Fuzzy and Fat

As I write this, I have hit the elusive Napping Trifecta: Dean, Frankie and Molly are all sleeping. We spent the morning in Grand Haven with my parents, Molly, Matt and Sylvie. Frankie was all fired up to be on an outing, especially one that involved a large piece of raspberry swirl at Great Harvest Bread Company. She took her first trolley ride, made even more thrilling by the fact that my mom convinced her she was actually riding Thomas the Tank Engine.
Unlike during our cross-country visit to Philadelphia a few months ago (peppered by shouts of "No, Frankie! BYE-BYE!" and occasional slapping), Sylvie and Frankie have seemed quite delighted with each other's company. Frankie is still a little hands-on in her approach to Sylvie, with a little too much tickling, face grabbing and hand-holding for Sylvie's (mildly autistic like her mother) taste. Sylvie is still sufficiently innocent enough that she is highly taken advantage of by Frankie. My mom overheard her explaining to Sylvie: "I will play with Thomas first for a while and then I will let you play with it. That's called sharing." Sylvie just nods in agreement.
It is still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the fact that we have an EASY BABY. We are so used to having endured a HIGH NEEDS BABY (this is just a politically correct way of saying a pain-in-the-keister-like-you-have-never-known baby). We don't find ourselves with steadily climbing blood pressure and sweat stains blossoming in our armpits as naptime approaches. This morning she just snuggled up in the sling and eventually fell asleep. Even when she is awake, there is no screaming or thrashing, no desperate swinging and shushing. She remains fat and jolly with a low threshold for things she finds humorous. At her most angry and agitated, she merely begins what we refer to as "baby cursing." She doesn't cry, she just gargles her spit and vocalizes in what would appear, in print form, as ampersands, asterisks and exclamation points.
I am eager to see how Molly's laidback personality transitions into toddlerhood. Frankie, even as a small baby, seemed full of tightly coiled energy, always alert and nosy, standing stiffly on my lap. Molly slumps in peaceful gummy happiness against my shoulder, letting me bury my nose in her neck folds. I fantasize that she will be a highly compliant toddler with sunny blond hair, chubby cheeks and a willingness to chirp "OK, Mommy" to me every time I ask her to come brush her teeth. It would be refreshing change from "Eight more minutes, Mommy. EIGHT MORE MINUTES!!!"

Hygiene gets a C+

I am always impressed by families that give their children baths on a nightly basis. All the parenting books talk about establishing a bedtime routine of baths, pajamas, books, songs, etc. etc. In my house if we started that routine after supper we would not be ready for bed until close to midnight. There is swimming to be done in the tub, floating, conversations with plastic dolphins, washing the walls with washcloths, struggling and pleading for opportunities to shampoo and rinse, pretend stories to be told. By the time Frankie is ready to finally pull the plug on the drain, we still have elaborate towel wrapping ceremonies to endure and hair to comb and recomb after each somersault. In other words, it is all we can do to get into pajamas and manage to brush her teeth. Consequently, right now, both my daughters are lying in their own filth as they sleep. Molly was nursed lovingly to sleep and as I lowered her gently to the mattress, she erupted with fountains of fresh warm milk gurgling all over her sheets and pajamas. I'm not heartless, I did change her sleeper, but admittedly only moved her to a different, slightly less moist, section of the crib sheet. Frankie, who capped off her evening playing "buried treasure" in the dusty stones of our landscaping, is soiled from head to toe. She also is sporting the faded remnants of a few tattoos and her hair's most recent washing was by the chlorine in the hot tub.
Frankie's hair is in a maintenance category of its very own. Even my adult locks do not require the care that her mop does to look acceptable. I was under the impression that we adult women used product and color and various electrical devices in an effort to reproduce the natural shine and luster of our youthful hair. Well somehow that luster and silkiness skipped Frankie's head altogether. Her hair has the consistency of a synthetic fiber- much like what I remember Barbie's hair being. At night, when Frankie rolls around on her pillow, the back of her hair gently begins to knit itself together in a big soft mound of material that bears little to no resemblance to actual human hair.
I have proof of this in the following unretouched picture taken shortly after waking up:

Now you see what I am up against: Hair, angry at the attention her adorable face garners, rebelling, fuzzing, frizzing.

Mornings

Frankie is busy watching the madcap adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine and his obscure British vocabulary ("Oh, bother, my coupling's in need of repair. Be a useful engine and buffer up to me.). In an effort to avoid early morning confrontation, she is being allowed to eat piece after piece of the nutritionally barren toast with butter and honey. Minus the crust. It is a wonder to me sometimes that the baby I so diligently plied with organic butternut squash and ardently protected from the cathode rays of Baby Einstein DVDs has turned into a toddler I plop in front of a video with crustless toast smeared with pure sugar.
Molly is down for her first nap of the day. She is always up at the crack of dawn, or earlier now that the days are growing shorter, and is usually ready for a nap just as Frankie is getting up for the day. This pattern continues throughout the day with Molly often waking up from a late morning nap just as Frankie is going down for her afternoon siesta. They seem to have an uncanny ability to overlap their sleep habits in a maliciously perfect scheme to keep me from having a few moments of free time.
Unlike Frankie's infant self, Molly wakes in such jolly moods it's impossible to be irritated with her early rising. She breaks into gummy grins that get wider and wider until she explodes in a high-pitched scream of delight and then pitches forward to try to noisily and moistly nurse my neck. When she's done eating, we lie in bed while I kiss her armpits and bite her ribs until she is exhausted from giggling and starts to rub her eyes. We are trying to wean her from swaddling and she is now wrapped only from the waist down, a purple mermaid with a chubby head as wide as her shoulders.
Dean thinks Molly is an abnormally happy baby. She is not just content, she is practically intoxicated with things to smile about. When Frankie was a baby, random and unpredictable things would elicit a belly laugh or two from her. I would always think that I had at last hit upon something that I could repeat to get her laughing, but the next time I tried it she would stare soberly as though she now realized how foolish it was to have found it funny in the first place. Molly has some no fail laugh-inducers. Tops on the list is any form of jumping- off the stairs, on the bed, a slight bounce on the floor. She also invariably laughs when slightly startled or when Frankie runs at a good clip toward her. If Frankie elicits a laugh from Molly, she leans forward and says in a sing-song, "Aw, Mollsie Dollsie, you love me so much! You like me! I am your favorite! You love me so much!" Molly just grins in agreement.
Despite her unhappy babyhood, Frankie has turned into a delightful toddler. She is insatiably curious and peppers me with questions, especially when driving. Forget cell phones and inebriants, it is truly distracting to drive with a curious two-year-old. "We turned right, Mommy? This is the other way, Mommy? This is the way to church, Mommy? This is called Lake Harbor, Mommy? All these houses are on Lake Harbor, Mommy? You are driving straight, Mommy? It is Sunday, Mommy? Who's driving, Mommy? You only have one hand on the wheel, Mommy!" This is coupled with various requests for things like a piece of gum, but when you hand it back to her there is great distress because "I WANTED TO TAKE THE WRAPPER OFF THE GUM!! I WANTED THE WRAPPER ON THE GUM!! THE WRAPPER!!!" Then follows a stern lecture on gratitude and graciousness and meanwhile I have been lucky to avoid taking out a row of mailboxes.