With a BAA and a MOO

This week we all suffered through Zoe’s second cold. Zoe suffers because she can’t breath, isn’t sleeping well and generally seems to be under the weather. Alison and I suffer because Zoe is not sleeping well. And she hates getting her nose wiped. If nasal mucus glowed in the dark you would be able to see our house from the moon. I swear the next cold she gets I’m buying myself a hazmat suit. Mid week I decided the only way to clear the crusted on by-product of her cold was to immerse her in water, so once again I tried the ducky tub. If you remember the last time I tried the ducky tub, Zoe screamed the second her toes hit the water. This time I tried a different approach. I put her in the empty tub and slowly, one cup at a time, filled the tub. By the time it was filled she seemed to be enjoying herself, or at least enjoyed sucking the water off the bucket of toys I crammed in with her. I, of course, took the obligatory baby-in-the-bathtub photos, which I will save and use to blackmail her with when she is older.

Although Zoe is not crawling, she manages to shuffle around. However, she does so surreptitiously. I’ll look over at her playing quietly on her play area, and a few moments later I’ll look up and she will be playing quietly in the snakes’ nest of wires behind the TV. Because she has not started crawling I have yet to childproof any of our rooms. This of course means that one morning we’ll wake up and she’ll be standing by our bed demanding breakfast (which would require that she eats real food, another not-yet). I’ll be forced to duct tape her to the floor while I quickly hide all the breakables and screw the kitchen cabinets shut.

Yesterday I had a quiet hour to myself while Alison and Zoe napped. Since our house is actually one giant acoustic box and ninety percent of our floors creak (I’m planning on spray painting those areas that don’t squeak a bright orange so I know where I’m allowed to walk during nap time) I am limited to the kitchen. I was happily fixing a light dinner (pommes de terre with saucisson a la Provincal in a nice beurre noisette, you know, nothing fancy) and found myself repeating the rhyming text from one of Zoe’s favorite books, Barnyard Dance. “Stomp your feet! Clap your hands! Everybody ready for a barnyard dance.” I tried to force something from Springsteen into my head but instead I got, “Bow to the horse. Bow to the cow. Twirl the pig if you know how.” I fear that Alison and I will be dancing in the dark (did you catch the Springsteen reference?) and I will whisper seductively into her ear, “Bounce with the bunny. Strut with the duck. Spin with the chickens now cluck cluck cluck!”

See photos of Zoe at http://picasaweb.google.com/dbglass.