Howdy!

It is an absolutely gorgeous day in Pasadena. Our weather has been particularly spectacular this winter. I am starting to take it for granted! I don't want to complain, because I know the rest of the country has been experiencing a hellish winter, but I'm ready for some cooler temperatures. I want to cook some comfort food dammit! There is a Ragu dish that has been on my bucket list for ages, that involves pork butt, but I can't spend an entire day making a fancy ragu when it is 80° outside. Okay, enough grumbling from Paradise. (Pork butt - sorry, couldn't resist saying it once more.)

Pippa and I recently started taking a music class and we love love love it. Love it! Forget all those toys that make annoying beeps. I want to hook my daughter up with an awesome music box. With symbols and tambourines and bongos and those awesome triangles. When friends and family visit, I am going to trick them into joining our music circle. Music is one of the most joyful things out there, and making music is even more joyful than passively listening to it.

I play the piano. I'm no Elton John, but I do love playing. Pippa is now getting into banging the piano keys and she looks so pleased with herself when she makes some music. The piano is in our guest, a room we rarely use. So I forget about the piano for days and days. Methinks it is time to get back into the piano! I have bought some sheet music for old children's songs, and as Pippa gets older, I would love to play tunes while she dances.

So you have fair warning: if you visit the cranky pumpkin household, be prepared to shake a tambourine and beat a drum!

Babies Are Weird

Pippa wanted to sleep tonight while sitting up. Every time I put her in her crib, she would scramble to a sitting position and fall asleep that way. I would sneak back into the nursery and try to lower her to her back... and then she would wake up and give me a look that said "if you are not going to let me sit up, then at least have the courtesy to hold me all night." This happened six or seven times.

Once, I let her sleep for about thirty minutes while sitting up, hoping that if she got into a deep enough sleep, I could finally transfer her to a supine* position without waking her. After thirty minutes, I checked the video monitor to see how she was doing. At that very moment, she toppled over and woke herself. This was not funny at all. (Just kidding. It was hilarious.)

Finally, after two hours of playing this fun new game, I was able to get Pippa in an appropriate position for her nighttime slumbers. Hopefully she will stay that way for the rest of the night! If not, hopefully she will at least stay that way until Nathan gets home. (On the night our baby decides to be extra weird, Nathan of course has to go to a charity event for work.) I am sure he will be totally thrilled to play this game at 3 a.m.

Why the hell did Pippa want to sit up in her crib and fall asleep that way? It was not a teething issue, our usual scapegoat for sleep issues. (If she was teething, she would not be sleeping sweetly in her crib as I type this.) Ah well, babies are weird.

*It took me about 30 seconds to summon this word from my "Vault of Words I Rarely Ever Use." And now I send "supine" back to the Vault. Don't worry, he's in excellent company with words like "kerfuffle," and "panacea."

The 100 Podcasts Project

In December, I realized I was bored. I love being a stay at home mom, but holy crap, peek-a-boo does not exactly stretch my intellectual muscles. My brain was crying for stimulation. At first, I thought I would attend some lectures at libraries and museums. Maybe I could audit a college class! Or take a literature class at Pasadena City College! Then I looked at my baby and realized I was crazy. Pippa is a trooper and is happy to go just about anywhere, but "just about anywhere" does not include lecture halls.

Then I had a light bulb moment: podcasts! I have always thought I would enjoy podcasts but was too damn lazy to find shows I like and download them to my iPod. But now there are iPhone apps that make it easy to listen to podcasts. I am using PodCruncher and love it. I would marry it except (a) I'm already married and (b) you can't marry an app (yet).

I decided listening to podcasts would be a good project for 2014 and instituted the 100 Podcasts Project: I am going to listen to 100 different podcasts by the end of 2014. That does not mean I can listen to 100 episodes of the same podcast. I have to listen to 100 different podcast shows. I want to expose myself to lots of new ideas, voices, stories, etc. etc.

