Maddie and I on a Trip to Japan?!

I've got the travel itch again and the only way to get rid of it is to, well, travel. But it's tough because on the one hand I can't leave Maddie behind yet. I might be able to do an overnight somewhere without her and survive, but I couldn't go much longer than that. And that's way too short to cure the itch. On the other hand, I could bring her with me and... yah! I'll just bring her with me.

So, I was thinking of going to Japan. It's the cleanest and most modern place I would like to currently travel to and I think it's the best choice for Maddie. After talking to several coworkers "in the know" on Friday all of them said "Yes, you should totally go. You won't have any problems being there and getting around with the baby."

The only thing that really scares me is the plane ride over there. It's something like 14 hours long. And that scares me. If she decided that she was unhappy it could get really bad, and I'd feel terrible being "that parent and child" on the plane. But then again, she's totally mellow and a great kid so I'm sure it'll be fine.

Am I crazy? Am I crazy enough to actually go? Would I enjoy the trip as much as I would have pre-baby days? I'm confident it will be a whole new experience.

Tikka Masala

Hi, it's Rainbow. I'm too lazy to log out of my husband's account and log back in with mine to post this correctly.

I recently ran across a recipe for tikka masala that actually seemed like it could work out to be similar to my favorite paneer tikka masala dish from Biryani. I took a picture of the recipe from my friend's cookbook and made my version of it on Friday night. It turned out great!

I chopped an onion and added tomato sauce, yogurt, and paneer along with the spices from the recipe. I also added a little black pepper. We finished off the leftover's tonight for dinner.

I'm publishing this here because I'm hoping to not lose this recipe.

About half a year ago or so I found this fantastic recipe for ranchero sauce, as in huevos rancheros. I made a ton of it and put a bunch in the freezer. It's all gone now and I really would love to make more. But I can't figure out where I got the recipe. I think it was on one of my iphone recipe apps, but after spending a bunch of time trying to find it, I've finally given up. t's sad because it was so good.

My Worst Fear Realized

Yesterday we went up to a friends house for their son's 5th birthday party. They just moved to this great big house in Pleasant Hills.

Maddie went down for the night while we were there and we didn't bring our monitor. We were lucky enough, or not, as it turned out, to borrow their old one. She went to sleep on the floor of the parent's room, which happened to be on the other side of the house from where we were all hanging out. My honeypot set up the monitor base and had the other end of the monitor on his pants. I think he even tested it when he was setting it up, I'm not sure though.

A couple hours later another guest at this event came into the kitchen and said that our baby was screaming. (She had gone to the bathroom which is next to the bedroom.) At first I paused because my honeypot was nearby and I could only hear static on the monitor. But then I reacted and ran in there and it was pretty clear that Maddie had been crying for a little while at least. Her neck was sweaty and she was very much worked up compared to how she usually is when she just wakes up and shouts out for some consoling. It took me a couple minutes to calm her down, poor thing. I felt and still feel so terrible.

As it turns out, when the light switch was turned off when she was left asleep in the room, it also turned off the power for the monitor base. Unfortunately that piece of crap monitor receiver doesn't do anything if it can't find the base signal. (Ours will have a red light instead of green and beep every couple of minutes.) Lesson learned: test the monitor with the room in the exact configuration that the baby will be sleeping in, or better yet, stop forgetting ours when there's a chance we'll need it. Hell, I might go buy one just for our "to-go" bag after this. I don't think I could handle having this situation happen again.

One of the things that so sucks about this is that I always have this fear when I'm depending on our monitor at home that it'll fail and our baby will be laying there screaming and nobody will know. It's terrible, and it makes me go check on her when the monitor is just a little to quiet for my comfort. In last nights situation, I was busy hanging out with folks and it was my honeypot's day to be the primary parent, so I wasn't really worrying about it.

My poor baby girl.

Helicopter Parents

I found this great article recently. I think I do okay with not being one of these parents, but it's still pretty early. I do let Maddie fall over and explore her body, and play by herself. When she gets vocally frustrated enough, I'll help her. That's true for any situation all the time.

I've definitely gotten better at letting her overcome physical situations that she doesn't know how to deal with. Many many months ago I would always help her if she seemed frustrated in the slightest. And pretty much anytime she was on her tummy, she'd start grumbling. I soon enough realized that she was never going to get any quality tummy time if I always saved her from her slightest grumblings. I realized I was being a bit extreme.

In fact, just yesterday she wowed me with what she was doing and she did it all by herself. She's sitting and playing with toys and went after a toy that was out of reach. She's leaning forward (too far to get back up to sitting, I think) and ends up on her belly with her legs under her somehow. She looked at me and started whining a little. I looked back at her and told her I wasn't going to help. Then she got up on her hands and had her head up, leaned her head over, pushed her arm forward and kicked her leg up. And bam! she rolled over. And she was so excited! (So was I) This was the first time that I saw her go through this whole sequence of getting from sitting to on her back. And I doubt it would have happened if I had gotten involved.

I think it must help Maddie tons to see Sebastian, her new Nanny share friend, cruising around the house. He's a really solid crawler (and super cute to boot!) and a pretty mellow kid.

I have a game that involved lost of crawling that I started doing a couple months ago to help her see what crawling looks like. She's so freakin cute when we're playing this. I basically pretend I'm a bear or some animal and crawl in circles around her and growl at her and mock bite her arms/legs/body and push her around with my head and give her lots of kisses. It's one of the only guaranteed ways I have of getting her to laugh that hard. Sometimes I do it to her on the changing table too. (She'll always be my cub.)

