She DID NOT WANT To Have Her Picture Taken

The BabyGirl and now Bright Eyes as well have both been so blessed by many wonderful gifts from friends and family members. I think the BabyGirl was a year old before i had to buy her any clothes. Gammer and Granny in particular have kept our girls very well dressed, and we are so thankful. It was especially helpful last fall, when money was so tight. The BabyGirl would not have had any clothes had we not received so many generous and loving gifts.

Early in the BabyGirl's life, i made a special effort to take pictures of her in the outfits that Gammer and Granny sent. They live far away and do not have opportunity to see how cute she is in their clothes. Well then i really dropped the ball while i was pregnant, and have been trying to get in the habit again. Except, now the BabyGirl has a mind of her own. She does not always want her picture taken:

It was really very tragic, because she liked that dress so much and really enjoyed wearing it. My photo efforts simply caught her at a bad time. We had gone to McDonald's with the Three Brothers after church. An hour of running around in the play place was a little more excitement than she could handle. She was none too thrilled when it was time to leave, and she was none too thrilled that it was naptime as soon as we got home. So we tried again:

Nope, still doesn't like it. Therefore i am instituting a new method. I'll take a picture of the clothes themselves so that we can all remember who sent them. And if i get a picture of the clothes actually being worn, the it's a huge bonus! But if not, oh well, c'est la vie. Here's our first batch:

 

Cute clothes from Granny! The gray shirt on the right, the one that says "Star," is her current favorite. She wears it every day. Fortunately, i got a picture! This is a bonus feature because she's wearing a shirt from Granny while opening a present from Aunt Kay:

 

 

Tune in next time for First Christmas Bib, and if we're lucky we'll also have some Christmas Minions!

 

Bright Eyes Speaks Her Mind

Bright Eyes is now four months old! Thankfully, she seems to be understanding life a lot better now. She has become more mellow and predictable during the day. However, she's still wild and crazy at night.

She had her four month checkup this week, and the verdict was: healthy with a touch of reflux. They said she was a very fine specimen of a baby girl. Her favorite activities currently are sucking on her hands, wiggling and watching her big sister. She devotes 100% of her wakeful moments to the pursuit of sucking her thumb. She's not quite there yet, and she will do nothing else until she masters it. This means that she's a big drooly mess all day long. She used to go through multiple outfits a day due to spitting up; now she goes through clothes because of the drool. Nonetheless, she's adorable and we're glad that she is ours!



Sucking on her hands, of course

 

Smiling, but with a finger in her mouth

 

Big smile

She's definitely been making herself heard recently. Being a person naturally given to extremes, she likes to be as loud and shrill as she can. It gives her great satisfaction to make a lot of high-pitched noise:

Making a Difference: The Professor

By now you have all seen this on facebook, but i want to preserve it for posterity so i'm posting it here too:

The Professor was featured in our local newspaper! A colleague jokingly commented to him, "When i saw your name and picture in the paper, i got really worried! It's usually a bad sign to have your picture in the news!"

Thankfully, The Professor has not become a mass murderer. Instead he is inspiring his students to change the world. Every semester he has his Ethics classes complete an assignment in which they perform an ethical deed. The results range from tear-jerking to pathetic. While one student spent a day helping a man with Multiple Sclerosis, another decided to smile at each person they saw while out walking.

When this article was published, The Professor was the big man on campus for a day. Tons of faculty and staff that he didn't even know gave him their congratulations. It generated a lot of dialogue about ethical actions. The janitor who cleans his office told him that she and her husband had a long discussion about the article and enjoyed coming up with ideas for good deeds they would do if they were in his class.

It really has been neat to see how this class project has changed the perspectives of many of his students. Now through the article, even more people have been challenged to meet the needs around them.


College ethics class asks students to test impact of acting ethically
Updated: 24 November 2012 | 4:23 pm

For three semesters, K***** College instructor "The Professor" has charged his ethics students to do something they would consider ethically right.

The Professor, a philosophy instructor on the Cornstalk campus, said he felt what he had been assigning in the past was too much memorization and “too much on the objective knowledge instead of really trying to see the impact, not just theoretically, but in their lives.”

The ethics project, which is 10 percent of the students’ grades, could be something large or small, but it had to be something they wouldn’t have done otherwise, without the assignment.

