One and a half days old

Yesterday as I walked down the halls of the hospital labor and delivery unit to meet our friends Carey and Brant and their new baby girl, I was retracing the steps I’d taken as Rob and I walked laps back in July as we tried to get labor going the night before Owen’s birth (we were eventually sent home before real labor set in for good). And I was remembering those incredible morning moments when both Owen and Will came into the world.

And then I got to lay eyes on sweet sleeping Curran, who was born, all 8 pounds, 7 ounces of her, just before midnight on Friday.




And that’s when I began to cry. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?

Road trips -- big and small

Yesterday we made a simple car trip from Columbus up to Marietta to have dinner with Rob’s grandparents before heading up to Rob’s parents house in Toccoa while the boys caught the first hours of their nighttime sleep. The first leg of the trip up to Marietta took over three hours instead of the expected two because as we encountered delays in domino-effect.

First after about five minutes on the road I made the mistake of mentioning to Will to remember to give us some forewarning if he needed to pee so we’d have time to find a proper place for him to relieve himself.

“I need to pee!” he announced immediately after I’d issued the reminder.

So we pulled off at the next exit, which featured no gas stations or restrooms, and let him pee in the grass beside the off ramp. All he could produce was a one-second-long trickle. Rob and I rolled our eyes at each other as the cars whizzed by.

About a minute later, back on the interstate, Will made a new proclamation: “I need to poop!”

“Are you sure?” Rob asked, having just enjoyed a father-son hotdog lunch featuring chili-smothered hot dogs at Will’s pre-school. “Maybe it’s just gas.”

Will was sure. So we pulled off at the next exit, which thankfully did feature a gas station. Rob pumped gas while Will and I ran in hand in hand. The women’s restroom was locked. I didn’t even hesitate before trying the men’s. Locked.
So Will jumped around while we waited for an open restroom. Then as I held him on that toilet-paper covered public toilet, Will made some chili-dog inspired bodily noises, produced nothing to flush, and announced with a shrug: "I guess it was just gas." And it was up with the underwear and back to road.

Then we trudged through construction traffic around Newnan, Georgia. And by the time we’d hit Atlanta traffic our scheme to beat the rush hour had been thwarted so we sat in more stalled traffic after first pulling off to nurse crying Owen beside some mega parking deck.

Which brought us to a looming question. We’ll be heading out to Colorado in June for my cousin’s wedding and for some general fun in the mountains. And we’re considering skipping the plane tickets and rental cars and making a road trip of it instead.

“Are you sure we want to do 48 hours of this?” I asked Rob yesterday as we waded through the rush-hour traffic and I fought off some minor nausea I’d given my car-sick prone self by turning around too often to hand toys or cheerios to Owen.

But really Will was a trooper and Owen was semi-easy to keep content with a parade of toys and sufficient nursing. So we’re still considering it. And I’m still wondering if we’re insane.

So it’s time for another poll:

Would you drive with an 11-month old and a nearly 4-year-old from Columbus, Georgia to Eagle, Colorado?
	Not for a million dollars.
	Why not -- road trips make for great adventures and it'll be character building.
	Have you lost your mind? Absolutely not for MY family. But I think you should do it so we can laugh as you recount the agony of it all.
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Catching babies

With every advancement Owen makes in mobility and agility, Will regresses a bit in his ability to resist pestering the little guy. His favorite trick lately is to “catch” Owen, cradling the back of his head after pushing him down so that he descends softly to the floor. This is all fine and good when laid-back Owen is in a happy mood, but if he’s already borderline fussy he hates to be put to his back like a flailing turtle. And I have to swoop down and bring crying Owen back to sitting.

I’ll remind Will not to push Owen down, and he’ll say “I wasn’t pushing him; I was CATCHING him.”

He also enjoys laying himself immediately in Owen's path, like some insurmountable obstacle for the just-trying-to-crawl kid.

We are every day sinking deeper and deeper into that strange brotherly love-antagonism that seems to characterize so many male sibling relationships – or maybe it’s just sibling relationships in general. And I find myself talking with Will daily about strategies for keeping Owen happy and our responsibilities as big people living with a little person who can’t quite fend for himself. Sometimes Will looks me in the eyes and agrees and proves himself to be quite the little helper – other times he shuts his eyes and laughs. And then I know we're headed for battle.

Any strategies for instilling peace in a house with big mobile, grabby babies and young children who can run, push and pester? I imagine I’ll be needing them more and more.

Sharing a long book

Will and I just finished our first chapter book together the other night. We read "Charlotte’s Web" and loved it together. (Actually Will’s reading it twice, because he wanted to read it with Rob too. So we just managed a couple bookmarks and now he and Rob plan are continuing from where they left off before Rob went away for a good piece of the week.)

This double reading thing is not our idea. We’re just trying to follow Will’s lead in terms of his reading interests at the same time that we steer him, without being pushy, toward books that look interesting to us. Sometimes he wants a very simple picture book like “Digger Man” (for obvious reasons, and because the two brothers in it remind him of himself and Owen); sometimes he wants to fall back into the story of Charlotte and Wilbur.

I have to admit though, that I was enjoying "Charlotte's Web" so much that I sometimes worked a bit to lure him back. Occasionally when he’d say he wanted to read something else I’d counter with: “But remember, Wilbur was just about to go to the fair…… I wonder what will happen next.” And he’d be eager to read every time – and always asking for another chapter once we’d tackled one. When we finished the book, he looked at me and said, "Let's read it again." (I’m sure it also helped that Will had seen the movie “Charlotte’s Web” a while back.)

