* We have a cloth book that crackles and has rubbery bits attached that Alec just loves. He sits and flips through the pages, waves it around, then crams it in his mouth. The only problem is that after about ten minutes, he starts to get overstimulated, but he can't figure out how to just let go of it. So he sits and cries, the book clutched in his hand, crackling away. I usually have to go pick him up and forcibly pry it out of his hand and comfort him. Poor little overstimulated brain. In case you were wondering, babies aren't very smart.

* I am feeling Very Clever at the moment. One thing I really dislike about our house is the lack of closet space. Currently, all of my hanging clothes are in the closet in Alec's room because he certainly doesn't have any clothes that need to hang. But it's inconvenient and annoying to have to go to a different room to get dressed for work, so I started thinking a small wardrobe would be just the thing. The rub there is that even a cheap one from Ikea is more than I'm willing to spend, particularly for something that would wind up being particle board.

So instead, I decided to make my own wardrobe. I bought a Gorm shelving unit, with only the top and bottom shelf. The I got an Antonius clothes rail and screwed it to the underside of the top shelf. Et voila, the $25 wardrobe, and it's even real wood. It works perfectly to hold the clothes I use the most and is small enough to fit easily in a corner of our bedroom. At some point when I'm feeling ambitious, I'll probably paint it and make a curtain, but right now it's fine just the way it is.

"I want to go the bookstore."

"No, we should go home. You're getting cranky."

"I am NOT CRANKY!"

I spent the evening doing this and that - going to BJ's to replenish our frozen foods (to replace what I bought just two weeks ago, including $15 of organic chicken *sob*), searching high and low for the baby undershirts I bought for K to wear under her bodysuits to prevent me from having to turn up the thermostat and her from turning into a babysicle so we can now keep Alec from turning into a side of frozen baby, making a fruitless trip to Target to try to buy baby undershirts only to find that they don't have any smaller than 2T (am I really the only person who doesn't want to put a short sleeve bodysuit under a long sleeve bodysuit to prevent having to spend all day snapping? Or do other people profligately heat their houses so they're actually warm? ) and finally finding the undershirts.

And then it was after midnight and I had missed a day of NaBloPoMo for colossally dull and trivial reasons, and then tried to make up for it with a tremendous, barely understandable run-on sentence. Well, I haven't been to bed yet, so I suppose I can say it's technically still Friday. And I'm not being graded on this, thank goodness.

We went out yesterday morning* and accomplished buying a new refrigerator in very little time. It wasn't that hard - we got the cheapest one Sears had that was large enough to accommodate a decent amount of food and also had a freezer. That didn't require much looking. We were lucky enough to have hit upon a 20 percent off sale, so we have a slightly better cheap refrigerator than we would have otherwise, but it's your basic Kenmore low end model.

However, now that it's sitting in our kitchen, it's gorgeous. It's so clean, and it has functioning shelves and drawers that don't fall out when you pull them just slightly too hard. There's a shelf in the freezer, which is the sort of thing you don't think about needing until you don't have it. And of course, it cools and freezes when it should cool and freeze.

We went out tonight and spent less than I thought we might to fill it with grocery basics. Even so, it feels very empty. A broken refrigerator has the same sort of cleansing effect as a fire or catastrophic pipe bursting. It forces you to get rid of all of the suspect things that had been hanging around the back, not quite spoiled but not appealing enough to eat, and the hopelessly freezer-burned food at the back of the freezer that had been hiding under the food that gets eaten often enough to get regularly rotated.

*Requiring that I cancel a dentist appointment, since we wouldn't have any time to do it otherwise until tomorrow, and that seemed like a long time to go without the ability to refrigerate breastmilk. This is par for the course, since I seem to have contracted some sort of dental curse since moving here that prevents me from going to the dentist.

I had my first dentist appointment since 2006 last week. And it's not like I was being negligent and avoiding the dentist for three years. I have no real excuses for 2007, except that we moved to a new city and my father died, and there's nothing like the knowledge that you need non-urgent dental work to make a trip to the dentist seem less than appealing. But we finally got it together enough to make an appointment in May 2008. And that week, we all woke up with pinkeye. It took a little while to reschedule, and by the time that appointment came around, I was pregnant and throwing up every time I brushed my teeth. So I rescheduled for the second trimester, since surely I wouldn't be throwing up by that point. And then I woke up that morning with stomach flu. At that point, I threw up my hands and made an appointment for when I wasn't pregnant any more... which then got rescheduled by the dentist's office. That appointment was last week, and I was very very late to it because I had to take K to the doctor. But at that point, I was going to fight my way through all the minions of Hell if it meant not having to reschedule again.

