Rugrats
About kids, ours and others, pictured or not, and Rugrat Carnival announcements
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Sunday, May 21, 2006
So the Valerie?
3 months old today.
Wow.
I’m sure her father will be along with pictures in the next day or two.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Caught At A Weak Moment
It’s Deb’s night out. Note the oddly colored moon tonight. I took the opportunity to give myself a recently rare Chinese food fix and introduce Sadie to the cuisine. She liked the first piece of crab rangoon - after all, cream cheese - but wouldn’t eat more later. She loved the lo mein, including the scallion that she pointedly tried after eyeing suspiciously. Fried rice is rice, so she was thrilled and only threw part of it. The other appetizers from the pu pu platter? Not so much. Except maybe a little taste of beef terriyaki and boneless rib, she tried none of it. And I didn’t offer her the shrimp, figuring one tiny bit of shellfish was enough for today.
She wasn’t impressed with how hard the fortune cookie was to eat and discarded half of it, but I saved her first fortune ever; something about careful planning and riches.
Anyway, got her in the tub, did some cleaning and putting away, got her out of the tub and as we walked by the door it knocked at us. Doh. It was a nice young guy from Verizon, lining up dates for people to switch to FiOS. That is, fiber obtic. Net price is less than we pay now for at least six months, free installation, same national calling plan but cheaper. We just have to tolerate installation guys taking 4 - 6 hours to set it up next Friday.
I knew we’d get it anyway, but the dude put me on the spot and derailed my plans to wait as long as possible. But less money and multiple times as fast? Hell yeah. And Idol starts like 3 minutes ago…
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
American Idol Final Four: Katharine’s Death By Elvis
I’ll just copy and paste from my spoiler post earlier and comment on the performances, which did wind up being of those songs.
Taylor: Jailhouse Rock and In the Ghetto
Amazing performance on the first one; easy to see why he has such a fan base when he’s at his best, and that was about his best of the season. I’d happily see him perform it live. Hold that thought and see later in this post.
Oh, Valerie watched him intently during this performance, but didn’t make a sound.
His second song, not so much, and disappointing compared to my expectations from Taylor. I love that song and know it pretty well, and didn’t like how it was changed - and I don’t mean the trimming to fit the required duration. It was okay, even good, but not all that to me. Deb had a more positive impression, and we talked about how different our perspectives are on Elvis, given that she’s not old enough to remember him being alive.
Chris: Suspicious Minds and A Little Less Conversation
I wrote earlier: “The first is perfect and can really show some range for Chris.” Wow. He so totally nailed it, and got the red-blooded American women Deb speaks of when he performs warmed up for what was to follow later. I said above I’d enjoy seeing Taylor live covering Jailhouse Rock. The difference is that Chris could have a radio hit covering Suspicious Minds. Looked at like that, no comparison.
Valerie started cooing at Chris in response to this song! We just abount flipped. I don’t know if I have mentioned how much she loves music and how strongly opinionated she seems to be about what she’s hearing, but there you go. Taylor she was rapt and quiet. Chris she was rapt and audibly approving.
I found the second one to be a station turner when it was hot a few years back, when someone discovered it mouldering in a vault and got it high on the charts posthumously. I’d never heard it before then. No appeal. No interest. Chris made me like the song. Elvis? Not so much. It doesn’t get much better. Deb strongly invoked the red-blooded American women factor.
Elliott: Trouble and If I Can Dream
But not in that order. I loved If I Can Dream, and he performed more appealingly than ever tonight. Not so much my song, but he was great. I’d really like to hear Mandisa do it, with its gospel leanings.
Valerie went nuts for Elliott’s performance, cooing and ahh-gooing and just loving it.
With his second performance, Elliott won the night. He deserves first place this week. If he is voted off, it will be more than just another case of people getting voted off the night they do unexpectedly well, it’ll be tragic.
Katharine: Hound Dog/All Shook Up and Can’t Help Falling In Love
That was really bad. Started not so bad, but it was utter folly to make it a medley, never mind forgetting words and getting breathless. I think I actually liked it a lot better than Deb, if I am remembering right. Just not enough to keep it from being hands down worst of the first set and probably the night.
Valerie opined on Katharine too. It made her cry. That was funny.
Her second performance wasn’t much better. If it wasn’t worse. Sure enough, she picked an easy song for me to be unimpressed with, and succeeded in unimpressing me.
So tonight there is no question that Katharine was the worst. It’s not even close. First through third we’d say it’s Elliott, Chris, and Taylor. Which probably means Elliott and Katharine will be bottom two, but it’ll be a major shocker if Katharine doesn’t go home.
