Hayley and Kate Minter

Hayley and I went to Target today (Wade thinks we spend half our lives there and the other half at Walmart). As I was looking for some socks for Hayley, she spotted a pair of “Dora the Explorer” slippers that someone had stuck on the sock rack. The slippers were the kind that cover the whole foot, like a regular shoe, and they have Dora’s head and torso at the toe end. They just happened to be Hayley’s size, and Hayley seemed to want them. I checked that the price was reasonable and got them for her. Little did I know what the rest of the day would hold…

When we got back home, I offered to put the slippers on Hayley’s feet. She wore them around until naptime. I asked if she wanted them off, but she said no. So, she napped in them. She continued to wear them the rest of the day. Tonight when it was time to take her bath, I tried to take off her slippers with the rest of her clothes. But, she would have none of that. She didn’t want those slippers to leave her feet. Wade and I tried to explain to her that we would put them back on again after she took her bath, but either she didn’t believe us or she didn’t understand because she cried and cried. Wade had to hold her to keep her from climbing out of the tub while I tried my best to rinse her off. As soon as she got out of the tub and had the slippers back in her hands, she was fine again.

I’m assuming it’s just the novelty of the slippers and that after a day or two, she won’t be so obsessed with them. She’s wearing them right now in her bed…I wonder if she’ll take them off at all tomorrow…

Hayley is no longer a baby–she is now a kid. I have recently purchased cold-weather clothes for her, and I had to buy everything is sizes 2 to 3. No more clothes with sizes in “months.” She’s also moving up in shoe size. I have gotten several pairs of her shoes over the last year at Target (because I like Target’s baby shoes). They have these little bins on the ends of the shoe aisles that contain only shoes for babies. But, apparently, they only go up to size 5 or 5 1/2 because when I was looking for a size 6 for Hayley the other day, there were none. I had to go to the KID’s section. I couldn’t believe it. At that moment, it hit me how fast she’s growing up, and I was a little sad that she isn’t a baby anymore.

Our fridge is no longer safe from Hayley. For weeks, she has been going to the refrigerator when she wants something and grabbing the handle. She would try to pull it open while saying, “Pull,” but she couldn’t open it…until today. I guess she finally put enough weight behind it so that the door opened. Yikes. Looks like Mommy’s going to have to do a little rearranging in there so I don’t end up with eggs all over my kitchen floor.

For the past week or so, Hayley has been talking herself to sleep. Wade and I try to get her in bed between 8:30 and 9 pm. We do the same nighttime ritual that we’ve been doing for weeks, ending with holding her for a few minutes and then putting her in bed while she’s still awake. She’s been very good about not crying or screaming for us to come back in. But, she has been talking to herself and rustling around in her crib every night for 20-30 minutes after we leave the room. We don’t know if she’s talking to her bears or just to herself, but I guess if that’s her way of winding down, we won’t mess with whatever works.

Hayley has also been repeating a lot of what we say lately, and has graduated from two-word phrases to some with three words. The other day she said, “Hay fall down.” And, if we say, “Hayley, it’s time to change your diaper,” she will say, “Change dipe.” She almost always repeats the last two or three words of what we say, except when it’s a question. Then she answers “otay” or “no.” It’s cute to hear her trying to say so many new words.

When I came home from work today, Hayley was doing flips. She’ll walk across the floor, bend over until her head touches the ground, then kind of flop over to the side. But a couple of times, she actually did a real flip head-over-heels, landing on her back.

Holly thought she was about to break her neck, but I was amazed at our little gymnast!

I like to play with Hayley, read to her, etc., but I have discovered that it is when I watch her play by herself that I learn the most about her.

In Hayley’s nearly 20 months of life, we have read some books hundreds of times. I have memorized most of these books (which isn’t hard to do considering that most of them have only one sentence on each of their 5-10 pages). Now I am finding out that Hayley has memorized them, too.

