[At the park. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get good photos of Ronin as she gets faster and faster.]

Ronin’s latest obsession is the slide at the park. Alberta park has several different slides, from baby-easy to scary spiral straight out of the 80s. Ronin settles for the easier ones but covets the scary slide. She is always making a beeline for the steep ladder and protesting loudly when we deny her. We go down it with her occasionally but it is really unpleasant for larger people to go down. Like tumbling down a narrow spiral staircase until you are dumped out into the bark-a-mulch at the end.

She often makes a little “woo” sound right when she is ready to go down. It’s awfully cute.

Here she is on the fast slide at the school a block away (we have a lot of playgrounds to choose from).

We usually go down the bigger metal slides with her for fear she’ll capsize and bonk her head on the sides. If she’s wearing overalls though, we’ll send her down solo on her back (without overalls, she risks slide-burn, which: oooouch).

[Again! Again!]

So now she’s decided that our yard is sufficiently steep to slide down as well. She sits on her butt at the top, scoots over the edge and (saying “woo”) slides on her butt down to the sidewalk. (She figured this out on her own.) We tried to get her a piece of cardboard to facilitate the slidey part since really, the grass is not terribly slick, but she did not understand what we were getting at and just got pissed off at us for meddling. So, butt slide down the grass it is. Woo!

Happily, the projectile vomiting episode was a solitary occurrence and not a precursor to a week-long episode of misery. Ronin slept fitfully but more or less “through the night” (as we like to call it—haha—around here) and ate minimally the next day. So, basically back to normal.

[Ronin is a climber. See if you can spot all 295,738 ways she nearly kills herself on the way up. She climbs down sometimes too, which is even scarier. I think our camera is on its way out; you can hear it laboring over the zoom. We’ve had it since before the boat trip so it has been through a lot really for just a little camera.]

We decided to take advantage of $2 Tuesday at the Portland zoo and acquaint the baby with some real monkeys. Zoos are always a bit weird and I felt sort of bad about all the animals in their strange little pens with a bunch of gaping kids pointing and making mooing sounds or whatever.. but Ronin was pretty into it. When we first got there and started looking at different animals, it was like she was going to explode. She was bok-boking, moo-mooing, omf-omfing at the animals, and rrrrrrrrr-ing at all the little battery-operated mini trucks the zoo workers zoom around in (seriously, she was just as excited over all the little “Dluh! Dluh!” [truck truck] as the tigers or chimpanzees). She wanted to be held, then put down, then walk, then held, then down. We saw polar bears, which she called “Die-dah” (Nigel, in Ronin-speak) and she was big into the chimpanzees, to which she said “oo ee oo ah ah oo.” She also really liked looking at the big Amazon fish tank exhibit where she could get right up to the glass eyeball to eyeball with the huge fish. We were there two hours and probably barely saw half the animals; however, I wanted to get her home by naptime and it was insanely cold. My lips and fingernail beds were blue by the time we got back to the car. Damnit Portland!

[Joshua tries to teach Ronin the Jedi knock-down (Joshua gets to be the Jedi and Ronin has to play the battle droid).]

This morning Ronin got it into her head that she wanted to take a bath. She dragged her little tub around, grunting and staggering, and whined at me saying “Dah! Dah!” (which is the word she uses for her water sippy cup… maybe it means water?). So I started the bath and set about gathering her toys and when I got back to the bathroom, she had chucked not only Nigel in the water, but “Green Eggs and Ham.” Argh. Nigel can always use a bath (he’s white, or used to be) but “Green Eggs and Ham” is now a ruffly mess. Once I got the baby in the bath, she was happy and I was able to sip my coffee in peace without anyone clamoring at me to read them “Are You My Mother?” another twelve times.

We think she may be teething again though we’re not sure which teeth exactly are giving her static. She has been sleeping fretfully, waking more and having trouble napping, or rather waking from naps (meaning she is a total wreck when she wakes). She has been on a horribly short fuse lately and when she is even mildly irritated at something, she bangs her head (or face) on the floor/wall/side of the crib and cries. She also has a tendency to play with her hair when she is upset or tired and lately, this has turned more into pulling and she’s actually pulling out a lot of hair at times. She will holler and run up to the side of the chair (wooden chair) and just bite the side of it, banging her mouth over and over on it. Of course all this hurts and so if she wasn’t already totally crying to begin with, she is near hysterical by the time I can get over to her to stop her from doing damage. I think she needs to learn some better anger management techniques.

