Dublin bloggy meetup

Meeting other bloggers is a funny thing. They may look like their profile photos or have unaccountably cut their hair since, but that's really the only aspect of them that you'll probably find to be in any way as you expected. Last time I met up with some other bloggers, I wasn't familiar with their online voices, so what I noticed was more superficial. But on Saturday I met up with some of the Irish Parenting Bloggers in Dublin, and was delighted and surprised by how similar or different people can be in person when you know them best (or only) through an online medium.

In writing, you can't tell an extrovert from an introvert. You can't tell a Dublin accent from Cork from Texas. You might have an idea who would command the floor if a group got together in person, but you might not be right about that at all.

When it comes to socializing, having an online persona doesn't exactly level the playing field, but it definitely changes the game. A bloggers' meetup is a bit like a gathering of rock stars in reverse: far from looking for the limelight, many writers, by nature, tend to shy away from attention and want to deflect instead. We prefer to interact on the page, on the screen, where we have time to consider our words and where we're never too far from the delete key.

So the fact that a bunch of us dared to meet up at all, in daylight, with laptops left at home and phones put away, is a testament to the power of our connection online. And it turned out that we had a lot to say to each other about everything that was not blogging, as well as things that might be.

Here's everyone. From left to right at the back we have Looking for Blue Sky, Laura from My Internal World, Mind the Baby, Lauren of The Dare Project, Sadhbh from Where Wishes Come From, Caitriona from Wholesome Ireland, yours truly, and Office Mum. The front row has BlueSky's daughter Smiley, then Lisa of Mama.ie with adorable baby, Lucy of Learner Mama, Muuka of One More Pair of Boots, and Glitter Mama Wishes.

Welcome

Mild is not a word that's ever applied to the weather in America. In Ireland, it implies an element of grateful surprise that it's not any colder. The weather is mild right now, which is lovely. It's not warm, but it's warmer than we have any right to expect at this point in October. It can be mild and raining at the same time, of course, but if it's mild and breezy and the clouds are scudding past, it's really very pleasant.

The plane came in at 4.30 am and Ireland came up with its fairy lights, as Louis Macniece said, even though it's not Christmas. They were little orange dots, like Lucozade. Exactly like Lucozade.

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That was Monday, and now it's Friday. We've been pretty useful, but I still wonder how we got to the end of the weekdays without feeling like we've done more than dip our toe into being here at all. We've established that Mabel will happily exist on unlimited potato waffles while Dash would like to eat nothing but fresh-baked baguettes from the local shops. Along with milk and chocolate biscuits, these will form the basis of their diets for two weeks, and I'm sure they won't die or develop rickets in that time. Probably.

I've also been reminded that while Dash in personality is very attached to schedule and routine and predictability, in physiology he adapts much more quickly to the five-hour time difference than his sister does. However, since Mabel has slept through, or almost through, every night - in contrast to past years when she's been wide awake and wanting to play at 3am for nights on end - I suppose I'll forgive her the screaming and kicking and hysterical "I'm not tired"-ing at 11.30 for the past two nights.

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Never mind all this talking. How about a picture or two...

'Scuse me

In Ireland. Busy drinking tea and mainlining chocolate digestives. Back soon.

I felt this embodied the true spirit of the National Natural History Museum,
unchanged from school trips through the ages.

Vision therapy: further update

Dash has a vision therapy assessment this afternoon. I haven't been talking about vision therapy much because I want to do a big reveal when it finishes up, but I'm tired of waiting, and frankly I'm excited about the way things are going.

At the start of the summer, Dash was seven and a bit and fresh out of first grade. He was reading a little above grade level, but it was a struggle and far more halting and laborious than it should have been. He was comfortably reading books like this:

More tellingly, he never spontaneously read a road sign or a store name. He resisted reading anything we asked him to, though he faithfully did his 20 minutes of homework reading every night, eventually, when all other options had been exhausted. He would blink and say the words had gone blurry after a sentence or so, but he'd persevere. It was painful to listen to.

