radish times

It is a Saturday morning and we are having a family meeting to discuss the holidays. The meeting is going to be over breakfast. Breakfast doesn’t start for another 25 minutes. Therefore, I am waiting for the meeting to eat breakfast. I can tell I am hungry for it gives me great pleasure to think this word while I type it: breakfast, breakfast, breakfast…

It is a funny thing. Now that I am a mother I eat breakfast (breakfast, breakfast, breakfast) at home every morning. In fact, I eat Corn Chex for breakfast (breakfast, breakfast, breakfast) every morning if I can. I no longer like to pick up a bagel for breakfast (breakfast, breakfast, breakfast) on my way to work. I don’t enjoy it. I think that it is a function of how early I have to get up these days. Recently, Katya has been getting up at 6:45 am regardless of what time she goes to bed or how many times she wakes up during the night. I find this greatly depressing for about 10 minutes every morning while I struggle to wake up and wash the night out of my mouth and off my face. Then I greatly enjoy it.

It has several times occurred to me that I could ask Peter to get up early some mornings when Katya wakes up, but every time I am on the verge of doing it, I think of Katya’s big morning smile when I discover myself to her by creeping up to the crib and I can’t give it up, not for more sleep, not for less headaches, not for nothing and not for anything! It’s the smile that is more addictive than caffeine!

As you know, since you can’t stop a baby from growing, Katya is growing, growing, growing. She is 15 lbs now and she has become very adult. She is at just that age when her gaze is intimidating to adults, for she looks straight at you with a serious kind of knowing smile, which says “I can see all that you are trying to hide and it is heavy, very heavy indeed.” No smile breaks the steady weighing up of your soul and your effort cannot distract it.

On the other hand, she also has experiences like this (recorded earlier this week):

A most exciting thing happened for Katya just now. You won’t believe this…. She found the corner of a chair! Yes, really! She is in her walker toodling about the room. Her walker is low enough to fit under the bottom of a black reclining chair we have in our sun room. She toodled her walker right at the chair and then lunged to touch the corner with a look of fierce determination and joy. Right now, she is critically evaluating the chair corner and considering its virtues.

Other news just coming in…. Katya has woken up from her morning nap in an alarmingly expedited fashion. It has been the norm for her to sleep for 2 to 3 hours in the mornings. This morning, she has been asleep less than 40 minutes and I can hear her talking to herself and playing in her crib. For the last five minutes I have been hoping she would fall back asleep, but now such hope is becoming faint indeed. I will have to go to her.

We have just discovered (with great joy) the “Johnny Jump Up” or, better put, KATYA has just discovered the “Johnny Jump Up.” If you don’t know what it is, it is a seat on a spring that attaches to a door frame. The baby sits in the seat and jumps up and down in a springy sort of way. This is the first thing that Katya has EVER done for forty to fifty minutes at a time on her own. This is extremely significant considering that the next best thing doesn’t even last 10 minutes. We put Katya in the Jump Up and discuss dinner, cook dinner, eat dinner, clean up from dinner, talk about how much we liked dinner, plan several other dinners… and whenever we look over, there she is bobbing up and down, and up and down, and up and up and up and down. Sometimes she laughs to herself or coos with pleasure. Other times she just doggedly jumps and jumps and jumps and jumps.

It is kind of eery in way - as if the Jump Up was enchanted to keep her bouncing away into eternity or some kind of baby drug that has her addicted. Right now she has been jumping for about 45 minutes and I am getting a little edgy about it. She is kind of whimpering as if she would like to stop but doesn’t know how.

There are so many new things going on. Katya is watching her hands all the time now. She stares as them as she waves her fingers in the air and then lays them over her face. As she is trying to turn over, she will stop for a moment to examine her hand, as if it surprises her to see it there at that moment. She holds her hands in front of her watching as they clasp and unclasp each other.

She seems to be very carefully teaching herself to turn over onto her stomach. She never gets crazy with it, flinging herself into a position she cannot get out of. She slowly and carefully turns herself on her side, lays there for several minutes testing the air with her foot as if checking how far it is ok to move that leg. Then she moves it forward slowly, rests a little closer to turning over, and then drops it back and lays on her back again. She has been doing this for weeks now.

While she cannot turnover yet and cannot sit up, she seems to be advancing rapidly towards standing. Today she stood by herself resting her back on the side of Peter’s desk for long enough for him to take two pictures.