G understand when my cell phone rings, its not just a noise anymore, she knows exactly what is making it.

The other day she grabbed my mouse and held it to her ear like a phone.   its got the clamshell profile, seemed like a good idea.

now we’re slapping hands and tugging ears.   Dayum that baby is smart.

I boop her nose, she boops my nose, i boop her nose, she boops my nose. its a game we figured out. she laughs, i laugh, she laughs, i laugh.

i had errand to run, a dog to walk, i think I rode all morning so beckie was wanting some baby payback and mostly i hadnt seen my human all day…so we loaded us all into the car and went to the hardware store. I carefully waited til about 6, so we could leave kila in the car. I explicitly parked in shade, windows, water…dog was good that’s how we roll. After 5 min of getting no help from the orange-smock in the garden dept (and its usually not their fault, Home Depot hangs employees out to dry), I heard a page for the owner of a black acura 453SVG. yeah knew it some good samaritan reporting how my dog was suffering. meanwhile, I had about 3 things to get so figured…why not put G in the cart proper so she can move around but not get out. it was working really well, the track workout in HD for me and some pilates in the bin for her…i had my hand on her the whole time. next, onto the angle brackets. these took forever to find, trolling up and down the fasteners aisle. another orange smock, this one older and clearly from the midwest started yammering at me about babies in carts and how we had one just yesterday in here gosh. meanwhile, seeing me troll up and down the aisle, she blows off my asking for help. so i tell her yeah ok thanks, so angle brackets? take note, angle brackets were to attach G’s dresser to the wall so she could not pull it down on herself. anyway, G’s leaning out grabbing, i turn the cart and holy shit before i know it she plunges out of the cart.

well my heart stopped. literally. i have done some scary shit, some scary shit on a regular basis, but…what went through my mind was some jugular puncture, a bolt through the eyeball, a spinal fracutre. the thud when she hit the ground was evil, the most evil and hurtful thing i ever heard i swear. and then she cried, and then i looked her over and really she looked fine. no blood, no welling geyser, the baby just looked really really pissed off. i’ve hit my head, so i looked at her eyes, i watched her breath, i watched for convulsions. and she looked fine. i couldnt beleive it but she looked fine. the evil so-superior HD orange jersey wouldn’t back off…and at that point im like yeah i know i fucked up but i need to be close to see hear and feel my baby and know if she is ok, and i will know, and i did, and horrible as my irresponsibility was i knew she was fine. go away self righteous cunt and tell me where to finde angle brackets. and so we did, and so she was, and we got a toilet stopper too and it was good. and so was kila. and so was the park for the 3 or us. I am so going to ACE next time.

got home late the other night. from riding Windgate with Alex Rentzis and then watching league finals at Cap Basin. An excellent way to spend an evening. Rode Beckie’s Superlight, and found myself way to close to the bars, so I kept not recovering on the climb with too much weight up front and felt really sluggish steering on the downs. Still we had a good time and finished just at dark, a minor doinger going through Paradise Wash a rock reached up and grabbed me. Finals were good, Al’s team which seemingly should have been defeated long ago won, so there ya have it let’s hear it for the champs. I showed up in my jersey, to which JT and Stoli sassed me on my flamboyance, but when I revealed back pockets full of beer the compliments abounded at my ability to combine form and function.

Anyway, got home late and wasted. G woke up soon after, held her, did a pants-check, she kept crying…then she walked over and grabbed the legs of her high chair. She looked at me like “duh?! get with the plan? gimme sumptin ta eat!”. Wow. very clever baby. A friend of mine from high school Cindy Barr wrote a book on baby sign language, I haven’t gotten to read it but the idea is pretty cool. It seems pretty intuitive to me, from having dealt with Jo, Kila and the cats. They don’t talk, but say plenty if you know what to look for. G definitely sends clear signals, and they are not hard to see if you pay attention. I’m not sure how much more the communication would benefit from sign language, but I’ve got about 6 months to find out.

