Is it wrong

That I think my daughter's pouty lower lip trembling right before she starts to cry is The Cutest Thing EVAR??

No, I haven't made her cry just to see it. But it is OH SO TEMPTING.

Oh and did I mention ...

The drool? The teething? If there's anything worse than a baby who is constantly frustrated by not crawling, it's a baby who's constantly frustrated AND teething. Whee!

Desperation

I hold her and she arches backwards, making impatient noises. I lay her down, she rolls over on her tummy. And writhes. Knees under, bum up, faceplant. Elbows under, tummy down. Hands pushing, belly off the ground. She slides slowly backward. She is grunting at the effort. Every once in a while she can coordinate it, hands planted, knees bent, and her chubby belly lifts for a fraction of a second. And down.

She keeps at it. She watches her brother intently as he crawls around the floor to encourage her. She makes noises of frustration; once they start to escalate I pick her up and distract her, but soon enough, it starts all over again. Practice, practice, practice. It's all she wants to do.

She wants to crawl So. Badly.

And all I want to say is slow down baby. There's lots of time. Don't try to grow up so fast.

More irony

The last baby I had would not sleep on his own. For months. I recall he was five months old before he would sleep longer than 10 minutes alone, for all my quiet wiggling and easing myself away from him. Five months!

However, once he did sleep on his own, he would sleep properly on his back, like a good baby, arms and legs akimbo.

My daughter, on the other hand, slept 2.5 hours this morning, most of it totally on her own. But on her stomach. She will not sleep on her back. She will kind of sleep on her side. But lay the girl on her tummy and she's out cold for hours.

So I can leave her, but I sure shouldn't.

Anyway I am doing nothing to interrupt the status quo. For the next year I can stay near her while she sleeps on her stomach, and once she's a year old it's safe to let her do it on her own. After The Boy Who Wouldn't Sleep, I'm taking The Girl Who Will, even if it does come with Limitations.

(Kind of like those ads you see for medication that promise all these wonderful things but have fine print. You can have a daughter! She will sleep! She won't cry very much! (But you'll have to stay on the bed with her for the duration because she'll only do it on her stomach.)

In other news, The Girl has been rolling well and this morning while hanging out on her tummy, she drooled so much and burbled through it so much that it looked like she had a little beard. Classy. Even more classy? Telling the intarwebs. yeah.

Ah the irony

When we moved in to this place, there was a security lock on our patio door. There's also a handle lock, so we never really bothered with the security lock -- no idea why, guess we're just trusting. Also, if you look into our living room there's nothing good to steal, and neighbours can see you if you try to jimmy the door for a load of books which won't get you any money, so you'd have to be pretty dumb to try it.

To be truthful the real reason we don't use it is that for some reason when we moved in the door shifted and the bolt no longer hit the hole quite right, and despite it being an easy fix we just weren't motivated to fix it.

But this last Friday, we decided we would do some fixin' up around these parts, and that was one thing we decided might be a good idea to have fixed.

Let me back up a moment here and add that we have, against our preference, been letting out one of the cats. We live in a high-traffic area, with raccoons and skunks, and a cat outside just seemed a very poor idea. But this one cat is EXTREMELY noisy, and he hasn't taken well to the newest member of the family, and has been making his displeasure known at 3am, sometimes for HOURS, and if you add that to a new baby and a preschooler who will wake if the cat howls and then not sleep and be a weepy mess all day ... well, you have a recipe for disaster, don't you? So we've opted to put the cat out at night. It's my hope that he'll soon realize, especially in the fall, that nighttime howling = being put outside = SUCKS and the behaviour will stop.

Anyway. So out goes the cat last night.

And this morning? the lock has seized up. We cannot get it open for love nor money nor WD-40. And the weather is definitely darkening. Oh, sure, I can go around and get him, but he's used to coming in that back door, so when I go round to get him, he often runs for the bushes (at least, that's what happened this morning when I went to give him food ... poor cat was starving!)

SO. I guess it's good that we have secure doors. We can't get out but NO ONE ELSE CAN GET IN. So hey! Success!! Not so much for the cat, but you can't have everything.

The Difference between boys and girls

This party today was, as I said, that of a four year old girl, and The Boy was the only boy present at it. I didn't think it would be much of a problem, given that he plays with these same girls at daycare a lot ...

But OH, how wrong I was.

When we first got there, he just wanted to go home. He even cried a little. It was in a huge gym with a very noisy bouncy castle and it was just Too. Much. The little girls were running about shrieking (maybe it was the shrieking that was the problem, come to think of it!) and having a great time together.

I finally convinced him to go to the party room instead, where there would be food (sushi!) and cake later. There were large Disney princess colouring sheets for everyone ... but he was mostly interested in squishing out as much sparkle paint as he could from the pens.

One of the girls chose to stay with him (I like her a lot!) and play / colour ... soon joined by another girl who instigated a game called "keep the balloons away from The Boy", which was heavily weighted in their favour ... man, can girls ever be mean! He got engaged though and didn't seem to mind too much.

And then the rest of the girls came in, and he ate some food and some cake and played for a bit ... but all in all it was not a great success. Six girls and a single boy ... they just didn't want to do anything boyish at all, and he was left out a lot.

I'm kind of considering that next year's daycare, when there will be only six boys, might not be that great for him. Sigh.

Ah well. At least it might teach him something about having a little sister. Hopefully it won't be just "how to torment small girls."

Although considering the tormenting was all on their side this time, I suppose it might just be fair game.

It's true, we do live in Vancouver

The Boy is off to a birthday party tomorrow -- one of his favourite girls is turning 4. I saw her mom at daycare this morning and asked if she was all ready for tomorrow. She laughed and said no. But that she had done all the ordering that needed doing.

"the cake," she said. "And the sushi."

And what's weirder was that my response wasn't "ew! Sushi for a preschooler party!" It was relief that there would be food there my kid would eat.