Out of the mouths of babes...

Okay, so to review: we first thought the Boy Wonder had graced us with the word "broccoli" as his initial foray into the land of the linguistically capable. Alas, it seems that was a one-off, as it has been repeated several thousand times by his parents without so much as one repeat performance on the part of the babe.

Then, there was last week, when we thought we were getting manifestations of "baby" and "kitty," (okay, it was more like "heeee-teeee," but cripes, throw me a bone here) which made sense, in that his two favorite things in life are his own reflection and the furry residents of the home. We've had a couple more instantiaions of "kitty," so I no longer fear he'll be the only kindergartener grunting and pointing instead of "using his words."

Then today, we had some pretty indisputable evidence that his first words are slowly gaining intentionality--like motive is quietly leaking into his parroting of phrases we say all the time.

The scene:

In the bathroom, D is standing on his step-stool at the sink (which will be the subject of a cute, cute, cute, vid later this week), holding Lambie.

D: Heeee go. (first word said at a high pitch, second word lower.) ((Holds Lambie out to me))

Mommymatic: What, sweetie? Is that Lambie?

D: Heee go ((proffering Lambie to me once more, with a decidedly less patient tone of voice)).

M: Daddy, come look at this. What's he saying? ((at this point, D drops Lambie, which Mama picks up and hands back to him. )) Here you go, sweetie.

D: ((beaming, holding Lambie out yet again)) Heeee go.

M: I don't know what that means, sweetie. Do you want your toothbrush? Here you go.

D: ((all but rolling his adorable blue eyes and the sheer stupidity of the "highly educated" total idiot standing in front of him.)) Heee go.

Finally, thank God, Daddymatic realizes D is probably saying "Here you go" which of course is what we say to him when we hand him stuff 89765 times a day. He has figured out that's what you say when you're handing someone something, so now it's his turn to try.

Right. I knew that. I just wish they had more about this in my babe-ese-to-clueless-parent dictionary.

Weekend Update with Mommymatic

I know I'm due for a real post and not just a "post some cute pictures with captions and be done with it" post, but I'm burning prime sleeping hours, so I'll give you the short version of what's been going on around here other than trying to mentally gear up for the whole logistics-of-a-2000-mile-move thing:

For one, this weekend was a gustatorial triumph: Daddymatic and I had barbecue TWICE (being from NC, we are snobs about The Art That Is Barbecue, so it was a rare treat to have totally yummy 'cue more than once over a weekend), Red Red Rine and I drove 40 minutes for the pleasure of being able to visit a Legitimate Multi-Retail-Outlet Establishment (read: a mall that doesn't totally SUCK) and found ourselves at the mercy of several adorable Brownies (the little girl kind, not the gooey chocolate kind) and were summarily talked into relieving them of several boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. We also discovered possibly the only eating establishment in Central PA that serves real Sweet Tea (also known by its official title The House Wine of the South), and we managed to squeeze in a Dunkin Drive-by to complete the Girls' Day Out, so of course the trip was a success.

The weekend was a sleeping triumph as well: Daddymatic, the hero of this story, saw that I was tired, tired, tired and offered to tend to the night wakings so that I could sleep uninterrupted, and oh, it was a beautiful thing. No sweeter, more seductive words were ever, I think, uttered than, "I've got him tonight, sweetie. You sleep now." Under Reasons Daddymatic is The Man, this is Exhibit A.

The weekend--this morning, anyway--was a gustatorial triumph for the Younger Member of the Household as well: whilst mommy was diligently reading blogs working, she noticed that Someone had become very quiet, which is not usually a Good Thing. It seems that yes, in fact, his arms are exactly 1 inch longer than I had calculated, and he had managed to pull his half-full (I'm an optimist, see) container of yogurt down on himself and was enthusiastically smearing as much of it as possible on every bodily surface, clothed or not. He was pretty much basted in it by the time I figured out what was going on: it had pooled on his socks, for pete's sake. So file that one under Why Mommy Should Only Visit Bloglines Under Strict Supervision. But just so you don't miss a minute of the burying-the-thrill-meter action around here, I snapped a few pics of the Yogurt Debacle:






What? Do you really think I'm going to smear this stuff everywhere? Am I so transparent to you?










Yeah, you're right. I am.

But the look can't be beat: it's like Jackson Pollock meets Andy Warhol at Old Navy, right?

