The Vaccine Scene

November 3, 2009 at 11:29 pm (Uncategorized)
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One of the (few) things Devin and I put off researching before Laurel was born was the very thorny topic of vaccinations. You wouldn’t think this would be a thorny topic at all, what with how vaccinations have saved millions of lives that could otherwise be lost to polio, whooping cough, measles, etc., but it is — especially in San Francisco, where people host parties to expose children to the chicken pox. When we were kids, I don’t remember vaccinations being an issue, but since the rumors kicked up that vaccines are somehow related to autism, suddenly people are much more interested in avoiding the slight chance of autism (a connection that has been disproven) than in avoiding the, say, 1 in 100 chance their child will die of pertussis if he or she is unlucky enough to get sick.

We thought we might turn out to be the sort of parents who wanted to delay vaccines a while, so as not to overload Laurel’s system with pathogens. One thing that has changed over time is that kids get more and more vaccinations. By the age of six months, it’s recommended that kids get three sets of shots, protecting them against nearly a dozen different things, some of which they can’t get unless they have sex or share needles with someone. So, while I was at home laid up with a nasty bout of mastitis, Devin trundled off to a several-hour panel on vaccinations, and came home with a sheaf of notes from the opinions of child-health experts, homeopaths, Wiccans-or-something, and a couple of middle-of-the-road types. After talking about it, and realizing just how many things Laurel could be exposed to on your average Muni ride with dozens of passengers, any one of whom could have just stepped off a plane from Sri Lanka or Tanzania, we decided we’d play it safe and get her vaccinated against most things as quickly as possible. Plus, because I wasn’t making enough milk to satisfy her nutritional needs, it seemed like I wasn’t providing her with a full set of immunities, either.

In addition, one of our baby friends — a girl who was born two days before Laurel and delivered by the same midwife — contracted pertussis when she was just three weeks old. Her father drives a taxicab and, after being exposed to whooping cough, probably by a client, came home with a cough. In adults pertussis is mild, but the little girl was in the hospital for roughly two weeks. She was lucky to be one of the ones who didn’t die from it, but she was still coughing for weeks afterward. And this was before she was old enough to be vaccinated.

So Laurel has had most of her shots up until now, and she’s taken them well. She cries a little at the injections, and is maybe a little fussier or more tired for a day or two afterward, just like we are when we get shots.

Still, we waffled recently when deciding whether to get flu shots for her. We debated whether having the flu would be very serious for her, or whether she’d build better immunity by getting sick than she would by being vaccinated. We held off until a couple of weeks ago, and then decided that all of us should be vaccinated, both against seasonal flu and H1N1. Our research suggests that the flu is generally mild for babies, but in a few cases can be severe and fatal, just as with adults. Our pediatrician’s office says its patients have only had mild cases of H1N1, but that’s been in children old enough to describe their symptoms; we felt babies are still pretty vulnerable. Of course, now we’re waiting to see when — and whether — they will get any of the H1N1 vaccine. We’ve already done the first round of seasonal flu shots (babies get two, while adults get just one), and although she’s been sick for a few days, the bug seems unrelated.

Living in this city does mean treading carefully when it comes to other people’s opinions. Many do choose not to vaccinate, or to delay vaccinations until a child is older. If you’re like us and generally feel they’re a good idea, it can be tempting to ask someone what on Earth is going through their minds. But for those whose kids don’t ride public transit, don’t play with other babies and are generally more isolated from disease, it may make sense to wait or not vaccinate at all (or at least until the child is old enough to decide for him- or herself). Still, vaccinations are about protecting the community as much as the child, and that’s yet another reason we’re choosing to vaccinate Laurel — because so many of her peers aren’t getting the same protection.

– Beth

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Delight

October 23, 2009 at 8:43 am (Uncategorized)
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Laurel has hit a sweet phase this week in which she’s squealing happily when she sees something she really likes. For example: she squealed at several of the other babies in our Wednesday playgroup. She squeals at Mouse. She squeals at my breast when she’s about to nurse. She squeals when she’s about to scoot across the house. It’s really endearing.

– Beth

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Solid Standing

October 9, 2009 at 11:40 pm (Uncategorized)
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No, no, not the applesauce

At our six-month visit to the pediatrician in early September, the doctor suggested (somewhat sternly) that he’d like Laurel to be “well established” on solids by 9 months, by which I think he means “comfortable with ingesting a variety of foods.” We hadn’t given her any food up to that point, and had been procrastinating doing so.

