Daddy Tree: Tiny Footsteps

As I've mentioned before, changing Willow's diaper really takes a minor miracle some days. Well, the task is getting even harder. I suppose you'd call it a major miracle now. After I pick up Willow and carry her toward her room, she sees the picture hanging in the hall outside her door and starts whimpering. She knows what's coming. A few steps later, I lay her down, and she starts that cute, but fake, cry of hers (Mommy loves this face, it's so cute). Getting her to the changing table is the easy part. The hard part comes as soon as I start tugging her pants down. That's when the squirming begins. Usually Mommy and I temper this by giving Willow a toy to play with, but that's not working anymore. Willow pitches the toy over the side then grabs one of the rails and pulls herself over onto her tummy. Then she tries to crawl off the table. She doesn't make it that far, of course, but having to pin your baby down and constantly having to flip her back on...

Please forgive my haste and sloppy writing. As Willow becomes more active, I have an ever-tightening window for writing on this blog. I'll keep plugging away, though. ### Miss Willow has had an extraordinary few days, and they're going to continue. On Friday, she and I headed to our first Gymboree class, and we had a blast! I'd been nervous about going because I tend to shrink from strangers, and I was intimidated about being the only man in a group of cheerful and chatty women. I was wrong. Willow and I had so much fun that we can't wait to get back on Friday. Aside from Willow and me, there were seven mommies and their babies ranging from 6 months to 9 months old. Both Willow and I were shy at first, but we got over that pretty quickly. A mom about my age helped me out of my shell, and Willow, well, I think her curiosity overcame her timidness. Before long she was off and crawling, exploring everything (she was not one for staying in Daddy's lap during th...

Willow is getting greedy. Or maybe she's just exploring the bounds of possibility. No. She's getting greedy. This morning during her second bottle, she tried to combine two of the things she loves most: She tried to drink her bottle AND play. At the same time. The two together. Maybe some day she'll be able to do this, but today was not that day. Normally she sits near-Indian-style on the floor drinking her bottle (this is the Daddy variation of bottle-taking; Mommy lets Willow sit in her lap for bottle time; this is my loss, I suppose, but I like to tackle a quick chores during that time without having little hands pulling on my pants leg). She usually sits there sucking on her bottle the whole time then quickly discards the bottle when its empty and pursues her play. Not this morning. While she was tugging on the nipple, Willow got brave. She was next to her ExerSaucer, and she tried pulling up on it with her right hand while the bottle was in her left. This didn...

As a stay-at-home dad, I fully acknowledge I have the best job in the world, but the best moments don't come during the week while I'm working hard. The best moments come during the weekends, when the whole family, Mommy, Willow and me, are home. I love the meals together, playing together and the trips to the park (I hope there will be more of those as the weather warms). But my favorite moments happen when Cherish and Willow don't know they're happening, when Mommy and daughter sneak off to take a nap together. I join them for a family nap sometimes, but mostly I take their nap times for some Daddy time (and I realize these are special moments for Cherish and Willow; the weekends are for them, I get the weekdays). These naps aren't my favorite moments because I get alone time (though I do cherish that). They're my favorite times of the week because I sneak in during the nap and I look down on my wife and daughter. This is magical. Usually, Cherish is lying...

As I've spent the last few weeks chasing my speedster-crawling daughter around the house, I've come to realize that she might very well be a caveman. Witness: She communicates with guttural sounds and fist-banging gestures (sometimes using wooden spoons and toys for emphasis). Imagine, if you will, this conversation: "Hey, Willow." "Heh." "Did you have a nice nap?" "Heh." A scowl starts to creep across her face. "What's wrong, baby girl?" "Heh!" Then she starts banging, loudly, on the crib railing. "Heh! Heh!" She likes to gnaw on everything. Anything. I imagine cavemen were like today's adolescent sharks; they had to bite on everything to figure out if it was food. Take the above conversation example. Willow might very well follow a "heh!" with squeak-squeak-squeak gnawing on the crib railing. Willow stares dumbfounded at light sources. When Willow and I enter a room and I flip on...

Willow is 9 months old now, and she's keeping me busy. I'm not sure "busy" even cuts it; she's keeping me in hyperdrive. I think I need vitamin B shots just to get through the day, and she's not even walking yet. I'm shaking here, folks. Shaking. I've already lost 19 pounds since becoming a stay-at-home dad (much more and I might be almost healthy). She's napping now, so I get a chance for some updates. We visited the doctor on Monday, and Willow checked out perfectly. She's officially 20 pounds now, but I can tell you she weighs more than that. I'm sure of it. Willow cried when the nurse weighed her (just like Mommy does, Cherish noted). But there were no shots. YAY! Up to now, Willow hasn't been afraid of anything, but she's starting to develop her shyness of strangers. Of the doctor her eyes spoke, "Who is this strange woman, and why is she touching me? Oh, why is she touching me THERE?" Willow is eating all sorts o...

A baby reaches many milestones in her first year. Some, such as crawling and walking, are celebrated. Others aren't celebrated as much, but they strum the heartstrings just as much. I haven't seen a baby scrapbook, for example, that asks "When was the first day your precious little one acted like a little girl?" I realize "little girl" is a negative connotation in many cases, but not in this one. I mean "little girl" in the most magical sense, as in "sugar and spice and everything nice." That's what my little girl is made of. Now she's not skipping around in a dress and sparkling shoes spreading glittery cheer on everything. Not yet. But she has scratched the surface, playing a bit like a little girl does. Now, for example, she's sitting in the floor playing with Mommy's chew-bead necklace. She's running her tiny fingers across each bead, one at a time, and chatting with each and every bead. She's saying such ...

I'm a sports fan, which means Willow will be a sports fan, right? Of course I'm right (despite Mommy being nowhere close to being a sports fan). So far she's watched the baseball playoffs and UK basketball games with me. Well, she was in the same room with me at times during those games. And on Sunday she watched her first Super Bowl. OK, it's true she spent most of that time reading the newspaper with Mommy (that is trying to rip the paper from Mommy's hands), but I sensed she cared what Daddy was doing. Oh, who am I kidding. She didn't care. I think she looked up when a baby or animal took to the screen during commercials. (She DID NOT, however, look up when my beloved Jerry Seinfeld pranced around on the tube, GASP!) But the weekends belong to Mommy, and that's where Willow prefers to cling. And I do realize that Mommy is roughly 343 times more fun than Daddy most of the time, especially during games. But I'm not giving up yet; there's a ...

Have you ever seen one of those competitive cup-stackers, the ones who stack and unstack plastic cups on late-night TV shows? They do so with blazing speed, the cups appearing to move in a neon blur. Well, those cup-stackers have nothing on Willow. No, Willow doesn't stack things. Actually, she doesn't even construct things. Her specialty is destructing, and she does so with blinding speed. There used to be a cartoon on a few years back named "The Tick." On it, there was a speed greater than the speed of light. It was the speed of lint. Nothing was faster. As in: "Where did that lint come from?" "I don't know, it's just there, out of nowhere. It moves at the speed of lint." Willow moves faster. This morning, for example, as I finished breakfast, I heard, "Whap! Whap! Whap!" Willow had gone from playing peacefully in the floor with her cereal bowl to pulling magazines off an end table in record time. The "whaps" wer...