After she’s gone, as Deb says, any of the remaining three could win and we’d be happy. They are all that good.
Now to go see whether other bloggers were on hallucinogens or agree with me this week…
Update:
Has the DEA checked the water supply nationally for hallucinogens? They appear to be widespread in the populace…
Sadie Lately
These are pictures of Sadie downloaded off the camera on the 6th and (twice) on the 7th.
The first four are at my brother’s new place - a house he’s renting on a farm for the same as his apartment had cost - for my niece’s birthday party Sunday. I gave her a little ride around on the bike after she showed so much interest, but she had enough quickly. She loves Sadie-sized furniture. We need to get her a little table and chair set like the ones we saw in Wal-Mart the other day, to give her something abusable she can color at.
The next one is Sadie hugging one of her frogs, which the other day she declared “baby!” It’s actually a frog backpack I bought from a door to door salesperson (allegedly fundraising for charity) at the office years ago. It had been living perched on the patch panel high on the wall in a recessed corner until recently.
The next one is her hugging her grandfather when we were at his house in Plympton to visit and pick up their excellent old dining room table, which looks like it was made to go in our kitchen and couldn’t be more perfect. No more folding camp table.
The one after that is in my father’s yard, near the driveway, where Sadie discovered that a drain grate is Best Thing Ever. She set out to drop as many pebbles and twigs as possible down there, one at a time.
Finally, Sadie in a hat she likes to put on, looking sad for some forgotten reason. Perhaps it was one of her several falls per day. Perhaps she had walked off the end of the coffee table into midair like some obsessive coyote. No idea.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Well, I guess that speaking English thing is coming along…
Sadie just brought me her shoes and said, “go go go!”
Too. Freaking. Cute.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Today
We’re combining a visit to my father and stepmother with picking up a table and chairs from them. They are replacing an old but very nice set, and we’ve been using a folding camping table, literally made of cardboard and aluminum, and wooden folding chairs. And that only started because in this apartment we had the room for it and we wanted to teach Sadie about eating at the table, once she was approaching not needing the highchair. A side benefit will be making it safer for Sadie, and perhaps transitioning her out of the booster seat. She likes to sit on the back of the booster seat, and went from there to sitting on the back of the chair, just begging to go flying across the kitchen. The new chairs will make that impossible.
Later I’ll probably mow the lawn. My understanding was we were all supposed to share keeping up the yard, so I asked the neighbor downstairs about there being a mower and what the deal was. She was surprised I was asking, as pretty much they’re used to doing it all. They bought a new mower last year, which she showed me, and we walked all around the yard and she pointed out this and that, and even which room they used for what on the first floor. Turns out her husband, who is handicapped, uses the room under Sadie’s as an office and works from home. I’d assumed he was simply disabled and hanging out. She warned me about the mulberry tree above where I park the truck, and pointed out I might want to put it on the other side of the Sentra. The landlord mentioned that too, because in effect that was the extra spot I might be able to get away with having a third car in, even though officially we get two spaces. The mulberry droppings were the caveat. What I’ll need to do is get some of my tools out of storage, so I can do some pruning and stuff as well.
Anyway, that was fun, especially the part about shocking them. It makes them feel good about having gotten the driveway plowed all winter.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
She’s A Cutie
I don’t have time for a whole Valerie Gallery just now, but I have to share what is probably my favorite Val picture so far. I can’t bear to wait.
There are a bunch of other good ones, including at least one of her legs curled into the air as she attempts to roll over, so more soon.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Easter Egg Hunt Sampler
These are just the start of the pictures from Sunday’s Easter Egg hunt/cookout at my grandmother’s house. The upper right corner of the first picture shows part of the shed that was Sadie’s prime target when she could be dissuaded from exploring the street. After all, there are tools, cool old parts, old nails, and other dangerous things in and around the shed! What red blooded future engineer wouldn’t be fascinated? Ah, I just noticed it’s also in the background, more like the upper left, of the third picture too.
The sandbox was a great relief, as she thought it was Best Thing Ever and played intently for an extended time. To the exclusion of things like wanting to have any food, as well as testing her ability to withstand direct hits by moving vehicles. I was a little concerned when she eventually decided it would be fun to pour sand all over herself, but hey. I think my sister said she has an old sandbox we can have if we want it, which is just a matter of making sure nobody else here objects to it in the yard.
The other kid in the sandbox is her cousin Alicia.
