Tomorrow is Cora’s birthday. She’ll be one year old, which is a pretty momentous event. We had great plans for celebration: Saturday was supposed to be the big family party, with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents in attendance. But it was supposed to snow Friday night into Saturday, and we were concerned that folks wouldn’t feel safe driving, so we moved the party to Monday. Unfortunately, we misjudged, and the title of this newspaper article tells the tale: Snowstorm Pummels Washington Area. So, instead of hoopla from Friday delayed to Monday, everyone is snowed in in their own little houses, and Cora’s birthday will be spent playing with just Mom and Dad.

Now the question is how much of a hoopla do we throw for our one year old? We’ve had the balloons up since Thursday, and Cora and our cat Joe have happily been pulling on the strings. But do we decorate with streamers? Do we put out the other decorations? And, the one I’m personally grappling with, do I decorate the 3-d duck cake that’ll take me probably 2+ hours to decorate? We have cupcakes – Cora actually had one this evening. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to just decorate the cupcakes then go through the headache of decorating this large fowl? (The cake’s already baked, but baking the cake is the smallest part of the effort.)

The rational side of me says that Cora won’t know the difference, and that 2+ hours is a whole lot of time to spend on something. But if I was willing to do that when there were people coming over, what does that say about my motivations? Admittedly, Cora has never really seen a cake before, so the fact that this one is shaped like a duck won’t have much impact on her. When she’s older, that Mom makes cool cakes for her birthday might seem neat. Now, though, is it worth it to Mom to spend that much time? And the sad answer is, no. Apparently, I was willing to make the cake when I’d get the glory from the other folks attending, but I’m not willing to do it when it’s just my daughter and my husband, particularly when there are perfectly acceptable, newly-minted toddler-sized cupcakes on hand.

Found whilst seeking a recipe/instruction set to make a rubby ducky cake for my daughter for her birthday:
“Duck jailed for cake theft”

From the same site:
“The Beard Liberation Front, an informal network of beard wearers, says clean shaven men lead more stressful lives as they have to get out of bed earlier every day.”
So _that’s_ why I’ve never seen my dad without a beard. . .

And it just gets better. . .

A priest brewing beer in his washing machine. . .
“A priest without alcohol, that’s the wrong combination,” he argued.
“Jesus didn’t say, take this healthy camomile tea, he offered wine.”

Cora’s figuring out pecking orders, and lately I seem to be the third person in line for her affections. First comes Daddy, then comes Grandma, and then comes me. Grandma and I actually alternate, I think, in terms of who takes position 2 behind Daddy. Cora will drop everything to go to Daddy; will cry and wail if Daddy comes into the room and doesn’t immediately pay attention to her; gets horribly upset if he leaves her sight. Grandma and I, well, we rate, but we’re just not Daddy.

The way that Cora’s affections work, if a higher ranking person is available, there’s no concept of sharing the love. Oh, occasionally she’ll drop a bone here and there, and go to a “lower-ranked” person for a moment, but she’ll quickly return her attention to the person higher in the pecking order. (Sounds like office politics, doesn’t it?) That means frustration both for the lower-ranking person and occasionally for the higher-ranking one who’s unable to peel away.

Tonight, after discovering I was in position 3 when picking up Cora from Grandma, I felt pretty hurt. Questions of: would it be different if I were home all the time, what am I doing that’s so different, why does Daddy win out – all went through my mind on the drive from Grandma’s to our home. I’m hoping to end up reconciling it with myself with a couple of points. The first is that Cora has lots of people to love because lots of people love her, and that’s a wonderful thing, regardless of where we all stack up in her current pecking order. The second I’ve forgotten because it still smarts that I’ve got to be an adult and forget about the “who’s loved by her best” kind of mental contest. She still loves to be held by her mommy, so long as her daddy isn’t around as an alternative. The third is that two days a week, mommy is around and daddy isn’t around as an alternative until he gets home from work, at which point its wonderful that Cora wants her daddy so that mommy can take care of other things.

Tonight I did make sure to work the system, though, so that I got my Cora-fix. Usually I come pick up Cora and then make dinner. We talk and coo, but I can’t hold her and play with her and still manage to get dinner on the table. So, dinner waited. (We had leftovers in the fridge, anyway.) And we played and cuddled and I got my mommy fix in until Daddy walked in the door. And then I made dinner and got the dishes done, since my hands were suddenly not needed for baby duty.

