cranky pixels

It’s beastly hot here today. The high is 99, and already it’s dangerously warm in our little condo. Our house is reasonably well insulated so it’s never unbearable like it was at the old place, but it’s still quite toasty on days when the temperature approaches 100.

My sister (who doesn’t have a fun nickname – perhaps Auntie Pep? She was a cheerleader in high school, after all) is flying in for the weekend. She is a pale, blonde health nut; I suspect the sheer amount of solar energy in the air will cause her to burst into flames the minute she steps outside. And stepping outside is inevitable – we will go on walks, and play at the park, and generally do things that healthy people do. Also, she eats things like flax. I am mildly terrified.

The combination of beastly heat, cranky baby and brain-scrambling math homework made it all but impossible for me to get much housework done yesterday. You try scrubbing countertops while trying to wrangle a grabby baby. Forget about putting him down: if I’m not in the same room he is, Happy Fun Baby assumes I’ve left him for the gypsies and reacts accordingly. I’ve tried explaining that the kitchen is right there and he can see me if he looks, but he’s not buying it. Yesterday I had to put him in the sling just so I could finish making my lunch. It’s a good thing he’s so cute:

Anyway, I am cleanliness-challenged at the moment. The timing couldn’t be worse, since I have what practically amounts to a phobia about a messy house and guests. I want to foster the illusion that I am a competent housekeeper. Is that so wrong?

Not So said he’d take care of cleaning up downstairs last night, but apparently we have different definitions of “downstairs.” When I think of the downstairs area, it includes areas like the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Considering that’s pretty much all that comprises our first floor, I feel pretty justified. Not So swept the hallway and started the dishwasher, and this morning he took out the trash, which just leaves me with…the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Oh and the downstairs bathroom. In addition to the upstairs, which isn’t too bad but still involves bathroom-scrubbing, carpet-vacuuming and laundry-doing. In the sweltering heat, with a cranky baby. But at least today I don’t have math homework! (Not much, anyway.)

I’m very excited about seeing my sister, though. Happy Fun Baby is going to be in baby heaven. Auntie Pep is a party, even if she does have funny ideas about what food is made of.

Blogged with Flock

Just so y’all know, one of my pictures was picked as “Image of the Day”
over at Blogging Baby. This month’s theme is kids and pets, and they
liked one of the Ellison and Savannah pictures I posted:

technorati tags:cats, baby, blogging baby, image of the day

Blogged with Flock

technorati tags:cat, baby, sun

Blogged with Flock

In honor of upcoming Father’s Day, Ellison has started saying “dada.” This pleases Not So to no end, even though the “dada” is entirely non-specific. He’s dada, I’m dada, the toys are dada…modifiers, descriptions, conjugations, all are da da. It is a veritable dada party over here.

It’s all very dada.

Of course, Happy Fun Baby also says mama. Or, more specifically: he wails “mama.” It’s his default noise when he’s upset (has been since he was born). Any time there’s something wrong he lets loose with a miserable “Maaaaaaaaa!”

So, to recap: dada = happy, mama = tragic. Sigh.

Good thing they’re so cute…

technorati tags:baby, dada, preverbal, wail, father

Blogged with Flock

I’m posting this from Flock, a new browser that’s purportedly part of this whole “Web 2.0″ thing that everyone’s been buzzing about. I don’t understand what’s 2.0 about the web, but that’s because I’ve spent the last year afflicted with mama brain. (Apparently it’s all O’Reilly’s fault. The Web 2.0 thing, not the mama brain. That’s all Not So’s fault.)

Flock is a little buggy, but has a gorgeous interface and lots of features which have the potential to be really handy, like an integrated blog editor and photo management. I’ll let you know what I think of it once I’ve had a chance to play around with it some more. Beta testing with a baby isn’t exactly efficient.

Day One: 4:00 am
Four hours of sleep. Mexico, here we come!