Miraculously, despite it being three years and my having terrible teeth, I only had one cavity. They agreed with previous dentists that I could use a couple more crowns, but they didn't seem at all in a hurry to schedule. So I scheduled an appointment for this week to fill the cavity and the dance begins again. So far, I have a message on my answering machine from the dentist moving my (rescheduled) appointment up ten minutes. We shall see how much more that moves by the time this ends.

I suppose it shouldn't come as too much as a surprise, given that I owned several Muppet movies and albums long before I had children, but today I found myself switching to a cd of Backyardigans in the car when the radio got too depressing. And there were no children in the car.

What can I say? A great deal of it was because that was what was in the cd player and I didn't feel like going through the contortions of getting a different disc. But part of it is that, um, I actually like the music. I can guarantee that if the disc had been that wretched Sesame Street album where Elmo sings the Macarena, I would have gladly listened to all six hours of Shoah first. But the Backyardigans use a large variety of musical styles and the lyrics are genuinely clever and funny. I can't say I like the show enough to watch it on my own the way I do the Muppets, but I'm always happy when K wants to watch it because it's cute and funny and while they may periodically learn Valuable Lessons, it's generally free of the painfully obvious morality plays that plagues much of chldren's television programming.

Having watched quite a variety of children's programming in the past couple years, I've found there are two main kinds. The first is the painfully earnest sort that is aimed at children and only at children, which consists of the things that the writers think children find interesting. They're the ones that hold children in unholy thrall while their parents fantasize about opening a vein to get sweet relief. This includes things like Barney, Caillou, Ni Hao Kai Lan (speaking of excruciating morality plays) and Dragon Tales. Dora. Diego. The list goes on and on.

On the other end of the spectrum is shows that while they're intended for children and usually take pains to be developmentally appropriate, the writers are clearly writing the things they find interesting and funny. This is what made the Muppets brilliant, as well as Sesame Street (this is still the case, except for Elmo's World, which careens right back into category 1). These are the shows where you realize you don't mind so much if you get the songs stuck in your head. This is sadly a much shorter list.

Somewhere in the middle is a lot of shows that you find yourself enjoying a little despite yourself, because they're clearly not meant for you, but they're a little funny and the writing is decent. Blue Clues and Wonder Pets fall here (I'm always kind of conflicted about Wonder Pets. The music worms its repetitive way into your head and burrows there like a Ceti eel and a lot of the plot points can be spotted a mile off, but there's a demented sort of humor running underneath and Ming Ming is amusingly snarky for a duckling with an annoying speech impediment).

And then of course there are the shows where the writers have clearly done too many drugs, like Yo Gabba Gabba and Wow Wow Wubbzy. Watching them is kind of like having a fever dream and makes them impossible to categorize, since adults tend to either love or hate them.

A corollary to this is music groups: just like it's not hard to tell the difference between writers writing things they think children will like and writing things that they like, there is a painful difference between a band consisting of people who came together out of a genuine passion for writing and performing music for children, and people cast by executives out to make a buck in the lucrative children's music field. I think of this every time I look into despairing eyes of the Fresh Beat Band attempting to act like it's cool and fun to sing about bananas (why do I allow this on my television? Nick sticks it in front of their On Demand programs and I'm not always alert enough to fast forward).

Yesterday, our refrigerator started making a worrying hum, all the more worrying since Spiderman villain Hum Dinger was nowhere in the vicinity. And today, I opened it up and realized that despite the fact that I could hear the motor, I couldn't feel any cold air. Up in the freezer, none of our blue ice had frozen and things were steadily defrosting. Ack. Our refrigerator had stopped running.