There are several signs that your baby is theoretically ready, including being able to sit on his or her own, being able to do a pincer grasp with thumb and forefinger, reaching for other people’s food or watching them interestedly when they eat, and no longer thrusting items out of his or her mouth with the tongue. Laurel was doing some of these, but even now she doesn’t sit that well on her own (and doesn’t seem interested in working on it). Plus, we didn’t know what we wanted to give her first, what foods we definitely wanted to delay or avoid, and so on.

It started with an apple core. I was eating an apple one day as we headed somewhere on BART, and when I was finished with it, I let her taste it. She sucked on it a few times interestedly, but didn’t raise any objections when I took it from her and threw it away. A week or so later, Devin gave her a taste of avocado, just a little chunk. She made the “yucky” face and spit it out. When she tried another bite, she gagged once it got to the back of her throat. We tried again a couple of days later, this time letting her serve herself, and got much the same response. We tried banana and sweet potato. She liked some of the banana “juice” but the chunks made her gag, and she was completely uninterested in the sweet potato. She’s also tasted daikon, spicy cheese, pomegranate seeds and bits of plain chicken.

Meanwhile, she’s been sucking on every apple I’ve eaten in the past two weeks, forcing them out of my hands if I won’t share. So I broke down and bought a jar of applesauce, and discovered this week that she’s happy to eat small bites of it, even opening her mouth for the spoon. Within a few days, she’d figured out that she should swallow it rather than spitting it out. She still makes a bit of the “yucky” face but she seems to enjoy it otherwise (although this enjoyment is often displayed by reaching for the spoon, grabbing a handful of applesauce, and then mooshing it into her face). Supposedly from here we’ll be able to get her to eat other things. We’ll see.

(That’s what she’s eating in the photo above. I know it looks like we’re torturing her, but in fact she was on her way to grabbing the spoon.)

That’s not all she’s been up to. Her scooting has gotten faster and faster, and is now interspersed with periods of being on her hands and knees or hands and feet (the latter with her butt stuck into the air). Both of these are precursors to real crawling, so she seems headed in that direction.

She’s devoted a lot of time lately to clambering over things, particularly us. And just a couple of days ago, I laid her in her crib after a diaper change and went to wash my hands. When I returned, she had pulled up to a wobbly stand, and got herself more upright when I stood by her and provided some higher hand-holds. From there, she crept over to a taller part of her crib and stood for several minutes.

Pulling up to standing

The next day, she somehow pulled herself up on one of the coffee tables and went nuts grabbing pens, remote controls, and other fun stuff and knocking everything to the floor. I suspect the coming weeks will be spent sizing up every piece of furniture in the house for its potential to provide support for standing.

I just hope she learns to sit before she learns to walk.

– Beth

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Of family vacations, sore asses, and Folsom Street Fair

October 4, 2009 at 2:04 am (Uncategorized)
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We’ve had a family week. I took a week’s vacation time to spent with Beth & Laurel — something I’d been planning to do since before she was born. Actually, I’d been planning to save one of my parental leave weeks to take at or around the six month mark, to spend extra time with the various developmental stuff that goes on around now. As it happened, I screwed up the dates on the form and ended up taking all my leave up front, somewhat to the discomfiture of my employer’s HR department. Oh well — I took some vacation time instead.

September/October’s a good time for time off in the city — for those that aren’t accustomed to our weather, the usual June/July/August months are one of San Francisco’s two winters (the other occurs in the more conventional Californian winter period). So if you’re looking for moderate weather and nice sunny days, this is the time for it. Everyone seemed to know it, because half the city seemed also to be on vacation this week. It’s also the trailing edge of Leather Pride Week and the start of the SF Love Fest, both of which raise the number of people found on the streets in unexpected costumes or states of undress above the usual baseline levels. Plus, there are music festivals, street-food events and other frivolity — it’s a good time to live here.

