Dada Goes to the Beach!

And it was fun! We went with a group of families and stayed in two houses right on the beach in Surfside Beach, Texas, which is near Freeport, which itself is near Galveston. Not exactly the most pristine beaches, as indicated by the sticker on the back door of our beach house (on stilts, which meant it swayed a bit, kind of relaxing once you got used to it) reminding us to clean tar off our feet if necessary. Luckily, not necessary this weekend.

Anyway, if you want to see some pictures you can got to the Kodakgaller album: Dada's First Beach Trip. We didn't take a lot of pictures because we were too busy looking after Dada and, in Eliot's case, being Mr. Cool Guy Surf Instructer with some of the other parents. We've confirmed the What Goes In, Comes Out rule vis-a-vis sand; let's just say, that child ate a LOT of sand. A castle's worth. We also strolled on the beach with Dada, who learned to enjoy feeling the waves on her little toes.

We stopped in and visited Po Po on the way home from the beach, along with some of her friends who all agreed that Dada's exceedingly cute and destined for great things. Dada also got to meet her Uncle Tommy, who was especially interesting for making eye contact and smiling a lot but NOT doing a lot of cooing and stuff, a notable difference from the other new people at the time.

Dada has also learned to plant enthusiastic, wet, smacky kisses on us, which is, of course, endearing. Less endearing, she's learned how to get through the dog door; but don't panic! Because, as many of you know, we have two dog doors, one from the kitchen into the laundry room and the other from the laundry room to the outside. She only went into the laundry room, not outside. Also, the kitchen is ordinarily gated off--so she won't be scooting outside whenever the spirit moves her. Oh, and the backyard is fenced, so she wouldn't make it out into traffic, in the event of a huge supervisiory failure.

For the record: she was under her father's supervision when she made this discovery.

Future plans include going back to Po Po's for Mothers' Day--as a new mother, I'm looking forward to being fussed over while doing a bit of fussing over my own mom.

House update: time to pick appliances, so they can finalize the kitchen plans and so that, months from now, they don't have to rearrange the kitchen in a day when I say, oh, I want a gigantic Viking range, didn't I mention that?

Dada Progress Report: Week 8

We've had a busy couple of weeks chez Woods-Kimber:

Dada started swim class with her daddy and is doing well, especially in the all-important skills of jumping into the pool when Daddy says "1-2-3" and in looking cute in a tiny swimsuit. She's walking like a champ and running a little bit, too, which is a source of both maternal pride and anxiety.

We went to our first post-Dada movie, too: Sin City, a movie that is SO very not for children or many adults. Vanessa and Sherry babysat and sucessfully comforted her though a crying spell, which means that they are heroes in our estimation.

Also, she seems to have picked up a cold, of the mild palindrome variety, ie. "tons o snot" with few other symptoms, other than a tendency to get tired and to need to nap more. One of the Advice For Moms books I read said that if a toddler has an especially bad day, it's likely that she's coming down with something, though usually the "bad day" refers to tantrums. But, sure enough, after Dada had a miserable crying jag at the daycare center at the Y--while I was in yoga class--she was looking peaked and getting stuffy the next day. The doc had said to expect her to get every single bug that's going around for at least a year.

Also, Eliot took his first business post-China trip last week. He'd mentioned the week before that he was going and I didn't give it another thought until he said, oh I have to leave very early tomorrow (on Tuesday). Eek. I hadn't made any arrangements for any help, everyone we know is insanely busy (tax time, etc) and so I'd be on my own for Three Whole Days. Couldn't be that hard, right?

Well, yeah. Here's what I learned: multitasking with a toddler in your care is nearly impossible. Also, naptime is brief, as is the overnight time when she's asleep. And you can't leave a sleeping baby, so every errand you run will require you to bring the child, who as we all know, isn't always going to think Whole Foods is a fun place to hang out. Or, worse, who's going to decide that WF has potential but only if you let her out of the cart and run around pulling things off shelves. Add to that the fact that she was coming down with a cold and you can imagine we were both pretty tired by Friday evening.

