The Telephone Transition

I know I call my parents a lot, but I don't realize how much I rely on them being there to give advice, help out with something or just chat until they change locations for the winter or spring.  Each year right around Christmas or New Years, they relocate from the mountains back to town here for the winter months.  I catch myself time and time again picking up the phone and preparing to dial an area code plus number when they're only seven digits away.   It seems to take about two weeks to get mentally re-oriented to their new location.

You're asking why I don't use speed dial, right?  On the cell phone, I definitely do.  But I prefer the land line for hands-free talking where possible.  a speaker phone that you can hook on to your collar and have both hands truly free to cook, clean, tend a baby, okay maybe not cook, but laundry.  Definitely laundry.  Never-ending laundry.  Single-tasking is just so 1980's.

The Big Boy Update:  It appears the trick to getting him to stand up without pulling up on furniture or your leg is to stick him in the middle of a large area with nothing to hold on to.  Say, like the middle of the road.  Not to worry, it's a dead end road and we're the only house on it.  And there were multiple adults laughing at him, I mean encouraging him. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She wore her tutu pink onesie last night that says "Mommy Rocks." I'm a much more practical parent and would never have bought anything so dreadfully cute for her.  Black, white and pink ruffles was a good look for her.

Where's my period?
(And also my apostrophe.)


I can tell I spend too much time on an iDevice because when I complete a sentence, I press space twice and expect a period to magically appear at the end of the sentence.  Working on the computer, I'm forced to not only type my own period, but I have to add the apostrophe to all the contractions too.  I have to hold down shift for the first letter in a sentence and "I" isn't auto-capitalized.  How will I ever manage?

Years ago, I was thrilled when there was a spell checking tool built into Word.  After working on your document, you'd run the spell checker and it would let you know what words weren't in its dictionary.  That was great.  Years later, little red lines started appearing under misspelled words and you could correct right then.  Nowadays, many misspelled words or commonly mis-typed words just get auto-corrected.  I'm not sure I could even type "teh" without it being corrected to "the."

I love technological advances.  Especially ones that cause scores of web sites to be created for crazy things auto-correct has done to people's words.

The Big Boy Update:  He loves ham.  Loves it.  Also, he loves yogurt.  He worked my mother up good last night.  Every time she tried to feed him the chicken and stars, he pitched a fit and waved his hand at the yogurt.  Lesson learned--offer the lower value food first, then bring out the favorite.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Did I mention she has cute feet?  Her brother had these "clod stompers," as I like to call them. He's twelve months now and is wearing socks for two to three-year-olds.  She has dainty, tiny, cute feet.  I know it's winter, but we keep the house reasonably warm so she has her feet out of little pants or outfits all the time.  She's extra cute when she's wiggling her little feet around.

The Pound Countdown
 

The weight is coming off.  I’m not superstitious, but I’ve not wanted to say anything to people in case the weight loss stops and I even regain some.  But, so far, so good.  After having my son, I lost most of the weight fairly fast.  But I was ten pounds over the weight I was when I got pregnant with him when I got pregnant again.  Seven weeks after delivering, I’m back to the weight I was when I got pregnant with her.  If I can keep losing at a reasonable pace, I should be back in so many things in my closet that I’ve only been able to look at for the last two years.   

Losing weight is not fun, always a challenge, and usually frustrating.  Having been on restricted activity with this last pregnancy, my cardiovascular health is terrible.  In addition to being more active now, I’m able to get a lot of things done that I had to just put off until the baby was safely born.  My “to do” list is starting to get “to done”.

Nineteen pounds to go to get back to my ideal weight.  I wasn’t where I wanted to be when I got pregnant the first time, now that I’m a middle-aged mother, I’d better get on the ball and at least keep my weight under control before everything else starts to go.

