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My birthday was on Monday, but things being as busy as they were, my mom and I didn’t get around to making a cake until yesterday.  (Although, my mother-in-law did get me a Care Bears cake on Sunday.  Why Care Bears?  Because Care Bears are awesome, duh.)

Rob and I have been moderately obsessed with “Lost” lately, and are coming up on the end of season 2 in the instant Netflix queue.  THAT IS ALL WE’VE SEEN, SO IF ANYONE MENTIONS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS BEYOND EPISODE 21 OF SEASON 2, WE WILL NO LONGER BE FRIENDS.  Ahem, so.  I chose a “Lost” themed birthday cake.  I wanted to play with fondant, which I haven’t done much of, so we decided to recreate the main Dharma logo.  Here’s how it came out:

The lottery numbers are around the sides:

It’s not worthy of Duff Goldman, perhaps, but definitely good enough to devour with the family on Saturday.

Dear Robbie,

I had a bit of a rude awakening this morning.  I babysat a one-year-old for a friend, and that boy was perfectly capable of walking right over to the coffee table – otherwise known as The Place I Store Tiny Things So You Can’t Choke On Them – and popping things into his mouth.  I suddenly realized that we have a long way to go before our house is actually baby-proofed.  No matter, though, because you’re a long way from being really mobile, right?  Oh wait!  The other thing that happened today was that you decided to sit up and crawl for the first time.  Honest to god, I caught you crawling right across the living room floor.  On one hand: Yay, congrats, kid!  On the other hand: Shit.

When I was pregnant with you, I often wondered how you’d be different from your sister once you were here.  Would you be harder to please?  Happier?  More likely to claw and bite my face?  (The answers to those questions are no, about the same, and oh my god, my face hurts.)  One arena in which I was convinced you’d have her beat was in food consumption.  Because, come on, your sister can survive a day on half a chicken nugget and a Cheerio.  Surely, surely, you would be a voracious eater.  The joke, of course, is on me.  Not only do you not eat voraciously, but you are worse than your sister.  How is that even possible?  All this month, whenever we’d put baby food in your mouth, you would make faces suggesting we were trying to feed you carrot-infused dog poo.  I even emailed Awesome Doctor to ask for advice, which I never do because I don’t want to bug her outside of her work hours, and all of her suggestions were ones I’d already tried.  (Except for saying, “[Awesome Doctor] says you must eat this.”  But that didn’t work either.)

So, here I was, at my wit’s end, thinking you were going to have to survive on formula for the rest of your life – which would be WAY expensive in the teenage years, oh my god – and then we had a breakthrough.  I never would have guessed the thing to get you interested in food would be miso soup.  I’d only tried it myself once before.  We were sitting in a sushi restaurant, and you were again refusing your pureed bananas when we decided to give the soup a shot.  For the first time, you were desperate for me to return that spoon to your mouth, and you started fussing when I didn’t do it fast enough.

Last week, Gram, Papa and I took you, Kaylee and your cousins to the zoo, and paused for lunch to eat sandwiches.  Gram held you in her lap while she tried to eat her lunch – with limited success, because every time she raised her sandwich to her mouth, there would be an infant attached to the other end of it.  You got it into your head that you wanted to eat that sandwich, and nothing was going to stop you.  Since then, you’ve also tried soft pretzels, freeze dried apples and icing off a birthday cake, and thought they were all several kinds of awesome.  I guess the lesson here is that you’re not against food – you’re just against that flavorless shit that comes in baby food jars.  So I’ve been adding a little salt and pepper to your meals, and now I can get you to swallow a couple of spoonfuls at each meal.  It’s not much, but it’s progress.  I’m just hoping that, by the time you’re three, you’ll be able to pack away two chicken nuggets in the same day.

You’ve sprouted two cute little teeth since last month, which means your penchant for shoving other people’s digits in your mouth has taken a turn for the painful.  But those teeth add so much character to your smile.  Now, when I come back from the kitchen to find you’ve figured out how to crawl across the living room, and I see you grinning that open-mouthed smile loaded with pride, I can’t help but set aside the panic for my future sanity and smile right back.

I love you, buddy.  I once worried about how our family dynamic would change once you entered the world, but now I can safely say I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Love,

Mommy

I had a great idea for this week’s photo, really. Back in, I dunno, 1998 or so, a picture was taken of me while I was driving my car. It cost me $45, because I was driving my car too fast on my way to work. Naturally, I resolved to keep the photo forever, because why would I throw away such an expensive picture?

That was my one and only speeding ticket, caught by an unmanned speed camera on the busy street that took me from my sad little apartment to my dead-end job, with an expression on my face that clearly said, “I am not looking forward to arriving at my destination.”

