She can eat hard food now

The top front tooth that Natalie's been babying for weeks finally came out tonight. Which is really terrific because it's felt like having an old person living with us. Soft food only!

This tooth has tormented her! No apples, having to bite a PB&J with her canine and first premolar. Can you imagine her relief?

She suggested Tony and I go to bed early tonight, so we don't scare away the Tooth Fairy.

She looks like a real kid now. Not so much my baby anymore.

I'm back!

I'm baaaaack!

And it's all thanks to my two faithful readers, Thyme and Kristine, who were standing out there in the dark, holding their lighters up for me. Let me tell you, when I get complaints from 20 percent of my readership, I take it seriously.

So, the last two months, in a nutshell:

1. The new job continues to be awesome and sometimes exhausting. Some days I am literally (I hate it when people say "literally," but I want to be clear I'm not exaggerating) running from one meeting to another. But it's exhilarating and amazing to feel such purpose in my work again. Someone I admire recently told me: "This is going to be the best job you'll ever have."

2. Natalie is loving ballet (see photo above) and she has signed up for tap, following in her mother's footsteps. We plan to take a Mommy & Me tap class this summer. Between tap and Natalie and I joining Daisies (little Girl Scouts), I'm in mother heaven.

3. We went to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. It was very cold!

4. I went skiing with my dad in Aspen - my first time on skis in 15 years!

And first time on shaped skis. We had a great time. Saw a bald eagle from the chair lift! I actually missed Natalie's ballet recital because I was on a plane to Aspen. Terrible!

5. We might get a puppy. A chocolate Labradoodle. Oh they are sooo cute! We drove up to Norco last night to see them and fell for two - a boy and a girl. Now I am tormented between them. Tony says either one will be a great dog and I won't regret whatever we choose. He is always so reasonable about these things.

The boy:

The girl:

6. Natalie is getting funnier and funnier.

The other day she asked when she'd have lunch with the principal again. Lunch With the Principal is an honor at school for kids who are doing well in class.

"I think that was just a one time deal, honey," I said.
"Oh."

"Though I don't know for sure. Do kids get to go back?"

"Yeah, if they left something in there."

I called the Mister right after to tell him.

There was another funny one. Recently at school, Natalie pointed out a kid to Tony.

"That's Ronnie. 'Cept his nickname is Ronald."

7. My 38th birthday is next Saturday. I feel good about it mostly because I have a wonderful job and family. Last year I had a classic birthday of self-loathing where I said to myself: I'm 37 years old and what am I &%$##@! doing with my life?? I would feel better about it if I didn't have all these gray hairs, which I suddenly see because I had the great idea to grow out my highlights. Guess who's getting highlights again?!

8. I have a new nickname here at Mill Peak Road. Big Mama. And we live at Big Mama's House. Natalie and Tony both think it's hilarious.

That's all for now. I will try to post more regularly, Thyme and Kristine. Or I will just see you at the next Kevin Faulconer event!

Halloween

We had a nice Halloween this year, beginning with a rainy trip to the pumpkin patch and carving these two beauties, which we named Pumpkinseed and Steve.

Sadly, Pumpkinseed and Steve only lasted a few days before their teeth curled in and they started to stink up the house.

Natalie, shocking everyone, veered from tradition and eschewed her Cinderella dress (worn the last two years), opting instead for Tinker Bell. Here she is dressed for the parade at school.

On Saturday night, Tony and I dressed as our favorite TV couple from our favorite TV show, "Friday Night Lights." Coach and Tami Taylor set a much better marital example than our choice last year: the totally dysfunctional, but extremely stylish, Don and Betty Draper from "Mad Men."

Here's Coach in his East Dillon Lions gear. He even got Croakies for his shades. Authentic!

And here's Tami. Wish my hair was longer, but I think I captured her Texas spirit. That silver and turqoise belt belonged to my grandmother. The boots were an impulse purchase that I justified by telling myself I would have them for life and they were the same brand worn by Teddy Roosevelt.

After we snapped this photo, we went next door to our neighbors' house. Dwayne and Manya and their friends spent the entire day dressing up the house with spiders and centipedes and cobwebs. It was the best Halloween house I'd ever seen. Oh! And someone brought a cake in a kitty litter box, with a scooper for serving and Tootsie Rolls on top. Gross, but tasty!

I think we might keep up the TV couple theme for next year. I was thinking Archie and Edith Bunker, but Tony had a better idea: Lucy and Ricky Ricardo! I'm going to start looking now for a red wig...

Happy Halloween!

My littie gril

A favorite time of day for me is pulling Natalie's folder from her backpack to see what Mrs. Evins has sent home from Room 1.

The other day, it was a picture with a story below. Natalie wouldn't let me read it until she'd grabbed her crayons and finished the drawing at the dining room table.

