The Seversons

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.