As you can imagine, we are not sorry to have seemingly left those days behind.

I used this improvement to tentatively introduce a little bit of dairy back into my diet last week, and it seems to have not made a difference to him at all.  So, with the next trip to the grocery store, I am officially going back on the dairy.  And, you guys, you have no idea how excited I am about it.  I have created what is perhaps the world’s most ridiculously unhealthy grocery list as a result.

Mind you, there’s a lot of vegan food around here at the best of times.  I can often go a week without eating any animal products at all without noticing or thinking about it, and I eliminated a lot of lactose-containing food by simply avoiding the small amounts usually present in stuff like commercially-produced bread products and many kinds of chocolate.  But, once I took a sabbatical from dairy products, I started missing certain foods so very much.  Ergo, over the next few weeks, I anticipate a blissful honeymoon with:

• Pizza.  Pizza!  And various other types of cheesy flatbread.
• Crusty bread with a nice brie or chèvre.
• Homemade cake frosting with lots of butter and/or cream cheese.
• Buttermilk biscuits.
• Nutella.
• Ice cream.
• Homemade cookies, various types.  (Stick margarine just does not bake up in the same way.)
• Lasagna.
• Candy bars and most kinds of chocolate.
• Cream cheese brownies.
• Grilled cheese sandwiches.
• And the simplest of pleasures: crackers with a nice, sharp cheddar.

Stay tuned for next week’s post: “OMG, why is post-partum weightloss so hard?“

Now, we just started the preamble to the four-month growth spurt, which is notorious for wreaking long-term havoc on sleep schedules by sending babies back into a prolonged period of waking up every two hours all night to eat.  Happily, we have not yet gotten to that point.  Less happily, all of the mysterious little physical and cognitive advances that are preparing themselves in Theo’s brain are manifesting themselves by making him suddenly, almost comically cranky.  (Lest ye think this is another post dripping with self-pity, though, I will note that this is a Recognizable Phase, and one that should be over within a few weeks, after he’s done growth spurting.)

It’s like having a little miniature toddler.  While I love that he now seems to actually have tiny little unintelligible opinions about things, this seems rather precocious behavior for a four-month-old.  Yesterday, every change of position or activity was met with initial approbation, then, only a few minutes later, a screwed-up red face of horror and inarticulate despair: “Nooooooooo!  This is not what I wanted at all!“  But, when you are both pre-verbal and pre-mobile, your options are limited.  And, when you are the caregiver of a bizarrely cranky four-month old without any adult backup, car, or ability to go outside (thanks for nothing, predicted thunderstorms), you’ll pick up the tiniest scraps to add to your bag of amusement tricks.

Lying on one’s back to play with toys?  Insufferable!

Sitting on one’s mother’s lap to play with toys?  An insult!

Tummy time?  How dare you!

Swedish bouncy chair?  Not so ba… aaaauuuugh!

Reading a book?  Its pages!  They burn!

Doing assisted baby crunches to reach a sitting position?  Undesirable!

Hanging out in the rocker?  You mean the rocker of hot lava?

Pulling up to a standing position?  Fun, but… why am I not moving?

Doing my best Robyn dance around the office?  We are not amused.

Awesomely, I seem to be responding to this developmental burst of inchoate toddleresque angst by channeling my inner (and, let’s face it, pretty easily accessible) teenager.  “Whatever, kid,” I’ll find myself muttering as I move him from whatever tortuous position he’s in into something marginally more acceptable, rolling my eyes hugely.  Frankly, it’s a relief to find myself not taking the temporary (… let’s hope) residence of Sir Cranksalot too personally.

Though I have found myself trolling Craigslist to see if anybody’s selling a baby jumper for cheapish.  Kid, that whole standing and walking thing just isn’t going to happen for a little while.

—

On this week’s Target list: “Size 9m 12m sleepsuit.”

After living for half a year with a very, very small maternity wardrobe, though, I’m not feeling the pinch too much.  I’ve got most of the above out-of-rotation stuff in the back parts of the closet, and a date to revisit it all in a year or so, when I figure I’ll have to be realistic about the future state of my post-baby figure.  Also, I seriously need to counterbalance the metric ton of coats and sweaters that I own with some clothing without sleeves or pant legs, as much as I love a good 30-degree winter morning that allows me to show the locals how it’s done.

Given my extended wardrobe separation — I’m looking at the better part of two years, here — the speed of Theo’s physical expansion is utterly ridiculous.  Yes, yes, “they grow up so fast!,” blah blah blah, but he’s less than four months old and we have a grand total of three gifted onesies left for him to grow into.  Last Monday I was getting him ready to go out on a bit of a coolish morning, and I realized that there was no way I could wrestle his little knit pants on over his big cloth-diapered bubble butt.  “Size 6m pants,” I wrote on the grocery list.  On Friday, I crossed that out: “Size 9m pants.”  The size 6m onesies that I put in the drawer a couple of weeks ago already require vigorous yanking and wrestling to snap closed, and I’m starting to research convertible car seats because his head just keeps growing closer and closer to the top of his baby bucket.

