A conversation with M-: I don't 'wike' it either

My wife doesn't seem to understand how to properly manage our 18-month-old daughter M- and her often bizarre behavior as well as I do, particularly when it comes to eating. But this not-atypical conversation shows how it's done:

M-: Hun-gree. Hun-gree!

Me (pouring Kix into her Snack Trap cup): Okay, baby.

M-: Mmmm, sear-yuhl! Thankoo, Dad-DEE.

Me (holding out the cup to her): You're welcome.

M-: No! Don't wike it, any-moe!!

Me (sternly): Yes, you do-- now you eat them.

M- (changing to a sunny, smiley face and walking towards me with a hand outstretched): Okay, okay-- thankoo-Daddee!

Developments at our house, Vol. 9

Here are some more recent developments around these parts:

1. M- has taken to singing along with our cell phone ring tone, which is the Super Mario theme song. She figures with the icy knife of cuteness that is a 17-month-old saying, "Doot, doot, doot, doot-doot-DOOT!" she can control us like marionettes. She's probably right.

2. I realized while briefly lecturing D- on something that he has no basis for understanding what air quotes are supposed to signify, so I'm left wondering whether he gets a vague understanding from their context or if he's totally lost. I'd love to see the world through his eyes for just minutes at a time.

3. The shampoo I'm currently using is made to smell like a Fresh Berry Smoothie. It smells good, but I'm not sure how they arrived at this particular flavor of shampoo. I think flavor has got to be the right word, because that's what they seem to be going for, rather than having people just smell like something clean. I think I might submit the idea for a "Fresh Cheeseburger" flavored shampoo to all the major players, to see how many million-dollar offers I get.

4. After a handful of experimental instances over a couple of days, D- very solemnly declared one evening over a game of Cariboo that he now has new names for us-- "Dad" and "Mom". I don't think it's possible to type out how deliberately he pronounces these truncated names for us, so I won't even try, but each time he says them I'm struck with the reassurance that it will soon pass, at least for five more years.

I'm thinking of starting a pool with J-, and anyone else who wants in on the action, as to how long this will last before he forgets all about it. I'm also thinking of starting a separate pool with everyone but J- on whether her obvious irritation with this will make it stick before he can forget*.


* Properly pronounced "free-get" if you are a 4-year-old, it seems.

Corporate intelligence: Hydrogenate this!

By this point in the campaign by the nation's sanctimonious (myself included), I think we're all aware of how toxic partially hydrogenated oils are. Semi-solidity at room temperature is not a natural state for most liquids, and does not make for a friendly substance in your body.

However, because it's cheaper than similar natural substances and because it help keep food from turning into a science project* that even the uninitiated can recognize as an unhealthy thing to put in one's body, the country's mom-and-pop food producers pump it into most everything we eat.

This tide has been slowly turning for a few years, as corporations try to respond to what vocal demand there is while still making sure to increase profits enough to not be considered "stagnant" (dun-dun-dunnnnn!).

However, this effect clearly does not extend to product lines aimed at the poor and/or desperate, such as vending machine and convenience store foods or generic store brands. The only exhibit you need is this jar of generic peanut butter we unwillingly purchased, which contains as its third ingredient the elusive Fully Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil:
What's more, they go on to specify in parentheses the vegetables whose oils they are fully hydrogenating, beginning with the startlingly named Rapeseed. Now, if you were trying to convince someone to buy your product versus another, you'd use the happier-named Canola breed. But when you know you've got your target market right where you want them, you have no need for artifice, and you just do the cheaper, easier thing and let them know exactly what you're giving them.

Mmmmm... nothing like some good old hydrogenated rape to keep you going through the afternoon!


* A fact that of course indicates even filthy mold spores can't find much nutrition in these alleged food substances.

Household occurrences likely to revisit me in nightmares

Here are several events at our house, most from this morning alone, that I believe I'll be seeing replayed in some form in the coming nights whenever I manage some sleep:

1. M- firmly poking the bottom of an open box of cereal on the table and me lunging forward to catch it just before it turned upside down. I haven't always been so lucky. (In my nightmares, I'm sure the box will always be just out of my reach.)

2. D- standing on the rug between the dining room and kitchen saying, "I'm having an accident!"

3. M- streaking through the dining room with a Spider-Man fork stolen from the dishwasher.

4. M- climbing all over me like a boa constrictor, onto and off of the chair, moaning, "No, no, no, noooooo!" over and over again for no apparent reason other than sniffles and crankiness (it was before 8).

