Cross it off the list

OK, here's a photo of the first thing on my "I judge other parents about these things and will never do them with my own child" list:

It's the 4 of us at Sonic after we drove Harper around to try to get her to sleep.  That's what I had said I wouldn't do, drive around the baby to get it to sleep.

Here's the other one we flip-flopped on already:

Here's the rest of the list I can think of right now, in order of their likelyhood of being flip-flopped:

1. Pacifiers - flip-flopped
2. Drive around baby to get it to sleep - flip-flopped
3. Own a minivan
4. Use the TV as a babysitter
5. Allow our child(ren) to have a handheld video game device permanently attached
6. Cellphone before the age of 10
7. Own a minivan with a TV in the back

I'll update the blog with photographic evidence as any of these fall.

Scary Nutcracker Dream

One of my dreams last night was truly horrifying. There was a weird nutcracker doll that turned into a sort-Chucky-animated-monster. It had a jaw that when animated would chew and chew and chew and could not be stopped. The doll would just crawl around and chew through furniture, walls, cars, and would eat any person that got in its path. The dream played-out like a horror movie, and when I half-awoke remembering this dream I realized it was inspired by my constant little breast-feeding companion.

She is a lovely and much-loved little suckling, but I will look forward to more interaction than eating, pooping, crying, sleeping, and the occasional moment of awake contentment. Actually I do look forward to "tubbies" each evening. Tubbies is our term for bath time. Harper loves her bath-time and looks genuinely happy if only for 5 minutes.

Refluxin'

So we have a little reflux issue. Harper is a very "windy" child. Air comes out both ends all the time, and this makes her little belly and esophagus very unhappy. So every 2ish hours during the day we:
*change a diaper
* burp before each feeding
* feed for 10 - 25 minutes
* burp for at least 5 minutes after the feeding
* keep Harper upright at least 10 more minutes.

Even in my sleep I do this routine; I have been dreaming almost exclusively about breastfeeding and burping. I heard Rick muttering "shh shh shhhh" in his sleep a few nights ago, so at least I am not alone.

Does it count as staying in your pajamas all day if the clothes you have worn for 24 hours aren't actually pajamas?

Gramma SuSu's Visit

So, this is a much overdue post about Gramma SuSu (mama McTodd's mom)'s visit.  She came a little over a week ago, and was able to stay for a full week.  It was excellent to have her around to help, and she was willing to do most anything.  Again, as I mentioned earliler in the posts, the only thing she couldn't be relied upon for, was bringing nugget back at the end of her "shift", as she relished the time with her granddaughter too highly.

I took a few photos, and here they are.  If you want hi-res versions, let me know and I'll send them to you, as I can't post them that way here, and these won't print well.

This week's sign of the Apocalypse

We've posted our first video on YouTube. That's right, you can look forward to trading out some of those boring, old-fashioned still lifes for mundane, nauseating home videos that only the cameraman thinks is interesting!
It's all thanks to a couple of our friends that told us about this Flip Video camera. Do a Google of it if you're interested. Basically it's the size of an iPod, and has a built in USB plug, and built in editing software that will also automatically upload to YouTube, MySpace, etc. Pretty darn easy.
So here's a video of nugget chilling on my lap:

Oh, by the way, the title is blatantly stolen from a little weekly section of Sports Illustrated.

Regression

Three cheers for Rick for keeping the blog active while I took a much needed rest from the computer. I never knew that trying to get 4 hours sleep in a 24 hour period could be so exhausting.

I thought that as a new parent I would gaze at my newborn and try to determine whether her face, movements, and personality most resembled Rick or me. Instead, I find myself gazing at Rick, and noticing behaviors in myself that are newborn-infant-like. Maybe it is the sleep deprivation, but here is a list of things Rick and I do that seem more like things Harper does, than things a normal adult would do:
* Slowly blinking our eyes while they don't quite focus on anything (usually with a slack-jawed mouth accompaning vacant stare)
* Yawn very very slowly
* Sometimes dribble out food out of our mouth while eating
* Sleep with our hands curled up in little fists by our faces

Maybe this is an evolutionary strategy to allow us to better understand Harper.

