Moo moo

Here's a duet between Julie and Lyla.

Julie: Old MacDonald had a farm. E-I-E-I-O. And on that farm he had a cow. E-I-E-I-O. With a--

Lyla: moo

Julie: Here, and a--

Lyla: moo

Julie: There. Here a--

Lyla: moo

Julie: There a--

Lyla: moo

Julie: Everywhere a--

Lyla: moo

I'd go on, but I think you get the idea.

New shoes

I took Lyla to Target today. She squealed and babbled and ran all around, and I chased her and tickled her; it was hilarious. To other shoppers I must have looked like some combination of the incompetent father and the fun uncle.

Then we finally made our way to the shoe department, which was the reason for the trip in the first place: Lyla needs shoes with hard soles on Monday, as opposed to those baby slippers she loves so much. So I found a decently cute pair and put them on her, stood her up, and watched her crumble into a weeping, whining pile of a child. She clung to me and lifted each leg alternately, as though crocodiles were trying to nip off her toes.

I persisted in stuffing her into pair after pair, failing each time to compel the young lady to walk even one step. Finally I gave up and bought the pair I thought fit best.

At home I put them on her, and she loved them!


Just kidding, she hated them.

Auntie Jen was over, teaching Julie how to sew. Sometimes people ask me what it's like to be married to someone with an identical twin sister. Today it was like walking in on two lookalikes sewing.

But as I flopped onto the couch exhausted from my hour of shoe wrestling, Julie and Jen taught Lyla how to coexist peacefully with her shoes. How? They lured her around the room with treats, like a dog.




And now she's a big girl and likes her shoes just fine.

Monster threshold

Lyla's threshold for stuffed Sesame Street characters is usually about five seconds. She still insists on saying hello to the Zoe puppet most mornings and evenings, but then immediately after the "hi" comes the "bye bye" or the "all done."

Tonight we went over to my parents' house for my dad's birthday, and someone had put an Ernie doll where Lyla would see it. She ambled up to it eventually and said "Uh-nee," but clearly she wasn't all about becoming best friends forever. Later in the evening she fed Uh-nee some imaginary food from a spoon, but that was it. It's like she was thinking "I don't like you, but that doesn't mean I want you to starve."

I think it's stranger anxiety. She doesn't experience it with humans, just fake monsters.

Hard-soled search

Lyla will begin her transition to the toddler room on Monday. Rejoice!

That means we need hard-soled snow boots and hard-soled shoes. Shoes are easy; you can buy them anywhere. Actually, we might be getting some of Lyla's friend Anja's old ones that are hardly used.

Boots are another issue entirely. We live in Minnesota, which is north of the equator by approximately one million miles, and there are no baby snow boots in any stores anywhere. You have to go on eBay, craigslist, or steal them from the feet of another baby. We do have one pair that Julie ordered last week, which arrived today. They're stylish:


And they totally don't fit. Either that or they fit and we're just incompetent at cramming Lyla's feet into them. We angered her so mightily in our first attempt that the mere sight of the boots afterward was enough to make her shriek and fly around the room on a broomstick. Julie quickly worked to dismantle the boot anxiety we created.



So now we just need to go to thrift shops or something and find her some ugly-ass boots that actually fit.

Fired up about "fine"

I think the infant room at daycare is turning into the ragged edge of the universe. I walk in there in the afternoons and ask how the day was, and it's always the same.

"Oh, she was fine today."

"Yeah?"

"Had a couple toddler moments."

"Oh? Anything else?"

"Not really. She had a fine day today."

Thankfully boring conversations can't kill you. The trouble with the infant room is that it's full of infants, and Lyla doesn't fit that description anymore. So these teachers are excellent at the rocking, the tummy time, the bottle feeding, and all that, but I don't think they know what to do with Lyla. They like her very much, but I think they're counting down the days until she moves to the toddler room.

So am I. In fact, tomorrow when I pick her up, I'm going to insist that they transition her to the toddler room next week instead of the week after. It's in Lyla's best interest, perhaps, but really it's in my best interest. I just can't have that conversation again. "She had a fine day today." Please. I have 140 students to their 8 and I can come up with something more specific than "fine" for every one.

I'll try not to sound like such a dick tomorrow.

Hey, in other news, Julie invented a hilarious game called Taco. Let me see if I can remember the rules.


1. Strip the child and place her in the center of a fleece blanket.

2. Gather up the corners of the blanket slowly, to build suspense.

3. Say "TACO!" while grabbing the child and wrapping her in the blanket.

4. Unwrap the child and repeat.

Here's how a round of Taco sounds:

"Lyla, are you ready for Taco?"

"Ta-ta!"

"TACO!"

"HEE-EE-EE-EE-EE! More."

I sit down every single night and write about my daughter. How dare anyone spend the day with her and sum up the experience with "fine."

Pisser anxiety

I don't like the word potty, but I don't think there's a way around it. I suggested to Julie that we instead call it the pisser, but she wasn't having it. "Lyla, before you get in the car, do you want to go to the pisser? Do you need to take a piss, honey?"

"Mama, I need to pee." That's almost just as bad. "I gotta go pee pee." Worse.

"Father, kindly park the car so I can enter this McDonald's and urinate." Nice but unrealistic.

But we're buying a little pisser for Lyla, likely with a picture of Elmo on it somewhere, hopefully not down in the bowl. Incidentally, I'm horrified at the prospect of emptying it. The child will unload her waste into it, and I'm supposed to do what, dump it all in the toilet? I could vomit just thinking about it. At least with a diaper there's the euphemism of the "dirty" diaper. "Oh, this diaper is dirty," I say to myself, and my mind connects to dirt, which is not gross.

"Hey Dan, Lyla just made a gigantic deuce in the potty, and it's your turn to scrape it out and dump it in the toilet."

I could die.

And then what? Do you wipe out the pisser with a rag or something? An old t-shirt? My stomach is turning. When Lyla's old enough to use the pisser, won't she be old enough to sanitize it, too?

Toddler toilets

I got a tour of the toddler room today, where Lyla will move in March. In the center of the room is another room with four-foot-high tiled walls and no ceiling. Inside the room-within-a-room are two miniature toilets. I have not yet shared this information with Lyla.

There's no rush, obviously, as a potty-trained 15-month-old is unheard of. Still, I'm a little afraid. Those toddlers will be sitting on the toilets reading the Wall Street Journal and doing sudoku puzzles, and Lyla will be in the corner cracking one off in her pants. It's not a pretty picture socially.

So we're buying her a potty. We'll put it in the nursery by the changing table, and Lyla can explore it at her leisure. Maybe we'll plop (the wrong word, I know) her down on it just before putting a new diaper on, get her used to the feeling. It'll be a game. "The potty!" we'll say when she sits down on it fully clothed to read an Elmo book. And the next steps will come eventually. I think it'll be an excellent opportunity for mother-daughter bonding.