[Ro and me playing at the park while Joshua juggled.]

Many things have been going on around here lately that I can list as excuses for not updating the site in a million years. One is apathy (brought on by sleep deprivation, hopefully), another is the molars (GAH!), and still another is that our house got burglarized and our laptops stolen (lame!)

[A couple more photos from the camera card that didn’t get stolen. We were at the park for another Pedalpalooza thing. Note the orange band Ronin is wearing on her wrist: it’s to make sure Ronin doesn’t buy beer. Because she is underage.]

So yeah, Ronin is getting molars. She has been a total mess for the past six weeks with only minimal progress: first top molars just poking through, one bottom fully in, and the other has just surfaced in all its gory splendor. Then when she’s done growing all these, there are eight more.

Possibly it is just a developmental stage but I feel it is related to the teething; Ronin’s latest thing is a sudden and singular obsession to one random item, like for example, a Kid-Z bar wrapper. Take the other day when we were at the park playing; I’d slip bites into Ronin’s mouth as she ran by me en route from slide to stair (she generally refuses to eat while standing still, or god forbid, SITTING in her high chair) until finally the bar was done and I put the wrapper in my pocket. Then later when we passed a trash can, Ronin saw me unearth this holy treasure and (gasp) discard it. And she completely lost her shit. At first it didn’t occur to me what she wanted and I carried her away twisting and screaming and reaching desperately for the discarded wrapper. Unphased by Look! a bird! a ball! swings! trees! squirrels! firetrucks! babies! or any of the other park’s many distractions, Ronin continued to pitch a fit of epic proportion until I finally walked back and fished the wrapper out of the garbage can. Now all the staring parents were thinking, not only am I a mean mother for upsetting my precious child, I am an unhygienic one too who gives her poor kid pieces of trash to play with. Ronin, however, was immediately pacified and happily waved the wrapper in our wake as I took her home.

Yesterday’s drama was Weetabix. We walked to the store for our sample fix, from which a significant portion of Ronin’s daily caloric intake comes, and upon arrival, I fixed her a little paper cup of mini Weetabix to munch on as I wandered in a daze about the store. She spent the time taking the pieces out of the cup and putting them back in the cup, chewing on the edges of the cup, sucking on the Weetabix making a little shuuck shuuck sound, but not actually eating any of it. No biggie—she was happy and she lives on air anyway. We strolled home and as I tried to disentangle her from the straps of the stroller, (cue ominous music) I took the cup of Weetabix out of her hand. Bad move on my part. Her previously happy mood was shattered right then into a million bits and she started EH-EH-EHing hysterically. I got her out of the stroller and quickly shoved the cup back into her hand. She quieted but was a bit stressed out from those moments she had just spent wondering if she would never see her beloved Weetabix ever again.

Whatever kid. We got in the house and she continued to just play with the Weetabix, sucking on them and rattling them around in the cup. She spent a considerable amount of time taking the Weetabix pieces out and putting them various places in the house, on the chair, on the couch, in her shoes, and in her dump truck. Then she pooped.

Because I am a mean mother and Ender of All Things Fun, I scooped her up and took her into the bedroom to change. Yes, the Weetabix came along (I’m not that mean) though I was starting to plot the demise of the soggy things. Have you ever seen Weetabix? It looks like little fibrous bricks, sort of styrofoamy and rather unappetizing. Anyway, it was a big tragedy for Ronin to be so callously torn from Weetabix In The Front Room and she hollered loudly, struggling and twisting to get me to, presumably, drop her onto the hard floor. I removed the Weetabix cup from her hands while she screamed hysterically and set it on the bed next to her so I could lie her down. She carried on so tragically that I handed the cup back to her to hold while I changed her and she reigned in her mood. She laid there sniffling and clutching the cup on her chest but then she tipped it up to peek in at the Weetabix, which promptly fell down onto her face and around her neck. TRAGEDY! Oh the sobbing! I picked up the three sodden bricks and put them back in her cup, righting it in her hands on top of her chest. She slowly peeked inside to see the Weetabix and again it tumbled back out onto her face and around her neck. Again the sobbing and the restoration of the Weetabix cup; again another look in the cup and the disastrous outcome. Eventually I carried the sobbing mess back out into the living room.

She was so torn apart by the changing incident that I had to hold her on my lap with Nigel (and the cup of Weetabix) for a few minutes while she sucked on a pacifier and rested her head on my chest. Once recovered, she returned to games with the (now dirty and raggedy) cup of (now utterly disgusting, sodden and covered in rug fuzz) Weetabix. Eventually she lost interest and I was able to sneak it away and chuck it, but it took a while.

I always give her samples at the store and she usually eats them, or doesn’t eat them and chucks the paper cup on the floor for me to pick up (sometimes over and over again—a fun game!). I suppose I must be more selective when choosing things for Ronin to play with lest she develop an unnatural preoccupation with it. What it was about the Weetabix that triggered her obsession I’ll never know but one sample was enough to convince me to never buy the stuff ever as long as I live.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 12:11 am and is filed under doings, ronin. 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.