So we took these videos a week or so ago and I just haven’t had time (which is a lie, really – I could have made time, but I didn’t) to post them.

As it frequently turns out when we mention an exciting new milestone to Amelia’s teachers at school, she’s been doing this for a while with them. I don’t get upset – I want us to have frank and open communication about Amelia’s development – but sometimes I see the point of the parents who tell their daycare providers that they don’t want to know if their child took her first step or spoke her first word that day while they were writing email about office supplies. But then again, if it takes a village… we’ve got one, so I guess I shouldn’t hang on to my antiquated expectations.

Anyhow, here is Amelia walking with me and with Tom. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to tell which is which.

Is it wrong to be jealous?  I was looking through Facebook today and one of my friends posted something about her parents going on vacation for a couple of weeks.  The next sentence was asking about who wanted to do playdates or other activities.  The jest was since her family was away she’d be needing some help keeping the little one entertained. My jealousy comes from not having that luxury at all.  Another couple will have a grandmother living in the city soon too so they’ll have that delicious escape available almost any time.  The other side is having that resource of knowledge of raising kids.  Just someone to tell us we aren’t screwing up or that Amelia isn’t dying when she has a fever of 104.  Or someone that’s been there to tell us that we are doing a good job. We don’t and it makes me sad at times.

See my Mom passed away in 1993.  It happened quite suddenly on a Sunday morning while she was on the phone with a friend.  Those of you who knew her knew that she loved kids.  All kinds of kids.  From little babies to toddlers to even teenagers.  Granted my brother and I weren’t model kids as teenagers, me especially.  But she loved us with all her heart and loved to provide anything she could for us. She was a strong and smart woman too.  She left her parents house on her own long before that was a normal thing to do.  She made her own living and didn’t really have any interest in marrying for security from what I can gather.  She married my dad cause she loved him and he was a good man.  Not cause she needed a man to be happy.  They got married when she was 34 and I arrived about a year later.  In 1968 this was somewhat of a big deal, having a kid at 35 and another at 37.

When Siri was born she was the first girl in our immediate family on the Hinze side.  Before that it was 8 boy cousins.  Sure there is extended family with 2nd and 3rd cousins.  But this was the first niece she had.  I was in high school, Otis wasn’t far behind me.  Most of the family was done having kids really.  Heath was the youngest cousin up to that point and he was in junior high.  At 52 years old my Mom’s grandmother instincts kicked in when Siri was born.  And apparently it was contagious ’cause Dad got bit too.

They would have Siri over for the weekend, take her to the zoo, Mom would make her doll clothes and tea sets.  Dad taught her how to paint.  Thing was you could see on my Mom’s face the joy she got out of doting on a little girl.  Both Otis and I knew she would go nuts when we had kids.  I had decided when I was about 20 that I was definitely going to have kids before I reached 35.  Fate laughed at that one and I bet is still laughing.

So our daughters, mine and Otis’, won’t know about her except for stories.  How she would spend a good part of November baking for the entire holiday season.  That you would never go to her house and not find some cookies or sweets of some sort.  Amelia won’t get to sleep under one of the beautiful quilts she made just for her.  Mom won’t be making a tea set, doll clothes or little girl clothes for her.  Amelia won’t have my Mom to teach her how to bake, not that Andrea and I can’t teach her that.

But what gets me on the day to day stuff is I can’t call Mom up and ask her why? how? and what am I supposed to do?  Andrea and I can’t just let Amelia spend a weekend with her grandparents.  Don’t get me wrong.  Andrea’s family is great and they all love Amelia to pieces.  Her family is an added extra special bonus to being married to her.  George and Mary are awesome grandparents and will be a big part of Amelia’s life.  But the 3000 or so miles makes it a little difficult to have a sleep over.  And my Dad will love and spoil her just like he’s done with my niece.

I’m just jealous we don’t have that cushion of family near by to help and support and reassure.  And I guess I’m here to remind all of you that do, be thankful.  Having your family close and available as your little one grows is a blessing beyond measure.

