Having a nap on the way home from a weekend with Bob's family at the lake.

I think she must be dreaming about kissing her mommy and daddy.

SNORING away. . .

Lilli and Schuyler on the computer (this was the pizza weekend at Lummi.)

Lilli likes those computers! Anything with buttons. . .

Reading back a bit, I realize that I haven't really blogged much of substance of late. To be honest, I think I am overwhelmed. Lilli does so much new stuff, so it's hard to choose a topic to write about. And then when it comes to general "motherhood topics," well, I'm afraid to get myself started. It's hard for me to write a succinct, compact little piece, you know. I'm sure I'd start a-ramblin', and there would go a whole nap, and I wouldn't have watched a single Sex and the City, which is my nap time indulgence these days. Thank you, Netflix! (On a total tangent, is it weird to anybody else that the Sex and the City girls are even friends? It doesn't make sense to me. Miranda and Carrie, ok. No one else has anything in common.)

Plus, I had this huge run in with the vet who did Addy's surgery, because he was a total asshole about what his staff did to Addy's neck, and so I have been mentally composing a nasty letter to him for the past two weeks. That has pretty much taken up all my mental composition time, which I usually devote to blogging. Plus, it has absorbed all my miscellaneous anger, which I usually take out on random subjects. I'm never going to send that damn letter though, because it is about ten pages now, what with all the mental composing I've done. I wish I could be succinct. And let that vet have it.

Anyway, I guess my unsuccinct point is that just because I haven't blogged a whole bunch about stuff or the new things that Lilli is doing, does not mean that Lilli has not been doing a whole bunch of new stuff. In fact, she has been busy, busy, busy. She pretty much knows the names of everyone in our families and she knows the names of all her favorite TV shows. She's climbing up on everything and getting into everything. She has a foot fetish and is a shoe junkie. She likes to match up people and their shoes by bringing the right shoes to the right person. "Here mama! Mama's shoes!" I took her to the Nordstrom kids' shoe department and she went crazy. "Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!" She loves the sound of lawnmowers. She LOVES looking out the bedroom window onto our backyard. She's counting. She knows how to get what she wants. Sometimes when I make her porridge in the morning and I haven't put what she wants in it, she'll send me back to the fridge for the proper ingredients. She's starting to learn how to throw a tantrum. I'm starting to learn how to ignore them.

Oh, what fun we are having! Actually, I think I can finally and genuinely say that having a child is a lot of fun. More fun than not. She hugs me and kisses me and does everything that I do. She shares her "nummies" with us, and brings us all her toys. She loves her dog and her daddy too of course. She says "hi guys!" when we enter a room full of people. She is a CHATTERBOX.

So, that's all for now. I will try to think of something succinct and substantial for next time :)

My latest Gymboree indulgence. . . I got to break it out because it was in the eighties here yesterday! Almost 90 today!

Lilli and mama.

Stalking the kitty. . .

Many people express wonder at Lilli's hat wearing skills. I make her do it by appealing to her vanity. I say, "the hat makes you look so pretty!" And voila!

I think I was sneaking up on her or something. She looks so suspicious!

This is an attractive picture of juice dripping down Lilli's chin. Got to stay hydrated!

New Stats

Lilli had her eighteen month checkup today. If you ask her how old she is, she'll say "oooone!" Too hard to teach her how to say, "eighteen months!!"

Anywho, I'm sure you're all dying to know the news. After hovering shamefully close to only the 95% at her last checkup, she managed to eat her way back up to the 99th percentile in the last three months. Have I mentioned how my girl can chow down? Those of us who have had the privilege of sharing a meal with her know how she can pack it in. She can drink half of a Jamba Juice! Anyway, she is now 30.5 lbs (99th), 34.5 inches (99th) and has a head circumference of 19.25 inches. That means that while she only gained 12 oz. from 12 months to 15 months, she gained over 3 and a half pounds from 15 months to the present. I have noticed her appetite increase, but now my neuroses are kicking in, and of course I'm wondering, was I starving her before?

In any case, we are grateful that all is well, and that she is pristinely healthy. She did manage to escape the doctor's office without getting any shots, for which Bob was grateful. Phew. Six months until our next one of those!

My dad took these at Lummi over the last weekend. Be glad I haven't had time to download my photos because they've mostly been of the dog's butt and neck.

Shying away from the paparazzi. . .

Very serious.

Look at those fat cheekies!

She liked wearing Linda's "hat."

Lilli and Uncle Schuyler (well, the back of his head anyway).

Lilli amongst the tulips.