What he does 457 times a day

Video Sharing at DropShots.com

The Big News

No, I'm not pregnant. Our big news is that Daddymatic has accepted a job at the University of Utah, so we will be moving to Salt Lake City as of this summer.

I know what you're thinking: But you guys aren't Mormon, are you? No, we're not. But apparently, neither is 60% of the SLC population. So there's that.

This has been a heartwrenching process for the Familymatic--or at least the adult members of the household. Daddymatic's other job offers were in VA and Toronto, Canada. While a HUUUUGE part of me really wants to be back in the South, close to our parents, we both decided that, for now anyway, we need to go where the job seems like it will be the best fit. Daddymatic decided that was Utah, so I'm turning my thoughts away from sweet tea and southern accents and towards learning to say things like "Gooooo UTES!" Also, I am beginning the Convince Bee-bee and Grampy to Move to Utah campaign as well.

To kick off the campaign (and for the sake of my own morale), I'm going to publish a list of the 20 coolest things I was able to find out about Salt Lake City over the weekend. I need your help, though-- if you've heard anything especially funky and/or cool about Salt Lake City (or Utah in general, or heck, even Mormons), now's the time to share. If someone you knew lived in SLC and hated it, I probably don't need to know about that.

Also, if you live in the Far West or California, remind me how much fun it's going to be to be a day's drive or so away from all of you. Also, you could tell me that we *might* get out there in time for me to drive to Blogher, which would be freakin' sweet, as I could finally meet the amazing women in person that I've been so fortunate to ah, "meet" in blogworld. So in the comments, please add stuff I've forgotten and if you have nothing to add, well, some nurturing words of support will substitute just fine.

20 Coolest Things about SLC:

1. The largest parade in SLC is the Days of ‘47 parade, which I think celebrates the day Brigham Young looked at the Wasatch Front and said, “Yup, this is the place. We’re stayin’.” The second largest parade? Utah Pride. I love a city that’s not afraid of its schizoid side.

2. Good football at the U. Plus the view from the stadium is stunning. And the My Cousin Vinny jokes you can do with a team called the Utes is not to be underestimated.

3. Two words: Arena. Football.

4. There’s a zoo, a children’s museum, some great city parks and a fuh-haaabulous public library. Thank you, Mormons, for having many offspring and building a city to accommodate said offspring.

5. SLC is within spittin’ distance of, oh, say, a BILLION national parks: Arches (setting for all Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons), Zion, Bryce, Grand Staircase Escalante, Capitol Reef, etc. It’s right purty in them thar parts.

6. Park City is home to Sundance. And if that’s not indie enough for you, try SlamDance, which is the anti-Sundance. Because you gotta have people for whom Sundance is just, you know, like sooo mainstream and has-been.

7. It’s a dry heat. Plus there will be an approximately 400% increase in Hours of Sunlight, since Central PA, as my friend Jon is wont to say, is “The place where low pressure systems come to stay.”

8. Heavy D will be able to pursue rock climbing, camping, snowboard cross, hiking, cross-country skiing, and snow shoeing, all of which means I get to buy lots of Gear.

9. There will be an IKEA in the area next spring. There is also, apparently, a Roots store. All we need now is a Bojangle’s restaurant, and my retail trifecta will be complete.

10. Donut shops. Plural.

11. Dooce, of course, is from SLC. So the blog vibes are good. Or something.

12. Public transpo that’s not limited to buses.

13. Foods they have in SLC that they do not have here: Thai, Mexican, Moroccan, Afghan, Lebanese, Tibetan, Turkish, Polynesian, Russian, Swiss (are you kidding me? Swiss? OH YEAH.) and Filipino. Thank you, Mormons, for going on missions around the world and being better than the British at bringing back food to spice up your otherwise underwhelming native options.

14. Next week, Motley Crue is playing in SLC. Who’s a has-been now, huh??

15. The state bird of Utah is…the seagull. Bonus points if you know why without Googling it.

16. You can turn around an oxcart on most streets in SLC. Seriously. Brigham Young said so. There are also buckets at each crosswalk with orange flags in them so you can play Crossing Guard EVERY time you cross the street.

17. You know where you are in the city at all times based on the address. For instance, if you’re at 655 East 3400 South, you know you have 34 blocks between you and The Temple. Thank you, Mormons, for being as anal as I am when you laid out your city. (except that in MY city, everything would be relative to MY location. But that’s being nitpicky.)

