8 Months Old!

Look at our big eight-month old girl!  I know I add a lot of similar photos, but I can't help myself!  She makes the cutest faces!  Actually, it's more likely that I didn't get a really GREAT photo, so I have to put in several semi-great photos.

  I'm sick of taking pictures, come play with me!!!

Obligatory giraffe attack; actually, she didn't really care much about attacking the giraffe today - must be a sign of growing maturity, I had to put it in place right in front of her face before she started grabbing the hairs and trying to bite the jugular.  Is this an example of setting your child up for failure?

Making silly faces

Willa is getting wiser every day!  She is getting very vocal about things and even a little whiney sometimes.  I think it is just because she is more aware of everything.  When I sit her on the floor to play, she suddenly remembers and realizes that it is much more fun to play with mommy than it is to play alone!  When I try to put her diapers and pants on, she loudly protests that have a nice naked bum is so much more comfortable!  She's much more talkative and I love hearing her little voice making sounds and laughing.  She gets quite opinionated about certain Baby Einstein scenes (from the sound of her voice) and has also started laughing and talking to certain Elmo clips instead of just watching them.

Things about Willa: LOVES Jason Mraz and Elmo, Will. i. am. and Elmo, Katy Perry and Elmo, and basically every Elmo clip on Youtube.  Check out this Will. i. am. song, in the beginning Ernie, Burt, and the Count have their hair combed like Will.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyVzjoj96vs

Here is Ryan's favorite Elmo clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc20vMz0V7Q

Favorite books: Mirror Me and First Words - she likes books in general but she actually smiles for these books and doesn't try to eat them (as much)

Tan Lines: Willa has little tan lines in the creases of her chubby wrists and ankles!!  I'm really good about sunscreen when we go to the pool, but not for anything else.  We haven't spent much time outside, so I'm guessing it's coming from our daily walk to the mailbox and the very rare 8:30 am walks in the stroller WITH the sunshade.  She's going to be our brown little nut.

Swimming: She really likes swimming now, especially trying to drink the water.  No matter how tired she is, she never is grumpy at the pool.  She might cry to the pool and from the pool, but not in the pool. She also loves bath time and will stay there forever without getting cranky.

Sleeping:  She still sleeps 11+ hours a night, with good naps throughout the day.  She has started sleeping more solidly in her naps and not waking up after 30 minutes.  She's in that hard place where two naps isn't quite enough, but three naps push into bedtime.  It's been a bit of a struggle now knowing if I should try to keep her awake and fussy, or put her down and risk a later bedtime.  I don't have to do any ritual to get her to bed, I just lay her down.  She'll even reach for her own pacifier and put it in herself (she's gotten VERY adept at pacifiers since the unswaddling).

Boredom: She does get bored and it surprises me!  I used to try to put her down for naps because I thought she was tired, I am now realizing that if I just switch the activities up then she is happy again.  Ryan is working at a new job that's not easily accessible for public transit, so Willa and I have been home sans car on most days.  Overall, it hasn't been bad - but sometimes it's a struggle to know what to entertain her with.

Solids:  Solid food is going poorly, she does not like it - even gagging out yummy fruits.  She does best if I let her suck a little on my finger first to get the flavor, but even then she hardly will open her mouth and most of it gets spit back out.  I'm lucky to get one solid feeding in a day, and often just forget about doing them because they are a hassle.  Any ideas?  If I feed her when she is really hungry right when she wakes up, then she is too furious to eat.  If I wait until a time when she is not ravenous then she's not hungry enough to eat.  I just keep telling myself that solids at this point are just for her to learn and get the experience - not necessarily for the nutrition.  I'll just be excited to cut down a little on nursing, even though I mainly love it and she only nurses about five times a day even without solids.

Nursing: She is still an extremely distracted eater.  Her mind must be thinking something like this: "milk, my toes!, milk,  t.v., milk,  dad!, milk, scratch the couch, milk" and so on.  She reminds me of the dogs in the movie Up who completely lose their train of thought every time they smell a squirrel.

Church: We switched to 11 a.m. church and it is the greatest thing ever!  She gets a full two hour nap in the morning and wakes up just in time to eat and get to church.  She's awake and happy for all of church, then takes a nap as soon as we get home.  A lady in the ward is on bedrest for her pregnancy so we took her two boys to church with us last Sunday.  They are 3 and 6 years old and very exuberant!  It was certainly interesting for Willa, though I'm not sure how much she liked them stuffing the toys in her mouth.

