10 Months

Aerin turned 10 months old yesterday! Look at me being all timely and stuff!

(It's only because I started writing this post three days ago.)

It's been a very eventful couple of months! In just the last four weeks or so, she:

- Learned to crawl

- Learned to wave

- Started drinking cold milk out of a sippy cup (a big change from body-temperature milk in bottles)

- Started eating chunkier things like chicken, cinnamon rolls, muffins, and cheese

- Had an ear infection that lasted from the middle of March until yesterday

- Got c. diff from taking three antibiotics in a row

- Had ear tubes put in Friday morning

- Cut her seventh and eighth teeth

The whole time I was pregnant, I kept saying that we were about to get our payback for Micah being such an easy child. I think I was right. She is so very different from Micah in so many ways.

1) She is into EVERYTHING.

Micah was such a cautious child. He got into things, sure, but not with the same gleeful, self-destructive abandon.

The first week in April, she learned to crawl, and since then has been on a non-stop quest to receive a fatal head injury. She is into everything: pulling drawers open into her face, opening the entertainment center doors into her face, pulling up on the coffee table in order to properly smash her face on the corner, pulling the caps off all the door stoppers and attempting to choke on them, shredding newspapers and magazines with unbridled delight, plucking various bits of dog hair off the I-swear-I-just-vacuumed carpet and taste-testing each one, rifling through her brother's toys to find the one choking-size object I forgot to remove, grabbing fistfuls of the sleeping cat's fur, and that tape dispenser with the serrated edge? YES PLEASE.

Yesterday, while I was down the hallway harassing her brother and cousins about scattering marbles all around ("Keep them down here and away from Aerin, I don't want her to choke!"), Aerin was getting into a bowl of plastic strawberries her cousin had left by the toy box. When I came back to the living room, she had one trapped way back in her mouth, stuck behind her teeth. She was struggling to spit it back out, but couldn't even make a sound. I think I may have lost a few years off my life, right there.

I can only imagine it will get worse as she learns to stand and more things come within grabbing distance. Even before the crawling, I often joked about her go-go-gadget reach, and our constant household refrain was "Swiper, no swiping!"

With Micah, as he got older, I thought nothing of turning on the TV and taking a quick shower while he sat and watched it in the living room. Aerin, I expect, will be the child that uses those ten unsupervised minutes to empty the flour canister, paint a mural out of nail polish, trim her hair with the kitchen shears, pour all the hand soap in the dishwasher, attach her booster seat to the dog as a saddle, and decorate the cat with a Sharpie.

2) Her approach to food

Food, to Micah, was business. He was a champion eater, but he hardly ever smeared cheese sauce in his hair, or coated his face with spaghetti so as to resemble an Oompa Loompa, or deliberately shoved macaroni noodles in his ears. Aerin, on the other hand, believes a good portion of a baby's nutrition should be obtained through osmosis and acts accordingly. She will be the child I take to the doctor to have a pea removed from her nose.

She's also a bit pickier than Micah. He loved cantaloupe, but she's not impressed. He liked mushrooms, she eats around them. Her current favorite foods are spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, lasagna, pears, peaches, Cheerios, puffs, and YOUGURT IN ALL THE FLAVORS. And boy can she pack it in.

3) Teeth. So many teeth!

Last weekend, Aerin cut her seventh tooth and yesterday she cut her eighth, both on the bottom. I'm pretty sure nine and ten are on the way on the top. This time they seemed to come easier. There was plenty of drool and still some night waking, but at least she didn't go on another nursing strike.

As far as how she looks these days, her weight has been stuck around 20 pounds the whole month, what with the ear infections and c. diff and all. Her growth has also slowed down. She's been in 9-month outfits since she was 6 months old, and she's just now starting to outgrow them.

Her hair has grown in quite a bit and has started to curl by her ears. Her eyes are looking a bit more hazel than brown these days. Her skin is still super soft and smooth, with the exception of her legs. All that crawling has left her with rough, red skin on her knees and an assortment of small bruises from various toys she's attemtped to scale. She's still all dimples in place of knuckles and elbows.

She's developed the habit of wallowing around in the crib and wedging herself against the bars in various uncomfortable positions. This (along with the teeth) has resulted in more night waking, which may just kill me dead.

I've been happily buying adorable dresses for her, and I want to dress her in three different outfits every day just to see her in them. Girl clothes are so much more satisfying than boy clothes. And some of the tunic/pants combinations are just too cute to resist.

