Ronin is a big fan of these Sylvia Long books. She uses the tune of this one, a non-commercial re-imagining of the classic Hush Little Baby lullaby, to make up her own songs about whatever we’re doing.

Valentines day in Portland was blah and wet and rainy and gray. We were all feeling a little snarfley anyway so energetic walks in the rain were low on the activity list. We felt somewhat inspired by the pink holiday and decided to make cookies. Ronin’s first cookie baking experience. She was very serious about it and stirred the flour for a long long time. Periodically, she would sample the flour with the tip of her tongue. When she started to spoon it back into the wet measuring cup, we knew it was done.

I used one of our christmas cookie standby recipes (’christmas logs’) and rolled it out for cookie cutting. I have only made cookie-cutter cookies once before (not counting when I was a kid) and I’m not really sure what recipe you’re supposed to use. I do have have cookie cutters—bugs! Ronin was big into the cutting of the dough and of poking of the fingers into the cutter to eject the dough. It was all I could do to get her to actually taste the dough at first (Ronin is suspicious of all food or food-like substances) but once she got some on her tongue, she was a convert and I had to move fast to keep the dragonflies from being devoured raw.

We didn’t have a frosting decorator squirter thing but we dug out one of the syringes that the hospital sent me home with when Ronin was born (in case I had to do some tricky breastfeeding), loaded it with pink frosting, and that worked quite well. Ronin, curiously, did not need coaxing to taste the frosting. Some things you just know.

[Female and male cardinal.]

Both Joshua and I left Ronin for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago (well, awake that is); my parents watched her for something like seven hours and how does it go? Apparently she never even asked where we were. She’s going to be a very grateful teenager, I can tell already.

We made the journey to Arizona, which included an hour commute via bus and train and that was just to get to the airport. We had one long flight, a connection in Phoenix and another super short flight. So short that when the pilot got on to welcome us aboard, he said we were already making our descent into Tucson and don’t even think about complimentary beverages. Ronin was amazingly calm and happy the entire flight and airport change. Well, until the last twenty minutes.

My parents live out in the desert south of Tucson. They have two crazy dogs, which fascinate Ronin, but who are sadly not interested in toddlers. Ronin found other diversions, such as rearranging the extensive (and likely ordered in some complicated way) CD collection, opening and dumping out spices, banging on the piano, and digging through small drawers.

Unfortunately, she managed to get sick toward the end of the trip; she had a fever and then developed a cough. A nasty one that triggered her gag reflex and made her barf. We were sort of worried about the plane ride home; my mom flew recently and a family with a sick baby got kicked off her plane in Texas. We dosed her with acetaminophen one hour before boarding.

Twenty minutes before boarding, she ate a bunch of power bar and grapes, which she then barfed up all over herself and Joshua’s shirt. Joshua emerged from the bathrooms with a wet spot the size of a dinner plate on his shirt and I took Ronin to try to clean her up. I ended up stripping her pants off to wash them and spot-cleaning her jacket and shirt. I changed her diaper so at least that was clean and brought her pantsless back to the terminal. She was kind of freaking out too—rolling around on the ground, not letting us pick her up, acting all hyper like she was overtired. Everyone bestowed upon the pantsless toddler who smelled of puke and was acting crazy looks of smiling happiness and goodwill. The flight did not go well.

We tried to keep her in our seat row while people boarded. Soon a 20-something girl stopped at our row, checking and double checking the overhead numbers. We were all “Congratulations! YOU WIN!!!” As she settled up against the window, she told us that she had just spent the past two weeks with her sister and her three small children. We hoped that they were more poorly behaved and vomitous than ours. She spent the next twenty minutes erecting an invisible wall between her seat and ours, stuffed headphones in her ears, and immersed herself in a really odd book where she stayed for the entirety of the flight.

We’re all recovering now from The Cold (except me, whose cold has morphed into a sinus infection. Bonus!). There is a lot of coughing and snot going around still. The other day she woke up crying “Dada, get the boogers OUT!”

[Ronin reads Velveteen Rabbit to us.]

