We had a nice holiday. Technically there's still a day left, but there's no more travel and there are no more house guests, so I think a recap would not leave much out at this point.

SNG's family came here for Christmas, which was nice since going anywhere with a small baby is a bit like going anywhere with concrete shoes on your feet. After everyone went home or back to work, I ate a lot of 50% off Christmas candy, watched a lot of TV, and as you may have guessed, played on the computer a lot.

Friday, SNG, e-baby and I went shopping, and we got a new camera. YAY! It takes much nicer pictures than the old one. The biggest differences are in speed: it takes a picture faster (push-button-to-click time is very short-- better for catching a spontaneous expression, like a smile) and it can take pictures of very fast things (which means fewer blurry pictures of babies and dogs). We've been keeping DOTi most of the week (Peace and Fuzzy's dog) and she is VERY fast.

For the weekend we went to SNG's parents house. Dianaverse will be there until New Year's Day, bt we came home today to beat the traffic. Nothing like sitting in hours of home-from-the-OBX traffic with a baby howling and a dog pooting in the backseat. It was a good idea: there were very few cars on the road today.

As an ending to what may be the most boring blog post ever written, here are e-baby pictures for December. Enjoy!

Two Posts In Two Days! or, Diaries From a Boring Kitchen Table:

e-baby has found her hands. I had read that this happens around 3 months, and in true e-baby fashion, at 3-months-and-1-day we caught her staring intently at her right hand, turning it over and over, wiggling the fingers (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4), then sucking on it, then looking at it again. It was the most interesting thing she'd seen since lunch. The next day she found her left hand. Now, flailing her arms about, she stops mid-swing to look at her hands, turning them over and over.

She already knew how to grasp things in her vicinity, like pushing her pacifier back into her mouth if it was slipping (more of a forearm-push than a grasp, really). With the discovery of hands, however, she is learning to grab objects held in front of her. This feels like a milestone, the beginning of Big Things. However, it seems that grasping comes much earlier than letting go:

*On her swing, there's a setting where she can grasp the fish hanging on the sides to make the music start and stop. She's been able to control this feature for a few weeks. However, after a few minutes of playing, she'll start fussing and then crying and tugging, tugging, tugging the fish, changing the music each time. It is quite evident that she does not know how to let it go.

*SNG gave her a tiny red teddy bear, and she bopped herself in the nose, chin, forehead with it before crying and shaking it about like a sticky piece of trash, all the while clutching it tightly in her tiny fist. She was undoubtedly aiming for her mouth, missed, and wanted it to Go Away.

Our lesson for the day is this: If a baby grabs your hair and won't let go, remember that it is probably as distressed about the situation as you are. Addendum: Don't take your baby mackerel fishing or you will pay hefty fines for keeping illegal-size fish. Most states won't even give a fishing license to a 3-month-old for this very reason. Babies just don't understand catch-and-release.

Oh, yeah- this post is going to reel in some interesting Google searches.

We had a fabulous Christmas. I'll post more about it later. But first, I wanted you to see these adorable pictures:

Who is that? No, it isn't e-baby. Hint: look at the date.

All along I've thought e-baby looks like my mother, but this is uncanny. She doesn't have my grandfather's nose after all. It's SNG's.

FRAU:(shouting) "Send in the clone!"
NUMBER TWO: "He is identical to you in every way, except he is one-eighth your size. "
DR. EVIL: "Breathtaking. I shall call him Mini-Me. Mini-Me, you will sit to my right."

TEN DAYS OFF WORK YAY YAY YAY!

I'm stocking up on 50%off Christmas candy and warming up my credit card for things I don't need.

