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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

 

4/8/10 (Thursday)

Cara went for her very timely five-year checkup today, her first time at the new pediatrician in Highland Park. It was exciting, of course. There's an elevator! Cara weighs 41 and a half pounds and is 45 inches tall; she's in the 90th percentile for height and in the 50-75% range for weight. She had her blood pressure checked, her eyes examined (during which exercise she learned what a plus sign is called), her hearing checked. We had to bring a urine sample!

The doctor asked us a lot of questions. Some were for me and some for Cara. Some of Cara's answers were interesting. She claimed to drink milk every day and to be able to ride a bike without training wheels. She demonstrated that she could write her name, hop on either foot, walk on her tiptoes, and walk on her heels. She denied that she was being taught to read either at preschool or at home. What did she do at preschool? She forgot. Overall, it was a fun visit! The bad part was at the end, when Cara had to get four shots. Poor kid!

All week I've been hearing about a volcano they're working on at preschool. Tomorrow, it will erupt! Cara demonstrated with hand motions and sound effects what will happen. The sound effects included screams.

Poor Owen's tummy is still upset. I'm giving up on the plan the lactation consultant suggested and continuing to avoid all dairy and chocolate. We'll give it a week or so and see what happens.

4/9/10 (Friday)

Owen was up at 2:30 and I didn't get back to bed until around four; it took us an hour for him to have his bottle, because we both were snoozy in the glider. Then he woke up some time after six, and we spent the next two hours snoozing in the glider with a bottle. Altogether, it was really really nice. Cara came along once in a while to tell us what was going on in her morning, and then we would go back to sleep. She even came up with a question about where something was in the kitchen, and I was able to answer it. It was nice to feel that I was helpful, while sleeping.

When I look back at the journal from when Cara was a tiny baby, there are some parts where I think I sound, well, kind of moronic. I wonder whether I'll feel the same way about this. One thing I wonder about is how to get a baby on a schedule. I have heard that such a thing can be done. No one has ever said how. I sort of tried the other day, putting a sleepy Owen into his crib in the morning. It lasted for half an hour, perhaps. Maybe what I should do is write down for a couple of days when he eats and when he sleeps. Then maybe I'll find out whether he has a pattern and maybe I can manipulate or at least understand it. Or then I could claim that I have him on a schedule. Hearing about Griffin's first few days, when he has his days and nights reversed, have made me see how well Owen really is doing, as far as sleeping goes. It's nice to see progress!

So, Cara went off to Grandmama's house to sleep over, and Steve, Owen, and I had an evening on our own. We got takeout and sat around watching TV, and Owen, who had basically been awake since four and had been pleasant for most of that time, was cranky. He didn't want more bottle. He didn't want a popper. He didn't need to be changed. We'd both tried holding him for a while, which he liked. When we put him down, he got upset. Eventually we realized it was getting to be the time when he usually goes to bed. Steve took him upstairs, put him in his sack, turned down the lights, and cuddled him in the glider. After maybe ten minutes, he put a happy baby in the crib. Yay for routine!!

4/10/10 (Saturday)

What a long day! Cara had her Middletown birthday celebration this morning at breakfast, which apparently consisted of birthday cake--a surprise birthday cake! She received a doll's high chair from Grandmama and Grandpapa, and Aunt Claire came and gave her Hungry Hungry Hippos. Grandmama reports that when Aunt Claire showed up with her beautifully wrapped gift, the thing Cara wanted first was a big hug. Hungry Hungry Hippos was my suggestion, and I'm excited about having it, but it really is a very very loud game. It's a loud game to have with a baby in the house. I mean, he doesn't mind noise, but that's really noisy!

Our next event was a trip to Uncle Jim and Aunt Sarah's house to meet Griffin and let them meet Owen for the first time. Griffin is almost a week old, and he was a nice quiet baby. He woke up and looked around when Steve and I held him, but otherwise he was mainly asleep. Owen was not. I don't know whether he was upset about being in another baby's territory or what, but he fussed for a lot of the time we spent there. Cara got a birthday gift which included the game Crazy Eights, and her uncle taught her how to play. I'm not sure how successful that was, but it went on for a while. She also played with Floyd the dog, running around and peeking at him through different doorways. Floyd actually came out into the kitchen, which surprised me, and sniffed Owen a few times.

I was holding Owen when Sarah was nursing Griffin, and Owen stared and stared. I think he got jealous. My evidence is that he then latched on with no problem and nursed for a good fifteen minutes, very happily. For some reason, no one took pictures! (Some day we'll print this out to make a binder of it. There are so many things we can delete!)

