Charlotte Lily, Six Months Silly

Yesterday was Charlotte's half-birthday. I can't believe my baby is already six months old!

In honor of Charlotte's big day as well as last week's Facebook fad, here are 25 or so random things about Charlotte:

Height: Short (not getting an update until we see the doctor on Tuesday)
Weight: Light (ditto) ... until you've been holding her for fifteen minutes already
Hair: Some coming in, maybe brown but maybe blond
Eyes: Still true blue like her Daddy's (Go Duke!)
Teeth: Working on her first one (we are all suffering along with her)
Current hobbies: Giggling, sucking on her toes, rolling over from her belly to her back and back to her belly, sitting up, sucking on everything she can get her hands on including her hands, shaking her head back and forth vigorously like she's saying "no"
Favorite things: applesauce, sweet potatoes, keys, paper, cell phones, silicon spatulas, bathtime!
Dislikes: peas, naps, suction bulb, Q-tips, falling over, being put down, breastfeeding
Best friends: Jacques the Peacock, Balaam the Singing Ass, Libby doll, Oscar the Octopus, Carmen, and Mommy

La Bella Charlotte

This one makes my heart feel like bursting!

(I don't really like the blue backdrop or the cheesy columns in this picture (looks really '80s, and not in a good way), but she looks so cute. I'm going to try cropping it and changing it to black and white or sepia and see if I can make it work.)

Rice cereal

This kid is really, really into food, even if it is just rice cereal. I can't wait to see what she is going to do the first time we give her chocolate.

Giggling

Everything is so funny when you are 5 1/2 months old. Seeing other people laugh or smile, looking at yourself in the mirror ... or even watching Mommy jump around like a monkey.

Enjoy the Soothing Blues and Greens

P.S. I just have to give a little shout-out to myself because I put this layout for my blog together by messing with the HTML code for a while yesterday ... and I really know so very little about programming. Eat your heart out, TheCutestBlogontheBlock.com!

Social Security

Friends, let me share with you an adventure I recently had. I spent two hours yesterday at the social security office in East Houston trying to get Charlotte a new social security card since the one we applied for when she was born was never mailed to us ... or it was intercepted by some very greasy US Postal worker who sold it on the black market.

In Texas, you practically have to get strip-searched to get any kind of government documentation. For example, at the DMV (or the DPS, as they call it here) I had to show three original forms of I.D. on top of my North Carolina license and get my fingerprints taken and run through a digital database before they would give me a new driver's license. I thought they were going to throw me in the clink for not having my marriage certificate with me to prove that my maiden name on my passport was really me. Seriously, as I stood posing for my "mug shot" at the end of all that I wondered if they were going to march me down the hall into a holding cell while they printed the license out. (Nope, it turns out that Texas waits two weeks to mail you a license even after all the time you spent waiting in line there so they can check you out some more.)

Getting a social security card for my child wasn't a lot different. Because of my previous experience at the DPS, I took everything I could think of with me: my drivers license, passport, marriage certificate, social security card, birth certificate, all my college and high school I.D.s, and my report cards from ages eight on. To prove Charlotte was my kid, I took everything I had: Charlotte's birth certificate, her medical insurance card, pictures of my husband and I with Charlotte, Charlotte's umbilical cord stump, our hospital bracelets, hair and toenail clippings, congratulations cards from all three baby showers, and some blood samples from every member of our family.

Nope, still wasn't enough. They wanted her SHOT RECORD too. I guess some illegal immigrants in the 1980s were coming into Texas and using the birth certificates of babies who had died to get social security cards, so now you have to have the shot records of your kid to prove that the baby is still living and being vaccinated regularly. Well, this is the story they gave me at the social security office anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that those government workers just really enjoy making you wait two hours in a stinky, crowded, dirty room looking at a hairy six inches of butt-crack on the woman in front of you and then telling you that you have to come back again another day and do it all over again. Those sick sadists ...

Anyway, after a lot of crying and begging, I convinced the social security woman to give me the card even though the suitcase of items I had brought was insufficient evidence. She bent the rules and gave it to me. I'm glad she did, but now I am suffering from another kind of crisis of conscience ... Did she bend the rules because I'm white, blonde, and green-eyed? Upper middle-class? Well-educated? If I was Latina, or African American, or even white with a darker complexion, or if my clothes were a little shabbier or my speech a little less refined, would she have insisted on more documentation? Hum. Welcome to Texas!

Charlotte is a Good Girl

Charlotte is a good girl. Just look at her in her little "Gretel von Trapp" dress. She looks absolutely precious and innocent in it, even though she spit up on it six times during church and covered Mommy's skirt in curdled milk.

Charlotte is a good girl. She loves lounging in bed with Papa on Saturday mornings ... until she gets bored and starts fussing because she wants to go play with her toys.Charlotte is a good girl. She loves playing on the floor with her toys ... until she gets bored and starts fussing because she wants Mommy to pick her up.
Charlotte is a good girl. She lets Mommy take a lot of pictures of her ... until she gets bored and starts fussing because she wants to be walked around the house.Charlotte is a good girl. But sometimes being held and walked around just isn't enough to keep her happy. Rough day, Charlotte! (And a bad hair day for Mommy too.)