Where We Are: Graydon at 9 Months

He's mobile! Hide your drinks, your eyeglasses, your keyboard, your toys (Addie), and your lamps (good luck with this one!). Nothing is too high, too obviously unstable, or too boring to be thoroughly investigated. There is no speck of paper, dust, or dog food in our house left untasted. I have to leave what I'm doing and run interference on Graydon and some object at least 25 times a day.

Sometimes the object in question might be another child

But I love it because he loves it. Grady is so obviously delighted to be on the move. He's got a really fierce and intense army crawl down pat and he is already pulling up on everything with ease and attempting his first wavering free standing moments. He is also sporting his first bruises as he faceplants into various hard objects when he gets a little too ambitious. 

Various hard objects include other skulls.

That didn't end well for anyone.

Addie crawled at 8 months and 10 days. Grady? 8 months and 8 days. I might have passed the word onto him just to see how he'd respond to a challenge. I don't look at it as promoting sibling rivalry...I'd like to think I'm encouraging G to achieve ;-)

As he has become more active, Graydon has definitely slimmed down, much as his sister did. He is still a big boy, of course. He wears size 12 month and 12 to 18 month clothes, but he looks a lot less like a sausage stuffed into a too small casing.

Rollin' down the street, eatin' cheerios, sippin on my juice box. With my mind on my Mommy and my Mommy on my mind.

His recent leveling of the growth curve is definitely due only to activity because G man is still pounding down the food. He can still be persuaded to eat baby food every now and again but he really prefers the texture of "real" food at this point. He has six (!) teeth now, four on top and two on the bottom, so he can mostly keep pace with what he wants to eat. His favorite foods include Saltines, Cheerios, yogurt, chocolate chip cookies, macaroni and cheese, french fries.

 He still nurses somewhere between 5 and 6 times in a 24 hour period, but his nursing sessions are mostly very brief. He can't be bothered to sit still long enough to drink much and he is constantly popping up to investigate any new noise or sight. I doubt he will nurse as long as Addie did, which is fine with me.

(Sidenote: I figured out that out of the last 33 months of my life, I nursed for 28 of them. Holy mother of lactation, I am due for another break!)

Unimpressed Graydon is unimpressed

As he gets older and ever more interactive, Graydon is starting to enjoy reading and watching "movies". His favorite books are Feely Bugs by David Carter (a gift from my Mom), When My Baby Dreams (a gift from honorary great uncle Rick), and In My Den (a gift from honorary great aunt Edith). The first and the third books are tactile experience books and I believe he likes the second one because he likes looking at other babies.

His favorite "movies" are Baby MacDonald and Baby Neptune. Addie still loves these too, fortunately, so every couple of days I can pop Graydon in his bouncer and steal 23 minutes to take a shower or cook something while one of these is on.

(Another sidenote: Yes, I let my 9 month old watch TV. What can I say? I have no family closer than 1.5 hours away, my husband works 80 hours a week (not an hour more! it's illegal! that would never ever happen! honestly! no, really, it's the "truth"!), and the TV is my babysitter at times. I guess if Ads and G become total stoners that enjoy adult coloring books and stale Cheetos, we'll know it was the Baby Einstein DVDs.)

Too late! He is already chewing hemp!

While Graydon is starting to like reading and other such things, he mostly prefers to be on the go.  He loves stroller runs, his bath, and "wrestling". He heartily dislikes diaper changes and immediately starts the alligator death roll if you lay him on his back. Tim forcibly holds him down and I sing the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to him. This is really his first behavior that requires discipline and it's sometimes hard for me to fathom that his "innocent" days are already over!

(Yet another sidenote:There are our parenting styles in a nutshell. Graydon now cries with Tim but doesn't struggle whereas he continues to struggle with me when he can tear his mind away from the mesmerizing Jedi mind tool that is "Itsy Bitsy".  His is the better long term strategy and mine is the better short term, in my opinion. I guess this is why we parent in twos, right? You hope that your pros and your cons overlap enough to create a decent or perhaps excellent human.)

He also enjoys decorative gourds. "It's decorative gourd season, mother..." Well, I'm just going to go with "mothers". This is a family blog.

Getting all Simon Cowell with his large pumpkin choice.

Other interests include power tools and napkin rings. Making a fall centerpiece is not for the faint of heart.

Speaking of Jedi mind tools, I would like to Obi Wan Kenobi Graydon's sleep schedule. How awesome would that be? I could just wave my hand in his general direction and say "You will sleep now for 12 hours without stirring." And it would happen.