He began vision therapy in June - two half-hour sessions a week, with a few minutes of "homework" to do every morning and evening in between. It's hard to explain what the therapy consists of - reading and pointing and following arrows and picking out highlighted text and finding letters in order and learning how to focus and unfocus his eyes as if he were doing one of those magic-eye pictures that I can never do. Games and puzzles and things on a computer.

We had a preliminary assessment after six weeks or so, and to be honest at that point I was still ambivalent about how things were going. I couldn't see any change, really, in his homework reading. I felt at that point that the worst outcome would be if his reading improved a little, but nothing really changed much, and if we'd never know whether he'd just caught up late as he was going to do all along or if the therapy helped.

Less than a week later, something changed. He started reading the next level up and stormed through a level-three Ninjago book in a few nights. Words didn't go blurry any more. He was reading paragraphs.

Now he's reading text that looks like this:

He's on his third Magic Treehouse book. He's still reading aloud, and only for his 20-minute mandated time, but if you'd told me when we started this that we'd have reached this point as soon as October, I'd have said all my hopes had come to fruition.

Today he was off school. We were talking about his reading and he said "...and when I'm finished all the Magic Treehouse books, I can read higher-level books and when I'm finished all of those I can start reading about real things."

"You don't have to wait till you've finished all the fiction in the library to read about facts, you know. We have a history book at home."

So he did this:

He read two pages about World War II, asking me what things like N-a-z-i and C-z-e-c-h-o-s-l-...  and D-u-n-k-i-r-k spelled, and taking in every word even though his supporting background knowledge and geography are pretty hazy because it's quite an advanced level book of world history.

His handwriting has improved to the point where he's writing essays entitled "Why my writing is so neat." He brought home a report card full of straight A's last week. (This is his first letter-grade report card, so I can't really compare it to previous ones, and I really don't care and don't want to put any pressure on him to stay a straight-A student, but that's a different blogpost.) Last week at a birthday party he willingly read out the list of scavenger hunt items, even though they were in an unfamiliar cursive font.

At Wednesday's session I got talking to another mother. Most of the kids I see at vision therapy are Dash's age or a little older, but this woman's son is in tenth grade, which makes him 15 or so. His deep voice sounds out of place beside my son's piercing trill as they both do their separate exercises with their therapists, around the corner from where I sit and wait.

This mother said they'd spent thousands and tried everything trying to figure out what was going on with her son's reading. He'd bring home A's and B's but his homework was taking seven hours a night. He'd had an IEP (individualized education plan; for children who need extra help while in mainstream schooling due to something like high-functioning autism or ADHD, maybe). Nothing had helped until they discovered vision therapy. She looked at me with hopeful weary eyes and told me we were blessed for finding this now, when Dash is seven, for saving ourselves all those years of struggle. I don't doubt it.

Vision therapy isn't over yet, and today's assessment is to get a better idea of how he's doing and how much more he needs. But I am happy to report that things are looking good. No pun intended.

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To read more about Dash's journey with vision therapy, see here or type "vision therapy" into my Search field. If you wonder whether vision therapy would benefit your child, read this very informative page and take a look at the checklist linked at the bottom. We found a qualified developmental optometrist in our area using this search. Feel free to e-mail me if you've any specific questions, though obviously I'm far from an expert.

Family car

As the only child of tidy-minded parents, I always found that other people's cars had an air of messy family-ness that ours lacked. I loved it. I loved the casualness and the randomness and the disorganization. It seemed to be the hallmark of a real family to me, and I loved being subsumed into the families of my more-siblinged friends, whether for a whole week in the summer or just an after-school playdate.

At my house, when we got home, whatever had come with us came out of the car and back into the house, to be thrown away or put away as appropriate. The glove compartment contained one pair of gloves, one pair of sunglasses (in their case), an orange chamois to de-mist the windows with, and the car's owner's manual. (Of course, this was before you needed twelve different adaptors for all the things you might conceivably charge in your car, and also before cars were littered with broken CD cases, defunct cassette tapes, and album inserts that didn't match the contents. We didn't even have a car with a radio until I was 14.)

