Hello! It's Been A While!

Some new photos: The BBB and her Uncle Stu ...

Eating paper ...

The Brooklyn Baby Mama, The Brooklyn Baby Baby and a very hairy man.

Man, almighty, ever have weeks in a row where you just don't get a break? It's been like that in New Brooklyn Baby Manor. The move was a little over a month ago, the job is crazy busy, people are getting laid off all over the place (in general not specifically at my job) we have lead paint related issues that I'm not all that comfortable talking about here, and I live in Poland.

Okay, so the last point is not specifically true, but sometimes it feels that way. Ocean Parkway is the "real Brooklyn" in the sense that almost no one speaks English as their first language. It's kind of funny that that is what marks someplace as authentic to us newcomers to the neighborhood.

So let's talk about the Brooklyn Baby Baby then, okay?

Things are coming along well in this neck of the woods. Stella is now like 23 pounds. She's a big girl for her age, and she's starting the rudiments of crawling. She kind of pushes herself backwards, so it's the opposite of forward movement, but she's starting to get there. She also rolls herself onto her belly or side to sleep. First we were scared about this, but now she's been doing it long enough where we are more comfortable with it.

She's also starting to talk. Her first word, I am proud to say, was "dada," although she's since branched out into "mama" and "nee-nee." Nee-nee is her all purpose term for boob feeding. She'll get upset, start crying and then you'll hear a plaintive refrain: "nee-nee." It's adorable. Or, as Randi, the Brooklyn Baby Mama says, it would be adorable if she didn't say it "all the freakin' time!"

Seriously, this girl is a total boob adict. She still nurses all day, and for long stretches of time. She's supposed to suck for like five minutes, but does it for half an hour at a time. She's just always hungry, or she's simply addicted to the closeness. She's even started sucking on my arm, god knows why.

Another new thing happens when I get home at night. Nine times out of ten she's crying, and Randi can't do a whole lot to get her to sleep. So I go into the darkened bedroom, and lie down with her, and she rolls herself into my side, buries her face in my shirt and THEN goes to sleep. It's adorable, but I'd be lying if I told you I understood it. I guess she just like some dad time. Often I will go do to sleep, too, when this happens. Being a parent just keeps getting more and more singular all the time.

Other baby related highlights? Well, she sleeps a whole lot better than she did two or or three months ago. Those endless, sleepless nights that turned into weeks that turned into months that turned into my entire life are now mostly over. She still wakes up a few times during the night, most nights, but often after she's done eating her midnight snack I can put her back in her pack and play (a portable crib, for those of you who aren't toting rugrats just yet), and she'll actually roll over and go back to sleep.

Yes, this means she still sleeps in our bedroom. I know this is probably bad. We have a big, beautiful bedroom set up for her, but we still sleep in the same bedroom. The logical reason is because she still wakes up so much, so it's a shorter walk. But also I think it's that we're not totally ready for the seperation just yet. She might be, but I guess we aren't. Her crib, which is lovely, and a total bitch to assemble (and I did it TWICE) sits in her bedroom, holding stuffed animals, but no Brooklyn babies.

I guess that's my life right now. It's exhausting, and very focused on the child. I haven't written all that much (as most of you can see), I haven't played all that much music, I haven't done a lot of things that I used to take for granted. But I feel it hasn't been wasted effort, because the energy has gone into Stella. She deserves it.