We Heart Bedtime

When it comes to ease of parenting, the first fifteen months of Miss Noodle's life have had their ups and downs. We are definitely, definitely on an up right now. 

Noodle reacted to her first month of daycare with what can only be described as dismay. At the kindergarten itself she was fine: she wanted her teachers to carry her around all the time, but was otherwise friendly and personable. But once she got home...DAMN. Tears. Lots and löööts of saying "no". She reverted to her face-smacking ways. Threw things on the floor. Would not go to bed. 

She had also learned a slew of new techniques for driving us slowly bananas. If for example it was bath time or time to leave the apartment or time to put her coat on or whatever, she had learned how to go as limp as a sack of dead cats, leaving us to try and and manipulate her dangling, whining body into or out of her clothes without accidentally dislocating her shoulder or whatever. 

Also, she learned how to pick her nose. (Except she doesn't even do it right. Nothing comes out. She just inserts her pointy little finger further and further up her wee nostril until her left eye is tearing, and then she leaves it there a while.) 

But anyway. This tumultuous period is behind us now, and it is the dawn of a new era of total compliance. Well, 50/50, anyway.  In the mornings she is ultra keen to go to kindergarten, where she has made a few equally tiny friends that bobble around with her. She has stopped saying "no" as often, and now mostly says "yes," even when she has no idea what we're saying to her. Actually, she doesn't say yes. She nods. But we'll take it. It is so brilliant to be able to ask whether she needs a new diaper, whether she is hungry or thirsty, whether she would like to play with her blocks, and actually get an answer. 

And here is the best part: 

She TELLS us when she's ready to go to bed. When she is really on her game she'll even point toward her bedroom and start saying "bye bye".  Other evenings she is cranky and unamused, but if asked whether it is bedtime she will nod. And then she starts chirping "bye bye" while her PJs are put on and her teeth brushed. 

The video below doesn't actually capture bed time, but you can see the nodding. 

I LOVE THIS NOODLE! And also: walking around, climbing on furniture, saying "no," going to kindergarten, and putting herself to bed? I hereby declare this baby a toddler. 

Sea Changes

Winter is coming. But before that, we have to get through the Fall. And it is madness, I tell you. We have thrown ourselves overboard into unknown seas. 

I'm back to work at a wonderful new job with great new people. And I have to say, compared with a full day alone with the bebe, working seems easier. It's always nice to do new things, and at the moment I'm sort of revelling in the fact that I get paid to put on nice clothes and interact with adults all day long in an environment full of endless free coffee. And when I snack on an apple at work, it's all mine. There is no child hanging on my leg, gesticulating at my fruit and chanting: "Appie! Appie? Appie! Appie?" I can use the restroom and shut the door. You know. The little things. 

Anyone need any crayon on their wall? Anyone?

However. This also means I need to cherish all the hugs and kisses I can get from my mini mouse when we are together. Because while there are many joys relating to the new job, kissing my baby's squishy cheeks is not one. And I love kissing my baby's cheeks. 

But of course, she's not a baby anymore. She is a full-fledged toddler. You can tell because of how she toddles, mincing about like a tiny drunken tyrannosaurus. She follows me around the apartment (on two feet!), playing peek-a-boo around the edge of the furniture, unloading our drawers, crayoning on the mirror, blowing kisses across the room. She tries to put on her own clothes (so far no luck, but we're bullish), insists on feeding herself, and seems to understand basically everything we say. Well, stuff that matters for her, anyway. For example, any mention of fruit precipitates gleeful chirping. Any mention of b-e-d-t-i-m-e results in distinctive fleeing behaviours. At the moment, she flees with all the speed and grace of a chubby flightless parrot. It's adorable. 

Noodle at the playground. Now that she's a toddler, she can do playgrounds! (Well, sort of.) This photo is from my mom's visit. Consider it a preview. 

And despite my secret desire for her to stay one year old forever, she is off to kindergarten. She is currently in the painful phase referred to as The Transition. This is where a parent takes her, stays for a while, and then leaves for ever longer periods. Alex is taking care of this process at the moment. He has a theory--not unreasonable--that our little mommy's girl will be more likely to accept her new environment if someone besides said mommy drops her off every day. It has been five days, and results have reportedly been mixed. Apparently her new teacher does a lot of carrying her around. Since I pretty much have chronic back pain from lugging the chunk around, Ms. Teacher has all my sympathies. 

As does the Noodle. Her new teachers are lovely, as are the other kids in the Frog Group, but of course switching from long, quiet, one-on-one mornings in our living room to the mayhem of the classroom would be a bit of a challenge for anyone. 

Because, you know, children are lunatics. On the morning I went there was a three year-old girl parading around with a naked doll on a plastic plate. She asked no one in particular if they would like a slice of her baby, and then pretended to serve everyone a piece. She was using an inch-long doll knife to pretend to cut into the baby's forehead. 
"Hmm," said the teacher, gently. "What are you doing, Betty?*

"This is a baby-cake," explained the girl. "A cake-baby."  

