Play time

A few pictures of Sofie at the 6-10 month old play class at the Ballard branch of Gymboree this past weekend.

Balancing on a stability toy is no sweat for her -- this is a half sphere with the flat surface up and the rounded surface down:


So let's add another baby (her buddy Hazel, who we've known since she was about four weeks old) to make it more complicated:


Face to face and spinning around like a merry-go-round was a little harder and led to some topples:


And everyone's favorite activity -- bubble time on the parachute! Sofie reaches out to pop a few, while Aunt Erica looks on:



Looking on as Jackson and Hazel get the bubble treatment:

Thoughts on the stay at home life

One of the best things about being a stay-at-home parent is that your time is your own. Sure, a heck of a lot of that time is taken up feeding, putting down for naps, getting up from naps, diapering, reading to, playing with, and otherwise caring for your kid. But at the same time, you have the pleasure of sitting with your sweet little baby in your lap who has just waken up from a good nap and looking out the door to see that the weather is gorgeous and deciding that you're going to go to the zoo today. Or out to breakfast, just the two of you. Or that you're going to drive to the beach and look at the water.

I've never experienced the luxury of free time like this before. That sounds like such an exaggeration, but this is literally true - like most people, I went from college to grad school to job to other job to other job, without much time in between. I suppose summers when I was a kid were free, but I didn't exactly have the same power I do now to decide what, when, and where I was going to spend my time.

It feels amazing, and makes me understand how great it must feel to be self-employed, or independently wealthy with no need to work.

Especially that second one.

The harder side of being a stay-at-home parent is that wow, the hours are long. I get up at six or seven with Sofie, and often my day doesn't wind down until 9 p.m. After Brett gets home, we have dinner, and then he gets some much needed playtime with her while I find myself cleaning and otherwise completing chores until the stroke of eight, when Sofie begins to meltdown and needs to be put to bed. And even if Brett tries to take the reins on that process, Sofie nearly always reaches for me when she decides she's willing to nod off to sleep in one of our arms.

"What am I doing wrong?" I exhaustedly asked Brett yesterday as I was folding laundry on the dining room table at 7:30. "Are the hours supposed to be so long?"

"If you're doing it right, yeah," he said.


Nonetheless, the wonderful far outweighs the difficult, and I'm grateful every day that I get to be home with Sofie, and that I have a supportive husband who's willing to go off to work every day to pay the bills, and who didn't make an issue of the fact that we could easily have afforded a nanny had we both kept working, and who is willing to give up some of the extravagances we were used to to do the best thing for our baby.

I'll go back to work someday in the not-too-distant future, hopefully not until Sofie is in school, but possibly before that if circumstances require it. But I know I'll look back on these first few years as a kind of nirvana.

Why I love this time of year

Cherry petals covering the grass in the backyard:

By hand

I've started hand-quilting the quilt I was working on in the last month of my pregnancy. This quilt (a very simple pattern called Illinois Road) is really special to me because I was working on pinning the layers together the day I went into labor. In fact, the first thing I did on determining that yes this really was labor was rush back to the baby's room, where I had the quilt top, batting, and backing taped to the floor, and finish putting in the rest of the safety pins so that I could pick it up, fold it, and put it away.

It's an amusing enough picture to imagine a 9+ month pregnant woman crawling around on the floor pinning a quilt, but alter that picture to include a 9+ months pregnant woman who's in labor, and you'll get some sense of what this scene was like. But it was a labor of love (no pun intended) -- this quilt was for Sofie, and there was no way I was leaving it out on the floor for the cats to wreak havoc with while we were away, and no way I was ever going to get back around to pinning it once we came home with a newborn.

Call it nesting gone awry.

Nonetheless, it feels great to be quilting it. Here it is in the hoop:



Why am I doing this by hand? Well, a couple reasons. One, I really stink at machine-quilting. I can make the tops just fine, but I don't have the correct setup (read, a good quilting table with the sewing machine recessed into the top) to really handle a quilt top well, and even if I did my skills are not so great at doing this, and I want this to be NICE. It's my "when you were ready to be born" quilt.