Sadie
I’ve been thinking about a post about Sadie’s borderline autism becoming increasingly apparent and frustrating. About how she’s in her own world and that leads to one-sided exchanges like “Sadie. Sadie. Saaadie. Sadie! SADIE! Saaaadieeee. Sadie, you need to learn your own damn name.” About how little trouble there has ever been with toddlers trying to exit my grandmother’s huge lawn in favor of the street, between all the better places to go, the apparent inherent clarity of the boundary, and not having to be told more than a couple times, so now comes Sadie being obsessed with making a beeline into the street. Over and over and over. Eventually I explained to her the concept of being smooshed by a car and how it was dangerous, as if she could understand, but the street-mothing trailed off after that. She does the same here, where if you put her down she will run the entire length of the long driveway in a flash. At the office it’s the parking lot she favors over the sidewalks and grass, though there was a day she discovered the steps from the parking lot to the street and wanted to go that way. About how funny she is with people, especially larger groups or any who do not fit her mental image of what or who should be in a given spot, like on the elevator when the door opens. About how we didn’t realize just how different Sadie was until Valerie came along. About how frustrating it is that she understands almost everything we say, can say almost anything she wants, but refuses to talk to any meaningful degree.
Then she does something like what she did last night, where her own agenda, intelligence, and sense of what’s right and timely charms us all over again.
We have had a toddler bed in her room for months, all setup and ready to go. You may recall the story of how she actively ignored the new bed when we first set it up, instead of being fascinated as expected. She had absolutely no interest in sleeping in it, sticking to her crib. It was almost as if she preferred the security of being enclosed. She also freaked and wouldn’t sleep in her crib the first night the bed was in her room, though that may have been unrelated.
She eventually started climbing on her new bed, and developed a distinction between “bed” and “crib.” That came out yesterday when Deb had her pick clean sheets for “her bed” and she picked yellow, then carried them to the bed, not the crib.
They stayed there and eventually it was bed time. Instead of carrying her to the crib as usual, she was loose. She followed me into the room, went over to her bed leaned onto it and hugged the sheets that were waiting to be installed. Awww. So Deb asked her if she wanted to sleep in her big girl bed and put on the yellow sheets. We gave her a blanket and left her laying on the bed.
After the door was closed and light was off, she came over and made a token protest at the door, then got back on the bed and crashed.
Just like that. When it was time, it was time, and she decided. It wouldn’t surprise me if she asks to sleep in the crib again before settling in for good, as she did once with the highchair, but generally once she decides, that’s it. Good timing, too, as we were on the verge of getting a new crib for Val, on the idea Sadie would never give hers up.
This is what will probably happen with potty training and talking. It’s what happened with weaning; she just decided it was time and stopped. It’s what happened with solid foods. She declared herself a babyfood-free zone. Even the bit with the pear last week; how long until I might have decided she was ready to gnaw on a whole fruit herself?
She is still sacked out in the position she crashed in last night. We cracked the door this morning so she can just wander out when she’s up.
It’s great that the coolness factor outweighs the frustration.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Ummm, yeah.
I had something else to say today. I also have two small children. It’s like that, you know?
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Valerie: “The things I have to put up with. Sheesh!”
In this bath picture Val has what I call “ocean eyes.” They make it seem she’s going toward green.
Poor kid. She turned two months on the 21st. Sadie started teething at two months. They are related…
Mmmm… Pear
Yesterday Sadie just couldn’t stop eating, as if she’s on a growth spurt or something. At one point she raided the refrigerator for this good pear, ran off and just started eating it, skin and all. Normally we cut fruit up and remove all or most of the skin. Apparently she decided it’s time to start eating it like big people. Good thing to start with, in that case. You can see in the pictures how big it is. She ate almost the whole thing herself. After she was about halfway through I sliced the rest, ate a couple of those, and gnawed around the core, showing her that we throw that part away. But otherwise it was all her.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Valerie stats
So I’m running behind this morning because it was time for Val’s 2-month well baby visit. She weighed in at 10 pounds 9 ounces and was 22 1/2 inches. The doc is quote-unquote thrilled with her growth, and so am I. According to their charting, she’s 50th percentile plus on both height and weight, but the online calculators are saying more like 25th weight and 35th height, which would jibe with that according to my records, she’s almost exactly the same size that Sadie was at this age. Both of them seem to have no relation at all between the point on the chart they were at when they were born and the curve they wound up choosing. Fascinating.
Speaking of which, did you see this? Breastfed babies put weight on in a different pattern, which is something I’d seen before in the breastfeeding info I’ve looked at, but apparently the WHO is going to publish new charts that regard breastfed babies as the norm. I believe the CDC redid their charts about 5 years ago, and they’re based on a mix of breastfed and formula fed babies.
Anyway, Val is set for the next two months. She got her first set of shots today, which she took with relative equanimity. Poor kid. Beats the hell out of the alternative, though.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
And Valerie? She’s got her priorities straight.
