Herself

Lyla is feeling much better, so on Halloween, the day when kids love to become someone else, she was content to just be herself again.

And for about ten minutes, a chicken.

Well

You know when you're sick and you don't even remember what it felt like to feel well? You're pretty sure that you'll never get better and that your awful symptoms are actually your new permanent reality.

The same is true when your baby is sick: the happy, sane version of her, the version you secretly think could be in commercials or on magazine covers, disappears. It's replaced by a miserable creature with ooze shooting out of unlikely orifices and a disposition that suggests she might one day commit violent felonies. After a few consecutive sleepless nights, your brain temporarily blocks the memory of your perfect child so that you can deal with the poor beast she has become.

Days pass. It runs its course.

Remember how yesterday Lyla had zero naps but then slept through the night? Well, she woke up at 7:00 this morning and looked like a cocaine addict. That's a direct quotation from her mother. Lyla was up for one hour, ate food, drank milk, and went back down for two-and-a-half hours. Then it was up for another hour, food, milk, and down again for a second two-and-a-half-hour nap.

And then at 2:00 in the afternoon, triumphantly, Lyla woke up for real:

Spikes

For the first time in Lyla's life, she did not nap all day. It's because of her...drum roll, please...ear infection. She's fine when she's up, but when she's down, the pressure builds and she turns from Baby Jeckyl to Psycho Baby Hyde.

So yes, Lyla has an ear infection. The doctor is also fairly certain that she had the flu, though her fever is now gone. For those tracing the development of this fever, it started on Monday, peaked on Tuesday night just shy of 104 degrees, continued at around 100 or 101 on Wednesday, and was nonexistent today. The only way the doctor could explain the 104 was flu.

Which is totally bad-ass. I'd like to purchase for Lyla a black leather jacket with shoulder spikes. The back would read, "H1N1 Is My Bee-otch."

She's sleeping now. If you Google ways to help a baby's ear infection pain, you'll get a whole bunch of nothing. The antibiotics will kick in eventually, but until then it's Tylenol and hoping that once she finally finds a comfortable head position, she doesn't move. I'd like to freeze this moment in time and make it carry through until tomorrow morning. We need the sleep.

Oops: now I hear her. The moment was decidedly unfrozen. This might be a long night.


*Update*

I stand corrected. The sweet child slept all night.

Feverish

Lyla and I hung out together all day, she with her fever, me with my pile of ungraded work, and both of us sleep deprived. I spoke with a couple nurses about what Lyla's sickness might be. Her fever is going on three days, but she doesn't have the terrible cough that afflicts most babies with H1N1. She's congested and very fussy in the crib but generally happy and active otherwise. Drinking and eating are overall normal.

Our favorite hypothesis at this point is that she has an ear infection. There's no ear tugging or pulling--I think those Elmo photos I posted yesterday are a coincidence--but an ear infection would explain her other symptoms. The crib fussiness, one nurse explained, might be due to ear pain when she's lying down. We have an appointment scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully we'll get some real answers.

Auntie Lori has agreed to be on Lyla duty tomorrow morning and early afternoon, which is a major assist and will allow Julie and I to keep our heads above water at our respective jobs. With all the effort and energy Julie and I have put forth with this sickness, it gets me wondering how in the world single parents do it.

Obnoxious

Any idea what's going on here? Lyla was home again today with a fever, and Julie's immediate thought upon seeing Lyla with her hands on her ears was that she had an ear infection. But after observing Lyla turn the pages, Julie determined that something entirely different was going on.

Lyla was imitating Elmo.

Every time she turned the page to find Elmo with his hands on his head, Lyla did the same. Here's another photo, and you'll see that it's also a different page in the book.


I've always tried to prevent this blog from becoming an obnoxious daily reminder of how cute our baby is, but this...this. I mean, don't you kind of want to eat her face?

I'm staying home with Lyla tomorrow. If she takes requests for her next feat of magnificence, I will ask her to lower her fever.

