Big City Baby

The three of us just spent a lovely weekend in New York City with dear friends of ours.  My old high school pal, Erin, and her hubby, Charles, have an adorable 21-month old, Baird.  He and Emmeline had loads of fun together.  I was so impressed by the way Baird shared his space, toys and highchair with Emmeline.  They had one little scuffle, but did very well otherwise. Emmeline was very entertained all weekend and seemed to enjoy her first trip to the Big Apple.  We spent most of our time in NYC on the upper west side, walking through Central Park and Strawberry Fields and visited the American Museum of Natural History and FAO Schwarz. Emmeline especially liked FAO Schwarz as she found a wooden shopping cart to push around the store.  We ate NYC style pizza, Thai food, Gray's Papya hotdogs, honey roasted nuts, the most amazing cupcakes from The Magnolia Bakery and Erin's yummy vegan cookies.  I bought a piece of pottery at a craft show outside of the museum and Paul and Emmeline both got a pair of Crocs!  We had a wonderful time and can't wait for our friends to visit us in DE.

Enjoy our pictures!    

Friday night: Emmeline is very glad to be

 out of the car and in NYC.

Baird sharing his toys and highchair

with Emmeline. What a sweet boy!

Erin, Baird, me and sleeping Emmeline at

the Bethesda Terrace and fountain

View from Belvedere Castle, Central Park

Emmeline and daddy at the America Museum

of Natural History

Erin giving Baird the world...

Emmeline in Central Park; the guy in the

background was memorizing lines for a

Beckett play

Emmeline at FAO Schwarz

Baird and Emmeline playing nicely

at FAO Schwarz

Emmeline near the Mad Hatter sculpture

in Central Park

Everything abloom in NYC; you can see

Paul and Erin pushing the strollers in

the background 

The highlight of the trip for Paul.  Yum!

What fun!

Sheep Meadow in Central Park

The Big 1-0!

Emmeline is 10 months old today!  I can't believe it.  It felt like we waited forever and a day for her to arrive but since she has been born the time has just flown by.  She is doing so many amazing, incredible things...including standing up on her own without holding on to anything. She even took one step forward on Saturday!  She is such a character: laughing, mimicking, chasing the cats and pulling their tails, playing, observing, getting into everything, yelling (unfortunately even some screaming...ug).  Paul and I are having so much fun with her.  Her mobility is hard to keep up with sometimes but she sure does enjoy getting around.

This evening we celebrated her ten-month-day by moving her nursery around.  She has gotten so big that she has been able to reach and pull on the curtains near her crib.  We had to rearrange everything so that she cannot reach anything from her crib...what a task!  Emmeline and I spent the earlier part of the day on campus.  I met with my dissertation advisor and when he saw Emmeline moving, he warned me that I only had about two more weeks before she was walking.  Yikes!

Campus is quite busy these days because it is orientation season.  As I pushed Emmeline in her stroller and watched parents with their almost-grown children, I realized that in about 17 years I would be in their shoes.  My heart aches thinking about it.  I vividly remember watching my parents and baby sister tearfully drive away as I stood on the curb outside my first dormitory in Duluth, MN.  Five  years later my family drove away again, except this time Paul and I were standing on a curb in Delaware and they were driving 1,500 miles back west (sniff).  Well, I know I have put my parents through their share of heartache and goodbyes...and I know that my turn is coming, too.  Wherever Emmeline's future takes her, I know I will be proud of her but I will also cherish these wonderful early days of Cheerios falling out of her diaper, wobbly knees, and chapped thumbs:

Emmeline and the cats love to tease

each other under the door

Emmeline shows off her skills behind

the wheel.  Notice that her mouth is wide open;

she was yelling at the top of her lungs...just for fun!

Yelling here again, though not for fun

"What do you have, mommy?  I want it!"

This picture is poor quality, but in it you

can see Emmeline standing on her own...

though a bit wobbly!

"Baby prison"

Warm-ish Wilmington

Dearest readers,

Since my last posting, we have been enjoying the warm weather and watching Emmeline grow increasingly independent.  She is now standing on her own for five seconds or so.  Those first real steps are not that far away.  She is still a very cuddly and attached baby (she likes to crawl over to us, sit in our laps and suck her thumb), but she has also been excited by her new-found mobility.  Every time she does something new, she looks at us with her proud little face and screeches excitedly.  At our birth center play group she is a little thief who does does crawl-by toy heists.  She is into everything and moves faster on her hands and knees that most people do on two feet.  She now has six teeth, the latest of which (front top right) popped through on Saturday.  We have also been increasing her menu.  It now includes chickpeas, sweet peas, butternut squash and organic Cheerios.  She loves to snack on those Cheerios!  One of her new fun games is to play with the kitties under doorways and shake their feather duster at them.  It is interesting that she knows this toy is for the cats and not for her.  She is so close to saying "cat!"  It is still "dat!" but she also pronounces the occasional hard "c" without the "-at."  She has many other sounds that she makes but none are quite as deliberate as "dat!"  She is actually quite good at matching pitches when I sing notes to her...a future singer perhaps?!

