All Hail Delilah

Delilah is our black lab. She is about 8 years old. She came to live with us around her second birtday. She has matured in to a wonderful loving dog. More than that though, she has become the baby's favourite person in the world. The baby follows her around. Kisses her (well, it is more of an open mouthed head butt at present), pulls her tail, pulls her ears and grabs away her toys. Gives her nary a moments peace and the dog takes it all with aplomb, grace and endless patience. I have seen those jaws grind through a rawhide in seconds, and yet when that little tiny hand reaches in and pulls the tennis ball out, it is as if the teeth were made of cotton wool. I love Delilah.

Wake Up Call

The Fridge, The Rad, The Tooth and Her Dentist

The Fridge
Ok, I want to know how someone who is only 9.5 months old and has only been crawling well for just over a month can move so fast when she wants to. It doesn't matter where she is, in the dining room playing with the dog, in the kitchen staring at her reflection in the garbage can, wherever. I crack the door of the fridge open and the icy cool air has just started to spill out when her hot little body is pressed between my legs reaching into the interior, seeking purchase on shelf, onion or crisper. How can she do it and what is the fascination?

The Rad
We had fancy new wall mount rads put in when we renovated the house last year and the one in the kitchen is situated in such a place that someone who is just learning to stand can use it for balance while raiding the cookie sheet slot, or the recycling or just wants to clean off the window sill. The other day someone was indeed using the rad to hold herself up when she stretched out with one hand to grab a newspaper from the recycling. Her left foot left the ground leaving her balanced between right foot and left hand. Perfect pivot and SMACK her face goes right in to the rad, then WHAM her head connects with the floor. Much crying and plenty of bleeding.

The Tooth
Once the bleeding and crying had stopped - due in the largest part to a hasty and generous application of Breast - it was noticed that a certain young soul now had quite a snaggletooth going on. When you only have 6 teeth, it is pretty easy to spot when you have lopped a third of one off. Her top left front tooth comes to quite a nice point now.


Her Dentist
This occasioned somebody's first visit to the dentist. Turns out that it is only enamel that was chipped off, no root is exposed, and we just have to watch that it doesn't turn grey - which it will if the root was damaged.

Now I am thinking this all ties together because if I had just let her get busy and pull everything out of the fridge like she wanted to then she wouldn't have been at the rad, wouldn't have done the face plant, wouldn't have chipped her tooth and wouldn't have gone to the dentist. Silver lining though - the dentist is in Little India so I got to buy delicous Barfi for the teenager and I to share.

The Teenager

The teenager may be taller than me. (Besides her 2 uncles, she is the tallest on my side of the family.) The teenager may be smarter than me. (When it comes to helping with homework, these days I am more moral support than anything else.) The teenager may have more hair than me. (I was braiding her hair the other morning and she has at least 3x more hair in her pony tail than me.) But I still have bigger feet! Je suis le roi de la pied! Bonne!

Music

I mention in my "about me" that i have a bit of a compulsion for grabbing new music. I really do. To the point where I don't even have time to listen to some of it. Sad I know, but I have sort of always been like this. Not always about music (comic books spring to mind), but always fixating on something. Let's not even talk about my year long love in with DVDs on eBay. I am sooo embarrased. Anyhow, lately I have been grabbing most of my new tunes off other blogs (you can find two of them in the links column to the right hand side) using Rapidshare or some other public sharing site. It is amazing what you can grab. Most sites stick to out of print stuff, but some don't. Even if you don't want to get a premium membership on Rapidshare you can still download about an album an hour, and you just can't beat that. Check out the sites below. I may not like everything they have on offer, but I like at least some of it. Enjoy.

Christmas Music - Already!

Weird old spoken word and music

tons of punk, metal and other stuff

so much reggae - mostly from 70s and 80s

garage - surf - rockabilly - tons and tons of it

whoo whoo old school punk - and plenty of it!

These are just a few of the ones I visit. Most of them have links to tons of similar ones. If you go to check the stuff out make sure to check out the archives of the blogs because there is even more stuff.

This Week

This week has been ok so far. We dropped in on a local community center and they have daily public playtimes with lots and lots of toys that aren't boring yet. We will be back there often during the winter. We had Grandma over for a lunch visit on Wednesday. We have slowly but surly increasing the length of her naps with a couple of hour long ones and an hour and a half one yesterday. We aren't out of the woods yet, most are still 35 minutes, but we shall struggle on. Teething kicked in again today, but not too bad.

The weirdest part about today was eating. Two things were going on - in the house she wanted to feed herself - which is a good thing - except that she only wanted to eat Kiwi and Banana and those tend to mush up before they make it to her mouth. Outside the house she would eat anything that was offered, but it had to been in a specific order otherwise she gave the spoon the big brush off. Today she ate her first dim sum; tofu bun, veggie bun, spring roll, sesame ball. She liked it all, but the yellow bean paste in the sesame ball was the clear winner followed closely by the tofu.

We were downtown by the dim sum place because we had a doctors appointment. She had this wicked diaper rash and bruises on her face and legs. The doctor looked her over and pronounced her fit and fine and sent us on our merry way. (In the doctors defense - we had already pretty much vanquished the rash and the bruises were clearing up.)

