At the State Fair

Last weekend, we went to the state fair here in Dallas. It was the first time I'd been since I was a little girl, and even then my memories are somewhat confused because I am pretty sure I conflate the state fair with the Fort Worth Stock Show. Anyway, we had a really lovely time and it was one of those beautiful, perfect days you get sometimes here in autumn. Mid to late October is really the best time of year in Texas; it is sort of warm-ish, sort of cool-ish and you don't need jackets but you don't usually get hot. Autumn is such a wonderful season, and it even manages to be lovely here in Texas. When we went to the fair, we had soft blue skies with just the tiniest flecks of clouds and a warm, friendly sun.

We took the light rail train down to Fair Park where the fair is held; it was very convenient and a lot more fun than trying to navigate parking with a mass of humanity. And after all, I do have a great love for train/subway-type public transportation. I also have a great love for food, and there was no shortage of fun things to try. Fried food is a thing at the Texas state fair, with awards given out for the most unique fried item and whatnot. We decided to pass on this year's big new trend, fried butter (YES-- FRIED BUTTER), but instead went with chicken fried bacon (last year's hot new item), a fried Snickers, and fried peaches and cream. They were good, but I think the best things were the corn dogs that we all started our afternoon with.

My favorite parts of a state fair are the old-fashioned parts, like the livestock and the quilts and the pies and the Ferris wheel and all that. We explored some of the livestock barns and got to see cows and pigs and goats and sheep-- pretty much the first time Grace has seen any of these animals up close and personal, I think. And the highlight of our day was our trip on the Ferris wheel. A slow circular path up up up to the top of the tallest Ferris wheel in North America to let our gaze travel far and wide over the flat Texas prairie overlaid with city as far as the eye can see.

The Tee Vee

My TV watching habits have been wildly different during Violet's babyhood compared to Grace's. For starters, Grace had really relaxed, leisurely nursing habits combined with rather difficult sleeping patterns that resulted in me watching quite a bit of television. It was not unusual for her to nurse for an hour at a time when she was tiny, and it was also not unusual for her to refuse to sleep unless being held. (She would be apparently completely asleep and then startle to wakefulness and tears as I gently, oh so gently, tried to lean down and deposit her in her crib. This happened ALL. THE. TIME.) These circumstances combined so that I could often be found cozily ensconced on the couch with the TV on, nursing Grace or holding her while she slept. Employed thusly, I watched a LOT of TV in the first half of 2006. I watched every single episode of Gilmore Girls thanks to reruns on some cable channel, cooking shows galore, The Daily Show, and a whole lot of Battlestar Galactica.

(Have I told you my Battlestar Galactica story? I think not. Someone had told us we would like it, so we told Tivo to record them but we never really got around to watching them. During my maternity leave when I was home full-time with Grace for 6 weeks, I finally got around to watching the first one we had recorded and I was so blown away that I watched the whole season we had recorded [Season 2, I think] in the space of 2 or 3 days sitting cross-legged on the couch with Grace curled up on the Boppy in my lap. I got to the very end of the season with its dramatic, cliffhanger ending and my jaw dropped when they splashed across the screen, "To Be Continued-- October 2006". How could they do this to me?! I could not wait that long! My tiny new baby would be 8 months old by then! In my quasi-insane hormonal haze, this seemed the most impossible thing I had ever heard.)

Anyway, Violet's breastfeeding/sleeping habits are so different that I haven't had the same long stretches of indolent TV watching. In her early weeks, we were having some oversupply/overactive-letdown issues so each nursing session was a brief chaotic milky spluttering affair that required my entire concentration. This all evened out, thank goodness, but she still has been a really fast nurser, like 5-10 minutes fast. And I almost always can manage to put her down to sleep by herself for at least a few hours, thus, much less TV watching. This pleases Robert, who is somewhat prejudiced against TV as the mindless, empty opiate of the masses. I maintain that someone who is so devoted to playing pretend college football on the Xbox has nary a leg to stand on.

