Rocky mountain high

We had a wonderful time on our long weekend trip to Denver, even though Baby B took a misstep on one of my cousin’s deck steps and landed nose-first on the concrete below. Thankfully not much blood or many tears were shed, but it’s left some bad scrapes on her poor nose that look pretty awful (I’ll probably post some pics on Wednesday, so you’ll see then).

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Baby B did AWESOME on the plane rides, even with having to get her up at 3:30 a.m. on the way there (she napped a little on the second flight) and with a nearly three-hour layover yesterday that fell right during her nap (again, she slept on the second flight, so all was good, even though the nap wasn’t until 5 p.m.). She did much better during the airport waiting time during the trip, which was the big challenge when we went to Maine. I definitely like traveling with her at this age.

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No issues with her adjusting to the two-hour time zone difference. I wasn’t super worried about it, but I know that two hours often is enough time to throw off a little one’s routine. Thankfully Baby B is good at rolling with the punches and had no issues despite quite a disrupted routine all weekend.

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File this under “T” for Things That Baby B Says That Aren’t Good for Other People to Overhear:

The scene: We were at the Children’s Museum of Denver, eating our packed lunch in their cafeteria. The Husband had left for a minute, and  Baby B and I were talking. A girl about Baby B’s age comes through the cafeteria, screaming and crying.

Baby B: “Why’s she crying? Is she going home?”

Me: “She might be. Or she might be scared. Or tired. Can you think of some things that would make you cry?”

Baby B (thinking first): “When my mommy and daddy hit me. And put me in timeout. All by myself.”

WHAT?! Hit her? Where did she come up with that (because, for the record, it’s not true at all). Thankfully I don’t think anyone heard her, but omigoodness that’s not a very good thing for people to overhear, especially when your child has a nose that’s all busted up!

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Probably my favorite part of the trip was the day we went to Estes Park, a cute little mountain town with lots of shops and restaurants, and then drove into Rocky Mountain National Park and then hiked along the Continental Divide for a little bit. Despite my asthma, I felt no ill effects of the altitude change during the trip except for maybe 5 or 10 minutes when we were hiking up a mountain at 12,000 feet. It just hit me briefly, but I did feel light-headed for a few minutes (just slowing down my pace helped) and my heart was pounding more than it normally would have for the level of exertion. The Husband was hit a little harder with it, especially when Baby B asked to be carried (definitely understandable!). Thankfully Baby B didn’t seem to have any altitude symptoms during the trip (not even while hiking), and she avoided the puking that hit two of her second cousins on the drive down the mountains.

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We were visiting my first cousin, so her children are Baby B’s second cousins. The First Cousin’s kids (all boys) are 11 years old, 6 years old, and 21 months old, and Baby B really took to all three of them, but especially the 6-year-old. I’ll call him Silly Cousin (for obvious reasons…he was the most silly), and I think that’s why Baby B was drawn to him, since she’s the same way. I think she’s also just generally drawn to kids who are around 6 to 8 years old. When we go to the park and she pairs up with a kid around that age, which seems like it always happens, I like to joke that Baby B would have made such a great younger sister that it’s almost a shame that she can only ever be an older sister.

Wordless Wednesday: An affair to remember

State of a fair

Ack! Combine a busy (and short) week at work with getting ready for a trip with (temporarily) no Internet access at home in the evenings and it makes for not many opportunities to post.

But I’m here. Barely. For today, at least. Tomorrow we hit the friendly skies to visit my cousin in Denver through Sunday. It’s my first time going there, and I’m very eager to see the area. We’ll hit their children’s museum and also get to experience some of Boulder and Rocky Mountain National Park. Of course, that’s if we survive getting up at 2:30 a.m. tomorrow morning (or should I say tonight??) to make our super-early flight. I’m sure we’ll do it fine, but it’s going to be tough!

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On Saturday, we decided to head to the state fair, just over an hour’s drive from here. My confession: I’ve lived here my whole life and I’d never been to the state fair. No good excuses, really. Just never went. But this year we decided to go after I received inspiration from a friend who had gone to her state’s fair, and I’m so glad we did because we had a great time! Good enough that we were there for about 11 1/2 hours (with a nap in the car in the middle of the day; The Husband and I each took turns during naptime exploring the fair on our own).

