Ronin is getting close to walking. It’s very exciting. Unfortunately (and ironically), this makes actually going out for a walk incredibly difficult. She wants to “walk” herself and we end up holding her fingers all hunched over at an awkward angle, covering only about 1/10th the ground we might normally cover. In her exuberance to go forth, the number of face-plant related injuries have increased. The other day she let go of our hands at a curb and went down, scratched her chin, and split her lip open with those two protruding bottom teeth. It was really sad—she was crying and slobbering bloody slobber all over herself and me and by the time we got to the grocery store, we had to make straight for the water and napkins lest someone call CPS on us and our bloody child.

She also sort of made it through the night without nursing for the first time ever. She normally nurses 2-3 times per night and I was beginning to fear night weaning would never happen. We gingerly try to push the first feeding back if possible in hopes that she would get used to sleeping longer and longer stretches. Of course, in practice, what this means is when she wakes up to eat, instead of nursing her immediately and then all of us going right back to sleep afterward, Joshua goes in and tries to quiet her back to sleep. Almost never has this worked; usually he bounces and rocks a shrieking child until we give up and I nurse her. The other night he went in when she woke to eat and after two solid hours of fussing (but not hysterics) and laying down, crying and bouncing, shushing, singing, rocking, she finally stayed down for good. And then she slept solid until 6:30am! CRAZY. Of course, we didn’t get to sleep until she did (at 1) so we still only got 5ish hours of sleep. But those five hours were all in a row. That makes a huge difference and I woke up actually feeling sort of refreshed. And also like my boobs had been replaced by a couple of leaky rocks.

No repeats so far though. Oh well.

Ronin drives the radio flyer.

Hans and I were eating burgers at The Kennedy School last week and Ronin discovered a delicacy. She would eat bits of my bun and Hans’ fries but refused my tator tots (huh?). Of course, my tater tots were served with ranch dressing but I prefer ketchup. I already know that Ronin doesn’t really like ketchup though so I gave the ranch a try instead. She went nuts and kept jumping up and down screaming “Nana.” After banana, her word for any food she likes. I’m not sure what she calls food which she doesn’t like but she makes herself understood by shaking her head vigorously and trying to smack it out of your hand. She ended up eating the entire ramekin of ranch dressing, minus what she rubbed into her hair of course. Our plan is to trick her into eating veggies by covering them in the stuff. Our first attempt wasn’t entirely successful because she simply licked the dressing off and threw the veggies on the floor.

The other new food breakthrough is soyrizo. She was happily eating applesauce this morning when we started cooking soyrizo and eggs for breakfast burritos. Ronin immediately threw her spoon on the floor and started yelling Nana. I gave her an actual banana but that went on the floor as well. I was ready to give up on breakfast but we decided to try her on the soyrizo anyway. That’s what she wanted! and she ended up eating handfuls of the stuff.

A unnecessarily long video in which Ronin plays with refrigerator magnets (pronounced yoda). We try to discourage her from eating them (with mixed results). You can see that she’s can briefly balance on 2 feet without support. She hasn’t tried to take a step yet, but I expect it to happen soon.

Ronin builds up charge and shows off Roswell (pronounced Bubba). Unfortunately, this is the last we’ll see of Roswell. He crash landed somewhere on the upper floor of IKEA and could not be located. His EPIRB failed to deploy and even the professionals at lost and found were unable help.

Occasionally, Ronin looks around hopefully and asks “bubba?… Bubba?” We are all very sad and just don’t know how to break the news. Mostly we avoid the subject and try to direct her attention to another member of her entourage. Batbear seems kind of lonely too since he and Roswell went hand in hand.

Hopefully he hitched a ride on an outbound EKTORP and is on his way to his home planet.

Never ride this bike to the airport.

[The toothbrush is one of her favorite things and we can’t make it out of the bathroom with her without letting her have it to chew on.]