"Ah," said the teacher. "A cake that looks like a baby." 

The little girl looked up with her big, brown eyes and shrugged. "Ja. Okay." 

Cake-limb, anyone? 

I see cake limbs

This is not to suggest that my own Noodle* is some kind of placid angel. She spent a good deal of time last week trying to force feed another kid her age with a plastic drinking cup. 

"I don't think Lily* wants anything to drink," said the teacher. 

Lily's lower lip quivered as she tried to escape. 

"No no no," said the Noodle, shaking her head. "Baba dis daba." And shoved the cup in Lily's face again. 

You know what their classroom is like? A reef. The three and four year-olds are like sharks. As the biggest and strongest, they can nip down and take what they like (well, as long as their teacher overlords don't see). 

The two year-olds, though, are the piscine residents of our coral paradise. Some of these fish spend the day tearing around in manic circles, while others gently float, opening and closing their mouths every once in a while. They eat the lower forms of life and poop sand. Both the fish and the sharks swim in schools and demonstrate social, even very loving and altruistic behaviour, but are ultimately alone in their little egos, hunting for Things To Do. 

Now the one year olds, however, while technically mobile, are much more like a bunch of anemone. Perhaps jellyfish. They don't really get around. They can spend minutes alone, fiddling with their teeth or a single counting bean or a corner of the carpeting. But should the stormy ocean currents blow them into one another, beware! The first probing swipes of each other's faces are followed swiftly by alarmed poking and then outright violence and defensive secretions, like tears and spit. 

Look how much our dearest pookie pants has changed!

But there are plenty of tempting treats for a young wiener in the Frog Group. First of all, there are endless toys, and endless children to observe, which is the Noodle's favourite hobby. Secondly, there are bananas like basically every day. Third, her classroom features a kiddy pool full of chestnuts, which, you know, is pretty sweet. And as far as assuaging my own deep-seated concerns, I notice that the group includes plenty of tiny noodles who seem happy and comfortable with their caretakers. So I'm sure it'll just be a matter of days until she's happy to go. At which point, I'll probably want to cry. 

Well, that's enough feelings for one sitting. I also need to post photos from our trip to the zoo and my mom's visit this past weekend, but those will have to wait until next time. 

******************************

*Names have been changed to protect the dangerously young. 

Remember Those Tadpoles?

Remember how we saved a bunch of tadpoles and took them home? Well, weeks and weeks later, we finally have at least one teeny weeny frog. Yesterday we also had one, which I picked up and put down a couple of times, only to learn that wittle bitty fwoggies do not like that. It died minutes later. This morning, yet another wee polliwog became a frog--apparently ingesting his tail overnight. I feel terrible about the one I man-handled and have decided it's definitely time to release all of them--I don't have the skills or equipment to care for these incy wincy amphibians any longer. 

TA-DAAPOOOLE!

Of the original flock cloud, only around eight remain*. All the rest went in one of two major die-offs. I don't know what happened the first time, which was about two weeks after we'd first installed the tadpoles in our home. Suddenly the water was a murky mess and half the critters were floating around looking grey and hollow. The second massive die-off was entirely my fault: I had run out of boiled lettuce and cheated by dropping in just a tiny bit of, um, bread. Fail.

Almost frogs (or toads?)

For anyone who cares to know, here are my major tips and tricks for the successful raising of tadpoles. Assuming you consider eight almost-frogs out of 30 tadpoles a "success": 

1. Change their water every few days. The new water should be de-chlorinated. I put tap water in a big glass jar in the sunshine for a few days, which seemed to work. Sometimes I also added a little fresh tap water, but I guess in Vienna the chlorine levels are so low it didn't hurt anybody. I reckon in many other cities tap water would basically be an amphibian death sentence. 

Also, not changing the water is very bad--I'm pretty sure that's what was behind mass extinction one. The water should not get even a little bit cloudy - not at ALL. You'd think that was fine, since tadpoles live in filthy puddles, but it is not. I'm sorry, duders. I drowned you in your own goop. 

How do you go about changing tadpole water? What you do not do is try to individually spoon the tadpoles out, because you have better things to do, like change your actual human tadpole and make lunch or whatever. What you do is take out all your decorative rocks, pour the whole mess of water and tadpoles through a fine sieve (poop<"fine"<tadpoles), and dump the tadpoles into a bowl of clean, de-chlorinated water. Tap tap tap your sieve! Those suckers can be sticky. Put your rocks and your tadpoles back in their aquarium, i.e. their big glass tupperware with no lid, which is what we used. Add water as necessary. 

How the Noodle looks to a tadpole.

