Things I worry about as a mother: When is Hazel going to wean and will it be easy or difficult for her? What do we do if she ever wants barbie dolls or “princess” stuff? What do we do if she ever says “can I shoot one of Grandpa’s guns?” What happens if she gets hurt? What happens if she gets sick? Do we homeschool / public school / some alternative school? How many siblings is a good amount? What if she gets bullied? What if she dates a mean boy (or girl!)? What if she wants to pierce things that shouldn’t be pierced? What if she wants lame tattoos? What if she’s not happy? What if she doesn’t like her life? What if she doesn’t like US?

This weekend all of that has been pushed aside for: What do we do when she leaves home? How do we take her to some town for college, buy her with a bunch of crappy food and a set of plastic drawers and XL twin sheets and just LEAVE HER THERE? What if she wants to go to college in CALIFORNIA? I am watching all these nervous parents moving their kids into their dorms this weekend and I want to cry. And the parents of every friend I’ve ever had who has gone to another country for school or work or life (um, hi Mom).

I have at least sixteen years. But we are already half-way to the point where we need to make some serious school decisions. Panic.

At least I have stricken the following worry from my repertoire: What happens when we have another baby? Because I think I know that one. Hazel LOVES babies, all of a sudden. She has been cradling stuffed animals and dolls and board books open to pictures of babies and singing to “baby Yo-wee” and hugging and kissing them. She will be just fine. Thrilled, in fact, to have a baby brother or sister.

She loves baby Zoe. She also loves Clint and Kelly A LOT.

Listening: Vic Chesnutt
(I am) Reading: haven’t touched a book in days
(Hazel is) Reading: The Bee Man of Orn, in that picture up there and all day yesterday
Working on: Etsy, Etsy, Etsy…
Thinking about working on: fall PJ pants for Hazel, baby gifts, some wall art (for what walls? I don’t know – I have no walls)

Whilst waiting out a torrential downpour in our tent last week, I ran out of animals / vegetables / minerals to draw for Hazel, and for some reason thought to draw West Virginia. Then we made a list of people from WV. Then Mikey drew Ohio and we listed people from there. We were desperate to keep her entertained, and she seems to enjoy memorizing lists lately.

“How about Clint… Clint is from West Virginia. Who else?”

“Hawvey.”

Hazel has met Clint & Kelly’s dog, Harvey, only three or four times ever. He’s a youngin’. She saw them two weeks ago and can deduce that since Clint is from West Virginia, his dog must be, too.

I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but HOW DID WE GET HERE. My BABY is DEDUCING INFORMATION. Terrifying.

Of course, we blew the whole thing twenty seconds later when we informed her that Paisley is, in fact, from Ohio.

Two West Virginia natives (one by way of Indiana) meet, adopt a buckeye dog and manufacture a Canadian child. Figure that one out, kid.

Today she examined photos clipped to a string on the wall and instead of naming the people, named their dogs. I died a little.

“Ea-wuh, Paisee, Hawvey, Cah-win.”

Earl, Paisley, Harvey, Carlin. We met my parents this afternoon to reclaim that buckeye mutt of ours. I missed her and Hazel missed her. I don’t know about Mikey, sometimes. Clint says “I’ve never known someone who had such loathing for their dog.”

I know my parents are really good dogsitters because Paisley is always depressed and won’t eat for two days when she comes back from their house. Thanks, parents. Welcome home, daggit.

Sometimes I feel like Hazel is growing faster than my brain can comprehend, and I underestimate her – a bad word, but the only thing I can think of. And then I think that parenting is probably just a lot of trial and error – can she do this yet? Or this? And then I get to a thing that she CAN do really well and I feel kind of like, “well shit, how long have I been depriving her of THAT?”