Other families' cars, though, had cyclinders of wet wipes on the back window and crumbs between the cushions, lost hair bobbins on the floor and abandoned liquorish allsorts under the seats. There was a fine line, of course, between the endearing and the disgusting - used tissues proliferating on the passenger seat, mysterious stickiness on the door handle, half-eaten packets of Tayto scattering as we rounded every corner were definitely out of the grey zone and into the gross.

More often than I could understand, there was a hairbrush in someone's car. My hairbrush never travelled more than a foot from my dressing table, where I picked it up, brushed, and set it down again. My mother's was the same. I always puzzled over the migratory hairbrushes.

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Well, I'm happy to report that I've achieved nirvana, where nirvana is the perfectly messy family car. Art projects on the passenger seat? Check. Discarded toy parts and litter and tissues liberally spread around the floor? Check. Crumbs in every crevice? Check. Hairbrush on the back seat? More often than my former self would believe.

Tiny things

One of the slats of Mabel's headboard isn't sanded smooth like the others. I'd never have noticed it, but one night at bedtime I saw her feeling each one. 

"What are you doing?" 

"I'm looking for the rough one."

I felt with her and found the rough one, one from the end on the right.

It's one of those tiny things that children take the time to find out and adults breeze right by. It will be one of the sense memories she retains of her early childhood, of her first bed, of her bedroom and this house.

I remember what the underside of my bed looked like, how it felt to turn my head slideways and slither swiftly under it for a game of hide and seek, where it's rough and smooth and painted, and how it was surprisingly roomy underneath, before I got too big and it wasn't any more. 

I remember the view from inside the hot press (linen cupboard), behind the mound of spare balls of wool for darning, on top of the good damask tablecloth and the other teacosy that was a present and the pillowcases nobody ever used. I hid there for a long time one afternoon, until my seeker had long given up and my mother was getting worried.

I remember the waist-high wall at the back of my best friend's garden, the one we once climbed over to roam through the next garden over and the one after that, until we heard his mother calling in the distance and scrambled hurriedly back to be roundly scolded. The wall was made of rough dark-grey concrete domed over mortared-together granite rocks. The concrete was flaking away in places, where we could pick at it and find the underneath. 

Even when you can go back - and I still can, I'll be there next week - sometimes you need a child to help you see the past properly.

Shut down

I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don't want to get something wrong, and it's not directly affecting me; but still, it's happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read much better informed explanations of why elsewhere, so I'm not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed "nonessential" have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people - I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It's been going on for two weeks now, and that's 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can't go into his office, because it's closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they've been taken offline. He's working from home when it's quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I'm not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it's having, so I don't think it's working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered "essential," so it's business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They're not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking "Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don't get a check at all? When will this end?"

The knock-on effects are enormous - restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won't.)

And then I read about the Antarctic.

This is stupid. It's farcical. It's not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

Come on, Mr Obama. I know you're in there.

The party of the first part

We, hereafter also known as "the host," hereby acknowledge that we will take your child ("the guest") for two hours (or three if you're lucky) on a weekend afternoon. You may leave the premises and we will not call CPS and denounce you for abandonment (unless they are particularly badly behaved).

In return, you must provide, along with your child, a present, lovingly/hastily wrapped, decorated with a handmade rosette/curly ribbon/animal stamps/nothing, of a certain value that will be deemed appropriate by your parental peers but will never be mentioned and cannot be inquired about.

Your child may choose to (or you may choose that they) dress up in their "party best" for this occassion. We accept no responsibility for mud, grass, ice-cream, purple frosting, blood, snot, tears, pizza sauce, juice, or ketchup that may stain their clothes during the time they spend with us. Likewise, if you choose not to dress them up, or they choose to rebel against such dressing, we retain the right to assume that you didn't feel we were worth making an effort for. Any such offence may, but will not always, be taken with no redress on your part. (Oops, that was a pun.)

We agree to keep your child fed and watered during the time that they attend our party. If your child is returned to you hopped up on sugar/red 40/soda bubbles, you will just have to put up with it. We hope you spent those two hours we gave you barricading your valuables and putting foam rubber on all the sharp surfaces in your house. Extra padding under the sofa springs is also advisable.