18. No nonstop flights to Bee-bee and Grampy’s hometown, but there are nonstop flights to a number of Mexican beaches. That takes the edge off of winter (if you’re counting, that’s another TWO reasons why Bee-bee and Grampy need to move to SLC).

19. The Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is in Utah. Having done work with abandoned/abused animals in North Carolina at the Horse Protection Society, this warms the cockles of my heart. Thanks to my friend Elizabeth for remembering one.

20. I can finally train for the sport for which I was born: the art of après ski. The hot cocoa, the silk jammies, the bad mystery novels being read by a fire: what is not to love? In fact, I’m so stoked about this that I’m going to skip the whole skiing thing and go directly to the bon-bon eating part.

Softie-Matic

Behold, the softie, fresh from the hardworking nimble fingers of Heather-Miles’s mom (when I was a little kid, I called friends’ moms by their kids’ names: Billy’s mom was “Mrs. Billy” and Jen’s dad was “Mr. Jennifer,” so Heather would be Ms. Miles, since I’m all up in the PC with the titles and stuff these days).

Anyway—doncha LOVE? Doncha want one? Heather and I did a trade, but if you have more cash than craft (as is the case with me—she will probably wish she’d just let me buy one when she gets the item I made for her), you can buy one. So whatcha waitin’ for? Click on over to this post to get your ordering info and see pix of adoptable softies.

The beautiful thing about Heather is that she appears to have an innate sense of what a family needs, softie-wise: For instance, for the Junipers, she made voodoo softies softie replicas of Wood, Dutch and Juniper. For us, however, she realized the only thing missing from the Familymatic unit was…a DOG!! We have dubbed her Rosiedog O. Matic.

I’ll go ahead and answer the burning questions you’re slavering to ask:

Is the softie adored by your child? Check. It even gets the N. O. R. The little boy is D-voted.




















Is the softie adored by other Matic household members? Check. I’m a big fan of red as my alma mater is NC State (Go Pack!). And Daddymatic loves red for reasons that will be revealed later. And see, even the LBC likes it (That’s Little Black Cat, Snoop--not the 213).















Is the softie chock-full of T3 (Textures Toddlers Treasure)? Check. Corduroy on one side, flannel on the other, felt bits for eyes. And that star? Getting some serious love from One Who is Not Easily D-stracted (okay, that last nickname is cheating, but give me a break: it’s Saturday night and I’m BLOGGING, ‘kay?).

Can grown-ups get their own softies? Check. I have half a mind to order one for my friend Ellen, who loves blobbies, which are a kind of second cousin to softies.

Is Heather nice to deal with? Check, check, check. Go see if you don’t believe me.

Okay, I’m done with the shameless promotion of fellow bloggers’ merchandise. For now. But you might wanna click on the MotherDuds button over on the sidebar if you’re in the market for a very groovy, mama-hood-promotin’ t-shirt. I’m trying to find a reason for Daddymatic to buy me the cap-sleeved one that says “No more Mrs. Nice Mom.”

**One final nugget before I sign off for the weekend: check back Monday for some BIG FamilyMatic news.**

Belated Sappage

I do things late, if at all. Whenever we’re home and we go to my parents’ church as a family, my sister likes to point out that we actually sing three hymns during the Sunday service, since I have yet to make it in time for the first one. That’s just how I roll. I’ve tried to change it, and I was doing well until I had a baby, which, coincidentally, also doubles as a perfect reason to be late to ANYTHING. Poor D-lovely has become an excuse for every delay: “Sorry, we had to have a snack/diaper change/bottle/car seat adjustment/pacifier recovery, but we’ll be there in 5 minutes.”

However, being punctuality-challenged does not excuse me for not posting a sappy love declaration for Daddymatic on That Hallmark Holiday Which We Spent Cleaning Out Kitchen Cupboards* So here it is.

Daddymatic, I have known you for almost 13 years, and this summer will make a full decade that you have been on the business end of my slightly neurotic but vast and devoted love. You were a great friend to me first: you made me laugh for hours on end during the magic month we spent as classmates at Oxford. One story I’ll never forge: our friend Candy lit a cigarette and offered you one, and you declined. She jokingly said, “You don’t smoke? What do you do after sex?” and you mildly replied, “Oh. I just do it again,” I knew at that point that underneath your fine-upstanding-Methodist Young Republican** exterior was a boy whose funny needed to run free. I never thought I’d be the one who was lucky enough to watch it grow and sharpen over these last dozen-plus years, but I’m so glad I got to be.

