I tricked Wade into guest-blogging.

M: How did you like your paternity leave?

W: I thoroughly enjoyed it. Are you typing about it?

M: No.

W: Oh. Well, I definitely prefer every day of paternity leave to any day in the office.

M: What was your favorite thing that you did with Ruby?

W: Um, my favorite thing I did with Ruby? Um... the time period where I taught her to blow raspberries. Watching her not have any idea what you're doing, and then figuring it out, and then her actually doing it. It was like the cavemen discovering fire. It burns at first, but then you learn to control it.

M: What was your least favorite thing?

W: Uh... Oooh [he is watching soccer, Arsenal v. Liverpool]. Probably the first time I was here alone and she didn't go down OK. That was super-concerning and she was fussing and I didn't have any way to soothe her. That happened around the fourth day. What are you doing? What are you doing?

M: Nothing. What was your favorite outfit that you put her in?

W: My favorite outfit that I put her in...

M: You like to repeat my questions, don't you?

W: That's how I think about things. When I put her in her Pumas. That's when we came to see you in the office. It was a super cute outfit too. The purple and red pants...

M: Purple and red? She doesn't have any purple and red pants.

W: Maroon and brown then.

M: What? Purple and red or maroon and brown?

W: You know which ones, the ones that we always put her in.

M: Oh, those? They're brown and red.

W: OK, whatever. Brown and red. Though I'd like to state that brown and maroon are of the same origin.

M: Really?

W: Yes, really. Anyways, those pants with a tie-dyed shirt. With her red Pumas. I thought that was really cute.

M: If you had to sum up your two-week paternity leave in one word what would it be?

W: In one word? Ruby. Or fulfilling. One of those.

Pop culture, Red Bull, stuff like that.

I could probably count on one hand the number of people who will find this interesting, but I couldn't resist.

LC'S DATE FROM "THE HILLS" SPEAKS!

That is all.

Ruh roh.

The Bumbo chair -- friend to wanna-be sitter-uppers everywhere -- is being recalled due to a possibility of head injuries if you place the baby in it on an elevated surface like a table or counter.

Guess what we just bought and were playing with last week? Luckily, we were only dangling Ruby out the window holding the Bumbo by our fingernails, nothing so crazy as putting her up on a stool or something. (Sorry if you're one of them, but who are these parents? Doesn't it seem like a bad idea to place an unstable baby on anything that's high up? Even if they are sitting in something so substantial as 15 inches of molded foam?)

It doesn't matter though. We never used it more than once or twice because Ruby's thunder thighs get stuck in the little leg openings when you try and take her out of the chair. So for all you baby over-achievers out there who want to sit before your time (especially on top of say, a cat tree or a tall, skinny pole): Relax. Frustrated laying down is way better than becoming Massive Head Wound Harry.

Paci se puede.

Chief on the list of things I swore I'd never do as a mom was give my kid a pacifier. (I also said that I'd never let my kid watch TV, but as W and I are pigs at the trough, we've already had to amend that to not letting Ruby watch (too many) commercials and/or shows with a lot of cursing. Even then I'm pretty sure that her first words are going to be, "I'm the suburban baroness of bud, Mama!") Yet she seemed to have an incessant need to suck on something, and as my body parts could only handle so much, a paci hound she became. Girlfriend loved her some paci, especially during sleeping, car rides and moments of general bad attitude.

Have you ever really watched a baby take a pacifier -- I mean, when they are really restless and fussy and kvetching? It's amazing. Their whole body relaxes. I relax just watching Ruby relax. I'm telling you, if we hand pacies and binkies out in the Middle East, that whole mess will just resolve itself.

But like any drug, if you rely on it, it's a bad scene when it's gone. So if Ruby inadvertently pushed out said paci as she fell asleep, all of a sudden she'd be awake and hollering for a fix. And the only reason that it would stay in for any length of time to begin with is because we were swaddling her; her arms were wrapped against her sides, so no wayward hands could flop around and wipe that paci out. Untethered, those hands are like baby birds -- flying around in a tiny orbit, with no apparent sense of direction.

But she's getting too big to be swaddled. And we knew that when we put her to sleep unswaddled, her arms would go a-waving, and we'd be popping that pacifier back in literally every minute or two. F that noise. So? We decided to abandon swaddle and paci all in one. Cold turkey.

Dude, if a baby could get the DTs, Ruby did last Friday night.

I think at first she just thought that we were lying her down to play and just forgot about her. When she realized this was it, lights off for the night, the situation devolved into flailing and wailing and hissing and spitting. Then, even when she wanted to fall asleep, she just couldn't. She would start to doze off and then her left arm would creep up and bop her in the eye. Cry cry cry. Then she'd doze off again and that dastardly left arm would pull a sneak attack and poke her in the cheek. Cry cry cry. Poor kid. This happened on and off until about 2 a.m. at which point I broke down. It was too painful to watch.

