I may be deluded, but it seemed like the crop of bluebonnets this year was especially lovely. Unlike much of the rest of the country, we’ve had a fair amount of really great weather already this year, so a couple weekends ago, we dressed Maya up and took her out for her annual bluebonnet photos.

Maya in the bluebonnets – 16 months old

We seem to actually be getting a bit of a spring in Austin this year. The weather has been pretty mild (except for that one brief bout of near-golf-ball-sized hail) and so far, we’ve only had a couple days that even got close to 90.

Maya in the bluebonnets – 16 months old

Maya has lately been working on her frown. Anna calls it stink-eye. Whatever you call it, Maya’s a master. Half the time, I don’t think she’s especially unhappy about anything; it’s just something new and interesting to do with her face. Suffice it to say, we’re probably lucky we got any photos of her looking even semi-happy.

No, I will not hold the bluebonnet while you take a photo.

Speaking of stink-eye, this is my very favorite photo in the whole set. I get a distinct “to hell with these flowers; I’m gonna go play in the dirt” vibe on this one.

Maya loves to be outside. She whiles away a lot of time picking up rocks and sticks and assorted lawn detritus and relocating them to other parts of the yard.

Maya planting flowers

I love to plant and grow things, but time has become a pretty precious commodity and that was one of the things that’s fallen by the wayside in recent years. Given Maya’s love of the outdoors (and dirt in general), we decided to buy a few plants that we could plant together and try to keep alive through the brutal summer months.

We’ve had some really nice weather lately. However, when we decided to undertake this project, it was a little cooler and awfully windy. That didn’t stop us though. We got some soil and old pots together and slowly but certainly, Maya helped me load ‘em up.

You can see in these photos that she moved the soil one tiny nugget at a time, and often she found it much more enjoyable to wander off with her soil nuggets. Maya also didn’t entirely understand why should couldn’t just grab a handful of plant-life and yank. (Some plants were maimed, but so far all have survived.)

The garden!

Most of the rest of the yard still looks like a weedy hell of shameful neglect, but Maya’s little garden looks pretty good.

(And yes, some of you will notice that we got our grabby toddler a cactus. Frankly, I think it’s the perfect plant for her: it can protect itself and it thrives on neglect.)

I know last time we posted, we shared that Maya wasn’t interested in walking. Since then, her attitude has changed. She walks everywhere now, and even tries to run. We let her get into as much trouble as we can while still avoiding brain injury. Her little shins and knees are looking pretty rough at this point.

Maya is 15 months old today. She does a lot of really wonderful things that I’m happy to talk about. The first question people ask though is inevitably, “Is she walking yet?” The answer is no, but that doesn’t keep her from getting around in style.
Her Lolli and Pop got her a YBike Pewi for Christmas. Maya was a little wobbly at first but in a few short weeks had mastered walking, running, turning, backing up, and skidding to a stop by lightly dragging her feet. She’s to the point now where she can get on and off the YBike by herself too, which is interesting to watch because it has castors instead of fixed wheels, so it rolls very freely and in any direction.

It’s so much fun to watch her ride that thing. She can run all over the house, often for 20-30 minutes at a time. We don’t generally let her play with her toys while she’s on it, so she’ll ride back to her room, hop off her bike and play with her books for a while. Then she’ll hop back on, cruise around for a while, eventually stopping in her play room to work on her toys. Sometimes she even trucks it into the kitchen to her high chair and pats her chest to say “please”. I think she’s really enjoying her new degree of independence.

Wind chimes!

We take the YBike outside to play too. Maya is especially fond of riding it in the back yard (where we barely *have* a yard) so she can occasionally walk over and ding the wind chimes. She’s endlessly obsessed with leaves and sticks, so there are lots of stops to examine those things as well.

Leaves!

Since Maya had gotten so strong on the YBike, nanny Anna tried her out on the little alligator push toy that she had received as a hand-me-down from friends of ours. Where it would get away from her before, she’s mastered it now. It’s a little too heavy for her to turn on her own, but in a straight line, she’s solid, clacking down the hall, often at speed. Sometimes she even whips out a combination move: riding her YBike while pushing her alligators.

