As of my last update, we had stopped allowing Lennie to nurse. We’ve actually managed to keep it up, and Lennie has had no boobie in almost a week. Initially, she asked for it some, but now she rarely asks, only occasionally suggesting that she be allowed to “cuddle mommy.” As for bedtime, I seem to rule the roost now. Lennie still has boobie associations with lying down or sitting in the rocking chair with Mleeka, and so I’ve developed a track record for getting Lennie to sleep and helping her get back to sleep when she wakes up at night. Unfortunately, the most effective method for getting her to sleep at this point is to lie down in front of the TV with her and let it entrance her into sleep. It’s a step, though. I hope to move toward lying down without TV (maybe with music) and then eventually lying down in bed and finally just putting her in bed when it’s bedtime.

By and large, Lennie seems to be sleeping more restfully now (and Mleeka usually gets a full night with no interruptions). It’s pretty common for us to get her down by 10:00 or so and for her to sleep alone until 5:00 or 6:00. When she wakes up, I’ve had pretty good success so far lying down and snuggling her back to sleep for two or three more hours and going back to bed myself (or getting up to go to the gym), though this morning, she woke up and I brought her up into bed with us. In any case, 2/3 of us are sleeping better now (my sleep has suffered a bit, but I guess it’s my turn), and I think we can say that we’ve officially weaned.

If you’re even the least bit squeamish about reading about breastfeeding, you should skip this entry (though it’s not graphic at all).

In the first three weeks of Lennie’s life, there were two or three nights during which she didn’t have access to Mleeka to nurse. Since then, not a single night has gone by that Lennie hasn’t nursed at some point during the night. I suspect a lot of people think we’re weird for allowing Lennie to nurse for so long (she is over two years old now, after all), but Mleeka read up on it, and there are lots of benefits to nursing longer. The American Pediatrics Society (or some such group that baby doctors tend to belong to) recommends nursing for at least a year, and some other primates nurse their offspring until they’re the human equivalent of 7 or 8 years old. There have been times when Lennie’s been sick and not eating during which nursing has probably saved her trips to the hospital to be hydrated, and of course, it has also provided comfort.

In recent months, Mleeka’s milk supply has begun to dwindle, and the result is that Lennie, when she comes to bed after we put her down on her own for a few hours, spends the rest of the night hopping from side to side to try to get milk. It’s been very frustrating for Mleeka, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 2-plus years. So a few weeks ago, we decided to start trying to discourage nursing in an effort to slowly wean. We started with distraction at non-sleep times. She’d ask for milk (or to cuddle Mama, one of her stock phrases for it), and we’d just divert her. She handled it pretty well, sometimes whining a little, but generally dealing with it much better than we had anticipated. We still let her nurse at naptime and bedtime. Last week, we started discouraging nursing at naptime, and that too she’s dealt with better than expected. She’s learned to snuggle (we have to use that word now because cuddle has other connotations) with Mleeka in front of the TV to get to sleep. It’s not ideal, but it’s another step in the right direction. We hadn’t been 100% on-task about avoiding naptime nursing, but she’s had very little of that in the last week. Yesterday, Mleeka wound up driving Lennie around to get her asleep at naptime, and when I came out of the office after she got back, I saw that she had actually removed the whole car seat from the car with Lennie in it (a feat of strength and flexibility not to be sneezed at) and brought her into the house that way to avoid the probability of waking her up by removing her from the seat itself.

This week, Lennie’s been very fussy, and we noticed an escalation of tooth erosion on the back of one of her front teeth. She grinds her teeth, and a depression had been forming in one of them, but it began to look much worse. We took her to the dentist (trying to play it up and make it fun by talking about how the dentist was going to count her teeth, a prospect she was amused by), and it turns out that in spite of some things Mleeka had read to the contrary about nursing’s effect on baby teeth, all-night nursing has played a role in eroding those teeth. We’re getting on the schedule now to get crowns on them to prevent further erosion and pain. We’re also ramping up the no-nursing campaign.

Which brings me back around to the title and the first paragraph of this post. Last night, after having dinner over at Dave and Karen’s, we drove around a bit in hopes of getting Lennie to sleep in the car. She hadn’t nursed since Mleeka turned over at 5:30 yesterday morning and Lennie woke up and declined to go back to sleep. She did fall asleep in the car on the way home, but she woke up as I was putting her in bed. She was really angry and threw a little fit. I’ve learned that when she’s doing that, I sometimes have to just let her have a fit for a few minutes, making sure she knows that I’m available and eager to comfort her when she’s ready. Trying to force my comfort on her just makes her angrier. So after a couple of minutes, I got her to come hug me, and then we stretched out on the floor in front of the TV on our backs with her using my arm as a pillow. We lay like that for an hour-and-a-half until she was good and asleep. An hour or so later, she woke up crying, but I hopped out of bed and was able to pat her back to sleep. When I got up at 6:00 this morning to go to the gym, she was, astonishingly, still asleep in the living room.