Amelia, you are nine months old today!

Auntie Aimee has this great thing she does on her blog in which she wrote a letter to H on each of his month-birthdays, and I really wanted to do that but haven’t done so until now. Why not? Well, I’ve been pretty busy and stuff, but really I have no good excuse. Maybe I needed 9 months to gestate as a mother like you got to gestate as a kid.

You are growing and learning so much these days! You roll and pull yourself up, and you love to stand up and hold onto things as you creep along a surface. Just the other day you walked across the room with Daddy holding your hands, and you loved it! It’s wonderful to see your joy in your physical achievements – it obviously makes you very happy to learn new ways to move. Very soon, I think you’ll be crawling – but no rush, I’m a little worried about what happens after that.

You are really finding your voice, too – not like that’s ever been a problem for you! But you know a number of different phonemes now – all the vowels, and so many consonants: B, M, D, TH, N, P, Y, and the ever popular glottal stop. One of our favorite things you say these days is “Oh!” and we love saying it back to you. I love all your new sounds and expressions… and I’m trying to be better about using sign language together. I think you might soon understand “milk” and also possibly “more” and “all done.” It will be great when we can communicate better, because when you get fussy, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what you need from us.

You have always enjoyed being sung to, and we have our bath-time routine of “How Much Is That Baby In The Mirror,” “Bath-Time Baby, You’re The One,” and “Baby Taco.” Of late, I’ve also enjoyed singing you barbershop quartet tunes like “Lida Rose” and “Sincere.” We listen to Texas music when we spend time in the kitchen lately… I don’t know if Slaid Cleaves is appropriate listening for you, but you don’t seem to mind it.

It’s still too hot this summer to take you outside much, but we try to take you on walks very early in the morning on the weekends. You spend time outside every day at school, and the teachers say that it’s the one thing guaranteed to make you happy – although you’re pretty happy at school these days, too. All in all, you’re a pretty happy baby – you fuss sometimes, but we’re almost always able to make you smile with a funny noise (Daddy) or by throwing you up in the air (Mommy).

You’re eating more and more solid foods these days – we only started giving you solids two months ago – and you really enjoy yogurt, bananas, applesauce, avocado, carrots and butternut squash. Rice cereal and oatmeal are also big hits. This weekend I made you some plums and peaches blended with banana, as well as green peas and green beans. I hope you like them, too! One thing I love about feeding you solid food is when I bring the spoon toward your mouth and you just open it like a baby bird. (Have I mentioned that playing with a spoon is like, your FAVORITE? We let you hold one while you eat from another.) You are the rare baby who loves to eat solids and breast-feed. You LOVE to nurse, and I love it right back – it’s our special time to connect and snuggle, and I doubt either one of us will be ready to wean anytime soon.

You are absolutely fearless! You love being thrown in the air, twirled around, hung upside down, and thrown over a shoulder. Daddy invented a game where he tosses you onto a pillow from about 2 feet up, and you LOVE it, giggling the whole time. You lean forward and backward when we’re holding you and you want to get a better look at something (like water filling a glass or whatever I’m frying – that Indian squash dish with all the mustard seeds FASCINATED you) and you like being on our shoulders, too. You are SO curious about the world, it makes me excited for you.

We read books at bedtime, and your favorite for Daddy to read is “Bear Snores On” because he does lots of voices and a neat snoring noise for the bear. Mommy reads you “Guess How Much I Love You,” but I have to be quick because recently you learned to turn pages yourself (rather than just shutting the book like you used to try to do) and you don’t have a lot of patience for ALL of the words on the page. “Goodnight Moon” is always the last book before bedtime, no matter who is reading to you.

Have I mentioned how much you love water, my little Scorpio baby? You recently learned to splash in the bathtub, which just cracks me up every dang time, and you love Friday Splash Day at school more than anything! Anytime we get you into a bath or a pool, you are transfixed – and you love watching the water go down the drain at the end of a bath and trying to catch it.