Google searches are weird

Things you can type into a search engine to find my blog:

-Mango SNL (thanks Uncle Randy)
-breastfeeding sluts
-poop desperation
-poop nugget
-juice butts
-butt smell
-blood coming out of dogs butt
-poop butt
-my dog poos in her sleep

And you know what puts me at the top of the list?. . . .

-my dog's butt smells!

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. My conclusion? People just have issues with their dogs and their butts. I feel for them, and I hope they have taken some consolation in our issues. I guess this has been my contribution to the world.

My brother Schuyler likes to build things. He enjoys rustic things and manual labor. I'm not even sure we're actually genetically related :) But I'm not against enjoying the fruit of his manual labors. One of his pet projects has been to build a wood fire oven at our house on Lummi Island to make bread and pizza. This was a laborious process in which he had build a hot fire in the oven and let it burn for a couple of hours, then die down to embers. The oven was then about 1000 degrees. I made the pizza dough, and thus, we had pizza, that cooked in about one minute. Here we are posing with dough and his homemade pizza mading utensils.

Enjoying our rustic pizza in a rustic setting in the yard.

Schuyler getting ready to feed us.

The finished product. Num num! as Lilli would say. She loved it by the way.

One, two, three!

This morning, I was in a sleepy stupor, after four nights of solo night baby duty while Lilli and I were at Lummi. Lilli was running around like crazy, not sleepy at all, when I thought I heard something. She was in the corner playing with something, and I distinctly heard "one, twooooo, threeeeee!"

"Schuyler!" I said. "Did you hear that?" Schuyler was asleep on the bedroom floor with the blanket over his bed, partly because of the light, and partly because we were annoying him with our baby level of loudness (=very loud). All I heard was a groan, but I got all the confirmation I needed when she said it again. Lilli was counting to three! I don't know what she was counting exactly, and I'm not sure exactly when she picked it up, but she was doing it. It's weird, because she could say one, and I'd occasionally heard two, but I'd never heard her say three and I'd certainly never heard her string them together. And yet, all of sudden, here she was doing it! I'm sure that she learns stuff and practices secretly until she can pull it out at the least expected moment and stun us with her talents.

She was a little bundle of energy this weekend, chattering constantly. We were all fascinated by how babies are constanly verbalizing everything that comes into their little heads, a clear manifestation of the busyness of their little brains. She would just flit from one subject to the next, often creating a strange verbal segue. She might say, for example, "Mango's shoes, mango's shoes, mamamango, mango mama, shoe mama, mama's mango manmama, shoe mama," and finally come up with "here mama! Mango's shoe!" as she managed to pass me his shoe. Fascinating.

She's also, in this last week, learned a new communication trick, that's not so amusing. She's learned that she can use her words to not only describe what's she's doing and what she wants, but to tell OTHER people what she wants them to do. For example, take up. She used to use it to tell us when she wanted up or down or when she was going up or down. Now she's realized that it can apply to other people as well, and she uses it fully to her advantage. It seems like every morning this week, I've been dragged out of bed by her pulling on my hands and demanding "up, up, up!" So. Pleasant.

In which our family has a string of bad luck

It has been a long, hard week. You don't realize how happy you are to have a dog with a properly working anus until you have a dog that doesn't. Let me tell you, it is no fun. We had a couple of instances during the week where I was more intimately acquainted with his butt than I care to be. Not only did I have to check his butt sutures daily, but I was often having to check to make sure that poop wasn't poking out, since it hurt him to poop and he would wait until the last second when it was almost too late. I'm happy to report that his butt is now working a lot better, and we are very thankful to the Butt Gods. They have been good to us.

However. . .