You have also shown me such piercing sweetness that it takes my breath away. Kindness permeates what you do: you make sure I sleep. You make sure I eat. You understand why I have to spend so much money on haircuts you can’t always tell I’ve had, you know why a dirty sink bugs me and you know when to step in nicely and gently ask (over my swearing) if I need help with a misbehaving computer.

You’ve never lost your sense of adventure, either. Going to Poland to teach English and living with a host family who could only be called słabo, braving the wilds of corporate banking culture, moving to Pennsyltuckey, slogging through windstorms in a tiny tent on the prairie with a pregnant wife, and then helping hatch and nurture a baby boy: you have been so brave and so dedicated and so. much. fun.

What you did last week kind of sums up our relationship for me: you wrote an email from school asking me a mundane question and I, being in a funk, replied somewhat despondently. I didn’t get a reply, so I figured you’d gone back to your project or were just leaving me alone to work out my blues. You could have knocked me over with a feather when you appeared 20 minutes later with flowers, candy, a funny cardand open arms.

But that’s what happens with us: just when I feel so alone, like I’ve alienated everybody with my gritchy temperment and bad moodiness, you appear. No matter what’s up with me—whether I’m being a jerk, being depressed, doing my best “come hither, big Daddy,” you show up. You’re there, no matter what. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I hope you keep renewing that contract of ours. I love you.


Here we are as young'uns, back in 2002, in front of the Getty in LA.













*In my defense, we were afraid we were getting another infestation of Indian meal moths which, as you can see from this post, is pretty much unbearable and deserved attention STAT.

** Interestingly, you are no longer either a Methodist nor a Republican anymore. But you are still Young, and Fetching and Fine.

D-unit's new trick: The Noise of Recognition

Okay, so D-liverer still isn’t talking, but he does have this totally adorable gleeful squeal we have come to call the Noise of Recognition. Here are the things in our house that get the N.O.R:

(1) Any of the kitties: M, Cat, a rare Sula sighting. Shere Khan, the stuffed tiger gets the N.O.R. as well. Even the kitty sculpture at the library gets it.

(2) The Veggie Booty bag. Thanks, Junipers.

(3) The graham cracker jar. (seeing a pattern here? Kid loves to get his grub on.)

(4) His stuffed horse and, of course, Lambie. (see the video of dubious image quality below--the tiny squeal from across the room is the N.O.R., not to be confused with the S.O.G. [Shout of Greeting] upon contact with Lambie)

(5) The Musini, also known as A Toy I Thought Was Cool When It Was Given to Us But Which Now Wears Badly on my Nerves.

(6) Many of his books. Notably, Everywhere Babies, Owl Babies (we gots us a thing about babies) and Guess How Much I Love You.

(7) The vacuum cleaner, which, as on the Teletubbies, is called the “Noo-noo.”

(8) Other babies. Or himself in a mirror. Daddymatic reports that he also has said “baaay-beee” a couple of times as well, but I'm still skeptical.

(9) Any phone.

(10) And of course, us. Usually it’s whichever parent didn’t get up with him, which seems grossly unfair, but hey, it makes for an awesome day for whoever gets to sleep in AND get the red carpet welcome.


Share Video at DropShots.com

He's ba-ack

So Daddymatic has been home about a week from his whirlwind International Please-give-me-a-job Tour. We missed him so much, and it's great to have him back. Even if I didn’t love him so darn much, I would be deeply grateful for his return because it meant a reprieve from single parenthood.

So anyway, during one of his lightning switch-suits-get-underwear-and-wash-some-shirts stopovers, he was just dog-tired and he said, “I think I finally know the difference between being tired and being fatigued. Being tired is like, ‘Man, I got up too early this morning. I need to go to bed earlier.’ And fatigued is like…”

He trailed off, and I thought about the events of the past weeks, the 25 loads of laundry, the 12 trips to the grocery store, the 62 diaper changes, 13 baths, 3 outings to the library, 6 trips to the pool, the 39 high-chair-tray wipedowns, 15 naps, 34 bottles and the 876 repititions of "not in the mouth, sweetie." And I put my hand on his, looked deeply into his eyes and as gently and nicely as I could, I said, "Sweetie? I think I know the difference between 'tired' and 'fatigued'."

