Skipping Town

Oh, bliss. All our mail has been forwarded for the past two months to Connellsville, but finally, finally I’ve perused the new Parenting and am ready for this month’s commentary. Maybe it’s because I’m still just so very tired, but the abundance of you-go-girl-with-your-fab-mama-self tone and the excessive exclamation points annoyed me more than usual this time. Let’s get right down to it. In “Picky-eater Pleasers,” we’re advised on how to handle taking a picky kid out to a holiday party. One piece of advice was to feed the kid before leaving the house and then not freak out if the kid eats only carbs or cookies at the party. But what would she eat, if she’s already eaten a meal? Another meal? Nonsense. But I’ll reserve my commentary for the final tip: “Bring a food ‘present’ to the shindig to share. If your kid is super picky or if he has food allergies, bring a gift of his favorite dish. (Be sure to get him to wrap it up with a bow.) Give it to your host, then mention that your chil...

Since Lucia seems, today, to be much like her usual self, with the exception of some screaming when dressed in her winter coat and some nap-refusing, and, of course, some morning crankiness and spitting out of nicely offered food at a play date—oh. Scratch that. Since we’re heading to Connellsville tonight and my exhausted, weary body and soul sees a glimmer of sleeping-in, baby-free-outings, grandparent-backup days in the very near future, I will interrupt the regularly scheduled programming of fatigued posts to provide a brief cuteness report. A new favorite book is Duck & Goose: A Book of Opposites . One spread shows Duck being happy, while Goose is sad, with a tear on his cheek. Whenever we get to this page and I say in a mournful voice that Goose is sad, Lucia does her cuddle-cuddle-cuddle motion. I am very taken with this: not only does she understand what sad means, she also understands that cuddling Goose is what will make him feel better. I did not prompt her to do this. G...

Little One, As you can see, I am several days late with this month’s letter. This is your fault, though not in an intentional spirit. You’ve followed old habits and acquired a cold after our long flight, and you also seem to be teething—you’ve been gnawing and drooling and screaming and crying and not napping well and not falling asleep well and basically not given me even one millisecond’s rest for one entire week. I am falling over with exhaustion and frustration. Only late this afternoon did the regular Lucia seem to reappear, with dancing and snapping and giggling. Perhaps the worst is over. (And surely it is, since I have to get through just Monday now and then we’re on our way to two weeks of grandparent backup. I am literally counting the minutes.) But, a quick recap of the month nonetheless. Walking, of course—more consistently now, especially yesterday and today, when you’ve often opted to walk instead of crawl to your objective. And more words—besides “bump,” you’re saying “b...

Rolling around on the floor giggling! Feeding her stuffed animals! Dancing to the music of her push toy! Lucia was very calculating in her explosion of cuteness over the past few weeks. Let me ingratiate myself , she thought, before turning into an absolute monster. Upon our arrival in New York, which followed the Worst Flight Ever—well, let me spend a moment on the flight. Five hours of screaming, crying, and writhing, with intermittent bouts of more screaming, crying, and writhing. No nap, though it was naptime. We were the parents about whom people whisper disgustedly, Can’t they control their child? We were trying, believe me. But even with her very own seat, even with an entire grocery store’s worth of snacks, even with an arsenal of toys, Lucia would neither nap, nor snack, nor play. She just wanted to scream. Now, back home, she has turned into a baby Godzilla, descending on the city with roars and stomps, gobbling skyscrapers and sending terrified pedestrians fleeing as she wre...

We’re going home! We actually have return tickets, for Saturday. It has been a truly lovely, fun seven weeks, but we are ready to go, even if it means returning to frigid temperatures. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to survive this, our first real winter in five years. But I have a new winter coat, hat, mittens, and Nanouk of the North fur booties for Lucia, so we’re going in prepared. Things we’ve loved about Mountain View: the Eagle Park playground, the public library, the Mother Goose & More program at the library, walking down Castro Street, the smore’s bars at Le Boulanger, shopping at Trader Joe’s, driving to Target, going to Paper Source, watching Lucia stand at the window to wave goodbye to Andrew’s colleagues catching the shuttle to work (even on days when Andrew’s not among them), playing outside pretty much every day for a little while, exploring all the beautiful fallen fall leaves, buying far too many books at the library book sale, seeing the Clarks, seeing Julie ...

Lucia is walking. Never more than eight or ten steps at a time—and usually fewer—but when she gets it in her head that she wants to practice, she goes for it. She stands up—rising slowly from Downward Dog into a balanced stand—and then toddles forward in a Frankenstein walk, grinning all the while. She’ll walk to me now if I sit on the floor with my arms held out, and she’ll walk with her own arms held out, walking faster when she reaches me and then nearly jumping into a hug. It is too, too cute. But not as cute as her dancing. When the nose of her lion push-toy is pushed, tinny electronic songs play—which, being a baby, Lucia loves. She will push her lion, but when the music stops, she stops too, eases slowly to the front of the lion, pushes the nose, and then walks back to the handle. Instead of pushing it again, though, for several moments she’ll dance to the music—bending her little knees in an attempt at rhythm and snapping the fingers of one hand. Well, she can’t actually snap. ...

Anyone who knows Lucia knows she loves books. Reading books is her number-one favorite activity. Indulge me for a moment as I brag about her amazingly long attention span, her rapt fascination with words and pictures, her absolute absorption in turning pages. This week I watched from the kitchen while she played by herself for twenty minutes—a good portion of which she spent standing at the couch with a pile of books in front of her, selecting one after the other and paging through them. We’ve become regulars at the library across the street, and Lucia charmed a librarian yesterday, who walked past as Lucia was turning pages of a book while sitting by my feet. When we went to the library this morning for the Mother Goose and More song and story time, that same librarian greeted Lucia by saying, “And here’s our little reader!” This mama’s heart swelled with pride. Yes, she is a little reader. She is indeed. Lucia sat or stood with her eyes trained on the librarian throughout the program...

We’ve made our mark on this corporate apartment. Marks on windows, marks on walls, marks on carpet, marks on tables, marks on pretty much every surface that has the potential of coming into contact with babyhands. Though they provided us with a two-bedroom apartment for our unexpectedly lengthy stay here, this apartment is normally set up for a roommate situation. Each bedroom is marked as the “red” room or the “blue” room, and Andrew and I have keys on lanyards corresponding to each color. This is not an apartment where a lot of real-life living goes on. It’s a place where engineers from around the world crash for a month or two while they work on projects here in Mountain View, with roommates cycling in and out. We, however, have lived here. And any living done with a baby around is hard living. The furnishings here are not what you’d call built for the ages, and the kitchen provisions are far from our top-quality things back home. They are, in fact, quite cheap, and when you have a ...

Lucia’s been saying “mama” and “dada” consistently now, with “duck” and “ball” as occasional semi-words. But yesterday she said her official first non-parental word. That word is “bump.” Lucia’s favorite book these days is Fall Colors by Rita Walsh. It is an adorable book about fall leaves and the fun that can be had with them. One page shows children raking leaves and says, “Rake the leaves into a pile, / You’re sure to see lots of smiles. / Spin and tumble, dive and jump, / Then leap off an oak tree stump. / Land in the leaves with a BUMP!” Every time I read this to her, which is going on, oh, five hundred times now, I say “bump” with an excited expression. Yesterday, when I turned to that page and got to “bump,” she turned her little face up to me and said very clearly, “Bump!” Then she kept saying it: “Bump! Bump! Bump!” She said it with a good amount of gusto, putting extra emphasis on the “p.” It is definitely “bump.” She likes saying it so much that when we turned to that page t...