fish and fat

the prior goldfish (r.i.p.) lived lengthy goldfish lives in the tank at violet's daycare, so hopefully these guys will too. some weeks ago i promised to provide replacements for the flushed, but after a frustrating petco experience wherein they could not sell me any goldfish ("they're under surveillance") despite an employee having told me via phone a few hours earlier that there were OF COURSE goldfish for sale, i asked kevin to take over the fish duties. i surely would have shown up with two half-limp carnival specimen, but kevin classed up the joint with four gorgeous freshwaters of varying halloween colors. i look forward to reporting back once the teachers have named them.

apparently aghast at the thought that we'd ever stoop to lazy parenting tactics (despite the evidence of our still night-nursing little co-sleeper), kevin assembled violet's convertible walker/hot ride. she keeps a stuffed banana in the front compartment, and every time the car stops moving, she checks to make sure the banana is still in place. maybe she is a girl after my own heart: never leave without snacks.



one thing i know for sure is that violet is a girl after her father's heart. every time something is "out of place" in the house - a laundry basket on the floor, a package on the front stoop, a bag of groceries on the counter - she points at it emphatically. "DA," as if to say THAT doesn't belong there. it's only a matter of time before she's straightening askew magazines on the coffee table.

i can't believe i've neglected to mention that violet has not one but TWO teeth! well, more like one and a half. the first one took weeks to come in, and the second one is moving even slower. you can catch a glimpse of the first tooth in this pic taken by my friend monica, who spent last saturday entertaining the munch with her amazing goofy faces.





i wonder if there's any correlation between how slowly violet's teeth come in and how slowly she puts on weight. what you see on her tray is typical fare for her. shredded veggies made into cakes and then fried to blazes in olive oil. summer squash drowned in olive oil and then roasted. i've made banana muffins with double the butter and half and half in place of milk, and then buttered some more upon serving. all carbs are slathered in butter or cream cheese; macaroni and cheese is also made with half and half. full-fat yogurt is spooned into her mouth at a furious pace until she realizes, wait, i don't like to eat from the spoon, and the same goes for sweet potatoes pureed with huge glugs of olive oil, frozen, and then re-warmed with melted butter and cinnamon. can you imagine if we got to eat like this all the time? after her bout with roseola, during which she barely ate for a week, she was all ribs again, so we've been working overtime to recoup. hopefully i won't have to cry on the car ride home from her 12-month appointment in a few weeks.

in other news, little miss chicken legs has figured out how to stand on her own. keep you posted.

violet's hair is so long now that it gets in her eyes. after her bath at night, kevin brushes her wet hair into a donald trump swoop in hopes that it will dry sideswept for the next day, but she still always ends up looking like linus when he sees "the great pumpkin." my mom cut my hair when i was a baby, and it was screwy from then on out; she didn't cut my younger sister's hair, which ended up long and gorgeous. we've been avoiding cutting violet's hair based on this sole data point; daycare noted its protest by sending her home looking like bam bam.

fits and starts

it sometimes feels as if violet hasn't changed THAT much lately. but then what is actually A LOT of change makes itself suddenly known. or more precisely, the fact of just how much she's changed (and how quickly) suddenly dawns on me.

violet used to eat the books. we rarely made it past page three without her chewing on the corners. god forbid if we attempted a story without flaps to lift (and rip) or pop-up cookie monsters to tear out (and gum to decapitation). i'd hear about these two and three and four month olds and how much they love the hungry little caterpillar, and i'd look at my hungry little cardboard eater and promise that good looks are better than brains any day. but now she'll sit for surprisingly long stretches with full attention on a book. she'll point and babble along. when did this happen?





i used to think violet was an especially tough crowd, which has been rough on her comedy writer father. we'd try so hard to make her laugh only to be met with pity and scorn. now? she's a crazy gigglepuss. tickling works best (and spares us all from desperate dick jokes).



i also used to think that violet would walk early, since she was an early crawler, but now i think she's going to walk late. first of all, she's got chicken legs and isn't very sturdy, and when we try to hold her up by the hands, she protests by firmly planting her butt on the floor like she's (and the irony doesn't escape me) gandhi at a sit-in. "we really need to assemble that walker," i said to kevin. but as it often does, lazy parenting won out.



when i went to lift violet for a ride on her froggy rocker, kevin intervened: "she knows how to climb on and off herself." what?! what's next, a harley?



but just when i thought all of this maturity was more than i could take, violet went and had her best night of sleep since that fateful night that ended in mastitis for me about eight months ago. she went down fast at 8:45pm and slept in her crib with no wake-ups until 3:45am, when i brought her to our bed to nurse, after which she fell asleep easily, dreamfed at 6:15am, and woke up smiling at 7:00am.