For those of you who know me only by blog (and there ain’t that many of you – I know how few folks read this thing!), there are a few key characteristics of me that impact this entry. I’m not a girly-girl – I hated dolls as a kid, wouldn’t be caught dead in pink, and my idea of a great afternoon in college was getting muddy playing rugby and finishing off the day with a rousing round of bawdy songs and beer. My knees can no longer handle the rugby thing, but I’d much rather be out fishing/hiking/camping (and drinking beer, though I tend to pass the bawdy songs by) than doing anything that requires me to wear something frilly.

I figured when I had a daughter that I’d introduce her to all of the great virtues of being a tomboy. Sure, she’d have teddy bears, but she’d also play with footballs. At the moment she wears a lot of pink, but face it, there aren’t that many other colors available out there for ten month old girls. (I’m not so out there as to dress her in boy clothes. . . somehow I’m not comfortable putting her in a sweatshirt with little toy trucks on it.)

For Christmas Cora got all sorts of neat stuff. And she’d been playing with it all happily – gender-neutral stuff like stacker cups and Elmo balls and stuffed bunnies (hey, my nephews got the same stuffed bunnies). Then my neighbor showed up with one last Christmas present for her. It sat, unopened, for a couple of hours: Cora really doesn’t get the present thing yet. Finally my curiousity got the best of me and I prodded her to open it. Meaning, I mostly opened it and she played with a piece of the paper. Inside was a baby doll. One with a hard plastic head, plastic hands and feet, dressed in all pink. The very kind of thing that I wouldn’t have anything to do with as a kid, and teased my little sister unmercifully about. In the wondeful karma of life, however, my daughter has adopted this baby doll as her favorite toy. She often picks it up and carries it around, dives into it if it’s on the floor, pets its head. . . My vision of her future as a truck driving/motorcycle-riding/neurosurgeon has suddenly been clouded – suddenly the mist forms into a perfectly coifed, minivanner who is wildly successful running a company that makes Baby Einstein tape knockoffs. (OK, so that that’s not such a bad vision – do you know how popular those Baby Einstein tapes are?)

We’re guessing she might think it’s a baby that’s littler than she is. She’s often watched other babies and tried to interact with them. Maybe this is just a smaller baby from the nursery. Or maybe she’s pretending to be like her mommy and daddy, in which case she has some odd ideas of how we care for her, as she picks up her baby doll by the collar of its shirt.

Whatever the explanation, my utopian vision of a gender-role-blind child has been cracked. It turns out that there might be some kernel of truth to the girls will be girls and boys will be boys idea: my daughter will earn her own sense of what’s right for her as a little girl, and her poor mother will just have to live with it, and maybe get used to the idea of little baby dolls. Just so long as she doesn’t want to become a ballerina. (smile)

Saturday I tried to get Cora’s picture taken with Santa. After her nap and a bath, I primped her hair and dressed in a beautiful green velvet dress. She looked adorable and she was happy. Doesn’t get much better than that in baby picture-taking land. I had scoped out a mall that doesn’t get much business lately, which also means that its Santa line was nearly non-existent, even on the last Saturday before Christmas.

Got to the mall, easily found a parking spot, and headed towards Santa. So far, so good- Cora’s interested, even curious, as we approach Santa’s area. There’s no line to speak of. . . only a few kids wandering up to give Santa their wish list. Cora and I step up. My plan was this: either hand her to Santa or, if that doesn’t look like it’ll work, sit with Santa too and get a Mommy and Cora picture done. Seeing as I hate getting my picture taken, this counts as one of those sacrifices you make for your kids that they don’t appreciate at the time, or possibly ever.

That sacrifice turned out to not be necessary. While Cora was interested in Santa and his workshop, my little girl turned into Worf (a Klingon from Star Trek Next Generation: as in, she “clings on” to my shoulder) and would have nothing to do with looking anywhere but at the fibers of my sweater. So, instead of a beautiful picture of Cora with Santa, we’ll have to make do with this one. . . [that’s probably how she viewed Santa, anyway … ]

Baby puke. . . our first exposure to it was this morning. Smelly, nasty, all through her hair baby puke. The picture I should have gotten was her, being held by her Daddy who’d just unhappily discovered the night’s results. Her hair was sticking up and matted with bits of her dinner from the previous night and she positively reeked, but she had her normal morning wondrously happy to see us face. Funny, just to see the difference between her face and Daddy’s.

She seems fine. We think it was either the beginnings of the cold Jas and I both have, or that the turkey deli meat we gave her the previous evening _really_ didn’t agree with her. Either way, no further episodes, no fever, happy baby, and seriously cleaned crib sheets.

Laura’s blog for today mentioned baby shower games that have the attendees distinguishing baby food carrots from squash. We’ve tasted each of the flavors of baby food that we’ve given Cora, and for the most part, they’re pretty awful. The veggies and fruit are OK, but when you get to the meats, bleccch! What evils we do to our childrens’ tastebuds in the name of what? It’s not nutrition, since at this age our daughter’s still getting most of her nutrients from formula. We’re gradually transitioning more and more to solid food, but she’s still probably getting 50% of her food intake from a bottle.

