Leif was a lot easier to deal with in the pool today. He didn't insist on clinging to me like a little monkey the whole time. I think the pool party on Saturday really helped get him used to the idea of being in the water.

He did, however, scoot himself along the wall, saying "Leifr monkey water!" (Leifr is a monkey in the water!)

shanasuer - he's now trying to shove Mariel and I together by the necks. I am amused. Rather indiscriminate little guy.

I'm so glad he's learning. It makes the idea of spending lots of time in the pool this summer much more appealing. (The idea in general is very appealing, but doing so with a little monkey attached permanently to my waist is a little not.)

"Sarah left! I cry many tears! My heart is breaking... Oh wait, there's a duck!"

Occasionally having the attention span of a toddler would be useful, you know?

Um, when I talked about Leif passing out early, I didn't really mean 5PM early...

*sigh*

Today went well. Leif and I met koyote to walk home after his hapkido class. It turned out there was a cinco de mayo celebration on campus with free kid activities. Leif experienced his first bouncy house, first face painting (a blue balloon, which promptly smeared all over his hair), and first pinata. He had a blast.

They also had a free health screening, which indicated that we're basically healthy, including some numbers I'd been curious about. Yay!

Now we're headed over to essa_lemuroid's for a BBQ. When she originally told me about it, she said it was a grill party, which I misheard as girl party, which was amusing, as I'd made the same mistake earlier this week. In my defense, it was really noisy when she was talking to me.

Leif is terribly happy - he adores her son. Earlier this week he got sad, curled up on my lap, and said "I miss Zander".

In any case, things are going reasonably well overall. I feel like all I ever post anymore is grumpiness and angsty stuff, and that's not really accurate, but what else is a journal for? :)

Leif is currently wearing too big, cutoff, camo pants and a hideousillusion-decorated green shirt that is starting to get too small. He has a bedhead full of hair tinted purple from our kool-aid experiment last week.

He looks like a midget teenage punk.

Leif just came running into the living room carrying a tray of cookies and yelling "I got it!"

I woke up hearing someone messing around with our stuff outside. Turned out to be the neighbor's cat, who wanted in out of the rain. But now I can't get back to sleep.

I'm tempted to give the doula program a piece of my mind. I sign up for two days a week. On those two days, I can't go further from home than the library (and even then I'm unlikely to get there within the 30 minute response time if they call - I basically have to be sitting at home ready to go for that to happen) and have to be ready to drop everything at any moment, pack Leif off to friends, and rush to the hospital. This means that my friend is also on call on these days.

I haven't been in since November. It's disheartening, especially since I'm the only person on the schedule those two days. I get no feedback, so I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong that's causing me not to get called. I did get called once, but it was randomly on a day I wasn't actually on the schedule, and they found someone else before I could arrange care for Leif.

Looking at the tentative schedule for the next two weeks the coordinator just sent out, I don't think it's just me. Only four people (out of 50 or so on the mailing list) responded for her first request for availability information, and there are lots of slots open. I'm sure some will come out of the woodwork (like I did) now that she's basically sent the final reminder, but still, it looks like people are losing interest. Only 2 people other than me attended the last group meeting.

I have a friend who was in the program a few years back who eventually quit because she was never being called in.

I know the coordinator can't force the midwives and nurses to call doulas, and maybe there just truly isn't the demand. Not everyone wants a random stranger to come in and sit with them during labor.

Still, it seems like something needs to change if they want the program to work. The current coordinator is moving on to a new project (making the hospital into an official baby friendly hospital, meaning basically that they provide exceptional breastfeeding support), so perhaps the new coordinator will be able to push the program a bit more.

A funny LJ coincidence happened yesterday. In the morning, someone posted in ucdavis about seeing a cop staking out a local bank with a rifle, and mentioned seeing some people across the street taking about it and taking pictures. In the evening, I saw a post while reading friendsfriends from the person who had been taking the pictures. The really odd part - she's was just visiting Davis for the weekend, and our mutual friend lives on the other side of the country and has no connection to Davis. She was, however, with a local friend who is on the friends list of my former roommate. Small world.

Leif is in love with the Babar movie. It's cute, but I find I really don't like the colonialist, materialist message it has. Yes, the elephants are of course oh so much happier wearing clothing and living in a city than they were frolicking in the wild. And then there's the mommy-death, which, if I'd thought about it in advance, probably would have had me avoiding it entirely. The inconsistancies between the movie and the bonus episode on the DVD bug me, too. In the movie, he clearly becomes king as an adult. In the bonus episode, he's a child king. Ah well, continuity is for wimps.

I should try to get more sleep. 5 hours really isn't enough.

Leif fell asleep at 4 today and is still out. This does not bode well for tonight.

We were heading out for park/ice cream/whatever, and I told him that he needed to go potty, since he hadn't been since before library story time this morning. He refused, threw a fit, and then fell asleep. And then peed all over the place in his sleep an hour or so later.

I expect he's probably a little sick, both because of the sleeping and the peeing.

I was looking forward to the ice cream.

I don't feel like updating.

Leif and I are visiting at my mom's house. The keyboard sucks, so please excuse any typos I don't correct.

We're supposed to go to San Diego tomorrow, but my mom is sick, so I'm not sure we'll make it.

I wonder if Leif is weaning. I can count the times he's nursed since we left early Tuesday morning on one hand, and he actually didn't want to nurse before his nap this afternoon, and fell asleep on his own, which I don't think he's ever done when he was with me and not in some form of transportation (car, stroller, baby carrier, whatever). It's possible that he has certain associations that were broken by going someplaces else.

I went out on my own this afternoon. I went to a coffee shop and drank a latte and ate a sandwich and finished my book. Then I wandered around stores and a library. Whoo. I saw the oddest thing in a women's clothing boutique - a fleece spaghetti strap tank top. Huh?

Leif is currently watching Finding Nemo, and seems to want me to come over and hold him, so I suppose I will do that.

Ah, the joys of having a two year old. Leif took a long, late nap and refused to eat dinner. Then he woke up and fed his mashed potatoes to his stuffed kitty. He still hasn't actuallly eaten anything himself.

We cooked a big Thanksgiving dinner, despite being only the three of us. We intend to eat off of it for the next month or so. A medium sized turkey, quinoa stuffing, 4 lbs of mashed potatoes, gravy, greens, salad that we never ended up eating, silkensteel's cranberry sauce, a pumpkin pie, an apple pie, and 2.5 dozen coconut chocolate chip cookies that were baked at the same time pretty much as coincidence.

Yes, we have leftovers.

I burned my hand today. This is pretty much a Thanksgiving rite of passage, except that it didn't actually happen during anything Thanksgiving-related. koyote was serving up beans and rice for breakfast, and some got on my hand.

It's ok now, though. A little red and stiff, but not really painful anymore, and no worse than first degree.

I discovered that I like pumpkin pie batter much better than actual pumpkin pie. It tastes like eggnog. I hoped maybe this recipe would taste similar once it was baked, but it tasted like plain ordinary pumpkin pie, which is good, but not my favorite.

Leif gobbled it, though. Not surprising, since he wasn't into dinner.

This sounds way too whiny for a Thanksgiving post. I don't mean it that way. It was the first time that I can remember that I've had a Thanksgiving dinner without tons of extended family around, and it was nice.