Sunday, January 31, 2010

Owen Dancing, Nora Laughing

One of the best things about having two kids is watching them interact with each other. Nora adores her big brother, and while most of the time Owen is too busy playing to take notice of his baby sister, occasionally he'll decide to do something incredibly sweet. When he does, Nora just eats it up. Thankfully it happens often enough that it wasn't too difficult to capture on video. Here's Nora cracking up watching her big brother dance for her.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Nora's First "Solid" Meal

Now that Nora is almost five months old, we've started her on solids. With Owen we waited until he had his first taste of Avacado, a food a bit more substantial than rice cereal and breast milk, before we wrote a blog post on his first solids, but we decided Nora's first taste of semi-solids warranted a post. She wasn't quite as excited as Hazel was for her first taste of rice cereal, but she took to it fairly well. Our little baby is growing up...


Thursday, January 28, 2010

Rolling Over

On December 15th, Nora rolled over for the first time from her belly to her back. It happened at 11 am and was so unexpected that no footage was obtained at the time or even when she repeated the feat that night for father and brother. She then refused to do it again for over a month. The past few weeks it's made a return appearance, and on January 25th Nora even added the more difficult back to belly maneuver to her repertoire. Alas, Nora has abjectly refused to let us record it for posterity and lately has taken to waiting until we leave a room or turn our back to alter her poise. She's apparently the Snuffleupagus of the rolling over world.

But after a couple of intensive nights of filming we were finally able to capture the elusive Nora rolling from back to belly (we've given up on filming the belly to back thing entirely). It's not her finest work, there's a lot of teasing, and I find it maddening that once Allen took the camera away she was practically doing flips, but at least we finally have evidence to back up the baby book.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Every Little Boy's Dream

Owen woke up today to a digger, a dump truck, and a bulldozer outside his window digging a giant hole to work on a sewer pipe. Needless to say, it's been a good day (and thankfully the sewer pipe work hasn't seemed to affect our plumbing ;)

I Like to Ice Skate Ice Skate

We took Owen ice skating for the first time on Saturday, and he had an absolute blast. Just a couple falls, and he jumped up and brushed himself off each time. His favorite part though (and the cutest bit of the movie below) is when he started 'ice dancing' while singing, "I like to move it move it, I like to ice skate ice skate!"

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Feels Unlike the First Time

We don't coddle our children. Sure we buy organic food, have a dvd player in the minivan and our toy to furniture ratio is somewhat askew, but dammit, when we decide it's time for our baby girl to start daycare we make her sit in a stroller in less than 30 degree weather for the 1.67 mile trek to the Department of Labor.

In our defense, both kids were pretty well insulated from the elements and Nora actually slept the entire walk in. She continued sleep even after I dropped Owen off and so Nora and I hung out in my office for another 45 minutes until she woke up. We headed down to Ms. Kita's room and settled her in just in time for a walk with her classmates (inside, because it was less than 32 degrees and DOL's daycare apparently does coddle our children). We nursed and played for a while, she slept, we nursed again, and then she joined me for a discussion of health insurance coverage of part-time workers before we grabbed her brother and headed home (she slept through that commute as well).

Nora took the whole day in stride, and while her sleep was a bit off (1.67 miles doesn't equal all that long of a nap), she seemed surprising chill about being separated from her mother for extended periods of time (if one considers an hour an extended period). I for the most part was too distracted by a backlog of queries to pine away too much. Really the most traumatic part of the day was returning home and realizing that I'd lost one of Nora's first shoes in the flurry to leave.

Owen's first day was definitely harder on both mother and child, though the fact that Allen was in Japan at the time might have been a confounding factor. Regardless, Nora and I are staying home for the next few days and regrouping before we venture back to DOL on Friday -- when the weather is predicted to be a balmy 50 degrees.

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Friday, January 01, 2010

2009 - The Year in Sleep

It's become customary on our blog to start the year with a look back at the previous year in something. Last year was a look back at 2008 - The Year in Phrases, the year before way 2007 - The Year in Language, and kicking it all off was 2006 - The Year in Sleep.

This year we could continue the recent language theme, but Owen talks far too much now to condense into a year end list. Alternatively, we could do the year in potty training, but that didn't really start until the very end of the year, and it wasn't until he went back to Classroom 9 starting on January 4 of this year that everything finally clicked with wearing underwear.

The best plan though is to focus on our beautiful baby girl and give her a Year in Sleep post of her very own. As you can see, Nora's wonderful sleeping patterns that emerged in her first month have continued. With Owen, we looked back on the year that was 2006 with a hopeful note because he finally slept for eight hours straight twice at the end of December. With Nora, our sleep has hardly been interrupted, as she's slept eight hours or more at least thirty times this year. As much as we'd like to take credit for her great sleeping patterns, it wasn't any skill on our part, all the credit belongs to our wonderful, sleepy, baby girl.