The alligators clack – you can hear her coming

When she’s not on her bike or walking her alligators, her little sponge-brain is working things out. She knows several signs (please, thank you, book, ball), can point to many of her body parts when asked about them (including her butt – HA!), pick a specific book or toy out of a pile on request, and gently pet the cats (each of whom she knows by name). She relates the photos on the wall to real people and relates the pictures in books to real objects. She has even recently been putting things away a little bit instead of working to remove every toy from every bin everywhere in the house. She is free with her affection and has a fantastic sense of humor.

No, Maya isn’t walking yet, but she learns so many things so quickly that we’re not worried. She’ll do it once she decides she wants to.

Happy holidays!!!!

Maya’s xmas 2013 composite

Well, we managed to keep a baby alive for a whole year. Go us!

Maya – ONE YEAR OLD!

Maya is one year old today. We made it through sleepless nights, DOC band wearing, a few bouts of sickness, and airline travel with an infant (twice). Through work-life balance issues and endless breast milk pumping. Through baby vomit and baby blood. And now our kid is a healthy, happy one year old.

Even through all that, I still can’t figure out where the time has gone. I had no idea how much pure joy there was in parenthood. I’ve heard countless new parents gush, even those not known to be overly expressive, but there’s really no understanding it till you’re in their shoes. The sleepless nights, the shitty diapers, the anxiety over which decisions are “right” … all completely worth it.

Of course, Maya can’t walk or talk yet. Maybe all that will change ;-)

Making Grammy nervous

We had planned to start her at daycare this week. After taking her there to visit last week, we realized that we just weren’t ready for her to be out of the house and away from us all day. Anna agreed to continue being Maya’s nanny for a while longer. We agreed with each other to reassess in another six months. We still feel like it’s important to get her around other little kids, but there’s time for that later. In the mean time, we’re really enjoying having her around.

Grandpa builds the towers, Maya knocks ’em down

We had her party this past Saturday. Both sets of grandparents made it down and her Aunt Darci and cousin AP visited as well. A decent number of our friends showed up too. I think there were maybe 15-20 people in the house all told, setting a new record for number of guests we’ve entertained at one time. I baked cookies and birthday cake. Sean and Harry and Helen picked up our barbecue, sides, and pie order from Micklethwait Craft Meats (a wholly satisfactory choice by the way). Dad and Carol made sure the dishes were washed and Maya stayed out of trouble. There was a cooler full of drinks and a pile of presents.

Face full of barbecue

Because of all the commotion with family being in town, Maya was resistant to napping; she wanted to be part of the action. She finally settled down about a half hour before her party was to start. We decided a happy baby was better than a punctual baby, so she slept through the first half hour of her party. Already, she’s learning how to be fashionably late.

Cake!

Little girl loves her some barbecue. Lolli and Pop were feeding her, and it sounds like she attacked her plate of food. I expect she was already plenty full by the time we brought in her cake. Just like her Daddy though, she found room for dessert and took out a substantial chunk of birthday cake.

Opening presents

A quick bath helped knock off the icing and seemed to perk Maya up a bit. She found the energy to let Aunt Darci and AP help her open her presents. Everyone was very generous and Maya had quite the haul of clothing and toys.

Hellooooooo Pop

Sunday was a quiet day, spent examining presents and spending time with Grammy and Grandpa and Lolli and Pop before they all started the arduous drive back home. By the end of their visit, Maya had even warmed up enough to dole out kisses to everyone.

Relaxing with Lolli

We are deeming the birthday weekend a success. The party seemed to go well, and despite all the hustle and bustle, we still got to spend a decent amount of time with our parents. And probably more importantly Maya got some time with her grandparents.

Sean wanted to take smash cake photos with Maya. I naively thought that meant he wanted me to let her smash into her cake on her birthday and have him take photos. Then he started showing me some example images with beautiful backgrounds and adorably clad babies and ridiculously large cakes. Clearly, this would require a little more effort.

