Category: Maddux

In the past two weeks, our wee daughter has gone from a bored baby to an inquisitive infant. Now that little Maddux has figured out this sitting thing, a new world has opened up in front of her.

It used to be that, in order to play with toys, Maddi had to coax someone to dangle something interesting overhead. To survey her surroundings, she needed to be held upright by some kind adult. Not anymore! With her new found independence, Maddi has become — if it’s possible — an even happier, more fun-loving baby than she was before.

Within two or three days of that first wobbly sit, Maddi began perching like a pro. She quickly began sitting for 15 and 20 minutes at a stretch, happily playing in her playpen with exciting new toys that only big girls who sit up by themselves can enjoy — pop beads, stacking rings and chime balls.

Her stroller now glides about with her facing forward in an upright position, which allows her to grin out gummily at random people at the mall who we don’t necessarily want to meet, but do anyway.

Now that she’s not concentrating so much on keeping her balance in the tub, Maddi has also discovered the transcendent joy of splashing busily with both arms, looking very much like a tiny maestro at the piano. She also devotes great concentration to chasing her rubber duckie around the tub, gnawing on it with gusto for the brief seconds before it shoots from her arms and the hunt begins anew.

Perhaps the most exciting offshoot of Maddi’s new skill is her ability to enjoy the theatre. No, not the cinema, silly! That’s way too loud for her baby ears. But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of live performance.

Maddi has the one and only season ticket to the Playpen Theatre, Peachland’s finest animal show. The tiny audience is seated within the safety of a Graco Pack ‘N Play while an intrepid animal trainer shakes a bag of Whiskas Sensations. Within seconds, fascinating creatures known as house cats are crunching and munching their treats within mere inches of Maddi’s little “theatre box.” Sometimes they meow. Other times, they gaze back curiously at the wide-eyed, smiling baby. Either way, it makes for good entertainment.

Of course, sitting is not so entertaining when the poor baby eventually topples over, especially when it is the first pain she’s experienced not related to gas bubbles, vaccinations or teething. And especially when her neglectful mommy is not there to cushion her fall and feels compelled to check her constantly for the next 24 hours to make sure she isn’t concussed. (The nurses on the medical hot line apparently had never been called regarding an infant falling over from a sitting position and bumping its head; I’m not sure whether that means I’m the first mom whose little one hit the carpet, or just the first mom whose imagination conjured up the horrors of closed head injuries and consulted three different medical professionals. Incidentally, after a call to the hot line, a rebuffed attempt to visit the ER, and a quick visit to the doctor, Maddux didn’t even have a bruise.)

The dreadful combination of negligent AND neurotic mothering aside, Maddi has been having an absolute ball as an upright baby. She sits on beds, on couches, on floors and in her playpen. She plays with toys, sucks her hands, watches cats and smiles up at her parents. She doesn’t want to lie down, she doesn’t want to sit in her Bumbo, and she doesn’t want us to hold her. She wants to do it herself! If ever there was a happy baby, it’s our wee one in her favorite position.

To celebrate Maddi’s 24-week anniversary, here’s a publicity still from the hit show, “Look! Kitties!”

And here she is working on her next skill — standing!

As Maddi moves ever closer to that six-month mark, she is more and more excited about eating food. She’s gone from watching me drink juice to trying to grab it from me. (Not only that; if I pour myself a glass far enough away to keep my beverage safe, our hungry daughter can be heard emitting a series of frantic “eh-eh-eh”s and waving her hands angrily in the direction of my cup.) And once, when I was eating ice cream at Nana’s with Maddi in my lap, I jokingly brought the spoon toward Maddi’s face. With at least eight inches to go, Maddi opened wide in anticipation. Despite the fact that she has never eaten anything, let alone junk food, she looked so disappointed when she figured out she wasn’t getting any of my treat.

For now, however, she seems to be doing just fine on Mommy’s milk. A few days back, I was writing down her five-month statistics in her baby book. As I reminisced on months past, I noticed a trend. While Maddi’s height has varied from the 50th percentile to the 90th, each month, her weight remains in the 90th percentile or higher (usually higher). Clearly, this is not a starving baby.