Speaking of baby food, Grandma C. let us know yesterday that she had heard of an infant formula recall. Scary things – they tell you that there’s some organism that may be in your child’s formula and that may (emphasis on may, as in, in this case, very minute chance) make her very ill. For car seats, cribs, toys, etc, you’re supposed to fill out a product safety card so that they can let you know that some piece may break off if your child manipulates the product in ways hithertofor unseen by humans. But for formula, that stuff you’re putting directly into your child’s system, the recall information is buried on the health section of CNN. And it’s not even a lead news story on the Health section of CNN! For that kind of thing, I want bells and whistles to start flashing, my home phone to start ringing, the formula can itself to lock itself shut. . .

My mother-in-law (who graciously takes care of our daughter 3 days a week so that I can work: thank you!) has made a prediction that our now 8 month old daughter will be walking before she’s 10 months old. Our daughter’s intent on motion – at 6 1/2 months she was scooting/crawling backwards and content nearly only when standing. At 7 1/2 months, she figured out how forward works, and has been taking full advantage of it ever since.

The problem is that I’m just getting used to having a baby who moves from where you put her. It used to be, you could put her down and be fairly certain that she’d stay within a few feet of where you put her. Within the past couple of days, though, she’s figured out that she can crawl to where you are. I’m having trouble adapting. I used to put her down somwhere in sight of whatever it was I wanted to accomplish, give her a toy, and then happily do whatever it was that needed to get done but couldn’t have a baby in the mix (lots of things involving cleaning products fit into this category). The idea of her walking and all the various things that that’ll impact are just frightening! I have some basic idea of what it’ll mean, but I’m certain it hasn’t hit home yet.

We want our child to grow up, to experience and learn new things. It’s all happening very quickly, though, and I’m just not keeping up! I just get used to how things work at one stage, and she’s off and running (figuratively, for now) to the next thing. I have this fear that I’m going to wish my baby was still at some particular stage (I can actually see this wish coming), and that that’s going to convince me that we ought to have another child. Never mind that the logical side of my brain says that babies/kids are a whole lot of work, that my patience level isn’t what I’d hoped it’d be, that two kids are probably more than twice as hard as one kid. Some part of me will want to have a snuggly baby who can’t move more than a few inches away from where I put her.

So, the prediction is that she’ll walk before 10 months. Today’s her 8 month birthday. I’m scared.

Today was my first day without Internet access at my fingertips – I suffered withdrawal. Had to turn my work laptop back in, so didn’t have anything to plug the wireless card into. Cora and I had to just veg, not veg and surf. Surfing was my refuge from just sitting there holding/feeding/entertaining a baby; as long as I could surf at the same time, then my brain was being fed, even if my body just sat there like a lump. Bleah. Lump days aren’t very inspiring.

Theoretically, I could have sneaked a peak at my e-mail whilst my daughter snoozed today, but then, my daughter doesn’t nap like a normal baby. Those moms that have blocks of time to get things done while their kids nap? I’m not one of ’em. I get things done either by holding a baby on my hip, listening to a baby wail because I’m not holding her on my hip, or just waiting until my husband gets home so he can hold her or listen to her wail. Add another invention to my list of useful things they ought to issue to new parents – a marsupial pouch. Nice as the Baby Bjorn was while it lasted, Cora’s too big for it now. She’d like to have a kangaroo for a mommy, thank you very much. Maybe I should just start calling her Joey.

It’s been a long day already. . . Cora’s convinced that the only way she can be happy is if she’s either being held or being supported so that she can stand up. Attempts to play with her/let her play on her own/distract her in any other way are completely nonsuccessful. Sitting down next to her and stroking her or talking with her, etc, have no effect. She’ll sit or lay there and scream. And scream. And scream. Babies don’t much understand the logic that says they’ll never learn to crawl, etc, if mom and dad continue to hold them continuously (much less that mom’s nerves won’t continue to hold out. . .)

So, I put her down. And she screams. And screams. Finally calms down, looks at me again, and screams some more. As soon as she gets distracted (and it takes a while – she’s got a good idea of what she wants!), she calms down. Unfortunately, my cold occasionally makes me cough, which reminds her that I’m there and that she wants me. So, she screams again.

The positive side of all this is that I know she’ll be dedicated in going after what she wants. The negative side of this is it’s only 3:30 and I’ve got a splitting headache. She has finally laid down for a nap, so hopefully I’ll have a breather for at least a little bit.