Fifteen months and fearless

"Fearless" being the adjective most often applied to Bat Girl in recent weeks, by us, by friends and family, and by complete strangers. She tears across the playground at the speed of kids twice her size, she tries to climb up the slide like the big kids do, she wants to hang from the jungle gym bars and cannonball into the sand pit, she'll march into the middle of a crowd of seven-year-old boys and snatch their ball ("ball!") for herself, she climbs onto the rocking chair in her room and stands on it to crane her little neck to look at the trucks ("chuc!") outside ("tsa-tsai!"), she shouts hello to all strangers and doggies, she'll happily wander away from me at the playground or in someone else's apartment and if I'm not careful, I'll find her minutes later, elbow deep in mud or stolen sandbox toys or a bag of cat food.

She loves draping things around her shoulders--a T-shirt pulled from the laundry pile or my dresser drawer, a pair of pajamas from her own room, one of those crib toys with a lot of little stuffed animals strung together--and is especially delighted if I drape a long-sleeved tee of mine over her like a cape. We thought this was peculiar, but apparently another kid we know who's her age does this too. So I guess it's normal?

She likes to "clean"--give her a rag and she will crouch down and scrub the floor, or wipe her high chair tray, or clean her hands. I don't know where she got this, as she certainly didn't learn about scrubbing floors from her parents.

After spending the first year of her life unattached to anything besides her parents' bodies--no pacifiers, no loveys, nothing--she's suddenly fallen for a couple of teddy bears ("beer!"), and she alternates dragging them around our apartment or snuggling them in front of the TV. She's not particularly interested in sleeping with them, though, nor do they provide much comfort when she wakes (still!) in the middle of the night--only Mom or Dad with a bottle will do.

She continues to be a little chatterbox (though most of her words are probably unrecognizable to anyone but her parents) and has started putting words together, like "Mommy shoe" (pointing to my sneakers) and "see toe!" (in the bath, pointing to her toes). Our friend who babysat for her last week claims BG said "It's a ball!" but I'm pretty sure she imagined that.

She loves self-feeding and can only tolerate being spoon-fed for a few minutes before demanding the spoon ("poon!") herself, which means I'm sometimes frantically shoveling yogurt into her so I can get her fed at least a little before she smears and splashes and coats the whole kitchen with food. She's finally gotten the hang of holding a larger piece of food and gnawing on it, rather than trying to shove the whole thing into her mouth. At the end of meals, she often sweeps all the food remaining on her high chair tray onto the floor, grandly rejecting the pears/chicken/cereal/quesadilla/peas/whatever...then as soon as she's let out of her high chair, she's like, "Oooh, food on the floor!" and snatches it up and eats it before I can wrestle it out of her hand. She's still addicted to the bottle (four 4-oz chugs of milk a day), though she'll drink water from a sippy at meals. She does not deign to hold either bottle or sippy herself, however--why bother trying to master the correct angles when you have a mom or dad who will hold it for you like your personal drink bitch?

She's extremely strong-willed and will throw a major screaming tantrum in a heartbeat--red face, arched back, supersonic shrieks, flinging herself to the floor. This is especially fun when it happens for no apparent reason at 3 a.m. (Though the pediatrician, this morning at her 15-month well-baby visit, observed that she had a whole lot more teeth coming in, which might account for the middle-of-the-night screams. We're kind of slow to figure things out.)

She loves music and loves dancing around the room in my arms or her daddy's arms. She also "dances" herself, swaying and rocking to the beat with a big grin when a fun song comes on the TV or stereo. (The other day it was an Erasure song, which prompted my husband to observe, "You really are a Korean girl, aren't you?")

She peed in the potty a few weekends ago, but I'm pretty sure it was a total accident.

She is the coolest little person, and I can't believe how fast she is growing up.

In case you were wondering...

I was offered the job. But I turned it down today.

The money was okay, not great. It was a small bump up from my current salary--not as big a bump as I wanted, but not an insulting amount, especially considering that my industry is not doing so great right now, and that I'm the sole breadwinner of my family. It would have been enough to buy myself some more nice things once in a while, enough to help out the college fund a lot. But ultimately money wasn't the reason I turned the job down.