Be that as it may, we are beginning to work on transitioning her into the dining room. For the last week, we have taken our meals in the breakfast nook, accompanied by Maddi in her high chair. Today, we brought out her big sister Kaija’s old sippy cups and put them through the dishwasher. In the coming days, we will give her a small cup of pumped milk so she can participate in “dinner” at the table with Mommy and Daddy rather than sitting in the high chair growing increasingly frustrated at the fact that everyone is eating except for her. And in a few short weeks, our not-so-tiny-anymore daughter will eat her very first spoonful of rice cereal.

But for now, even though she’s incredibly curious, she doesn’t really know what she’s missing. Otherwise, we could not have eaten Chris’ amazing turkey dinner tonight, on Canadian Thanksgiving, while Maddi was content to nurse just 18 inches away from the tastiest stuffing, sweet potatoes and most juicy turkey imaginable. It’s Maddi’s first and last “food holiday” during which she won’t be sampling the delights of the season.

Just because she didn’t enjoy the bountiful Thanksgiving feast doesn’t mean she didn’t play an important part in the festivities, though. Not only did she help provide the entertainment, she also served as our only Thanksgiving decoration.

Here’s our little turkey showing her true colors.

It seems like just yesterday I was anxiously awaiting the go-ahead to start pushing. In reality, it has been five whole months. For me, it’s flown by as I scramble to stay on top of my to-do lists, maintain our battery supply lest Maddi’s swing be stilled, and keep the house from descending into such chaos that Chris will be forced to take a week off to unearth me from the floor-to-ceiling laundry in our room (OK, it only took him an afternoon!). There’s never enough time in a day, and it doesn’t seem there have been many days in the last five months. But for Maddi, these five months have been, quite literally, a lifetime.

Maddi has accomplished many things in her short life. Lately, our little darling has been working on her gross motor skills. (I contend that smearing spitup on people, at which she’s quite proficient, qualifies as a “gross” motor skill, but my baby books say it’s a fine motor skill. Well, it’s not so fine with me, but whatever!)

No sooner did she figure out how to sit up with assistance than Maddi began working on removing Mommy and Daddy from the equation. For a few weeks, she’s been pulling herself up to a sitting position when I try to lay her in her baby swing. Instead of cuddling back against my abdomen and chest while reading her bedtime story, she’s been eagerly pulling forward so she can use her gross fine motor skills to wipe curdy gobs of slobber on the pages of her favorite books.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me yesterday when I noticed that, while I was technically holding her as she sat and played with her toys, she was actually sitting on her own.

Sure enough, when I folded up a big crocheted blanket until it was nice and soft and plopped the wee one in the middle, she managed to hold her balance for about 15 or 20 seconds. I tested and retested. It was not a fluke.

Without a toy, Maddi can sit on her own for quite some time. With a toy, it’s a bit shorter because she gets excited, but she still holds her own. Of course, when I brought Chris in to see what his little girl could do, her new skills vanished. She can barely contain herself when he is in the room, and his presence proved far too exciting for our wee princess to be able to concentrate on her balance.

Less exciting for most people, but very thrilling to me, is Maddi’s final accomplishment of the back-to-front roll. She did it once on accident, many weeks back, and was shell-shocked by the unexpected tummy time. She never rolled onto her tummy again.

I tried everything I could think of to get Maddi on her front and keep her there. Mirrors were used to no avail. The flaps on her Gymini’s floor? Worthless! Getting face-to-face with our wayward wee one was an exercise in futility. The second she had the opportunity to roll onto her back, she did it in a flash.

As you might have guessed based on my conviction while pregnant that my failure to complete a French memo board for her room would result in our daughter’s becoming homeless and drug-addicted as an adult, I was convinced that the worst would happen: Poor Maddi, so traumatized by her hatred of tummy time, would never learn to roll over. She would then fail to learn to crawl, which of course would lead to her never learning to walk. I envisioned her at two years old being rejected from nursery school because she’d still be getting around by pushing off against things with her feet. I pictured her scooting up the halls of her university on her bottom. The scenario seemed pretty bleak in terms of Chris and me being able to enjoy our golden years.

