fall update

I'd heard that we might wake up to 4-8 inches of snow this morning, but it didn't happen. It did, however, remind me of a metaphor: it snows a little and you're like, "hey, I should really go out and shovel the driveway." But it's just a little and it seems like a hassle so you wait until there's a little more. And then it snows more, but now it's so damn cold out that you're too busy staying warm, making hot chocolate, and stoking the fire to go outside and shovel. And it just keeps piling up and up until the next thing you know, you can't get your car out of the garage.
That's how this blog has been lately...the longer I put it off, the more there is to write, the busier I get at work, the less free time I have, etc. It's simpler to update it every day, believe it or not, than to write something worthy of a two-week hiatus. Not that there's a lack of things to write about. Had I waited any longer, I'd be telling you Sadie is walking and talking and feeding herself with a fork and knife.

So let's go back, waaaaaaaaaay back, to the middle of September. Did I mention at any point we were taking Sadie on her first camping trip? We went with the Lantzys and the Browns and all of their baby girls to an easy-access car camping spot on the Metolius River. Less than an hour from home, in case anyone got too fussy. Sadie crawled around in the dirt, petted the doggies, and was mesmerized by the campfire. Later that night, she slept like a champ wedged between me and Reid in the back of the bus. It was a lot of work and planning for one night away from home (all told, less than 24 hours), but we left confident that we could, indeed, camp with a baby. On the drive home, not only did we look forward to next summer, we wished we were road tripping to next campground. Sure, the days of ultralight backpacking tents and Thermarests are over, but a whole new adventure awaits us!

Enough about camping. The rest of September flew by thanks to a business trip, a visit from our friend Dave, the worst cold (actually the only cold) I've had in three years, and a crawling-standing-climbing Sadie that we can't turn our backs on for even a second. Overwhelmed by the constant chasing, we finally succumbed to purchasing what we like to affectionately refer to as "baby jail". That's right people, we bought a playpen. But hey---it's expandable! And moveable! And can be set up in any configuration your heart desires! And it remains to be seen how well it works or if Sadie will even tolerate it, because it hasn't been delivered yet. Even if it buys us twenty minutes in the kitchen without fear of her eating a knob off the stereo receiver, it will be worth it.
Incredibly, I have no pictures to prove that Sadie is crawling, standing up, or really doing anything threateningly mobile in the least. In fact, the last pictures downloaded off our camera are from three weeks ago. Bad mommy, bad daddy. How about a swinging video instead? We call that scrunched-up look she gets when she's really excited her "Chucky face":



Ok, on to the big news: baby girl is not so baby anymore. She has a TOOTH! Her lower, middle right one, to be exact. It's so tiny, so cute, and so sharp. We had expected fever and fussing of the monumental variety, but the tooth made its appearance with relatively little fanfare. A sleepless night, a runny nose, and presto---there it was.
By no small miracle yet purely by coincidence, the timing of said tooth could not have been more perfect, as I (unintentionally) weaned Sadie last week. How's that, you ask? Well, I was so flu-bitten and cough-ridden that I didn't want to get too close to her, so Reid did round-the-clock bottle duty while I recovered on the couch for four days. It must have been the Nyquil fog, because when I finally snapped out of it, I realized that lo and behold, I hadn't nursed her the whole time. I felt a teensy bit guilty, having wanted to make it a full nine months. But fate has its way with such things, I guess. I went to the grocery store the next day and stocked up on all the dairy products I'd been missing out on since February.

What else? Did I mention she's eating Cheerios?
Nah, I'll save something for the next update...