Finally, we headed to Grandmom's house to have dinner and cake! Owen got to cuddle with his grandparents, whom he hadn't seen for an unheard-of two weeks, and Cara got to draw outside with chalk. One of her gifts was an activity book, and we cut out a set of paper animals on surf boards. Once they'd been folded a little, they would stand up on the table and surf across it when someone blew on them. Four of us tried it, basically attempting to crash them together in the middle. Why didn't they have paper-surfing animals when I was a kid?

We got home around nine. Now it's eleven. The kids are both in bed. The cupcakes have been decorated, though standards have been lowered slightly in that regard. Goodie bags are being decorated (poor Steve--I wanted to use paper lunch bags because they're recyclable, and I'm making him draw on them). Pizza has been ordered. I think I'm going to put sheets on my bed. Maybe soon it'll be time for sleeping!

4/11/10 (Sunday)

The other day, Cara's item from her Make Me Take Me birthday party arrived. It is a painted mug that looks like a dinosaur pulling a mug trailer. On the back of the trailer Cara painted a girl. She explained gleefully to us that the girl had been standing in the dinosaur's path, and hadn't gotten out of the way when he drove by. "Splat!"

I have noticed lately that when I come in to get Owen from his crib in the night, he is several inches away from where I put him down. Hmmm. I think he's going to start moving quickly. He bobbles his head all over when I hold him up, and Juliana agrees that he has a strong neck. This morning Cara came in and looked down at Owen. She smiled at him and said his name--and he smiled back! That was cool.

For Cara's birthday my mother got her a subscription to a kid's National Geographic magazine. The publication hasn't arrived yet, but in the mailbox this morning I noticed we had received the free pair of binoculars that go with it. We showed them to Cara, who spent a lot of time walking through the house, looking through the wrong end of the binoculars and exclaiming over how far away we all were.

Today was Cara's birthday party. It was a bit of an adventure for us parents, since it's our first time having a birthday party with the Yellow Brick Road kids, and our first time having the party at "a place" instead of at our house. Having the Middlesex Gymnastics Academy host the party was supposed to take a lot of stress off of us, the parents. And yet still somehow we spent the morning in a tense race against time, trying to get everything ready and into the car. Cara helped by continuously attempting to change her outfit. Mommy and Cara had carefully chosen a party outfit for her the night before, and she was wearing it, but somehow this was not good enough. Attempts at reasoning her out of a change resulted in tears. Meanwhile, Owen helped our preparations by being fussy and hungry a lot.

Somehow, though, we made it to the party on time and things went well. It was nice to go back to MGA, where Cara used to have classes before she shifted over to dance. Cara knew what she was doing on all of the usual routines: swinging on the rope, jumping on the trampoline, going through little obstacle courses. I didn't get to see all of what the kids did, because I had to set up the party room and then run out as fast as I could to buy cups when it turned out the pizza place we ordered from did not bring them as requested. We think the kids enjoyed themselves, the cupcakes were a hit, the pizza arrived on time, and the party favors will hopefully be interesting.

We got home with a whole pizza, a tray of leftover cupcakes, a big garbage bag full of presents, a diaper bag, a sleepy baby, and a very tired five-year-old. After we opened and pawed through all of Cara's cool gifts, Mommy and baby spent a lot of the afternoon snoozing in Owen's room. Cara and I spent a lot of the afternoon taking all of her presents out of their packaging and trying them out. She got two new Barbies. One of them is roller skating in a doggie park, and the other has a giant horse. The one on the horse has a shirt that is painted on her--so Daddy will never have to take it off! The doggie park one is not as fancily dressed, but has roller skates and a mechanical dog that is supposed to pull her along by its leash (although I have yet to make this work--I blame our carpeting). She also got one of those Zhu Zhu Pets. These are tiny battery-operated gerbils or hamsters that make a lot of cute chirping noises but will also randomly roll around the floor, backing up and turning around whenever they bump into anything. The clincher for Cara was that the clever gift-giver also gave her a carrier and blanket to go with the creature--she loves putting things to bed, so this is perfect for her. She has also already stated that she wants to purchase all of the millions of accessories available for Zhu Zhu Pets.

Many of the people from preschool seemed to realize that Cara has an artistic slant--either that or they just got lucky, because she ended up with a lot of appropriate drawing, painting, and craft-related items. The one that caught her eye most was a sand art kit, which Cara and I got out and messed with after the Barbies had been retired. The kit came with many packets of colored sand, five or six empty containers, a funnel, and a "design stick" with which to tamp down the sand once you poured it into the chosen container with the funnel. Cara of course decided we had to exactly match all of the sand-layering shown in the containers pictured on the box. I had hoped I could get away with filling one or two containers with sand, but by the time Evie came downstairs and we were still going, she pointed out the real advantage of filling all of the containers in one sitting: I would never have to figure out how to safely store a bunch of already-open packets of colored sand. So we did the whole sand art thing and now we have five or six pretty containers of multi-colored sand.

