Joshua's Spot

Spring (and change) in the air...

First and foremost - Joshua has a new little cousin, as of yesterday. Felicia's sister Rachel (and, incidentally and far in the background, where he should be, her husband Erik) gave birth to a 6 pound, 9 ounce daughter named Hannah, after a disgustingly ridiculous number of pushes, like, four. We're hoping Felicia's next delivery is like that:  get to the hospital, get your epidural, go "eh", and there's yer baby, plop, just like that.

(Rachel's story, I'm sure, would be rather different. But then, what does she know? She was on heavy medication at the time. MY version is probably no less fictional than hers would be. And Erik was in a chauffer-driven car on the way out from NYC for most of it, so I think we're pretty much free to make up our own story here, people.)

Joshua would be absolutely thrilled to hear he has a new little baby girl-cousin, if only he spoke English well enough to understand what we were trying to tell him. Felicia and I, however, are thrilled, and we can only assume that Grandma Jo is beside herself, since she's been too busy with SOMETHING for the past couple days to complain about the lack of blog activity.

Meanwhile, back on the home front...

WE'RE DEEP IN THE MIDST OF THE WEANING PROCESS.

Sorry for shouting, but it seemed appropriate. Consider it a fair, if virtual, taste of the decibel level that we've had in the house the past couple days, since we began this whole dramatic change in our entire delicately adjusted way of being as a burgeoning family.

Hey, we had to do it sometime. The spur, I think, was Felicia's increasing desire (entirely unrelated, I'm sure, to Hannah's arrival in the world) to Be Pregnant Again, and thus to Have Another Boo. This, obviously, is not so easy when one is still breastfeeding, and thus pumping all those ovulation-suppressing hormones into one's system (and I'm not talking about mine, here, people). So the Decision Was Made that we should start the process of getting this Boo off his Booby, and we put the plan into effect a couple days ago. Mom would not breastfeed him except at night (*), and would stop pumping except for (temporarily) doing one session before she leaves for work, so the Grandma and the Daddy would have at least one bottle of booby-milk to give the Boo when he wakes up in the morning, and to eke out thereafter through the day as needed. (Since Daddy is up about, oh, four HOURS before the Grandma every day, and since the Boo is still at least somewhat hungry for the booby-milk when he first wakes up, this means Daddy has gotten it all and that it's all gone by the time Grandma wakes up and gets her sorry butt moving in the morning. HA. Serves her right for getting a decent night's sleep, the early bird gets the worm, gotta strike while the booby-milk is hot, and all that.)

* You can see the obvious loophole. Given that His Poopiness has NEVER consistently slept through the night, this "no booby-feeding except at night" loophole is big enough to drive a milk truck through. What this means, in practice, is that for the time being, he's getting about 80% of his daily caloric intake between 6pm and 5am, when he and his momma are conspiring to MORE than make up for all the booby-feeding sessions they're missing during the day. But I digress.

And the corrollary to this loophole is that Daddy and Grandma get to struggle by all day on nothing but solid food, water, juice, and whole milk (so sue us, we accellerated the American Academy of Pediactrics-approved schedule for introducing cow's milk by a month) all day, and then Momma gets to come swooping in at the end of an increasingly hairy afternoon and play Supermom, presenting the Superboobs to the rescue of us all. At least until Daddy insists that it's time for the other shoe to drop, anyway, and tells her she has to give him a glass of cow's milk or a sippy-cup full of water, just like the rest of us mere mortals.

To be fair, Felicia has been surprisingly good about following along with The Plan, now that we've finally decided to implement it, after many months of delay and hemming and hawing. To my surprise, she's even decided that it's time to start enforcing the Sleep-Through-the-Night Plan, AT THE SAME TIME, which deprives them both of some otherwise easily-justified midnight booby-time. (No, all you moms out there who are wondering, she is not suffering from exploding-boob syndrome, nor is she leaking all over herself, nor is she in serious pain.  Sure, her relevant bits feel a bit like she had a silicone implant by the end of the day, but she's otherwise fine - though I keep warning the Boo to stand back when it comes time to do his bedtime feeding, for fear it'll be akin to drinking from a fire hose. Still more proof that Felicia was genetically engineered to be Supermom, if any more were necessary.)

So, we're into Day Three of this scheme, and so far so good. Mom hasn't had her entire upper superstructure explode (knock wood), the Boo hasn't starved yet (ditto), Daddy is still here to write it all about (ditto ditto), and although Da Gim is feeling pretty neglected and gunshy, even HE is still relatively intact, a few pulled dog-hairs notwithstanding.

Grandma and Grandpa, however, are AWOL, so it's hard to say how they feel about this whole thing. Grandpa Ken returned from Michigan last night, and shlepped the Grandma off to the coast within a record-setting 15 hours, meaning he'd hardly even taken his laptop out of his briefcase before he'd kidnapped my main helpmate in this whole daytime childcare/weaning scheme.

Shocking. Time to import another grandma, for backup.

Shlepping in style

In preparation for our upcoming experiment this weekend with taking the baby camping with us (in Redwood National Park, down the road from here on the coast a couple hours away, in case anyone's interested), we decided to try out a new piece of gear - namely, a Baby Backpack. We put it through its paces last night, and it was a big hit, with both baby and Daddy. Check out the pics of the trial run in the photo album...

And, incidentall, we went back to our normal routine yesterday... and HAD A GREAT DAY, thankyouverymuch. Books, shmooks, we do better on our own, HA. (Thank goodness, 'cause Daddy really needed a good day with this little Tasmanian Devil, just to soothe his jangling nerves...)

Exersaucing our way to happiness...

We decided it was time to throw a few new toys at this little boy, to see if we could expand our repertoire of Distraction Methods and thus keep him occupied while we go about our lives to at least a minimal degree. So we made a trip to Toys 'R' Us on Saturday, which was almost entirely a waste of time, since they don't seem to think any kid below Nintendo Age is worth selling to... but even so, we managed to dig up (drum roll please...) an EXERSAUCER. Which was a big hit, thank goodness, even though he's technically a little young for it.

For instance, he's still just a tad short, as you can see. ("Look, ma - no feet!")

The puppy, meanwhile, stood there and watched me putting this thing together with this very accusing look on his face, which seemed to say in puppy language, "I don't remember you getting ME anything this cool, big guy." Which is just SO wrong - Gimli just has the memory of, well, a dog.

It's just that you ATE all your toys, Gim. Cough 'em up and get over it.

There are more photos in the album, folks. (Oh joy. Oh rapture...)

Of mice and minivans...

Briefly:

I made my dad cry? KEWL...

Okay, now on to our regular daily programming. I thought I'd give you an update on what's been going on with Joshua's Daddy lately - I know, I know, you're not really interested, you'd rather hear about the baby. But TOUGH. (I'll throw in a baby picture, just to bribe you into listening. I'm that desperate for adult conversation, really.)

You're going to laugh at me (I know you are), but I've been approaching another major milestone in my downward slide into irretrievable parent-geek-hood: yes, I've been experiencing an early but pronounced stage of Minivan Envy. What's particularly sad about this is that it's only a year ago that I finally bought a Manly-Man Vehicle with more testosterone (barely) than what my kid sister drives - I guess we could argue about that, but I think I win just on the sheer fact of greater size, my Titan versus her Jeep. And now here I am, my monster truck relegated to duty as a baby-hauler, having been used hardly at all for its intended purpose of shlepping piles of dirt and trees and drywall and other such manly things, because first my knee reconstruction and then His Poopiness intervened before any major projects could get underway that would have required significant truckishness.

So I find myself overlooking the integral cargo tie-downs in the cargo bed, and the nifty little lockable toolbox in the outside of the left rear wheel well, and the four-ton towing capacity, and even the factory-applied (as opposed to aftermarket) bed liner... and wishing Mr. Truck had a baby-view mirror, so I could watch what the Pookachoo is up to in the back seat. And it would sure be nice if the truck had some sippy-cup holders, and maybe a set of LATCH attachments in the middle seat.

Clearly, I've unwittingly migrated into a market segment that Nissan did noooot have in mind when they set about designing a big, bad, macho manly-man truck. (For that matter, it's a market segment I didn't entirely have in mind a year ago, either - but then, who's complaining? I did get a really super-cool Jack Spade diaper bag for a wedding present, after all.)

All this comes to a head anytime I have to haul the whole family around, dad, mom, baby, and especially puppy, in one of our existing vehicles. The trip up to Klamath Falls weekend before last started the whole thought process; this past weekend, running all over the Grants Pass Greater Metropolitan (ha!) Area on the Garden Tour just gave it added impetus. Minivan Envy. You betcha. Boy would those sippy-cup holders and the baby-view mirror be nice...