2. Direct sunshine murders frogspawn. We put our container on a table next to a big plant whose (non-toxic) leaves sort of gave it some shade, and anyway it was not in direct sunlight. Also, somewhere on the internet it says that mint and some other herbs and plants are toxic for fwoggy woggies, so beware. I'd be more specific but I can't really remember and also there is Google. 

3. Boiled lettuce. Feed them lettuce boiled down into nothingness, which you then chop. You can freeze little chunks in an ice-cube tray (a whole ice-cube would be, like, five times too much for one feeding of 20 tadpoles, though) and drop them in every two or three days. Do not feed them bread. I'm sorry, little guys. I didn't know. 

4. Don't touch them. They die. I'M SO SORRY, little frog from yesterday. 

Have fun growing froglets! 

----

*A flock? A pride? A murder? A group? According to the internet, the author of one book about clusters of animals says it's cloud, but scientists use school or shoal. Let's go with cloud. 

No But Really. Ten Things I Actually Wish I Had Known Before I Had a Baby.

There are a lot of lists on the interwebs of things new mommies wish they had known before they had a baby, and I have read and liked (and "liked") many of them. They are all full of truths, practical advice, encouragement, and hilarious observations. However, I do feel a little bit like these are all actually things I did know about having a baby before I had a baby because before I had a baby I read a lot of lists about things one wishes one would have known before one had a baby. You dig? 

Back when I read a lot of books about babies.

Unless your pre-birth reading is confined to a certain well-loved tome that rhymes with Schmut to Schmexschmect When You're Schmexschmecting (which I read cover-to-cover, obviously), you'll already have been told to just effing relax and schmexschmect the unexschmected. 

Therefore, here is my contribution to the genre. Behold. Ten things I actually wish I had known before I had baby. 

1. Relax. Babies are ignorant as s***. Your average newborn has the face of yoda, the unfocused middle-distance gaze of a sage, and the eye motions of an ancient land tortoise. This may give the false impression that your young hatchling is yet imbued with supernatural wisdom, a residue of a past existence that dissipates as we grow into clunking, hormone-driven adults. 

Actually, babies don't know anything about anything. That gaze is a result of their terrible vision, and the strange stillness is because their wimpy limbs are no match for gravity. I'm not saying they're dumb. They're as smart as any of us. But their ignorance is an oceanic thing, guys. In fact, it is astonishing how quickly they actually manage to learn, you know, absolutely everything. "This is a red cup," I say, holding up a red cup. Think about all of things they have to learn before they can even understand that sentence, and that's assuming their color vision has already kicked in. 

So much wisdom.

What does this ignorance mean for you in practical terms? Well, first and foremost, it means you should be impressed as hell when your kid stands up ten months later, picks up a tiny piece of crud off the coffee table, holds it up to you, and says, "Ba ba dis dis?" and then gives it to you. And then makes the baby sign for milk. I mean, for gof's sake, it's amazing. But secondly, it also means that if you occasionally stub your toe and let loose a string of sailor-like invective in front of your two month-old, it really doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter if, in those first three wonderful and lonely and awe-inspiring and sad months, you sometimes need to start crying and then while away the long long hours by watching Judge Judy with your snoozing child on your chest. 

Seriously, it doesn't matter at all. You don't need to read her The Economist out loud every night, even though you totally can, because she does not care. Well, not yet. Later it gets tricky. 


2. Be prepared with some baby stuff, but rein it in, Imelda. Look, you are obviously going to buy some baby stuff before the kid arrives. For one thing, you will actually need some things immediately. Moreover, that late pregnancy urge to nest and feel prepared is totally overwhelming and must be sated. But for gof's sake, if at all possible, don't overdo it. Get the baby furniture, get a buggy and a car seat, buy some cute room decorations if you must, get one (1!) package of diapers and a set of bottles, have a couple outfits and a ton of cloth diapers for wiping up drool, and then, if you can, buy nothing. Nothing, I say. There are two major reasons: 

Noodle and her daddy, surrounded by some of our
many many many baby-related possessions

One: You will need stuff that is not the stuff you think you need. Par example, I bought about a month's worth of perversely expensive, organic, argan-oil soaked baby butt wipes in a fit of lunacy during my last trimester. And then lo and behold I was told that newborns should have their buns wiped with warm water-soaked cotton pads. I purchased a fancy baby-wearing cloth, which I used precisely three times before realizing I am not nearly devoted enough for this crap and vastly preferred the convenience of a Baby Björn. As it turns out, I was just as lazy as a new mom as I was before (see next point). Plus, until I actually had the baby in hand, as it were, I didn't really know what features to look for when baby shopping. (Pro tips: Too many buttons suck. Buttons down the baby's back suck. Materials other than cotton or wool suck. Baby clothes that require hand-washing, no matter how cute, should be banned.) 

Our generous relatives gave us so many baby clothes. 

