a brief interruption

This morning I discovered when I arrived at work around 7 AM that our web site was unavailable-- to be specific, our web hosting company did not renew our domain name registration. After furious e-mails by me involving words like "unacceptable" and "contract termination" and a customer support chat between Rob and our host, our web site was up and running again around 10 this morning. When the site returned I happily browsed and looked at pictures of our family and friends. When Rob and I first registered our domain name and began to post photos online of our preparation for Ally's arrival, we expected that the web site was for everyone else-- all the friends and family members who could not see us regularly and who may enjoy keeping up with our blundering attempts at child care. Now I see though that our web site is as much for us as anyone else because it helps us feel connected to each other when we are separated. Seeing Allison smile, or sneeze bananas, or chew on her toothbrush makes our days brighter in a way I could not have imagined before her arrival.

cheers

About a month ago I began offering Ally Cheerios. She liked the taste and was very entertained by "chewing," but was unable to feed herself; she could pick up the Cheerio and bring it to her mouth, but not transfer it into her mouth. After a few minutes of trying, she would begin to make her grunty-whiny "gimme" sound. But today... success! Ally looked intensely pleased with herself after maneuvering a Cheerio into her mouth, and quickly managed to consume about ten on her own. She developed a technique of sorts that involves picking up the Cheerio, inserting almost her entire hand into her mouth, opening her fingers, and then extracting her hand while sucking madly on her fingers. I suppose you can't argue with success.

garden state

Until this weekend, we had not taken a trip more than an hour or so away from home since Ally's birth. Finally convinced of our prepared-ness we packed the car on Friday with just about everything we own and ventured to New Jersey to visit our friends Mark and Emily and their son, Efram, near Trenton. The trip went off without a hitch, including dining on pears in the car and some rest stop nursing (classy!). As always, we had a blast together. In his lauded role as electronics guru Rob convinced Mark to purchase a new television within hours of our arrival. Efram and Ally engaged in some coed naked bathtub fun and Ally made a major dent in their stash of excellent homemade baby food. Emily and I herded everyone out into the windiest day in known history to enjoy bubble tea, and as always there was jolliness and mirth through long chats, games, and great meals. And like the rockin' new parents we all are, we just barely managed to stay awake until 11 PM to watch The Illusionist! The last time we visited Mark and Emily was last March, when Emily and I were both pregnant. It's funny to see the difference a year makes. Ally and Efram, in the belly: Ally and Efram, out of the belly:

I can bring home the bacon

There are some days as a working Mom that are pretty rough, and as I ride home on my commuter train I frantically wonder why I've signed up for this life. But then there are really good days, and today was one of those days. I had an extraordinary lunch with coworkers at my first "real" restaurant visit since July, chattered happily about politics (my goodness I can speak on matters other than diaper rash), and wrote some good code that worked on the first try. I even sold a textbook on Amazon, as Rob and I often have multiple copies of the same texts. The sky was blue and the sun was shining. When I picked up Ally at daycare, she was laughing hysterically at the other children who were throwing paper airplanes and watching her reaction. Our bean happily sat and played in the living room while I unloaded bags and ate a nice dinner of blueberry-apple oatmeal. After Rob arrived home, he folded a few of his own very snazzy paper airplanes, which he threw for Ally (see left), inspiring laughter so frantic she began to cough. After her bath, she fell asleep while nursing, her eyes closed and breath slow and regular. She woke briefly when Rob entered the room to zip her into her sleep sack and gave him a big smile and "bbbbb" sound before falling back to sleep. It was a great day.

the best $2.59 ever spent

There is a first-birthday tradition in China to spread before a child a variety of objects and toys; the item selected first by the child foreshadows her future profession. Based on Allison's fascination with her toothbrush, we predict either a career in dentistry or an OCD tooth-brushing compulsion. On Friday I visited the dentist for a cleaning and my hygienist, who has three young children, recommended giving to Allison a toothbrush. Aptly noting that every toy is the subject of chewing and gnawing, she feels that becoming accustomed to the bristles while playing will encourage Ally to accept future tooth-brushing. Ally is smitten with her toothbrush. She has ignored all of her cooler, larger, more expensive, light- and sound-emanating toys in favor of her toothbrush. She even played with it for nearly thirty minutes yesterday before bedtime, when her attention span is at its shortest. I think we'll need to buy more.