Aerin's been more difficult these last several weeks as she's learned to really voice her displeasure with people. Her impatient shriek just grates on me, like no other sound in the world. The daycare teachers laugh at her for yelling at the boys in her class when they don't do what she wants them to. If Micah's in her face, she squawks indignantly (and loudly) at him. But over the last few days, I think I've seen her trying to use some sign language (they teach it at daycare.) She holds out her hand and makes the sign for milk when she wants a sippy cup with her meal. She's starting to make the sign for hungry, too. Maybe it's coincidence that she's making those motions, but I hope she's really trying to communicate. I much prefer adorable baby signs to being howled at repeatedly.

Not to say she's not a happy baby. She's still very smiley and cheerful, even when she's sick. She's starting to get a little more clingy, but she'll still grin and wave happily at strangers.

As fast as she's changing now, I can't wait to see what she'll be like by 11 months.

Backyard Bubble

A while back I stumbled across a website called Play at Home Mom. The site has tons of fun ideas for playing with your kids, from simple little games to big DIY projects. Two of the ideas jumped out at me: the plastic bubble and the light box. Both looked cool, but the bubble was definitely the biggest hit of the weekend.

Around 10 AM Saturday morning I spent about 15 minutes duct-taping up two sides of a 10x25 sheet of 3.5 mil clear plastic. Then I took it outside, rigged it to our fan, and taped up a bit in the middle. Because it was a really windy day, I made a couple loops of duct tape and staked the fan end to the ground. Then I turned on the fan and POOF, we had a bubble.

At first Micah was little unsure of it, mostly because I was dumb enough to joke about it blowing away with him after a particularly strong gust of wind.

But once he went inside, he was in love.

When the wind blew hard, the whole back end of the bubble would lift up, way up, over our heads. At first he was a little scared whenever the whole thing started flapping around, but by Saturday evening he and I both were laughing like crazy and yelling, "It's a windy wind! A WINDY WIND!" It was hilarious at the time, I swear.

A couple things:

1) Suffocation - The plastic we used is a 3.5 mil plastic. It is NOT the super-thin plastic drop cloth material. The thickness of the plastic is such that it cannot be accidentally sucked over a child's face. Also, please keep in mind that air is continually being supplied by the fan and the bubble is never deflated with a child inside. That said...

2) Supervision - It kind of goes without saying that although the risk is low, we still supervised closely. I would have been content to watch from outside, but he wanted me to come in with him. I spent most of the weekend playing inside the bubble with Micah, and it was nice and cool and kind of surreal. I can totally understand why he loves it!

3) Fan placement - The original post showed them using a stand fan. I prefer a fan that sits on the ground because if the kids get excited and run up the plastic wall, they can jerk the fan over. Ditto for wind. A fan on the ground might fall over too, but it won't come down on someone's head.

4) Seams - I was a little sloppy putting the bubble together and didn't get the plastic lined up right in the seams. When the bubble inflated, I had exposed strips of tape. When we deflated the bubble for naptime and came back out later, those exposed strips had stuck to the plastic in several areas and tore it when I tried to pull them apart. When we do this again, I'll be more careful with the seams.

5) Staking - I did a poor job of staking the thing down and spent the entire weekend hitching it back over to the fan. Next time, I'll use bits of rope attached to the seams and I'll properly stake down both the bag and the fan.

For only about $20, we had an activity that totally fascinated Micah for nearly two whole days. I figure we'll give it a shot the next time we have the cousins or Micah's friend Trey over and see if other kids get as much of a kick out of it. My guess is, yes!

A few more pictures

Let's see, what else did we do this month?





We visited rockets and model Space Shuttles at MSFC.




We painted glittery paper eggs and made an Easter tree.




We purchased a play structure and the guys assembled it.
Yeah, it's been a good month.

And now an exceptionally cranky baby is waking up from her too-short nap. This is why you never hear from me anymore. I swear, that child can hear someone typing from a mile away.

Stand Up

It's been a while since I've gone on an old-fashioned political rant here. I've mostly transitioned from idealistic-and-mouthy-college-student to mommy-who-takes-lots-of-pictures; however, this topic, fittingly, touches on both. I'm a little rusty on the bloggity ranting, but let's see if I can get this one out.

