Cheap onesie, good cause.

The folks at the superadorable site Spunky Sprout are selling very sweet little tie-dyed onesies and t-shirts. 100% of the proceeds of these will go to Reach the Children, a nonprofit that provides health care, education, community development and all manner of good stuff for underprivileged kids in Africa. And for (ahem) frugal people like me, the price is right.

If you want to check them out, go here now: http://www.spunkysprout.com/reachout.html

Top 10 reasons I like Wade.

1. He truly loves being a dad and -- not that I'm surprised -- is really good at it. And Ruby adores him. Like wigs-out-when-he-enters-the-room adores him.

2. He puts up with my bossiness. "Did you change the baby's diaper?" "That's not exactly the outfit I would have put her in." "Did you check the water temperature of the bath before you put her in?" "Don't you think we should set the heater at 70 instead of 71?"

3. He sings a mean rendition of "Mother" by Danzig -- in Spanish. It starts off, "Madre, quiero bang cabezas con me...."

4. He doesn't exactly love his job, and when I ask him what he wants to do with his life, he says, "I wish someone would pay us to just hang out with each other all day." And he means it.

5. He honest to god thinks I would make a great children's' book author. He asks me questions about what I'm writing (when I'm writing) and comes up with great ideas to spur me on.

6. His go-to meal when I ask him to cook is called "black bean mush" or sometimes "gruel." It is both healthy and delicious.

7. He knows me. He knows that even when I do something that pisses him off, I did it because I have the best of intentions.

8. He can fool me in to believing his made-up words on Scrabulous, like "GOTUMBLE" (which is now a part of our family lexicon, as in "Oh, gotumble yourself").

9. He supports me on things that I find important like the environment, veterans' issues, Buffy/Firefly, American Idol, really good food, on-sale baby clothes.

10. He still hasn't killed Kermit. Remarkable!

Hate you, poo. Hate you the most. Happy birthday.

Last weekend.

Saturday morning: the great outdoors. We went hiking. Here is the proof.


Ruby was not a fan of the sunglasses, but Wade was determined. This actually reminds me of me and my dad; he was always trying to get me to wear croakies with my sunglasses. Do you know how lame croakies are when you're sixteen?

But I don't waaaanna go hiking!


OK fine. We'll go hiking.


I didn't feel like lugging my camera around on the hike (really more of an uphill walk), but it was gorgeous. Vistas from Catalina, which is 26 miles offshore, to downtown, 15 miles in the other direction. Yup, eeeevery so often, LA doesn't suck.

Saturday night: got a big group together to celebrate W's 32nd birthday in high style: we went to ROLLER DERBY! No pictures from this either, but imagine the level of coolness that comes with roller derby, and then multiply it by 47. The girls are badasses. Amber, you must become one so I can live vicariously through you. I personally could never try out as I have a great fear of knocking my teeth out on a skinny girl's elbow. It's a highly specific phobia.

Sunday: Ruby's first birthday party (as in the first one she's attended). Very cute, lots of rug rats at the park, and the parents had even hired a woman to come out and lead the kids in playing with instruments and various sensory experiences (balls, feathers, etc.). (Of course, this completely freaked me out and I immediately started wondering what I'm going to do for Ruby's birthday -- in three months. Get a grip, M.)



In the forest of big legs.

And finally, enjoying the beautiful day with Daddy.

Item #192 on the to-do list? Check!

So I FINALLY finished my brain dump from June 28, 2007. If you have any desire (and I honestly cannot imagine why you would), you can read about my labor here. If you just want a quick summary, I've bullet point-ed it for you here:

• It hurt.
• It hurt a lot.
• A baby came out.

No joke, the other version is really long.

(To my new friend Chris Cool, who is due in three weeks, you were the motivation for this. Hope it doesn't scare the panties off you -- or make you want to adhere them on permanently.)

Make her a STAH!

My cousin Sanam Salek is an amazing artist (also "Jamsheed" of "Jamsheed's Corner" over there on the right), and she’s one of three finalists in LA Magazine/KTLA’s Style Star of Tomorrow contest. Her medium is paint and nails, and it is amazingly creative and well done (here is a link to her work, though there are quite a few nudes, so consider yourself warned: http://sanamsalek.blogspot.com/2008/03/nails-on-wood.html). To win, she needs to have the most votes on this website: www.ktla.com/stylestar. Winners will be announced on Friday morning. I’m not sure what she’ll win, but if she does, you could then say you read the blog of the cousin of the Style Star of Tomorrow! And won’t that be exciting?