The Garden Tour, mind you, is one of my very favorite things, and a highlight of the year. Not just because I love getting inspiration about all the beautiful things we could be doing with our property if only it weren't a Big Huge Dirt Pile (more on that in a moment) - but also because there's this undeniable voyeuristic pleasure in seeing how other people (usually richer people, admittedly) live and what kind of neat stuff they have around their houses. I peek into all the hedges and planting beds and underneath all the trees to see what's growing and try to play the "let's identify that plant" game; Felicia, meanwhile, peeks into all the windows and checks to see if the doors are locked, hoping she can get a look inside. (I just know I'm going to have to bail her out someday, if not for trespassing then for shoplifting, given her habit of "taste-testing" stuff from the bulk food bins at the grocery store and showing up at the checkout line with nothing but empty plastic bags.)

Of course, the downside to the Garden Tour comes at the end of the day, when we pull into our own driveway and are smacked in the face with a visual reminder that the various contractors working on our landscaping have been coming up with all new ways of de-beautifying our property. I know, I know, it's all just a stage, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and all that garbage, but still.

The latest taunt to our thwarted aesthetic senses was dumped into the landscape just yesterday: namely, a massive cement water tank half-buried next to our driveway, in an all-too-prominent location that makes it the very first thing one sees when pulling up to the house. The positive aspect of this monstrosity is that it should finally resolve our Water Problem - namely, lack thereof, due to some impossible-to-locate leak in the mile or so of PVC pipe that runs between the well we share with three other properties and our house, which became apparent just as we finished planting 50 or so new trees and ran out of natural rain to keep them happy with - which has been driving me crazy and keeping me running up and down hills with hoses (in between baby feedings and diaper changes) for the past month trying to keep all our plants and trees alive, which is NOT the preferred irrigation method around here.

The negative aspect to this solution to the Water Problem is that I'm not kidding, the first thing you see as you pull up is this massive cement vault, like somebody's tomb, sticking up out of the ground, with a bright fluorescent blue pressure tank and a bunch of Rube Goldberg-ish PVC tubing sticking out of the top of it, along with a truly lovely freestanding plywood... "thing" holding the breaker panel, which looks like a big signboard that's just waiting for a tourist trap ad to be stuck on it.

We're trying to come up with ways to hide, or at least disguise, King Tut's Tomb - not that we're not grateful to have a ready supply of water to support our plants in the manner to which they aspire, mind you. Apparently the traditional thing to do around Grants Pass is to stick a shed on top of it, on the theory that you've got this nice level cement pad already there, so you may as well park your lawnmower and weedwacker and meth lab and other assorted paraphernalia on top of it and stick some kind of a roof over them. Of course, it's also traditional in Grants Pass to park three generations' worth of worn-out cars, trucks, refrigerators, dishwashers, and surplus children in the front yard, in case you need spare parts or a handy place to bury a body. So perhaps we can come up with something less traditional, but a bit more elegant. They tell me it's not really a good idea to turn it into a lap pool, but I haven't given up yet.

Sadly, King Tut's Tomb fits in all too well with the rest of the landscaping at the moment, since our entire yard is basically a massive pile of dirt with trenches and pipes running through it more or less at random. They tell me there are several hundred perennials and shrubs waiting at our landscaper's property, all ready to go in once we have a ready supply of water, so hopefully if I can just be patient a bit longer everything will work out for the best, and we'll have a Real Yard Very Soon, as opposed to something all too closely resembling a BMX track. We'll see. Getting people up here to do Actual Work is a perpetual challenge, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

Wait! I have the solution! MINIVANS. Lots and lots of minivans, parked all over the front yard. They'll hide the dirt, AND I can shlep the whole family around in comfort and something vaguely resembling style, sippy cups and all.

Yeah, that's the ticket...

Joshua's guide to baby shopping...

As I would have anticipated, Grandma Kay and Grandpa Ken have taken to their grandparently roles like ducks to a pond. (Although I suspect their little legs might be paddling like mad under the surface; they look awfully happy and placid...) They're so agreeable about holding the baby, feeding the baby, changing the baby, burping the baby, and otherwise pawing over the baby in every possible way, that Daddy has had remarkably little to do with the baby the past few days, other than chauffering him in to his Momma at the office at lunchtime so she can have some Quality Time with her boy. Which is just fine, and don't worry about me feeling neglected or supplanted or anything. After all, I'll have the next, oh, 18 years or thereabouts with the little burpmeister, all on my lonesome. It's not like I have to rush into it or anything. Reinforcements are a Good Thing.

Grandma and Grandpa have gotten so into this whole baby thing, in fact, that they've even developed their own increasingly firm opinions about various items of baby gear. They were In Awe of the new baby swing, which arrived Monday and was assembled by Joshua's very handymanly Daddy the following morning, to many oohs and aahs from the audience. And Grandma and Grandpa agreed that the new swing is to the old swing as caviar is to Jello. (Yes, Jean, I would strongly suggest that you consider getting a swing, or snookering someone else, like, say, me, into getting one for you; particularly when you're by yourself, it's like having an extra set of hands in the house to rock the baby when you go do something else, like, say, pee, or get a bottle ready. And thanks for the offer to EBay the old swing, Grandma Jo, but I think we're going to relegate it to Felicia's office. It may be substandard, but it's still better than paying one of Felicia's medical assistants however many dollars an hour to hold the baby instead of doing their Real Jobs - though they certainly don't complain about it! The office seems to be where the Bad Toys get sent when they are supplanted by something less, well, bad.)

Other product ratings on which Daddy and Grandparents seem to be in agreement:

• The Medela nipples are better than the Avent ones. The Avent nipples work, but they take a lot more effort, and Joshua don't like 'em! Whether this is a bad thing, or suitable preparation for the baby's future life of sweating and grunting for every bit of possible advantage, I'll leave it up to all you armchair theorists to decide.
• The Graco car seat, unlike the Graco swing, is a wonderful device; we (Grandparents and Daddy) especially like the fact that you can tighten all the shoulder and lap belts at once with one tug on a single strap, rather than having to fiddle with them individually. (The little neck support thingie, however, is essentially useless, and seems to be basically a fig leaf. Granted, to hold up a newborn's head effectively, you really need one of those neck braces they put on football players who have a tendency to butt 350-pound linebackers too hard with their heads.) In fact, I'm told that Steve and Liz developed their own bit of baby gear envy when they saw our car seat in action. Ha! Serves 'em right.

Along these lines, I've decided that now that Joshua is a full four weeks old (even if it feels more like a year, sometimes), and we've had time to try out all the various types of baby gear - at least those relevant to his tender age - it would therefore be appropriate and a Service To The World At Large if we were to provide a certain amount of guidance to future baby shoppers, along with feedback on which items among the flood of much-appreciated and much-loved gifts we received (and those we've bought for ourselves) have proven to be true gems, and which have proven to be... ahem, "not" gems. (Don't worry, all you generous people who gave so many things to us, it's all our fault when said things haven't worked out well, since we were the ones who blasted through Babies 'R' Us in about 45 minutes armed with nothing more intelligent than a checklist, provided by the store, and a scanner, and blitzed everything without doing the proper research, and thereby told you what we thought we wanted. We didn't know any better! We were overwhelmed by the bazillions of choices and the three-page list of Things We Absolutely Had To Have Or The Baby Would Grow Up Weird And Go To Some Podunk College No One Has Ever Heard Of! We just wanted to escape as quickly as possible, so we scanned everything that was standing between us and daylight as fast as we could! It's not your fault! And thank you anyway, we love you!)

Here are the marvels that various wonderful people got for us, the wonders of engineering and enlightened childcare technology which we absolutely treasure and really would not have thought of on our own, and which I strongly suggest someone get for any parents-to-be they might know (like, say, JEAN):