Normally, this would be where renting would come in handy, but while I normally like our landlord, one of his drawbacks is that he doesn't provide a refrigerator. It's worth it because we're living in a very nice neighborhood for a lot less than you would expect, but our current refrigerator is the one that the previous tenants left behind. It's, er, not exactly a huge shock as to why. It's ancient, has a tiny freezer, is missing several shelves, and generally gives the air of an appliance ready to float down the River Styx at a moment's notice. And lo! It's gone on its final journey.

The problem with refrigerators is that it's one of the only appliances you can't live without for any amount of time. If the stove broke, we could use the microwave. If the washer or dryer broke, we could go to a laundromat and use the clothesline, or even use the bathtub. Heck, even if the furnace went out we could shiver in front of a space heater for a couple days. But nothing will refrigerate food except, well, a refrigerator. And as much as I hate to lose an entire refrigerator and freezer full of food (really hate, since I just made a trip to BJ's last week to fill the freezer), it's the breastmilk I'm producing that makes it vital to have refrigeration. And, of course, I've finally just reached a point where I've pulled ahead a bit of demand and have a bit of a surplus.

Sigh. When we started hearing the hum yesterday, we started responding to listings on Craigslist. But none of the leads have panned out, so I think tomorrow morning we're just going to have to suck it up and go to Sears, who is at least offering free delivery and will haul away the wretched husk of our old refrigerator. This wasn't what I wanted to spend money on right before Christmas, but we can more or less afford it. And I have to admit, I will look forward to a refrigerator that doesn't have an empty pizza box replacing one of the shelves.

Guess who's teething?

Our gigantic baby, that's who. He was 26 inches and 17 pounds, 3 ounces at his well baby visit today. I expect our health insurance to cancel his coverage any minute now. He's in the 90th percentile for height, weight and head circumference, making him a very well-proportioned baby. And you can really see it - he has a decent amount of chub, but he's not at all fat, just big. He's firmly into 9 month clothes now that all of his wrists and ankles are sticking out of 6 month clothes and we can't snap any of them under his crotch without endangering our future grandchildren.

In physical developments, he has started rolling over. And like magic, the boy who never wanted to play on the floor is suddenly thrilled to be under his activity arch. He's even happy to be on his stomach for quite a while. He isn't making any forward movement when he squirms around on the floor, but he will often wind up 90 or 180 degrees away from where he started by rolling around. He's become much more interested in holding and examining objects, and he frequently becomes frustrated when he's under his activity arch because he can't hold the dangling toys and hold them the way he wants to.

Socially, he's the most incredible flirt. It's not just that he will smile at anyone who looks at or talks to him. He will also deliberately catch the eye of people passing him and give them a coy, come-hither smile.

He has started laughing, in response to being tickled, to many of the things K does, and to being sung nonsense. Honestly, I'm not sure why I bother to remember lyrics to songs when the thing he finds most hysterical is my chanting:

A dee-dee-dee,
A dee-dee-dee,
A dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee!
[vigorously move baby's arms about in various semaphore positions]

Not exactly poetry for the ages. But who could resist making this face smile?

After failing NaBloPoMo spectacularly last year, I'm trying again to try and get back into more regular posting mode. So here goes:

I drove off to work yesterday with our virgin pumpkins in the back of the car, so sadly, longstrider's Halloween afternoon activity of pumpkin carving with K was cancelled. But despite the early fly in the ointment, Halloween went off pretty well. After I got home, we dressed the children and took them back to my museum with a cute dinosaur:



and a princess (who was torn between dinosaur and princess until the costume was purchased)(and yes, that's a Disney princess dress on the child who has an entire trunk full of handmade princess dresses. But small children don't quite understand the frugal principle of wearing something you already own for Halloween instead of getting a new costume, and she certainly wears those dresses enough that we'll get our money's worth out of this one too):



Since we're a big mansion that can look spooky in the dark, we decorate for Halloween every year and open up for the local trick or treaters. K and Alec were met with gratifying acclaim by my co-workers and the (female, middle-aged) volunteers. Then we went back home and longstrider took K out around the neighborhood while I answered the door.

They came back when K's bucket was full and she kept giving it to longstrider to carry between houses. They had only covered a quarter of our street, which brings home to me how much more dense this neighborhood is than the typical suburban subdivision I grew up in. All of the houses on our block are duplexes, and are long and narrow, so the narrowest side of the house faces the street. That makes for a lot of houses packed onto a street.

