Tuesdays with Sadie

6:45 A.M. S-she'll probably go back to sleep.

7 A.M. And we're up for the day. Unfortunately, I had decided that the exciting conclusion to the Thunders vs. Mavs game was worth staying awake for and had gone to bed at 1 A.M. It's hard to measure how good a game is going to be vs. the need for sleep when taking care of a child.

9 A.M. After finishing a fairly routine feeding of s, the whole affair was less gruesome than some of our other events, primarily because squash turns out to the consistency of soup when pureed and thus can't look entirely disgusting when it's mashed all over a face, I noticed that her onesie was a bit wet. And I discovered that a good deal of the squash soup mixed with milk mix had ended up pooled in the bottom of her seat. Thus, I had to decide whether she was wet from your garden variety diaper leak or whether it was admissible to remain in the onesie even if it just had been dampened by squash soup. I decided, bad parent withstanding, that if I had spilled soup on pair of pants that I'd probably stay in them, but that if I had urinated in them I'd probably feel obligated to take them off. I think it's fair to apply the same to a baby. The oneside stayed.

s is currently teething, so she spends most of the day angry/looking for toys, keys, knuckles to gnaw on. This irritability also causes me to have to do crazy things that I wouldn't normally do like watch her closely, and take hour long walks in our neighborhood. But mainly it means that she gets to spend more time in her jumperoo. A jumperoo is sort of like heroin for a baby. And even when she starts to cry after fifteen minutes or so she still continues jumping and whimpering to herself because she knows she can't give it up.

2:00 By this point I'm ready for my second nap of the day, but s shows no mercy. I notice that she's got enough lint stored underneath her layered chins to stop up a dryer. I make ineffectual stabs at removing the stuff while she looks at me wondering what the heck I'm up to. I desist after a while and chalk baby chin lint removal to mom's task.

2:15 By this point in time I'm trying to figure out how to nap while still watching her. She's sitting on the two blankets I've put out for the day grumbling about teething, and I close my eyes for just a moment and when I open them she's rolled over from front to back, which I don't think I've ever actually seen her do, and I suspect that the little urchin has done so on purpose to punish me for being tired and loving basketball.

2:30 To alleviate further discontent we head out to the front porch. The fun part of summer in DC officially ends when the mosquitoes come out. And yes, I know summer hasn't even started yet, but I think it's safe to say its over because s and I were fending off the pests for ten minutes or so. But at first we were just watching the neighborhood, her little neck craning back sometimes and she looks up at me as if to make sure that the lap she's sitting in is actually mine. "I'm here," I tell her, but she's already peering at a car with a cheap muffler bumping down our pot holed street.

And as the mosquitoes start arriving, small pesky things, not the larger things that had occasionally worried my childhood on the west coast. These mosquitoes bite toes and calves, smart enough to ignore the arms and wrists that lead to instant death. And as I'm flailing my arms about wildly in an attempt to keep us both clean a strange sound comes from the little serious and quiet person in my lap. And, after a minute, I realize that s is giggling. Apparently she finds me swinging my arms wildly in an attempt to snatch mosquitoes pretty damn amusing. And for the next three minutes, even though the mosquitoes have gone, I bend my right arm at my elbow and close the fingers of my right hand on an empty air while s fills the day with peals of laughter. Minutes later when a new brave mosquito appears I lean into s's elephant like hair and whisper, "We're on the same team, let me know if you see one."

And by six o'clock when S arrives home we're back on the front porch, only this time I manage to kill four mosquitoes, and s finds my gestures less amusing, perhaps because she can now see that they are not idle, that these hands can kill. I suppose if I have a take away from the day, which was truly tiring, is that I'm excited to have this just over two foot tall wispy haired little girl on my team. It is a good thing.