Baby Chaser and Odds and Ends

May 22nd, 2009 by: cheyenne



[In the mornings when I get up early with Ronin, she generally amuses herself by digging through the recycling while I make breakfast and coffee. The other day I turned around to see her lying on the floor amidst various cardboardy debris intently studying a Comcast advertisement.]

I can finally and with great certainty say that Ronin has had her first real cold. I thought she had caught a cold twice before but she really only sniffled and coughed a bit and was in a crap mood for about a day or two. But this, this is a full-on, straight-up cold complete with green snot bubbles when she tries to breathe, a bizarre and adorable nasal twang to her little chirpy voice, an utterly foul temper—particularly in the night time, an unfortunate food strike (I tremble to think that she may never eat broccoli, pasta, cheese, granola, or yogurt ever again), and painfully disturbed sleep. I haven’t had to nurse her four times per night since she was practically a newborn. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of some real sleep in the past couple of months, it’s far too painful for me to even imagine going back. Therefore, now that she is getting better, we’re night-weaning her once and for all. I am a cold wire mommy.



[We recently got back from Arizona where we spent a weekend with my parents. The air was dry and warm and Ronin’s hair turned into dessicated straw. To remedy this, mealtimes were spent rubbing olive oil, yogurt, cheese, risotto, and eggs margarita into her hair. Then she took a nap.]



She has moved into this interesting stage of babbling. Instead of the monosyllabic babble or “DAH! DAH! OOF OOF OOF!” she now natters on with all these weird complex sounds and serious intonation and has animated conversations with her stuffed animals and such. She can clearly understand a lot of what we say to her and it’s kind of awesome to tell her to go fetch something or come here and have her actually do it. Presumably it won’t take her long to realize that even though she understands, it doesn’t mean she has to DO.



[Oma Peggy is not tired of ‘Are You My Mother’ yet. My brother Sage, his wife Elise, and their daughter Riley were also visiting. Ronin still asks for “WILEEE?”]

She is a tantrummer, big time. All you have to do is deny her something, either tell her “no” she can’t do something or move her hand away from, say, the scalding hot cup of coffee, and she completely falls to pieces. She often does this at the park where there happens to be a steering wheel mounted across from the slide. This one little wheel is a major catalyst for strife on the play structure. Ronin, being one of the younger smaller babies, often gets bossed around by the bigger kids who push her aside and take over the steering wheel. As soon as she realizes what is happening, she pretty much loses her mind, crying piteously and yelling at them (cursing them is what it sounds like) in baby jargon. It’s simultaneously tragic and hilarious the way she screams and points accusingly at the offender as I try to reorient her towards the slide. It’s so hard not to laugh at her dramatics. (Cold. Wire. Mommy.)



[Joshua and Ronin during a walk up the road to look at the cows. My parents have a fence around their property, otherwise the cattle that range freely over the entire area would eat all the vegetation, trample mom’s herb garden, and poop on the patio. When we visited, all the little babies had just been born. It was very exciting for Ronin and Riley, and of course Joshua took a billion photos.]

It may possibly be related to her cold, or it may be because in her confidence she moves a lot faster than she used to, or it may just be because her hair is perpetually hanging down in her eyes (she violently refuses all hair management paraphernalia) but she has taken about 20 falls onto the concrete over the past two days. Her palms and knuckles are all scabby, her toes and knees are scraped up, and yesterday evening as she was scooting on her butt down the stairs, she sort of mis-timed the butt and went forward head first down the remaining two steps. She bounced twice on her head and came up with the bridge of her nose all scraped up. And a lot of screaming. Both of us totally freaked and even though she was fine aside from the scrape, we kept checking her pupils and cuddling her and trying to figure out if we could somehow have gotten to her in time to save her the fall. Poor little monkey.





[You can see the massive chunk removed from the bridge of her nose from the step incident. Now I just have to keep her from picking off her scab because that stuff is MIGHTY TEMPTING.]

She’s been on a (solid) food strike the past four days yet I’ve managed to stay surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Today would have been the fifth day but I was able to get 1/4 cup of yogurt, two pasta pieces, 1.5 slices of pear, and 1 broccoli florette in her. This, friends, is a major success (I should be in politics). I had chalked it up to her being sick but as I was nursing her this evening, I noticed that she has her first molar poking through in two spots. Joshua and I have been anxiously awaiting the molars and normally this would be cause for raucous celebration, but honestly she rarely shows interest in food that does not flow through a straw so molars: who needs ’em. And she really only just likes to bite on the straw anyway.



[Someone refuses to wear a hat. This stresses out the mama.]



4 Comments on “Baby Chaser and Odds and Ends”

  1. Peg Bowden says:

    Hey,
    I adore all the photos of life on the rancho. You MUST post one of the videos you took of Ronin and Oma Peggy playing the piano. The kid has talent—I can just feel it. I do hope the babe’s sinus cold is dissipating, and that Cold. Wire. Mommy. is getting some sleep once again. If you haven’t already tried this—run a humidifier in her room at night. Really loosens up the glop. Love, Oma Peggy

  2. Mike says:

    Hi, nice posts there :-) thank’s for the interesting information

  3. vids says:

    omfg! That Ronin is so gorgeous!! I love love love the photos of you two (the scabby nose ones). Her lips are perfect. She sounds like a handful sometimes, but you always seem so calm and composed. What a great mommy she has.

  4. vids says:

    I can’t stop looking at the photos of Ronin. She is gorgeous! She is undoubtably going to grow up to be an amazing person. How exciting.

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Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell