Tree City Baby

Farewell

2010-05-17T22:48:00.000-04:00

I haven't made any updates in a while now. I hadn't realized quite how long until The Intervention at the dinner table tonight, complete with crying and yelling and pleading. (I only exaggerate slightly.) There are a couple of reasons that have factored into my absense:

Work. I'm out of the house from 7 am to 6:15 pm during the week, which leaves little time for taking photos and writing about George's many adventures. I know that I could find time, but I made a deliberate choice to put blogging way behind work and family.
"Tree City Baby" has seemed incongruous ever since moving from Tree City, USA. And George is no longer a baby, to boot. He's a full-blown toddler, walking around and throwing the type of temper tantrum that causes a whole store to stare. Thanks, George.
Privacy. The older and more distinctive (i.e. glasses) that George looks, the less sure I am of putting so many details of his life out there on the internet.

I could redo how I do things here to address these issues. But Jeff and I decided to take a different course. From now on, George updates will be at our new blog: Dear George With Love. It is a private blog and you need permission to read it, but if you request permission and I know you, I will approve you. If you're someone I don't "know", but have been reading this blog and are generally non-creepy (a blog of your own helps to prove this), I'll probably approve you too - just ask.

Updates to the new blog will not be frequent, as we simply don't have the time. But we want to keep a record of George's early years, and we want to be able to share it with our distant family members and friends.

It's been quite the journey, and I'm glad to have shared it with you for this long. Adieu.

Blowing Kisses

2010-03-30T18:40:00.001-04:00

Busy week so far - I started work yesterday and have been loaded down with (even more) new hire paperwork and a sea of new acronyms. But luckily for me, I get to come home to this:

Oh yeah, and my cubicle has a window. Score.

Puzzles

2010-03-28T11:05:00.000-04:00

This is why George is no longer allowed to "help" us with puzzles.

We haven't tried the wooden toddler puzzles, but I have a feeling that those might be a little more up his alley (i.e., indestructible).

Busy Week

2010-03-26T22:55:00.003-04:00

Since I start work on Monday, Jeff and I decided to tackle a bunch of outdoor projects that we've been procrastinating getting done.

On Wednesday, we decided to start with mulching the beds. George "supervised" from the sidelines. He was as happy as a clam for most of the day, crawling around in pursuit of good twigs to chew on, eating dirt, cruising in circles around trash cans, and climbing on top of the overturned wheel barrow. During his afternoon nap, we worked on putting a swing up in the tree. Since he loves the swing at the park, Karen wanted him to have one in time for summer. George was happy to get to try it out after his nap, and again multiple times yesterday. (Today was awfully chilly.) He giggled for the first few minutes that he was in it, at which point we decided to grab the camera. Of course, the giggles stopped at that point and he just kind of chilled in his new swing.

(Oh, and in non-outdoor-project news, George now loves playing patty cake and randomly decides to "mark it with a G" for us, as in the above photo. He has also learned how to kiss.)

On Thursday, we decided that I would build George a picnic table (yes, really) while Jeff worked on cleaning out the gutters. One of my favorite blogs, Knock Off Wood, recently posted plans for building two children's picnic tables. I've been itching to build something of hers, but Jeff keeps rightfully knocking down my ideas. It doesn't make sense to build something like an entertainment center when we don't even know what kind of space we'll be working with when we get our own place. I wanted to build her Farmhouse Bed, but our furniture is squeezed in our room so much now that the extra width that would come from the frame would mean that we could no longer fit our one nightstand (with alarm clock and table lamp) in the room and we would no longer be able to walk on that side of the bed. There were another dozen designs that I wanted to try out, but again, we don't know what kind of space we'll be working with when we move. I had resigned myself to not building anything for the time being, and then she posted the two picnic tables. We have outdoor space to put something like that. George likes trying to climb on the child-sized picnic table at the park, and will soon enough be at the stage where he can sit at a small table to eat or play with toys. I decided to pull the trigger. We ended up choosing to build the Modern Kid's Picnic Table, in part because the Martha Stewart image that she posted of the stacked benches serving as shelves convinced us that it would be more versatile and could double as extra storage inside if we needed it too - in the winter, perhaps? In retrospect, the other one would have probably been a bit easier.

The project took significantly longer than I was expecting based on the other comments in her blog from people who have completed her plans. Somewhat in my defense, power tools and babies don't mix. So George was banished to the yard, and while he was happy eating twigs and pulling grass out of the ground on Wednesday, he decided that enough was enough and he loudly let me know that it was time to play. At that point, Jeff and I decided to trade off working and playing with George. (Later, when Jeff and I were both trying to get our respective projects done by dinner - ha! - Karen and Cary were kind enough to step in and take George on a walk.) This gave me some time to make a bunch of cuts and screw things together, in between nursing and playing sessions.

Safety first!

We also didn't have quite the right tools for the job. We have a miter saw box and hand saw, but the saw seriously sucks and there was no way that I could make that many cuts using it. Instead, I marked all of the cuts using an angle and/or a square (depending on the cut) and used a circular saw to cut them, but it just was not as accurate as using fancier equipment would have been. I also somehow managed to miss the part about using a square to make sure that the legs are a perfect 90 degrees when attaching them, which came back to bite me in the butt. I had the table and chairs mostly finished by dinner time yesterday, but things just weren't square and I was exhausted and I decided that I was going to finish, damn it! Then Jeff came out and gently pointed out that there were serious gaps where the legs and top met. We ended up taking a couple of legs off of their respective tops, and then it was almost dinner time so we just left it. I learned a couple of big lessons:

Make sure that all cuts are straight and that the angles are correct the first time. Not doing this more than doubled the amount of time this project took to complete.
Do not just start attaching things because you're getting tired and want it done. Just step away.
If you take stuff apart, make sure that you clean all wood glue up while it's still wet. It's just easier.

I woke up this morning still tired and very sore, but since I really wanted to get the project done before George's birthday party next weekend, I plunged ahead. We started off with something kind of like this:

Together, as George was napping, Jeff and I took each of the legs off. The legs looked good enough that we didn't want to take them apart entirely. I mean, while they weren't square, everything came together fairly flush and they seemed pretty strong. So I figured out how much to take off the ends so that the part that attaches to the table or touches the ground would be completely straight, and so that the two ends of each leg would be the same height. (I was also having wobble issues.) I then got to work with a plane and sander, and in one extreme example I took the circular saw to a leg. I also cut a 2x4 down to 31.5" long to work as a center support for the table.

I then got to work putting everything back together. The benches went fairly smoothly, but then when attaching the top to the table I somehow drove one of the nails directly between the two 1x4s in the leg and it split and the shorter 1x4 just fell off, and then when I tried to pry the leg off (I ran out of screws and was using nails at this point), the center support came with it. Somehow, in the middle of this, my thumb started bleeding and dripping all over the table. I almost broke down at this point, but Jeff brought me two things that helped a lot- lots of George hugs and kisses (did I say earlier how much I like his newfound kissing ability?) and a big mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream. I got a second wind and managed to slowly get the blood cleaned off and everything put back together.

Here's George playing with the set just after I filled in some of the screw and nail holes with wood filler:

We found some cedar-tinted wood sealer at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, and so I used that to finish it.

The wood and the wood filler are supposed to be the same color, but the wood filler is clearly visible and it's bothering me. I earlier noticed that the wood filler is significantly darker when wet than dry, and the above photos were taken just after applying the sealant. I'm really hoping that the difference is less obvious once everything is adequately dry. If not, I'm debating painting it or leaving it as is. Terry and Cary said that George will probably color all over it and spill some lemonade on it, taking attention away from the wood filler, which is probably true. But still.

I kind of roll my eyes when people on Ana's "Bragging Board" say that their completed projects are far from perfect, as they always look so great in the photos, but I now understand completely. The wood filler's bothering me, plus one of the table legs is a bit shorter or longer than the others despite all of my work today, and so tomorrow I'm going to work on figuring out what exactly is going on and try to correct it. But, this is my first time ~~trying to build~~ building a piece of furniture and I mostly did it solo. Towards the end, I got out our dremel and carved into the underside of the bench that I built it for George Everett's first birthday. That's just something that you can't buy from a store.

Walking Boot Camp - TW Style

2010-03-23T17:33:00.000-04:00

George has been cruising like a pro and is holding onto things with minimal support, although he's been very reluctant to let go and take off. Terry has decided that it is high time for George to get up off his lazy bum and start walking, and so he decided to hold boot camp yesterday afternoon.

I'm not convinced that we'll be able to urge George to walk until he's good and ready to walk, and I don't think he's quite hit that point.

Our Little Musician

2010-03-22T23:27:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago, I was in the basement when I noticed this peeking out of a box:

Our little musician took right to it (if you use the most liberal definition of taking to it that you can muster up). Apparently in addition to having great talent at the drums, he may also turn out to be a saxophonist like his Daddy.

Au RevwAAAAAR Pirate Patch!

2010-03-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

And I guess I need to apologize for that corny joke.

George had a follow-up visit with the ophthalmologist yesterday. His eyes are now both tracking about the same and seem equally strong, and so we're tentatively allowed to stop patching! If we notice his eye start to wander again or anything like that, we're supposed to give him a call back and discuss where to go from there. He also wants to see him again in 3 months. I tried asking him if he could give a long-term prognosis, or even tell me if it was likely that his eye sight would improve or worsen as he grew older, but he said that it was too early to say.

It was beautiful outside yesterday, and so we spent a lot of time outdoors. George helped Karen and me with working on some of the landscaping, by very helpfully relocating rocks from the bed to a pile he created a few feet away. He also tried to eat grass and twigs, which are evidently much more tasty than the turkey, cheese, and veggies I had tried to give him during lunch. We later went on a run and ended up at the playground, where he had fun on the swings and then playing with mulch on the ground. He was fairly muddy by the end of this all, and somehow managed to scrape up his knee (despite wearing lined long jeans). When we got home, I decided to give him a bath. That pissed him off. He had spent hours making sure that he was covered with the perfect amount of mud and snot, and I had to go and ruin it all. Mean mommy.

"Haha, there's now more snot on my face."

He also had some fun prank calling the house.

2010-03-17T16:44:00.001-04:00

George's fever and vomiting are gone, and it's obvious that he's feeling worlds better. He's still a bit congested but really seems to be improving. However, he has decided that he does not need an afternoon nap. (It's hard to hear, but after I said, "Why don't you want to take a nap?" he burped at me. Boys.)

I take the glasses off at nighttime and for naps. Doesn't he look weird without them? Almost naked or something.

And this is him watching the first video back. When Video George started shaking his head, Real George knew that he had to copy it.

2010-03-16T10:30:00.000-04:00

The Good News
Yesterday, I accepted a job offer (contingent on background test and drug test). I'm very excited about the position and will be starting in two weeks. It will be hard to be away from George again, but I think that this is a great opportunity plus an income is always a very welcome thing.

The Bad News
I really thought that George was doing better, but then he got progressively more congested yesterday, was pooping at about ten times his usual rate (no exaggeration), and as of last night his fever is back. He is also acting like he's teething, and after he managed to chew through a couple of board books - and pooped out part of a book spine - I ran out and bought him more teething toys. Over half of ours had mysteriously disappeared, and he was getting bored with the remaining ones. The poor guy had a really hard time sleeping last night, even with Tylenol and lots of mommy cuddles. I was up from about 3:30 am to about 6 am with him, and he finally fell asleep laying on my chest. I am currently downing the coffee while he is taking a nap next to me.

Let's hope he starts to feel better soon.

Peek-A-Boo!

2010-03-15T12:04:00.000-04:00

George also has a new toy to play with:

The batteries have been removed, but he still thinks that the buttons are fun to press. He caused a little more havoc playing with my cell phone this weekend. He managed to call my dad's voicemail (which he couldn't access as he didn't know the password), and then the house phone, then Jeff's cell, and then my dad's phone again - all by himself. We got him a baby cellphone for his birthday, which should be a little bit safer as far as phone bills and confused people on the other end are concerned.

2010-03-10T18:15:00.000-05:00

Dear Great-Aunt Carla and Great-Uncle Monty,

Thank you for the hat! It has helped me get one step closer to my dream of becoming a pirate conductor when I grow up. I don't think there are enough pirate conductors in the world.

Thank you again!

Love,
Georgie

Walks

2010-03-10T18:05:00.000-05:00

I mentioned earlier today that George enjoys going out on walks. It was gorgeous today and the temperature was pushing 70, so we decided that going out on a walk probably wouldn't make George feel any worse for the wear (he's had a fever since yesterday). I think we made the right call.

In the Less Wholesome Entertainment category (AAP recommends no TV for children under 2), George also thoroughly enjoys watching American Idol while bouncing around in the exersaucer. This one's from last week:

11 Months

2010-03-10T11:31:00.000-05:00

George is now 11 months old!