Two: Having baby stuff to shop for will give you something to do. Don't ruin the fun beforehand! When you are quietly losing your mind in the first couple months after the child is born, and desperately trying to think of reasons to leave the house (newborns are pretty useless at the playground, ski slope, swimming pool or local bar), shopping for baby stuff presents a magical opportunity for an excursion. It checks so many boxes. You get to indulge in a little shopping therapy even though your own body still looks like one of those deep sea creatures after it's been dredged to the surface. Plus, if you haven't already purchased every damn thing your kid could possibly need for the next three years, it's necessary! You need these little outfits and crib liners and baby-wearing devices! Trust me, it's way more satisfying to stroll around the fun stores with your slumbering wiener than it is to stroll to the grocery store (again) for yet another package of diapers and Q-tips. 

3. You are still going to be you. All your wonderful and terrible qualities will remain with you. You'll try to exert more control over them, you will work on being more patient, you will try to be less messy and more organized, but ultimately you're still just YOU. Your existential fears and doubts, your penchant for gin and cake, your desire to be pretty. So will your sense of humour, your smile, your intelligence and your ambition. I found that my baby gives me a lot more motivation to be a better version of myself, but she certainly doesn't make it any easier to get there. 

4. Your areolas will return to their previous shape and scope. Y'all know what I'm talking about. Give it a few months.

4. In fact, ALL your bits will return to their previous shape and scope. Well, my belly still hasn't. But you know what I'm really talking about here. Give it more time than you'd hoped. 

5. Your baby politics may change, and that's fine. If you were previously against public breastfeeding, for instance, feel totally free to change your mind. My attitude prior to breastfeeding was that women should be able to breastfeed in most public places, if they do it discreetly and bear in mind that there are some spaces where it is simply not appropriate. My attitude once I was actually breastfeeding was that everyone can kiss my butt, this baby's hungry now and I'm not going to make her eat her dinner in the toilet. What, you've never seen a boob before? 

Another example: I used to think that the reason I would want to go back to work was because I would be bored at home. God, I was a snob. It can be boring sometimes (a lot?), but mostly it is a freaking slog. Hello? Coming up with stimulating things to do with your baby(ies) all day long while creating nutritious meals and handling the unreasonable expectation that you'll do all the household shopping and chores because you have "nothing else to do?" Yeah. No. Super drag. I'm stoked to go back to work soon because any environment where you can tune out for five minutes, earn money by speaking to adults, and have a regular sense of achievement sounds like a little bit of a relief. Obviously, working can also be a patience-testing slog, but at least if you're having a bit of a bad morning you don't have to feel so guilty about it. I now believe that women who work and women who stay home have it rough, because we so often get saddled (no matter what we do) with more than our fair share of shopping, cooking and cleaning--and this seems to happen even when the intention is to split that stuff fifty-fifty. Feminism hasn't won yet. 

6. Time flies, but also it doesn't. Everyone tells you that the first year goes so fast, so take a lot of pictures, keep a diary, and cherish every moment. Etc. Predictably, that is true. Actually, I found myself thinking a lot about time in general after the Noodle was born. And by time, I mean life, by which I actually mean death--my own, my husband's, everyone's. Including my daughter's. The impossibility and total certainty of it. You know. The beauty and horror of everything. Rainbow of the salt sand-wave and all that. That type of thought. Does that sound morbid? But it's true. I thought about those things a lot in the first few weeks, in particular. As a friend recently told me on his birthday, "Ah, the inexorable march toward death. I'm with the Buddhists on this one. Don't get too attached to life, because boom." Life is short--take a lot of pictures; post them on Facebook; maintain a sense of dark humour about the castles we build in the sand. 

This seems SO long ago.

On the other hand. Be prepared for some days to draaaaag on. I mean, wow. It's an almost nutritious kind of boredom, the kind that spurs creativity and insanity, dog-days-of-childhood-summer-boredom, the kind you rarely enjoy after the age of, like, twelve. One second plodding after the other. As your baby breastfeeds you sing yourself a song of sixpence, run through your mental grocery list, daydream about something or another, come back, and only three minutes have passed. It's insane. Just to clarify, though: you're still going to accomplish mighty few of those DIY and crafting projects you planned. 

7. You should start believing in vibes. Because your baby can feel them, and will react accordingly. Not just the vibes you think you're sending just by acting calm and breathing deeply, but the ones you are really sending. Unlike adults, they cannot be fooled, so it's time to get esoteric with your inner self, man. That sounds stupid, and certainly I used to think it was, but I swear. Emotional energy, vibes, all that nonsense. When it comes to baby-whispering, it's so real. 



8. Louis C.K. gets funnier. Maybe this is just me, but I used to think he was kind of gross, and I didn't much like that he called his kids assholes just to get a few laughs. Now I think he's hilarious. I mean, he's still a jerk. But while his kids are probably not going to appreciate any of it, they should know that their daddy is super funny.

