It's almost done.

Your daddy has been building us a house, with his own two hands. And it's nearly ready for you.

Rock the Vote.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

-Dr. Suess

Smell my feet

Trick or treat
Smell my feet
Gimme something good to eat!

Month 5

Dear Sophie,

Today you are five months old. It is also Halloween, and you are going to be a Hershey's Kiss, because I thought that was appropriate. Not because you are chocolaty and melt all over the place making a mess, or because you are usually wrapped in tin foil. Or because whenever we kiss you, you open your mouth and try to eat us. No, I thought it was apt because your father and I are your parents, therefore you are one part sweet, one part chewy, one part shiny and one part nutjob. Sorry about the last one, you get that part from me. Anyway, since you haven't been a Kiss yet I don't have any pictures, so I'll post those later.

Wow, five months. Five whole months. As I stated in last month's letter, you started a sleeping strike about a week before you turned four months old. Sadly, you have continued said strike through this month, which is what all the books and the Internet chat boards call the 'four month wakefulness' which is honestly really very annoying and I wish you'd cut it out. You know, so I can stop being a zombie and resume being a functioning member of society. We try to get you to sleep in your crib, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. Like last night. You slept in your bassinet until about 1, were awake and wanted to play from 1-2, then slept in our bed from 2-4, again from 4:30-6, and at 6 you were up for the day. Since I had to get up for work, after all the time it took me to fall asleep after you did at 4:30, my alarm went off. Curses.

The day before yesterday I made a wonderful discovery. You were busy gumming my finger (hey, it makes you happy, and it's one of the only ways I get to eat my dinner in peace) and, lo and behold, I felt something hard and sharp in there. So, your father and I leaned you backward and pried open your maw, pushed that thrusting tongue out of the way while you looked around spasmodically wondering what in the world was wrong with us, and there it was! A TOOTH! On the bottom, in the center, a little to the left, a tiny little white tooth bud. Yay! Maybe this is why you refuse to sleep.

So, in true Us fashion, we had to celebrate. I mashed up a little bit of banana with some breast milk and spoon fed you your very first solid food. And you made a face like I was trying to poison you and spit it at me. Oh well.

You babble and talk all the time, this alien language that only you can speak, and love to talk to your toys. A couple weeks ago the three of us were at a sushi restaurant, and it was not totally quiet but was definitely a low-voiced, serene place. And you were carrying on with your keys and a rattle, and everyone in the entire place could hear you. I don't know what kinds of jokes they were telling you, but you were really enjoying the conversation. You are starting to laugh a little, especially when I blow raspberries on your tummy. You still squeal when you are excited, and it's kind of a "HI!" that makes me laugh. You have retained your distinctive cry that I could identify if you were in a room with 100 crying babies, that pitiful 'mwaa' sound, but now accompany it with the occasional paint-peeling, jaw-grinding, chalkboard-scratching screech that comes from deep within your throat and kind of sounds like you are choking on your own spit. I do not like that, not at all.

You are getting to be a good roller, but I still think that you are rolling to get things that you have dropped or by accident, and sometimes to see something that is happening that you can't see when flat on your back. You haven't figured out that, hey! I can get places by rolling around, and that's just fine with me.

It is getting very cold outside, this morning it was 30 degrees. Your father and I bundle you up in a fuzzy white wool-lined bunting or your puffy pink coat and a wool hat, and you do not like it because you can't move. Then we stuff you into your carseat, which was apparently not made for babies with fuzzy winter gear on, or else they lied when they said it was for babies up to 22 pounds. Because with your winter layers on, the harness just barely snaps closed, and you are nowhere near 22 pounds.

Five months. I cannot believe that time has gone by so very quickly. Next thing I know, you'll be packing up your stuff and heading off to college. You have changed my life so much, and there are times when I can't remember what my life was like without you, or it seems so long ago and so far removed that it might have been a life that happened to some other person. I was happy then, just like I am happy now, just a different happy. I don't think I ever imagined, or ever fully realized, how having a child of my very own would change me, or change my philosophies on life.