To his credit, my amazing spouse smiled and said "Oh. Yeah. I guess it's kinda like my saying, 'I know you're in labor, but this hangnail is the most painful thing EVER,' a la Ross and Rachel. Sorry." I assured him this wasn't what I meant--it's just that when you feel so exhausted, you're sure no one else can understand. But we all do. So now we're catching up. It is deeply, deeply cool to have our Daddymatic back.

And I know I bitch about all the laundry I do, but for the love of LOST, what about the cuteness of these diapers?! It's. just. too. much






Come on, Foo. You know you want the Boy in Blue.





















I can almost hear him singing "Baby in reeeeeed, is looking at me"

What's the meme-ing of this?

Dang! Memed again--I feel so like the kid who came late to the party on the meme thing. Anyway, I was tagged this time by Lisaopolis. My answers won't be as exciting as hers, I'm sure, but heeeere we go. I won't tag anyone for this one, but if you end up doing it, let me know in the comments box.

Four jobs you've had in your life (in my case, Life Before Mommyhood):
Mosquito Control for Meckelenburg County, NC. I wish I were kidding.
Tagger of Red Cockaded Woodpeckers at Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, McBee, SC. You cannot make this stuff up. Seriously.
Oral History Transcriptionist, Lousiana State University in Baton Rouge. Firsthand stories of the Civil Rights Movement. Can't beat it.
Peace Corps Volunteer, Suwalki, Poland.

Four Movies you would watch over and over:
[disclaimer: I am a child of the 80s. This is important.]
Steel Magnolias (I'm also from the South)
Any of the original Star Wars Trilogy. (An unspoken rule in the Matic household is that if Star Wars, Empire or Jedi are on a station we're clicking through, we must stop and watch whatever's left of the film)
Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. The dolphin scene. Dude.
Dangerous Liaisons. John Malkovich=H.O.T.

Four places you have lived:
Radom, Poland. Arguably, the armpit of the universe.
Asheville, NC, as in "God kissed the ground and called it Asheville."
Raunheim, Germany (back when there was an "East" and "West" Germany--it's on the S-14 between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden)
State College, PA. Obviously.

Four TV shows you love to watch:
The West Wing
CSI: Miami
Scruuuubs
Conviction (even though not one single episode has aired yet, my husband has already crowned me a total slut for this show once the Olympics are over. Sadly, I think he's going to be right.)

Four places you have been on vacation:
Out West, A Driving Trip On Which I Found Out I was Pregnant, May 2004 Click the link to see our interactive map with pics
Torremolinos, Spain, Where I discovered I do, in fact, love topless beaches as much as Daddymatic does, May 2001
Italy, Christmas 1998
Hungary in its "Behind the Iron Curtain-Call" phase, June 1988

Four websites I visit daily:
Bloglines (to see if Cookie, The Junipers, Lisa, Kat, T'pon, Granny, Emily , Belinda or Heather have updated overnight)
Yahoo for mail
My own dang blog, to see how my 5 readers are doing
Site meter's site, to see if I can win this dang contest

Four of my favorite foods:
Fresh pineapple
Penn State Creamery ice cream (it's where two guys named Ben and Jerry learned their stuff)
Daddymatic's chocolate chip cookies
Bacon. Or sausage. Pretty much any pork product. I mean, I did live in Poland.

Four places I'd rather be right now:
Any of the sunny, warm ones
Visting where-ever in the heck we're going to be living next year (because then I'd know where we're going to be living next year)
Baton Rouge, LA, eating crawfish etoufee and beignets
Right here with the D-train and Daddymatic, as cheesy as that sounds, only with Bee-bee, Grampy, Nana, and kimnjim here with us.

Talk to the Experts: Your Questions

So every parent blogger—including me—has done at least one post about Sleep Issues. This is sort of one of those. We’ve been having a rough time as of late, and I’ve been thinking back over the books I’ve read and their differing philosophies on sleep. One thing I’ve noticed is when these authors predict and answer “questions” they think their readers will have, kind of like a book version of a pre-emptive strike. What I’ve found, however, is that these questions are the ones the authors hope their readers will have; they do not represent the actual questions. What follows are the actual questions I’d ask if I met any one of these folks.

Dr. William Sears: The Attachment Parenting Guru, Promoter of Co-sleeping, Sensitively Working Through Sleep Issues With Patience and Longsuffering

Dear Dr. Sears: During the time you were raising your 8 children, when, exactly, did you get to have sex?

