It occurs to me

[kiya]

that I have been basically keeping radio silence for long enough that I should do a general life update post. Not sure how long this will get so I will be doing a sequence of cuts.


KJ is coming up on 18 months old now.

She walks. She climbs stairs. Solo, crawling, with assistance she walks up holding a parent's hand or the handrail. She does the Toddler Stompdance when she likes the music. She has pretty good fine dexterity as well, and can spend ages doing things like fitting crayons through small openings. teinedreugan's sister was quite impressed when we were visiting.

Her favorite things include putting things in containers and taking them out again, knocking over block towers, bringing me stacks of The Muppet Show DVDs, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and One Blue Hippo, and artan_eter.

She signs a moderate amount, and has a few words - at the moment primarily "meem meem" (milk, ... mostly), "up!", "no" and "be" (please). Sometimes she manages to make "be" into "bwees", and she often accompanies it with the ASL sign for 'please'. She appears to think it means 'give!', as she says it when asking for things and when giving them to people. Her language tendencies led to my family, over the winterholiday visit, adopting, "Be!" as a personal mantra en masse, because wiseassery is in the blood.

She is shy in crowds, social with smaller groups and with people she finds familiar. Separation anxiety was pretty epic for a bit there, but I can drop her off in the nursery at church now and only have a little bit of sobbing. She loves the cats so much that whenever we see a cat in one of her board books she wants to kiss the page.

She has ten teeth and a moderate reluctance to use them on food. She also doesn't use them on me, so that's fine. Chicken is a favorite, also apples, also whatever artan_eter is eating. Sleep is also a touchy point, and I am running perpetually short.

She is sweet and loving, occasionally intensely demanding, and the best flufflehead ever.



We are still in the process of figuring out this whole moving things. artan_eter and whispercricket are officially here for the duration, after being unofficially here since KJ was born.

Househunting is kind of a mess. Because there are four of us, with our distinct and weird needs and preferences, finding something that can work for us is tricky, and there isn't much out there that does it - at least that we can afford. There's one place that would be a pretty good match, but the current owners have an overblown sense of house values at the moment, so they're not willing to sell it for anything remotely close to what we'd pay for it. (And what we'd be willing to pay with it is in line with assessed value, it's not that we're jerks.) Latest news is that they don't need to sell so they will sit there and see if anyone bites on their overpriced thing in a bad market.

I'll be sad if someone does, but also, well -- P. T. Barnum's maxim holds. (Though Wikipedia says that that's not the sort of thing Barnum would say. Well, whoever.)

The house thing is sort of profoundly depressing, because it's so unrewarding. And I'm feeling half-uprooted, which is a really unpleasant condition for me - as well as hitting a point of sufficient overcrowding that I occasionally threaten to move into the bedroom closet.



I am settling into the UU church I occasionally babble about. I have not put my name in the membership book, primarily because if I do that and we wind up moving somewhere where I can't get to church easily it will fuck me up in the head bigtime so I'm being self-protective. Community is hard. I'm very happy there, though, to say the least.

I am waiting for comments back on the Traveller's Guide manuscript so I can submit a final draft for editing. I am also in negotiation with an artist, who I really need to get back to with notes on what I want and a few sketches I promised like a month ago. I've been buried in stuff, primarily toddler-based, alas.

My progress on other manuscripts has been more or less nil. The Onion-Hoeing thing is hard and also I just can't make my brain do right now - not enough sleep, not enough time to concentrate.

(Also been working of building a set of routines, but have more or less had that sabotaged by the great sleep shortage.)


I think that's most of it.

Comments

[zeborah]

KJ sounds adorable!

Good luck finding a house – there's bound to be something out there that suits what you all need.

[hawlla.livejournal.com]

Kids are adorable up until they start speaking back. This is the maxim my mother lived by and I'm beginning to find it true. My son recently started talking back and sassing. This is, of course, my fault entirely since I both talk back and sass on a regular basis. It is, of course, also proof that he is indeed my son.

[k0m1sch.livejournal.com]

TRAVELER'S GUIDE YAYE