Baby B’s favorite part was probably the Ferris wheel (or the Big Circle, as she called it), which didn’t terrify her at all, but did me (a little). I know it’s safe (and is a permanent fixture, not a temporary one that’s put up and taken down all the time), and it was unlikely that Baby B would thrash around, toss us all out to plummet to the ground, but let’s just say I held onto her extra tightly while inside. I certainly don’t want to be that news story.

Her other favorite attraction at the fair was probably the goats, which she loved petting and trying to hug. She even enjoyed watching the goats being milked; I think she could have stood there all day watching that.

It definitely made for a long day, but Baby B did really well despite resistance to her nap at first. All day long she was excellent at holding our hands when we needed her to and listening to our instructions. I’m thinking maybe next summer she might be ready to hit the amusement park (if we’re brave enough for that adventure!).

(If we get our connection back at home, I’ll try to upload some Wordless Wednesday pics from the fair. Otherwise I probably won’t write again until after we’re returned from our trip. Have a good week!)

She’s a keeper

We had our first evening with The Sitter watching Baby B on Friday night, and it went wonderfully! She’s definitely a keeper — I’m still wondering what the catch is! Here’s just one indication of how perfect she is: We offered to let her watch TV, watch movies, or play our Wii after Baby B went to bed. Or offered to let her bring a laptop over next time. She said she usually just preferred to read. But she didn’t bring some celebrity magazine or a trashy romance novel. She brought Pride and Prejudice to read. For fun. Not for any assignment or anything. Oh yeah — and she was reading it for the second time.

She engaged Baby B very early on after coming over as we were showing her around, and we’re told that they had so much fun together. When we left, Baby B didn’t mind a bit. In fact, it was more like, “Okay, see ya later, just leave now so I can play with The Sitter.” She’s cried (for a few minutes, we’re told) the last few times we’ve left her with people, but she was so casual about it this time. (Could be more her developmental stage rather than it being The Sitter herself, but either way, it made it much easier to leave.) The Sitter helped her finish eating dinner, and we left them some cookie dough so they could make chocolate chip cookies together afterward. They played outside for a bit, the The Sitter did her bedtime stories and got her put to bed pretty close to the normal time. The report from The Sitter: “She’s so full of energy and is a really good kid.” Yay!

I think Baby B really liked her too. When I went in to give her a kiss when we got home, she looked up at me, blinking sleepily, and said, “Where’s [The Sitter]?” LOL Not, “MOMMY! You’re home!” But where’s The Sitter? 😉

I’m so glad to have an additional person in our rotation of people to watch Baby B. You can never have too many options.

Car talk

I think my favorite time to talk with Baby B is when I’m driving and she’s my only passenger. I love our exchange of questions about each other’s days:

Baby B: “Were you at work?”

Me: “Yes, I was at work. Did you get to play on the playground today?”

Baby B: “Yes, uh-cuz it was pretty outside and our teachers took us to dee playground.”

And I love how she quizzes me on the things we see around us, almost as much as I quiz her:

Me: “Do you see anything green right now?”

Baby B: “Your shirt is green! Do you see any trucks right now, Mommy?”

Me: “Actually, yes I do! Right over there!”

And I love using this time to talk about things that are going to happen:

Me: “Do you know who is coming over on Friday?”

Baby B: “[The Sitter]?” (She uses her actual name.)

Me: “That’s right! She’s going to play with you, and eat dinner with you, and put you to bed. That sounds fun. Would you like that?”

Baby B: “Sure! Does [The Sitter] have a baby?”

Me: “No, she doesn’t have a baby of her own. But that’s why she wants to come over and play with you!”

Baby B: “Does she have her own car?”

Me: “Yep, she has her own car. She’s a grown-up like Mommy and Daddy.”

Baby B (impressed): “OH!”

But one of the best parts about our car talk is when I glide into the garage or a parking space and she says, totally unprompted, “Great driving, Mommy!”

I like to think she’s talking not just about my driving skills but also the conversation that got us from point A to point B.

Wordless Wednesday: Get your goat

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Au naturale

I’m the kind of person who likes to think ahead and research my options with most everything I do, so I should note that even though, no, I am not expecting again, this is a topic that’s been on my mind recently, possibly because of my niece’s impending birth (she was just born on Saturday).

I think I’ve decided that whenever I am pregnant again, I’d like to see about switching to a midwife. It’s not something I’ve ever really talked about before, but an option that I’ve considered for a while. However, back when I was pregnant in 2006, I looked into the options in our state, and they were not plentiful. At the time, there were just two certified midwives in our state, one of which was on an extended leave, and the other of which was not taking new patients. That’s in the entire state! I’ve looked into it here and there in the ensuing three years, but the ones I’d found concentrated their practice on home births, which is not something I want to consider for myself.

