My dad has been ridiculously excited about Ronin, but hasn’t been able to come up until now. He brought cigars… Apparently he’s been giving them out to everyone he meets (“IT’S A GIRL!!”) and arrived with the last half dozen or so. We’ll have to try one.

Carlos sent us some pictures of his big truck adventure to Texas and Grandpa Jeff got so excited he decided to skip his flight and drive back. We sent him off in Tyrone and he’s now somewhere in Utah (I hope it makes it). It sounds like a good time. He already got stuck in the snow once while trying to 4 wheel it to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Also, those Utah cops weren’t sympathetic when he tried to explain that the transmission works a lot better at 80 than 65. But it’s true, Tyrone won’t drive 65.

We went out for pho before he left. We’ve been braving restaurants for lunch only. She does okay most of the time, and it helps if there is a place to stand near the table.

Firstly, a few things.

* She sucks in her sleep. It is ridiculously adorable.
* She has outgrown her first batch of baby socks. Her feet still seem so tiny and yet the first time I put these socks on her, she was swimming in them.
* She has started to make baby babble sounds and her voice is so soft and cute. Before, her non-fuss sounds were very limited. It is like she has just discovered her voice.
* She makes a fantastic amount of noise when she sleeps. Sighs, squeaks, whimpers, snuffles, wails, inhuman creaky sounds, and loud breathing. She always has though; this is nothing new really.
* Her new hair is much lighter. It might just turn out all blond.
* Her eyes have gone from dark gray to medium-dark blue. So far. Mine are blue and Joshua’s are hazel.

[I will cut you.]

Nextly, some things that are probably excruciatingly tedious for non-family types.

The past couple of nights Ronin’s sleep routine (haha: “routine,” see how I delude myself) has somehow gone completely to shit. We have generally been able to put her down sometime between 7:30 and 9pm, usually twice or maybe four times before it took (I’m not saying this is perfect, but it positively glows pink with success when I think about these past few nights). She would sleep in blocks of three [blissful] hours, then two hours, and then one or one and a half hours thereafter. Generally, she is easy to put back to sleep after waking—I’d say one time per night needed extra rocking and attention. I’d get up three, sometimes four times per night and that was doable; I wasn’t complaining. On a few rare occasions, I’ve had to get up five times. Then I complained. Well, these past nights, she slept for 1.5 hours as the longest stretch and then it was one-hour or 45-minute stretches thereafter. I got up five times the first night until she was UP at 6:30 and then the next night I got up SIX bleeding times before making Joshua deal with her at 6:30. What gives kid?! I look like crap with bags under my eyes. If this keeps up all my hair is going to turn gray before I am 35.

[Eye-bags carefully edited out for my own vanity’s sake.]

[The next day.] A miracle occurred yesterday and the third night, she went down at 8:06 (had to put her down twice but no big whoop). AND SLEPT FOR FIVE AND A HALF STRAIGHT HOURS!!! I could hardly believe it when I looked at the clock as I got up to feed her: 1:40am. She went right back down and slept again for nearly three hours. Then again until 6:50 when she was UP. I have no idea what we did differently. Maybe she was just tired from the previous two nights. We’ll see what happens. We just got her down at 9:15 (took three tries).

This brings me to the horrifying and fascinating thought that her nearly three-hour stretch is just about the longest I’ve slept at one time since she was born. I would say I got two solid hours plus maybe fifteen minutes of sleep. Other than that, it’s been usually an hour and a half max (unfortunately it always takes me a few minutes to go back to sleep after I get her back to bed, drink a glass of water, rock the cradle, bang my head against the wall, etc.). It’s really rather amazing when you think about it because really I feel mostly fine. All those years I wasted getting eight hours of sleep…

By the way, Ronin would like to announce her brilliant idea for a book, it’s called, “Things that are alternatively screamingly hilarious and cryingly tragic at 4:37 in the morning while lying on the changing pad.”

[She is SOOOOOO peaceful when she sleeps. And SOOOOO cute.]

Development on Project: Genius Baby continues. Notably, she has begun sucking/gnawing on her fingers. Frantically, slobberingly. Loudly. Today I watched as she eyed her own waving fist in an attempt to bring it to her mouth. She makes little monkey noises and usually misses or hits her eye, nose, etc. but eventually she makes it to her mouth and fanatically drools all over her prize as she shoves it in. It’s hard to believe one has to actually LEARN how to do such things. Saliva production is also on a steady increase. Unfortunately, the ability to swallow said saliva won’t happen for another couple of months (evolution is quirky that way). I fervently hope that this doesn’t mean she is sprouting a tooth anytime soon, I mean, she was just BORN for crying out loud. I am probably not the first breastfeeding mother who has feared the advent of teeth.

