Toddler Speak

A list of funny things Lana said in the past week:

1. To her father, after he said good night to her:
   
   “Good night, girlfriend!”



2. To her Pop, after he passed her another french fry at dinner:
   
   “Good boy!”



3. To the My Little People Busy Town lift the flap book she was reading on the couch:
   
   “People, and bicycles, and boats, and doggy, and good buddies, and butterflies…”
   
   [Good buddies are what she has decided to call squirrels, it turns out.]



4. To the bin of diapers, which now includes Princess-themed Easy Ups and Dora Pull Ups:
   
   “Fun ladies, fun ladies, and dis… dis here panties.”



5. To me, after I asked how the newly-bathed Rico smelled:
   
   “Yummy!”



6. To the tissue I threw away after wiping her nose:
   
   "Bye, bye, booger!"

Gym Rat

When I began taking Lana to a local Baby Power and Forever Kids for a weekly parent/child enrichment class, I hoped she would get practice interacting with children her own age and learn to feel comfortable in a group setting. Mission accomplished. She's not only gained confidence around new people and children, but she's also learned a variety of new songs, the importance of taking turns, and how everyone should pitch in to help clean up. What could be wrong with that?

What could be wrong is that the child has become absolutely obsessed with "the Gym", as she likes to call it. We go to class on Friday morning and to Open Gym at least once a week, but it is never enough. Most days, Lana wakes up in the morning and immediately asks, "Gym?" I often tell her that the gym is closed (which is usually true), at which point she sadly repeats "Gym closed" and shakes her head slowly like she's contemplating the injustice of global hunger.

Lately I've noticed that Lana has taken a different approach to her quest to spend every waking moment at the gym. She's begun placing pretend phone calls to her grandparents, perhaps as practice runs until she manages to hit the right call back number on our caller ID. Here are the transcripts from calls placed last night:

"Hey Granny. Hi. Gym fun. Jump, slide. Boys. Ok. Uh huh. Gym? Ok. Bye bye."

"Hi Pop. Love you. Gym? Bye bye."

Should I be more alarmed that she's already figured out how to bypass Mom and Dad and ask the grandparents or that she's already talking about boys?

Can’t Top Pop

Two weekends ago my mother (Granny T) and father (Pop) came by to visit with Lana while John and I played our last match of the mixed-doubles tennis season (it was a crushing victory, in case you care). During the visit, Pop took a mylar balloon that I gave to Lana on Valentine’s Day and began throwing it around the living room by the weight at the end of its string. Eventually the balloon became lodged in our ceiling fan and wacky hijinks ensued.

End of story, right? Not hardly. Lana now takes great pleasure in retelling the details of the incident at least five times a day, EVERY day. It begins with animated pointing at the ceiling fan and chants of “Pop, Boon (balloon), Pop, Pop!” I am at this point obligated to indicate that I understand what she’s telling me – “Yes, Pop threw the balloon up into the fan.” She then nods happily, her whole body bobbing up and down as she recalls the thrill of seeing the balloon stuck in the fan. Once the nodding stops the grunting begins – this is my cue that I have reached the question and answer portion of the story. “Was Pop supposed to throw the balloon into the fan?” I oblige. “NO,” Lana replies and furrows her brow in an attempt to look stern and serious. “How did the balloon get down?” I ask. She thinks for a moment and then her face lights up as she exclaims, “Ganny! Ganny! Boon!” I interpret this as “Granny got the balloon down.” Lana flashes me a huge grin and then as quickly as the story began it is over, at least for the next 15 minutes.

I am both impressed by her memory of this incident and a little concerned that a balloon in a fan has been the highlight of her month. It seems we need to get out more.

Sometimes You Have to Laugh

Lana is generally a very sweet and happy little girl. Sometimes, however, she likes to remind me that she is also a toddler that wants things done her way. I try to be as accommodating as possible, but there are times when I just can’t do things her way. Like when it’s 20 degrees outside and all she wants to do is stand in the driveway pointing at the snowman, the birds, the planes, and the boys playing football until her nose turns black and falls off.

This is what it looks like when things don’t go her way:


I’m still not exactly sure how to handle these tantrums, other than to run get my camera and document them. In my quest for insight, I turned to an ever reliable source – Vicki Iovine. She was so helpful and funny in The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy that I was excited to find she also wrote a guide to toddlers. Here’s how she describes them:

“…they are the raw and uncensored examples of our human nature. They are the urges, frustrations, desires and fears that all of us feel, but they have absolutely no veneer of civilization to make them more palatable to their fellow human beings.”

Is that a great description, or what? I haven’t made it very far into the book so I still don’t have a strategy for dealing with tantrums, but I did find something to improve my mood. The author of one of my favorite blogs, The Sneeze, has a hilarious post about a Christmas experiment with his young child and Raisins. Enjoy.

Reasons I’m Running Low on TUMS

1. Lana came down with a cold last week, her very first illness. While we felt very fortunate to have made it 15 months without more than a runny nose, we also felt totally unprepared for the snotty, congested, cranky toddler that we found ourselves living with. Fortunately she is mostly recovered now and I’ve decided not to update the Rage Level Alert.



2. The Christmas lights, not content with just pissing me off, have moved on to trying to poison my baby with lead.



3. The vaccination Lana received two weeks ago may have been contaminated with bacteria.



4. At least 17% of the toys we already own or might purchase for Christmas are covered in lead.



5. Our kids are living in a stew of chemicals and environmental toxins.



6. The woman on the tums.com site, which I visited to check if TUMS should be in all caps (it should), won’t shut up about “taking my order.” I’ll take two smooth-dissolve TUMS and a new site design, thanks.

Now I’m off to buy a big plastic bubble.