There is an election coming up, and I looked at several issues with new eyes. You reinforced my belief in the old saying that this earth does not belong to us, but is borrowed from our children. That as a society we need to look for and find alternate sources of energy, that are sustainable, and do not take food out of people's mouths. We need to preserve and reverse what we as a species have destroyed, so that when you are grown there are polar bears and lions and tree frogs living in their natural habitats, outside of zoos. We as a nation need to stop spending money on never ending wars and use that money to invest in our schools and eliminating poverty at home and abroad, and enact laws to elimiate the gender pay gap, where women earn 89 cents for ever dollar men do in the same exact job. I honestly believe, down to the depths of my heart, that ignorance is far more expensive than education. The values of this country are revealed when one of the very most important jobs, that of an elementary school teacher, is also one of the lowest paid. It is no longer simply my future that I am voting for, it is yours. And you deserve something better.

Love,

Mama

All the cool kids are doing it.

Sometimes I forget how very lucky we are.

http://sgirl79.blogspot.com/

http://mydearisaac.blogspot.com/

And then I come across someone like this... and there are just no words to express how I feel. So, with tears running down my face, I am thankful for all of those nights when you won't stop crying, for the times when you scream when you're in your carseat, for the days I spend washing exersaucers and carseats while cursing leaky diapers, and for having to pump every 3 hours at work. And I am thankful for ten fingers and ten toes, for lungs that breathe, for a heart that beats all by itself.

Love,
Mama

She smiled for the camera. I have proof.

I know I'm cheesy.

Month 4

Dear Sophie,

Today you are four months old. This month has gone by in the blink of an eye. I packed away all of your 0-3 month clothes, and pulled out all of the bigger clothes. It's getting cold outside, so you are wearing sweaters and sweatshirts and sweatpants in the mornings and evenings. You look kind of funny all bundled up and squished into the baby carrier, but I get a lot of giggles at your expense.

You are very nosy, and need to know what is going on all the time. Whenever we go out, you watch other people, especially kids, to see what everyone is doing. Sometime it is hard to get you to eat because you are craning your neck to see something. You like to watch people, and you like to look at things that are red. Before, you would grab toys and things that were given to you, or put in front of you, but now you grab anything that is in grabbing distance. This includes hair, glasses, and of course, toys. You prefer the hard teething toys to soft stuffed animals, and everything goes in your mouth. You bat at your toys in the exersaucer and on your carseat to make them spin, and your coordination is getting better every day.

You found your thumb, and realized that while your fist may not fit in your mouth, by golly, that thumb is the perfect size! I think that you are a lefty, like me, because you reach with your left hand.

All of my bragging and boasting about your sleeping habits has come back to bite me in my sleep-deprived a... ear. This month we decided to put you in a Halo blanket instead of your Swaddle-me, and you decided that everyone needs to be awake at 12am. And at 4am.

You are still not sleeping in your crib, but we put you in there sometimes to play with your toys. And you use the slats of the crib to turn in circles, and you roll over (for real this time!) You like to roll over when nobody is watching, but we come back in the room and you are on your tummy when we left you on your back. Your father even set up a hidden video camera so that we could see you, but you must have known he was up to something because you wouldn't do it. We do, however, have about 30 minutes of exciting tape of you laying in your crib eating your bib.

Your Grandma came all the way from Illinois to spend last weekend with you. You were really good, smiling all the time and not spitting up on her once. You already know who buys the presents.

Your dad and I opened up a college account for you this month, and you're well on your way to that PhD from Yale. Or you know, wherever you decide to go. I think that part of being a parent is the desire for your children to do better, to have better than you, and to make all of their dreams come true and have them want for nothing. I know, now, that life consists of a general happiness or contentment, with bright and shining moments of pure, unadulterated joy. It is those moments of joy that make life worth living. You and your father and a lot of other people have brought so much joy into my life, and I can only hope that I do the same for you. That is, until you're a teenager, and it's all downhill from there, because you may not leave the house wearing that and get off the phone now, and then it's my job to make your life as horrible and embarrassing as I can. But for now, you are just my little baby, and you're always going to be my beautiful little baby, my precious little baby that I love so very much.

