Hayley and Kate Minter

We’ve got a pretty set morning routine now. Hayley wakes up (not by screaming any more, thank goodness, but just by rustling and “talking”). I go in to find her playing with her teddy bears in her crib. I change her diaper, take her to Mommy, and then go get my breakfast. I come back up to the computer room to check my email and catch up on the night’s blogging and whatnot.

They stay in bed until Hayley wants out, which is usually pretty quickly. Hayley then comes walking into the computer room to visit with me. Her trick lately has been raiding my cereal bowl. I don’t put milk in my cereal, which means it’s just right for baby fingers to grab. I also still eat little-kid cereal (motto: “I may grow old, but my breakfast will still be day-glo blue”), which is just asking for trouble.

The past couple of weeks, Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries has been on the menu, and Hayley has discovered the joy of the Crunch Berry. I, too, know the joy of the Crunch Berry. So much so that when I find the rare bunch of Cap’n Crunch All-Berries, which is true to its word and contains 100% Berry and none of the yellow cereal, I get a six-month supply. Hayley expresses her love of the Berry in a special way. When she comes toddling into the room in the morning, the first thing she does is pluck all of the Crunch Berries out of my bowl and stuff them into her cheeks like a squirrel in November. Which means that I’m left with slightly-sticky non-berried Crunch, which isn’t my ideal breakfast. Meanwhile she’s looking like an ad for Red Man and grinning a red and blue smile. I should switch to Muselix or something and see what her reaction is.

The sacrifices we make for our offspring. When she asks me for the car keys in 15 years, I’ll tell her she’s still working off her Crunch Berry debt.

To make up for my slackness in putting new Hayley videos up (there hadn’t been once since December), I give you two, count ‘em, two videos tonight.

The first one features Hayley enjoying what passes for winter in North Carolina, and the second one shows her cousin Ashley reading to her.

Enjoy!

This adorable story comes from Holly today.

She and Hayley were in the kitchen, Hayley eating Cheerios and Holly laying down on the floor. Hayley came over to Holly and put her head on her stomach, in the process getting “Cheerio residue” on Holly’s shirt.

Holly, jokingly, looked at the mess on her shirt and said “Eewww!” Hayley then got up, walked over to the sink and got a washcloth, brought it over to Holly, and started wiping off Holly’s shirt.

That’s amazing. She’s really good about doing stuff when we tell her to (”Go get your kitty, Hayley”), but this is the first time I think she’s figured out what we were talking about, and taken the initiative and figured out what to do on her own.

That’s so cool.

We got some really good pictures back today from Holly’s (film) camera. I’ve uploaded the photos to the pictures page, but you’ll need to look at the bottom of Page 1 through Page 2 to see them, since they’re earlier than our Lexington pictures at the top.

Check ‘em out!

I love this picture (click for a bigger view).

Hayley had a busy weekend - we spent a couple days visiting family in Kenbridge and Petersburg, before heading Sunday to Lexington to visit Holly’s college stomping ground and to see her friend Cassie.

Hayley charmed everyone on the trip, of course. She warmed up pretty quickly to Cassie, her fiance Greg, and their dog Mollie. She even got to the point where she reached for Cassie as much as either of us, and she fell asleep in Cassie’s arms this afternoon.

I think we’re in a new phase with Hayley now. She’s big enough that she wants to do things and gets upset if she can’t, but she’s not big enough that she understands when we’re telling her “no.” So, for example, she’ll be in a store and grab something off the shelf. We’ll tell her “No, Hayley, give that to Daddy.” She’ll then run away so we can’t get it. And, when we prevent her from going back, she gets upset and starts hollering. I think it will be easier when she can understand what we’re saying to her but, until then, we just have to put up with teaching her to behave as best as we can. We don’t want to raise a spoiled brat.

That led to problems when we ate out this weekend. Hayley would sit in her high chair for a bit and eat, but then she’d want down. “Up! Up!” she’d say. If we didn’t let her down, she’d start fussing and yelling, and we couldn’t find a way to calm her down. So one of us would go walk her around an empty area of the resturant, but then she’d see some stuff she’d want to get into, or people she’d want to run around, and when we didn’t let her do it, she’d get mad again.

I don’t know if we’ll be eating out much until this phase passes.