5. D- holding a ball and taking aim at my happy place while I demonstrate how to stand upon the parallel bars at the park. (Luckily it was only a Nerf ball so it didn't hurt, but still I saw the look in his eye-- it was a vicious one expectant of painful hilarity.)

6. M- taunting D- by walking across the family room with his Corduroy bear and, instead of giving it back as originally ordered, slapping him twice across the face with it (like Monty Python's Fish Slapping Dance) and running back away.

7. Driving off a giant mushroom and falling into a bottomless pit, like I did a couple times last night in MarioKart Wii. (In my nightmares, I'm sure the magic man on the cloud will never come to save me.)

8. M- splashing her hands in the toilet saying, "Pee-pee, pee-PEEEE!" (we've gotten thisclose to it several times now), before bidding it bye-bye while waving as she has been doing for the past few weeks.

9. Closing a fresh, clean diaper, standing up and turning around, and then detecting a dreadful hint of baby byproducts. Yes, M- tends to be picky where she defecates, but then so do some adults.

10. A massacre by a rampaging spoon-spork hybrid. Okay, I only read about it, but I have a very impressionable brain, and things like that tend to stick. At least it's better than a velociraptor attack.

Things that should revisit me in my dreams:

1. M- comforting a crying D- by saying, "eye-ing", offering a kiss and hug, and then sitting down to let him read her the book (Good Night, Maine) they had been fighting over earlier.

Thar's GOLD in thut thar water!

Let me begin by stating for the record that M- has a problem confusing her tub seat with the toilet (which she has yet to begin using, ahem... so much for her being extremely advanced). For more information, see item #6 in my 10 reasons my 3-year-old son may NOT be homosexual post, and also possibly another post I can't remember and am too lazy to find.

Suffice to say, that post would mention that she opens (at the very least) each bath and shower by wetting herself, whether or not she just took off a fully loaded diaper. As yet another side note, this surprises D- every single time, judging by his tone as he calls out, "Her peed!!"

Anyway, the other day M- was apparently overcome with thirst only once I started getting her clothes off for shower time, because she had just turned down a cup of milk not 5 minutes earlier. I'll stop here for a moment in case you're considering stopping here yourself, and let me reassure you it doesn't get as bad as it sounds it might.

She sat in her tub seat (as a $1 thrift-store find of Katie's, it's in a lower weight class of the same league as my dishwasher), lunging towards the falling water with a bath-toy cup, desperately trying to catch a few drops of that precious first water out of the shower, which as we all know is generally of a temperature just slightly warmer than Absolute Zero.

After middling success in this endeavor, she noticed a much more appealing alternative: the alluring golden mead that had started pooling in her seat. Now, this is a kid who loves new and exotic things as well as watered-down juice, so I think she saw in this a Venn Diagram of ecstasy. She pointed and pulled out most of her beverage-based repertoire, calling, "Joo! Joooo! (juice) Tir-tee! (thirsty) 'Wink! 'Wink! (drink)" as she tried to think of a way to get this newest flavor of Kool-Aid into her mouth.

Suddenly, Daddy found much more success than M- had in getting that shower water down to the baby, and just like that, the magic elixir of the gods vanished as quickly as it came. Much like leprechauns do. Maybe they brought it? The world may never know.

Oh, that's an old bowling injury...

J- discovered, as did I many months ago, that with the advent of Wii Sports, it's possible to strain much more than just your thumb while playing videogames. Two hours of Wii Bowling may get you (J-) a lot closer to Professional status (a.k.a. Dan League), but it can also get you a sore shoulder and hamstring.

As a seasoned veteran, I know enough to recognize Wii Shoulder on the horizon and to switch to lefty in response, so I was in the clear the next day. There's nothing like watching someone lay on the couch after a long day of work only to hear her complaining about being sore from all the videogames she played on the weekend.

The sad thing is, you may have noticed we're on a bit of a Wii kick of late, and odds are good we'll both be right back at it today. She should probably let herself heal up before facing me again, but then she's just as competitive as me. Maybe I'll do some Wii boxing during naptime today, to keep it fair. With our luck, we'll both be stiff as zombies tomorrow.

Recipe for destruction

While typing up one of the blog posts this week, I was frequently leaning back in my chair to peek into the dining room where the kids were playing, all of 12 feet from me, and the following happened in the space of 2 minutes between peeks:

D- threw a giant rubber ball at M-'s Snack Trap cup full of Goldfish crackers, which jostled the lid loose. I had heard the ball throwing and scolded him, but he neglected to mention the result of said throw, which is out of character for him.

