Separation anxiety

Emily has gone to Disneyland with her mom and grandmother. This is the first time I've been separated from her overnight, and I'm very sad about it--coming home this morning to an empty apartment after taking them to the train station was a real downer.

Why didn't I go, too? First, I may have jury duty; so far, I haven't, but I have to call all week. Second, I probably wouldn't have gone anyway, since I don't like amusement parks. My parents dragged me to them as a child; I hated the rides, and when I yelled, they laughed at me. I know that they were just trying to 1) get me to have fun; 2) make light of my mortal terror. Still, it's not a happy memory. Plus it's not as if I was an dour child anyway (though this is apparently their memory of me): I loved playing sports and so on. I did enjoy the parks to some extent, so long as I didn't have to go on any rides. Or only the low-key ones, like those little cars on tracks you could drive around.

No, I would have gone--if Emily has fun, I want to see it. I just hope she never asks Daddy to ride a rollercoaster.

Growing quickly

Yesterday we went to a barbeque on the beach. Emily hadn't napped much all day. Refreshed, perhaps, by the sea air, she slept soundly for two hours in her stroller. When she woke up, she seemed strangely older: she talked for several minutes in nearly full sentences of babble, nodding and making eye contact with whomever she was speaking to. Maybe it was being around all those academics, and she, too, was trying to be pompous (actually, these were almost all very nice people, which is why we went). She looks different, too, in the last few days--her face has more definition, and she looks older somehow.

We finally broke down (well, I did, since I was the one against it) and got a video camera. Now we can bore everyone with movies of Emily trying to walk or smearing peanut butter on her face and so on.

I want my mommy!

Emily has finally figured out that she's separate from her mother's body--so the developmental psychologists say happens around this age, and I now believe them. She does not like to be separated from her mommy at all. If J leaves the room, Emily crawls, bawling, after her. If J goes into the bathroom, Emily crawls up to the door and pounds it, usually with her fist, but sometimes with her head. If mommy leaves the apartment, she cries and looks pathetically out the kitchen window to see her go by. When the door opens, she jumps and crawls rapidly towards it, hoping it's mommy.

Her smile is so big now that it's a little demonic sometimes.

The explorer

Emily's trips around the apartment are becoming increasingly . . . aggressive. She doesn't much like to sit still now at all, no matter which toy we try to tantalize her with. She tosses it aside and immediately is off. If a door isn't completely closed, she will push it open. Our apartment doesn't seem big enough, and we worry that she's bored. Does she need some new kind of toy? A little jungle gym? A keyboard? Should we play with her more, or just leave her to crawl around and figure things out (like why wires don't taste so good)?

She's also on a solid food strike. This is apparently typical--they start to want to feed themselves before they actually can. She closes her mouth, firmly, turns her head, and swats angrily at the spoon. J came up with the idea of wrapping Cheerios in sticky fruit as a finger food, and this has worked somewhat--she does eat some of it, though more of it goes on her clothes and the floor. Oh well, babies are supposed to be messy, and we've certainly kept her unnaturally clean so far.

The dustbuster obsession continues. Last night I actually used it and she came crawling rapidly towards me to be near it.

Baby-proofing

We spent a little time (ok, J spent a lot of time) worrying about baby-proofing and a little time actually doing something about it (J spent a little time; I left to go watch soccer on television or something). As Emily is now very much on the move, we have realized that our apartment is one danger zone after another. Some of the danger is due to our professions (bookcases about to topple over at the slightest tug; a computer hard drive she loves to pull herself up on), some due to our passions (my gigantic CD tower), some just plain negligence (wires), some lack of income (cheap furniture that is easy to topple over). It's...well, not a nightmare, that would be too strong, but certainly upsetting that Emily crawls around from one trouble spot to another, as if she has some sort of nose for it--but not that she'd have to in this place. Her current favorite is the dustbuster, which is obviously going to have to be moved, probably into the same closet we put the paper shredder, another early favorite in her explorations about the apartment. The picture illustrates another favorite trouble spot--she's obsessed with what's on this table, and unfortunately, there's far too much.

It's made us see our apartment in a whole new way, not in a good new way, but instead a new way that says, "Man, we're slobs."

The University

As I was pushing Emily home a couple of days ago, I couldn't help but notice, yet again, how ugly the UCSB campus is. It's in a gorgeous location, but they've made a mess of it. When the prettiest structures on campus are the parking garages, you know you've gone wrong. It's hard to single out one particular building for crimes against architecture, but the administration building might be the ugliest: it resembles, apparently deliberately, a prison, with narrow slits for windows (did the architect consider the scenery outside distracting to cubicle-bound bureaucrats?) and lots of steel.
It seems to embody the message administrators usually send to college students: please don't bother us. Just pay your bill and get out. They should tear everything down and start over. There is a lot of construction now(it's hard for me to teach my class over the noise, which also seems symbolic somehow), but they're probably just putting up more ugly buildings. There is one new science building with lots of glass that I like a lot. I'll try to take a picture of it and post it.

Dancing Emily

Yes, she started dancing. While sitting, of course. But it's a definite dance--one of her little dolls plays music, and she bounces along with it.

Children are very funny with their toys (not just because she'd rather play with the New York Times than any of her toys); they have tremendous affection for one of them for a few days, then ignore this same toy, then love this toy again sometime later. You're supposed to rotate toys frequently because of this, I guess, but even someone as anal as I am, with days to discard old razor blades and switch to new ones entered into a calendar, cannot keep up a consistent rotation of toys.

J is preparing for a big lecture on Tuesday, so I have Emily all day today. We have big plans--a long walk, and she's going to watch Spain-Latvia in EuroCup 2008 qualifying with Daddy and a neighbor.