The Big Boy Update:  Dribble, dribble, slam dunk.   This is how he tries to play basketball with his new toddler hoop: Drop the basketball on the floor, wave your hands around like you’re trying to dribble while the ball rolls away.  Chase the ball, kick it accidentally.  Get to the ball, pick it up, walk over to the basket and drop it into the hoop.  Smile at everyone who is cheering for you. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Seven weeks is such a good age to take a baby somewhere.  We had a dinner party to attend tonight and needed to take her.  As long as she’s filled up with food, she’ll sleep for hours.  People didn’t even notice there was a baby in the room for a good while until someone realized there was a car seat in the corner. 

Ocular Assistance
(Or Back To Bad Eyes)

My eyes have been getting worse over the years, much like most of my friends.  A few years ago I went to see if I was a candidate for lasik.  It turns out that I did have some options, but they wouldn't address anything if I was either pregnant, nursing or trying to get pregnant.  Since we were trying to get pregnant, I told them I'd be back in a few years. 

I was wondering how I was going to fare, as my vision was frustrating, and becoming more difficult to correct, when I got pregnant.  Magically, a few weeks later I completely forget about my vision issues.  It was a few weeks after that that I realized it was because I was pregnant.  I suppose if you're going to have a live, moving, energy-sapping body inside yours, the benefit of better vision and bonus of never being cold, is a nice compensation.

About six weeks after having my son, boom, I was back to crap vision.  Then a few weeks later, I was pregnant again and ahhh, my vision was great again.  So now, I have a six-week-old daughter and no plans to have a third baby and vision that's getting worse daily.  But nursing will be over in a few months and I'll be back at the doctor's office. 

The Big Boy Update:  Duck, Duck, every day.  I don't think it's a real word, but it's one of his favorite things to say.  I believe it might represent all nouns.  He points and says "duck" at things all day long.    Additionally, there's a lot of "buh buh bah bah" conversations going on when he's playing with his toys.   He got his hair cut after lunch.  Much less-shaggy looking now.   And yet, he still managed to get bed head during his afternoon nap.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: She's such a good baby at night.  Eating quickly and going back to sleep.  Already, she's reducing the amount she's eating during the nighttime meals.  But we pay during the day.  She's hungry more frequently and for more amounts.   She's got her eyes open a lot now too.  It's nice to watch her look at you or other things in close proximity as she's spending more time awake.

Parents in Proximity

Christmas is over, the dishes are cleaned up.  Time for some perspective.   What a great day.  One thing that makes holiday times fun for me is having family close.  To say we have an abundance of help from our parents is an understatement.  My in-laws will drive over an hour to come and help if we have something to go to or do.  My mother and father, for the winter months, live five miles away.  My mother will drop everything to come over and she'll stay as long as we need her.  My father is always available to help with anything that needs fixing.  My mother nicknamed him "King of the Crapper" as we all call him when our toilets break.  And even in the summer months, my mother will cancel everything and hop in a car from the mountains to get here if she even thinks we might need help. 

Our parents have the giving spirit year-round.  We're always happy to have them visit and share in the chaos, I mean fun, with the children.   Note to self: don't plan on moving far away.  Ever.

The Big Boy Update:  Too much Christmas fun.   He was overtired all day yesterday.  Missed the morning nap completely and the afternoon nap wasn't as long as it should have been.   Excitement with Christmas dinner and family visiting and he didn't have the night I would have liked him to have once he finally got to sleep.  But it's important that children be flexible.  If there's no variety, he can't learn to adapt.  Things will be back to normal soon enough.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Bring on the over-love.  Some people love babies.  They want to hold them, feed them, cuddle up to them.  Whenever we have people over, I hand off the baby at first chance to one of those people in the room.  I point them to the bottle of milk and let them pass her around.  She gets lots of attention and a chance to interact with new and different people.  I would look over at her from time to time to see adult smiles and a very happy little girl in someone's arms.

Pre-Christmas Carnage

It's Christmas morning and people are waking up.  I'm quietly sneaking down to the basement to get a quick post off.  The presents are still wrapped, the house is in relative order.  In short, it's gonna get messy soon.