It was her first full night’s sleep since the very beginning without boobie and without significant intervention on our part.

This won’t be the birthday anthem to my daughter that I really want it to be. It’d take a few hours of hard thought followed by a few hours of drafting followed by a few hours of editing to get anywhere close, and I just don’t have that kind of consecutive time right now. So here’s a quick, humble little ditty instead.

Let’s start with a brief retrospective. When I wrote the big birthday message last year, Lennie was just starting to communicate with intention (as opposed to simple labeling) by instructing me in simple terms (“there”) to take her to one spot or another in the room. Now she communicates rather more extensively by saying things like “Lennie no want brush teeth with green tooth brush” or “chocolate milk is so delicious.” She has probably dozens of repeated sentences now and clearly knows enough of a grammar to compose understandable new sentences, often surprising us with her ingenuity. I guess she must have been walking a year ago. Now she runs, slides, jumps, turns somersaults; this evening, I tried to entice her into her bedroom for a diaper change, and one or the other of us suggested hopping, and sure enough, she followed me hopping through the house to get a clean diaper. A year ago, we were in the habit of calling her “Lou.” It felt right at the time, but we’ve moved on to Lennie now. We’ll no doubt oscillate between the two in the coming years.

The thing Mleeka and I consistently and frequently find ourselves thinking about Lennie is how astoundingly happy we are that we got her. And not that we got a baby, but that we got the very baby we got. She’s so bright (I mean in terms of personality in addition to intellect) and special, and there’s never in recent months been a single day during which we haven’t been delighted by some phrase she’s come up with or some impish thing she’s done or face she’s made. At every stage in her life to date, we’ve thought back to how far she’s come, and it always seems impossible that she’s progressed so far, that she’s managed to become so much more special than she had been the last time we checked. And yet she has. More and more, I find that I enjoy her not as my offspring, and not because I’m in some way bound to, but because she’s this objectively wonderful little person all by herself.

I gave up hope weeks ago on posting any baby updates of substance. I’m just too far behind. So for now, lest all written records of her recent activity be lost, here’s a quick list of what comes immediately to mind.

• She can jump (barely — it’s a two-year-old skill) and first showcased this while we were at the beach.
• She’s terrified of the ocean and will cling to you for dear life and climb up your very body in order to avoid being put down prematurely. Eventually, she warms up to playing in the sand and being walked (clinging very tightly to you) in the shallows. Once or twice, we actually got her in the water briefly, but further exploration of the beach will likely wait until next year.
• She’s turned into a big swimmer. Terrified as she was of the ocean, she was proportionally enamored of the swimming pool, to the point that we went out and bought her a life vest so she could have a little more freedom.
• She counts to ten in the proper sequence without skipping any numbers and with verve.
• She speaks in complete sentences and has brief conversations.
• She’s begun to express opinions (“no, blue cup” and “purple pants”).
• She apologizes (after bumping heads, “I’m sorry, Mama”)
• She asks for “tiny baby,” which is our cradling her in our arms like an infant, often while holding a sippy cup up for her like a bottle.
• She’s a great singer and can sing most of the alphabet pretty reliably, though with more emphasis on tune than on articulation.
• She knows concepts like “inside” and “outside” and “light on” and “light off.”

There’s gotta be more, but there’s a start.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a goal of writing around 5,000 words a week between this blog and my work blog. Travel, real life, and sloth have kept me from doing it, and a period of relative prolificacy has petered out into the recent stagnation both here and at my work blog. In keeping with the habit of late, this’ll be brief.

We’ve been eating a lot of pasta lately as part of our diet change, and we’ve had in particular a lot of the corkscrew pasta. The other day at lunch, Lennie ran out of pasta on her plate, looked at one of our plates, and promptly asked for more caterpillars. In the last couple of days, she’s started drinking a lot more cow milk and juice than previously.

I’ve noticed a trend lately when I’m giving her an early diaper change wherein she looks up at me and catalogues my facial features. Just out of the blue, “eye, nose, ear, eyebrow.”

