Saturday, June 22, 2013

Opal 23 - 26 weeks


 


Recently this baby lady has grown from being a clingy little monkey to being a clingy little monkey person.  She's really turning into an actual human.  When she's not insisting on being carried around the house in her human arm palanquin or the Bjorn, she's rolling all over the floor, gumming toys, pulling down the changing pad, and getting stuck under the bed.  Opal is getting really good at lifting up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth, the prelude to crawling.  This is the squirmy age too when they start trying to spin and roll during diaper changes.  Who knew you could have tiring wrestling matches with someone who weighs just under seventeen pounds? 

Opal is starting to get that chubby cheek baby Popeye look that Zeb had around this age.  She likes watching people while they eat and gumming the air, or even better, grabbing a huge handful of Mommy's hair, wrapping it around her fist, and jamming that into her face.  She's doing well with cereal and I'm sure she can't wait to start real good foods (she looked extremely jealous of Eli's surplus school birthday soft pretzels).  Maybe part of the reason for all that urgent gumming - the doctor says Opal is officially teething!  Little pits are visible on her gums on the bottom where the teeth are eventually going to bust out. 

The best of all is seeing Opal interact with her brothers.  Wolfie is especially nice with her, from the self-slapdancing he does to entertain her to holding her and letting her eat his hair, but she loves watching all of them.  And when the boys start bouncing off the walls, she's beginning to add her own squealing vocals to the mix!  Yeah, I know, remind me of how cute I thought it was next year when she's toddler screaming along with her crazy brothers!  All in all, though, she's my Nuggetina Ocarina of love!

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

June happenin's

So Opal had her first plane trip to Oregon,

A photo of one of the eighteen seconds Mommy and Opal got to spend with groomsman Daddy at the wedding
 
One of the other eighteen seconds, aw smoosh


What you see when you look up "ideal baby girl."
 
and now we're back!

See ya later, Mt. Hood
 
She was good on the first three planes, cranky and crying for a good chunk of the fourth plane, which was fortunately the last and shortest leg of the trip.  But boy, did she require a lot of jostling and amusement, and girlfriend barely slept at all.  Between all that aviatory exercise and not eating six pound breakfasts plus ten pound dinners plus hitting up the old-timey M&M dispenser for the first time ever while visiting Oregon due to dietary restrictions, I actually managed to lose a pound and a half while I was gone, even though I did eat a ton of chips the one time we went out for Salem must-have Mexican.  (I'll put up more pics of Oregon later this month on Facebook of course.  I'm trying to figure out how to keep a blog but not be redundant with pictures now that I'm posting pics of all the kids over on the ol' FB profile too).
 
So it's been me and two three and four here for the past week now.  Things can be a lot easier with Wolfie keeping Zeb out of my hair all day, but I have to remember Wolfie is five and half the time he's throwing his shirt up in the air and spazzing the sheets off all the beds in the house while babbling nonsense about peeing or butts or whatever.  I also have to remember to try to keep up with the good work he was doing in school.  He was asking for blank flags of the world to color in like he was in class, and so far he's done Central African Republic but declared Tibet too hard after begging for it.
 
All the boys were really impressive on Father's Day when we went for a walk to the school playground and played a game of state trivia using the giant USA map that's painted on the ground near the kindergarten playground.  We called out state names and Eli and Wolfie raced each other to the correct state on the map.  Then when we were done with just calling out names, we started throwing out trivia questions, like "This is the state where Aunt Sally and Aunt Lizzy went to college" or "This state is home to the Grand Canyon."  They pretty much immediately knew every single state, even though they weren't labeled or anything.  Zeb even knew a bunch of them.  I think that's really something special.  I'm pretty sure I only recently as an adult figured out how to identify the inland states based on shape and location alone. 
 
We actually mostly celebrated Father's Day the night before at Cheesecake Factory since Dad went to the US Open on Father's Day proper.  I think it was my first time back at the ol' Factory since my ritual night before C-section gorging session back in December.  Of course this time I had to thoroughly research the menu ahead of time and bring a post it with the five or six things I could actually eat, but it was still a really good time.  Zeb passed out on his worshipful aunt's arm,
 
 
probably foreshadowing his assumption of the "dude who passes out every night at dinner on the ship" role on the Alaska cruise next month, a role previously played with great success by Wolfie on the New England cruise of October 2011:
 
 
On Father's Day itself, besides the traditional Giving of the Ties and the trip to the playground, we finally introduced Opal to solid food.  Well, overly boob milky rice cereal.  She's been jealously watching us eat for months, and recently started making Popeye-like faces while gumming the air, which is baby face language for "put some food in my belly!"  She liked the cereal okay on Sunday, but it mostly dribbled down her face while she grabbed the spoon handle. 
 
 
But last night we made it a lot thicker, which she seemed to really enjoy.  I guess she was like "forget this dribble, I want real mush!"  Also Nic started playing the computer game I gave him for his birthday (Bioshock Infinite).  It's a good one to spectate (while the boys are sleeping or busy of course), which is always the best way for a game to actually get played in this house.  Not so good - the Voodoo Donut bacon maple flavored beer by Rogue Brewery that we brought back from Oregon that we drank while Nic played.  Tasted like the smoked pig ears my dogs used to chew growing up, and Nic says he was burping it up well into the next day at work.  Yum.
 
