random cute pics

Homegrown potatoes homegrown potatoes
What'd life be without homegrown potatoes

Favorite Word

Laszlo loves saying "yeah" in answer to most any question.

Me: "How old are you?"
L: "Yeah."

Me: "How many fingers do you have?"
L: "Yeah."

He'll frequently answer yes to mutually exclusive options.

I'm sure he'll rediscover the joy of "No!" soon. Lately, the only time he uses "no" is when he's doing something forbidden. I'll hear him in the bathroom, saying "no, no, no, no, no," as he holds down the flush handle of the toilet (and we were an "if it's yellow..." family even before the latest drought. Oh, the sin of it!). Or he says it while unplugging the dustbuster. Or sometimes, as he does things that we've never bothered to forbid, like taking sand from his sand table and putting one handfull at a time onto the trampoline, (though perhaps he's recalling that the same behavior was not allowed when it was fistfulls of dirt from the raised veggie beds.)

I've re-read David Copperfield so many times that I can't watch Laszlo do any endearing behavior without thinking, "My darling boy," the way DC's mother always said it to him in private, furtively conveying all her love with those words.

Couple of Tree Pics

A few days before the removal, grumpy Paul sweeps the deck for the third time that day. (After clearing the roof and the gutters.)

The scale, as seen from next door. All the neighbors and passers-by came out to watch.

This dude was amazing. He climbed like a monkey with a chainsaw dangling from his belt. He and the crane took down all three trees in less than six hours.

Off to the chipper! A squirrel was staring at me from the top of the fence as I took this: guilt and glee all at once.

And now:

• Sun enough for citrus and the garden
• No aphid poo on Laszlo's slide and trampoline
• No more multiple deck-sweepings per day
• Laundry drying outdoors without getting gummed up
  
• Nothing to curse and shake our fists at when we go out on the deck. What will we do?
  

For Avid Fans of Peek-a-Boo

The Most Elusive Prey

If there's one thing that's highly prized and impossible to get enough of nowadays, it's sleep. On this trip, a combination of spiders, mold, noise and tight quarters are making it ever more dear. For any trip away from home detailed strategies are explored, outlined and executed, but anything short of Crib in Another Room also involves a great deal of anguish and prayer. Well, maybe not prayer because we're athiests, but desperate hope, and a deep concentration that borders on superstition: "if I just close my eyes and want, want, want so badly for Laszlo to fall asleep, (or stay asleep), it will happen."

And the truth is that if he's alone, he's a marvelous sleeper. On our first day in Missouri, I put him on Uncle Dan's bed surrounded by pillows and pacifiers, closed the shades and walked out of the room, and he didn't make a peep for three hours.

But we recently discovered that if he's in the room with us, we need a visual barrier in order for him to fall asleep and stay asleep. And at Dan's, that's not happening. In theory, there are two beds in the room, but one of them got saturated in a recent precipitation-leak event, and we've now spent two nights without it as ever so slowly "dries" in the sun room. So bed #2, on the floor, consists of the couch cushions with a fitted sheet. One might think this is the perfect spot for the smallest of us, while the two >5' people (me and Paul) could share the bed. And that would be true if it weren't for the population of brown recluse spiders with whom Dan unwillingly shares his house.

He advises us to shake out our clothes in the morning before getting dressed, because they like small, dark spaces.

And apparently, only the bed that's off the floor is safe from them, so obviously our Precious Child sleeps there. And it has to be away from the walls, too, because (Dan's theory is that) they are less likely to make it onto the bed if they can't bridge the 6-inch gap. Unfortunately, on our first night here, Laszlo's head fell into the gap a couple of times, then a leg fell in there, so I decided that sleep is more important than not getting bit by a poisonous spider, and put pillows around the edge of the bed, providing continuous and ample passage to the spiders, but preventing further head-wedgings.

On the other side of the bed is me. It's not a long drop to the carpeted-floor, so I'm not actually worried about him falling. If the second matress were dry, I would sleep on it and I think things might go better.

More riviting accounts of our Missouri sleep saga to come...

