Note: I started this on the road but
I finished long after arriving at Danny & Steffanie's house.
Don't get confused.
At this moment, we are roadtripping to
Nevada to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Danny & Steffanie.
Woohoo! Amelia (15 months old) is decidedly anti-carseat today, of
course. She keeps wailing something that sounds eerily like “LET ME
OUT!” and it's freakin' me out a little. She's too young to talk!
Well, not really. I know lots of kids her age are saying way more
words than she does, but this kid uses words very inconsistently. At
times I wonder if it's because James and I are usually pretty good at
figuring out what she wants without the words, especially now that
she can point at something she wants (usually something I'm eating)
if a whine is insufficient to communicate her needs.
Amelia has also invented a sign which
we think means “hug”. She
folds her arms emphatically at times, and we've been interpreting it
as a demand for a hug or cuddles or something. For a while we weren't
sure what it meant. Heck, we're still not sure,
but hugs seem to satify.
So it seems talking is merely a tool
for entertainment for now. She has mastered “OH NO!” and
“WHOOOAAA” and “MAMAMAMAMAMAAAA!” and “HAHAHA!”. I would
find “mama” much more endearing if she'd use it without making it
sound like a complaint. She says “daddy” sometimes, but she says
it a lot when James is at work. Perhaps
she's just wondering aloud where he is...
A few nights ago she said “amen”
with us at the end of our family prayer. Woohoo! (Update: During
family prayer at Danny's house, she even knelt and folded her arms
with us. Impressively cute.)
Amelia has pretty much plateaued
growth-wise. She's still big and all, but it my delight she has yet
to grow out of 18-month size clothing. She's gotten longer without
adding much weight to her bones, but I'm not sure if she's gotten
skinnier or not. Still, now the clothes issue is keeping them clean.
I've discovered how pervasive dirt stains can be... and yet I have
discovered how strangely satisfying it can be to take once-white
socks which have been brutally transformed into nearly-black (and
sometimes multicolored) creatures of filth... and them make them
brilliant white again. Ahhh. So good.
It's possible she no longer needs size
5 diapers and can switch back down to size 4... We had to move up to
that size back when she was 8 months old because her thighs were so
fat that the size 4s were too small to reliably hold in pee. I
got leaked on too many times in a row to deny that we needed to move
to size 5. It's just a little weird though, because her cousin Oak
(about a year her senior) is only in size 4 diapers. It feels
backwards for her to be wearing bigger diapers than he does.
Speaking of diapers... for some reason,
ever since we came to California, she has all but shunned her potty.
How odd! She used to love the thing. We've been giving her some extra
diaper-free time lately (during which I tend to call her Naked Butt
Lady) because, importantly, it helps her diaper rash go away and stay
away.
So far, our carpet has been completely
spared. (Miracles!) When she pees during diaper-free time (we can't
always avoid it, sadly), she trots over to the adult toilet and pees
next to it. Most of the time. If the bathroom door is closed,
she squats and pees on the tile next to her little potty. (Sigh.
Really? The potty is right
there.) She also climbed onto the kitchen table once to pee
there. As far as I can tell that was her only purpose in climbing
onto the table at all. This morning she peed on the bed though. That
was less fortunate, so I was grateful that we'd planned to wash the
bedding this morning anyway.
I've decided to take her pee location
choices as encouraging, though. I mean, peeing next to the toilet is
almost peeing in
the toilet, right?
Amelia still nurses a lot. There was
about a month or so where she cut her nursing in
half—inexplicably—and then—also inexplicably—she went right
back to nursing like a maniac. There are still some days when she
shuns solid food and prefers to nurse. (Those days are just a tad
frustrating because it seems she is never
quite satisfied. And
some of those days I don't
want to nurse that much, so she just has to deal with it. I figure no
nursing when Mommy would rather listen to hours of fingernails on
chalkboards instead is a completely okay
as a rule, particularly when Amelia is old enough to get calories
elsewhere.) Mostly the
lots of nursing is fine with me. The increase was just
surprising. And she still shuns all liquids besides water and the
rare orange juice or high-quality apple cider. Seriously. Picky,
picky, picky.