In other Zeb news, his grimey orange dog-like teeth necessitated an early trip to the dentist.  His first appointment was pre-Oregon at our regular dentist, but Mr. Stereotypical Toddler was far too "busy" to sit still long enough for our dude to be able to get in there and do the deed.  So we had to make another appointment at the circus-like office of a pediatric dentist last week, where Nic says he did fine until the necessary scraping part at the end, where they gave the option of giving him knock out juice, but Nic opted for a good old fashioned holding him down while he screams bloody murder.  This caused him to throw out his arms and scream out a classic gem on the way home - "It's a STINKY WORLD!"  Stinky, of course, being Zeb's recent favorite negative adjective to apply to any situation - "This show is stinky!" "You're stinky, mama!"  Of course, his even newer toddler rage phrase, acquired while we were in Oregon as far as I can tell, is "You're fired!"  As in, dropping to the floor in the middle of a tantrum, then pointing at the offending parent and screaming "You're fired, Daddy!"  His extremely silly haircut and puffy little face make him scarily Trump-like when he does this.  Another Zeb gem - he recently noticed and became fascinated with the mole on my forehead.  He likes pointing it out, touching it, and remarking on its circularity.
 
Tomorrow is Eli's eighth birthday.  Eight years ago today at this time I was in a ton of pain, about 24 hours and halfway through a failed induction.  I tried to tell Eli that this morning, but he made a point of ignoring me and saying in a typically surly fashion "I'm not obsessed with baby stuff!"

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Beautiful birthday family album

Well, since I've been so remiss at posting lately and since I'm leaving in a couple of hours here with Nic to take Opal on her very first plane ride on a trip to Oregon to see one of Nic's old best friends get married, yet I have some pics that need urgent posting on here, I'm just going to leave the following "notes about cute kid stuff going on for me to write about when I get a minute to myself on the computer" pretty much unedited:

Wolfie holding Opal and saying "It looks like I'm going to the dentist," Wolfie saying "when I wanted a baby boy we had a baby boy, when I wanted a baby girl we had one" and him saying he wants twenty kids total in the family and another girl next, Opal grabbing poopie diaper during changing, Wolfie's wild shopping outfit old man suit while helping me find dress with Aunt Lizzy, Eli in the car line making me laugh hysterically by saying "what are those two legit moms doing?", naughty zeb dumping his full cereal bowl in the running dishwasher, Opal being close to sitting and scoot propelling herself and smiling at gpt

Bet you can't tell what this one refers to.

I do have to mention in non-notespeak that today is Wolfie's last day at his preschool, which of course is breaking his teacher's heart because she tells him literally every day he's her best student.  I don't think it's an exaggeration, either.  Mom told me that a few days ago when she picked him up, another student's mom came up and asked her what program Wolfie's parents used to get him to read so well.  The answer, of course, is fart humor and booty dancing and a self-selected steady diet of his own boogers, I mean, Wolfie's natural intelligence.  I don't want to think about this being our last time at our preschool we've been at since Eli too much or my tear ducts might explode. 

Won't we send the youngest two, you ask?  Well, as many of you know, we're trying to move out of the area this summer.  We thought the destination would be in place by now, but it's been a little more challenging this time around.  It doesn't matter for this school, because we aren't sending Zeb to school until the 2014-2015 school year anyway and I'm sure we'll be out of this area by then, but I do feel more than a little sheepish when it's still not 100% set that this summer move is happening but I hear about how Wolfie and the teacher talk like every day about him moving and then yesterday he comes home with a card saying "We'll Miss You Wolfie!" signed by all the kids in the class.  I mean, he's graduating anyway, but that's not what the card meant.  Gotta get these plans set already!!!!

Eli had his first grade spring show yesterday, which birthday boy Nic came home early for.  The theme was "Bugz" (almost typed "Butz," which is of course our daily life theme here), boys were army ants, girls were lady bugs.  He was nervous but smiley and proud:


We went to Rita's for water ice/gelati afterwards.  The boys had birthday cake cream ice with custard (aka a gelati).  I was surprised I was able to convince Woog to try ice, and he liked it, but Nic had to finish his.  They smelled wonderfully cupcakey, but me and my dairy-fearing-but-31-pounds-so-far-weight-loss-inducing diet couldn't partake (Woog gets his fruit flavor loathing from me; I'm a cream ice and gelati girl all the way).  Then we went to Pumpernick's Deli for Nic's birthday and got the same waitress we had on Mother's Day (gotta repeat these restaurants to go to wherever has my delightful dry turkey clubs on rye or the other two things I'm allowed to eat for dinner).  This time I did get the whitefish appetizer as well, so at least I changed it up a little.  Nic got double cake (chocolate at the restaurant and carrot at home) and shared with the boys, so we had two near-barf whine balloon gut boys last night, yet miraculously no beds full of ralph. 

And now, my raison d'blog this morning - the hideous head photo shoot.  I took this ridiculous picture of Zeb making one of his favorite awful photo faces:


Which reminded me that photos shot up close and from below are hideous and terrifying, so we took the following gorgeous family shots:

Beauty muppet

I'm the naked warning lady from the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark book!

 Rotted out eyes on a sick dog
 
 Turtle man!
 
 Dental champion
 
 Lookin' gorgeous
 
Aliens could land in this Neanderthal's beard
 
Opal was asleep upstairs and thus did not join in the highly attractive fun.  Aunt Sally needs to be added to the roster as her muppetyness is sure to work well with the medium.

Gotta get ready to jet with this pretty lady, wish us bon voyage!