About 30 students in The Professor’s ethics classes last fall and last spring and about 25 students this fall semester took those parameters and returned with projects that inspired their teacher, with stories of helping elderly neighbors, picking up trash in the park and donating time to charities.

“I think much of what I see from the students is very encouraging, very inspiring,” he said. “It definitely confirms to me that there’s value in this kind of project.”

One student volunteered to help arrange 500 vases of flowers to be delivered to cancer patients. Another student reported she could see and hear how grateful an elderly couple was after she anonymously paid for their dinner at the Olive Garden. A Cornstalk City student last fall, Boussina, taught her friend, a Sudanese immigrant like herself, how to drive so she could find a job.

Heather wanted to do something long-lasting for her ethics project. Heather, 24, is a first-year K****** student studying horticulture.

She signed up for the bone marrow donor registry for her project this fall. And because getting on the donor list took a little longer than she expected, she also donated blood, which she wrote about for the class.

“I wanted to do something a little above and beyond,” Heather said. “Everyone is getting so apathetic. I think the ethics project is a great way to get people off their couches and off their stupid cellphones and into the community. I was pretty excited about it.”

Heather also had a cousin who had leukemia and needed a bone-marrow transplant, so she thought joining the donor list “was like paying it forward.”

For her project last spring semester, Stephanie found an elderly man seeking assistance with home chores on the website Craigslist, after his son was hospitalized and could no longer help him. She enlisted some of her friends and they helped the man with his yard, house cleaning and walking his dog. The man offered to pay them, which they declined. At the end of her paper, Stephanie wrote that the man was so happy and grateful.

“He said he was glad to see there were actually genuine, caring people left in the world, as he had almost given up hope,” she wrote.

The assignment, The Professor said, was inspired in part by Aristotle.

“I hope that this assignment helps students to live well and also, by extension, to benefit the surrounding community,” he said.
 

Posthumous Blogging: Who Wears the Crown?

Here is a story from sometime in July:

The BabyGirl's night-night song is "Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus." We have sung that song for her bedtime since she was about 4 months old. She knows it by heart. My dad even commented that she knows verses that he and my mom don't even know.

Back in April, the BabyGirl and i made a trip to visit my parents. She has a very difficult time sleeping in new environments. One night while we were there, i put her down for bed and then my mom and i needed to run out to the grocery. My dad was on BabyGirl duty. I told him that if she woke up, he should hold her with her head on his shoulder and sing Tis So Sweet.

Well sure enough, she woke up. He followed instructions and held her while singing her song. He tried to put her back in bed; it was a no-go. Like trying to put a cat in the bathtub, she resisted gravity. He sang it again; she still wouldn't go down. At this point he was bored of that song and decided to sing something else. She jerked her head up from his shoulder and glared at him with a look that said, "You are breaking protocol and i won't stand for it." He quickly resumed singing Tis So Sweet, and she rested her head back on his shoulder.

By the time she was two years and a few months old, however, she also got bored of Tis So Sweet. One day during naptime i decided to sing "What Wondrous Love Is This." She loved it! She's got quite a knack for picking up new songs. After two naptimes' worth of singing it, she knew most of the words to the first verse. (Even though she has no idea what a "soul" is.) Then she turned her attention to one of the other verses:

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down
When I was sinking down, sinking down
When I ws sinking down, beneath God's righteous frown,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul, for my soul.
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.

When i got to the part about the crown, she lifted her head from my shoulder and said enthusiastically, "A crown like a princess wears!" She was so pleased to have picked up on a word she knew.

I said, "You're right; a princess does wear a crown! And Jesus has a crown also."

Whoa, whoa, wait a second there Mama. She looked at me with pity for my ignorance. You see, she knows A LOT about Jesus. She has her Jesus Storybook Bible practically memorized. There was a stretch of time when she refused to get out of bed in the morning until she'd read her Bible (pretty convicting for me, actually). She flips through the pages and names each character: that's Daniel! that's Zaccheus! that's Saul!

But her favorite picture by far is Jesus with the children. She frequently requests it. "Want to see Jesus and boy and girl!" After multiple experiences of flipping through the entire Bible to find that page (well okay, flipping through the gospels. It's obviously not in the Old Testament), we finally committed it to memory. Page 225.