One of her favorite activities is talking on the phone. She spends hours every single week talking on the phone. Chattering, laughing constantly, peppering the conversation with words that she is learning. It’s one of my favorite ways that she pretends, but it has never, never occurred to me to ask her who she’s talking to. It never occurred to me that she might have an actual conversation partner in mind, I guess usually because she’s the one talking incessantly and not letting the person on the other end of the line get a word in edgewise. Yesterday she was, for a change, doing most of the listening – a high-pitched new squealey giggle that she’s been perfecting, and “yeah…cool”, every few seconds. Running laps around the kitchen island. Half an hour straight. I finally asked her who she was talking to. She gave me this look:

“Are you daft, mother?”

“Come on, tell me! Who are you talking to?”

She raised her phone-less hand, palm-up, rolls her eyes ever so slightly towards the heavens, and whispered in an annoyed voice (exactly the same way I do when she interrupts my phone conversations… oops), “Wot.”

Duh, Mom.

Of course she was talking to Walt. Not, you know, Grandma or Paisley or Morgan or Alice. Her one and only these days.

And then…

She peed on the potty. Nineteen months old, right?? This isn’t going to happen again until 2011, right? I had her stripped down for her bath and plunked her down on her little potty, where she’s been sitting multiple times per day – clothed – since we moved home. And I’ve been EC-ing her off and on in varying degrees since she was born, and I know that she DOES have some grasp of the sensation of peeing going with the word “PEE” because of that. Other than that, we’ve done nothing remotely resembling “potty training”.

So anyway, I put her on her potty because I knew she’d reliably sit still there for sixty straight seconds while I finished drawing her bath.

“This is where you poop and pee. Sit on your pot for a minute.”

And she did, staring vaguely off into space with her hands folded neatly in her lap. I never fathomed that she might actually pee, but she DID. She peed, beamed at me, and stood up to run to the edge of the tub and wait, tossing me looks over her shoulder as I rejoiced. I am 100% certain she knew exactly what she’d done. We dumped it in the toilet and washed it out and the whole time I was trying not to FREAK, but I said “Hazel you went PEEPEE on the POTTY!! YAY!” <— total mom voice. And she was looking at me with her “duh, mom” face but eventually my excitement caught on.

“Peepee ‘da POYEE. YAY!”

Yes little girl, yay. Yay, yay, yay, yay. You are awesome.

Edit: …and then she slept all night in her own bed until 7:00 a.m.

Listening: Damien Rice
(I am) Reading: The Poisonwood Bible; Last Child in the Woods
(Hazel is) Reading: Whoever You Are
Working on: plans & projects & packing

It’s almost 11 a.m. on Saturday, and gorgeous outside. Hazel is still in bed because she is teething and has seen midnight come and go for two nights in a row. She is cuddled up to her Daddy, also sleeping, who I’m pretty sure didn’t come to bed until about 4:00 this morning after studying all night long.

I’ve been sitting at the computer for most of the morning thinking about the end of Harry Potter vs. the end of LOST. Dumbledore said, in book seven, pretty much exactly how I feel about the end of my favorite stories, including LOST: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

That series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now LOST. I mourn the end of fiction really hard, and after a conversation with Kelly last night, I lay in bed for hours thinking about how to introduce these things to Hazel and her future siblings.

It’s one of the most daunting responsibilities of parenthood. Don’t laugh.

I want her to enjoy Harry Potter (and eventually the other things) to their fullest. It was my only consolation when the I closed the last book – at least someday I’d be able to share it all with my children. How do I do that? Let her pick them up whenever she shows interest? Begin reading them to her aloud? Wait until all the siblings are old enough for a family reading? Will she be too old then? Read them all to each kid individually? What do I do what do I do?? It was no less magical because I started reading them in college versus childhood (when they didn’t exist), and had I read them as a kid I don’t know that I ever would have fully grasped the political and social implications in the stories, which are one of the greatest things about them, to me.

The only thing I know for sure is that Aunt Janet will read aloud the beginning and the end. Nothing is more magical than Janet reading Harry Potter. The voices, oh man, the voices!