But — lucky me! — we live in Canada, where the public health unit has weekly sessions in which experts answer questions from parents about these puzzling young creatures in charge of whom we have found ourselves. On Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to talk to the infant-development expert, who gave me some tips on getting Maddi to roll over.

Tonight, I lured her onto her side using her beloved banana toy. Then I moved it just out of reach so that she would have to roll onto her tummy. And what do you know? Apparently, that silly toy was all the incentive she needed. Not only did she roll onto her tummy, our little one actually stayed there for a few minutes while I praised her to the skies.

So, all of you who were worried about her grim future, you can rest easy now! (OK, so maybe it was just me.)

So some things took a little longer than I had thought they would, and others have sneaked up on me way too quickly.

Not least of which is the fact that my tiny baby is now fast approaching her half-birthday. And yet, somehow, the laundry is never done and my to-do list has only gotten longer. And there are always more batteries to buy.

And here it is: A picture of our proud 5-month-old sitting all by herself.

It seems like yesterday that Maddi did nothing but eat, sleep, poop and offer up the occasional smile. Much to my ever-increasing dismay, our wee girl just grows up more and more quickly. In recent weeks, she’s been sitting with minimal support, working on her one-handed motor skills, and grabbing and attempting to drink from the cup we use to rinse her in the bath.

And most importantly, she’s honing her verbal proficiency. Chris and I were so excited when (in addition to bleating like a lamb while passing gas) Maddi started saying “ah-goo” at barely a month old — a skill “What to Expect” told us not to expect until she was four months old. Alas, as with most parents who fancy themselves the progenitors of genii, our early hopes were quickly dashed when Maddi failed to begin uttering grammatically impeccable sentences full of five-syllable words by her third month. Week after week went by, and still Maddi failed to tire of “ah-goo,” “glurhh,” “ah-ba” and the ever-popular raspberry.

But finally, our little prodigy has tired of these childish utterings and has moved on to bigger and better things (proving once and for all that our baby, is as we suspected, a future prizewinner of the Pulitzer or Nobel variety — we’re not picky!).

First there was “ahh-oooh,” right on time sometime between months two and three. And we’re not sure when she’s supposed to say them, because they’re not in any infant-development literature I’ve read so far, but our exceptional offspring is now coming forth with such verbal gems as, “moo-moo,” “boo-boo,” “doo-doo” and “doo-boo.” And just when you think she’s going to say “moo-moo” or “boo-boo” again, she comes up with “lala,” “momo” and “bobo.” Brilliant! Brilliant, I say!

Some babies her age may be inadvertently saying the names of their parents, but not Maddi! Our wee one is telling us what the cow says, pointing out injuries and dirty diapers, and telling us in Korean that she would like some tofu. Yes, it is certain that we have a great mind in our midst.

But being a renaissance baby doesn’t come easy. Little Mozart had to learn to play the piano before composing his operas and concertos. Little Da Vinci had to hit the sketchbook long and hard before conceiving “The Last Supper” and immortalising “Mona Lisa.” In order to attain her amazing verbal feats, wee Maddux spends hours practicing her oratorial skills. From the crib, late at night, we can hear our wee one saying “moo-moo-moo.” While eating, she often pauses, wide-eyed, to utter a thankful “boo-boo-boo.”

And today, while riding in the car, Chris and I were treated to a performance of … well, we’re not sure what it was. The closest thing to which we could approximate it was a tiny, high-pitched bear growling contentedly. Still, what parents can boast that their baby, just shy of five months, has approximated not one but TWO animal noises?

So far, she hasn’t yet asked for her dinner in a complete, well-composed sentence. But, clearly, it is only a matter of time!

And here she is: Our 21-week old wunderkind, who is clearly (and we’re not just saying this because we’re her proud parents) the most intelligent baby on the planet. (So smart is our wee one, in fact, that she quickly tired of her shiny new high chair when she realized that, unlike the others at the table, she had nothing to eat.) Her newest trick, which we noticed tonight, is smiling whenever we pull out the camera, no matter how tired and crabby she was 2 seconds earlier. I think she realizes that when the shiny box comes out, Mommy will soon be making silly faces and saying “Boogie-boogie-boo!” — and it doesn’t take a genius to tell you that is high comedy right there.

