Sitting Bull

Our Aries baby just began to sit unassisted two weekends ago. Between this latest milestone and starting solids, I am starting to reclaim my body as “mine” again. For me, surviving babyhood is about celebrating these small victories back to the self I once was—BC, before children.* Although I am still young Miss Vivian’s personal milk slave, so we have some distance to travel before I can stop wearing shirts with an eye toward easy access.

I find young Miss Vivian to be a focused baby. She sees a toy—usually one with small, removable parts—that she wants and rolls toward it. She grabs her bottle with both hands. In the morning, you better make sure that your coffee cup remains beyond her reach. Young Miss Vivi is the wiley sort of baby who will arch her back and strrrretch in order to gain that extra inch toward the desired item just past the kitchen table’s Forbidden Zone—home to adult beverages and sharp utensils. In fact, we gave up on using the Bumbo seat in favor of the high chair for feeding time. Both of us, parental units, quickly tired of her extending her apple-puree covered limbs and grabbing anything within a five-inch radius of her blue plastic seat.

Overall, I would say that Vivian is a pleasant baby. Unlike her brother, she managed to sail through newborn phase without colic. And, I won’t waste more blog space talking about how well she sleeps. Every day we do a little happy dance as we give thanks to the baby sleep gods. Unfortunately, Parental Unit #2 and I are about to enter a new world with Vivian, a world so scary that it makes my miserable pregnancy seem like easy gravy—I am talking about teething. What? I can’t hear you because 1) this is a blog and 2) my shoulders are up to my ears in tense anticipation of the coming dental storm.

*as if that is even possible!

Halloween Shenanigans

This past summer, young Master Bertram would spend at least 20 minutes watching the construction work taking place along one of the main drags where we live. Bertram was particularly obsessed with the blue dump truck, the backhoe, and the front-end loader. One day, the man directing traffic around the construction site even gave Bert his orange flag. Bertram waved that flag, which was quite heavy for a 2.5 year old to carry, up and down the street with glee.

Thus when the time came to decide upon this year's Halloween costume, I was not surprised that Young Master B chose to dress up as a construction worker. Of course, Bertram wanted to be not just any generic construction worker, he wanted to be The Flag Man. Parental Unit#2 and I got down to business with grand ambitions of making a family costume around the theme of construction work. Parental Unit #2, who is mighty fond of the color orange, decided to dress up as a traffic cone at one of the many Halloween events we attended. I scaled down the hat he made to fit the little lady, and the next thing you know, she was the traffic cone. Since I had to carry the traffic cone, I became the road. Note that the sling I'm wearing has two lanes. When we went trick or treating, one of our friends observed that Parental Unit #2 (who sadly didn't manage to procure another costume after his traffic cone debut) could be considered the pot hole.


As tradition dictates, this was the third year of our Baby World Leader Costume Contest. Since we host the contest, we don't compete officially, but we always have an entry. Unfortunately, Young Master B is going through a phase where he refuses to have his picture taken. He prefers to click the camera buttons and scroll through previous shots. Knowing this, I decided to focus on young Miss V as Queen Victoria. The picture shown above is one of my favorite outtakes.