Sometimes Hayley likes to sit by herself and “read” to herself. Today when I asked her (twice) if she wanted Mommy to read to her, she adamantly said, “No, Hay,” and pointed to herself. So, I just watched her. As she took each book off the shelf, she looked at the cover and gave it a one-word “title.” For example, a book about the Pound Puppies was “pup”; a book about a pet show was “show”; and a book about monkeys was “ooh ooh.” When she found one that she wanted to read, she sat down and opened the book. As she turned the pages, she looked at each picture and “read.” Now, I could see the book from where I was sitting, and as I listened to what she was saying, I realized that she was reading it correctly. She would say one or several words for each page, and they would be actual words or sounds from the story. It’s amazing how much information kids can retain. The one that really threw me, though, was this flip-book of letters and numbers. Each letter has an animal or object with it that begins with that letter. The numbers also have pictures of one dog, two cats, etc. At the end of the book are colored shapes. I knew that Hayley can recognize animals by their pictures, and she knows objects like nest and umbrella, but I didn’t know she knew shapes. But, when she got to the shape section, she said “cirk” for circle, “hah” for heart, and “tri” for triangle. I was pleasantly surprised to be sure. Repetition of a book may make parents a little nuts at the time, but it certainly seems to help children learn.

From the “Things I never thought I’d hear myself saying” department:

“Daddy is not a bug. Do not hit him with the flyswatter.”

As I’m sure everyone has been waiting anxiously, it’s time for the final chapter in the East Coast Baby Tour saga.

We got up on Wednesday morning in our hotel, verified that nobody had stolen our car during the night, and got an early start to Baltimore. I’d driven past Baltimore a ton of times, but I’d never actually been to the city. Following John’s directions, we made it to downtown pretty easily, though we decided to punt and go for a parking garage instead of trying to find cheaper parking. We came into town right by the Inner Harbor and drove past the National Aquarium, so we were able to find parking a block or two away.

Arriving at the aquarium around 9:30am, we managed to get tickets for immediate entry, which was nice. They’re apparently adding on to the building, so we had to wind our way around the construction. We actually got two tickets - one to get into the aquarium itself, and the other for a dolphin show. Entering the aquarium, there was a big open tank full of stingrays. The aquarium tour itself was very cool - lots of interesting marine life on display. One of my favorites was the tank that contained the electric eel - above the tank was an indicator showing how much electricity th eel was currently generating. You could watch the voltage fluctuate as the eel sent out shocks to try to find food. Hayley was more interested in the colorful fish, though.

Around 11am, we headed off to the dolphin area for the dolphin show. That was also very well done - they gave some information about how they worked with the animals, then it was trick time! The dolphins were very well trained, that’s for sure. The only problem was that one of the dolphin tricks was playing with a ball, and when Hayley saw that, she wanted the ball! We tried to explain to her that the ball was for the dolphins, but she wasn’t having any of it. Yeah, it was near her naptime.

She was pretty tired when we got out of the aquarium, and fell asleep on Holly as we were walking back to the car. We got our stroller (they didn’t allow them in the aquarium itself, so we left it in the car) and went out to find lunch. We strolled around several blocks (including what the locals must call “porn street” - lots of peepshows and adult stores in this block) before ending up back at the Inner Harbor. We went into this waterfront mall and ate lunch at a seafood place called City Lights Seafood. Hey, you’re in Baltimore, you gotta have the crabcake. From our table, we had a great view of the water taxis ferrying people around the harbor. That had a drawback, though, as a horn from one of the boats woke Hayley up almost as soon as we sat down. Thanks.

We feasted on the crab in cake form, picked up a couple of souvenirs from the mall, and headed back outside. It was getting near showtime, so we drove across town to the First Mariner Arena. It’s good that we left when we did, because the parking garage at the arena was full. Yikes - I don’t know my way around the city, now I’ve got to find parking. I dropped the girls off at the arena, not knowing how long it would take me to find somewhere, and found an open garage just around the corner from the arena. Of course, the spaces in the garage were so narrow that the van could just barely fit into them, and I ended up on the 7th floor of the garage, but it was parking, so I couldn’t complain.

Back to the arena, where Holly and Hayley were in their seats. Y’know, there were a lot of kids there. I’m just sayin’. Of course, that’s because we were there to see The Wiggles, and they have a different target audience than, say, Nelly. Holly got Hayley the obligitory Wiggles merchandise, and we sat down to wait for the show.