One of the great joys of having a baby is picking out his or her tiny clothes. Some of the fondest memories I’ve ever forged were those of Chris and myself giddily shopping for all things pink the week we found out we were having a little girl. There is something so exciting about choosing tiny shoes and wee sleepers and postage stamp-size blankets for one’s highly anticipated baby.

Of course, shopping for a baby once it’s arrived is fun too, but it’s usually done on a minimum of sleep — and often while the baby is clad in her last clean onesie because your estimate of how many outfits a baby needs was made without factoring in that baby’s ability to have 12 diaper explosions per day. The bliss of wandering about with one’s partner, filled with hope and love and an aching desire to do something — anything — to feel nearer to that baby who’s nestled so close and yet so far away, is impossible to completely recapture once that baby has entered the world.

But however wonderful it is to bring that baby home and dress him or her in all the tiny, wonderful outfits you and your beloved have chosen, the day will come when those outfits start to fit your baby like sausage casings. Soon, those adorable little togs will unsnap at the crotch when the wee one kicks or rolls over. And eventually, as we found out the other day, the straps on the tiny overalls — in which baby once swam — will no longer reach the buttons.

It was sad, to be sure, when Maddi’s tiny Gerber newborn sleepers grew too small. But they’re meant, after all, to be worn home from the hospital. Now, however, much of her 0-3 month wardrobe is ready for storage.

To accommodate her growing cache of 6-9 month clothing, I finally (and reluctantly) culled all the outgrown clothing from her dresser, closet and diaper bag. Little sleepers that strain at the snaps, pants that end at her knees and onesies that fit like a second skin — so many clothes, and so many memories. Some were worn once or twice; others — like the little chick outfit Chris bought me for my birthday (just a week before Maddi arrived) or her pink-and-white striped OshKosh overalls we bought before we knew for sure she was even a girl — were worn whenever they were clean and we had something bearing the faintest resemblance of an “occasion” to dress her up for (yes, that would be grocery shopping!).

It’s bad enough that our newborn is gone forever; now I have to pack up all those sweet memories for good, as well. Although I’ve got all those tiny clothes washed and set aside, I haven’t found a box or bin in which to put them. To be quite frank, I’m not looking forward to the task. I know there’s no way our little girl will fit in her pink-and-white polka-dotted sleeper, but it’s so hard to say goodbye after spending so many days holding my warm sleeping newborn who just happened to be wearing those cute little pajamas.

Hate it as I may, at some point I’ve got to put all those tiny outfits in storage. And soon enough, the same fate will befall Maddi’s 3-6 month clothes, which grow more snug by the day.

I try to tell myself that she will wear new outfits and make new memories, but that was cold comfort this afternoon as I packed her old clothes into the closet and made a mental note to find a wee bin in which to store them for the next baby. There are a lot of things that get lost in the chaos of everyday life with a young baby, the least of which is the fact that those days are oh-so-fleeting. As much as I try to live every day enjoying Maddi to the fullest, when I pack up my memories of a younger baby, I wind up feeling that I’ve let those days fly by without savoring them quite as much as I should have.

And here’s a picture of little Maddi, who, at 20 weeks old, no longer wears wee precious newborn clothes but instead wears pony shirts, like her daddy (you can just imagine the tears I will shed when this number goes into storage!):

One of Maddi’s first “life lessons” apparently will be delayed gratification. You see, while Maddi is intensely interested in food, she will not be getting any until she is six months old.

Of course, we can’t stop the baby from dreaming.

In the past few weeks, I’ve observed Maddi staring in wonderment at whatever tasty treats I manage to consume with her in tow. For awhile, she’s been eying such diverse foodstuffs as burritos, granola, tortellini and barbecued chicken, but only with the vague interest that she might afford a dog or a stranger at the mall.

But a few days ago, I poured myself a glass of bright-orange V8 Splash and downed it in front of her. Maybe it was the bright color, or maybe it’s just Maddi’s time to become interested in food. Either way, our wee one was riveted. Her eyes followed the cup as I brought it to my mouth and back down. “Mommy is eating,” I told her, just as I tell her when she’s about to eat, or when the cats are eating. Maddi looked at me wide-eyed, then burst into gales of uproarious laughter. As I finished my drink, she continued to stare at the glass and laugh.

