Oh my heavens, has it been half a year already? My daughter is six months old today.

"Gigi" can roll 360 degrees, sit up with minimal assistance, feed herself a bottle, play peek-a-boo, laugh, babble, and charm the socks off of passersby.

At this stage, she has also begun to notice when Mommy or Daddy is not in the room. Today, Grandma carried the baby around behind me to show her that Mommy still exists when she goes into the next room to fix herself breakfast. "See," she would narrate, "there's Mommy making coffee...and now she goes to the refrigerator and Ooo! She got the butter out...and what's she doing now? Ooo! She got a cup...see, you have to keep an eye on that Mommy, you never know what she'll do next!" Funny, I thought I was the one who was never supposed to leave her unattended.

The good news, I suppose, is that I will have a respite from this stalking in the interim between Grandma's departure and Gigi's learning how to crawl. I expect I'll spend much of that time in the bathroom, enjoying blessed solitude for the last time, at least for the next five years.

I'm getting word that some readers may be having difficulty accessing this page. Sorry about that, blame it on Blogger.

Well aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Oh boy. I could never be an outright atheist, because I see constant evidence of the Ineffable One's existence, manifest in a perverse sense of humor.
Remember how I was going to spend my "vacation" down south resting, recuperating from my cold, and letting the gaggle of relatives spoil the baby?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
What was the highlight of our trip? Gigi's first trip to the emergency room! Yep, the crud that Mommy and Daddy have been fighting off is probably viral pneumonia. Oh, and Gigi also has a urinary tract infection. The 104-degree fever kinda tipped us off that there was a problem over the weekend. The good news is that she is on the road to a full recovery, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine. I will spare you the gory details of the medical intricacies; let it suffice to say that catheters were involved.

We're off! the captain shouted. (Sorry, inside gag, my grandmother used to say it all the time...)
Okay, the Purple Scare household is heading to another Undisclosed Location for a few days. I expect I'll be off-line for the duration. See you next Wednesday.

Well that was fun. Despite my ongoing reign as Queen Lungbunny of Planet Hork, we had a great time with our British visitors this past weekend. We took them out to a game and translated cricket into baseball, which is a lot easier than vice versa. (As much as I enjoy baseball, I can't imagine sitting through a five-day game.) But the outing did little for the recovery of my scratchy throat. Day Seven and I still sound like Lauren Bacall on a respirator.

Geek Milestone: Gigi visited her first national park today. She slept through most of it, however.

A Big Shout-Out From The House of Flying Boogers. Yep, it's family cold time here at Undisclosed Location. Baby Gigi doesn't seem to have it too bad, but it floored Daddy for a few days, and yesterday I woke up sounding like Lauren Bacall. The timing gods are, of course, laughing their blessed keisters off: tomorrow night is Kindly Uncle's birthday party, after which we go to the airport to meet our visitors, who are with us through Tuesday. Wednesday is Daddy's bridge night and Mommy's movie night; Thursday is a baseball game; and Friday we're hopping a plane south so Gigi can meet some great-grandparents. We're back the following Tuesday night for a two-week visit from Grandma.
The good thing about this schedule is that it is very grandparent-intensive: this lets me sleep off my cold for more than one hour at a time while Gigi gets lots of attention.

Gigi's getting very good at rolling over. We're taking her to meet her great-grandfather down south in another week and a half. Woo Hoo!

Deep down, my brain is still in Baltic mode. It's April. I've been driving around with the sunroof cracked for a week now. We took the baby downtown to see the trees in bloom, against a perfect azure sky. Temperatures are in the 60s and 70s.
But I still have trouble putting the snow shovel away.

I sense a great disturbance in the force. They have taken Nature's Perfect Food, i.e., peanut M&Ms, to a place I was not prepared for. Usually I don't have much truck with blockbuster movie promo gimmicks. But this? Peanut M&Ms and dark chocolate are such marvelous things, yet I never dared to contemplate combining the two.
And somebody has to explain to me why Mexico gets its own country site, the U.S. gets its own country side, but the other third of NAFTA doesn't. Fercryinoutloud, Belgium has a site, with a choice of French or Flemish. Don't tell me they can't write Javascript in Quebecois. And if you think Darth Vader as a yellow peanut M&M is the most disturbing thing you've seen this week, you haven't seen the synchronized swimming M&Ms on the Italian site.

On this date five years ago he asked me to marry him. It was a very public proposal, an entirely unexpected one, and one that involved a conspiracy of several seemingly reputable individuals. In the middle of a museum, with high school tour groups surrounding us, I watched him get down on one knee to invite me on this journey of a thousand miles that started with a single "yes".

I had been living with my cat in a one bedroom apartment in the middle of the city, working my keister off at a job that gave me neverending jet lag; I was dating this man for over a year and thinking this was the happiest I had been in a very very long time. I could not have imagined the bewildered awe I would feel today, owning a several-bedroom house in suburbia with a yard bigger than my old downtown apartment, forgetting the feel of a desk beneath my hands and the ubiquitous sound of telephones ringing, and looking down at the pale creature peacefully drinking from my breast, calling her my daughter.

In the words of John Lennon (Peace Be Upon Him), "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." Just because I never expected to be here doesn't mean I'm not glad I made the trip.

A wise man once said, "Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis."

This is not a post males will want to read. You have been warned.
I've been a little cranky of late, and it boils down to three little words: Plugged Milk Duct. (Guys, I told you, you were warned. If you have to ask, you don't want to know.)
This is not my first bump in the road of breastfeeding. Early on, we had "latch-on" problems because I supposedly had "flat nipples". That's hilarious. Nothing about my chest has been flat since I was 11 years old.
So this PMD got me to spend money on specially designed soothing gel packs for achy breasts. Thus, at age 36, for the first time in my life I'm stuffing my bra. Gad-effing-zooks. I am hopeful that this problem will clear up quickly. These things have a way of developing into infections if not treated promptly. I can only begin to imagine how much fun that is.
Fortunately, we're coming up to the six-month mark, at which I had figured I could consider a transition away from nursing. So maybe this whole achy mess is just karma. We'll see.

Today's Excitement: No Plumbing! Yeah, the utility company decided that a sewer refit was in order, so our whole block spent the day (8 a.m. - 8p.m.) with no drinking, no washing, no flushing. But hey, no water, no problem, right? We have vodka!
Okay, I spent waaaay too long in Eastern Europe.
Nah, f'real: I spent the day at a girlfriend's house, and she watched the baby while I went diaper shopping. Whoo hoo, another wild and crazy weekday in suburbia.

MILESTONE! Baby Gigi made her first full 360-degree rollover today. She celebrated by laughing and putting her toes in her mouth. I tell you, this kid is ready for university life: she can sleep till noon, hold her own bottle, belch like a foghorn, barf like Niagra Falls, and babble incoherently. Once we teach her to type, there's no stopping her.

Notes From The Changing Table: My observations of the last five months lead me to several conclusions.
First, that the degree of cooperation from the diaper changee is inversely proportional to the urgency of the diaper change, i.e., when having a slightly damp diaper change, the baby will wriggle and twist and into all sorts of contortions, but when up to its shoulders in diaper gravy, baby will be as docile as tuckered-out puppy.
Second, perhaps in a Darwinian self-preservation strategy, the volume and complexity of cute noises, coos and gurgles emitted by the diaper changee is directly proportional to the volume and complexity of the diaper contents.
Third, new mothers who have inhaled a few too many diaper fumes are wont to use terms like "inversely proportionate" in unusual contexts to remind themselves, when up to their shoulders in their offspring's poop, that they have Bachelors degrees.