If we'd taken two steps forward with the unswaddling and paci-removal, we only took one step back: swaddle with one arm out and no paci. The result? Our kid became a thumb-sucker, instantly. It was kind of bizarre actually. She did it so naturally it was like she'd been practicing when we weren't watching.

So now that's what she does. The other day we even tried to give her a pacifier in her car seat, and she spit it out and stuck in her thumb. Well, alright then. You know what the beauty of a thumb-sucker is? If her thumb falls out of her mouth, we don't have to put it back in.

The wildfires.

The air has been pretty hazy out here for the last few days. On Sunday, we were up at my mom's house in Pacific Palisades, which is not far from the Malibu fires (maybe five miles?). You could see big smoke plumes coming from that direction, though in short order they became indistinct and just appeared as a general haze over that area. Monday and yesterday the smoke from the north (Malibu), east (Lake Arrowhead), and south (Orange County and San Diego) made the air quality here in west LA gross: muggy, warm and dirty -- like walking around in dirty bathwater. Your eyes (pardon the pun) burned any time you went outside -- and if it was that way here, where the nearest fire is 30 miles away, it's awful to think how bad it must be closer to any of the areas where the fires burned. Today, the Santa Ana winds have died down, so the air quality is a bit better.

My parents used to live in one of the worst hit areas, Rancho Bernardo. It's a part of north San Diego County, inland. On the map that shows where the fire has actually burned, my parents' old house is less than 2,000 feet from the "fire area" (the Witch Fire in this case). I can only imagine that the reddish overlay on the Google map is somewhat imprecise, but I do hope that the fire never reached that house. (Of course I hope that the entire area indicated is much less than what has actually been burned.) My parents didn't live there long, but I have great memories of that house. It's where Wade and I lived (yes, with my parents) the summer after we got married. He worked for a law firm that went surfing every Friday morning, and I worked at the Humane Society. (The Humane Society is in safe area; his firm is in an area that has been evacuated.) It was the last summer my dad was alive, and even though cancer was polka-dotting his lungs by then, he was feeling pretty good. The four of us would bar-b-q and sit out in the backyard that overlooked the canyon and play cards and drink wine and talk. Sometimes I like to pretend that there's a parallel universe out there where he got well and is still alive and we all still get together at that house and drink and eat and laugh again.

Southern California is so beautiful, it's easy to forget how vulnerable it is. Here's hoping that the fires are out soon and that any more damage to homes and properties and people is contained.

I am dairy cow, hear me moo.

Nothing makes you feel better about your decision to go back to work than standing in a file room three times a day, hooked up to a breast pump, and, because your kid is insatiable and because when you're away from her you're like the Sahara, working your boob like it's a pastry bag and you're trying to decorate a very large cake.

525,600 minutes.

October 17, 2004
Dawn in Rome -- the only time the streets are empty.


Just after dawn at at the Colosseum. (Right now my mother is saying out loud, "Why does she have to make such awful faces like that?" I just do, Mom. I just do.)

October 17, 2005Waking up in D.C., all warm and slobbery.

October 17, 2006Surprise!

October 17, 2007The "surprise" in a kicky brown track suit, practicing blowing raspberries.

October 17, 2008

My precious surprise chomping down on a frozen chocolate-covered banana. As she would say, "Nyum nyum nyum."

October 17, 2009

My (first) adorable surprise, now in pigtails, taken with my iPhone (technology not even on the radar when I found out I was pregnant three years ago! what!? weird) early in the morning -- or in the last part of my night, as I usually go back to sleep at 7 a.m...

...thanks to this second, adorable surprise. Three years and one day ago, I thought I'd have kids in maybe six, eight years? If ever? Today -- I have two of them. Two really great ones, actually. Thank you, life. You keep me in a state of awe at just how wonderful surprises can be.

(P.S. That's my arm, Tabs is sleeping on, not my boob. Just an FYI.)

Funny the way life changes in a year, isn't it?

First day back.

Hmm. It wasn't the best day ever. I mean, it wasn't the worst either I guess, but... I don't know. I'll put it this way: I spent the whole day crying or trying not to cry, but I got to dress up in cute clothes and not get spit up on. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have my first day back. My first day back.

I cried when I left the house. I teared up on the bus to work. When people at work asked how it was going, I got a lump in my throat. I scanned through my online photo albums of Ruby on Picasa all day. I cried again when I got home and held her. (Truly, this is the cuddliest baby. I'm not sure how she got so smushy, but she's like a live, warm teddy bear filled with flour.)