Did you know that on average, people lose about 100 hairs a day? Just normal hair loss, not pattern baldness of any kind. While I was pregnant, I don't think I lost a single hair to natural causes. Honestly, I did not have to clean my brust for 9 months, plus two more months after the baby was born. The awesome thick hair was one of my favorite things about being pregnant. People attribute the phenomenal hair, nails, and skin of pregnancy to prenatal vitamins, but it's not that because I'm still taking them and the hairs have started to fall out. It started about a month ago, and apparently, I'm making up for lost time because I leave a trail of long blonde hairs everywhere I go. So let's see... even if I lost 50 hairs a day (which I think is an overestimate), then that's 48 weeks at 50 hairs NOT lost a day, so there are 16,800 hairs to lose now, plus the usual 100 a day. The thick hair was nice enough to almost make me want to be pregnant again. And then I smack myself in the back of the head and return to my senses.

Good news of the week: PartnerInCrime and LeBon have their electricity back!! Not only had they been without power for a week and a half, but her whole family was coming to town for Christmas, and oh yeah, did I mention she's VERY pregnant? Because she is. And she just got over a terrible several-week-long stomach thing. And she lost a whole freezer full of casseroles that she had made for after the baby's born. Now it's time to track down the person with the voodoo doll of my cousin before anything else happens.

Not-good news of the week: Peace is sick. She and Fuzzy were supposed to be in Philly for the holidays and we were planning to watch their dog DOTi this week, but now it looks like Peace won't be going anywhere soon. Send happy-healthy vibes for her.

Speaking of family in town, SNG's parents will be here sometime tomorrow, staying for Christmas and a little after-Christmas shopping. We'll have turducken again. I love turducken. SNG's mom will make some pies. Turducken and pies. Those are leftovers I won't complain about.

Of course, this is e-baby's first Christmas so she is dancing to some Christmas jazz music.



Merry Christmas to everybody!

Have you noticed that blog posting for me is feast or famine? This week it's feast.

From the file marked "Gee, really?", Christmas is Monday. New Year's Day is the next Monday. What is noteworthy about this is that my company closes for business between Christmas and New Year's every year. Ten days off. I love that.

January 2 I return to work full time. I don't love that as much. I'm still trying to figure out how to work exercise into my schedule once I'm back FT. This month has been easy because I take e-baby to day care at 9, work until 10:30, jog 30 minutes, feed the baby at 11, grab lunch until about 12:30, and work until about 2:30 or 3. But day care is only open 9-5, so something will have to be cut short to get in a full day's work (which is also 9-5). Soon she'll be big enough to ride in the baby jogger and I'll be able to take her to and from work on foot, but before that can happen the weather will have to be warmer. So I think that's not possible until March or so.

Hopefully I'll be traveling less next year than in previous years. For several years, upper management have been telling us that teaching via the internet is the wave of the future and that we'd all better get on board with it. I resisted this for as long as I could because I really LOVE being in the classroom face-to-face with my students. I also love seeing new places so travel was always a treat. But now that my priorities have shifted a bit, live web teaching is looking much more attractive. Let's just hope it doesn't make me start to hate my job. Because have I mentioned before? It's the perfect job.

Not being able to get in more than a 30-minute workout 5 days a week has certainly made it difficult to lose the baby weight. Oh, and being hungry all.the.time doesn't help much either. I think my pregnancy appetite stayed around. But, I guess this is temporary and once I can start jogging and biking to work again, I'm sure things will settle back to normal.

So what else? Nobody else will be around to hang out next week, since friends from work will be out of town and SNG will be at work and Dianaverse doesn't have the whole week off. So it'll be e-baby and me, cooped up alone like the family in The Shining, only without the axe-murdering Jack Nicholson character. Or the creepy twin girls. Or the blood-spewing-elevator-shaft.

Other than eating 50%off Christmas candy and going shopping for things I don't need, what is there to do for 4 weekdays on my own?

I'm trying out a trick to embed videos here from youtube. It's e-baby chatting with us about her big night out in Manhattan.

One week: Two trips, two colds, one bottle, three pizzas, and a very large rice krispie treat.