So. Background. In Alabama, as in many states as of late, a flurry of bills seeking to limit access to abortion or to outlaw it entirely have recently been introduced. I am Pro Life AND Pro Choice, and so am fundamentally opposed to all these bills. The reasons for my opposition are many and are best explained in a different post, because what I'm talking about here today is the bill that I feel most strongly about: SB12/HB418.

This bill, known as the "Right to See and Know Act" is one of the forced-ultrasound bills that have recently become so popular among the Republican legislators of this country. In its current form, the bill requires that:

(b) Prior to a woman giving informed consent to having any part of an abortion performed or induced, and prior to the administration of any anesthesia or medication in preparation for the abortion on the woman, the physician who is to perform the abortion or a qualified technician shall:

(1) Perform an obstetric ultrasound on the pregnant woman, using either a vaginal transducer or an abdominal transducer, whichever would display the embryo or fetus more clearly.

(2) Provide a simultaneous verbal explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting, which shall include the presence and location of the unborn child within the uterus and the number of unborn children depicted. If the ultrasound image indicates that fetal demise has occurred, a woman shall be informed of that fact.

(3) Display the ultrasound images so that the pregnant woman may view them.

(4) Provide a medical description of the ultrasound images, which shall include the dimensions of the embryo or fetus and the presence of external members and internal organs, if present and viewable.

Now I, of course, am thrilled that the current bill has recently been amended to include a little less rape by offering the option of an abdominal ultrasound. But the part that has my full attention is this section right here:

(1) ABORTION. The intentional use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance or devise [sic] or method to terminate the life of an unborn child, to terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with an intention other than to produce a live birth and preserve the life and health of the child after live birth, to remove an ectopic pregnancy, or to remove a dead unborn child who died as the result of natural causes, accidental trauma, or a criminal assault on the pregnant woman or her unborn child.

(Emphasis mine)

Let's clarify here. The "Right to See and Know Act" would require that a woman undergoing a D&C for the removal of her miscarried baby be forced to pay for a medically unnecessary ultrasound AND have her dead baby described to her. In detail.

I miscarried my second child, a daughter I call AnnaBelle, in June of 2009 at around 11 weeks. I miscarried my third child, a boy I call Aaron, in February of 2010 at 13 weeks. Both times I needed a D&C.

When I think back on my miscarriages, the one completely vivid memory I have of both is the moment the doctor turned away from the ultrasound screen to confirm what I already knew from the images. Time seemed to slow and freeze and it was as if everything was suspended in free fall, like I could almost see the words leaving his mouth and making their way across the room to drill their way into my brain, the ringing in my ears almost drowning out his murmur. "I'm so sorry."

I needed compassion. I needed to decide if I wanted to risk waiting on the baby's remains to come out naturally or have a D&C. I needed my husband to hold me. I needed my living child in my arms. The last thing I needed then was for my doctor to say, "...but now I have to tell you about your dead baby. See, here is her head and her nose. Here are his arms and his legs. Here is the heart that is no longer beating..."

This bill would force my doctor to do exactly that. That, or make a woman have another ultrasound a few days later. "Look, here is your baby. It is still dead. Here is its head..."

If you don't have a problem with that, then I'm pretty sure we can't ever be friends.

I am completely sickened by this bill. With most anti-choice legislation, I may oppose it and disagree completely with everything about it, but I can at least see where the other side is coming from. But this? This is unnecessary, unspeakable cruelty. It is nothing less than state-required torture and abuse of grieving mothers. It is horrific that anyone ever wrote it. It is horrific that anyone ever SPONSORED it. There is no justification, NONE, for such a thing.

On March 18, there was a rally in downtown Huntsville opposed SB12, among other bills. And so I called up my sister, packed up my baby girl, and we drove to Big Spring Park to stand with a hundred and fifty other people of different backgrounds, professions, ages, colors, and religions to say NO. NOT ME, NOT MY WIFE, NOT MY MOTHER, NOT MY DAUGHTER. YOU WILL NOT DO THIS THING.

Will it help? Probably not as much as letters and phone calls to my representatives.

But was it right?

Hell yeah it was.

Lately

I started to write a real post, but it's late and I'm tired and Todd just got home and I'm hungry and it's been a long, long couple of weeks. So here's what we've been up to:

Turning 8 months old




Gluing stuff




Playing with leftover party streamers




Dodging another effing tornado




Pointedly ignoring cameras




Enjoying the warmer weather




Being loud




Trying on new hats from nice ladies




Tossing children