The trick or treating had pretty much ended for the night by 8, in time for the baseball game to start, and we poured our tired, sugared up princess into bed for the night.

A double ear infection!

Wait, huh? I asked her about her ears and got a firm negative. But according to the doctor, sometimes ear infections manifest as referred pain in the stomach instead. Bizarre.

The jury is still out on the urinary tract. She refused to pee at the doctor's office, so we didn't get an immediate dip and their lab takes several days for results. In any case, she's on antibiotics now.

She was pretty chipper this afternoon, which is impressive given that her fever never went below 100. I really hope it finally goes away tomorrow. She's staying home no matter what because school won't let her back until she's gone 24 hours without a fever. I understand their reasoning, but it can be a bit infuriating when you know what your kid has isn't contagious. Fingers crossed that the antibiotics kick in so she can go back Thursday.

K woke up this morning hot to the touch and complaining that her stomach hurt. As I heard that, I got a sinking feeling in my own stomach at the realization that the flu had caught up to us. I had been recently cursing the Philadelphia schools for sending home permission slips to give the H1N1 vaccine and then deciding that they weren't giving it to the preschoolers (yes! We shall give the vaccine to all students except the ones most vulnerable to complications from the flu! This makes perfect sense!), and my curses doubled up. Anyway, we gave her ibuprofen and settled in to wait for more symptoms to show up.

Meanwhile, we got a call from our pediatrician's office asking if we could reschedule Alec's well baby appointment today because the office was filled with sick kids. Gosh, do I want to take my currently healthy four-month-old into the cesspool of disease and pestilence masquerading as your waiting room? Why yes! Or not. We rescheduled the appointment. Although I suppose it doesn't matter if we try to avoid disease by staying home if K is going to bring it home to us from the plague grounds of preschool, Seventh Seal style ("The salmon mousse!").

At noon her fever was down to 100 and she was more chipper, but not showing any other symptoms. She slept most of the afternoon. In the late afternoon, I tried asking her if anything hurt, trying to find out what symptoms she might be developing (at this point I had pretty much decided she must just have one of those anonymous viruses small children like to pick up), and she said again her stomach hurt, but nothing else. Did it hurt when she pees? Yes. Was it her lower stomach that hurt? Yes.

Drat. Another UTI. On the plus side, not the flu and not contagious! On the negative, it was 4:30, half an hour before the doctor's office closed and an hour after the appointment we had given up for Alec and decided not to take K to instead because what could the doctor do for a virus? Sigh.

We have an appointment for her tomorrow morning (a mere hour before the dentist appointment that I've been making and breaking for the past year and a half, but that's another story), and hopefully getting antibiotics will get her well enough to ship her back to school on Wednesday, poor bunny. And I will continue to be grateful that we're continuing to dodge the flu bullet. As hard as it is to watch the numbers climb on the thermometer as your toasty warm preschooler lies limp and flushed, the terror of a young infant with the flu is one I would just as soon avoid.

Traditionally, the library is supposed to be a good way to reduce the number of books you buy. Tradition, however, has not reckoned with that most seductive phenomenon known as the library used booksale.

It's a beneficial thing for all parties involved - the library gets to simultaneously get rid of weeded books and donations they can't use and make some money, and book lovers get the thrill of picking through acres of Harlequin romances and John Grisham novels for rare gems. Growing up, my local library had quarterly book sales, which rarely netted me much useful because I tended to go on the last day, the dollar-a-bag day, the library's shameless attempt to lure people into carrying away as much chaff as possible left over once the wheat had been thoroughly picked out the two days preceding. It was quite a deal, assuming your heart's desire including all the bodice rippers, Agatha Christie novels and Time-Life books from the 70s that your arms could hold. I have occasionally found some rare gems this way, such as my hardcover of Peter Beagle's Folk of the Air (which Bunter later peed on, the wretched creature), and a gorgeous edition of Canterbury Tales in Middle English with lovely color illustrations. Trying to read it is a bit like trying to read mock-Swedish, but goodness, it's pretty to look at. But mostly, I've come away with armfuls of dreck, falling apart paperback mysteries and cookbooks from the 60s that I thought I might conceivably be interested in that I wound up eventually handing right back to the library as a donation.