George can cruise around furniture like a pro (and is keeping us on our feet as he tries to get into stuff), but he's still not standing unassisted. He can do it, but when he realizes that he's doing it he panics and falls over. We've generally been slow to baby-proof due to optimism that we will soon have jobs and our own place to live, rendering baby-proofing Terry and Karen's house unnecessary, but have had to up our baby-proofing efforts this month. George has been very intent on getting into stuff that he shouldn't, like the cabinet in the kitchen that has the good china in it and the razor blades in the bathroom cabinets Not for babies.

George is also starting to exhibit some signs of autonomy. He knows that he is not supposed to touch the television or any of the electronic equipment on the television stand, but sometimes crawls and cruises over there, looks at me, giggles, then proceeds to touch it. He also knows that he is not supposed to splash in the dogs' water dish, and did you see him trying to fake me out during video week to get around this rule?

He's also showing some signs of stranger anxiety, and acts very shy with people who he doesn't know. He hugs us and tries to bury his head in our chests, and will occasionally try to peek out and look at them.

He's been doing very well with the glasses, and I think he forgets that they're there for the most part.

George has become a lot better at turning pages in books, both in real books and in board books. Unfortunately, with the ability to grasp individual pages comes the ability to tear out individual pages. He's also started to sit better and look at the pictures when we read to him. Favorites include Dr. Seuss (still!), anything by Mo Willems, and anything that has fur for him to pet (like the That's Not My Teddy books).

He loves playing with the dogs. And by playing with the dogs, I mean pulling Dylan's hair.

Chloe's fun, but not as fun: she licks.

He has also started throwing balls for the dogs to chase, which he thinks is quite funny. He can only throw them a couple of feet, but the pups still get into it.

Other things he enjoy include patty-cake, peek-a-boo, walks outside, and "chasing" people around the house.

2010-03-06T23:17:00.000-05:00

As the sun rises earlier and earlier, so also does George (much to our chagrin). Terry told me that if George woke up early on Friday and if we got him dressed appropriately, he would take him into work and try to pass him off as a clerk, allowing us to get a little bit of extra sleep.

We did our part.

But Terry reneged on the deal. I think he could have passed as a clerk... it's probably the glasses making him look older. Walking rather than crawling would probably help him, though.

Video Week: Bonus Video

2010-02-28T17:03:00.000-05:00

Vintage George.

It's funny in retrospect how completely obvious it is that the poor guy just wanted a little milk.

Video Week: Day 7

2010-02-26T22:23:00.001-05:00

George is getting a little more sophisticated in his attempts to reach the dogs' water bowl.

Video Week: Day 6

2010-02-25T10:41:00.000-05:00

Piggyback rides are fun! Although they'll be easier when he figures out how to reliably hold on for himself. Holding my arms behind me like that, with an extra 22-ish lbs of resistance, gets hard after a while!

Video Week: Day 5

2010-02-24T14:52:00.000-05:00

It's sunny and a little bit warmer today, and so Jeff, George, Chloe and I went on a run and then swung by the neighborhood park on our way back.

While there's definitely snow on the ground in the park, the weather's been warm enough for a couple of days now that the roads and sidewalks have cleared off quite nicely (except for where the snowplows left huge mounds, of course). But it looks like we may have snow showers for the next two days.

Video Week: Day 4

2010-02-23T12:41:00.000-05:00

Today's video is from breakfast. Eggs and chorizo, yum!

Eggs are one of George's current favorites. He's eaten a whole egg by himself for breakfast a couple of times now. Other favorites include: baby ~~crack~~ puffs, oatmeal, yoghurt, ground meat, beans, cheese. Prunes when we offer them. And honestly... that's about it right now. We keep offering other stuff, especially fruits and veggies, but unless it's on the above list, he's prone to just throwing it at the dogs. Sigh. At least he's getting vitamins and plenty of milk.

Video Week: Day 3

2010-02-22T15:14:00.001-05:00

Those new socks? The three of us went clothes shopping yesterday. The one pair of socks that will stay on George's feet is getting too small, so we wanted to buy some more, larger ones where that one good pair came from (BabyGap). We thought we'd want to get 3-4 pairs (we do laundry frequently enough that this makes sense), but then it was actually cheaper to buy five pairs. So George now has two pair of pirate socks and three pairs of boyish striped socks, sized 12-24 months.

We also got new pajamas while we were out, as George is on the verge of outgrowing the ones he has. I spied some cute sets the last time I was at Costco and we couldn't find anything in the mall that really competed either as far as price or versatility. So, we headed over to Costco to stock up on baby pajamas, whipped cream (another necessity, I swear), and lettuce. Each of the sets comes with a matching short sleeved-tee and pants, and a coordinating long-sleeved tee - meaning that he can wear the long-sleeved ones now, and on the off-chance that they still fit come warmer weather, we'll be able to put him in the short-sleeved shirt plus a diaper.

I didn't even realize it in the store, but the monster on the long-sleeved tee has glasses just like George!

George showing off his new monster duds... while watching Nascar.

Construction equipment, robots, and monsters - boyish enough?

The crazy thing is that the footed sleepers we're replacing are size 6-9m, and the new ones are size 24m and 2T. But the old ones were purchased by a friend in England, and so I have a feeling that the sizing is different.

Video Week: Day 2

2010-02-21T17:14:00.000-05:00

Eye Patch

2010-02-20T12:14:00.005-05:00

George has a brand new eye patch! I sewed it up last night using this pattern but making a couple of modifications-

I added a couple of snaps, so that it can be snapped onto his glasses. The original pattern is made so that you can thread the eye patch over the ear piece and then onto the front of the glasses, but I examined the strap on the back of George's and it doesn't want to come off. I really don't want to break his glasses by trying to force the issue.
I didn't bother sewing black felt onto the back of the patch, as the body was already in navy blue.
I decided to make it pirate themed instead of flowery. Aarrr!!

It took a couple of hours, but I sewed everything by hand and had to figure out how to use a snap press (as that method of afixing snaps seems sturdier than sewing them on, as far as preventing them from coming off and having George choke on them goes). Friday nights as a mother are pretty darn glamorous, huh?

The finished product looks pretty snazzy, if I do say so myself. The patch is made so it completely envelops the eye, meaning that he can't try to look around it with his left eye - something that I admittedly was concerned about.

As with pretty much everything that we've put on his face, he spent a minute or so trying to take it off and then, after putting it back on his face a couple of times and redirecting, forgot it was even there.

Ahoy Noah's Ark, prepare to be boarded.... BY PIRATES!

Who should we make walk me plank first? The goose? Avast!

Or Noah's wife? Aye matey!

I don't know why, but the two planks are by far is favorite part of the whole Noah's Ark set. The geese are distant seconds.

Video Week: Day 1

2010-02-20T11:41:00.000-05:00

George's favorite part of doing diaper laundry is helping to sort the prefolds. (Not that they need sorting, but he doesn't need to know that.) Not only is it super exciting, but it really helps his mama out.

Nap

2010-02-19T16:21:00.000-05:00

Is there anything more gentle or beautiful than a sleeping baby?

Wake Up, Mama!

2010-02-19T12:17:00.000-05:00

Terry and Karen are about to leave for Texas for about a week. As this means an entire week without George (gasp!), Terry has requested frequent videos on the blog. I think I'm going to aim for about one a day - let's hope that I can keep up with that schedule!

To kick off Video Week, as it will hence be known, here's not one but two videos. George wants to title the series, "Don't you know it's time to wake up and play, Mama? AAAAAH."

Note: These are not staged - hence me being somewhat out of it. This is what happened this morning, and happens basically every morning. And George doesn't wear glasses when he sleeps, just like the rest of us glass-wearers don't wear them to bed.

2010-02-18T21:05:00.000-05:00

The evening that we found out that George would need glasses, I did quite a bit of searching online. I was focused mainly on researching his exact vision condition and different types of infant glasses, as well as the nagging question of how you actually keep a pair of glasses on a baby, but I also found a blog entry written about finding out that your child needs glasses. One thing that it mentions thinking about is other people's reactions. I hadn't thought of that aspect of things until then - emotionally it was more like "why did he have to get my bad vision genes, I already screwed up our kid" - but it at least helped me know that I needed to prepare quick responses to common questions. Questions like:

Are those real glasses?
Why is he wearing glasses?
How did you figure out that he needs glasses?
How do they figure out a prescription for a pre-verbal child?

And we have gotten all of those questions already.

George has certainly gotten quite a bit of attention when he goes out in public, most frequently from people asking if the glasses are prescription glasses and (when his good eye is patched) if he just had eye surgery. It's led to some interesting conversations with people who have had a lazy eye corrected through multiple surgeries or who have a friend who had great success with patching. For the most part, everyone has seemed pretty positive about the glasses.

But the attention today got to me. I was out with George, and overheard a little girl saying to her mommy, "Look, the baby has a bandaid on his eye." The comment in itself was innocuous - particularly coming from a child young enough that she's not going to know to filter comments about differences in appearance - but it affected me more than I expected. I had managed to convince myself that George is our wonderful baby who happens to wear glasses, rather than a glass-wearing baby who happens to be wonderful - a small distinction, but an important one nonetheless. But then the eye patch was the first thing that the girl noticed about him. I realize that by the time he hits school age, many more of his peers will be in spectacles as well and it will begin to matter less and less, but for the time being I want people to see George and not the glasses baby. Que the music - "You can't always get what you want..."

In other vision-related news, George was his typically grumpy self right after I took the eye patch off the other day - it's sticky, and so this is similar to ripping off a bandaid - and I stuck it on my own eye which made him laugh. I only had it on for five minutes, versus the 4 waking hours (so 5-6 hours overall) that he has to wear it each day, and it was really irritating my skin by the end! Not fun. Fortunately I just stumbled across this sewing pattern for an eye patch that goes over the glass frame. What a great idea! I would need to modify it so that it can fit over his glasses, as the strap that goes across the back of his head is connected to the glasses, but adding some velcro instead of sewing two of the seams should do the trick. (Or maybe the strap on the glasses can detach? I haven't tried yet, but that may be easier than modifying the pattern.) I could also modify it so that it has a boy pattern on it instead of a huge flower on it, but may stick to the flower as I have a feeling that Terry loves flowers and would like nothing more than to see a big one on his grandson's face.

2010-02-18T00:31:00.001-05:00

Today, Jeff installed a pot rack in his parents' kitchen. It's something that they had been thinking about for a while, and it really does look great.

Jeff's reaction to the instructions, "Smile'. Thanks, honey.

Since discovering that he could open the kitchen cabinets, George has been doing so quite enthusiastically. It kept him nicely occupied as we planned out how we were going to put it up (it was designed to be installed perpendicularly to where we needed to install it) and then implemented our plan.

The ricer was good for at least 10 minutes of continuous entertainment, which is more than we can say of any of his designated toys. Funny how that works.

Of course, since everything that he emptied out of the cabinets and the drawer ended up in his mouth at one point, this whole escapade created quite a bit to do in the way of dishes.

Next step: putting the little guy to work. I have a feeling that he may enjoy making mashed potatoes.

George's Corner

2010-02-16T21:54:00.000-05:00

I was trying to help out another blogger earlier today with redesigning her kids' room on a budget, when I realized that I've never shown George's current space. I did show some photos of our room a while back, when we first got serious about George napping in the crib. We have since baby-proofed the cord situation, using one of those outlet covers that also covers the cords going into it plus a bunch of those sticky cord things that anchor the cord pretty firmly into the wall. That thing ain't going anywhere now.

Since we were using an old crib and since he was actually sleeping in it, I decided to recheck the crib safety guidelines just to double check that everything was okay. Re-reading through it, I found a couple of points that I just wasn't sure about. It seemed like we had all of the parts when we put it together, but we were going without instructions so we weren't 100% sure that everything was done correctly. The way that the mattress base attached to the crib doesn't meet currently recommendations, however. Since this is the one area where we leave George unsupervised, we decided that we needed to rethink the crib and started doing research.

Seeing as we don't have incomes, our budget for a new crib was as little as possible. Whenever we are working with this type of budget, our first two thoughts are "used" and "Ikea". I was starting to feel like some areas of our old home were getting a bit too like Ikea showrooms, and have decided that we should try to tap the used side of things a bit more this time once we have our own place. We are - after downsizing and moving - Craigslist wizzes, after all. (Sidenote - I've recently found a blog that is all about furniture building plans for beginners, and I now have dreams of building a lot of our furniture for our future place. While simultaneously supervising George and preventing him from creating mayhem. Laugh all you want.)

Where was I? Ah, yes, used cribs. The more I looked into it, the more nervous I got. Drop side cribs are being recalled right and left. A lot of brands have faced numerous recalls, and you can't be certain whether or not a certain crib that you're eyeing on Craigslist or in the consignment store has been subject to a recall without knowing at least a model number. I found one Pottery Barn crib on Craigslist that was quite cute, and was able to find the exact one using my friend Google, only to discover that it had also been recalled. Um, Plan B please?