9. You may give in to electronics and noisy toys. I don't care if you live in a hut under a rock in Siberia and ply her with a steady diet of hand-crafted wooden blocks and fabric books. Show that kid a cell phone one time and she will be hooked for life. And you will love it. Writing emails and the tyke is underfoot? Pass that baby a cell phone and buy yourself fifteen solid minutes. Also, do yourself a favor and buy some of those blinking, beeping, totally obnoxious toys. On a long car ride, you can tune out the circus sounds. A screaming baby is so much worse. 

10. The only desire that having a baby fulfils is the desire to have a baby. A professor at Boston University told me this (or something like it), and of course it is something I knew before I had the baby--but now I have one I feel the full force of this truth. Being a mother is something I have always wanted. It is an ambition I always had. And now that I get to be this perfect baby's mom, I am filled with new purpose, my life feels layered with new meaning, and there is nothing that brings me greater joy. 

However. It has not supplanted to any degree any of my other ambitions or interests. I still want to see my professional life go further. I still love to read and write and craft and cook and drink beer with my friends and talk about politics. I still want to learn how to keep plants without killing them. I would like to travel more. I want to understand many branches of science better. I want to stay on top of technological innovations. I want to write this blog. I want to be healthy; I want to be pretty. I want to be able to dress well when the situation demands it. And so on.  

Having a baby just makes it harder to do all of these things. Obviously there is less time and money for each of them. If we have more kids, it'll be even harder. Alex and I just don't have space or time any more to do some of the things we used to like, like nerding out on weekends with kilos of pottery clay or working on soapstone carvings. But being parents, I think, makes it more important to try to do what we can. I want to show my daughter that you can be a mom and have a job but also have good friends and pursue your interests and be fabulous all at the same time. Okay, that makes it sound like I'm accomplishing the above, which would be a lie. I'm sitting here in boxer shorts in an apartment that looks like Dresden in 1945. But the point is to strive for all those things, right? 

Before I had a baby, I thought it would be noble of me to relinquish some of my hobbies for the kiddo. Now I feel exactly the opposite. No one (dads or moms) should let anyone tell them that being a parent means it would be selfish to maintain their other interests. I don't want to pursue my own interests to the detriment of being a good parent, but it's hardly a zero sum decision. And I think giving up my other interests entirely would make me a pretty terrible role model. Right?

At one point I would have found everything happening
in this photo alarming. Not anymore!

11. You will eventually stop googling striking baby behaviours all the time. And stop worrying about whether you are going to break your child. Eventually. Or am I just more neurotic than most people? I read so many books while I was pregnant, and for the first few months after her birth I was constantly on the interwebs doing searches like: "3 wk baby punches self in face ok?" or "2 mo baby burping normal range day" or "4 mo baby fed cake frosting likelihood death adult obesity". Also I'd go check on her milestones. Like, I wasn't concerned if she hadn't achieved them, but I needed to know. 

Now I don't even look unless it really does seem like an emergency. For instance, the internets would probably say that the Noodle's lack of teeth at her age is totally weird, but I am now calm in the knowledge that she probably has milk teeth and that they will eventually emerge. Well, let's hope so, anyway. 

For any parents out there, what do you wish you'd known before having a baby? 

UPDATE: And by ten, apparently I meant eleven. My ability to count has also failed to improve with motherhood, more's the pity. 

A Reason for Tadpoles

People keep telling me that kids just get more and more difficult as they get older. 

Sure, the story goes, newborns are hard. But after this initial hurdle, your average four-month old is an immobile blob of placid joy. It's all downhill from there, they say. First you have to start cooking for them, then they start crawling around and destroying your home (fact), then they start walking and drawing on the walls and running into traffic, and then, once they start talking, they just don't stop. The questions ("But why?") start coming, and then the opinions ("NO"). And the questions become harder and the opinions more and more obnoxious until they finally move out, at which point the child, now an adult, becomes merely expensive and disappointing. 

Bundle of Joy.

Obviously, none of this applies to me. MY kid is going to be angelic, friendly, successful and emotionally stable even through her teenage years. Just like her mother was (HAHAHHahhahahaha...HA!) 

Ruh-roh.

But there is one thing about her impending childhood that I'm really looking forward to, and that is Doing Experiments. 

It was my favorite, favorite thing as a kid. Kitchen science (volcano, anyone?). Investigating bugs under a magnifying glass, and perhaps accidentally frying a limb off in the process, thus Learning an Important Lesson both about the relationship between heat and light and also the fact that with great power comes great responsibility. Making oobleck (by the way, when I lived in Malaysia we had nothing like the oobleck they're doing there these days).  Playing with prisms and colored lights. Toying with magnets. Hunting for treasure with a crappy metal detector. You know. The good stuff. 