***UPDATE: Sanam lost. :( It's probably for the best though; if she'd won, she'd be insufferable to be around.

More. Eat. Milk.

So we're working on signing with Ruby. I'm DESPERATE for communication. Any little bit from her is the most amazing thing ever. When she lifts her arms to be picked up -- I want to die. When she scrunches up her face at a new taste and looks at me like "WTF, moms?" -- the best thing ever. But that's sort of it, you know? Nothing else yet.

But that's not for lack of trying on our parts.

Following in the footsteps of my friend Heidi (who was the first of my peers to have a baby -- and Liam is exactly three years older than Ruby, so I can just check her 2005 blog entries to compare and contrast -- so handy!), we are teaching Ruby sign language. So far we've been focusing on "more," "eat," and "milk." "More" is still sort of a foreign concept, though lord knows I'm banging my pointed hands together for every damn thing that she could possibly want more of. "Eat" and especially "milk" though, she totally gets. Dude, when we make the milk sign, she nearly loses it she gets so excited. (If you couldn't tell from looking at her, cupcake likes to eat.)

But she has yet to make any signs back at me. DOH! I just want her to sign SO BAD. Grr.

I'm very impatient when it comes to this kind of thing. I remember when she was two weeks old and Wade first went back to work. He asked me what I was going to do with her. I said that I thought I'd start teaching her sign language from the book/dvd that we had. Only later did I read in the book that a good time to start teaching is when the baby is seven months old. Let me restate: She was two weeks old. She could not yet hold her head up or focus her eyes. I was going to teach her sign language. Like I said: impatient. (And also, I had (have?) no clue about babies and their developmental stages.)

On a somewhat related note, I have to make a confession. I harbor secret fears that Ruby is not going to do whatever baby thing comes next. Before she could sit up on her own, I was convinced that she was not going to sit up on her own. Before she could roll over, I was convinced that she wasn't going to do that. Before she could hold her head up all the time, I was sure that she wouldn't be able to do that. It's not even that I'm afraid that she has autism or some other developmental disability. I just can't see how she's going to do the next thing. Crawling? No, I can't see it. Walking? Phhft. No chance. Talking? Actually, that one is a maybe. There's loads of new noises everyday (lately there's sort of a sing-songy falsetto thing happening -- it's flowery and wonderful). And signing? I don't know. Maybe. In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep doing this.

Don't laugh.

No really, DON'T LAUGH.




I'm going to show you something. But you CAN'T laugh.




I mean, yes, it's funny. It's adorable and cute and amusing because she looks very fat -- perhaps like a mini-sumo wrester relaxing after a hard match. But you mustn't laugh.




OK, here you go.

Our first night away from the baby, or How I bought 10 hours of sleep with 25 ounces of breastmilk.

After two mornings of EARLY wake ups (try 4:30 and 4:45, hos), W and I needed to get the hell outta town for a night. The gentle breezes and soft ocean sounds of Santa Barbara were calling our names, so plans we made and off we went. We left the most adorable Huskaroo in town with her Nonnie Pat and made sure we defrosted my entire supply of breast milk (which killed me since it's taken me months to store up) -- and even then there wasn't enough and we had to leave a bit of what my local lactation center calls "the F word" to supplement it. Then we hightailed it to Santa Barbara for a night of drunken debauchery and high jinx.

Actually though, no debauchery or jinx ensued. We flaked on our plans with friends (shocking!), watched "Disturbia" on the hotel's HBO (so different from the HBO at home!), and crashed out at 11... and slept in UNTIL 9 AM! Yes, 9 a.m. was a nice, late wake up time, but we would've slept even later, but my sister called at 9. Let me type that again and remind you of the context: On the first night in eight months that we were getting a full, uninterrupted night of sleep, my sister called at 9 a.m. (actually it was 8:48). In case you're wondering, I did NOT kill her, but really that was only because I was in SB and she was in LA; the head start she would've gotten to Mexico would've been too big. She did, however, have apology flowers waiting for us when we got home, along with an IOU for one early morning sleep in while she takes care of La Rube. It's a start.

It was a lovely weekend -- very refreshing and yet another reminder of how GORGEOUS southern California is. Seriously, Santa Barbara is ridiculous. We'll be moving there soon. Feel free to come visit. We'll let you sleep in.