Incidentally, she also knows a good deal about princesses, thanks to my sister's gift of the book The Princess Primer. It is filled with all sorts of useful information, from styles of ballgowns to how to tell a good prince from a bad prince to the proper way to curtsy.

As she looked at me, i could see her mentally filing through all the pictures of Jesus in her Bible and comparing them to the pictures in the princess book:

With her analysis complete, she felt qualified to inform me: "No Mama, Jesus has no crown."

There was no arguing with her. She had evidence.

One day we will spend a little more time reading Revelation, where Jesus kicks butt and takes names. But for now, she sees Jesus as a familiar friend who invites you to sit on His lap and play.

I think that's exactly how it should be.
 

Silly Songs With Mama

I love hearing the songs that other mamas invent for their babies. Making up baby songs is so much fun! My sister Kay and my friend Laura are real professionals when it comes to baby songs. Kay has a whole anthology of songs on YouTube. My favorites include "Bath Day" and "Miss Eliz She Is the Shiz".

I remember one year on a church women's retreat, a couple of people were sitting around chatting with Clare Adella about her singer\songwriter career. I chimed in, "Laura is a songwriter too!" Everyone gave a surprised facial expression, thinking, "Really? I know Laura pretty well, how did i not hear about this?"

Laura said enthusiastically, "Oh yes, i write songs all the time!"

I exclaimed, "Sing the one about 'He likes to burp and eat potatoes!'"

She then entertained us with a rousing rendition of "He Likes To Burp and Eat Potatoes".

Our family's songs may not be as exciting as Kay and Laura's, but i would like to record them for posterity, so here you have a few of our favorites:

Who's My Baby Muffin Pie
to the tune of Camptown Races

Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl, BabyGirl!
Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl Alaina!
She's my muffin pie,
She's so very sweet.
Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl Alaina!


Very Hungry Girl
to the tune of La Cucaracha

Oh my Bright Eyes, she is so pretty
She's a very hungry girl
Oh my Bright Eyes, she is so pretty
She's a very hungry girl
We need to feed her; we need to smooch her
She's a very hungry girl
We need to feed her; we need to smooch her
She's a very hungry girl!

Carseat Song
Written by The Professor and BabyGirl
To the tune of Rockabye Baby

Rockabye Bright Eyes in your carseat
We will go driving til you're asleep
Then you will wake up and you'll be fed
And then we will lay you down in your bed


Bright Eyes' Sleeping Song
to the tune of the chorus of Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

Bright Eyes, Bright Eyes
Why do you wake up
Eightteen million times a night?
Bright Eyes, Bright Eyes
O! My Bright Eyes -
When will you start sleeping right?


When it comes to real songs, here is one of the best for little girls:

Posthumous Blogging: Election Day

When Emily Dickinson died, her sister found hundreds of poems in her room. When JRR Tolkein died, his son published the Unfinished Tales. When i die, there will be drafts of half-written blog posts queued up in my post list.

It's hard to write a story to completion these days. Someone mentioned National Novel Writing Month and i thought, "Man, a whole novel! I can't even write a whole blog post!" So under the inspiration of NaNoWriMo, I'm attempting to publish several of my half-written stories. This means that the first 75% will be well-written, but the last 25% will be mediocre. The conclusion of a story is the most important part, but most of the time i can't remember where i was going with some of these posts. We'll start with one a little more recent: Tuesday, November 6. Also known as Election Day.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
On Monday morning I was laying on the couch surrounded by crumped tissues, cough drops, and peppermint tea when the doorbell rang. I was reluctant to answer the door due to my extremely haggard and dishevelled appearance. However, Bright Eyes had just fallen asleep and i was not interested in hearing the doorbell ring a second time.

A very nice looking woman in a cute green scarf introduced herself. She was a representative of my policital party who had come to remind me to vote. Vote, oh my gosh! I had totally forgotten!

She looked at me like an alien from another galaxy. We live in a swing state. It is not possible to forget the election, even if you wanted to. This election is so ever-present that is makes even young children cry.

It wasn't that i had forgotten that there is an election. I had not forgotten that Tuesday was voting day. I just didn't realize that Tuesday was taking place TOMORROW. My life was a blur of countless days of fevers, coughing, sneezing and runny noses. During the nights i collapsed into bed for a few minutes of tossing, turning, coughing and sinus pressure before having to get back up to intervene with either a sick\crying girl or a hungry\crying baby.

