Magrilless

The household chefs, hard at work in the kitchen making dinner.

Over the weekend, the three of us walked up to our local plant nursery for some pretty flowers to go on top of our upside down tomato buckets. It was quite a lovely day — a nice temperature, rain just on the verge of beginning, Eliza sole princess for an entire walk. Bill had Maggie in the front carrier; I had bright six-packs of plants over my shoulder; life is fairly idyllic.

Then Bill stops suddenly and gasps and makes a frantic swatting gesture with one arm. Maggie’s eyes are big with surprise. “A bee. It flew right at her face. I hit it,” says Bill while contorting the front carrier around as best he can to look at Maggie’s face. “It was going right under her hat brim.” I good-naturedly walked over to reassure Bill that the Mags is fine. Maggie is mildly interested in the goings-on.

In the course of my “humoring you” investigation, I spot the bee sandwiched between Maggie and the front carrier, just inside her sleeve. “It’s still there!” I say, pointing. “Agh!” says Bill frantically moving in to flick it away. Except he flicks it further down her shirt.

Now we have to quickly remove Maggie from the front carrier (unsnap, unsnap, unsnap, lift), open up her onesie from the bottom (unsnap, unsnap, unsnap, lift), and find the little bugger wherever he’s set up temporary residence. He was just on top of her diaper, dead, probably squished to death with all the activity. And a quick check of Mags revealed no blossoming bites. Later that evening I found the bee’s stinger on her sleeve. I think he was turned around the wrong way and might have tried to sting the front carrier. Poor guy.

It was all very exciting. And Maggie just sort of had this expression on her face like “What are we doing now? I’m learning. Oh, interesting.” Which is probably the way it should be: children have no idea that a situation is on the verge of desperate while the parents’ hearts are pounding. They come away thinking, “Oh, what are we doing next? Something else interesting?”

Happy happy!

Maggie is a great eater. Just like a little birdy she opens her mouth after she swallows each bite. She’s very neat too; mostly everything that’s meant to go in her mouth actually does. And she fairly well understands that her high chair is an exciting culinary place to be.

This is all assuming, of course, that the food in question is orange. Boy, this kid’s gonna have great eyesight. Carrots, squash, peaches — these go down like beer at a Superbowl party. Pears, bananas, and apples are also hits. Sweets for the sweet, I guess.

Green stuff has been less successful. She did eat avocados, but it was obvious she wasn’t happy about it. And when I tried the store-bought green beans, she would also eat those (this was before she’d tried peaches, carrots, pears, or apples). When I cooked green beans and pureed them for her (since the store-bought test was positive), she actually made herself gag on the second bite. So much for Momma’s home cookin. (Going back to brand-name baby food has not remedied this, by the way. I guess she’s been momentarily spoiled by all the sweeter fruity things.)

She’s very interested in the eating thing now. The other day, after watching us wholly enjoy what we were eating at the table, she opened her mouth wide and looked at Bill expectantly. Unfortunately, we were eating popcorn and so she wasn’t allowed any. That was a bit sad. But I think she’ll be an adventurous eater when she has the opportunity to try whatever she wants. In the meantime, the act of feeding her “real” food is satisfying. It’s as if it turns her from a completely dependent creature into an actual human. Which may sound terrible coming from her own mother, but there it is. At least I’m coming around.

Maggie loves the water. Bath time is always fun; she always enjoys splish-splashing around in her tub. And she has this super tub like the Jetson’s might have. There’s a thermometer to read the temperature as the water flows from the faucet. From that trough it flows to a basin which overflows into the tub where baby is sitting. And there are plugholes in the tub so that as the clean warm water is flowing in, dirty cold water is flowing out into the sink.

So I thought, why don’t we put her little tub in the big person’s tub (which is, after all, where baths occur) and then we can bathe at the same time. Maggie in her tub tub, me in the shower. Only one problem with that. (No, it’s not what you’re thinking. The shower head pipes are different than the tub pipes, so we can in fact have on both the shower and the faucet at the same time.) The problem is that to have her little tub refreshing itself, it needs to be under the faucet with Mags facing the wall while I’m in the same end of the tub under the shower. I have heretofore been sliding her tub to the wrong end and just periodically pouring water from a cup into her tub. Which is fine.

Until I did this.

Bendy straws, three wide and six long, fit up the faucet and to her little tub where she can lounge and flap around safely while I’m at the right end of the tub showering. We’re facing each other this way too so she can be amazed at Mommy’s hair turning white suddenly and then miraculously back to normal. Wax keeps the joints of the straws sealed and the thermometer keeps the water the correct temperature so the wax doesn’t melt. Not an engineer, indeed!