Traveling: We are both very excited to go on another plane trip!  We are flying to Ohio tomorrow to see Grandma and Grandpa Daniels and Dylan and Claire!  Houston has cheap, direct flights to Dayton, Ohio!  Who knew?  It's going to be a great week, and I am excited for a change.  Better get packing.

Let me see that tootsie roll pt.II

Baby on the Roll:

Sisyphus

According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was forced to roll a boulder up a mountain every day and watch it roll back down because he had attempted to trick the gods.  Agh, the futility, the inanity, the insanity!

Behold, the Sisyphean tasks of housewifery:

This list should also include making the bed and basically everything else. They never end!  You fold the same clothes today that you folded yesterday; you empty the same dishes today that you will empty tomorrow.

 Here's a funny story, once when we were dating Ryan asked me what my least favorite chore was.  I told him that I hated making my bed.  Months later somehow he mentioned that my bed probably wasn't made.  I was highly offended and asked him why he thought that and he replied it was because I hated making my bed.  I replied, "Ah yes, I hate making my bed, but I still make it every day!"  These days, I don't mind making my bed at all, funny how things change.

According to Camus, the myth of Sisyphus basically explains the hopelessness and pointlessness of man's existence.  When a person realizes this he can (according to Camus): kill himself, delude himself with religion, or be happy at the ridiculousness of it all.  This, my friends, is the French school of existentialism.  As a general rule, Ryan and I spurn post-modernism in all of its different permutations and this includes existentialism (sorry Cate); this is also why I have refused to use a capital E when writing it.  

I love that I get to be home to do these boring tasks! Turn on a little internet radio with Pandora and get 'em done! The best part is that I get to play with and attempt to snuggle with this little bug!  My little flower, becoming cuter and wiser every day.

For those of you who are still reading past the photos, here is a little treat.  I was finishing up grad school in Indiana when Ryan and I got married.  My friends there gave me a bridal shower; they were all grad students and very, very smart.  Here is one of the questions they asked Ryan beforehand, which I had to guess his answer to at the shower.  

"Would you prefer Cathryn became a freewheeling relativist or an unimaginative positivist?"

Ryan's response:

"Truth needs no imagination.  I could stop there but because Cathryn knows this is one of my favorite topics allow me to elaborate: First, a relativist is at best inconsistent and at worst contradictory... Second, I don't like Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend, or any so-called post-modernist.  Chances are, if Cathryn were a relativist I wouldn't like her none never neither (triple negative)."

That's actually only a smidgen of his response, but you get the idea.  Ryan REALLY hates post-modernists.  Actually, I think I got the question wrong at the shower - probably because I actually didn't understand any of it.

Say hi to Miguel!  Miguel is one of the maintenance people at our complex.  

 Here are some photos of the front of our complex, the gate was broken for a few weeks and was just recently fixed.  I'm a little disappointed because I would fantasize about telling the management off and demanding a lower rent for the month since we were contractually paying to live in a gated apartment complex and they were failing to keep their end of the contract.  I often fantasize about telling off the management for things like this in order to get lower rent.  I have never (rarely) given into these fantasies, though.  The people I would be complaining to have no real power; I was a secretary once and while I couldn't help bad stuff from happening, I could very often do nice things for people who were nice to me.  The lesson: always be nice to secretaries.

The maintenance people are very friendly.  Most of the people who live here are gone during the day, so Willa and I stand out a little bit since we're home every day.  The maintenance people always say hi and try to get Willa to smile.

The main plus about being friends with maintenance workers is that they keep you in the loop and help you out.  One day, a large package came in the mail.  I went to the office to pick it up, and Miguel offered to drive it back to the apartment in his little maintenance golf cart so that I wouldn't have to carry it.  So nice, and actually - I really didn't even know him then!

Sometimes I've tried to stop by the front office only to find it locked; if I run into Miguel outside, I can ask him where everyone is and he will tell me they might be in a meeting and when I can check back.  A few days ago I got Willa dressed up for the pool, isn't she cute?  But when we got there, the water was a little greener than I like to swim in.