My one-year-old is just figuring out presents.  But even at this young age, the focus on Christmas has shifted from adults, to everyone getting excited for the baby, even if he doesn't understand what's going on himself.  It's really nice.  Or, rather, it'll be nice until the children get old enough to start to expect gifts to be lavished upon them.  Hopefully we can prevent that from happening.  But we have such great family and friends who are so giving and kind.  At any rate, I'm looking forward to a fun morning of Christmas with family.

This evening we have our Christmas Day Dinner, something we took over from my parent's best friends, the Perkins, several years ago.  It's just about my favorite thing of Christmas.  I love all the people who come to dinner, and you couldn't ask for a merrier crowd.

The Big Boy Update:  There's an ongoing diaper dilemma with my son.  Now that the milk/formula/vomit situation is under control, he's started blowing out is diaper in the middle of the night.  The bed gets wet and he cries because he's confused and uncomfortable.  It looks like we're going to have to find some of those extra-absorbent nighttime diapers for him as soon as the stores open after Christmas.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Six point two ounces!  She only weighs a bit over eight pounds and somehow yesterday evening she managed to eat over six ounces of milk.  I fear at this rate I won't be able to keep up with her hunger.  Signing off to go eat some oatmeal for breakfast.  I hear it can help boost milk supply.

Happy Christmas and Merry Holidays to all.

The Present Predicament

We have a great holiday gift-giving system with our friends.  Everyone has Amazon gift lists, and we each select items from the lists for each other.  Present exchange doesn't happen on a particular week, but is usually over a few Friday night movie night gatherings.   Overall, it's a low-effort way to get that perfect holiday gift that your friend wants.  With a catch...

What happens when someone gets you a $40 gift and you got them a $20 gift?  Do they value your friendship twice as much as you value theirs?  Or was that what they wanted to get you, and they weren't concerned about the cost, they liked that item the most.  Since we're all picking the items ourselves, we can go back and see how much someone spent.  I don't mind one bit if I get someone a more expensive gift than they get me, or even if they get me no gift at all.  But I really don't want someone to think they're "not worth as much" as a friend.   I also don't want to get into a present price war with anyone either.  So while I love the system we have in place, I hope no one gets hard feelings in our group.

Overall, I'm not too worried.  We have the best friends, we enjoy every single one of them and have a great time together no matter who or how many are at a particular gathering. It's one of the best holiday gifts I've gotten this year, so many good friends with which to spend it.

The Big Boy Update:  He was hungry well before lunch today.  I tried a hand-me-down item from a friend that's a little bowl with a rubberized aperture he can stick his hand into to pull out cheerios or goldfish hoping he'd figure out how to use it and stay occupied for a while until lunch.  He is currently sitting on the floor sticking his hands in and out of the bowl and is quite pleased with himself when he successfully pulls out food.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "It was a dark and snuffy night..."  While normally a quiet sleeper, last night there was an abundance of congested sounds coming from the crib.  I'm okay with the nasal aspirator (or "brain sucker") but my husband is a professional.  It's a skill he mastered with our son.  As it turns out, babies don't like having their brains sucked out in the middle of the night, or more to the point, ever.  With his help, her congestion was ameliorated, and she eat and and went back to sleep.  Go Daddy.

It Only Takes a Title

It's the next day and it's already after 4PM and I haven't even made it to my computer yet.  But I made it.  Now, I have to decide what to write about.  Rambling on about nothing in particular--I did the dishes, I washed the dog, I ate some cheese--doesn't appeal to me.  I need a subject, a topic about which I can write.   Over the past month I've been thinking of things I would write about, if I happened to have a blog.  Recently, I started noting these down so on a day like today, I can run downstairs and get something out that I've been thinking about.