Things to remember when she’s a teenager

Lana has reached a point in her life where she is ridiculously cute and fun to be around. Everyday she does something that makes me laugh and marvel at this amazing little person that John and I have created. I would rather spend time playing with her than almost anything, and that includes sleeping late or eating chocolate cheesecake.

The only downside of all this cuteness is that I frequently worry we have reached the point of maximum fun – a peak in the Gantt chart of mother/daughter bliss that will slowly decline until the day she becomes a teenager and responds to all my questions with an eye roll and dramatic sigh. It can happen, just ask my poor Mom.

It is this concern that drives me to document and commit to memory every adorable moment of this wonderful stage in her life. These are the things I never want to forget:

• The way her face lights up and she says, “Heeeey!” when she sees me.


• The way she reaches for my hand when she needs support.


• The way she crinkles her nose when she laughs.


• The way she wraps her arms around my legs and buries her face in them when she’s feeling shy.


• The way she adores my singing.


• The way she offers her most cherished possession, her bunny blanket, to children she meets.


• The way she makes me feel like the luckiest woman in the world.
  

My Princess Problem

I don’t care for princesses. Sure, I’ve seen the Disney movies and don’t have any particular beef with the female heroines – I just prefer a scrappy Little Orphan Annie to the passive Sleeping Beauty. I chose not to swath my baby girl’s room in pink or to buy clothing and accessories with “Princess” emblazoned on it. I thought by doing so I had put the kibosh on my princess problem. I was very, very wrong.

I’ve come to learn that the prevailing princess culture is impossible to avoid as the mother of a baby girl. When I walk into my local Wal-Mart, I’m surrounded by blond-haired, blue-eyed princesses plastered on pink tricycles, pink toys, pink pajamas, pink everything. As I dig through the toy bins trying to find a non-princess-themed ball for Lana, a stranger walks by and says, “What a pretty little princess you have there!” And then this catalog arrives in my mail last week, its cover the visual illustration of almost all my pet peeves (only the vanity license plate is missing). I suppressed my gag reflex and turned the page to look for “Lil’ Princess” alternatives, only to find the next four pages filled with “Lil’ Quarterback” and “Lil’ Slugger” designs in various shades of blue and brown.

When did this rigid segregation of boy and girl begin? Why is it completely impossible for me to purchase an athletic-inspired toy for my daughter without settling for something designed specifically for a boy? What do I do when Lana grows up enough to develop her own preferences, and inevitably becomes obsessed with the pink princess wares? Is there really any harm in it, or am I just pushing Lana toward my own interests in the same way that other moms encourage participation in cheerleading and beauty pageants?

That’s a lot of questions, I know. In my quest for answers, I stumbled upon an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine titled, “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?” by Peggy Orenstein. In it, the likeminded author examines her own reservations with princess culture and the brilliant marketing of princess products by Disney and other companies. According to Orenstein, Disney’s “Princess” line is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has every created, but it is also on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

Despite her personal opinions, Orenstein offers a complete examination of the princess craze and its origins. She notes that:

“There are no studies proving the playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs – who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty – are more likely to be depressed than others…What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine.”

She also examines other studies that warn of detrimental effects for girls who are encouraged to “have it all,” but instead feel pressured to be it all – athletic, smart, strong, and adorable.

“In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time.”

The conclusion appears to be that there are no real answers, that princess may be just the first of many contradictions our daughters will invariably face while growing up female. The best we can do is love them, support them, and hope that their generation succeeds in finding more answers than their mothers and grandmothers before them.

Happy Birthday MomGenes!

It’s true what they say about babies – they grow up fast. Today marks the one year anniversary of my very first blog posting about my pregnancy. When I began the site, I envisioned it as a way to chronicle my journey into motherhood. A place to post updates on my progress, photos of our baby preparations, and other minutia that only those with genetic ties would have any interest in following.

Much to my surprise, friends and family began visiting the site on a regular basis and passing it on to their own friends and acquaintances. I actually began attracting loyal readers – people who for some reason or another connected with my stories. I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every person who has visited my site and posted a comment or provided some other form of support. Your compliments and encouragement have motivated me to keep posting, the result of which is an amazingly thorough and honest record of my pregnancy and the first year of Lana’s life. It’s something I hope she will value later on in her life, once she gets past the embarrassment of having her bodily functions described in excruciating detail.

To celebrate this milestone, I present a brand new site design and a renewed promise to bring you more stories about my beautiful baby girl, adventures in parenting, favorite baby gear, and of course, baby poop! Please let me know what you think.

Baby's First Play Date

Lana had her first official play date over the weekend when Kim, Michael, and their four-month old daughter Alexandra came to visit. Kim and I were both journalism majors at UGA and we had one class together our senior year. We didn’t get to know each other then, though – Kim was an advertising major and I was in public relations. In the small world of the J-school, that’s like the Bloods and the Crips, except we battled with Photoshop and annoying perkiness instead of guns and intimidation. Kim and I later became friends when we worked together after college, and we kept in touch after Kim and Michael moved to California several years ago. Through email, we shared our pregnancy complaints and the joy of the birth of our daughters just one month apart.

When Kim and Michael moved back to Georgia last month, we jumped at the chance to see them again and get our two girls together. I didn’t expect much in terms of interaction between the girls because they are still so young, but Lana and Alex seemed genuinely interested in each other and even reached out to hold hands at one point.

As cute as that was, it was even cuter to see how our guys have come into their own as dads. John couldn’t wait to hold Alex and was genuinely disappointed when she cried as he held her. “If babies don’t want to be held, they shouldn’t be so cute,” he told me. Later on when Lana grabbed the sleeve of Alex’s hoodie, Michael captured the moment perfectly when he used a baby voice to ask, “Is that velour? Where did you get it?” These are two very cute and very lucky Daddy’s girls.