Ruby and I ventured into the suburbs twice in the last two days! I've realized that after 5 years of living in San Francisco, I am now fully and completely a City Mouse. To be fair I have probably always been a City Mouse, as I was born in a city, lived the first 5 years of my life in a city, spent the next 12 years plotting my escape from the suburbs, and returned to the city for college. However, I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, driving through the narrow downtown streets would nearly give me a heart attack. Nowadays, I am perfectly at ease weaving through traffic on city streets, but getting on the freeway on the way to Marin on Friday, I was white-knuckled and doing about 40 on a 65. I realized I had completely forgotten non-city driving etiquette. When I crossed back over the Golden Gate Bridge and reentered city limits, I felt an actual wave of relief.
Ruby and I were in Marin County on Friday because one of the members of our playgroup recently moved there. She is one of four moms in our original mommy's group who in the last year moved out of city and into the suburbs. The playgroup on Friday was actually a goodbye party for another one of the moms who is moving all the way to Texas! There is definite trend for new parents to flee the city in search of more affordable housing, less competitive preschools, higher quality public school systems, and of course, backyards!
On Saturday, we headed south to Palo Alto where we took advantage of the Indian summer weather at the Rincanada Pool. It was actually the first time Ruby had gone swimming since her swimming lessons last year. She was a bit hesitant at first, but then thoroughly enjoyed herself wading in the tot pool.
Unfortunately, there are no such outdoor pools in the city as temperatures rarely reach levels appropriate for outdoor swimming. Despite these apparent shortcomings, my love affair with San Francisco, which started the minute I laid eyes on the city, is still going strong. With our recent home purchase in a neighborhood with decent public elementary schools, I feel like we can safely remain in the city for at least 10 years, at which time Ruby will be entering middle school. Hopefully by then either the city's public middle schools will have significantly improved or we will have come into a large enough forutne to send our child(ren) to private school. For the time being, it looks like Ruby will also be a little City Mouse.
Steve, Ruby, and I moved into the new house about three weeks ago on August 16th. One of the main reasons we put off moving out of our old apartment for as long as we did was because the thought of packing all of our crap, er belongings, made me want to knock myself unconscious. Although Steve and I tried to not be hoarders and to make periodic donations to Goodwill, we still accumulated a massive amount of belongings since our wedding (mostly in the form of china, glassware, kitchen gadgets and appliances) and an even more massive amount since the birth of Ruby (in the form of furniture, baby gear, and TOYS).
Before getting married, Steve and I had really quite little in terms of wordly possessions and never needed to hire professional movers to move. The last time we moved (from Steve's apartment in Mountain View to our apartment in the city), we rented a small U-Haul and enlisted the help of two friends. Almost everything we moved belonged to Steve, as I had brought with me only two checked bags from the East Coast a few months earlier. The time before that, when Steve and I moved from an apartment we shared in Sunnyvale during the summer I interned at Roche Palo Alto to a house in the Berkeley hills, we rented a minivan and did the entire move ourselves. And the time before THAT, when we moved from Steve's apartment at Stanford to the apartment in Sunnyvale, we used only Steve's personal sedan. Of course those were the days when Steve possessed exactly 1 bowl, 1 spoon, and a pair of chopsticks.
We packed our first box about a week before Moving Day. We only had the few hours between when Ruby went to bed and when exhaustion overcame us to work. We tried to tackle first the most tedious aspects of packing: the china, glassware, and frames. Even though the wrapping of each individual item in packaging paper was the most time-consuming part of the process, most of the items we were packing had been stored inside cabinets and had not seen the light of day since they were first unpackaged during receival, so our packing progress was not apparent to the outside observer. After several days of packing, I realized that we had yet to pack a single thing we actually ever USE.
We planned the move for a Monday, so that Ruby could be watched by the nanny at our share care partner's house. Even though we had packed diligently every evening the previous week and through the weekend, we were still up until 3am the morning of Moving Day, throwing things into boxes.
Midnight on Moving Day, a sad state of affairs:
Our movers arrived around 9:30 in the morning. They were highly efficient and finished the job in just 4.5 hrs. Although there are many moving companies in the San Francisco area, this one seemed like it was meant to be.
In addition to hired help, we also enlisted the help of all grandparents in the packing/moving/unpacking process. My mom flew in the Friday before Moving Day to help pack and to look after Ruby so that we could pack. She stayed until two days after the move to assist with the most critical elements of the unpacking: setting up the nursery and rendering the kitchen functional. Her departure was immediately followed by the arrival of Steve's parents. Steve and his dad were tasked with putting together the many pieces of new furniture that required assembly, while Steve's mom cooked and stocked our freezer. After a week of frantic unpacking/organization, the house looked quite in order for just 1 week post-move.
