[That scratch on her forehead? She clawed herself during a pissy moment and while it’s long healed, there is STILL a faint scarrish groove in her forehead. Sheesh baby!]

It’s been rather a lengthy while without the typical barrage of Ronin photos and update on all the new baby stuff she has mastered.

Baby talk. She started in with “der der der” but now favors “Ay-DA!” The der-der-ders were primarily used to yell at her toys or to rant at us when she was irritated with being dressed or put to bed.

[This was taken a few weeks ago. Warning: it is of a lengthy, possibly only interesting to grandparents, nature.]

But she also der-der-ders at things when she is in good spirits; unfortunately, she always shuts up when I get the camera out. Here I snuck up on her and the peacock toy; this is somewhat post der-der-der transition talk.

[Ditto the above video: grandparenty.]

She rolls over now too. I was getting worried that we’d hit six months without Ronin rolling over and the pediatrician would start to talk developmental milestones at us and get us all stressed out. The fact is, we only seldom put her on her belly because she hates it generally and will fuss herself into a full-bore shrieking frenzy if we leave her for more than four seconds (more than once barfing on the bedspread in the process). So… we tried it once upon a time, twice, and then almost never again. We figured she could hold her head up just fine and maybe someday she’ll be more interested in lying on her tummy.

[Ronin likes to suck on the nose of the elephantmouse.]

So, five months came along and I began to worry again so I started putting her on her tummy again four seconds at a time. Meanwhile Joshua and would I do acrobatics in front of her to keep her distracted and not freaking out. We would roll her from back to front, front to back, over and over, and about a week or so later she did it herself. YAY! Whew.

Sitting! Sort of. Close enough. I’ll take it! She can go 15-30 seconds or so sitting up and balancing on her own before capsizing. It helps to have something interesting to look at in front of her (a melamine measuring cup is about the hottest shit around these parts lately) and then she’ll play with the toy while bobbling a little back and forth but ultimately staying upright on her own. As soon as she gets distracted and looks up however, the momentum of her head sends her flying backward.

She also supports her weight in a standing position; for example, we can stand her facing the back of the couch and she’ll hold on and play with her toys. She gets grumpy if you try to hold her sitting in your lap. Sitting in laps is for little babies. She much prefers to be ballanced in a standing position and she’ll hang out for quite some time or until you get tired.

Still no teeth but the slobber is serious. She likes to blow raspberries now and a mouthful of thick drool makes all the difference.

She is not quite six months yet but we gave her a couple of tastes of food last week. First we tried yams. I smashed a bit and gave her a blob on my finger. I think you could sum up her reaction to the whole food thing as “Displeased.” This is a baby who wants everything in her mouth, who opens her mouth wide as you pick her up because she wants to eat you. Yet the barest hint of actual food on my finger and she clamped her mouth shut, wouldn’t open it at all. We sort of waited a while and when she opened it, I scraped it off on her gum shelf and she made a face. After gumming at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, she started to cry. A few days later we tried a bit of avocado and her reaction was more or less the same. Now when she gazes intently at us when we eat like she wants something in her mouth, we remind her of The Lesson of The Avocado and The Yam.

I want to figure out how to wean her from swaddling. Ronin is a lousy sleeper and if she is not tied down, she’ll flail herself into a kicking pissed-off and ultimately awake baby. When we wrap her in a blanket, she’ll generally be okay although she never sleeps for very long. We have tried twice to see what would happen if we didn’t swaddle. The first try we put her to sleep as usual around 7:30 but she awoke angry mere minutes later and it was not until 9:30 when we gave up and wrapped her into a tight bundle that she finally passed out for good. During this time, we alternatively bounced, rocked, patted, soothed, sang, and shushed her nonstop trying to get her to stay asleep for more than (I kid not) five seconds but she’d jerk and flail and start crying hysterically, then she’d finally suck herself to sleep again for another few seconds, then startle awake, cry tragically, etc. over and over. We actually tried it again a few nights later but during one of the midnight feeding sessions when she usually goes right back to sleep as soon as she eats. She went right to sleep and I just laid her on the bed but after about five minutes or so, she started to flail and jerk around. So I held her hands and she calmed and fell back asleep. She did this for the next three hours about every ten minutes or so and I would hold her down basically until she calmed. After I fed her the next time, I swaddled her back up and we both went to sleep. Maybe we’ll try it again in a few weeks. I worry because it’s getting warm at night again and I hate to have her bundled in a blanket.

** I would just like to add that only ONE day after I wrote this, she fell asleep for not one but TWO naps unswaddled and stayed asleep for an admirable period of time and then, THEN, that night broke out of her swaddle around 9pm but stayed asleep until 11pm or so when she woke for a feeding. Miracle. This is not the first time I bitched about something she did that I didn’t know what to do oh wah wah poor me and damned if she didn’t stop the very next day just to prove me wrong. Just goes to show that complaining works.