Then she read it to me. And when she was done, she looked up at me, over her glasses like an adult would pausing from the newspaper.

"My name is Natalie. I am six yrers old. I am a littie gril. I like to go to the zoo because it is fun. I like to do my best."

Natalie and me on the grass; the sign says pink "because me and Mama like pink"

Of course I told her I loved it.

"You do like to do your best, don't you?" I asked.

She nodded.

The day before I started my new job I told Natalie I was nervous. She considered this, and then gave me a piece of advice I have followed every day of the last two weeks - during which much of the time I've had no idea what people were talking about and felt like I'd parachuted into a foreign country.

"I was scared for first grade. But I'm not scared anymore," Natalie said.

"Just do Mama's best and work hard."

So every day I'm doing Mama's best. I'm so proud of my littie gril.

Curly hair

The new thing around here is braiding Natalie's hair at night, when it's wet. In the morning, when we take out the braids, her hair is "curly" for school.


Actually, it's crimpy. Very retro '80s. I told Natalie that when I was a little girl, I slept with rollers in my hair. (Really, it was just two for the bangs, the rest of my hair left straight. Great look.) I shouldn't have told her about rollers because now she wants them.

I usually manage about six or seven braids and then call it quits. There's no way I'm doing rollers.
Last night Natalie was so excited about the braids and her curly hair, she imagined what her little school friend might think.

"Maybe my hair be so curly, Calista not know I'm me!"

Milestones and hope

It took me awhile before I could drive past Rady Children's Hospital and not think of the night I stood at the pay phone in the ER waiting room and cried into the receiver, telling my mother in Wisconsin that my new baby daughter had suffered two violent seizures and a CT scan of her brain showed that it was atrophied.

Not only would she be paralyzed, as we had been told the day of her adoption just a week earlier in China. She might never be a normal child or functioning adult.

I can still see the parents in the waiting room. I thought them so lucky; their children had fevers or a broken leg. They looked away as I sobbed into the phone. The next morning I drove home to find dinner on the table as we'd left it, plastic wrapping from the paramedics' instruments on the floor, and the phone on the coffee table, where I'd dropped it after calmly telling a 911 dispatcher that my year-old daughter was unresponsive.

But later that morning, I returned to the hospital to find a kindly neurologist, and then an animated neurosurgeon who reminded me of Guy Smiley. And within a few hours the diagnoses from the night before and China were dismissed. They were replaced with theories about the mysterious scar at the base of Natalie's spine and why her brain's ventricles were so large - along with the physicians' guarded hope for a normal development. There would be more visits to the ER, but we had begun the ascent.

My mom and Natalie

There were many visits to Rady Children's over the next several years. And as Natalie sat up, and then learned to crawl and walk on the padded mats of the physical therapy department, those terrible memories of that night, when I thought everything was lost, started to fade. When I'd approach the hospital on the freeway, I didn't feel sick anymore. I felt happy. This was the place that was fixing my daughter, and fixing me, too.

It had become a place of comfort, compassion, camaraderie - and most importantly: milestones and hope.

On Monday I start my new job there. I can't think of another place I'd rather be.

All aboard!

A quick post here as momentarily we will be boarding our train to Santa Barbara for the weekend to see my parents. Look at our old station in San Diego. Isn't it cool? I always thought it'd be a great place for a wedding. That's the train we're taking - the Surfliner.

This will be Natalie's first train trip other than the kids train at Balboa Park that she's ridden 9,000 times with her dad.

Not sure how many times Tony has been on a train. Lots and lots of times for me, starting when I was little.

My dad and I took the train to the Grand Canyon, where he had me stand on the edge and point into the abyss for a snapshot. We sped past moose and deer and stood between the cars shivering to see the moon. I took a train with my mom to visit my aunt in Sacramento. A mustachioed cowboy named Bart took a shine to my pretty mother with her long, strawberry blond hair, but he and his guitar got off in Cheyenne, Wyoming and that was the end of Bart.

Then there were train trips on my own as a child, from Milwaukee to spend weekends with my dad in Chicago. I was so scared of falling asleep and missing my stop. I knew Glenview, which I called Gwendolyn after my school friend, was my warning that downtown Chicago was next.

As a young adult, I took trains across Europe and through the British countryside and stared out the window,watching the landscape rushing by and thinking deep thoughts, typically with headphones on. Trains are great for deep and dramatic. I can't help but think of Dr. Zhivago and his family on that train winding through the Ural Mountains. And then, Strelnikov!

This afternoon will be a whole new experience. Cold cuts and salads from Little Italy, a bottle of wine and my two favorite people in the world. And the best part: my dear dad waiting at the station in Santa Barbara.