The sleep thing is actually a lot better, even without the Force. He is now sleeping a good 4 to 5 hour stretch at night and could probably make it through a whole night if I would insist upon it. I don't insist and so he continues to nurse twice after his bedtime, once around 11 or 12 and again between 2 and 6. He generally wakes up for the day between 6:30 AM and 7:30 AM. G is still taking two naps a day and he goes down really nicely for those and for bedtime. I have managed to successfully wean him from nursing to sleep, which is a great development for everyone. It means I can leave him with a sitter or with family for longer than two to three hours. That's a big milestone!

And can I just say that we adore this kid? He is a total mess...already a big mischief maker and bidding fair to be as stubborn and fiery as his big sister...but we live for his snuggles and cuddles and dimpled grins. 

We love you, G Man!

Musings: Eyeore

 You guys remember Eyeore, right? That sad little grey donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh that was always moping around? I felt like Eyeore this summer, and I hated that because I love summer.

(Incidentally, what was A.A. Milne (who wrote WTP) thinking? "Hey, I know, let's put a clinically depressed donkey into the story. Kids will eat that up." Even more incidentally, the real life Christopher Robin was Milne's son, who felt that the author stole his childhood for profit. Maybe that explains Eyeore. Maybe Milne could see that his son was shaping up to be a real gem and it depressed the bejesus out of him.)

I really wanted to skip this post and move straight into Addie and Graydon's updates but this post REFUSED to be ignored. I kept typing stuff and it was flat and blah and frankly boring. So I finally decided to just lay this out there in hopes that tying up this virtual loose end would free up my creative energy. 

You know how in life things are mostly good and then you hit a season of sadness? Sometimes it's a crippling, loss-of-life-or-limb type of sadness and sometimes it's more the death-of-a-thousand-cuts type of blues. It's been a season of sadness around here mostly because of the "thousand cuts"...things that seem too petty or self pitying to blog about but added up together cast a pall on my summer.

And then there was an amputation type of loss too, with my parents finally, gut-wrenchingly, separating and moving into the final stages of the divorce process. I thought I was prepared for it, but I wasn't. And maybe I will blog about that process at some point, about what it's like to lose your family unit as an adult.

Or maybe I won't. It's a tricky situation because sharing something on a blog, or facebook, or twitter, or anything of that ilk, means that you're making a decision to share it for everyone. And I don't know if my family is "ready" for that. Not all of them are from the share-all generation. I'm not sure how much of that story belongs to me, and is fair game to be shared, or how much of that story is family property to be protected. If I figure it out, I'll let you know.

I guess one of the hardest things about the "summer of suck" is that it sapped my creative energy in a big way. I usually WANT to blog every night, although I only actually get to it about once or twice a week. And I take pictures every day. And sometimes I write other things. But this leaden cloud killed that. I didn't have any desire to create, or to share. I just wanted to muffle and pretend everything was normal.

I guess that's because sadness is so stigmatized in our culture. It's like this thing you have to "deal with" or "get over" or "tackle". It's like you need a plan for how to feel better or you're somehow failing at life. In reality though, sometimes life is sad. And that's OK.

There is a lot of wisdom in children's books, you know. And this summer as I read We're Going on A Bear Hunt to Addie and Graydon, I found myself reflecting on the truth of the refrain in the book. "We can't go over it! We can't go under it! Oh no, we've got to go through it!"

Finally, I just went through it. I got comfortable with being sad, in the knowledge that this, too, shall pass. And that we are allowed to suffer because it softens us and makes us open to learning. Too often in my own life, I've heard other people's bad news and said "Oh bless their hearts" in an automatic kind of way. I feel badly for them...well, actually that's not true. My mind says the right words but I don't register them in my heart. I don't actually FEEL badly for them. But in my own season of sadness, I do register that pain. I do take the time to pray for those that are hurting or tired or grieving. And I think that's important and I hope it's a lesson I take with me out of this kind of "blah" time.

And now it's fall. I love this season every year, but it's especially welcome this year. We've got apples and pumpkins and a really glorious color change this season. And all of a sudden, I am again experiencing the joy of day-to-day life with my family.

My circumstances are still the same, of course. But the pain of them feels a lot more bearable. Life does go on, and it is still sweet, and perhaps even sweeter for a little bit of a drought.

I can't tell you how great it feels to kick Eyeore to the curb. In this family, we much prefer our characters to have some joie de vivre.