She’s quite the singer now, and I think it’s pretty interesting that she can remember tunes more reliably than she can remember words. She pretty frequently sings “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” and she gets the tune right but has to muddle through a few of the words. She does the same with the alphabet song (which is really a twofer, sung to the tune of “Twinkle, twinlke, little star”). She’s trying more and more to count, though she seems to have a particular aversion to the number four. Even in repeating numbers after me as we insert coins into her piggy bank or count out other items, she balks at four more than at any of the other numbers. In the non-musical arts, she’s been painting a lot with watercolors and coloring with various implements. She’s also taken up graffiti, doing several vertical scribbles on the wall in the hallway outside my office.

Lennie can almost jump (it’s a two-year-old skill, so she’s right on track), and she runs with more reckless abandon than ever now. She generally declines to sit in her booster seat anymore, preferring to sit on her butt or her knees while we eat.

In the people department, she asks for people by name all the time now and has greater object/person permanence. She and Mleeka went to Vanderbilt to visit Ashley while I was out of town last week, and she saw Ashley from a distance and started calling out her name excitedly. She frequently asks to look at pictures on Mleeka’s computer and has begun asking for particular people and particular pictures of them. For example, she’ll come up to Mleeka and say sweetly “Ella sleeping.” She’s also liked seeing pictures of herself and of a pretty recent visit with grandma and granddaddy. As for perfect strangers, she’s learned pretty reliably to identify general categories. She knows boys from girls and will point them out, and at a bookstore tonight, she saw a woman probably in her 60s and said “see grandma.” Most men are daddys. Lennie’s very good now about greeting people with a friendly “hi.”

She’s definitely started dreaming. One morning, she was talking in her sleep about sharing stickers. The morning I last left for California, Fleda stayed over to be around while Mleeka took me to the airport, and Lennie woke up early anyway, talking about Fleda, whom she had cried out for pitifully and at length the night before when she went off to bed. And then there’s the Easter Bunny fiasco and followup nightmare. Mleeka and Lennie and Stacia and Lowen were at the mall one morning after their baby/mommy group playtime meeting, and they saw an Easter Bunny kids could have their pictures taken with. From the second level of the mall, Lennie laughed and smiled and waved at the bunny, but when Mleeka took her down for a closer look, she cried and clung to Mleeka with no intention whatsoever of actually interacting with the bunny. That night, she woke up crying at some point, and it occurred to us later that what she had been saying when she woke up was “rabbit.”

We’re going on a beach vacation in a couple of weeks, and Mleeka was interested in renting bikes while we were there. A week or two ago, we had Dave take Lennie for a ride on his bike to see how she took to it, and her reaction was one of puzzlement and pleasure. So we went out and bought bikes and a seat for Lennie and helmets and a bike rack for the car. Her response to the bike ride itself so far has been pretty lukewarm, though she’s fascinated with bikes. She actually calls them bicycles. She’s interested in the idea but balks a bit at the fact of riding one. She’s not terribly fond of putting her helmet on, and on a couple of occasions, when we’ve tricked her into wearing it and have gotten her strapped into the seat, she’s lost interest. The last time we tried, we took a longish hilly ride around our neighborhood, and she seemed to like it. I think it helps when Mleeka and I are both around because one of us can ride along beside and provide encouragement and really try to sell the experience.

A couple of weeks ago, Lennie started resisting her car seat very strenuously. As in it was sometimes very hard to force her into it if both of us weren’t involved, and even then, we were very sincerely worried that we were hurting her a little as we forced her into it. Naturally, we had tried various enticements and briberies in an effort to seat her more peacefully. Finally, Mleeka hit on just the thing. Lennie loves Just Peas, and they’ve turned out to be the precise enticement we needed. As we approach the car now, we begin playing up the pea seat (or pea chair), which, from the way we sell it, is just about the most exciting thing one could possibly plant her butt in. More often than not, especially as we’re leaving the house, Lennie will agree to sit down in her seat without a struggle in exchange for a little cup of peas, which we usually wind up replenishing several times during whatever trip we’re on.

