Some folks keep baby books up to date, marking first smiles, first teeth, first crawls… We attempted it with Cora, but I’m afraid I’m not conscientious about recording that sort of stuff. With Callie, it’s been even worse. I don’t have any sort of baby book for her.

Just scanned back through some blog entries, though. I give them a category as I write them, and I have a category for MommyHood. Some comment spammer left a comment on a way-old entry that talked about a prediction that Cora would walk by 10 months. As it turned out, she didn’t walk by 10 months – she sort of stalled and waited until she turned a year old – but the entry lists other milestones, like when she scooted backwards (6 1/2 months), and when she crawled forward (7 1/2 months).

Cora’s little sis, Callie, is a little bit over 6 months old. Her latest exciting milestone was rolling over – she did it for the first time on Easter this year, much to the excitement of Aunt Paula and Daddy, who were coaxing her at the time. Now, that little fact hasn’t been entered in a baby book anywhere. But I can now look at the archives for our blog and see the previous entry for Cora, and now this one for Callie. And then hop over to our image gallery to see pictures of the girls at the appropriate ages.

So, my Creative Memories consultant isn’t making anything off of me, but I’ve got the info I want as both images and text, interspersed with other blog entries that show what was important enough for me to write about it at the time. Works for me, baby book or no…

You know you’ve watched too many children’s videos when
(1) you get the jokes when the Daily Show mocks children’s programming (love those Boohbah’s)
(2) when a coworker doesn’t show up on time for a meeting the tune from Bear in the Big Blue House thing of “where is, where is, where is shadow?” becomes “where is, where is, where is Derek?”
(3) Bach’s symphonies now conjure up visions of toys and puppets
(4) The theme from Elmo’s World (go ahead, tickle him) seems pretty catchy to you

Cora’s a pretty sharp little kid. Before I headed to work today, I hung my requisite identity badge around my neck. Cora’s response: “No badge, no badge!” But wait… it gets better. Calling home, my usual late afternoon reminder to both me and my family that the workday is soon to be over, Cora got on the phone and said “Badge off! Badge off!” When she figures out that Mommy can’t get into the building without her badge, I’ll be lucky to ever find it.

(Title stolen/tweaked from Coupling episode that I had the misfortune to see last night, and worse, the amazement at it to sit through it all.. Now I’ve seen it once and can avoid it like the plague…)

The daughters are already in cahoots. When one’s asleep, the other’s awake. Up to today, I could count on the option of reclaiming some much-needed sleep during Cora’s nap. She always naps for two hours or a bit more in the early afternoon. Callie’s so little that she naps nearly round the clock, particularly if she’s just eaten. But today, no such luck. Cora went down, as planned. Callie stayed up. Oh, she snacked and dozed, but no sooner would I lay down to attempt to recoup some of my sleep loss from last night then she’d wake up again and start fussing. Pacifiers didn’t soothe her, swaddling her didn’t soothe her – only being gently bounced or given another go-round at the mommy Atkins diet plan (babies prove it wrong – no carbs [directly, anyway], yet they still gain a ton of weight) would calm her. Get her calm, put her back in the bassinet, sneak under the comforter to doze and … the cycle would begin again. I _think_ she’s down for the count this time, but I’m already hearing Cora begin to stir, so my nap time has come and gone. Given that Callie granted me one 3 hour stretch of sleep last night, and then nothing more until my husband graciously granted me another hour and a half by whisking her away with a bottle, I’m running a little low on steam here. Maybe tonight will be better (hah!).

It’s funny. Among the many guidelines for nursing mothers (no caffeine, no alcohol, no gassy foods, no spicy foods, …) is the instruction to get plenty of rest. What cruel, cruel words…

Born to two computer geek parents, Callie entered the world on 10/10 at 1:10 am. (Never mind that she was supposed to come some 8 hours or less after induction began on 10/9… she’s apparently as stubborn and determined to make her own way as her mommy.) That either makes her a binary baby (all 1s and 0s, for my non-geek readers) or her own long-distance calling plan code (just dial 1010 0110, plus the number, to get our best rate ever!).

Surprisingly, she’s blond. Not sure why that’s such a surprise – Jason was blond as a little guy, and still has some blond in his beard. But we’ll get to see first-hand whether blondes have more fun… heaven help us!

Check out pictures of our new little girl. Please grant me more than a little leeway in any pictures that have me in ’em… 15 or so hours of labor just doesn’t do much for a gal’s looks. (My) vanity aside, Callie’s cute enough to cover the two of us. And pics with Cora in ’em (the new big sis!), too, just are nearly too cute to bear.

At 1:00 this morning, I woke up with a back ache and contractions. Aha! This would be it! No more non-stress tests, ultrasounds, weekly visits, discomfort at night from poking elbows and knees… I’d just have to make it through the labor and delivery process and this pregnancy thing would be pretty well wrapped up. Still, I waited to be sure this was the real thing – having already experienced false labor once (a fun thing to experience at work), I didn’t want to wake my doctor or my mother-in-law up for something that turned out not to be real. By 2:30, I was pretty well convinced. So, I woke my doctor – she turns out to be pretty chipper when paged at 2:30 in the morning – and we agreed that we’d wait until my contractions were 5 minutes apart before I called her again and went to the hospital. Of course, she advised me to get some sleep if I could, and of course, the combination of contractions and just general excitement meant that I really couldn’t. Add in a toddler who decided to wake up at around the same time, plus then our cats made just enough intermittent noise to make it seem like there was an intruder in the house, and I didn’t get back to bed until 4:30. I was still having contractions, but figured that I’d try to snag whatever rest I could, since today was apt to be a long day.

