Six Months

Lewis is six months old this week and has been here for an entire half a year, as impossible as that may seem. He is such a happy baby, so full of humor and joy and cheerfulness at the world around him. He has four teeth, two still-blue eyes, and many delicious chubby rolls of baby fat. It rather boggles the mind that he has grown to his current self ingesting nothing but breastmilk and a smidge of baby Tylenol; we've made two little attempts at feeding (scrambled eggs once, pureed apricots once) that have not gone super well and I think I'm going to give him a few more weeks before trying again.



He is such a big, strong baby. I don't think we are just projecting some societal sense of maleness onto him; it is pretty much empirically unquestionable that he is both big for his age and a bit advanced in gross motor skills. He weighed 20 lbs at 4 months and had just moved up into 12-18 month clothes then. Now at 6 months, he weighs pretty much the same and is still wearing the same size, but he has gotten much taller and the arms and legs are not at all long on him anymore. He might spend THREE WHOLE MONTHS in this size of clothes. A friend recently commented that he looks like he is growing into his body, and I think that's true; his proportions are shifting from the long torso and shorter curled-up limbs of early infancy to the longer (albeit chubby) arms and legs of later babyhood. It is a bit of a relief to see his growth start to plateau out. Otherwise carrying him around would have become immensely arduous and there would not be a diaper anywhere that would fit him by the time he is 2!

And as for strength, he's been rolling from back to front for quite a while now. He has been pushing himself up into upward-facing dog for a few weeks and has been somehow wiggling himself around on the floor for about a month. You know-- he's not really crawling but somehow he rolls and wriggles himself so that you put him down in one spot and you find him a few minutes later across the room. Just this week, he has started pushing himself up to his hands and knees, belly off the floor, and will rock back and forth. Right now this most often results in him face-planting on the floor but we are looking at honest-to-goodness crawling very very soon. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! And baby gates! Ugh. He is less advanced when it comes to sitting, although I'm sure that won't be very far behind either.



Every night when we change him from his clothes into his pajamas, he laughs and laughs and laughs, with a gurgling chortle that comes from his belly. Apparently it is the most hilarious thing ever, although only at night-- changing the other way in the morning from his pajamas to his clothes is not funny at all. It is a gift every night, a unlooked-for gift of joy and beauty that takes my breath away. Much like him.

Six Years of Grace

This week Grace turned six years old. A six-year-old! She is getting so big, and so lovely, and so amazing. She has grown so much in competence as well as confidence in the past year; she can actually DO stuff. She can read! She can swim! She can ski! She can brush her own teeth! I am taken aback by how capable she is, by her ability to concentrate and focus. She still wavers in her motivation when something is hard and can be anxious about new ventures but she does so well. There have been a lot of chances this year for her to attempt something unfamiliar and it is such a delight to see her try it out and do well, to see her see her own competence.

She loves to put marker to paper to make cards and pictures as gifts for us, to overwhelm Lewis with cuddles and affection, to dance and run and play, to read books. The reading has been such a pleasure to see unfold; she can now sound out pretty much any word and is getting a good handle on the quirks of English spelling. She still mostly reads aloud, even to herself-- a fleeting glimpse into her mind that I hold dear. She is such a sensitive soul; she has been since she was a tiny baby and I think it is just who she is. She feels her feelings so intensely and has a vulnerable, aware heart. She is so full of love for the people around her. Her teachers say she is highly attuned to the feelings of others, and she has a strong sense of what is right and that rules are important. She is vivid and eager and bright.



We had quite the birthday festivities for Grace this year. She started out with a little celebration at school in her kindergarten class. There is a state law that you can't bring any homemade food to classrooms (isn't that so dumb?! I am still annoyed about it, and probably will continue to be every time a child of mine has a birthday for as long as we live here) so we ended up bringing fruit leathers, bunny crackers, and party hats for everyone in her class. It was really fun to see all her little kindergarten classmates sing to her and make her feel special.