Convenient

Lyla was sent home from school today with a fever. We think she got it from a boy who was having his temperature taken when Julie picked Lyla up on Thursday. This is proof, perhaps, that Lyla and the boy had been making out.

The fever rule is that Lyla can't return to school until she is fever-free for 24 hours without the assistance of Tylenol. Julie, who is just barely on the cusp of feeling better herself, will stay home with Lyla tomorrow, and I'll stay home on Thursday if necessary.

I was just thinking about how inconvenient it is for us to miss work this week, of all weeks. What's funny is that the notion of convenience disappeared somewhere around Julie's third week of being pregnant, and yet here I am complaining about it like it's a new concept. You can't be the parent of a baby and get upset when life becomes inconvenient. It would be like buying a fish and getting mad at its gills.

After bringing Lyla home, she participated in the following activities:

- Spent 20 minutes emptying Mama's purse
- Ate cheese, ham, bread, puffs, yogurt, and bananas while I made dinner
- Practiced walking
- Chugged milk

Aside from actually having a fever, Lyla did not seem like a girl with a fever. And that, I suppose, is as close to convenient as we're going to get.

Mental

Lyla's watching an Elmo song on YouTube. It's about counting ducks.

Julie felt awful all day today, so I had to be Super Dad. It's exhausting to take care of everyone and everything; I pretty much suck at it.

The house is squalid. There's no way to stay ahead of it all. I made Julie soup and brought her little sandwiches. I bought her bottled water because there was a chance she might actually drink it. She promises she'll stay home tomorrow morning but might go in for the afternoon if she's feeling better. I might hide her keys.

Lyla was demanding today. I think she's simultaneously teething and experimenting with ways to assert her will.

Bottom line, no matter what the so-called experts say about keeping babies away from screens, sometimes you need an assist from Elmo so you don't go insane.

Pretend

Lyla invented a game before bed last night. I was lying on the floor in her nursery while Julie sat in the rocker, and Lyla walked from Julie to the ottoman, then to me. When she got to me, she knelt and rested her head on my legs. Then she got up and made her way back to Julie.

She repeated this process 15 or 20 times. Julie and I said, "Nigh-night, Lyla," whenever she put her head down on me. So now it's the nigh-night game. Perhaps you will play it at home with your significant other.

I think the nigh-night game marks the first instance where Lyla has role played something. Actually, now that I write that, I'm remembering that occasionally she pretends to feed me a Cheerio. That's the fun of pretending, I guess: Lyla knows she doesn't really have to relinquish the Cheerio, just as playing the nigh-night game means she's not really going to bed.

Socks

At some point in my 20s I decided it made sense to have a drawer filled with identical white socks. You rarely see socks anyway, so why waste time matching them? But Lyla's classroom has a no-shoe policy to keep the carpet sanitary for all the crawlers. You have to enter with your socks on display for the world.

The parents of Lyla's classmates seem very well-to-do, and from what I've seen, they all have nice socks. Plus, as I pull up in my 2002 gray Corolla with the one working headlight and park next to an Audi, a Lexus, a Mercedes, and, I kid you not, a Porsche SUV, I start to feel self-conscious about my socks.

So I've given up the white socks and replaced them with dress socks of various colors and patterns. These damn yuppies are turning me into a metrosexual.

Both

I'm at parent-teacher conferences tonight, wondering if there's a diplomatic way to not shake any hands. I don't need germs from mouth-breathing parents to infect our currently healthy household.

Lyla did not wake up before I left this morning, so unless she stays up late for the first time in months, I won't see her. Maybe I'll get ready for bed loudly, clanking my toothbrush against the mirror, pounding my feet, slamming down the toilet seat, in hopes that she wakes up briefly and needs some encouragement to return to sleep.

In the meantime, I'll post this without a picture since I have not seen her all day. I also haven't had any parents sit down at my table. When they do, I wonder if they'll interpret my reluctance to shake their hands as germaphobia, or resentment for being here instead of home.

