Oh Barf

Okay seriously though. The kid needs to stop barfing. The child is perfectly healthy (thank goodness), so I use the word "barf" advisedly. I realize that with respect to cheery, milk-guzzling little wiener people the preferred nomenclature is "spitting up," but let's call a spade a spade. Milky it may be, but barf is barf, and make no mistake about it. 

An oldie but goodie: Noodle at four months, barfing...she's
lucky she has me wrapped around her little finger.

When she started eating solid food I thought the barfing would slow down but as usual I was wrong. My sugar pumpkin barfs onto her pants. She barfs onto my shoulder. She's barfs while we're Skyping with my mom and she barfs while she's playing with blocks. When she's crawling around she's been known to do a little casual barf off to the side. 

I feel a song coming on. 

Barf on the couch and barf on the floor, 

barf down your front; don't stop, barf more!

Barf to the left and barf to the side, 

barf pooling below or barfed far and wide. 

Now in a haiku:

After a bottle

of nutritious formula

comes, like the rain, barf.

Between our also barf-happy cats and my daughter, I would conservatively estimate that I spend approximately 16 hours a day cleaning vomit off of surfaces. I split the rest of my time between poop, enthusiastically reciting ancient and oddly dark nursery rhymes, and having fitful dreams about running out of paper towels. 

I don't really mind though. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Thank God babies are so freaking cute. I'm especially partial to mine. 

The cats better get their s*** together, though, or I'm hurling them out the window. 

Hope you're having a great weekend!

Booting Out Baby

In the oceanic dusk of four a.m., a voice rings out. It rolls across the hills and valleys of our bed, ever more insistent, like the refrain of a lonely humpback whale. 

"Awawawaoooooooooooooh," she sings. "AwaaaawaahahahaOOOoooWAHHHHHhhhooo."

Fast asleep, leg still in hand, by 9 a.m.

"Please, no," says a different, hoarse voice. It might be mine. "Please. Just ten more minutes." 

And so it has come to pass that we are throwing our daughter out. It's time for her to have her own room. A room far, far away where we can supervise her via a creepy spy cam and--crucially--turn off the volume in the event of a non-emergency. 

The good news is that we have two bedrooms. The bad news is that since we were co-sleeping anyway, our so-called "nursery" has never been anything more than a disgusting hoarder's paradise. It's where we hang our laundry. It's where we keep tools and our tent. It's also where we keep stuff that we're just not that into. Like, you know, stuff we just use but that we don't like to talk about with other people. Towels that are clean but discolored. My orange shopping trolley. Swiffers. Stuff with a good personality.

No one show my mother this photo.  

About a month ago we realized it was time to take action. It was time for a clean break. So obviously, instead of doing that, we took out what will soon be the babe's crib and painted it white, and then re-inserted it among the jumble. 

Pro Crastinating. 

Then it was really time to start sorting through the nonsense, so the next weekend we went out to the hardware store for supplies, came home and constructed little pinewood feet with which to elevate the crib and the pull-out sofa. 

Then we really were going to clean that room up, but first we needed to put the little feet under the furniture so we could stow our suitcases, but this was a chicken-and-egg dilemma that would involve real commitment, so we just ignored it completely for another week.

Dude, it's hard to break up with some stuff. But eventually, we did. Okay, actually we just hid it better, but that's basically the same thing. 

And voila! We now have a plain and empty bedroom. So what if all the furniture hovers two-and-a-half feet over the floor, as if a baby giant is about to move in. It's stuff-free and we're ready for the fun part: decorating!

Floating furniture. And yes, that's our laundry.
Look, it has to go somewhere.

This is What Constitutes a Major Achievement in My Life These Days

Because Alex and I are adherents of the Path of Least Resistance School of Interior Design, we decided to conveniently locate Nava's diaper changing table in our living room. For the same reason, and because we are almost entirely innocent of either good taste or disposable income, our living room is basically monochromatic: everything is either black or white or a shade of gray. 

But the changing table was made of wood stained a fairly deep yellow, which didn't match, and it was missing an attachment that would have made it deep enough to fit a baby (we'd been laying her sideways). 

So last weekend, we built an attachment and painted it white!

BOOM. White changing table. Shot from below to add majesty.

Um, and that's it. 

Gosh. I was hoping this would be more of a blog post. It seemed like a serious achievement at the time. It involved planning the table extension, dismantling parts of the table, going to the hardware store, having wood cut, sanding the whole thing, nailing new bits together and painting everything twice. All on a Saturday. OH, oh, AND blogging about it. WITH a baby! I think we should get extra points for doing it with a baby. 

Not that our baby can talk or propel herself, or anything, but she does squall* loudly and for no reason for a couple hours every evening, and that made it pretty hard to concentrate. On the plus side, it made it totally irrelevant that Alex could have woken the dead when he was nailing pieces of wood together (at that point I was making futile efforts to calm our hysterical and inconsolable bairn, who was not hungry or in pain but was having her usual 6 pm bout of what I imagine is Creeping Existential Dread). 

Whatever. Fixing up the table was really hard and we are proud of ourselves. 

Here's a picture of our baby. She continues to be by far the best thing we've made. Didn't even have to go to the hardware store. 

P.S. Shana Tova, to those who celebrate it 

* By the way, the expression "a squalling infant" was a cliche I'd often read, but I feel like now I really understand. And we're lucky enough to have what they call an easy baby (knock on wood, salt over left shoulder, etc)!