And the fun continues

It is Friday, and I am tired. I am tired because Clementine woke up at 4:30 AM this morning, ready to greet the day and start playing. She wakes up at about 4:30 every morning these days (yes, we are backsliding, but I'm usually too tired to do anything about it, especially because putting her down at night keeps getting easier and easier) and we can usually get her right back to sleep in her own bed or nestled between us. A week ago she tried this whole up-before-dawn thing and then fell asleep in the car on the way to daycare, slept almost two hours once she arrived, didn't take an afternoon nap and was a hot mess of tears all night. Determined to avoid a repeat performance today because there's a carnival in town tonight, I hopped in the car on the way to daycare this morning armed with grapes, some toys, a rockin' soundtrack that had her head bobbing the second we pulled out of the driveway and a few tricks up my sleeve (though nothing to do with removing my own fingers). She was asleep before we even hit the mile mark, grapes in hand, foot still twitching to the beat. As my rush-hour stops and starts rocked her around a little and caused her to surface from sleep ever so slightly, she began to pop the grapes into her mouth and chomp on them IN HER SLEEP. She didn't eat them, really, but compacted them and then stuffed them into her cheek where I was convinced she would choke on them mid-nap. At a red light I was eventually able to reach back and try to squeeze them from her mouth, but she woke up enough to clench her jaw and moan "nooooo," pull her head away and sink back to sleep. Willful child:



Last night she was not interested in her bath one little bit. As we were undressing her, she started demanding "Dada bath." Yes, in what my brother-in-law would call our hippie parenting style, one of us is never above hopping in with Clementine (usually to make it less of a screaming match but sometimes just because). I'm sure there are some people who frown on family bathing (I remember a disturbing conversation in college about Gary Snyder's poem "The Bath" when one classmate suggested we turn Snyder over to the FBI for child molestation), but I frown on a wet, slippery, pissed off kid flailing around in a big iron tub. It's much better to just hop in. Last night Nate wasn't in the mood to bathe, though, so he kept saying no until she gathered up all her strength, doubled herself over and clenched her fists before yelling "NAAATE! Bath." I ask you: how does one not laugh, especially when she started shaking from the effort? Laughing, of course, just encourages her, so she began to sing "Nate bath, Nate bath" until I gave her a washcloth, told her it was her cousin Abby's and she trotted off to lovingly submerge it in the tub, oblivious to the fact that she was bathing alone. As she picked the washcloth out of the water again and again, she continued her "Nate bath" song, eventually interjecting an "Amanda." Yep, that's my girl.

I finally pulled some pics off my camera from our infamous weekend in Chicago. Here are the younger ladies lunching:



A post-pee, pre-puke picture with her dad (and looking at it, how could I have not predicted the puke?):



The always-elusive picture with Grampy. Will we ever get one where no one is crying, everyone is looking at the camera and everyone is looking good? Happily we have years to try.



And the aftermath on the way home"