The Seversons

Over the last few weeks, I went 14 solid days being sick. It was our first experience with the cold that makes the rounds and somehow I drew the shortest straw. Graham had a little stuffy nose and was a bit out of sorts for a day or two, but overall he’s been okay, if super fussy. I guess I’d rather he be the one to make it through with minimal difficulty.

I have been sick for so long that I haven’t really been able to enjoy my new haircut. You may not have heard, but I am a redhead now and I think it’s going quite nicely. The far bigger shock for most of you will be that my hair is shorter and I am wearing it down about half of the time. Once, in law school, I wore my hair down. Once. It happened 2nd year and nearly everyone stopped me in shock. It is not something I do much. Because it happens so rarely, you may be even more surprised to know that my hair is curly. I have generally referred to it as wavy, but that is a big fat lie. It is curly, it is frustratingly curly. It falls happily into ringlets, it does not require any real scrunching. I wish it could be happily wavy, more mellow, looking like Kate-on-LOST hair’s always does, but it doesn’t. I still have no real idea what on earth I’m supposed to do with it. I have blown it out all the way once and it wasn’t a disaster, though a headband was required to tame it from a giant mane into something approaching a hairstyle. Maybe I will do it again someday.  Perhaps the best news was that the baby still recognized me.

As you may have noticed, we are not doing so hot in the blog-update department. This has a lot to do with the fact that we are busier than I think we have ever been. It should let up around May or so. Until then we’ll have to do our best to continue to post pictures of our baby.

Lately, Graham has been having lots of fun making noises with his mouth, and sticking out his tongue like a lizard. Observe:

You may be wondering why there is a burp cloth on his head.  I was wondering the same thing.  Eric’s answer: “Because it looked funny.”

I would love to give you all sorts of nice little 6 month stats, but we don’t actually know them.  Graham turned 6 months old two weeks ago, but his appointment isn’t until next week.  Like I said, we’re busy.

One recent accomplishment I’m quite pleased about has been the re-nicknaming of the Nugget.  (Sorry, he is still the Nugget and Grammer.)  When he was first born, Eric and I both immediately and without thinking started calling him Bud and Buddy.  I have no clue why, and I’ve never been particularly fond of those names.  I decided the best way to lose them was simply to change it into something better.  So now, we have our little Bug.  I like it.  He seems to like it, too.

Tomorrow I am working. For serious. Even more than a full day. Dropping baby at 7:30 a.m. and picking him up probably around 6 p.m. It is the kickoff of what is going to be an insanely busy month that will include work in 5 states. I will take the Southeast by storm. If there is a college here, I will probably be there. Well, I will be if any of the advisors or pre-law groups on campus ever return any of my emails.

Because it is the first trip I am trying to approach it as a happy fun new thing. I will get to wear one of my awesome new dresses. I will get to show off my new hair. (Did you know I’m a redhead now?) I will pretend I am the lawyer version of Joan Holloway, because, let’s face it, even with the Spanx that will be underneath the aforementioned dress, things are still pretty darned “curvy” these days. I prefer looking “curvy” to looking “fat” or looking “pregnant again.” (And Joan Holloway definitely looks curvy, but not fat or pregnant.) I will focus on all of the good things, and maybe with all the work I will either find the motivation to make time for the gym, or I will just be so busy that the pounds will go flying off.

Even if things don’t work out this month, at least when they slow down again in March-ish (assuming they do slow down in March-ish) I can probably get that sparkly new gym routine going. I came up with the concept and it seemed perfect until my life got in the way. So I haven’t yet joined the gym. Instead, I have bought another pair of post-baby jeans and a good, sturdy belt because it might be a little while and odds are good there will be more babies someday.

Eventually you just realize that you are not the girl who has already lost all her baby weight before she leaves the hospital. And you are not the girl who loses it in a month or two. And you are not the girl who loses it in six months. You did not get those genes. Just like you didn’t get the genes that give you no stretch marks. (If you think it’s cocoa butter, think again. Genes!) There are lots of very nice people who say don’t worry about it that first year. For the first few months I thought those people were crazy, did they realize how long a year was? Now I am realizing those people are very smart. The first year is kind of insane. Especially if you have a job. Or a very willful baby. I have both. Plus a husband who works unpredictable hours.