We will attempt to entertain your child in a manner that is not life-threatening or potentially mentally scarring. If these attempts backfire and your child decides to spend the duration of the party a) having a meltdown, b) playing alone with our child's toys, or c) demanding to know when the cake will come, we reserve the right to deal with this as we deem appropriate. If things are really bad we'll call you, but I'm sure you would rather this was our final option.

We have hopes that your child will behave somewhat reasonably, though these hopes are modified according to the age of the child in question and the number of children of that same age present. Please do not abandon us with your child if you think those hopes are completely out of the ballpark.

If your child demands to take home again the present they brought, or any other present, they will be denied. We hope this does not cause offense, because it's non-negotiable.

The host may provide goodie-bags, but this is neither promised nor stipulated in the contract. Any children demanding a goodie bag will be unceremoniously kicked out, unless a parent is heard to be shushing them on the spot. We can provide no guarantees in re the contents of said goodie bag, except for the fact that they will probably include items of exactly choking-hazard size that your other children will immediately fight over, and some more Red 40 for good measure.

Please sign here. Have a lovely time.

Stick police

Things that go through your head when your kids start playing with someone else's kids at the playground:

Isn't that nice, they're all playing together.
My children are so well socialized, obviously.
They're playing a nice game of tag.
Wait, where did that stick come from?
Oh, that's okay, they all have sticks.
Wait now, that's not a stick, that's half a small tree.
Is the other parent here? He must be the man in the car. Where does he stand on the stick issue? Should I say something? Am I a helicopter parent if I wade in yelling "No sticks!" or am I a negligent parent if I don't? Is he judging me?
Okay, they're in teams. That's nice.
No, wait, you can't exclude the little one.
Uh oh. Here comes the little one to talk to her dad.

... 

Maybe I'll just go have a word with them. Make sure they're all playing nicely together.

"Hi! What's your name?"
"Sarah, this is Mabel. Mabel's four. Are you four? Is that your brother? He's in second grade like Mabel's brother? That's nice. Now you can be friends. Be careful with the sticks. Maybe we should put the sticks down. Dash, how about playing tag with no sticks? Hmm? No, you don't have to defend yourself. Well, yes, I can see that the other boys have sticks ... Fine, just everyone play nicely, right?"

...

Well, that cleared everything right up.
Girls against boys?
No, but, the girls are four and the boys are seven or eight and that's three against two... oh good, she wants to be on his team...but now it's everyone against the little one again...
I should not be policing this.
But that father is sitting there in his car.
Judging me.

...

He wasn't judging me. He looked out his car window and we had a nice conversation about how you should let the children just play, but that it's always hard to know where another parent might draw a line that you don't. And then I decided that playing dodgeball with sticks was probably a good moment to draw a line, and announced that it was time to go home.

Some days are better than others

Some days I am on top of the laundry, and some days the laundry is on top of me.

Some days a blog post comes to me fully formed in the shower. Some days I have to hiccup it out like a cat barfing.

Some days I go for a run or do a whole exercise video and then saute kale for lunch. Some days I stop after five minutes and have a muffin instead.

Some days my children climb trees and run outside and I show them how to make leaf rubbings, and feed them meals that have components from each of the food groups. Some days they sit in front of the TV for too long and get a waffle and five frozen peas for dinner.*

Some days I am fired up with efficiency, and the kitchen is clean and the dentist appointments are scheduled and the new season's clothes are sorted and I am superwoman.

Some days I'm not.


I think the key is not to give up after one - or many in a row - of the off days. Just keep swimming.

*Obviously, I'm talking about Mabel here. For Dash, eating from all the food groups means a peanut-butter sandwich and a juice box.

Rat's arse

This morning it was still so humid that it was positively smelly outdoors, and I put on capris and a t-shirt and sandals again and complained loudly. Since then the deluge has reached us, the lawn (ahem) is dotted liberally with yellow leaves from the trees behind us, and everything's a lot more autumnal. I made soup for lunch. It's still humid, but getting better.

