Birthday Girl

Today is . . . well, it's not exactly Allison Clare's birthday, as she won't have another birthday proper until 2012.  And she's not exactly one year old, since that won't happen until tomorrow.  But--today we celebrated, and we'll celebrate again tomorrow.  

Allison Clare started her day with fruit and some cereal, which she pushed out of the way when she caught her first glimpse of the doughnuts also on the table.  She had never seen doughnuts before, or tasted one, but she seems to have instinctively known that they were to be preferred over oatmeal with applesauce.  Then she got passed around among Grammy and Grandpop and Daddy and Mommy while we all did various things to get ready for her little party. 

We wanted to keep it a simple little family party, with with one set of friends who stopped in.  I roasted two beefs (made two roast beeves?), my dad sliced them very thin and tender with the meat slicer, and my mom made a rich brown gravy, which we put into a Crockpot to serve with fresh rolls.  I had made a dark chocolate cake and a buttercream frosting, and my mom put on a raspberry filling and a base layer of frosting; then I decorated it with beading, pink sanding sugar, and her monogram--I had had this idea for putting it on the cake by printing it out on paper and cutting out a stencil with a craft knife. We also had a fresh fruit salad, a strawberry-walnut vinaigrette salad, and punch to make things festive.  

Allison Clare definitely knew that it was a special day.  She wore the little party dress her Mamaw and Papaw sent her for Christmas, crawling around in it and asking for "yum-yums" when she saw all the new foods all day.  She had her own piece of cake, squishing the frosting between her fingers and sampling the cake but looking perplexed by it, much preferring a handful of blueberries (always her favorite).  She was especially delighted with the puppy book she received as a gift.  We showed a video of pictures from her first year, which I'll post here some time soon.  We saved her other gifts, from us and her grandparents, to open tomorrow because it was getting late and she'd already started looking pretty somber and tired.  

. . . And when I think of this past year, even our gratitude is infinitesimal in comparison to our debt.

 

Spit off the Old Block

One day, when I was about six years old, I remember sitting at a restaurant table and feeling relieved to see that there was water in my mother's glass at the end of the meal, because it occurred to me that she would dampen her napkin with the water from her glass, instead of spitting on it, to wipe my face.  When she did spit on the napkin anyway, she asked me why I was screwing up my face, and when I said, "I don't like when you spit on me," she burst out laughing.  

What stories will my baby girl have to tell once she can talk . . . A few weeks ago, I took her in to the office, where she sat in my office chair with one of her books. She could reach into one open desk drawer to amuse herself with feeling around for the phone book and the spiral-bound college catalog. I noticed she had leaned into the drawer and had her mouth on the edge, but I kept my eye on her and thought she was just leaning on it until she popped her head up and I saw that she had little brown specks on her lips where she had been gnawing on the drawer and shaved the finish off with her tiny teeth.

Now, our furniture is easily 50 years old, maybe 80 or more. I swept her up in my arms, brushed her mouth off, and sniffed to see if she had a mouthful of vintage desk varnish.  I wasn't sure, and without even hesitating, I held her up to my face and swept her mouth with my tongue.  I mean, I realized this had happened after I had done it, when I thought to myself, "What did I just do to another person?"  Motherhood is totally turning me into a freak--my mother's napkin-spitting was nothing.

Yum!

AC has added one more word to her repertoire: "Yum."  This single syllable has surprised us all with its versatility.  It first appeared one day as I was absently chattering to her, my back to her as I mixed applesauce into her oatmeal, and I said, "It's almost ready--yum-yum-yum."  And from over by her high chair, I heard a little voice say, "Yum-yum-yum."  It was startling to hear her talk back to me, as I've gotten totally used to narrating what I'm doing without expecting an actual response . . . she does make little babbling and "jargoning" sounds, but usually just on her own.

So, anyway, since then, "yum" has made several entertaining appearances:

I didn't know she understood "getting hungry" until I said to her, absently again, "Are you getting hungry by now? You must be getting hungry by now!" and she surprised me by singing back, "Yum yum yum!"  

And when it gets toward snack time, or if she is sitting in her high chair and sees food being prepared but hasn't received any yet, she furrows her brow and lets out anxious little bleats of "yum?  . . .  yum?"  

She also spied her favorite snacks on the grocery store shelf, and announced their presence with a frantic "Yum!  Yum!"  

My favorite, by far, was when I was nursing her, and as I moved her from one side to the other, she smiled over at me and said contentedly, "yum yum yum."

