Beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah!

Audrey is winding down for the day by driving around the living room in circles, lurching and crashing into walls. Scott made a quiet comparison to my driving, and then looked away fast when I turned to give him my Death Stare. We danced to some Louis Armstrong, and then a little Moby. Now she's babbling a blue streak-- today the new sound of choice is a "th" sound.

But back to this whole topic of driving. I would wish for my daughter that she never drive like I drive, like a nervous, crazy grandma. And that she learn to drive, for heaven's sake, before she's almost 30. I want her to learn while she's still young enough to feel invincible, and to have that confidence tempered by a healthy fear of what will happen if she wrecks mom and dad's car.

Big week coming up: Grandma Jean is visiting and Audrey turns ONE on Wednesday. I plan to post many photos and clever musings. And somehow this week I will find extra time, between the sofa cushions, with all the loose change.

Hippo-bottomus

The final frontier of baby proofing in our house is the kitchen... so many tempting things for the enterprising baby to get into: the recycling, the cabinets that don't yet have kiddie latches on them, the stale cheerios just reachable under the stove. Both of the exits are gated, though, as you can see above. She likes to open and close the gate herself.

Last night she stood on her own for a few moments, clapped with delight, and then fell down. Other new tricks include some more words, like "CAH!" which means "cat," a name applied to all animals, and "MAH!" which I think is "Mom" and is accompanied by smacking sounds. The smacking is either kissing, or an indication that she wants to eat-- I'm not sure which. She also has been known to make the ASL sign for "milk" to indicate me, which makes me feel like a walking, talking Dairy Queen.

Clap. Stomp. Scream. Mark-it-with-a-B.

I'll tell you what: keeping up with this blog is not as easy as it used to be. Until a couple of months ago, I could set Audrey down sometimes and work on my laptop while she played (and until quite recently, playing could be as simple as watching the ceiling fan). Now, if Audrey and the laptop are in the same room, I have to have the laptop held over my head as if I were protecting it from flood waters, because she will get her hands on the power cord or the keys. She loves buttons. And she loves to do what I do, whether that's hand clapping or typing or drinking from a cup.

If having a newborn is like having a sea cucumber for a pet, having a one-year-old is like having a pet chimpanzee. She imitates everything we do, and even though that is evidence of no special brilliance on her part, we like to think it is.

But I have a lot less time to sit quietly and post pictures. Friends with more than one child say that this is totally normal, and that if I ever have a second child, I will have almost no photos of him/her at all.

How not to film a moving subject

If you are prone to motion sickness you might want to skip this video of Audrey on the front porch swing. If I had better material, I'd post it, but I am aware that I've been neglecting to post much of anything at all this month. There is, it turns out, an inversely proportional relationship between the amount of activity of the growing baby and the amount of activity on the baby blog.

Her first birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks. It is astonishing to us that a whole year has passed since we stumbled home from Mt. Auburn hospital and gingerly set her infant car seat down on the kitchen floor and thought, "Well, now what do we do with her?"

When I set her down on the kitchen floor for a moment this morning she rifled through my cookbooks, unplugged my laptop and began to sort through the recycling, all in the span of time it took me to pour a cup of coffee.

Sweater Weather, and a cardigan by Cousin Ruth

Cool fall mornings are finally here, and this beautiful sweater made by our cousin, Ruth, fits Audrey perfectly. Right season, right size-- a trickier combo in children's clothing than I'd realized.

The craftsmanship on this sweater is truly impressive. There's a cable everywhere you look. I wish that when I picked up knitting needles the results looked like this!

From the archives: lessons in marriage

I've been looking at this photo a lot recently as our second anniversary approaches, and thinking about that day on our honeymoon when we donned the blue smurf suits and set out into the unbelievably blue waters of Lake Taupo. Lake Taupo is an old volcano crater, in the middle of the North Island in New Zealand, some twenty miles long (our trip was just a beginners' paddle around a small area near shore). The kayaking guide had given us the "honeymoon kayak," so called because it's-- obviously-- a two seater, but more specifically because piloting the two-seater kayak requires cooperation to get anywhere.

And she wasn't kidding about that. You really can't just climb into the front and decide to do everything your own way. It turns out that once you get away from the secluded inlets around the shore (which in this analogy I guess would be the engagement and the wedding) and get out into the open water, where things can get a bit choppy sometimes (do I have to fill in the analogy here for you? I don't think so) you have to work together, or bad things may happen including capsizing your vessel by hitting a wave sideways, or just spinning yourselves around in circles until you end up in the middle of the lake, which in this case was miles across. We left the first quiet inlet and paddled out into a more open area, still near the shore but the wind was kicking up some pretty good chop. Then we turned our kayaks directly into that wind, and I started paddling frantically and non-productively while Scott, there in the back, tried to compensate for my insane slapping at the water by steering us more calmly and imploring me to please settle down and work with him, for heaven's sake.

It turns out to be a rather accurate picture of us on many days. I am learning to paddle more calmly and to not get so riled up that I end up whacking my partner with my paddle instead of helping him move us along. And Scott continues to bear up with (sometimes almost unbelievable) patience while trying to keep us on course. He also does a screamingly funny impression of my paddling technique-- ask him to show you next time you see him.

And there are days of perfect harmony when we both paddle at the same pace, and the lake is beautiful and there's a gentle wind. And we don't drop our bag with the picnic lunch over the side.

We very much hope to get back to Lake Taupo and try out their three-seater kayak next time. Audrey's Pa Skip is an accomplished kayaker and if she's lucky she will have inherited some ability directly from him.

Book!

Here's a not-so-subtly staged photograph of Audrey reading a book. What she'd really do with a book like this is shred all the pages into a fine julienne, which is why her personal library is all board books. She understands the word "book" and will go and fetch some if prompted. (Yes, I know that only makes her as smart as a below-average dog, but still!) She's a little more interested these days in actually looking at the pages and turning them than she is in simply pulping the whole thing with her gums. I did have to turn her in to the librarian on duty in the children's room at the Lexington library last week when she tore up some end papers, but she was released back into my custody with a gentle warning.

Our nerdy hope is that she will like books as much as we do, but whether that will be as fodder for her growing brain or just as salad remains to be seen.