Your hairstyle is still very Grandpa Barney – short on the edges and even shorter on top – but as he says, “they tell me Amelia’s adorable and then they tell me she looks just like me!” And you are really adorable – I don’t think I’m being partial here; everyone just exclaims at how gorgeous you are. Plus, you’re super-photogenic, which is a plus, considering that so many of your family only gets to see you growing up in pictures! Don’t worry, we’ll get to visit them before you turn 10 months.

It would be LOVELY if you could start sleeping better at night. Perhaps we could both work on that?

Anyhow, it is a constant blessing to be with you every day. You are a miracle – our miracle – and your dad and I love you more than we ever knew possible. Every time you smile at us, or giggle, or sigh, we are floored with gratitude for having you in our lives. Thanks for picking us out of the line up! We love you.

Amelia is not what I understand to be an “easy baby.” I don’t know what it would be like to parent such an animal, but here at Chez Wigglet, Amelia is frequently Hard To Please. Granted, she’s in nowhere NEAR the bad mood she was in during The Colic Months, but she still has high standards and still gets really fussy for no damn good reason. Plus, she’s… outspoken.

Of course, no one sees this but Tom, me, and her teachers. In “public,” Amelia is 99% coos, sighs, giggles and calm. Drives us both slightly up the fucking wall, I can tell you – though I would be mortified if she were as high maintenance out in the world as she is at home.

I will fess up to the possibility that Tom and I are huge sissies, unable to stomach even 5 minutes of a crying baby after all those months of inconsolable sobbing. So maybe the monkeys are flying the plane at our house, it’s fully possible, I admit it. We don’t know how else to parent her and keep our sanity, so we mostly just try to keep her happy without killing ourselves. As a colleague tells me with a weary intensity: “You do what you have to, to survive.”

Grim, huh? Yeah, I have a LOT more ego than I thought I did before I handed my life over to the care and feeding of the little tyrant.

All of which is completely off topic – what I am really posting about is how Amelia gives Tom such a hard time so many afternoons. When she gets fussy and Tom is caring for her, she has this weird thing about him having to hold her and walk around with her. He can’t put her down, or sit down while he is holding her, without her starting to fuss. Hours of this.

And then I get home, and it’s all smiles and squeals – which is cool cuz I got the jooce, we all know how that works – except then after Amelia gets her snack, she will sit on my lap and be rocked, or stand by her “pond” and play while I walk away or get a bite to eat or whatever. Which she practically NEVER lets Tom do. And I know from experience, it rankles after a while.

She’s starting to get a sense of object permanence, meaning she now will get some separation anxiety when one of us leaves, or she’ll cry when a toy is taken away from her, but the “dance, Daddy, dance” routine is older than that, and it’s disappointing that she’s still doing it. Especially considering the sacrifices we make to have her with Tom in the afternoons. Is she anxious when it’s just her and him? why would she be, after all this time? Why is she so much more relaxed with me, when I spend less time with her?

Any thoughts? If you could solve this for us, it would totally make our week.

Another supercute thing that I hear about from Amelia’s teacher(s) is how much she and a little boy in her class, L, enjoy each other’s company.  They regularly have “lunch dates” now, in which they both sit at the baby-sized table and eat, babbling to each other all the while.  Lately they’ve gotten even fonder of each other, passing toys back and forth across the ballet bar that they like to stand at.

Amelia likes to hang upside-down after nursing, and L really enjoys crawling over to touch her face when she’s upside down, which Amelia finds hilarious.  L, interestingly, hates being upside-down, grabbing at the adult’s shirt who tries to suspend him in such a precarious position.

Amelia has started moving her fingers up and down over her mouth while making noise, which comes out like “B-B-B-B-B-B-B,” (someday I swear I will get it on video) and L thinks that is just FASCINATING.  He loves watching her do this, and can’t seem to figure it out himself, even though he is older by a couple of months and crawling and signing and things.  Today, I’m told, he stuck his finger in Amelia’s mouth while trying to decipher the technique.  Not to be outdone, she stuck her finger in his mouth, too!

