Not only do our neighbors have a penchant for home-grown vegetables, but they also seem to enjoy fresh eggs. In our immediate neighborhood there are at least six backyard chicken coops with two or three chickens apiece. Ever since Ronin learned what chickens said, we’ve made it a point to make the rounds of the visible coops so Ronin could look at all the bok boks.

A few blocks up the street we come to the first of the backyard chickens; Ronin actually does not let us walk past this alley without stopping to visit. There are three that live here and they pretty much have the run of the yard. When they see us coming, they usually cluster around the fence hoping for snacks.

Ronin pretty much picked out her outfit today.

The second coop we visited was not opened yet for the day and we couldn’t really see the chickens so we moved on to the third stop, a nice, easily accessible backyard coop with viewing windows.

Ronin discovered that if you run your fingernail down the dingy glass, it makes a sound that makes the mama’s head shatter. What fun!

And the chickens, also hoping for a handout. Every so often I have to prevent Ronin from poking her juicy grub-like finger through the chickenwire.

After I took this photo, the camera decided to totally break. It was bound to happen; five years of very heavy use and abuse. So, now we’re in the market for a new camera. Any suggestions? We’re eying the Canon G11.

I actually have memories of fingerpainting myself. Unfortunately, those memories are not made up of feelings of excitement as my artistic self was awakened, of the infinite possibilities before me as I contemplated my paper and palette. Sadly, the memory brings back a fingers-on-the-chalkboard sort of cringe as I remember how it felt when you ran out of slimy paint and the thin skin on the inside of my knuckle dragged against the scratchy dry paper. I have goosebumps right now as I’m writing this; I’m not kidding.

Nonetheless, I decided quite suddenly the other day that Ronin’s brain was going to shrivel up and fall out her ear if I didn’t get her some Craft Projects immediately. Enter the fingerpaint. Maybe she’ll like it. Maybe it’ll be a mess. I’ll certainly use better paper than they gave babies back in the 70s. Plus, I’ll make pretty colors (I also remember the paints being dark drab colors: forest green, navy blue, burgundy, brown—bringing home papers with a slurry of blended green/brown/black smeared in the middle).

I found this recipe on the internet and cooked up a batch earlier this afternoon. Cooking it was fun—sort of like making cream of wheat where you stir and stir and stir for a million years and still it is just watery milk and then, suddenly, in the span of 15 seconds, all hell breaks loose and you suddenly have a pan full of porridge. Corn starch and water is a very curious porridge indeed.

After it cooled, I portioned it out into baby food jars and added food coloring. That was fun. It’s pretty thick with the recipe above so I added more water to make it a more paint-like consistency and stirred it all up with a chopstick. Even more fun, Ronin discovered the food coloring tubes and how to twist off the caps and while I was off neglecting her, she opened up the red, blue, and purple and squirted the stuff all over her hands. I was sort of flipped out and she repeated after me as I ferried the food coloring tubes out of reach “ssit ssit” (bad mama!).

The setup. All neat and tidy with cool and warm colors separated by dinner plate. I stripped her down and planted her in front of the paper.

Ronin tests the waters. Hmm. Colors pleasing… Paper smooth…

She was a little weirded out by the Stuff! on her hands!! It can be nice having a neat-freak toddler (she is a relatively tidy eater—partly because she doesn’t like to eat) but it is also alarming to take said toddler to the beach all, “BEHOLD: THE BEACH,” and have her totally freak out when a grain of sand gets stuck to her hand. She mellowed out a bit but I got her some tools anyway.

Palette knife and paintbrush.

Paintbrushes are for lamers.

Of course, nothing is better than simply cutting to the chase and eating the paint straight off your palette knife.

I’d say it was a success mostly. I’ll do it again at least despite the fact that food coloring does not just wash off of hands (or anything else) and her fingers are now stained purple-green-pink. Hopefully this fades quickly. I have to get better at ‘letting go’ as far as smearing paint in hair and eating it is concerned but I’m working on it. Ronin seems to enjoy the painting just fine but the real standout is getting to stack and rearrange the plates (between sneaking nibbles of turquoise or fuchsia), dumping the paper out on the grass and then arranging it back on the blue bin. And I sit back and dream wistfully that her future memory of fingerpainting will be happy, cathartic, and with zero spinechills.

[The mama’s eye view.]

