We had a very dramatic “First” tonight: our first projectile puke! (My heartstrings!) Sources close to the victim (aside from Ronin, Nigel and I–not to mention the entire bathroom–were thoroughly doused) disagree as to what might have caused this evening’s mishap but we do agree that the volume of puke was truly fantastic for such a small being. I say it was the bizarre (though inventive) combination of dinner items Joshua fed her that proved to be her undoing. He maintains that the sheer volume of sippy contents + dinner compounded with nursing immediately afterward did her in. We both fervently hope it is not a stomach bug. Poor Ronin had such a surprised look on her face when it happened, then she started to cry pitifully. We chucked Nigel into the tub and peeled off her clothes, then I climbed in with her for a colossal hose-down. I had puke in my ear. Weirdly, she was very quiet and calm after we washed her off and she fell asleep with a mostly empty stomach clutching a stuffed dog (Nigel was out of commission for the evening). I hope she’s okay.

Of course, she puked all over her last pair of clean wintry (yes, we’re back to “wintry” again here in Portland) pajamas and so we had to put her in summer pajamas with sweaters and sweatpants over them. In the end we had a confused (possibly sick) baby with a roiling belly, an hour overdue for bedtime, a wet head, the wrong teddy bear, and a seriously messed up pajama situation. The whole scene was truly pathetic.

So, the plus side of all this is that she is obviously eating enough to puke it up afterward. Who are we to complain, right? (Also, the bathroom is spotless!) Some current–and I hesitate to call them “wins”–are waffles with maple syrup, and a little something Joshua likes to call “Prunerice,” which is (drumroll) Prunes Mixed With Rice. Some day Ronin will bring a guy home with her that she really likes and we’ll all be sitting around talking and I just know something like this will pop into my head and I’ll be unable to control myself. “Guess what Ronin used to eat when she was a little baby?” I’ll say.

And ignoring the eye-daggers continue, “Yup, she even puked it into my ear once.”

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.

I think I can safely say there has been a major breakthrough on the sleeping front hereabouts. No, she does not sleep through the night (wakes usually twice to be fed) BUT she goes to sleep with minimal work on our part and after she is down, she usually does not need us to go in periodically and get her back to sleep. She just sleeps until she wakes up. To nurse (sigh). But still, this is seriously heaven. She is also going longer on her first sleep cycle and hopefully the trend will continue until she sleeps the entire night. Sounds brilliant right? Of course that means that if things continue at the pace they have gone since birth, she’ll be three years old before that happens.

Still, things are looking up immensely. I haven’t yet recovered from the year of broken sleep; I find myself waking after only four hours and unable to fall back asleep until she starts squawking for milk. Then of course it takes me ages to fall back asleep after I nurse her so unfortunately I have only been getting marginally more sleep than I had been getting. Presumably I’ll be able to sleep eight hours in a row again.

I with I could say there were similar breakthroughs in her eating habits but I will say that tonight I almost was worried because she actually DID eat. We’re talking: four slices of sauteed zucchini (minus the rinds), three slices of cheese more or less (less = what ended up on the floor), around a tablespoonful of leftover Indian food, a jar of baby food approximately (dolled up with ranch dressing of course), and three slices of orange. Seriously, she NEVER eats so much. I was astounded. Her belly actually felt full afterward. I don’t know what got into her.

I have had half a mind to film our little eating sessions because they are so sad and depressing generally but I haven’t gotten around to it. So here’s a little rundown of the typical scenario. It’ll be noon and she’ll have only eaten two spoonfuls of yogurt since she awoke (not counting nursing). I’ll announce in a faux-excited voice that it is Time To Eat Yay Food Oh Boy and pick her up to put her in the highchair. Immediately she’ll begin to cry piteously, struggling and arching her back. It takes me some doing to get her fastened in the chair and the tray attached and by this time she has tears running down her cheeks and is rubbing her head with both hands (she does this when she is upset or very tired) and just completely fallen apart. I always feel awful but feeding her anything but cheerios and dried fruit is not possible when not in any sort of restraining contraption. So I put her in the chair. Now that she’s stuck, I dance around with food options: Cheese?! Nana!? I start to put stuff on her tray and she either smashes it with her hand or swipes it off. Since I totally don’t have a problem picking food up off the floor and feeding it to my child, I replace it and hope for a second (and third, and fourth) try. I make faces and bounce around and act like every single piece of egg or macaroni or banana or cracker is the abso-fucking-lutely BEST thing that EVER existed in the ENTIRE planet. I give her my undivided attention and cheer her on every time she even hints at making a move toward her mouth. I eat my own sympathetic lunch, hoping to inspire, offering her bites of whatever it is I’m eating (rejected, typically, unless it’s the last bite and then she’ll eat it with gusto and cry out for more). I try ignoring her and washing dishes instead, sneaking peeks in hopes that she’ll have finally focused on what is in front of her and taste something already. I fix her a shocking array of different things and put them on her tray one at a time in hopes that she’ll find something that doesn’t offend.

Eventually a shred of food makes it into her mouth and she realizes that maybe it’s not the worst fate there ever was just to eat a a little bit after all. Provided it is not green. Or nutritious. And preferably it has sugar as a primary ingredient. It’s really quite sad; she will happily eat pieces of cookie until the cows come in but treats anything vegetable with outright suspicion. Our latest trick has been to put dollops of ranch dressing on whatever it is we want her to eat. She will lick it off and we can only hope a molecule of the good stuff is ingested. Anyway ranch dressing has wee flecks of green so she’s getting some vegetables at least.

Ronin signifies that the “meal” has ended typically with an abrupt return to her former crabbiness. To be sure I understand that she is finito with all the stuff on her tray, of which she has usually only eaten a small fraction, she systematically swipes the remains onto the floor and begins to rub her (ranch dressing/Toby’s tofu pate/chorizo-covered) hands into her hair while whining and crying. I remove her from the Chair, wash her hands in the sink (dislikes), wipe her face off (dislikes extremely), and turn her loose. In the end, I’m totally frazzled and exhausted; I survey the destruction and begin the clean up.