One thing I hadn’t planned on was everyone getting sick — first Laurel & Beth, then myself; probably just a cold, though it made Beth miserable for a week, me lightly symptomatic for days, and Laurel both congested, drippy and with a case of diarrhea which then kicked off an ugly and protracted bout of diaper rash. By the time of Folsom Street Fair, she was sporting angry red swathes all over her nether regions, complete with little dark welts and other unpleasantness. Meanwhile she converted from her usual enthusiasm for diaper changes (during which she can most readily grab her feet) to sobbing dread and screaming disapproval. Plus, owing to the diarrhea, she was getting tons of these occasions, and hating everything about it. If you didn’t catch her in the act of soiling herself she’d let you know seconds later, either because it hurt to poop or because she knew we’d take her in to clean her off, which clearly hurt a lot. Eventually we started doing diaper changes on the floor rather than the changing table, because everything was going to get kicked off the table onto the floor anyway, and that way you could use legs & shoulders to hold her down, or at least keep her in the vicinity.

The standard remedies for diaper rash are cleanliness, air exposure (i.e. diaper-free time), patience and zinc oxide. In addition to the frequent changes, we provided the cleanliness via baths, which went fine and are sufficiently uninteresting as not to be worth going into. Air exposure is another matter when dealing with a diarrhea-afflicted baby capable of moving on their own — I diligently tried it, for a period of about ten minutes, one morning after an especially loud and misery-inducing diaper change. By late afternoon I’d finished washing the ten or twelve different things she managed to poop on, gotten a price quote for rug cleaning exceeding the value of the rug itself, bathed Laurel to deal with her innocent, cheerful willingness to crawl around in whatever happens to be in the way no matter how pathogen-laden, and written off diaper-free time as a remedy suitable for those who live in one-piece fiberglass bathrooms lacking textiles and with an abundance of drains. While we’d started with the typical leftist organic & herbal remedies of calendula creams and balsam pastes, after a few days of screaming and general unpleasantness I’d lost patience with the all-natural approach and opted for the strongest over-the-counter option modern pharmacology had to offer, which worked significantly better. We also shifted her to disposable diapers for a couple days, though motivated less by any faith that they’d help (they didn’t) as by the fact that we’d run out of cloth ones.

Naturally, faced with a baby with an intensely sore butt and a tendency to go apoplectic with fear & pain at any rectal/anal activity (be it solid, liquid or gaseous), plus a partner too sick to leave the house, the obvious recourse is to head off to Folsom Street Fair. Folsom’s a lot of fun, even if it’s being watered down by the relentless flood of heterosexuals who keep showing up to what is basically a five-block S&M party oriented around gay men (and, so a somewhat lesser and historically antecedentory degree, women). Laurel was the youngest postnatal attendee I noticed — the fair doesn’t actually forbid bringing kids, and usually there are one or two each year. It’ll almost certainly be her last for a couple of decades — by next year she’ll recognize too much of what’s going on to let it all slide, but far too little to actually understand. Leatherfolk are, by and large, a warm & accepting group, but I’m too busy preparing toddler-compatible explanations for the laws of thermodynamics to come up with one for why post-operative women are whacking one another with leather paddles on the sidewalk. I’m also unprepared to convincingly and comprehensibly argue that while fellatio is a splendid activity for loving participants, it’s customarily done in private, and cases where grown men are doing it to one another in the middle of a street are the exception, provided for by a lengthy history of psychological probing, self-acceptance, civil rights battles, social adaptation, public adulation and finding someone to hold your beer so you can properly attend to the task.

For those convinced that she’ll be subconsciously scarred anyway, she slept through the entire thing, and had a happy afternoon clambering around on the floor and laps of friends who live just slightly off Folsom St. People react to men carrying babies in slings in various ways — setting indifference aside, I’d say that the most common reactions in normal public settings are endearment, followed by amusement. At Folsom, indifference still predominated, but surprise dominated the remainder, followed by discomfiture, confusion and, rare but still significant, endearment & delight. She got pretty much the usual number of cooings and fawnings-over, despite being, as I say, sound asleep and with a hat over her head (it’s often noted that for some reason, an event where one wears forty pounds of black-tanned leather is nonetheless held outdoors in the sunniest, hottest part of SF’s year).

One group that didn’t react one way or the other to her presence was the people running the Fetish Tots booth, which we spent several minutes giggling over. Despite a strong desire to see a copy of their business plan, I doubt they’ll make it to the 2010 fair, just considering the Venn diagram of their prospective clientele.