Rob and I had both tried reading "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" by Beverly Cleary with Will about a month ago. Will lost interest after a bit – and I did too, although I remember loving the story when I was in elementary school. E.B. White is a notch above Beverly Cleary in his storytelling capabilities -- even a children’s author can lure me in with a bit of humor or a turn of a phrase.

Now Will and I are just getting started on "Little House in the Big Woods," one of those books from my childhood that I’ve been excited to revisit (so I had the Easter Bunny plant the book in Will’s basket). It didn’t matter a bit to Will that the protagonist featured on the cover is a girl. He is enthralled by the idea of a gun-toting Pa and all the wolves and bears lurking outside the house. And for all of those reasons I think we’ll keep this a daytime book. Hopefully that way it won’t become fodder for nightmares (which still disturb Will semi-regularly and almost always feature animals coming into his room).

What are some chapter books or longer stories that you’ve enjoyed reading to your kids -- or that you're looking forward to reading to them once they're ready?

Easter in photos

Will enjoyed his third egg hunt of the week in our backyard Easter morning. And this one was particularly fun because he got to “win” the hunt. He’d told me with some measure of disappointment in his voice that another girl in his class at preschool had found the most eggs in a playground hunt they did on Thursday. Then Friday we had enjoyed an egg hunt play date at a friend’s house – but I was so caught up in a conversation, with Will sitting by my side, that I failed to realize the egg hunt had been launched and with our 30-second handicap many of the eggs had already been found.

“Give Will an egg,” all the nice, attentive moms around me started telling their children when they saw his measly collection. So he wound up with a boatload, but that was just charity. He hadn’t quite earned them.

So yesterday, he announced to Rob, Owen and me as we were heading out the back door: “I’m going to find the MOST eggs!”

It seemed like a good bet, since we gave him no competition. In fact Will found every egg -- save for the one that we’re pretty sure a raccoon beat him too. (We did a hard-boiled/plastic egg combo hunt and I hid the plastic eggs Saturday night. But one that contained a bag of yogurt-covered-raisins was removed from its hiding spot on our hammock, split open and all the contents consumed by some night scavenger.)

Throughout the hunt Will speculated about where the Easter bunny must have hopped to situate the eggs in their various locations. He was particularly mystified as to how the bunny managed to jump this high:

When we’d completed the morning hunt, Will walked inside singing “I got the most, I got the most. Mommy and Daddy, I got the most.”

“Did anyone else get any?” I asked him.

“Ally and Puff just got a little bit, but I got the most.” (So convenient to have imaginary friends who you can triumph over in competitions like this.)

We also enjoyed a small Easter birthday party yesterday with Simon, who turned 5. If, like Simon, you’re lucky enough to have a mother for an artist, you can get a dinosaur cake that looks like this...

and a dinosaur piñata that looks like this:
This piñata was a real fighter. It endured blow after brutal blow from the kids who weren’t too scared to fight him with a bat (Will was NOT in their brave company). Finally, the adults had to finish the deal.

In a sort of cathartic release of what appeared to be joyous rage, first a mom, Courtney, wailed away ruthlessly at the dino, shouting "This is wonderful!" as she attacked the pinata. Then a dad, Dan, who happens to be a psychologist by profession, went nuts on the dinosaur until the battered thing finally busted.

All of it was great fun to witness.

And here’s a final photo of Owen, in the arms of Aubry, his number one fan. My favorite Easter moment of all.

A romantic evening at Kohl’s

It’s been eons since we left Will and Owen with a babysitter so we decided to do a little late-afternoon, early-evening stint in part because I still don’t feel comfortable making a babysitter put both boys to bed and in part because our babysitter had somewhere to be by 7 p.m. We weren’t in the mood for a really early dinner so we took some Kohl’s gifts certificates we hadn’t spent since Christmas, split up and went on a little shopping spree in our respective gender departments for half an hour then teamed up for our final selections (Rob is actually a wonderful shopping partner, which is pretty ironic since I go shopping less than just about any woman I know; he’s actually interested in my fashion – probably because I need real help on that front).

Then we enjoyed a happy hour beer at a sports bar of all places, because it was the only place we had time to go that also had outdoor seating. When Rob started to talk about Tiger Woods and how Georgia got put out in the first round of the "tourney," I headed off for a bathroom break and told him to keep talking sports while I was gone. By the time I got back we had a great sports-free discussion about just about everything. And I realized that that Kohl’s/sports bar date, although it sounds so decidedly unromantic, was actually a lovely way to spend an evening. Sometimes it’s just fun to do the things you can’t ever make time for with kids in tow.

Will had a good time too. When we got home, and found he and Owen assembling a tinker-toy airplane with the babysitter, he asked if we could leave again. Then we got our big hugs.

Snakey baby

Will and Owen and I were all really happy to get Rob back after his three-day workshop in Augusta. I’d been vaguely dreading that little stint of solo parenting but it actually proved pretty painless. It made me more aware of how much Owen’s grown up since the last time Rob left us alone for a conference – in his own not-quite-crawling way, he’s getting more independent by the day. And I welcome that. It may be more work chasing a crawling baby who’s eager to get into everything and put it all into his mouth too, but I find it freeing as a mom to know that I no longer have total control over the location and play things of my little ones. I’m ready for Owen to become an explorer.

And it’s really interesting to watch how a not-quite-crawling kid can maneuver around an entire room, propelling himself backward, paddling to the right, then the left, even getting up on his hands and knees, only to sink right back down again. Will and I think Owen looks kind of like a snake, and on occasion we’ll get down on our bellies and snake around with him for a moment too. I imagine it won’t be too much longer before Owen sorts out the forward motion thing, but all the backwards-sideways stuff is really kind of elegant and amusing in the meantime.