I hope you enjoy these select *few* pictures taken over the last week:

The blossoms and fountain in Brandywine park;

I took this on our walk there on Friday

Emmeline enjoying her ride in the baby jogger

Getting the hang of the "Snack Trap";

isn't her outfit cute?  (First skirt

of the season!)

Happiness is squishy peas!

On the swings again on Tuesday 

in Bellevue

I am getting the hang of this, mommy!

Enjoying the cool grass today in Bellevue

"I'm gonna make a run for it!"

"Here I go...

...later gators!"

Feeling Dandy

It was a beautiful day in Delaware yesterday. Spring, I think, has officially arrived. It was a high of 71 and sunny. Emmeline and I walked to the Birth Center and back for our once-a-week mom's group. It was a wonderful walk. The spring blooms are in their prime; they smell and look beautiful. When we finally got home for the evening (after an emergency trip to Babies R Us for some Seventh Generation Diapers) I noticed the very first dandelion of the season in our yard. I love these little yellow flowers. My sisters and I loved to pick these as little girls and bring them into our mom. She used to cheerfully thank us and display the weeds in her kitchen window until they turned brown and shriveled. When I saw the flower, I could not resist introducing Emmeline to our yard:

What is this?

Look what I have!

Maybe I could eat it?

Or just rip it up in tiny pieces

Cutest baby on the block!

What a ham!

Cheerio and Cheerios

I recently received an email from a women in England thanking me for posting the A. A. Milne poem on my blog. She said that she had been searching for it and that she, too, has a daughter named Emmeline. Her Emmeline is 14 years old and her name is pronounced Emma-lean. It was very exciting to receive an email from her; it is fun to think of someone in England reading about our little life here in Delaware. I wonder who else reads this blog?
I am very pleased to report that we have been having great success with the Ferber method. Paul convinced me to stay strong and keep with it. We went back to Richard Ferber's book and looked for support and encouragement. I have let Paul handle the difficult nights and that seems to help. It also helps to occupy myself with something else (always within close range of the monitor, of course). For the past two nights, she has gone down to sleep on her own with almost no fussing. Naps seems to be a little bit more tricky. Our routine for naps and bedtime always include nursing; I am already nervous about weaning her but that is several months away.
Emmeline has been happily cruising along on her hands and knees and is pulling herself up on pretty much everything. She is also learning how to get down from standing but is still getting the hang of it. If you let her, she will also crawl an entire flight of stairs.
We have been introducing her to a couple new foods lately. She has been enjoying pineapple, pears and carrots (carrots are usually a first food but I just never got around to cooking and pureeing them). At the suggestion of a friend, I also have introduced her to little Gerber sweet potato puffs. They are supposed to dissolve quickly in the baby's mouth and teach them how to feed themselves. I bought a little device called a "snack trap" to reduce spillage. Emmeline can put her little hand into the slots on the lid but still bang the cup around and not spill. It is so ingenious. Why didn't I think of that?!

The "Snack Trap"

Pregnant Pause

Did you hear about this man who is pregnant? Oprah had pregnant Thomas and his wife, Nancy, on her show yesterday afternoon. They also appeared with Nancy's two grown daughters from a previous marriage. Well, the story is that Thomas was born Tracy and decided that she would wear man's clothes, get her breasts removed, and take testosterone hormones. Soon Tracy became legally a man. I wonder how one becomes "legally" a person of a different gender? Do you have to get your birth certificate changed? I wonder what it is like contacting your bank. "Hello. My name used to be Tracy Smith. I now am Thomas Smith. Can you change this on my bank account and checks, please?" Yikes.
So, Thomas met his current wife Nancy when he was just starting to take hormones and really began to live publicly with his new male identity. OK. Nothing too unusual there. In our society we often hear of people deciding to change genders, to be both genders or switch back and forth. What is unusual about this story is that Thomas and Nancy decided to have children, but Nancy could not bear anymore children. Thomas still had his female reproductive organs so they decided to get him inseminated (the pronouns are a bit tricky here...). And with the help of a sperm donor, two rounds of insemination and some luck, Thomas became pregnant. His OB/GYN (the tenth doctor they sought out for care) was interviewed on Oprah and testified that his pregnancy was completely normal and that because he had stopped taking testosterone two years ago, his hormone levels were normal. The baby appears to be healthy. They are having a girl!
This is a very strange story. When I first saw the photos of the pregnant Thomas, I thought it was a hoax...one of those Ripley Believe it or Not fact or fiction things. His story did come out on April Fool's Day, too. So now that I have watched an hour of television about a man having a baby, I wonder what does this mean for our society? What does this mean for humans? I understand that this couple had an intense desire to have their own baby and this was the only way that they could see how, but isn't this one of those things that should make science and technology take pause? Or am I being too conservative?
I think about raising my daughter in this society. How could I possibly begin to explain something like this? But then I also think about the many children who are born into the most devastating circumstances: parents who hate each other, poverty, violence, abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, war, a devastatingly polluted planet. If a devoted, middle class couple who have the means and love in order to raise a baby decide to have a baby together, gender/reproductive confusion aside...great. I hope they are happy and have a beautiful family. I think that there are much bigger problems out there.