In the evening we tried out a Barbie movie Cara got for her birthday. I thought it was great, and the parent who gifted it mentioned it was "not as dark" as the other Barbie movies on offer. Still the child felt it was a bit too scary. We did get through the whole thing, though, and it is all about mermaids, so hopefully we won't give up on this one.

Asked what the favorite part of her party was, Cara has more than once replied "All of it!" so I guess that's good. We parents are just glad to have gotten through it all in one piece. Now we're on the other side and maybe next weekend will be a little less over-stimulating for our children!

4/12/10 (Monday)

Owen had a fussy, cranky morning. Finally, around one in the afternoon, we were able to go do the errands that I'd aimed to be leaving to do at eleven. We had to stop at Linwood, so of course lots of people were excited to see him and thought he was wonderful and gorgeous and fabulous, which he certainly is, though it is sometimes hard to remember that during crankiness. Having fallen blissfully asleep in the car, Owen had about a ninety degree slump on. He was very happy. Half of the people we ran into, though, wanted to or wanted me to "fix his head." I tried over and over to explain that he really likes it that way!

I know people like to see babies, but I have to say that Owen seems to be particularly attractive to elderly women. He's like a magnet. I don't think this happened as much with Cara, but maybe I just don't remember. Any time Owen and I are out, though, they flock to him. They'll stop us on the street. We have long conversations in the grocery store. Today, in keeping with our theme of the head-slump-controversy, an elderly woman in the grocery store, having commented on his slump and been told that he likes it, suggested that perhaps he was cold and was slumping to try to keep his head warm, perhaps by burrowing it into the blanket that I had over him.

4/13/10 (Tuesday)

Owen was nicely slumped when I went to get Cara for swimming class. Miss Jane says that most babies do not achieve a full 90 degree bend. I am astonished.

One of Cara's Barbies explained to me this morning, in song, that she is a dog walker because she doesn't have a real job and that she lives in a volcano. She is, actually, a dog walker. She came with several dogs. She also has roller skates.

Swimming class was, once again, a success, but Cara seems to be getting a little bored. She took a potty break towards the end, though she'd gone right before class. Afterwards, she expressed a desire that the class would do more "exciting stuff." In the car, though, she told me that her Barbies were jealous because she got to go to swimming class and they didn't. Also because she went to preschool. Also, come to think of it, because she could walk. Because they thought they were real girls and didn't know they were just dolls!

Owen's been on soy formula all day. We had a nice day, too! There's been a definite change in his diapers; his poop is far more normal. He was pleasant all day, too. Then, of course, because's nothing's clear-cut or easy, he screamed pretty steadily from five thirty to seven thirty.

Towards the end of the screaming, to which of course she was immune, Cara started drawing things and getting us to cut them out. She started with a person. Next, she wanted to show me something "pretty freaky!" It was a freaky-looking (I had to agree) cat. Then there were some mice and a mouse house. The cat had eaten the mice's mother and father. And their brother. The bump on the cat's back was the brother mouse's ear. There were just two little girl mice left. What fun!

4/14/10 (Wednesday)

Owen and I had a busy day. We went out to lunch with Hinda, and she got to hold Owen and give him his bottle; we ate tag-team style. Owen liked her very much. She was a really great person to talk to about my baby feeding issues, having used formula eventually on her breast-fed kids. I'm slowly, very slowly, feeling better about stopping pumping. I'm slowly stopping pumping. I feel awful about it.

It was a nice day. We had an epic battle with Cara in the morning over whether she would wear shorts or not, since the temperature was supposed to get up to 68. We left it at her bringing shorts to change into. She thought she'd change into them for the time they were inside. I thought that sounded odd. She forgot the shorts, anyway.

Owen and I took a walk after lunch, and he stayed awake throughout. We went over to Babies R Us and then all the way to Walmart. For many portions of this adventure, Owen looked absolutely astonished. I can see why Cara says he's surprised! I changed his diaper in the restroom at Babies R Us, which is a great place to do that; they have a diaper receptacle set up and everything! Back at home, I gave him a bottle outside under the tree on a blanket, and then we lay down together and closed our eyes. It was gorgeous.

My fairly lame but sort of cool, depending on how you look at it, notion for dinner was hot dogs, cooked outside. Hot dogs in and of themselves is a fairly pitiful idea, since Cara eats way too many of them, but grilling is good! I managed to start the charcoal grill, but not in time to actually cook dinner. The three of us who could walk went outside after dinner, though, to roast marshamallows. Cara and I went out first and got sticks and got started, and Steve joined us. Cara started out doing her own but then handed me her stick to handle. She mentioned the idea of cooking hot dogs on sticks, which she said she'd seen in Curious George. George had done it with Hundley the dog, and George had held Hundley's stick. The natural conclusion, I thought, was that therefore I was George and Cara was Hundley. She wasn't so sure about that.

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