Next, Grace had a dinosaur-themed birthday party with friends at the newly-opened Natural History Museum of Utah. The architecture of the new building is gorgeous and their staff did a really fantastic job organizing the party. This is the first time we have had a not-at-home party where I paid people money to set up, clean up, plan the activities, etc and I have this to say-- it is WONDERFUL. The party went so smoothly and it was so interesting and I was so relaxed. I will admit that I have harbored a certain doubtfulness about such parties in the past, thinking that one does not need to spend any significant cash on children's birthday parties, that little children just want to play and eat cupcakes with their friends. I still think this may be true for the toddler set but Grace's birthday party at home last year was just this side of too big and too crazy. Hence, our trip to the museum.



I even abdicated the task of making the cake this year. Our amazing friend Haley made it and it was so, so good. It was gobbled up by Grace and her friends from school and church and around town, after walking around the dinosaur skeletons, using picks and brushes to discover their own buried dinosaurs, and checking out fossils.



And then finally, on her actual birthday on Monday, we celebrated as a family with her gifts from family, leftover cake, and Chick-Fil-A for dinner. We've only been to Chick-Fil-A maybe 4 times since we moved to Salt Lake but it is what she requested and she is the birthday girl, after all.

Our intense, bright, beautiful birthday girl.

The Five Senses

• Grace and Violet have been doing swimming lessons in the indoor pool at the community rec center close to our house. It is surprisingly relaxing to be there-- a huge warm echo-y space full of quiet splashy noises and voices muted by the huge volume of water.

• We had a lovely snowfall last weekend that summoned everyone up to the ski resorts and burdened all the trees with a layer of glittering white. I wonder how many years of living where it actually snows it will take for me to not be utterly enchanted by the sight of it.

• Lewis' skin and cheeks and feet and hands are so gorgeous and amazing I almost can't bring words to bear on them. The oxytocin rush from his rosy, velvety, perfect skin makes me swoon and I hope I can remember the exact feeling of kissing his dimpled knuckles or rubbing my cheek against his forever. 
• I mix up my all-purpose cleaner from a concentrate (this stuff, which I really like, FYI) and usually doctor it up with some essential oils to make it smell nice. I always put in tea tree oil because a) I like how it smells and b) it is supposed to be antiseptic to some level. I sometimes add in something else for kicks; this past time, instead of my usual lavender or rosemary, I used peppermint oil and now everything I spray smells like toothpaste.
• We like red wine, but we don't like spending great quantities of money on red wine. Rob is sort of a fan of Tim Ferriss and last month saw this post about how to hyper-aerate your wine to make it better. You know how red wine is supposed to breathe for a long time in a decanter before you drink it? To expose a lot of surface area of the wine to the air, thus making it better? Doing this hyper-aeration thing is like taking that to a logical extreme. The way we do it is to pour a whole bottle of wine into my batter bowl and then put the immersion blender in it and run it for, I don't know, 60 seconds or so-- lots of wine getting exposed to lots of air in a very short time. We did a double-blind taste test (this involved two of Violet's opaque sippy cups) and it totally made a difference; the un-blendered wine tasted flat and bland in comparison. Yummier wine on the cheap!

Many Moons Ago

Ten years ago this month, Rob and I got engaged! We had been dating about two years, doing the long distance thing for about 3/4 of that as I was in grad school in Austin and Rob was in med school in Dallas. I was at McDonald Observatory in west Texas for a late January observing run and Rob drove out there, all secretive and such, coordinating with the people who were there to surprise me. He surprised me on the catwalk of the 2.7-m telescope in the middle of the night and is lucky I didn't have a heart attack, because that is not exactly a place one expects to run into other people. Rob had a ring and the stars in the cold winter west Texas sky and it was all lovely and wonderful. Everybody say, "Awwwwwwww..."

Just engaged, in the west Texas dawn

A ring!

A while before we got engaged (in the summer of 2000, to be exact) we both went to Central Asia with Campus Crusade for a summer to teach English and work with college students. Unbeknownst to either of us, some of my roommates went around on the last day we were in the country taking pictures with themselves and random people holding this sign:

I decided not to put the one featuring a dead goat on the internet.

