May, 2010

not that we were particularly in the running for “parents of the year” so far, but our application was burnished this week when we successfully went the whole weekend without killing our daughter.

not for lack of trying, mind you.

the weekend started with sparklet rolling through the lady sparkler’s hands, off the impromptu changing table, and onto the (fortunately well carpeted) floor. daddy took it a step further by tossing sparklet into the air — and directly into a low-hanging door frame.

not to be out done, baby sparklet taught herself how to open a dresser drawer, and then close it on her hand.

fortunately, sparklet barely noticed all the varied attempts on her life, and mommy has been formally introduced to the “no blood, no foul” rule.

or is it “that which does not kill you makes you stronger?”

sparklet has two days of swimming under her rather stylish two-piece bikini (and mostly matching hat) now, and she seems to be getting the basics.

on day one, when she got tired, she’d put her face down on the carpet … only to find that the carpet was liquid and made it sorta hard to breathe.

by day two, she was putting her face down on purpose, trying to lick the water. i’m pretty sure this is a step forward, unless we’ve just gotten her addicted to clorine.

oh, and check out that faux-hawk head of hair. it’s not much, but mom is SUPER excited.

Well, turns out the doctor was right and sparklet hadn’t seen the worst of her virus, yet. (It took four days of vomiting on daddy to get to that point.)

Things are finally looking up, but sparklet has developed a quirk in the last week that we hope don’t develop into a permanent asterisk at the end of her current title of “best baby ever.”

Namely, she’s begun to see naps as a parent-sponsored means of torture. We can’t even lay her on he back without screams of bloody murder and looks of abject betrayal.

To combat this new development, we’ve had to resort to Karl Rove-ian levels of subterfuge … including long, long walks around the neighborhood in the morning and deviously timed car trips in the afternoon.

Before swimming yesterday, we spent 45 minutes in the parking lot of Sonic, because sparklet finally fell asleep and we we’re paralyzed with fear that twitching a solitary muscle would cause her to wake up.

Things could be worse, obviously — our child could actually BE karl rove.

this is us waiting for the pediatrician … only there were so many people in line before us that we had to wait outside.

seriously.

baby sparklet picked up a bug last week at an impromptu play date, and it all came to a head today. she’s not sleeping and lot of congestion — basically a head cold on steroids.

we got an appointment with the pediatrician for 4pm, and when i arrived there were 13 (thirteen!) babies and toddlers in line in front of us. i think it’s possible they might have overbooked.

there was no place to sit — and with 13 sick babies around i wasn’t exactly prepared to drop her in the sick-baby playgroup in the middle of the waiting room.

it took about an hour and ten minutes to even get into the back (and two hours to get in and out completely) but sparklet eventually got a clean bill of health. doctor thinks it’s just a virus, and that it just needs to work through her system, but that it’ll likely get worse before it gets better.

meanwhile, i think we’re going to start looking a pediatricians a little farther away from downtown …