Skipping Town

Despite the fact that her nap schedule has gotten completely erratic and out of control, and despite the fact that I still spend much of my day chasing her around the house with forkfuls of food, Lucia has been doing some extremely cute things lately. I thought I’d share some of them here. This is a post that's probably interesting only to grandparents and aunts, but let's indulge them, shall we? She’s gotten incredibly attached to her blankie. Sometimes she puts it over her shoulders like a cape, or around her neck like a stole. Sometimes, when she crawls, she carries it in her mouth. She’s also very attached to her duck and cat stuffed animals. They sleep with her in her crib, and in the morning or after nap, when I lift her and blankie out of the crib, she points insistently at each one until I pick it up and put it into her waiting arms. When we leave her bedroom now I’m always carrying a Lucia who’s hugging her blankie, duck, and cat. We can’t leave the room without all th...

Drum-roll, please: Lucia took her first steps tonight! She was standing at the coffee table, eating sliced grapes while I read her Bunny’s Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown, one of her favorites. She was being very cute, doing many of the bunny’s noises and movements—stretching, scratching, munching, thumping. When we finished the book, she pushed it toward me; I was to read it again. This time, when I got to one of her favorite pages, I held the book at a bit of a distance and also held out a slice of grape. She turned from the coffee table and took a step over to grab the grape. She did this several more times, walking toward both me and Andrew to get a slice of grape, taking up to three steps each time. We are on our way! She’s been loving the Stride-and-Ride lion I got her last week, walking back and forth with it in the living room; yesterday I took the lion with us to the playground, and she walked all around the swings and down the sidewalk, stopping only to pick up enticing le...

Thankful for blankie, wrapped around the shoulders, and grapes, and a cold afternoon at the playground, and a fun new push-toy. Happy Thanksgiving!

Lucia is weaned. Our last nursing was Friday, November 19. I breastfed her for exactly one year, one month, and four days. Yay for us. It happened quite easily—we had been down to one feeding for a couple of weeks, before her morning nap, and then one day we just didn’t nurse; we just rocked and sang songs while she nuzzled her blankie. I didn’t consciously nurse her for a “last time,” which I think has helped me not be too sad. Weaning happened naturally and painlessly for both of us. Sleeping straight through from 7:30 to 7—no more nursing—our baby is growing up! And now I get to splurge on some fabulous non-nursing bras. It is high time.

So, we’re still in California. Our best-laid plans were derailed on Friday, when our certainty that returning East was the right thing to do soon gave way to an equally firm decision that staying in California for a few more weeks was best. It came down to the idea of the simple solution being the best. Leaving today meant several flights (CA—FL—NYC), a flight back to CA for Andrew, several days of me and Lucia alone, my parents coming up for a weekend, an entire week alone, another cross-country flight for Andrew for the weekend, and possibly yet one more week alone. It just seemed…complex. Staying here involves just doing what we’ve been doing, with a flight back to NYC in mid-December. We can all stay together. Andrew has to be here for now, and so Lucia and I will be here too. Though we’re very sad to be missing Thanksgiving in Jacksonville, truth be told, it feels fine to be staying on. We’re going to buy some more clothes and toys. We’ll join Beth and Nate in Napa for Thanksgivin...

We’ve had a lovely week in Mountain View. Temperatures in the seventies, cloudless blue skies, leaves crunching underfoot—a perfect California fall. Lucia and I have explored a bit further afield in the past couple of days. Yesterday we drove to Los Altos and walked around the cute downtown, full of nice shops and at least three fabulous toy stores. Today we went to the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall in Palo Alto, and browsed around for a bit. And Andrew and I have been sampling some of Castro Street’s restaurant offerings this week: ramen at a Japanese noodle house on Tuesday; burritos on Wednesday; and sushi tonight. All delicious. I took Lucia to another free-trial gym class on Tuesday, at The Little Gym. Like the Gymboree class, Lucia was not amused. She did not want to crawl from the center of a circle to me, on the outside. She did not want to sit either on or underneath the gigantic parachute. She did not want to “walk” on a balance beam. She did not want to sit on a ...

Dear Little One, You’re over a year old now, considered, I believe, a toddler and not a baby. Phooey. You are still a baby, a dear one, a trying one, an adorable one, getting cuter and funnier every day. But as you are not actually yet “toddling,” and since you seem to be demonstrating absolutely no interest in it whatsoever, I will continue to see you as a baby. You are very nearly weaned. We are down to about once a day—sometimes twice, but usually once. You are sleeping consistently through the night, from 7:30 to 7 or 7:30. This is blissful. I credit California; being here in unfamiliar surroundings helped break some of the breastfeeding associations, making weaning easier, and it was surprisingly painless to cut out the middle-of-the-night feeding. A week or so of Daddy coming to you when you cried, giving you your pacifier, and singing to you for a little while, and soon you weren’t bothering to wake up at all. Your cutest new trick is “cuddle cuddle cuddle.” You have several bel...