Reconnection

Facebook has presented me with a few awkward moments, such as friend suggestions for people I don't know, or friend requests from people that a reluctant soul-searching process reveals I don't like.  However, this weekend Facebook presented me with a really delightful experience: an old friend and his wife that I got connected with just this past week had posted pictures of a trip to this area, and I happened to see the pictures Friday and posted, "If you're ever in the area again, let me know."  Within an hour or two, I'd gotten a note back saying, "Guess where we are right now?"

So the long and short of it is that my prayer partner from college, E, and his wife, B, and their two sons ages 4 and 6 went to church with us this morning and out to lunch afterward, just before they headed back to their home several hours from here.  I don't think I had seen E since his wedding the summer after my senior year in college, but our friendship was formative for me because during college, I came to terms with my faith in some foundational ways.  I had attended a very somber Baptist church all my life, with preaching straight out of the King James Version, and I had never experienced any kind of fellowship, or really even happiness in church, even though the experience of private prayer did make me happy sometimes.  Faith to me meant reading the Bible and muddling along trying to do what it said and talking tentatively to God along the way.  It was kind of lonely, though in a way that I never noticed because I thought everyone was alone in it.  But in college, I discovered lots of people whom I could enjoy and admire, who were fun and cool (in the nerdy way of my school) and hilarious and endlessly kind and grappling with the tough issues of faith without flinching, really wanting to be changed by the things they believed to be true.  

Still, I didn't know any of the songs or even some basic Christian ideas (the Bible being rather confusing on many points), and in that sense, I was kind of wide-eyed for my whole first year.  I remember at one meeting there was singing, and one very kind person noticed I wasn't singing along and said, "For the next song, let's do something Tara knows." And I didn't know a single song.  Not that anyone cared, but there was clearly a culture that I wasn't aware of--and that I still have ambivalent feelings about, though its expression in that context was entirely sweet and welcoming.

E was the opposite, the son of two professors at a Christian college, very well read in Christian theology and source documents in other religions too.  We were opposite in other ways too--I was tidy and prim, whereas I'm pretty sure I once saw E pick a piece of skin off his foot and eat it. During a meeting.  A prayer meeting.  One that he may have been leading.  But we'd gotten paired up in a random match as prayer partners in our first semester in college, and we met every week for the rest of my time there, often walking all over campus for hours and talking about all the big ideas and tender ideals and bold hopes that you have when you're in college.  I think that relationship gave form for me to the idea that faith can make us brothers and sisters, connected by a bond that is not at all romantic, yet is powerful and affectionate and resilient.  

Seeing him and his wife today made me remember what I loved so much about my college friends: the sense that the endlessness of the pursuit of holiness (and by that I don't mean being prim--I mean being broken and changed and made more humble and generous and forgiving) was not discouraging but invigorating, filled with joyous possibility.

At this point in my life, it sometimes feels like the elements I have to work with in relating to God have changed so entirely that I don't know where His alchemy even begins.  I don't mind, and I'm not worried, in that I know that God seeks us (as C.S. Lewis once said, talking about my pursuit of God is like talking about a mouse's pursuit of a cat), but it has been a bit disorienting.  I feel like someone who was once a runner, accustomed to the ease of keeping up a steady pace without having to think about it, and after some surgery or something, all my coordination is all different, and I lurch along in a somewhat horrifying manner.  What once felt easy seems awkward a lot of the time, even as I know that it's just part of the new way I live now.  It was nice to be around old friends, to remember how they once surrounded me and buoyed me along, and to see them further along in their family life and know that hopefully, my strides will even out a little more too in time.

Timber!

The winds last night were so loud that I couldn't hear anything but their beating and howling at the house, and the power went out around midnight.  I found myself unable to sleep because on some level, I was listening for AC even though I couldn't have heard her over the noise (and obviously, the baby monitor was non-operational), so I gave in at about 3:30 and brought her to our bed in hopes of getting a little sleep. Of course, an hour and a half later, in the early morning gray, I woke up to a little voice behind my back murmuring, "Mama."  Very cute, if very early.  Thankfully, she went back to sleep.

When I called the power company first thing, the recorded message estimated that power would be restored at 11:59 . . .  pm . . . tomorrow!  I worried about the oodles of stews, homemade spaghetti sauce, soups, and casseroles I had been stockpiling in the basement freezer--as well as how we would get through the day, since the house was already growing colder.  Sam and I had a strategic planning session that ultimately settled on all three of us going to campus; we could see lights there from our upstairs window.  Then we could pass AC back and forth for the morning between teaching and working in our offices, and in the afternoon, I might take her to the mall.  But the blessed power came back on just before it was time to leave--thank you, Mr. Electrician-spied-on-the-corner!

