Category: Baby

Motherhood

~ meh ~ Leave a comment

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A few days ago as a gesture of gratitude for holding down the fort, and because he loves me, Paul brought me a homemade red velvet cupcake with a big dollop of some sort of cream cheese frosting on top, from the resident lounge.

“Something special,” he said. “Just for you.”

As he walked up the stairs with it, HH saw it, took it from him and carried it over, holding it up to me yelling,  “MAAAAAAAAHM!  DADDY BROUGHT YOU A CUPCAKE!”

I bent down and took it from her.

“That is so nice of you to bring that to me, HH!  So helpful.  Thank you.”

She looked up at me, expectantly.

“I want to stick my finger in it.”

I told her I’d cut it in half and we could share.

I got a plate, cut it in half, and we sat down at the table.  She picked up one of the halves and shoved the entire thing into her mouth.   I picked up one crumb that she had dropped and ate it, causing her to freeze mid-chew and look up at me with total suspicion.  Then I reached to pick up the second half.

She grabbed the plate and pulled it into her chest, cheeks stuffed, red dye smeared across her face, glaring at me, poised for freakout.

I looked at her.  “HH…we’re sharing.  That half is mine.  In fact, the whole thing is mine, I was sharing with you.”

Paul joined in: “That is Mom’s cupcake, she was nice to share it with you.  It’s not yours.  Give it back.”

Cue: freakout.

Wailing, sobbing, and with her mouth wide open and chewed food flying everywhere, she promptly dropped the other half of the cupcake on the ground. Frosting down.

E, who had been hanging out in the vicinity waiting for something exactly like this to happen, speed-crawled over, and puked on it.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there.  I hope you all got something special.  Just for you.

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Crafts

~ meh ~ 1 Comment

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I don’t do crafts.  But a few weeks before Christmas I decided I was going to.   Because that’s what good parents do during the holidays.  Paul was working nights, so I was flying solo on this.

Wednesday: On a trip to Target (duh) I decide baking cookies will be the perfect thing to get in the holiday spirit.  I like baking, and I’m good at it.  Sometimes.

Friday: After two days of the ingredients sitting on the counter, I decide to skip including my two year old in the dough-making process.  It’s not like this is a life skill she HAS to learn.  I make the dough on my own so it’s ready when she gets home from preschool.  She comes home from school in meltdown mode.  I make the executive decision to delay cookie making.

Monday: 3/4 of the dough still sitting in fridge.  The other 1/4 I ate over the weekend.

Wednesday:  A week later.  This is the day we will bake! HH has been having night terrors and sleep-walking when she goes to bed after 7:15 (fun), so we rush through dinner and have just enough time to get the dough out, roll it, cookie cutter some shapes (which she is way less into than I thought she would be), and throw them in the oven.  No time to decorate.  No time to admire the finished product.  I put the cookies in a tupperware after she goes to bed, keep frosting ingredients in the fridge.

Friday: Half of the cookies are gone because I ate them.  Sans-frosting.

Sunday: Facetime with Nana and Opa.  When I suggest HH show them the cookies she baked, she accidentally breaks an arm off of a star of Bethlehem.  I tell her it’s OK to eat it.  She looks at me confused, then suddenly the realization creeps across her face…these are edible! And not only can she eat the piece that broke off, she can eat the whole cookie.  And she does so.  From then on, every time she walks into the kitchen: “Cookie?”

Monday: Now that there are only 5 week-old cookies left in the tupperware, time to decorate!  I get out all the decorating icings and frostings.  HH smears green frosting on half of one cookie and goes, “I eat it now.”  I explain that no, decorating cookies is SO FUN, we can eat them when they’re decorated, and don’t gingerbread men look better with a face? and they taste better with frosting anyway.  “NO!  NO FROSTING!!  I EAT THE COOKIES NOW!”

So I take them away.  Tears.  Screams. Faux seizures. Drama.

The cream cheese I got to make special frosting is still sitting in the fridge.