(Maddie's sitting solidly; has been for a while now. She even is stable with her hands and toys above her head.)

Spicy Baby Food

I've been offering non-bland food to Maddie sometimes. And she usually eats it.

The other day we were at Biryani House (my favorite Indian restaurant and cheap!) and I gave her some tastes of the dishes. She reacted a little bit, but she wasn't upset. I think she's happy to get to try what she's seeing everybody else eating. And I try and do that as much as I can.

A couple days ago I put turmeric, basil and pepper in her peas. Peas are kind of gross looking when you put them through the cuisinart. She ate tons of this combo.

It kind of makes sense to me that the whole bland food for babies thing is nonsense. It's not like they know the difference. And the only way their going to think it's normal and not fight it when they're older is if they're eating it right from the get go. I'm not suggesting that you feed them fiery hot spiced food, or that you don't adjust their food based on how they react. But I think feeding them bland food is boring, boring and it might just set up a picky eater for later. Especially in our house, where we don't normally eat much that's bland at all.

Yesterday I fed her yogurt and she had this really adorable expression. It was a little tart for her and she only ate a couple bites. I wish I had a picture of that face. So cute!

Reading

Last week I finished the book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It's a cute story. Tells a little bit about Chinese culture during the cultural revolution.

I'm also about to finish Julie & Julia tonight. I've only got a couple pages left. This is also a light decent read.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I'd like to read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I tried reading it a couple months ago, but I didn't have the amount of processing power (spare brain cycles) to devote to it. It's not a light read, and he plays around with the English language some also. Maybe I'll try it again. I'm not as tired as I was then.

There's a Dead Fish in the Office

I came into work today to find a dead fish in a little fish tank and it made me really sad. Probably sadder than it should have.

One of our recently hired engineers had this beautiful blue fish on her desk at her old job. She had it on her desk here for a bit too but came to the realization that there wasn't enough natural light for it, so she put it in the common/kitchen area. (Her office was one of the darker ones.)

When that fish got moved to the common area I was already sad and worried about it. A couple years ago somebody thought it would be a good idea to have a fish there and everybody fed it and it died pretty quickly. Our office is really bad at taking care of things.

Also, a couple years ago they spent some serious money to get some really nice large plants for the main room that most employees work out of, and it didn't take more than a couple months for most of them to die or be rapidly on the path to death. And the thing is.. most folks didn't even notice the dying plants. That's what always suprised me. They're right in front of everybody, but nobody can see them. (I can. Maybe I'd be a happier person if I didn't notice things like that.)

The fish did fine for several months, then my coworker went on vacation for 3 weeks. She had a responsible coworker take care of the fish, and all was fine. Then he went on vacation and I started to worry more. There just aren't that many people here that I would entrust with not forgetting about the fish in another part of the office.

Today I walked in and the fish tank was all cloudy and the fish was floating at the top with this film around it. It's pretty sad.

I think the thing that really affects me about this is that the fish was trapped. It depended on things and people outside of itself to survive. And that task of it's survival is so casually passed around here. It probably was negelected and died from dirty water and maybe it wasn't getting fed anymore. I don't know. But it makes me think of all the kids in the world. They depend on somebody else to make sure their needs are met. And for some they aren't, but there isn't much they can do about it unless they make it to being old enough to help themselves.

Sleep Progress

I've wanted to share this for a couple days now, but I also really didn't want to jinx what was happening.

Maddie has started only waking up around 5am for a feeding. She'll usually go back to sleep for a couple hours too. So she's going 10 hours or more from the time she goes to bed until she wakes up for that feeding. I'm pretty excited that she's doing this on her own. She's so close to just plain dropping that feeding and sleeping continuously throughout her nighttime.

I previously had a plan to night wean her. Then I decided I'd rather move her into her crib in our room first, and then work on nighttime food consumption. I had heard not to do these at the same time. Since we haven't had a chance to do the rearranging required to get her crib in our room, we haven't done anything at all. One feeding at night is still not that bad, and having it be that late in the night is great.

In other news, Maddie can pretty much sit on her own unsupported and not fall over. I still put a pillow or something behind her in case she does fall over. But she's become a pretty solid sitter.

These pictures are from Willard park in Berkeley. We went there this past weekend.

More Milestones

Maddie's been able to stand, holding on to something, for a month or so now. She's gotten really strong and will grab my shirt collar to support herself without me holding on to her. It's pretty impressive. Lately I've been showing her how to pick up a foot and move it forward and then do the next one while supporting her.

Well, when I came home from work today she was taking steps all by herself! (I was providing support, of course) But I couldn't believe it. I was actually talking to a friend of mine when she started doing this. She ended up "walking" about a couple feet before she stopped doing it. The steps were so cute and small. And the excitement she had was contagious! I'm sure she's starting to realize the power that mobility will provide for her. She'll get to go right to the toys she wants and be able to move around.

We found a permanent family to share our Nanny with and their boy, Sebastian, is about a year old. He's a really good crawler and can get around easily. I'm hoping that he'll influence her to learn how to crawl.

What a weekend

Our entire family was sick this weekend. It was no fun at all. I can't imagine what you do if you're a single parent. Especially a single parent without family or somebody to fall back on around. I slept all night on Saturday then all day on Sunday and all night on Sunday also. I really expected to be wide awake Sunday night, but I slept like a log. I've been fighting this terrible illness. My right ear has been plugged (like it's in need of popping, but unpopable) since Friday. I'm finally coming out of it now. But this has been really bad. I can only hope that we don't get anything else like this again.