In recent years, libraries have begun to realize they can get make money more consistently if they have a constantly running booksale going, which can range from a lone bereft table in the lobby to bookstores that boast an entire room or two to themselves and some semblance of organization. But they're all similar in that you rarely pay more than a dollar for a hardcover. This encourages more discernment in choosing your books, but is still a low enough price point to seduce you into some real stinkers. The large print version of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time for instance, which is certainly a good book, but as it turned out, one I already owned. In normal print.

Currently, we have access to all of the books longstrider's library has for sale before they're available to the general public, which is so, so bad for us. We've cut down on the crap quite a bit. But in terms of sheer volume of books coming into the house, we've gotten much worse. I keep coming across children's classics that I want for the kids when they're older. Or I find book three from a series I've always wanted to try, or books that I want to give as gifts, or copies of books we own but in better condition, except we keep forgetting to get rid of our older copies. Recently longstrider came home with ten classic science fiction paperbacks, most of which are probalby going to go right back, as they're magnificent examples of 50s misogyny and Red fear. K seems to be under the impression that she can buy anything she wants at the library because we'll generally buy her anything she finds that she wants off of the booksale racks because after all, it's only a quarter. We've found some really good stuff. We've replaced the flimsy Science Fiction Book Club editions of the first four Harry Potter books with full size copies in lovely condition. Somebody keeps buying science fiction and fantasy novels in hardcover, reading them once and then donating them to longstrider's library, which has resulted in our acquiring things like the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel for a dollar.

In any case, this weekend the friends group at longstrider's library held their quarterly booksale, which meant there were lots more books available, and I came away with what seems like a classic sampling:

-a romance novel by an author I don't want to like but somehow can never put down, in poor condition, which will probably go to my library's booksale once I read it and then get over the resulting feelings of vague shame and self-loathing
-two mystery novels from a long running series from which I've read three or four books, which I may well get around to reading, or quite likely they will go on the bookshelf for a few years until we move again and I need to make some space
-Princess Academy by Shannon Hale, a book I loved, which has me wrestling with my conscience because my first instinct is to put it in my library, but I want to keep it clutched in my grubby hands. There's no reason that I should feel obligated to give books I want to my library, but I enjoy the idea of children finding a book I love. I think a lot of the instinct of a librarian is wanting to share books you like. In this case, however, I'm keeping it.
-Search the Seven Hills by Barbara Hambly. This was the real jewel, since it's a wonderful mystery by an author I love that's virtually impossible to find.

I don't see our cheap bookbuying habit ending any time in the near future, even as we find ourselves hip-deep in mediocre paperbacks. Because out for every ten books we sorta wanted to read sometime, there's the irresistable prospect of find Homer Price in hardcover.

Of course, just when you're ready to set your child out on the curb for gypsy pickup, she manages to save herself by singing sweetly to her brother:

"Rock-a-bye baby,
Up the tree top,
When the cradle falls,
You'll fall asleep."

I think I'll keep her for now.

Yesterday, I was THAT mother, you know, the one who has a firm grip on a struggling child as she marches them along, clearly at the end of her temper. The one people tsk at because what sort of abusive parent is so rough with their child?

In my case, it was because K decided it was funny to run away from me. I had let her run around on the grass with some kids at school pickup, and when I said it was time to go, she decided it was time to run instead. I can't let that sort of behavior slide, because what happens when she decides it's funny to run away in a parking lot or crowded store? So I grabbed her around her upper arm, because she was inclined to go boneless and there's a danger of dislocating a child's elbow by pulling them by the hand too hard; a very common cause of this is by a child going boneless while a parent is holding their hand. So while a hand around the upper arm seems much rougher, it's actually a lot safer.

Anyway, I eventually got us back to the car, although it involved at least a few feet of walking while holding each child around the middle. And K lost her promised trip to Burger King because if I couldn't trust her to stay with me in public, we needed to stay home.