Folsom aside, it’s been a fairly domestic week of babyproofing, calls to the pediatrician, a truly absurd number of diaper changes, and playing with the baby. Laurel’s still trying to learn to use her body — she’s been hoisting her (now significantly healed) butt in the air on hands and feet, trying other ways to get around. She’s still not crawling, per se, but scoots around all over. She pulls herself along and grabs at everything by clawing with her fingers, so she breaks her fingernails a lot. She has no interest at all in sitting, although she’ll hold a seated position pretty well if we put her in one. I did get around to the various mom & baby groups — an odd social dynamic being the only man in a group of women whose husbands & partners have all long since gone back to work. I haven’t encountered any unseen or underappreciated developmental milestones — even back at work I’ve been closely enough involved to experience them all — but it’s been a good week regardless.

- Devin

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Perils

September 17, 2009 at 9:59 pm (Uncategorized)
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Laurel is so much happier being able to move. Each morning I put her on the floor and she gets this intrepid look in her eye, rolls over, and takes aim at her first object. She’ll do a few little swimming motions and then scoot, scoot, scoot over to whatever it is. She can’t get enough of movement.

But these new skills come with a big downside: she’s hurting herself a lot more. She doesn’t seem to be at all aware of where her head is, so she constantly bonks it into things — table legs, the couch, etc. Unlike some babies we know, who shrug off injuries and keep going, Laurel will start crying at the slightest head-bonk, and will want a cuddle. It’s sweet, but sometimes she hits her head several times in the course of a scoot session and eventually I begin thinking about getting her a helmet or something.

Some of these encounters have shown us places where we need to babyproof. For example, last weekend during a nap she woke up and scooted right off the bed. Fortunately, she landed on a soft pillow and was completely unharmed, just very startled. The next morning, she managed to pull the fireplace grate down on top of herself. And today, the worst yet, she pulled the Playstation 3 over onto her face, resulting in the red marks on her nose and cheeks you can see above. It was pretty scary, and resulted in lots of cuddling. At that point, we both needed it. :-/

We can’t possibly swaddle every item of furniture in bubble wrap, despite the temptation. We’ll probably get something to soften the corners of our few square-edged tables, and we’re borrowing a bed rail from a friend — probably a stopgap until we put the mattresses on the floor for a while, I’m guessing. She’s already trying to pull herself up to standing, and that’s not going to go over well in a bed as high off the ground as ours.

It’s so hard watching her go through this. Until now, the world was a relatively safe and gentle place, and now that she’s going at her own pace she’s discovering that it’s a hard and unpredictable one. We can only protect her so much. Devin’s pretty easygoing about it, but for me, it’s difficult.

– Beth

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Scooting

September 9, 2009 at 9:53 pm (Uncategorized)
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Laurel spent the Labor Day weekend deciding it was high time to get mobile. Here’s a short video from today:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/96304466@N00/3903795071/

(Unfortunately I can’t figure out how to get WordPress to embed a Flickr video; click through the link to see it).

Crawling will probably come with time, but for now she has a way of getting what she wants. :)

– Beth

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Happy half-birthday

September 7, 2009 at 10:32 am (Uncategorized)

So, we’ve managed to keep an infant human being alive for six months. I’m not sure how that happened; I can’t even keep most plants alive that long. I can do cats, but cats are much more self-sufficient. But Laurel seems to be not just alive, but thriving and happy and developing just as she’s supposed to. That makes us feel like pretty good parents, so far, but then she hasn’t learned to say “no” yet.

It’s amazing the skillset you build as parents in the first few months of a baby’s life. We started out feeling pretty new and unschooled, but now we have all kinds of fu for changing diapers, soothing and entertaining, getting her to sleep, etc. Those skills have come in handy, as the past two months have been difficult developmentally, with seemingly constant shifts in how she sleeps, eats, and interacts with the world. A friend of mine said between five and six months, her daughter grew so much that there were days she wouldn’t recognize her in the morning. I had at least one of those mornings, and more than one in which I swore her legs had gotten longer overnight.

All of this makes me wonder what it’s like from Laurel’s side of things, but she’ll never really be able to tell us, other than through basic smiles, cooing, screaming, and so on, none of which are all that precise. She has specific cries for “I don’t know this person and they’re freaking me out!”, “I’m exhausted and can’t sleep!”, “I’m bored!”, and so on. She doesn’t cry much for hunger anymore, and doesn’t cry about dirty diapers ever.

