What's up with us.

Maia's asleep for the night now, and Brian and I were just watching a bit of the "Frontline" documentary on Hugo Chavez. We're seriously contemplating getting rid of our satellite dish (and thus our TV reception, for the most part), and so we're experimenting with different ways that we might be able to access the one or two shows that we really don't want to lose. (Those shows being "Top Chef" and "The Daily Show." Everything else is expendable.) But anyway, "Top Chef" is on in half and hour, and we have a bit of Thanksgiving prep and blog updating to do before then.

We're having Thanksgiving here at our house tomorrow, mainly due to the fact that my current doula client still hasn't had her baby. Included in my professional "duties" as a doula is that I commit to stick around the Ann Arbor area around due date time, and so our Thanksgiving plans have changed somewhat in the last week. So, rather than traveling to East Lansing, we'll have Thanksgiving here with Mom, Dad, Nannie ("Great Nannie" to Maia), one of Nannie's caregivers, and perhaps Uncle Dave. Oh, and Phoebe and Nunzio will be here, too! :) I really can't express how much I appreciate the fact that our family has been understanding and flexible with all this--again, welcome to the unpredictability of doula work!

What else? Well, as Brian pointed out in the previous post, Maia's language and cognitive skills are just continuing to explode. We think she has around 700-800 words in her vocabulary at this point; we counted 500 about a month ago, but she's expanded her personal dictionary by leaps and bounds since then. Cool language development moment of the day: she demonstrated that she understands, to some degree, the concept of "yesterday." We were talking about what food we ate today, and she said "I eat rice and beans yesterday." This is an accurate statement: we had dinner at our favorite burrito place yesterday evening, where Maia enjoyed her usual black beans and rice. This is the first time that she expressed this rather complicated concept accurately. Also, she's starting to substitute "I" for "Maia" in many cases, as well as using the possessive pronouns "her ____" or "his _____." Cool stuff.

Finally, in other major milestone news, I think that tomorrow will be my last day of nursing Maia. After nearly two years of breastfeeding, I'm feeling that it's a good, kind, reasonable time for both of us to wean. We've been through nursing strikes, drastic decreases and increases in interest, changing activity levels, changing purposes for the whole enterprise . . . and I'm really deeply proud of us. In general, though, Maia's requesting her "nook-uhs" with a lot less frequency (only once a day, usually), and I'm really not producing milk any longer because of it (ah, the beauty of a demand-then-supply system). From before the moment she was born, I planned to nurse her until she was about two years old, and I'm so proud of both of us for reaching that point. We're going to have some quiet time together tomorrow morning for our last nurse (I'm crying a bit right now just thinking about it . . .), and then we'll say goodbye to this moment in our lives. We've been talking a lot over the last couple of days about the things that we're all thankful for, and Maia's list includes "Thankful for nook-uhs." How wonderful is that? She nurses her baby dolls, and just generally talks about the whole experience with a lot of warmth and affection. I just can't really put into words how much more nursing is than just food; it's such an enormous part of my parenting philosophy, and it's given me countless hours of quiet, peaceful, connected time with the wonderful human being that is my daughter.

So, yeah, there we are. It makes me really, profoundly sad, but also happy and proud at the same time. A mix of emotions for a very complicated moment.