I don't ever blog about work, or what I do for a living, so this will be hard to do without violating that rule but...suppose you were a zookeeper. (I am not a zookeeper.) And say you were dreaming of running your own zoo devoted to penguins, but right now you're working as a general zookeeper, taking care of a few penguins as part of your overall duties. And you're suddenly offered a job running the...um...reptile division of a zoo that has no penguins whatsoever. You might consider taking the job, just to get the experience running a whole division of a zoo, but this would be taking you further away from your penguin dreams (because you'd be losing out on penguin experience, and not keeping up with the latest penguin care innovations). So you stay at your current job, in the hopes that one day you might be put in charge of the whole penguin exhibit. Does that make sense?

Anyway, I decided to sacrifice a small short-term gain in income in favor of my long-term dreams (as much as I can be said to have any career "dreams," as wizened and cynical as I've become). Luckily my husband was supportive of this. And I guess Bat Girl will just have to take out another college loan when the time comes.

But it was a tough call. It's not the first time family considerations have entered into a career decision for me. In fact, I took my current job, after being self-employed for a long time, largely because we wanted better health insurance to cover IF treatments. But this time, it was even more concrete, thinking about how much organic milk or tiny shoes or 529 contributions that small but real raise would have bought. And in deciding in favor of my dreams, in taking a risk, I really did feel for a moment that I was depriving my child.

Ah well. If mama's happy, everyone's happy, right?

Dear Whole Foods,

Don't get me wrong. In theory, I applaud your decision to eliminate plastic shopping bags in all your stores. I'm something of an eco-freak myself, and I think we can all agree that plastic bags are evil and polluting and make us slaves to the oil companies and kill animals etc. I like bringing my own shopping bag and I do appreciate the $0.15 discount you give me when I use it.

But. Your plastic bags were the best. I loved them, I really did. They were roomy and hefty (I almost said "big and thick," but this is not that kind of blog, you perverts. Okay, I guess it kind of is) and didn't need to be doubled up. They made the best garbage can and diaper pail liners--they never tore, never leaked, kept in the poop smells better than any other bag. Now we have to use those cheap flimsy bags from the grocery store down the street.

And what am I supposed to do with all of these paper bags? Because sometimes, I just don't have my own shopping bag with me, and I have to use your paper bags (doubled up, annoyingly). And my kid is only 14.5 months old, so she doesn't have any textbooks to cover, and the cat only needs one bag to play with, and there are only so many presents you can wrap in brown paper bags before you become that girl, and you don't want me to be that girl, do you, Whole Foods?

And here's the big thing: I live in the big city. I don't own a car. I walk and take the subway everywhere. I walk from my office to your store, and then from your store to the subway, and then a five-minute walk from the subway to my apartment. And you know, a lot of times it's raining, or snowing, when I'm walking home. And I am just waiting for the terrible day when one of your stupid brown paper bags gets soaking wet and falls apart and spills my groceries all over the sidewalk while I'm walking home in the rain. Uphill. With wet shoes. And my canvas shopping bag is soaked through and my box of stupid yuppie organic "O" cereal gets all wet. And it will be all your fault, Whole Foods.

I will probably continue to spend my entire paycheck at your store, because I'm a lame eco-yuppie like that. But I will hold this plastic bag thing against you. I just thought you should know.

Love,
electriclady

What was that about the terrible twos coming early?

A phone conversation, today, approx. 4 p.m.:

Husband: Yeah, she just dumped everything out of your T-shirt drawer.

Me: Well, make her put it all back.

Husband: Hey [Bat Girl], put the shirts back in the drawer.

Bat Girl (in the background): No!

*****

Kitchen chez electricfamily, approx. 6:30 p.m.:

Me (to BG, fussing in her high chair): Hang on a sec, I'm just making you a little guacamole.

Bat Girl: [ultrasonic, ear-piercing shriek]

Me: I think my eardrum just ruptured.

Blah blah blah

Last year, when Bat Girl was still in the "aa...goo?" phase of verbalization, a friend with older kids told me that watching your child learn to talk is one of the coolest experiences there is. And she's right.

I'm fascinated by how Bat Girl picks up words. Sometimes she just starts saying words out of the blue--if you hear "No" often enough, I suppose it's not hard to just bust it out one day, as she did Easter weekend. (Except she pronounces it "noo," which is hilarious.) Other times you can watch her working on it. A few days ago, she pointed to the flowers on the lampshade in her room, and I IDed them as "flower" to her. Every night since, she points at the flowers and says, "Fow!" I say "Right, flower!" and she repeats back carefully, "Fo-wa!"