Ever since that day, Maddi has stared obsessively at me every time I ingest food or drink. She ogles cinnamon rolls and gazes in rapture at brightly-colored salmon maki. She smiles knowingly as I shovel in pasta. Occasionally, as she is intently eyeballing a drink, she will reach out and pat the cup.

She loves being at the dinner table. If she’s taken her naps, she will sit in someone’s lap smiling at everyone as they eat this amazing stuff they call food. She hasn’t tried to swipe any food — yet. It is just a matter of time, however, before food ogling escalates into food grabbing and, perhaps, even food mouthing.

Alas, it is not to be, sweet Maddi. Not until November 6.

This next two months may prove very frustrating indeed for our little gourmand, who never met a food source she didn’t like. It’s not like we can even tell her “It’s for your own good,” because, frankly, we’re not even sure she understands “Hi” yet (although that doesn’t stop her from trying to say it!).

No, our darling daughter will have to figure out for herself that good things come to those who wait. (Let’s just hope she thinks strained squash is good.)

And here is Maddi at 19 weeks old, clearly getting quite enough nourishment without sushi or V8:

Ever since we’ve incorporated a routine, Maddi’s schedule has become very predictable.

At 7 a.m., you can count on her waking up. Sometime in the 9 p.m. hour, Maddi will be laid in her crib and, within minutes, fall into blissful slumber. She has regular meals — if you come calling around 10 a.m., for instance, our daughter will be indisposed. You can even count on a dirty diaper every day about noon (unfortunately, you can also count on several random “bonus” diapers).

And each day from 2:30 to 3:30 and 5:30 to 6:30, you can rely on Maddi to NOT be napping.

Now, these are her scheduled nap times. In fact, they were scheduled by Maddi herself. At approximately 3 and 6 every afternoon, Maddi becomes cranky and her little eyes begin to grow red with sleep. So I pre-emtively begin rocking and singing while she is still happy, to avoid having to put an overtired baby to sleep. Alas, whether she is tired or not when the naptime ritual begins, there is one thing Maddi also wants to avoid at all costs, and that is her nap.

You see, Maddi is a very social baby. She would much rather be part of the excitement, even if the part she contributes is the screaming.

Clawing furiously at her purple-rimmed eyes all the while, Maddi routinely manages to stay completely awake through not one but both of her naps, assuring that she misses not one moment of fun. And what fun it is!

Because whatever oh-so-thrilling activity we may be doing, within five minutes it becomes familiar enough to cause boredom, and the boredom leads to sleepiness. And the sleepiness leads to the intense need to not fall asleep (this is VERY important to her), and that means that she must go on to a new activity.

Rocking with Mommy won’t do, so she takes a ride in the sling. Pretty soon, that threatens to lull her to sleep, so she arches her back in an attempt to propel herself out of the pouch and into something that will keep her more alert — like her floor gym. Alas, the floor gym involves lying down, which is also done during — you guessed it! — sleep. Such a nice comfy position … we can’t have that!

At this point, Mommy is probably hungry and losing it, so on to the table, where Maddi will sit in a lap just long enough for the lap’s owner to settle down for dinner. Then, it’s too comfortable. Time to stand and bounce! Perhaps some maniacal screeches will liven things up! Wheeeeee! MUST … NOT … SLEEP!

This goes on and on, all night, until our purple-eyed baby is shrieking and bouncing from activity to activity like a chimpanzee on crack. Finally, it is time for her bath, massage and story. These are Maddi’s cues that she is about to get her nighttime sleep, which for some reason is acceptable to her.

After nine hours, she is ready to begin the day anew. New places to go. New people to see. New things to explore. New ways to avoid napping.

You can count on it!

And here, for your viewing enjoyment, is an 18-week picture of our wee somniphobe attempting to savor all the joy life has to offer … even if it makes her miserable.