This brought us to Ikea. Ikea cribs are evidently well liked by the Baby Bargain books, as well as by a lot of people at Ohdeedoh.com (a children's design website). We particularly liked the Gulliver crib when we were over there buying the mattress. All of its sides are fixed (which is nice with the dropped side craziness going on right now) and it converts into a toddler bad. Not bad. We considered a couple other inexpensive cribs on the market, but the brands in question have had enough quality issues that we decided that the Ikea cribs were the safest bet in that price range.

However, we didn't really want to make another trip out to Ikea. Regardless of where you live, it seems like the nearest Ikea is minimum 30 minutes away and that store is like a giant black hole once you get there. BUT from my research online, no Ikea cribs have been recalled. One model has had some problems with certain mattresses not fitting tightly enough, but it wasn't the Gulliver one that we liked so much. We started to think about used cribs again.

Then we saw two Gullivers on Craigslist, listed at $20 a piece. The owners were moving and were getting desperate to sell them, and unfortunately they had tossed the fourth side when they converted them into toddler beds. I had noticed them for weeks. But then Jeff and I had a wild thought: since this particular crib was built with 2-fold rotational symmetry, why not just buy both cribs and combine them into one? It would only be $40 for the crib (versus $100 in the store), and would save us the trip out to Ikea.

And so (if you've made it this far), I present to you George's space. As it was about a week ago.

George and I sometimes play a game where we see if I can put diapers back in the changing table as quickly as he takes them out. Fun times. He's gotten a head start here...

All of the diapering suppplies are stored in the cubbies, as well as George's blankets. The diaper pail is to the left of the door. George has two drawers in our armoire for his clothing. We keep some of his toys and books under the crib, and some in a storage ottoman in the family room. Starting today, seeing as his toys have mysteriously multiplied despite no new additions since Christmas (do they breed when we have our backs turned?), we have culled the living room toy collection down to what will fit in the ottoman, plus his push walker, and have put the rest in the depths of our closet. We will rotate once things start to get boring.

Since I started this post off with writing about doing a kid space on a budget, I guess it would only be fair of me to post the real budget.

Crib: $40
Scroll up for details.

Crib mattress: $39.99
Ikea Sultan Blunda

Crib quilt: $14.99
Ikea. But honestly, if we hadn't accidently put the box of my old crib quilts at the bottom of the storage unit and in the back, we could have done without this one.

Mobile: $6.99?
We bought it at Ikea, but I'm not finding it on their website. We hung it above the changing table to distract him during diaper changes. It worked at daycare. It worked for about two weeks after we got it. But he's back to being his typically crazy self. One of the moms at playgroup today laughed at me because I changed his diaper and put pants and shoes back on (one fell off) as he was actively crawling away from me. But you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

Overhead Lamp: $10
Also at Ikea. And this is why I don't like to go there. Everything is amazingly priced for what it is and suddenly our house looks like Ikea exploded in it. Yikes!

Moving on...
Cord Baby-Proofing Supplies: About $10.

The alphabet cubbie changing table was Jeff's when he was little.

The contour changing pad, cover, sheets, and mattress protector were all shower presents.

Total spent: About $121.97.

The blogger who prompted this post had a $50 budget, and I suppose that I've gone way above that. However, we've been dilligent about selling baby supplies that we're no longer using and do not see ourselves using for a second kid:

Old jogging stroller that does not fold down or have a sunshade or decent brake: $15?
Arm's Reach Cosleeper: $50
A couple of carriers that I didn't like brought us another $40 or so.
Some duplicate toys, sold before we moved: $20 or so?

And suddenly we are looking at breaking even. Not too shabby, huh?

I say that... but we did spend some more money over the weekend. I had $69 sitting in Paypal, still, from when I sold my wedding dress on Ebay. The sale happened within months of our wedding, so it's been a while. We bought some prints that we think will be completely adorable in George's room, once he has a room of his own again. And it will be quite cute in our space right now, and I think it will bring some cheeriness to the wall. Plus Jeff likes robots and rayguns and the like.

To be hung above the crib:
Boris Robot
Ted Robot
Stan Jr Robot

To be hung somewhere else (TBD):
Raygun

With a $10 discount for buying four in the same series, this translated to us spending basically nothing out of pocket (well, $4 including shipping). I'll have to remember to post some more pictures when we have received them and have them up on the wall.

Looking at the Snow

2010-02-16T20:27:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, George said "baba" when we were leaving my mom's house, and today he said "ba" when we left playgroup - both times accompanied by a half wave. Could this be his first word?

Between the shoes, the big boy clothes, the glasses, the cruising all over, the possible words (!?), I don't know where my baby's gone. Can you believe that he once looked like this?

Teeth

2010-02-14T15:41:00.000-05:00

Because I'm really into posting bad photographs today.

Cary asked the other night at dinner when George was going to get some more teeth.
That night, George decided to cut three teeth.
Thanks, Cary.
The teeth are now getting more visible.

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

It's so much harder to take photos of George now than it was when he was in his houseplant stage of life. Case in point:
A rose? For me?

But what do I do with it? Do I eat this end?

Or do I eat this end?

What do you mean I don't eat either end? That must mean that I need to bang it against stuff while grunting.

That's not it either? Well, should I... wait, did you know that this cabinet can open?

Do you think there's anything interesting in here?

Glasses

2010-02-12T19:25:00.001-05:00

I mostly got our taxes completed the other night. However, it appears that George's social security card is buried somewhere deep in storage, and none of us have gotten to that point yet where we can just rattle his social security number off by heart. Since we need it in order to claim him as a dependent on our taxes, we decided to go ahead and get a replacement card today. While we were out there, Jeff and I realized that we hadn't seen his card for a while (years?) and so we filled out the paperwork to get a replacement on that one as well.

The trip took less time than we were expecting, and so I went ahead and called the glasses place. They had told us, three days ago, that the glasses would take two or three days to get in. However, I hadn't gotten a call from them yet and I wasn't sure if all of the snow had thrown a wrench into that time frame. So I spoke with someone who said that they had the frames in and could have them ready within an hour. So of course we headed over there this evening.

George isn't wild about the new glasses, quite frankly. Right after we first put the glasses on him, he kept looking around at everything, being very quiet and observent. The employees in the glasses place said that he was probably seeing everything clearly for the first time. But then the reality that he had to keep those things on his face set in, bringing with it a lot of this:

and this:

However, with some extra time (and bribes of baby puffs and milk), I think he's starting to warm up to them.

Oh, and this is what they look like from the side:

Pig

2010-02-11T17:28:00.001-05:00

George and I met our first pig the other day. It was at the hardware store. I'm still not entirely sure what a pig was doing at a hardware store, but I digress. George saw it and, thinking it was Chloe's little sibling, promptly stuck his hand in its mouth. As a result he earned the privilege of having his hands held for the remainder of the pig viewing experience.

Pirate

2010-02-10T23:37:00.002-05:00

Monkey See, Monkey Do

2010-02-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

Harvick Bear on Grandpa's head.

Harvick Bear on George's head.

George has used some of his newfound skills to "help" me with laundry. He takes items out of the laundry hamper, one by one, holds them over his head, sticks them in his mouth, and then throws them on the floor behind him, where I pick them up and fold them. Very helpful.

In other news, George just cut one of his top middle teeth, and the other one should be coming through anytime now.

Glasses Decision

2010-02-08T23:20:00.002-05:00

Thanks so much to everyone who voted or commented on what glasses they thought would be best for George!

Today, we found a local place that sells the Miraflex frames and headed over there to look at them in person and place an order. They only had one pair that was the correct size for him, with oval frames, which took care of that decision for us. Fortunately, I think everyone was in agreement that oval frames would be best.

They had samples of all of the different colors. In person, we liked the dark grey best followed by blue. The blue was much more darker and muted than I thought it would be. The dark grey was on back order, so we ended up going with the blue. They should be in within a couple of days.

His glasses will look something like this, but with oval frames:

Glasses

2010-02-07T13:42:00.001-05:00

It's not really a secret that I hate glasses. I haven't even bothered to get my prescription for my glasses updated in about ten years, as I only wear them right before bed, if I wake up and someone else is in the bathroom preventing me from getting my contacts in, or if I have pink eye. I suppose that if I woke up and the house was on fire, I'd also put them on. I hated them enough when I was young that my parents made the decision when I was only in the third grade that I was mature enough to handle contacts.

Why does this matter? From what I'm reading, we all need to be really positive about the glasses for George. He needs to wear them and we need to encourage it. He currently likes to take off hats which makes me think that he'd also like to take off glasses. He will move to a stage, sooner than I'd like, where he'll start to assert his autonomy and may start to say "no" to wearing glasses and may constantly try to take them off. And at some point, he'll move to a stage where he's sensitive to the fact that the glasses make him different than other kids. (Sidenote - evidently Build a Bear makes bear glasses and having a bear/bunny/doll who wears them can help kids feel a little less alone, and one of the American Girl dolls may come with glasses as well. The things you learn from message boards for parents with babies in glasses.) But, the point is, we need to be positive.

Unfortunately, I'm not all that enthusiastic about the glasses selection on the market for little kids. From what I've been reading, traditional glasses are not a good idea with very little kids, who (a) are rough on things and (b) are learning to walk, and hence are falling on their faces a lot. It looks like the best option really is to go with a one-piece flexible style (like, flexible plastic rather than metal or rigid plastic). They can evidently take the kind of beating that babies and toddlers dish out, and are not likely to hurt the kid (too badly) if the kid happens to fall on their face while wearing them. This leaves only two brands. One of those makes only comes in cutesy baby blue and pink and in bright colors. The other has a few more options. After thinking about this and talking to some of my friends, I think the best route is to go for a geek chic look and embrace the glasses - after all, it's apparently in right now in Men's fashion. And as one of my friends said, in darker frames he may look like the singer of Ween or something. I guess it's a testament to how un-hip I am that I had to look up that reference, but anyways. The dark grey baby glasses would probably be our best bet here, as black and brown are not available. There are two possible styles, the Miraflex Baby Zero2 (left) and the Miraflex Mini Baby (right):

So... Does anyone have any opinions? Feel free to vote and/or comment. There are more styles linked in the last paragraph, if you're anti-dark grey for some reason, plus the two Miraflex options come in a variety of colors. If you think that we should go with some color other than the dark grey, is there a particular style that you prefer over the others?

10 Months

2010-02-07T10:05:00.000-05:00

George is 10 months old today!

Mama, do you really have to take these photos?

You can take photos but I'm not going to look at you. And bribing me with Dylan doesn't work.

Daddy, there you are. Please rescue me!

Daddy, where are you going?

That's it, I'm out of here.

He's getting increasingly fast at crawling and at cruising along furniture. He's has added the "Ma" sound to his repertoire. He sometimes waves hello and goodbye, and more reliably claps (as often when he's crying as when he's happy, to my amusement). He's getting a little more sophisticated with the way that he plays with toys: I just caught him trying to put a lacrosse ball in a cup. He's also getting more interested in the images in books than he used to be - he used to just want to tear them up and turn the pages.

George is now sometimes showing Daddy/Grandpa preferences, which is new and a little bit weird for me. But Jeff had to get through the strong Mama phase, and I guess it's about time for this.

We found out two days ago that George needs glasses, which was a bit of a shock given his age.

It appears that George inherited my vision

2010-02-05T20:42:00.000-05:00

George had his visit with the pediatric opthamologist today. We've been noticing that his right eye sometimes trails off to the side, so our family physician gave us a referral.

Crawling around at the opthamologist.

I've been to regular optomotrist visits so I had an idea of what to expect, but the visit was obviously different than I'm used to as this time the patient was not able to understand simple directions or talk. They started off with George's medical history (was he premature, what was his birth weight and gestational age, any regular medications, when did we start noticing the one eye wandering, was it wandering inwards or off to the side, how often did we notice it) and moved onto family history (diabetes, high blood pressure, lazy eye, blindness). Then, they spent a little while shaking various toys in front of him while trying to get him to look at them and track them with his eyes. They wanted to watch him tracking a toy using only one eye at a time, holding a hand in front of the other. But he kept grabbing at the doctor's hands instead of looking at the toy, and so it took a while for them to be able to complete the test.

The next step was putting a numbing eye drop in each eye, followed by drops of three more medications to dilate his eyes. We then spent about half an hour in the waiting room while the drops did their magic. When we went back into the examination room, the doctor got out the various lenses and held them up in front of George's eyes (one at a time) while trying to get him to focus on him. They can figure out prescription just using the way that light refracts. He ended up having Jeff stand right behind him with a toy with spinning colored lights touching the doctor's ear, which is where he wanted George to focus. We had to take several breaks, as George kept squirming all around (plus we were butting up against naptime), but he finally got all of the information that he needed.