It’s not a particularly interesting photo, actually. I sort of wish I’d been singing along with the radio, belting out a Lisa Loeb song or whatever I was listening to at that stage. So when you imagine it, Internet, maybe you could picture it a little differently. Maybe, in your head, I could be flipping off a passing motorist or wolf whistling at a frat boy or sobbing uncontrollably – whatever, as long as it’s better than me staring straight ahead, looking kind of sullen.

I’m asking you to imagine this picture because, well, I can’t find it. I don’t know whether the photo album it’s in is packed away in a closet or if Kaylee picked it up and buried it in the backyard. I almost started pulling boxes out of the closet in my office, but then I realized it’s late on Friday night, and I’m much, much too lazy to do that sort of thing.

Oh wait, I have an idea!!! Here’s the author’s rendition of that photo, which is way better because it has a thought bubble:

Let me give you a moment to marvel at my amazing artistic skill.

Done? Ok.

The reason I’m bringing up this photo is because it was my only moving violation ever, and it didn’t count because I didn’t lose any points on my license and I never even had to explain myself to a cop.

Thus, I’ve always felt completely justified in being a bit judgmental whenever Rob has gotten a speeding ticket. Not that he gets that many, but the four he’s gotten in the time since we met – including one a few weeks ago – seems like a lot compared to my one.

I imagine, with all this gloating I’ve been doing, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I got a speeding ticket today. In a construction zone. Going 11 over the speed limit. Because really, if you’re going to wait sixteen years to get your first real speeding ticket, you might as well do it big.

Lucky for me, the kids were in the back seat and Robbie was screaming his cute little head off – at least, I think that’s why the officer took pity on me. What should have been a $250 fine ended up being $105 because he pretended I was only going nine miles per hour too fast, and didn’t write down the “construction zone” part.

Then he correctly guessed both kids’ ages, told me they were cute and sent me on my way.

A few minutes later, I sent Rob a text reading, “I don’t get to give you a hard time about your ticket now. ”

Damn. I hate it when I lose ammunition. I guess now I’ll just have to settle for being right all the time when we argue.

Yesterday was Kaylee’s surgery, and it went just fine.  The doctor ultimately decided to operate on both eyes so we wouldn’t end up back in this same position two or three months from now, and it only took about half an hour.  The worst part, by far, was the wait beforehand, during which Kaylee got progressively more frightened, especially after the medicine they gave her to calm her down kicked in.  Apparently, it’s difficult for a three-year-old to remain calm when she suddenly and inexplicably loses control of her limbs.

Afterward, she woke up in a bit of a panic to find that she had an IV taped to one arm, a patch taped over one eye and a pulse oximeter taped to her toe — and she tried to remove them all.  So she got more drugs, and there were more enraged tears.  She finally cried herself to sleep in my arms, and shortly after that we were able to go home.  In all, it was a successful but emotionally exhausting day.

The nurses did their best to keep Kaylee calm, pointing out the awesome socks she was getting to wear, encouraging her to watch cartoons, and helping her into the “funny hat” she had to wear to cover her hair.  They even treated Kaylee’s stuffed bear, Bubble Gum, as if she were a patient, too.

She had an ankle band and everything.

Kaylee wasn’t especially impressed.  I guess putting an ID bracelet on a bear doesn’t do much to make a kid feel better about losing the ability to speak coherently, but I appreciated their effort.

Somebody tried the swings at the park last weekend.

And somebody thought they were awesome.

Dear Kaylee,

We are still dealing with your eye lump.  Ugh.  Every morning and every night is devoted to holding a warm compress to your face for as long as you’ll let me — right now you’ll let me sing the ABCs, followed by “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” followed by counting to 15 — and then smearing medicine on it.  It’s looking better, but everyone who sees you still asks what happened to your face.  We took you to McDonald’s over the weekend for ice cream and play time, and you immediately befriended another little girl.  At one point, she took a quick break from playing to run over to her father and say, “There’s something wrong with her eye.  Should we do something?”  I’m really looking forward to the day when strangers are no longer inspired to pity when they look at you.  Probably only slightly less than you are looking forward to that day.

I kind of feel like a bad mom because of that eye, too.  About a week ago, we had random run-ins with two doctors that we hadn’t met before, and both of them commented on your eye “infection.”  At our appointment three weeks ago, the eye doctor said it didn’t seem infected and declined to prescribe antibiotics, so I was convinced you were fine.  Until those doctors made those comments last week.  Then I scrolled through old blog entries, came across this photo and literally gasped with shock.  Because as bad as I thought your eye looked on the day of that appointment, it looked so much worse last week.  How could I not have noticed that?  Here you were, walking around with an obvious infection on your face, and I just missed it.  I called your eye doctor’s office and we got a prescription for amoxicillin to carry us through until your follow-up visit today.  You’ve been on it since Friday, and already your eye looks so much better.  I’m not looking forward to that doctor’s visit, though.  This thing was supposed to be almost cleared up by now, and it’s just not.  I hope the doctor gives it a little more time.  I don’t want the answer to be surgery.