Ronin’s increasing playground freakouts were starting to get me worried about her socialization. It’s probably nothing out of the ordinary for your average short, illiterate, toothless (mostly), incontinent person who can’t speak English, but she is so painfully sensitive about having things taken away from her (toys, pine cones, steering wheel on the play structure, personal space, etc.) that I get to thinking (The Internet does not help). Sometimes she just decides she doesn’t like the look of some kid at the playground and whenever that kid comes near her, she just starts crying and flailing accusingly at him. Of course, this leaves the poor kid totally perplexed and a little disoriented. I have to take Ronin off and explain that that kid has a right to be on the play structure too and blah blah what the hell?!

The answer: Playdates. I may as well buy the minivan and sign myself up for the PTA now I suppose.

We have a couple of baby friends we specifically meet up with. Winslow is two months older than Ronin and they actually seem to interact together. We usually meet up at the park and the babies follow each other around, poking at vegetation, stamping around in the wading pool. The stakes are low since there are no specific toys involved and they have always gotten along pretty well. Our new baby friend is Rilke, whom we met at the Tiny Tots Story Hour at the library.

Winslow’s mom actually is the one who “introduced” me to the library story hour or else I never in a million years (well, several at the very least) would have gone there myself. (I know, I know, a library, other mothers, their toddlers! Very scary stuff.) As it turned out, she convinced me to go then stood me up and I was forced to brave the story hour by myself. (Spoiler: I survived, and even returned the next week.)

I still am not sure what to think of it. It’s a room full of toddlers and their parents, there is group singing and participation, there is the highly anticipated story, there are bubbles and a massive bin of brightly colored plastic toys dumped out at the end. Everyone seems to know each other, like they started out in birthing class together and graduated to Tiny Tots. It feels like some sort of group therapy, which makes me nervous, but then everyone is pretty normal and it’s not much of a stretch to realize I’m the freak and that I need to just RELAX. Makes me wonder who is really in need of socializing.

Ronin is still in the observational stage. She burrows into my lap and is probably taking detailed mental notes as the more outgoing kids run amok around the room, crawling over other parents and knocking each other down. All the hands up, hands down, hands all around type stuff pretty much mystifies her. She managed to reach out a finger to pop a bubble and by the second time we went, she ventured forth into the mayhem that was the pile of toys (those tots do know how to party) and only got in minor, swiftly averted scuffles over more desirable articles.

I managed to make a friend too. No thanks to me of course; she was the friendly one and my only contribution was managing not to screw up my own email address.

This was taken about a month ago, she’s taller now.

Last Wednesday I picked Ronin up out of the crib after her nap and she felt crazy hot. I stripped her down and brought her to my bedroom for a diaper change and instead of putting up a fight as per usual, she just laid there, eyes half mast, rubbing her hair with her hands. I got out our fancy newfangled digital thermometer and jimmied her mouth open with it. She was not super thrilled but I was able to get the tip of it in her cheek for a few seconds. Luckily a few seconds is all the thermometer needs and it beeped at me: 104.5. Holy shit I thought, that can’t be right. I tried to take it again but she was similarly uncooperative; I got 104.5 again though. I took my own temperature: 98.0. I took hers again: 104.5. Kid’s got a hell of a fever.

After dosing her with acetaminophen, I wet her head with the shower sprayer. She cried piteously and I felt really bad by the time I got her in front of the fan. She just let me hold her and laid her head on my shoulder. This may not seem drastic but I’m telling you, Ronin is not a child who likes to be cuddled. By the time she lets you hold her close, she is in a State. Putting her head down though, that’s serious business and I was pretty worried.

I emailed Joshua a few dozen times, rechecked her temperature (104.1), and called the doctor. By the time they got back to me, half of an hour had passed and her fever had dropped to 103.4. The pediatrician did a good job of reassuring and calming me and after a couple of hours, Ronin’s fever had dropped to 99 something and she was running around almost like nothing was wrong at all. Babies are so weird.

We had a couple of days of up/down fevers but never a spike as high as that first day and though I thought it had to be Roseola (oh, Internet! You SLAY me.), she never developed the telltale rash. Mystery abounds.

Now we are back to The Usual. The usual being extraordinarily crabby especially in the mornings when she insists upon waking at 5am well before it is reasonable for anyone to be up I mean for god’s sake the sun hasn’t even come up yet but up she is and refusing to fall back asleep until like naptime. And during these few hours, she will SCREAM and generally be riding a knife’s edge between two chasms of doom and gloom. It sucks pretty badly. Eight more teeth to grow and maybe we’ll find out if it was really just the teething after all and not her natural disposition. La.