It turns out that Lennie’s a big fan of the great outdoors. We’ve had her out plenty, but this Spring, she’s aware enough of her surroundings to really enjoy it. She and Mleeka planted 40 daffodil bulbs a few weeks ago and have made a habit of going out to count the ones that have come up (32 made it). Today, they went out to weed our little (mostly herb) garden in preparation for the coming seasons, and she had great fun. Judging from the dirt smudges around her mouth, we have a little pica baby. I watched for a few minutes as she played with a spade, transferring dirt from a pot to the ground. Later, when I was done with work and was able to come out and really play with her some, she grabbed our garden gnome (yes, I know, dorky) and ran around the yard with him. She identified him pretty clearly as Santa without being prompted, which is especially weird because I don’t remember playing up Santa very much over the holidays. We sit out together on the swing on our back patio (during the first three or four months of her life, I was able sometimes to rock her to sleep swinging out there), and she climbs around on the swing and then hops down and putters around the yard, perking up when she hears birds calling. She’s such a little cherub, and it’s such a nice, pastoral little scene.

Lennie Lou. It’s a silly name, we know. It started out as a joke, really, but it’s a cute nick for her occasionally, and she wrings all the hillbilly out of it. Her friend Lowen, with whom we have several videos of her walking great long distances holding hands, has taken to calling her Lennie Lou, but he doesn’t have those initial ells yet, so it comes out Ninny New.

We almost feel safe having Lennie around stairs now. Ella has been negotiating her stairs for months now with no problem, and Dave and Karen could take their gates down but that we’re over there so frequently with our daredevil toddler. This weekend, she did much better on the stairs, bumping down them on her butt rather than leaning her big toddler noggin out at a 45-degree angle in front of her and trying to take them standing up. I don’t mind so much if she takes a little fall now and then (her recent exploits outside have resulted in a few scratches here and there, and I’m pretty stoic about it all, though Mleeka’s a little worse for the wear), but I really don’t relish the thought of her tumbling all the way down a flight of stairs. I think we’re not too far from the time when that won’t be so much of a worry, when we can turn Lennie and Ella loose without fear of a bad fall and without spending half the evening camped out on the stairs to cushion whatever fall may (but never does) happen.

We think Lennie’s going to grow up to be a pleasant mixture of girly girl and tomboy. She likes to play in the dirt (a few months ago, she was very prissy about getting her hands dirty) and was enthusiastic about poking at some sort of larval bug we found and about holding a toad (which Mleeka didn’t let her hold for fear of a squeezy Of Mice and Men moment). She’s also quite the little athlete, with a pretty good arm and abdominal strength that, proportionally, puts most people to shame. One of her latest tricks is to climb up onto an end table and dart across the length of the couch, dismounting onto the other end table and stepping at full height onto the arm of my big chair, where she stands and grins at her horrified parents, who’re afraid to move lest the lightest stirring of the air knock her to the floor or provoke her to leap floorward to certain and serious injury. So she’s rough and tumble, in other words. But at the same time, she’s the little girl who tucks her stuffed animals and babies into bed with kisses and (a recent development) nurses her baby dolls. She’s the little niblet who’ll point to the tiniest scratch or bump and tell you about the ouchy. She’s the powder puff who asks constantly for lotion to rub on her legs or hands or her stuffed duck (not a great outcome that). So she’s rough and tumble, but she’s also delicate and girly, and we think it’ll be a fun combination. She defies the old nursery rhyme, composed as she must be of snakes and snails and sugar and spice.

Lennie has discovered the shower. I’ve bathed her in there with me a few times over the last year or so, usually because Mleeka had already bathed or just wanted a rare bath by herself, and it’s never been a big deal. I’ve always held her in my arms to bathe her. She’s lately demonstrated a more pronounced interest in the shower. When Ella’s over for a visit, the two of them will run into the (non-showering) shower, and Mleeka will sometimes lift the curtain up so that they can run in and out unimpeded.

The other day, Lennie seemed to want to stand up on her own in the shower, and I let her, and it was fine. I gave her some soap and let her wash her belly, and then I put some soap on my leg and asked her to help wash my leg since she was down there anyway. I picked her up to do the finishing touches and take care of her hair, but it was by all accounts mostly a normal shower for her.

Last night, it wasn’t my intention to shower with her (she had already had a bath), but she was hovering around the shower as I prepared to hop in, and since she was between outfits and wearing only a diaper anyway, I stripped her down and let her run in there. She was startled when I turned the water on, but she stuck it out and just sort of played in the shower while I bathed. She’d cry out “Daddy Shower, Yay!” (who knew I was that dirty?) and sort of stomp her feet or crouch over the drain. Later, after I was long done with my shower and she was still standing there dripping wet, she peed in the drain to much praise from Mleeka and me. Hey, diapers aren’t cheap. Next, I think I’ll see how she manages with an old jelly jar.