Baching It

Ugh. Nothing like your daughter waking up an hour & a half earlier than you expected her to to bring out the worst in a guy. Sheesh. This whole past week I've been teaching my summer class, and for some reason The Rozzle has been sleeping in until 7:00, pretty much right on the dot every morning. So, when Miss Tessmacher took off to her TSO gig this weekend, leaving me home alone to play bachelor dad, I thought "Great! Roz will sleep in, and I'll get a little extra shuteye myself!" Which, nope. Despite skipping her afternoon nap entirely yesterday, for some reason she started in with the crib kicking at 5:38 this a.m. That's her newish thing, by the way: just kicking the ever-lovin' SHIT out of her crib, such that it sounds like she's moving furniture around in her room. Big, heavy furniture, like solid cherry bureaus and king-size waterbeds. I desperately sent back-to-sleep vibes out to her, but by 6:15 she was weepy and angsty and I knew that there was no going back. "Don't take it out on her," I kept telling myself. After all, aren't I the lucky guy whose daughter sleeps a reliable 12 hours at night, every night? Alas, I still found myself to be short-tempered, turning my worst passive/aggressive urges on her in a futile pissing contest she wasn't responsible for, let alone that she could even understand. Bleah. Still, we had a pretty enjoyable breakfast, and when I saw how quickly she downed a handful of grapes, some Elmo-Os, her bowl of oatmeal AND nearly a full banana, I realized that the extra-early waking was caused by the bottomless pit of her stomach. Remember in Return of the Jedi, how Luke, Han and their cohorts were to be fed to that gaping desert maw by Jabba the Hut? That maw pretty well represents Rozzle's empty tummy. *Sigh.*

So, at 7:30, when we should have just nicely been coming downstairs, she rubbed her eyes, yawned, and stuck her thumb in her mouth, effectively communicating "I'm tired now, Dad!" So I put her down for a nap, which, HA! Now she's up there kicking holy hell out of her crib and going through an increasing bout of whining and crabbiness. What's a guy to do? Go rescue her, I suppose. More to come.

(...time passes...)

Hokey-dokey, several hours of playing, snacking (while watching a Muppet Show) and reading later, she's down for a REAL nap this time. *Whew!* Single parenthood? Is for the birds. I know, I know...plenty of people do it (including my OWN mother, for much of my childhood), but given that I didn't start out that way, I know there's something better. Easier. Whatever...I'm just really glad I don't have to do this ALL the time.

And, while this nap is likely to last for over an hour, there are probably fifteen other (read: better) things I ought to be doing, but since I started this post, I feel the urge to finish it. So here's an update on what everyone's (okay, MY) favourite girl is up to:

1) Breast feeding is done! This isn't so much OUR choice as it is Roslyn's. Everything I read tells me that "babies don't wean themselves," but that's bunk as far as I'm concerned. Rozzle started slacking off on breast feeding weeks ago, with the obvious consequence that Tess' milk has been slowly waning, and no amount of pumping or beer-drinking has helped. (Seriously: beer increases your milk. Go figure.) We knew that Roz needed to be done by the time she and Tess go up to Interlochen for two weeks, and so we just made the decision: we'd use up the 80 or so ounces of milk currently cramming our freezer full, and Tess wouldn't pump this weekend while she was gone. Voila! Finished. I both laugh and cringe, though, to think that we spent months and months panicking about whether or not we'd have "enough" milk saved up for...well, for whatever we needed it for, and now we're just sort of casually using it up, and even THEN we'll probably throw some away. Ugh. Since July I've come to think of breast milk as being more precious than gold ("white oil," if you will...) and the thought of throwing it away seems more than wasteful...it's somehow sacrilegious. And what I DO give Rozzle in the bottle? She really seems awfully ambivalent about it. I've been giving her 2.5 oz. in the morning and at night, and she almost never finishes it; it's more like, "Oh, thanks, yeah, I was thirsty, come to think of it." She drinks a ton of water now, though, which is interesting.

2) STILL no crawling! She makes more of an effort now, and she really doesn't seem to mind spending time on the floor...but, little headway. On the other hand, STANDING is really coming along. Her balance is pretty good, and when she *Plops!* down onto her bottom she laughs...and then wants to do it again. And again. And again... Every source I read tells me that she'll have SOME sort of pre-walking mobility, but I'm beginning to suspect that rolling is going to suffice for her, and that we'll simply move right into walking. Meantime, at least when I sit her down, I know she ain't going anywhere...

3) Remember when Venkman, Ray and Egon were told that they had to "choose the form of the destructor?" Well, in our household that form isn't the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, it's The Rozzle. Armin Brott told me that Roz would be building block towers like crazy during her 9th or 10th month, but so far all she wants to do is wreck the ones *I* build. I stack 'em up? She knocks 'em down. She will tolerate no toy to ever be stacked or resting or otherwise atop any other. Never. Not ever. If I thought to extrapolate her future career from her present activity, I'd say she's going to one day own her own demolition business. You know, like those people who so artfully implode casinos and buildings and whatnot into relatively neat little piles of rubble? Except, in her case, she's going to invent a far more efficient method whereby the casino would EXplode with such ferocity that every particle of it would be strewn outside the Vegas city limits...thereby eliminating the need for any sort of hasslesome cleanup.

4) She's learned to throw (see #3 above), especially her handy little Fisher Price look-at-the-thing-inside blocks...except she manages to throw everything BEHIND her. We've quit putting pillows behind her when she sits, and she still occasionally goes backward with a thumping "ka-WHAM!", but it never seems to bother her. Now, though, with the throwing everything behind her...well, I can just see her somehow tossing a block and then flopping backwards onto a corner or what have you. Yeah, yeah...paranoid parenting.

Otherwise she's going great, with two ferocious little teeth in her bottom jaw and hand mobility skillz that allow her to pick individual cat hairs off the carpet...to be subsequently tried as a rare delicacy. Ahem. Here are some photos for your perusal, as she nears her first birthday...

Out to lunch on Mackinac Island.

Readin' with Dad.

She actually told me this was "O" when she picked it up.