Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Britt Speaks


Remember when Brittany met her little friend Grant at the park last week? Well, Grant's dad was surprised that Britt speaks in full sentences already. He and his wife did the baby sign language thing with Grant and they speak to him in English and Spanish, wanting him to grow up bilingual, I guess, but he's two and a half and still doesn't talk much. I think the kid probably has too many ways to say what's on his mind and can't figure out which one to use.

Anyway, it surprised me that anyone would be surprised at Britt's speaking ability. I can remember worrying that she was never going to speak English, but I guess that's not a problem anymore.

She'll say short sentences like "Where Poppa at?" and "I get it" (except when she says "I get it" she really means "You get it" because she just stands there holding her hands out toward whatever it is she wants), and a few days ago she looked out the window and correctly told us "It rainin."

She can say "hug" and "kiss" but she hasn't said "I love you" yet.

On TB (TV) she likes to watch BobBob (Spongebob), the Woogies (Wiggles), Tubbies (TeleTubbies), and Booze Cooze (**snicker**) (Blues Clues).

She eats with a foke, she likes to swing when she goes to the poke, at night it gets doke, and this is a hote.

She likes to fix my hay (in proper OkieSpeak, "hair" has two syllables and she's only mastered the first one so far).

You know how she used to say "eeg" instead of "egg"? Well, now she says "aig" like a proper Okie should.

She likes cuwrin in her coloring books, and she likes to carry her cuwrs in a buckup so she can dump them out here, there and everywhere. I get to go around and pick them up about fourteen times a day.

She knows most of her body parts; most recently she learned about her nack and her albow.

She's showing a sense of humor already: she'll reach out her arm and holler "Howp! Howp!" and I "rescue" her by pulling her over to me and she'll just laugh and laugh. She also likes to fake us out with little baby snores, pretending to be asleep, and then she'll start giggling.

She knows when we're driving past the park or the library and she'll yell out "Poke!" or "Booksth!" (she also has a slight lisp).

She's still having trouble pronouncing Ls and Rs so she calls herself Bitney. I'm hoping she'll try Aunt Bridgie's name before she masters them, because wouldn't it be hilarious to hear hear say Aunt Bitchie?

Monday, August 28, 2006

Bedtime Story


Mikey's started putting Britt to bed at night; she won't let me do it anymore because she likes him better. But I'm A-okay with that since it means I'm finally free from the dreaded Chair.

He'll lay down with her on our bed (yes, she sleeps in our bed because after all the sleep issues we've been through we discovered that we don't have the up-and-down-all-night-long thing if she's in our bed, plus she doesn't take an afternoon nap at all anymore and the only quiet time I get is when she's asleep, so she sleeps in our bed and yes I know that's bad and shut up about it already) until they both fall asleep.

The first few times I let him sleep because, hey, he works hard, he's tired, he needs the rest, right? Then he growled at me for not waking him up because he lost his whole evening, needed to write checks, was supposed to do something, whatever, whatever, so in the future I should make sure he gets up after she's asleep.

So I try. I do try. I go in there at 15-minute intervals and shake him until his eyes open and I tell him what time it is and he'll say, "I'm getting up," or "Gimme a few more minutes," or some such thing and after doing this five or six times a night it feels pretty ridiculous so I give it up and go back to playing on the computer until it's time for me to go to bed.

Other nights, like tonight, he actually does wake up and get out of bed. And then you know what he does?

He crashes on the couch.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Illin'


We've been so sick over here. The flu, I think. It was so bad that I missed two whole days of computer time. Yeah, I heard you gasp in shock. Two whole days.

Mikey came down with it first: snotting, sneezing, hacking and choking, then he spent a night huddled in a fleece blanket breaking a fever.

I got it next; my worst day was Friday, when I drifted in and out of consciousness all day. I did manage to stagger around long enough to fix Britt breakfast and lunch, and to dig out my heavy winter sweatpants and a long-sleeved sweater because I was freezing my ass off. I woke up a few times to find Britt throwing crayons in my face or using my pain-racked body as a trampoline:

ooooh, sweetie... grammy's so sick... I can't... zzzzzzzzzz...

Gawd, the pain was way worse than the snotting and hacking part. I felt like I'd been sledgehammered all over. I was curled up in a fetal position at one point and when I tried to draw my knees up closer to my chest I got a whanger of a charleyhorse, which was like the freakin' cherry on top.

Mikey didn't miss a single day of work, so if he felt as bad as I did and still managed to stay upright all week, he's a superhero.

Britt had a snotty nose for a couple of days and then... nothing! Her nose cleared up and there was no fever, no coughing, no malaise, no nothing.

Seriously, she's only been sick three times in her life, she's never had an ear infection, she never has fevers or poop issues, she hardly ever has a snotty nose, and she's never had eye boogers. Not once, ever.

This kind of blows me away, because I already raised two kids and they had plenty of all the above. Even pneumonia at one point. We always had a bottle of pink amoxicillin in the fridge, sometimes one for each kid.

I don't know what to think about our little miracle baby, except that her immune system must be fucking stellar.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Vomitus Horribilis, Part 2


Sherri asked if I've checked with Britt's pediatrician about her vomiting thing and, yes, as a matter of fact, I have. The pediatrician advised me to try to "bring her down" before Britt gets to the vomiting stage, but that's easier said than done since she can start spewing within thirty seconds of bursting into tears.