Ug. So just now we took a 45-minute
walk around some fancy schmancy shopping center because Amelia needed
to stretch her legs. It took that long before she seemed even
remotely ready to be strapped into the carseat again. Of course she
screamed bloody murder when we strapped her back in.
We still have another two hours before
we reach Danny and Steffanie's. I'm really hoping she'll decide to
fall asleep and stay asleep now... or soon. [She didn't fall asleep
until we were half an hour from Danny's house. She was quite angry
until then.] She slept for about forty-five minutes earlier, but
honestly, it didn't count for much because I got emergency starving
and so we stopped at Popeye's and ate some finger-lickin' good fried
chicken. Om nom nom. And then she woke up. Oh noes! Darn it. We
wasted our nap on fried chicken. Oh well. Thankfully, she is
currently quite entertained by some My Little Pony board books we
found at Barnes & Noble the other day for fifty cents a piece.
Awww yeah.
Anyway. Speaking of naps, the little
one continues to be wildly erratic in her napping habits. Sigh. Well,
she usually takes one nap everyday, which lasts something between
twenty minutes and three hours. And we've established a bedtime
routine... short and simple. Pajamas, brush teeth, sit on the potty
and maybe read a book with Daddy, baby prayer, then nurse and/or
cuddle with Mommy in bed until asleep. Even with the routine, there
is no guarantee she'll actually go to sleep anywhere near the same
time each night. She goes to bed sometime around 7pm and 11pm. Doom.
Especially because James and I ideally like to climb into bed by
9:30pm.
Oh oh oh! The other night was super
special and she slept for four hours on her own mattress all by
herself. After the four hours though, she apparently desperately
needed to nurse and so I was
forced to abandon my book and join her in bed. Oh well. It was a
record-breaking mommy-less stretch of sleep, so I was excited. I
think she is nursing less and less at night. It really is
kind of exciting.
At the
end of next month (December 22nd),
I will be flying down to Arizona with Amelia to spend a couple weeks
with my parents. I'll be honest. I partly decided to do this because
I wouldn't have to ride in a stuffed-to-the-brim car with a whining
toddler for an entire 8+-hour drive. Also, if I fly away, I will also
take the baby, the carseat, the gianto stroller, and an entire
suitcase worth of clothing. Which means there will be lots more room
in the car to take extra things back to Oregon. Namely, books.
I am
so going to miss Pleasant Hill. I love, love, love it here. It has
been my most favorite place to live in my entire life so far. So I am
sad to leave. One of the awesome things I will be leaving is a
library which is highly superior to the pathetic library back in
Springfield, Oregon. One of the things that makes this library so
awesome is the HUGE used book sales every three months. We will be
leaving California with over one hundred more books than we entered
with. I am so saddened that we will be missing on this book sale for
the rest of our lives. Le doom.
Though
I'm not certain that I could point to any one thing
about the Pleasant Hill that I like better than anywhere else I've
lived, but I do love it. Most places I have to continually convince
myself that I like it. I have not had to do that here. My best guess
is the proximity of other Diltsen. We like Jesse and Jenny. And Urban
and Ayla and Oak. And I'm sure we'd like Pikachu when he or she is
born. (I wonder what they'll name him or her.) And also there is
significantly less rain. And our apartment is significantly nicer
than any we've lived in before. And library. And everything I could
ever want within walking distance...
And
even a ward I really like. And the ward really likes us. (Honestly
this shocked me. My first impression of the ward was that everyone
even close to my age were couples of “it” girls and former jocks.
Possibly still true, but my mistake was thinking that meant I'd never
be able to connect to anybody in the ward. Boy, was I
wrong. And I was never happier
to be wrong in my life. I guess I needed to learn something. To my
credit, my hopelessness at finding any friends here lasted all of
forty minutes.)
