A Zaftig Pea in a Pod

When we last saw Owen bathing, he was happily seated in his Wash Pod, feeling all contained and secure, if a bit solemn.  Fast forward to a month ago, when I gave Owen a bath in his Pod only to discover what happened when he played with his new favorite toy -- his toes -- in his tub.  The answer is:  he gets rather wedged in, making it hard to lift his slippery chub and enrobe it in a ducky towel.  When I lifted him up, the tub came too!  Oh dear.

So we got a basin tub for intermediate bathing, and he now mostly takes a daily bath in his tub in a tub, sitting up, kicking his feet and eating his wash cloth.

Next stop:  a pool and a natty pair of trunks?

All He Needs Is A Dirk and Sporran

Wouldn't this leg look good in a kilt? 

 Oh wait, the hand's blocking it.  Let me try again:

He keeps trying to shield his chubby thighs from the camera!  

Another try!  There we go.  This leg.  Isn't it kilt-worthy?

Owen says:  You're kidding me, right?

You mean a plaid skirt?!

 With nothing underneath?

And if the wind blows?

Alphabet Meme

Anger:  What I get when people on a crowded train try to leave their bags on a seat while other people are standing.  I’ve gotten so that I now only go to sit on seats with bags on them, thus forcing the bags’ owners to put them on their laps or at their feet, LIKE CONSIDERATE PEOPLE AUTOMATICALLY DO, ahem.

Breasts:  I have never thought about, seen, or handled my own breasts as much as I have in the last five plus months of breastfeeding Owen.  Nursing has been a positive experience on the whole (albeit fraught with malady), but I will be glad when my breasts are no longer so center stage.

Candy:  I am ready to divorce it.  I’m talking to you, chocolate!  From now on, let’s just be friends who see each other on occasion.

Dorothy:  I frequently worry about Dorothy’s health (recurring UTI’s and allergy hotspots).  It makes me realize how lucky I was with my pug, Tulip, who until her last two years, basically only required a yearly check-up.

Empathy:  To me the ability to experience empathy is a person’s most important trait.  Which brings me to someone who has no empathy—Romney—and thus another “E” Election:  I still get a bit giddy when thinking of the outcome of the presidential election.  Were we not lucky?  Did we not just dodge a lethal bullet?!  I say yes.

Feathered Friends:  I’d love to put up a birdfeeder or two in my yard, but the neighbors have a killer Siamese who hunts on our property.  I do not want to create a buffet for this cat.  I did hang up two egg-shaped birdseed covered treats on high branches during our snowstorm a few Saturdays ago, but the birds have either not found them yet or don’t like them.  Am I wrong to feel insulted by this?

Gingivitis:  Whenever I start trying to figure out why Owen might be fussing, Sean makes fun of me by proposing maladies he clearly does not have (gingivitis, tetanus, etc.).  I always start worrying about the new disease before figuring out that he is teasing.

Hat:  Owen is now a little more inclined to let a hat stay on his head when we put one there, which is nice because he looks so cute in hats!  Like Humpty Dumpty in his wee bowler.

Ice:  I drove the car in snow and ice on Sunday (okay! To get donuts! A totally gratuitous trip!) and used my foul weather driving skills honed by living in NH for nine years.  I’m rather a slow driver with no hubris, but I can definitely navigate a patch of black ice.

Jam:  Apricot.  To me there is no other kind.

Kenmore:  In our new house we have a Kenmore fridge that is a refrigerator on top and a freezer on the bottom.  The freezer is thus a drawer that you pull out, and it has annoyingly rounded sides so that anytime we try to stack things in an organized fashion, they all end up slipping into a jumbled mess at the bottom that we then have to fish through to find an errant burrito, say, or a box of waffles.  Who designed this machine?  Did the designer never use a freezer?  Did s/he have something against ice cream say, or pre-prepared foods?!

Lick:  Why do I let Dorothy lick my hands and feet even after seeing what else she licks/eats, like a random pile of (hopefully) cat vomit in the basement?

Meltdown:  Owen had another one last night, and when we are in the midst of one, I become convinced that he will never stop crying ever again and that sleep is but a memory.  Why does a baby’s crying cause such immediate desolation?

Neck:  Sean thinks Owen doesn’t have one, so he refers to his “neck” in air quotes.  And it is true that his neck does seem to be, well, shy.  One has to part his multiple chins in order to find it to clean.  It is there though!

Owen:  What else could I choose for “O”?  He’s my fussy little muffin.  One of my favorite Owen moments is when I go to get him from his crib when he wakes up in the middle of the night or after a nap and he looks so happy to see me.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  Well, I suppose it would be better if I had to get him less frequently during the night, but all in good time.

