Who says all our babies look the same?

Some of them are dressed in pink

Big News

I am pleased to announce my first official blog post on this site . . . and we had our baby.

If I were Jennette I would say that we had our baby a week early. But since it's me . . . we had our baby within the standard deviation of due date ± 2wks. Actually if you take the limited data from Jennette's previous pregnancies it appears her mean gestation time is not quite the standard 40 weeks, but we'd have to have a lot more kids to get the confidence interval nailed down.

It took us a little while to settle on a name while I tried every negotiating trick in the Scientology handbook to convince Jennette to name him "Surrey Fringe Fennimore." I was unsuccessful, so we've compromised on:

Saul Smith Fennimore

For those keeping the box score:

Arrived: Mar 10, 2009
Weight: 6 lbs. 12 oz.
Length: 20 inches

Mom and Baby are at home and doing well. Max and Olivia are loving having a little baby in the house and are eager helpers. Isabel, however, insisted her name was "baby" today when I introduced her to a friend, so I guess she's not exactly ready to relinquish her former position. Oh well, the baby-elect is amenable to a power sharing agreement.

For those familiar with our previous infants, this one doesn't exactly break the mold, but there are slight nuances that make him unique. To the untrained eye it probably just looks like I'm recycling a baby picture from one of our previous babies because I couldn't find a USB cable.

At any rate feel free to tell us he's the most beautiful baby you've ever seen. Hopefully we'll post additional news and pics in the coming weeks.

Random Conditions

We're coming off of a big winter snow storm and two days off of school thanks to the icy conditions (although yesterday was lovely and sunny, even if cold). But it was cold enough to freeze the pipes in my kitchen (strange....), so just watch....today will be just the day I have this baby considering that the counter is full of dirty dishes that I didn't feel like getting to last night.

And now it would drive me absolutely crazy if I had to leave them for something like giving birth.

Oh great!.....so I opened up the door to our crawl space under the kitchen hoping that the warm air from the house will help thaw the pipes in there. However, our cat must have made his way in there and now he's come back with a mouse that he's currently playing with under the table next to my desk. Yes, a real mouse. AAAAHHHH!!


p.s. Before I go figure out how to get the mouse out of here, I should mention that the photo above comes from the site TalkLikeAPhysicist.com, which is a funny site, or maybe just funny for those who have to spend a lot of time with physicists who always give a good laugh to jokes involving a theorist and an experimentalist walking into a bar. Anywayzzzz...apparently, March 14 2009 is "Talk Like a Physicist Day"....

....now that sounds like a much better day for having a baby.

Update

How's this for my goal of better time management: employ multi-tasking. Right now with the 10 minutes I have before it's time to get Olivia from school, I'm here at the computer checking on all my daily sites...but I am doing it while eating my lunch and while I put Isabel on the toilet upstairs with instructions to perform either of the necessary potty-activities. Priorities!

Oops...time's up.

Milestones and Metamorphasis

Late last week Olivia started complaining that her teeth were hurting. When I looked in her mouth--lo and behold--I found that there was not one but two loose teeth! I was certainly surprised considering that Max didn't lose a tooth until he was 7. But maybe I should have realized that she'd be on an accelerated tooth-loss schedule as she had 13 teeth by the time she turned 1 yr old, whereas Max was nearly 1yrs old by the time he even got his first tooth.

So now she's one tooth down (and the Tooth Fairy one dollar lighter), with the second tooth so wiggly that it's set to come out the next time it meets a hard apple. Losing teeth is like crossing the threshold in to Big Kid-ness, and she's thrilled about it.

Me too, actually. I've been thinking a lot lately about the person that she's becoming. She was quite possibly the most docile and happy baby that ever existed. She, and I'm not exaggerating here at all, was pretty content to just sit in her stroller for the first two years. She was never the kind of toddler that you couldn't take your eyes off for fear that they'd make their way into the laundry room and dump out all the detergent. I don't think that I really ever had to babyproof anything.