Thanks to PodCruncher, I have already listened to twenty-one different podcasts . My favorites so far are WTF with Marc Maron, Welcome to Night Vale, Poem of the Day, Slate's Culture Gabfest, NPR: Pop Culture Happy Hour, and Books on the Nightstand.

I realize I'm many years late to the podcast party, but I'm not going to let a little tardiness hold me back. Would you ditch a wedding just because you go lost on the way to the church? Of course not! Now excuse me, I have to go dance on the table with Marc Maron and get a glass of wine from NPR. This podcast party is awesome!

Happy New Year!

As I write this, I am sitting at my dining room table. Pippa is in her highchair, having some delicious pureed green beans for breakfast. Don't worry, I'm not a total monster. She will get some oatmeal in a few minutes. The grownups will be having waffles shortly. Okay, I'm a total monster.

Outside, one block from my house, hundreds of people are waiting for the Rose Parade to start. Many of them camped out overnight. Fools! Even though this is Southern California, the nighttime low was still in the low 40s. Sometimes we even get a little frost over night. I wonder if there were any orgies.

I made some resolutions last month, none of them having to do with this blog. But this morning, I woke up with a strong desire to get back on the Blog Horse. So hello. Good morning. Happy New Year!

I have a lot to blog about, but the waffle iron is calling my name. (His name is Wally, in case you were wondering.) Then I'm taking Pippa to see her first parade! I'm sure she will be more interested in pulling leaves off the neighbor's hedge, but at least we will still be able to say that her first parade was the Rose Queen of all parades.

Our Favorite Toys, The Almost Eight (!) Months Old Edition

Hi, my name is Courtney, and I'm a toyaholic. It's been two days since I bought a toy for my baby girl. (A textured red ball at Target. She tried to eat it at the store, so I had to buy it - right?) I realize a baby is entertained by a cardboard box and wooden spoon, but I stand by my toy addiction for the following reasons: (1) Pippa loves to play with several toys at once, switching between toys every few minutes; (2) every week, Pippa can do new things, and she is ready for more complicated toys; (3) it's much more fun to buy toys than things like paper towels and diapers; (4) I can donate any toys that Pippa doesn't like; (5) I'm playing with these toys, too, and there's only so many hours I can spend with Freddie the Firefly before I go bat shit crazy; (6) I keep stashes of toys in the car, stroller, and various rooms of the house because I'm too lazy to be constantly carrying around the same three toys; and (7) it's good for the economy. (Amazing how that seventh reason can be used to justify almost any purchase.)

At seven months old (almost EIGHT months old, holy crap), these are Pippa's favorite toys:

