Prepping for the Baby

(This post is late, as Ellie is already here, but I have some time in the evenings to catch up on blog posts that I didn’t write when I was cooking vats and vats and vats of red sauce so that we would have food to balance on top of Ellie over the next few weeks.)

Anyway, one of the things that we needed to do was get some of the baby gear out of storage and make sure that it was all ready to go.  Make sure, for example, that all the cat hair had been properly removed.

You see that this is a valid concern. 

Anyway, Margaret was very interested in the preparations, and was quite helpful.*

I had explained that the carseat went in the car, and we took the base outside, switched Margaret’s seat to the other side (because otherwise, no one will be able to fit inside the car to drive it, which makes cars less useful than one might imagine), and fitted it in.

But Margaret wanted the seat in the car, because as she explained, “seat fit a car.”

So I took it out, snapped it into the base, and we went to run errands.

But first, Margaret felt that a seat that had straps and buckles NEEDED something in it because otherwise, what’s the point of having a seat in the car?**

And that’s how this happened.

So Margaret, even though she feels pretty secure in her own position vis-à-vis Leo and I, may feel that Ellie is displacing her penguin.  And that’s the sort of thing that I think she’s just going to have to put up with.

*In order for this sentence to be truthful, we have to employ a somewhat specialized definition of helpful, which involves poking and prodding and misusing all the equipment, as well as sitting in all the things that could be sat in and sometimes trying to lift them up and put them on her head.  You know, that kind of help.  As I believe, however, that it is very important to give credit where credit is due, I need to point out that Margaret was very good at helping test that the buckles are still in working order.  As far as her product testing goes, she can report that they all do up, but undoing them requires assistance.

**This is a very fair point, and one that I considered making to her when she demanded that we put the seat in the car even though we had, as yet, no baby to stick in it. 

Working Hard

Sometimes, after a hard day of sleeping and eating, it is important to sleep with one’s arms in a triumphant position.

Sometimes it is also important to point out to one’s mommy that she is an ineffective swaddler.  

Because it’s never too early to point out how people could improve their performance.

In my defense, these are small blankets, I’m trying to do the swaddling on the bed, and my waist still doesn’t bend as well as I would like because there is a recently-stitched baby-size hole in it.  (And no, I don’t think that I’m being overly defensive about imagined slights).

All Right Then

Margaret has been somewhat slow to warm to Ellie.  I mean, she’s not exactly opposed to her, but she’s not exactly gung-ho on the concept.

And she hasn’t wanted to have much to do with her.

But this morning Leo and I showed Margaret her baby pictures (well, not all of them.  That would take far too long), and she seemed to warm to Ellie a bit.  And certainly enough that she was finally willing to get close enough to touch her.*

And she learned her name.

*I also think that the fact that I am wearing pants and behaving somewhat more like a normal human being is helping with this, but I may be rating my own attractions too highly.  Whatever it means to Margaret, pants are a big thing for me.

Chicks and Geese and Ducks and Penguins

Ellie is asleep in her bucket (seriously, hospitals stick babies in rubbermaid tubs.  I’m sure that’s safe sleep), so I’m going to take this opportunity to catch up on some of the blogging that I should have been doing last week instead of tearing around doing fun things so that Margaret could enjoy her last week of being an only child.  Of course, most of the subject matter of this post is the stuff that we were doing for fun, so if I hadn’t been tearing around, I wouldn’t have had anything to post about, so there’s a bit of a conundrum there.*

Anyway, one of the things that Margaret really likes is going and feeding ducks and geese in Forest Park.  On a really cold day (of which there have been none, really, in the last week or so) she will settle for looking at geese and ducks out the car window.  But she prefers to feed them.  Actually, what she prefers is for Mommy to feed them while she munches away on her own piece of slightly stale duck bread.

She has also learned, thanks to a helpful book on barnyard animals, to distinguish mommy and daddy and baby ducks, which is very cute.  She, as nature intended, seems to think that the daddy ducks are more interesting.  Or at least she talks about them more.  Except that we went on the carousel at the zoo, and she rode on a goose figure that she rather thought was a mommy duck.  So that has been figuring in her conversation.

Another thing that she likes to do is demand songs from me.  Mostly songs about ducks, when it really comes down to it.  And she does it by title, though a certain degree of discernment is required to unpack which possible duck song, out of all the duck songs in the world, she is wanting me to sing.  In the following clip, she asks for the “geese and duck song,” which is a verse from “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” announcing that those fowl, along with some chicks, ought to scurry.

Other duck songs are “ducky song,” which is “Rubber Ducky,” and “duckling song,” which is the relevant verse from “Clementine” about driving ducklings to the water.  Sometimes she asks for “duckling and boot song,” which is two verses: the one about the ducks, and the one about Clementine’s enormous feet.***

Another favorite bird- and park-related activity was going to see the penguins.   We have many videos of penguins swimming, but this seems to be Margaret’s favorite.

*Also, Ellie** decided that she needed to eat A LOT last night, and that she was against being put down, so I have a really good excuse for slightly scatty prose.  I usually need an excuse, but right now I have one, so I’d like it to be noted.

**My mother has noted, apropos of the great nickname debates that raged with Margaret, that we now have kids that we can call El and M.  Apparently we need an N, and O, and a P.  I’m not, at this moment, seeing that in my future.

***I was singing her the whole song, since she liked it, but then I decided that it wasn’t a great idea to try to allay her fears about her baby sister by singing her songs in which younger sisters wait until one has drowned, and then swoop in and steal one’s boyfriend.  It didn’t seem to create the right sort of attitude towards little sisters.  And the more you read between the lines, the more the little sister looks like a poor prospect.  I mean, why doesn’t SHE take the ducklings to the water some of the time?  What’s she doing when not stealing men?

Why God Made Uncles

So that there would be someone to let the nieces and nephews do the damn fool things that their parents know they shouldn’t do.

Speaking of which, Ron let Margaret drive the car up the driveway the other day.

She thought it was pretty awesome, but probably illicit.

She has been looking at the pictures of this event on my phone over and over and over and cackling with joy about it.

Speaking of uncles, Ellie finds them quite comfortable.

Dubious Acceptance

Margaret isn’t completely certain that she’s on board with this little sister thing that we’ve got going on.

I mean, she hasn’t thrown the baby out of a window yet, but she isn’t all that interested in holding the baby.

Nor is she particularly interested in the fact that I am in bed all the time. Although she seemed much happier this afternoon when I got up and staggered down the halls with her.

But there was a very sweet moment when Margaret and Grandma read nursery rhymes to Ellie.

Margaret is concentrating very hard on the precise meanings of the poems.

In Which We Try To Find Apt Winnie-The Pooh References

You know, because it’s kind of a thing that we do when we announce the birth of our daughters.

Anyway, you’ll get to the Winnie the Pooh reference if you stick around long enough.

To start with, we have another baby, Kathleen Elizabeth Human (called Ellie)*

This is what she thinks of us.

Or perhaps this.

At any rate, she is surveying the world with a certain amount of distrust.

Although, if there is any milk around, she wouldn’t be averse to having some, since her internal clock is perpetually stopped at a little before 11.**

*It was a last-minute compromise which allows both of us to save face. 

**See, there’s Winnie the Pooh.