It'll be both.

*Update*

I've shaken a lot of hands and used a lot of hand sanitizer. It's been a busy night, and time has flown. Julie just emailed me this picture:


I hope at some point Lyla asked about her dada.

Poke

Lyla got her round two flu shot yesterday and did not make a sound. I can only conclude that her legs are so fat that the nerve endings stop before the dermal layer. Either that, or the binky dipped in sugar water worked its magic again. Or maybe the event is meant to foreshadow Lyla dropping out of school and becoming the human pincushion in a traveling circus.

Today we got to look at proofs of Lyla's school photos. They are all hilariously terrible. The group shot has babies looking apathetically in all different directions, except for one who is so upset that he might benefit from an exorcism. Lyla's individual shots feature a lump of a girl slouching on a gray backdrop, not smiling. It looks like a baby prison ID card. Her expression says, "Give me respect or you will get shanked."

Unlike this expression, which says, "Poke me with a needle. I like it!"

Ankles

Lyla is exactly one month away from being one year old. She's never eaten cake, but I imagine her first time will be on that day. Things will get messy. Cake will perish.

I discovered an amazing diaper changing technique today: don't pull off the pants. Those legs can go crazy at the most inconvenient times, so leaving the pants at the ankles impedes leg mobility, like a straitjacket. Plus, you just pull them up when you're done rather than struggling to thread the feet through.

I can't believe it never occurred to me before. Am I an idiot? Shh: that's a rhetorical question.

This technique isn't perfect, however, as it might occasionally result in the unintentional smearing of feces. If my sense of smell and paternal instinct ever tell me I am about to encounter the apocalypse in Lyla's diaper, I might err on the side of a full pants removal just to be safe. But for ordinary diapers, it's pants on, baby, and it only took me 11 months to figure it out.

Wrinkles

Julie and Lyla are wearing skirts tomorrow, and I ironed them both. Julie was feeling high maintenance, and I figure that if I'm on the bubble to get into heaven, I might get waved in based on things like skirt ironing. "Well, we do need someone to iron the angels' wings. Okay, Dan..."

Lyla recently shattered her record for consecutive unassisted steps. It's now up to two. All day at school, according to her teachers, she would pull herself up on something, walk two steps, and slide down to her knees, immensely proud of herself.

Consequently, she was wicked tired when we got home and totally fell apart seconds after the above photograph. In fact, see for yourself:


She's happily asleep now, psyching herself up in her dreams to take that third step. Maybe it'll happen tomorrow when she's officially an 11-month-old. At least there won't be any wrinkles holding her back.

Busy

Tomorrow I'm collecting papers from all 145 of my students. Thursday and Friday are parent-teacher conferences, and they'll want to know how their kids did. Why do I do this to myself?

Am I boring you? "I'm soooo busy! Waaaa!" Everybody's busy.

Hey, Lyla's busy. She's smiling in that photo because she just discovered how to slam that door. Do you know the hours that went into that discovery? These things don't just happen, you know. She opened and closed it for many hours before the epiphany hit her that perhaps there was a better, more delightful way to go about it.

So I need a better, more delightful way to grade all those papers. Hey, maybe I'll let Lyla grade some. She drooled on this one; clearly an A. See, what I'm realizing is that it's unrealistic to finish them by conferences, which is actually fine. I have plenty of other things in the grade book. I'll just finesse the parents a little if they ask about the papers.

Lyla understands finesse. When she crawls over to a vent, which she's not allowed to play with, she'll turn to us and shake her head no. Then she'll usually busy herself elsewhere. There she is, a 10-month-old figuring out how to smoothly work her way through the world.

Here's the point, maybe: babies have a certain zen quality, where sometimes they just automatically know the best way to do something.

I should've had Lyla write this.

Feet

Auntie Jodie reported that Lyla tended to focus on pages with boys on them. Also, yesterday at daycare I saw Lyla feel the bicep of the studliest boy in the class. By the time she's old enough to have boyfriends and bring them home to meet me, I hope I'm intimidating.