I was looking around last week and found a practice here in town — made up of all women — that has three midwives and three obstetricians. Now, I should say that my labor and delivery experiences were excellent, and I have nothing at all against my current OB, but finding this practice made me think a few things.

One, what would it be like to have a woman in this role? I’ve never had a problem with going to a man for ob/gyn needs, but what if the care I received from a woman was even better? What if she can relate to me in the way that a man cannot?

Two, it made me consider (again) the idea of attempting an unmedicated birth the second time around. This is something I toyed with early during my pregnancy with Baby B but ultimately decided against for a variety of reasons that I do not regret one bit. If I had to do it over again, I would not get the Stadol, but I have no hesitation that the epidural (which I researched thoroughly and considered carefully; it definitely wasn’t an in-the-moment, I-can’t-handle-the-pain decision) was the right thing for me at the time. I think it helped me rest up and push effectively when that time came. I had no side effects from it, I did not have any stitches or tears, and I was walking very soon after the delivery process was completed. It was a positive experience.

But I feel like if I’m going to attempt an unmedicated delivery next time — or at least be open to the idea — then I need to surround myself with professionals who are ultra supportive of this goal, which midwives most definitely are. Yet I like knowing that yet there are OBs in the practice that can take over medical care if a pregnancy, labor, or delivery becomes more complicated.

The other advantage to switching practices? It looks like this practice has rights at another area hospital (where I did not deliver), and this hospital is going to be opening a dedicated women’s (and birthing)  center in early 2010. I’ve read a lot of promising things about this facility, including the fact that they seem to be supportive of unmedicated births. (In fact, I would like to be free of all interventions, including the stupid IV, which was the worst part of my whole labor/delivery experience).

I feel like this is something I can do — you’re going to laugh at this — after seeing that I could run a half-marathon.  I kind of laugh at it myself, but it’s just that after doing that, I have truly seen what my body can do if I  have the right focus and set my mind to it (and it can handle a great deal of pain!), so why should this be any different? I have less element of the unknown the second time around, and I think it would be very interesting to compare the two types of experiences. As Serenity pointed out, it will be good motivation to keep up with working out during pregnancy since I know I’ll have to be strong at the end. Very good motivation right there.

I don’t know what will come of this — if I’ll end up following through or not — but it was on my mind enough at the moment that I wanted to write it out. And it’s one of those things that I feel very excited about…much like when I sign up for a race and have that giddy anticipation when I think about it.

A few questions for those of you who see midwives: What do you like about her? If you were previously with an OB, why did you switch? Are you glad you did? Anything you liked better with your OB? Please chime in to tell me your experiences. (If you’d rather e-mail, the address is on the right side of the page.)

Sit. Stay.

We don’t have family in town that is able to babysit for Baby B, but we have two great friends who have always been able to satisfy our babysitting needs. For a while, though, I’ve been thinking that we need to find an outside, paid babysitter to give us some more options — and even give us the chance to actually go out with these good friends instead of them always having to play the role of babysitter. (Though they are kind and do it without complaining — and for free. We are very thankful to have them in our lives and know they like spending such time with Baby B.)

For probably close to a year now, I’ve browsed the babysitter section on Craigslist maybe every month or two, just to see the options out there, but I’ve never been impressed by the selection. I’m amazed at the number of ads where the people represent themselves so poorly. In a 200-word ad, how can some of these people have so many typos/misspellings?! If you can’t have the attention to detail required to make a good first impression in an online ad, then why do I want that kind of person looking after my child? Answer: I don’t.

So really, browsing the Craigslist ads really became more of a game of finding the most ridiculous ads to scoff at.

Until earlier this week, when I found a great ad. She’s a college graduate who is taking a year off to work at a law firm before going to law school. She has experience babysitting all ages. She loves to read. She spelled all the words in her ad correctly. 😉

So I e-mailed her. I should note that I’ve never felt compelled to contact anyone from Craiglist. I’ll even browse items for sale and will find a really good deal, but still never really make that leap to contact anyone. But something told me I needed to contact her and see if this would be a good fit.