Anxiety Dreams that don't involve missing exams

I know, I know, I've been remiss.  I haven't posted in a couple of days, and I'm sure our adoring fans are getting annoyed.  Things are going really well.  Our complaints are minor.  Harper basically ate all day today.  Very few breaks.  Momma's tired.  Diana's mom has been wonderful.  The only shortcoming is when we go upstairs to nap, and tell her we'll be down in X number of minutes, leaving her to watch Harper.  If we oversleep, she can't quite be trusted to come and get us, as she loves snuggling with the baby (as do the rest of us!).

I had this crazy anxiety dream the other day.  I don't have a lot of these, at least that I can remember.  In this one I was a super hero.  There were a pair of super villians, and we were in their lair.  I don't remember everything, but it was sort of stainless-steely, glass, and towery.  I think I trash talked them, and then went to make my escape.  Unfortunately one of the super villians had the ability to slow time, only around me of course, and the other had the combined abilities of Mr. Fantastic (strectchy, impervious to things like bullets), the Hulk (big, powerful, tough, cool green color), and the voice and brain of Mr. Spock.  How am I supposed to compete with that?  The majority of the dream that I remember was Mr. Fantastic Spock Hulk coming after me, and me trying to fly away through the quicksand of slowed time.  It was pretty intense.

OK, now that you've drudged, or at least scrolled, through the text, here's today's photos:  I think I'll probably retake the feet one without the tag in the way.  For a sense of scale, that tag is probably 3/4" long.

You have to find the humor in this stuff, or you're done

Not that stuff, the humor in that is easy.  Last night I was changing Harper, and made a series of rookie mistakes.  Rookie mistake #1: while changing Harper, I didn't have the replacement diaper ready.  So she had a little poop in the first diaper, and I was scrounging around getting the 2nd diaper ready, when a lot more came.  I scrambled to kind of keep some of her clothes and the sheet clean.  Here comes rookie mistake #2: I was holding her bottom up trying to get the poop under control when she peed.  Now, when I say pee, don't think about some little dribble.  Think about a male tiger marking it's territory.  My god it went everywhere.  The sheet and clothing I had tried to keep clean, the sheets on our bed (which she wasn't even on).  Both my arms up to my upper arms.  Then, to top it off rookie mistake #3.  This is really more French bathroom accoutrements rookie mistake #1, than diaper changing mistake #3.  I wanted to get the clothing and sheets that had poop and pee on them somewhat clean before I put them in with the rest of the laundry, so I figured I would take advantage of the basically unused bidet.  For those of you who are also unfamiliar with how it works, I'm sure there's a wikipedia entry about it.  But for the purposes of our little tale here, there's a "bath" function, and a "shower" function. Therefore there's a knob that adjusts between the two.  I had the hot water flowing pretty good in a predominantly bath mode.  I leaned over the bidet to reach this knob, and gave it a good twist.  Apparently there's a lot more capacity for water flow in the bath mode than in the shower mode, because the little twist I gave the knob made a LOT of water come from the little tiny showerhead.  And yeah, it pretty much hit me right in the face.  The water then deflected off of my face and showered the rest of the bathroom.  Probably the most slapstick part of it is that I had to lean forward, more into the stream, to get to the knob to shut it off.

All I can say is that I find potty humor pretty damn funny in general, and I had been laughing about each of these individual incidents.  The combination of the three had me roaring.

In other, more tame news, our friend Ann De gruy (I think that's the correct punctuation), who is entitled to a little congratulations of her own, came over: 

And we got an excellent shipment of children's' books from Camy and Sara (Harper's Aunts).  Here's a photo of the proud papa reading Quick As A Cricket to an attentive Harper.  Thanks guys!

Visits and Football

No particular story behind this one.  I just think Diana and Harper are both pretty damned cute.

Here's 2 of my favorite pass times, watching football, and having Harper nap on my lap/belly/chest, oh, and Go Bears!:

Without question the main news of yesterday/today was the visit of Grandma Todd, whom some have dubbed DiDi.  Harper can't quite say that yet, so the jury is still out:

Today's Update

At some point I'll try to go back and post the summary up to this point, but things are a little busy, as you can imagine.

Tropical Storm Hanna turned out to not be a big deal for our particular locale, which was fine given the circumstances of the first day home with our first baby.  We got about 1.4" of sorely needed rain, and some pretty intense wind, but didn't lose power or anything.