Maya’s cake smash – almost 1 year old

To start with, I bought a giant cupcake pan. Then, because so many of the cakes in the photos looked to be professionally done, I bought a decorating kit. Sean bought a purple background and a fluffy orange tutu. I baked a test cake and practiced decorating it. I made a giant pile of icing. I attempted to refrigerate said icing overnight and somehow destroyed it. Sean purchased emergency icing (‘cause I just didn’t feel like making more icing just then.) The long and short is that a LOT of preparation went into this project.

The day finally came for the photos. I had baked the cake earlier in the day and decorated it while Maya napped. Sean set up his background and lighting. I looked at his set-up and told him he needed to be fast on the trigger. If the pudding painting was any indicator, the girl was going to be hauling cake to her mouth as fast as her little arms could manage. He said he wasn’t so sure. Lots of the kids in the online photos were pretty dainty about it. Maya, generally speaking, is not a dainty child. I bet him five dollars that she’d tear into it. Needless to say, I lost my money.

Happy Pre-smash Maya

We got her all tutu-ed up and brought her in for some photos. She happily bounced around and grinned while Sean took a few cake-free shots. Then I brought the cake in. She reached out and touched it right away, and then she paused. She looked around in confusion and crawled around the cake to get to me. We tried it again. Nope, getting away from the cake as quickly as possible.

We thought maybe it was because it was late in the day, so we tried again the next day. Again, no joy. She’d scramble away from that cake and into my arms almost as soon as I sat her down. I gave her tastes of the icing and of the cake, feeling certain that if she just realized it was sweet and delicious, she’d lay into it, and still, she was having none of it. She got so upset at one point, she was full on, tears-streaming-down-her-face crying. Even sitting on my lap near the cake, she was very tentative and kept wanting to crawl away.

Not sure about this …

Finally, Daddy took control of the situation. He plopped her in front of the cake and shoved her hands in it. Even then, she was pretty ambivalent about the situation, seeming to want nothing more than to get that mess off her hands. We did manage to get some cute smash cake photos, they just weren’t the photos we set out to capture. When Maya was born a month early, someone told us it was good practice – that she’d be surprising us every step of the way. That person wasn’t wrong.

I wanted to be the mom who made her kid a costume for Halloween, and Sean and I wanted to dress up with her. We’ve been thinking of cute ideas that would allow all three of us to dress up thematically. As so often happens, there just wasn’t time, and we wound up buying costumes instead. Yeah, that’s plural. We couldn’t make up our minds so Maya wound up with two.

Maya the Tiger – 11 1/2 months old

Maya growls. She has this little stuffed tiger that Aunt Kay made her, and we taught her that the tiger growls. Now every time she picks up her stuffed tiger, she growls. And when we ask her to growl (and she feels like it), she does it. So definitely she had to be a tiger.

Maya the Monkey

Maya’s also silly. We’ve called her Maya Monkey forever. So definitely she had to be a monkey.

The costumes are hot and the hats that came with them slip over her eyes, so Maya’s not too keen on wearing them. 11-month-olds, it turns out, do not value aesthetics over comfort. Tonight we’ll probably try to dress her up to hand out candy at the house, but I’m guessing it won’t last too long. Oh well, at least we have cute pictures.

Two weekends ago, we finally had a bit of a cold front blow through town. With morning temperatures in the 50s, you could almost believe it really was October. With the promise of temperatures topping out in the low 80s and the sun shining, we decided to spend some time outdoors. We took Maya to Bastrop to a pumpkin patch.

Maya in the pumpkin patch – 10 1/2 months old

We left Austin bound for Barton Hill Farms mid-morning, figuring Maya would nap during the 45 minute car ride. Not so. She kept up a steady stream of playing and jabbering, not even looking sleepy till the last five minutes of our drive. Sean looked at me and said, “I bet we have fifteen minutes.” I knew it was probably true.

We were wrong. The moment we got out of the car, Maya looked around and giggled. I don’t know if it was the sunny but not blistering weather, the kids running around, or what, but she was happy. Better still, she was pleasant and active for the next two hours.

The whole family!