The verdict is that George has +0.5 vision in his left eye, with a slight astigmatism. This is relatively normal for a baby. In his right eye, he has -2.5 vision. To get an idea of what that means, you can check out this chart on Wikipedia - the way that his right eye would see the chart would be somewhere between the chart labelled 2D and the one labelled 3D. While the doctor didn't catch his eyes looking in different directions, he said that it would not surprise him whatsoever: when there's that much of a disparity in the vision, it's pretty normal to rely on the eye with normal vision.

George needs glasses. I'm not quite sure how we're going to keep glasses on him, just looking at how he does with hats, but I know that other people manage. I'm sure we'll figure something out. He also needs to wear an eye patch on his left eye for four waking hours each day, to force his right eye to work. We need to make sure that the nerves and muscles develop the way that they should. If left untreated, his brain could start ignoring signals from that eye and he could go blind in it. We also have a follow-up visit in mid-March, so that the doctor can evaluate how he's doing.

We got him started on the eye patches today, which George was less than thrilled about. The doctor told us that it was fine to wait until after this snow storm passes through to get the glasses.

Repelling Diapers

2010-02-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

George was standing and looking out of the door two days ago, when I noticed a trickle of pee coming out the side of his diaper. Um, what?! I had heard that synthetic fibers are more fussy in the wash and can be prone to repelling if you have hard water or use too much detergent (or use fabric softener, or detergent with additives, or diaper cream without a liner, or do a bunch of other things that you're not supposed to do), as it can build up in the fabric and prevent the diapers from absorbing. An online search suggested taking a clean diaper and pouring a little bit of water on it. If it beads up and then runs off the diaper instead of being absorbed, your diapers are repelling.

Affirmative. (It was more obvious in person than in this really bad photo.) This was especially untimely, as George is going through another one of his phases where he will not lie down for a diaper change, and just arches his back and tries to roll off the changing table the second he goes down. We rely on pockets during those times, and the pockets were the ones having the issues.

The solution to repelling is to strip the diapers. We gathered all of the pocket diapers - from the diaper pail, the changing table, the diaper bag, the car - and threw them in the wash. You want to start with clean diapers when you're stripping them. One commonly suggested way of stripping diapers involves hot water, dish detergent, and lots and lots of rinsing. I've heard of people boiling diapers on the stove, but I didn't feel like bothering. We wanted hot water in the wash though, and to make sure it was very hot, we put a pot on the stove and started boiling it. Once the diapers had gone through one normal wash and were clean, we started the washer back up on hot/cold, poured the boiling water in, and then added about a tablespoon of dish detergent. I've read that you need to be careful with boiling water and snapped diapers, as the plastic snaps can melt, but we were all getting oddly enthusiastic about stripping diapers and didn't wait until the washer filled up with enough hot-but-nowhere-near-boiling water to hopefully offset the boiling water we were pouring in. We had no problems, thankfully.

The first wash produced a ton of suds. You are then supposed to keep rinsing until all of the suds are gone, so we then did a couple of extra rinse cycles. Someone checked after about two or three rinses and didn't notice any more suds, and so we did one more rinse for good measure, and then Jeff threw them all in the dryer. Another water test in the morning, when the diapers were dry, showed that they were absorbing fluid again. It worked!

2010-02-03T11:56:00.001-05:00

George's latest... um... thing. He's been doing this a couple times a day.

What set it off this time was playing with this pig.

2010-02-01T10:14:00.000-05:00

This weekend was fairly quiet and relaxing. Randy and Susan came over on Friday night. Being a Friday night, it was Randy's birthday (family tradition), and so I baked a rocket cake. I started with a 9x13 red velvet sheet cake, and then cut it to shape:

I then added buttercream frosting and candles:

Those are flames coming out of the bottom - pretty awesome, huh? Terry and Karen and Jeff worked together to calculate that Randy was 1009 - his age in years plus all the Fridays since they've lived in the same area (and thus celebrated his birthday) minus two "real" birthdays that happened on Fridays in that time.

Jeff's birthday is this week and since it's the kind of birthday that only happens once per year, I feel like I need to do an even better job with that cake. Rockets are out. Maybe an alligator? I need to start planning.

The snow started coming down Saturday earlier than we expected. We went out to breakfast but there was enough of a cover on the ground by the time that we got back that we declared ourselves snowed in. We spent much of the weekend playing cards, working on a puzzle, watching movies, and playing Duplos with George. We build towers; he takes them apart.

Looking out the window at the snow.

Cruising and Crawling

2010-01-27T16:17:00.002-05:00

George is keeping us on our toes these days.

9 Month Checkup

2010-01-26T00:02:00.000-05:00

George had his (slightly belated) 9 month checkup today. We decided to try a family practitioner, with the thought that we could use the same doctor for the whole family. I don't think George quite knew what to make of her and was abnormally calm and reserved, to the point that she asked if he was relating well to people and acting excited when he saw them (i.e., was trying to gauge if he was showing signs of autism). He even laid calmly while she was checking him out, which was amazing to me as he is very much in a standing phase. I'm averaging about two diaper changes on his back per day, and the rest are done standing up or as he crawls. Embarassingly, I realized as he was laying on the table with his legs splayed out that he had some dog hair on his private parts. It's hard to spot that and clean it off when he's crawling in the midst of a diaper change. Oops.

Current size stats:
29" tall, which puts him somewhere near the 75th percentile
20 lb 3 oz, which puts him in the 30-something-th percentile according to the AAP/CDC charts

She reminded us that to make sure that things are baby-proofed and to keep him rear-facing. Speaking of, I found this video a few weeks ago that's worth watching. We're planning on rear-facing to the limits of the seat.

I mentioned to the doctor that he's not been terribly interested in food in the past couple of weeks, and she said not to worry about it- little children are good at knowing when they need to eat, and he'll start eating more solids eventually. She did give us a reference for a children's opthamologist to check out his eye.

And then we tortured the poor little guy. He got four different shots, which left him sobbing. I nursed him until he was acting like his normal, happy self, and then we went into the waiting room as they wanted him to stick around for at least 15 minutes in case he had any adverse reactions. There, he found a toy that he very much liked playing with - a little baby doll. He kept poking her nose and lips, and opening and closing her eyes. After 15 minutes had past, we picked up again with the baby torture and took him to the lab for them to draw blood and test for anemia. We didn't put pants on him during this journey, as we weren't sure where they were going to stick him and didn't feel like having to take them off minutes later, and so we were just toting him around the building in a shirt and his cow print diaper. The receptionist had never seen a cloth diaper, and kept asking us questions like if we had a Pamper on under it, and if he peed while I was holding him would it get my shirt wet. She then walked around telling other staff about his diaper. She evidently has a 4 month old, and said that she's going to look into it for herself!

The office was right next to the mall, and so we went to try to find a shirt for me to wear with a suit tomorrow. Jeff and I are going to a career fair. I found a skirt that was drastically on sale that I liked, and Jeff convinced me to buy it. But he was getting grumpy, and George was getting even grumpier (shot after shot plus almost naptime did not make him a happy baby), and so we ended up leaving before I could find a good shirt for tomorrow. Karen's lending me one of hers.

In bedtime routine news, it's taken a while to get George to bed some nights, but once he's asleep he seems to be sleeping better than he was before.

Bathtime

2010-01-22T21:09:00.000-05:00

George woke up at 10 pm or so last night, and then again three times in the middle of the night.

Adhering to the 8 pm bedtime was much harder today, which I was expecting. He had a short nap this morning, and then had morning nap part two around noon, which pushed his afternoon nap back, which pushed waking up from his afternoon nap back. He was surprisingly acting tired by 7:45, but it took an hour to convince him that maybe he should also go ahead and fall asleep.

Night Two of the New Bedtime Routine

2010-01-21T21:03:00.001-05:00

Looking back on yesterday morning's post, I realize that I didn't tell the full sleep story. The late bedtime really isn't the issue. Really, we've been having other sleep issues lately.

Sleep Issue #1: George has a hard time winding down for the evening, and gets so keyed up that he can't go to sleep. He has a hard time going to sleep even when he's clearly tired, and ends up crying and throwing tantrums. It sometimes takes considerable effort to try to get him to go to sleep, and it's at a time in the day when I'm tired enough that it's hard on me.

Sleep Issue #2: George was alternating between sleeping through the night and having one wakeup a night when we moved here in November. Some nights he slept straight through; some nights he woke up once. I could deal with both of those situations. Ignoring the constant waking associated with his fever, he's usually waking up 3-4 times a night these days. That leaves me tired and grumpy. You expect that when they're really young, but it's hard now knowing that he's not so young and that he used to be able to sleep pretty well.

Some of my friends had similar issues until they started implementing a very constant and predictable bedtime routine, as well as making sure that the environment in the evenings was generally relaxing. I think that a lot of the sleep books advocate strongly for bedtimes around 7 pm or so, and honestly that's what has worked the best for most of my friends, but since Jeff and I want to be able to go out to dinner and eat with my parents, we thought that 8 pm would be a good compromise. It's late enough that we can go out - we just can't eat too late - but it's early enough that it should be a little bit more healthy for George. If we find that 7 pm is really all that people say it is, I suppose that we will figure out what to do from there.

Night One.

6:10 - Turn the TV to satellite radio, and listen to calm music while cooking dinner. We then all eat together.
7:30 - Bathtime and brushing teeth, followed by pajamas and a night diaper.
7:45 - "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish."
8:00-8:10 - Fussing in Mama's arms.
8:10 - Transfer sleeping baby to crib.

3 nighttime wakeups.

Day Two.

Jeff and I talk some and decide to strike bathtime from our nighttime routine. We're still going to do it when he needs it, but have decided that it would be more convenient if we don't get in a situation where he comes to depend on it right before bed. George does some finger-painting in the afternoon, and then gets a bath right afterwards.

Night Two.

6:10 - Play with Duplos and blocks in the living room.
7:00 or so - Dinner.
7:50 - Change into pajamas and a night diaper, and then read the title of a book. George starts to wail and then bites my shoulder, which is his way of saying "nurse me NOW" (and the reason that I'm trying to teach him sign language for "milk" - ouch!), and I decide to nurse him rather than trying to read over him screaming.
8:05 - George falls asleep nursing, and I try unsuccessfully to transfer him to the crib.
8:15 - Having soothed him back to sleep, successfully transfer him to crib.
8:45 - George wakes up and tries to climb out of crib; I rub his back until he's back asleep.
8:55 - And again, only Jeff's trying to get him back to sleep this time.

Unknown number of nighttime wakeups, as we haven't gotten there yet. And come to think of it, I forgot to brush his teeth tonight. Damn. I'll get them in the morning.

I think that it's supposed to take about a week for any new sleep routine to really set in and for you to be able to see a difference, so we'll see how this works in time.

2010-01-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

Thankfully, George now seems to be feeling better and I didn't catch him with a fever yesterday. After three nights of constant wakeups and crying, sleep last night was also a ton better - once he finally went to sleep, that is. I kept pushing bedtime back because he kept acting not at all tired, and then when we put our foot down (at 10:30, no less) he threw a grand temper tantrum. He yelled his angry yell and he hit and he clawed and he pulled my hair. Jeff stepped it at one point for relief and let him just keep tantruming around until he lost steam and fell over, and then he patted him lightly on his butt until he fell asleep.

In the aftermath of the tantrum, Jeff and I had a brainstorm about how best to address bedtime. George's bedtime keeps creeping later and later and later as he's too wound up to go to bed, and so we're going to try altering his environment some to prevent this by establishing a good bedtime routine and sticking to it this time, as well as cutting out television and other types of stimulation (like "boxing" and chasing each other around) after about 6 pm. It's not going to happen overnight, but our new goal is dinner, then bath-book-nurse-bed just before 8 pm. We're also going to start enforcing an earlier wake-up for everyone (including me, boo). George and I woke up at 11:30 am yesterday, which I figured was because he was sick and I was tired from all of the midnight to 4 am wakeups, but was almost inevitably working against us as far as a reasonable bedtime was concerned.

In other news, I decided to give George his first haircut last night. His hair's so light and fine that I've been debating whether he really needed one, but it had been bothering me that it was a lot longer in back than on top. The back also kept sticking out and doing crazy things. The main other hairstyle that I can think of that's "business on top, party in the back" is a mullet. I am not the hugest mullet fan. I basically cut all of his hair from ear level downwards at fingertip length, and it no longer looks mullet-like. Terry says that he sees no difference.

Before.

After.

I realize that those pictures leave something to be desired, but he was a wiggly crazy man and so most of the pictures I took looked something like this:

2010-01-18T22:10:00.001-05:00

George is still sick and feverish today, although for the most part he's been in better spirits.

I'm pretty sure that the first thing that my mom would notice about this picture is that his color is off, and she'd be right.

