Lapsit! (or, how I learned to love brown bear)

Thursday mornings, 11 a.m., Mission Branch library, guaranteed to crack you up. The kind librarians are persistently upbeat even at the 11:15 midway, otherwise known as the edge of the precipice of baby tolerance. By 11:16, somebody is crying. By 11:18, somebody else is crying. By 11:20, the room is brought back from the brink of utter despair by the beloved "uno dos tres CHO, uno dos tres CO, uno dos tres LA, uno dos tres TE!"

Never fails to rouse. Don't miss this weekly baby event. Check your local branch for their lapsit times and make a round robin of it.

Teething Lucca Ravoli

It is the week of pain as two molars, possibly three, begin their relentless eruption through the gums of Ruth. Tears, sadness, short-tempered fits sprinkled with glimpses of the usual good cheer leave little alternative than to seek out her favorite foods and parks so off we went to Lucca Ravoli (22nd and Valencia) and Mission Playground (19th between Guerrero and Valencia).

The men at the deli are old-world cranky, stare hard at the lookers, love to talk sports and are sweet to the little ones. Like merchants who keep dog biscuits behind the counter for their customer's pooches, Lucca hands out long thin breadsticks to the babes, a usual delight for Ruth, except for Ruth with tooth. The breadstick, something she usually waves around like a victory baton, caused shrinking fear, leaving me no alternative than to pick up a bottle of Chianti for the promised night of difficulty ahead.

The park was a bright spot. Clean, fenced, with beautiful flower beds and two jungle gyms. One of our regular spots now.

Babies love ravoli, even teething babies. And the fevers that the doctors say are not associated with teething? Ask anyone with a sweaty, screaming, bleeding gummed ball of fury if they believe correlation is not causation.

Preschool Already?

Benny's mom is preoccupied with admissions and applications for her goldilocked 16 month old. "And can you believe," she said, in her more than slight less than heavy Russian (Yiddish?) accent, "you have to write these essays about how you think your child will enhance the school, or how they will somehow make it better or something. I don't even understand it really."

But she is forging ahead through the process, excitedly. "Benny is really into the alphabet, and figuring things out, he isn't so creative yet. So maybe a Montessori school, I don't know. And there is a preference for siblings so I have my applications in my first and second choices already cause I am not sure we can get in."

Ruth is into her orange ball. She also likes to take things out of bags and put them back into bags. It seemed, although this comes from a removed perspective, that Benny also likes the orange ball and may like to take things out of bags.

"So, where do you want Ruth to go?"

"Um," I said, "We're going to move before she goes to school."

Baby preoccupier of the day: Ruth has a drawer full of toys. This morning, I took the toys out and replaced them with clothes that no longer fit her.