The most HORRIFIC THING ever also happened to the poor dog this week, and it was just so awful, given everything he has already been through. Dogs are so trusting and stupid, and they think that everything that happens is just their fate to endure. Anyway, before I get ahead of myself, what happened was that on Saturday morning, while I was busy getting ready to depart for Lummi Island, I noticed that Atticus was acting very strange. He was hopping around the kitchen in this spastic way and he kept lying down and then getting up in a jerky manner and then lying down again. I thought this was his painful incarnation of the poop dance, so I rushed to leash him up to take him outside for a poop. He was happy to go out, but he only continued to lie down and get up again, in a crazy sort of way. I then noticed that he was trembling all over, and I reflected on how he had been especially depressed during the last couple of days, and how he hadn't eaten very well either. At that moment, Bob arrived with my brother, who was driving up with me to the island. I commented to Bob about how weird Addy was being, but we dismissed it as ouchy butt. Then Bob noticed a spot of blood on his leg, and then I remembered how he had been incessantly licking a spot on his bed (dogs like to lick blood). THEN my brother Schuyler noticed that his collar seemed bloody too. I stooped down to get a better look at his neck. I pulled his Elizabethan Collar (a plastic cone worn to keep him from biting at his sutures) away a bit and ALMOST PUKED. It had been tied on with gauze by someone at the hospital, and the gauze had sawn away at his tender throat until there was a would about six inches long and three quarters of an inch deep, as though someone had taken a switchblade to his throat. My first thought was that he was nearly decapitated and was going to die and I panicked and chased down Bob (who was already in his car to go back to work) and cut off the offending collar and gauze and sent Schuyler and Bob to our regular vet (as opposed to our butt vet), which is only a few blocks away. Luckily, it was "only" a flesh wound, but the dog has the most grisly line of sutures and scabs on his neck now, in addition to having baboon butt. I just feel SO GUILTY that I didn't know he was suffering like that, probably since we brought him home from the hospital, and I'm also angry that he didn't whine or SOMETHING to let us know he was in pain. Of course, we are also PISSED at the surgical animal hospital, for being so negligent. How could they tie something on so tightly that it would saw away at flesh? I just imagine myself being in my poor dog's place, having something cut away at me and not being able to say anything about it, all the while having a swollen butt, and it is so depressing. I guess I'm glad I'm not a dog.

The weird thing about that 24 hour period though was all the bad things that happened to our family. My brother's car broke down on the way up here and my dad had to drive three hours to fetch him, our dog's throat was slit, and then my mom's bicycle was stolen out of our garage. All was resolved, but what is the universe trying to tell us, huh?

Can you handle it? More poop!

Some have noted that my posts of late have been rather "poop heavy," but sadly enough, that is just a reflection of my life right now. My thoughts are dominated by poop: Is there a poop in Addy's butt? Has Lilli pooped today? Has Lilli had enough water today for proper poop consistency? Hey, did I just step in a poop nugget?

Bob and I don't really understand what's going on with Addy's butt right now. We are *hoping* that it hurts to poop (poor guy :( ) and that's why he waits until the last second to poop and thus we are blessed with the occasional 'oh my god, the poop is halfway out of his butt' moment when we are still in the house. On the bright side, we only had one tiny poop nugget yesterday and only 1 1/2 the day before, so at least he is managing to hold it in somewhat. Little turds are not just slipping out while he is sleeping.

On a happier poop note, I forgot to mention about a month ago that Lilli started occasionally telling us when she was going to poop or had just pooped. She would point to her diaper and say "poop!" I was all hopeful that we would have an early potty training, but then the novelty at pointing at her poop seemed to wear off and she hasn't done it in a while now.

Well, I guess that's all my poop news for now. I'm sure there will be more to come :)

Butt update

Just to be clear, we had an double anal sacculectomy (mmm, yummy) performed on Atticus, and it wasn't an elective surgery. His anal sacs were the size of golf balls and were chronically infected. Not having fishbutt anymore is just a bonus. Of course, like I said, the good old "fecal incontinence" thing might be a double bonus.

The animal hospital said it was very unlikely we would have this problem, especially as Addy apparently has a 'very toned anus,' (good for you Addy!) but we won't really know for two or three weeks. Until then, I am having a taste of what having a fecally incontinent dog would be like as he is very bruised and sore down there and so does not have fully operational capacities. I was petting him on the bed this morning when I noticed this spot of brown. That can't be poop, I thought! Well. . . . .I smelled it, and I WAS WRONG. I made Addy get up, and there were these little poop splotches all over the bed, like someone had taken a sponge, carved it into the shape of a dog anus, dipped it in poop, and done a little sponge painting. Well, actually, that's pretty much what Addy had done, only he skipped the sponge step. Why use a sponge when you've got the real deal? I suspected this anal leakage might mean a poop was coming, so I took Addy out in the yard. We can't just let him out there because he's not supposed to run around. So there I was, trailing Addy around the yard waiting for him to poop. He knew it was coming and had a panicked look in his eyes, probably because he knew it would hurt like a mofo. I could sympathize having felt the same way after giving birth. Then I imagined someone taking a scalpel to my butt and my sympathy doubled.