2010-01-17T22:42:00.000-05:00

George is sick. When I tried to comfort him during wakeup #4 or 5 last night, I realized that his skin felt like it was burning. Thankfully Karen was thoughtful enough to give us an ear thermometer shortly after we moved, and so we didn't need to go through the rigamorole of taking a rectal temperature to confirm that he did indeed have a fever (101.2). George thanks her. He continued waking up every 10 minutes or so whimpering, and I gave up on sleep entirely from about 4:30 to 6:30, sitting next to him and rubbing his back. Meanwhile, I sat on my laptop, trying to figure out dosage for infant Tylenol - the package says to call your doctor - and trying to figure out health insurance, as we still have not received cards or other plan information in the mail. George started feeling well enough when the Tylenol kicked in around 6:30 that I was able to get some sleep, and then Jeff took over when he woke up the next time.

He's been in good spirits as long as we're up to date on Tylenol, and has been trying to do normal George things like climb the stairs and chase the dogs. But whenever the Tylenol wears off, he gets pretty grumpy. Poor little guy. He's also been more tired than usual and took four naps today, and I gave up on Mission Crib Nap entirely as it just did not seem like a good idea. We've spent a lot of time cuddling.

We called the nurse on call as he's also been tugging on his ears. We've been attributing it to teething, given that his only other symptom has been copious amounts of drool, but together with the fever I was wondering about an ear infection. They had us come into pediatric urgent care tonight. His ears look fine, and everything else looks fine minus the fever. We're just supposed to keep on giving him Tylenol and lots of milk.

2010-01-16T23:04:00.000-05:00

George has been going through a development spurt for the past few days (and unfortunately for me, the accompanying sleep regression as well). His recent accomplishments include:

Standing from a sitting/squatting position, unassisted.

Standing unassisted for up to five seconds.

Crawling up to stairs, rotating on his belly, and then going down the stairs butt first. Sometimes he forgets to rotate, but if I say "butt first" he remembers. I may want to change that to "bottom first" or something, I suppose. Is "butt" still considered a bad word in the pre-school set?

Waving, or making the milk sign. I think it's waving though as he did it to a strange boy at dinner tonight, and I really hope he wasn't asking him for milk. But then again he does it sometimes when he's nursing. Hmm. It may be best to model waving as a distinct up/down motion or back/forth motion instead of a cupping the hand motion in the future, because the nuances between a cupped hand wave and signing milk are a bit much for a 9 month old.

Clapping.

Going through board books one page at a time, and feeling all of the textured areas in the board books that include them.

Chocolate Cake

2010-01-13T16:00:00.000-05:00

We were watching television last night when Terry got up, and asked us if he could grab us anything while he was up: "Pizza, chocolate cake?" We all said "chocolate cake!" We thought he was joking, but the next thing we knew we heard the garage door opening. He reappeared not too much later, chocolate cake in hand. George got a taste and loved it. Mmmmm.

Health Insurance

2010-01-13T15:50:00.000-05:00

We just got a letter in the mail that I've really been waiting for: we've been approved for private health insurance! This is a huge relief, as I've heard horror stories about this and as I don't have the most unblemished medical record for someone my age (back surgery, bad pneumonia). What's more, they're giving us the initially quoted price, which is about half of what we'd be paying for COBRA.

We're technically without medical insurance right now, although we're still in the enrollment period for COBRA and could get retroactive coverage should something major happen in the next couple of days.

The application process itself was a bit stressful as they wanted to know every time that you've had a doctor's appointment or even consulted a doctor in the last five years. Every time. How are you supposed to remember that? I went through George's records to try to find all times that I consulted a doctor and I could swear that there were more. While I love most things about our old pediatrician, I will say that they were fairly lacking in the medical charting department. I did the best I could given what I had. I know that I've made my share of first-time mama calls to the doctor over things like a runny nose, or a bloody nose after I took the first nurse's advise about suctioning said runny nose, or a bumped head, so George's part of the questionnaire looked way too busy given the fact he's only been around for nine months.

But we now have medical insurance, effective Saturday. Phew.

George's First Trip to the Liquor Store

2010-01-11T16:44:00.000-05:00

Definitely one for the baby books.

If it makes it any better, we were on our way home from a delicious meal at McCormick and Schmick's.

9 Months Old

2010-01-09T12:03:00.001-05:00

I'm a little bit late (again) with George's Mr. Bunny pictures.

You want to take pictures of me with this bunny?

Well fooey!

The Mama phase is lessening some, and he's increasingly happy being held and playing with people other than me. He is exhibiting a strong male preference though.

He's continuing to jabber along. According to Terry, he even said his first "word" yesterday, which was something along the lines of "my grandfather is the most wonderful person in the world." I'll believe it when I hear it for myself.

A couple of days ago, he did a true wave goodbye for the first time.

George also loves peek-a-boo, and when we were driving to NJ for Christmas he even pulled a blanket over his own head and then pulled it aside when he wanted to play. For some reason, he also loves being upside down. He'll start to fling himself backwards when he's in our arms and if we then turn him upside down, he just grins and laughs. Weird kid.

He also enjoys pulling on Chloe's tail, as well as taking bones and tennis balls out of the dogs' mouths so that he can chew on them himself. Lovely, huh?

As far as physical development goes, he has a classic hand/knee crawl down pat but prefers to stand if possible. He's started (slowly) cruising along furniture. And he's gotten pretty fast at getting around.

He's also figured out how to go up stairs. We're currently working on going down stairs butt first instead of head first.

One of his favorite activities is taking toys out of his toy box,

sticking them in his mouth,

and then flinging them on the floor. He's gotten pretty good at making a mess.

From time to time he'll put toys back in the toy box, which I prefer. But those instances are few and far between.

In the past couple of weeks, we've noticed that his right eye sometimes drifts off.

We're going to mention this to the pediatrician when we go for his nine month checkup. It's likely that we're going to have to take him to an opthamologist to get it treated. This is one of those conditions where it's important to catch it and treat it early so that his brain doesn't start ignoring vision in his right eye, so we definitely want to be on top of this.

Our Room

2010-01-07T15:04:00.001-05:00

Now that the holidays are over, Jeff and I are getting serious about two things: finding jobs and getting in shape. As a result, we've decided that it's finally time to move from co-napping to having George nap in a crib so that we can make full use of naptime and his earlier bedtime. Sleeping in a crib isn't entirely new to George, as it's what he did in daycare, but he hasn't done it for a couple of months now and so we're expecting some grumpiness from him as he gets used to it again.

We moved our file cabinet into the study (with Terry and Karen's blessing), moved a couple of smaller storage units into the closet, and then started carefully measuring furniture and shuffling things around. Our goal was to fit our bed, the armoir (as we have to store clothes for three), a nightstand, a changing table, a crib, and a diaper pail in the room. A few months ago I would have said that a changing table was not a necessity, but I've mostly changed my mind. It's a great place to store all of our diapering stuff, plus solids mean messy diapers and being up on the changing table signals to George that he needs to lie still for a minute or two. On the floor, he's all over the place.

We weren't sure whether it was feasible to fit all of this in our room, but with some shuffling of furniture it worked out much better than we thought.

Looking into our room. In order to fit the nightstand we had to turn it sideways, rendering the drawers unusable, but we at least have a surface to put an alarm clock and light on. We have a bedskirt in storage, somewhere - it should be near the top of things - and we're going to try to find it next time we're out there.

The armoir/closet corner of the room.

George's corner of the room.

I've previously blogged about the crib and the crib skirt. The changing table was Jeff's when he was little, and we're using the four cubbies to store diaper supplies and extra blankets. We've decided to store some of George's toys under the crib so that he can play with them in our room.

We did splurge on a new mattress yesterday, as we tossed the mattress we had before moving: it was my mattress when I was a baby, and while that's fine for house staging purposes, mattresses aren't made to last that long for sleeping purposes. While I'm a huge fan of Craigslist, consignment stores, and yard sales for baby things, mattresses are one of the few baby things that I insist on buying new for hygiene/safety purposes. (The others are carseats and breast pumps, if you're wondering.)

George happily took a nap in his crib this afternoon, while I worked out and Jeff applied for jobs. Success!

We also installed a mobile over the changing table, to help distract George during diaper changes and to keep him happy staying on his back. It's something that they did in daycare that really seemed to help. The outlet in that corner is hooked to the room's light switch, and as there's no overhead light and we no longer have a place to rest a table lamp, we decided to install an overhead lamp. We just got a cheap plug-in type rather than bothering with trying to rewire Jeff's parents house.

Unfortunately, this puts the cord coming down right behind the crib. George likes to try to bite cords. While we could reroute the cord, the outlet is on that wall just above the mattress and so there would still be something in George's reach. For the time being, we've undone the cord and strung it up way out of his reach, and put outlet covers on the outlet. We're going to head to Babys R Us later today to see if they have any type of cord baby-proofing supplies and will go from there.

Also on our list of things to do is to research baby monitors. We had a monitor that died on us shortly before we moved, which I suppose wasn't too much of a surprise as someone holding a yardsale just gave it to us.

Beef Stew

2010-01-07T14:10:00.000-05:00

Washington Post Article on Breech Births

2010-01-05T16:43:00.000-05:00

My mom just brought this article to my attention: Obstetricians debate whether Cesarean section is always best for breech babies. (You need to register to read it, but bugmenot.com may have a username and password if you don't feel like registering.)

I found it to be an interesting read.

This is being nit-picky on my part, but I would have like to have seen more discussion about the limitations of the Term Breech Trial (like how the definition of experienced practitioner may differ - experienced in breech birth, or just in birth?) and about how the two year follow-up showed no significant difference in vaginal versus cesarean delivery. I'm also not convinced that the author realized that there's a difference between natural birth and vaginal birth.

On a more serious note, bodily integrity and informed consent should trump litigation mitigation any day. I appreciate their mentioning that litigation mitigation is a driving force behind some of the decisions to deliver breech babies via ceserean, and hopefully it will make some people think a little bit further about whether that means that cesareans are in all ways best for breech babies, but I would have liked to see them expand on implications for maternal rights as well.

But, all in all, I'm glad that they're bringing attention to this. And I will confess to getting a bit teary eyed at the end upon reading about the successful breech VBA2C (vaginal birth after two cesareans, for those not up on the lingo).

2010-01-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

My grandmother is increasingly ill and has been transfered from her local hospital to a larger hospital, so we drove down there with my brother a couple of days ago to visit her. She seemed very weak and I think was disappointed that she didn't get to see George, who stayed in the main lobby due to my grandmother's MRSA infection plus a lot of signs saying that visitors under the age of 18 were prohibited. I could tell that she was very glad to see Stephen and me, though.

Other than that, it's been pretty quiet here for the past few days. Jeff got his car inspected yesterday and is off to the DMV right now to get it tagged here and to get a new driver's license for himself. I'm putting some final touches on my resume; Jeff's applying for jobs. We had a quiet New Years Eve in. George ate his requisite black eyed pea for New Years Day, and several more for lunch yesterday. He has a thing for beans, which I'm trying to limit as I don't want him to get too gassy and uncomfortable. He also had his first baby food on Friday: prunes. Within an hour or two it did just what we had hoped, and ended five days with no poop. And then some - it just kept coming.

George's favorite activity right now seems to be making messes. He pulls up on his toy box and then systematically tries to dump everything, one item at a time, on the floor. He takes apart his stacking train. He pulls up on the diaper shelves and tries to pull diapers onto the floor.

Unfortunately, he's not at a stage where he's able to understand putting things back. He'll occasionally transfer a toy from the floor to his toybox for fun, but it's not quite enough to help mama out.

He also figured out how to go up stairs. He had been able to climb up the one stair separating the family room and the kitchen, but yesterday I put him outside the laundry room at the foot of the stairs while I transfered a load, only to find that he had gone up a couple of stairs in the time that it had taken me to do that. And then later that day, with supervision, he climbed up the whole set of stairs to the second floor.

Baby-Led Weaning: A Follow-Up

2010-01-01T11:34:00.000-05:00

Now that we're a couple months into our solid food journey, I thought I'd take a little time to post about our experience. We decided to go with a baby-led approach, for reasons that I had mentioned in this post. It was pretty slow starting off, as George didn't quite have the motor skills to move food into his mouth and to swallow it well. He's been getting steadily better at it as he gets more practice and as he's developed better coordination and grasping techniques.

The main reason to introduce solids to babies under 12 months is for the learning and social experience of eating, and baby led solids has done a great job of introducing these aspects of eating to George. He gets to eat the same things we do, which is exciting for him. His face once lit up when my mom handed him a whole popover for himself, and he could see that everybody else at the table had a whole popover - just like him!