And at work? I emailed. I worked on a spreadsheet. I made a few phone calls. I checked my email about 9,839 times. All very challenging, rewarding stuff. Not like that trivial baby-rearing, making-a-good-human-being nonsense that I was dabbling in at home. My co-workers were super-nice though; someone made coffee cake in my honor, and everyone welcomed me back and told me they understood how hard it was (which they couldn't have, otherwise they would have shooed me away from my desk, shouting "Go home! What are you doing here? This is pointless, boring work. We'll hire a temp for as long as you want to stay home. You just take your time, years if necessary. Drop in and draft a report or something whenever you feel like it, but for now, just go be with your baby!").

Not only is the actual going-back-to-work thing hard, but these past few days have brought up a nice little quarter-life crisis for me, and I clearly need to work out some issues: Do I want to work or stay at home? Or maybe I just don't want to work now, but maybe later? If I decide to stay home, will I be satisfied enough? If I do work (now or later), is the is job/position/field I want to be in? If not, what is? Is personal satisfaction more important or is money, which can buy several trips to Hawaii thus creating personal satisfaction? If I don't want to work now, will I be bored and/or feel like I gave up on the working world? Do I have the balls and initiative to do what I really want to do? Am I smart enough to do what I really want to do?

I think I think too much.

P.S. It should be said that Wade is so incredibly supportive of whatever decision I make. In some ways I'd rather he just told me what to do so I didn't have to figure all this out on my own. Also, I know how friggin lucky I am that I even have these choices to make. I'm dumb, but I'm not that dumb.

Ketchup.

This has been a busy week.

• Grandpa Mike and Grandma Lorna were here to snuggle and cuddle Rubykins, watch sports with Wade, and feed me (and everyone else) some delicious homemade lasagna. On a separate note, Lulu is warming up to Ruby.

• Ruby met her ultra-cool Great Grammie for the first time and each was enchanted with the other. Grammie said the most apt thing I've heard in a while about Ruby: "Oh, she's solid! This is one hunk of baby!" Indeed, Grammie, indeed. Ruby was also introduced to her first "horsey" ride. They both had a great time.

• Rubes just got over a hoarse throat, most likely brought on by some crazy dry weather around here. She wasn't sick, just froggy. She sounded like Lindsay Lohan after a rough weekend.

• Ruby is napping so well these days. The other day we were over at a friend's house and she got tired, so I put her in her car seat, sang to her, tucked Bun-Bun in next to her, and rocked her for a minute or two. She fell asleep without a peep and stayed that way -- asleep and peepless -- for 45 minutes. What? I mean what?
• Because Ruby has been sleeping so well and so long and because she sleeps on her back, she's been getting way more tangles in her hair in the back. And if I don't get the tangles out right away, they quickly travel down Ratty Hair Road to Dreadlockville. Girlfriend had crazy hair to begin with, but now we're dealing with dreads? All the hippie girls I knew in college used things like beeswax and aloe vera gel to get their hair to dread up; too bad they didn't know all they had to do was lay on a mattress and rub their heads around five times a day.

• Kermit has gone from The Worst Kitty Ever to The Pretty Goodest Kitty Ever. The Korean lady hasn't been around anymore and we haven't felt the need to crush up a few too many Tylenol and put them in his food. The difference? We're letting him outside whenever he wants. He was getting out anyways, so now it's just a sanctioned escape, like furlough. At first I was worried since he's declawed and has only three teeth, but he just goes and sits in our carport or on the path leading up to our house. Every so often you'll see him next door -- the neighbors love him. And then when he comes home, he's all tuckered so he just falls asleep. NO MEOWING (or at least, much less meowing). He and Ruby should form the local chapter of the Good Sleepers Club.
• I go back to work Monday. Blech. Not only am I not enamored of my job, but now instead of staying home to play with my new toy, I have to go be a transpondster or whatever it is I do. Double blech.
• Subsequent to my return to the life of an on-the-go career woman, Wade will stay at home for the next two weeks and play He-Mom, King of the House-iverse. I want him to guest blog, but we'll see. He doesn't like to play my games. But even more importantly than Wade's paternity leave, we're interviewing nannies to take care of Ru for when we're both back at work. Weird. I mean, with a few phone calls, meetings and reference checks, you have to assess if a person is good enough to take care of the most precious thing in the world to you.

America's Next Top Model.

You're an animal! You're a tiger. Be a tiger, baby! You're great! You're Grrrrrreat! You're Tony, be corn flakes, baby, be frosted. Now be a lemur, baby! You're a ring-tailed lemur. A small mammal native to the African savannah. C'mon baby, you know. Like this! [imitating lemur] OK, predator coming! Now, burrow, burrow! You're a lemur. It's all you've got. I take it back. Be a tiger again. Smashing!