I can tell you all this without fear of jinxing anything because I know full well she’ll likely not do this again for a while, so I just had to share. Valerie went down at ten o’clock last night and woke up at...get this...quarter to six this morning. You know that weird, dizzy, groggy feeling you get when you sleep longer than usual? Oh, yeah. I am so there.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I heard Tom let Katie have an epidural. How generous!
Poor Brooke Shields. How unfortunate to have the TomKitten born on the same day. Not nearly as bad as things will be for poor little Suri, though. Ugh. Is it wrong of me to be sad that they had a girl?
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Rescuing Recess
You all know I grumble frequently about how it’s crazy to bitch about ADHD and obesity and and insist on killing recess, but all I’ve done is grumble. Jacqui at Enviropundit, though, points to a way to try to do something about it.
Monday, April 17, 2006
You’d think she was from Fresno or something!
Does being conceived there count? And is that TMI? And do people in Fresno actually like raisins to an abnormal extent? I don’t think there’s a correlation, come to think of it. I think living in Fresno made me like them less, actually.
Anyway, Sadie’s latest food obsession? Raisins. She lurves the raisins, she does. Walks around the house with a little box of them, stopping occasionally to feed me one because that’s what she does with the food she loves the most: she feeds it to whoever happens to be nearby. Because it’s so damned good the whole world has to have some! Very, very sweet, she is. Too freaking cute.
And I, of course, am overjoyed that we’ve discovered something that she’ll eat for the moment. Because she’s going through that phase. Fun!
Sunday, April 09, 2006
You Know You Have Little Kids When…
Here’s the other “you know you have kids when...” picture I mentioned, featuring Bob the Duck (aka the House Duck) on his “perch” of educational Baby Einstein water cup thingies, which are pretty clever actually. To the right is a big cup from the hospital, which we use for rinsing Sadie’s hair, filled with her fish set. There’s a fishing pole, squirty fish, sieve fish, sucker fish (so now she knows all about suction cups), goldfish, turtle and frog. Each of them can be hooked up by the fishing pole, or hooked to each other. Hooking them to each other drives Sadie crazy.
This One’s For Ith
I took this as one of a pair of “you know you have little kids when...” pictures. However, it’s also amusing because on the House MD mailing list, they refer to the doctors who work for House as “the ducklings.” And so these three got their names, from left to right: Cameron, Foreman, and Chase. Of course, the senior duck, better quality and traditional yellow, was long since dubbed Bob the Duck, but this would make him the Greg House of the bunch.
These three have squeak holes on the bottom, so they don’t float properly the way Bob does. You can actually force them to fill to varying degrees with water, then squirt it out. Sometimes I fill a couple of them to where they float with relative stability with only the beak and top of head above water, then play Monitor and Merrimac.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
I was hoping to fill the empty space here a bit…
But our DVD player chose this week to expire in a fit of irony (Jay got DVDs for his birthday, you see), and the bit of guilty me-time it (in cooperation with the Baby Einstein Company) buys? Gone, baby, gone.
In other news, Sadie is right this minute having a breakdown because she wants grapes and we don’t have any. This is newsworthy because she’s whining, “gay, gay, gay,” and she almost never asks for anything by name or whines with any specificity. Yay for language development.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Paging Billy Idol
What color are these eyes turning? It’s our favorite guessing game these days. Click each one for larger verions (full size, more than the normal 800 pixels wide). Sadie was clearcut blue almost from the start. Valerie had the indeterminate newborn blue, but it started changing promptly, looking at times like it’d be brown, or golden tan brown, or green, or maybe blue after all, if a steel gray variant, or hazel…
I have to get to work as I am already late, so more pictures will have to wait for tonight or tomorrow morning. Note that the above are all very recent pictures, like past week or less. They are a large sample size, not to show a sequence over time.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Yow! Yikes! Zap!
The corollary to Jay’s rough weekend and now week is that I’ve been home alone full-time with both kids for the first time.
Wow.
All I can say is that parenting two under two is a full-contact sport. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life. I’m managing to get some stuff done around the house, though, in between nursing sessions and rounds of “The Wheels on the Bus,” which pleases me no end. And this may be by far the hardest job I’ve ever had (and I’ve had some doozies, let me tell you), but it’s also the most fun. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t lie, cheat, and steal for a full night’s sleep, but it’s worth it in a way I can’t describe.
Yeah, yeah, I’m a walking cliche. But they get that way because they’re true.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Four Weeks
Valerie is four weeks old today!