So we were headed to Santa Barbara, where there is sun, and I was paranoid about Ronin’s perfect fair delicate soft sweet skin. I had read that you are not supposed to use sunscreen on infants less than six months old so I thought I would make a lightweight shirt that would cover her arms yet be cool in the event that it was actually warm in Santa Barbara too.

[Here’s the stupid part: note the yellowish smudge front and center; I did this with the iron today as I was ironing the shirt nice and smooth for this photo session. I suggest you not be like me and never iron anything. Ever.]

I dug into the bag of fabric scraps I’ve been hauling around with me for fifteen years, packing them up and unpacking them again through approximately thirteen separate moves. I believe I’ve had the white fabric the entire time and have only now used it for the first time. I have no idea where I picked it up actually. Anyway, I knew back in ’92 that it would come in handy some day.

I didn’t have a pattern and only a rough idea of what I wanted to make so I took out a shirt that fit her loosely and measured it for width, height, and arm length. And by “measure” I mean I made a mark on a sheet of paper using my fingernail. My only requirement was that the pattern be so simple I could feasibly complete it in random 20-minute intervals over the next three days without tearing my hair out in frustration.

[I know it’s hard to read; you can click for a larger image.]

Because the fabric is not stretchy, I gave it an inch or so here and there. It looked enormous really and I double-checked my (cough) measurements to be sure but I was still pretty much sure I was screwing something up.

First I sewed the arms into tubes. This was easy. Then I trimmed them by an inch or so because they seemed really long (in the end they turned out a tad shorter than what I had in mind; oops).

Then I laid out the torso folded in thirds, eyeballed the V crossover in front and cut it out with scissors. I also gave the back of the neck a bit of a scallop instead of leaving it straight across.

Next I sewed the top of the torso (the shoulders). I cut holes (carefully!) in the sides where the sleeves would fit.

Fitting the sleeves was sort of tricky. You have to stick the sleeve inside the hole in the body and carefully sew it up so that it doesn’t pucker or look like a total Neanderthal did it. Also, you have to be sure to orient the sleeve properly with the body so that, you know, both finished sides end up on the same side of the shirt. Seems obvious but I screwed this part up. Twice.

I felt doubly like a moron because I actually thought long and hard about how to keep this from happening. Here’s how to not be like me:

I made some seam binding out of some other material I had lying around. (This material had only been taking up space in my basement since last November.) I measured the lengths I needed (two for each sleeve, one for the neck opening, one for the short side flap piece, and one for the bottom) and cut strips about 1.25 inches wide. (I made the neck binding on a bias and the rest of the pieces regular.) I ironed the strips in half and then ironed the ends tucked under so that it would be easy to fit it together on the shirt for sewing. Then I sewed it all on.

We went to Scrap a couple of months ago, which is a store of weird scraps of odd crap (pieces of tile samples, poster board decked out with seventh grade science projects, plastic containers with some corporate logo on them, wedding invitation misprints, a bin of razor blades—no joke, etc.) and they had a bin of leetle sew-on snaps and I was overcome with how cute they were and thought I should buy some just because, hell, who knows, they may come in handy in thirteen years. But I didn’t get them and when I made this shirt, I was sorry. Instead, I scrounged some old buttons from my mom’s old sewing kit (so, I’m guessing they were probably 35 years old) and, since I didn’t have a zig-zag stitch on my machine, I braided little loops out of embroidery thread to fasten the buttons down.

For the side flap, I made a couple of ties (my loop-button situation was not very attractive) to secure the front flap. It looked huge sitting on the bed next to my little baby but it fit her perfectly. I hope it lasts the summer.

About a week ago I had an idea for a mobile and became obsessed with the idea of a New Project. This often happens when I have other projects in the works, usually unfinished. In this case I had two unfinished projects taking up all the space on my work desk. But, this new project was bright and shiny and I was terribly excited about it so I cleared a couple of square feet on my desk and went out shopping for my materials.

Often it is the idea of shopping for new materials that inspires a new project.

[The butterfly tin is one of the things I picked out from my grandmother’s house when she died to keep as a reminder of her; it was packed with a snarl of embroidery floss—floss, incidentally, that happened to be the same color palette as the felt I had used.]

My plan was to make ten mobile cosas—raindrops in this case—out of colored wool felt (oooooo!) to attach to the mobile skeleton that hangs over Ronin’s cradle (the one that held Joshua’s Expired Credit). Ronin and I skipped on down to the local yarn/Crafty McCrafterson shop on Burnside and I spent an hour poring over the many beautiful colors. I desperately wanted one of each color but limited myself to shades of blue and green.

I decided to make them double-sided (twice the work of course, because I am a crazy person) so that when they spun, they would be nice from both sides, and I cut out twenty different drop-like shapes. Then I cut out 49,577,601 various oblong and wobbly littler shapes out of the felt and neurotically pieced them together on the drops to make pretty topographies.

I think it turned out pretty cool. Ronin likes it too. But then she is equally impressed by a slotted spoon.

SE 13th and Alder, Portland, Oregon