easiest baby ever

Maple is definitely the easiest baby I've seen or heard about. Either that or she's brain dead. I've never experienced so little complaining fom anyone with my genetic material.

We get up in the mornings and I put her in the evil chair, where she sits, happily vibrating away, while I make breakfast and get ready for work. She is completely happy to just sit there and watch me. The other day, our friends Toby and Jim gave her a Whoozit toy, so we attached it to the bar above the evil chair and now she fixates on that for as long as an hour. Eventually she does get bored, but by that time I'm usually desperately missing her so it's perfect. Before she was born, I swore I'd never leave her in that chair for any length of time. But now I see that there are things we need to do (like cook) that aren't conducive to wearing her in a sling.

Speaking of slings, I have been feeling like a failure as a pseudo hippie mama because Maple HATES slings. I was so obsessed with slings before she was born, and she came out of the womb with only one thing that made her unhappy -- the sling. But I think I've found that it's not slings that she hates, but being held in the cradle position. She loves her Baby Bjorn, because she's upright. The Storchenweige "sling" is great because I can hold her upright, although I still need to practice tying it on -- I didn't get to practice with the MS attack because I couldn't move my hands well enough, but now I'm doing better and can get back to it. But the ring slings are still prohibitive -- I just can't get her (or me) comfortable in them. I need to go to a babywearing lesson or something.

We went to IKEA yesterday, which was a lot of fun. Maple was great, as usual -- I just had to feed her once and she was happy. Our friend Nate got us a gift certificate, which we used to buy a funky cabinet (red) for the office. I also got a small filing cabinet, which is great cause now I'm like officially growed-up and suburban, with my man and my kid and my filing cabinet.

Maple makes it so easy to be a mama. The only things she ever really complains about are hunger and loneliness. She's really amenable to different situations; last night, for example, we were putting furniture together and wanted her to go to bed before us. We usually go to bed with her, or hold her while we watch a movie and she sleeps. But last night we put her in her Moses basket to sleep. At first she didn't like it, and she whined a bit, but after about ten minutes she was fast asleep. She's the coolest!

We're going to our childbirth class reunion today, so we'll put some pictures up later...