Ronin’s newest obsession, aside from asking nonstop constantly all the time “What’s Ronin doing? What’s Mama doing? What’s the kittycat doing? What’s Ronin doing?” She doesn’t actually want to know what she/me/kittycat is doing of course, because she well knows that the she’s pouring milk onto the table/I’m getting her some toast/the kittycat is lying in the grass. It just seems to be the only way to engage in conversation. I expected the “why” questions but she doesn’t seem to be interested in the why, just the what. Anyway, the newest obsession, as I was saying, is reading her books to us. It’s totally adorable although much of what comes out of her mouth to us is total jibberish. I think it’s like when I sing along to, say, Persian pop. I “know” all the words but presumably my “pronunciation” is utter crap; it would be laughable for someone who actually spoke Persian to hear me.

On the sleep/no-nap front, things have gotten better. We discovered that after we had read fifty books to her and sung songs and talked about our day and told stories about Roninfish and she still wasn’t asleep and in fact was more agitated and squirmy than ever, we could pick her up, bounce her and sing Baby Beluga, and she’d pass right out after only a few minutes. This was a wonderful boon to our quality of life.

Of course she does not like to be bounced or sung Baby Beluga to and she struggles and screams the moment we start to cradle her. We feel bad but not as bad as we feel after three plus hours of begging and pleading with her to just lie down and go to sleep.

As far as the nap goes, she appears to have totally forgotten about it. I suppose it’s time to throw them all away for good.

Yesterday she actually went to sleep on her own in her bed while I was reading Frog and Toad. It was great.

Recently we decided to take Ronin and go drive off into the wild blue muddy yonder in search of some farm animals. Horses or alpacas or something. Ronin likes these kinds of things.

After it took us a million years to get out of Portland due to some missed freeway on-ramps, we found ourselves up some windy road in the gorge. We had to drive a surprisingly long distance before we spotted our first cow. Then we couldn’t stop and admire said cow because the road was narrow and there was no shoulder. We finally found a place to pull out and look at cows and were shocked to discover that some kind of mean evil wind was blowing up in the gorge. It was hard to walk, and it was instantly freezing. We walked 30 feet, mooed at the cows, checked out that awesome little bird of prey, then all but ran back to the car and drove back home.

[Moooooo moooo moooo. Mama what’s the cow doing? Cows say moooo.]

Edited to add: Ronin has since named the bird “Post” and the cows “Honey” and “Whiteface.” We say hello to them every morning.

[Nigel and Batbear go joyriding in the shopping cart.]

If Ronin disliked sleeping before, it is nothing compared to how she feels about sleep now. She ignores, fears, hates, and tries her damnedest to avoid sleep and her loathsome bed. In the past week she has napped twice out of sheer exhaustion and she has been taking upwards of 3+ hours per night to get down. The last hour or so is always a total screaming hysterical meltdown. It’s totally awful and I’ve been meaning to post something more interesting than the horror that is her sleep habits lately, but the scattered handful of brain cells that have managed to survive this beastly past week are too depressed to write blog posts.

The sad part is that we brought it on ourselves. We ‘broke’ the nap (her pacifier). We had hoped that she would slowly let go of her need for the nap but it seems that she has been getting more and more dependent upon it. The entire household would come to a standstill if we couldn’t find it when it was bedtime, she’d get all agitated and amped up trying to find it and it would take a million years to get her down, etc. Plus, she developed this nasty rash around her mouth where the nap touches.

We felt just taking it away from her was too harsh so we cut a hole in the end of it. We went to bed as usual and she popped her nap in her mouth, gave it a couple of sucks, and then pulled it out to inspect. She was utterly perplexed and we had a hard time trying not to laugh at her obvious confusion. We told her that it seemed to have broken and she told us to fix it. Then she wanted to get some tape to fix it. We taped it up and she held it for a while and we told the story of the little Ronin-fish who had a nap once when she was a little baby but then she got older and turned two and the nap broke and it was time to try to sleep without the nap but it was okay because she didn’t need it anymore, etc. And she seemed okay with it really. She was a little upset right at first when we said we couldn’t fix it (though we tried with tape) but she didn’t cry specifically for the nap after that. We put it under her pillow; she takes it out every once and a while and adjusts the tape, then puts it back.