We had just been dating for about a couple months at the time.  But then... my friends lost the roll of film! They were so sad. But then... another team from our group came to the same city later and found the roll of film in the apartment we all lived in! They developed the film and left the prints in a desk drawer where my friend found them, upon returning to the same city for about a year later! She brought them back to the U.S. and gave them to us after we got engaged and now here they are, for all of you to see.

Looks Like 2012 Is Here to Stay

We are knee-deep in the new year and so far so good. Grace is back at kindergarten, Lewis weighs 20 lbs (20 lbs! At 4 months old! And is wearing 12-18 month clothes!), and Violet is somewhat unpredictable and perhaps a tad feral. This past fall was entirely consumed by adjusting to life with a new baby and getting Grace settled in at kindergarten and potty-training Violet. There was not much else on our schedule and I think this was a wise move on our part. As we have rung in the new year, I have felt more capable of expanding our life a bit, of perhaps driving children to an activity once a week and being at a certain place at a certain time. Thus, Grace is taking swimming lessons and Violet is doing a gymnastics class at the community rec center close to our house. The former is going more smoothly than the latter; Violet has had not much experience with structured, class-type environments and so far each gymnastics class has involved at least one screaming fit, refusal to sit on a carpet square, and unfocused wandering around the room. It's awesome, let me tell you.

This time last year I found out I was pregnant with Lewis. Can you believe that? A year ago he was a tiny tadpole-like creature, I was queasily miserable, and we were freaking out about the disruption of our carefully-laid-out adoption plans, while today he is this gorgeous squishy smiling baby:



What an unexpected joy... I can't imagine a world without him, the newest love of my life. (The love of my life who has shared a cold with me, the naughty boy.) We are still very uncertain about what will happen with our adoption plans. On the one hand, we still feel as passionate about adoption as ever and it has been something we've wanted for such a long time. On the other hand, I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling of how many children I can cope with well. Love is certainly not a limited resource, but time is, and so is energy, I think. I know we don't have to decide right now and that having three children will get easier as they all get bigger and gain more independence, but it has been tough to meet everyone's needs in these months since Lewis was born. I think Violet has been the most lost in the shuffle, since her needs are not as immediate and intense as Lewis' but she is not as mature and self-sufficient as Grace. I think the two main areas she could use MORE in are a) cuddles and hugs and physical affection and b) stimulating and interesting things to do. There has been a LOT of free-form unstructured play at our house in the past few months. This is not a bad thing really, but I think works best when balanced with planned fun things to do. Hence, the gymnastics class (which she does love, to be clear-- she's just not very good at being part of a group/class yet).

Also hence, preschool, starting this Thursday. I have been researching preschools and getting my applications in around town at the ones that seem good and are close to our house and all that. It turns out that one of them has an open spot right now (a student moved away in the fall) and we've decided to take it and start Violet at preschool now, two mornings a week. It's a total hippie preschool, which I am fine with but will be a new experience for us as Grace has gone to more traditional preschools. They also call themselves a "creative arts" program and do lots of music, dance, theater, visual arts, etc. When we were visiting, the little class was chanting and clapping with the teachers, "Allegro allegro allegro aaaaaadaaaaagioooooo aaaaaaadaaaaaagiooooo..." I think she is going to have a blast. I also think she is going to be somewhat disruptive and havoc-wreaking, coming into this class that has been together since September and has their little routines and listens to the teachers and whatnot. She will be the youngest in the class and is not particularly mature when it comes to classroom skills. I think the hippie vibe of the preschool will be in her favor in that respect. They know where she is now maturity-wise and say they are totally fine with bringing her up to speed with everybody else. The director was saying she thought it would be 3-4 weeks of transition and then she thinks Violet will do great at participating and listening and so forth.

So starting this week, I now will be responsible for getting TWO children to school at regular times. I can do it! I think.