Here's a picture of the damage two doors down, plus another view including someone's pickup for scale (someone lucky, since the truck wasn't flattened!).

Peek-a-Baby

See that raised eyebrow?  It's so Fee it kills me.  Believe it or not, she lifted that eyebrow at me when placed on my stomach at birth, as if to announce from that first instant that she was her father's daughter.  There is no fighting DNA; I surrender, I surrender!

The Sleep Diaries; or, Day 345 of My Captivity

[July] We were elated.  Allison Clare was sleeping through the night, and life was good . . . for a month or two.

[August] Then she started going to bed earlier and earlier (eventually settling in at 6:30), and as her night got longer, she started waking up once.  But, we told ourselves, we couldn't expect her to sleep for 13 hours and not eat, right?  So getting up once didn't seem like a bad price to pay.

[September] Then when she started solid foods, her night feeding moved earlier and earlier . . .

And then there were two.  She'd wake up at 11:30, and then wake up at 4:00 or 5:00.  This, I figured, was simply my lot.  The pediatric nurse said to feed her more during the daytime, but it only worked for a few nights, in spite of my great hopes (and I suspect it was only a coincidence).

We hovered there at two feedings for a while.  I tried sleep-training her once or twice, but it quickly became pretty apparent that her sleep skills weren't the problem: she was just hungry.  If I didn't feed her, she'd keep putting herself back to sleep pretty well, but then waking up every 10 or 20 minutes again and crying, until she was just crying continually.  If I fed her, she'd take a full feeding and go back to sleep for hours.  Since she was kind of slim at that point (10th percentile), the pediatrician advised us to keep letting her nurse at night.

[January]  But then, a few weeks ago, she started waking up a third time. And now, unlike before, I was fairly certain she wasn't very hungry at one or two of the feedings.

So, I figured it was time for some tough love.  I picked the new feeding to eliminate first.  The first night, she woke up and was furious when I didn't feed her--crying her angry cry for a while in her crib, but she eventually went back to sleep.  The second night, she woke up again and got angry again when I came in to soothe but not feed, but she went right back to sleep when I laid her (red-faced and screaming) in her crib at that feeding time.

The third night, she went to bed at her usual time (6:45), slept though two of her usual feedings, woke up just once in the early morning to feed, and went back to sleep for a few more hours until 7:15.

Thus, here we are . . . tentatively elated again?  To be honest, I really feel like her size and metabolism have finally developed to a point that she can go long enough without eating to use the sleep skills she seems to have.  I can't blame Sam for this one--when I was telling my mom about how AC still wakes up at night, she mentioned that I didn't sleep through the night until I was a year old.  If I had known this when Allison Clare was a newborn, it probably would have devastated me, but as we are (unbelievably) nearing her one-year mark, it was a ray of hope. 

What's In a Name?

We bought this decal for AC's room.  Now that I've discovered the existence of custom decals, there is the chance that I might start covering the walls with them . . .

Is it Friday Yet?

I was late to class yesterday.

I was late to class because the snow-melt-slush-refreeze-repeat pattern had left veritable acres of inches-thick ice for me to traverse on my walk to school.

I walked to school instead of driving because I left my car on campus the day before.

I left my car on campus because I had locked my keys in my office.

I left my keys locked in my office and walked instead of driving Sam's truck because earlier in the week, when I drove Sam's dearly beloved truck (my car's wheels having just spun and spun on said ice acreage), I attempted to extricate it from an impossible parking situation--and got it caught, couldn't get it out, waved down a construction worker to spot, and ultimately scraped it with a horrific sound, barely escaping pulling the wheel well off.  

And yesterday, in the very moments when I was contemplating this list of misfortunes, my inattention allowed Allison Clare to propel herself off the sofa belly down and head first, resulting in her first bruise and a scratch on her cheek. 

Thankfully, these are all minor crises, and if anything, AC's tumble reminds me that she's much faster and more agile these days, and I need to revise my estimates of her abilities more quickly.  Still, what a week!

Snowy Weekend

Sam gave me a new camera for Christmas, and I got to experiment with it this weekend.

"Watching Daddy Work," snow day edition.

Distracted by the camera.

I don't know why I love this overexposed pic.  I guess it seems kind of ethereal, like she was when she was first born.

Sweet profile.

Cheery.