Last week I took my first trip without e-baby. It was two nights in suburban Philadelphia, which is quite a bit more boring than urban Philadelphia, but probably less violent. So I guess that's good. I was feeling the beginnings of a sore throat on Sunday night, and I hoped that by the time I got home I wouldn't be contagious anymore and that maybe e-baby wouldn't catch it.

SNG's parents came up to help him out and since they live in The Land Of Crappy Malls (their mall is likely to carry more double-wide trailers and fishing boots than Abercrombie sweaters) they took advantage of the day care to get some Christmas shopping done, and in the evenings there were 3 pairs of hands to feed, change, and snuggle with the SmallAndFuzzy one. She probably felt as though this was ALMOST the level of luxury to which she should become accustomed.

Meanwhile, in suburban Philly, I slept about 5 hours a night (oh cruel insomnia! oh terrible sore throat!) and every evening had SNG put the phone up to ebaby's mouth so I could hear those panting and grunting noises that I love so much. I came home Tuesday night, and SNG was waiting for me with e-baby in the car seat. As I came down the terminal hallway I saw her face light up and she smiled big for me. I think she knew that I was in need of some major baby therapy, and she stayed really cheerful all evening.

On Thursday, SNG, e-baby and I flew together (!) to New York. We got pictures of her first cab ride and her first hotel room and she even got a security badge at the regional office. So cute! Thursday night we had dinner with my cousin Cosmopolitan at a pizza joint owned by Mario Bataly (OH it was SO good). I always love seeing her when I can. She's the first person from my dad's family to meet e-baby in person and of course e turned on the charm. She smiled and cooed and then gracefully fell asleep so that the grown-ups could chat in peace over pizza, cheese, veggies, and a nice bottle of wine.

*side note: I really wish I could see my cousins more often. Every time I spend time with them I am reminded how much I like them. My mom's family always gets together at Easter, but the southern Louisiana family reunions have sort of died out. We need to get that going again. Cousins' weekends? Different city every year?

On Friday SNG and e-baby wandered around Manhattan and met some of our friends in the NY office (again, full-on charm) and then we hit LaGuardia for our:

5:30pm flight home.

The pilot for our plane was scheduled to arrive at LaGuardia at:

8pm.

Do the math on that one. It's OK, I'll wait.

Luckily the snack bar in the C-gate area is transcendent and I found a rice krispie block that was about 1/8 cubic foot. It was gone before we left the ground.

I was too optimistic to hope that e-baby would be spared by terrible sore throat and cold. By Saturday she was snot-logged and now she's a pathetic, whimpering mucous fountain. Poor little e-baby.

NEW PICTURES ARE POSTED!!!

Here are pictures of e-baby from weeks 7-9 , right before Thanksgiving

Here are pictures from Thanksgiving in Austin

Enjoy!

The Earth (hearts) Boobies!

Since becoming a mother, I've gradually become a complete and total devotee of breastfeeding. And it isn't just because of those La Leche League meetings I've been going to. But they are a lot of fun. While pregnant I had decided to nurse e-baby the first year, but I wasn't sure whether I'd like it much, or whether it would seem weird.

I've also become a connoisseur of baby and child care books, and one thing is clear from all of them: there are countless benefits of breastfeeding over formula where the baby's health is concerned. Health benefits aside, it is a lot cheaper and it's darned convenient. The thought of having to prepare and heat bottles of formula above and beyond everything else that baby care entails makes me twitch a little. There are a million other reasons, e.g. if I get a flu shot, the baby gets the immunization through the milk. Pharma can't manufacture an antibiotic cocktail that even approaches colostrum & milk for its timely adaptability to exposure to germs.

Besides all that, there's something ticklingly sweet and Hallmark-tastic about looking down at that little profile and her look of utter and complete peace & satisfaction at having a cuddle with mommy and eating and being warm and safe all at once. I wouldn't allow myself to be deprived of that for a million dollars. When e-baby is a surly teenager someday, I'll try to remember those little nursing moments to remind myself that she was, once, perfect.