There were lots of hay bales stacked up here and there with old farm machinery and lots of pumpkins. I’m not sure why, but Maya really seemed enamored with those pumpkins. And of course, hay is fun to eat.

They had some goats penned up for the kids to feed and pet. Those goats may have been among Maya’s favorite things ever. They nuzzled at her hand searching for food and she petted their heads and played with their tiny horns.

Maya loved the goats

The Barton Hill Farms folks had made a very large Willie Nelson themed corn maze, and we walked in it a little while. For the first time all day, I actually started to feel hot, and Maya was kind of bored, so we didn’t spend a great deal of time in there.

We ended our outing with lunch at a picnic table under a big shade tree. Maya drank her bottle then helped eat Mom and Dad’s hamburgers and fries. We had barely made it out of the parking lot before she was asleep.

Summer is finally (FINALLY) over here, but earlier in the month it was still distinctly present. We took advantage of the warm weather to wedge in a few last little outdoor photography projects.

Maya Pudding Painting – 10 1/2 months old

Project 1: Let Maya paint with pudding. All in all, this worked out well, however, there were two tiny issues. First, the moment she realized it was pudding, she wanted to eat it, not paint with it. Second, chocolate pudding looks like crap, in the most literal sense. Still it was hilarious to watch her mess around with it. As long as you remember that it’s chocolate pudding, it’s pretty cute.

Maya in her Summer Dress – 10 1/2 months old

Project 2: Photo Maya in her little summer dress. We had picked up this very thin, pretty little dress on a whim a while back. It can really only be worn when it’s warm and next spring she’ll certainly be too big. We hustled her into it and let her play with the trees in the yard. Very pretty.

We’d been wanting to take Maya to the beach at least once this year, but hadn’t quite worked out the logistics. Luckily, our friend Holly HAD worked out the logistics, rented a condo in South Padre for a week, and offered us the spare room. And that is how in mid-September, we came to be taking our first long-distance road trip with Maya for her first-ever beach vacation.

Maya at South Padre – almost 10 months old

The drive to South Padre is pretty easy; once you get past San Antonio, there’s really no traffic (at least in the off season – can’t speak for spring break). We whipped out the big convertible car seat for this trip so Maya would have a little more room to stretch out, but even so, by the end of that drive, she and that car seat were through with each other.

The condo was pretty lively with Holly and Chris and their kids Ruby (age 4) and Herbie (age not-quite-2) and the three of us. I think Maya was in heaven. There were other kids there for her to watch and interact with, Mom and Dad didn’t enforce vegetable quotas or bed time, and there was a pool practically right outside the door.

It’s right in the middle of hurricane season and there was at least one, if not multiple incoming tropical storms, so the water was pretty rough for most of the few days we were there. We did manage to make it to the beach and play in the water one day though. Maya really likes sand. When we put her on her blanket at home, she’s a little wary of crawling out into the grass. Not so with sand. She hauled ass off that blanket at speed, not stopping till she was all fours on sandy beach. I wish I could tell you that no sand was consumed during that outing, but I’d be lying. Not only did she eat it, I think she enjoyed the flavor.

Playing in the Gulf was a little different than playing in the pool. We didn’t really let the waves splash Maya’s face much, but she still never quite made her peace with the water rushing at her all crazy like that.

Lounging

Given the sometimes rainy weather and the choppy water, we spent a good deal of our time in the condo pool. The kids LOVED it. Maya spent hours relaxing in her little floating thing and playing with Ruby and Herbie’s toys.

We had a great meal at Gabriella’s. The pizza is delicious, they have a nice beer selection, and they seem to be really tolerant of small children.

Can you tell they’re related?

I’m a little sad that we didn’t get to see the beach a bit more, but all in all, it was a good trip. Herbie, Ruby, and Maya provided most of the entertainment. The vibe was distinctly low-key, which was perfect for us. We only stayed a few days, so we didn’t have a chance to get vacation-with-an-infant fatigue. I think we’re already planning to go again next year, figuring a kid who can move around a little more on her own might have a better time playing in the water.