He's also been accepting of a wide variety of foods. Spoon-feeding has been slow going as he insists on being the one to put things in his mouth and so I largely haven't bothered with anything that needs a spoon, but lately he's sometimes been able to eat things off of a pre-loaded spoon or fork that he then manipulates into his mouth himself. But he's been great with all sorts of tastes and textures. I have a couple of friends who started with baby food and are now having a time getting their babies (older than George) to eat anything with chunks in it, including stage 3 babyfood. I'm sure that a lot of it comes down to the temperment of the baby and other similar factors, but I'm glad that we haven't had to go through that struggle.

We ended up introducing certain foods earlier than originally planned, as they're in so much of our cooking and as I'm not convinced that delayed introduction really helps to prevent allergies: dairy, wheat, and egg whites come to mind. Our pediatrician told us that a lot of the food recommendations are really more for cultural reasons than medical reasons. We're still trying to hold off on shellfish and nuts until George is at least a year old, although George accidently ingested a big bite of shrimp a couple of weeks ago with no ill effects. I've read conflicting information on the increased risk of allergy from introducing potential allergens "early" (meaning different things to different people, but something that everyone seems to have an opinion on), but in 2008 the AAP made the following statement:

"Although solid foods should not be introduced before 4 to 6 months of age, there is no current convincing evidence that delaying their introduction beyond this period has a significant protective effect on the development of atopic disease regardless of whether infants are fed cow milk protein formula or human milk. This includes delaying the introduction of foods that are considered to be highly allergic, such as fish, eggs, and foods containing peanut protein.

"For infants after 4 to 6 months of age, there are insufficient data to support a protective effect of any dietary intervention for the development of atopic disease."

We've also been feeding him some foods that are on delayed introduction lists not because of allergies but because of acidity and upset tummies (tomato sauce comes to mind on this one, as do black beans which he LOVES), but he hasn't seemed any worse for wear. If he did, we'd limit them further.

All in all, I've been pretty happy with how we've introduced solids. It's kept it fun for all of us, which I think is important.

2009: A Year in Review

2009-12-31T22:51:00.001-05:00

January
Possible partial placental abruption.
Modified bed rest.

February
Feeling better.
Finish birth classes and engage in other nesting behaviors.

March
Waddle, waddle.

April
George Everett arrives: surprise breech birth in the guest room, following a 43 hour labor.
Family visits.

May
Travel to Virginia for Aunt Cary's graduation.
First smiles.
Lifts head briefly.
I return to work.

June
Battles with the permit office.
Mini pushups and better head control.
Consult house stager.

July
Household projects galore.
Visit Chicago for the fourth.

August
Drool.
More household projects and decluttering.
Jeff returns to work and we scramble to find childcare.
George begins to roll.
Skunk attack.
House stager's final touches.

September
House goes on the market.
Open house.
Showings.
Unassisted sitting.
Car accident.
Under contract.

October
House inspections and appraisals.
First solids.
Craigslist is our friend. Yard sales are not.
Backwards scooting.
My last day of work.

November
Close on house.
Move, without Jeff.
Jeff gives notice.
Two front teeth.
Lose a beloved family member: RIP Aonghus.
Army crawling.

December
Full on crawling and cruising.
First snow.
Jeff finally moves back.

We can't wait to see what 2010 brings us.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

2009-12-30T17:30:00.000-05:00

We think that meatballs have officially surpassed collard greens as George's favorite food.

"Look at my MEATBALLS!"

"Do you think that's a speck of meatball over there?"

"I guess spaghetti is okay, too."

Growth

2009-12-29T18:41:00.002-05:00

On a whim, I weighed George today. He's now 20 pounds, give or take half a pound (the accuracy of the bathroom scale). Our pediatrician had mentioned at our 6 month visit that George had dropped a bit in percentile, so I got out his growth charts to see where this now put him. The AAP/CDC growth charts that are typically used are based on 1977 data that used predominantly formula fed babies who were introduced to solids early, and I've read they're not accurate for breastfed babies who are introduced to solids at the recommended 6+ months. Evidently breastfed babies tend to chunk up more than formula fed babies in the first three months and are then leaner after that. It turns out that George has followed that pattern:

The WHO growth charts, on the other hand, are built using data on healthy breastfed infants from around the world. Amazingly, George is continually smack on the 50th percentile using these charts.

Since I was already graphing all this, I decided just to go the whole hog on the nerdiness. Out came the measuring tape. George is 28 inches tall, making his length growth follow this pattern (upper graph):

I went ahead and plotted this on the WHO graphs as well, to see if there was a difference like there was with his weight.

I measured another three times, just to make sure that I was accurate. He is indeed 28 inches, which means that he's fallen to the 50th percentile for height.

Looking at the weight-for-length charts, this means that he has chunked out. Dear Lord.

It's a bit less dramatic on the AAP/CDC chart (below) than on the WHO chart (above) but we've already established that the WHO chart really should be more accurate.

I'm wondering if I caught George just before a growth spurt, and so I may check up on him in a few weeks if we haven't seen a pediatrician for his 9 month checkup at that point. I have a feeling that we may be doing a belated checkup. If we switch insurance, we may end up going without coverage for a month or so and would want to postpone the well visit until we have coverage again (we would retroactively enroll in COBRA coverage for that month if something were to happen). There's also a chance that our current pediatrician may not accept the new insurance and that we'd have to switch practices, which could push the appointment even later.

In other weight-related news, I'm still holding out at 8 pounds over pre-pregnancy weight. This is better than expected, as I stopped exercising while my shoulder/neck/upper back healed while eating way too much over the holidays. Dylan is now down to 23 pounds, so the mix of diet and exercise apparently is paying off for him!

George's First Christmas

2009-12-28T11:41:00.000-05:00

George's first Christmas has come and gone, and we all enjoyed it very much.

On Christmas Eve, we briefly met with my mom to exchange gifts. We then got together with my dad's family for a great, relaxed dinner and exchanging of gifts. George got to meet his 98 year old great-grandfather for the first time.

Bottom, L-R: Papa, George, Me, Jeff

Top, L-R: My Uncle Lee, My Dad, Uncle Stephen

My dad and brother found all of my brother's old Legos and gave them to George for his Christmas present. It includes a pirate ship, some space ships, and who knows what else - there were three tubs! We sorted out the handful of Duplos and are saving the rest until George is old enough to not put them in his mouth and choke on them, but both Jeff and I are extremely excited that we'll be able to share them with George. My brother and I played with them a lot when we were growing up and they were one of my favorite toys. Jeff has fond memories of his as well, and is extremely happy about the pirate ship: evidently it was on his wish list long, long ago. (Wish lists for more recent Christmases have included the Lego Death Star and Star Destroyer, and so clearly Legos are not a toy that boys grow out of.)

We got back home to find Terry, Karen, and Cary in new Christmas pajamas with a wrapped set on our bed waiting for us, and changed into them to watch It's a Wonderful Life. George slept in my arms.

The next morning, we awoke to breakfast pizza and coffee. After lingering over breakfast, we opened presents.

George didn't really have the whole unwrapping thing down until later that evening, so we mostly unwrapped presents for him. He got several very cute new outfits, and I've had a fun time dressing him up ever since. I know that his grandfather is happy that he looks like a little boy in his button downs and polo shirts; he's never been a fan of the BabyLegs. Our little monkey also received a stuffed alligator, a singing pirate, a train, a baby-sized real drum, a tractor pull toy, and his doppleganger.

Santa was very generous to Jeff and me as well.

I also had the opportunity to finally reveal of all my knitting projects. I gave Jeff a basic ribbed hat, as he asked for a no-frills red hat for Christmas. I then made George a coordinating Aviatrix Hat. The main modification that I made was that I went with the 0-6 month pattern with larger needles (size 6 for the ribbing and size 10 for the body) to accomodate the chunkier yarn, and also made two button holes for attaching the chin strap instead of just one. It fits fairly well and he has some room to grow in it; it may even fit next winter. It was a really quick, fun knit, and I did much better with the shaping than I usually do. I had enough yarn left over that I also knit George some mittens, and modified the pattern with a couple of purl rows to coordinate with the Aviatrix hat.

As an after thought, I also knit George an apple rattle after he went to bed one night. I was trying to make a soft rattle ball out of scrap yarn, but it was shaped more like an apple than a ball and so I decided to add leaves.

In case anyone else would like to knit an apple, here's the basic pattern that I came up with by combining multiple patterns that I found online.

Apple body:

Using four size 8-ish double pointed needles, cast on 9 stitches, placing three stitches each on three of the needles.

Round 1: knit

Round 2: KFB in each stitch; 6 stitches per needle/18 total

Rounds 3-4: knit

Round 5: M1L in each stitch; 12 stitches per needle/36 total

Rounds 6-25: knit

Round 26: stuff with ball, and then K2tog in each stitch; 6 stitches per needle/18 total. As you're knitting around the ball, it's going to be awkward going from here on.

Rounds 27-28: knit

Round 29: k2tog each stitch; 3 stitches per needle/9 total

Round 30: knit. Then cut yarn off and thread through remaining stitches, pull close, and tie tightly down.

Leaves:

Work in garter stitch, with small needles - size 4 or so. Make two leaves.

Round 1: CO 3 stitches.

Round 2: Knit.

Round 3: M1L at each end; 5 stitches total.

Round 4: Knit.

Round 5: M1L at each end; 7 stitches total.

Rounds 6-9: Knit.

Round 10: M1L at each end; 9 stitches total.

Round 11-16: Knit.

Round 17: K2tog at each end; 7 stitches total.

Round 18: Knit.

Round 19: K2tog at each end; 5 stitches total.

Round 18: Knit.

Round 19: K2tog at each end; 3 stitches total.

Round 20: Knit.

Round 21: K2tog, knit: 2 stitches total.

Round 22: K2tog. Cut yarn and pull through remaining stitch, sew in.

I attached the leaves only at each end so that he can still play with the them, and then made the stem by braiding a few strands of yarn. And then I found that evidently you can buy items like this. Who would have thought? It's much cheaper to just knit them out of scrap yarn, though.

After a morning nap, George had a great time playing with his new presents.

We finally headed off to Jeff's aunt and uncle's house to spend the evening with them and eat dinner and apple strudle with them and their families.

The next morning, we woke entirely too early and hit the road to go see Karen's family in New Jersey. George did surprisingly well traveling, and was full of smiles at his great aunt's house. I think everyone was enamored with him: after we thwarted a couple of kidnapping attempts as we left, more than one person expressed that they wanted to have a baby just like him. Our trip back yesterday did not go so smoothly and ended with an hour of screaming, but George seems happy now that we're home again.

I think that Christmas went more smoothly than usual and was the most enjoyable Christmas I've had in a while.

Part of it may be that we're not as rushed, now that we're living in the same area as family. We didn't have to cram a million and one activities into a week-long visit. We also spread events more evenly between a couple of days around Christmas rather than attempting to see both of our families on Christmas itself.

We were very low key with the gift giving, mostly giving pictures of George, baked goods, and knitted items (which is a hobby of mine). This meant no last minute crazy shopping, which is something that I've never enjoyed.

We have a full week ahead of us, which is going to include going to see my grandmother again, a couples date night, and a bunch of errands.

Boys and Their Toys

2009-12-22T14:16:00.000-05:00

2009-12-22T11:58:00.000-05:00

We measured 18 inches of snow when everything was said and done, but I think that the official measure was 19 inches.

Despite the storm, Jeff was able to make it in on Saturday night. It was a long trip, but it helped that there were not many people on the road. It was late enough when he got in that George was a grump, but in the days since he's been delighted to have his Daddy here again.

I was able to finish all of my Christmas projects with time to spare, and even made some peppermint marshmallows the other night, using this recipe but substituting 3/4 teaspoon of peppermint extract for the vanilla extract. They turned out pretty well but I think were slightly heavy on the peppermint.

Jeff, George, and I trekked off to the mall yesterday to see Santa. George did NOT like Santa.

I also did not fare so well at the mall. The stairs in the parking garage were very slick and I fell down a couple of stairs, banging my right wrist and elbow. Later yesterday evening my right shoulder and neck started cramping up and really hurting, and I had a hard time sleeping through the pain. I think I may have pulled something. I keep popping ibuprofen and am trying to take it easy, but it's hard when George wants to do nothing more than climb up me. Jeff's spent the morning trying to distract him.

Snow Storm

2009-12-19T12:02:00.000-05:00

Jeff's last day of work was yesterday. There was a bit of hassle there at the end about whether he would have to pay them back for last year's tuition, but we knew that HR was grasping. The contract that Jeff signed was on our side, as were the exam dates, the dates he got his grades, the official end of term for the semester, and practically everything else HR could think of using as an "end of class" date. We finally got it in writing that he would not have to pay them back, which was a relief. I was half-expecting this to stretch out further.