Most of her vocabulary is unintelligible to anyone but us ("chuc!"=truck; "tsai!"=outside="Hold me up to the window so I can look at the chucs, lady!"). Because of the random nature of our reading material and toys and our city life, she has what is probably a somewhat unusual vocabulary for a toddler. She says "shark" and "penguin" but not "cow" or "pig," "truck" and "BIG car!" but not "apple" or, frankly, "Mama." (She says mamamama but doesn't consistently say "Mama" the way she she says "Da-ee!", dammit.)

She listens carefully, so I've had to cut down on my swearing--a month or two ago I dropped something and said "Shit!" and she promptly parroted back, "Shit!" Or I'll say something like, "Are you going to sleep better tonight?" and she'll say back, "Niiight?" in the exact singsong ickle-bickle tone I used.

The other fun thing is, of course, teaching her stupid baby tricks. Like how, if you sing the Blue's Clues mail song to her, she'll chime in at the end, "Maaiiiii!" complete with jazz hands. My husband especially enjoys teaching her things in secret and then busting them out to surprise me. A week ago we were all hanging out in bed and he said, "Hey [Bat Girl,] KARATE!" and she immediately responded, "CHOP!" complete with chopping hand motion. I nearly peed my pants laughing.

The downside is that despite her extensive vocabulary, she is still 14 months old, and still has trouble communicating the most basic of things. Or rather, I understand perfectly that when she reaches up for my glasses, sitting on the bathroom counter, and lets out a wordless whine, she would like to grab and mangle them. But no dice, kid. And I understand that when she stands outside the gate shutting her out of the kitchen and lets out a series of high-pitched, supersonic shrieks, she means something along the lines of, "Stop messing around with breakfast and come pay attention to ME! And/or let me in there so I can snack on cat food!" And I foresee many more toddler meltdowns along the lines of what we've been experiencing lately, where she'll demand her "CUP!" and then when you give her said cup, she screams and turns her head as if offered a poisoned chalice. And then plunges into despair when you take the cup away, sobbing "cuuuup...." Yeah, I'm guessing we'll hit the terrible twos early, here.

*****

I keep meaning to post a monthly update on Bat Girl but I can't seem to get it together--I still have thirteen and fourteen months sitting in my draft box--so this will have to do for now...

Why am I awake right now?

I have a job interview tomorrow. I don't particularly want this job. I like my current job. But despite our fat tax refund, we could really use some more money. So I'm going into this job interview, and if they ask for my salary requirements, I'm going to ask for nearly 40% more than what I'm making now. Because really, why the hell not?

The problem is that about a year and a half ago, our computer died and I lost the only digital version of my resume, and I never got around to making a new one. I still have hard copies of the old one, so it wasn't too hard recreating it, but I had never updated it to include my current job. So I'm sitting here at 10:30 pm trying to remember what the eff it is I do all day long.

Woohoo!

Just got a call from our accountant--we are getting a HUGE refund this year. As in, approaching five figures huge. Whee!

Unfortunately, we can't run out and blow it all on DVF dresses (me) and vintage Transformers (husband) and foie gras (oohhhh), as over the past year, between the hospital bills and the organic formula and the partially unpaid maternity leave and the going from two incomes to one and the price of EVERYTHING going up and the total lack of budgeting skillz up in our house--and, clearly, the massively excessive tax withholding from my paycheck--we have been running a major budget deficit each month. So most of that fat gubmint check will go to replenishing our savings, and then maybe we will buy a sexy new vacuum cleaner. And pay the accountant.

But it's nice to know that having a kid does have SOME financial perks. Now excuse me, I have to go change my withholding.

(God, being a grownup makes you so fucking boring. Accountants! Withholding! This is what passes for fun around here!)

Blogger makes me tired

But despite my total lack of html skillz I managed to update my sidebar, cleaning up my links and figuring out how to get my bloglines feeds listed. Check it out! Who else should I be reading to help me waste time at work? I had trouble sorting some blogs into infertile vs. non-infertile but really it was too much of an existential quandary on 5 hours sleep and fuck it, it's not like anyone's going to go looking and then complaining about it, right? (although, if you feel your blog has been mischaracterized, let me know!)

Also, I have been planning to go through and label all my posts and then do a sort-by-label thingy on the sidebar, but there doesn't seem to be any quick way to do that--I either have to manually code each label's link or I have to switch to Blogger's paint-by-numbers "Layout" mode, which I think will break all the html fussing I've already done. Bleah. Any ideas? (Besides "Shell out for Typepad, you cheap Luddite.")

Housekeeping posts are so riveting!