i'm sick to death of grading--been doing it, off and on, all day--so here i am.

i had all of these things that i could have told you, but now i don't remember any of it.

dangit.

blossoming.

i think i'm growing along with maggie.

somehow, in the last month, i have changed. or perhaps all of the pieces that had been growing in my soul all came together. or perhaps, as i really believe, my body finally reset and i am feeling more myself than i had been in the six months before.

but i'm just...happier. and finding great joy in my daughter rather than worrying so much about everything. naps are what they are.  teething sucks. solid foods are fundamentally and irrepressibly confusing.

she, however, is a joy.  i'm sitting here on the couch, watching her crawl furiously between two stacks of toys, pulling things out of the storage ottoman that i opened for her that is full of random old toys that she doesn't normally see.  she's pulling up on the ottoman, examining things, taking them out, eating them (of course), and then crawling back to toy home base, where the larger stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else hangs out.

she is just adorable. i think my heart just exploded a little bit.

but every day, i find these moments. every day, i find ways to get more things done. she's been going through some serious separation anxiety issues, mostly related, i think, to some big fat front teeth that are pushing through. as my friend saf put it, sometimes you just need your mom.

unfortunately, sometimes that is around 2 am, and she is not inclined to let me go so that she can go back in her crib.  it's been a bit of a struggle, but we're wandering our way through it, groping together in the dark to figure out what to do.

and i think i'm realizing that's mainly what motherhood is.

as i stumbled back to bed at around 330 last night, i told musicboy (who was awake too) that separation anxiety was kicking my butt.  but i didn't say it angrily or resentfully. just stating a fact.

but when i wake up in the morning, still tired and wishing for another hour or even another half an hour, and i hear my chattery baby talking to herself and pulling up and plopping down and enjoying her first moments of awakeness by herself in her dark room, i know we're doing something right.

when she just has so much fun cruising from chair to exersaucer, when she pulls out books and loves to chew on them, when she finds a metal mixing bowl the best toy of all, when she crawls over just to say hi and tell me she's hungry (or i realize that's probably the problem). when she thwacks the doorstop over and over to hear it make that sound, when she giggles at us singing the beginning of "crazy train," when she never seems to get enough of doing the same things over and over. when my voice calms her down as i sing the silly snowman song, when she decides to go to sleep as we're rocking and she nuzzles into the crook of my arm and is out just like that. when she chews on the crib, on the tv stand, on the side of her highchair.

when she does anything and everything.

maybe it's the season. maybe it's figuring out who we are as parents. maybe it's just that maggie is tremendously wonderful.

but our life is good.

letters to my girl: month seven.

dear maggie, or magpie, or maggie girl, or maggie mags, or magaroo, or any other combination of silly names that we've given you,

you are seven months old.

it snuck up on me. it really did. i don't know where the time has gone, though i'm pretty sure a fair bit of it has gone to you.  i don't regret that. not even one tiny bit. in fact, it seems preposterous to me that it would ever be any other way.

you change every day, but the past month has brought the most obvious changes. 

you crawl.

you pull up, on people and objects.

you sit from crawling easily.

you like to crawl under and over things, and you especially like to hang out under your exersaucer like it's a fort.

you're working on your pincer grip. i need to vacuum more often because whatever's on the ground is free reign for your exploring hands.

you talk, though no real words yet. today, it really sounded like you were working on "yeah" or "yay" and, remarkably, you imitated me for several minutes when i talked back to you.

you sometimes seem like you are close to saying mama or dada, and you do say dadadadadadadada as it seems to be one of your favorite consonant sounds.

you are learning what "gentle" is. you are learning fast.

i think you know what "no" means. i wish i said it less. i'm trying.

you love, love, love to be outside. if we go for a walk in your stroller, you are now facing forward, sitting straight up and looking at the world around you. you love it.

you now deeply dislike the changing table. this saddens me, as it used to be the place where we had so much fun. you're just too interested in spinning around and twisting like a pretzel. i have to give you a toy to get you to be still.

you are beginning to hate your car seat too. when we've been out and about, you seem to resent being restrained. i understand it, but we're talking to you about how you may not arch your back but you may protest verbally.  i swear i think you understand.

you still don't really like green beans.

--

we've had our fair share of sleeping challenges lately. you've done some great things, like learning how to put yourself back to sleep after waking up and yelling out, which is awesome. but you've also had some real trouble sleeping through the night.  this has caused me no end of stress--well, at least, it did at first. i kept thinking i needed to DO something else, to change something we were doing, that somehow we were harming you in someway by comforting you, rocking you, doing whatever we needed to do to help you get back to sleep.  but any time we thought about doing something else, it never felt right, never felt like it was right for you.

so, with your grandma's help, i just decided to trust my instincts. i still struggle with this. case in point: even though we've been through two teeth already, i still doubt the distinctive signs of teething. i doubt the fact that i KNOW that you teethe for a month before they cut.  i doubt the fact that i know that you get a runny nose just a few weeks before it cuts.  i doubt the fact that it interrupts your sleep in strange ways, until i see that distinctive little white line underneath your gum.  but until then, i just keep thinking that you're sick, that you're cranky, blah blah blah.

