Zoralee on the move

Okay, this is a long post. I am sorry if it sounds like a Christmas letter in which I make my child out to be a superstar. She is, but I'm sorry if it's too obvious. Ha ha. Anyway, if you make it to the end of this post, you'll be rewarded with a booby photo...of sorts.

Just over 7 months ago now, I birthed my little Pumpin Buns. Before getting to know her, I would've guessed our offspring would be pretty chilled, of average energy levels, happy-go-lucky. I placed a whole lot more faith in general baby timetables. If you'd have said my baby might only quasi-laugh a handful of times in her first seven months of life, I'd have thought you were crazy. "But we love to laugh!" I'd have said, "And so will our baby!" Now timetables can eat my shorts. Zoralee smiles just fine, and she'll squeal and shriek with enough encouragement, but some babies have been laughing for months by now. Not Zoralee. She has other things to focus on than cheerfulness and merry-making. Namely, exercise and mobility. (?!)

From the very start (and I mean, on literal Day 1), she wanted to hold her head up. And she did it too, by George, for several seconds at a whack. We still held her head whenever she was against us, 'cuz that's what you're supposed to do with babies, but she never had that noodle neck flopping thing. I've no idea why, but I sometimes wonder if it was the way she was situated in the womb. At a couple weeks old, if you held her hands, she would try to pull herself up to a stand. I am not foolin' around.

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As soon as Zoralee was happy to lay on her stomach, say, around three months, she started maintaining the superman position for long stretches of time. Abdomen to the floor, arms and legs held outstretched and off the ground. This is hard to do as an adult! Of course, sucking one's toes is too. Zoralee didn't spend a whole lot of time rolling over. Some time, yes. But once she'd get onto her belly, she would push her arms down in a half push-up and hold. Downward dog, I think it is, in yoga terms.

Around six months, she started crawling and experimenting with standing pretty much within the same few days. My first indication that the crawling stage was going to pass quickly was when she crawled off our bed at nap time, waaay before I knew she could make that kind of forward progress. I had gone in to check on her and found an empty bed. I let loose with an explicative, and my eyes scoured the dimness to find her laying on the floor, chewing on the bassinet leg. You can bet I kicked myself good over that one. "Anticipate the next stage, oh Mother Of A Learning Baby!" My heart was pounding and hands shaking for 1/2 hour.

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Within a day or two of that, I watched her pull herself up inside the bassinet. Alrighty then! There went the bassinet, because I was paranoid she could somehow lift a leg up and whip herself over the edge. So, over the last few weeks as she has been coordinating opposite legs and arms (rather than scooching or haphazardly going forward), in the standing arena, she is letting go of the table edge with one hand. She also uses vertical edges to get herself up, like a door. I'm seeing rock-climbing in her future.

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Now her bed is a Thermarest camping mat on the floor. This works great, because I can co-sleep to get her down for naps and night time. Then I get into our bed, which we're fixing to take off the box and just have as a plain mattress on the floor for even better transitioning. When Zoralee wakes from a nap, she crawls off her mat and around the room looking for something to play with. We bought a baby monitor a few weeks ago, and it's handy.

Other fun Zoralee factoids:

• She bounces to music, and if there is no music, plain old rhythm'll do. Like, if you hit a pot with a spoon, because you're honestly trying to get food off the spoon, that's rhythm, and bouncing will ensue.

• She still fights sleep like the dickens, but three times now she has been content to lay down beside me without nursing and fall asleep. I nearly woke her back up to bestow upon her high praises and show her that this is exactly how she can love to mommy every day. She hates to lay still for a diaper change. Hates getting dressed or undressed.

• Z doesn't particularly love getting into her ergo-carrier, but once she's in, she is quite content and comfortable. I use it daily for outside chores around the place, inside while I'm cooking or cleaning, and whenever we go on walks or to public places, so pretty much all the time. She falls asleep in that a lot.

• Just today I discovered that she likes yerba mate tea. Can you beleive that? Jason says yerba mate tastes like it was made by letting water steep in a concoction of barnyard substances - hay, animal excrement, etc. I admit it's an acquired taste, and I wouldn't have imagined a baby who has tried such sweet delectables as strawberries (wee bits at a time to make sure of no allergies), pineapple, and chocolate to be okay with such a flavor. But she got really excited and kept wanting more tastes. As though this child needs any additional sources of energy. Jimminies.