(Seriously though and I know I'm biased, but I'm not sure where this gorgeous child came from. Neither Wade nor I are that good looking, and yet we produced this perfect specimen. It's like genetic synergy, but with crazy hair.)

Oh for Pete's sake.

Apparently now it's a popular name for kitties too.

A day at the park.

Today was a gorgeous fall day here in LA, so Ru, Lu, and I took a field trip to the park.

Ru yelled at the trees for quite a while. She accused them of being lazy and then made outrageous claims like she invented the question mark.

Then we played airplane on Mama's knees for a little while, which she clearly enjoyed...

...until lunch got recycled as a semisoft cheese/milkshake. The majority of this landed on me, so we had to leave so Mama could get a clean shirt. (This picture is gross, sorry.)

Still a lovely, lovely day though. My maternity leave ends next week, and I am going to miss afternoons like this something awful, spit-up and all.

We should have spelled it RooBee.

Damn. Celebs are pissing me off right now.

Wade and I kept the name we chose for the bean a secret until the birth because I told one person what we were thinking, and she said with great disdain, "Like the diner?" I don't know what the hell she was talking about, but it clearly wasn't a compliment. (UPDATE: I found out.) I didn't need that crap from anyone else, so into covert name ops we went. But as I mentioned before, we picked this name A LONG TIME AGO. Well before my boss in DC picked it for his daughter, and well before the current Ruby zeitgeist. Grrr.

First I found out that Tobey Maguire and his now-wife named their daughter Ruby. OK fine. They seem like nice people, environmentalists. Fine. We're in good company -- or if not good company, un-annoying company. And since their daughter was born first, I couldn't complain too much.

Then, sometime in July, professional obnoxious TV personality Jillian Barberie had her Ruby. She's like this decade's Jenny McCarthy, but with less couth. Ugh. This left a bad taste in my mouth.

Then the other day I see that Charlotte Church -- former opera wunderkind and now, from what I gather, sort of a tamer British Britney Spears (read: frequently drunk and inappropriate) -- had her own Ruby. Lovely. Another MOR (mom of Ruby), and this one is a rubbish-mouth drunky.

So right now my attitude is definitely one of "Are you f-ing kidding me?" We purposefully chose this name -- in 2003 -- because we knew of no Rubys. None. Now it the the cool thing for lame-asses the world over. Whatever. In the forthcoming Ruby Gladiatolympics, my Ruby will squash these other crap Rubys. Squash them.

We're those people now.

When we lived in DC, we had these friends who were our age, had a dog, lived in the same oh-so-cute neighborhood (I'm definitely having a little nostalgia for DC these days) -- but then they went and had a baby. At first it was sort of a cute novelty for us, like they had a new accessory that we admired. The baby would come with all of us to dinner, drinks, etc and just sleep in its carrier at the table, so Wade and I thought having a baby was awesome. But then the baby "got on a schedule," and our friends had to be home by 7 every night to put her down. We started getting take-out and going over to their house, but that's not as fun as getting blitzed on mai tais and man-tinis at the local Thai place. To be honest, Wade and I thought they were kind of laming out. I mean, whatever, it's just a baby. What's the big deal if they go down now or later, here or there? And also, shouldn't parenthood be this natural, organic thing, where things like bedtimes just sort of evolve? Weren't they being nap nazis about all of this?

Dude, we are so those nap nazis now.

Ruby has adapted so well to her four-nap-a-day, up-for-90-minutes-in-between-each, eat-every-three-hours schedule. Truly, all we did is introduce it, and the kid has clamped down on this routine and is thriving. Today she even took a two-hour nap. TWO HOURS. The pope should be contacted. We might have to canonize Brandi, holy saint of baby sleep.

And are we going to mess with this schedule that Ruby loves so much? Not on your sweet Aunt Fanny. Or at least not until we've maintained this uber-regular schedule for a while. Anything that might push us back to the Neanderthal days of walk-rock-shush-bounce is absolutely not going to happen for several years at least. So bring the sushi take-out if you you want to hang out for dinner (I like spicy tuna rolls the best) because we're not leaving the house. I'll even mix up some mai tais for us.

Voodoo

Whatever sort of witchcraft Brandi did in our house when she came for the sleep consultation (or roofies that she gave Ru) is working. Holy guacamole, Ruby is like some sort of champion sleeper now. She's joining the Olympic team, maybe the pro circuit after that.

Last night, only our second night doing this crazy, put-your-kid-to-sleep-without-45-minutes-of-shushing thing, she fell asleep immediately. No fussing at all. Just, you know, closed her eyes and that was that. And today, only our second day of this insanity, she's gone down for her naps with very little or no (!) fussing. A little bit of mobile-watching and then quiet.

Those of you who have children who will not sleep can feel free to hate me now.