They both get irritated with the 5-month-old baby, M, who is crying a lot lately (my theory is growth spurt).  And evidently, Amelia and L fight sometimes too.  One teacher told me she watched them playing happily with different toys one day, sitting next to each other, when Amelia got mad that she couldn’t reach L’s toy (which was too high up on the wall for her) and started to cry.  L got mad about Amelia crying and started crying too, and they both scooted to where they were back to back, presumably crying because the other was “being mean.”

It’s so interesting to see how interactions of little, little people bears so much resemblance to the interactions of large people.

Amelia has been pulling up for weeks now, and creeping for a good week or so, and is still very under-interested in crawling.  At school, I am told that she rolls where she wants to go, flipping from her belly to her back, over and over, until she gets where she wants to go.  Sometimes she does this while protesting and sometimes she does it silently and her teachers look up a few moments later and she’s laying 5 feet from where they left her.

This does not happen at home, needless to say.  I imagine we’re way too responsive to let her complain that long; moreover, her play area at home is much smaller – not so many things on the other side of the room to entice a baby.

What she does a LOT at home is creep.  Though she decided not to perform when I broke out the camera (she TOTALLY knows what a camera is, as do most first-borns I imagine), she frequently starts at the far side of “the pond” (exersaucer) and creeps all the way to the entertainment center and then all the way along the entertainment center until she hits the wall.  The wall has lots of interesting wires and things that babies like to grab for…

This video also has her making some of the awesome sounds she’s practicing lately: the OH! with the glottal stop at the beginning, and the tththththtp sound too.  She learned O and N in the same week, but not in any connection to each other.  Still, I wondered if it were a sign of Words To Come.

While I fall down on the job on unimportant parenting tasks like setting regular meal or nap times, I have already started a mini-family tradition with Amelia: Foodie Church! On Saturday mornings we sleep as late as Amelia wishes (sometimes as late as SEVEN-THIRTY) and then we try our best to get to the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market by 9 am.

We go armed with a list, of course, as ours is a frugal household that can’t afford to spend $5 for four fresh, local figs just because they’re fresh and local. So mostly we buy staples, but even at the market we have our routine: first we make a recon round, checking on what’s there and what’s new, and who has the prettiest produce for the lowest prices. This market is rich in organic, pastured meats, but our household does not dine on $35 chickens - so we keep to the green grocers, even eschewing the fresh mushroom stall and the goat milk & cheese stalls. This week we bought peppers, onions, roma tomatoes, a huge canteloupe, and an eggplant. Usually I treat myself to a small bag of kettle corn. When Amelia gets old enough, I might even share.

After our trip to the market, we go to the grocery store for the rest of our staples. Even though Amelia is big enough to sit in the cart these days, I keep her in the Ergo baby carrier when we shop because that way I can maneuver in the crowded store without worrying about the cart. More importantly, it allows me to keep a running conversation with her about our shopping trip, which might go something like this:

“what’s next on the list… oh, shall we get Daddy some cookies? Do you see the kind he likes, with the chocolate chips? I don’t see them! Oh, there they are – good eye!… don’t let me forget the honey – we have to go back for it because I forgot it once already – oh, those plums look nice, don’t they? Let’s get some… not too hard but not too soft… I think four is enough… what else do we need? We bought onions at the market… we have potatoes at home… what looks good in the fish case?” Every so often a fellow shopper overhears our conversation and glances twice, but I flatter myself that it’s no more irritating than someone talking into a hands-free device as they walk along, effectively talking to a phantom. Plus, it keeps Amelia soothed and quiet.

By the time we get home from our errands, Amelia’s usually overdue for a nap, so I have to rush the groceries in the house, rush the frozen things into the freezer, and let the rest of the bags rusticate on the counter or the kitchen floor while I nurse her down to a nap. If the whole day is free, we’ll spend the afternoon in the kitchen together – her in her exersaucer and me at the counter. To keep her somewhat engaged, I’ll sing along to whatever music suits our (my) fancy that day – this weekend it was barbershop quartet stuff on Pandora. Bless you, interwebs, slave to my every musical whim!