How many nights of 4 hours of sleep or less in a row did you suffer through? Were your patients understanding when your lack-of-sleep-induced irritability caused you to snap at their brats and take a perverse pleasure in administering blood tests?

Dr. Marc Weissbluth: Cry-it-Out Aficionado, Guilter of Parents Who Don’t Care Enough to Let Their Children Cry

Dear Dr. Dub-yah: When, during the hours and hours of crying parents must endure under your method, do most parents start attempting to put their heads through solid wood doors?

When a child throws up after crying for 6 ½ hours, do you clean it up or figure, “well, she/he made the choice to throw up, so he/she can figure out how to sleep in it”?

Elizabeth Pantley: Schiller of the “Babies-shouldn’t-cry-but-they-shouldn’t-keep-you-up-all night-either” Bit

Dear Miz Pantley: Is it worth it to try and maintain your baby’s trust if, after the first mind-blowingly tedious hour of standing by the crib “helping” your child fall asleep, you feel a rage so palpable that you believe you might, in fact, never speak to her/him again?

What if, instead of maintaining a calm, relaxed demeanor over sleep issues that have yet to be overcome, I point out unhelpfully the irony that the child could simply GO BACK TO FREAKING SLEEP instead of being awake and whiny at an ungodly early hour? Does it matter that sarcasm is lost on babies and most toddlers?

Parents, are there any you'd like to add? Come on--here's your chance!

Meme 'em and Weep

Okay, so I got memed by Belinda, and I felt like I was finally in. Everyone I know around me gets memed all the time, but not me. Always the meme-reader, never the memed. So thanks for sharing the moment with me.

Ok, now, the deal is this: The person who's been memed thinks of 3-5 movies that make them weep. Like really weep. Then that person goes to Google images and finds a pic from the movie that doesn't totally give it away, and paste the image into his/her blog. Then, the memed one highlights the pic and creates a link to the movie's IMDB page (that way, if someone doesn't know what movie the pic is from, they can click on the picture and it'll take them to IMDB so they can find out!).

The final step is that the memed becomes the memer. If you get tagged here, pick some folks and meme them, too!

Ok, so here are four of my weepers. I am ashamed of the last two, but I gotta be me. After the images, I'm naming the folks I hope will do this, but naturally, anyone's welcome to do it. Let me know in the comments if you guessed my movies and if you're going to do it, too, so I can check out your list.
























And the one I'm MOST embarassed to admit...




























Okay, now for the tag-you're-it bit. Do it if you want. If you do, I can't promise you that you'll get an email with a funny video in it or a free computer from Microsoft or anything, but I can promise you that if you don't, you won't have seven years of bad luck or anything:

Kat

Lisa

Emily

Ann

Heather (since I'm sure Brian doesn't cry at movies)

Justify, my love.

Why do we as parents feel like we have to justify every single thing we do? Like, we went to our WIC appointment the other day (your tax dollaz, hard at work) and the nutritionist mentioned that a Certain Little Boy needed to be giving up his 3 bottles-a-day any time now. I told her I understood the worry about tooth D-cay and that I was going to start brushing his teeth after bottles, but that while he would drink vast amounts of water from a sippy cup, he simply won’t drink milk from a cup, sippy or otherwise. So the bottles would be difficult to give up. She said, “Well, as long as he’s off by 15 months, he should be fine.” Or else. . .what?

Of course, I didn’t question this, and spent the rest of the day fretting that I’d start finding tiny decayed teeth laying around the apartment, lodged in his favorite board books, lined up in rows on his bookshelf. I Imagined him, all toothless in his high school graduation pictures or, better yet, with a couple gold teeth up in his griiiill.

So of course, as I am wont to do, I formulated a plan: cold turkey off the bottle. Well, I managed to get him to take a whopping 6 ounces of milk via cup the next day, and I held off on bottles as long as I could. However, by bedtime, we were both exhausted and pretty cranky, so he got an 8-ounce bottle. Since he was about 10 ounces shy for his daily milk intake, he of course woke up for a night bottle, and I decided we’d just have to live with the fallout: bottles aren’t going anywhere for now.