• Chatterbox Telephone: I was shopping with my mom when we saw this old toy. I remember loving Chatterbox but I doubted Pippa would be interested in it. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of today's new toys. But my mom insisted on buying it, and thank God, because it's Pippa's favorite toy by a mile. She cannot get enough of Chatterbox. She would probably sleep with Chatterbox if I let her. When I pretend to talk on the phone, she cracks up, even though she has never seen am actual real rotary phone. We do not even have a phone hooked up to our land line! We just use the land line for internet stuff. Thanks to Chatterbox, Pippa will probably assume that in the Old Days, all phones had wheels, blinking eyes and pull cords.
• Water bottles: The best non-toy toy.  End of discussion.
• Mommy's iPhone: No, wait, let's reopen that discussion. THIS is Pippa's favorite non-toy toy. She especially likes to slobber all over my iPhone until the speaker is clogged with drool. If Pippa was writing this blog entry, she would argue that Mommy's iPhone is the best non-toy toy, end of discussion. But I maintain that the water bottle is the best non-toy toy because if the Sweet Pea destroys it, you are out $2.00 at most.
• The Activity Triangle: Pippa has loved this toy for two months strong and her love for it keeps growing stronger and stronger.
• The remote control: I actually had to give Pippa the remote control to get her to sit still for some Halloween costume portraits. Then the remote control disappeared. We found the remote two days later completely buried under the couch pillows. No idea how Pippa accomplished this feat, but it prompted Nathan to give her a defunct remote from some forgotten VCR. Ten bucks says she'll still want to drool all over the real remote when she's sitting in daddy's lap.
• Keys: She would like to play with my keys, but I have refused this desire to date. I'm afraid she'll cut or stab herself. Instead, I let her play with a set of teething keys that can go in the freezer. When I open the freezer and Pippa sees the keys, she waves her arms around in excitement.
• Butterfly Spinner: My parents have this one at their house, and there's an old battered one at our mommy and me class. Pippa loves any variation of this toy. We actually don't have one for our house! Shocking, I know.
• Stack and Roll Cups: The folks at Fisher Price really know their shit. This toy seems so simple, and yet Pippa is wild about it. 
• Freddie the Firefly: We own two, and my parents have one as well. This thing must be bewitched because Pippa is mesmerized whenever I fly it about the room.
• Whoozit - Pippa is obsessed with her Whoozit, but she hates riding in the car if she's alone in the backseat. Solution: I keep the Whoozit in my car, and she only gets to play with it there.  So far, this strategy has been an unmitigated success.  
• Mommy's hair - So fun to yank! Bonus points if you can make mommy cry.
• Einstein ball: The Baby Einstein toys are consistently good.
• Rhyme and discover book: I did not want to buy this toy. It's a plastic book with lots of moving parts and music, and that felt sacrilegious to this bookworm. But it looked like the perfect toy to entertain the Sweet Pea during our road trip to Sonoma, so I bought it anyway. Then Pippa got a cold so we cancelled the trip, and I brought the toy out since my sick baby deserved a new toy. And oh but she loves her musical book. 
• Toys at our mommy and me class: there are an assortment of toys available at our Mommy and Me class. And Pippa always lunges for the toy that looks like it is harboring the bubonic plague.
• Bead mazes: These are a double edged sword. Pippa gets very excited when she spots a bead maze, but she gets uber frustrated when she discovers she cannot put the entire thing in her mouth. As she desperately tries to get all the beads in her mouth, she loses her balance and topples over, bringing the bead maze down on top of her. Which scares her shitless, causing her to scream as if she is being eaten alive by killer pandas.  This means she can only play with a bead maze if I am sitting no more than six inches away from her.
• Nuby teethers: Thank you, Nuby, your teethers were clearly designed by Jesus himself.
• That toy the dog ate: Thanks, Rowan. You asshat.
• Balloon: I bought Pippa a balloon the day she got her second flu shot. I figured she deserved a balloon even if she forgot about the shot 45 seconds after it happened. I splurged on a foil butterfly and it's still floating merrily in our den. But once I brought the damn balloon into the house, I realized it was a huge hazard. Stupid Mommy.
• Mirrors, especially this one: At first, I used the mirror to trick Pippa into enjoying tummy time. Now I'm using the mirror to encourage Pippa to crawl. The girl can move, but she prefers scooting around on her butt through a series of intricate moves. And she will butt scoot towards anything interesting except her mirror. If she sees the damn mirror, she screams until I put it within her tiny arms' reach.
• Sea Dreams Soother: This gizmo helped Pippa nap for about six weeks. Now I save it for emergencies, e.g. she's teething and pissed at the entire world and needs a distraction from her dumbass teeth which are taking their sweet time arriving and wrecking havoc upon her beleaguered.
• Daddy's hair: Almost as fun as Mommy's hair, but harder to grasp.
• Desperation Dinosaur: Fisher Price does not actually call this toy the Desperation Dinosaur. That's my moniker for my favorite prehistoric beast. I have only brought it out twice, when Pippa had a fever from her second flu shot. She was miserable, but the Desperation Dinosaur cheered her up with its popping magic. The Desperation Dinosaur lives in our guest room, away from Pippa's other toys. It's an insurance policy against sick/rainy days.
• Jack in the Box (Maybe): I let Pippa play with a clown Jack in the Box when we were at Babies R Us a couple of weeks ago. She clearly enjoyed the toy, but she enjoys anything that is (a) colorful and (b) chewable. (Her definition of "chewable" is much broader than mine.) But baby's are easy to trick, so I dumped the Jack in the Box in the baby food aisle when the Sweet Pea wasn't looking. Maybe Santa will bring one for Christmas.
• ABC floor tiles: I bought these at Babies R Us to soften the tile floor in our den. I thought I was just buying flooring but Pippa loves them. As she gets older, we'll be able to reconfigure the tiles into tunnels, forts, etc.  

