Big stupid things

Lyla's sense of humor is not subtle, so you have to do big stupid things if you want to make her laugh. I'm game for it. Julie is definitely game for it.

It amounts to a lot of butt shaking, basically.

We leave our blinds open, so when it gets dark, you can probably see into our house. I'm concerned our neighbors think we're freaks.

Spectators in her world

After a busy three days of family events, Julie and I imagined a Sunday where Lyla would be exhausted. We'd witness the legendary three-hour nap.

Instead, Lyla was manic all day. For instance, this is all the crap she put in Daisy's cage:


Except for Daisy.

The new play area did provide excellent outlets for Lyla's unexplained energy.







Julie and I got exhausted just watching her. Her naps were agonizingly brief. But she was also hilarious and for the most part peaceful, allowing us to just be spectators in her world.



And yes, Lyla does occasionally play peekaboo with herself.

Things that are cozy

In the booklet on how to build the Cozy Coupe, there are no words, and the pictures suck. It's like they hired the people who weren't talented enough to draw instructions for Ikea. There's a picture of a guy calmly inserting these bar thingies into the body of the car. I was able to do it only after several karate chops.


Lyla loves it, though. Her new favorite activity is to open and close the gas cap.

Julie and I decided to make Lyla a play area in the guest bedroom. Now she'll have somewhere to go in her new car. Check it out:


We hope the tent replaces Daisy's cage as Lyla's favorite hangout.

Lyla-centric universe

Yesterday we had Julie's family over for Thanksgiving: Grandma Jackie, Grandpa John, Aunties Jen and Jodie, Uncle Matt, Future Uncle Jason, Lyla, Julie, and me. Oh yes, and five dogs listed here in order from least annoying to most annoying: Abby, Cooper and Violet (tie), Tulip, and Daisy.

It was a big group, and it's getting bigger. Jodie, pictured in yesterday's post, is preggers. We think of her fetus not as her daughter but as Lyla's cousin, as if Jodie and Matt's primary objective was to pony up a playmate for their niece.

The tentative plan for Julie and me is to have a second child at some point. (At some point = in our 30s.) Our discussions mainly revolve around possible names, and how nice it would be for Lyla to have a sibling. Just like Jodie's unborn, we haven't personalized our unconceived second child beyond defining him (ours will be a boy) as an accessory for Lyla. Perhaps we'll name him Ken, after the doll.

I also like the name Cletus the Fetus.

But repeat: we're not expecting. And we don't expect to be expecting anytime soon. After all, Lyla hasn't yet asked for a little brother or sister.

What I'm thankful for besides the obvious stuff

Actual Thanksgiving conversation:

"Lyla, can you say turkey?"

"Dee dee."

"Yay! What does a turkey say? A turkey says gobble gobble."

"Beela beela."

Last year on Thanksgiving Lyla was one week old, and this year she knows that a dee dee says beela beela.

By the way, check out what Julie made. Happy Thanksgiving.

A mighty ahh

Lyla still drinks from a bottle but sometimes attempts to use a sippy cup. I define a "sippy" as the tiniest possible sip. That's what Lyla takes before throwing the thing on the floor.

One of Lyla's grandmas (we think it was both of them independently) taught her a funny trick. You know those soda commercials where the sweaty athlete desperately wants to quench his thirst? He cracks open the can, leans way back with it, and chugs it with his eyes closed. Then, his mouth buzzing with chemicals and future cavities, he crushes the empty can with one hand, wipes his mouth on his wrist band, and finally, at the climax of the commercial, exhales a mighty ahh.

Lyla now exhales a mighty ahh after every sippy.

Easing into the day

Lyla used to wake up at 7:00, a time of sanity and convenience. Now she wakes up at 6:30, and the difference is enough to flip our morning upside-down and shake it till the change falls out of its pockets. At 6:30, I am trying to get out the door, and Julie is half-clothed in the upstairs bathroom finalizing her outfit and zipping the human mask over her alien head.

So now instead of leaving for school on time, I run upstairs in coat and shoes, yank off Lyla's pajamas and diaper, ignore her myriad objections, and stuff her into a hastily chosen outfit. A quick kiss and I deposit her at her mother's feet.