7:00 – wake up to a calling toddler. Discover that contractions have stopped. Toddler’s not going back to sleep, so there’s really no way for me to get back to sleep unless I take her to mother-in-law’s and then retreat back to bed. But by the time I go to the effort of getting her over there, might as well just go to work.

I’m now at work, luckily in an up-time for me for energy. This afternoon’s going to really suck, though. I’m waiting on my doc to call me back so that I can schedule those non-stress tests, and I’m very inclined to say – “Uh, induce me, please… Pretty please???” Theoretically, this could all continue for 5 more weeks, between the 2.5 or so weeks before my due date, and the two weeks after that are usually considered “the zone” for having a baby. 5 more weeks…??! Forget about the baby blues after delivery – I’ll be a walking zombie before this baby gets here!

Realized that something felt different yesterday. Ah, yes… I can breathe again, and there’s a bit of extra room in my maternity clothes. I had forgotten about this part of the pregnancy – the ‘lightening’ or ‘dropping’ where kiddo decides to prepare for takeoff. Head down, butt up, everything in a line to exit the pod. Crash helmet at the ready, our little daredevil prepares to run the luge.

Suddenly I’m no longer quite so confident that things are a good month or so away. My grandparents are visiting in early October, and I’ve been forewarning them that the baby probably won’t be here before they leave. Now, every little twinge makes me wonder if labor’s starting. The ‘what to expect’ books aren’t very helpful – they say that for first time moms, lightening generally happens two to three weeks before delivery, and that for those of us who’ve had kids before, lightening can wait and not happen until just before or when labor begins. But, they note helpfully that there’s no good hard and fast rule. Darn it, I want the hard and fast rule that says I now have precisely X days to get everything in order and to prepare for labor pain to begin! That on day Y my schedule will become completely not my own, as I stop whatever it is that I’m doing and navigate to the hospital. If our child chooses poorly, I could get to navigate not one but two Beltways to get to the hospital! Traveling those byways is nerve-wracking enough on a normal day – can you imagine what kind of driver I’ll be as I grip the steering wheel through each contraction and try to swerve around any potholes?

We’ve realized that our daughter has got this bedtime thing figured out. Bedtime is to be avoided. Anything that looks suspicously like preparations for bedtime is to be avoided. Pajamas are definitely to be avoided, as is Mommy, generally, since Mommy has been known to scoop her up and hustle her off to bed. She still thinks Daddy is the safer choice, but she’s discovering that Daddy is beginning to be just as suspect.

The parenting guideline for bedtime used to be that when Cora would get snuggly, that she was ready to be rocked and put to bed. She’d consistently snuggle in somewhere around 8:00, and then Mommy and Daddy would have the evening to themselves. As Cora’s gotten older, she’s become less interested in snuggling, and more interested in cramming every last bit of playtime possible into the day. Rather than snuggle, she dances out of reach, spinning herself into a frenzy of activity designed, we think, to keep her going out of sheer momentum. 8:00 slides past, and then 9:00, and then 10:00 – and still Cora will keep going. Momm’s ready to drop, but Cora will keep going.

And so we’ve discovered that we can’t rely on the signs from Cora to determine when she goes to bed. We have to impose our own bounds on her, partly for her benefit and partly for our parental sanity. We need time to be adults, to be adults not on toddler duty from the time she wakes up in the morning till past the time we ourselves ought to be in bed in the evening.

I bet we’ll discover lots of things like that, where parental guidelines have to be imposed, either for her sake or for ours. The thing’ll be figuring out just where those boundaries are, and why we’ve created them – to know when they’re of necessity hard and fast, and when they can be flexible. Letting her run free is no way to raise a kid – she’ll have no concept of how to fit in the world. But putting her in an iron box won’t help either – she wasn’t created to be a little automaton. Granted, those bounds and bonds will stretch as she can do more, knows more, understands more. We’ll need to figure out her place in the world, just as she is, and the challenge will be for us to keep in synch. We won’t manage it perfectly – sometimes we’ll be ahead of the curve, and sometimes she will. But for now, I’ll trundle her off to bed when we deem it necessary. And feel grateful that as yet she’s still a toddler, so our hardest decisions are bedtimes and mealtimes, what toys are appropriate and how much is too much, and when a minor illness warrants a trip to the pediatrician rather than just a big dose of love with a little dose of Children’s Tylenol.

Most kids go to bed holding their teddy bears, or their favorite blankies. My kid went to bed tonight clutching her sandals.

We’ve known she’s got a thing for shoes. While she’s still in her pajamas, it’s not uncommon for her to come to us with one of her pairs of shoes, demanding that they be put on. If we stay in bed too long, she’ll often flop our shoes up on the bed at us. And often the first thing she does at grandma’s house in the morning is to go get grandma’s sandals and bring them back to her. You can even catch her in some of the new pictures in the gallery, walking around in her daddy’s shoes.

We think the shoe thing has to do with being able to go outside. Since she often hears “Wait, Mommy and Daddy need to put their shoes on”, she preempts the delay by bringing shoes to us and making sure that she’s also appropriately shod. I just don’t know where she thinks she’s going sleep-walking tonight…

Two experiences, unconnected, within a half hour of each other:
Female co-worker: You’re six and a half months along? Wow, I’d have pegged you for four!
Male co-worker: Say, shouldn’t you have had that kid six months ago??

Ego boost, ego flattening… At least it all evens out. God’s got a sense of humor that way, I think…