Lesley suggested acid reflux, but I don't think Britt has it. I've been studying up on it the past few days, but the symptoms just don't seem to fit. I don't see anything in what I've been reading that makes me go, "Yep, that's her." Besides, I don't think she started doing this until she was a little older -- in the first episode I can remember, she was standing up in her crib.

She did it again last night at bedtime. A thunderstorm rolled in just after the three of us crawled into bed together, so Mikey went to put the dog in the garage so he could open the side gate. As soon as he left the room, she started howling with rage (because Poppa is her very favorite person in the whole world and once he gets home from work he must not be allowed to leave her orbit) and puked all over herself, the bed, and me. I was so frustrated that I burst into tears my own damn self.

Then she did it again in her highchair tonight, because we had the utter gall to insist that we eat dinner before going to the library.

See, that's part of what pisses me off about it. I'm not ready to say that she's doing it to manipulate us, but it feels so damned manipulative because it usually happens when we fail to bend to her will.

(The other part that pisses me off is having to clean up the mess, because it's pretty freakin' gross, y'all.)

So, anyway, then Mikey surprised both of us with a trip to the park before we went to the library (way to go, babe -- reward negative behavior, oh yeah). And guess what happened at the park?

Britt picked up her first boyfriend. His name is Grant, and he's two and a half.

It was the first time I saw her really interested in playing with another kid. Usually, other kids try to play with her while she wanders around doing her own thing.

Also, they hugged each other!

Oh, my.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Vomitus Horribilis


There's only one thing Britt does that drives me absolutely batshit crazy: when she gets really really upset, she vomits.

I don't mean a little spit-up. I mean she spews. The child has range. It goes everywhere.

(**sigh**)

This last time, it was only 30 minutes after I got her to sleep for the night and that damned Emergency Broadcast System or whatever it is started blaring on the TV and it was so frickin' loud it made me jump. Britt woke up screaming, so I went and laid down with her and she cried and cried and started gagging and I was all "No, no, no, noooooo..." and thar she blew. She was covered with it and so was I and so was the bed. She even managed to spray the carpet at the foot of the bed.

A few weeks before that, she spewed all over herself, me, the couch, the living room carpet, the kitchen floor, the kitchen cabinets and Mikey. It was a stunning performance, lemme tell ya.

She did it a couple of times in the tub when she was going through her bath-phobia phase (which has passed, thank God!), she barfed all over her safety gate once (which was a bitch to clean), and she did it a couple of times when she was still in her crib so that I had to run the bumper pads and all through the washer.

I'm guessing she has a hair-trigger gag reflex because sometimes she'll gag a little when she laughs really hard, too. I've never known of a baby vomiting like she does, though, so I don't really know what to make of it. It's kind of like The Exorcist, except her puke's not green. And her head doesn't spin. Mine sure does, though.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Family News


I called Mom tonight to wish her a happy birthday, and this is what Bad News Betty (heh! just kidding, Ma!) had to say:

Nine-year-old Madison has been diagnosed with diabetes, and is handling the shots like a trooper, along with learning a whole new way of eating. I didn't think of it until after I got off the phone, but wasn't her daddy a diabetic too? And that's why he was so sickly, because he wouldn't get with the program?

Also, this unfortunate lady, who was driving along minding her own business in the wrong place at the wrong time, was Mom's cousin's widow.

Monday, August 07, 2006

My dog ate the Internet


Woke up Saturday morning, fixed Britt her breakfast, snuck in here to check the news, and discovered that my Internet service was deader than shit. I had a feeling, so I went outside and checked the cable and, sure enough, Pepper had chewed halfway through it. Most of my cable TV channels were still working, but still -- that bitch!

Oh, hell, I thought, it's gonna be a looong weekend. I am so addicted to my Internet.

And then I thought, okay, this is a good time to catch up on all those boring little tasks that I never get around to, like:

* transferring photos off my big stack of disks and onto my hard drive so I can edit them and see which ones I want to get printed. My poor old dinosaur digital uses floppy disks instead of a memory card (and this is my second digital camera; I wore the first one out during our eBay days). I have to do a lot of color-correcting and if I try to save images back to the floppy, sometimes it screws up and damages my pictures beyond repair.

* scanning vintage family pictures from the photo albums Mom loaned me so I can get my own copies made.

* writing up some posts for my blog on WordPad so they'll be ready to go as soon as I'm back online.

Well, I did write one blog post -- this one. I played about a dozen games of Free Cell but got bored, so mostly I fiddled around with the relationship calculator on my Family Tree program. And that's pretty much it.

And my beshitted computer keeps locking up! It does that every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month, but now it's started doing it like every thirty minutes. Gaaah! I used to be a whiz at keeping my old Compaq Presario (equipped with Windows 95A -- aaargh!) wheezing along, but this computer's been so trouble-free (until now) that I've forgotten all my little tricks. I tried everything I could think of to get it going again without rebooting, but nothing worked. It better just frickin' quit it, dammit.

Man, I wish I had a shiny new laptop. With Wi-Fi. And without a single MicroSoft product installed on it.

Anyway, the cable guy's come and gone already, and I'm back in business. Woo-hoo!