This is not to diss women who don't breastfeed, and I have aunts on both sides of my family who didn't and their kids are fine. And, of course, adopted babies are generally not breastfed and they are fine, too. But I just love it. I didn't know if I would. It took a couple of weeks to get the hang of it, and it hurt at first. It's since evolved to where I can feed the baby in the backseat of the (parked) car in the middle of a busy day of shopping and fun. Without flashing anybody, either! Formula would be a lot more trouble.

So, the bee that pollinated my bonnet for this blog entry? I was surfing the web for info on Fenugreek (since I travel for work, I need to keep my supply up), and found this site .
If that doesn't convince you to start lactating and go nurse some random baby right away, I don't know what will.

Bike Rider in Training

Bike Rider in Training
Originally uploaded by catandtony318.

I will post pictures from the Thanksgiving trip to Austin soon. In the meantime, here is our "Cindy Lou Who" in her biker gear.

Turkey, Family, and Baby Diphthongs

Tomorrow e-baby and I are flying home from Austin. SNG, e and I flew in on Thanksgiving day, SNG flew home Tuesday, and I taught a class Tue-Thur (it just ended). Flying cross country alone with a baby (and a ton of luggage) sounds like a recipe for Big Fun.

The visit here has been so much fun, and really busy. E-baby has aged before our eyes in the past 6 days. She loves to look at EVERYTHING. The flight here was really easy, except that it's not easy to do anything onboard an airplane with a baby attached to you. She didn't mind the up and down business, but once we got onto terra firma, she was MAD. I think her ears must've been popping or something, because the whole evening she screamed and cried.

My niece, my brother and sister-in-law, and one of my aunts were at mom and dad's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and the next day, another aunt and uncle came to town with 5 of my little cousins (cousins' kids). The youngest of these is 8, the oldest 18. All were entertaining to, and entertained by, the little fuzzy-top baby. My cousin Twinkie #2 came to town on Sunday morning and spent Sunday and Monday with us, which was so much fun.

We also got to spend some time Friday, Saturday and Sunday with two of our best friends here, T&E, and their little guy Big Al, and the soon-to-be-baby-in-belly. Whew!! They are going to be TIRED starting in mid-March!

SPEAKING OF BABIES, I've been keeping mum about this, but she's 12 weeks along now so I can tell you that my high school BFF Lizard IS HAVING A BABY! Yay! So between PIC, E, Lizard and me, we'll have a little army of teeny babies, ready to take over the world. I can't wait!! I think e-baby's excited about it, too, but all she says is "LA!"

Actually, that isn't true. Last night she said her firstdipthong. It was a long "I" sound, pronounced like "Ah-ee." She's sosmart!! I was singing a little song to her that says "IIIII LOOOOVE YOUUUUU" and after the 3rd of 4th time, she said "IIII" (or, more accurately, "ahee") So I sang to her again, and again after 2 or 3 more, she said "IIII" ("ahee") She did it 3 times, so I know it wasn't a fluke. Not quite a first word, but more than a simple phoneme.

What other stuff did we do?... we watched people ice skate on the roof of the Whole Foods world headquarters on a beautiful 80 degree afternoon, walked to Mozart's for tea and the view of Lake Austin, and went jogging several times while others watched the baby. Who knows what else we'll do, since it's still almost a whole day until my plane leaves....

Monday and Tuesday were my first 1/2 days back at work, and e-baby's first days at daycare. SNG and I devised a morning ritual, which starts with my shower at 6am, moves to SNG changing the diaper, yada yada and ends with feeding the baby one last time at the daycare at about 8:45. It's a complicated little dance, but it'll work well once SNG and I practice our moves a few times. It worked so brilliantly, in fact, that even when e-baby poopinated her fancy new-kid-at-school outfit at 7:40am yesterday, we still had her changed and at school roughly on time (9:05, but who's counting?).