This month has brought with it an increase in jealousy in our house.  Your brother is no longer too little to do every little thing you do, and it’s starting to bug you.  Whenever he gets to try something new, like drinking water from a sippy cup, suddenly you have to do it, too.  I have a feeling you’ll be demanding jars of baby food in the next few weeks, and we’ll be tasked with convincing you that the food you get to eat is way, way better.  The problem with this strategy is that, someday, Robbie will get to eat the way better food, too.  Someday you’ll have to face the reality that Robbie’s going to get to do all the same stuff you do, and you’ll just have to deal with it.  I am not looking forward to the screaming.

You’ve increased your ability to make things up this month, too.  We’ll be hanging out, watching an episode of “The Backyardigans” for the bazillionth time and you’ll launch into a story about how you climbed a ladder and went way up to the sky and jumped and caught a butterfly and saw a pony and ate an ice cream cone, and we just smile and nod and say, “Oh yeah?”  We want to encourage this imaginative streak, especially because I keep reading that all this TV I’m letting you watch is killing your creativity.  (Just imagine how creative you’d be if I didn’t let you watch television.  Good lord, that would be a level of insanity I’m not sure I could deal with.)

You speak so well these days and in such perfect, complete sentences that sometimes I just stare at you in wonder of how far you’ve come.  I pulled an old memory card out of my camera bag over the weekend and used it to take a few pictures before discovering some old photos from two years ago.  Look at this:

And look you now:

In the space of those two years, you have become an opinionated, wonderful, talkative, sweet, surly, crazy, beautiful little monster/princess/angel/devil, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Robbie,

Just last night, your dad and I had a conversation about how you’ve suddenly hit that point in your babyhood when the changes are going to speed up.  A couple of months from now, we’ll look back on pictures of you and marvel that you’ve come so far, so fast that you no longer seem like the same baby.

In the past couple of weeks, you’ve suddenly started babbling.  You seem like you want to tell us something, and you’d really let us have it if you could get the right words out.  Among the random syllables that come out of your mouth are two that make me smile every time: “Mama.”  I really don’t know for sure that you’re saying it on purpose, or whether you are talking about me, but I’ve decided to pretend you’re saying my name each and every time.  You should probably play along, because you’re going to need this credit to your name a couple of years from now when you’ve colored on the walls and I’m contemplating whether to sell you off to the lowest bidder.

This birthday is a big one for you, because it means I finally have the green light to start giving you food that doesn’t taste like total crap.  (We know for sure it tastes terrible, because even your sister won’t eat it.  She’s become a jealous little monkey when it comes to you, and she wants everything you’re having all the time.  Except for the rice cereal.)  When I go grocery shopping later today, I’m going to buy you some baby food and then we’re going to have a little party.  At the end of that party, I’m pretty sure your whole head is going to be covered in pureed peas.  I hope you love it.  I hope you’re not disappointed in the general blandness of the food I’ll be offering you, because I know you have your heart set on eating the things the rest of us have at dinner every night.  When I put you in your high chair in the evenings, you usually fuss until I get you out and put you on my lap.  This is exactly what you’ve been waiting for, because the moment you’re within reach of my plate, you open your mouth like a largemouth bass and dive for my plate.  Your aim is terrible, though, so you haven’t managed to snag a bite of pork chop yet.  Give it time, buddy.  You’ll get there.

You’ve also become the squirmiest little shit I’ve ever met.  Now that you know how to roll over, you won’t stop for anything.  Getting you dressed in the morning is like trying to put a onesie on a toothless, rabid, slippery basset hound puppy.  I’ve tried to get you to understand that you’d be free much faster if you just let me button up your outfit, but you fight me every time.  You’d much rather roll over and stare at the bear on the bumper pad of your crib than hold still for the six seconds I need to get you dressed.  If I were smarter, I’d remember to turn on your mobile, which for some reason captivates you like nothing else (except maybe ceiling fans).  Your dad has referred to your teddy bear mobile as the “Jonas Brothers for babies,” which seems about right.  You do sometimes scream like a preteen girl when we wind it up and it starts playing music.

You’re trying so hard to sit up, but your progress impeded by the fact that what you really want to do is stand.  When I offer you my fingers, you pull yourself up into a seated position, but before you get a chance to practice balancing on your butt for a minute, you pull yourself up onto your feet.  You watch your sister running around the house and jumping off of furniture every day, and I can see you’re aching to join her.  You’ll get there, little buddy, I promise.

We’re having so much fun with you, kiddo.  We can’t wait to see what you do next.