The problem is that she doesn’t know how to sleep without it. Now that the nap is no more, what little interest she had in sleeping vanished. She just can’t figure out how to go to sleep without passing out from exhaustion, usually after screaming herself hoarse. It’s awful and I can’t figure out if we should get her another pacifier or if at this point, she’ll never revert to the far better sleep situation we had previously. It’s funny too because if you had told me then that our sleep situation was ‘far better’ than some other possible sleep situation, I would have laughed incredulously. Or killed myself.

[Toddler whose life is ruined because her cruel cruel parents broke her nap.]

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Some of the bird ornaments I made for our tree (and for little christmas gifts). The black and white one was a pattern I got online. I doctored the original pattern to add interfacing to prevent stuffing lumps and I reinforced the tail. Essentially I turned a reasonably quick and easy pattern into a royal pain in the ass. My specialty!

All the other felt birds were ideas I ripped from making random google image searches. I made them out of wool felt and embroidery floss. I haven’t really ever embroidered before but there are a lot of online tutorials.

I took Ronin’s mobile apart temporarily to add raindrops to the tree.

I felt compelled to make a mustache ornament since they are ALL the rage this year. Mustaches, not specifically mustache ornaments, but I imagine they are out there.

Ronin loved the birds. I made several of the stuffed fabric ones and put them on the lower branches. Ronin had a field day rearranging them each morning.

[Ronin napping*** with her friends. Clockwise from upper left we have Muddy, Bones, Bunny, Punk Rock Girl, Batbear, Ronin of course, Nigel, and Chess.]

Earlier this evening, Ronin managed to get a hold of an old coffee can that still had some coffee bean crumbs. These she merrily dug out and shoved up her nose as far as she could, an alarming habit she has with things that smell interesting (rosemary, pine needles, and oregano are repeat offenders). We picked out what we could but she spent the entirety of dinner sneezing and digging around up there with her finger. During the soup course she managed to eject one of the bigger chunks and we idly wondered how much of the stuff she managed to actually snort down and ingest. I suppose we got our answer around 7ish when she quite suddenly started literally bouncing off the walls. Her cheeks got all flushed and even though she missed her nap (which means she should have passed out dead around 6:30), she spent the next couple of hours running in circles in her bedroom, climbing onto the furniture and jumping off, ferrying her stuffed animals busily from one part of the house to another, etc. We were mildly alarmed but happy that at least she was in a good mood. We just kept asking her if she wanted to go to bed (to which she’d immediately reply “Nope”) until finally there was hesitation in her reply and Joshua seized the opportunity to put her in her bed. He told her the Billy Goats Gruff story (a favorite; it’s the library’s fault) and she was out after only a few minutes. No more coffee for Ronin.

*** NOT today’s nap.

[A pretty spider web coated in tiny ice particles. It was freezing cold the majority of our Eugene trip.]

I’m happy to report that Ronin (Ronin’s parents) survived the Christmas holiday without any heads exploding from all the excitement and doting relatives and trees and presents and ornaments and presents.

We have actually managed to somehow avoid Christmas for the past 13 years by either being out of the country or snowed in (that would be last year) but this time, it was nigh on impossible for us to avoid such festivities with such an adorable little munchkin in tow just waiting for sugarplums and santas and grandparents and all that stuff. We drove to Eugene to Joshua’s Mom’s house.

[We got a tree this year because Ronin so clearly loves the tree. Last year she loved Michelle’s tree and this year she loved our tree. She spent (still spends—we have yet to take it down) a lot of time poking around underneath it, manhandling the ornaments, and packing the lower limbs with her flock of stuffed animals. Here she is shoving all the critters she can find into the lower branches of Cheryl and Larry’s tree in Eugene.]

She’s getting huge, no? She has even started selectively eating (cookies, mac n cheese); you can see it in her upper arms. Our little monkey might even crack the 10th percentile someday.

[Ronin loves to show Nigel the park. She calls that hat the “Armadillo Hat” by the way; we have no idea why.]

She’s getting shrewder about checking first to see what we are all eating (pie, lately) before getting into whatever we try to feed her (yogurt and fruit, say). Needless to say, she has eaten her weight in pie and bunny grahams this past week. If I were smart, I could probably sneak some peas in her by burying them in lemon meringue.

