ChezLark

I just caught myself saying the following out loud. It pretty much summarizes a lot of my life these days:

Sweetie, that’s your ear. Yes! Ear. Like daddy’s ear.

Why are you putting your cracker in your ear?

There’s a great post over at the QC Report about boredom and children. Perhaps Quinn will forgive me if I excerpt a portion here. After an exasperating series of entreaties for attention by her daughter, Quinn breaks down and:

At this point, I dragged her into my lap. I looked deeply into her eyes.

“Listen to me carefully. There are people who don’t know how to entertain themselves. We are not those kinds of people. I have every faith that you will remember how to make your own fun. I will work on emails, and you will work on remembering. If you are spurting blood, come into the office and show me. Do not use the stove. Otherwise, I will see you in an hour.”

I should use this technique with Ryan when she gets older! One of the comments on the post was amusing, too:

When my kids say they are “bored”, grandma replies, “If you are bored, it’s your fault!”

I love it.

It’s been weird having baby pictures of little Ryan Marie next to political diatribes. The tension between family news and political observations has meant that I have put less energy than I should into updates about Ryan.

I’ve finally done something about this and broken out the family news into a separate blog, LarkFamily, which is at http://www.chezlark.com/family. I encourage friends and family to check that address, and/or subscribe to LarkFamily’s RSS feed, to keep up-to-date with family news. I will now stop posting family news to ChezLark!

A minor note probably only of interest to me: I noticed the other day that my beloved Canon 20D’s “odometer” rolled over for the first time; it does this every 10,000 shots.

This might sound like a lot, but I gather that pros routinely take tens and tens of thousands of shots in a year. Depending on who you ask, my camera’s shutter is apparently expected to last somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 shots.

In case you care.

Here’s what all those shutter actuations go towards:

Laura tells me that complaints have been lodged. Irate complaints. About there being too much politics and not enough pictures of Ryan Marie.

Your wish is my command. Laura and I took Ryan to the wading pool in Volunteer Park over the weekend; it was approximately a bazillion degrees out, and Ryan had a great time splashing around in the water. Laura took this picture (obviously); I really like it. I went for a retro kind of treatment in the developing.

Today is Ryan’s 8-month birthday. Happy birthday, little one!

The One Tooth becomes ever sharper. Yikes!

Big news on the home front: Ryan Marie’s first tooth is surfacing! She seems none the worse for it.

Here is my Wisdom Of The Day:

Also, I must say, I am perpetually amazed at how happy it makes me to just be around Ryan Marie these days. I’ve had an annoying cold, and I swear, holding her actually makes my head clear up.

Plus, she smiles like that basically all the time, which means it’s pretty much impossible to be angry at her, even if she gets you out of bed at 4 in the morning, or pulls on your glasses.

It is with great trepidation, lest I jinx it, that I announce that Ryan has been sleeping through the night. Well… assuming you’re OK with waking up at 5:30 or 6:00.

She’s done this at least 4 times in the last 5 or 6 days, and she seems to be settling into the habit of tanking up on milk before going to bed, sleeping through, and then waking up ravenous.

Here she is in a moment of contemplation:

Last weekend we did a bunch of landscaping work on our yard. Ryan was an enthusiastic spectator:

Don’t worry, we didn’t let her chomp on the leaf for too long lest she actually ingest any of it.

Today, little Ryan is 7 months old. Laura and I have been looking through pictures from when she was born, and we each picked a previously-unpublished picture to post on her birthday. Here is mine:

This picture was taken after Ryan was moved down to pediatrics; you can’t see the room in the background, but we set up a little cot next to Ryan’s bed, and traded off keeping a vigil next to her.

Here is Laura’s selection:

This was taken while Ryan was still in the NICU; you can see the feeding tube they put in when she was born, but only had to use once.

It’s hard to believe this much time has gone by already; Ryan is now much bigger and plumper, and rolls around and coos on our bed every morning. She’s currently asleep in her own crib, and when we’re lucky, she only wakes up once or twice a night. Before we know it, she’ll be walking.

Happy birthday, Ryan!