Love,

Mama

This guy, right here:

My nieces had a pool party for their birthday on Saturday, and Robbie got to go swimming for the first time.  He thought it was the BEST. THING. EVER.  He kicked, he laughed, he forgot that he was starving and hadn’t napped.  And after getting out of the pool, he couldn’t take his eyes off the water.

Kaylee, on the other hand, has a love/hate relationship with the swimming pool.  Sometimes she despises the fact that water is wet, and other times she gets adventurous and wants to leap into the deep end.  (Which, for her, is still the shallow end but farther from the stairs.)  On Saturday, she started out in her surly mood, demanding that no one be allowed to take the pool toys into the pool.  But by the end, when she realized that her DADDY! was there and he’s way more adventurous than boring ol’ Mommy, she got into the spirit of things, and she was doing this:

… which I only watched long enough to snap a couple of pictures, for fear that my heart would stop.

Way back in April, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to provide Kaylee with an Abby Cadabby birthday cake, as you may remember. When I finally found an Abby cake pan, Rob and I had a brief text-message conversation that he promptly forgot:

For whatever reason, I decided to take on this mission.  Rob and I love the short-lived TV show “Firefly” and its accompanying movie “Serenity,” so I relished the idea of making a Serenity cake for him.  So I enlisted my mom, and we started brainstorming ideas for how to create a cake that would vaguely resemble the movie’s logo:

My parents came over yesterday and my mom worked on my nieces’ birthday cake — one of them shares Rob’s birthday, and the other’s birthday is a few days earlier — while I worked on Rob’s.  We had grand ideas about airbrushing that didn’t really work out at all, and we couldn’t figure out a way to write “Happy Birthday” in that Serenity-style font, but it could have been worse:

Now, if I could just figure out how to vacuum my floors more than once a month — ok, once every six weeks — I’ll officially achieve Domestic Goddess Status.

Dear Robbie,

Someone asked me how old you were the other day, and her jaw dropped when I said you’ve been around for five whole months.  I really, truly feel like I just woke up the other day and had a baby.  Not a newborn anymore, but one of those kicking, squirming, trying-to-sit-up babies that actually does stuff other than stare at the ceiling fans and cry.

Where have I been?  How did I not notice you’re becoming such a big boy?  I’ve been giving you baths in an infant bathtub since you were born, and just the other night I realized you’re much too long for it now.  When I pour water over your head, it cascades out the sides of the tub.  You’ve love to splash, and you spend your whole bath flailing your legs so much that I end up soaked in bathwater (and pee, because you always go in the bathtub) from the waist down.  It took getting drenched to make me realize that you’ve outgrown this thing.

When Kaylee was a baby, we bought her a jumperoo to help her work off her insane amounts of energy in a confined space.  (Do you know how long I have to wait to go to the bathroom sometimes because I’m too busy entertaining children?  Yes, the jumperoo falls under the category of toys my friend calls “the circle of neglect,” but sometimes your mother needs to pee.)  I’d been thinking you were still too small for it, but once I realized how blind I’ve been about the bathtub, I decided to break out the jumper for you.  I put you in it for the first time the other day, and your face immediately lit up.  The look of wonder in your eyes made me feel like a jerk for having deprived you of the jumper for the past five months, for you were immediately, deeply in love.

At your four-month checkup, Awesome Doctor gave the go-ahead to start giving you rice cereal.  The first time I gave it to you, you were intrigued.  What is this new substance in my mouth? you seemed to wonder. Should I swallow it?  Should I spit it all over my clothes? You settled on swallowing it, and were so caught up in the excitement of the new experience that you didn’t immediately notice rice cereal tastes like ass.  Well, you’ve noticed since then.  You’re reaction nowadays is more like, Why are you torturing me, woman?  Now I shall commence screaming. I’m supposed to start giving it to you twice a day, but I’m not sure I want to.  I’d hate to turn you off eating altogether, right when it’s about to get good.  (Oh, and don’t tell your doctor this, but I did give you a taste of beef broth once, and you thought it was pure awesome.)  Don’t you worry, kid, there’s better food in your future.

We’ve gotten out the high chair and you now sit at the table with us during dinner, and you are captivated by the things we eat.  I’m hopinghopinghoping that means you’ll be a voracious eater, unlike your sister, but I’m pretty sure she tried to steal my French fries when she was your age, too.  Last week I made the mistake of letting you try to drink from my water glass, and now you’re a little ice-water addict.  Except you haven’t figured out you’re supposed to, you know, swallow the water, so both of us end up soaked.  Now I can’t drink anything in front of you or you’ll open your mouth and start flailing your arms in a desperate attempt to will my beverage into your gaping maw.

This month, you’ve also discovered that your sister is super entertaining.  All she has to do is look your way and you start laughing.  I love that the two of you are enjoying each other so much.  And here’s a secret: Your dad and I are enjoying you, too.

Love,

Mommy