Beached Noodle: Bubble's First Seaside Adventure

Lignano, like any really popular tourist destination, is in many ways just awful. Located in very northern Italy, Lignano has Austria's closest beach. As a result, the place both feeds on and is totally ruined by hordes and hordes of pink, German-speaking mountain people seeking a plunge in the sea.

Sand mouse.

It is filled with gaggles of drunk teenagers on spring-break type trips. The beach is packed with endless rows and depressingly deep columns of umbrellas and deckchairs, all of which are strewn with low-maintenance holiday-makers and their noisy offspring (like us). Long-suffering immigrants march the beach doing the hard sell on shitty trinkets. Miles and miles and miles of beachfront property are filled with medium-sized hotels that range from soulless to cheesy. 

From the neck up, baby.

But the good outweighs the bad: you can always find a room and an umbrella, there are arcades and amusement parks (never been myself, but Gulliverlandia sounds intriguing), they sell ice cream and sunscreen every ten feet, and you have to walk about 100 meters from the tideline into the placid sea before the water gets up to your waist. It's like going to the pool, only safer. The beach is soft and sandy and devoid of all life besides the very occasional mollusk, bait-size fish or crab. And despite the fact that it's 90% Austrians roaming about, you are actually in Italy, and so the fruit and veg, restaurants and coffee are all great. 

I've been there with friends several times over the last ten years or so, and have usually stayed in the same hotel, where you have bring your own sheets and towels and toilet paper and pay extra if you're not going to personally scrub the room clean afterwards (which I'm not, thanks). The mattresses and pillows are salty and lumpy. But every room has a kitchen and a balcony with a table and plenty of chairs, and it's directly on the shore, and in general feels like a home. I kind of love it.

Destruction.

On this trip I asked Clemens, who is responsible for making arrangements (because he speaks Italian and his family have been staying in this hotel since time immemorial) what the rooms would cost if we used booking.com. He looked at me like I was insane. 

"Have you seen Frau Kohlrabi's book?," he asked. (Everyone calls her Mrs Turnip. Apparently her actual name sounds a bit like "Kohlrabi," and she looks like one, too.) He explained that paying up involves a ten-minute wait while the Turnip licks her fingers and flips back and forth through the pages, making notes and erasing numbers with a stubby pencil. "I have no idea what she's doing in there," said Clemens. "Maybe she's just acting important." 

Bubbles helping to dismantle a castle.

We spent the evenings with our friends, drinking vino on a balcony next to the baby monitor. Ten years ago we'd be up all night at one of the truly terrible discos and would sleep it off on the beach. Now we pushed the sleeping baby down past the bars at nine p.m., shaking our heads at the sight of shirtless boys and glittery girls drinking vodka out of hollow watermelons. They were hopping around to commercial techno, showing off their boring tattoos and their very nice bodies, getting it on with randoms, and ultimately vomiting on everything nice. It's actually quite heart-warming. There is nothing more feral and human than a bunch of drunk youths. 

In the early morning Alex, the Noodle and I would go stroll around the mostly-empty main strip. A smashed watermelon, lost hair decorations, broken glass. In some cases you could almost picture exactly what had happened where. 

I should never have let her taste ice cream. She's a machine.

For instance, I tried to withdraw some money from an ATM and realized only after several minutes of pushing diverse buttons (I speak zero Italian) that it was empty and wasn't going to work. Then I noticed that the wall and floor all around the cash machine were covered in big, wet stains. Elementary, my dear Watson, I deduced. The machine must have stopped working some time last night. And then I thought, I should probably wash my hands. 

What has not changed over the years is my deep affection for building sand castles. If Alex and I have one thing in common, it's the fact that we can both really get into crafting something tedious. This year we had the added benefit of the Noodle, who was our personal Godzilla. Her presence also seemed to justify buying all the fancy plastic tools we wanted. Well, her and the fact that we no longer calculate the opportunity cost of beach toys in terms of vodka-filled melons. 



This year, with six of us working to pile sand, hold passers-by at bay and keep each other well-moistened with light white wine spritzers, we managed to do quite the project--a larger-than-life sand mermaid lying around on the beach. Lots of little kids and their parents came by to take pictures and help donate seaweed, shells and blobs of sand. (You know you're in Europe when no one gives a hoot that you've built sand hooters.) 

Noodle, for her part, had a blast at the beach. She was either laughing hysterically at the waves, the sand, the muck and the algae, or she was fast asleep. Needless to say, this was also awesome for her parents. 

