The latest in fashion for those who are home from daycare due to excessive pooping

The Very Hungry Dylan-pillar

On Sunday she ate through homemade pad thai, three fish sticks, a bowl of cheerios with soy milk, and a big pile of cheese. After that she felt much better.

All that food has quickly worked its way through her system and we are now in full decontamination mode. Explosive episodes aside she seems to feel fine.

Apparently she has managaed to turn some of the massive amounts of food she has been eating into more Dylan because very suddenly there is a perimeter around the edge of the dining room table that is within reach of prying little fingers.

In response to "What does Mommy say?" she now blows her nose. I totally did not teach her to do that. We have gotten her to pat herself on the head when we say "Good baby" a couple more times.

We are down to two huge roving beasts. Actually they're not roving right now. I think they're exhausted from spending the whole weekend sprinting around like fools. I wasn't sure it was actually possible for Snuffy to BE exhausted for any appreciable amount of time, but there you have it:

The Next 12

7:30pm - 12:00am: Dylan asleep.

12:01 - 3:00am: Dylan up.

3:01 - 5:00am: Dylan asleep.

5:01am - present: Dylan up. Send reinforcements.

24: But This Time a Good 24

7:15pm - 6:45am: Dylan asleep.

7:00am: Kate tells Dylan she is a good baby for playing nicely by herself while Kate continues sleeping. Dylan pats self on head.

7:10 - 7:30am: In an effort to preserve the yard, Kate and Dylan give each of the three beasts an individual walk.

8:00am: Wake! Up! Daddy!

8:15am: Kate, Aaron, Dylan to Public Market.

8:30am: Dylan consumes her weight in breakfast sandwich and cider. Kate and Aaron consume approximately the same amount of breakfast sandwish, but proportionately it is not as close to their weights.

9:15am: Back home.

9:45 - 10:45am: Dylan and Aaron play in the living room. Kate makes a mad dash to the office, then across town, to meet with a Burmese interpreter in a possibly harebrained scheme to increase enrollment in her study.

11:30am: Aaron and Dylan down for naps.

11:31am - 1:45pm: Kate does important work vanquishing demons and the like. Aaron is a little late to the "sleep when the baby sleeps" concept, but makes up for the late start with an excellent execution.

1:46pm: Dylan up.

1:50pm: Concede failure of yard preservation efforts. Throw dogs in yard.

2:00pm: Wake! Daddy! Up!

3:00pm: Trip to Lollypop Farm because there just were not enough animals in our own house. Squeak with glee at the sight of each new creature.

3:15pm: Decide Snuffy has a horse head and a goat body.

3:30pm: Piggy feeding time! Yay!

3:31pm: Help restrain an errant goat trying to horn in on the pig feeding.

3:45pm: Leave farm. Narrowly avoid adopting several cats and a dog.

4:15pm: Toy store!

5:00pm: Stumble around Fairport desperately looking for dinner.

5:15pm: Find a nice looking place. Be encouraged that Dylan will be fine by lack of other patrons.

5:30pm: Other patrons arrive. Wait for a table = one hour.

5:45pm: FOOD FOOD FOOD EAT EAT EAT NOT EVEN THE LITTLE ONE IS PICKY

7:30pm: Dylan down.

Cream filling

I have a bunch of video snippets I want to post, but I am having some technical problems so you get filler instead. Or I guess different filler than originally planned is another way to think about it.

Through a rather strange confluence of circumstances we have ended up with two enormous dogs in addition to our normal one enormous dog-in-residence for an indeterminate amount of time. That is a lot of dogs, hence a lot of potential for barking and waking up the baby, as just happened. *taps heels together and wishes for baby to go back to sleep*

I was just looking through some pictures sent home from daycare. Highlights include photographic evidence that she does in fact sleep there, or at least did one time:

A bear kiss:

A vat of cheerios:

A drum circle:

Some kind of tragic traffic problem:

And, the best part, I swear I had no idea this had happened, or why:


The secret lives of babies. *dylan stayed asleep, SCORE*

Rub a Dub Dub

HI

It has been a goal of mine once Dylan's sleep gets regular enough to get up at 6:00am and take Snuffy running before she wakes up. Had I been functioning at that level, this morning would have been a golden opportunity for me since I was up then anyway. Unfortunately, it was after several hours of trying to get Dylan to sleep. So I squandered my big chance and opted for what amounted to a quick nap once I got her down.

Aaron put a valiant effort into getting her down, but when he walked back into our room with twenty-some pounds of baby at his side I knew it was going to be a long haul. We tried our usual trick of having her thrash around the bed while we ignore her and sleep, but it worked out a little differently that usual. Dylan was, reasonably enough, avoiding the scalding touch of the radioactive lava poison mattress. Her main strategy involved putting as much of me as possible between her and it, so as you can imagine everyone got a lot of sleep that way. It started with the usual fuzzy head dive bombing into my face, but quickly progressed to burrowing her head under my chin like a vampire whose teeth need a good sharpening. Aaron started giggling at the point where she planted her butt on my head and started kicking. ***BREAKING NEWS*** HE JUST BROUGHT HER DOWNSTAIRS WHY IS SHE NOT ASLEEP FOR THE NIGHT?!! I QUIT.

