I should be getting THREE cupcakes.

Three months! I am too young to have a babelette so old.

Thigh check! Four-day old thighs:

Three-month thighs!

Oooooh, pinchies! Pinch a-pinch a-pinch!

New superpowers include putting herself to sleep in her own crib LIKE A PERSON, sleeping through the night, exacting tiny baby vengeance for being forced to put herself to sleep by no longer sleeping through the night, LAUGHING OH MY GOD YOU GUYS, and a wide array of dolphin-sounds.

Also, her hands. She's not super-good at directing them (unless it's To The Mouth) but she knows they are hers, and she'll watch them float around in front of her sometimes like, Woah, this is a weird trip.

fresh new baby cannot distinguish you from the surrounding stimuli

three-month-old baby thinks you are a RIOT

In sum, greater awareness + more sleep = grand times. 

Stuff I Have Pinned And Actually Made, Because Otherwise It's Just a Lazy Time-Waster

Pinterest is a lazy time-waster ANYWAY, but at least stuff comes of it. Mostly calories.

Caramelitas. Deviating from the recipe to add nuts because nuts are delicious. These were also SUPER-DELICIOUS. And easy. I am a fan of easy like I can't even.

Bacon cheddar ranch pull-apart bread. It was surprisingly difficult to pull apart, for all that it's IN THE NAME. Will have to re-evaluate serving method. Tasted surprisingly whatever-fine for something covered in cheddar and bacon and drenched in ranch.

November cakes for book club on The Scorpio Races. The recipe is the author's own. The orange extract was completely unnecessary (because untastable), so I would either double it or leave it out next time. Otherwise, MAN THESE WERE A-TASTY.

Feeties! Ok this one's not done, I have to stamp her feeties again at 6 months and a year. And for the feetie on the left, she placed each of her painted toes down delicately, but for the feetie on the right, she schmeeered them. Babies: not good at arts.

Lemon bar cookie cups. SOOOO DIFFICULT to get out of the muffin tin intact. I tried, like, eight different strategies, and in the end it was easiest to just follow the recipe's instructions and deal with a bit of breakage. Oh, and I used my own lemon curd. Oh, and it made a mazillion, so next time I would make half of the dough (but the same amount of lemon curd so that I had leftovers to eat with a spoon. LEMOOOON CURD!). These would be excellent for a tea party - so daintylike - and are as good or better the next day. Make aheadsies!

Red velvet whoopie pies. I don't usually whisk together the dry ingredients for things due to excessive laziness and a general mistrust of extra steps, but for this you NEED to. Like, even more so than I actually did. BREAK UP THE COCOA CLUMPS is what I'm saying. And I think I over-mixed the batter as a result, and I think they were toughish as a more further result. But oh man, so delicious. I used this cream cheese frosting as a filling (also found on pinterest).

5-ingredient meltaway cookies. These are just straight-up shortbread, let's not lie to ourselves. Shortbread is the grossest cookie I can think of. My cookie-eating face, it is sad.

Pinterest makes me drunk, so prepare to see more posts in this vein.

The best-laid etc.

When Robyn and I were roommates in college, in between our fort-building

and towel-swaddling

and prowler-scaring

we'd talk about our future children, and how we would have SONS and wouldn't that be AWESOME, our passels of sons, and I would have children FIRST and then Robyn would have children LATER and eventually we would marry them off (although since we were both having SONS they'd have to gay-marry).

Today Robyn and her big-girl daughter came to visit me and my pint-sized daughter and we are both like YES, DAUGHTERS FOR ALL and can't even fathom what we'd do with sons.

certainly not all stick our fists in our mouths, like hams. except for Eleanor, who is busy being a buddha.

I tried to get a picture of the two girls together, but sitting up isn't Eleanor's forte right now.

whoops!

heeee, damn!

And the one time Eleanor stayed upright, Meredith made a break for it.

And we're moving in a few months, so our daughters won't grow up to be best besties. At least, not right now. Maybe in college.

She's a cheap date.

Who needs toys when you have A BLANKET?!

I mean, all the things you can do with a blanket! You can eat it!

You can...you can eat it!

You can eat it?

I suppose you could put it in your mouth and pretend to eat it, but not actually eat it. That might be fun.

Now wait'll I get my mouth hands on a BOX.

Parenting! Like a couple of bosses!

We have been teaching Eleanor to go to sleep at 7:30, like a proper big girl with a bedtime, and it has been stressful. There is much crying (from all parties).

But it's starting to pay off. Tonight she fell asleep promptly at 7:30.

We were, unfortunately, still out for dinner at the time. Sorry, babything. We will be more consistent in future.

Loves the doctor. FOR NOW.

Eleanor has a couple of toys that make crinkly sounds, and she loves them an absurd amount. She is sort of hilarious about them. The elephant ear on her playmat, for example. She'll flail an arm against it by accident, and then you can see her spend the next minute trying to figure out what she did, and how to reproduce it.

And then we went to the doctor for her poke-and-prod (11 lbs 9 oz!) and she's lying on that sheet of paper they pull out for each new patient and she squirms and it crinkles and she is like WAIT A MINUTE. THIS IS AMAZING.

Over the moon, this one.

That's one down...

The cousins, three months ago:

The cousins today:

Come on out, little bean!

Designers...

I watch a lot of tv these days, which means that Eleanor watches a lot of tv (while not wearing a hat! And chewing on exposed wires!). We watch Til Debt Do Us Part and Kitchen Nightmares and it is satisfying to see very messy things (people's financial lives, restaurant kitchens) cleaned up without having to do any of the work.

We also watch Project Runway Allstars (don't spoiler us, we are well behind) and the lack of Tim Gunn concerns us.

She does her little turn on the catwalk.

Sometimes I just stick a camera in her face and go to town.

Work it, gurrrrrl.

This one derails quickly.

I bake cookies.

Eleanor helps.

Let the record state that when I am out and about with her in this, all her bits are tucked in. It's just, when we're wandering around the house doing stuff, a limb or two will fall out and she sleeps longer if I just LEAVE them. Don't judge me.


...While we're on the topic of not judging me, people need to stop obsessing over my baby's lack of hat. I don't mean you people, I mean real-life-stranger people. And they need to stop...you know what? No. They can go ahead and keep touching her. The only random strangers that touch her are, like, old Chinese ladies and grandpas and I am actually fine with that. Just, don't be touching her head to make sure that it's warm enough because she isn't wearing a hat, and then asking me where her hat is. The only things Eleanor tolerates on her head are a hoodie hood and, weirdly, pants, and it's spring and warm and I have her head tucked into the wrap and next to my body and also she is my responsibility. Seriously, people, stop asking me where my baby's hat is. I will shank you.

I should get her a strip of leather to chew on. Like olden times.

I know it's early, but we think Eleanor might be teething? Her sleep patterns are thrown off, she drools like a bulldog, and she's gotten really bitey.

Ahng.

Nahng.

H'NAHNG!

It's lucky for her she is cute.

Because she has not napped all afternoon and I am thinking of selling her on ebay, here are some adorable photos of The Infant.

You know? I think I will keep her.

Everyone is cute.

Eleanor went to see her great-grandpa and his wife yesterday.

Last time she saw them, she was an Original Crankster. This time she was excellently behaven.

GG-pa was also, it must be admitted, super adorbs. Oh, she likes the floor, does she? Let me just...*old-man sounds* There.

Hullo, little girl.