I’m saying: Theo goes through a complete wardrobe cycle about 50 times faster than me, assuming a two weeks to two years ratio.  Clearly, I am not the one who needs a walk-in closet in this family.

As I understand it, it’s not so much that all of your hair falls out postpartum, but that you start losing all of the hair that didn’t fall out while you were pregnant, since pregnancy hormones keep unusual amounts of it snugly growing in place.  When said hormones wear off about three months after delivery, however, awesome amounts of hair start falling from your head in drain-clogging masses.

I don’t really brush or comb my hair except when I’m washing it — it just makes it puffy — and I usually have enough product of some sort going on to stop random hairs from working their way apart from their wavy peers and depositing themselves on my clothing.  So these days, the shower drain is really impressive, and the bathtub — which has sat, sadly unused, since some initial post-delivery sitz baths — collects whorls and tumbleweeds of hair from God knows where, which eventually get so bad that I’m occasionally compelled to swipe them out with a damp washcloth.

In a way, though, I’m hoping that the overall effect of all these hairs fleeing my head is enough to put off the ongoing search for a simpatico hairstylist.

—

In cheerier dispatches from Babyville, Theo’s nighttime sleep has been awesome for the last week or two, and routinely affords me an hour — a whole hour! — in the evenings to do some writing.  Pete and I are even thinking about sitting on the couch and watching a DVD this weekend!  (I’m not taking this development for granted, because I’ve heard horror stories about the four month sleep regression and I want to mentally prepare myself for the worst just in case I spend a month feeding him every two hours ’round the clock.)  Theo’s also really into conversational babbling these days.  After he’s woken up and been dosed with his morning reflux meds, he’ll beam at you as you say something inane.

“Hooooow.  Whoooo.  Oooohhh.  Haaaaaah!  Haaaaooowww,” he’ll reply, carefully pursing his lips and raising his chin to articulate his vowels, and burst into a delighted grin when you reply in kind.

Considering that he’s the familial product of a ridiculous number of educators, it’s particularly encouraging to see that he’s entering into the spirit of respectful, back-and-forth exchange and intellectual inquiry at such a young age.

But we’ve been joking that we still need to train him to be able to handle conversation with Pete’s family, where all ideas are aired loudly, simultaneously, and with vigor.  I’m pretty sure he could get a handle on that technique before he learns social interaction as we do it in my family, where we all sit in the same room and silently read our respective books.

Or maybe we’ll just combine the two and sit in the same room, all reading aloud from our books, simultaneously and vigorously.

I can already hear some of you urging me to fight the dominant lease- and HOA-imposed landscape paradigm, but, you guys, we have already ceded two security deposits in the past two years, due to Pete’s ability to find jobs at intervals that do not coincide with the duration of our leases.  I’d like to at least try and go legit for once before cheerfully jettisoning yet another thousand-plus dollars, you know?

I thought that we’d been doing pretty well on the HOA front, what with me scrupulously keeping the trash and recycling bins away from street view and all.  Several weeks ago, however, we got a nagging little email — routed, of course, via the leasing agency via the owner via the HOA — letting us know that we had unacceptable numbers of yard weeds and needed to mow the lawn.

This was, of course, two weeks after Pete took care of said weeds, then mowed down the resultant carnage.  (If “carnage” can be described as looking like a packet of prewashed mixed salad greens left in the fridge for one week too long, that is.)  They also mysteriously CC’d this email to my father, who, as a seventy-odd-year-old Ohio semi-retiree whose only presence on our lease is as an emergency contact, has really only the most perfunctory interest in our lawn maintenance.

Given this background, you can understand why our back neighbors are my new heroes.  I don’t know them, but I already think that they’re pretty great, based on what we can see over the backyard fence.

Behold: the perfect image of suburban defiance. They can regulate your front lawn, but they can never take your backyard!

• Where is Baby’s Belly Button?
• Are You My Mother?
• Peek-a-WHO?
• What Color is It?
• What Makes a Rainbow?
• Where Does Maisy Live?
• Where is Maisy?
• Mr. Brown Can Moo!  Can You?
• Is Your Mama a Llama?
• Are You a Cow?
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
• Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

Why must we demand so much of them at such a tender age, I ask?  Surely we, as a nation, can afford to establish a Bear Sensory Experience Task Force or Baby Navel Location Task Detail instead of exploiting intellectual child labor to investigate so many vital questions!

He clip-clopped lazily down the mostly empty row of cars through the parking lot, heading towards the frontage road to the freeway.  I craned my neck to follow him, but lost sight of him as he turned the corner around Fuddruckers.