[Happy in her bouncy seat!]

[Still happy! Playing with her friend, the dishtowel.]

[Help! Help! It’s all falling apart!]

Joshua has been working three days a week and I have been the stay-at-home-mom. This means that while we may be busy, we don’t get anything done (like, ahem, updating the website, cough). Ronin may be demanding but she is usually easy to please. If I’m lucky, she’ll let me put her in her bouncy seat where she can geek out at her toys for a while (20 minutes or so if I’m lucky). In this time, I can usually get myself dressed and some of the apartment debris cleared. She has pretty clear phases: nap, wake and be happy or wake and be cranky in which case she must be fed (NOW), and then she is usually happy for a while (bouncy seat territory) or happy but requiring attention (Must! Be! Held!) (And Bounced!!). Eventually though she begins to fall apart and I make it my personal mission to get her to nap again. Reboot the baby.

Evenings though, she is more cranky than not. Joshua comes home from work all, “RONIN! My BABY!” and she is all, “Eh eh eh eh eh.” Poor Joshua. I don’t know what it is about evenings but the books and The Internet even say that babies are crankier in the evenings. BLAH. We go to great lengths to please her and have discovered that she LOVES to watch us dance. This evening’s descent into madness includes the following: downloading the YouTube video of the Las Ketchup song so that we’d be sure to have the moves right.

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.)

[In the throes of a nap.]

YESTERDAY

We just got back from the doctor’s office for Ronin’s two-month well baby checkup and first round of vaccinations. Oh my god did that suck. One thing: we had a different doctor this time than our usual doctor and both of us like her much better than the original; we’re hoping we’ll be able to switch for future visits without it being awkward.

First the good: Ronin is 12.5 pounds, healthy as a baby can be, and all growth is right on schedule. Then the bad: JABS! Ack. A snoopy print scrub-clad nurse came in and began apologizing before she had the door closed behind her. She had three shots and one oral (rotavirus) lined up; DTaP, IPV, and Hep-B are combined into one injection, then PCV and Hib as individuals. Ronin was almost asleep when we laid her out on the table and I held her thigh. The nurse took out the first jab, which was easily as long as my finger and she just plunged it right in to the hilt into Ronin’s leg! It was pretty horrifying and Ronin began screaming right away. Two more, one in the other thigh and the third shot again in the first leg; it was over very fast but Ronin was hysterical. I thought she had gotten tears before but those were just damp eyes. This time she had her eyes squeezed tightly closed and there was a perfect pearl of a tear clinging to the eyelashes in the center of each eye. Oh man it sucked. I cried; I felt like such an accessory. Afterward, Joshua held her whimpering on his shoulder and she just kept her eyes clamped tightly shut, a heartbreakingly pathetic expression on her face.

By the time we got her into the car seat for the drive home, she was smiling and had apparently forgotten the traumatic episode. I’m bracing myself for an evening of fussing and fever and generally Sad Baby. She’s probably going to have a lifelong fear of Snoopy.

TODAY

Well, yesterday was interesting. Joshua came home from work with infant acetaminophen for Ronin and a tub of ice cream for us. He said he had the choice of grape or cherry flavored (the hell?!) and corn syrup or sucralose sweetened; he decided the lesser of the evils = grape and corn syrup. (For us, he selected mint chip.) Joshua squirted a bit into one of Ronin’s cavernous cheeks and the look on her face was … thoughtful. And confused. She stopped fussing long enough to mush it around and ooze it out her mouth but I think she managed to swallow enough to feel better because a few hours later she stopped her weak cries and whimpering and actually was happy and content for at least 20 minutes.

So she had a fairly typical response it seems: two hours after the shots, she fell asleep and started to cook. She only woke up to cry feebly or eat, except for the brief tylenol reprise. We held her the entire time until she finally went down in her cradle at around 10pm; she would not let us put her down otherwise. Poor thing. It is hard to hold a baby whose legs hurt from knee to hip on both sides.

This morning, she’s much better. Fever is gone and although she’s still sore, she’s more or less back to normal. She’s right now more or less content in her bouncy-seat, blowing spit bubbles and grousing at her toys.