In completely unrelated news, there's this cough remedy on the internet, and I can't figure out if it's a hoax. What you do is rub Baby Vicks on the baby's feet, put socks on, and it takes care of the cough. The quickest path to the throat, it seems, is through the feet.

We haven't tried it. One site said the whole idea originated as a phony email forward some years back. And nothing on the Vicks packaging mentions the feet. And yet, you'll still find mothers swearing that nothing was working for poor Johnny, but then Vicks on the feet cured everything.

Lyla continues to cough in her sleep for an hour or two each night. As I mentioned in an earlier post, waking her up is counterproductive if not explosive. But I can't sleep while she's hacking in there. I came down to the couch last night to get away from the sound. Meanwhile, Julie snoozed peacefully in her normal position, hanging upside-down in the closet.

Okay, that was unprovoked. I'm just cranky that everyone in the house is sleeping but me. Maybe I'll try the asinine Vicks-on-feet remedy. But see, then a guy with a camcorder will jump out and I'll learn that everyone was in on it; worse yet, it'll be Ashton Kutcher in all his Punk'd douche-baggery.

What I need is one of those suck hoses from the dentist. I'll attach it to Lyla's mouth, and it'll vacuum all the snot and teething saliva before it drips into her throat.

Or maybe I just need earplugs.

Guru

Any guesses as to what Lyla's upset about? Think about it, and I'll give you the answer at the end of the post.

Julie is the official bedtime guru, so when I try to take over for a night, Lyla calls foul on my shenanigans. For one thing, when Lyla is falling-apart tired and needs a diaper change, I have recently become incompetent. Within seconds, Lyla is either crying her guts out or standing bare-assed on the changing table.

The other issue is pajamas. I've always complained about the 789 snaps that are impossible to align, but it's worse since Lyla has become stronger than me. She's also faster and smarter. So she'll be crawling away, and I'm crawling after her and trying to snap those stupid things at the same time.

Then Julie comes up to mercifully take over, and the first thing she says is, "Where's the fingernail clipper?"

"Oh, you're going to clip her fingernails?" I say, panting and sweating. "A quick clip before bed, hmm? Just a quiet mother-daughter clip clip?"

Julie puts Lyla on her lap, and they sit together in maddening serenity as Julie clips Lyla's miniscule fingernails. Lyla is now literally a millimeter away from a painful, bloody disaster, and she yawns and rests her head on her mother's shoulder.

I walk over and Lyla allows me to kiss her goodnight. "I'm going to clean the kitchen," I say.

Julie murmurs, "Make some tea."

Clip clip. Lyla closes her eyes.


Back to our riddle. If you guessed that Lyla's sobbing meltdown happened because she was kneeling on her book and was therefore unable to turn the page, then ta da! You're the big winner!

Punishment

At around 11:00 last night, Lyla's coughing got so bad that I decided to intervene. I entered the nursery with a bottle, but I should have immediately left: she was sleep-coughing. "Never wake a sleeping baby" bounced around the caverns of my brain, but I ignored it.

She chugged the bottle. Then she started coughing again and spewed it all over both of us. My bare chest glistened with formula and bile. "Seriously?" I said to her.

"Ba ba ba," she replied, now soaked and sour-smelling.

I opened our bedroom door to see if Julie was awake to assist with a bath, but she was battling a bug of her own and in a NyQuil coma. She actually did stir long enough to say, "I am sleeping, glurble nurble," not that she would remember saying it in the morning.

One unassisted bath later, I put Lyla to bed again, taking note that she was coughing just as much as before. My involvement accomplished nothing but getting us both barfed on, which was an apt punishment for waking a sleeping baby.

Ace

Lyla came home from school today with her first ponytail. They must get bored there, day after day. Maybe tomorrow it'll be henna tattoos. Or real ones.