It’s been an idyllic California weekend, though Lucia has the lovely souvenir of a black eye. There is nothing more awful-looking than a baby with a black eye, and she looks distinctly like she’s been in a bar fight. Other parents of toddlers, however, will surely understand that her bar-fight foe was actually a sudden loss of balance while cruising and an unfortunately placed coffee table. Friday night we drove to Redwood City for dinner at the home of one of Andrew’s co-workers and his wife. Their house was just beautiful, with an amazing backyard that featured a Balinese daybed. Their house was stunningly decorated, full of statuary, textiles, masks, and other paraphernalia from the co-worker’s extensive work-related travels through South America. Needless to say, this couple does not yet have children. Everything was breakable, and stone, and heavy. Nothing was covered in yogurt-fingerprints. Toys were not underfoot. I had to watch Lucia with a hawk’s-eye…and yet I still could not ...

At the playground this week, two little girls—sisters—were waving at Lucia from across the playground, and echoing her little squeals back at her. Then they came over, holding hands, because they wanted to say hi. After some smiling and waving back and forth, the older sister said firmly, “We have to go now. We need to get things for my project. I’m doing a project on rose hip tea.” “Are you making rose hip tea?” I asked. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I need to go buy rose hips.” This seemed like a very California-y project. But I hope we’re able to send Lucia to a school where she can make rose hip tea, too.

Poor sick baby. For the past couple of weeks, Lucia’s had a cold and cough, and yesterday it took a turn for the worse. So this morning found us at an urgent care center, where we saw a pediatrician and got some antibiotics. I hope this will help. There’s nothing sadder than a runny-nosed, coughing baby who’s also teething. Perhaps because she’s not been feeling well, Lucia has decided that eating is just not for her these days. Three times a day, I embark on an Iron Chef-style contest to use whatever’s in the fridge and freezer (not much, in these temporary quarters) to make something she’ll actually a) put in her mouth, b) chew, and c) swallow. (Sometimes we get through one or two of the steps, only to then have her give the Mango Face and spit everything out.) There have been meals where I’ve prepared three or four things—an egg, toast with cheese, various cut-up fruits, pasta—only to have her deign each item unacceptable and toss it to the floor. And I can't just say too bad yo...

Lucia was a little social butterfly last week. Thursday, our friends Julie and baby Allison drove down from Auburn (near Roseville) to spend the afternoon with us. Allison is just five weeks older than Lucia, and Lucia had such a good time playing with her—they actually seemed to play together, rather than just side by side. We spent time at the playground and here at the apartment, and there was lots of giggling and passing toys back and forth and standing at the window, playing with toys on the windowsill. I met Julie in prenatal yoga—and it’s always been fun to see how the girls have grown over this past year-plus. Maybe someday they’ll be transcontinental pen pals. Saturday we spent the day with the Clarks in Napa, happily revisiting wine-country territory we thought we’d left behind. The grapevines are all gold and red right now, and the scenery in wine country is gorgeous—since we missed the inferno of the summer, we can look at the landscape, including the fully brown hills and ...

Three years ago, Andrew and I got married at The Summit; now, three years later, we’re across the country (still), but on the plane from JFK to SFO we fell into conversation with the Aussie couple sitting in front of us who’d spent three weeks in the United States, including a stop in Farmington to see Fallingwater. We told them we’d gotten married at a place called The Summit—and they said that’s where they’d stayed. Small world. And three fast years! It hardly feels like November here, with temperatures in the mid-seventies, sunny blue skies, lush greenery everywhere. Some leaves are changing, though—at the playground, Lucia’s favorite activity is crawling around and picking up all the fallen leaves, examining each one carefully before handing it to me and seeking the next one. Our lovely playground, however, sometimes seems to me to be the site for some psychoanalytical issues I’ve never addressed. I’ve mentioned before the abject fear and loathing I had as a child for other, brashe...

Happy birthday, happy Halloween. For my birthday Friday we went out to a great Indian restaurant; for Halloween tonight we went to a party at Andrew’s boss’s house. The rest of the weekend has been strangely relaxing—gloriously so—with a nice lunch of pho on Saturday afternoon (Lucia had her first taste of Vietnamese food) and the farmer’s market today. We got groceries, ordered pizza, took walks, played, read. It seemed so quiet, so civilized, so normal, so…nice. One week of Mountain View down. And, I hope, infinite more to go! Ha! Things have taken an interesting turn! Instead of feeling like our return to California is a burden and a horror, we are slightly horrified to realize that this time around we…like it. It feels treacherous even to write this, seeing as how the past three years have been more or less a long rant against the Golden State. But the thing is—and I think I made this clear in my summing-up-our-CA-years posts—we did grow to have a certain fondness for certain Calif...