But then, she made up for lost time. I hate to admit it, but the next few years (really!) I was unsure about who she was and how to handle her. Oh, yikes, she was so emotional and so darn volatile. It seemed like her main form of communication alternated between screetching or crying inconsolably. I remember one specific occasion when whe was three and I was trying desperately to get her to stop another round of irrational crying and I finally asked her, "Why are you crying?" and she answered, sobbing, "I don't know!" It was a common exercise to carry her out, in full meldown phase, of Primary, or dinner, or a playdate, or just about any other event. Throughout these years I kept internally pleading, "Please, please, please let this be a phase and not her personality!", but I was not feeling so certain about the prospects.

So when her birthday just missed the cut-off for Kindergarten this year, I wasn't sorry at all thinking that it would be good for her to have another year, and hopefully we would be able to get more of a handle on all the drama.

Turns out that turning 5 must have been just the ticket. Over the last few months she's become a completely different person. The meltdowns have all but ceased, she is willing (and mostly happy) to do whatever I ask (and often on the first time!), she is cooperative and supportive, she is the most reliable candidate in the family to share or give up whatever she has in order to help Isabel or Max, and we have started calling her our family's peacemaker. Early in the school year when I questioned her preschool teachers about her emotional state in class, they looked at me like I was crazy and reported that she was nothing but delightful. She looks for ways to show responsibility, she is my very best helper, and she is Isabel's very best playmate--they have become quite the pals. Teaching her has become a joy as she's replaced most of her previous stubborness with a sweet eagerness.

Now I am worried about what Isabel and I are going to do without her at home during the day next year.

Max's party

We haven't given Max a "friends" party since he turned 5, so we thought that this year we'd really better not skip out. We decided to make it an ice-skating party, mostly because the idea of entertaining eight 6, 7, and 8yr-old boys at my house for two or so hours sounded like an exercise in pulling my hair out and coming away having very mean feelings for not only the birthday boy, but for probably anyone who was in the vicinity. Who's just weeks away from giving birth, eh?

It was the perfect solution and we had a really fun time giving the party and being with all the kids. We had all of the boys meet at our house, where Adam played a few outdoor games with them while we waited for everyone to arrive. Then we had some pizza for lunch and Max opened his (very nice!--and wow, I need to do better when buying for other kids) presents.

Then we drove them to the ice rink, where I'm pretty sure that everyone had a really fun time. At least, they all worked themselves pretty hard and were really great sports, regardless of all the booty-falling that was going on. And we had cupcakes at the rink.

That night we kicked back with leftover cake and a family movie party to watch "Mary Poppins," but mostly Max just put together his new Lego sets during the whole thing.

Happy Birthday Max! We love you.

Eight

I have an 8 yr old now.

It's something that somehow I didn't really expect. Everyone says stuff like, time goes so fast with kids...but seriously....he's 8! How did this happen?! Mostly, though, it makes me feel like now I have to start the "real" parenting. It's both exciting and scary--but mostly exciting because he's a really, really nice boy.

One of the greatest things about Max is his extraordinary gift for being able to enjoy just about every situation he's in and everybody he meets. I see this as one of his biggest talents. Sure, he still draws like a 3 year old, but he makes friends as quickly as I can put down an open bag of snack-sized Twix. He has a true joie de vivre.

Recently his class was given a writing assignment where they would each write a letter to another classmate of their choice. Max came home with five letters--half the boys in the class. And what I know about Max is that a huge part of this gift of his personality is that he is completely unaffected by ego or competition. When it was time to plan his birthday party he quickly made a list of 19 kids. I had to force him to pare down the list to eight boys, and you would have thought I was forcing him to eat asparagus.

Speaking of dinner time, I admit, sometimes at the table it really starts to bug that his overflowing exuberance means he can barely keep his bottom on the seat without multiple reminders. Or, last Fall, it did drive me just a little crazy to watch him in soccer and see that he wasn't necessarily playing to excel at the sport or figure out every aspect of how to actually play the game well, but that he was playing to just...well...play. I complained to Adam about my frustration, he pointed out that if I love Max for being so easy-going in so many other aspects, that this is just part of the package.

What it means is that the boy has basically no anxiety.
And that's a birthday present that I hope he keeps getting for years to come.