basically, i doubt myself all the time. and i've been doing it with your sleep. it's been a rough month, but that month was full of things you've learned to do: crawl, pull up, stand in your crib, sit up, etc.  and then there are the mental milestones also: learning language, learning about inside/outside/under/over, learning words and ideas and gaining independence.  so i know that the month began with your sleep being interrupted by that.

and if this wasn't all maddening enough, you'll occasionally give us a night or two in a row that's entirely silent. you sleep like a log, and it reminds me that you can.  those are little gifts, and they tell me that you know what? you really do like to sleep and you really do want to sleep. you just are having some trouble right now.

so i'm trying to listen to my gut when it comes to you.  sometimes it's hard, because this is my first time at the rodeo, but i'm trying really hard. thanks for being patient with me.

--

you love mango--but it doesn't love you.

you love to spin around. i foresee a 2 year old you in twirly dresses spinning. if you look, you'll find pictures of me spinning and twirling on our wedding day. the apple doesn't fall far.

i love to giggle with you. one afternoon, before your daddy got home, i was giving you kisses. and i started making kissy sounds and saying "kiss" and you started to giggle like it was the coolest thing in the world. and so, of course, i started to laugh because your laugh is entirely infectious.  it was the best thing that has happened in the past few days.  i love those moments.

you think the best thing ever is to pull up on the TV armoire and touch the buttons. you were laughing to yourself about it today.

when i come back from upstairs and you are playing, i always say "hi!" and you always give me the biggest grin. it is the best.

when you are crawling toward us, and we say "hi!" or "come on!" you start to breathe really fast because you're so excited and you crawl faster. it's adorable.

you have started letting strangers interact with you and even hold you (!) and it's awesome. i love watching it, because it tells me that you are secure enough and confident enough in our love for and protection of you that you can explore the world a little bit.  i love it.

i don't know what the next month will bring for us, but i know that you will keep on being a delightful joy. i was looking at the pictures of you when you were so small, just born, with your old man wrinkly forehead and clothes that just didn't fit.  i can hardly believe that you are the same girl, except that you are as beautiful today as you were that day.  your personality is so kind, generous, loving, and observant. you are so smart, and i am so lucky to be your mom.

thanks for teaching me a little more every day why it's important to become like a child if we want to return to Heavenly Father. your wide-eyed embrace of life and your absolute empathetic and total love for us shows me more about what i want to be. thanks for forgiving us our frailties and loving us into our strengths.

we love you more than we can say.
mommy

air.

you've probably noticed that posts have gotten more sporadic around here.

that's because i don't really have any time whatsoever to do this blogging thing.  i used to do it as a sort of procrastinatory move.  but now when maggie is awake, and i'm on the laptop, the only thing she wants to do is pull up and grab at it. so, long thoughtful entries during the day are pretty much out.

and at night, i'm trying to do the work that i can't do during the day or i'm sitting on the couch wishing i had the wherewithal to do anything close to putting a dent in my to-do list.

i'm busy, i guess, is what i'm saying.

lots of stuff going on, lots of which i'd like to talk about/express, but none of which seems blog appropriate, which really tells me that i need to get back to journal writing but please see above situation about lack of time.

i'd like to know how to solve that because i'm feeling increasingly like the early years of my marriage and the early part of maggie's life is only really captured by fleeting facebook status messages--like the fact that maggie was imitating sounds the other day (or so it seemed) and so i said "can you say hi?" and she said "hi dad" and then said, a couple of minutes later, "dada YEAH." which was just hilarious. or the fact that tonight her daddy was tossing her up and around and she was doing the real laugh. not just the baby giggle. like a full on laugh of glee and pure joy. we were laughing too. it was awesome.

so those things seem to slip by me.

or the fact that i have realized something about myself: when i do not get quality sleep, i will break down.  and by break down i mean have some sort of sobfest about something that is just a bit too much to handle. maybe it's the workload. maybe it's maggie's tendency towards fighting naps. maybe it's the fact that i don't have any jeans that fit me. who knows? but it's not crazytown. it's exhaustion. do you know how instructive that is? huge. HUGE. big revelation there.

these are things that might be important to remember someday.

like the fact that our family motto has become "we're gonna make it." and it means so much and is so much deeper than it seems and i love it and sometimes we just say it to each other and some days i have a little internal scoffage like "i don't know how" and sometimes i'm just annoyed to hear it because heyman i'm wallowing here in the fact that i wake up multiple times a night and every dad in america is hardwired to sleep through babies crying but every single time it gets me thinking about the fact that hey. we will make it.  and we will make it together.

that's also good to record.

but in the meantime, i guess i'll just come up for air every once in a while to say "hey guess what happened?" and then i will go back to it because hundreds of papers aren't going to grade themselves and the longer i wait the more there are of them (did someone feed them after midnight? come on.).

but i will say this--i have made a halloween costume for my baby. that's a stinkin' victory right there.

sigh.

back to it. 

letters to my girl: month six and a half.

dear maggie,

i am two weeks late.