Love,

Mama

14 pounds, 14 ounces, 24 1/4 inches

One day you just wake up

And you realize your baby's eyes aren't blue anymore.

Today

Dear Sophie,
I know that you aren't another month old today. This one's a bonus. I felt I had to say something about Today. Today is September 11, 2008, and it is indeed a Today with a capital T. Today is the seventh anniversary of 9/11, the day that is forever a wound that will not heal.
On this day, seven years ago, a group of terrorists, a militant sect of a group of people called the Taliban, hijacked four airplanes. Two of those planes crashed into the beautiful twin towers in New York City, brutally murdering 2,684 people, not including the 147 people on board the airplanes, not including the hijackers. One plane was heroically taken back by the passengers, who crashed in the middle of a field in Pennsylvania, sacrificing their own lives to save countless others. One plane hit much closer to home.
My baby, we live in the DC metropolitan area. Seven years ago, your father and I lived in Arlington, a stone's throw from the Pentagon, where 125 people inside the Pentagon and 59 passengers of American flight 77 died.
Some say that every generation has a collective moment that everyone remembers exactly what they were doing, exactly where they were. Ask your grandparents what they were doing when they found out that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. died, or when John Lennon was shot. For your father and I, we will always remember, with tears in our eyes, that we were out walking Janka, that we were home, and we were safe. That I had just graduated, and was still working in a restaurant and had the dinner shift that started at 3:45, and that your father had a job right across the 14th Street Bridge that he hated and had stayed home that day. That we could see the sickening smoke pouring out of the gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon for days. The smell of charred death. The frantic phone calls to friends from college that lived or worked in Manhattan to make sure everyone was okay, the frantic phone calls we received from my parents and other family and friends to make sure we were okay.
I sat in front of the TV in that little one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of the Windsor for hours during the following days. DC was all but shut down. National guardsmen stood with tanks and uzis on streetcorners. Life was surreal.
There was a woman, her husband worked in the Pentagon. He didn't work in the part that had been hit, but he never came home that day. They showed her on the news, sitting in the parking lot, waiting for him. People brought her things. A chair, food, water. She stayed, vigilant. Her husband was coming out. And I watched her, prayed for her, hoped for her. She stayed in that parking lot, not even going home at night to sleep. And one morning, two weeks after, I watched as she stood from that chair someone had brought her, weeping, as she turned to leave. And I wept with her. He never came out.

In the days and months after the attacks, we came together, despite all of our many differences. We nursed each other. We flew flags, we lit candles and we mourned together, as a nation. And we stood strong, triumphant, because We Are Americans. A year and some months after 9/11, your father and I stood at Ground Zero, in Manhattan, in the freezing cold, and hugged each other and cried.

When you are older, I pray that your life will never be touched by tragedy. That all of the hate and the war and the religious zealots in the world will be over. But, my baby, we brought you into the world during a time where all of these things exist.
Because if we stop living our lives, if we pause and let a little shimmer of fear enter our souls, we have let them win.
And we can never, never ever, never let them win.

Love,
Mama

Month 3

Dear Sophie,
Today you are three months old. We had several big events happen this month. First, I went back to work. It was really sad for me, I miss hanging out with you all day. But you stay with your Abuelita and she loves you very much, and I don't think you really noticed one way or the other.

Second, you rolled over! Well, kind of. I heard you half-rolled, onto your side, twice in the same day. So I rushed home, waiting to see rainbows and fireworks and... and... NOTHING. That was apparently the only day you wanted to roll.

Bubbles! You have become the Bubble-Blowing Master. The Queen of the Drool Bubbles, the gold-medalist in the Bubble Olympics. And you love it.