Speaking of the willful baby, he continues to be like most babies, with his own strengths and weaknesses. In the strength category, he eats like a champ. Yesterday he got his first veggie, sweet potatoes, and downed them like a starving child. I don’t think he cares too much what he eats, he just likes eating. He still highly enjoys sitting, too, and is turning into the kind of baby you can just plop down for a good while. (Which is incredibly awesome.)

However, he does have his weaknesses. He hasn’t laughed yet, which isn’t really that meaningful, but I would like to hear a little baby belly laugh. Mostly he just opens his mouth very wide and smiles and screams. He wants desperately to crawl, but tends to prefer screaming until you give him whatever thing he can’t reach instead of trying to reach it himself.

His major hangup these days is in the nap department. The books say that a baby will start to get in a nap routine and then settle into 2 naps a day long before now. Grammer definitely got in a nap routine, which consisted of napping about 5 times a day. It used to be more like 8 times a day, back in the horrendous days of the 20-minute nap. Now, it appears that he is finally getting into the 2-nap thing (despite the fact that by now he should be heading towards the 1-nap thing) and it is not a smooth transition. He gets seriously pissed whenever we put him down for a nap, most of his naps are insanely short, and every now and then he’ll go for one long stretch. I am trying to figure it all out, but I can’t quite find his new rhythm and I’m not sure he can either.

One thing that has happened is that those post-baby hormones have so kicked in. Having another baby doesn’t exactly sound desirable at the moment, but it sounds very do-able. Like pregnancy is just one of those things you do instead of the most miserable 9 months possible. Because we are doing lots of future planning stuff right now, I have found myself thinking more and more about baby #2 and his/her time frame.

That also means I’ve found myself thinking about baby #2’s name. Because that is what I do. I cannot help it. Ever since I renamed my Cabbage Patch Kid because I was convinced that Phoebe didn’t sound or look like a real name and was just something a toddler made up and renamed her Alicia Margaret, naming is just something I do obsessively. If #2 is a girl, we are so set. We are more than set. If #2 is a boy we are in trouble. We used up all our boy ideas on #1.

When we were waiting on #1, Eric restricted my name talk. Recently he made the mistake of telling me that this wasn’t because he dislikes name talk, it was just soon-to-be-parent jitters, which are obviously gone now. Little does he know that he’s opened the door, and now I’m free to obsess over what on earth we are going to name hypothetical boy #2 that will work as a companion to Graham and the name we’ve already chosen for hypothetical girl #1. It is a monumental task, but I am very much looking forward to it. I am trying to think of another classic-but-often-overlooked literary figure with a wonderful name so I can have another child whose name is an homage to a great author, but I cannot seem to think of any. I suppose it’s a pretty tough order to fill more than once.

And there’s an awake baby. Apparently we have been transported back to the 20-minute-nap world. Until next time.

There have been two things we’ve been trying to get on camera for weeks now.  One is Graham’s first tooth–and number two is close on its heels.  The other is his new talent of sitting unsupported.  The problem is getting a shot that doesn’t go wrong.

When it comes to the tooth, you’d think it’d be easy.  He does smile a decent amount and we see that tooth many times a day so it shouldn’t be so hard to capture on film.  But it’s like he knows what we’re doing and tries his best to thwart our efforts.  Observe:

Sometimes I think I got the tooth, but when I zoom in it turns out just to be the gleam of baby saliva.

As far as sitting goes, we’ve had several unsuccessful attempts, which almost all look like this:

That is one of the longer ones.

But Grammer seems to have turned a corner.  As of yesterday he now seems to be an utter master of sitting.  He still takes a tumble every now and then, but I practically made an entire sandwich this afternoon while he sat there dropping and then picking up his rattle.

I realize that to someone who doesn’t spend all day with Graham this may seem like small potatoes.  I get that.  But he is just so pleased with himself.  Except that he is already trying to move on to bigger and better things.  He may not know what crawling is, but he desperately wants to do it.  He now moves by a combination of sitting and rolling to get wherever he wants to go.  He also has developed a new hobby: leaning back.

He enjoys the looking back over the shoulder pose, perhaps next we will work on broken-down-doll.