Project!

So far the Noodle is, of course, not yet interested in any of nature's unexpected delights, since she's still coming to grips with the banal. Gravity, for a start, is something she battles daily now that she is learning to stand (my money's still on gravity, generally). And then there is everything else we take for granted by the time we're five years old. 

I point out an unusual-looking dog; she is closely inspecting a tiny piece of floor crud. We got stuck in a massive rainstorm with my friend James and she couldn't stop staring at the rain where it hit the ground and bounced back up. I showed her a little inchworm in the park; she tried to eat it. 

But anyway, her interests aside, I now have a great excuse for indulging MY interests and therefore we have now got TADPOLES. Yay!

These were "rescued" from near certain survival in the rain-cover over our friend Gustav's mother's swimming pool. We had gone over to help (okay, watch) them pump out said water and fill up the pool for the summer, but the pump was broken, so instead we spent the afternoon grilling ribs and watching zillions of tadpoles slither around in the muck. 

My little frog puppies.

And now about 20 of them are slithering around in a container in our living room, to my endless joy. I've been feeding them tiny pieces of boiled-to-death green beans and cucumber, and they appear to be doing well. My dear husband is utterly disinterested, as are the cats, who appear not to have noticed that there is a container of swimming treats by the windowsill. The Noodle is only interested in splashing the water, so she is no longer invited to assist in their upkeep.

If they make it to young adulthood (after they grow legs but before they get jumpy) they shall be released into the pond of a local park. I saw some heron-looking birds there yesterday, so I'm certain they won't be bored. Wish us luck! 

Neglected Blog Returns After Hiatus

This is just a post to say that following a month-long blogging hiatus in which we were tremendously busy working and also going on vacation, I've resolved to get back on track. 

"You are not the only fatface in the world. There are many others!
 But you are my favourite one." - Alex, some time last month.

Here are the top five things that happened in the last month:

1. We went to Italy and looked at very beautiful scenery and ate ourselves stoopid. McNoodle likes truffles! That's our girl.

2. While on vacation, Alex got a tick in the usual unfortunate area. He is totally unfazed by such things but they fill me with deep horror and the need to go check myself every 15 minutes, even if, for example, I haven't sat in any grass for the last three days. Note to self: Get everyone shots. 

3. We finally installed a baby jail structured play space in our living room so that I can actually go do things while the child is awake.  Sadly, she often sits clutching the bars exterior boundary and screeching at the top of her surprisingly sturdy lungs crying while I slice apples or whatever. In terms of nerve-wrackingness this is only a marginal improvement to overturning the cats' water bowl (again! and effing again!), emptying bookshelves full of looseleaf paper, and chewing on cables. 

4. McNoodle outgrew everything. I swear, the kid doubled in size overnight. Everything in size 74 (6-9 months) is now just a little too small for her. However, we refuse to accept this expensive new reality and so half the time she just crawls around with a diaper wedgie. 

5. McNoodle's doctor informed me that I'm rubbish as a parent. Actually, he said that the baby is in perfect health, but noted (I did ask) that her eating habits are all wrong. Apparently she was getting double the amount of formula she's supposed to (like, when did that change and was I supposed to get some kind of memo?), and also I should not feed her vegetables at night. Because gas. And somehow also because, he doesn't know about other places, but here in Austria we eat a meal with meat at lunch and we do not eat vegetables at night. 

"What? We do so," I said. 

He looked momentarily troubled. Perhaps because one does, in fact, eat vegetables for dinner in Austria, if not gigantic schnitzels that overhang the plate all the way around. 

These are not vegetables, but this was not Austria.

"Ja, gut," he said. "But she should just have porridge. It will help her sleep through the night." He sat back down in his swivel chair and was typing up his notes, which meant our little meeting was over. 

"She already sleeps through the night," I said, perhaps a tad confrontationally. 

He gave me a slightly distant look, as if he was remembering what it had been like back when I was still standing in his office, and swivelled gently. And won, that bastard. 

"Okay, so porridge at night," I said. "Right. Thanks a lot. See you soon."

"Come back in two months," he said. We were dismissed.  

I left very confused about what the good doctor generally has for dinner and what time of day the baby is, in fact, supposed to eat vegetables (as snacks?). But I also decided that my doctor doesn't know very much about vegetables, or Austrian eating habits, and so I resolved not to ask him dietary questions any more because they undermine his authority. Am I truly supposed to take the no-veg-at-night rule as seriously as I would take his instructions on, for example, the frequency and dosage of baby medication? Of course not. He might be a doctor and all, but he's also twice as old as me, which means he has had twice as long to forget what it's like to even BE a baby, so, you know, I'm pretty sure we're both right. 

Anyway, I digress. Porridge at night. Except for when I give her vegetables. Which is often. The End. 

