Yes I know I haven’t posted squat lately and it’s because every single spare moment has been taken up lying down with Ronin trying to get her to FALL ASLEEP ALREADY OH MY GOD CAN YOU BE ANY MORE FLAILY AND CRANKY??!! By the time she finally goes down, it’s all I can do to keep my brain from trickling out my ears or the drool from making the top part of my shirt all soggy and so I haven’t really been on the writing ball as of late.

So… to catch up with things…

We returned home from Maine triumphant! Flights to went swimmingly, and flights from—aside from teething, a delay, an unexpected overnight hotel stay, teething, and three-hour time change—went a heaping crap-pile better than I could have expected. When the lady trapped in the window seat by a squirming eight-month old says that our baby did “really well” during the flight, she is either hopped up on corn sweeteners or… or… I guess that means WE WIN! And I suppose she won too, but of course not as much as we did.

We’re still trying to break it to Ronin that we are now on Pacific Time, and that 4am is NOT an acceptable time to get up in the morning. Basically, after a fitful night of six hours sleep, then the longest day of her life (20 hours! Yeeg) cut up by unorthodox (upside down! I fell asleep while holding her) and sporadic naps, she arrived back in Oregon not knowing what day it was and we had to force her to go to sleep because it was night and, well, keep forcing her to stay asleep because it was still night for god’s sake.

I mentioned she was teething. Of course, she started drooling and gnawing on things at three months but it was not until about day two of our Maine trip that she developed a vicious snotty nose and an incredibly touchy personality.

“Here, meet our wonderful child!” says I.

“Meh. Whine. Whiiiiiiiinnnnne. Eh eh eh eh… SCREEEEECH!” says Ronin.

We feared initially that she was coming down with the dreaded Airport Sickness and because Alden was also grumpy and snotty, she may have given it to him. We were about to award ourselves the Guest Of The Year award when, one morning, Alden’s nose stopped running and he popped a tooth! Can you believe it? Sharp little bugger too. We were all astounded and spent the morning shoving our fingers into Alden’s mouth feeling up his poor little gums. So that’s what a tooth looks like. I started on GumWatch 08 with a renewed vigor. It took a full week of serious grumpiness, random shrieking fits, and a whole lot of nose-bulbing until we finally noticed a funny little pucker in her lower gum. Just a dot. But I spotted it the moment it was visible and felt around in there (nothing sharp yet). The next day it was about a millimeter long and every day it grew a little until it was a small slit. A week later the other side did the same thing. Here we are two weeks later nearly and the tooth itself only made an appearance a day ago. She makes clicking sounds when she chews on glasses and she bit me the other day for the first time. We still are giving her acetaminophen on a daily basis—I can’t believe how long they are taking to come up.

Ronin and Alden got along famously; we were sad to have to tear them apart at such a tender age. They sat near one another and grabbed toys from each other’s hands. Ronin liked Alden’s toys and Alden liked Ronin’s toes. We had avoided the freakish plastic “jumperoo” electronic “mary-had-a-little-lamb”-spewing toys thinking wholesome, tastefully designed wooden toys were best, but of course Alden had a jumperoo and damned if Ronin didn’t think it was the Greatest Thing Ever. It was simultaneously horrifying and heart-melting to watch how absurdly happy she was playing on it. I fear this is a trend that will continue until she is old enough to get her own apartment.

[Alden had all the cool toys.]

Interestingly, Ronin picked up a “word” from Alden: “Nai-nai-nai-nai”—she does this when she is getting irritated at stuff or just plain tired and ready for a nap. It’s hard to believe they actually learned words from each other but she never said this before and this was a pretty typical Alden thing to do in the exact same context. In all honesty, it’s pretty catchy: I noticed Ilana also nai-nai-naied when she was frustrated at something and I now find myself saying it at times too. It’s surely all downhill from here and I’ll be speaking in monosyllabic babble within the year.

[Two of our lovely hosts (Ilana and Alden).]

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 8:16 pm and is filed under doings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.