The Trixie Update

Yesterday morning Trixie balanced in the standing position without assistance for about 5-10 seconds. I was excited by this development, but for her it was completely unintentional and very unwelcome.

I was helping her stand up when I noticed that her body language seemed slightly different and more responsive. So I pried my hands free from her steely claws and backed away. Much to Trixie’s distress, her stabilizer muscles and balance kicked in automatically. She was not happy about this new behavior her body was exhibiting. Not at all. She was like, “LEGS!, you’re pissing me off!! STOP STANDING!! Put me DOWN!” Of course, her legs were not about to give up their newfound freedom and she had to manually override them by doing a controlled collapse onto the floor.

I picked her right back up into the standing position and she automatically balanced again - even more upset this time. “I said STOP IT! YOU STUPID LEGS!! GET DOWN!” After two more times, she refused to straighten her legs at all, and the exercise became as futile as trying to push a piece of rope.

I’m hoping she’ll get the hang of it eventually. Right now, however, her legs and I are on Trixie’s shit list.

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It was about this time last year when we found out that the thing that kept kicking Jennifer from the inside out was going to be a female life-form. I have to admit that I was at a loss the day that we discovered this fact. For me, the issue was that I had no idea what I would do with a little girl. The irony here is that you pretty much raise boys and girls the same until maybe the last year of high school, so it was a stupid thing to get hung up on.

Still, I was pretty convinced that we had a boy on the way, and we already had a good tough name picked out for him. Yes, Baby Strong-O was going to be the kid that other kids would always be nice to on the playground for fear of a good beating. But it was not to be. The day we found out I immediately called Schaff and we proceeded to start drinking heavily at the good old Odessa on the Lower East Side.

After a couple of hours, having a girl didn’t seem like such a bad idea anymore. It turned out that girls are better than boys, but I think most of us realize this at some point in our lives. It’s just something that you have to relearn time and again. I came to appreciate that my baby girl will be strong like bear and easily as tough.

But you can’t forget that there is a softer side to having a baby girl. I spent the next couple of months torturing Jennifer by playing Enya songs over and over again while providing a voiceover: Jennifer’s pregnant … she’s having a baby …. a tiny little baby …. she’s having a little girl… she’s pregnant… it’s special…

In retrospect this was a dangerous game to play with a pregnant woman. All those extra hormones gave her the strength of 10 pregnant women, and I was just lucky that she was more interested in grilled-cheese sandwiches than chasing me down.

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Turns out that Trixie is sick. I took her in for an unscheduled doctor visit yesterday because her left eye had been very teary for the previous 12 hours. She was perfectly happy, but pitiful to look at. Her one eye was constantly welling with tears to the point that there was a steady stream running down her face. The diagnosis? She had caught a little bit of our cold and it had clogged the tiny, tiny baby ducts that drain the everyday tears that lubricate her eyes. With nowhere to drain, the tears were overflowing, leaving Trixie looking like she had just attended a marathon funeral. There’s no need to treat it unless the area gets swollen (i.e. infected), so we’ll just keep an eye on it.

However, it turns out that she does have an ear infection, and so Trixie’s getting her first prescription. Considering that the liquid Amoxicillin comes in a great bubble-gum flavor, you would think that Trixie would eat the stuff up. But no, trying to squirt the oral syringe in her mouth is more difficult than when I’ve had to do the same thing to a cat - even though babies don’t have claws. In a matter of seconds this morning’s dose splattered all over her as the pink liquid erupted, gurgled and bubbled out of her mouth like a grumpy volcano. Only 18 doses to go.

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Jennifer just hit the jackpot! Just now, she happened to be the lucky changer of diaper number 1,500. What sort of prize did she win? A nice full, non-leaky, non-poopy, perfectly routine, cute little wad of Trixie pee. Trixie also came out ahead with a clean, dry diaper. And I get to set a new one-year diaper target.

Her diaper usage today stands in sharp contrast to those early months. When Trixie hit 500 diapers at 44 days old, I estimated a worst-case scenario of over 3,686 diapers in the first year. We’re happy to see that we will actually come in well below that amount. I now project that we’re going to hit right around 2,000 diapers when July 31st rolls around - just as long as Trixie continues to cooperate.

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She followed me into the kitchen this morning. My initial reaction was similar to discovering that a stray animal has followed you home. It’s cute but also a little bit alarming. Are you supposed to feed it? Does it have rabies? In short, “Yes, yes, you’re adorable. Now go home.” Of course, Trixie is home, she doesn’t have rabies and we’ve already been feeding her for about 6 months, so she gets to stay.

The more pressing issue is that I saw the kitchen floor in a whole new light. There are dangers everywhere: laundry detergent, stain remover, recycling, the open dish washer. And Trixie was staring wide-eyed at them all.

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The squash has worked its way through Trixie’s system. Up until this point, we’ve been extremely lucky when it comes to Trixie’s poop. First of all, when a baby only drinks breast milk, the poop is pretty innocuous. I’ve discussed it here on the site before. It’s a wacky yellow-orange mustard color and, while it does smell offensive, it’s usually not that overwhelming. Secondly, it not uncommon for breast milk fed babies to go days without a bowel movement. In Trixie’s case she would regularly go 2-3 and sometimes 4 days without a poopy diaper to clean up. It was one of the bright spots in the world of diapers. Well, we can kiss all that goodbye.

Now that she’s eating real food instead of super-refined breast milk, she’s crapping real poop. And it’s every bit as disgusting as you might imagine. It’s kind of like stepping in a giant pile of dog shit, except that it’s not on your shoe, it’s smeared all over your baby. And instead of happening occasionally when you make a false step at the park, it’s going to happen in your house everyday. I seriously can’t believe that toilet training is ~18 months away.

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Trixie has now had her first food: Butternut Squash. I realize we previously awarded Rice Cereal this distinction, but after careful consideration it really is more of an adhesive than a grain, and we are retracting the honor. She seems to like the taste ok, and we’re excited about having a different colored mess to wipe up. Now we just wait to see if there is any adverse reaction.

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The distinction of first food goes to “rice cereal” — a questionable accolade in my opinion because it looks like mica and smells like fish food. But if people want to call it food, then I guess I’ll go along. Trixie was very interested in seeing how much we would shovel in her mouth before she tried to poke it all back out with her tongue. The main lesson for today? It’s time to get a lot more bibs.

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This could become the most practical milestone we have achieved. It took almost 40 minutes of frustrated crying before she fell asleep for a mere 60 minute nap, but that’s a small price to pay in the long run. What’s at stake here is Trixie’s ability to fall sleep by herself and comfort herself. Up to this point, we were only able to put her in the crib when she was already asleep, and she would often wake up in the transfer.

Now we are ready to put her in the crib when she starts exhibiting sleepy behavior — the funniest of which is balling up her hands and rubbing her eyes — and she should learn to go to sleep. Of course, it’s possible this afternoon was just a wishful anomaly, and Trixie might have no intention of going to sleep without a bottle in her mouth or a warm body holding her.

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We just changed Trixie’s 1000th diaper. Mercifully, it was neither poopy nor leaky. More diaper news coming soon-

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