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Today when I picked her up at daycare they said that one of the kids had sneezed, then right afterwards they heard Dylan off to the side going "CHOO." They also discovered that she will blow her nose upon being handed a tissue. I think both are a testament to how bad my allergies have been lately. There is a new teacher in the classroom who I like already solely based on her telling me that story today -- the other one just doesn't seem to want to exchange any extraneous words and I have been missing the stuff her old teachers would tell me about her day. I think Aaron put his finger on it today when he said the one teacher treats me like I am an authority figure and she has a problem with authority.

Dylan has been saying "hi" lately. Of course it cannot be captured on film, but it is hilarious. She says it with this very breathy h sound and then grins.

Elfin (500th Post!)

The evidence:

Thoughts on Fall

Over the weekend the whole neighborhood dutifully raked their leaves to the curb in anticipation of the yearly Great Leaf Pickup. It's really cool (although really, is it necessary?) -- crews come through the streets with all this equipment and clear up all the leaves and everything looks all nice. I can't help but notice though that only half the leaves have fallen so far. And I can report with confidence that they do not come back through after the designated week because of the year that we misinterpreted the schedule and missed the pickup and our leaves sat sadly waiting to be picked up for months.

One year in college I was visiting Aaron during the magical weekend where daylight savings ends. We had a lazy morning and spent that Sunday cruising around Red Hook (not the Brooklyn one), not really paying attention to the time. We wanted to do a few things that day, I don't even remember what anymore, but there were two or three places that would have been closed when we got there but for that extra hour. We were, there is no other word for it, giddy for having taken full advantage of the time. Every year it's still one of our favorite days.

You may have noticed in the sidebar that Aaron is still in the survivor football pool. This game has become a staple of fall for us (just for fun! and monopoly money! betting on sports is illegal!) the past few years, which is strange because I hate football and want nothing to do with it. Yet every Sunday we get all excited about the big game. Luckily we can just watch the numbers change on the computer and don't have to see any of the actual boring football being played.

It's like Where's Waldo but with Aaron

Last night Aaron went out around 7pm to help out his former boss at the bakery with a "computer problem." The question is, what is the nature of the illicit activity in which he is taking part? The obvious answer is an affair with the ex-boss, but I'm entertaining other possibilities. Drug mule? Hunting endangered species? Violating copyright protections? Maybe he is helping illegal immigrants cross the Canadian border? Running a puppy mill? Smuggling antiquities? Your comments and suggestions welcome.

This week we have been experimenting with the correct number of persons per bottle of wine. We started with 3 ppl/bottle Friday night. Saturday we moved on to two. In my family this generally disintegrates into bottles per person, but we're not there yet. I have to say that Aaron didn't really pull his weight last because of the embezzling or whatever.

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"Did you see the VOTE LIBERTARIAN sign across the street?"

"Yeah, aren't they all about not telling people what to do?"

Baby needs a new pair of shoes

Today I am living the dream: the laundry room, after lo these many years, is clean enough that if the clean laundry falls on the floor I don't have to yell UNCLEAN and put it directly back into the washing machine.

Remember how I was all excited with how cute Dylan's shoes were? Outgrown. I have been having a hard time finding decent shoes that fit her, which means we end up spending actual money on her shoes, which I find unfortunate. She has fat little feet and has to get wide sizes. We also had to get her warm winter boots, which they don't even make in her size.

Aaron and I both independently decided today that she had snapped out of whatever week-long funk she had been in, so we had a really nice day. It was gorgeous out and an appropriate fall temperature, so we spent a lot of time outside. Here we are this morning in matching hoodies. Sorry if this is verging on becoming a fashion blog, I can't help it if we're stylish.




Also, everyone is always asking if Aaron takes the pictures. He does not. Unless I am in them, and even then only sometimes, and usually only as a result of some kind of temper tantrum (which of course we don't reward, Dylan) along the lines of "I AM NEVER IN ANY PICTURES WITH DYLAN AND YOU ARE IN ALL THE PICTURES SO YOU TAKE SOME PICTURES OF US RIGHT NOW AND MAKE US LOOK GOOD." Of course that was not the case for these. Ahem.

Butterfingers

I spent the entire day discussing my hair. I guess the people, they like their bowl cuts. If you want to see a full frontal version, as requested in the comments to yesterday's post, you can go here and see what else I did today when not explaining that no, I will never again take the time to make my hair look nice, stop PRESSURING ME.