P.S. I actually really like this doctor, because he is kindly and loves kids and is not prone to overmedication. We just do a terrible job communicating with each other. For my benefit he sometimes speaks English, except he only says the really easy things in (worse-than-my-German) English, so the things that I might actually misunderstand remain in German. It's an awesome system. 

P.P.S.: ToothWatch: Keep watching. 

P.P.P.S: It's Noodle's nine month birthday! HOORAY!

The Greatest Gift of All

Diverse toys + Mega Pooh

Consider a baby’s toy. Is it safe? Is it beautiful? Is it educational? Was it hand-stitched by ruddy-cheeked, well-insured farmers’ wives, or shat out in a plume of factory smog in a land whose only comparative advantages are coal and suffering?

There are many criteria by which to judge children’s playthings. But as anyone with a baby knows, the only thing that really matters is how loud it is.

I can instantly rank McNoodle’s toys in order of noisiness simply by recalling them in my order of preference. Quiet is good, noisy is horrible. Stuffed animals > foam blocks > that one stuffed bear that has a jingle bell embedded in its head > rustling fabric books > the fabric dog with the crinkly ears and honking foot > plastic stacking cups (individually lovely, collectively horrific) > rattles all sorts > battery-operated monstrosities.

In addition to toys, Noodle enjoys snacking on paper and plastic.

Battery-operated monstrosities, in fact, deserve their own category. The noodle loves them because they provide total and instant sensory overload. They light up and whirr and beep out little ditties about the alphabet. For the same reason, I only break out these babies in moments of true desperation.

Yet among these devilish gadgets is one so abhorrent it deserves special mention. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you: the Fisher Price Laugh and Learn Learning Wallet (only $9.99!).

Sure it’s electrified and loud, and almost certainly was not handcrafted on the banks of a Norwegian fjord, but what really sets it apart is its message. No numbers or letters over here, guys. My father Santa brought this in a fit of apparent insanity at Christmas. 

We unpacked it under the tree, opened its smiling blue cover and it burst into song: “Open up your wallet! Do you see a FRIEND? Maybe there’s some money for you to spend!”

Okay. There are a couple ways we can interpret these lyrics. The line “do you see a friend?” could be a totally random aside. “Let me open up my wallet and… hey! There’s Jimmy! Hi Jimmy! So anyway, do I have enough coins for this soda or what?” I’ll admit it’s possible. It is possible. 

Or, OR, this wallet is a sign of the End Times and the “friend” refers to one’s dwindling cash and mostly maxed-out credit cards. “Gee, I really want this sweater…which of these bits of plastic is gonna be my friend today? Is it you, little Visa? Or you, pretty Mastercard? Oh Chase. It’s been so long.”
Any other super obnoxious toys out there? Or am I overreacting? 

Baby Swimming!

Is there anything more adorable in the entire world than heaps of little babies doing things? Of course not!

It's good to have baby friends. This picture taken two
months ago. Clockwise from the top: Nava, Noah and Enzo.
Nava was a *little* unhappy and Enzo looks surprised,
but hey - at least Noah (another best baby buddy)
is in control of the situation. 

So it was with great glee that my friend Antonia and I signed our little whippersnappers up for baby swim classes, which started this week. 

Nava's friend Enzo is two weeks older than her, but in fact their due dates were only three days apart. Which is to say, they're about as close in age as two people can get. This is great for Antonia and I, since during our pregnancies we could call each other and ask intensely personal questions about growths and appetites, and now we can compare shades of poop and our babies' bizarre reluctance to roll from front to back (yet!). It's all very reassuring.  

I wasn't really sure what to expect at a swim class for infants. Certainly not a lot of swimming, obviously. 

At the pool with Nava, who just figured out where
she got her double chin. All pictures thanks to
Antonia, who couldn't swim because she's
recovering from shingles. 

It turned out to be pretty cute. First we sang a song introducing all the babies by name, and then we held the kids in different positions while we pulled them in circles through the pool so that they could get a feel for the water on their skin. At the end, the babies were paraded under a bent swimming noodle while the instructor used a tiny watering can to baptise each head. And boom, 25 minutes and 25 euro were gone for good. 

Nava was doing great until the part where I was supposed to drag her on her back, supporting her head in one hand with my other hand on her chest. I think this is because, being the hero that I am, I managed to get a bunch of water in her ears and nose. 

The instructor kept talking about letting the babies relax completely, but mine was sort of kicking and struggling and attempting not to drown, so I might have done something wrong there. Anyway, I'm sure Nava will grow up to be a little water rat. Her dad and I both are, so it stands to reason. A little water down the wrong tubes is just part of the process. Right? Right. 

Naomi, Nava, Enzo, and his aunt, Domenica.
I cannot tell you how badly Nava wanted Enzo's ears. Very badly indeed. 