Plum and Posy:  Both slight cause for worry these days, as both need dental work, Posy badly, and Posy is also having some breathing issues.  It is hard to breathe through a smushed nose!  Add to that the fact that Plum is mean to Posy and keeps attacking her, and Plum is also having the occasional frequent “going to the bathroom where there is no litterbox” issues, and, well, sometimes Pets Are Hard.

Quote:  “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”  ~Virginia Woolf

Reading:  it’s what I dream of having more time to do these days.  I read the New Yorker on the train and a book on the evenings when Owen actually does go to sleep at a reasonable hour.  But my “to read” pile is not noticeably shrinking!  Plus I have two books on a new kindle!  So little time.

Stalk or shadow:  What Dorothy does to Sean.  She has to be near him at all times, unless he is playing vigorously with Owen, in which case she goes up to the spare bedroom to sulk.

Time I wake up in the morning:  5:40 on the weekdays.  Which seems awfully early most days, seeing that I usually was just up two hours before attending to the spawn.  But the sky behind our house has been very colorful lately!  Although each time I stand at the landing and look out at it, I see a branch that I think is a deer.  Do we have deer in our immediate neighborhood?  No, we do not.  Do I still look at this distant branch every morning and think oh! A deer!  Yes, I do.  Just about every morning.  My brain—it is not what it used to be.

Utter nonsense: I'm surprised that anyone believed that Lance Armstrong did NOT take drugs.  Do these people believe Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens too?

Visual:  I am not a very visual person.  Sean is:  he can look at the spread out pieces of an item from Ikea and see immediately how it should all fit together.  Me, I need directions – and directions printed out on paper.  I recently had a wee argument with my new kindle, which of course did not come with any paper directions, just an app on the kindle itself.  I know, I am old.  But I still like to refer to things on paper.  The argument almost ended in fisticuffs, but luckily for me and for my kindle, Sean intervened.

Warming:  Did I mention we had no snow last year and only one snowfall so far this year?  When I moved to Philadelphia, I hadn’t thought I was moving to the south, but what with global warming and all, I think I might have done.  O boots!  O mittens!  O hat!  O snowday!

X:  What my eyes would be if I were a cartoon.  Lack of sleep and all that.

Yummy:  Cake, chocolate, cheese, pesto, fruit.

Z’s:  The holy grail of those with an infant.

Owen says ffffffft! to this post:

Road Rage

At our baby shower in the summer, Sean’s boss gave Owen a bouncing red race car to hang in a doorway.  He recently has grown enough to use it:

Is that not funny?  I was at work the first time Owen took his car for a spin, but I’m told it didn’t end well, since Dorothy saw him bobbing there and decided to treat him as if he were a chubby piñata.  Needless to say, there were tears. 

We’ve put him back in it a few times since then though, and he likes it for about ten minutes or so—but it seems to take him a few attempts before he decides something is okay (being carried in the bjorne for example, is no longer cause for screaming bloody murder; in fact, he likes it).

Anyway, as all toys seem to do these days (why?  No really, why?!), the car plays music.  In fact, it plays a kind of diabolical version of Oh Susanna.  It’s Oh Susanna played allegro agitate, and what really ups the ante is that the whole time it is playing, Owen is unknowingly honking the horn, which is placed by his elbow.  So it goes something like this:  Oh Susanna!  Oh HONK don’t you HONK cry for HONK me!  For I’ve come from HONK HONK HONK Alabama HONK with a HONK banjo on my knee HONK HONK.  It is quite a cacophony.  And all the while Owen is trying to chew the dashboard and getting a bit enraged that he can’t put whole bits of it into his mouth.

Right now we have to put a cushion under his feet so he can touch the ground, but once his legs get longer and he can really bounce, I think he will like spending a bit of time going for a drive in his speedster.  Because of his teletubby shape (due to his bumgenius cloth diapers) he tends to get a bit stuck in the seat on the way out.  How embarrassing!  And like many a driver, he is not immune from a little road rage: 

Banana Peel Plum

The title of this blog sounds like a postmodern still life, but it is instead Plum’s latest tactic to either spice things up a bit or get us back for bringing a crying infant into our household.  For what Plum has taken to doing is this:

Lolling about on the carpeted stairs, the color of which is perilously close to the color of his lilac fur, making him just about camouflaged and thus deadly.  I now make it a point to scope the stairwell before walking up or down with my twenty pound offspring, whose head I can’t see over when walking down or up. 

Find a new place on which to get your Z’s, Plum!

Thank You, Morrissey

Sean and I were both very apprehensive about our car ride up to Boston.  Owen has been a House Baby for the first four months of his life precisely because of his bad behavior in the car.  He screams in his bucket seat pretty much non-stop.  The idea of being in a car for six hours with a screaming baby had us alternately wringing our hands, cursing our fate, and thinking maybe it would be a good idea to have Christmas in Abington this year.

But we bit the bullet and set off with bulldogge and baby.  Dorothy rode shotgun:

She did an excellent job, too, although she spent most of the trip sitting up with her head leaning in a woebegone fashion against the seat back.  She did not get sick and she didn't need her meds, which was nice.  We did have a bad parenting moment in which we stopped at a rest stop and didn't notice that Dorothy had jumped out of the car with us and was moseying around the parking lot on her own.  Eeek!  

On the way back, we got stuck in terrible traffic, so the six hour ride became a nine hour ride.  I'm happy to report that although I did a lot of whining myself, Owen did a great job both ways.  He was stuck in his bucket seat for nine hours with only one brief outing, slept most of the time and only cried for a bit.

And for that we have Morrissey and The Smiths to thank.  Every time Owen began to cry and get fussy, we turned on a Smiths cd and Owen was asleep in about two minutes flat.  I don't know why he found "William It Was Really Nothing" so lulling, but nonetheless he did.  And now Sean and I are both even more fond of The Smiths than we were to begin with.

Sneg Edyot

We had our first real snowfall in two years this past weekend.  And as I write those words I am rolling my eyes a bit, since it snowed only four inches or so.  But as a big fan of snow, those four inches are better than nothing!  And along with the modest inchage, it did seem like a real snowstorm, complete with white on all the tree branches and delicious snowstorm hush.  

Since last year we only had a dusting, this was Dorothy’s first real experience in the snow—and she loved it!  She wanted to be out in her yard even more than normal, and once there she raced around in the snow and sprang and pranced.  Her father threw snowballs for her and she tried to catch them, getting all confused when they disappeared into the ground.  And then later when Sean took her for a walk, she refused to walk on the shoveled bits and spent the whole time with feet on snow.  Or in the air above the snow.

That’s my girl!

I took Owen out into the snow at one point too.  Once he is in his parka, he doesn’t quite fit into the baby bjorn, so I had to lug him around like a slippery sack of potatoes.  But he was very interested in the whole kit and caboodle, and spent the entire time outside looking around at his surroundings in awe:

Here we are standing under the tree in our front yard!  

Now I am ready for a snowfall of multiple feet!  Twenty-four inches should do it, as long as we keep our electricity....

Are Trolls Festive?

I ran out of time to put together blog entries in December.  In fact, I ran out of time for a lot of things, including cookies (O cookies!), and was only able to make one kind this year (peanut butter balls with chocolate hats) and that at the last minute at Martha’s house.  Sean and I take turns with Owen, but he is still young enough and still occasionally fussy enough that my free time comes in snatches and tends to be colonized by laundry, etc.

All of that is to explain why it is January and I am just getting around to writing about Christmas decorations, which we actually were organized enough to put up at the beginning of December.  We had a nice little tree in our living room, and I was able to get out my ornaments for the first time in a very long time.  Here is the tree naked and then clothed:

And here are two very spiffy ornaments in particular, a Red Sox ornament (for what says Merry Christmas more than one’s favorite losing team?  All I need is an Eagles ornament to make the tree depressing).  And a pug ornament!

Sean gave me a few ornaments for Christmas this year too.  What could be more apropos than Dorothy dressed as an angel?  This is definitely how Dorothy sees herself:

And my favorite ornament theme – pigs!:

This was the first time I've had a tree since having cats, and I was afraid that the cats would climb it, or at least try to bat some ornaments.  But nope!  Neither Plum nor Posy were interested in the tree whatsoever:

We put a wreath on our door:

And then I also got out my collection of trolls to put on my mantel.  Most of them I inherited from my Grandmother’s collection, but a few of them were new to me.  Although I think they are quite festive, Owen fussed whenever I showed them to him.  Not a fan of the trolls yet, mayhap?  We’ll work on that.  Anyway, I am including all of the troll pictures below so that my sisters and mother and aunt can see the ones that have been packed away for awhile:

For Christmas news, I’ll be really lazy and just link to Martha’s blog.  www.itstheelliotway.blogspot.com/2012/12/christmas-eve-2012.html  She did a much better job than I have the energy (or photography skills!) to do.

I will leave you with one Christmas morning picture--of nine wild turkeys walking around in the snow!

And then here is Dorothy, eyes locked on to the turkeys, certain that if we would just let her, she could go get our Christmas dinner:

Happy Holidays!