Janet Potter, summer 2005.

The end of LOST is not going to be as emotional as the end of HP, but it’s going to feel so much more REAL because I have “seen” these characters with my own eyes constantly for four years, instead of just imagining them. They have voices and personalities that are common for all of us, and leave little room for what our brains can make up. I have dedicated so much time and brainpower to this show. I’m already really disappointed by this season, and when it ends it’s going to… well… it’s going to suck.

I remember when I first started watching it and we went out to dinner with Mario and Jenn, one of whom was hiding the season 1 set under their shirt when they arrived. I remember all of us wondering aloud where we’d be when the show ended. Would we all be watching it together? Would there be babies? Would Mikey and I still be in Canada, or off somewhere else? Would they be somewhere else?

And now we’re there. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be watching it together. We are home and they never left. There are two baby girls. How did we get here?

You’ve probably seen this at least once before, but I’m going to repost it because it just made me cry a lot A LOT. Written by Jenn, about the end of Potter:

Read more »

Even though that seems to be the case, it is not. Just to clarify…so when I say, “I love my family” you don’t think I mean his iphone, too. Because I really don’t. But when I say something like “tonight I took a walk with my family” or “tonight I ate dinner with my family”, that does include The Other Woman. It’s a very fine line, really.

I love my family.

(But not that other woman.)

Can I just tell you what Hazel is wearing in that photo? A 3-6 month skirt that she’s been wearing for a year. And beads that she took from around my neck on St. Patrick’s day and has yet to return. I am monumentally excited that she likes beads. Gabe’s has a set of chunky Melissa & Doug lacing beads for $5.99 and I very nearly bought them for Hazel today because I’ve been waiting, waiting for her to care about beads.

But I didn’t. I have to pay our cell phone bill. Adding another member to your family is pricey enough to make a $5.99 toy seem like a huge extravagance.

Other things, lately, seem that way – and not because of our cell phone bill (which is definitely a HUGE extravagance that I never would have foreseen – but here we are). Mainly because, you know, we don’t so much have jobs and are trying very very hard to make our money L-A-S-T so Mikey can get as much school work done as possible – while also keeping Hazel out of daycare – before one of us has to find gainful employment besides Etsy and babysitting and such. Not paying any rent is very helpful with this endeavor. And also because I have simultaneously been thinking about two things a lot lately. Not so much worrying about them, just thinking. Thinking about how for the next X number of years we will be – at once – paying off debt from our own four university degrees and trying desperately to save enough for our kids’ future degrees. Especially any sons that we may have, because if we read them The Butter Battle Book enough times they might not be eligible for any kind of government financial aid, if you know what I mean.

So there’s also that.

I guess the big questions are: can I make it basically the rest of my life without buying bubble bath, Coke and flavored coffee (still indulging in those two), contact lenses, razor blades and everything else that I truly do not need?

Could the two liter in our pantry be the last one I ever buy? Of course. I would be without my #1 on a very short list of simple, instant pleasures – it would be much more delicious as a treat on a road trip or from some friend’s fridge, as I know from many previous Coke-fasts. Coffee? Yes – I’ve only been drinking that stuff every morning since the first snow-in. I might not want it on warm mornings anyway. I have not bought bubble bath since I was pregnant. I am out of contacts and do not see myself (har har) spending money on them anytime soon because I have perfectly functional glasses. I’m on my last razor blade and hate buying them so much that I might just stop shaving my legs.

I think by the time Hazel is old enough to start asking for some Coke when I pour a glass for myself (SOON), we’ll stop keeping it in the house, so that will be easy. I guess get what I can now, sneaking hits of it here and there, every time I get in the car it seems, a nice big dose at the end of the day, kind of like Mikey’s Other Woman.

Do I stop shaving my legs, though? It gets so itchy.