Jeff packed up this morning and finally hit the road, just in time to have to drive through the snow storm of the decade. By the time that I took the dogs out this morning, the snow was already up to Dylan's belly and he had a hard time walking around in it. It's supposed to continue all day. The last weather forecast I saw was calling for 15-25 inches.

We're hoping that we'll be able to see Jeff tonight, but he has strict orders to pull over and stop if it gets to be too much. Brian's family lives in Pittsburgh, which may work out well if Jeff manages to get there and then wants to call it quits for the day. As of when he left the roads were cleared and traffic was light, and so we really hope that the rest of the trip will go smoothly for him.

I'm sure that this is going to be one of those days that he remembers for a long, long time.

As for us, we're going to be taking it very easy today. I baked scones for breakfast, and have determined that I am not using that recipe again. It instructed me to continue to add two cups of flour and then to continue adding it until they were no longer too sticky, and to be very careful not to overmix them, and the first part of that ended up taking close to a cup of flour I think. How can you not overmix when it's that far off? I'm going to bundle George up at some point and take him out to play in the snow. I'm also hoping to finish a knitting project and to start another one. Both are going to be Christmas presents for George, if I can finish them on time, and so I'm working with quite the deadline here.

Biscotti

2009-12-16T18:06:00.001-05:00

Today, George helped me to make chocolate chip biscotti. They should go well with coffee and hot chocolate and other wintery drinks, plus the recipe was listed as being appropriate for beginners (a group which would certainly include George), so we thought it was a pretty good place to start.

He did a great job stirring the dry ingredients, but his favorite part was helping me clean up.

The biscotti are currently in the oven for their second bake. The crumbs when we were slicing them up tasted good, so I'm hopeful that the final product will turn out well.

Diapers, Revisited: A Few Months Later

2009-12-15T23:47:00.002-05:00

Our Current Stash

A while ago, I mentioned that our ideal stash of prefolds and Thirstie covers was less ideal than we thought, once we had a super wiggly baby complicating diaper changes. We were trying to figure out how to adjust our stash to keep up with George's craziness. To recap, we ended up selling our fitted diapers, our BumGenius pocket diapers, one of our Happy Heiny pocket diapers, and all of our all-in-one diapers. We kept the velcro pocket diapers that could be put through the dryer, as this was our main problem with the BumGeniuses. We bought a bunch of snapped pocket diapers.

Our diaper stash now consists of about 18 pocket diapers, about three dozen prefolds, and a few covers of each size. I generally prefer the prefolds if George is going to be calm enough to use them, and go for the pockets if he's feeling particularly wiggly or if I need some for the diaper bag, as they're trimmer. I keep about a dozen prefolds and a cover in the car, just in case - and they came in handy last Friday when my mom and I (and sleeping George and the dogs) ended up finishing a movie at her place pretty late, ending in the decision to just spend the night. The pockets/prefolds mix is working really well. We have enough diapers that we could probably go about five days without doing laundry, which I realize is just crazy, but it would allow us to have two in diapers at some point should we need to do that. Assuming George is out of diapers at an average age, this would basically just mean baby #2 sometime before he's 3 years old. So, we're hanging on to them.

Nighttime Diapering

George is a heavy wetter (progressively so in fact), and it took a while to figure out something that truly worked. At first we did different variations of stuffing pockets, but ultimately pockets are too limited as to how much absorption you can add. We eventually moved to prefolds plus doublers plus wool pants, but the wool shed and each morning I'd have to spend some time cleaning lint from his boy parts. Ew. We're now using two prefolds plus a nighttime cover. I haven't seen many nighttime covers on the market and I'm honestly not sure how much they differ from regular covers, but we actually won a couple in a drawing about a week after we learned I was pregnant. They're humongo, and we need humongo covers to cover a double diaper, so they're what we use.

Here's a nighttime diaper tutorial, much for Jeff's benefit as the double prefold thing is relatively new.

Tri-fold one of the prefolds and lay it on top of the other, like so.

Position under baby and do a normal angel fold.

Snappi up the diaper.

Slap a nighttime cover on it.

Get grumpy tired baby to bed.

I think that some people do a true double-diapering, but I think this method gets all of that extra absorption where it counts. It's working great for now, at any rate.

Laundry

The rest of this section is going to talk about poo. You've been forewarned.

We had no laundry problems, other than some minor staining, for most of our diapering life. But in the past few weeks, we've had some stink problems and I've been doing research online to try to get to the bottom of it all. I'd read that this is a problem with any synthetic fabrics, which would definitely include pockets. But the problems we were having weren't the typical ammonia-smell problems. The solution to that problem would be a vinegar rinse, which I tried for good measure, but which didn't really help as it did nothing to address the actual issue.

I finally realized that I wasn't doing a good enough job scraping poo off of the diapers. You see, breastmilk poo is water soluble and can just go straight into the wash, but if baby's consuming anything other than mama's milk, you need to get the majority of the poo off the diapers and down the toilet before laundering them. You also are supposed to do this with disposable diapers before trashing them to prevent spread of disease, and I keep trying to remind myself of that when I get squeamish about it. It's just par for the course.

The biggest complaint I have about the approach that we're taking to solids is that George has been in the soft peanut butter poo stage for so long now. I think that the switch from breastfed baby poo to solid poo that can just be rolled off the diaper usually takes a lot less time than the two months we're currently looking at - like, two weeks or so. But I'm not sure that we're going to get to rollable poo until he's taking in much more solid food, and he just hasn't been ready to do that yet.

As long as we're in the peanut butter poo stage, there are a couple different common ways of getting poo off the diaper and into the toilet: dunking, scraping, and spraying.

Dunking in the toilet seriously soaks up all of the water in the toilet without doing too much damage to the coating of yuckiness on the diaper, so in my experience that's worthless. It's ineffective enough at actually cleaning poo off the diaper that I think that it has been the cause of most of the stinkiness. It's also gross, as you then have to very quickly try to transfer the diaper from the toilet to the diaper pail, which you of course have put right next to the toilet for this exercise, and risk accidentally getting poo water somewhere it shouldn't be and then having to get out the cleaning supplies.

I've recently been scraping with toilet paper into the toilet, and while it's effective and seems to have eradicated the stink, it's also time consuming and I've now gotten poo on my hands one too many times. Next!

We own a diaper sprayer which I definitely could install on the toilet, but I'm not completely sure if it would need to be mounted to the wall, and I really don't want to do any semi-permanent stuff to someone else's house.

Some people use a spatula to scrape, and so I think that will be the next line of attack. I'm going to pick up a cheapo diaper-only spatula the next I'm at a store that stocks such items. I hope this does the trick.

Uncle Brian is a Bad Influence

2009-12-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

"Were going streaking up through the quad and into the gymnasium! Come on everybody, come on! Oh, look, a toy!"

Sleep-Crawler?

2009-12-14T11:18:00.000-05:00

Jeff used to be a sleepwalker. I'm now wondering if George is going to follow in his footsteps. He has twice now started crawling while appearing to be asleep. He once woke himself up from the movement. The other time he crawled into the wall and bumped his head, which woke him up. Uh oh.

Babysitter

2009-12-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

While George has been away from both Jeff and me before, many many times, he's always known the caregivers we've left him with. Last night marked the first time that I left him with a babysitter. One of Cary's friends, who is experienced with the little ones, came over to watch him. I went to see the City Choir of Washington's annual Christmas concert with Jeff's family, and afterwards we went out to dinner. I had a great evening. George, on the other hand, not so great. In the six or so hours I was gone, he ate less than one ounce. He refused to take a nap. He was generally very grumpy. And he was very happy to see me when I got home.

Getting a Bit Faster

2009-12-11T15:08:00.002-05:00

2009-12-11T00:42:00.000-05:00

George and I drove to visit my grandmother in the rehabilition facility today. I think she was feeling a little better than she was over Thanksgiving, and she seemed to enjoy seeing him. And, of course, all of the nurses and other old people loved seeing him, although one elderly lady got upset because she thought I had brought in a puppy, which clearly was not allowed.

The drove timed out perfectly with George's naps, which were perhaps his longest to date (with the exception of naps when he was just a new newborn, of course). He slept for two hours on the way down, and another two hours on the way back. Amazing.

2009-12-09T16:43:00.000-05:00

This morning, George woke up crying at 5 am or so. I had just realized that his diaper was soaking when he started settling himself back to sleep, and I made the snap decision to go ahead and change him. Big mistake. He took it as a cue that it was time to get up for the day. I tried my best to go back to sleep, but he just grabbed my shirt and pulled on it to stand up. He sat back down. He pulled himself to standing. He sat back down. He pulled himself to standing. He sat back down. A few times in there, he also pulled my hair or tried to stick his fingers up my nose or giggled. Once or twice, he climbed over me and then climbed back. This went on for about two hours, with me too tired to get out of bed and him too wired to stop bouncing around. I finally threw in the towel and got up. Thank God for coffee.

He's usually not so good at the whole napping thing, but he's currently two hours into a nap. I would have preferred the two hours of sleep this morning, personally. But it is what it is.

Cuddly Chloe

2009-12-08T11:09:00.000-05:00

Chloe's really been wanting to cuddle with George during his naps. I guess it's safer than when he's awake, as he's less likely to bite her! You're not supposed to let babies and pets co-sleep, so I'm only letting her do it at nap time or between the time when George goes to bed and I go to bed, with large amounts of supervision.

Jeff's Hair, Definitely

2009-12-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

This is after trying to smooth it down, but it looked the same way before.

By the way, those are George's new stacking/nesting cups.

Holiday Sing-Along

2009-12-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot to mention - George and I went to a holiday concert at Wolf Trap Sunday afternoon. It was supposed to be a meet-up for a local parents group that I'm joining to meet some more parents in this area, but because of the snow it ended up just being me and one other family. And it was COLD! I somehow did not think to bring mittens, and George did NOT want to keep his hands under cover. He just wanted to wave them all around and try to grab nearby people. The only solution that I could think of was to nurse him, as then he kept his hands on me and I could put a blanket or coat over them, and so we nursed for maybe 2/3 of the concert. And then sometime during the concert he apparently lost a sock. Yikes.

The concert itself was pretty good. They started out with some holiday medleys, and then moved on to a sing along portion that included visits from Frosty, Rudolf, and finally Santa himself! It's evidently an annual event and it's free, so if I remember we may go next year as well.

8 Months

2009-12-07T20:54:00.000-05:00

George is 8 months old today! I can hardly believe how quickly time is flying by.

Mr. Bunny shoots are getting increasingly difficult for one big reason: somebody won't stay still!

George is now standing (holding onto something) reliably enough that he doesn't really need a spotter.

He's also able to pull himself up to standing.

He's talking to us a lot. If only we could understand what he's saying! He seems to have his vowel sounds down. As far as constonants go, he's particularly fond of D (aaaadadadada), B, Y, and (as of yesterday) TH.

He's had a rudimentary pincer grasp for a couple of weeks now, but yesterday he finally busted out a classic pincer grasp and he hasn't been able to stop! He keeps using it on completely inappropriate things. Like large blocks, which really demand a whole hand. Or on trying to take bath tiles off of the tub surround.

Along with the developing grasp, in the past week or two he's gotten better at getting food into his mouth.

He's able to indicate some wants with gestures - he has "Hold me, Mama!" down pat, as well as "Hold me, person sitting next to Mama! Okay, changed my mind, hold me Mama!" Speaking of, the intense Mama phase is still going on.

This is not at all related to development, but I think he's inherited his Daddy's hair (and thus also his bedhead).

A Book Review, of Sorts

2009-12-06T12:30:00.001-05:00

Last week, I picked up a book from the library called "Growing Up Green!" I figured that I like green stuff, and I like children, and so I might like the book and might learn something from it. What I wasn't expecting was that I'd hate the book so much that I'd end up throwing it against the wall.

Suggesting that women should formula feed, as environmental toxins can make it into breastmilk? The research showing that breastmilk is the ideal food for an infant was conducted with the environmental toxins in the milk. It's still ideal. What we should focus on is cleaning up the environment so that there are less environmental toxins harming women and babies, not on discouraging breastfeeding.

Suggesting non-toxic "entirely affordable" $500 cribs? Somebody is out of touch.

Speaking of out of touch: while it would be great if hospitals would use organic cotton swaddling blankets and serve organic meals, that is not going to factor into my decision of which hospital to go to, should I for some reason need to visit a hospital. I can think of many, many much more important factors. (Sidenote: my homebirth used a lot fewer resources and was a lot more "eco-friendly" than the cesarean I would have had in a hospital would have been. That did not factor into my decision making, and I do not feel the slightest bit of remorse.)

Suggesting that families get rid of their microwaves, as "Processed foods made for the microwave are junky"? Logic fail. I used the microwave a handful of times yesterday. Once, I nuked some milk (more on that later) to make hot chocolate from scratch. Another time, I heated up some leftover chicken. And for dinner, I had organic tomato and roasted red pepper soup heated in the microwave. And then I had some hot apple cider for dessert. Clearly the presence of a microwave in a home does not mean that the family is subsisting entirely on ramen and Easy Mac.