The dogs, however, were not the least bit tired, because they hadn't been walked in three days since we haven't figured out how for one person to manage the dogs and Dada at the same time--the leashes get tangled up with the stroller and she's not interested in staying in the sling that long.

On the whole, though, it wasn't so bad: Dada's an easygoing kid, the dogs are pretty mellow, too, and I learned some important parenting lessons such as, line up a sitter in advance when needed. Another lesson: make the dogs stay outside if there's a chance they'll bark their stupid heads off at the mailman and wake the baby when she's only been asleep for 15 minutes and her tired mother has only just drifted off.

Re. the house: test drilling and framing plans.

Dada Progress Report: Week 6

This was our fourth full week home and our sixth with Dada. It seems like it's been much longer than that. We're definitely starting to reach that "what did we do before?" state. Fortunately, our lifestyle was so boring before that it hasn't really been that much of a change, although we did have to take a pass on the midnight show of Southern Culture on the Skids down at the Continental Club, which we really wanted to do. But we realized it would require getting somebody to babysit all night and we weren't sure we could actually stay up that late. So maybe next year.

So what interesting things has Dada done or experienced this week? Let's see:

• First live TV appearance. We went to the Mighty Texas Dog Walk and Aunt Joanna, who is one of the organizers, asked me to be interviewed on the local news so Dada and I got to answer some questions. Later on the walk we ran into a lady in her driveway who said she had seen us on TV and that we looked "cute". Not sure I said anything intelligable...


• First Mighty Texas Dog Walk. Not sure how much fun it was for Dada. She didn't want to be in the stroller for the whole three miles. Unfortunately, we didn't break the record this year. Even with Band Aunt Venessa and Band Aunt Sherry to help with dog and baby wrangling, it was a lot more work than we had expected.


• First day care. The local YMCA offers day care for up to 1.5 hours for children Dada's age. We tried this out this week and it worked great--she seemed to have no anxiety about being there without Mom, who was able to get a quick workout.


• First baby sitting. We had theater tickets for Saturday night and Uncle Jay and Aunt Kay had agreed to babysit for us. We had no problem leaving after dropping her off. But we blew off the play and just went and had a nice dinner. Jay was able to get her to go to sleep in the portable crip without too much difficulty. We were back home in bed with lights out by 9:00. We are old.


• First mac and cheese. We went out to lunch with Marla, Andria, and Hallie Jane and Dada got to try her first mac and cheese, which she seemed to enjoy but didn't eat a huge amount of (but then she wasn't much into eating at that point anyway).


• Dada has moved from halting walking to full-on motoring. That was one of the challenges at the Dog Walk--she wanted to walk, which is sort of problematic in a press of people and dogs. She seems to be pretty fearless and bouncy, which is mostly a good thing but means we have to be extra sharp. Since I finally got the back yard mowed, we tried walking on the grass a bit. Juries still out on that.


• She's started saying "hi" and using the "eat" and "more" signs more or less intelligably. We think she may also being using a form of the all-done sign, but we're not sure.


• She's cutting some more molars and these are bothering her more than they have in the past, so she's actually cranky, although only in little bursts.

So I guess the next thing will be running, at which point we might as well hang it up. Having had a week or two more or just crawling wouldn't have been too bad, in retrospect....

Breaking News

We've had some interesting developments here that I'm sure you'll all find to be interesting and, really, good news. We'll explain more later as things develop.

As some of you know, Dada has been experiencing some interesting changes, developmentally speaking, and we've sought some advice from experts who've suggested that we enroll her a special program. We've found that this school offers the best fit for our very special girl: Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters

Yes, it seems that Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters will be the best place for our girl to develop her very special talents, and we are very very proud. Here's another site with some more information about this remarkable school.
X Mansion

For more information, read here: click here