…but I won’t complain, because it’s just allergies. I will welcome this marshmallow-head feeling because I know it is a result of springtime, digging around in the gardens trying to clear them of winter debris.

Of walking down the road with my dog squatting to poo in the strip of grass on the right and my toddler squatting to mimic her in the strip of grass on the left.

As much as Hazel is 100% cautious with people, she is 100% reckless with her tiny little body. She runs down hills when she could barely walk them a few days ago. She makes dives for the end of the porch or the steps, knowing someone is behind her ready to grab her by the armpits. She falls down the same way ten times in a row before she tries something else. She is not afraid of anything when we are outside this house and it’s scaring the hell heck out of me.

Mikey found some website where you enter your URL and it gives you a percentage of your blog pages that contain a curse word. Mine is 35% or something like that, way higher than his. Which is weird.

…and will hopefully return to your regularly scheduled programming soon. Two sleepless days. Two incessant-nails-on-chalkboard-whining-days. This is pretty much how she feels about me right now:

Mikey: “Hazel, where’s your Mama?”
Hazel: “Moo.”

Attachment parenting: the most time consuming, exhausting, rewarding thing Mikey and I have ever done. As happy as I am that we have chosen this parenting “philosophy” and as natural as it feels, I’ve wondered approximately fourteen million times if Hazel is EVER going to stop sleeping in our bed. Is she EVER going to stop nursing? Is she ever going to be the independent little girl who decides things for herself – the very thing that attachment parenters of years past always swear is the result of a well-attached baby? It seems so contrary – a toddler who has been in a stroller twice in her life and has spent the rest of the time riding around on mom or dad, who has never spent a whole night sleeping by herself, who has nursed whenever and wherever she wants from her first moments of life, who has never been left to “cry it out”… how is she ever going to be independent? We aren’t sure, but it has always felt right to us so we keep doing it. We see it working for our like-minded friends. So far, we’ve been rewarded with an extraordinarily happy little girl.

All of a sudden, it’s happening. Two weeks ago I was at the end of my rope with Hazel’s newfound love of all-night nursing marathons. Seriously, just call me Jersey – all I was good for was milk. I felt like crap and none of us were getting enough sleep. I read in a book that sometimes the problem (for a baby who is just pacifying and not nursing for nourishment) is that the mom keeps offering – of course this has occurred to me, but I didn’t know how to NOT offer. So, I just didn’t. I wasn’t trying to wean her, necessarily, because I want her to have some say in it, but seriously – we just needed to sleep. So that night when she rustled around at midnight, spit out her binky and started rooting around, I just… popped her binky back in her mouth. She went back to sleep and didn’t try to nurse again until the sun was up, when I happily obliged and she got some breakfast. Aside from last night, which was horrible for unknown reasons (I haven’t gotten a good look in her mouth yet, but I suspect a 4th molar), she has not nursed between when she goes down for the night and about 8 a.m. for two weeks. I never fathomed this would be so easy. On a day when she doesn’t fall on her face or get overstimulated to the max and doesn’t need to nurse for comfort, she nurses three times. First thing in the morning, before nap, and before bed. That nighttime refusal when she wasn’t even awake was all she needed to realize that she can put herself back to sleep. We still have a long way to go until she can soothe herself back to sleep any time she wakes up in the night, but I’d much rather lay beside her working on a new high score on LineUp on my iphone while she figures out how to fall asleep than have her nurse me to death. Most nights when I put her down for the night, she nurses till she’s done and then rolls away from me and goes to sleep – will wonders never cease? I never thought I’d be so amazed at the sight of my child laying with her back to me, going to sleep. As much as this is all a relief in some ways (and I feel MUCH better physically, and we are all getting better sleep), I am a little sad that our nursing dyad is obviously in the beginning stages of weaning.

