Kaylee

Of course, I'm way behind on documenting where the kid are at. Gabe is forging ahead boldly into preschool territory, amazing me every day with his profound little steps into personhood. But this post is about Kaylee. At two and a half months, she feels like she has been in my life forever, and yet also seems to be rocketing through the infant stages so fast that I fear I will blink and miss them.

Today she laughed for the first time. Kaylee had just endured Gabe's end-of-day meltdown, in which he first screamed that he didn't want to be in the shower, and then screamed that he didn't want the shower to end. Chris applied some zen and calmed him down; Kaylee looked on with a giant grin, and then said "tee-hee!"

Kaylee just beams at us now, great big toothless, lovely grins. As with Gabe, the ceiling fans have been her first crush. She wakes up at dawn beneath our bedroom fan and proceeds to have an hour-long wiggle-flirt session with the whirling blades.

I had been taking Kaylee directly to bed with me at night around 8, when she was ready for sleep. But of course this prevented me from having any grown-up time with Chris, so I switched to putting her in the crib for the first part of the night. She surprised me by being entirely okay with this arrangement, so much so that on many nights she accepted my good night kiss and went to sleep without any fuss whatsoever. But then she went and slept through the night! I woke up at 4 A.M. that first night with this terrible feeling of not being ready yet, and broke all the rules by waking her up so that she could come back to bed with me.

Okay, so that was silly of me, and I haven't done it since.

What else? Well, I've started experimenting with a variation on the ancient and universal human method of dealing with baby elimination; i.e. "pottying" the baby instead of wasting resources in the form of a diaper. I am officially committed to doing nothing; I am not aiming to have a diaper-free infant or a halved diaper bill or anything as grand. For me, that would be a recipe for failure. I am merely asking, "can I get her to pee in a box once or twice today, to keep one more diaper out of the landfill?" The answer, so far, is hell yes! I will have to write more about this in another post, assuming that the experiment continues to go so well.