As for our adventures in sitting, I am debating an important question: how often do you let your kid face plant?  I keep him from falling over if it looks like he’s going to hit something or hurt himself, not that that’s stopped him from getting a couple of bonks on the head.  Still, I know he has to fall if he’s going to learn how to balance himself.  He doesn’t seem to mind falling backwards so much, but falling forwards tends to require a good minute of cuddling before he can venture back out.  It is our first real test of baby independence vs. parental protection, but it appears it’s working because that baby can sure sit.

1st ingredient: Teething baby.  You may remember in the previous post we had a picture of a vacant-faced baby in front of a Christmas tree.  He is usually so smiley that we were disappointed that every one of our Christmas Eve pictures turned out with that blankly open mouth, like a zombie in an old movie.  Wasn’t travel fatigue as we suspected.  Was his first tooth, which finally appeared the day we got home.  (Also contributed to the rough last few hours of the drive home.)

I can’t complain too much, even though we were totally unprepared for this development.  Tooth #2 appears to be well on its way, we’re hoping it finally pokes its way through tomorrow-ish.  While Graham has been extra cranky, he has also been extra sleepy, which means he’s not awake as often and thus there is less cranky time to deal with.

2nd ingredient: Jessica has delusions of domestic grandeur.  I swear I am actually sending out holiday packages.  That they are late is only partly my fault.  It was unavoidable in the end, because one of the required elements, ordered online at the beginning of December, took about a million years to arrive and didn’t get to the apartment until after we left.  I’d left a thoughtful note for the UPS man, knowing we’d miss him by mere hours and asking him to leave it at the office.

Unfortunately, some other mail delivery person beat him to it and left another package at the front office, and removed the note as instructed.  So we came home to find the big box sitting on our doorstep, as it had been for over two weeks.  Luckily we were not robbed.

But I did not get a chance to start on the packages until yesterday because of the…

3rd ingredient: Total and complete car insanity.  Apparently if you drove a car recently and came near a car one of us was driving, you were helpless but to ram yourself into our bumper.  We think there may have been some kind of magnetic force involved.

Eric got rear-ended in October by a rather large truck owned by a large company that is a subsidiary of an extremely large corporation.  Despite the fact that these things are probably run-of-the-mill for a massive company with an insane number of trucks (you probably saw one within the last few days) getting it taken care of took a lot of trouble.  We didn’t get everything worked out until early December.  By then it was too late to take the car in to be fixed since we were leaving in only a few days.

And then I got rear-ended while doing a little Christmas shopping.  We both came out unscathed–though my neck has been a little sore–and Eric’s car is sporting a seriously ugly rear.  Mine came out looking okay, given how fast the car behind me was going.  But looks are deceiving.  We found out right before Christmas that the car was totaled.  I am still grieving.  Rest in peace, little Scion.

All of this left us in a quandary, we’d been planning to sell my car this summer before we moved for residency.  But we couldn’t go with only one car when Eric finished his rotations for the last few months.  (Strapping the baby into his car seat at 5 a.m. is so not how we roll.)

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, once we got back in town, returned the rental we’d driven to Texas in, and got back to our normal lives, the transmission in Eric’s car started to go.  So now we can’t get the bumper repaired until we figure out what’s wrong with it and whether it’s worth fixing.

And that’s how, within about three weeks, we went from two cars to zero cars.  And that’s how we ended up in a car dealership on New Year’s Eve.  When you walk into a car dealer on New Year’s Eve, they all give you a look like, “Yeah, we know why you’re here.  You know about our yearly quotas and you’re trying to make a deal.”  One of them said to me, “You coincidentally want to buy a car today.”  I responded, “Actually, I coincidentally just had my car totaled.”

But we are not the type to overlook a bargain, and so we walked away with a new car instead of the used one we’d thought about.  I am still freaking out just a little, having never bought a new car before, but we feel pretty comfortable with the decision.  Our new Matrix is bigger than my old Scion by a lot–I can fit the stroller and groceries in the trunk instead of just one or the other.  So that will be the car we move with wherever we move to.

4th ingredient: We’re actually only here for a brief respite until we take yet another pre-residency trip.  (We are keeping the residency specifics to a minimum until Match Day, when you will all be the first to know where we are headed.)  We will leave little Grammer with his grandparents for a few days while we head out for our first no-baby trip.  We leave quite soon, probably before Eric’s car gets its bumper fixed.