It'll take forever, given that I can find the time to do a square or two every couple of days, but when it's finished it will look great.

And a postscript...

We had to find a new use for the bassinet, now that Sofie's outgrown it. Right now it's serving as animal ark:

The great crib drama that wasn't

Well - she did great. That was a nice surprise. The first night she slept two four hour stints with each of us getting up to help her get back to sleep once, and the second night she cried twice but put herself back to sleep in under a minute and we didn't get up at all. Yay Sofie!

This crib thing feels very freeing to me. She's not much further away than when she slept at the end of the bed, but she's far enough away that I don't feel like I have to tiptoe around when I get out of bed, and we feel a little less guilty about having the television on after she's sleeping. And naptimes - naptime is a revelation. Knowing she's safe and secure in a crib she can't climb out of (rather than on my bed, or in the bassinet) is WONDERFUL. I can safely go do things elsewhere in the house and keep an ear out for her wakeup cries without wondering if she's going to roll out of bed.

So big buildup, little payoff in the drama department. But that's a good thing.

On a side note, I found her standing up in her crib today, having pulled herself up on the railing. Sheesh, Sofie, you're only six months old! You don't have to learn to do EVERYTHING this month...

Pace yourself!

Big Night

Tonight is a big night at our house - it's the night we're going to put Sofie to sleep in her crib for the first time. To date, she's been sleeping in her lovely Eddie Bauer bassinet at the foot of our bed. That's been great, but she's too big for it now - she's able to sit up completely in it, which is a no-no (because it raises the possibility of her toppling over the edge), and is past the weight limit by a couple of pounds.

But Sofie is not so big on change, so this promises to be a momentous event in her young life. I've been preparing her by putting her down for her afternoon naps in the crib all week. She's doing fairly well with that - she cried for a long time the first day, but eventually settled down to sleep after a few visits and pats from me. For the rest of the week, she's only cried a few minutes each time - maybe ten minutes the second day, and hardly at all today (day five). After a little bit of fuss she turns over on her stomach (impossible in the bassinet), and goes to sleep, usually sideways, like this:



You can see her big huge tiger -- actually a former occupant of Brett's office at Microsoft that Sofie inherited when he quit -- who she loves more than life, pressed up against her legs.

We moved the crib upstairs a few weeks ago, and it's now in the front nook off our bedroom so that she's still not too far away - a few yards from the bed is all. The idea is that it'll be easier for us, at least, to move her into the crib if we don't have to run downstairs to her bedroom all of the time, and then once she's used to the crib we can move her to her bedroom when she's a few months older. Or maybe we're just setting ourselves up for further difficult transitions this way, who knows.

If I had it all to do over again, I'd have moved her into the crib much, much earlier, or not used the bassinet at all - just put the crib up here right from the beginning and had her sleep there. Then we wouldn't be going through this potential disruption. Ah, the things I know now...

Anyway, we're hoping that the napping this week will have prepared her a little, but realistically speaking we're probably going to be up in the middle of the night a lot this weekend. We're hoping that maybe by Monday she'll be getting used to it and the worst will be over.

I will, of course, let you know how it went.

Spring is here!

Happy Spring! The cherry tree out back is blooming again:



And for those of you wondering where I found the blue sky for this picture in this rainy, rainy month, I'll admit this is a picture from last year. But it looks JUST like this, I swear.

I'm looking forward to being able to keep up a little better with gardening and yardwork than I did last year - even with the baby, I think I'll be able to do more than I could when I was pregnant and unwieldy. I've been enjoying pruning the roses back (my favorite spring task) and putting in a few new plants, and thinking about what to do next.

I've also got another confession - I paid a gardening service to come in last month and do a thorough spring cleanup for me. Because I was otherwise occupied in September and October, I didn't get out and do all the "put the garden to bed" tasks I should have done in the fall, which led to an unbelievable mess out there this spring -- the wisteria in the back of the house was 20 feet high and winding all over the roof, out of reach of my highest ladder, and the bamboo grove was taking over the other corner. So I called someone, and in addition to doing those two jobs, they weeded all my beds, cleaned up my perennials, and trimmed the dogwood trees out front! So I'm starting the gardening season out without being massively behind.