A big difference with the animals, however, is that they don’t have much to say. G definitely had more complicated things to say. Kila never wanted to bang on the keyboard; Jo wants to eat the keyboard, but G stopped doing that months ago; and Diego just wanted to sit on the keyboard. Genevieve knows that hitting the keyboard makes the monitor do stuff and makes cool noises. Kila gets hungy and just hangs out and looks needy, she never picks up her dish and bangs it. But G, stupid as she is, had more complex thoughts about the same things than the more mature animals do. Its a cool example of maturity vs. intelligence.

the baby loves peas. I discovered this a couple months ago. its hysterical watching her tinyHuman fingers plucking individual peas tinily into her mouth. for some reason peas have fallen off the rotation lately, and i was noticing both us and daycare sometimes fall back to giving her too much carbs and not enough veggies. So peas were on the menu tongiht, and they came roaring back to the top of the cool list. wow did they ever. Its like in the Eminem song “The Way I Am”. They feed me the fuel that I need for the fire to burn and its burning and I have returned”. Wow…what a meal. First, the baby plucked peas, but with great aplomb. Then she began to take peas out of the container, then she began to place peas back in the container. There was pea rolling, pea dropping, pea spooning (though that did not go well), pea grabbing, pea mashing…quite the entertainment must have taken her 20 minutes to eat.

Sometime after the peas, when the filthy hands got clean and the mashed peas which now looked like parrot shit were wiped from the floor, the phone rang. G actually knows now what the handset is and grabbed it when it was ringing. This was neat, she’s been into phones for a long time and I always thought it was just cause they were shiny and make noise. But lately I started to figure out she liked em cause we used em, and last week she actually started putting her cell phone (“her” cell phone…the demo phone they gave her at Best Buy to keep her from having a meltdown when Beckie was buying a $3000 washer dryer) up to my face to try to get me to do something. So, I called our house on my cell and tried to talk to her. Not sure it worked too well since we were right next to each other, but I’ll have to get Beckie to help and try it from across the room.

Beckie and I are convinced G is saying Kila, and if so this would in fact be her first word. I’m cool with it, Beckie seems ok with it too. It makes sense, since its a word G hears more than just about anything but her own name, the first word she hears when she gets home. All the effective means of associations are there — repetition, paying attention, happy times and positive reinforcement, unambiguous. At first we would go “Kila!” and G seemed to be going “keeewaahh.” Maybe a coincidence, the kid babbles a lot…but lately she will say it when the dog comes in the room, and last night when the dog was barking at the door she said it too.

Today for the first time G held out her face like I do for the dog to lick her. Everybody seemed to enjoy that, especially Kila, who would greatly appreciate if the damn baby would just start to learn to treat her in a manner befitting civilized dogs.

Uh oh…here comes the evil black-hearted parrot!

Run!

**I reordered these photos for artistic and narrative purposes; G is not this smart. Her first scar is on her right index finger where the parrot got her (not this time, I am not that bad of a dad).

G started at a new daycare last week.

her first report…

I wish I could do dirt exploration and be cheerful.

This place is more expensive and more rigid w. schedules than the last daycare. But their setup for 1’s is a lot better. The old place’s 1’s room was kind of dismal and they didn’t offer too much in the way of activities. T he teachers seem much more focused and involved with the kids, on the whole, than they did at Kiddie Care. There were lots of nice people at the last place, and as an infant it was great, and being able to bring G in whenever we wanted and only pay by the day was huge. But it was definitely hit or miss with the staff — some were great, some just didnt seem so sharp. Don’t know if it was the neighborhood or what, but as a group they seem better and a bit more stable at Kinder Kare. Seemed like it was time to make a move, and spend some of the money we saved the first year. Plus with Beckie taking the job at Cox we really need something close to home that doesnt have to be on our commute route.

So far G has been very shy when we drop her off, but she was that way at the last place in the 1’s room too. The teachers seem to get this and always try to settle her in. I’ve noticed too with G that the transitional phases are where meltdowns are born or defused. Most of the days thus far she has had a Cheerful day!

I turned on the dome light the other day and G started laughing. I turned it off, I turned it on, more laughter. I put my hand on the switch, and by now she had figured it out and was anticipating me turning it off. She’s figured out her own cause-and-effect, but this was probably the first time I noticed she figured out cause-and-effect for someone else.