It’s hard to believe that, as of yesterday, our tiny daughter is four months old. This weekend, we went to the Festival of the Tomato in Oliver, a few miles down the road from Nana’s farm. It occurred to me suddenly, as we strolled through the farmyard fest with our little one, that last year’s Tomato Festival occurred on the very last day of ignorant bliss before that fateful pregnancy test that heralded Maddi’s existence.

This year, she’s so much more than a little pink line on a stick; so much more than all of the photos of fetuses I gazed at nearly every day of my pregnancy, trying fruitlessly to imagine what our little daughter might look like; so much more than the helpless, uncoordinated little cone head we brought home from the hospital May 6.

Now we’ve got a giggling, floor-gym-playing, toe-grabbing, “a-ba”-saying, raspberry-loving bundle of sunshine. She seems to hit new milestones every week. Some, like waking at 3 a.m. to practice new skills and trying to help with her diaper, we could do without. Others, such as laughing at silly faces and patting the chests and faces of her loved ones, I can’t imagine life without.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a third of a year already. I still cling to my image of Maddi as brand-new, even as she’s nearly doubled her weight. Conceivably, the reason we’ve had to buy new clothes COULD be because the old ones have all shrunk (enormously) in the wash.

A few weeks ago, we met a tiny new baby who looked like she was rattling around in her giant infant carrier. “She’s so small!” I exclaimed, certain in my belief that Maddi had never been so tiny. Alas, the baby I thought was a preemie weighed a full pound more than our little 15-and-a-half-pound piglet did when she was born. Somehow, my mental image of a wee little thing grows to accommodate Maddi’s ever-chubbier form.

Our constantly changing baby has presented us with so many new things to deal with — first sleeplessness, then gas, and later, rolling over and trying to escape from swings, car seats and laps. While not prepared for these things, I could at least convince myself that they were typical of a baby who was practically a newborn. This week, she’s apparently begun the joyous journey of teething — definitely not newborn territory.

This past year has been full of the unexpected. Not only did I not expect to have a baby — I never expected to have such an OLD baby!

And here’s a picture of our gigantic four-month-old — in a decidedly big-girl-like pose — enjoying the sights and sounds of the Tomato Festival from outside my body.

It seems like just a few weeks ago that our wee daughter discovered her hands. In fact, it was just a few weeks ago. In the time since, she has played with her fingers as if counting them, tented her hands like a small, chubby C. Montgomery Burns, used her new tools to insert pacifiers and grab toys (first, quite comically, with closed fists and later with a mitten-like grasp), and, as I may have mentioned, she has spent quite a lot of time stuffing her hands in her slobbery little mouth.

But now, the bloom is off the rose, and Maddi has gone on to bigger and better things. Namely, her feet. At any given time, Maddi is either gazing adoringly at her toes as she holds them high and proud, or she has one foot firmly grasped in a little fist. In the past week, she has been waking in the night to play with her newest toys (and then wail piteously while still clutching her pajama footies) and has even managed to pull off a few pairs of socks.

I’m not really sure why she finds feet so fascinating, but there it is.

She plays with her own feet constantly, and then stares in awe (followed by uproarious laughter) when I put on my own shoes and socks. In a 40-year-old man I would find this more than a little weird, but luckily for Maddux, she’s an exceptionally cute 17-week-old girl and this behavior is more adorable than creepy.

However, it’s not all fun and games. As her neck and shoulders have become stronger and she’s developed this new-found interest in feet, corralling Maddux into a car seat or her swing has become more difficult. Either she will bend forward to grab her toes as I’m trying to secure her, or she will arch her back in refusal — knowing that once she’s buckled in, she won’t be able to reach her favorite playthings.

Apparently, for our little princess to be a happy girl, she must have easy access to — and good visibility of — the all-important feet.

Tonight, I introduced a new variable into her nightly bath and was stymied, in part by her foot fixation. Instead of putting Maddi in her infant tub, which now requires grease and a shoehorn, I assembled her new bath seat and tested its popularity.

Unfortunately, Maddi a) is not yet 5-10 months old, which means she is lost in the giant bath seat; b) cannot sit for more than 2 seconds on her own, which means that without my help, she eventually either slumps over the front or crumples toward the back; and, most importantly, c) cannot see her feet when positioned in the bath seat, which means that her entire time in the bath seat was spent contorting herself into positions in which she thought she might get a better vantage point. Her favorite position to optimize pedal visibility was standing straight up (another new fixation), which meant that the bath seat was hard-put-upon to contain our slippery, naked, too-small baby.