The other important difference in my TV watching now is the little-pitchers-big-ears phenomenon. There is just not much I feel comfortable watching when Grace is awake and in the house. She is at that sponge stage where she hears and understands way more than I give her credit for. She will quote lyrics back to us from any songs she hears, and brings up things from books or TV shows DAYS later. So if I want to watch something while I fold a load of laundry, I am left with, what, cooking shows? Yep, that's pretty much it. Grace divides my cooking shows into "man cooking" (mostly Alton Brown) and "lady cooking" (mostly Nigella Lawson) and will usually consent to watch them with me, although sometime she protests and insists that she would prefer her own TV shows. I know the feeling, Grace-- I know the feeling.

A recent addition to my TV diet, one that I do sometimes watch in Grace's presence, is Adoption Stories. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's like all those baby/birth/pregnancy shows on TLC or Discovery Health except it's about adoption. Rob finds this highly amusing because when I was pregnant with Grace, I was obsessed with those childbirth shows and watched them all the time. I lost interest pretty quickly after she was born because, well, it's turns out there's not a lot of variety in them. I will admit there's not a ton of variety in the adoption ones either, but I will then also be forced to admit that yes, I think I've seen nearly every episode. I know I've mentioned our adoption plans in passing (as has Rob now), but we really are doing this. We have met with a social worker and gone to a big 8-hour education seminar and now have a big stack of forms sitting half-filled-out on our desk. We are adopting through Hope Cottage here in Dallas and are pursuing a domestic newborn adoption of a child who will most likely be of a different race. We are still early in the process so no babies are going to arrive anytime soon (which is good, since Violet is still very much a baby herself) but we are feeling excited about this next stage for our family. Hooray!

Gah! Is It Friday Again Already?!

The weeks fly by in a whirl of making lunches and folding laundry and cuddling little girls. There are worse ways for a week to fly by, no? Today is a lovely, cool, rainy day and both Grace and Violet are wearing LONG SLEEVES. Shocking! Oh, how I love days like this... I need to plan meals for my next grocery shopping run, and I fear that today's weather means I will be tempted to do nothing but soup and stew and warm, homey comforting foods. Foods which will not taste as good when this nice weather goes away, I suspect.

Rob's mom had her surgery this week and we got some very wonderful news afterwards-- the growth turned out not to be cancer at all! This was a big surprise to everyone and we are feeling very grateful. It turns out it was just the base of where her tonsil used to be acting all weird. Crazy, right? And my parents have a contract signed for a house in the Chicago area, so hopefully they won't be homeless for much longer. They are living right now in a temporary furnished apartment with nearly all their belongings in storage, and I know the sense of unsettled transiency is wearing on them.

I have entirely lost my sewing mojo. I have not sewn a single stitch in about a week now, probably the longest I've gone since Violet's newborn days. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it is a combined result of a) a few failed projects that came in succession (ugly pants for Violet! a non-cute dress for Grace!), b) this cooler weather we've been having (for which I have more clothes that I like, fit into, etc, thus reducing my desperate sewing motivation of, "I have NOTHING TO WEARRRRRRRRR!"), and c) new fall television shows (How I Met Your Mother! Glee! Project Runway!). I am starting to feel the tiniest return of my itch to sew, so hopefully soon I will be happily slicing through fabric and listening to the whir of my serger. The first thing that I really must do is put together a Halloween costume for Grace. That's still a long time from now, but at my current rate of zero sewing projects completed per week, I really should buckle down. The other thing that I suspect might jumpstart my sewing motivation is this book, which I pre-ordered this week and cannot WAIT for. For the uninitiated, Japanese craft books (as well as Japanese textiles) are a thing in sewing/crafting circles. However, they are usually, you guessed it, in Japanese. The brave among us forge ahead anyway, relying on the pictures and diagrams and metric measurements, but I have not been so intrepid. This one, however, has been translated and published for the American market and I am SUPER DUPER EXCITED, especially because the sizing is just perfect for the, uh, consumers of my sewing efforts. It is girls' sizes 4-7, and I can easily grade the patterns down a size to fit Grace right now, and then I can use it for the years ahead.

