The Breezeway Zoo
2006-01-23, 15:57

It's Monday, and I thought I'd take advantage of having some awareness of my surroundings today by sneaking in some sort of coherent entry. H and I have learned a valuable lesson about sleep this month, courtesy the baby. Last week, from Tuesday to Friday (three nights), I think I managed to get a total of eight hours of sleep. I have some understanding now of the concept of sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

Thank goodness, whatever issue Laurana has been having over the last couple of weeks has tapered off over the weekend, because she's basically slept through the night since Friday. We're still not sure what the problem is. It might be teething, though the normal signs aren't there, other than a slight fever she had on Tuesday. It might be grieving, which is considered to be normal for her age, coming to fully accept that what she knew as an infant is now totally, irreversibly gone, and that had been freaking her out, especially at bedtime when normality is a must.

And now that see seems past this (at least for the time being), Laurana's been bonding to us all that much more. She's been naming our family roles more often, and she has a name for herself now, rather than calling herself Baby - she now points to herself and says, "Na!" And she's working on clearer names for her sister and brother, too. All in all, it seems like she's feeling more like a part of our family. It's amazing to watch the process happen before your eyes. Sometimes you can just see in her eyes that something important has just dawned on her, changing her world view.

Our intercommunication is on the rise, too. Laurana's using yes and no (in the form of head nods and shakes) to basic questions almost constantly now, and in ways that actually make sense. Does she want some juice? She nods Yes, and then she actually wants it! It's not just for the novelty of nodding to entertain her parents. How cool is that? We're continually astounded by how well she comprehends what we're saying, especially when you consider that she's only been hearing English for half her short life. On Saturday, she was standing up holding onto the coffee table and looking stressed out by all the standing she'd been doing all afternoon, I asked her, "Do you want to chill out on your Dora couch and look at a book?" She nodded, and then promptly dropped to her butt, crawled over to her couch, grabbed a board book and lay down to peruse. That was three concepts all in one question, and she nailed the whole concept without blinking. Yowza.

Laurana's love for green beans has risen to disturbing levels. Sure, kids can pick some interesting favorite foods (The Boy's was rice & black beans for a good long time, for instance), but really, green beans? We went to the grocery store yesterday, and when we got a bag of frozen beans, she insisted on holding the bag while she sat in the kid seat of the cart for the rest of our trip through the store. She was even trying to open the bag to get her some, not that I think she would have been pleased with the temperature once she got one in her mouth.

Yesterday evening brought us a bit of excitement. H was in the process of taking the dog out for an evening pee, and right after she goes out the back door and into the breezeway, I hear snarling from the dog and a frantic, "Please come help me!" from H (I used names, incase you might be confused as to who might have been doing the snarling and who the talking). I run over to the door to see the dog tussling with a decent-sized raccoon in our breezeway. We have a very old screen door with a missing window (stupid aluminum tabs that hold the window in place broke off!), and the thing must've wanted to explore our garbage selection. Fortunately, the dog decided to listen to my Manly Command to 'come here' and thus away from the frightened-to-death critter. We got everyone back inside, and we left the raccoon to look for its own way out, which I assume it did. This makes the fourth type of creature (that we know of) to have graced the cracked floors of our breezeway: field mouse, stray cat, bat, and now raccoon. Oh - make that five, as I remembered that we found a frog in there, once.

Anyway, the dog managed to escape unscathed, if shaken. Apparently she held her own pretty well - H said at one point she had the thing's head in her jaws, though there was no apparent damage done to the raccoon, either. We watched it through the kitchen window for a while - the baby especially got a kick from seeing it, and The Girl was ready to adopt the thing - crawling about, looking for an out, or at least waiting for us to stop staring at it so it could go on about its way. Which we, and it, did. At least I think it did - I didn't see it anywhere around in the morning. I just wish I'd gotten a picture of it before it scuttled into the shadows.

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