Newish
Hello, 2010! It's nice to meet you. I only wish I had dressed up a little more for the occasion. Enchantée nonetheless.
So! It's a new year, a new decade, a new opportunity for me to catch up on crap that should have been done last night, last week, last month. Here goes.
--It's always nice to come back from vacation to a clean house, but how is it that no matter how sparkling clean it is when we leave, the second we open the front door we smash nose-first into a wall of odeur de soiled kitty litter? It makes me wonder if perhaps our house always smells like that but it just takes a week's absence for us to notice. Mon dieu.
--What does stay fresher longer while we're away, however, is the food in the fridge. The veggies that usually go slack and slimy after a week when we're opening and closing the fridge all the time seem to thrive when there's no one here to eat them. When we came home last Tuesday, the green beans and red peppers were as bright and perky as the day we brought them home from the store. Too bad all I've wanted to eat for the past two weeks is peanut brittle and peppermint ice cream. Good thing I resolved to gain weight and fully commit myself to inactivity this year!
--When I was growing up, I was a fan of soft and cuddly toys--Pound Puppies, stuffed Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids by the six-pack. The hardest toys I owned were My Little Ponies (Ponys?), and although they were made of plastic, it wasn't the kind of plastic that would STAB me if I accidentally sat on it. Hey, did I mention that Wombat got some hard plastic lions for Christmas? HE DID.
--And speaking of corporal afflictions, Salt Lake is DRY in the winter, yo. The whole time we were there, my eyes were scratchy, my lips red-rimmed and blistery, and Wombat's cheeks chapped until the skin broke and he looked like a prize fighter. Due to infrequent showering/lotioning since we've been back in rainy California, my skin is still suffering, and I fear there may be actual scales forming on my flank. Sadly, I don't think this will make me amphibious (like a salamander, or a luxury RV) but will only render me misérable and turn my ten-year supply of Aquaphor into a mere week's worth.
--Speaking of...while I was away (WITHOUT INTERNET OR TELEVISION FOR SIX DAYS), another big, exciting contest ended on my Review blog, and guess who won? Susie! Let's all be happy for her, shall we? (Unless I don't hear from her by this evening, in which case I have to pick another winner. Could it be you?)
--Alas, we never did carve our Christmas pumpkins as planned, so if you're a stalker with a sharp eye, you'll know our house by the gourds standing sentinel on our front porch as well as the Christmas lights that we left up from last December and then never turned on once this year. Turns out our family tradition is not carving Christmas pumpkins or illuminating the neighborhood with a single string of energy efficient LEDs but making grand plans and then half-assing our way to a participation trophy. See also homemade Christmas stockings (still a pile a of fabric) and holiday cards (still need to get stamps on the ones to Canada and Australia; damn you, blog friends and your farawayness!).
--A few weeks ago I decided it was time to clean all the itty bitty baby stuff out of the cabinet formerly known as the party cabinet, so into a storage bag went all the bottles and nipples and various other newborn feeding apparatuses (apparati?) that the kid never really figured out. Flash forward to last week, when I realized that he can have cow's milk now that he's one, and praise the goddess of saggy boobies, I filled up a bottle (he did NOT want a sippy cup before bed) and boy oh boy did the kid go to town on Dr. Brown. Problems are threefold: (1) Do I go out and buy a bunch of non-newborn-calibrated nipples to encourage this development or do I had him a sippy cup full of milk and tell him to suck THAT? (2) It turns out that a baby drinking out of a bottle is freakin' adorable, and I'm having fantasies of dressing him in a white cashmere layette, shaving off all his hair, and swaddling him old-skool, for he is my pweshus wittle babykins. And (3) Neither Simon nor I has any idea what bottle feeding is all about. How much do we give him? How many times a day? Do we need a fancy-schmancy bottle warmer or can we let the kid do it himself over an open flame? We have a toddler and we're amateurs!
--We were invited to four celebrations for New Year's Eve (five if you count the barely legal chicks that tried to pick up Simon in the grocery store that night), and we didn't choose to attend the one at the dance club in San Francisco or the one with the toddlers in San Leandro or the one across the street or the one next door. Instead, we decided at the last minute to go to a soup party. Or perhaps I should say Soup Party, because clearly initial caps are in order here. I mean, hello? A Soup Party? (DING DONG! SOUP!) How is that not a completely ridiculous way to ring in the new year (my geriatric readers excepted)? Also, pretty fun, as it turns out, despite the fact that the one bowl of soup I was able to consume was cold by the time I got to the fourth slurp because, say, have you ever pondered the logistics of supping on soup while holding a one-year-old on your lap (because if I put him on the floor the giant dog would eat him)? Between trying to keep the bowl far enough away that Wombat couldn't pull it onto the antique rug and trying to finesse a spoonful into my own mouth without dripping onto the antique rug, it was quite the feat. Grab a celebrity, pour him into a bedazzled spandex unitard, and make him eat soup with a toddler on his lap. Ta da! Circus of the Stars!
--Finally, a Christmas video slideshow thingy! And in record time, considering I'm still working on the one for Summer 2009 and Linus's second birthday, in August. Please enjoy. We did.
Christmas 2009 from LeahK on Vimeo.
*100 gold stars if you guessed I'm currently editing a book that includes beaucoup de French vocabulary. Good eye, you!
I love the part where he topples over in the doorway. Clearly, he is a California baby.
My baby is over a year and I still get squishy inside when he finds a lone bottle and tries to suck on it. Of course, I never even gave him a bottle until he was almost a year old. I'm sure some women might say to stick with the sippy cup but I'd say do whatever is easier. Plus, sippy cups LEAK, all over, if you don't find the magical kind that doesn't and I have no idea what kind that is.
These don't leak: http://www.amazon.com/Gerber-Color-Change-Sippy-Cups/dp/B000SXSMX6
Try a sippy cup with a straw - my daughter was bottle-fed but never held her own bottle, so she didn't get the whole concept of tipping the sippy cup and her head back to get to the liquid inside. But she took to the straw-type right away. Supposed to be best for teeth anyhow.
Here's my attempt to help with the eau de kitty litter - I don't know what type you use - traditional, the natural stuff made out of pine cones or whatever, etc, but I sing the sweet praises of the silica crystals to everyone I know. No particular brand in mind but for some reason, the larger the crystals you can find the better. The best part is that the poo turns into little fossils and the pee basically just... vanishes.
Happy New Year!
I had a big stuffed lion when I was a kid, too! Loved the mix of photos and videos, well done. :)
Nice slideshow! What happy holidays were had! I love when Wombat topples over. Dahlia was hysterical when I put her in her new boots this year. hee hee!
my kids all had bottles while i was at work from 5 months on, so at a year we swtiched to milk in bottles for a bit (to get them used to cold, COLD milk first) and then did a cold (ha) turkey switch to sippies. im pretty mean and ditch the bottles by 13 months. but dont ask me about pacifiers.
straw ones are way better for teeth and speech development, but i went with "regular" ones first and now aaron (16 mos) will throw a straw one across the room. silly me.
amount of milk per day- we would do water with meals and during the day sippies with milk (as well as first thing waking up), as long as the amount of milk theyre drinking doesnt make them too full to eat food, he'll regulate himself. you can google it as well.
My daughter is the same age as your son, and I think the trick is to get a multitude of different sippy cups and expiriment - see which ones he likes best. Try about 6 ounces every four hours during the day - for a total of about 24 ounces a day.
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Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe. - Josh Billings