Growing Clara

Hi. I decided to start a blog to share all my stories about Clara. Also, it seems like the best way to keep track of all the interesting things she says and does. Usually all I have at hand to record her new words or habits is miniature stickie notes. I try to buy notebooks, but I always seem to lose them. A blog makes much more sense.

Clara is 15 months. She walks (runs) and talks (screams, shouts, shrieks). She goes to sleep at 8:30 and wakes up at 7:00. Sometimes she naps for a few hours in the afternoon, but usually she only goes down for about an hour. If you're lucky, she will sit still long enough to read a book. She likes Sesame Street and flour-less chocolate torte.

Clara's favorite toys right now are her baby dolls, all of which were given to her by her grandparents. She has four: a tiny, filthy cloth doll that she chewed on as an infant; a rag doll from the Bahamas with a brightly-colored skirt; a small, pretty Aryan baby with a perfectly puckered mouth; and a larger baby with a misshapen body. Her favorite baby at the moment is this last one. Her grandparents bought it for her last Christmas. Its body is misshapen because it contains a bulky battery pack that enables it to cry, to blink its eyes, and make sucking sounds when you put its bottle in its mouth.

We, my husband, Simon, and I, call the doll "Ugly Baby." I find it unnerving because its cries sound to me like the long, drawn-out craaawwww of a chicken on the prowl for food.

We hadn't bothered to change the doll's battery pack for several months, and it stopped making all of its baby noises, sucking, and blinking its eyes. Then, one day recently, Clara put the doll's belly against the edge of the sidewalk, mafia style, and stepped on her back a few times. Much to her delight, the doll began to make her crying sounds again. It doesn't suck on its bottle anymore though, and only one eye blinks, making it look like it's always winking malevolently.

Clara calls the doll "Beeeee," which is short for "Baby." She insists on sleeping with it, even though I imagine the battery pack makes it less-than-cuddly. She also feeds it. Simon calls me "Dick Cheney" because I'm constantly dipping the doll's plastic head in the sink to clean off chicken grease, yogurt smears, honey, etc. There's a tiny bit of almond butter stuck way back in the doll's mouth. So far back I can't get to it. Who knows how long its been there and what kind of germs are festering in it.

Ugly Baby's bottle is tightly tied to one hand so it doesn't get lost. This arrangement means it's impossible to get her shirt off. After several months of lavish hugs by ketchup-smeared fingers, it was so stained and grotesque I had to cut it off with a pair of scissors the other day.

Thus, Ugly Baby is now naked from the waist up and, Clara imagines, exposed to the spring chill. To mitigate this, she pulls clean clothes that I neatly folded from the laundry basket or dresser drawers to wrap Ugly Baby in. Usually, it's a pair of my sweat pants or work-out shorts, but Daddy's T shirts work just as well.

I think it's time to make Ugly Baby a poncho.