• The TinyLove mobile, which has several significant advantages over any other mobile we've seen (and we now have about, oh, five, in various places around the house): 1) it has a bunch of different classical tunes (not your standard lullabies, which you get sick of hearing within about, oh, 21 minutes after you have a baby) from three different composers; 2) all of said pieces are played in key (critical if you don't want to go crazy, and, I suspect but can't yet prove, also critical if you want your baby to be able to carry a tune in a bucket when he/she grows up); 3) it has all kinds of interesting things to look at, they're extremely colorful, and they move, which is cool and probably more stimulating than if they just rotate in space; and 4) it's built like Fort Knox, as opposed to these other chintzy things that seem guaranteed to come apart the first time the baby tugs on them. (Note that no mobiles seem to be designed very well when it comes to attaching to things securely, since they all assume they'll be connected to a very narrow crib rail and won't work well with anything else, including a better-built crib with a hefty rim; but the Tiny Love mobile's attachment system is better and more widely adaptable than the others we've seen.)
• Those one-piece, no-legged sleep sacks that look like a sleeping bag with arms and that zip up the middle, leaving the baby's legs safely tucked away inside the sack where he can't kick his way out of them and get himself all cold and miserable (and therefore NOISY) in the middle of the night. Since the Safety Police have emphatically told us in a gazillion different ways that one Must Not (MUST not!) put a blanket over the baby while he's sleeping, for fear he'll suffocate himself - or, worse, throw it on like a cape and pretend he's Queen Margaret or something, no doubt leading to a life playing bit parts in bad off-off-Broadway shows and working as a busboy in a Sbarros in the West Village - these sleep sacks are not only a very practical, no-fuss way to keep the little tyke warm at night, they're also probably going to prove to be critical to getting him into the right college someday and making him a productive member of society.
• The Baby Einstein play gym is a veritable fiesta for the eyes and senses, and also gives him a nice place to do "tummy time" on the floor without eating quite as much dog hair as he would if we just stuck him on the carpet. Joshua spends... well, minutes anyway (he still has the attention span of a gnat at this point, after all) looking at all the bright colors and neato toys and things hanging all over it. It's still not quite as perfect an item as the Super Swing, but it shows every prospect of becoming yet another step on his way to aforesaid Good College and Productive Membership in Society, yadayada.

And, in the spirit of a true consumer's guide, here are a few "pans" that didn't work out as well as we expected - besides the Graco swing, which I won't harp on again, poor thing:

• The Diaper Champ seemed like a good idea at the time - it doesn't need any special cartridges (unlike the Diaper Genie), so you can use any ordinary garbage bag, which saves trips to Walmart or whatever your source of refill cartridges might be (as well as money), and the mechanism seemed really easy to use. Unfortunately, the mechanism jams all the time, so you spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort trying to jimmy it into dropping the last diaper so you can dispose of the current one properly. Annoying, to say the least, and since you generally have to open the lid and yank the jammed diaper out, you not only wind up smelling the old diapers a lot more often than any sensible person would ever want, but you also wind up playing in poop a bit more than anyone over the age of, oh, 18 months can really appreciate. So we've broken down and gotten ourselves a Diaper Genie. Since the latter is apparently a controversial item, we'll have to see whether or not it's really an improvement. (In the meantime, guess where the Diaper Champ is going to wind up? That's right: in Felicia's office, where all the Bad Toys go...)
• This isn't really a "pan" per se, but rather simply an observation: it really is possible, I now firmly believe, to have too many baby wash cloths. Ditto with receiving blankets. I know said opinions will raise some eyebrows, since I've had multiple people tell me that you can never have too many of them - and they certainly are popular items to give at baby showers, which is how we wound up with 1,532 washcloths and 367 receiving blankets in the first place - and granted, you do need several of each, since they're useful for multiple things and they do tend to get dirty. But 6 or so washcloths would really be enough, and maybe about as many blankets, unless you really are not on speaking terms with your washing machine (or, worse, don't remember where to find it). That said, all those handmade blankets and afghans and plush towels and things we got from kind, talented people out there all have honored places in our house, including one particularly wonderful one that's hanging on the wall in the nursery, and another that is permanently draped over the crib. (It can't go in the crib, remember, because the Safety Nazis would haul us away and give our baby to Child Protective Services, who would stick him in a foster home where he would be beaten regularly but at least wouldn't have a blanket in the crib, horror of horrors that that would be. Go figure.)
• Remember my prediction about the baby socks - that they'd wind up in 300 mismatched singletons, with no one sock matching any other? Well... Beth had the right idea: get 15 pairs or so all in white, or whatever color you like best, so if you lose a few, you won't have to worry about having "orphan socks" hanging around. (Socks, by the way, are surprisingly versatile: Joshua uses them for mittens, since he has a habit of playing with his eyelids, which is not a particularly good idea with all the hangnails he's constantly getting. And I guess we could always use them as pee pee tee pees, although they're a little big for the purpose. Hmm.)

Ironman Baby, fussing

The past few days have been just a little bit... challenging.