I love being home, and although it is WAY more work in some ways than going to work I don't want it to end. For my coworkers who think i am on vacation (yes Mr. Lopez - I am looking at you) I can only say, try it yourselves gents and let me know how vacationy it is.

Good and Bad

The reunion was nice, the rest of the weekend had it's ups and downs.

We fought for most of it. It wasn't even good cleansing fighting, it was slow silent angry death by attrition fighting. The kind where even if one of you wants to make up the other one is still too mad and that sets the wanting to make up one off again and on and on. I hate it. To be honest things still aren't all better, but they are getting there. There is nothing like parenting plus the inherent sleep deprivation plus the surly "bear with a sore paw" part of my personality to make fighting an inevitable. Add to that my hangover on Saturday morning and BOOM.

We visited friends on Saturday and they were really really nice to us, and gave us TONS of their daughters too small clothes and loaned us a LeapFrog Music Table (mixed blessing there - I don't know how many more times I can listen to that insipid leapfrog woman's voice saying things like "open" "close" "red" "triangle" etc. etc. without going mad.) While we were in their backyard the baby took her first stabs at art. She didn't draw the teddy bear thing, but she did make the emphatic dashes and slashes below it.

Reunion

The Toronto Midwifery Collective had their annual Baby Picnic last saturday in Dufferin Grove park and we went. It was a pretty good time, lots of babies, lots of old friends and plenty of midwives. Sadly only one of ours was present but it was good to see her. It was also a chance to reunite all the babies from the pre-natal class - well almost all, there is one family that has never really been interested in keeping in touch. It was a great place to eat lots of sugary junkfood. MMMM mini donuts. We took something healthy, but I ate crap. Baby got to try her first Masal Dosai, and her first not made by me daal. One of the nice things about baby poo is that it makes it really easy to remember what you fed them the day before. The daal was very easy to distinguish on Sunday morning.

The Horror, The Horror.

I knew of course, the way one knows that you have to look both ways when you cross the street, that giving a baby a nursing cookie was a dangerous and messy thing. But knowing is one thing, acting on knowledge is another, and just like people still get run over, I gave the baby a nursing cookie the other day. Sure, it calmed her down, and eased her pain, and kept her busy, but oh my stars and garters, the mess! It is like they make them out of some form of ancient horse hoof based glue with a bit of sugar. Add saliva and it turns into a sticky brown paste that adheres to everything, imbeds itself into any fabric it touches, and leaves the sickly sweet smell of molasses on everything around it. MMMMMMM. Complaining aside, they really do work, and I sure was sore that I forgot to take one with me today, half way through Mount Pleasant Cemetary she started in a wailing, and cheerios just weren't cutting it. The picture isn't from the incident with the cookie that involved the inside of the ear, the eyelid, the back of the head and the feet (I was too traumatised to take pictures that time), it was when I just gave her a little corner to chew on.

Over a week already gone!

Crikey,

over a week of my paltry 3 months at home is already gone! Crap, this isn't going to be nearly long enough. It is so great spending all day with the weeny one, I can't bear the thought of her going off to daycare and me going to work.

Now that said, let me make a few things clear. As great as being with her is, there is no respite from it (especially with her being a 35 minute nap taker), and too much of anything - even a good thing - can get wearying after a while. As well, I have nothing against daycare, and particularly not for profit - licensed - unionised daycare - hello campus co-op. The teenager went to daycare at Campus Co-op and it was a totally positive experience all round, she came out better and so did I. I am just not ready to send the baby off. I am not really ready to go back to work now, but I am sure I will be itching for it eventually. You can't do something every day for like 20 years and not want to keep at it on some level.

Everything has been getting better here with each day. After about 4 nights of pulling the weeble move and sleeping sitting up she started laying down, and has even started putting herself back to sleep when she wakes up. She hasn't cried for more than 4 minutes for about 5 nights. SWEET! I got her laying down on her own by practising on the bed during the day. I would sit her down, then lie down myself and ask her to do it. The first dozen or so times I had to help her down, and now she practically flings herself face down. I guess her muscles learnt how, because she is the same way at night by herself. We couldn't have done the whole sleeping on her own thing without the loan of the video monitor from our friends X and A. You two rock and have made our lives better.

It is wicked good as well to have the wife and the teenager back at school. What you say? What? No really it is. Firstly I missed the big one while she was gone all summer, and secondly getting back in to the swing of things makes the days flow smoothly. Getting the dinner made, the lunches made, the fruit salad made for breakfast. When I go to sleep at night I know I have the whole of the next day primed to go. I can go to sleep contentedly. Nerdy perhaps, but it does float my boat.

Every day we go to the park at least once, some days 3 times. We also go to the library 2 or 3 times a week, and starting soon sign language mother goose, and super indoor toysville playground. Maybe even story time. Who knows. The picture in this post are from the big park, and the sweet little t-shirt was from our friends A & JJ, who run the wicked business Front Door Organics which you should check out, especially if you are from Toronto and could use it. I do, and even if they didn't give my baby shirts I would still say it is a good thing.

Every day at about 2.30 we walk down to the wife's school and meet up for some serious nursing acksh once the kids are dismissed. It makes for a great cap to the afternoon, and a nice walk home. Did i mention that I am already freaking out about my return to work?

All and all this has been a great week, and I feel sorry for you all that you aren't here.