Incisive Commentary

Two more teeth have made their savage way through Violet's poor beleaguered gums, bringing us to a total of 4. She now has those four middle teeth, two on top and two on bottom; she is a very symmetrical baby, obviously a sign of an orderly and sensible nature, right? I remember Grace having a cheekily lopsided look for a while there as one tooth would come in on its own, but Violet's are coming in nearly simultaneously. They are also coming in with a bit of misery and fuss, of course, and apparently a whole lot of nasal congestion. We are 2 for 2 now with the concurrent arrival of teeth and a runny, runny nose so I have nearly convinced myself they are related. I tend to be very skeptical about all the crazy stuff that people attribute to teething symptoms (fever? diarrhea? really?) but perhaps it is all true, or maybe some of it. Grace would be fussy and clingy and want to nurse non-stop while she was teething but that was about it. I guess this is just how it's going to be for Violet-- new teeth = much snot. Her new teeth also have caused her to sit around feeling them with her tongue or something so that her little chin is jutted out a lot of the time. Cro-Magnon baby!

Another symptom of Violet's teething is that my hair is now in a non-ideal state. I've been annoyed with the color of my hair for a while now, feeling vexed about the brassy orange ends I had (leftover from some hair coloring experiment from the past months, I'm sure). I am particularly sensitive to orangeness in my hair (yuck yuck yuck yuck) which is somewhat inconsistent, I realize, because I really love when my hair is reddish. The orangeness is a common problem I have if I ever do highlights or the like; it may look lovely/neutral/sandy right after they're done but they turn orange and brassy on me in short order. Anywho, I was won over by an alluring box of hair dye at Target that promised to turn my hair to a nice shade of brunette free of the yucky orange and then I waited for an evening to do it after both girls were in bed. We had just gotten over Violet's first spate of teething-induced sleep disruptions and she had been sleeping so much better that, carefree and cheerful, I thought, "Tonight! I shall transform my hair into lovely cool brunette tresses!" I had actually gotten all the dye onto my hair and was about to set a timer for the allotted 10 minutes when Violet woke up fussing, starting up the next round of teething. "Fine," I thought, noting the time on the bathroom clock. "I will just settle her and then come back to read or something for the rest of my 10 minutes." I then started the pat-pat-rock-rock-try-to-put-down routine, all the while carefully keeping my dye-saturated hair from touching anything, and thinking, "Oh, in another minute she'll settle and I can leave." Violet was having none of it, however. There was no clock where I could see it and eventually I grew a little nervous about how much time might have elapsed and called for Robert to come and take over the baby soothing. I then rushed back to the bathroom and saw that it had been twice as much time as I was supposed to leave the hair color on. Oops! This has resulted in my hair being a) inky, raven dark and b) kind of damaged and fragile. Fortunately I was using one of those semi-permanent 28-wash kind of hair colors so it has already started to lighten toward something approaching what I was going for, but I have looked like a slightly Goth version of a suburban mom for the past few days. In related hair news, I think I may have found my next science experiment.

My parents departed for real this past weekend and, as hard as it is for me to believe, I am now the only one of my immediate family living in Texas. My sister lives outside a military base near the Carolina coast with her Army husband and my parents are now Midwesterners living on the banks of a Great Lake (well, they're going to live in a suburb pretty far from Lake Michigan, but you get my drift). I feel somewhat flummoxed as to how I ended up being the one left behind, but there you go. I have a bit of permanent wanderlust, you see, and probably also (as Rob suggests) a bad case of familiarity breeding contempt for the Dallas area. Up until my parents left, my main feelings were being sad for them as they were so obviously grieving the end of their time here, and being sad that they wouldn't get to see Grace & Violet on a frequent basis in their quick-changing tiny humanity. Now that they are gone, I find myself feeling sad for me as well, although perhaps for the wrong reasons. Oh well-- time to reflect more on the true nature of contentment and the numerous blessings in my life. And I have certainly been tremendously blessed.