Oh my God, I'm exhausted. There are a few more toys I could add to this list, but I'm officially sick of this post.

Greetings from Scenic Snotsylvania

I do believe this is a personal first: I am blogging while standing up. The Sweet Pea has a cold and is struggling to nap. I discovered that she sleeps best if I keep her in the Ergo and move around. I tried rocking her on a chair but no dice. She needs movement while standing. So I finished watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother while standing and now I'm blogging at our kitchen island. My clothes may or may not be stained with baby snot.

Note to Mom: I am still a few episodes behind on this season of HIMYM, so no spoilers!

I've invented a game. It doesn't have a name.  And I've never played it before. So let's play it now! In this blog entry, I will list a few random current facts. Then, every month or so, I can see how these random facts have or have not changed. I guess it's not a game. It's more of a narcissistic list. So let's call this "game" the Narcissistic List.

Courtney's November Narcissistic List
Last t.v. show I watched: A month old episode of HIMYM.

Last movie I watched: Random snippets of Conan the Barbarian. Not my movie of choice, but my husband started watching it while I was folding laundry. Did you know that Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay?1 We all have to start somewhere.

Last book I finished reading: My Antonia, by Willa Cather. I read this for school in the ninth grade and all I could remember was (a) I hated it and (b) there was something with an owl. I decided to reread it since it's the great Nebraskan novel and I married a Nebraskan. I discovered that (a) I love My Antonia and want to read more books by Cather and (b) there's no owl in My Antonia. I think the owl might be from Bless Me Ultima, another book from the ninth grade reading list, which coincidentally, I also hated. Damnit now I have to reread Ultima to see if I can track down this owl.

Last major outing: The California Science Museum to see the space shuttle Endeavor. So cool! And inspiring! And much smaller than I expected. (That's what she said.)

Last trip: Wow, that was over a year ago, when Nathan and I went to Orlando to visit Nathan's brother and our sister-in-law. We were supposed to be driving to Sonoma today to meet my new niece Beatrice, but instead we are trapped in Snotsylvania. We did not want to share our germs with one-month-old Bea. But oh I cannot wait to meet her! She has more hair than Pippa and such a sweet pretty face. She is my second favorite baby.

Last song I listened to: Some kids song on my iPhone. Let me check... Ah, yes, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. I believe Metallica did a cover version of this classic song in the late 90s.

Last meal in a restaurant: Um, wait, I can do this... CPK! Yes, I ate at CPK at the mall on Monday afternoon, just me and Pippa, after our Mommy and Me class. At this point, I thought she was just having a rough day of teething. I did not realize until Tuesday morning that she had fallen victim to Count Snotula. Crap I hope we did not infect our entire Mommy and Me class!

Life Lately

1. My daughter and I are Ergo-holics. (The Ergo is our baby carrier of choice.) Right now, she is napping in the Ergo while I sit at my desk and write.

2. Technically, it's not my desk. It's the family desk.

3. For years, Green has been my favorite color. And I still love green deeply and truly. But Purple staged a rebellion and usurped Green's throne.

4. I want to read the dictionary. From start to finish. I actually bought a new dictionary for this purpose. If I pace myself, I figure I can finish the M's before I die.

5. I am an aunt! My niece Bea was born almost a month ago. I cannot wait to meet her.  In fact, the Cranky Pumpkin family is road tripping to Northern California next week to meet Bea. This trip will require Pippa to stay in her car seat for about eight hours total in one day. Pray for us.