Slowly, we’re getting to know Laurel as a personality. She loves to interact and “flirt” with people, as long as Devin or I is holding her at the time. She’s excited by the colors bright red and purple. She loves plastic bags and keys, but she especially loves Mouse. (Every time Mouse comes into the room, Laurel lights up and tries to go after her. We’ve had several “practice” petting sessions, mostly because Laurel’s technique involves grabbing handfuls of kitty fur/ears/tail and squeezing tight, which causes Mouse to swat at her.) She loves nursing, even if she’s finicky right now about when and where she’ll do it. She likes public transit and being with other babies. She seems outgoing, despite her discomfort with people she doesn’t know. She smiles. A lot.

It’s tough to know how to summarize the first half-year of someone’s life, but when I worked at the Examiner, we often did a “by the numbers” sidebar to add useful information to a news article. So here’s a bit of Laurel, by the numbers:

Months alive: 6
Weeks alive: 27
Days alive: 191
Diapers soiled (est.): 2,160
Inches grown: 7
Pounds gained: 10
Naps taken (est.): 573
Nights she’s slept by herself: 0
Uninterrupted nights of sleep for her parents: 0
Breast milk (mom’s) consumed (est.): 18 gallons
Clothes outgrown (est.): 10 lbs.
Cost to ship domestically: $41.55 (priority mail)
Muni routes ridden: F, J, N, L, T, 1, 14, 22, 23, 26, 38, 44, 49, 52, 108

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It’s Starting

August 24, 2009 at 3:07 pm (Uncategorized)

As of yesterday, Laurel’s starting to be able to sit by herself for a few seconds at a time. We have to put her into position, but her balance and ability to hold herself upright — both of which she’s been working on for weeks — are just about there.

She’s five and a half months old. :)

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Growing is hard

August 10, 2009 at 10:56 pm (Uncategorized)
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I’m feeling a bit sorry for Laurel these days, because her poor body is so intent on working on her back and abdominal muscles, getting ready to be able to sit upright, that the poor girl can hardly get a break. The first thing she does when she wakes up is either a bunch of leg lifts or something akin to a crunch. It’s almost like she can’t control it, especially with the crunches; she seems to look at me like she wishes she could just relax. I don’t blame her. I don’t like doing leg lifts or crunches, either, although I need them at least as badly as she does.

Nursing has become more acrobatic, too. She wants to move her head and torso in all kinds of directions (with the nipple still in her mouth, of course), and the latest thing is, she wants to play with her feet while she’s nursing. Or maybe she doesn’t want to; it’s just those abdominal muscles needing to work, work, work. Most of the time I can tell she’s enjoying playing with her feet, but it’s less obviously fun when it’s in the midst of trying to drink her milk.

She tries to sit up in her bouncy chair now, which makes it a lot less safe for her to sit in. So I borrowed a Bumbo chair from a friend, but she doesn’t much like it either — I think she feels it’s too confining. She desperately wants to be able to sit and play with toys (not to mention go after them), so playtime has been full of frustrated reaching and grunting lately. I tell her it won’t always be this hard, but I don’t think she believes me.

– Beth

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Fathering, travelling, and korean food

August 3, 2009 at 12:23 am (Uncategorized)
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Laurel and Kochu Karu

I haven’t written much since Laurel was born. Mostly because I’ve had virtually no spare time, and when I do, I don’t have enough cognitive function left. In small part it’s been because while Beth has found it easier to find things to say about Laurel now that she’s here, I’ve found it somewhat more difficult, or at least harder to find good ways to describe her and how she’s doing. The natural conclusion was that the prospect of having a baby amounted to a tremendous ego trip, and now that the baby’s actually here and turns out to be an individual person with her own qualities incompletely molded to my will, my ego is no longer fulfilled. If so, at least I’m admitting it now, whereas some fathers won’t admit it until their kid drops out of law school. In any event, Beth offered to trade dishes for blog posting, and since I spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen already, I may as well try.

I’ve been a father for a bit less than five months now. I like it — it feels good, and it’s easier to get into than I suspected it might be (that doesn’t mean it’s easy, just easier to stay involved in). I’m also a “working father,” a phrase not part of the common lexicon because, demographics and history and social trends and anatomical tyranny being what they are, it’s so close to ubiquitous that we don’t really have a word for it. I’d still rather be home with the baby, or at least I’d rather be home with the baby until around 11am or so. Coincidentally, it takes until around 11am each day to get through my email. Hmm.

