Baby plants become unbearably cute with the addition of “cute ‘spouts, Mama! Baby ‘pants! Yook Mama, gettin’ big!”

There’s almost nothing that is more satisfying than successfully navigating witching hour with an activity so distracting that Miss Hazel Mae hasn’t even noticed that 6:00 has come and gone with not a single ounce of Whine. This particular evening – scraps of felt and wooden beads & buttons, chosen individually and handed to Mama for stringing… 40 minutes straight until she declared it Done…

…which is, of course, perfect.

After more than two years of mothering, this is among my top 5 favorite things: watching her begin to very mindfully, rather than experimentally, make art. The girl is a fan of glitter, big paper, stickers, and the color white.

“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.

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

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:

For Half-Blood Prince, I pre-ordered from Amazon. It was delivered on the first day it was available. However, they had plenty of copies in stores at midnight. Mario ended up with one of those. This is a synopsis of what transpired that night:

So, Mario and my little brother John and I went to the Bellaire Kroger for the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book on July 16. They wanted to buy copies (mine was coming in the mail the next day from Amazon). I had seen advertisements for the Harry Potter release party at Kroger but I didn’t know what to expect.

We walked in to find a small crowd (maybe 25 people) of the mangiest literates I’ve ever seen. There were two women dressed up like witches working the booth. I was thoroughly convinced the larger of the two was a man in witches drag but John and Mario didn’t agree.

As we stood around waiting for the clock to strike twelve I stood back and observed the crowd. The two witches in drag kept trying to get everyone to join in on a group photo to send to JK Rowling and I wanted absolutely no part of that, so I kept hiding in the shampoo aisle which was an excellent vantage point to people-watch.

There was a woman in a bright tourquise knit skirt with leopard print flip-flops. She looked about 40ish and like she had spent most of those forty years sitting in the sun lathered in baby oil and smoking Winstons. She had on a very tight yellow Corona t-shirt which revealed what must of been a boob job in the 80’s that had gone seriously awry. It was chilly in the store so her pink buttons were standing at attention, only one of them was pointed up towards the flourescent lights and the other was pointed towards the National Enquirers on the bottom shelf of the rack she was leaning on.

Corona lady had her roughly 8 year old son with her who had a large plastic skull hanging around his neck and a black cape. There was a 50ish woman waiting in line with a tall pointy witch hat on. Mario kept talking to the that one. I swear he is like a puppy. If you take him anywhere you end up having conversations with random weirdos.

There was a man with a WWF t-shirt on and his daughter, a soccer-mom looking woman with a Dale Jarret shirt and a man who had to weigh nearly four hundred pounds waiting in line for his copy of the book holding a single jar of pickles.

The icing on this group cake was that my high school trig/stats teacher was also in line. She has a beard and always liked to feel the “material” of guy’s shirts in class. I hold her personally responsible for the only F I’ve ever received. Freshmen year WJU statistics.

The clock struck twelve and the group lurched forward snatching up their copies and scurrying to the registers. I did not need the Potter but I had noticed that the new Janet Evanovic was out in paperback so I picked that off the rack and headed to check. Mario somehow made it out uncscathed but when it came time to ring up my brother, the Kroger stock boy, who I’m sure had been called out of the warehouse to help rangle the mad Potter fans couldn’t figure out how to use the register.

He moved us from aisle 8 to aisle 9 and back and forth a few times, trying to get a register to work. The problem was that by doing this he kept creating lines behind us in both aisles. These people didn’t realize what was going on so they were getting really angry at John and I because they thought we kept cutting them in line. People kept yelling out comments about “cutters” and saying ”we were here first!”

I looked around at the crowd, wild with the excitement of a midnight release, itching to crack open their books and I imagined a riot. I envisioned a jar of pickles smashed on the floor, my little brother getting wacked with a leopard print flip-flop, me being thrown to the ground with a wrestling move by bulky He-witches. I realized that if the group noticed that I wasn’t there buying the Potter book that my fantasy brawl might happen. I threw money at my brother so that we could check out together and we bolted for the parking lot where Mario was nearly done with the first chapter.

And, at that point, I really knew how amazing it is that the little British welfare mom got so many people of different walks of life to read.

So, long-story even longer, I will probably pre-order a copy to be mailed to me (just to be safe) and still try to pick one up and the Bellaire Kroger. How could I pass up that excitement?

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.

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.

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

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??”

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

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!