Walking

Melissa is in no hurry to walk, unlike her brother who walked at 9 months and change. This doesn't bother us, except it IS increasingly difficult to keep her in pants -- now that Winter is over it's hard to find long baby pants, and she's worn holes in the knees of all the ones she already has.

But despite encouragement from her mom and dad, she just couldn't be bothered with walk practice. If she consented to it at all, she insisted on holding both my hands.

Today, then, was a breakthrough: she walked holding one hand to her mom in the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the living room, where she found something more interesting than walking. (A mostly-deflated balloon.)

Uh-oh

Mom went to play with the Riverton orchestra tonight. Daddy had the kids.

Matthew went to bed with reasonably good grace, or at least no worse than usual, but Melissa did not. She fell asleep while I rocked her, but as soon as I put her in the crib she sprang up madder than a wet hen. She yelled if I rocked her more, yelled if I bounced her on her knees, yelled if I tried to tuck her back in and pat her back.

So I told her if she was just going to yell anyway, she could yell by herself in the crib. And I left. Half an hour later the yelling subsided and I figured she must be asleep.

When Rachel got home she went to check on her baby and found her on our bed -- next to the crib. Looks like Melissa, like Matthew, is truly an heir of her mother's climbing genes.

There's such a thing as too much imagination

Matthew is very into imagining things. This is great, because he can entertain himself for a lot longer than he used to. But it does have a downside.

Tonight Matthew was playing on the neighbor's slide. Whatever game he was playing involved a blue gameboy, a ticket, and money. When we came inside, he started to get agitated. "I lef' gameboy, ticket ou'side!"

Daddy thought quickly. "I picked them up for you, Son. Here they are." And I mimed handing him the gameboy and ticket, and all was well.

When boys play with teddy bears

Matthew was playing with Melissa's teddy bear last night. (He has a couple of his own, but playing with Melissa's is more fun, somehow.) Bear swooshed around the house, shooting bad guys, until Matthew had an even better idea.

Bear could turn into a spaceship.

Matthew folded up its arms and legs and tucked down its head until he had a compact Bear Cubeship. Then the cubeship swooshed around the house, shooting bad guys.

I'll take blue-collar bed sheets

I remember reading somewhere that really high-threadcount bed sheets are a waste of money because you can't tell the difference between them and cheaper ones, past a count of 2 or 3 hundred.

This is incorrect.

Rachel got some really high-count sheets, 6 or 8 hundred or so. They're supposed to feel cooler in the summer. They do. They also feel slippery. Like I'm risking a friction burn every time I get in bed.

So they have been relegated to the guest bed for now.

60 seconds

Matthew's latest thing when Mom puts him to bed is being rocked while they count to 60. (So it's really more like 3 or 4 minutes.)

He's very pleased with being able to count and likes to find new opportunties to practice.

It's 10:30. Do you know where Matthew is?

I know where he is: in bed. Wide awake. Alternately singing the
ABC's to himself and talking about Bad Guys.

Tomorrow he will wake between 6:30 and 7:00, as he always does no
matter how late he is up. And then he will be grumpy because he
really needs 12 hours of sleep to have his happy-batteries fully
charged. And his Mom will bear the brunt of the grumps. Poor Rachel.

Old news: after I wrote about Matthew learning to type his name, my
friend Mark told me that he gave his niece a really old laptop for
that sort of thing. Oddly enough, my Dad just shipped me my mom's old
486-33, I think it is, with grayscale (passive matrix) LCD. Windows
3.1 and DOS!

Matthew thinks it ROCKS.

It works fine except the battery is totally dead, and it seems to be
very sensitive to dirty AC, or something. It will work for anywhere
from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, then die without warning. Sometimes it
dies during the boot process. I'm tempted to get a UPS for it but
that seems silly given how much more the UPS would be worth than the
laptop.

Why I didn't sleep much last night

(Graphic descriptions of gross bodily functions ahead. You have been warned.)

Shortly after 2 AM last night, Melissa started making kind of a choking coughing sound, like you might make if you were trying to hack up a really big loogie.

Then BAAAAAARF she puked all over the bed. Got some on the quilt, too.

Trying to clean Melissa off was clearly a lost cause, so Rachel bathed Melissa while I changed the bed sheets. (I have to give "Totally Toddler" props for living up to its billing in getting the puke smell out of the mattress where it had soaked through the sheet.)

Melissa enjoyed her bath. It was like she was thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad after all."

We got the sheets changed and Melissa bathed and dressed in under half an hour. We congratulated ourselves that it could have been worse.

It got worse.

Ten minutes after we went back to bed, and before anyone really got back to sleep, the hawking sounds started again. "Oh no!" I ran to get a cloth diaper for her to barf in. I was too late. And anyway, the way she flails around, it probably wouldn't have done any good.

Rachel bathed her again -- she didn't enjoy it as much this time -- and I changed the sheets. Again. At least Melissa didn't get quilt #2.

By this time Melissa was pretty awake. Rachel took her into the front room to rock her to sleep. I went to bed. For about 5 minutes, until she puked again. Poor kid.

This time she nailed Rachel pretty good. And the floor. Not so much on herself. I changed her onesie and wiped her off while Rachel showered. While I was rocking Melissa I heard crying from Matthew's room. I figured maybe the noise had finally woken him up. I didn't really want to, but I went to see what was wrong.

Matthew had puked on his bed, too.

Fortunately, Matthew was sleeping on top of his quilt, which, unlike ours, was machine-washable. None of the small amount of barf got through to the other sheets. Also, Matthew's old enough now that he knows that there are Good Places To Puke and there are Bad Places To Puke, and his bed wasn't on the good list. (He probably wasn't very awake when it first came up.) He said something about having more business to do, but he wasn't in any hurry to go to the bathroom, so I picked him up and deposited him in front of the toilet. He finished things off there, washed his mouth off with water, and went back to bed. Took it quite in his stride, really.

I got him a bowl in case he had more later. He said he didn't need it but I told him to humor me.

He needed it.

Fortunately that was the last incident for the night, and he kept it in the bowl. Rachel took Melissa again to settle her down while I went back to bed to try to get back to sleep.

Elapsed time: over 2 hours. It was probably another 20 minutes before Rachel got Melissa down.


* Rachel's note: Actually Matthew threw up 2-3? more times and I got up with him each time to console and clean the bowl. He mostly took it in stride. Poor kid. Poor parents. What a night.