Needless to say, I decided to retire all baby-bath gizmos, large and small, for a few months and just bathe her in the big tub. Unused to bathing in more than a cup of water poured into her sardine tin of a baby tub, she regarded this new “floating” thing with a measure of trepidation at first. However, Maddux soon realized that she had GREAT toe access and was mollified.

And here’s a picture of Maddi at 17 weeks, entertaining herself in her new favorite way:

As a society becomes more sophisticated, so does its use of weaponry. As our little daughter wages war on every surface in our home (and on my person), she has adapted her destructive forces to match the measures Chris and I have taken to protect ourselves from her aggressive filth assault.

It used to be that I had to wash Maddi’s entire wardrobe every two days because of — oh, let’s call them pant grenades. These showy displays of power were attention-grabbing both visually and olfactorily, and definitely inspired shock and awe. But in time, thanks to my PANTRIOT Act, which involved larger diapers and more accurate tab placement, bumland security was beefed up sufficiently to vastly minimize collateral damage from the pants grenades.

Our dear little laundry nemesis also has been relentlessly pursuing an aggressive campaign of puke-lear (or as President Bush would say, “puke-ular”) warfare. Day after day, hour after hour, she launches volleys of dirty “lactosium” bombs at shirts, receiving blankets, her change table, her mattress, her Gymini, my hair … anything within two feet of this gooey, curdy bioagent’s launch site must be written off until the next wash cycle or shampoo.

This particular weapon has been employed since Day 1, but while our technology remains the same, she has been steadily increasing the amount of puke-lear material used in the attacks. Our intel suggests that within three months, she may upgrade her cache of bomb-making booty to include grain- and vegetable-based explosives, which may be used to rejuvenate her limping pants grenade program as well.

But Maddi’s latest battle tactic may be her cleverst yet. Like radiation poisoning, it’s barely perceptible at first, but it will get you — oh, yes. Unlike radiation, however, it won’t kill you. It’ll just wear you down and make you feel like you’re swimming upstream. It’s like modern psy-ops meets the ancient Chinese art of drip torture.

It’s slobber-ops, and no one will be spared.

It starts out this way: Maddi is wearing a clean outfit. You look away for a second and then look back. Where once was a clean dry chin, there’s now a string of spittle. You blink. Where Maddi’s lips were, all you can see now is a foamy cloud of tiny bubbles. Within 10 seconds, her shirt is soaked to the armpits. In 20, her pants are clinging to her legs, and there are tiny curds everywhere even though your intel reported that no actual pukes had been deployed. You recoil in horror, but it’s too late. Maddi has contaminated you with an unusually viscous admixture of saliva, phlegm and near-microscopic bits of puke-lear material.

Don’t even bother wiping it off. Recently, Maddi has begun employing not only the fore and aft missile launchers, but has developed a program to utilize her newfound Heather’s Attire Nonexplosive Destruction System (or HANDS) to stealthily gather weapons of mass disgust and smear them on very specific targets — even moving ones.

Her ever-more-sophisticated sense of gamesmanship has evolved to the point where she uses affection as a sort of Trojan horse. You think you are getting an affectionate pat to the face, whereas you are actually being smeared with a toxic, stinky coctail of lactosium and various other gooey bioagents suspended in warm saliva.

Having the advantage of cuteness on her side, our wee outlaw also has been known to lure her targets by expressing her love for “flying.” This allows her to gain access to weak areas and exploit them. Recently, during a seemingly routine flyover, she dive-bombed the sensitive ocular region of Laundry Central’s mother unit, causing a temporary loss of visual contact and garbled verbal communication.

True to form, she was seen on Al-Brassiera television smiling and making light of the situation as she restocked her arsenal for what we can only guess will be future attacks.

Whether the Launder Alert will be green, yellow, white, clear or several of the above is anyone’s guess.

And here’s a 16-week mug shot of this cute — but armed and dangerous — laundroterrorist gearing up for another messy HANDS attack.