successfully set up a routine.   The only way I have ever lost weight is to diet.   And right now, the very idea frightens me because it means giving up my addiction.

At this very moment, I’m craving some peanut butter M&Ms.   J says I’m the only person on the planet who likes peanut butter M&Ms better than peanut M&Ms.   He may be right.

I wonder if they have rehab programs for sweet junkies.