The main reason for the furious pace of the unpacking was our desire to minimize the disruption to Ruby's day-to-day life. Ruby is definitely a creature of habit, and she does not adapt easily to new situations/environments. For the first week after the move, our share care partners hosted the nanny share for the first time in their home. Even though Ruby had been to their home before and she was familiar with all the people there with her, she experienced a lot of anxiety about being in a less familiar place. For most of the time she was there, she needed to be held by the nanny the entire time or else she would get scared and cry. After the first day, Steve started dropping her off in the morning because it was too upsetting for both of us when I had to leave. Even though by the time Ruby got home the first day, we had set up her bed and unpacked all of her regular toys, she could tell something wasn't right, and she regarded everything in the house with a great deal of caution. Oftentimes when Ruby feels insecure or scared, she becomes even more attached to me than she usually is. Anytime I was in her eyesight, she would protest loudly until I picked her up and then bury her face in my shoulder and cling to my neck for dear life.
It took Ruby a week or two to fully adjust, but I can tell she is now comfortable with our new home. She is once again able to play on her own, and she is less cautious and more eager to explore. It is a little sad to think that Ruby will soon forget our former home, which is where she was brought back to from the hospital, where I spent 36 hours in labor, where we learned I was pregnant, where Steve and I came home to after getting married. Of course I'm sure we will make even greater memories here, ones that Ruby won't forget.
I'm sure it's been so long that most of our regular readership have given up hope, and I am now just talking to myself, but so much has happened in the last 4 weeks!
First there was the business of PACKING, and then the craziness of MOVING, followed by the labor of UNPACKING (as well as the assembling of furniture and the running of errands in conjunction with the caring of a toddler). Also the more that happens, the harder it is decide what to start talking about.
In addition to the changes in our lives due to our relocation into our first home, there have also been some major changes in Ruby! The most exciting of this past week is that Ruby, at the tender age of 14.5 months, began to crawl!
The Long-Awaited First Crawl:
At first, Ruby's crawling constituted of maybe 1-2 feet of forward motion. However, over the past couple of days, she has really taken off! Now Ruby FOLLOWS me around the house! While this may be 7-month-old news to most of my fellow mommies with 14-month-old babies, it is a completely novel concept to me and quite a sight to see Ruby in a crawling position. Although for most parents there is a sense of dread when their babies become mobile enough to get into everything in the house, we have been waiting for Ruby to crawl for so long that we are practically encouraging her to get into things! We'll see what happens when the novelty wears off.
At this point, Ruby is going through a transitory phase where arguments could be made that she is still a baby and arguments could also be made that she is now a toddler.
Ways in which Ruby is still a baby:
1) She STILL does not crawl. The closest she comes is getting into an awkward crawling position before collapsing onto her tummy. However, we have learned that this crawling deficiency was inherited from her father, who also did not crawl, although everyone chalked it up to him being too fat.
It is encouraging to know that Steve does know how to crawl NOW, so this deficiency can be overcome.
2) Ruby will only take milk like baby, either from nursing or from a bottle. After 1 year, babies can be transitioned onto cow's milk and are encouraged to drink from a sippy cup. However, this arrangement was not to Ruby's liking. Although she drinks water from a sippy cup like a champ, she refuses milk when it's in a sippy.
Although I had no plans to stop nursing, I hoped to begin to introduce cow's milk so that Ruby could warm up to it at her own pace and so that I could stop pumping at work. Unfortunately, it seems that Ruby has some sort of reaction to cow's milk that causes any skin the milk has touched to turn red. Although the reaction is fairly mild and goes away on its own within an hour, we decided it's probably best to not transition her onto cow's milk for fear that it may exacerbate her eczema. The pediatrician suggested several alternative milks including goat's milk, coconut milk, and almond milk, which I have yet to try. In the meantime, I am still the sole milk supplier and Ruby's preferred method of milk delivery.
3) Still squishy.
Ways in which Ruby is a toddler:
1) Ruby is actually toddling (with assistance). She now walks quite well with her lion walker and along furniture. Although she is by no means a speed demon, she has definitely improved to faster than a snail's pace. This means she finally has some autonomy over where she is going, at least until the lion bumps into a wall.
2) Ruby becomes more and more communicative every day. The list of Words Ruby Can Say has expanded to include:
Na-na
Ye-ye (Grandpa in Chinese)
A-yo! (Chinese expression of surprise)
When she wants milk, Ruby will now call out, "Ma-ma! Ma-ma!" as she vigorously makes the sign for milk.
Just last night, on one of her dinner dates with her little boyfriend Julien, Ruby engaged in a brand new form of communication: inter-baby communications!
In the middle of eating their dinners, Ruby and Julien suddenly looked each other in the eye, chatted back and forth, and waved to one another! Although Ruby and Julien have played on many other occasions ever since they were 3.5 months old, this was the first true communication between them and the first time I had ever witnessed Ruby make a connection to a fellow baby/toddler in the same way that she connects to an adult.
3) Earlier this month, Ruby transitioned to one nap a day, which is definitely a big kid move. She also has 4 more teeth coming in on top, which would bring the total to 6. Overall, she is more mature. However, she is hardly ready to venture out on her own, and I am hardly ready to let her.