We walked around the W&L campus a bit, saw the new Commons, the historic Colonnade, and the Theatre department. We have pictures, too, which should be up shortly. Who knows, Hayley might be W&L Class of 2024.

She handled the long car rides about as well as we could have hoped - she seems to nap in the car somewhat longer than she does in her bed, which is good. But she doesn’t want to be in her carseat when she’s awake. The only thing that really seems to keep her occupied is when somebody reads to her. Poor Holly about lost her voice on the trip home tonight. And there’s only so many times you can read a childrens book before you come to believe that Nancy Parent is the antichrist.

Hayley’s asleep now, having been bathed and bedded. She’s earned it. It’s been a very busy weekend.

We enrolled Hayley in a “Toddle Time” class at the Fuquay-Varina Community Center, and today was the first class.

We got there early, since the time we were given was 9:15, and the class didn’t start until 9:30. It ended up that there were five kids in the class - all of them older than Hayley. It looks like the ages ranged from 20 months to three years.

Needless to say, the other kids got a lot more out of the class than Hayley did. The class was very interactive - songs and dancing and props and whatnot. The older kids could follow along with the songs and do the actions, while Hayley pretty much did her own thing, wandering around the room.

So she may be a little young yet for this sort of thing, so I doubt if we re-up after this month’s classes. But the exposure to other kids is a good thing, and for the most part she was friendly around them. She did keep trying to take things from the other children, though. She, like Daddy, never learned to “play well with others” or “share.”

Hayley has also learned another trick recently - she can move this little blue footstool over to the sofa, stand on the stool, then climb onto the sofa all by herself. Of course, many times this ends with her falling off and landing on the floor, but we don’t call her “Massive Head Wound” for nothing. Even with the injuries, it’s pretty cool to see her figuring stuff like that out, and then growing big enough to actually do these things.

It goes hand-in-hand with her new stair-climbing technique where, instead of climbing onto the next stair with her knees, she’s able to put her foot on the next stair and stand up that way. It’s like she’s people.

Hayley’s starting to show her personality, and part of that means testing the limits from her parents. Take last night for example.

Hayley was exploring the living room, and she wandered over toward an endtable by the TV. She grabbed onto it and started climbing onto the bottom shelf. Now, she’d already fallen and cried twice last night, so I took her away from the table and said “No, Hayley. You can’t climb on that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

So what does she do? Walks right back over to the table and starts to climb it again. So I pull her away and repeat my warning. After a couple of times of this, she goes back over, picks her foot up like she’s going to step up, but pauses, staring at me. Waiting for me to stop her. As soon as she started stepping, I told her “No” again.

This went on for a while. She’s going to be a handful in the Terrible Twos.

I’ve been kinda slack about updating the BabyBlog recently. We haven’t hit any major developments or anything in the past few weeks - pretty much settling into a nice routine.

Hayley and Holly came to lunch with my work today. They had a lunch for a couple of birthdays and a new baby from a co-worker, so I invited my folks along, too.

Hayley had a good time charming people. She was flirting across the table at Alex. Either that or engaging in a staredown with him. It’s hard to tell with her sometimes. And everyone stopped by to say how cute she was (and of course she is). She was pretty good during the hour-and-a-half lunch, but got a little antsy toward the end and wanted to run around the floor. So we boxed her into a confined area and let her down.

With two molars on the top coming in, we’re waiting for the next tooth. It looks like it’s going to be a bottom molar, judging from the bulge on her gumline.

She’s been sleeping reasonably well. We’ve mostly switched her nap schedule from two half-hour naps during the day to one hour-plus nap. She generally sleeps through the night from around 7:30pm until 6-7am, with a few nights where she wakes up screaming.

Her hair is curling in the back. I wonder if she’s going to have curly hair like her mother?

Daddy had another night alone with his baby tonight, while Mommy went off to work on her scrapbooking.

We had a fun night - had some dinner, read a few books, sang some songs. Hayley stood and sat on things, and played with the magnets on the fridge. She’s also been experimenting with a kid’s first natural high - spinning around in circles until you get dizzy and fall down. She did that a couple of times tonight, giggling until she collapsed.

We did our usual routine of pajamas, milk, stories, toothbrushing, and then bed. She was a little restless after I put her in her crib and left, but didn’t cry and fell asleep pretty quickly. She’s still asleep as I write, breathing gently over the monitor.

Father/Daughter night is nice.