Onward, into another year
Jan/104
I now have a one-year-old daughter, which is pretty unfathomable to me.
She can say “hi”, “bye”, “mama”, “daddy”, “baby”, “no”, “puh-puh” (that means “puppy”) and “buh-buh” (which means “button”) and just this morning I think she started saying “up”.
She crawls everywhere.
She scribbles with her crayons.
She dances.
She runs all around the coffee table and back and forth along the couch, but hasn’t quite gotten brave enough to try to walk without support.
She can sit by herself quietly absorbed in turning the pages of books, or she can work a crowd with her peals of fake-laughter and melodramatic gesticulation.
She hugs and nuzzles into my neck when she’s sleepy.
She points at everything that looks interesting to her and waves at everyone she sees in public.
She gets so excited when her Dad comes home that she repeats every greeting she knows — “hi-bye-hi-bye-hi-bye-hi-bye!”
She gets the giggles if she’s really tired and content and I’m rocking her to sleep.
She’s an adventurous eater (and even loves meat, much to my chagrin).
She politely says to herself “no, no, no” while reaching for the forbidden cords or putting crayons in her mouth.
She understands nearly everything that comes out of my mouth.
She loves the cats and all her stuffed animals, searching for their faces and giving them huge smiles.
She has seven big teeth in her toothy grin.
Nothing about being a parent has been what I imagined it would be. When I think back on it, sometimes I can’t believe I decided to have a child. I went through most of my life never planning or wanting to have kids and then suddenly I wanted one? How could I have taken that enormous of a leap of faith? I only had the vaguest ideas about what my life would be like, and none of them were really right. I guess the human instinct to reproduce can be a very powerful thing.
Of course, now that I know what I know, I’m incredibly glad I naively jumped into the whole idea of having a baby. It’s addictive and refreshing to love someone so fully without any reservations. In the midst of everything bad going on in the world, it feels good to be constantly impressed by someone. It feels good to know that there’s someone out there for whom I would do anything, without question, without even thinking about it.
It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses and bunnies. In the first four or five months, when I had postpartum depression, there were far too many days when no matter how hard I tried, I’d try to imagine the next day and I’d just see blankness, as though I wouldn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t suicidal, but simply couldn’t imagine living anymore. It was scary. But having lived through that, it’s pretty easy for me to keep my perspective on the days when Eva’s fussy or I’m tired or just sick of the drudgery of taking care of a baby. The good moments so vastly outweigh the bad moments.
And there are lots of little things about our daily life together that are just getting easier and more fun every day. Taking care of Eva is getting easier. Balancing work and family is getting easier, especially now that Brad is working some new hours at work and he’ll actually be home during Eva’s awake time in the evening. Eva’s on the cusp of walking and the calendar is moving ever closer to spring and I’m imagining what it will be like to have a toddler this summer.
Life is so good right now.
Eva wuz here
Sep/091
My parents had to patch a section of their sidewalk this weekend and I joked that we should have Eva walk across the wet cement. Apparently, everyone thought it was a great idea. Eva had fun too.
She wasn’t too fazed by the weird feeling of wet cement under her foot.
So far, so good.
The handprint didn’t work so well. Eva was very grabby. So she just kind of gauged a hole in the sidewalk.
The finished product:
At this point it was sort of a frantic effort to keep Eva from eating the cement off her hand. We immediately went inside and dunked her in a sinkful of water.
We later went back and added her name and the date to the sidewalk, but haven’t gotten a photo of it yet. My parents have plans to do a better job fixing the sidewalk sometime in the future, so we’ll save that piece of it and I’ll have something to put in my own garden someday when I have a garden.
Lectured by my 7-month old daughter
Aug/092
Tonight Eva had one of those little milestones that strikes me as important even though I’ve never read about it in any baby book or website. She finally started trying to talk (using consonants) clearly in order to communicate rather than just making sounds. She fixed me with this penetrating stare (or glare, more accurately) and started berating me: “ba! Ba ba ba ba bababa!” Apparently I wasn’t getting her to bed fast enough.
I knew she was unhappy and was trying to tell me so, but all the same it was all I could do to not laugh in her face at how cute she was and how endearing it was that she seemed to think she was using words.
The kid never ceases to amaze me.
A modern conundrum
Aug/091
If neither Facebook nor Twitter will open, where will I complain about how neither Facebook nor Twitter will open?
Wheee!
Jul/090
Life has been crazy lately.
Eva celebrated her half-year birthday on July 16. Six months already! I did an extensive photoshoot for her half-birthday (as I’m too cheap right now to pay a studio) and still have to go through all the photos, but here’s one of my favorites:
One big source of craziness right now is that Brad finally got a job offer! Well, he had a different job offer months and months ago, but the company’s budget got slashed at the last minute and the offer dissolved. Because of that, I’m paranoid about celebrating this particular job offer until he’s actually sitting at his desk at his new job. However, they want him to start work early next week which means that whether or not I’m superstitious about believing in this job, we still have to find someone to take care of Eva during the day in the likely event that Brad will be working very, very soon. So the day care search is on.
