Lauren Takes a Stand

Lauren can now stand for about a minute at a time before collapsing her knees in a sumo-squat. She has a walker we bought through Craigslist.com, and loves tooling through the house with it. Soon, I’m sure, she won’t need it.

She continues to shout “Baby”, most recently when the Suleman octuplets were shown on TV. (But, pictures of dogs are also babies. And the picture of Aunt K on our fridge is also a baby.) And she said her first sentence last week: Kaye has a cartoon called “Wow Wow Wubbzy” on when I pick Lauren up every day, and Lauren can shout “Wow Wow Wubbzy!” It’s on Noggin, a station we don’t get, but the library has a couple of DVDs I can bring home.

Lauren hugs and gives pats on the back. She eats more food than I ever thought possible. She’s mastered the spoon. She flips through books constantly.  She finally lets us wipe her face (it’s cold season. I think she got used to it) and lets me hold her hand (she was never a fan of that). Good kid! Dad’s headed out of town on a business trip, but we have a birthday party this weekend.

Meeting Brayden Samuel

Here’s Lauren pointing at Brayden and saying, “Baby!”

At daycare, Lauren sits with Mason, 4 months, and gently rocks his vibrating chair. She rocks her baby dolls in her old car seat. The girl is pretty maternal (more than I was, anyway), so meeting her new cousin Brayden was amusing. “Baby! Baby! Baby!” she said. We stopped in to visit parents L&J, bringing a sandwich lunch and meeting up with Nick’s cousin S and her husband R. While Liz fed Brayden (he was rooting while I held him, and chomped onto my sleeve), a spirited bipartisan political conversation started. A good time was had by all, in a very mature fashion.

Brayden Samuel. 9 lbs. 2 oz, 21 inches long at birth. L was in labor for 26 hours, then delivered without a C-section. Healthy beautiful boy with reddish brown hair like his mama. His parents are naturals. He is a lucky guy. I’m not a sentimental person, but I get happy just thinking about the good times he’ll have with Lauren, playing outside during visits, and Rockwellian stuff like that.

Valentine’s Day

Lauren, with her Valentine’s Day loot.

“They probably don’t know a Valentine’s Day party from a Friday the 13th party,” joked Kaye on Feb. 12. Wrong-o. Nick showed up with Lauren, always the last parent, and Megan, one of the sweetest 3-year-olds you’ll ever lay eyes on, whispered politely to Kaye, “Can we look in our bags now that Lauren’s here?”

Cards. Goldfish crackers. Animal crackers. I was ill from a stomach bug on Friday afternoon. In a move that sarcastically wins me Parent of the Year, I brought Lauren downstairs to play so I could stretch out on the couch. I gave her two animal crackers from the Baggie and set them up on the coffee table. My eyes snapped open two minutes later when I realized they were dumped all over the carpet, and Lauren was chomping hungrily. Not bad for a chica without teeth at 14 months. (Nick knew a great pediatric dentist to call, since the book says “Worry if they don’t have teeth by 15 months.” The book being, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years”. Our appointment is next month.)

V-day: Nick and I exchanged gifts (we capped the spending limit). I gave him some locally made chocolates. He gave me a gorgeous hot pink running top. We laughed at the paradox; unhealthy versus healthy. Then, off to see Lauren’s new cousin, Brayden Samuel…

Doggie Love

Lauren, with our friends J&J’s dog, Sadie.

Most of you know this already, but Lauren has a profound love for dogs. She does this little high-pitched scream and pets the dog softly like we show her. She doesn’t pull tails. “She must think it’s just a big, moving stuffed animal,” Nick pointed out. I thought this picture did a good job of capturing the joy.

Nothing like a crazy week to make you appreciate normal ones! Lauren’s doing a lot of walking with her walker and tons of creeping. Today at daycare, she played with a toy cell phone; she puts it up to her shoulder and says, “I!” (hi.)

Dining Humor

Eating with a fork: A work in progress.

Tonight, after a long day, I tucked Lauren into her high chair with some Gerber Graduate pasta and fruit. The pasta was a no-go until Nick decided to give her some marinara sauce, and then it was devoured. We give Lauren a spoon or fork and feed her with a spoon or fork of our own, but she managed to grab ours in this shot. She gets the concept that the spoon goes down in the bowl and comes up in the mouth. Other developments this week: more imitation. If you make her dog puppet bark, she “barks”. If you rock her baby doll and “feed” it her cup of milk, she will do the same. She is at a darling age and I feel lucky.

So, Nick came home and I needed his support; things this week progressively got out of control. My grandmother fell during her art class, compressing two vertebre and bruising her tailbone, requiring surgery. During the hospital visitation, Lauren blew out her diaper. One outfit changed. We got some R&R by visiting friends J&J in Milwaukee, but Lauren, while sitting on the floor and allegedly cured from the flu, vomited down her front. Two outfits changed.

We interviewed an impressive candidate for a substitute caregiver for Lauren while Kaye is on vacation, victory. But then my company discontinued one of the five magazines we print. Monday, Jan. 25 was dubbed “Bloody Monday” nationally because of 100,000 jobs lost, and I have no idea whether or not to start getting nervous about my own. Plus, because Lauren had a doctor’s appointment, Nick and I went over her immunization history beforehand on the phone with Dr. T after we realized the nurses had repeated her 2-month and 4-month shots after we changed doctors because the first doctor didn’t register them with the state Immunization Record bureau. And our current doctor’s office didn’t add them to Lauren’s chart correctly. I freaked out; Dr. T apologized profusely and reassured me that studies do not show a connection between autism and vaccinations. (We are getting everything in writing, and now have her complete immunization record on a card. So it’s time for me to be proactive about this). Then my friend suffered a miscarriage in her tenth week of pregnancy. I had no idea what to do or to say, but I made a dinner to take over, learned about what happened, and thought about how she came to support me at my mom’s funeral. (We’ve known each other for a long time.) I thought about how precious life is, what a good parent she is, and prayed for the week ahead to be “normal” for both of us.