It only takes a title.  That's all you need, just a good title like Stranger in a Strange Land, or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  A good title makes you want to find out what it's all about. At night, when I'm winding down in the tub, titles come to me.  Not amazing titles like those that would merit a whole book, but ones that could have a few paragraphs of detail for more explanation.  Right now, I have a surplus of titles.   I'm going to have to remember to keep taking baths so I don't run out of subjects.

The Big Boy Update:  He's talking in his own special tongue.  He has whole conversations with himself, and only he knows what he's saying.  Today I think he did his first situational repeating of word and gesture.  Bye Bye.  People do come and go so around here!

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We're preparing for Baby Boot Camp in two weeks where we reduce the amount of food during the night to have her sleep for twelve hours by three months.   It's going to be weeks of "bridging" her until the next feeding time so her stomach will stretch and she can eat more at one go.  But so far, she's doing very well.

Don't Look Back 

Or rather, don't read back, just press post. Something I thought would bog me down with these posts would be the reading and re-reading I would do before I felt a post was ready.  My sister-in-law, Adrienne, did did a post one day with no proofing.  It was a nice long post which read well, sounded just like all her other posts, and I'm hoping took a lot less time to complete.  So, I though that would be my plan for the whole blog.  No revising, just writing and posting.  If it contains poor grammar or lack of punctuation, I'll just have to get on the ball for future posts.

Speaking of Adrienne, she was a great inspiration to me to finally start this blog.  I had just delivered my daughter and was up in the middle of the night feeding her with not much to do.  I'd catch Adrienne's entries shortly after she published them from the West Coast from my iPad while nursing.   So thank you Adrienne, for being that cross-country, no-pressure, friendly motivator I needed to get posting.

I've got my six week checkup at the obstetrician in thirty minutes, as my daughter is six weeks old now.  So... I'd better wrap this up.

The Big Boy Update:  We had Christmas with my parents last night early due to travel schedules.  I'm not sure my son at twelve months knows the difference between a toy and the wrapping the toy came in, but he had a great time opening presents.  He carried an empty bag around for a good while and laughed at everyone.  He got a vintage xylophone from the 1960's from my father that he had a great time banging on.  Fortunately, that was the only loud toy this year for Christmas.  .

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She likes to be awake more during the day now.  I had her in her "My Auntie Knows Santa" onesie from aunts Adrienne and Brenda for the Christmas present opening photos.  Alas, it got spit up on one too many times and she couldn't stay awake for the festivities.

There, I've done it.  I pressed the create button and now I have a blog.  But do I have anything to say?  I have plenty to blog about while I'm sitting in the tub at the end of the night, reflecting on the day.  I mentally write blog entries in my head while I relax to the completely absent sound of children crying.  I make plans to write that first blog entry tomorrow morning, first thing, right after feeding the children, and getting organized.  Then, bam, the time is gone and it's the next night and I'm back in the tub.  

That being said, I have no idea how spotty blog entries will be.  I make no promises that they will be interesting, entertaining or even well-written.  This is a project more for me.  It's also a hope to try and get some general things written down as they happen.  The sort of thing people did with real paper in the past and called them "diaries."  How amazing would it be to look back twenty years from now and know a few things that happened in my life on this very day. 

So I shall try to get here fairly frequently and say something or other.  One thing I plan on adding at the end of every entry is a bit about what the children have done or are doing.  You think you're going to remember everything as they grow up, and then you realize you can't even remember what was happening this time last year. 

The Big Boy Update:  Recently, we're trying to get my son off formula.  We tried some toddler milk-like formula as he's a year now and needs to get off the baby formula.  Fifteen minutes after eating it, food and milk is everywhere.  We weren't smart enough to figure out the connection the first time.  That, or we liked completely washing his linens, bed bumper and him after a tiring day.  So now we're moving to working in milk with the baby formula.  No more vomiting, whew.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She is sleeping quite well at night.  Not through the night, oh no.  Not at six weeks.  But she's doing a good job of sleeping a bit longer, eating a bit more, and then going right back to sleep.  She's more wakeful during the day, and is just plain cute all day long.