Charge down the stairs, grab my stuff, and out the door. Then I enter my car and immediately relax. There's the light traffic, the hum of the road, and the dependably asinine morning radio. It's brain-off time, ease-into-the-day time. It's a stark contrast from wrestling the diaper pail's stupid flip handle mechanism that always gets jammed, and from wrestling a baby into ill-matching clothes that will not advance her social agenda.

But I'm not complaining. I'll take Lyla's new 6:30 wake-up time if it means seeing her before I go. I'll take the stinkiness and fussiness. In addition to the inherent good of seeing one's daughter before work, the commute with its brain-off time feels better when the brain has recently been on.

Two in each leg

Lyla had her one-year doctor appointment today and got four shots, two in each leg. Up to this point, I was half worried that Lyla actually enjoyed getting shots, that she was a freak baby who would one day sit in math class and give herself tattoos with paperclips.

I'm no longer concerned, for this time she screamed her ass off. After grunting through the first shot, sugar-binky in her mouth as usual, shots two through four inspired sledgehammer-your-pinky-toe wails.

The shots will prevent Lyla from getting MMR, chicken pox, H1N1, and hepatitis. It is up to us to keep her away from the Ebola virus and werewolves.

Lyla's stats are impressive: 85th percentile for weight, 60th for height, and, like Einstein, 95th for head circumference. The doctor had to drive to Home Depot for a longer tape measure.

That's a lie. But everything is normal with Lyla. We're trying to decide when it's time to fully eliminate formula from her diet and replace it with whole milk. Let's see: a thing of formula costs about $25, and a half-gallon of organic whole milk costs around $3. I think perhaps we'll make the switch the instant it's time to buy more formula.

Whole milk looks thick and nasty, I must say. It's basically straight from the teat, which is historically the way Lyla prefers her milk.

And we might switch Lyla's car seat to front-facing. But will such a move, coupled with her burgeoning vocabulary and her desire to do whatever Mama does, make her a backseat driver?

Life with zombies

Last night after the family extravaganza during which a Dairy Queen cake was maimed and then driven to our house, where it now sits in critical condition in our freezer, Lyla got to bed 90 minutes late. Julie and I then concluded, based on our entire year of parenting experience and the logic that courses through our brains, that Lyla would sleep in for approximately (any guesses?) 90 minutes.

She didn't. Lyla has her own ideas of what makes sense, and what made sense to her this morning was to lose her binky and scream at 4:27, and then fall back asleep until only 6:17. It was Julie's day to wake up with Lyla, but I squinted my eyes open as she sat up in bed. She sensed I was feigning sleep and said miserably, "I never got back to sleep. I've been up since 4:30." If anyone ever does a Twilight spin-off with zombies instead of vampires, a sleepless Julie could play the female lead.

So I got up with Lyla because I am a good person and also because I do not like spending Sunday interacting with a flesh-eating, undead wife. Lyla and I ate Kix and yogurt, and then we read books. Lyla is getting more and more into books; she'll grab one and say "Buh!" and then you have to read it to her or she'll say "AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

That makes Lyla sound like a zombie, too, doesn't it?


"Buh! AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" We're still working on "please."

Cake carnage

Today we had two separate birthday functions for Lyla, one with Julie's family and one with mine. The gargantuan pink gift from my parents was a table and two little chairs. Lyla cheerfully pushed the table around the living room as though it were a folding chair on an ice skating rink.

Julie's parents answered with a Cozy Coupe, one of those toys that reminds you of everything awesome that you begged for as a child but never got.

Lyla also had two opportunities to shove cake in her face. The first time was a 7-Up cake made by Julie from her mom's recipe. I had never heard of 7-Up cake, so I can only imagine it is something that originated in Wisconsin but recently came to Minnesota, like Brett Favre. Yeah that's right, we have your quarterback and your cake, suckers.

So anyway, Lyla was ambivalent about 7-Up cake. She poked it with her finger as though it might suddenly scuttle off her tray. Then she waved her hands in the air to signal to us that she was "all done."

Later at my uncle's house, Lyla got affectionate with a Dairy Queen ice cream cake. My family members' reactions were anywhere from amused to horrified, depending on the severity of their anal retentiveness. We have some video footage of the carnage, so in a day or two I might isolate some stills and post them here.

But it was a wonderful moment, a rite of passage that parents romanticize: when the one-year-old attacks the cake. We might have to repeat it tomorrow.