Ronin’s starting to fall into patterns. She has the day/night thing more or less down I think for now, although she doesn’t sleep through the night or anything—far from it; the way I would put it is that she tends to cluster her naps more during the dark hours. But I’ll take it. Basically we have to pretend we’re rockstar know-it-all parents, for example, we say things like, “She usually takes a nap around 11.” What this really means is, ‘Once she took a nap around 11.’ Or, “Her bedtime is 8pm;” translation: ‘We’d like her bedtime to be 8pm.’ “She’s crying because she is hungry,” or, ‘Shit man, your guess is as good as mine.’

One valuable parenting skill we have learned so far is to choose her daily attire wisely because once we get the onesie and pants or whatever on her, there’s no going back. She is not a happy dresser and we typically emerge from the bedroom with bloodshot eyes and a wailing child. Therefore, any attempts at “dress-up” have ended up with Ronin actually just wearing the [insert crazy pink bombshell here] for the day, or at least until she pukes up enough times to warrant an outfit redux. And call me a bad mother but sometimes it’s got to be bad before I’ll subject our apartment building to the fury unleashed by changing her.

[6am… smirk?]

Speaking of apartment and therefore our neighbors, we finally ran into the guy who lives behind us—the guy who can surely hear any noises we might make (can you guess what noises I’m talking about?) better than anyone in the building—and he said that while he knew we had a baby, he hardly ever hears her! (!!!!!) I can hardly believe it and am wondering if he was trying to spare our feelings for some reason. I don’t know enough about him to have any reason to believe one way or the other. For example, I know 1) he listens exclusively to Tracy Chapman; 2) he gets up at 4am, leaves his apartment at 5:45am, and returns at 8am, making a shit-ton of noise while doing it; 3) about once a month, he has two paper grocery bags full of washed and folded white washcloths that he leaves sitting outside his door for a day or two. It’s just not enough to go on really although the washcloth thing might be an important clue.

And in Milestones, we have Ever Increasing Lung Power (our neighbor is saying to himself, “Did I just say I could barely hear her?” as he stuffs washcloths in the cracks around the door). We have Falling Out Hair (I didn’t think this would be an issue until she was, say, 80-ish). We have Drool! (Sweet!) We have Consolidated Poops! (I.e., blowouts!) She’s Sitting Up! (Um, well, sort of.)

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