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.