Adjusting

I was able to remain in denial about being unemployed until I dropped Mom off at BART on Wednesday evening for a red-eye back to Massachusetts. We had a glorious couple of weeks of fun and laziness and extended familiality. We did all the usual activities: Steam Train, Little Farm, Discovery Museum, Academy of Sciences, as well as lots of parks and Peets'. Mom also introduced a new activity: walking to the end of the block and sitting on the curb at the corner of Solano and Masonic. From there, you can see busses (Buh!) trucks, BART passing overhead (Bah!), children walking to school, trees (Ah-Bo! en Espanol) and all of "city" life. On the way, you can pause to ponder every piece of litter, light-post and manhole in the way only toddlers do. EVERYthing is worth focused examination and remark. Case in point: Laszlo is newly aware of planes overhead and the distant tooting of trains to the west. Trains pass many, many times per day. I wasn't aware how many. But now I am because every time he hears one, he shudders and stops what he's doing to proclaim Doo-doooooooo!

Yesterday, Laszlo and I took BART and MUNI to the CA Academy of Sciences. Almost immediately upon leaving the house, I wondered if I was making a really stupid mistake not to bring baby conveyance of any kind. Embarking on a trip to the City with no stroller and no Ergo? It wasn't just the prospect of tired arms; carriers serve a dual purpose of containment when one has to, say, pee, or fish out bus fare. This all worked out okay, except he managed to open the stall door and exit the stall while I was peeing at one point. And he fell asleep on my lap when the N Judah got stuck at Church and Market for like fifteen minutes, preventing me from taking advantage of his nap by knitting or texting (geez, spell-checker get a clue: "texting" is most certainly a word by now). Nevertheless, I think this will be a regular activity for us. I also found out we can take the bus to the Tilden Nature Area fairly easily, and the bus is way more fun than driving.

Thus we begin a period of unknown duration, in which Mom-Toddler becomes the primary pairing, for better or worse. I'd prefer to have more balance--for myself, between being work and care-giving, and for Laszlo between mom-time and time with Paul and other adults--but I'm also excited to experience the world at a toddler's pace for awhile. Doo-dooooooo!

I do not like change

In that way, I guess I'm like most toddlers. I haven't posted anything for ages, and I just looked over my draft posts from the last few months. There's Pusher, in which I describe my anxiety upon hearing the nanny's gleeful description of Laszlo retaliating against his nannyshare friend, Miles, by pushing him down (Sohan and Gigi, if this is the first you're hearing of this, my apologies). There's Wheels, in which I self-righteously proclaim that we're a biking family. And a couple of others that never went beyond being titled Discipline and Household Help. Those were going to be about our adventures with Dr. Jane Nielson (Paul likes her methods, but not her rationale. He says that what she calls "respectful" is really just manipulative, but nevertheless perfectly fine and effective), and a photo-montage (I'm throwing in that word without even looking it up, that's how brash I'm feeling) of Laszlo at the kitchen counter covered with flour, Laszlo with miscellaneous appliances, etc., respectively.

In short, BORING.

But we've got some authentic changes in the works over here. And I'm losing sleep because I FEAR CHANGE. And I'm going to be laid off when my paid leave runs out in mid-October. Then we'll find ourselves among the fortunate COBRA'd unemployed: fortunate to be paying $500 a month for Kaiser for me and Laszlo, (Paul has some lame coverage from U.C.); fortunate that I qualifiy for unemployment; hopeful that the Great State of California will be issuing real checks by that time instead of IOUs; grateful that we have a small financial cushion, and therefore Laszlo's amygdalic development isn't yet in jeopardy as a result of instability/homelessness, etc.; however still dubious about my punctuation, especially semi-colons.

Off we go. Wish us luck!

Marvelous Little Sounds

Laszlo's repertoire of meaningful sounds is slowly expanding. We haven't had the anticipated explosion of verbosity, but the profusion of sounds is charming. He loves to whisper. Often, while he's nursing, he waves up at me, eyeballs straining sideways toward my face. If I want him to go back to sleep, but don't want him to feel ignored, I whisper, "hi." When he's done nursing, he starts crooning, "Ayyyyy," (hi.) When I respond a whispered, "hi," he whispers, "tsshh-ah-wshhh," his standard reply to anything we whisper to him.