i am sort of glad, because these two weeks have been MONUMENTAL for you, and not a little bit so for me as well.

in the last two weeks, you turned a wormy scoot into a full-on crawl.
in the last two weeks, you decided you could do this sitting independently thing and have rocked it ever since.
in the last two weeks, you have learned how to sit up from crawling. next step, i assume, is sitting up from laying down. of course, i can barely do that, but i imagine your abs are significantly more impressive than mine.
in the last two weeks, most astonishingly, you have learned to pull up on furniture and anything stationary (including people!) and have taken your tentative first steps toward cruising along the furniture.

you are extraordinary. when you do something, you do it big.

you love to blow raspberries, try out consonant sounds, and smile all day long. you've started to giggle at me when i laugh at you. it's reciprocal and it's lovely.

you went to the park for the first time.  you LOVE the swings. today, when we played on a swing, you just giggled the whole time. you just seem to take such great joy in it. i so wish we had a yard so you could have your very own.

you are sitting in shopping carts now, beginning to get a little more at ease with strangers, interested in eating anything and everything, and absolutely loving books. 

you're working on more teeth.  you're waking up a lot more at night, sometimes having real trouble going back to sleep. you're eating solids like a champ, learning to turn the spoon over in your mouth to get the last bits of cereal and banana off of the spoon. i'm so impressed by that. 

so far, you really, really like peas, carrots, banana, oatmeal, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and mango.  apples seem to not agree with you that much, though the jury's out on that.  green beans are not your favorite, but i think you might tolerate them with something else. 

at your new pediatrician, you impressed with great growth: you were 18 pounds, 6 ounces and something like 26.5-27 inches long.  90th percentile all around, and your little head was right on target as well. the doctor gave you a clean bill of health and called your weight great, which was happy for me to hear.

your naps are improving, though only sporadically.  you slept an hour and a half in your bed one morning--it was extraordinary. someday you're going to get those naps worked out. i'm so looking forward to that. i think it will happen for reals when you decide to go from 3 naps to 2.

i love you so much, baby girl. you are so much fun. i knew that you would be, but you really are.  you're learning and growing so quickly that i can hardly keep up. i like watching you grow though. it's like watching you blossom and bloom--it's a gift.  some days we have our moments, especially when you're fussy and i don't know why, but i am trying every day to take great joy in you.  it's not very difficult to do.

i can't wait to see you shine some more, mags.  you are wonderful and we are so grateful to have you.  you already are on your own track and on your own path, and i'm astonished and excited.  i can't imagine what the next month will bring.

love,
mommy.

i don't like mondays.

does someone know of some completely legal, completely moral way to earn tons of money without having to deal with work?

i'm thinking having a rich relative is really the only way, and by rich relative i mean someone who bequeaths you mass amounts of money. or publisher's clearing house. $5000 a week for the rest of my life would be just fine, thankyouverymuch.

i just have days sometimes when i want to quit all of my jobs and tell all of my students to shove it. 

this is one of those days.

oh how i wish i could just stay home with magpie and just...do that.  not have to do everything else related to my jobs.

BUT.

i am grateful that i can. in the long run, it makes life SO much easier (and so much less indebted). 

sigh. but today?

i'd like to pitch them all.

(but not really. so, you know, nobody fire me. because i really do like my jobs. i just don't like dealing with them sometimes.)

knitting.

there's a mellow kind of sadness that comes from realizing that one of the wounds that felt so fresh is now, ever-so-slowly, healing.

maggie had her first visit with her new pediatrician today. it's in the office where i went to see the lactation consultant about, oh, six months ago.  when we came in this morning, there were so many tiny babies there. some were there for two week checkups, but one was there to see the lactation consultant.  5 day old little boy and a mom probably really worried.

she said that he had lost 6 ounces. i told her that was fabulous.  "you must be doing something right!" i said.

i remembered so well that worry--that worry about whether or not you could provide what your baby needed.

not long after, as we were waiting in the room, i heard the lactation consultant weigh that same baby after feeding, just as she had done with me and maggie.  "a little more than an ounce," i heard her say with happiness in her voice.  "is that good?" the mom asked. "for five days? that's wonderful!"

and my heart hurt a little bit, at the same time as i silently cheered that mama.  when we were measured, it wasn't even an ounce.  it was less than a quarter of an ounce. it was not sustaining.

while i was sitting there, i took stock of how i felt. it wasn't the raw, vibrating, resonating pain of failure anymore. it wasn't even the "i should have kept going," though knowing what i do now, i might have made a different decision.  it wasn't the hot regret of what could have been.  it was just...experience.  it was realizing that the finger that you cut a few days ago no longer hurts when you use it. it's knitting together of what used to be separate.

i think i'll always feel that same sense of memory as we go to that same place, though i imagine those memories will begin to be overtaken by memories of maggie making friends with kids in the waiting room, charming nurses at the same time as she screams at them, shots and measurements that indicate tremendous, healthy growth.

it was interesting. it was odd. it was time, i suppose, to let it go a little bit more.

we did what we could. next time, we'll try to do it better.  but nothing we're doing now is anything but awesome for maggie.

and mommy's learning that more every day.