Ronin’s personality continues to emerge like a some kind of 5-ton backloader trashing its way through a brick wall. She is very verbal and all sign language she had picked up initially has been abandoned in favor of words. Loud words. She has a large vocabulary of nouns but still lacks the muscular development to actually pronounce them. The three of us are the only living scholars of Roninese on the entire planet. We go to the park and she’s all about the DZEE (tree) and HOU (house) and DA (dog) and DU (duck) and in the past couple of days, she’s started to say “HI” to people we pass in the street. They are always like, “Did… did that baby just say ‘hi’ to me?” I was pretty shocked the first time she did it too. We can ask her things like, “What does the kitty-cat say?” and she’ll answer, “maw maw,” or “What does the chicken do?” and she’ll say, “bok bok.” “What does the mama say when she stubs her toe?” …

Also, she has started screaming at last. It’s not fun. I don’t know whether to ignore it and hope it’ll go away or what.

[I built up quite a freezer supply of expressed milk just in case. Turns out Ronin refused to drink it unless straight from the source. I held onto it until it was way past expired and then finally dumped it down the drain. Ronin had a field day with all the little iceblock-baggies.]

She is a very picky eater. I have no idea how we managed to spawn a picky eater but there you have it. We always assumed it was something the parents did that made the kid reject perfectly tasty food but now I’m convinced it’s a born genetic trait. Mealtimes are a study in patience and perseverance. Textures must be just so and in the right combinations, she will happily eat one thing for a day and then refuse to eat it forever after, she will often not eat more than a single bite all day long until we are sure we’ll go crazy (dropping everything we give her onto the floor instead) then eat fine the next day like nothing was wrong. I’ve gone to great lengths to make her elaborate dishes trying to find something she will eat (she hates quesadillas; what child hates quesadillas? I ask you) and I am dismayed to discover that one of the few things that do it for her are prepared baby foods in a jar, ‘turkey and vegetable’ and ‘winter squash’ flavors only. She won’t touch freshly prepared and pureed squash that I’ve made but she’ll eat this stuff out of a jar. Tragic.

We’ve taken to sneaking foods into her mouth, for example piggy-backing some yogurt (iffy) onto the spoon with applesause (usually a go) or pulling the Ol’ Bait and Switch (waiting until she opens for one thing and then quickly shoveling in a spoonful of food). While it worked the first few times we did it, now she carefully inspects each spoonful of food we try to feed her looking for tricks. She has a unfortunately good memory for such things and presenting her a spoonful of something white, even though we haven’t tried to feed her yogurt in DAYS, results in inspection, rejection, and often the entire meal from there on out is a bust.

She is very particular about her snacks, which she calls ‘nana’ (after banana); we feed her freeze-dried bananas, mangoes, blueberries, and cheerio-like things between “meals.” (The term is used loosely because basically “meals” are one big fat whine-fest where she grouses about everything we put in front of her before rubbing it into her hair or tossing it onto the floor.) However, she’ll eat them in descending order of preference only: bananas first, then blueberries and mango (she likes these the same), and lastly, the cheerios, which she often refuses to eat at all depending upon what day of the week it is.

We went nuts a few weeks ago and bought her a bunch of toys: a wooden shape sorter, a push wagon walker thing that we’ve loaded up with all her stuffed toys, a little bead maze that suction-cups down to our coffee table, and a stuffed polar bear puppet. She has always been extra obsessed with the polar bears in her Baby Beluga book and she totally loves the puppet. I think she thinks he is alive (we named him Nigel). She hugs and hugs him and sleeps cuddled up with him. It’s crazy adorable.

While she pulls up on things and will walk if you hold her hands, she doesn’t really show much desire to set forth on her own. We discovered that if we let go of her hands, she’ll stand there for a few seconds before realizing her predicament and slowly sinking back to a safer sitting stance. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gives it another couple of months before really trying to walk on her own. But then you never know, these things seem to sneak up on you that way.