Speaking of tomorrow, Julie has composed quite the chore list for me, being that it's MEA break. That stands for Minnesota Educators Association, by the way, and tomorrow and Friday there's no school due to a conference that is optional and therefore unattended by yours truly.

So I'm heading to Home Depot to buy L-shaped metal thingies in order to screw dressers and whatnot to the wall. Lyla is becoming a climbing expert, so Julie and I are imagining what in the house could topple over. The answer is pretty much everything. I remember setting up all this stuff in the first place and discarding the L-shaped metal thingie that came with each item. They sit in a landfill somewhere, next to all those Ikea allen wrenches.

I'm planning to prudently ignore Julie's request that I mow the lawn, paint the bedroom, and polish the garage door handle. I have a hair appointment at 2:00, and I do not plan to be sweaty. Oh shut up.

Speaking of hair, here she is again:


And this is what happens when you remove a rubber band from a ponytail:


You get baby Ace Ventura.

Windup

Julie puts Lyla in the sink after a bath. She brushes her hair and talks to her. It's so cute that you almost want to puke.

Speaking of puke, our house was not the place to be this morning. Lyla woke up early, chugged a bottle, and immediately spewed the whole thing. "Did you burp her?" Julie asked in a tone I'd describe as borderline murderous. My instinct for self-preservation kicked in, so I said, "Yes, absolutely!" when the truth was more like, "Yeah, sorta."

Okay, the real truth was, "No, but her stomach rumbled and I thought it was a burp." How was I supposed to know that the rumble was actually the windup before the pitch?

Bubbles

Last night Julie and I woke up about 15 times to Lyla squawking and whining. We'd lie in bed waiting for it to escalate, but Lyla always went back to sleep. My theory is that she was breathing through her nose and each time a snot bubble got so big it popped, it woke her up.

So she was a tad out of sorts at school today. When I picked her up, she saw me and immediately whined, "Mama!" It's odd because she usually says, "Father, I've been ever so eager to see you." But no, today she called me a girl's name and started to cry.

She did have one lucid moment at home. In the bathroom, according to her actual mama, she stood for seven consecutive seconds. In the photos you can see a clear emotional journey.






Then she totally fell apart and got put to bed at 6:45. We're hoping the triple threat of the nostril sucker, Baby Vicks, and humidifier keep the snot bubbles at bay.

Why

All Lyla wants to do these days is open cabinets and drawers. Today at Auntie Jen's place, a cabinet entertained her for 20 minutes. That's huge considering that on the attention span continuum, baby humans fall just below adult fleas.

What's crazy is that in all the hours Lyla has spent opening and closing cabinets and drawers, she has never once pulled something out.

But what really blows my mind is that Lyla won't remember any of this. She hasn't yet in her entire life had a single experience she'll remember when she's older.

A parent's memory isn't much better. Ask your parents what you were like when you were mere months old, and you probably won't hear many specifics. My guess is their memories of you as a baby got bombarded by how you changed as you grew up. So here you are now, and it's almost like that tiny version of yourself, with all the random, bizarre things you did, never existed at all.

That's why I write.

Evolution

We've had major developments. This morning, Lyla once again slammed her little car into the wall. Then, instead of shrieking homicidally, she turned and pushed it in the opposite direction. She is evolving.

Oh yes, and a couple days ago she took her first totally unassisted step. That was cool, too.

House

Lyla does not have an ear infection. The doctor hypothesized that when the nurse at daycare noticed Lyla's red ear, it was red because she had been crying. Apparently when some babies cry, their ear canals turn red. Take a moment to ponder this.

Done pondering? It's occurred to you, then, that a red ear can cause crying, but crying can also cause a red ear. Here's an analogy in case you're studying for the GRE.

Red ear : Crying

A. Doctor : Nurse
B. Lyla : Godzilla
C. Chicken : Egg
D. Peanut butter : Tuberculosis

The answer is C because of the eternal debate over which came first.