The kids around us, including Hayley, were all pretty antsy. There were lots of cases of kids playing around happily, then trying to do something like, say, dive off the balcony, getting told “No,” crying up a storm, then getting happy again. Hayley was one of the younger ones there - most of the other kids appeared to be at least two and older.

The show was about 15 minutes late getting started, so they were playing Wiggles videos on the big screens. Finally, the video changed to the show intro, showing the Wiggles driving the Big Red Car® up the B-W Parkway into Baltimore. Then the show started! The crowd went wild! Well, all except Hayley. She was interested, she watched it, but she didn’t really get into it like she does at home.

We figure she wasn’t really old enough to understand that she was seeing the people on TV, but they weren’t on TV. And the size of the crowd may have discombulated her. Even when, at various points in the show, Murray and Jeff came right by where we were sitting, she didn’t really pay them much attention.

The show itself wasn’t bad - they threw in a couple of chestnuts for the adults, such as playing the opening to “Stairway to Heaven” to tune the guitar, and having Capt. Feathersword sing like Bob Dylan. All the people in the show certainly get a workout, running and jumping around. So I think the show was worthwhile, even if Hayley didn’t really appreciate what she saw. In another year, she’d probably have been loving it.

Given her reaction, we hit the door when they announced the last song, in the hopes of beating traffic. it worked - we wound our way out of the garage, through Baltimore, and onto I-95 without much problem. Heading south, we stopped close to the beltway to meet up with Harvey, who brought us the toiletries bag we had left in Maryland. Then it was time to brave the Beltway in rush hour. I had been making predictions all week about the doom we were driving into, how it would probably take us three hours to get from Greenbelt to Fredericksburg. However, by some stroke of fortune, we sailed through DC. Sure, it was stop-and-go from the B-W through, say, Landover. But crossing the Wilson Bridge and making it through Springfield was a snap. We got into the HOV lanes there and went nearly 80 all the way to the end of the HOV. From there, it was only isolated pockets of slow traffic through Fredericksburg.

We stopped in Thornburg (my traditional stopping place on trips to and from DC) for dinner, then made it to Petersburg around 8pm or so. We even had enough time for me to participate in my first fantasy football draft at 9. Hayley went to bed without a problem, we did too after my draft was over, then it was onto Kenbridge and back to North Carolina the next day.

All told, we put around 1160 miles on the van on the trip, and we were in at least two different states every single day. So it was very tiring, and took us about a week to recover from. But it was a lot of fun going somewhere big as a family. We got to see lots of people who we haven’t seen in a while, and have lots of great memories. And that’s what vacations are all about.

So ended the East Coast Baby Tour 2004.

It’s been a few months since I’ve put a new video online, so we took some film of Hayley playing on the slide today.

We don’t have any swingset stuff yet, but our neighbors do, and they’ve invited Hayley to come play on it any time. Well, she loves her some slide action. If we’re out in our back yard, she’ll look over next door, see the slides, run to the fence, and yell “Swide! Swide!” She’s a good slider, too - she’ll just sit right down at the top, push herself off, and slide on down to the ground.

She sees Brian and Jenny next door walk up the slide to get to the top, instead of going up the ladder, so she thinks that’s the way she’s supposed to do it, too. And today, she surprised us by climbing up the slide to the top all by herself!

So watch the video and see what a big girl we have.

Holly had an evil idea last night. “Why don’t you put the baby to bed by yourself tonight?” I reminded her that it’s a rare event that Hayley will even let me read stories to her at bedtime, much less go so far as to hold her. The kid likes her some “Mama,” what can I say?

Before I could protest much further, she ran, leaving me alone with Hayley, who looked confused.

“Mama?”

I got her sippy cup of milk and convinced her that wonderous things awaited her if she climbed the stairs, so we stepped on up to her room. I changed her diaper and got her into her pajamas with a minimal amount of fuss, then we picked out some books to read. Well, attempted to. She said “no” to every one I offered, so I eventually just picked a couple myself and read them. She’d wander by on occasion to see what I was reading, then go amuse herself with a spool of thread or a mirror.