We hear that one day baby heads are going to actually go UNDER WATER, and we were given arm floaties, so I assume we can also look forward to independent baby bobbing. Can't hardly wait for next week. 

Boob: Once More, With Feeling!

Some time in the last two weeks our sprout hit a major developmental milestone when she parted her precious lips and, instead of crying, said, "Goo?" 

Her first sounds sounded vaguely like "hello" ("egh'looooo"), which was cute, and like "boob", which is even better. When she's upset she'll stick out her tiny little lower lip, say "booboobooboob," and drool. From a evolutionary perspective this adorableness is a pretty effective strategy, I have to say. 

Anyway, now we're trying to teach her that the sound "boob" has an actual meaning. 

"Boob?" I'll ask, encouragingly. "Are you hungry?" 

Alex says, "Is it time for a boob party*? Booooobies?" He points. 

I do a suggestive little shimmy. "Booooobs." 

Nava says "boobooboob." 

The cats pee on the floor. 

On one hand she doesn't really get it (it'll be months before she says a real first word and a few more after that before she really means anything she says). On the other hand, when she is unhappy, boob is always the answer so maybe she'll eventually put it together. 

I tried to film her saying "boob," but obviously as soon as I had my phone out she stopped. So here we have a video of me trying to coax her into saying boob, but with no success. The good news is that she makes other cute noises. 

I've read that kids don't remember anything that happens before they can talk (which will make that a dangerous little milestone). That had better be true, because her father and I are basically twelve-year-olds who are allowed to drive and buy candy whenever we want. Oh, and have children. (I'm beginning to realize why the world is in such a state.) Also, in two years Nava is going to walk up to some lady, point and say "BOOBS" and that will be our just deserts. 

____________

* Around here we refer to breastfeeding as "having a boob party," because infantile. When Nava was just a couple of weeks old we went down to the Lainzer Tiergarten for a walk. If you don't know (and if you don't live in Vienna, why would you), it's an enormous (really enormous) park with miles and miles of trail through woods and across meadows. If you like, as we did, you can pretend to enjoy some memorably bland gray food at the Rohrhaus. (Pro Tip: Bring a sandwich). Anyway, while we were there we spent some time eating ice cream on a scenic meadow that was riddled with a whole biology lesson's worth of animal poops. We sat in the sunshine, and confronted for the first time ever with sunshine, Nava freaked out. She continued to freak out all the back across several kilometres of trail and into the car, where she freaked out all the way home. During this time we pleaded and begged with her to relax because a "boob party" was just around the corner ("Think about it logically," as Alex likes to tell her when she is truly falling apart. "Let's analyze this situation together."). And so now we say "boob party". 

Nava Gets a Gift

Hooray! My good old friend Denia is in town. I don't get to see her much because she lives in California where she does brilliant nuclear stuff and where I assume she and her colleagues gossip about quarks and Snapchat with Nobel Prize winners. 

Anyway, because Denia is lovely and still condescends to speak to the likes of me, we had a great time chit chatting and playing with the baby, and then Denia and I went out for a walk (and by walk I mean she waited with me at my gynaecologist's office, because that's the kind of stellar feminist friend she is). We talked about literature, meditation, iron-rich vegetables and the recent work of a transgendered Stanford professor of neurobiology. Actually, she talked about those things. I talked about baby poop and my episiotomy. 

Unfortunately, however, Denia was generous enough to bring young Nava a lovely baby book as a gift. Predictably, it is about rainbows. It opens with the sentence: "Little Rabbit and his mother were sitting under a big, red flower petal." You see, that's where they were waiting for the rain to stop. 

Denia and Nava. Looks like Nava just finished reading her new book!

The book is about what rainbows are made of. I always thought rainbows were made of light refracted through tiny water drops suspended in the atmosphere, but apparently that's wrong. It turns out rainbows are made out of RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE and PURPLE.

Thanks a lot for this super educational book, Denia. I thought you were a scientist. 

Okay, actually the book is really cute and has this whole thing with pop-out ribbons that build into a rainbow. And Denia is a wonderful person whom I love. Thanks so much for visiting, Denia, and thank you very much for the book. 

My First Baby Book

Baby books depicted are not necessarily terrible

Look!
I am a baby book.
Read!
I am about the letters A to Z.   

Your baby needs a good head start.
So you will read me to your baby 
but your baby will not give a fart.

She will not care on your couch.
She will not care on a chair.
She will not care in your arms.
She will not care anywhere.

She will stare
past your shoulder in the air
and you will wonder why 
you have not written a baby book yourself
because frankly
baby books are dumb. 
They make your soul numb. 

They have a rhythm and a rhyme
but only sort of and only sometimes.

This one cost fifteen euros
that you could have spent
elsewhere
and your baby would still stare
past your shoulder into nowhere. 

P.S. Really looking forward to books for slightly bigger children, which are better suited for reading than chewing.