Ride home in the car was uneventful.  Harper seems to like the car seat just fine, which is good as she can join us in our road trippin ways, hopefully:

We got home and at least I didn't feel that dread of "oh my god how are we going to take care of this baby now?!"  Of course a lot of the pressure is off of me as the male, in that I don't need to provide nourishment for the baby.  We just need to keep in mind that off-the-shelf nourishment is just fine thank you.  It seems to be working pretty well for Harper as a supplement right now, that's for sure.

I put out a couple of balloons for the neighbors that wanted to be notified when the baby got home.  It was immensely satisfying to announce her to our friends and neighbors.  Here's the welcome home Harper (and welcome Hanna) photo:

The day pretty much consisted of feeding Harper, feeding ourselves, and sleeping.

We got another fair night's sleep, with some crying in the middle of the night.  It's still hard to know when she's gotten enough food, and when she just needs a quick break to burp or be changed.  We're getting it figured out.

Obviously she's fairly happy with what we've gotten done so far.  Here she was napping in the morning light this morning:

The Final Countdown

Here I am again, on the couch at an ungodly hour with my ginger ale, trying to cure the nausea, unable to sleep, alternating between reading a book, browsing the internet, and petting Osa. By tonight this will seem such a quiet, calm, relaxing time.

Unless I actually go into labor naturally in the next 10 hours we will arrive at Williamsburg Sentara hospital registration at 4 PM for check-in. Then by 5 PM I will have had an ultrasound to verify the baby is head down, and the cervidil will be administered. Followed by 2 hours of continual baby monitoring, some dinner, hopefully some sleep, unless the baby makes an appearance. Thursday morning around 5 AM will be when we determine if the medication did anything, and I get to decide how I want to proceed: pitocin, epidural, c-section - choices choices.

I am nervous, but know that we will have a baby, one way or another, by 7 PMish Thursday. Stay tuned.

So strange that tonight was the last night Rick and I had in our house with just the two of us and Osa. No regrets, but know that I will look back with glazed-over, sleep-deprived eyes remembering how quiet, relaxed, and well-rested we were. I am not at all certain we have savored this experience enough.

Chocolates!

So, we figured it was about time to have a post that wasn't about the baby. So here's a post about the hand-made chocolates I made yesterday for the annual Labor Day picnic. I got the idea, and I guess you could loosely call it a recipe, from A Chef's Kitchen here in Williamsburg (link). Basically the idea is pretty straightforward:
Start with a bunch of silicone cups:

Now, you'll need really killer chocolate. No, Hershey's just won't do. We used a dark Calebert (can't remember how it's spelled, and we ate it all so we can't look at the stamp on the chocolate), which we paid a nice $13.50 for 1.12 pounds, mixed with some of the last of our wedding milk chocolate, which if memory serves was also Calebert. You'll probably need to go to a gourmet shop, a chocolate shop, or if you have to, settle for whatever the best that's available at the grocery store. We used about a pound and got around 40 of the cups you see above. Chop the chocolate into several smaller blocks to aid melting, and place in a double-boiler. We made our own double-boiler with a couple of pots with about 1.5 inches of water in between:

Next, you'll need your fillings. We used some Macadamia nuts, some candied ginger, and fresh raspberries. The raspberries are AMAZING. They get cooked just a little bit by the hot chocolate, and it makes them quite magical. Place one filling in each of the cups:

Now use a metal tablespoon (or maybe a pastry bag?) to fill each one with the melted chocolate. Don't fill them too full, as if the chocolate overflows the sili-cups, they won't pop out well:
Now, place the entire sheetpan into the fridge. It took about 30-40 minutes for ours to firm up enough to be popped out of the sili-cups. You can tell when they're close to ready or ready when the chocolate on the surface is no longer shiny. It may take a couple more minutes after the tops are cooled for the rest of the chocolate to firm up, as the air isn't moving over the rest of the cup quite as well.
If you followed our advice and used the raspberries, or other fresh fruits, you'll definitely want to keep the chocolates in the fridge, as I wonder how long they'll stay fresh.
Ironically, while I spent several hours making these yesterday, Diana was out doing yardwork. Apparently raking woodchips doesn't make the baby come out :( Oops, that's "baby talk". Oh well, it's pretty much impossible to not mention SOMETHING about the baby in any conversation these days.