Wednesday with Sadie

6:45
S: I think she's up for the day.
M: Uh.


7:07
s's trilling finally upshifts into full blown crying, so I get out of bed.

7-8

s scoots around on the floor yelling like an insane person.



At one point she says something that could probably be inferred as mama. Like any good dad, I started chanting dada over and over for a solid ten minutes. s mainly looked confused until I started in with the m's again. Ingrate child.


Feeding time

I put her on blankets and let her feed herself bottles on her own these days. I do it because I'm trying to teach her independence. I'm also doing it because my e-mail doesn't check itself.

Later feeding time

I put on her bib and give her some squash with rice cereal. I accidentally taste some forgetting that it includes breast milk. I nearly die. s is getting better at eating, by which I mean she just opens her mouth as if she's a trash compactor and takes it in. Apparently it's better if they're all involved in the process and try to grab the spoon, but to hell with that, it makes a mess. Besides which maybe it will create a solid co-dependency that will have her living with us when she's forty.

10-12 She crawls around on the floor doing a pretty adequate job mopping the floor. Occasionally she makes her way over to an audio toy and pushes some buttons, then, as the noise starts, she looks over at me and smiles proudly. Yes, s, you did that, I tell her, in case she didn't know.

1:45

She starts scooting towards me while rubbing her eyes. That's the great part about kids, sometimes they'll just let you know when they need to go down for a nap. It takes all the pressure off you. Besides which, I'm virtually inured to brief bouts of crying at this point. (I'm less immune to the crying that results when I do something like smack her head against the stroller as I'm picking her up off the floor because I feel guilty. Not that that happened today).

The long and the short of my day with s is that she started to learn how to talk. And by talk I mean insanely jibber. And in the process of insanely jibbering she opens her mouth really wide as if she thinks that when speaking a person should look like Kermit the Frog.

I'm not sure we're really into consonants yet, but I found that she was able to entertain herself more today. One time I left the room only to come back and find her having gone about ten feet over to where she could gnaw on one of mommy's sandals. Ergo; I don't know if her culinary distinction is quite where we'd like it. Of course, when I saw her with the shoe I replaced it with one of mine and said, "Dada," because that's just good parenting.