This evening we went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. We are rapidly approaching the day when we cannot just whisk Dylan out to dinner and expect all the commotion to be enough to entertain her while we enjoy a nice meal. [editor's note: that day has already come and gone but certain parties are enjoying a certain level of denial] However, once Dylan discovered the joy of eating the little butter packets with her fingers we heard not a peep from her until she dropped it in the car on the way home, at which point she peeped until it was back in her greasy little mitts.

Stylings

The most important consequence of Annie leaving the country for two years has been a precipitous drop into the world of paying someone to cut my hair. I have gone to the same guy three times, so I guess I am now qualified to casually drop his name into conversations, as in "my stylist says this oil won't weigh hair down" and "Pierre* mentioned that the Incan calendar ends in 2012. What did they know?" I have generally been happy with Pierre's work, otherwise why would I keep going back, except that it is less than a mile from my house and that carries a lot of weight with me, but anyway I have been happy with my hair. Except this time for all the washing, cutting, moussing, blow drying, oiling, and straightening, I can't help but think that I've ended up with a bowl cut:

(also captured: my main parenting insight, ie Dylan loves the electric toothbrush)(also, please note that this particular head of hair will never be this styled again because spending time on my hair makes me feel like my life force is draining away)(nerd)

*Name changed to a stereotype.

14 Months, Whatever, It's Halloween

Halloween is the most awesomest thing ever. It's nice to look at the houses where people have really gotten into it and just imagine them lovingly draping the cobwebs from the severed head to the rotting corpse.

I had Halloween candy for dinner. I am so sweet.

Best thing about big day care center: enormous group of small children in Halloween costumes. (It's cool to put pictures of other people's kids on the Internet, right?)

I unplugged our (radio frequency) doorbell because every time a trick-or-treater came one of us would have to squash Snuffy's face to keep him from barking while the other one handed out candy. I am pleased to report that we have the only flame cauldron on the block.

Dylan and I went to a couple of friends' houses to show off her costume. They live on a residential street that's right off a busy road, so the residents were ready to have trick-or-treaters but weren't getting many. We ran into one woman walking down the street who was very concerned she had missed us trying to visit her house. One house really went all out -- torches, bats, strobe lights, every floor had some display. The occupants were all outside smoking and drinking to admire their work.

Dylan's costume was way too warm for the temperature today and as a result she was exceedingly cranky every time we put it on her. I tried to teach her to suffer for fashion, but she was having none of it. Even after it cooled off in the evening she was not very happy, particularly when her friend Maya the ladybug came over for a little ladybug vs kangaroo action. Here is Maya, who is five months old:

Here they are in the big smackdown:


And here is Dylan, whose takes on Angry and Pouty are varied and subtle:

Order your festival tickets now

The thought of starting in on the various details of the Festival of Home Maintenance (Rochester, NY, Sept - Oct 2007) makes me bored, so let's just say that it involved working with four different service companies and that everything is now working. I will add that I got one estimate for having the gutter fixed (broken, I believe, by the insulation guys driving their truck into it)(it would have turned the driveway into a slip and slide if it froze, so maybe we should have taken advantage of that before repairing it) of $390 (cannot be repaired, must replace entire gutter plus downspout while we're at it). The guy from the second place I called was like, that's so easy I couldn't charge you more than $20 to fix it.

I heard a woman on the radio today lamenting the commercialization of Halloween. Won't somebody think of the children?

Bedazzled
Parenting in Action
Snuffy's Madonna pose

Turtle

Dylan was playing around the corner of the living room yesterday when she started making her trademark irritated whining noise. She didn't sound like she was in pain and she wasn't trying to cling to me like some kind of annoying animated suction toy, which together account for 85% of all Dylan squawking. I was delighted to round the corner and find this sight awaiting me:

I of course laughed and went to find the camera while Dylan struggled to get out, arms a-flailing. She did eventually break free:



I have been giving Dylan buffalo or goat milk yogurt for breakfast, which she loves. Over the weekend our friends loaned us their yogurt maker and gave us some fresh raw goat milk, so we now have a large supply of homemade yogurt if you need any. It's not something I ever imagine making ourselves, but it's really good.

Sunday Morning Post

Maybe it should have taken me a little less time to connect the dots between "Hm, I wonder where the teaspoon is?" and "Hm, I wonder what's making that grinding noise in the disposal?"

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I'm having a video game problem. There, that was the first step. My game of choice is Zelda: Twilight Princess. I sure most 27-year-old females out there can relate.

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However painful getting this work done on our house has been (and believe me, that's a whole other post), it is now staying 20-25 degrees warmer inside than outside without the heat even on.

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I know no one is interested in pictures that are not Dylan and/or Snuffy, but you'll have to forgive me this one time. The light in the neighborhood was so cool this morning it made everything look spectacular, even the asphalty strip mall parts that I for some reason like to walk by.