Luckily, I saw Miguel that afternoon and asked him why the pool was looking like this:

He told me that they were out of chlorine, then he also added that maybe the apartment complex hadn't paid the company who ships the chlorine.  Or, he said something like that.  He has an accent and sometimes I don't always understand.

Thankfully, the pool is better now and we had a nice swim yesterday; but it's so nice having Miguel around to keep us in the loop!

Book Snobs

Cute and unrelated photo of Willa, I love how chunky she is getting. You don't really have to read the post below, I'm worried that it might come out kind of like an explanabrag; I tried to avoid it as much as possible, but read at your own risk.

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago---never mind how long precisely---having little or no money in my purse..."

I'm in the middle of reading Moby Dick and now I understand why this beginning is so famous! It is such a great way to start a book! Ever since I graduated from IU, I've kind of tried to slowly work my way through some of the classics that I had never read. There are so many books that "one should have read" that it's probably an impossible task, but it is so fun to read something and suddenly recognize and relate to all these cultural references that were totally going over my head before!

I think Moby Dick gets kind of a bad rap, and I can't understand it. People always seem to refer to it when they are talking about something long and boring, but it is not boring at all and it is only a little long! Think about it, a whaling adventure where the ship's captain is slowly going mad as he searches for the whale who bit off his leg. It's a great story! Plus, it's fun to read some American fiction that's not all depressing like Edith Wharton. The point is, I've read way more boring and longer books than this one.

Besides having a great story, the writing is just fantastic. The first line is just a harbinger of the rest of the book. Here is my favorite line so far, he is describing a whale: "he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face." Isn't that awesome? everlasting Mephistophelean!!! Mephistopheles is the devil in Faust who convinces Faust to sell his soul, sometimes in fiction a devil or something devilish is referred to as a Mephistopheles with reference to Faust. However, not until this book have I ever heard it as an adjective: Mephistophelean. So the whale has an everlasting devilish grin.

Then, Mephistopheles was also very cunning, so maybe Mephistophelean means cunning, so an everlastingly cunning grin. And why grin and not smile? The English language has such a rich vocabulary, much more than many other languages because of all the conquering and being conquered, so it's fun to think about what word is used and why, what are the different connotations by using grin instead of smile? By using Mephistopheles instead of Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, etc.?

I'll stop here because this blog read might be getting tedious; I just want to put in a plug for books. I recently read Tom Jones and it was pretty awesome and hilarious as well. That's the thing, often these books are FUNNY and they were meant to be that way! Sometimes they take me a long time to read - I kept reaching my online renewal limit with Tom Jones and had to go back to the library multiple times to recheck the book out, and I will probably have to do that with Moby Dick. I don't pressure myself to get through these books, there is joy in the journey and the plot is sometimes secondary to how it is presented. I'm not trying to be a book snob, I read all sorts of books and the amount of bad LDS fiction at my house is extremely embarrassing (Ryan teases me about it).

Actually, this post was supposed to be a well-thought-out rant against people who like to brag that they only read non-fiction. My point was going to be that sometimes (more often) we can learn more from fiction, but I didn't want to be a downer and people can read whatever they want. Just know that there are some really great fiction books out there!

Utah! - Cousins

With Ryker, Ashley, and Lexie.  They were all very cute, Ryker helped me give Willa a bath and brush her hair.  He asked some very observant questions about the differences between her anatomy and his!  Lexie is my other brace-faced niece; I feel cheated that my dad is going to retire before any of our kids will be nearly old enough for braces.  I want him to write in some sort of clause when he sells his practice that the new guy will have to provide free orthodontic treatment to all his grandkids.

 Cute little Beckham and Brody.  Willa was especially interested in little Brody and kept trying to touch him and smile at him.  They weigh the same amount, even though he is already a year old.

Little Thomas the tank.  Look at the difference in these two one-year-olds!  Thomas was so cute, we were glad we got to see him.  He was a little shy at first, but eventually gave us a killer smile (not for the photo, though).

Waterfeel!

Okay, so maybe she doesn't have the most thrilled look on her face. She wasn't crying, but I think the sun was in her eyes. Look at those chubby legs!

I'm sorry, but I can't stop taking and uploading pictures of her in this little swimsuit. She looks so cute, I just want to eat her!