Joshua normally (if one can say "normally," with only 3-1/2 weeks worth of history to judge by) is a very good, relatively quiet baby. Sure, he keeps us up much of the night, but babies do dat, or so we're told. He sleeps just about all day, which is kind of a relief, actually, since otherwise we'd quickly become Parents of Very Little Brain from sheer raw-nervedness.

Which is exactly the direction in which we've been headed this week.

The little poop factory has been soooo fussy the past few days. He's settling down a little bit at night, though that's only relative, meaning he quiets down enough for us to sleep for an hour or two in between feedings through the night, so maybe we get four, maybe a blissful five hours of sleep. Movement in the right direction, no? During the day, however, instead of doing his usual hibernating bear (er - maybe "squirrel" would be more accurate) imitation, he's been crying just about all the time he's not feeding. Or so it seems, but you'd probably blur it all together into one long cry too if you could hear the pair of lungs on this guy. (I think the Three Tenors should start looking over their shoulders, the next generation is already training up.) He cries when we try to put him in his bouncy seat, which he normally just loves. He cries when we go for a ride in the car, which he normally just loves, at least until the road sounds put him to sleep. He cries just about all the time he doesn't actually have his mouth full of boob, and sometimes he even cries then.

This is not good for one's spinal cord. I don't know why it is, but somehow we as parents seem to have something buried deep in our brain stem that takes a crying baby and transmogrifies that signal immediately into adrenaline and an overwhelming need to find a sabertooth tiger to wrestle down, or a small building to erect in a very short time to provide shelter for our Pack. Not restful, is what I'm getting at.

After eliminating a number of appealing, relatively straightforward possibilities, such as that he's hungry, or wanting to be held, or needing to be burped, or has a dirty diaper, we ultimately narrowed it down to one leading contender: the iron supplements he’s been taking ever since his little Incident. Posit: the iron upsets his stomach and/or makes him constipated, thus causing him to cry so much, because he’s really uncomfortable. We even decided to take a page from my engineer father’s parenting handbook and try a Scientific Experiment – we withheld the iron on Monday, watched how he behaved, gave it again on Tuesday, watched how he behaved, and then withheld it again yesterday, and again watched how he behaved. (Granted, ideally you’d want a longer period in between so the iron could work its way out of his system completely, but hey, we’re not being paid to do this, folks.) So far, there’s a one-to-one correlation between taking the iron supplements and Joshua being really, really fussy all day.

So Dr. Steve readily agreed to re-take Joshua’s CBC and check his hemoglobin levels and other critical factors, so we can better decide whether or not the poor little guy needs to continue taking the iron or if it’s safe to take him off it. It’s a toss-up: baby takes the iron and cries all day, or doesn’t take the iron, remains anemic, and sleeps all day. Hmm. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, Steve and Liz had us over for dinner at their house last night, which was fantastic. There are several competing theories to explain why they decided to invite us over to their place for dinner at this particular historic juncture: 1) they had both sets of grandparents there, a very rare occasion, and wanted to prove to their respective parents that yes, they really do have friends in this oddball town, even if said friends are pretty weird; 2) Steve wanted to show off his nifty new grill, since he's taken more than his fair share of flak over the postage-stamp-sized thing that most of us had at one point in our lives but got rid of once we graduated from college, and Steve wanted to prove that he's a Manly Man now that he's a dad and has appropriately graduated to big-boy gear; and/or 3) it really had nothing to do with us at all, and it was actually a case of Bela inviting her babyfriend Joshua over for a little nookie on the couch. (This has become the leading theory, especially given that they both dressed up in bunny outfits for the occasion. Coincidence? I think not. And we all know what rabbits do. See photo.)

In any case, whatever the reason, a good time was had by all, and the food was marvelous. Turns out that Steve and Liz are both apparently rather intimidated by the idea of inviting yours truly over for dinner, for some oddball reason, which is pretty weird - what, they think I don't serve cereal for dinner more often than not, when they're not around?? Interestingly, the dish they served - salmon with a black bean and corn relish - looked very similar to one that I used to foist, er, serve sister Christine back in the halcyon days when she was homeless and shacking up with me in Traverse City and I was in training to learn how to cook up to Felicia's emerging standard. Not a coincidence: turns out Steve and Liz decided to serve me my own recipe, the sneaks. Whatever the source, it was durn good, and the piece de resistance was Liz's famous (and entirely original, as far as I know) chocolate pear tart, which makes me turn green with envy every time I have it. Ahh, if only I could bake, Felicia would really love me...