There has been one major *win* on the eating front. BROCCOLI! She is actually eating it. More than once! This is seriously the best thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Of course, after brief initial enthusiasm, she now shuns ravioli, things sausagey, carrots, sweet potato, pasta, and blueberries. 90% of my daily mental energy goes into inventing new foods for her to try (and, after a brief honeymoon, discard forever). The latest brilliance: carrot/zucchini muffins; after initially picking suspiciously at the orange strings in the muffin, she seemed to decide it was something from the Treat family and ate the muffins without a second thought.

[Note the extended unedited video is of a Grandparenty nature.]

As you can see in the video, animal sounds are a big hit. Curiously, her pig sound is “hOM hOM”–not sure how that happened but it cracks me up. She’s similarly obsessed with her books. Current favorites are “Are you my mother?,” “Sheep in a jeep,” and “Hop on Pop,” all of which we read fifteen billion times per day. Then there’s the Big Book of Baby Animals, which she goes bananas over. Another good deal of the day is spent on the floor with the book propped up against the couch, Ronin manically running back and forth flipping the pages, oh look there are the kittycats meow meow, and the ducks quack quack, here’s a lemur … um …, oh look the baby horse neigh neigh. Often there are tears when the big book goes away (and it is a difficult book to hide; it is maybe three feet tall).

[Another obsession: things in ziplock bags. Or outside of them, as the case may be.]

She walks unassisted to now. Not very often, but she can. She is absurdly unsteady and it’s a miracle she still has her teeth with the number of face-plants she’s taken. Yesterday she stumbled on the concrete steps leading up to the house and just rolled all the way down. I expected to see blood but amazingly she managed to only bump her elbows and forehead. Catastrophe narrowly avoided, somehow. She wasn’t pleased with the fall and has since been a little more cautious with the climbing.

The weather here turned insanely beautiful the day before yesterday and we spent the day playing in the grass. We mowed the yard with a nearly seized-up push-mower (a workout) and tried to keep Ronin out of the dog poop (a battle lost, tragically). We have a space to put a garden and we might also build a raised bed in the front yard where there is more sun. I’m pretty excited about it; I’ve never really had a chance to plant a “real” garden.

For the past few days, we’ve been able to get Ronin to take some steps toward us. Then yesterday while out walking, she purposefully dropped my hand and took five or six wonky little steps on her own before stopping and reaching back up for my hand.

The past couple of days, we’ve gone out for “walks” where I just let her take me where she wants to go. We end up spending a half hour to maybe an hour and we literally go 60 feet tops from the front door. First we go up and down the front steps about 20 times. She goes at the steps by holding only my hands and flailing her foot in the general direction of the step, then I lift her onto it and she flails at the next step. She goes down stairs by simply walking at top speed off the edge; I have to hold her to keep her from falling into the abyss. We have some things to learn about steps still. Then we walk down the sidewalk, stopping to inspect various debris like dirt clods (I hope) or cigarette butts (yay), then we head for the curb. Up and down the curb several times until a squashed plastic bag full of *something* is discovered and before she has a chance to grab it, I swoop her up and carry her screeching to the neighbor’s house. He has wide clean concrete steps (the house is for sale and I don’t think anyone’s there) and she goes happily up and down the steps about 50 times. Eventually, I tire of the game or it starts to rain and I try to herd her back toward the house. Of course any denial or suggestion that she can’t do something is met with spastic rubber baby, arched back and tragic screaming. We go up the steps another million or so times until finally I just carry her, kicking and screaming, back to the house for some more baby torture (like maybe a snack).

Joshua’s dad Jeff finally made it up here to visit; he has been at work (at sea in the Persian Gulf) for the past several months and hadn’t seen Ronin since she was just a little blob.

I wish the weather could have cooperated a little more. We had either bleeding cold with a mean evil wind or rain and dreariness. Every outing we could squeeze in took two tries because we had to retreat back to the house and pile on more clothes.

Jeff took the following photos; this one is of Ronin right after a post-dinner bath.

Ronin usually wakes up from her naps happy and rested. It’s such a stark difference from how it used to be and I love it.