Climbing

April 18th, 2009 by: cheyenne

Happily, the projectile vomiting episode was a solitary occurrence and not a precursor to a week-long episode of misery. Ronin slept fitfully but more or less “through the night” (as we like to call it—haha—around here) and ate minimally the next day. So, basically back to normal.

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[Ronin is a climber. See if you can spot all 295,738 ways she nearly kills herself on the way up. She climbs down sometimes too, which is even scarier. I think our camera is on its way out; you can hear it laboring over the zoom. We’ve had it since before the boat trip so it has been through a lot really for just a little camera.]

We decided to take advantage of $2 Tuesday at the Portland zoo and acquaint the baby with some real monkeys. Zoos are always a bit weird and I felt sort of bad about all the animals in their strange little pens with a bunch of gaping kids pointing and making mooing sounds or whatever.. but Ronin was pretty into it. When we first got there and started looking at different animals, it was like she was going to explode. She was bok-boking, moo-mooing, omf-omfing at the animals, and rrrrrrrrr-ing at all the little battery-operated mini trucks the zoo workers zoom around in (seriously, she was just as excited over all the little “Dluh! Dluh!” [truck truck] as the tigers or chimpanzees). She wanted to be held, then put down, then walk, then held, then down. We saw polar bears, which she called “Die-dah” (Nigel, in Ronin-speak) and she was big into the chimpanzees, to which she said “oo ee oo ah ah oo.” She also really liked looking at the big Amazon fish tank exhibit where she could get right up to the glass eyeball to eyeball with the huge fish. We were there two hours and probably barely saw half the animals; however, I wanted to get her home by naptime and it was insanely cold. My lips and fingernail beds were blue by the time we got back to the car. Damnit Portland!

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[Joshua tries to teach Ronin the Jedi knock-down (Joshua gets to be the Jedi and Ronin has to play the battle droid).]

This morning Ronin got it into her head that she wanted to take a bath. She dragged her little tub around, grunting and staggering, and whined at me saying “Dah! Dah!” (which is the word she uses for her water sippy cup… maybe it means water?). So I started the bath and set about gathering her toys and when I got back to the bathroom, she had chucked not only Nigel in the water, but “Green Eggs and Ham.” Argh. Nigel can always use a bath (he’s white, or used to be) but “Green Eggs and Ham” is now a ruffly mess. Once I got the baby in the bath, she was happy and I was able to sip my coffee in peace without anyone clamoring at me to read them “Are You My Mother?” another twelve times.

We think she may be teething again though we’re not sure which teeth exactly are giving her static. She has been sleeping fretfully, waking more and having trouble napping, or rather waking from naps (meaning she is a total wreck when she wakes). She has been on a horribly short fuse lately and when she is even mildly irritated at something, she bangs her head (or face) on the floor/wall/side of the crib and cries. She also has a tendency to play with her hair when she is upset or tired and lately, this has turned more into pulling and she’s actually pulling out a lot of hair at times. She will holler and run up to the side of the chair (wooden chair) and just bite the side of it, banging her mouth over and over on it. Of course all this hurts and so if she wasn’t already totally crying to begin with, she is near hysterical by the time I can get over to her to stop her from doing damage. I think she needs to learn some better anger management techniques.



One Comment on “Climbing”

  1. Jasmine Swank says:

    So good to see the pic’s and video of your little climber. Solice gave me a terrible fright the other day at the boat yard when she scaled an 8′ ladder on her own… yikes!! They go up, but are not so good at going down without some bumps.

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Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell