Spring's a comin.

This we know from the melting snow and sopping wet socks and pants that we've been wringing out lately.



Benjamin continues to give me grief at night by waking frequently. He was such a good sleeper for so long, and I guess he's now making up for it by acting like a newborn. I suppose it has to do with his racing mind and restlessness due to all the new things he's doing. He's now walking behind push toys and will try to stand up in the middle of the room. If this kid turns out to be a 9-month-old walker, I'm going to have my hands full. Oh, scratch that-- Natali will have her hands full :) We met her one more time for a familiarization session before she starts on Monday for her first 8-hour shift. I'm still trying to find something wrong with her. She wants to do our grocery shopping for an excuse to get out of the house with the kids. She wants to learn about some of the eco-friendly things we do to incorporate into her own home. She thinks Benjamin is the cutest thing. Seriously, nanny from heaven? I think so. I guess the only thing wrong with her so far is that she's leaving at the end of May, when her husband begins his pediatry rotations in Washington. But we'll take her for as long as we can!

Some other fun pics I took recently:

My favorite men:


I've got toothers!


Note the beginning of a peeling away of the diaper on his right side...


Half-way through the job...


Success: diaper free baby.

owie owie ow ow.

as part of our new membership to accel fitness i received 4 free personal training sessions. i was excited since i've always thought personal training would be the way to go to kick me in the butt and make me answer to someone on my health trail. well, session 2 was today. session 1 was no exercise--just body measurements, etc. ("oh, you mean my body is 1/3 fat?") but today we did arm machines. for 25 minutes. that's all. and i'm dead. literally, i cannot lift my hairbrush. how i'm going to take care of 2 children tonight while mike works the late shift, i have no idea.

she said yes!

Woo hoo! We got our nanny! Soooooo relieved and excited. Granted, we've only met her once, but we really felt an immediate click. We'll see her again tomorrow for a brief training, and then she'll start Monday. I can see the dissertation pages falling out of the printer as I type.... heh heh. I'm hoping things will work out well. This should be a good start. No more driving Jack across town and feeling terrible when he doesn't want to stay at daycare. At least I'll be around (which will be a challenge in and of itself, but I'm willing to negotiate that). Here's hoping!

P.S. Sorry, Jaxson, Jack won't see you at the Kids' Room anymore. We'll have to plan more get togethers. Of course, once it's nicer out consistently again, you'll see each other outside all the time!

Bits and pieces

I just figured I should write a little update since it's been awhile. Uh, let's see. Highlights:

1) Benj will be 9-months-old tomorrow. He's finally starting to do solids, though still not whole-heartedly. He likes Cheerios, though. He has the cutest little cupie rooster tail that is always sticking up on top of his head. I just love it. He's at such a fun age. He's constantly saying "Ma ma ma" and "Ba pa ba pa" and other cute little baby babbles. He's got the sweetest little baby voice.


2) Jack has been enjoying the 50-degree weather by puddle stomping whenever possible. I finally decided he needed some rubber boots, so he and I went on a Target run yesterday to buy boots. Then we went on a mommy&Jack date to Caribou coffee. He was so well-behaved. He got to sit in the leather chair with his feet up on the bear ottoman. The coffee dudes gave him a cup of animal crackers and made sure our Hot Apple Blast wasn't too hot. Good times. I think these little one-on-one dates will have to continue happening with me and each of the kids as they grow. I don't want to lose that time even when our family is larger.

3) Mike and I got to enjoy a nice dinner out at a new restaurant in the downtown East Village called Alba. I'd heard good things, and wow, were they ever right. We took every single one of our server's recommendations on food, right down to dessert, and he was DEAD ON every time. I have not been that happy with a meal for a long time. My absolute favorite was the soup: a huge bowl, where the chef lined it with marshmallows sprinkled with cinnamon, then torched them so they melted into the bowl. Then he put diced sour apples at the bottom of the bowl, and the server poured piping hot butternut squash soup into it. I practically licked that bowl.

4) We are in the process of trying to find a nanny. Well, actually, we found one. We offered her the job. She's still deciding. It's killing me. She would be perfect. We need someone to work 8-4, 3 days a week. The part-time daycare for Jack isn't working well and Benj is so active now that I can't get much done even when I'm home with just him. I don't want him to go to daycare, so the nanny thing seems to make more sense. We interviewed 3 people and weren't comfortable with the first 2, but the third was so great we offered it to her right then. We should know by the end of the week.... I'm keeping all fingers and toes crossed. This should make a big difference in my ability to get good progress made on the diss.

5) I've yet to hear back from my adviser on the chapter I sent her. Maybe this is good. Ignorance is bliss? In some ways I don't expect to hear back. We'll see.

Bad Parent. Bad, bad, bad parent.

So I mentioned Benj started crawling. As with most babies, he started slow and was easy to catch. So we didn't hurry to put up the baby gate. I'm sure you know where this is going. We figured maybe this weekend it would go up, after we had people over last week and didn't have to teach everyone how to open and shut it and all that jazz (the way our home is set up, you'd have to go through the gate between the kitchen and family room everytime, and this gigantic gate always stumps people). So anyway, Benj got better at crawling this week. I went into the kitchen at one point to get something, leaving him in the living room playing with toys, and of course, that's the moment he chose to notice the stairs for the first time. I saw him going for them and I ran, but I got there 2 seconds too late. He crawled right off the top stair without hesitation, rolled down the 5 stairs to the TILE below. Could I have been more scared? He wasn't hurt and he didn't hit his head, but he was shaken up and I felt TERRIBLE. Mike put the baby gate up right then and there. Oh, what a close call. So, so scary. No more putting off the baby proofing. This kid is a danger to himself. He has pulled up on things now and fallen over (most recently a kid's storage chair that fell on him, the lid opened and pinched his fingers, and all the puzzles inside crashed out and onto him.) I can't keep up with this kid.

This is the new jail bird about 20 minutes after the incident:


Other than our child's near-death experience, we've had a good week. Yesterday it was 45 degrees and we go outside. Benjamin got to ride in the wagon with Jack for the first time. This was fun--maybe more for me, than them. I'm going to enjoy it--I'm sure there will come a day when two brothers facing each other in a wagon will not equal a good idea.





Jack's had some fun with the neighbors recently, too.
Ball tent with Jaxson:



Then fun with snowballs with Will:





And of course he had to try eating the snow. Which he continued to do for a good 10 minutes.

Mobility Strikes Again

Good-bye tiny baby, hello upcoming toddler. Since Benjamin began crawling a week ago, I've had little time to blink. The very next day, we find him standing at the play table. Maybe he'd been wanting, all that time, to figure out how to get near things so he could pull up and stand? All I know is that now his little cupie head pops up in all sorts of places I'd rather not find it these days...pulling out cords from under chairs, wandering around under foot in the kitchen while I'm cooking, heading off onto porcelain tile where I'm always afraid he'll bonk his head, meandering through my work piles and chewing up my newspapers from PR ("Uh, no, Virginia, I can't write that chapter. Because my baby ate my notes on it. No, really, he did.") I can hear the baby gates calling from down deep in the closets. Oh, how I loved having the freedom to roam the house without unlocking, locking gates every other step. Benj is apparently so excited about all this new freedom (paired with some ferocious teething) that he's decided he doesn't need to sleep. Oh, that's just fabulous, let me tell you. I'm trying SO HARD to finish this dang diss. chapter, and yet in 4 hours of Jack's daycare time, I can usually only eek out an hour and a half of real work time due to Benj's constant need for supervision or our long battles to get him to nap.

I sound like I'm cranky about it. There are down sides, true, but he's also very cute and much happier now that he can get to things he wants now. And he is still very baby-ish and that he still REFUSES to eat solid food. It's all breast milk, all the time. Jack had been eating 3 solid meals a day since he was 7 1/2 months-old. Not Benj. No sir.



Jack's update? He won't shut up. That pretty much covers it.

Okay, he did get to try watercolors the other day.


And he had his friend Symone over. Sandy is Symone's mother. She went to Drake with Mike and I, and she was our realtor when we moved back to Des Moines. Her daughter Symone was born 6 days after Jack, also a premie, so they were in the NICU together. Here they are on their first Halloween, 2 months after leaving the NICU:



Here they are now, at almost 2 and a half:



This was the Jenniges family's third time meeting Benjamin. Sandy had some baby fever.


Other than that, we've had some fun with friends here and there, and I keep chugging away a the diss. I'll be so happy when this chapter is done. Except then it'll hit me that I have to do it all over again about 6 more times.... yikes.


Peter, Terrilee, Loralei and Owen came over last week for dinner and some fun with the Wii. We are getting good use of the Wii. Loralei was a champion hula hooper.

Peter tried, too :)

Owen was seriously flexible and creative with how to move on the balance board.

Hey Look, it's a Graduate Student!

These days, our basement (i.e., my writing lair) looks like this:



Believe it or not, those piles do constitute a form of organized chaos. You can't tell, but on top of each pile of notes/articles/fieldnotes/interviews sits a marker telling me the topic of each pile. I guess it's a lazy (wo)man's filing system. Over the computer are some inspirational quotes I took out of "Destination Dissertation." I will admit, you can see in the photo that my dissertation is NOT what's on the screen...but it is sometimes, I promise.

The rest of the room? Not *exactly* organized....

But I guess this is the reality of finishing a dissertation while staying home with children. The only thing missing (besides a good proximity to the UI libraries) are my supportive and trusted colleagues and friends. Sarah, Lexi, Carrie, Samantha, Jon, Kenda.... I can't tell you how much I'd love to find a way to beam you all into my lair and share coffee and a few hours of conversation. I'm confident you would be able to help remind me that 1) I like anthropology and 2) I can do anthropology. Then I could get motivated to really plug away. But alas, no can do. So I'm trying to do it on my own.

I bought myself a gift certificate for a massage today, and hung it up on the fridge. Now I can stare at it every day until I send a full chapter draft to VRD. THEN I'll schedule it. Small incentives. I have a big incentive for finishing a whole draft-- Mike and I agreed that once I graduate, I can choose a destination for us to vacation to. Most likely it would be next spring or summer, assuming I graduate in December of this year. I'm thinking California.... :)

yoga baby

mike has started a new yoga routine in the mornings, and jack is fascinated. he likes it so much that the other night while i tried to get dinner ready and mike tried to get benjamin to nap, we turned on the yoga video to keep jack entertained. he's got some good, stretchy moves:

New Year, new joys.

My two New Year's Resolutions:

1) Finish my dissertation. Once and for ALL.
2) Go an entire calendar year without being pregnant for any part of it. This, after all, hasn't happened since 2004.

My happiest moment of this past week:

Toddler boy and Baby boy taking a bath together. Suddenly, unsolicited, Toddler boy scoots over next to Baby boy with a big smile on his face, hugs his little brother, kisses his head, and says "I love you, baby." Melt.

Other happy moments of the past week:

Toddler boy: "More broccoli, please!"

Hubby and I get to watch a movie together and cuddle on the couch, without interruption. This hasn't happened in a long time.

Happy 8 months old to Benjamin today!!!