Perhaps I'll end there for now. Anybody still reading this, besides our mothers and Rachel? Okay then, here is your reward:

a footstool booby

signs

Keeping on the lookout for signs from heaven isn't the hard part. It's when you get a sign, like a spider pointing at a specific word, that you really have to kick in with the question asking.

gardening is hard....ening

Well dagshnabit, a flock of pygmy grasshoppers has decimated our beet crop and our three variety of lettuces. First they got the claytonia, a very fragile lettuce, and we thought that's all they cared for. But a few days later, it was the black seeded simpson, and now they're working on the butterleaf. It's discouraging. I did re-plant beets, but the grasshoppers must lay in waiting, salivating, because they're attacking them as soon as they spring up. We were so looking forward to beets! Maybe ours wouldn't have been ready in time anyway though. I saw gigantic beets at the farmer's market last week, with greens that looked like bushes. They must've been, oh, roughly 3,000 times the size of ours.

The hopper population is of plague proportions. Don't try that sentence with numb lips. Our best defense against them seems to be keeping the garden area wet, but who wants to run the sprinkler 24 hours a day in one spot? Something seems wrong about that. The grasshoppers sometimes catch a northernly breeze, flying across the lawn in swarms, and we will lean on our hoes with weathered arms and watch the bugs with old farmer eyes and say bitterly under our breath, "Good riddance." And then we'll look down at our two remaining cabbage plants and five elephant garlics and say, "Looks like we'll be having a lot of cabbage and garlic. Or, wait. Looks like we'll be having a week's worth of cabbage and garlic."

The plague of hoppers has occured over the last couple weeks, and we're not hearing similar sentiments from other gardeners in the area. It is probably because we are surrounded by dry pasture land. Now today, we just discovered that our gate must've come open, because a deer ate our sugar snap pea plants down to 4 inch stalks of nothingness.

There is a time for admiring wildlife and a time for wanting to ring its neck.

After our first round of tomatoes sprouted but then died horrid deaths due to us purchasing "daylight" bulbs instead of "plant and aquarium" bulbs, we planted a bunch more maybe 6 weeks ago. Well, I am happy to report that those are healthy plants, ready to be transplanted into the garden. And actually, the seed success rate was such that we should have plenty of tomatoes. Should. Should. But not a lot else in the garden has gone as it "should." Our three mature tomato plants from Jese and Nikki are so far unscathed by critters. And our one zucchini plant and two winter squash plants are continuing to grow.

I also planted corn and carrots a couple of weeks ago, hoping for a late, hot summer. Yeah, I know the saying about corn, that it should be "knee high by the 4th of July." Well, ours was knee high...to a grasshopper, which, believe me, I had plenty of to measure by.

chicken down

A stray dog got one of our hens.
Booooo.

It happened within hours of us leaving for the family reunion. The neighbor kids saw two unfamiliar dogs in the area, so they ran over here in time to see one of them with a chicken in its mouth, dead. Just then the dogs' owner was driving through, hollering out the window for them. She felt so bad about the chicken and left her information in case we wanted her to replace it.

We'll never be able to replace that specific chicken, lady.

Okay, maybe we will. We still can't tell our hens apart much by looks - they are just too stinkin' similar - but some of them stand out by behavior. You know about Flight Risk, whom Jason chased with rocks and a stick to get her into the coop not long ago. She's the least sociable and usually the last one in at night. There are also two hens who stick together and like to graze and explore far past where everybody else is willing to go. There's another who Jason thinks has trouble seeing or flying. She seems to be lowest gal in the pecking order, and always roosts on the bottom rung at night while the others squish onto the top two rungs together. It's pretty sad. We think it's she who is laying eggs on the floor beneath the laying boxes. She also occasionally bumps into things, making us suspect blindness. Finally, our friendliest hen was one of the slowest to mature; we knew her first by her approachability, and also more recently by her short, pale pink waddles and combs. She greets us before anybody else does, follows us the farthest, and walks boldly up to the dogs to see what's going on. Heck, I'm going to go ahead and name her Friendly Bird right now.

So, which hen got killed? Well, our worst fear was that it was Friendly Bird. There's the pet lover in us, valuing human qualities. We could just see her running up to the stray dog and squawking out a hearty, "Welcome to the neighborhood!" Then, CHOMP. When Jason got home from work mid-week, he went to see which hen it was, and it was indeed one of the two or three least mature. We were so sad. But again, by looks alone, he couldn't tell precisely who. As time has gone on, it's clear that Friendly Bird is still here! None of the others I described above seem to be gone either, so we must've lost one of our lesser known hens.

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In other chicken news, Six Dolla' Roo is gaining confidence. Whereas before, he was a bit of a pansy rooster, he now attacks people's legs from behind while they're walking away. It's actually a little funny if you know it's coming. He was de-taloned, so it doesn't hurt. He flies into your legs and flaps about, and when you turn around and look at him, he just stands there looking back.