To celebrate, we got up at 5:30 or so to take her to her four week checkup, at 8:00. Go us.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Look Who’s Talking Now… Sort Of
I wrote this yesterday morning before we left for the rest of the day, and thought I had posted it when I hadn’t…
Sadie has gotten a lot more likely to use words to communicate recently, and has expanded the vocabulary she attempts to say. She’d still rather mime, but even having her say “no” or “yeah” when that is what she means is a pleasant improvement. In particular, she happily attempts 2 syllable words.
One of her favorite things is Robin Eggs, which are candy covered, egg-shaped malted milk balls. Deb loves them, so I bring them home sometimes while they are in season and a cheap treat. She had previously learned the word “egg” and applied it to them. Yesterday she pointed at the cabinet where we keep them and said “robin.” Well, clearly tried to; you can imagine what it actually sounded like in 18 month old speech. Something like “wahbwihn.”
One of her inexplicably favorite toys is a red plastic ruler I bought sometime between 1976 and 1978, when I was in high school. Who says they don’t build things to last. Anyway, a short while ago, I coaxed her into saying “ruler” while teaching her what it was called. It sounded something like “woollah.” Very cute.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Done
Hooray! Except for transcribing a couple of the forms with crossouts, and printing the “other expenses” 1065 attachment, and of course making photocopies and filing the returns, I’m done with the business tax returns.
Even better, I completely redid my depreciation table spreadsheet so the expired items from 1998 and 1999 no longer appear on it and it’s more usable. I originally lumped together all the 5 and 7 year items and (now fully depreciated) listed property, then had to segregate it to get the numbers to plug into the return.
Now I just need to fix everything about how I handle inventory so that is friendly at tax time.
Sadie is going with me today while I drive to the bank, the office to make copies of K-1 forms, Burlington to drop the K-1 forms off, Woburn to get parts, and back to the office. She’ll love that, and maybe Deb will get a nap.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Just… Yay!
Jen and Beau are working on a prospective future hubby for Valerie.
Okay, so it’s a little premature to say it’s going to be a boy, but I was right in expecting this so immediately. Who says I can’t be right about the sex.
(Now back to taxes. Deb thought, correctly, that this was worthy interruptive news.)
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
I Love Good News
The cost of adding Valerie to the health insurance? Zero. It’s already a “family plan” and covers multiple offspring for no additional money.
Maybe they really are cheaper by the dozen. Not that we’ll ever find that out.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Love in the time of toddler
Sadie is handling the whole having a new sister thing really, really well, I think. Still, the little darling has come up with a couple of tricks in the last week that just make me want to lose my mind. My least favorite? The going-limp trick. I think she’s been watching 60’s protest documentaries behind my back. If I’m crazy enough to grab hold of her to keep her out of imminent danger, she throws all of her body toward the floor, leaving me lifting approximately two and a half times as much toddler as is medically advisable.
I’m having a hard time not getting very, very angry with her for this, because it really hurts me when she does it. I was hoping to do something productive today, but after being subjected to a round of this when I kept her from pulling my boiling hot lunch down on her head (don’t ask me what I was thinking sitting it on my desk where it should have been out of reach...the kid is getting taller by the day, I swear), I just want to curl up on the couch and whimper. That shit *hurts.* The incision seems ok, but my back just can’t take it. It hasn’t adapted to my being shaped like a normal human being again as it is.
The poor kid is really bored being stuck at home with me right now, but it’s really hard to entertain her when I’m trying to stay out of reach. She has this eerie ability to zero in on the bits that hurt the most, so I haven’t been letting her sit with me much. One good kick in the incision, followed by an elbow to a breast, was enough to convince me that we needed to find an alternate way to be cuddly. Luckily, she’s recently discovered the joy of kisses. She kisses *everything.* And makes her dolls and animals kiss each other, too. Most frightening, though, was her reaction this morning when I asked her if she liked Elmo. She squealed, and made kiss-kiss noises at the TV.
I never envisioned a day when I’d be grateful for the existence of Elmo. Life really *is* strange sometimes, isn’t it?
Friday, February 24, 2006
Home
We arrived home a short time ago, a day early. Things are going quite well, though that doesn’t exempt Deb from being careful and taking it easy for a while. We stopped at my grandmother’s for a brief meet the baby visit on the way, even though we didn’t have to stop, as Sadie wasn’t there and I’ll pick her up (and other errands) later. She has spent three days in a row playing with her cousins while my mother went to their house to babysit. I just checked e-mail and made sure things were okay at the office, and we’re settling in and decompressing. Valerie has slept a lot today, including all the way home.
Next order of business is to call the doctor’s office about Valerie’s visit Tuesday morning, and arrange one for Deb next door immediately after.