Being a “working father” does mean that by the time you get home at night, the baby is already heading into the evening fussy period and no longer as perfect as the day’s text messages from her mother would have led one to believe. Mornings are Laurel’s best time, and since she tends to wake and need feeding shortly before I’d normally get out of bed, we usually get some time to hang out in bed and play or make faces at one another in the mornings. In the evenings I catch the tail end of her presentable period, deal with some portion of the less presentable period, then put her to bed for a presentable-but-hard-to-see-in-the-dark period. Then we’re together all weekend, of course, when I try to cram in all the fatherly playing, going out, napping together and so forth we missed out on earlier.

Going out with Laurel is a high point. She likes the sling, and now that she’s got good head control she can face forward, which makes our excursions into giant show-and-tell sessions. She’s very visually engaged with the world these days, and spends these trips looking wide-eyed at everything. It helps that there’s a lot to see in the city, and on weekends especially, ample time to stop and explain it to her in the hopes that she’s secretly recording everything I say with the intention of going back and replaying it once she learns to understand English. We also stop to let her smell flowers, touch things with interesting textures, or get fawned over by all and sundry.

The fawning is pretty impressive, actually. Fathers taking their babies out seem to be magnets for 40- to 60-year old women especially, though it works on a lot of different age ranges and gender combinations. But the middle-aged women don’t seem attracted in nearly the same volume when her mother’s around — even though I’m still the one wearing Laurel. Maybe it’s the backpack full of baby supplies that does it — when Beth’s there too she usually carries that. Perhaps carrying both baby and diaper bag somehow announces “suave and confident hunk of burning fatherly man-love” in a way that just the baby herself doesn’t.

Laurel’s also in a good period where we don’t need all that much equipment to go out running errands — it all fits in a half-full backpack and could probably pack smaller on tighter rationing. The only thing that really needs to be close to hand is a rag for graceful dabbing at her chin, since she’s decided that on balance, spitting is easier than swallowing and there’s always more saliva coming anyway. This enables one to stand there feeling quietly smug about the harried parents who haul giant strollers onto Muni buses, festooned with toys and bottles and clothes and blankets, whose kids fuss a lot and need to be entertained the whole way because they can’t see anything interesting down there. I’ll probably change that tune when watching out bus windows stops interesting Laurel so much, but it works pretty well for the moment. In the meantime, she’s entertained so long as she can look around, and I can keep her warm and comfortable merely by zipping my jacket around her when the wind blows. It’s a lightweight way to travel.

For the last few weeks, Laurel and I have made excursions oriented around learning to make kimchi. I like the stuff, and took a notion to try to learn to make it, so we’ve made a number of trips in search of ingredients and implements. First to Noe Valley, where strollers outnumber even the Priuses, and where I found a book on the topic (Laurel got a book out of that too, although it’s mostly about children becoming older siblings and relevant to her only insomuch as it’s got cute pictures of a mouse family and she might be into cute mice at some point). Then to a mostly-Chinese grocery in the south mission for Napa cabbage and shrimp paste (Laurel got cooed at by various shoppers, and some sympathetic looks when the bad pop music played over a half-broken PA system got the better of her and she started fussing.) Then a long trip out to a pair of Korean markets near Japantown for seau chǒt and kochu karu (Laurel got fawned over by lost tourists on the 44, enthusiastically chatted up in Korean by elderly women wielding chili peppers and enormous daikons, and tickled by the counterman in a mercado on 16th.) Then one further trip downtown to buy a suitable jug (Laurel got fussed over by a guy with a skateboard and a bright red sweatshirt, who tried to get her interested in the artwork on his deck but didn’t manage to draw her attention away from the shirt.)

Then we actually made kimchi, which took the afternoon to do (kimchi is labor intensive to make, mostly from all the chopping, plus I didn’t really know what I was doing and so had to do half of it over.) Laurel was largely indifferent to the whole process until the kochu karu came out, at which point her interest was thoroughly engaged. Kochu karu consists of bright red ground chili peppers. I’d bought half a kilo in an equally bright red bag. She followed it everywhere it went in the room, to the point where I eventually resealed it and gave it to her for a while. Then we couldn’t get it away from her again — if we pulled it away, she’d lean way forward in her chair, whimpering and reaching urgently for it with both arms, until we let her have it again. She liked the smell, too, when I opened the bag so she could sniff it. Later she watched me make up the chili paste, and coat the vegetables, and had the same reaction — lurching forward in Beth’s or my grasp, both arms outstretched trying to get ahold of the bowl.

Laurel and Kochu Karu

It was all pretty gratifying.

- Devin

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