12:00 pm
My feet are so swollen, oh my god. When did I become the type of person whose feet swell? This never happened before I was pregnant. Never.

3:00 pm
I’m so glad my baby isn’t one of the poor kids wailing about the pressure change. So glad he likes his pacifier. Aren’t babies supposed to be hard to travel with? He’s a breeze.

4:00 pm
Dear lord it’s hot. Like breathing under a blanket. I need a nap and some water. And…that’s the line for customs? But it’s so hot! And I need a nap! Oh my god, this is hell.

On that illustrious note, our vacation began. We were spending five days at an all-inclusive resort about an hour out of Cancun, but first we had to, you know, get there.

Day Two: 10:30 am
The baby screamed all. night. long. And then I overslept – stupid time change – and the breakfast buffet is closed. I must eat or I will die. This vacation sucks.

11:00 am
Oh, the grill is open all day. That’s not so bad. And mmm, quesadillas. Who’d have thought of quesadillas for breakfast?

12:00 pm
The pool is divine. And have you seen the ocean?

5:00 pm
This vacation is awesome.

Once we got into the swing of things, the resort rocked. Happy Fun Baby took to the water like a duck to…water. Except without the feathers. And with slightly less quacking. As the days passed, my pasty white skin slowly tanned to a less pasty shade of white. I saw a shimmer in my hair that I originally thought was gray, but as it turned out was simply a blonde strand. Sun! Bleaches hair! Who’d have thunk? Not So and I got to take romantic walks along white sand beaches, listening to the crash of the surf and the wailing of the baby, and then hurried back to the air-conditioned room to drink bottles of water and try to decipher Mexican TV. And at some point I managed to finish not one but two books. Grown-up books. Books with no pictures. I am a party animal.

The ocean was so beautiful it was unreal. I’d never been to the Caribbean before, and the clear turquoise water was amazing. And warm! Oceans should always be warm. I was telling Not So, if the ocean in Santa Cruz had been warm I might have been tempted to take up surfing. And not, for example, have become a pale, moody goth. Just as an example.

So batteries = recharged, and life = good. Cranky Mama’s cranky meter is at an all-time low. Let that be a lesson to you, universe: when the going gets tough, the tough sends me to an all-inclusive resort.

We here at the Cranky household have been…well, cranky, and by “we” I mean “the baby.” He so clearly needs a nap, but does he want to nap? No he does not. He fights against the idea of a nap with every fiber of his wee being, balling up his fists and scrunching up his face and demanding unreasonable things of his parents. Figuring out what he wants is somewhat akin to a game of Russian roulette. Does the baby want to be bounced? Rocked? Snuggled? Swaddled? Put down? Beware: one false move and you will anger Happy Fun Baby.

Currently we are in the bedroom, where the internet is inexplicably spotty. Why is the internet spotty? The important thing is that the baby has abruptly grown bored with his routine of screaming and turning purple and is now cooing adorably and grinning at me. Nothing has changed, of course – this is the prerogative of Happy Fun Baby, who is at the moment both happy and fun. Is anything cuter than my baby’s smile? Notice I say “my baby” – he is so much cuter than other babies, and conveniently located just to my left.

He outgrew his first outfit this week. When we first brought him home all of his clothes were ridiculously big; only one pair of jammies and a couple of little snap-front tee shirts fit him. I realized the other day that not only do all his other jammies fit now, they’re a bit too short. We busted out the 3-6 month stuff yesterday, thinking it would be nice and roomy, given that he’s only 2 1/2 months (and thus clearly not big enough for 3 month clothes). And then this morning Matt brought him downstairs dressed not only in three month clothes but in big boy three month clothes – cords and a polo shirt – and he looked so grown up I could barely stand it.

Right now he doesn’t look grown up at all. He’s so small next to me, with his cranky face and kicking legs (Happy Fun Baby has decided he hates everything again). He’s wearing these striped footie pajamas with a little bear on them and, even though they are size 3 months, are so adorable I just died.