No impressively huge plans for this season - I just want to take care of what's there, fix the watering issues in my rose bed, grow some tomatoes, and putter around here and there.

But it's spring! I'm so glad!

Cracking me up

Six months is such a fun age. I've discovered in the last week that Sofie's sense of humor has progressed to the point where funny voices crack her up. This has led to lots of time spent rolling around on the bed together laughing and laughing, which is just about the best thing ever.

She always giggled a little - but she never just chortled away like this before, like Mommy is the funniest person in the whole world. I love her silliness.

It's not QUITE as funny as this, but almost:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HttF5HVYtlQ

Random pics

Brett's come down with whatever viral thing I just finished up with, and has been flat on his back for the last two days. Leading to a series of nap shots I call Sick Time With Baby. She sleeps in her bassinet at night, but she loves nothing more than getting to take her naps in the big people bed, with company:





And finally, in celebration of sleep, a picture of Sofie during her morning nap today:

The little wins

Tuesday was basically cancelled due to lack of sleep. Oh sure, we got up and went about the minimal motions of our day - Brett got up at the last second and went to work, after depositing the baby in my arms and reassuring me yes, you can do this despite only 1.5 hours of sleep. But we did nothing that didn't have to be done. Coffee with a friend this afternoon? Cancelled. Dinner plans? Cancelled. Brain cells? Cancelled.

But it's the little things on days like this that see me through. I feel proud to realize, at 7 p.m., that in spite of Sofie staying up literally ALL night last night (for the second time this week), I showed up for duty today and did a pretty good job. I emptied the dishwasher and did the laundry. I cooked dinner for Brett and was nice to him too. And most importantly, I was cheerful and patient with Sofie in spite of my tiredness and we had a nice day. We read books. We played games. We sang songs. We jumped. Not only was I not cranky with her, I never even felt like being cranky with her.

Some days, you can surprise yourself with parenting resources you didn't know you had.

And Brett? He surprises me too, sometimes, with the amount of patience he has on these nights when it becomes apparent that there's just no way she's going to sleep, and that it's beyond what one person can handle. I try, I really do, to just handle it, but when one hour becomes two becomes three in the middle of the night, there's nothing like a supportive partner who will get up and hold the baby, or take her down to the basement for a while so you can get an hour of sleep, despite the fact that he has to go to work in a few hours. We're in this thing together, such actions say, and I know staying home with her is hard work too and you need a little rest to do it -- and there's nothing more sexy than that.



On a side note, I seem to post about sleep so much that I've now created a category for it. Probably they're the least interesting things on here, since they're always the same. "Oh god, she stayed up all night again!" Oh well.

Random news

(3/16 - adding a picture of the new island)

Busy weekend.

Friday was a momentous day in that Brett and I went out to dinner. Alone. For the first time since Sofie was born. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a meal quite so much in my entire life. One thing about staying home most of the time - it makes you appreciate going out more than when it's an every weekend thing.

We've finally found a couple willing to trade babysitting with us. My friend Kate (from Listening Mothers) and her husband Steve left their daughter Molly with us last Friday and went out for a couple hours, and this week it was our turn. I dropped Sofie off at their house in Magnolia and then drove downtown to meet Brett at Cafe Campagne, where we had oysters (me) and mussels (him), duck (both of us), and decadent desserts.

When we got back to Kate's house to pick Sofie up, she was fast asleep on her husband Steve's chest, having happily played with their dog, petted their three-legged cat, read books, and tried out a few of Molly's toys. They hinted at a little bit of a crying jag when I left, but all in all she did great.

Saturday morning, Brett went to Gymboree with Sofie for the first time, and got to take part in baby soccer and the hokey pokey and various other fun and games. A good time was had by all. I'm hoping this might become their dad-and-daughter bonding activity on Saturday mornings, letting me get a little extra sleep.

Then we spent all day Saturday and half of Sunday putting together this thing, our new kitchen island, which was without doubt the most complicated piece of furniture we've ever assembled. Good lord. It looks terrific, and I'm glad we got it, but we're wondering why we do these things to ourselves.