People
keep trying to convince us to stay. Unfortunately, as I keep trying
to explain to the Pleasant Hill branch of our fan club, this would
require James dropping out of school and losing all our income and
perhaps find a job as a cashier at Safeway or something. And then we
wouldn't even be able to afford living here. Doom! And then there
isn't much hope of us ending up here in the future because that would
require James landing a professorship at UC Berkeley. In his words,
he's good but not that good.
Awww maaan!
I've
spent a lot of time reading lately. Although I've been reading like a
madwoman trying to get through the Wheel of Time, I've finally
admitted I'm not going to get through book 11 by the time I leave
California if I continue at the current rate. I slowed down
significantly this week while trying to read Lord of Chaos.
I suppose it's possible it's something about that particular book,
but I think more likely it's just because I've been busy and super
tired. I've spent more of my free time napping this week. Oh well. I
guess that just means I'll be forced
to purchase book 11 so I can continue reading the series since the
Springfield library is lame and doesn't have it.
I've
been really enjoying this series, but I feel a little silly when I
realize that it has most affected me in the following way: I am
heavily considering not cutting my hair for a decade or two because I
think it'd be sweet to
have a waist-length braid to tug when I'm angry. I'm not sure how
this'll work, since as you may recall, I don't like having hair. I
have a better chance now than I ever did before though, since ever
since James bzzzzed all my hair off, it has grown back immensely
more cooperative than I ever remember it being in my entire life.
Strange, but I'll take it.
I've
also convinced myself not to ever write fiction... at least not for a
public audience, anyway. No one would enjoy fiction I'd write because
I have the most remarkable difficulty imagining any point of view
besides my own in enough detail to write with. All my characters I
imagine all act like me, think like me, and speak like me. My brain
hurts when I even try
to invent a character even remotely energetic or flippant or evil.
Which presents another problem. How the heck am I supposed to create
conflict when I can't imagine any motives for anyone ever doing
anything bad? Ugh. I try sometimes. I'm like, oh, well maybe he's
going to do this awful thing because he's super jealous and... wait.
That makes no sense. Why would anyone ever do something that dumb?
Yet somehow, other authors can pull it off.
Since
this realization, my in-head fiction has even started boring me. And
since I've used my in-head fiction to help myself get to sleep at
night for almost my entire life, now I don't know what to think about
to wind down at night anymore. Doom.
Oh,
joy. Amelia just handed me a loaded mouse trap—which I mistakenly
assumed to be sprung—and it snapped onto my thumb. (Danny's house
apparently had a mouse problem before they even moved here, and now
that the neighbor cat is no longer sleeping in Danny's garage... Lo,
and behold, Speedy Despereaux Gonzales has moved in and is
masterfully evading all traps.) And earlier she set it off and scared
her. I think moving it out of reach was probably a good idea...
What
else, what else...
Ah
yes. It took a while, but my body eventually got over the miscarriage
of Baby Beta. I was shocked that despite only knowing of Baby Beta's
existence for two days, my brain had a really rough time coming to
terms with this. I feel better now that I know that this is actually
pretty common to feel that way... well, at least it is for women. It
didn't seem to even phase James, so for a bit I wondered if I was
going nuts. But apparently, I was acting and feeling pretty normal.
Once the two weeks of bleeding was over, I started feeling pretty
normal again. Woohoo. Thanks for your prayers and well wishes. I'm
feeling optimistic for Baby Gamma to arrive soon. (Don't laugh.
Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly baby-hungry, I look down at
my belly and say things like, “Go, Baby Gamma, go! Divide into
sixteen cells! Commence morula stage!” and “Psst. You should be
burrowing into my endometrium now. I've made it super cushy for you over the last few weeks! You can do it!” I really hope
there is a Baby Gamma
and I'm not just talking to nothing...)
Well,
love and turkey,
Jenna
and Amelia (and hopefully, any time now, Baby Gamma)
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