She responded quickly, and we e-mailed back and forth that day, each of us telling more about ourselves — and me being more impressed with each additional e-mail. After talking with The Husband about it, we decided we’d like to set up a time to meet with her. We’re not really formal people (if you couldn’t already tell), so we decided to meet at a park near our house so we could chat in a more relaxed environment for everyone.

In the meantime, I looked her up on Facebook, and she could not have checked out any better. She was the president of her student senate. She was the president of her school’s panhellenic council. She studied abroad for a semester. She has 1,200 photos on there (most seem to be posted by friends), and not a single questionable photo is there…all pretty much just her and her friends or her family. I browsed through her wall comments, and again no red flags there.

So Saturday morning was meeting day. For a couple days beforehand, I’d talked to Baby B about meeting The Sitter, and she was looking forward to it. The Sitter asked the day before if I minded if she brought her dog (a small toy poodle), and Baby B was even more excited to learn this piece of information. 🙂

I was really hoping I wasn’t building her up in my mind more than she deserved. She almost seemed too perfect — what would be the catch?

We hung out with her for an hour that morning, and I feel even better about this than I did before (which was pretty good to start out). She’s outgoing and nice and funny and has a lot in common with our interests and smart and very mature (I’d never have guessed she was 22 or 23). I adore her already.

So we’re going to set up a time later in the week to have her come over to look after Baby B so The Husband and I can go out to dinner or a movie or something and see how it goes. It’s a nerve-racking thing to bring in a virtual stranger who doesn’t know your routine or rituals and expect that they’ll do well with your child (and that your child will do well with them), but I’m not feeling nervous about it in the least. I think it’s going to go well.

I hope she comes to sit and stay for a while.

The shield

Ever since Baby B started daycare almost 2 1/2 years ago, she’s been in the same room as two girls who are both a month older than she is. I’ve previously called them Big Buddy and Curly, and the three of them quickly bonded and became inseparable. They were like sisters — bickering one minute, but in the next beat giving big hugs and playing together and always looking out for each other.

As of yesterday, the Three Musketeers are no more.

Curly is moving to a new daycare that is closer to where they live (her mom has commuted to the opposite side of town this whole time, and finally decided it was time to switch). Her last day was Tuesday, and I happened to be there when her mom was picking her up, so I got to say my goodbyes and see Baby B give her goodbye hugs and kisses (though she obviously doesn’t understand the permanence of the goodbye).

We went out to the car, and Baby B told me, “My teacher was crying today.” I said, “Oh no! Why was she crying?” She said, “Uh-cuz she said to [Curly], ‘You can’t be leaving us!'”

I felt a lump in my throat and started to tear up a little myself. She asked me why I was crying, and I explained in simple terms. In a way, it’s easier that Baby B doesn’t fully realize what’s going on, but really, I think part of why I was tearing up was because she is oblivious and doesn’t know to be sad about this…but will.

In her mind, Curly is just gone on vacation and will return soon, but at some point, there’s going to be a realization on her part that Curly isn’t here.

A time when she realizes that what she trusted to be true — something that was a solid part of her life as she knows it — isn’t true anymore.

Of course I can’t shield her from these disappointments in life; isn’t that part of what builds character, when you rebound from such disappointments? She’s going to have to learn the life skills to cope with things like this in order to live a well-balanced life.

But that doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t want to whisk her away to some remote location, cover her ears to shield her, and just hold her tight and let that be all that matters in life. It’s not that simple, nor will it ever be an option.

But I bet I could make a fortune if I developed such a shield.

Wordless Wednesday: It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how

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Lock and (no) key

I’ve heard enough stories about young children waking up during the night, leaving the house, and getting lost (or worse) all while the parents are completely oblivious to what happened. So when we moved Baby B out of the crib, we took a few safety precautions to ensure this does not happen to her.

First, we put a door knob cover on the inside knob of her door so she cannot open the door. We still have the video monitor set up, so any request she has, we’ll be able to hear that way.

We also installed those hotel-style security locks on the doors, high above Baby B’s reach, as she’d recently taken to unlocking the front and back doors, even the dead bolt lock. We needed that extra measure to make sure she remained safely in our house. And a bonus, of course, is that it keeps other people OUT of our house.

Which sounds like a good thing. Until you actually want someone else to come into your house.

When we were in Maine, we arranged for a couple different people to come check on our cats. On Thursday afternoon, I got a call from my mom. My dad had gone to the house on his lunch break (he works near our house) but couldn’t get in any of the doors.

Yeah, it turned out that we’d accidentally left the security lock in place on both the front door and the back door (we had gone out the garage).

