I know there are greater culinary feats I could aspire to, but I am really distressed that I cannot fry tofu. It never works for me. And since there are no Thai restaurants around here where I can just go get some, I am stuck trying to make it work. This evening the results were interesting—crumbly, sort of brown in some places, generally pretty white and oily though and smelling oddly like popcorn. It did not enhance my curry (no, I cannot make that either—I take a spoonful of jarred curry past and add a can of coconut sauce and voila!) very well. And I somehow had to convince Ava that this was worth eating. No dice. She promptly stood up, walked over to the refrigerator and got herself a Yoplait yogurt. Fine. I guess she did not notice the homemade yogurt right above that. Yoplait is her new favorite after she witnessed her friend Adrian licking the little foil lid. I cannot manufacture little foil lids, so we went and bought a box of Yoplait. I was so disappointed in myself when I realized that I had bought a bunch of individual plastic containers inside a cardboard box after making a resolution to cut down on waste.

This is all in support of my conclusion that I am a granola-girl-failure. I can’t fry tofu, I leap at the opportunity to purchase things in convenient packaging, I bailed on the whole cloth diaper thing and then I bailed on the 7th Generation diaper thing (this is only because Carter keeps peeing through the top when he sleeps—otherwise I love them), and I have used way more than my fair share of plastic bags since Ava was born. The list goes on. My only crunchy success is that I am the mother of a nursing toddler and that is only because she is definitely not going to hand that off to Carter anytime soon.

That and I have decided to go vegetarian, mostly. This is both a health thing—no need for details, but it has had a positive result—and because I have decided that motherhood has completely changed my constitution. I am, or was, the least squeamish person out there, but ever since having Carter I have just not been able to cope very well with meat. I mean, put a steak in front of me, and I will enjoy it, but when I get down to the bone I just get all woozy. And hopefully there is no vein-y part in it, because that grosses me out too. And when I cooked a leg of lamb, the marrow was oozing out and I accidentally touched it and really got weak-kneed. And then there was the day the grocery store decided to offer kidneys in the meat cooler. Kidneys are brown. This is positively nauseating, and to demonstrate this I (honest to God) started retching in the store. Ava found this uproarious. Unfortunately, now I am faced with the difficult task of being a low-carb vegetarian.

Carter decided not to be fussy today. This lends support to the theory that he actually was sick with whatever I had, since I finally recovered today. He was happy and willing to sit and laugh at me while I cooked my tofu mush and he sat and laughed at me while I ate it, and he sat and laughed while I cleaned up. I did not even have to give him the whisk, his favorite thing ever. He is learning so much—I know he recognizes the words “mommy,” “daddy,” “ava,” and “rosie” –when I say them he snaps his head up and looks at me with a huge smile and then looks for the individual named—and if I say another name in the same tone of voice he does not even glance in my direction. Pretty cool. Ava turned off the overhead light today and he looked right up at it when it got darker—which struck me as interesting because that means that he has to know that the thing on the ceiling is where the light comes from. This is the sort of thing he is focusing on now—piecing together the world around him. He also returned to his efforts to talk—he had abandoned that for much of his fussy period, and I had forgotten how cute it is to watch him try to manipulate his mouth into little sounds. He can sit up unaided for about a minute or so, but is still so tippy—so he really needs help. Ava was not solid on her bottom until she was about 6 ½ months, and it is looking like he is following in her footsteps.

She is such a riot. She has discovered how to answer the phone, and if she beats me to it she presses the talk button and says “HI!” I would like to teach her phone manners, but I am not quite ready to give her total phone-answering privileges. She is so mature in so many ways, and it is very easy to forget that she is a toddler. Even I do this—I routinely tack 6 months onto her current age when I am thinking about her—when she was 18 months, I was already considering her to be 2, and I am now bumping her up in my mind to 3. This is not fair, because 2 ½ is a lot different than 3. But the problem is that people see how composed and verbal she is and then assume that this is normal, not realizing that it has a shelf life. When she reverts to very typical toddler behavior they are not prepared. This is tough, because her not so mature moments are then delineated in high relief, making her very aware of everyone else’s disapproval. Yesterday she was upset after waking up from her nap, and there was no reason for it, other than she seems to just have a very hard time rejoining the world after napping, and she started crying, and then wailing, and needed to be held, and then she would be ok, and then not, and she would need to be held again, and during this time I was desperately trying to get the toys picked up while dealing with my own illness, and she knew I was getting a little tired of the “upppeeeeyo” (what she says to be picked up—it is her version of up we go, something she has said since she was very small) and she sat down on the ground and looked at me and said “mommy, I am having a very hard time stopping crying.” My heart broke. I reminded her that it was ok for her to cry (I can never say this to her without hearing the “Free To Be You and Me” soundtrack in my head) and that it was better to get it all out, but sometimes it is nice to do your screaming into say, a pillow, or outside. “Oh” she said. “Can I snuggle with you?”