At this point, for most of her life, she has been pretty clingy around most other people except very immediate family and friends. She is friendly and flirty, but must have us nearby or she goes into meltdown mode, especially if she is overwhelmed by lots of other little kids (eg, Turner House). She’ll warm up to any situation eventually, but is very, very cautious. Last night we were out with Angie and Luca having dinner, and after she was done she Wanted Down Right Now Please and Thank You. I plopped her onto the floor and she took off. She just walked away from me, with not a glance back. For twenty minutes while we waited for Mikey’s takeout order to be finished, she ran laps around Black Blear, chatting and shaking her head and gesturing and flirting with total strangers, peeking very closely at the little kids in every single high chair, and never once… not once did she look to see if I was trailing along behind her. I don’t know if she trusted that I was, or if she just didn’t care. Either way, it was like a switch was flipped in our little peanut’s brain. We’re going to a friend’s birthday party tonight and I’m eager to see if this confidence in a crowded room repeats itself.

It is such a huge relief to place total trust in such a small person and then see her do things all by herself when she is good and ready. I don’t want to force her into anything she isn’t ready for and I don’t want her to have to learn things or be comfortable by a standard of “when we think she should.” I think now I might be able to stop asking “is __________ ever going to happen??”

Hazel loves her Valentine’s Day gift! She said, “oooohhhhhhh!!” enough times to melt my heart into a puddle on the floor. She has now moved on to tearing up the giftwrap into tiny bits, but the bean bags were super-fun for about ten minutes. I’m really happy with how they turned out, although depending on how much use they get I may find that I wish I’d stitched them differently. I stitched them wrong sides together, turned and topstitched for more sturdiness, and then closed the opening with a really tight zigzag. As I was doing that I was wishing that I’d just done that for the topstitching instead of a straight stitch. Oh well – they will last awhile, anyway, and I can always repair them if needed.

The past few days it has dawned on us that, all of a sudden, we have a toddler on our hands. So far she doesn’t appear to be possessed by demons, but she’s definitely fiercely opinionated and will go into a rage over a small thing if she’s tired. Last night she spied a stack of six rainbow colored cups on a shelf and Wanted Them Right Then Please And Thank You. I gave them to her and she promptly turned the stack upside down and five of the six scattered across the floor, leaving the one she was holding in her hand. She SCREAMED. We suppressed giggles and Mikey helped her nest them back together. She promptly turned the stack the wrong way and they all scattered again. More screaming. I AM PISSED OFF, MAMA. HELP ME NOW. I helped her gather them up from the various corners into which they had rolled, and she sat on the floor, diligently stacking and unstacking them and Figuring It All Out. Once she was satisfied that she could keep them together, she picked up the pile and wandered towards the livingroom to show her Papa her accomplishment. Halfway there… she tipped the stack and they scattered. Her mouth flew open (but nothing came out), huge tears poured from her eyes, her arms stiffened at her sides (one still clutching a pink cup in a tiny white-knuckled-hand) and shook with rage, and she went beet red in a matter of about four seconds. And then out it came – a devilish scream that proclaimed to all of Snake Hill (and probably the Cheat River Valley, too): I CANNOT KEEP MY F%$#@!G CUPS TOGETHER!!!

It’s okay, baby girl. Grownups usually can’t keep our f%$#@!g cups together long enough to make it from point A to point B, either.

After unwrapping her new book she screamed because she couldn’t get the paper back ON the book… but the bomb was quickly diffused (because she was not tired or cranky) by handing her her sack of bean bags.

I suppose this is only the beginning.

Listening: Dave Rawlings Machine (happy V-day, Michael John!)
(I am) Reading: Steady Days (happy V-day, me!)
(Hazel is) Reading: The Family Book
Working on: blue & gold blanket; Etsy mailers

This week’s organization resolution is making me giddy. Filling up bags of stuff to take out of your home and never bring back is one kind of purging-thrill, but majorly condensing stuff that you ARE keeping around forever is a much more satisfying task, but harder to do. We know lots of people who, for space-saving reasons mostly, get rid of all of their CD jewel cases and keep the liner notes and cds in binders or wallets (the current issue of DIY magazine has a really cool photo-framing idea using empty jewel cases). This is a great idea if you are That Kind of Person – we aren’t. The album art is a huge part of the deal to us and we just can’t get rid of all of it.