So, that explains why I am sitting here late at night with cookies in the oven instead of sleeping.  Making cookies with an awake, teething baby was not a good option.  Especially since going to the grocery store with a screaming baby didn’t seem terribly appealing.

And that, folks, is how you make crazy.

What we expected from our drive to Texas: 2 days, clocking in over 15 hours with a baby who hates his carseat and must tell us so constantly despite the fact that he lacks any language skills, requiring neverending stops at every gas station and rest area in the southeast while we try to calm him down.

What we got on our drive to Texas: a perfectly angelic baby, so long as his carseat was draped with a thin blanket.  It was like he was a little parakeet who thinks the blanket over his cage means it’s night time.

He happily played with his toes and toy elephant for hours on end with little naps here and there, you would’ve thought he wasn’t even there if we didn’t take occasional peeks under the blanket to make sure he did actually exist.  When we would check in, he’d give us the same look a surly teenager gives his parents when one of them opens the door to his room without knocking.

We expected our baby to handle things well once we settled down, and he happily bounced away on his exersaucer in the hotel during the night we spent on the road.  However, he was not such a big fan of the hotel crib.  And by that I mean, he did nothing but scream from the moment we put him in it.  So Graham and I shared a bed for the first time in a couple of months, which I don’t think either of us enjoyed much.

Once we arrived he did a better job adapting, probably because he rarely ever left the grip of his Grammy, who is a known baby-hog.  His favorite trick the last few weeks is a fake cough that I originally thought was real.  We found out it was fake when we started mimicking him and he’d immediately stop to listen to you.

Oh, did I mention his other recent trick? Pulling off his socks.

Being with a serial baby-hog at least gives us the opportunity to go out.  We went on lots of walks, jogs, and runs; saw 3 movies together; ate Mighty Fine, Freebird, brisket, breakfast tacos and Tex-Mex;  and slipped out for a romantic night all to ourselves (thanks, cheap hotel-booking websites!), which means we had steak for dinner and room service for breakfast.

Here you can see our lovely view of Town Lake (I refuse to call it anything else) and the reflection of our hotel room in the glass–I’m tucked in the lower left corner.  How we scored a lake view with our insanely low rate I’m still not exactly sure, but we certainly appreciated it.

We left with plenty of time before the holiday, so by the time we got to Christmas we had a rather disgruntled baby on our hands who missed his crib.  This is why all our Christmas pictures have the vacant expression you can see below:

All our Christmas morning pictures go back and forth between that vacant look and a baby who is very, very determined to eat all the wrapping paper he can get his hands on.

But Graham has been very pleased with the presents inside that wrapping paper.  His new seahorse is his regular bedtime companion and keeps said bedtime so calm we have to make sure the monitor is working.

It’s always sad to see the vacation come to an end.  We will be sad to lose our spacious rental car, mostly because it will leave us down to one vehicle.  Eric and I haven’t been the luckiest bunch lately.  Both of us were rear-ended within two months and we found out last week that my car was totaled.  It puts us in a pretty big pinch, had it happened earlier we would buy another car to replace it.  Had it happened a few months later we wouldn’t do anything, since we were planning to go down to one car over the summer.  But now we’ll need two vehicles for a period of three months next year and have yet to find a reasonable option.  Plus, Eric’s car still hasn’t been repaired so we have to get it in and get yet another rental since we’ll be completely car-less at that point.  Plus we have insurance companies to haggle with, which always makes the holidays brighter.

This week we’ll make one final visit to say goodbye to my lovely little car (and get my stuff out of it).  I plan on wearing black.  If you see me wearing black, you’ll know what I’m in mourning for.  Rest in peace, little Scion.

Hopefully our luck is changing.  On our return trip the baby happily went to sleep in the hotel crib.

Sadly, Graham can’t be with all his relatives for every holiday.  So for those of you who are missing our little Grammer, here’s some footage from Christmas morning.

(You can always go to our vimeo page to see the latest we’ve uploaded.)

A bigger holiday update will follow…

I was thinking the other day that I would like to start our own family’s Christmas traditions.  And the first one that came to mind was to pick out somewhere to give every year.  The immediate thing I thought of was donorschoose.org, a great website that lets you browse through classrooms in need all over the country.