With the lid loose, M- was duty-bound to pull it the rest of the way off and silently (somehow) dump the crackers on the floor, and D- was curiosity-bound to watch without alerting me. M- proceeded to delicately stomp on each of the crackers while D- had a grand old time consistent with any unsuspicious and legal game of merriment.

And here's how aptly named our household routine is:

I leaned back over, saw the enormous mess all over the floor (luckily hardwood), and invoked M-'s full name in a stern voice. Without prompting, she immediately sat herself down (of course on some crackers that had survived the massacre up to that point), and quietly awaited my strides over to her. She greeted my arrival with as droll a recital of, "No, no, no" that a 1-year-old could possibly manage.

Employing parenting instincts so finely honed in the fire of raising a previous baby, rather than reacting to this magic word or dignifying her defiantly smug mockery, I simply said, "That's right-- 'No, no, no!' " I then lectured her as usual, finished rolling her in the cracker crumbs, and baked her for 45 minutes until golden brown.

Developments at our house, Vol. 2

Some more developments at our house in the past day or so:

1. D- declared while standing in our shower yesterday that "it smells like Hot Pepsi." I have no idea what this means, and when pressed, it became clear that he didn't either.

2. M- has developed a need... a need for speed. She got her first taste yesterday of D-'s old Power Wheels Lil' Quad ATV, and she was very disappointed to have worn the battery out. To quote her as she stood up on the running boards in her knee-high leather boots (another story), fruitlessly mashing the red ignition button, "Go, go, go!!!"

3. D- has decided that he thoroughly enjoyed my explanation of how even big kids sometimes make bad decisions (we live right near a junior high school...), because their brains are growing a lot in a short time, just like little kids' brains. His new favorite word to say over and over is "teenagers". I foresee saying that one a lot myself, with a much different tone, in about 10 years.

4. J- has been staying at my parents' house during my sister's Spring Break, as they try to finish the planning and preparation for the wedding shower they are throwing my brother's fiancee tomorrow. We've decided life is much less fun without Mooooommmmma around.

(We aren't all staying over since the shower will be at my parents' house, and they said something about kids and their messes being counterproductive to cleaning...)

5. The TV made a liar out of me after I told D- that there wasn't enough snow yet to go sledding today (which is true). After watching Lilo and Stitch (awesome movie, by the way), the DVR went back to the news just long enough for D- to see a kid "making the best out of this unwelcome return to winter" by sledding down over the vaguely white grass. We just sat and watched in silence, probably with the same unfortunate expression on our faces.

I knew there was a reason I get all my news from the Internet.

Note: Here are the other volumes.

Portrait of the dishwasher of a young man

I just wanted to share with you all one of the not-so-minor joys of my life: my dishwasher.
This is not just some ordinary dishwasher, though dishwashers in general are right below the washing machine and microwave for the greatest inventions of the 20th century. I guess the refrigerator would have to figure in there somewhere as well, but even the car takes a back seat to the ability for me to put all my faith into a machine that washes dishes for me.

I never feel like dishes that are hand-washed by me are really, actually clean. As I put those dishes back in the cabinet, I feel a secret shame that people will assume in looking at them later that they were cleaned, when in reality they were merely wiped with soap and water until I couldn't see any more specks on them. The dishwasher, my friend, absolutely neutralizes all dirt and contamination at extremely high temperatures. Nothing is cleaner. Don't disillusion me, please.

Anyway, my particular dishwasher (a White-Westinghouse) is more than just a dishwasher-- it is an apartment-sized, portable, four-wheeled wonder that only cost me $10 at a moving sale. Almost 4 years ago back in Maine, we were lucky to come upon someone desperate to sell it the day before they officially moved to a house that already had a full-sized dishwasher. Granted, it was probably about 10 years old at that point, and someone had inadvisably clipped the grounding prong off the plug, but after easily installing a $2 heavy-duty grounded appliance plug, we were in business with what would be a $400 appliance to buy new.

This dishwasher has already made it through one cross-town move and one cross-country move, and it's still going strong. Sure, a couple of years ago it went through a minor bout of incontinence, but that cleared up as quickly and mysteriously as it occurred. And one of the casters broke during our first move, but even that broken caster (possibly part of the source of the incontinence) held the thing up for about a year before I finally remembered to buy a new one. Now it's better than new and glides like a dream.