Incidentally, the doctor also theorized that teething might be the root (pun intended) cause of the whole deal. It would explain the fussiness and the ear tugging, both of which are also symptoms of ear infections. Plus, I should mention that Lyla's diaper art lately has been unusually watercolor-like.

Too much information? Well anyway, that's a symptom of ear infections, too, but it's also a symptom of teething. If she's teething and therefore swallowing a lot of saliva, then it can thin the consistency of her...paint.

Bottom line, this would make for the most boring episode of House ever.

Sensitive

Lyla was disagreeable at daycare today, and they're wondering if she has an ear infection. I discovered the following when I picked her up early to take her to the clinic:

- Target Clinic does not see babies that are under 18 months. Thanks, guys! I'll stop hating you in just under 8 months.

- Lyla's doctor's office has appointments available tomorrow only, but they're same-day appointments, so I have to call back tomorrow to hopefully schedule one. Hey, I know! Why don't you all go to hell?

Meanwhile, Lyla's ear seems fine for the moment. Hopefully we can get her in before the weekend, though, just in case. Her fussiness is cute, I must admit. There was an incident involving the new car that Auntie Jen gave her, seen below in a photo from a couple days ago.


So anyway, Lyla was pushing it, happy as a crazy person. But living rooms, as you know, have walls, so when Lyla's car would hit one of them and she couldn't keep going, she absolutely lost it. We're talking shuddering, passionate, hit-your-thumb-with-a-hammer wailing.

I picked her up, bounced her, and consoled her before turning the car around and setting her by it. Happy crazy pushing resumed until another wall got in her way. Then it was dead-puppy-in-the-road sobbing once again.

So she's feeling a little sensitive today, and it may or may not be ear-related.

Fixing

Today was class picture day at Lyla's school. In a couple weeks we'll be able to log onto their website, enter a code, and view the various proofs before ordering hundreds (no, thousands) of dollars in prints.

Lyla did very well, from what I hear, but there's a new baby in the class that did not do well. She screamed her face off. I hope there will be a print with eight or nine oblivious babies and one having a tantrum. I'd probably order that one.

One of Lyla's teachers told me that the photographer fixed Lyla's hair for the picture. This man found something about my daughter that was unworthy of his camera, an out-of-place hair that made her unphotogenic, something that needed fixing. Had I been there, I would have fixed his face.

I relayed this information to Julie at home, and she laughed and said this morning Lyla looked like she had slept on top of her head. Her hair was Picasso-esque. Still. Still! Okay, so I overreacted. You would've too.

Coyote

Sometimes the teachers at Lyla's school open the door that connects the two baby rooms and let the babies roam back and forth like free-range chickens. When I arrive, it's fun when Lyla has roamed to the adjacent room because then I can spy on her until she sees me.

Today was one of those days. In the center of the room is what looks like a kitchen counter island in a little person's house. Lyla was traveling its perimeter drunkenly, dragging one hand along it for balance. I stood in the connecting doorway until she saw me, at which point she let go.

On the old roadrunner and coyote cartoons, when the coyote would accidentally run off a cliff, he'd hang in midair until he realized where he was, at which point he'd plummet. The same was true of Lyla: for a moment she stood there, but then she realized she was unsupported and kerflumped to the ground.

In unrelated news, Julie got a look at Lyla's half-tooth. I tried to use her toothbrush to get a look myself, but her tongue and lip thwarted my effort.


But I did feel it with my finger. It's coyote sharp. Hopefully she won't be a biter.

Iguana

Lyla is beginning to crawl on her hands and knees instead of sliding on her stomach army-style. If her nose detects a Cheerio on a faraway table, she'll opt for hands and knees to more quickly transition to standing once she gets there. She still uses the army crawl for things like getting under barbed wire.

Her speed is improving, too. Now she's about as fast as an iguana that is not being chased by a predator. And she's making mischief in all sorts of new places:





Oh, and we can feel a tooth. It's coming. She might not need those Halloween plastic vampire teeth after all.