I know many families have this same tradition and if you’re looking for somewhere to give this year, I would recommend this site.  Eric and I have picked our own class to donate to, but here’s a list of some that stuck out to us that we’d like to recommend.  All of them are science classes and they all stuck out to us from our own experiences with science as kids.  If you’d like to find classes in a particular subject (many need books for English classes) or a geographic area, you can search for them at donorschoose.org.

Mr. C’s 11th graders in Ohio want to do their first dissections.

Mrs. L’s high schoolers in California needs bunsen burners to do flame tests.

Mrs. R’s 8th grade class in Oregon wants to build rockets.

Ms. T’s elementary schoolers in Massachusetts need presentation boards for their science fair as they learn the scientific method.  (This one only has 9 days left and still needs over $400 in donations!)

Graham knows what he wants, he just isn’t always sure how to do it.  I know how he feels.  The last several weeks have been full of errands and things to do, but I don’t always have the ability to get them done the way I’d like to.

Happily, I’ve finally mastered the very fast open-and-close of the stroller.  And Grammer has good enough head control that now I can leave the car seat in the car and load him in there, instead of carrying the entire massive thing up the stairs from our apartment every single time we go anywhere.  So we can get moving pretty quickly.  But that’s not really the limiting factor.

Graham’s morning naps are long-ish and tend to come one after the other.  For example, this morning he was up at 6, had a change and a bottle, went back to sleep, up at 8:30, had a change and a bottle and played for a while, went back to sleep, up at 10:30, had a change and a bottle and played for an hour, and is now asleep again a little past noon.  This is how most mornings go, though the times may change.  It is impossible to get anything done before noon.

Once we’ve reached the afternoon, our windows of opportunity are quite small.  We shouldn’t go until at least 30 minutes after Graham’s eaten so that we avoid excessive amounts of spit-up while we’re out.  And he’ll only be up for about 2 hours before he’ll get very cranky and need to go back to sleep or need another bottle.  This limits us to one–maybe two–errands per day.  If I try to make another round after he’s had a nap it never goes well.  He can only stand so much of the car seat in one day.  (Which bodes very well for future long car rides!)

Yesterday I had a flat (thankfully, the baby wasn’t with me, he would’ve loved sitting around and waiting for an hour) and once the spare was on I knew I should head straight over to get the tire fixed or replaced.  But I couldn’t resist making a quick stop at the library first.  Because otherwise I may never get a chance to go.  And if I tried after we’d been at the tire place for an hour, I was guaranteed some non-library-worthy behavior.

Today the list of stuff I have to do is long, and it’s getting longer by the day as we are getting close to Eric’s exams and the holidays.  The homemade Christmas presents some of you will be receiving are not yet started and it’s very possible you won’t get them until 2010.  Sorry in advance.  I will also be sending my baby-gift-thank-you-notes with them and hope that the little presents will atone for my tardiness.

Things would be a little easier if we had weekends.  We don’t.  Not that Saturdays and Sundays don’t exist, but with interviews over and exams looming, Eric is gone every day studying.  It is bad enough that while he did take the day off for my birthday, we spent most of the day at the mall scoping out his birthday/x-mas present because I so wanted it done with and couldn’t do it without him there.  So yes, for my birthday Eric got a very large present.  (Ironically, my birthday present was not in stock.  It will be here soon.  Maybe.)  To be fair we did have a pretty fabulous dinner that night.

(If you feel that the story of my birthday is just unacceptable, you are always free to buy me a present from my amazon wish list.)

As for Graham, things are much better now that he can amuse himself, but there’s always something new for him to master.  He recently started rice cereal and he seems to have a love/hate relationship with it.  He so desperately wants the spoon with cereal on it and in his mouth.  But when it gets there he doesn’t know what to do with it.  Yesterday he seemed to have the idea for a few bites, but then it all went downhill.  We’ll see if he improves.

This afternoon we will attempt to get supplies for dinner, pick up several prescription refills, make a phone call to change a hotel reservation, and hopefully call the dentist if I actually remember to do it.  Without a baby it would be a breeze, but with him it’s a bit of a tall order.  And it’s a bit chilly out today, otherwise we’d pack him in the running stroller and walk over to the grocery store.  He enjoys that a lot, even when it’s cold.  The problem is he doesn’t like being warm inside the store after our chilly walk.  I share his pain, I always find myself taking off my coat when I’m inside, but we don’t have the freedom to be regularly dressing and undressing him yet.