it's also worth noting that all of a sudden (and it really did seem to happen all of a sudden) violet's separation anxiety is exponentially improved. no matter who was holding her, she'd scream for me if she so much as heard me tiptoe across another room. kevin has put up with many a morning meltdown while i hurried to get dressed and brush my teeth (though likely not my hair, let's not get crazy). daycare has had it bad too - just weeks on end of sobs and snot upon my departure. then last monday, no tears - and no tears all week! this week, she's actually excited when we arrive and reaches for her teachers, or sometimes even her "friends."

violet has been buddying up to a little boy named colt, who's about three weeks older and ten pounds heavier than her. he has a reputation (among the mothers of the oppressed preppy babies) as kind of a tuff who has been known to remove a hair bow or two. "so you're saying they're thugs in crime?" i asked. the teacher laughed with surprising heartiness - clear confirmation. in their age group, colt is the biggest and violet the smallest, so they'll make quite a pair in their reign of terror. i set violet down next to the quiet ruby, who wears special headgear and is one month violet's senior, and violet inched over and smacked her in the face. "oh (shit)! gentle! gennnntle," i redirected. and violet smacked ruby in the face a second time and wheeled back for more. ruby frowned at the injustice, and violet smiled widely as i grabbed her arm. oh viole(n)t, i knew we were tempting fate when we named you.

our little german

everyday i think i'll have time to post an update, but work is ramping up again as this is orientation week on campus and with it comes much office flurry. the students are moving into dorms, and i already feel a pang for the day when this will be us with violet. (should she choose to attend college. should we not be living in a trailer in 2028. and all of those other disclaimers.)

"da" is what's new lately. violet now points at everything, and everything is "da." dada? "da." mama's car? "da." hops the bunny? "da." the light switch? "da." the tree? "da." her favorite pony in her favorite book? "DA." and of course airplanes flying overhead. someone recently asked kevin if our neighborhood has a lot of air traffic noise, and we both thought, huh? no, none. now that violet looks up into the air whenever she hears a plane (whether we're indoors or out), we realize that burbank airport has arrivals and departures scheduled every four minutes during commuter hours. the resulting "da's" make me feel like we're in deutschland. we LOVE it - the cuteness is almost too much.

last weekend violet went to the del mar racetrack for the first time. my family is big on the races. my grandfather was a season ticket holder, and my grandmother used to let me "split" $2 bets with her (that she of course paid for). she loved to bet hopeless longshots, so i rarely saw any payouts, but that didn't matter. the most amazing moment last weekend was when the crowd leaped to its feet, as it always does when the horses are coming down the stretch, and violet caught sight of the blur of motion on the turf. the look on her face was as if she'd seen a flash of lightning for the first time. i imagine we'll get to experience that look over and over again, and i can't wait.







in other news, my mom gave us ridiculously generous birthday gifts - spa treatments at burke williams - along with free babysitting so that we could also go out to dinner. that's right - with violet at almost 11 months old, kevin and i went out on our first post-baby date! i'm sure there are those who pity us that it's been so long, but to us, it's just felt natural. ("it takes three legs to make a tripod, or to make a table stand. it takes three wheels to make a vehicle called a tricycle.") that said, it was so very nice to just be together so that we could - what else? - talk about the munch without her simultaneously climbing us like scaffolding.

we figured go big, so we went to osteria mozza and ate to make up for any missed dinner date in the past near year. for posterity's sake, we had:




santa barbara prawns with radish pesto salsa
carciofo alla firenze con patate e uovo (fancy artichoke and potato thing)
burricotta with radicchio, spiced walnuts, honey and fried rosemary
maccheroni alla chitarra with early girl tomatoes and garlic breadcrumbs
butternut squash mezzalune with amaretti
polenta with parmigiano reggiano
broccolini with chilies and vinegar
crespelle alla fragola (sauteed strawberries over crepe thing filled with housemade strawberry gelato and topped with sliced almond bark)

it would be superfluous to go on about the awesomeness.

and we made it home in time for me to nurse violet to sleep as i've done every night from the start. bad but happy mama.

dogs rule, people drool

we've been hyping how to wave pretty hard around the lynn house, and violet has started to catch on. she sometimes accompanies her wave with what i'm pretty sure is "hiiiiii." the problem is that we've been using the dogs to practice, and now she thinks that waving is meant for dogs. i took her for a walk last night, and we passed at least a half dozen dogs - she waved at every one! a nice old dogless lady saw violet enthusiastically waving at a giant white labradoodle and thought it was adorable (of course). i tried hard to get violet to wave at her, but violet just stared, arms limp. our daughter clearly prefers dogs to people, which may not be that surprising considering that we prefer dogs to a lot of people too.

however violet did wave bye bye to dada this morning, so he's definitely at the top of her favorite people list. or maybe he's just that scruffy.