Meanwhile, my Dad is scheduled for surgery this Friday, Eva has a cold and her legs still hurt from her six-month vaccinations (plus she seems to be going through her six-month growth spurt) so she’s cranky and ravenously hungry. And, of course, deadlines are looming at work. In the midst of all this, the nesting instinct that seemed to be lacking during my pregnancy has suddenly kicked in. I’m cleaning compulsively and doing things like making my own baby food and baking bread from scratch.
All in all, I’m running myself a bit ragged these days.
So, if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s just because life is crazy. But mostly in a good way.
Under the influence of freshly-pureed sweet potatoes
Jul/090
It’s funny. When Brad and I decided to procreate, I was never very into the whole concept of having a baby. I figured it was just the necessary path to having a kid. You put in your time taking care of the screaming, pooping little bugger and eventually it graduates from babyhood and becomes a fun kid you can have conversations with and build things with Legos together, or something. I never would have expected I’d be waxing poetic about that new baby smell.
Yet I can’t keep track of all the new things Eva is doing now and lately I’ve been feeling like everything’s moving too fast. And, man, sometimes it’s hard to see her grow and change so fast. Every single day feels somehow like I’m being forced to let go. I never knew this is what parenthood would feel like. There are so many things to look forward to in the future, but they’ll all eventually come at the price of her wrist fat, her gummy grin, her little excited grunts as she’s about to start nursing, her peach-fuzz head, the way she holds up her feet or hands to my face so I’ll nibble on them.
Just in this last week, Eva has started sitting up completely on her own. She’s getting scarily good at reaching for things and lunging toward stuff. Nothing is safe if it gets within a certain radius around her. It’s amazing how keenly aware she is of everything going on around her and how determined she is to grab everything and see if she can figure out how to chew on it.
She’s also decided she really wants food, so in addition to the rice cereal we’ve been giving her for a while, we gave her her first taste of sweet potatoes today. She took to them like it was the most natural in thing in the world to be eating sweet potatoes. She hardly even made a mess, since she was so determined to actually eat the stuff instead of just play with it.
I keep feeling like I’m going to wake up tomorrow and I’ll have a toddler, and then next week she’ll be starting kindergarten and then before I know it she’ll be graduating from high school and then I’ll be an old granny. I’m running down a hill and my legs can’t keep up with the rest of my body and the only way I can keep from falling down is to just run faster. Again: not what I expected parenthood to feel like.
Eva’s funny faces
Jul/091
Brad took some fantastic photos of Eva today. He’s not the photography-inclined half of this relationship, so I was surprised and impressed.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Of course, with a subject as cute as this, it’s sort of hard to go wrong.
Eva at four days old
Jun/090
I was just looking through my photos from Eva’s first few days and I came across these photos, which for some reason unknown to me, I had never saved to Flickr. When I saw her all tiny and curled up like that, my heart lurched. I know it’s a cliche, but I can’t believe how fast she’s growing.
The other thing about these photos is that I have no memory of taking them. I have no memory of putting Eva on her tummy at that tender age and having her not scream about it. I can’t remember ever (in her entire life) curling up peacefully like that while on her tummy. I’m sure it’s due to sleep-deprivation-induced memory loss, but it also makes me feel a bit bittersweet to realize how many things I’m sure I’ve already forgotten, and how many things I’m sure to forget in the future.
She makes everything better
Jun/090
Last night I had trouble sleeping. Insomnia and I go way back. I tossed and turned and drifted in and out of anxious dreams. I got up and paced for a while and went back to bed. I opened the window. Then I closed the window. Then I opened it again. I had more anxious dreams.
Finally around 3am, I got up and went into Eva’s room and sat on the rocking chair. I opened her window a crack because it was stuffy in the room. I just sat there feeling the cool breeze and listened to her breathe and suck her thumb and make little sleeping baby coos. I sat there for the longest time and all the stress melted out of me.
I went back to bed and slept soundly, dreaming of silly things that made me laugh out loud.
Better than nothing
Jun/090
I have a slew of unpublished drafts because life is busy and I can’t seem to get my act together enough to write a simple blog post.
I turned 31 on Monday. I kind of wasn’t all that aware my birthday was coming up and it was a very low-key affair. I’m good with that. The evening ended with me drinking wine and eating brownies while reading a book. All things which I can appreciate SO much more than I ever could before. I tend to be so busy that I just end up carrying a book around with me from room to room, from work to home, etc., and hardly ever get a chance to read any of it. So even though I got a multitude of nice birthday presents, just having time to sit down and quietly read for a while was probably the best one of all.
My sister visited from Boston last week. It was only the second time she had ever seen Eva. Watching the two of them together was pretty amazing. I don’t know if my sister just has a way with Eva, or if Eva somehow notices the family resemblance and therefore is drawn to my sister, but as soon as she saw Steph, Eva reached out to grab her face and smiled so big I thought her face would crack. She pinched Steph’s cheeks and nose and grabbed her lip and just wanted to touch every part of her face. It was really unusual for Eva, who tends to be a shy baby, and Steph was kind of awestruck by it. It was one of those moments I know I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
Life is good lately. I never would have been able to believe it when Eva was a month or two old and I was seriously depressed, but life is so good.
And now that I finally wrote a blog post… I think I’m going to try to read a few pages before bed.