It was surprisingly easy. Knowing that I could call or drop in any time eased my nerves, and feeding her as I dropped her off in her room made the transition easy for her. The only side effect so far is that she cllliiiinnngggsss when I nurse her now, dozing with her "head in the fridge," as it were, for about 30 minutes after all the food is gone. I can't say I mind the extra cuddling. It's comforting to both of us.

In my office, the 2 half-days were just about as wasted as they could be. Most of my time was spent trudging through 8 weeks of email and telling people that, yes, I'm back ALREADY and yes, it sure seems SOON and the baby is beautiful and motherhood is magical etc. I expected it to be this way. But to tell you the truth, it felt beautiful and magical to be back to my old routines and coworkers who, I think I've mentioned before, I adore. But, I was so unproductive that instead of working a half day, I stayed for 6 hours. In the middle of that I fed e-baby and took a 20-minute jog on campus. Hooray for daycare!

Hi folks, this is Alphagal's cousin, PartnerInCrime. I'm working on fixing a few things in her blog template, so the site may be experiencing some technical difficulties.

If the whole thing goes kerflooey, don't fret, I'll have it back up and running in no time. Promise.

note: IT'S STILL ME, I JUST CHANGED THE TEMPLATE

We had our orientation at the day care center today. Monday will be my first day back at work (but part time until the end of the year).

*snif

Of course, I will be only 2 buildings away since day care is on campus, and they're giving me a pager so I can run over there everytime she's hungry to feed her throughout the day, and the place is cleaner than my house and better equipped, and there are three teachers per class, and a max of 6 babies in a class, and right now there are only four. But still. It makes me sad to leave her at all.

*snif, snif

It really only bothers me that I will have to travel and be without her for more than the business day. The first trip will be hard, but then maybe I'll get used to it. One of my friends at work says that she's gotten to where she loves going on trips because it's the only time she's certain to get uninterrupted sleep.

The thought of an uninterrupted night of sleep brings a tear to my eye. I haven't had one since August, since that last month of pregnancy had me pretty restless at night. At the time, people told me I was "getting practice for when the baby comes." Um, OK, someone tell me WHY THE HECK DID I NEED PRACTICE FOR THAT? I can do it JUST FINE without the practice. And right about now I'd love to sleep uninterrupted for 10 hours.

I shouldn't complain. E-baby only gets up once in the night, somewhere between 2 and 4am. My neighbor's little 5 1/2 month old girl still won't sleep for more than 3 hours at a stretch. And that's an improvement from a month ago when she was up every 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

What else? We're going to Austin for Thanksgiving and the week after. Bunches o' family will be coming up to meet miss e, so that'll be fun. I hope they're ready for some noise. That girl has pipes and when she wants to be heard, she is heard. And best of all, Friday we get to watch the UT/aTm game with T&E and Big Al.


Hey, remember this picture? That was our little 3-day-old e-baby.

Here's a similar shot, at 6 weeks:

And here's what e-baby said this morning when I told her she'd be starting "school" next week:

I just switched to the Blogger Beta today, so if the blog acts funny, that's probably why.

Poor little e-baby. She has a cold, and for a couple of days has been screaming in pain and misery, and not sleeping very much. I took her to the doctor today (what does it say about me that I'm still in the habit of saying "to the vet" rather than "to the doctor"? Do we need another dog or what?). They poked and prodded her, and agreed with me that her behavior was not normal for her (they know her really well by now). But, since they couldn't find any obvious reason for the screeching other than having a cold, and since she had a low-grade fever, they sent us over to the pediatric emergency unit at a local hospital. Not the hospital that's walking distance from the house. No, they sent us to the one clear on the other side of town. At rush hour.

So, once we got there, we were checked in pretty quickly, and she was poked and prodded some more. Poor little thing, probably wondering what she did to deserve having her temperature taken, rectally, three times in one day. And to add insult to injury, they wanted a urine sample. Yeah, with a newborn? That requires a catheter. Someday this day will resurface in some repressed memory therapy session and she'll hate me forever.