So anyway, I'm trailing him around, and keeping my eye on Lilli too. Finally I see the poop start to emerge, and Addy starts an hysterical poop dance. Unfortunately, it is very soft and stringy and is a 'hanger' if you know what I mean, and Addy is freaking out that he can't get the poop to drop. Imagine a long stringy turd flapping out of the butt of a frightened dog and you imagine the results: that's right, poopy legs and hindquarters. Finally, the flailing about flings the turd away and he continues the poop dance, waiting for what's to come. This time he manages a soft little pile and I am relieved that we're probably done. By now Lilli has taken an interest in the goings on, and so I am having to negotiate a poopy dog and try to keep Lilli away from the random piles of poop at the same time. I decide we had just better go back in, but at this point I see a poop start to slip out of Addy's butt without him realizing it. Two turds drop out before he figures out what's going on and trots back to his corner with me in tow to finish his business.

Finally I manage to get both the little knuckleheads back in the house, but now Lilli is PISSED that her outside play time has been cut short, and Addy is PISSED that I am taking a wet rag to his troubled behind. If anyone had told me three years ago that today I would spend the morning with a angry child hanging on my back and screaming in my ear while I scoured the poop residue from the swollen behind of my reluctant dog, I would have thought twice about this whole thing, dog and child.

Knees and butts

I am amazed by how quickly Lilli picks up words lately. I can say something one time and she's got it. She doesn't always remember it, but at least she can repeat it. This morning she learned knee and immediately went to Bob and pointed out his knees to him. He was amazed as well because just this morning she didn't know her knee from her elbow.

Speaking of knees and elbows, let's talk about butts. Namely, our dog's butt. I think I have mentioned here that we have had problems with our dog's butt. I'm sure many of you readers probably don't have a good relationship with your dog's butt. Afterall, stinky poop comes out of there (which you usually have to pick up) and dogs are not known for their fresh and clean smell either. Add some fiber supplements in there and you've got some extra gas too. Mmmmm. Well, besides thinking it was kind of funny (if disgusting) when Lilli tried to stick her finger in there, we have hated our dog's butt for many years. First were the soupy poos, the worst kind of poos in the world to pick up. Then came the occasional accidental anal gland expressions (i.e. he gets anal gland juice on the furniture and makes the house and his butt smell like dead rotting fish). We got the soupy poop thing fixed up, but then came the pools of anal juice, mixed in blood, on our sheets! Boy did we hate that dog's butt.

Now that dog's butt has cost us a ton of money, but at least we may now come to at least have a working relationship with it. As of yesterday, we said goodbye to the anal glands. I am going to pick him up this afternoon, and I feel so bad for him. He will be wearing the cone of shame, but at least he won't smell like a fish market. Now let' s just hope that we haven't sacrificed his good ol' sphincter control. That might send our relationship with his butt right out the door.

Poop!

It seems like the internet is always coming through for me. Whatever I'm going through, well, there are people out there going through the VERY SAME THING. Poop is no exception. Just the other day I was reading this blog entry:
http://shenuts.com/index.php?p=1461#comments
I thought to myself, how awful! What I would do in that situation? And then I thought, oh well, that'll never happen. MORE FATEFUL WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN THOUGHT. God punished my pride in my baby's flowing bowel movements with the biggest, HARDEST, poop nugget imaginable.

We were at Lummi, and I was in the bathroom. Bob yelled from the next room for me to come right that second, and there was Lilli on the changing pad in front of him, little chubby legs in the air and the most enormous poop protruding from her butt. Clearly it was just the tip of the iceberg. We panicked. But then I said, hey! I just read where someone had the exact same problem and she used q-tips to dig the poop out! Bob looked skeptical, but I ran for the q-tips. Meanwhile, Lilli didn't seem to mind the poop in her butt at all. She was looking at us like, what's the big deal, people?

So, I slowly approached her bottom with the moistened q-tips, and Bob cringed and looked away as I tentatively poked at the poop. But this was a rock solid poop, and it was LARGE, and I couldn't bring myself to work that q-tip between the poop and her delicate skin. So Bob got the bright idea to put her on an actual toilet and encourage her to push it out. Well, THEN she got mad, at the indignity of being suspended over air, while naked, and no Pamper to cover her emerging poop. Imagine us holding a stuggling and wailing and naked baby over a toilet, encouraging her to just PUSH IT OUT!

So you know what we did? Absolutely nothing. She didn't seem bothered by the poop, so we just let it be, and lo and behold about ten minutes later we had successful poopage. I guess that Patience is a virtue, at least when it comes to poop.

Then I read this entry at Dooce today: http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/05_04_2005.html

So you see, how else would I have known that other people's baby's have poops stuck in their butts, and that everything turns out ok? The internet, oh what a comfort.