lowering our standards

In my previous life as one-half of a DINK couple, I used to wonder incredulously how someone could be too busy to make dinner. "How can you not have 20 or 30 minutes?", I would ask, pitying the legions of folks who must suffer from poor time management or skewed priorities or general disorganization and, by consequence, not have all the needed ingredients for a yummo dinner. Which brings us to Monday night. It was 7:00 PM and Allison was slumbering contentedly upstairs after her bedtime ritual of bath, book, and nursing. Before what I hoped would be a reasonable bedtime, we needed to complete the following tasks: 1. Feed ourselves dinner. Choices: a new recipe for yellow shrimp with coconut rice, requiring quickly defrosting a pound of shrimp from the freezer; stroganoff, a quick option ready in 30 minutes; roasted chicken, requiring 2 + hours of baking time; and homemade rosemary-potato soup. 2. Move baby bottles, lunch stuff, etc. to the dishwasher and run the dishwasher. 3. Move milk from 8 breast pump collection bottles into 3 6-oz. bottles for daycare. 4. Pack Allison's lunch: 1/4 cup cereal, 1/2 cup of fruit. 5. Pack lunches for Rob and myself for tomorrow. 6. After the dishwasher runs, remove pump collection bottles and assorted pump parts, re-rinse them since our dishwasher has been depositing sandy gunk on them lately, dry them, and pack them into work bag for the next day. 7. Contact our builder and the phone company about the water leaking into our basement from the hole through which our phone line comes into the house. 8. Call my grandmother to arrange for a visit the next Monday. 9. Call my parents. 10. Place an internet request for a pet sitter for a weekend away coming up. 11. Pay bills. 12. Rob works on his graduate research project. 13. Try to make some food for Allison, probably bananas. Wash food processor afterwards. Rob saw me looking forlornly at the list of meals I could prepare for Monday's dinner and the bag of frozen shrimp I was beginning to thaw and took pity. Carry out? Yep. Him: Hunan Chicken. Me: Shrimp, Hong Kong Style. Lovely. So today as I ate lunch (Monday's leftover carry out) I began to read with mild amusement the front article of today's Washington Post Food section: Wake Up and Cup the Coffee. I had a sense from the beginning that this article would only underscore our gauche home brew, much like touring model homes once highlighted my decorating failures (or buying second rate Chinese carryout illustrates my poor time management, etc.). We're rather proud to grind our own beans, but to be honest they're the cheapest beans we can buy at the market-- Eight O'Clock-- and I even have to drink decaf, which I imagine is a minor travesty. After learning that a good cup of coffee really requires an upgraded grinder (conical burr, thank you), I read with some embarrassment the response to our Eight O'Clock beans by a tasting panel: "it's hard to remain silent after a slurp of No. 3, which causes everyone to grimace over a thin body and a flavor so sour it brings burnt green apples to mind." Meanwhile, the article also quotes Ruth Poupon, co-owner of Patisserie Poupon in Georgetown and Baltimore: "This coffee craze is what the 30-something crowd is really into, and I'm just amazed they know so much about it." Woops. Guess we missed the memo about the coffee craze. But we have really well-informed opinions on diapers and strollers. Hmm, you say you're not interested and I should just move on to the cute baby pictures? Oh, fine. But please note that purchasing Jumperoos is one major reason why we're not enjoying Murky's El Salvador Malacara, which for $13.50/12 oz. would be "nutty and sweet, with no bitterness, a touch of chocolate, and, overall, a clean taste."

just break through already!

Yesterday Beth attended a baby shower for our neighbor who is due with her first, a little boy scheduled to arrive in early March. As sometimes seems to be the case it seems like many people we know are pregnant-- a coworker of Rob's, our first daycare provider, and every other woman in the grocery store. For awhile we considered putting together some advice to attach to our gift-- a "Top 10 Things I Wish I Had Known" list-- but in the end it sounded too preachy. Nevertheless it is fun to share these bits of advice... so how about you? What did you wish you had known? Here are some of ours: 1. If your baby's butt is red, your baby has diaper rash. Use some diaper cream. 2. Breastfeeding hurts for the first few weeks. Lactation consultants will tell you that if the latch is right it is painless, but it's just not true in the beginning. 3. Never let your baby stay awake for more than two hours if you can help it! Meanwhile, for the past week Ally has been acting a bit off. Her sleep patterns have been irregular and she has been more fussy than usual. The excessive drooling and gnawing on every object in sight has led us to believe that she is teething again, and yesterday we noticed the first definite sign that her top two front teeth are about to break through-- slightly puffy white spots right where the teeth will (soon?) appear. Today Ally surprised us by taking a very long morning nap. Earlier this week she had a string of days with 30-40 minute morning naps, so the two-hour marathon this morning was a shock! We decided around 11:15 to peek in on her and encourage her to wake up and were surprised to discover her sleeping on her side. Unlike many babies Ally doesn't seem to move around much when she sleeps; she rotates but rarely rolls. Since we weren't concerned with waking her at that point I snapped a picture, and believe it or not she slept for another 15 minutes.

the lint roller

One of the joys of parenthood is seeing the world through fresh eyes. This past July Allison taught us that ceiling fans are hysterically funny, and we continue to try to find new ways to hear her big belly laughs. Yesterday we put away our Christmas decorations, including the Christmas tree skirt that became covered in cat hair during the past few weeks. Rather than put away the tree skirt dirty (and since we weren't keen on taking it to be dry cleaned) we thought we would remove the cat hair with a lint roller. Ally laughed and squealed while Rob moved the lint roller across the tree skirt. So lint rollers are funny, in case you didn't know.

We wii, whee!

Rob's Mom was able to obtain a Nintendo Wii for us after standing in line for over 20 hours at a Wal-Mart in West Virginia. We have had a blast playing with it this past week. The Sports games were a big hit with the family, but we love playing Rayman Raving Rabbids and Beth is slowly making progress in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Do we have time to play? Well, not really. But we're managing. Sometimes we must make sacrifices, after all.