But the real reason I'm writing this post is to tell you about hospital procedure for an infant. Just like a grown-up, they took her temperature, blood pressure, respiration, weight, and handed me the teeniest, tiniest hospital gown you've ever seen. With puppies on it.

And yes, it ties up the back so that her little bottom sticks out the back when she's walking up and down the hall.

Or, just hanging around the room screeching from the indignity of it all. ;-)

Okay, so it took me a little longer than I had anticipated to sit down and post these. I have 2 sets of little videos. First, recent footage of e-baby in her new "overstimulation gym." Well, actually it's not called that but it should be.
She really loves "rock a bye baby," especially when it is performed by a blue octopus with flashing red eyes.
looking in the overhead mirror (and then looking a little overstimulated)
listening to her tunes
BTW, she's 6 weeks old in those.

For the next set, I thought this was fun. I found videos from 1, 2, 4 and 5 weeks old that show her face really well. It's really neat to see how she looks a little different in each one. She's not just getting bigger: her face is gaining character.
One week old
Two weeks old
Four weeks old
Five weeks old

I'm back online! Time Warner Cable are a bunch of jive-turkeys.

LONG story less-long: After 8 hours (EIGHT HOURS) on the phone with various tech support people over 2 days, they set an appointment to come fix something at my house between 8 and noon. But they ended up fixing it remotely and never told me so, and so I waited at home until the end of time without knowing the problem was fixed... until I happened to turn on the computer for something else and found "HP updates are available" and I said "How do you know this?" and the computer went online to get the updates-- which is how I learned that TWC had in fact fixed the problem without telling me.

What's most annoying about this? It was a server outage on their end. Which is what I thought it was in the beginning, that is to say, on Tuesday morning!! I told them so, and they kept telling me it was a hardware issue on my end. So I tested: 2 different wireless routers, 2 different cable modems, 3 computers, 2 different cable jacks in the house, a wireless connection, an ethernet connection, and a USB connection, with and without the router in play, enabling and disabling the firewalls, while holding a mouthful of coffee in my mouth, while standing on my head, seated and standing. I also tried playing JS Bach for the modem (good for babies, why not for modems?). They still wanted to tell me it was a hardware issue on my end. I told them that I was almost positive that they had a DHCP server issue, and they ignored me. Then they said it was the cable coming into my house. Which I knew it wasn't. And it wasn't. And I said I'd make this LONG story less-long so I'll just stop talking now.

Later I'm going to post some e-baby videos. E-baby is good for lowering blood pressure, and she can bost your immune system. And I know you want to see the proof. And it's cold& flu season. Consider it my good deed today.

Saturday night was our 2nd annual Guy Fawkes day bonfire, and a good time was had by all. Or, at least, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it. Unlike any other party we've ever thrown, the salad was the first thing to be finished off. That's probably because we forgot to show anyone where the hot dogs and s'mores were until after I noticed a couple of people eating their own hands.

We burned a lot of stuff, and I have to say that burninating with the assistance of youthful pre-pyromaniacs is really, really fun.

To see a photo-blog of the fun, go here. There are notes on most of the pictures because that is My New Trick. I should also mention that nearly all the pictures were taken by Dianaverse, which explains why she isn't actually in any of the pictures.

I have pictures from the Guy Fawkes party but I haven't been able to sit and post about it yet because there's this baby, who is all warm and soft and fuzzy on top, who smells so nice, who curls up around my neck and snores a little bit all morning long. She is there now and this took about 10 minutes to write. I should have it posted by this evening?

In the meantime, I put a link to Week 6 pictures on Flickr a couple of posts down from here, if you haven't seen them yet.

Test Post: Flickr Blog and Notes

Walking with mom
Originally uploaded by catandtony318.

I'm testing a feature in Flickr that lets you add notes to a picture. Neat. It also lets you post pictures directly to your blog. You can see the notes of you click on the picture.

WEEK 6 BABY PICTURES ARE HERE!