Speaking of envy, after a couple hours of watching Steve & Liz's much-better-than-ours swing work its magic on Joshua and put him right to sleep after he'd been fussy all dang day, we went right home and ordered the thing. Looks like Joshua is just a Fisher Price boy, period, and the Graco swing can be consigned to whatever dustbin bad baby toys go to. You might say it's a waste of money to have two swings and only one baby, and granted, the Fisher Price swing's fastest setting might as well be labeled "Space Launch," but it's worth every penny as far as I'm concerned just to have lullabies that are in tune. As if it isn't painful enough to sit and listen to baby music all day, Graco has to make it all horribly tone-deaf, and coming out of a tinny, IBM-XT quality speaker to boot. Oy.

So we spent far too long at Steve and Liz's house, enjoying good food and great company, including the rare opportunity to see where bothof them came from (genetically speaking) and watch dueling grandparents compete for baby time. (We graciously loaned Joshua to whichever grandparent was deprived of Bela, as our small contribution to the noble cause of maintaining peaceful Hirni-Marshak relations.) We had such a good time and found it so difficult to go home that by the time we finally did darken our own doorstep, the puppy was barely speaking to us, and wouldn't even deign to hog our bed - instead, he huffily slept on the floor all night, sulking. Poor boy. We'll have to take him for a long romp in the mud today, as compensation.

(Suckers for puppy-guilt? Us? Pshaw.)

Just the two (and a half, ish) of us...

Before I forget, if you haven't checked in for a while, there are lots more pictures on Joshua's other spot. I think we might even be up to two, maybe three pages! So be sure to take a look - that is, assuming spending half an hour browsing through a whole bunch of baby pictures isn't right up there in your book with having someone stick a drillbit in your ear. (In which case, what are you doing at Joshua's little blog in the first place, huh, huh?)

Also before I forget (this being the morning of Random Thoughts bouncing through my very Random Mind): at the risk of stating the obvious for those who are not quite brand-new to blog-dom, you should be aware that as I add posts to this thingamajig, the old ones roll off the bottom... into the archives, to which you can find links along the left side of this page (sorted by month). If I've been particularly verbose, and you've been particularly lax about checking in (and shame on you, nyah), you may actually have missed some before they got archived. So if you're really a glutton for punishment, be sure to click on the archives over there to the left and bury yourself in all the Past Poops That Were Fit to Print.

There. Now that all that is taken care of and I've done my bit of shameless Joshpromotion for the morning, on to the business at hand...

As I think I've mentioned in blogspace previously, Grandma Jo and Grandpa Mike finally abandoned us (waah!) to our own devices (double-waah!) yesterday morning... like, way early yesterday morning, since they had to drive up to Portland to catch their plane. Portland is about a three and a half hour drive for Felicia-Knievel, about four and a quarter for mere mortals like me, and about, oh, six, maybe seven for grandparently types. So Mike and Joanne hit the road at the very uncivilized hour of about 4 am yesterday morning - as best my bleary mind can recall, since I not only don't function very well that early, I don't even believe any human being should ever have to personally experience such times in the morning, and certainly not without at least six, maybe eight cups of coffee. But we got up nonetheless, or made a good pretense of it anyway, and kissed them goodbye, while Grandma Jo smooched the baby all over his little chubby cheeks and she and Felicia both did a lot of much-deserved sniffling. Then we went back to bed, to not-really-sleep for a couple more hours, and woke up to a house in which we were alone with the baby.

All I can say is, thank goodness for baby swings. Even though we got what turns out to be a pretty rickety, substandard one that plays 15 songs all completely out of key and either rocks hardly at all or threatens to launch the little tyke into space (with nothing in between) - and even though we have serious Swing Envy every time we look at the one Steve and Liz picked out (they being the much more organized types that they are) - it's still like having a third set of hands available to hold the little guy while we do other random things, like, say, take showers, or go to the bathroom, or, well, write entries in the blog.

Otherwise, our first day on our own was a lot better than I would have expected. We actually managed to spend most of it out and about - running errands around town, going to Medford to look at porcelain tiles for the front porch and countertops for the outdoor kitchen we're building and go to Barnes & Noble and stuff - and then came home to a relatively relaxing evening at home, with just The Pack. Which consisted of a) Seinfeld, b) Sex in the City (Felicia's an addict, truly), and c) our first adventures in breastpumping, bottlefeeding, and firing up the bottle sterilizer.

