Scenes from a life

• Elle, sitting in front of the gate that’s over the stairs to the basement, each hand gripping a bar and shaking with great force and intensity. All she needed was a tin cup, really, and you’d have one heck of a prison movie.

• The other evening, she didn’t want to leave the playground, so she howled all the way home. And it’s a considerable way home. Of course, if she saw a dog or people, she stopped yelling long enough to check them out, then resumed the noise once they’d passed on by.
  
  While it may have sounded like I was torturing her with a hot poker, periodic checks over the sun hood of the stroller made it clear that she was absolutely fine. She was being a Drama Mama.
  
  Girlfriend has very definite opinions, and if she’s not getting what she wants (already!), she lets the whole world know about it. Ditto this morning, when I wouldn’t leave the pantry door open so she could pull everything off the bottom shelf and fling it across the kitchen floor.
  
  I am SO MEAN. She needs to get used to that. Hee.
  
  
• Monday, no afternoon nap at the sitter’s meant by the time we got home Elle’s eyes were little more than bruises in her face, and everything that happened was trauma. She got a second wind after dinner and a bath, but wouldn’t drink much of her before-bed bottle even though her dinner wasn’t much (as usual).
  
  She crashed hard a few minutes before her regular bedtime, and I heard her wake up at least once in the early evening (rare these days). About 10:30, she woke up, and her crying wasn’t that angry come-get-me-now crying so much as it was a pathetic, things-are-not-right crying.
  
  She doesn’t wake up often, and when she does, I generally don’t go in unless I’m worried something is wrong; she'll fuss herself back to sleep. But something about her crying last night was different, so I got up and pulled her bottle out of the fridge.
  
  She was warm and soft and sleepy. She was also hungry, and after a few ounces of milk, some cuddling with mama, and a diaper change, she went back into her crib and fell asleep for the night without another peep. My sweet girl.
  
  I’m fine with cry it out. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to hold your baby in the night, when she’s a warm, barely-moving weight on your chest, and her hair is soft against your cheek.
  

(And yes, she still has a bottle before bed. I don’t put it in the crib with her, ever. We brush her teeth after the bottle and before bed. She puts herself to sleep just fine; goes into her crib awake and plays until she falls asleep, and the only thing she reaches for as she goes to sleep is her dolly. She drinks from a sippy cup or a regular cup during the day, not a bottle. She doesn’t use a pacifier.

It’s another case where “they” tell you there should be no bottle after one year. I’m so tired of “them” telling me about my baby. She still needs that evening milk. Eventually, she won't.)