[Siuslaw National Forest, Oregon]

I fixed a problem with the subscription emails. I don’t think any have gone out in November due to a problem with a software upgrade. I forgot that I had to manually limit the number of names in the bcc field so Dreamhost wouldn’t reject it as potential spam.

A couple of weeks ago, Ronin picked up on the sign for “milk.” We had been doing it at her when I nursed for the past few weeks or so and suddenly she just started doing it back. It’s really cute—she milks at me when she wants to nurse and then keeps on milking the entire time she eats. Of course, she now nurses about 50 times a day and when I put her down for naps or bedtime, she milks at me in desperation, “DON’T MAKE ME GO TO BED! HELP!” She does it so much that I’ve taken to pretending I didn’t see her at certain times, like if she’s just eaten and is feeling rambunctious and bitey. I’m sure I’m a terrible mother for it and she’ll require years of therapy.

She likes to roll her tongue now (like a Spanish R roll) and spends a great deal of her waking hours cruising around sounding like a motorboat. She is also all over the apartment lately—did I mention she is officially crawling? She is—and when I “chase” her, she shrieks with laughter and flees, checking behind her to see if I’m still coming to get her. Pretty hilarious.

She likes to turn the pages when you read books to her too; this makes reading to Ronin at bedtime a whole new scene. Before, reading was a near-constant struggle to keep her from tearing out the pages and turning them into soggy nubs. Now she’s somewhat interested in what’s next, often before you are done with the current page.

She’s been extra crabby lately again (we had, what, three or four days of pure happy normal baby) and is getting her left top tooth. I can see it as it’s just breaking the surface. She’s been biting everything she can get near. Today I was doing something in the bathroom sink and Ronin was doodling around on the bath mat and the next thing I know, I turn around and she has crawled over to the toilet and is BITING IT! ACK!!!

It should have happened months ago but finally tonight, Ronin is in her new crib, in her own “room.” Of course, by new, I mean a used Craigslist crib, and by own “room” I mean the hall/entry way of our apartment, which we have cleared of crap (i.e., stacked it in the hall outside the apartment) and placed said crib, a couple of butterflies I picked up off the ground in Central America and framed, and soon-to-be little dressers in which to store all her wee little shirts (IkEA, but we haven’t yet assembled them because all that crap I mentioned presses on the brain in such a way…).

And she is pretty much hating it. She sacked right out at 6:30 because that’s when she normally crashes but was up by 7, fussing and sitting up. Soon she was all out crying and we tried to get her to settle back down but within five minutes, she was hysterical. Anyway, it took until 9 to get her to fall asleep for more than 5 minutes in a row and we’re going on 20 minutes now and holding our breath and typing really quietly out here in the living room. And drinking (nigori).

Anyway, about the crib. We found one that wasn’t HORRIBLE on Craigslist and I emailed the person who was selling it and fine it was mine but then she emailed back saying she had to clean out her garage to get to the crib. Then when she cleaned the garage, she couldn’t find the hardware. So she was going to drop it by my place because the hardware was certainly just in the kitchen drawer and she’d find it in the morning. Then she had to go by Home Depot to get more hardware because she couldn’t find the old stuff (she knew what it took) but was still going to drop it by. Then a couple of weeks went by. Then we bought a different one that was really cheap because it was really ugly. BUT, painted, it would be really cute. A project! OH YEAH!

Well, anyone who has ever painted anything ever even once in their lives (this includes us) would have been able to tell us that not only would those spokes be a bitch to sand, but it would be a bitch times 54. Because that’s how many hard-to-sand-not-to-mention-paint-GAH spokes there were.

It took us over a month to get it done.

But it looks awesome.

[Looks almost like a “real” nursery.]

And Ronin so far hates it.

Sigh.

[Ronin in a spider mask made for a five year old.]

I got my yearly fix taken care of and subsequently Ronin had her first IKEA experience the other day. That store is a whole new experience with a child because that one section at the end I never paid attention to, that in fact I raced through at top speed to avoid all the screaming kids going apeshit over all the stuff to touch and throw and strew and trip passers by? That section is GREAT! I found myself wishing Ronin were five years old so that she would be able to play with THIS or, awwww, a fresh little newborn again who could snuggle in THAT. In the end, we got off relatively easy in that, as usual, IKEA was out of everything we wanted.

We spent hours in that store, trying to remember what it was we came for, got Swedish meatballs and mac-n-cheeze and gave Ronin bites of everything, and at last managed to escape one Poang, two Rasts, and a lot of miscellaneous Kalas-Leka-Titta-Prompt-Erslevs richer.

[The best thing we got were these six stacking plastic bowls. Ronin likes to stack them up (and knock them down) and put things in them.]