First baby beach trip was a great success. Can we go back yet? 

Family selfie!

The youthful hordes I was talking about? They liked the mermaid too.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

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!

Six Months and Counting!

A candid photo of me and baby blue eyes. That's a filthy lie.
My arms were breaking and it was all we could do to get a smile
 in a pic that wasn't blurry. You're welcome.

Well, that went quickly. Our babe is six months old. To be more specific, according to this handy calculator, she's precisely 184 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes and 57 seconds old. Fifty eight. Fifty nine. It is terrifying and beautiful how time goes flying by. 

Mine never came out like this, but feel
free to try it yourself.http://www.vat19.com/dvds/magic-christmas-tree.cfm 

It's strange to watch a baby go older, because they change so quickly you can almost watch them grow. 

Did you ever have those crystal gardens, the ones where you stick a chemical-soaked piece of paper in a solution and it gets shaggy with technicolor crystals within hours? Babies are like that, except the opposite, because those things are dusty and inevitably disappointing whereas babies are infinitely and infinitesimally wondrous. Equally messy, though. But I digress.

Six months old...

It's strange to watch babies get older, because they change so quickly but you hardly notice the cumulative effect of all that growing until you wake up one morning and realise six months have passed and the floppy, sleepy little thing that you first met is suddenly so much more solid, so much more a real person, awake and working hard to become herself. 

...and cute as a button. In my totally
unbiased opinion. 

She can sit. She can roll over. She can laugh out loud. She eats carrots, sweet potatoes, apples, pears, broccoli, zucchini, oats, rice, avocado and bananas. She loves the water. She hates her snowsuit. She can say "gah," "bah," and "amah," not to mention "bzrp" and "boob." She can hold her toes and fall asleep on her own and put things from one hand into her other hand and into her mouth. 

Indeed she now can do a thousand small things that we take utterly for granted when we do them ourselves, but that she worked on for hours and days to get just right. 

And she's just getting started. What an exhausting thought. What a privilege to help her along with all the rest. 

We love this kid and always will. 

Down at the Pumpkin Patch

Just got back from Thanksgiving with my aunts, uncles and cousins in Houston! But before I get into all of that, I just have to share our photos of the baby at the pumpkin patch. 

Pretty much the only reason for pumpkin patches is to photograph your offspring at them, right? 

A likely-looking pumpkin patch at the Dallas Arboretum

The whole family was in one place, including Nava's Uncle Elliott, and to my knowledge none of have taken pictures at a pumpkin patch in years and years and years, because it's kind of a weird thing to do without kids, but this time we had a kid and so off we went! Or rather, my mother was working but ordered the rest of us to go. 

We had a sapphire sky and high hopes we had for pictures of adorable punkins and rosy cheeks! 

Unfortunately, it was also the very last day of the pumpkin patch season, freezing cold, the sun was setting and the baby was asleep under many layers of blankets. 

Isn't she adorable up on that bridge to nowhere? Awwww. 

Oh well. There's always next year. 

Nava, her granddad and a pumpkin

Makin' those memories to last a lifetime with Elliott

She's in there somewhere, promise.

Moo! Happy World Breastfeeding Week

A single, devastating event has destroyed my laptop and my productivity, such as it was, has been pretty well shattered for the moment. Oh, and we had a baby. That's kind of taken a chunk of time out of my day, too. 

At the moment our little darling has one hobby only: boob. She is really into it. And there is but one person in all the land who is properly equipped to assist. I'm her jet skis, her stamp collection, her paintbrush, her snorkel...you

I'm udderly adorable!

get the picture.  

When I come near this child, her whole demeanor changes. Her tiny eyes open and her invisible eyebrows shoot up. She stares at my chest. Her baby bird mouth opens wide and her face begins a slow, seeking rotation,gawping and grasping like a wee leech in the grass. Once her targets are within docking distance she starts gurgling and punching herself in the face. It's so cute! 

Breastfeeding is kind of painful and exhausting, but it is also poetic and a beautiful way to get to know my daughter, so when I'm not busy doing silent screams of agony I quite enjoy it. 

Moreover, being objectified by anyone is a welcome change of pace. I just spent several months being exceptionally round and puffy, and now I look like a deflated orangutang  - except for my tremendous jet skis, of course - so it's nice that at least one person appreciates me for nothing more than my anatomy. 

P.S. Hope you had a glamorous World Breastfeeding Week!