Holiday crafts are the best.

Home

~ meh ~ 4 Comments

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…and we’re back.

Little Eazy-E was a champ on the flight home.

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If anyone looks like he could use some help it’s Dad.

HH will not let him go, to the point that it’s kind of an issue.  He can’t be in the room without her wanting to feed him or hug him or put a blanket on him or honk his nose.  But better that than the alternative.  She is honestly so happy to have her brother here.

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Not sure if the feeling is reciprocated.  (And her hair.  Seriously.)

Paul is already back at work, and we’re just adjusting to life with a +1.  More to come later.

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Another kind of two

~ meh ~ 1 Comment

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On Monday we flew up to Oregon and made the drive from Portland to Bend.  And on Friday, after two days in the hospital, we left with this guy.

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Due to some scheduling snafus, we spent a few days hanging out in Bend before the birth.

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It could have been worse.  Bend is full of trails and microbreweries.  When things got particularly stressful, I walked out our front door and went for a run…

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…then drank a beer.  Like I said, could have been worse.

Now we are hanging out in Oregon, waiting for all the paperwork to be processed so we can cross state lines and bring our newest edition home to meet our oldest addition.

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I am really looking forward to it.  Like, seriously.

The adoption was a journey, and we are very excited to get home.  More on that later. But in the meantime, we’re going to go for walks, enjoy some brews, and spend some QT together before we become a chaotic clan of four.

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…I mean five.  Depending on how you count.

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Goodnight Noises Everywhere

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I hadn’t read Goodnight Moon in about 20 years before this happened:

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She loves books.  LOOOOOVES books.  So there’s been a good amount Goodnight Moon up in these parts for the past year or so.  And upon reading it again for the first time, I was surprised.

I was surprised by how completely random and creepy Goodnight Moon is.

The lines and pictures from this book reside in the same eerie, dream-like haze as early childhood memories.  There is a ghostly familiarity to them.  But when my grown-up mind saw the pictures with grown-up eyes and heard the words for the first time in many, many years, my initial thought was, “HOW is this book so popular??”

There is no story.  The rhymes aren’t super fun or clever.  And take, for instance, the mush.  We wish it goodnight, as it sits, cold and colorless, next to a blank page that says “Goodnight Nobody.”

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So…bleak.

There is the picture on the wall across from the three bears sitting in chairs of a big rabbit fishing for a little rabbit with a carrot on a string.  What.

And then, of course, the quiet old lady whispering “hush”:

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Nightmare material like woah.  Case in point:

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Tell me there’s no resemblance.

And yet, despite the objective weirdness, Goodnight Moon is soothing.  And warm.  And because it lacks the typical structure and singsongy-ness, as you read it the second (or third, or fourth) time, it doesn’t grate.  It is simple and familiar and calming.  And the glowing light of the stars and the dollhouse windows on the last page…I love the last page.

So, like every other parent and grandparent, we’ll keep a few copies around, reading it over and over and over again, burying the same strange story with the same strange pictures deep into someone else’s childhood memory, to be rediscovered later.

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An Evening Out

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LA. The City of Angels.  But last week I left these two angels on their own and met some friends out for dinner.

At dinner we sat next to my first official LA celebrity (assuming we don’t count Kat or the fact that I am 99% sure I saw Jerry Ferrara driving a mini van out of Culver Studios last week).

It took a while for us to figure out who she was, but we did.

Then, on the way back to the car, a guy walking towards me started yelling, “You scared!  You so scared!  I can see it!”

I was busy trying to eat a cobbler that my friend had given me for Paul, with my fingers, out of a tupperware container, while holding a bag of leftovers and walking down the sidewalk (yes, that is as classy as it sounds), so at first I didn’t notice.  Then I realized that he was yelling it at me.  I looked up mid-cobbler bite.

“Yeah, you!!  Girl, I see how scared you are!  I see it in your eyes!   But nah.  Nah nah nah, don’t worry.  You too poor for me, baby.”

Uh…thanks?  F you?