We think she may be part cat.

After a couple of stories, when it was obvious that she wasn’t interested any more, it was tooth-brushing time. That went better than I expected, as it’s a crapshoot these days as to whether Hayley will view toothbrushing as Happy Funland, or Chinese Dental Torture. She was good for the brushing, though I didn’t give her the 10-minute scrub of doom that Holly uses.

Once I picked her up and took her back into her bedroom, though, she knew something was up. She started wailing before I had even cut the light off and shut the door. I just hung on and tried not to drop her as she squirmed and screamed “MAMA! MAMA! MAMA!” With nothing else to do, I just rocked her up and down while butchering the lyrics to the “Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird” song.

Amazingly, after 4-5 minutes, she stopped screaming and just lay with her head on my shoulder. I continued to bounce and sing, not wanting to jinx anything. Finally, after a few more minutes of that, I dared to pull her off of the shoulder and lay her into her crib. She squirmed around, but didn’t attempt to stand up, so I put her arm around one of her bears. She pushed that away, but stayed horizontal. So I covered her up, eased toward the door, told her I loved her, and left.

Holly was in the computer room waiting, and we stayed there, but Hayley stayed quiet. It worked! 15 minutes later or so we heard a couple of soft “mama? mama?” calls over the monitor, but Hayley stayed in bed the entire night.

Nights like that make me think that I’ll get the hang of this “Dad” thing yet.

We got up to a fine Deacle breakfast Tuesday morning. Scott and Sarah fixed us waffles (real ones, on a real waffle iron), and they were good. Reggie thought so, too.

Hayley and Reggie had a good time playing together. She would run from one room to the next, and Reggie would chase right after her. As we were getting our stuff ready to go, Sarah got out some pens so that Hayley could draw. We tried to get a picture of Hayley with Scott and Sarah, but she was having none of it. So we had to settle on getting them in kind of the same space at the same time.

The Deacles gave us directions into Philly, and we bade them farewell. The directions they gave us took us along this very pretty drive beside the river, past the boathouses and the art museum (of “Rocky” fame) into downtown. It was pretty easy to find the historic area, and we parked in a garage a few blocks away. We brought the stroller, though Hayley wasn’t really having much to do with it. Our first stop was the Liberty Bell. After making it through airport-grade security, including putting the stroller through the X-Ray machine, we were into the building that houses the bell. It’s not in Independence Hall, but rather in a new building on the lawn of the Hall. We saw the bell, it was large and cracked, and then we left.

As we were leaving the bell center, we saw a guy hawking horse-drawn carriage rides for $20. Since we wanted to see some of the sights, and knew that Hayley wouldn’t sit in her stroller, we took him up on the offer. Hayley got to feed the horse (”Caesar”) a carrot, and we began our trip.

The tour was decent - we went around about a 6-8 block area of the historic part of town. We saw sights like the old bank, tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Philadelphia hospital, jewler’s row, and more. I think it was worth the money, and Hayley was pretty good for the trip, eating and then standing in the floor of the carriage.

We went back to the car and left for Delaware. On the way out, though, we wanted to try one of the “famous Philly cheesesteaks” from either Pat’s or Geno’s. When I worked in Philly, I got my cheesesteak fix from random food carts on the street, so I’d never eaten there. Of course, before we left, we didn’t get directions, so we were wandering the streets of South Philly, Hayley asleep in the back, trying to find these places. We finally asked for directions and got them, along with the recommendation to “Go to Geno’s - they’re better.” Cheesesteaks are religion to Philly folk. We found the shops and got our food. The steaks were good, but I think the ones from the cart were better.

Our bellies full of steak, we got back on 95 South toward the Delaware/Maryland border area. Our destination was the home slash office of one John Skilton. I’ve been doing consulting work for his company, SkilTech, since 1997 or 1998, running the systems he uses. We don’t get a chance to meet face-to-face very often, though, so I wanted to make sure to stop by and see him.