And here’s the thing: I felt like I needed to justify this. I actually found myself saying things like, “But don’t lots of babies breastfeed way after their 2nd birthdays? Why are bottles so evil?” and “Well, at least they’re not his permanent teeth.” Um, I’m sorry, WHAT? Let’s put aside the fact that having bottles past the Deemed-Appropriate Age has never, to my knowledge, messed anyone up wicked bad. What’s more disturbing is how quickly I thought of ways to justify my choice to refuse to follow Status Quo Thinking. I mean, it’s like eating cheeseburgers in bulk while you’re pregnant (which I also did), right? People would think I was a terrible parent!

What I’ve realized is that anyone who would judge me for putting what’s best for my kid at this stage of his life before what I think of people who think I’m ruining him for not following the advice of someone who’s never even met him are jerks. (Wow. longest. run-on. sentence. ever.) It was a good lesson to learn: sometimes, you gotta trust that you know your kid best, and you don't need to justify that to anyone but yourself and him (or her). Anyone else feelin' this?

SteelerMatics

Live from Superbowl XL:
















Actually, no. "During the Superbowl" is after bedtime, so this photo was taken and tape-delayed for your viewing pleasure.

And yes, that's a playbook that Big D is chewing on. Let's hope the wheels on Da Bus keep going round and round.

I'm not your monkey, mother

Oh, but he is. Here's his new trick. The vid is super-short (because I could only get him to do it once) but cute, cute, cute.

Enjoy!


Share Video at DropShots.com

Developmentally appropriate?

Okay, first—some clarifications. When I say junk like, “I am the one who looks like her kinda butchy lesbian lover,” that’s what we language people call FISHING. Like for a compliment. Or at least a knee-jerk denial, as in, “Butchy?! Oh heavens, you delicate flower, you don’t look butchy. Maybe a little androgynous in a totally come-hither sexy way, but goodness knows, woman, you’re not the least bit butch.” It’s my fault; I should have specified that this was a self-deprecating comment and not an Oxygen movie concept you were supposed to run with. So it’s tooootally my fault—but hey, now we’re clear, right?

So, on to the real point of this post. I’ve been thinking about those wretched words “developmentally appropriate” quite a bit lately, because I really want the D-veloping child in the Matic household to be, you know, normal. I like that he’s walking and climbing (though someone last week guesstimated his age at six months. SIX MONTHS? Wha-? Has anyone seen a 25-lb. six-month-old recently?), but part of me wishes he’d start talking already. I know all kids are different, and I’m sure all the hoopla we threw at him for the one-off “buh-guh=broccoli” incident put him off language totally, but a mother worries. Especially a linguist mother. Darn the growth charts and baby books!

So anyway, when he started insisting that I drag out the playmat we put him on when he was but a wee bairn, I got a little concerned. Was this a regression? What did it mean? Why wasn’t he focusing on, say, learning to say my name or Daddymatic’s? Did we need remedial classes to get him back on track?

Of course, it turns out he simply wanted to conquer it, which in his case means pushing down the whimsical toy-laden arches and sitting on them in triumph. Which is—you guessed it—developmentally appropriate. Oh.

Here he is, pre-triumphing.
















Interestingly, the other children in the house like it, too:







Sula likes it. And dude, she's, like, ten.














So does Cat (because sometimes you run out of original, witty, kitty names).













Even M, the incredibly vain tabby, and her "friend" Shere Khan like it. Though they'd NEVER admit it.

When Blogworld meets Real World

So I have written before about Davis’s Honorary Aunt Emily, who is a fellow blogger (and do yourself a favor and read this post of hers about blog popularity—you’ll be glad you did). Anyway, Emily comes over, coos over D-Money and spoils him rotten to the core. You know this. But I have barely blogged at all about his Other Blogger Aunt, Lisa, who is largely responsible for the New and Different D-monikers that have been appearing of late. She also came over on Tuesday for some Toddler Love and to provide Mommymatic with some much-needed adult conversation (or, rather, “grown-up conversation” since for the sociolinguistically sensitive of you, the word “adult” might have skeevy connotations, as in “adult film” or “adult content.”)

ANYWAY. It was very cool of her to stop by, share a cup of coffee with me, and bring kisses and a very cool gift for my offspring, and I wanted to say thanks. Here’s a pic we snapped of the 3 of us, which I am calling “When Blogworlds Collide.” Lisa's the luscious blonde holding D-Lovah, and I am the one who looks like her kinda butchy lesbian lover. Not that there's anything wrong with that.