If the green scarf lady had not come, it is very likely i would not have voted. And for once my vote might actually count! In the Big City, my vote never mattered. I diligently voted anyway, but nobody i voted for ever won.

When Tuesday, which was tomorrow, arrived i stubbornly got all of our cranky, snot-nosed selves ready go vote. I told the BabyGirl how wonderful voting is and that many people in the world are not able to vote and we're so excited to go vote.

She of course had no idea what voting is, but i made it sound like a lot of fun so she was willing to give it a shot.

It was cold. It was raining. We drove to the polling place and started the Unloading Sequence: remove Bright Eyes from carseat, insert Bright Eyes into baby wearing apparatus, release BabyGirl from carseat, wait TEN YEARS for her to climb out of the car, shut the door, "hold my hand," "No! Want to walk MYSELF!" "We are in a parking lot and you must hold my hand," "Fine," look left then right then left again, okay safe to cross.

We marched up to the nice old lady at the table and proudly presented my license. She looked through the book. She looked through the book again. She couldn't find me.

I am a registered voter. I have voted at that location before. It is the location printed on my voter registration card. She said they were the location for such-and-such street through 22nd street. I live on 22nd street.

She looked again, i was not in there.

Meanwhile the other white-haired ladies working the election were talking amongst themselves about the BabyGirl's beautiful auburn hair.

She asked, "Do you live on the east side of 22nd?"

Yes i do.

"Ooooohhhh. Well in that case you don't vote here."

I looked at her with the defeat. Does she know how difficult it is to do to the Unloading Sequence in the cold rain? Is she really cold-hearted enough to make me put these younglings back in the car and go somewhere else to do it all over again? She looked at me with apathy. The other ladies, however, mumbled "What a shame! You have little ones!" One of them even offered to babysit while i ran over to the other place real quick. I almost took her up on it, except there must be a clause somewhere in the Election Official job description about not chasing 2-year-olds around the voting area while working.

We turned around to leave, and on the way out the door the BabyGirl spotted a voter holding a cute baby boy. "Baby!!! There's a baby, mama!"

There was an elderly man with a walker waiting at the door for his ride to pick him up. He struck up a one-sided conversation with the BabyGirl. How old are you? You sure are cute. Oh look, you are a big sister! I bet you are a big help to your mama, aren't you?

She just looked at him with big eyes until we were halfway across the parking lot. Then she stopped in her tracks to turn around and yell back, "Hi man! I'm two and a half! We're voting! See you later!"

By this time the lady with the baby had finished voting and was putting him in the car. The BabyGirl yelled to him too, "Bye bye, Baby!!! Bye! BYYYYEEEE!"

Then, while standing in the cold rain, i put The Girl Who Hates Her Carseat into the car and listened to her crying while i strapped in The Girl Who Moves Slower Than Molasses.

We went to voting location #2 and did the Unloading Sequence all over again. The white-haired ladies at this poll loved us too. They gave the BabyGirl an "I voted" sticker. Then they gave one to me, which i handed to her. She told the ladies, "Wait! My Daddy needs a sticker! I need another sticker for my Daddy!"

When i completed my ballot, i got up to take it across the room to the ballot-eating machine. All of a sudden, the BabyGirl wasn't with me anymore. She had wedged herself into the six inch space between two voting booths in order to invade the personal space of a little boy who was there with his grandmother. She is so exuberant about other kids right now, but unforunately it is a little overwhelming for the poor soul that she latches onto. She was trying to strike up a conversation and the little boy was doing his best to avoid eye contact.

I hauled her out the door and we triumphantly headed home. We voted! Going to the polls is half of the fun. The other half is camping out in front of the tv to watch the results come in. Ordinarily we would not be afforded this pleasure; we would have to keep checking the internet to find out how it was going. But thanks to Audrey's digital converter box and The Judge's outdoor antenna, we are people who watch tv! So exciting. We are not even politically inclined, but we had a good time. Except it was kind of anti-climatic that at the point when i had to leave to do Bright Eyes' dreamfeed, there were several states that were "too close to call." And when i got done with the dreamfeed, Obama had won. I thought it was going to drag on through half the night, but then all of a sudden it was over.

It's crazy to think that at the next Presidential election, I won't have to bring the BabyGirl with me to vote because she'll be in first grade!

Halloween Narrative

We had a blast trick-or-treating with the BabyGirl this year! She provided the most hilarious commentary on the other kids' costumes.

During the morning, i explained to her the basic protocol: "After dinner you will put on your costume and we'll go outside. We'll walk around to all the houses and ring the doorbell. Then people will open the door and you'll say, 'Trick or treat!' and . . ."

As i was speaking, she looked at me with an expression of extreme skepticism. Her face said, "What kind of crazy ideas has this woman come up with this time?"

I continued: ". . . they'll give you candy!"

Whoa, wait a minute. "CANDY?!?!?" That sure wiped the skepticism off her face.

"Oh yes, my friend. Candy."

She ran to her room and got her shoes. "Let's go now!"

Since she hadn't been paying attention for all the words that preceeded "candy," she hadn't heard that these events were to take place after dinner. This was a big hardship; she wanted to get the candy right now.

We did, however, go ahead and put on her daytime costume. She was a beautiful fairy princess. Mimi got her the pinkest, ruffliest, shimmeriest dress you could imagine and a pair of pink wings to go with it. She twirled and sashayed and pranced around the house displaying her elegance. She absolutely loved that dress! Unfortunately, she refused to allow me to take her picture, so you are going to have to take my word for it that she was very pretty.

Finally Daddy came home from work and we ate dinner and the long-awaited moment had come. She put on her nighttime costume of a tiger. It was cold out, and the princess dress was not warm enough. She would have had to wear her coat over the dress, in which case no one would see it. So she was a big fluffy tiger:

Bright Eyes got schlepped along for the ride. The only reason she is even halfway giving a smile is because at this point she had no idea what was going on:

We stepped outside right as a big clump of kids walked by. The BabyGirl was really excited now. "Girls!!!"

The trick-or-treating on our street is very profitable. Everyone else besides us is retired seniors who love having cute little kids come to their doors. The BabyGirl was a big hit! For the first few houses she was unsure of what was happening, but then she got the hang of it.

There was a boy with his dad who happened to be going at the same pace as us. We were about 30 seconds ahead of them, such that as we turned around to leave a house, they were walking up. This happened for many consecutive houses. The trouble, though, was that the boy's costume made the BabyGirl VERY nervous. I don't know if i can describe it very well. He was wearing all black, and his shirt had a green LED light-up outline of a body. His face was covered also and had the outline of big creepy eyes. Kind of like the standard alien face but not exactly.

The 4 of us were walking on the sidewalk when the boy and his dad passed us. They were understandably walking faster than us. I was in front with The Professor behind holding the BabyGirl's hand. She said, "Get here by me, Mama." She wanted Daddy on one side and Mama on the other to protect her from the alien boy. She kept a very close eye on the boy so she could monitor his movements. He was already at the door of the next house when we walked up. She made it very clear that we would wait for him to move along before we got any closer.

While we were standing a safe distance waiting for him to leave, she began to (very loudly) narrate what he was doing. "That guy is at the door."

"That guy is pressing the button."

"That guy is standing."

"That guy is getting candy."

The boy's dad was standing right next to us and had a good laugh over the BabyGirl's play-by-play. Eventually she said, "What's that guy called?"

Honestly i didn't know what to call his costume. I didn't know if it was a bona-fide character that i wasn't familiar with, or if it was just something he had made up. The boy's dad said, "Glow man." (Note: it was not the same as this. The concept was similar, but the shape was different.)

She resumed her narration. "Glow man is [with concern] walking THIS WAY!" Eek!

We asked her if she wanted to wait a minute to let Glow man get farther ahead. She wholeheartedly said yes. Later we were in proximity again and she said, "I will turn my head. I will not look at him." We affirmed her in her wise choice.

She got very excited when she saw costumes that she recognized. Cat in the hat! Coke can! We had gotten a late start, so we were out after the other small children had gone home and it was mostly older kids.

Then tragically, after we hit the last house and turned to go home, the BabyGirl tripped and fell. She dropped her bucket and candy scattered everywhere. It was so sad! She scraped her hands pretty good. Fortunately we successfully gathered up all the bounty. The Professor carried her home and we all celebrated the fun time we had together.