My brother's girlfriend Sarah took these when she brought her dog Henry Penny over to our house. . .

Lilli loved Henry because he was soft and didn't mind his paws being touched and he didn't smell like fish butt.

Is this a total model pose or what?

Close up!

Randy tries to entice Lilli into joining him.

What the hell? Lilli observing Randy doing yoga.

Lilli was snuggling with Mango, but as soon as she saw me come with the camera she tried to escape. They were enjoying a little music together.

A "Brief" Update on New Lilli Developments

It seems like Lilli has burst upon the chatterbox scene all of a sudden, and basically, we can't get her to shut up. Among the new offerings:

"This/that is a ______." She just loves to go around telling us what everything is. Over and over.

"This is ____'s _____." She seems to have grasped the possessive. She know's that certain things are certain people's. She used to just call the remote "mama." Now she calls it "mama's." Often times I am awakened by "this is mama's wallet. This is mama's wallet. Here mama! Here mama!" Which brings me to. . .

"Here ____!" When handing people things.

A bunch of new words, mostly nouns. Among them? Bath. Shirt. Boat. Yeah, we can really talk about deep stuff now. This is Mama's shirt in Lilli's bath, and oh, here! Boat!

She's also been talking in her sleep. Which is a little weird for us. It's so cute though to hear what she's dreaming about, and wonder about what goes on in that little head. Usually she talks about "doggies." Absolutely makes my heart melt.

And in non-language offerings, she's managed, just once, to open the bathroom door. Now the games have begun, I'm afraid. We will have to put those doorknobs things on. Bleh.

Last but not least, she has a fascination with my eyebrows ("abas") and she has a weird thing where she touches them before falling asleep and I have to tell her they are my eyebrows, like, a thousand times. Then she screams "night night!" in my ear about a hundred times and I have to echo her back or she screams louder. Babies are WEIRD.

Mango!

We had a great time with my family over the weekend, but I have to say the best part of the weeknd was NOT being with them. My parents were kind enough to agree to babysit for a WHOLE EVENING, NIGHT AND MORNING while Bob and I went into Bellingham for a "night on the town." I say "night on the town" in quotes because our definition of such has changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. Before Lilli we lived for nine months in a very isolated, hard-drinking college town (read: nothing else to do but party) and while we were very good boys and girls compared to many of our friends, let's just say we were not inactive participants. Even before that I lived in Seattle, so a night on the town usually meant dinner and then going to a club and staying out until 3am. Well. Bob and I were pretty excited to walk around BELLINGHAM, peek into some antique stores, have dinner at a pizza place, *think* about going to see a movie but then deciding against it, get coffee,walk around the waterfront, and then watch tv and be asleep by midnight. Woohoo! We had a great time. Who cared that our "plaza suite" meant that we had a view of the parking lot?? We slept pretty hard until 7am when our poor bodies are used to being awakened by hungry baby. We couldn't turn the hungry baby alert off so we were up anyway, even though we tried really hard to sleep in. Oh well. Thank you mom and dad!!

We did have a great time with family though, as I said. Besides my parents, my grandma and aunt and uncle (http://aubreypub.typepad.com/r_blog/) were up there too. You might remember my Uncle Randy, who Lilli refused to let play with her new toy? Well, times have changed, people! Lilli was mesmerized by Randy and seemed to have a certain particular affection for him. In fact, she had a special name for him. . .Perhaps some of you SNL fans will remember the Mango character played by Chris Kattan? Well, Chris, look out, because there is a new Mango in town! I'm not quite sure how it happened (Randy=Manghee=Mango) but before you know it Randy was Mango and she was running all over the place chanting "Mango, Mango! Hi Mango! Bye Mango! That's Mango! Mango Mango!This is Mango's!" I mean, how could you not love being called "Mango"? Everyone loves Mangoes! Anyway, Lilli was very sweet on Mango and besides her Mango mantra even bestowed hugs and kisses upon him. I think it actually made my mom a little jealous. . .I heard her whispering "guava, guava" in Lilli's ear.

More Silly Baby

We've been up here at Lummi Island all weekend, and there are many stories to tell, but I am on a dial up connection so I will stick to one amusing anecdote:

Some of you may remember Lilli's fondness for "wallet." If not, you can read about it:
http://lillirei.blogspot.com/2005/04/lilli-is-seemingly-able-to-repeat.html#comments

When we were coming across the ferry to the Island, Lilli was astounded by the broad expanse of water all around us. Her immediate declaration? "WALLET!"