The Trixie Update

Last month after Trixie’s top teeth had come in and the swelling and pain subsided, she discovered she had something new up there to bite against. I can’t imagine what a weird sensation it must be to not have opposing teeth (although I’ll probably get a taste of it in about 50 years.) Conversely, it was a curious situation for Trixie as she realized she was no longer biting against soft, wet gums. They had been replaced with hard, enameled, little chisels. And these new things make noise.

For almost a solid week the most horrible, terrifying noises came out of Trixie’s mouth. clik, clik, clik. clik. clik. grrrrrrrind. griiiinnnd. clik. These are faint noises, and you can’t easily pinpoint their origin. Trixie also doesn’t betray herself as the source. She just sits there the whole time, quietly, eyes huge, lips locked shut. clik. clik-click. clik. clik.

The noises are reptilian or maybe insect-like. They are the sounds you hear in science fiction movies right before something very awful happens to a little-known actor. These are the sounds that pierce your brain because they were hardcoded in our primitive ancestors as signs of danger long ago. These are the sounds that make you want to throw on the light after you’ve softly tiptoed into the nursery at 3am because you thought you heard Trixie cry out, but now you just sense some faint movement and feel a pair of giant black eyes watching you out of the gloom. clik. clik.

clik-click… clik

clik

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After I mentioned cards in today’s TPOD comments, I realized I hadn’t posted this incident yet. I don’t know if she was trying to destroy a bad hand or just marking the cards to help with counting. Either way, I wouldn’t play a game with her if money was involved.

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During baths, Trixie is obsessed with the bar of soap. We still wash her with Johnson’s Baby Wash, but the Ivory sometimes floats around as a distraction. She can’t get enough of it: it floats, it sinks, it’s slippery, it makes bubbles. What more could you ask for? Maybe a better taste. She screamed bloody murder after this incident — but only for a minute or two. I’m waiting for the next bath to see if she learned anything from her taste test.

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Trixie is going through another round of teething. I’ve never heard anything so horrible as the screaming that lasted almost two hours last night. We tried teething gel, ice, Tylenol, teethers and icy washcloths — as well as all the other sorts of holding, hugging and whispering you do to comfort a child. Nothing would ease the pain from the puffy, inflamed swelling in her upper gums caused by the two new front teeth now translucently visible below the bulging surface.

In the end, she exhausted herself from the uncontrollable, terrified anguish. She finally collapsed, shuddering and still sobbing, into the fetal position, asleep. Today, the teeth have still not broken through, but you would never know from Trixie, who is happy as a fully-toothed baby.

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As reported last week, we had only intended for Trixie to get used to going in the bathroom with us and get familiar with the new potty. She surprised us by actually getting very familiar with the potty — four days in a row. This was only a once-a-day event, but we were pretty excited. I was positive that she had made the physiological association and was well on her way to enjoying “on demand” bladder control skills. Turns out I was wrong. Either that or she actually does have full control, but just has a different agenda from the rest of the household. On day five, I sat her down and nothing happened. OK, no problem - no pressure. I’m still happy. Our record was still 4 and 1. But that’s not the final score.

As I was getting the bath ready, just 30 seconds after she got off the potty, Trixie promptly crawled over to the middle of the bathroom and peed all over the floor. I’m not sure what to make of it as far as potty training goes, but in my opinion, peeing on the floor is a much bigger problem than changing a wet diaper. As a result, my enthusiasm has been tempered a little for this endeavor, but we haven’t given up. I just might have to throw down some newspapers or cat litter. And, in case anyone was wondering, this was not counted as a diaper leak.

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Mine have lead to Trixie’s. Against the advice of my Mom, Gramma, various co-workers over the years and every dentist in the world, I eat ice all the time. Some of this has spilled over to Trixie when I started feeding her ice back when she was teething. Now she has a vicious appetite for it.

If she sees one of us with a glass of ice water, she immediately plunges her entire hand into the glass. It’s like watching a bear try to swipe salmon. She’s usually not very successful at actually grabbing a piece because she’s shocked anew every time by the ice-cold temperature, but she has fun splashing water everywhere with her numb, blue hand.

It didn’t take her long to figure out that the ice in the cup eventually becomes ice in my mouth. While I can hold a cup at arms length from her, it’s harder to hold her and keep her away from my mouth at the same time. If she hears me crunching a piece, she’ll grab my lips with both hands and pry them apart with freakish baby-strength. I’m able to keep my teeth locked shut, but I eventually yield and give her the ice because I’m afraid she’s going to tear my lip off. I’ve already had to start cutting her fingernails every other day because my gums were getting sliced to pieces by her little razor tipped fingers.

Long story short, Trixie is making me kick the habit out of simple self-defense. But eating ice barely seems like a bad habit anymore, at least compared to reaching elbow deep into somebody else’s mouth.

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I always imagined that real babies would wake up the way they do in cartoons. You know, a sunbeam breaks through the blinds, and the sleepy little baby slowly blinks awake, streeeeetches, yawwwns, and maybe even rolls over in an attempt to snuggle back to dreamland.

So, my question is, is there any way to get them to stop screaming when they just wake up? I guess first I should ask whether it’s something that all babies do, or if it’s only Trixie.

No matter what time of day she wakes up, whether it’s after a good night’s sleep or just a 38-minute nap, Trixie is vertical and hollering within seconds of waking.

I’ve watched her wake up before. When it’s close to the end of her nap, I’ll peek in from behind the door. She’ll usually be peacefully sprawled out. Then without warning, she’ll twitch a little and suddenly flip herself over and urgently begin to pull up on the crib bars — all in one move. Picture someone in a cage being lowered into a pool of water. That’s the sort of desperate struggling, yelling and clawing up the side of the crib I’m talking about.