I think I just might even love it more than my children. In my defense, neither of my children has yet washed even one dish for me.

If you think I have an unhealthy obsession with this dishwasher, you may be right. But if this is wrong, then I want to be very, very wrong. Sigh...

Kiki's delivery service

Because my sister Katie lives away at school (and of course because she's also a fun person), she is a highly sought-after commodity amongst the chilluns in our house. For example, whenever any of us are on the phone, M- has now officially switched over from endlessly calling out "Dado" (pronounced "DAH-dough"-- it's my dad's grandfather-name, which is Irish) to endlessly calling out "Kiki".

When she gets the phone, and it actually is Katie, M- is beyond triumphant, and she will walk casually around our apartment for an impressively long time, actually talking to Katie as best she can at her age (a few months past a year).

Every few weeks, M- gets the extra pleasure of delighting Katie with her enthusiasm in the flesh, and M- lets her know the feeling is mutual by running up and hugging her upon arrival. This, I think, may be what keeps Katie leaving her fabulous, glamorous university life to visit us all as often as she does.

Note: In reference to the title, J- and I highly recommend Kiki's Delivery Service along with all the other movies of Hayao Miyazaki we've seen: Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and, to a lesser extent, Princess Mononoke. This is true whether or not you are Japanimation fanatics (which we're certainly not) or have children.

Mommy's new watch

I don't know how many of you have seen this, but Rice Krispies boxes (at the very least) currently have an irresistible offer of "Mom & Me" watches. As you can see, these watches are not cartoonishly juvenile and cheap, but rather they are classy, understated, and a steal at twice the price.

All the box demands is that Mommy take off her boring old watch (one that can never be counted on to spice things up by losing or gaining time intermittently throughout the day), and replace it with this one, which is clearly the only genuine way a parent can express love and solidarity with her offspring.

I can only conclude that Snap, Crackle, and Pop hate fathers, as they fully exclude them from this offer. I'll get along, somehow...

A conversation with D-: A laugh in the forest

This morning, the kiddos and I were eating breakfast, while I was reading (Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, if you're interested), when all of a sudden, D- began fake-laughing hysterically. Naturally, I was curious, so I said, "What?"

D-: What? [with a completely blank expression, as if he had no idea what I could be asking about]

Me: You were laughing...

D-: Oh, I went [makes random, understated noise & face] to myself and so I laugh-did^. What were YOU laughing about?

Me: I wasn't laughing at all.

D-: Oh.

Fin.

^ This is how D- pronounces most past-tense verbs.

See the archive for more Conversations with D-.

Daddy: Destroyer of homes

This weekend, D- took his Lincoln Logs out to the dining room to build himself a house safely beyond the reach of pudgy little hands. Left completely to his own devices, I think he built a pretty impressive little shack (folks back in Maine might call it a 'camp house'):

When I saw it, I told him how great I thought it was, then I told him it was nap time. He asked if he could keep the house together so he could show it to Momma when she got home, and I of course agreed.

After nap time, he walked out into the room, saw the house, and said, with surprise and awe befitting the son of an unrepentant, vindictive, pathologically lying demolisher of childhood hopes and dreams, "You didn't wreck it!!"

I have no idea why he said this, much less why he said it with such unexpected joy, but I couldn't help feeling defensive. I just said "Of course I didn't-- I said we could save it for Momma, silly."

He just smiled with wizened amazement, wondering which of his slave duties was performed well enough to warrant such a magnanimous gesture from the tyrannical taskmaster he is unlucky enough to have to call Father.

Steppin' to the OCD

Like most people who've suffered a decrease in physical activity after enduring a marked increase in nighttime screaming and predawn eyelid yanking, I've gone a bit soft around the middle in the past 3 years or so.

To combat this, I've enlisted the help of my comically debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder, through the use of a pedometer.

As ridiculous as I may look, I've clipped this thing on my left front pocket every day for over a month now. Since the "other mothers" at library storytime pretty much ignore me anyway, I can unselfconsciously^ drive my way upwards towards the Minimal Acceptable Level For Physical Activity, which is 10,000 steps a day.

It's a lot easier to cite this nice, round number as a baseline than it is to walk it when the people you are chasing only measure their stride lengths in inches. I mean, what are the odds that this magical minimum for all humans is such a perfect number? Did the Masons arrange that, too? Just like they designed the Great Seal of the United States, and the way they planted this clever ruse now that Nicholas Cage has been hot on their trail for 3 years with no signs of slowing down?