Granted, getting this whole breastmilk-by-bottle system humming is the only way Felicia's ever going to be able to get back to work, so we can support our contractors' children in the manner to which they've become accustomed. But clearly, we have a few wrinkles to iron out. For one thing, the Medela nipples that came with the breastpump that Felicia's partner Tamara loaned us have a tendency to half-drown the little boob-happy tyke if his daddy isn't really careful about how far he tips the bottle. Number two, we'd better hope the pumping thing in itself goes just a little bit faster as time goes on, since at the moment it takes a very long time indeed to get an ounce or two in the bottles. (Luckily, it takes Joshua an equally long time to gobble down an ounce or two at the moment, but remember, if his growth continues in straight-line fashion, he's soon going to be 23 feet tall. One assumes he'll be just a tad more peckish by then.) And number three, Daddy has to get this whole thing down, or at least learn how to put on a better act of knowing what he's doing (like, say, not half-drowning the poor kid every time he tips the bottle), or Mommy is going to a) rip the bottle away and consign Daddy to the parenting dungeons, never to feed the baby again, and/or b) offer so much gratuitous advice on the precise angle of tiltage to use, or which way up the nipple should go, or what kind of tap on the lips will best signal Mr. Fussy that there's foodage approaching his little lips... that Daddy will throw his hands up in frustration and refuse to turn on Sex in the City the next time around, which will precipitate a major existential crisis, which Would Be Bad.

We'll sort it out. After all, between us we have something like, oh, 36 years of education - how complicated could it be?

(Any comments about "famous last words" and the like, you can just keep to yourselves, thankyouverymuch.)

Nesting, Nesting, and More Nesting...

A question I've been meaning to ask Maytag: why is it that no matter how long you set the dryer to run, the load is always damp on the first try?

Other great mysteries I've been pondering, as I try to blast through all the little things that we need to do to get ready for this little Tasmanian Devil who's about to land in our laps:

1) How does one keep all those thimble-sized baby socks together? (I see a train wreck looming on that one, with fifteen thousand singleton socks wandering around in the nursery dresser, each about the size of the tip of my pinky.)

2) What alternate uses can one find for surplus baby washcloths (of which we have enough to pave our driveway in plush polyester)? I'm thinking, like, maybe you could dry off a car with them, since they're a lot cheaper than chamois... though you'd have to sew together about, oh, thirty of them to get something manly-man sized. (And God help you if your buddies ever found out what you were waxing your ride with.)

3) Is it really possible that one little 8-ish-pound critter, who isn't even capable of independent motion much less making mudpies or eating fingerpaint (yet), could truly need so many clothes? I mean, short of putting on a fashion show, how is this little guy possibly going to go through so many onesies and socks and things?

Clearly, I've been doing Baby Laundry this morning. Not sure at what point it became a philosophical exercise - probably somewhere in the midst of folding all these things, which is a lot like making origami, actually. (Fold carefully, using only your pinky fingertips, tongue sticking out in concentration... my kingdom for a jeweler's loupe, so I could see what I'm doing...)

I'm beginning to see how these families with 13 kids actually happen - the parents had all these baby clothes and just hated to see them go to waste, so they kept popping out little ones to keep those onesies occupied. Tempting. I'll have to see what Felicia thinks about that, as a plan.

This week has been all about nesting. In other words, after 39 weeks and a few days thrown in after that brief moment of glory when we got ourselves into this mess in the first place, it finally penetrated my dinosaur brain that yes, we really are going to have a baby, and yes, I really am going to have to figure out how to take care of this little bugger after Felicia goes back to work and leaves me at home holding the diaper bag. Once I had this brilliant epiphany, and after I was done breathing into a paper bag and my heartrate was back to something approaching normal, I went into a blizzard of preparation. Which, in my little world, included some things that were fairly predictable (moving the bassinet and changing table into our bedroom, so Felicia's mom doesn't have us wandering in to change poopy diapers at 3am while she's here over the next few weeks)... and some things that would probably make sense only to my so-called brain, and maybe a few other similarly addled would-be and have-been ever-so-slightly-crazed dads-to-be (like calling all the landscaping contractors who are working on the house and setting in motion a flurry of activity, to make sure the baby has a lot of neato trees and a freshly redone front porch to come home to).

I just didn't expect Baby Laundry to be such a logistical and intellectual challenge... We may be in real trouble, here.