And now I will have to give up the blog post because he’s waking up from his nap.  Thus is life.

Graham has recovered from his initial confusion with his new toy elephant.  Now he is enamored with it to such a degree that they remind me most of that couple in high school whose tongues are constantly down each other’s throats.  Graham particularly enjoys sucking on the elephant’s ear.

Also, this kid will sit or else die trying.

They tell you that babies grow up fast and I don’t think anyone can really argue with that common knowledge.  In the last couple of weeks Graham has suddenly made some huge advances and it’s kind of hard to realize he’s the same baby he was not so long ago.

Perhaps the biggest change is that he can now play.  This was particularly lovely because a baby who cannot amuse himself is a baby who must be constantly held and walked around because this is the only form of amusement available.  It gets a little old.  For a while he’d been able to grab toys and then he started to be able to occasionally get them into his mouth.  But most of the time when we’d put him in his little yellow chair and put a toy on the tray in front of him he would try desperately to eat it only to have one hand try to pull it one direction while the other hand pulled it the other direction and in a moment it would be on the floor.  It also got him frustrated very quickly.  I didn’t realize that frustration was something babies could feel, but Graham feels it regularly.

Now he can not only grab a toy and pull it into his mouth, but continue to play with it and put it back in his mouth over and over again.  That means he can now play with a toy for more than five seconds.  In a matter of days he went from spending 2 minutes in the exersaucer to more than 10.  He can now sit there and amuse himself for a surprisingly long time.  (And when guests are in town, he quite enjoys showing off just how impressive he is.)

The other significant change is that Graham has “Ferberized” himself.  In layman’s terms, he has learned to put himself to sleep.  November was insane.  Eric was constantly traveling for interviews and I was often left alone with the baby for days on end.  Managing a baby for a few hours is fine as long as you know your relief is coming.  When no relief is coming, it can be exhausting, especially with the constant battles we had over every single nap.  When you’ve spent 45 minutes trying to get a baby to nap, only to have the baby wake up from that nap 20 minutes later, you start to go a little bit crazy.  We decided to save the sleep training for December, when Eric would be in town every night and we could both manage the potentially sleepless nights while we went in to check on him every few minutes.

Every now and then, I started attempting to lay Graham down in his crib without all the effort.  I figured out that if he went down without much of a fight and lay there relatively contented, I could leave and he would eventually fall asleep, even if he cried some.  Soon I started trying it even when he wasn’t particularly happy and most of the time it worked, too.  Now we do it for every nap and when he goes down for the night, and that’s it.  Every once in a while he will need to be held for just a minute or two, but it has been shockingly easy.

Now that Graham has passed the 4-month mark (and the 5-month mark is fast approaching…) we have been given the okay from the pediatrician to start him on solid foods.  We were planning to wait a while, it isn’t really necessary and it may be both difficult and messy.  But it looks like we may start him pretty soon.  He stares open-mouthed whenever one of us eats or drinks something and I feel bad.  So we may ease into it since we’re both around this month.

We just hosted our first Thanksgiving and I have to say it went off swimmingly.  I made my own batch of our family’s Wild Rice Dressing, I made the most beautiful turkey every pulled out of the oven (though it was a smidge dry because someone wouldn’t let me brine it), and we were all surprised by the incredibly tasty sweet potato and butternut squash gratin that I tried for the first time.  I must say, though, these big affairs would be much easier if you actually have a little bit of room.  With the tiny kitchen and table that technically only seated 6 when we had 8, everyone had to serve themselves from the dishes set out on the coffee table.  Ah, apartment life.

(Here you can see Julie setting the table and Elycia and Graham checking out the spread)

Since Eric’s family was here, we were able to take a 4-generation picture (4 of the 4 are firstborn sons).

We also got to celebrate a new milestone: Graham’s first tummy-to-back roll.  The second one is caught on tape here.  I think he did it mostly because he hates tummy time so much.  He probably would have done it a month ago if I ever actually gave him any tummy time.

Graham also got a new toy and promptly freaked out.  He’s really mastered the exersaucer, but give him a cute elephant that has all these things to pull and cram in your mouth and he doesn’t know what to do, so he ends up flailing his limbs around aimlessly.  But it is cute.