Every day after dinner, your Dad gives you a bath in your little bathtub, which sits inside my bigger bathtub. I get all of your things ready, the water in the tub, the soap, the shampoo, the towel, and set out your jammies. Then your Dad runs around the house holding you naked with his arms extended, babbling about 'This naked baby!' And you smile, and I know you're thinking about peeing on him, and that would be really funny. After your bath, he dries you and dresses you, puts on your baby lotion and cleans your ears and nose with special baby Q-Tips. And you cry. Then I put you into the Baby Bjorn, and we walk with both of the dogs around the neighborhood for about half an hour. Every day, your Dad and I argue over who gets to wear the baby carrier. I decided that we would take turns, but I have to hide the carrier to make sure that I get my turn.

The other day I was walking around Fairfax Corner with you in your carrier. There is this fountain there where water shoots out of the ground and the kids come to play in the water. They were screaming and laughing and having fun, and you watched them with wide eyes. And you waved your arms and your legs and squealed, because you understood that the kids were excited and you were excited too.

A year ago this weekend, give or take a couple days, was when I became pregnant with you. I was scared, and excited, and just hoped that you would be healthy and that I would be a good enough mom so that you wouldn't be in therapy before you started high school. I can't imagine my life without you, even though you've only really been in it for three months. It seems like you have always been with us, although I swear you were born a heartbeat ago. Until now, and for a little tiny while yet, you sleep in a Co-Sleeper bassinet that's attached to my side of our bed. You sleep right next to me, and at night I look over at you, all swaddled in your baby straightjacket, sleeping peacefully. And my chest just fills up and it's like nothing I've ever felt before. Your dad and I bought you a crib, and we put it together (well, okay, he put it together) in the extra bedroom that has both your dresser/changing table and our computer in it. It makes me very sad that soon you will be too big to sleep in your bassinet and will be sleeping in a room all your very own, in a bed all your very own. And instead of just turning my head to look at my baby girl, you are going to be a whole room away.

Love,

Mama

Month 2

Dear Sophie,



Yesterday you turned 2 months old. For reals! No more catching up. Today I had my wisdom teeth taken out, and you had your vaccines. We're really charming right now, let me tell you.


At about 5 weeks old, you started beaming one of the biggest smiles. Seriously. Huge.



That is, when you weren't crying. Here is a (small) list of things that make you cry. Being cold, being hot, taking a bath, sitting in a carseat. Having a poopy diaper. Being tired, being bored. Having to burp, having a tummy ache, having to fart. Unfortunately, those are most of the things that you do. Oh yeah, and getting shots.



Back to the poop. Your favorite place to poop is in your carseat. You are showing your disdain, I'm sure. The down side to that is that since you began only going once a day, you have some pretty massive poops, still watery 'cause you're a baby. Which means that they don't necessarily remain inside the diaper. Which means I've had disassemble, wash, and reassemble your carseat several times. Fun stuff. And there was this one time that shall forever be known as the On The Border Incident that I will torment you with even after you are grown.



Something that I'm going to have to catch on video is your gag. Whenever there's something in your mouth that you don't want there, a bottle, milk, even your passie, you act like you're choking on it. Drama queen. It's not possible for you to choke on a passie. You have learned how to blow bubbles with your drool, and you blow bubbles ALL THE TIME. Your daddy asks you all the time, 'What's up with the bubbles?' But you love them. And the drool. The drool. The buckets and buckets of drool, where we could water the houseplants and the potted plants on the balcony and the yard at the new house that we don't live in yet 'cause your daddy is still building it, and you would still have more drool.
Today at the doctor's, you were sitting in my lap in your blanket, and he came in, and you started smiling at him. This was the first time you had smiled at a stranger, and you smiled away, watching him, as he talked to us and listened to your heartbeat.

You have blue-ish brownish spots on your head above your right ear and another one more forward toward your forehead. The doctor said they are blue nevi. They are birthmarks that should go away on their own, but if they don't, they'll be covered by hair anyhow, and nobody will be able to see them if they don't. But for future reference, don't shave your head.




Speaking of hair, your hair is brown, except for this blond patch on the back of your head and the sides of your head, which are slightly reddish. You're my little calico baby.


Love,
Mama

12 pounds, 1 ounce, 24 1/4 inches long.