[We made cherry jam finally out of all the cherries we harvested from Cheryl and Larry’s tree. We gave Ronin the spoon to lick and she cried for jam jam jam more jam MORE JAM MORE JAM!!!!! for like two hours after.]

[We thought she was pretty willful before but she is far more so now. For that reason we let her take her two precious markers along on a trip to the store. She was basically good with them and only dropped them a few times while shopping. On the way home we quite forgot about them only to turn around and behold this. Mere hours before the rest of the family arrived for some Christmas Eve dinner.]

Ronin does drink plenty of milk, which is great, and curiously has shown an affinity for tea. Joshua made himself a cup of tea one afternoon and she wanted some. He loaded it with milk and put a bit of honey in it and she drank a startling amount. And yes, we only give her decaf because, god I’d hate to even think…

In general, she eats a lot better than she ever did, and her sleeping has improved exponentially. She is still murder to get down though, unless she skips her afternoon nap, which is painful in its own right. I am not exaggerating to say that we (usually I, since she suddenly prefers that I put her down lately) spend between 4 and 6 hours per day laying down with her trying to get her to sleep.

She is sleeping in her own bed these days; no more crib. Right before the Texas trip, way back when…, I was trying to put her to bed and I carried her to her crib and put her in it. When I turned to go fetch her various crib accessories, I heard a loud THUMP thump. She had vaulted over the side, dropped down to her feet and then landed on her butt. She was fine but she so often had violent crib freakouts that the thought of her throwing herself over the side in a blind rage made me nervous that she wouldn’t always land so well. Some friends of ours learned the hard way that it was time to get rid of the crib when their two-year-old climbed out and broke his arm.

The day we got back from Texas, we bought her a twin futon and some bed slats, which we propped up with 2×2s to prevent Warm Toast Syndrome (futons ’sweat’ underneath if you just put them straight on a wood floor; it’s hideously gross). She was pretty cool with the new bed. She has never shown any extraordinary distress when we’ve changed her sleeping situation (warm belly to swaddle, cradle to crib, our room to the hall room, old apartment to the new house and her own real room); Ronin has always been an equal opportunity sleep hater. Oh, I shouldn’t say that really; she has become much much better at the sleep thing and has at times even asked to take a nap (typically at completely inopportune times like when we’re in the grocery store). The first time she did it though I damn near fell down dead with shock.

So far she has only rolled out of the new bed once. We heard a dull thud and then a tiny moan; she never woke up even as we lifted her back up onto the bed. And she mostly stays under the covers so we don’t feel we need to crank the heat all night long. AND she often sleeps through the night before coming into our room at the crack of dawn demanding yogurt and the Christmas tree lights ON. It’s a pretty ideal situation really considering the first 17 months of sleep hell.

The pacifier (’nap,’ she calls it) is the next big thing to deal with. Oh, aside from potty training (gak). When she teethes (and she has been growing her canines in bursts and wans for the past four months; so far only the tops have managed to poke through) she wants to suck on the nap all the time. Seriously all the time. We feel like Big Meanies taking it away from her so we made a rule that she could have her nap whenever she wanted it as long as she stayed in her room. She took to this right away and we didn’t see much of her for about three days. Periodically she would emerge to eat some bunny grahams or drink some milk but the vast majority of the time she spent sitting on her bed reading to her animals or whatever. Sometimes she stood at the doorway whining at us and trying to creep slowly out with the nap in her mouth. We were beginning to feel like we made the wrong decision to give her free reign over her nap and wondering if we needed to do something when she just as suddenly abandoned the nap and emerged from her room. She still uses it to sleep but most of the time can deal without it (even when she is in her room). I really can’t decide if it’s worth trying to get rid of or if we should just let her keep it. I am very afraid of what may happen to her sleep if we took it from her. Now the current nap issue is that when Ronin teethes, her saliva turns to a caustic acid that gives her a rash around her mouth; the nap aggravates this. She has had a rash around her mouth for three months straight. Poor little monkey.

[Ronin with some of her Christmas booty. The doll, from Oma Peggy, has already been adopted into Ronin’s inner circle of friends. Other standout gifts include some awesome books and a perfect to-scale metal miniature shopping cart. Sheer brilliance.]