OOPS!

We thought of non-destructive ways to get into our house, but we came up empty. We looked on the Internet for ways to open such security locks (I’m sure that Google search got me flagged by Homeland Security!), but with no luck. There was just no reasonable way to get into our house. Which, of course, most of the time would be a good thing. Not so good when the cats needed to be checked on.

Thankfully they were fine because The Husband had given them plenty of food and water before we left, and we were gone for only four days from beginning to end (and I must say the cats are a bit on the portly side to start with, so I’m thinking they could do without their usual all-you-can-eat buffet anyway).

Here’s hoping the locks keep Baby B in as well as it kept our cat sitters out!

Talk the talk

I loved Baby B’s first smile and first giggle.

I loved when Baby B first learned to sit up all by herself.

I loved the crawling stage.

I loved when pieces of her personality were slowly revealed to us.

Despite the many warnings I received about it, I even loved the walking stage.

But, I think most of all, I love the talking stage the best…more specifically, the conversation stage.

To see Baby B get our jokes.

To hear her make her own jokes.

To listen to the pieces of imagination that spill out of her mouth and surprise us. Dazzle us.

To realize just how much she knows and how much we’ve taught her, often without even realizing it.

I know it’s not always going to be like this. While I hope that Baby B will always feel comfortable coming to talk to me and The Husband, I know there will come a time in her life when we’re the lame parents and she would rather eat dirt than have a meaningful conversation with us. A time in her life when she would rather talk to her friends because she feels like they’re the only ones who understand her, not fully realizing that her own parents were once young and now understand things more than she knows.

So for now I’ll cherish these great, innocent moments chatting with her, when she’s so eager to tell me about her day on the way home from daycare. When she cracks herself up because she played a trick on The Husband. When she ever doesn’t grow tired asking me what I’m doing or if I need help.

This is such a wonderful time, and I look forward to the next surprises she has in store for us.

GI hope we don’t have to go back

We had another follow-up with the GI doctor on Tuesday morning, and things are looking better overall. Baby B had an x-ray done, and while it didn’t look like what they wanted (pockets to black to indicate air and some pockets of white to indicate the stool), it did look better (a mottled gray) than the solid white that was revealed in the last x-ray maybe seven or eight months ago. I really think potty training has helped us along, as her stools are sometimes on the softer side but definitely formed (unlike before), so we now have a plan in place to try to wean her off the Miralax and see how she does. If things go well, we can cancel our next follow-up in December.

At first the doctor was confused by Baby B’s height and weight changes: She had shot up more than two inches since April, but had lost about four pounds. She said, “Wow, she had a big height growth spurt…” and sort of trailed off while looking at her notes, then breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the note that Baby B had her cast on at the last weight check. She laughed and said, “Yeah, that makes more sense.”

Wordless Wednesday: Waking up dry

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Fred said

On our trip to Maine, we drove 3 1/2 hours south to the York area to visit The Husband’s brother and his family. We’d printed out some Internet directions to guide us, a family member offered to let us borrow their GPS for the trip, and we took her up on it.

For reasons that are still not 100% clear to me, they’d previously named the GPS “Fred.” So every time we’d get directions from the GPS unit, The Husband and I would say in a monotone, bemused voice, “Thank you, Fred.”

Baby B kept asking who Fred was, and we’d point to the GPS unit on the dashboard and tell her that he was the voice coming from there, and he was telling us where to go. And then she’d ask again. And again. And so went the trip to York.

So we spent a day and a half in York, and we left on Saturday night to return to The Grandmother’s house. The Husband was putting the rest of the suitcases in the trunk, and I sat in the front seat getting things situated for the drive back. Baby B was in her car seat, and I turned on the GPS. Fred gave us our first directions, then out of the blue and without missing a beat, Baby B said, “Thank you, Fred.” The fact that it was unexpected coming from her made it quite amusing.

The next day on the plane, we were being held on the runway before take-off for flow control into Boston. The pilot came over the loudspeaker and explained to us what was going on and how much of a delay we were expecting. Baby B leaned over to The Husband and asked, “Is that Fred?” We laughed, but quickly said with a smile, “Actually, yes, he’s our Fred for this plane trip.”

(Incidentally, I realize these stories don’t carry quite the same level of  humor as if you’d been there, but it was a cute moment for our family and I wanted to make sure I recorded the story here, in what is essentially Baby B’s baby book.)