BUT.

We don’t care about DVD packaging. We own somewhere around 150 movies and documentaries (as it turns out, eep) and it never occured to us to store them in a more condensed way. We’ve only ever really gotten rid of DVDs when we got married and condensed our collections, and I think we’ve put a few on swaptree. For the most part, though, all of the movies/etc. that we own are in our possession because we watch them over and over and over (we don’t have cable – we do Netflix, so all we do is watch stuff on DVD from there or our collection or stream it).

And… I HATE having shelves and shelves of DVDs – they are ugly, they take up lots of space, and I just hate them. Did I say that? I hate them. I’d never entertained the idea of getting rid of the packaging because I think CD wallets and binders are even worse. And let’s face it – I’ve got more pressing organizational needs than DVDs (…you should see my fabric.) We’ve built up quite the collection over the years because we usually buy them used for a few dollars or in the $3.00 bins at BigLots (does anyone else love Spellbound like I do? Capote? Maria Full of Grace? The Squid and the Whale? – all in the $3 bins at BigLots)… so movie-buying is like a treasure hunt.

Anyway – I had a revelation the other day that hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s definitely not ingenious, but I’ve just never thought of it before because, well, you know – fabric, all that. I bought a set of boxes like these and some packs of single protective CD sleeves, and will make some alphabet tab dividers to fit. As soon as we got home from picking up these things we attacked our DVD collection with gusto. A few things got to stay in their packaging: the few TV series that we feel the need to own and watch and rewatch and rewatch, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, and some music stuff. The rest got filed into the boxes and then gutted and sorted into bags for recycling.

So, so, SO satisfying for my OCD and aesthetic brain. *sigh*

Was it good for you?

In other news… we keep running into people that we know, or used to know. It took awhile for this to happen. I was beginning to feel so weird about living here because we’d go run a whole afternoon full of errands and not recognize a soul. Now it happens all the time and all is right with the universe.

Today’s parenting freakout is about whether or not to turn Hazel’s carseat. I knew this day would come but every time I tried to think about it my brain would scream no, not yet, for the love of god just STOP. She has a Graco Safeseat and since she’s such a peanut it will fit her for quite awhile longer, but we were about to buy a new seat so she could face forward. And then I started reading, and now I think we should keep her rear-facing for as long as we can, but I still think we should buy a new seat so she’s not so reclined and so she’s sitting up a bit higher and can look around more. I hate trying to decide these very hard things. Even if I’ve committed to rear-facing in my mind and Mikey is on board… WHAT THE HELL SEAT DO WE BUY??? This isn’t the kind of things you can just… go buy. Or I can’t. Right now I am thinking the Britax Marathon, but I just don’t know. Thankfully she DOES still fit in her infant seat and I’m quite sure she’ll outgrow it in length before weight, so we don’t have to decide right now, but I do think her car trips would be more fun if she was in a “big kid” seat. I have to eternally protect AND entertain / comfort this precious little gal.

Her imagination is developing so quickly all of a sudden – it’s amazing. Watching her learn to smile and laugh and sit up and play and crawl scoot and walk (with assistance of course) were all amazing, but watching her learn to pretend… well, I simply can’t handle it. I need more of these creatures in my life.

Listening: Neil Young
(I am) Reading: I informed Mikey that tonight I WILL take a bath and read an actual BOOK for awhile – probably The Happiest Toddler on the Block – I need to get through it so I can move on to my fun reading
(Hazel is) Reading: Big Red Barn
Working on: blue & gold blanket; fat quarters for a fabric exchange; Hazel’s valentine
Thanks to: Delightful Divas for the blog feature!