I'm not sure why it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but advocating that women of childbearing age become vegan in part because women who eat dairy products are five times more likely to have twins (which are more complicated pregnancies) is what caused me to throw the book. I am aware that becoming vegan has more of a positive impact on the environment than driving a hybrid does, but - trying to minimize the risk of twins? REALLY? 1.1% of births are a result of a twin pregnancy. Using admittedly faulty math on my part and assuming that a negligible portion of the population is vegan, as I don't feel like actually figuring out the numbers, consuming dairy products takes your chances of having twins from something like 0.2% to 1.1%. While I don't want to minimize the issues that can arise from a twin pregnancy (I know someone who lost her sons from Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome), most twin pregnancies do not have devastating complications. How the heck is this minimal risk of a problem a reason to give up sharp cheddar, and hot chocolate, and whipped cream, and other things that make the world go round?

I really can't read anymore. It's going back to the library.

Laundry

2009-12-06T12:15:00.000-05:00

George is also a great laundry helper. Minus the whole chewing on the diaper inserts and then trying to dump out the contents of the laundry hamper thing.

Shoveling Snow

2009-12-06T11:37:00.001-05:00

Apparently helping Mama shovel snow is HARD WORK!

Crawling

2009-12-05T13:16:00.000-05:00

As I previously mentioned, George's crawl has progressed in the past couple of days. He's started to involve his legs, he's sometimes picking his tummy up off of the ground, and he's very occasionally crawling on his hands instead of his forearms.

Snow!

2009-12-05T13:13:00.001-05:00

George got to play in the snow for the first time today! While we had that freak snowstorm when I was in labor, I don't think he even left the house before it melted.

There are currently a couple of inches on the ground, and it's sticking to the road and sidewalks. It's still snowing, so we'll have to see how much ends up accumulating. Jeff's had snow a couple of times so far but he says that nothing has stuck, so I'm shocked that we're getting a real snow before he is.

George thought that the snow was hilarious.

Hilarious that is, until he decided to eat it. Once he found out that it was cold and yucky, he was done with it and wanted to go inside.

The dogs are having a blast in the snow, as always.

Dog Bone

2009-12-04T22:50:00.001-05:00

Yummy.

George is once more acting like he is teething. And I'm not just saying that because of the dog bone.

Santa Baby

2009-12-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

I had an incredibly cute photo of George in my head, but getting him to cooperate was another matter.

I just wanted him to be in a red diaper and Santa hat,

facing the camera,

looking happy,

with his face unobstructed,

and the Santa hat on his head.

In the end I got a couple of decent shots, although they were blurrier than I would have liked and I think they would have turned out better had he been willing to sit down.

I may try again another day.

2009-12-03T00:07:00.001-05:00

George is getting so big! Just in the past week, he's started to exhibit a decent pincer grasp and to walk sideways along coffee tables and sofas. He's started to do a half-army-crawl, half-real-crawl at times.

He can pull himself to standing, from both a sitting and a crawling position, and then take toys out of his ottoman.

He's also able to balance on his new ride-on lion (thanks Aunt Carol!!!) well enough for me to push him all around the house. He is not, however, big enough to rest both feet on the floor and push himself. Yet.

And this picture has nothing to do with how big George is getting, but I'm going to post it anyway because I think it's funny. So there.

Is nothing safe?

2009-12-01T16:18:00.000-05:00

Well damn. Apparently George's cloth dinosaur book has lead in it. And I thought that cloth was supposed to be safe.

I'm getting really discouraged with children's toys. I've written to the manufacturers of our bath toys and have discovered that they're made of PVC, which I'm not comfortable with. The manufacturer of another toy that we have that I suspect may be PVC will not even answer questions unless they decide that they've received that particular question enough for it to go in the FAQ of their website. I sent them an email but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Melissa and Doug, a company that produces a lot of open-ended toys made of natural materials and that made one of George's rattles, recently had yet another recall on several of their toys due to excessive barium.

On top of it, pretty much everything is made in China. I'd really like to avoid products made in China, after seeing a horrifying series of photos about the pollution there. I just keep thinking that if George was born into a different set of circumstances, he could be one of the little deformed children covered in industrial pollution. But part of my stroller search took country of origin into account, and I could not find a single jogging stroller that was made in America.

The Non-Toxic Kids blog used the term consumer paralysis. No kidding. How the hell can you find things that you know are safe and that were produced in a way that did not have a super negative affect on the environment? Ugh. There are still a handful of brands that I feel comfortable purchasing (Haba, PlanToys, Green Sprouts, Under the Nile, handmade toys off of Etsy..), but they're so hard to find in brick and mortar stores. And while you have to do your research on used products to make sure that they were not recalled and do not contain unsafe plastics or paints, at least you can rest assured that you're helping the environment by not purchasing a newly manufactured product and by saving the used product from a landfill.

George and Daddy Cook Breakfast

2009-11-30T16:58:00.002-05:00

I'm several days right behind right now on posting, partially due to camera issues. Our camera battery charger was somehow misplaced in all of the chaos of moving, and despite some time spent in our storage unit over the weekend, we're still not able to find it. I really don't think we're going to be able to find it until we start unpacking, quite frankly. I've tried just hooking the camera up to the computer using the camera-USB cord that I use to transfer pictures, but leaving it plugged in for hours does not appear to do anything to the battery. Sigh. It's basically dead until we start to unpack, as far as I can tell.

For the moment, I'm relying on a mix of borrowed cameras but as I don't have their respective softwares installed on my computer, posting anything with pictures is slow going. I promise that I'll try to do better.

On Friday, Jeff and George decided to cook us all breakfast.

Step 1: Dress appropriately. Aunt Cary's childhood apron does quite nicely at keeping stylish cow diapers from getting covered in food, and some leggings can keep little legs warm.

Step 2: Argue about what to cook: collard greens, or breakfast pizza? George was staunchly in the collard greens corner, with basically everyone else advocating strongly for breakfast pizza. But when Daddy handed George some sausage, he decided to come around.

Step 3: Actually do the cooking.

Step 4: Enjoy!

Jeff left town again yesterday morning, and we already miss him. Fortunately we know that he will be back within three weeks, for good this time.

Teeth!

2009-11-28T21:18:00.000-05:00

George got his Christmas wish for two front teeth a little bit early.

2009-11-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, George got to meet his great uncle and great grandmother for the first time.

His great grandmother had some medical issues after we left and is now in the hospital - please keep her in your thoughts.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T18:05:00.000-05:00

After about two weeks in which the official word varied day by day on whether Jeff would have to work for Thanksgiving, he finally ended up being able to come home! He arrived around 11:30 pm last night.

George and I went to visit my grandmother yesterday, and I think that she enjoyed getting to meet George for the first time. We tried to feed George Thanksgiving Dinner #1, but he was only interested in the collard greens. He got mad at us for even trying to feed him little treats like pumpkin pie and baked apples because the collard greens were in sight and were obviously much better than anything else on the table.

George was a bit more adventurous today: he decided to go ahead and eat some turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potato casserole (with the pecans picked out), green beans, and stuffing. He wasn't such a big fan of cranberry sauce or of pink stuff. He's getting increasingly proficient with getting stuff in his mouth and swallowing it, and is now at the point where he is able to really eat food instead of just play with it. As a result, he ended the meal in a bit of a food coma, too tired to even put his arm down.

Unfortunately, as the rest of us are now ready to take it easy, he appears to have gotten a second wind.

Collard Greens

2009-11-22T20:36:00.000-05:00

I think that George may have spent too much time watching the dogs eat.

One Year Ago

2009-11-22T09:48:00.000-05:00

How much things have changed.

Aonghus

2009-11-21T20:17:00.000-05:00

We found Aonghus at a shelter two and a half years ago. He had been a stray, and was just over the waiting period and was available for adoption. Our initial impression was that he was incredibly laid back and mellow. Shortly after getting home, we began to realize just how afraid he was. Before letting him in the house, we took him on a walk around the neighborhood. When he saw another dog in the park he bolted, somehow escaping out of his collar. A couple of other people in the park helped us catch him again. I tried to take pictures of him when we got home but he hid under the coffee table. I tried brushing him but he coiled in fear at the brush.

We began the slow process of trying to teach him to be less afraid. We were never able to manage certain things: his fear of dogs he didn't know, or of having his nails touched or his teeth examined. But he gradually seemed to become more comfortable with us. We taught him how to be cuddled, which is something that he hadn't been able to do when we adopted him.

As he shed the many extra pounds that he came to us with (how a stray dog was so overweight, we never did know), he became more and more energetic. He was soon a handful, between the nervousness issues and the energy and the cunning: he was able to jump on top of things to grab food, to jump over baby gates, and sometimes to open doors. He also became quite attached to us, and I could easily see why the breed is sometimes referred to as being velcro dogs. Wherever I turned, there he was. He was always alert and always watching. Jeff and I laughed when we saw the movie "Bolt", because Aonghus was Bolt. Ears and everything.

Once we took Aonghus to the vet as he had eaten chocolate and possibly wire off of the table, and they did an x-ray to determine if there was any wire in his intestines. While they were fine, there were a couple of BBs lodged him his back. I left feeling like I understood better why he was the way that he was.

At one point we decided to work with a trainer on a weekly basis to get him used to being around new dogs and other strange (to him) situations. It helped quite a bit, but there were some barriers that we were never quite able to break through. He could handle new dogs in off-lead situations, but not when he was on a leash. He still wasn't comfortable with strange people, although he was getting better and better at having visitors in the household.

And then: Brian walked into the house when helping us move, and Aonghus bit him. It was unprovoked.

I called my aunt, who does dog rescue. We talked a long time. Jeff and I talked a long time. My aunt had asked a lot of questions, and mentioned to us that there were other warning signs: the dog aggression, the protectiveness of us and of George. Jeff and I ultimately decided that we cannot take the risk that another incident happen. While Brian was okay, the next person may not be. And the next person could be George.

This morning, Aonghus and I went on a nice walk. We played fetch in the backyard, which was always his favorite game. Aonghus had the unheard of treat of ham for breakfast.

And then my mom and I took him to the local animal shelter, knowing exactly what would happen. With a bite history, Aonghus is not placeable. I signed a release for euthanasia, which the shelter behaviorist agreed was the best option.

Even in death, Aonghus was ever alert: eyes wide open, ears perked up. His body was more relaxed than I had ever seen it, save the time that he was coming out of general anesthesia for a teeth cleaning. But I was still surprised how much of his own soul his body had retained.

Aonghus, you were dearly loved and will be missed more than you know. I hope that you're now free of the demons which have haunted you for years. I hope that you're happier now than you ever were on this earth.

2009-11-19T22:12:00.000-05:00

George's army crawl is getting progressively faster, and he's more and more aware that he can reach things if he wants to.

Dylan (and his ears) need to learn to watch out for George. The toy in the foreground is one of Jeff's old toys, and can make various jingling and ratcheting noises.

One of George's favorite things in the last two days has been taking the apple toy off of the exersaucer. I'll put it back on and it will be gone in less than 10 seconds. Crazy.

In non-baby news, I managed to get a driver's license and plates here today. It's a really good thing I did, too - I've been driving with an expired license for a few days now and hadn't realized. Without going into too many details, obtaining a license and registering the vehicle was a multi-day process because they insisted that I needed a copy of my marriage license in order to register a car here, which involved going to the courthouse as we somehow managed to lose both copies within weeks of our wedding, and because their computers were down yesterday statewide. I think that the employees did treat me slightly better today than usual because George flirted with everyone he saw and so they couldn't help themselves.

I also learned that the DMV does not have any changing tables, which was awesome because George apparently poops everytime he sets foot inside a DMV. Go George. Fortunately today I went to the one at the mall, and of course the mall had a family restroom I could use.

Nebulizer

2009-11-18T23:09:00.000-05:00

George has broncitis and needs a nebulizer treatment four times per day, for the next week or so. He hates it. As he's a very strong baby, this is a two-person job. Poor little guy.

2009-11-17T21:53:00.000-05:00

Terry and Karen found some more of Jeff's old toys: some alphabet blocks, a Duplos train, and a toy that makes different rattling and jingling noises. George and I had a fun time playing with them this evening.

Smiley Baby

2009-11-16T22:28:00.000-05:00

A video for Daddy.

Birthday Dinner

2009-11-16T22:16:00.000-05:00

Beards are fun to grab.

Army Crawl

2009-11-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

What glasses should we get for George?
	Dark Gray Miraflex Baby Zero2
	Dark Gray Miraflex Mini Baby
	Red
	Bright Blue
	Baby Blue
	Yellow
	Green
	White
	Light Gray
	Round Frames
	Oval Frames
	Square Frames

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