...You might think my tendency to be easily distracted, which I'll tell you about some day, would interfere with my quest to achieve 10,000 steps per day. But, my friends, you would be discounting the awesome power of my OCD, which has spawned several worse nicknames for me than LiteralDan.

Do I have a fully calculating spreadsheet on which to record my daily steps and view my monthly average as it changes each day, you ask? You'd better believe I do. And will this spreadsheet only expand exponentially in complexity over time? My Magic 8 Ball says... All Signs Point to Yes. I think it's only basing that on my spreadsheets for our DVDs, Books, Bills, Presents (to give), and... that's all I have, really it is. Well, entirely by accident, I did recently create a spreadsheet for the pledged delegates in the 2008 presidential race. I swear I will delete that one once Obama wins the nomination. (You wouldn't think such a thing would really require a solemn oath, but when freed from the limitations of physical space, you'd be surprised by the useless s**t I have kept "in case I ever need it." Come to think of it, you should also come see the physical space in which I live...)

Anyway, because I'm such a gentleman, I did J- the courtesy of cloning my Steps spreadsheet for her, since she received the same pedometer from my sister this Christmas. All I can say is thank God the thing stores the previous 7 days' totals, or I would never be able to accurately record J-'s steps for her once a week. For some reason, she just doesn't seem to be consistently drawn each day to the computer to fill in the little cell with a number to see how all the other numbers change. And for the record, of course the spreadsheet is for her, not for me-- I am not now helplessly bound to fill the empty box I've created.

Alrighty... after walking around our apartment at least a dozen times just before midnight (I needed to beat my February average, to keep moving forward, and then I couldn't not break 6000 after getting so close), I'm ready to do that thing I do sometimes between feeding people dinner and breakfast... no, after sitting on the computer for a couple hours... for some reason, I can't think clearly enough to come up with what you call that... I'd better go lay down.


^ I've decided that this is a word, and that this is how it is spelled. I bet there's already a German word for it, though, and it would make me sound much more sophisticated.

Going out to eat

Do you know what doesn't make a good piece of note paper, even when struck by an idea in the middle of the night? A diaper.

As best I could tell after trying to trace my intended chicken scratchings the next morning, I think I wanted to write an entry about something that happened to us the other day at the library.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, M- seems to be trying her best to double her weight each day. She took this to an extreme when we were at the library last week, waiting for D- to be finished with his storytime. M- was very cutely sitting at a little computer to play a Dora game some kid had abandoned. I only wish I had a picture of this... maybe I'll remember to bring my camera next time we go and I can stage a picture. Anyway, after a few minutes of happily clicking and smacking away, she noticed a lady near us was feeding her son some leftovers.

M- then did what she always does when food is within her gravitational range-- she began loudly smacking her lips and saying "Mmmmmm!" Little did she know (or did she?), this lady was a classic Mediterranean mother, and she immediately decided that based on M-'s antics, I must be a single father who, out of sheer ignorance, limited M- to one meal a day, and she would soon die without some substantial home cooking from someone who knows what she's doing.

After being prompted to fetch a spoon from M-'s diaper bag, over the next 10 minutes, we moved from a few dainty spoonfuls (of what I was told was "cooked rice, beans, and... sheep meat?") to a constant flow from this lady's dish to M-'s mouth. I had no way of knowing, at the time, the limit of this lady's generosity, seeing as she had been trying to feed this food to her son (who was maybe 6 years old and totally uninterested in cold leftovers), so I foolishly kept assuming each spoonful was the last. This made for a long, awkward 15 minutes or so.

Finally, I suggested we should get going since D- would be done shortly, so she suggested I needed to manifest a Tupperware container to take some food home with me, since "she so hungry" and "she need good food to make her strong like [unintelligible]." I ended up dumping the corn flakes out of M-'s Snack Trap cup and into a very narrow empty bottle (easier said than done), so she could pack it full of this food, which I will say was quite good.

The lady was so nice, though aggressive in that Greek/Italian way I know well enough to not be offended by, that it only occurred to me after my daughter had ingested roughly a lamb shank's worth of this stuff that it might not be a good idea to take ambiguous food from strangers. For all I know, this lady and her son had spent their lives building up an immunity to iocaine powder, all so they could lure wandering morons into ingesting it so they could rob them and pose their bodies in ridiculous positions for their own amusement. Or something like that.

