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.