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I went to a local clothing co-op used clothes/books/toys sale at the weekend, and I had to take the kids with me because their father was out on his Saturday morning long run. I promised they could each get a toy so long as they let me look in the big room with the clothes first. I was in search of one thing: snow boots for each child. I found a perfect pair for Mabel, but the price I paid was more than the $5 I happily forked over to the nice lady at the desk, because in the toy room a disgruntled Dash found the most horrible toy in the world, and I was powerless to refuse, since it cost a mere two dollars.

It's a plastic rat. It is remote controlled, and its little red eyes light up as it whizzes around the kitchen floor. It is the embodiment of evil. And now it lives in my house.

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My body is rebelling against the computer by giving me a sore wrist. It can't really tell me any louder that I need to lay off the Facebook and go and read a book. And yet, here I still am. I'm getting better at surfing with my left hand, mind you.

And now for something more frivolous

You might not have been privy to my confusion over jeans last winter, but the agony of that indecision is still seared firmly in my mind.

First I bought some red jeans, but then I decided I needed too many things to make them right and that maybe the problem was with the jeans rather than the things, and I brought them back. (Also, someone directed me to this, or something very like it, and I began to think maybe they were somewhat over the red jeans thing on the other side of the Atlantic.)

Then I decided to stick to my straight/skinny blue jeans, and became quite fond of them. But I wanted to wear them with my beloved brown suede ankle boots, and I just couldn't figure out how that was supposed to go - did I tuck the jeans into the boots or leave them over the top. Neither looked quite right. I compromised by tucking one side in, which felt a little silly and I was never very happy with.

This year, faced with the same jeans, the same boots, and the same dilemma, the solution is obvious. I should roll the bottoms of the jeans till they're just above the tops of the boots. Why was cuffing not an option last year? Have things moved on that much? Am I right on the cutting edge of fashion? Yes, that must be it. Pinterest confirms it, actually.

Now, if you can point me in the direction of a pair of dusty plum curvy straight-legged cords that fit me perfectly and make my legs look long and slim and do not cost a week's salary, I'd be most grateful, because that's what I'm obsessing over this winter. (Hmm. Like these.)

The homework debate

My second-grader is doing his homework. It's quick and easy and it doesn't take long. But I started reminding (/asking/exhorting) him to do it when he got home from school at 3.45. He finally began at 7.20pm, after some outside playtime, some TV time, dinner, dessert, some more outside time, and a glass of milk. I've come to accept that this is how it is with him, and for now it's working. He knows that ultimately he is responsible for his homework being done. I worry about how things will go next year, when they say the homework load really ramps up, and when if he starts at 7.30 he won't finish till long past bedtime. I suppose he'll live and learn. He's not one to stress over his homework; I'm lucky that he's a relaxed kid who loves school for its social aspects and has not yet been turned off learning for its own sake.

People used to think that we should show children it's a tough world from the outset. Some people still feel that way, on one matter or another. You shouldn't pick up your crying baby. You shouldn't tolerate tantrums. You shouldn't let that five-year-old sleep with the light on. They need to learn that life's hard, and people are mean, and they need to buckle down and do their work; and the sooner they figure that out the better.

I think we should be kind to our babies and love them while we can, because life is short - and childhood shorter - even more than it's hard; and because they will find out the rest soon enough.

And so I'm thinking about homework again. I'm not saying that people who expect children to do homework are cruel, Dickensian types, or that making a kindergardener come home from six hours of school and asking them to sit down and do homework is like forcing a three-month-old baby to cry it out - but then again, maybe one day in the future it will be seen that way.

I'm not big on research. I like to read the headlines and let other people do the heavy lifting. But I can tell you a few things I've seen recently that have stuck in my mind:

• Studies show that homework is of no benefit for younger children (or maybe any children).
• There is a ton of research proving that children currently do not have enough time for free play, for exercise, for being outdoors, or even for the sleep they need to grow.
• Some schools have made the decision to remove all homework or vastly reduce it. (I don't count reading in this - I agree that reading to children and having children read every day is vital.)

Homeschooling is a wonderful option for many people, but I am not one of those people. I like our local public school and I want to be part of it. My son loves school. I enjoy sending him to school every day and picking him up at the end of it. I don't enjoy bugging him to do his homework for an hour or more every day while he strings me along with promises of "Yes, yes, after this," and finally sits down to do it right when it's dinnertime, or maybe bedtime.