We got to SkilTech World Headquarters in Elkton, Maryland, and John immediately put me to work. So while I used his wireless network to get a few things done, Holly and Hayley watched TV and played with his dogs, Buster and Max.

This was probably Hayley’s worst mood of the trip - I don’t know if she had gotten so over-tired that she snapped, or what, but she was just inconsolable most of the afternoon. She napped for a bit, but the dog’s barking woke her up. At one point, she was having a fit so bad that she slammed the back of her head into Holly’s face, cutting Holly’s lip. Yikes.

We eventually calmed down enough to go to dinner. John took us to a new place in the Newark, DE, suburbia called Red Robin. It’s a 50’s-themed burger place, and it was hoppin’. There was a 20-minute wait to get in, and we were fairly late getting there, so it was getting late in the evening before we sat down. Then it happened.

I was trying to get Hayley into her high chair, and she was facing me, so she didn’t notice the Red Robin mascot coming up behind her. So when she turned around to find Holly, she instead found herself nose-to-beak with a six-foot-tall anthromorphic bird, its wide staring eyes and yellow-beaked grin right next to her. She literally jumped from the high chair into my arms and grabbed on tight. She didn’t cry - she didn’t do anything. She was just comatose hanging onto my shirt. I could have stood up without touching her and she wouldn’t have moved.

The bird quickly moved away and didn’t come back, but Hayley didn’t leave that spot for at least a half-hour. She didn’t want to go to Holly, either, which is rare. She just clung to me. Part of the problem may have been that, in the line of sight from the way she was clinging, there was a 3-foot-tall statue of the same mascot. I don’t think she wanted to move for fear of it coming to life. We finally, as we were finishing our food, got her to loosen up enough to turn around in my lap and eat a few french fries, but that was it. I’ve never seen that reaction from her before but, when I think about it, if I saw a red creature three times my size coming at me, I’d probably be startled, too.

After the dinner adventure, John took us to the hotel room he’d booked for us. It was a Knight’s Inn right off of I-95. We got panhandled right at the motel office, which was kind of sketchy, but the room was fine. Except for the bathroom, which had a bottle opener attached to the inside of the door frame, at the proper level to be used while sitting on the toilet. A bottle opener? In the bathroom? At john-level? Who are these people’s clientele?

Since we were in the room with Hayley with nowhere else to go, we went to sleep pretty soon after Hayley did.

So ended Day 4.

I’m going to interrupt Wade’s accounts of our trip up the mid-Atlantic states with a bit of general news about Hayley.

First, our nighttime routine has disintegrated since we got back from our vacation. I assumed it would take Hayley a day or two to get back into her normal routine, but it’s been a week now, and things are not progressing in a positive direction. The last few nights especially, she would just stand in her crib and scream bloody murder until I went in and picked her up and sang her to sleep. I try putting her down and leaving, but instead of quietly going to sleep on her own, she screams and cries for “Mama.” Well, I’m sure some parents think I’m spoiling her, but it really breaks my heart to hear her cry like that. I mean, she IS just a baby, and if all that will make her happy and content is for me to go in and hold her, how can I say no? Despite this, it makes for a long day because she is also going to bed later. Most nights she isn’t asleep before nine, which gives me about an hour to myself before I’m tired and ready for bed. But, as I said to Wade, “This too shall pass.” She won’t always need to be rocked to sleep, and I will probably miss these days when she’s older.

Next, Hayley is finally beginning to say her own name. She will point to herself and say, “Hay.” It’s a start.

Lastly, Hayley can now do something that I never would have believed a 19-month-old could do…she can count to ten. You read that right–the kid can count. And, she doesn’t just say the numbers. She understands the relationship between the numbers and objects. Last night during her bath, she was counting her toys, and she would point to each one as she said the numbers. And, she said them all fairly intelligibly–she even said the two-syllable “seven” (although it came out more like “sebuhm”). I was quite surprised. My mom had told me that she was counting last week at her house, but I really thought Mom was making more of it than it really was. But, I heard it for myself last night. And, she later counted her toes for Wade, so he’s a witness, too.

Our smart little girl.