[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.

Ronin has her own room now that we are living in an actual house. Right now she doesn’t play too much in it and so it retains a fresh uncluttered feel. This will surely change soon and forever.

We bought a cheap crib off Craigslist and spent about a thousand hours sanding and painting it a bunch of colors. It was a royal pain in the ass and I do not recommend it to anyone. But I think it turned out cute. The raindrop mobile I also made.

I’ve since replaced the window curtain with a heavy Guatamalan textile, red with embroidered animals all over it. It helps keep her room dark in the mornings when it gets light at 5-freaking-AM. The butterfly ball is just one of those IKEA paper lanterns with 3-D see-through butterfly stickers all over it. The photos on the wall are of Joshua as a baby and my dad in his 20s. (We also have a photo of Grandpa Jeff over by the door.) The “table” is made from a large box containing a desktop computer we likely will never use again ever (not bitter), which I couldn’t find a space for; I covered it with a Mexican textile and put a basket of toys on top of it. The large thing to the left of the table is a giant book of baby animals. Ronin is more than a little obsessed with it.

Opposite the crib are her dressers (IKEA; painted using the same paint as the crib) with wooden toys from Mexico that she miraculously has managed to not break (and she does play with them) and a Subcomandante Marcos doll from Chiapas. The wooden machine to the right of the dressers is a rolling ball toy made for Ronin by our friend Kerstin. On the wall are real and painted butterflies, and a child’s huipil from Guatamala hand embroidered with lions.

More butterflies and a framed Ibis card.

Select a bowl from the stack of bowls on the shelf. Jostle all bowls violently around so that they make an ear-splitting racket; do this for at least two minutes. Put Nigel in a bowl.

Put the bowl with Nigel on the floor. Get the blue pie plate and put it on the floor too. Dog is already in the pot so we can ignore him for now.

Let’s put Nigel in the blue bowl. Nigel pie!

Reserve bowl for later use.

Give Nigel a turn or two in the blue bowl. You may want to put him back in the other bowl and then into the blue bowl a number of times.

[This is the tricky part requiring much skill and physical exertion. I made a video so you can study Ronin’s technique to reproduce at home. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, it takes hours of practice and hundreds upon thousands of repetitions.]

Dog is done in the pot for now. Let’s get some more ingredients!

Better yet, let’s try the pot out ourselves! You might get stuck in the pot unless you are a little baby. If this happens, scream at the top of your lungs even if the mama is standing RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU just waiting for something to go wrong so she can save you.

That was fun. Let’s get back to cooking.

Here is the baby pan. Let’s put Nigel in it! Smash him in there.

Okay we’re done with Nigel in the pan; put Nigel in the blue bowl now. Put wooden vegetables and corks in the pan. Nice and mix, nice and mix…

When sauteed to perfection, dump them out onto the floor.

Put Dog back in the pot and carefully arrange the wooden vegetables, a champagne cork, and a bottle of travel shampoo.

All done! Time to go to the park!

INGREDIENTS:
1 polar bear puppet (Nigel)
1 dog puppet (Dog)
5 wooden vegetables and fruits
1-2 corks (to taste)
1 bottle travel shampoo

YOU WILL NEED: 1 large soup pot, 1 wee saute pan, 1 mixing bowl, 1 pie plate, and something with which to mix/flail.

[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.]