I’m also grumbly because this has been yet another week of turning down and cancelling social engagements due to a certain someone’s wildly erratic sleep schedule, which makes me feel like I’ve officially become one of those horrible people who has a baby and then stops returning the calls of everybody she knows.  And, with a small child, going out of the house is generally one of the few surefire highlights of your day. On the other hand, it does stop me from having to have the following conversation over and over:

How’s Theo?

Oh, you know, doing well enough.  He’s getting pretty smiley and social these days.  He’s really into his hands.

Is he sleeping any better at night?

Nope!  Not at all!

Have you tried…

Yup!  You bet!

Is he napping during the day?

Ha!

What does the doctor say?

That he’s, you know, a baby.

How’s his reflux doing?

Well, he’s still fountaining forth entire feedings multiple times a week, but we’re pretty good at cleaning it up.

How’s your knitting / writing going?

[insert image of above-the-head stormcloud here]

…

(I think I need to take a cue from a friend and hang up a hand-written sign that says “ENOUGH WITH THE SELF-PITY, JEJUNE” somewhere prominent.  Because have I mentioned that this kid stays awake all night smiling and beaming?  And sometimes he wakes me up at 1:30 or 2 a.m. with the aggressiveness of his cooing?)

Here’s the thing: I already look back at photos of wee tiny newborn Theo and go awww, because he’s growing so fast and he was just so tiny only a few months back.  But you can sure as hell bet that, as he grows out of yet another clothing size and starts babbling in a conversational manner and holding his head up more and learning to laugh and otherwise flying through the the little developmental milestones that mark his oh-so-rapid progress into toddler-dom, I’m not going to be sighing sentimentally about how I’d wish he’d stop growing up so fast.

I’m relishing it.

The baby used to fall back asleep without much resistance after night feedings, but now he grunts and strains and thrashes, eyes open and red-faced, until he loudly fills his diaper in two successive blasts.  You take him into the nursery to change him, which wakes him up fully and illuminates his little face with grins of sociable excitement to see you, at his preferred hour, so willing to keep him company.

You wrap the baby back up and walk your circuit around the dark house to try and settle him back down.  When you turn around in the office — the farthest room from the bedroom, where you can still hear the white noise faintly playing — you hear a robin on the tree outside, calling insistently.

You are at first grateful for the unexpected musical accompaniment, then frustrated.  Why can’t you follow everyone else’s standard circadian rhythms, little robin?

The baby’s eyes eventually close, and you walk slowly back into the bedroom to buckle him back in.  His eyes pop open and he strains forward, bending himself into an angry little C-shaped arc of protest.  You sit on the floor, and rock him, and shush him, because you can’t have him wake your husband, who will be getting up in a few hours to leave for work while you spend your morning trying to change from out of your pajamas and eat a bowl of soggy cereal in between lengthy and abortive attempts at getting the baby to nap as the clock creeps inexorably on.

Eventually the grunting and straining and protesting slow down, and you lie back in bed, staring at the ceiling fan, and trying to forget that you’ll be up for good in less than two hours to do it all again.

At 3 a.m., you don’t have any friends.  At 3 a.m., you don’t have any allies.

Except for that damn robin.  And you can’t help but wish that he’d soon get his act together.

[Note: we are all well and fine in the Jejune household, as we were safely out of the way of last night's Dallas/Ft. Worth-area tornado excitement. Which is fine by me, since I'm still caught off-guard by the fact that we live in a tornado-prone part of the country where the houses are constructed without basements.]

This weekend, I got to combine a number of my favorite things: 1) driving around on back roads, 2) taking photographs, and 3) getting out of the house.  Thanks to the enthusiastic and extensive updates on local bluebonnet conditions in Ennis, we drove south of the city, down Waxahachie way, to gawk at wildflowers.  And, delightfully enough, they were worth the hype.

I wrote a little while back about my uncertainty about finding new landmarks amid the unfamiliar landscape of North Texas. And, while it may be occasionally climatologically hostile, far from many natural wonders, and largely bereft of things like, I don’t know, parks, bluebonnet season offers compelling evidence of both natural character and aesthetic respectability.

Of course, we were driving around in a caravan of other slow-moving flower-gawking vehicles. I imagine that bluebonneters are kind of like leaf-peepers in New England, and mostly serve as a nuisance to locals. But the upshot is that everybody is equally geeked out about the local flora, so you don’t feel at all out of place for constantly pulling over to shoot yet another round of photos of yet another field.

Thanks to a surprising degree of cooperation by young Theo, we were even to get the first of what will no doubt become a series of annual photos of him in the flowers, and touched by some gratuitous golden-hour sunlight.

Texas: pretty damn nice, when it wants to be.