I love Saturdays.

I am in pretty good with Amelia’s teachers at the Montessori school, seeing as I’m there every day to nurse Amelia at lunchtime. I get all sorts of great stories about the cuteness that Amelia perpetrates at school while I’m off marketing my silly old construction company.

Two of the best ones, lately:

All the kids were outside with their teachers: Amelia’s class and the class older than hers. Miss Cortney, who is a younger teacher in Amelia’s class, was hula-hooping to show some of the older kids how it’s done. Well, Amelia thought that hula-hooping was just. utterly. hilarious. She started laughing, slapping her knees with her hands, and laughed so hard, that she leaned back, lost her balance, and fell over backward – still laughing uncontrollably. Even after Miss Cortney stopped with her crazy hula-hooping craziness, Amelia sat and periodically laughed to herself, as if she was remembering a funny joke. “Heh, hula hoops. Heh! Hilarious.”

Just yesterday, Amelia was one of only two kids in the classroom with Miss Cortney (the other morning teacher is on vacation in Columbia). When I finished nursing her, the other little boy was getting his lunch – black beans and avocado – so I put Amelia down in the other seat at the table and left. Miss Cortney told me today that Amelia was squealing and slapping her hands on the table so much, clearly enjoying herself but agitated, that Cortney thought to offer her some avocado as well. (It was avocado that I had brought from home.) So Amelia and L sat at the infant-sized table with their teacher, both eating avocado, and had a long conversation together. First Amelia would babble along, and then L would babble and gesture, and then Amelia would respond. They never spoke over each other, and seemed by all accounts to be discussing something quite entertaining. Needless to say, kids their age rarely hold conversations, so Cortney thought it was pretty remarkable, to say nothing of the adorable.

I’m aware I miss out on things when I leave Amelia at school, but it’s lovely to at least get regaled with the fun happenings rather than not knowing at all what she gets up to.

Wow, OK – so Amelia’s feeling better, though last weekend was AWFUL. She hardly slept because she was feeling so crummy and Tom was out of town and for three nights in a row I didn’t get more than 2 hours of sleep at a time. But then on Sunday night she miraculously felt better and didn’t wake up but twice all night. Sleep has been really good since then – for those of you keeping score (like the critic in my head), Amelia sleeps with us in our bed and nurses off and on at night, whenever she wakes up really. Or whenever she wakes me up, more appropriately – she could be waking up quietly and not letting me know, I suppose. Having her there in bed, close, makes it really easy for me to just quickly nurse her down every time she wakes at night, which allows me to get more sleep, and honestly I don’t have the stomach for the sleepless nights that would be necessary for night weaning. Tom lives in horror of the day I have to travel for business or something, but we’re both so comfortably in denial about it that the status quo is undisturbed, for now.

Which is not the subject of this post, actually. Thought I’d catch you up and then I went off on a tangent.

I’m kind of got the doldrums these days. Work is frantic and dull by turns, and frankly it’s worrying to be in construction right now. It’s particularly worrying when both your incomes are in the building sector. Bah. Amelia and I seem to be in a good pattern, and Tom and I are collaborating well in giving each other some independent time and spending some time together every month, more or less.

And that’s all I’ve got, honestly. Life has kind of boiled down into a minestrone of baby, work, eat, sleep, and sometimes chat with Tom. Going to the farmer’s market on a Saturday is a big fancy outing for me. We don’t have any money to speak of, so we’re having to be very careful with our expenditures – my workplace has cut its hours 10% and Tom still works part time so he can spend afternoons with Amelia – and that’s pretty soul-deadening too. I love my daughter and I love my husband and life seems a little… too tightly focused, lately.

How do other parents of young children deal with this? Or is this kind of what it’s like from now on? (Please say no, please say no…)

OK, wow on many counts. First, that there was a Free To Be You And Me movie. Next, that it’s all on YouTube. And finally, that it included a teenaged Micheal Jackson singing about how “we don’t have to change at all” with Roberta Flack in “When We Grow Up.”