So I've been on Facebook for a while now and I've so enjoyed catching up on with people from past bits of my life. Scrolling through all those people makes me realize that I am old (well, at least, not young) and that people take such different paths, even when they start from the same places. However, I think one of my favorite parts of Facebook might be the suggested friends-- you know, people who you have friends in common with that Facebook's algorithms think you might know. They are usually people who I do know but am not quite close enough with to "friend". (That's "friend" as a verb, of course.) The more interesting people, though, are those who I don't actually know and who have friends in common with me who I know from totally different realms of life. For instance, there is one person out there who knows both my grad student advisor from the astronomy program at the University of Texas and the Indian-born guitar player I played with at our church in New Haven. Or perhaps more amazingly, there is someone who knows that same guitar player from New Haven (who grew up in India, went to grad school in North Carolina, and now lives in Orlando), a college friend of mine from Texas A&M, a childhood friend from where I grew up in a suburb of Fort Worth, and someone I now go to church with here in Dallas. And perhaps most unlikely of all, there is someone who is friends with 17 of my friends but I have no idea who they are-- in fact, I have never heard of them in my life. Ah, Facebook... Rob has turned a bit sour on the whole phenomenon (too many quizzes, I suppose) but I am hooked.

Things I Have Learned This Week

• Mr. Rogers called one of his grandfathers "Ding Dong".
• Nursing sessions with a grabby 9-month-old become much less painful after you trim her nails.
• The National Parks are pretty awesome.
• I need to feed Violet more prunes and pears and less iron-fortified cereal. Poor non-pooping baby...
• My old dollhouse was purchased and is going to a little girl for her birthday.
• Using duck-bill clips in my hair while it air-dries (like this) makes it possible for me to forego the hair dryer without looking all flat and triangle-y.
• I think they really did kill off Maid Marian in the BBC Robin Hood series.
• I can no longer take Violet's chair pictures without another adult standing just outside the frame, ready to swoop in and catch her, or else she will crawl directly off the chair, resulting in much weeping and injury and bleeding from her mouth.
• Rob has decided to return to the world of blogging, and will not encourage our children to be doctors when they grow up. (Well, I knew that last part already.)

9 Months

Last week, Violet passed the nine-month mark. She has now been here with us for as long as I was pregnant with her, a milestone that feels sort of impossible and insane. It's been nine months since she was born? And nine months before that, she was a handful of cells?

Violet has started babbling in the past week and when she fancies, will entertain us with a nonstop stream of "mamamamama". It's so fun to hear the beginnings of language from her, a step forward from the shrieks and laughs and other funny noises she's used before now. She bursts into dimples and smiles when we say "mama" back, and likes to chuckle with joy at us communicating with her.

She is a busy, busy crawling baby these days. She gets all the way up on her hands and knees and moves forward with purpose and resolve, her cloth-diapered booty shimmying back and forth behind her. Her favorite things to crawl toward are the dog's water dish, power cords, and tiny shreds of Play Doh or paper or other trash, and she cries in frustration and disappointment when we take her away from them. We are such mean parents; we never let her have any fun.

Violet is super interested in crawling and exploring and playing, but she is still not quite adept at making her way around and she is ALWAYS bonking her head on things. I kind of forgot about this stage with Grace, which I hope means it is a short one and her days of forehead bruises are numbered. Her instinct to explore is much stronger than her instinct for self-preservation, and of course by this I mean that she has NO INSTINCT for self-preservation WHATSOEVER. Also, no sense of the edges of a chair or couch or bed, and no sense that it might not be a good idea to try to throw yourself out of someone's arms in pursuit of something enticing. She is a thrill-seeking, daredevil baby.

Watch out, world. She is coming to get you.