the trials of Joseph

It's been a trying week for Joseph. He had his first cold, which he's still not quite over. According to Scott, who caught the same cold, it was very unpleasant. Poor Joseph spent most of the weekend trying to sort out his priorities: cry and be held, or play, crawl, and stand? He could not decide, so usually wound up crawling around while crying, then crying while being held. Very sad.

It was revealed to Joseph, as it is revealed to all children, that the best place to wipe your nose is on your mother's shoulder (or pants, or hair, or whatever presents itself). I didn't try to use the nasal syringe because that seemed way worse than a snotty shoulder, you know? How do you clean a syringe? Probably in some revolting hands-on way. At least my shirt can go right in the washing machine.

Then this morning he banged his head. He has done this many times before, especially now that he's pulling himself up, but this time his head landed on the edge of a low table, and he cut himself, thereby earning his first bandaid. Very sad.


See? Sad.

far too many pictures of the baby standing

Yesterday I just wanted to spend fifteen minutes working on the quilt. I had all kinds of help measuring and marking up the quilting lines.


What you do not see in this picture is that I also had two dogs who are extremely interested in arts and crafts. Whenever I get on the floor it is clearly because I need two dogs and a baby to climb on me, not because I need to cut a pattern or measure anything or do some yoga or dust under the table. This is obvious to everyone in the house except me. As charming as this was, I really wanted to get to work on this quilt. It's been in progress for three months and I would like to have it done before I move this summer. So I did a bad mama thing.


I sat him in a plastic storage bin so that way he couldn't electrocute or otherwise injure himself and I gave him a scrap of fabric to play with, figuring he would chew on the fabric and amuse himself for five minutes while I finished marking the quilt top. Instead:


Ta da!

Joseph has been pulling himself for a few weeks but now he's quite skilled. He pulls himself up on pretty much anything--pants, kitchen drawers, the safety gates we put up to keep him out of danger zones:

I like how in the second picture he looks like a crazed prisoner. So does Freckles, for that matter. I also like how in the first picture Indiana is just a blur. This is realistic. Also nice is that you can see how I haven't snapped the baby's overalls--they're just hanging there like a dress. It's so hard to dress this child that after changing his diapers I can't be bothered to do much more. He's way too busy to sit still long enough to get changed. Please. At least today the baby's wearing clothing, as compared to yesterday's nakedness (as witnessed by the first three pictures).

sleep

The two adult members of this household have really had it with the sleeplessness. Joseph has been waking up every two hours lately. Yes, that is a healthy sleep pattern for a newborn. Joseph is nearly eight months old. During the day he seems reasonably happy, it's just that he wants to be held and fed all night long. This stinks.

So now we're letting him cry himself back to sleep whenever he wakes up at night. You go into his room and he's standing up in his crib, holding onto the bars and screaming. It's terrible. Initially we had thought it was sadistic and wrong to let cry all by himself, but now it seems sadistic and wrong (not to mention pointlessly self-flagellating) to raise a baby who cannot sleep.

Sunday night was our first night with this experiment, and it turns out he doesn't cry for more than ten minutes at a time, usually more like five minutes. This morning he did not seem psychologically scarred or like he hated me or anything. Last night I took a benadryl and almost sleep right through the noise. I think I slept for more than four hours straight, which would be the first time that happened in a year. This morning I exercised. Really.

anyway

The puppy didn't make it--she died on Thursday night. When I picked her up from the vet that afternoon it looked like she would be okay, but within a few hours it was clear that she was not going to live through the night. Poor Pepper.

Amazingly, Freckles and Indiana were completely oblivious to the fact that another dog was living in their house for two days. Of course they saw her out on the porch, but once we knew she had parvo and worms we kept her in the garage and the spare bathroom so they wouldn't get sick. Scott and I must be getting better at outwitting the dogs because they didn't seem suspicious, even when there was food going in and out of the garage.

update: we are dumb

So. The puppy has parvo. She's currently at the vet spending money that we should have been putting towards a down payment. The vet figured that she had a 70% chance of making it, and the alternative was having her put down, which the vet assured us is what would happen if we turned her over to the humane society. There was no way that we were going to take home a starving, sick puppy (four months old! seven pounds!) and then put her down. No. I think that's what made the decision for me--the idea that we were going to have to take her home from the vet, give her dinner, and the next day drive her to the humane society where she would die.

Instead we decided to fork over $1000 to treat a dog we had found that same morning. It is very good that Scott and I agree about this kind of thing. We are stupidly fond of animals and not particularly smart about money. I have decided that after year of buying generic oatmeal, cheapo detergent and other products which my economics students learned to identify as "inferior goods" we will have paid for Pepper, and I just hope she's alive at that point. Living with somebody else.

She spent yesterday (pre-vet) on the patio, where she kept us well entertained through the sliding door:

Joseph in particular could not believe his luck in finding another puppy to marvel over:

All four of them were unconvinced that the glass door was entirely solid. There was a lot of pounding/tapping/leaping against it. Damned super-cooled liquid, you destroy our dreams.

look what we found

On the way to work, Scott found a puppy in the middle of the street. No tags, no missing puppy signs up in the neighborhood. She's rail thin and frightened but she likes being pet. Freckles and Indiana were fairly friendly to her (meaning that they smelled her but didn't growl) so she can be our foster dog assuming that the vet gives her a clean bill of health. Meanwhile I think I've washed my hands fifty times in the last two hours so that I don't transfer whatever illnesses she might have to the dogs or the baby. We'll try to find her a home so we don't cross the line that separates families with two dogs from families with three dogs (I'm assuming that there is such a line--I don't know anybody with three dogs). If we can't find her a permanent home, she stays with us.

The thing I hate the most about Phoenix (more than hostile drivers or the risk of melanoma) is the stray dog situation--people just do not mind their dogs here.

When we tried to feed her dog food she didn't know what to do with it. I don't think she had ever seen kibble before. But she ate some salami out of my hand (I realize that salami isn't the best option for a starving dog, but that's the only meat we had) so at least she has an appetite.

We're calling her Pepper.

it's official

We're officially crawling here. He worked out the kinks last Wednesday and now he's alarmingly fast. Crawling is clearly an opportunity for babies to flirt with death. They must get some kind of adrenaline rush from narrow escapes with death. All Joseph seems to be interested in is electrical outlets, wires, the dog bowl, table lamps with dangly cords, slobbery dog toys, shoes, and the cabinet where we keep (make that kept) the food processor. I don't know if dangerous/gross things are inherently tantalizing or what. So we had a weekend of fast babyproofing.

The picture at the top of the post is from last week, just before he managed to crawl forwards. I was on the floor sorting through my fabric to find god knows what, when he helped himself to a piece, and then dragged it as well as Freckles' precious lion toy into the corner. He was very satisfied with himself until he realized he was stuck. The major difference between crawling backwards and crawling frontwards is that now he can go wherever he wants (toward Indiana's gross orange bone, at the moment).

Should I be worried that he plays with the dogs' nasty toys? Because I'm not (I'm too busy trying to keep him from sucking on electric outlets, etc.). I don't think they'll make him sick, and dog toys aren't really dirtier than the floor, which is where he spends all his time anyway. And the dogs don't seem to mind. Freckles brings Joseph toys, and Indiana has suddenly decided that the baby is not a problem but an opportunity--he'll put up with the tail-grabbing and toy-stealing in exchange for the food-dropping. Indiana is a wise man.