Ryan Marie has a very important milestone to announce: last night, for the first time ever, she slept uninterrupted from the time her parents went to bed (roughly 11:00) until her usual waking-up time (around 6:30). She’s slept longer stretches before, but never coinciding with our sleep. Yay, Ryan! Here she is looking pleased with herself:

Here is Ryan Marie to counterbalance dreary politics:

Guard, my gruel is cold!

See, you think Ryan Marie is all harmless and cuddly, but really she’s not!

That’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered baby you ever set eyes on! That baby’s got a vicious streak a mile wide! It’s a killer! Etc, etc.

Ryan is also featured today on chromalark.

Happy Mothers’ Day to all the mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, Mothers-To-Be, etc, out there.

We’re having something of a trainwreck of a Mothers’ Day weekend at the Lark household; Laura got violently sick on Friday night, and she’s just getting back on her feet now. Yesterday was to be my prep-day for Mothers’ Day, but instead I spent the whole time sleep deprived and looking after Ryan. Whee. We’re thinking of declaring an unusually localized space-time distortion that inexplicably shifts Mothers’ Day into next weekend at the Lark house.

Further, some members of the peanut gallery have been agitating for less talk, more pictures. Here are Laura and Ryan in Budapest:

I’ll try to crank out some more of the family pictures from our Europe trip when the madness subsides.

Ryan’s title of the “Squeaker” got upgraded to “Squawker” during our trip, on account of increased decibels.

Also, Laura and I got a lot of joking mileage during the trip about how Ryan is always of paramount importance. If Ryan is tired, or hungry, or cranky, or bored, or cold, or hot, or restless, or asleep, the whole world screeches to a halt until the situation is to her satisfaction. For some perverse reason, I started flashing all the time on the classic Seinfeld episode The Face Painter (which also features such classic lines as “That’s the Letter D”). As a subplot in that episode, Kramer gets in a feud with a monkey at the zoo when it throws a banana peel at him. Kramer gets back at the monkey by whacking it back with a banana peel when it’s not looking, and this really embarasses the monkey, which gets depressed. Eventually, the zoo asks Kramer to apologize to the monkey, which Kramer does reluctantly, commenting at various times:

Don’t my feelings count for anything? Oh, only the poor monkey’s important. Everything has to be done for the monkey!

God forbid I should disturb the very important monkey!

So anyway, I decided that Ryan was clearly the Very Important Monkey. This fits well with her previous title of Hairy Monkey, since she had light fur all over her when she was born.

Along the same lines, when we got particularly tired of carting Ryan around in her carseats and strollers, we decided she was The Sultan. She even has a disdainful, distant expression that perfectly conveys “Yes, servants. Continue. Your work is satisfactory for now”.

There are lots of nuns in Krakow. There are even more when you’re inside the city’s major cathedrals. Some nuns in St. Vitus took a liking to Ryan. The lighting was pretty much at the edge of my camera’s working envelope, but I got some passable pictures:

Aside from the That-Baby-Is-Cold police, Ryan has made us a lot of friends in Eastern Europe. People are very eager to stop and make funny faces at her, inquire about how old she is, etc. Ryan loves the attention!

Today’s photographic entertainment game is called: Spot The Five-Month-Old Baby Near This Old Eastern-European Communist Monument.

You get bonus points if your guess was: “I refuse to play your game on the grounds that it denigrates the glorious cause of the workers’ inevitable revolt against the oppression of capitalism”.

Ryan and company have landed in Budapest, where the weather is vastly better: cool, sunny, spring days. We have discovered that the That-Baby-Is-Cold police have a strong garrisson in Budapest: stern old Hungarian ladies are forever reminding us that Ryan needs heavy boots to, say, have breakfast in the hotel cafe, or that Ryan must have a hat even if she is wrapped up and enclosed in the Moby Wrap. We smile and nod a lot.

Anyway, here is Ryan being cheerful in the morning in Krakow before we left:

Imagine our surprise a couple of days ago when we woke up in Krakow and it was… snowing! It wasn’t all that cold; close to 40F, but it was snowing pretty heavily. Being of hearty Canadian stock, Laura and I were undeterred and went out stomping around. Here are Laura and Ryan on the main square in Krakow: