u8ashark

No, it’s not the Pillsbury Dough Boy. No, it’s not Popeye. It’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow Baby!

Dearest [Nugget],  I am missing you so much!  I had so much fun with you on your first visit to Nana’s house.  You bring me so much joy!  You are the most precious angel baby in the world.  I love you so much!  You are such a sweetheart!  There is no way to tell you how much I love you, and how I treasure the time that I am able to spend with you.  I want to spend more time with you than my life allows me right now, but Nana is working real hard to change that.  [K.] and [W.] thought that you were the most beautiful baby they had ever seen!  They loved you so much.  They enjoyed talking,  and laughing with you, and you laughing back at them!  You have so much personality!  Aunt A. was so happy to see you too!  We think you look so much like Aunt A. when she was a baby, but with your daddy’s mouth.  When you are asleep though, you look just like your mommy! When you are laughing, you look just like your daddy did when I used to play with him, and talk to him.  Your daddy was a very good baby just like you!  He laughed all the time, and he always woke up smiling just like you do!  He would play for hours, smiling and talking with his toys, and he would laugh at the TV just like you do!  You are so funny when you get tickled!  I could eat you up!  I just cannot stop kissing you!  You have the sweetest chubbiest cheeks!  I call you chops!  I just keep seeing your sweet face in my mind with that beautiful smile, and it makes Nana smile!  Well I guess I will go for now, and try to send you this electronic letter!  Nana is not very handy with the computer stuff!  When you start talking, maybe you can give Nana some lessons on using it!  Let’s just hope Nana doesn’t erase it before I can send it!  I love you soooooooooooooooo very much!!!!!!!!!!

See you soon my love!

Your Nana

Dear Nugget,

If momma were required to to sum up this past month by only using a title taken from classical literature, she would have to choose Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For the first two weeks of the month you were Mr. Hyde. What happened to momma’s angel baby? You wouldn’t nap, you wouldn’t sleep. You woke up EVERY HALF HOUR in the night. You screamed directly into momma’s eardrums when we’d go somewhere in the car. If you weren’t actively screaming you were in a constant state of fussiness and irritability. You were obviously in distress and momma had no idea how to alleviate your trouble. None of the regular tricks worked. Nothing momma did would soothe you: rocking, swaddling, Tylenol, toys, Baby Einstein, naps, nothing. At one point in your screaming momma actually pulled your lips back to see if a full set of teeth had appeared in your mouth but everything looked normal in there as well. Then, just as out of nowhere it began, it ended, and you we’re momma’s angel baby again — a return to Dr. Jekyll. In fact, as if to make up for the two weeks of living hell, you became the extra sweetest, even sometimes snuggly baby. Oh, sweetheart. When you would reach your arms out to momma she knew you wanted her to pick you up and then, oh joy, you would lay your head down on momma’s shoulder! Oh oh oh, momma is tempted to say that the two weeks of HELLONEARTH (TM) were worth it just for those snuggles but she won’t get all crazy on you and go that far. No, not today.

Somewhere around the middle of the second Dr. Jekyll week, three new teeth broke through your gums and everything made sense. Ahhhhh. Teething. Ahhhhhh. Made sense. But why, kiddo, do you feel like you have to cut three of them at the same time? Three of them. At the same time. This is the same deal you had with your first three teeth and if we follow the same pattern again, then your fourth (or in this case the 8th) is not far behind. I realized at the time of the Mr. Hyde weeks that your distress could have been teething but when I looked inside your mouth (it was nearly always open) there was no evidence. No teeth. No bruising. No evidence. You had a completely wiped clean crime scene in there kiddo. You would have given Scotland Yard a run for its money the evidence was hidden so well. Any mother who feels guilt over having to go back to work and leave their baby in someone else’s care can at minimum take comfort in the fact that sometimes one of the benefits of going to work is you’re not the one having to endure the emotionally and physically painful to watch screaming fits. It’s someone else’s eardrums being assaulted. I know it doesn’t seem like much but take what you can.

Your new favorite activity is pushing the dining room chairs across the hardwoods. You take a chair as far as it can go in one direction and then when you run into a wall or another piece of furniture, momma comes to turn everything around and you push the chair back across the hardwoods to the other side of the house. If you get stuck on something along the way you’ll grunt and tug till you get the chair free or until all hope is lost and momma must rescue you. Apparently this is post-cruising/pre-walking behavior. We’ll see about that. You seem very happy just to push for now although we do see you sometimes let go and balance only for a nanosecond while you switch hands.

You weren’t that into the Baby Einstein Vivaldi Four Seasons DVD and Baby Neptune was just ”eah” for you as well. However, you just love Baby MacDonald and Baby Galileo. They are your new baby pacifiers. You love to eat yellow squash and zucchini is good too. Your all time favorite food, however, is Cheerios. You get excited just seeing the yellow box. Who knew when momma was a kid, a not so long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, that Cheerios would become the all time favorite baby food of your generation. This is the best part, kiddo, this is the best part! You can feed them to yourself. You can pick up individual Cheerios off the tray and put them into your mouth. You can self feed with Cheerios. Cheerios are the new black. Momma realized one day when you were feeding them to yourself, that everything momma has done with you concerning food thus far has been leading up to this very fact — self sufficiency in food. Now we just have to get you to learn how to take them off the shelf by yourself and you’ll be good.

Love,
Momma

Jeff Gordon has been in my garage all week; my husband brought him home as a stray, like a lost puppy or something. Apparently Jeff Gordon had been evicted and needed a new home. When I heard my husband’s SUV pull into the driveway two Fridays ago I looked out the second story window and I couldn’t see his car. I could only see Jeff Gordon strapped to the roof. Jeff is that big. As big as a garage door. We had to move my car to get Jeff all settled in and he’s been living there ever since. You can see the reflection of my garage windows on Jeff’s face. Not that I knew who Jeff was when My husband brought him home or anything; his existance and GREAT IMPORTANCE TO SOCIETY was later explained to me by multiple people. So now I know. Something to do with cars. And the number 24. Or was it 23? Anyway Jeff, the man of great importance, no longer has to live in my garage. Over the weekend he went to go live on a farm — in the pool room of a farm to be specific. It’s a farm where men as important as himself can go when they can’t live in my garage anymore.

No, I don’t have any more Jeff Gordons; please stop asking.

[Note: an astute reader pointed out that I'd mispelled Jeff's last name and god forbid I should malign the name of one so important to society. Everything has now been corrected and we can all go back to our regular scheduled program.]