And why is it that animal sounds are among the first that children learn to make? I mean, wouldn't you expect them to start with the things that are important to them? Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out a sound like "ow!" before the monkey sound, "oooh-oooh?" Paul figured out that Laszlo's utterance when he sees a picture of a duck, "wah-wah," is "quack-quack." Sometimes I can hear him lowing "oooh," in the next room, and I know without looking that he's talking to the cow piece from his stacking puzzle. All this before he's consistently saying any version of "mom" or "dad." Do cows and ducks, which he's rarely even seen in person, loom larger in his sphere than us?

In the realm of recognizable English words, "ba!" (ball) is still most highly favored, the branching out from there continues slowly. Any child under four is "bay-bay," and yesterday he started practicing "byeeee-byeeee."

Ana has taught him "ah-hya," (gracias). I don't think he knows when it's supposed to be used, except at the apparently random occasions when an adult says, "what do you say?" Speaking of thanks, I can't even express how utterly privledged I feel to have this child in my life. I really hate to gush, but really, the amount of happiness and fun and pure joy that this one little being has ushered my way is just mind-blowing.

Total Toddler

That hapless woman at Border's with one hand vice-gripping a toddler's, while the other works at cross-purposes with the toddler's free hand in an attempt to replace all the items he's removing from the shelves? That's me. I used to wonder why anyone would bring a toddler to a place they so obviously can't handle. Now I understand that yes, they're fools, and I am too.

A woman with a limp infant staring placidly from his Ergo narrowly avoids us. She raises her eyebrows as our mass of struggling limbs spans the board book aisle.

Right after I extracted him from the trailer outside the book store, he started making the sign for food. Feeling smug about my maternal competence, I pulled a couple of individually-packaged Annie's fruit snacks from the cargo hold and sat with him on the sidewalk while he ate. For something to do, I read the ingredients and noted that although they're organic, actual fruit is rather late on an ingredient list topped by cane sugar. Now I'm trying to figure out if unrestrained toddler/store is simply a bad combination, or if he got all wired from the bunnies.

But really, he gets free rein to explore most of what's within his reach almost everywhere we go, so how's he supposed to know the difference between a store and the Discovery Museum? A warning to the childless: do not have us over.

This is when I realize We Have a Toddler Now. Other evidence?

1. He diligently practices saying "NA-oo" at all times of day and night. He started this new, contrarian bird call from his crib at 5:30 this morning.

2. He thinks that running away from me--usually toward the street--is the height of hilarity.

3. His response to us telling him not to do something is to do the thing again IMMEDIATELY.

Could he be any more typical?

Bo Bo

Laszlo discovered a new word. He may have been using it for awhile, but the meaning became clear on Saturday afternoon during a visit from Julie, Scott and Jonah. We have our trailer park version of a kiddie pool, a cement mixing tray from Home Depot. It's more heavy and rigid than the usual pool, and short enough that he can get in and out on his own. It's small so it fits nicely on the deck and doesn't take a million gallons of water to fill.

We've been enjoying watching Laszlo run around naked outdoors on warm afternoons. (He no longer walks. Why walk when you can run? His protruberant belly takes the lead, and his legs can't quite keep up, each foot slamming flat on the ground just in time to prevent the face-plant--except when they're not. Arms flail goonily above his head.) We figure all the nakedness outside will be a good way to pottie train the passive, lazy way (my favorite). And he'll get his base tan.

Paul was on the deck with Laszlo and Jonah, when Laszlo looked at him and said, "Bo bo." Not knowing the meaning, Paul nodded and smiled. "Bo bo." Nod and smile. "Bo bo." Laszlo gets out of the water. And squats on the deck. Oh! Bo bo! This was followed by our usual poop-induced panic, flailing our own arms and running around goonily.

Parents out there will understand that besides being a gross story, this is actually a very exciting potty-training development. He's peeing on the pottie a couple of times a day already. Dare we hope that he'll be diaper-free by the time he's two?