I really don't like the conversations I've had with other parents who have more intense children who burst into tears crying "I just want to play" when it's time for homework, or whose studious third- or fourth-graders won't hear of stopping after 45 minutes even when their mom says they'll write a note because that's long enough.

And on the whole, I know that my household has it easy right now. So far, the amount of homework he has had has been very reasonable, his teachers have been undemanding, and he's not the type to stress over schoolwork. Once he finally sits down to do it, it goes pretty quickly these nights. Additionally, our school has said that roughly ten minutes per grade is as much work as they should be doing - 25 minutes for my second-grader, then; under an hour for a fifth-grader. (Does that mean zero minutes for a kindergardener?)

Children are not miniature adults. They are not just university students in training. Their minds and bodies are still developing and they have more learning to do than can be taught in school. Childhood is not the time for them to learn how to buckle down and work for a further two hours (or even 45 minutes) when every fibre of their being tells them they should be running and jumping and climbing trees and playing soccer and organizing skipping games with the other kids on the street and finding out what it is they love to do. They've spent six hours clamping down on their wild sides - or having them clamped down for them - when they get home it's time to do the other thing.

I want there to be no homework. Not just less, but none, for the sake of our quality of life four nights a week, and my children's childhoods. And I'm almost fired up enough to do something about it.

Listen (again)

This post was first published in September 2011, when Dash was five and Mabel was two years and ten months. I'm wheeling it out again as my contribution to the Irish Parenting Bloggers' blog march for National Breastfeeding Week in Ireland - head on over to Mama.ie for a full list of everyone who's taking part,and a great giveaway too.

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This morning Monkey announced that he wasn't going to cry today. He went off to school with his Dad and wished me goodbye with aplomb. Reports from school were good: he still wanted to be walked to his classroom, which we're not supposed to be doing at this stage, but he sat down and permitted a hug with nary a wail. I'm so pleased. There may, of course, be a relapse on Tuesday after the long weekend, and others to come, but I think it's a good sign.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Instead, let's talk about extended breastfeeding. Here, let me drag out my soapbox. Comfy down there? Need a seat? Don't strain your neck, okay? I promise it won't take long.

I didn't really even register that Mabel counted as "extended" for quite a while. When you're still nursing the big one too, you have to assume that the little one is legit, and the big one is just along for the ride. And technically, I'm not even sure when extended starts - after one year? After two? Okay, well, we're coming up on three in a few months (and the big one has stopped, you'll be glad to know, if you weren't sure about that), so we're definitely there now. She hardly ever nurses in public, so though we don't have set times, I think it's all ramping down gradually and I'm fine with that. There are days when she drags me to the sofa every five minutes, and I kvetch about how she needs to eat real food and stop bugging me, but then it turns out that she was starting a cold, or had been awake half the night, and she just really needs it.

Thing is, if I wasn't nursing her, I don't know when I would take that time to just sit down and have a cuddle with my two-year-old. She's a big girl - I keep telling her that every time I try to entice the underpants back on. She's starting nursery school next week. She'll talk to you till the cows come home and she knows that cheetahs are the fastest animal and that Iron Man has repulsor blasts. (Oh yes he does.) She can climb anything, run anywhere, reach every damn thing she shouldn't. But she's still two, and even when she's three, there will be times when she needs to decompress by being close to her mama for a while.

If I wasn't still nursing Mabel, if she didn't hold on to me every now and then in the most vital (and painful) way possible, I'd get up and walk away far too much. I'd say "Just a minute" and "Hold on a sec" and "I'll be there in a moment" and "I have to get this done" even more than I already do, and I'd expect her to be fully self-sufficient all the time. She's canny, this one, and she knows how to get her own way. Cuteness works, asking nicely works, whining works sometimes even though it shouldn't; but when push comes to shove and she needs what she needs, she knows how to get me and keep me.

Because she's right. The babies know. They always know. Listen to your baby.

Because one day they'll walk off to big school with aplomb, and they won't let you kiss them any more.

She was just about this big, and/or this small, back then.