The panic stops the instant one of us goes to pick her up, so it’s not something I’m concerned about. Besides, the quirky wake state could simply be a genetic trait she got from her mother. Jenn tends to wake up rather ‘alert’. I once slept through a tornado that removed the roof from my house.

Otherwise, I figure Trixie’s either having bad dreams right before she wakes up or she’s naturally suited to join one of those fringe conspiracy groups where sleeping with your boots on and waking up in a state of emergency is encouraged. All I know is that when the revolution comes, she’ll be ready.

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The physical laws of the universe as previously understood by Trixie were pretty simple. By application of gesture or voice, she could fully expect toys, milk or parents to fly across the room, coming to rest in her outstretched hands. From her perspective, gravity was easy to overlook — it was completely obscured by the extremely powerful Trixie force.

But small cracks began to appear in her world view. She discovered that sometimes a Cheerio would break free from the Trixie force (t) and hurl itself to the ground. Disturbing to be sure, but easy enough to overlook — after all, it’s only a Cheerio. But as more and larger objects began to behave in unpredictable and heretical ways, she was forced to reexamine her unraveling world view.

To her amusement, curiosity, and frustration, she has been probing this infinitely entertaining phenomena for maybe a month or two. Almost every night, after we have put a sleepy Trixie to bed, she’ll start hollering. Invariably the problem is that her blankets, animals or pillow have ‘accidentally fallen’ out of the crib.

I walk in and she’s always peering over the edge of the crib, staring at the pile of discarded stuff. She knows full well how everything ended up on the floor, but she still gives me the old, “It’s the darnedest thing, Dad. They just fell out.” If she could shrug, she would.

So we place everything back in the crib and she quickly throws everything back on the floor. The pattern repeats about 10 times a night. And if we try to stop her by holding on to one end of a blanket that’s destined for ‘testing’, she’ll wail. It’s almost like we’ve cut off her research funding.

This bedtime stuff is tolerable; the mealtime experiments are more tiring. Baby food isn’t as easy to clean up off the floor as a blanket. And at mealtime, everything goes on the floor: Cheerios have no business being on the table. And it’s critical to find out if applesauce bounces or splats. She also needs to stare at each fallen item for a good long time just to make sure it’s not going to suddenly fly back up on the table.

I beg her, “Stop these mad experiments now!! You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re playing God with the applesauce!” But Trixie remains undeterred. Her research has bumped right up against the blurred edges of the quantum universe. Yet she continues her struggle to reconcile gravity and the Trixie force in an unified theory.

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We’ve had a little throwing up problem lately. As documented in last Tuesday’s Pedialyte entry, Trixie threw up for the first time in many, many months. Now just a week later, she did it again. There’s no need to rehash the details. You can simply skim through the Pedialyte story and replace all instances of “Jenn” with “Ben” when it’s in the context of someone getting thrown up on.

We suspect that last week’s ordeal was the result of over-eating. We don’t really have an explanation for the latest round. The doctor’s office isn’t concerned as long as she doesn’t have a fever. And Trixie was right as rain the next morning. So we chalked it up as another anomaly — until she threw up one more time last night.

The problem with last night’s incident is that there are too many variables to figure out the cause.

1) She was way over-tired because of her interrupted sleep pattern from the night before.

2) She was very upset and crying hysterically when she threw up. This is in contrast to the previous night when she was relatively calm and yet threw up four times.

3) She only got upset at night - she was totally happy during the day and didn’t fight any of her naps.

4) So are we encountering some kind of horrific, nighttime, sleep-training backslide?

5) She didn’t have any strange foods yesterday at all. Just milk, green beans and Cheerios. Nothing new there.

6) And finally, she’s teething again.

Anyway, I included the above details just in case someone was going to ask about them. I think it might be a little of everything. At any rate, it seems to have passed. She was super happy today and she’s currently sleeping peacefully. We’ll be fine. But this brings me to main reason for this post… what’s the worst thing to clean up?

You don’t have to be a parent to answer this question. Maybe you had a college roommate who would come home drunk and mistake the hall closet for the bathroom. Maybe your coworker got a little too crazy at the office party. Maybe you have pets. Whatever the cause, please vote on what you think is the worst thing to clean up. Personally, I am so sick of washing vomit out of everything that I could cry. I almost want her diaper to leak just for some variety. Voice your opinion in the new TTU poll (to your left under ‘Latest TTU Comments’.)

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There’s no shortage of articles or advice about how to baby-proof your house. But if you follow the advice, you have to put all your stuff away and install a bewildering array of little, white plastic locks, latches, hooks and fixtures all over your house. Before you know it, you can’t get the toilet lid open in the middle of the night or find an extension cord when you need one. To be honest, this is really a lot of work and pretty inconvenient. It also takes a lot of top-down management. Why not flip it around and get Trixie working for us?

We’ve decided to take an evolutionary approach to baby-proofing: baby-proofing by means of natural selection. The best part is that it there’s no laborious set-up involved — we just let Trixie go crazy in the apartment. When she’s done, sweep up the mess. By definition, whatever is left unbroken is now considered baby-proof.

Unfortunately, the limping gazelle of our household turned out to be the table lamp with glass shade. Poor Lampy. We’ll never forget. Good times. Good times.

How did this really happen? The lamp was secured from a floor attack, but Trixie climbed on top of the couch and pushed it off. It took me two hours to clean the pulverized glass off of and out of everything. She thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

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