Anyway, both D- and I later managed to wrest some away from M- at lunchtime that day so we could try it too, and none of us have died yet. Now, obviously that lady had no way of knowing that M- frequently subsists on various bits of cereal when Daddy's in charge, but I can't help feeling that M- somehow traitorously communicated this fact to her. Furthermore, having gotten such an exotic treat in the middle of the afternoon, I think I see M- dying inside just a little bit each time I drop a bit of bread (or whatever other boring food I happen to have on hand) into her mouth when she's desperately tugging at my pant leg in the kitchen.

Now that I think I'm moving past the rejection, it might actually work for me to let M- outsource her feeding to the diverse international community that is our neighborhood. She could be a food snob by kindergarten! And I could be even lazier until then!

I've got to go rip some holes in that baby's pants.

A breath of fresh hypocrisy

For Christmas, M- got a toothbrush that plays music for 2 minutes, to serve as a reminder for how long one should brush (though with only three tooth-tips so far, 2 minutes would seem to be beyond overkill). The brush has a sticker on it that says "For better sound and a better planet -- turn off the water while you brush!"

Very subtly on the back of the package, it also says "Batteries included! Contains two AAA or R03 size non-replaceable batteries", and in case that wasn't bad enough, they add "Brush head is not replaceable." So the water-saving tip hardly evens things out. But at least all the ocean life living off the East Pacific Garbage Patch will have sparkling white teeth...

Beyond the environmental damage, though, these things cost $15, so your choices are to either spend $90 annually on toothbrushes (or a lot more, considering how quickly you'd get sick of hearing the same song, which plays louder the harder the kid brushes), or you could spend $10 on toothbrushes and $5 more on one stopwatch.

(Thanks to Amazon for the product image.)

Hippo with a hammer in hand

Only as a parent do you have to be on the lookout for hooligans cruising by on a hippo, squeaky hammer in hand, looking for victims innocently relaxing on the floor.

M-'s new chauffeur silently pushed her up alongside J-, whose eyes were closed at the time, and M- began lining up a hammer strike on J-'s temple. Where the kid learned this, I don't know, but had I not been able to grab the hammer in time, I don't think J- would have believed the Helpless Muscle Spasm defense M-'s little baby face has sold us so many times in the past.

Don't let the squeakiness fool you-- that is one solid hammer. And don't let the baby fat (and tiny little toes!!) fool you-- that kid's arm is hard as a coffin nail.

Now that these two are allied, J- and I will quickly be outmatched. Because you see, only children can get away with acting like children, as I've sadly discovered, and I know they will soon begin using this to their advantage.

Eyes on the prize

I have reason to believe that my daughter, M-, may be desperately trying to eat her way to a forward-facing carseat.

She is an extremely willful child, but I'm happy to say she seems to be learning that tiny balled fists being what they may, she can't scream her way to getting what she wants. So now she eats.

The backstory: In the chaos and confusion of trying to install two carseats in my parents' car on our way to the airport a few weeks before M-'s first birthday, I accidentally installed her carseat facing forwards instead of backwards, as recommended before age 1 and/or 20 pounds. This didn't strike me until we started driving, but given that we didn't want to risk missing our plane and that she looked pretty safe in the seat (not like a 16-inch softball on a sack of sugar with a Jell-o neck, like during the first few months), I let her be.

I cannot do justice to the looks of wonder and unexplained giggles that frequently radiated from that seat during the magical 20-minute ride, so I won't even try.

Since we got back from our trip, she has resisted being set into her usual backward-facing seat by any means available to her, including crying and stiffening her body while arching her back. Whenever she gets a glimpse (usually upside down) of the front seat, she shouts with glee, attempting to address anyone she sees up there.

After several trips starting like this when we got back, she began eating voraciously, essentially not ceasing all day to cram anything she could find into her cry-hole. This is because shortly after we got back, she turned one, but since she was sick for over a week around that time, she is still shy of the required 20 pounds. (We plan to make her wait till she's safely over that level, but don't tell her that.)

She has been plowing through her remaining baby formula, downing jars of food, shoveling in baby cereal, and even licking her hand and dunking it into piles of grownup cereal, for more efficient stuffing of said cry-hole. It's all I can do to get in a couple hours of videogames a day.

I've just got to get her feeding herself more reliably and less messily, so I can set up the baby gate in the kitchen and leave her there with the pantry door open for a little while each day, so D- and I can read and relax..... and play more Super Paper Mario.