Here's a pic:


That's Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris cookbook on the bookholder, by the way. Anyone else a big fan of hers?

And finally, Sofie celebrated daylight saving time by staying up pretty much all night on Saturday. She was up at least hourly from eight p.m. until four a.m., then slept four hours and got up for the day. So everyone's reeling today. The night before, she slept eleven hours straight. Go figure. There seems to be no logic to her sleep routine.

My sister in law Marilyn is doing a half-marathon today. I hope the weather in Sacramento is better than the weather here! We're in the midst of the Pineapple Express, fresh from Hawaii - lots of wind and rain for days straight. Good luck, Marilyn!

Sofie's tasting notes

Guest blogger today: Sofie

Sofie's Tasting Guide for Babies

Hey there, folks. Since I'm a bit ahead of a few of my little friends (shout out to Hazel and Molly - hey guys) I thought I'd give you the real poop on solid food. Here's what I know so far:

1) The first thing that's going to happen is that they're going to give you some kind of white mush that tastes a lot like milk for a few days. Don't worry about it - this part is a breeze. Slurp it down and lull mom into a false sense of security by not even making a mess. It'll make the next step more fun.

2) AVOCADOS! Holy diapers, who invented these? You'll probably have to take one bite, because you won't realize until too late that this isn't just more white gook. Once you realize it, though, rectify this mistake by getting it out of your mouth as fast as you can -- and I don'y mean by swallowing either, babies! That's right - spit it, dribble it, raspberry it across the room, whatever it takes. Then give your mom a look to let her know you're on to her tricks. What WAS she thinking?

If you do this forcefully enough, you won't be getting avocados again tomorrow. And hey, that's really the point, is it not?

3) If you're lucky, the next meal will be an old standby, sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes have several fine points - first they're yummy, and second, they make excellent body paint. Definitely eat these, but also make sure to get some on your hands. You can then rub this into your socks, and presto chango - your mom will take your socks off, which is what you've really been after since she first put them on you this morning. After that, apply liberally to whichever part of your body you think could use a little bright orange color.

Bonus points if you can get it on the cat.

4) Soon you'll get your first fruit. For me, it was pears. Mom was expecting this to be a shoo-in, but just to keep her on her toes I decided to reject the pears utterly. They're grainy, and squishy, and a really dull color that held no creative potential at all for me.

Personally, I'm holding out for twinkies. Keep your fingers crossed.

I love Stephen Colbert

This has been posted elsewhere, but it's so good it's worth repeating - a Stephen Colbert report on the stay-at-home dad phenomenon:

http://tinyurl.com/24jpk2

You have to watch a short ad before the main video comes online...

My favorite illness

I enjoy laryngitis so, so much that I can't seem to let a late winter season go by without hosting a party for it in my respiratory system for a couple weeks. Last year, I couldn't speak for upwards of three weeks. This year, after losing a week-long battle against a nasty virus last week, I woke up this Monday to discover I'd completely lost my voice. It's Thursday and I still can't squeak out enough sound to order a coffee in a coffee shop.

Really. I just tried. I did manage to get the kind of coffee I wanted, finally, but pantomime was involved.

Several points of frustration here:

• I'm discovering how tough it is to be sick and have the sole care of a baby during the day. I'm finally starting to feel a little better and have some energy, but the height of the dizzy-swimmy-icky stage, on Sunday/Monday/Tuesday, were really awful. Makes me nervous about what it will be like if I come down with the flu at some point. Call a babysitter, most likely.
  
• I can't talk to Sofie! I can whisper - I'm sure she's wondering why everything is now a big secret -- and I can whistle, which she finds endlessly amusing, so those two things are getting me by, but I haven't really said a word out loud to her in days and she has got to be wondering what's up.
  
• Now that I'm finally starting to feel better, it's eminently frustrating to have my voice lagging so far behind. The simplest things - answering the phone, going to the store and saying hello to the checkout person, seeing who's at the door, answering when someone across the street calls hello -- are such a pain now.

Oh well.

Sofie, thankfully, is fine. We both had a cold at the start of this, but hers cleared up late last week and didn't progress. I think nursing-transmitted-immunity is doing its job.