Maya turned ten months old yesterday. So fast! I feel like I don't write enough anymore, that there are all of these wonderful moments going by unremarked, and I'm certain the time will come when I regret it. This, then, is a sort of snapshot of Maya and where she is now. I'll try to do one for Sasha in a few days.
At ten months old, Maya is an absolute joy to be around. She's a really easy-going baby, with a smile that goes from one horizon to the other, just like the sun. She is very easy to amuse, and thinks sneezing is funny, and peek-a-boo, and standing up by the cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes she fakes laughing, a coughing-barking sound that makes me wonder if she is practicing her evil laugh in preparation for a future career in villainy.
She is very ticklish.
She has a lot of tricks: She pulls up to stand all the time - sitting is OK, but lying down is for losers - and sometimes she lets go for a second, or better, lets go with one hand and bangs a toy on the table with the other.
She adores the cat, and will pet him gently, more gently than you would think a baby is capable of. She is always excited to see him, day or night, and she raises her hand and waves at him, and she can just about say, "Hi, kitty!" (Though sometimes it takes her a few tries to get it right.)
Her favorite toy: Empty 20-ounce soda bottles.
When Sasha began camp, we took Maya out of the daycare that Sasha had been in for years, and put her in a daycare center. It's a little more money, and a rotating staff (so not the same person all day every day) but Maya has so much more space to play, and nobody feeding her inappropriate food, no TV on all day, nobody watching the news during breakfast. Sasha needed that stability, yes, even until she turned five, but Maya is a very different baby. It took only a week or two for her to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and become contented with her fate. I don't think Sasha would have done well in that environment.
Maya may or may not have teeth, and frankly I'm tired of trying to work it out. We give her bagels to eat anyway, and big chunks of soft peach, and cut-up chicken and pasta. Teeth or no, she manages to eat these things. Her technique appears to be slobbering on the item until it has a thick slime coating, then scraping off the slime with her gums.
She still doesn't seem to be the atopic allergy sort of child. No mystery hives, no eczema. Still, the anxiety I have with Maya and food took a turn for the worst last night; I fed her a small piece of cheese yesterday, most of which she spat out, and she was up for an hour, mostly crying, because her tummy hurt her. She would cry and cry, and then burp and settle down for a few minutes.
I think I will not be trying any more cow dairy on her until after she is a year old.
This morning, Maya discovered the stairs, and after some excited banging of a Dasani bottle on the carpet, climbed up to the third one. Woe betide us!
And thus we conclude the Maya-related infodump for today.
My kitchen is: Ah, who cares.
Today, the Gods of Childhood smiled upon us, and both of the girls slept in until the positively lascivious hour of 9am. We all woke up pretty much simultaneously, feeling well-rested to a degree that had escaped memory, if indeed we had ever experienced it before.
So there we are, quietly talking and playing with the baby, and Sasha stomps over from her room. "Can you keep it down?" she says. "I'm trying to sleep, here."
(You could tell from the grin on her face, though, that she was just kidding.)
My kitchen is: Really not terrific. Perhaps this weekend I'll find the time to do something about that.
So we subscribed to a CSA this year. This is "Community-Supported Agriculture," and what it means is that every Tuesday, I go to somebody's house and take a nice box out of their garage with a ridiculous amount of fresh, organic produce that was grown on a farm about 40 miles away. (This week: 4 pounds of red potatoes, 2 bunches of kale, a head of lettuce, a bunch of carrots, three Walla Walla onions, 2 cucumbers, 2 zucchini, a bag of about 12 peaches, a pint of blueberries. Not a bad haul.)
Yes, this is a way to express both my food snobbery and my crunchy-granola tendencies all in one fell swoop. But as a result, I'm doing a lot of cooking. Of vegetables. Early on, there were only greens in the boxes, and ohhhhh the amount of salad. So much salad. If it had gone on longer, I would soon have resorted to serving salad three meals a day just to recover a little space in the refrigerator for my sweet, precious cans of diet Coke.
So where was I? Oh, yeah, cooking. Matt and Sasha have endured a lot of strange dishes, such bizarre things as zucchini cake! And zucchini frittata! And bok choi stir fry with kale in lettuce wraps! And did I mention the salad?
But you didn't come here to hear me talk about vegetables and cooking, you want your cute kid story, right? I know what you're after.
So today, I've got Maya on my hip, I'm putting garlic through a press with my free hand (on its way to be roasted over red potatoes), and I make an astonishing discovery: Maya, she *does not care for garlic.* Given her heritage, I am not sure how this is even possible, but there you have it; the aroma of the fresh garlic made her turn away with disgust! There was a face! There was COUGHING!
My kitchen is: Weirdly cluttery. Having no problems with dirty dishes, and the new dishwasher is working out nicely (there's a story I'm missing here, about my dishwasher breaking, and us getting a new dishwasher, and Sasha throwing a fit because she *missed the old dishwasher* I'm not even kidding tears and everything). But I find myself with a lot of stuff in the kitchen with no home, no away to put it in. As always, this is telling of systemic problems in my life: I need to find an away. Or maybe just suck it up and hire cleaners again.