Today, I was one of THOSE mothers, you know, the ones who futilely try to reprimand misbehaving children while not actually backing it up. The ones who are creating the next generation of delinquents with their permissive parenting?* We were having lunch before going to buy her Halloween costume and I had let her sit in one of the comfy chairs at Panera, which she took as license to use it as a jungle gym. Meanwhile, I really desperately needed to eat at least a bit before leaving and Alec was drinking with his eyes closed, giving every impression that if I fed him just a little while longer, he would fall asleep. And chances were good that I was actually bothering more people by nagging K than she was by climbing all over her chair. I should have left immediately when I saw what her mood was and knew it at the time, but I was desperately hungry, so instead I threatened and threatened until she moved into outright defiance and deliberate provocation, at which point the Halloween costume got cancelled and we headed home, because if I couldn't trust her to listen to me in public, we had to stay home.

Only first I had to stop to mop up when I discovered I had managed squeeze juice from the juice box I was carrying all over the carseat, and then had to deal with the boneless puddle of child on the floor of the car. I feel a certain amount of pride that this is the first point in the past two days that I started yelling, which was just about as effective as it usually is, which is to say that she started laughing. I feel so much sympathy for spanking parents at times like these, but I also know that times like these are part of why I don't spank, because I don't think I want to allow myself to use violence when I'm that angry. As it is, I can't say I was terribly gentle when I pulled her up and put her in her carseat.

On the way home:

K lost tv privileges for the afternoon due to egregious seatbelt violations

My back started spasming, not doubt due to having to haul around a struggling forty pound child

I had to stop suddenly, causing my large cup of iced tea to hit the floor

K announced that she had spilled her juice

I won't even go into what it took to achieve a bath tonight. I have rarely been so happy to see bedtime come tonight. I think four may kill me.

So any guesses on how many more times we have to go through this and how many more patient explanations it will take before she finally realizes that defying me in public will result in staying home?


*And this, of course, is how a parent can never win, because if you don't discipline enough, people give you the hairy eyeball for being too permissive, and if you do discipline, you get the hairy eyeball for being too harsh and a possible abuser. Think upon this the next time you find yourself judging a parent in public: you are only seeing a brief snapshot in time of their relationship with their child. Try to be charitable.

We went to an openhouse for a local Friends school Saturday. It was a nice little school, with small class sizes and a good philosophy. It looked like the sort of place we could all be very happy with.

( This gets long )

It's not that nothing is going on in our lives these days. It's just that every single thing I do these days involves at least one of my hands. If I'm not feeding, soothing, wiping, swaddling, jiggling or otherwise entertaining a baby or small child, I'm pumping. Or in my miniscule spare time, sewing. Plus, very little in our lives is actually that interesting. We just keep doing the same things every day, and before I know it, over a week has gone by and I haven't posted anything.

So here are a few random things I can think of to keep another week of silence go by:

* Our trip to California was, on the whole, worth it. It was every bit as inconvenient and exhausting as we expected a trip across country with a baby and preschooler would be, with some extra jabs thrown in just to make us just that much more tired, but I'm glad we went. The wedding was lovely, I got to see a cousin and her daughters and we spent time with some college friends. And I have now been on the West Coast and seen the Pacific ocean for the first time.

* Alec rolled over today. I thought he might not make it, because he was clutching a toy in the hand of the arm he was rolling on, but once I helped out by taking the toy away, over he went. Last Thursday, he laughed for the first time. My tiny baby keeps insisting on growing and developing. Is college next?

* Every day, K comes home from preschool with a new drawing, almost always of our family. It's fascinating how her drawing has been progressing in the past week. First, we were largely just heads. Then we were heads with bodies and limbs attached. Then she started drawing in details like hair and longstrider's beard and a very definite attempt to have one of us holding Alec. Today, we all had glasses on and she had made a very creditable attempt to sign her name with at least three recognizable letters. I've made no secret about the fact that I find four a very trying age, but there are parts of it that are just so incredibly cool. I don't know when my kid got so smart and capable, but it's wondrous to behold.

* I love the cool crispness of fall, which fell on us this year with a startling suddenness that left us sitting there blinking. I've been scrambling to put away the short sleeves and pull out the sweaters as the temperature in the house plummets. The cats like us again as they compete to crawl under the covers with us when we go to bed. It's amazing how they're suddenly ready to accept the new messy small creature in the house when there's body warmth to be shared.

* I'm taking new member classes at church, although I'm not able to attend many of them between our travelling and my work schedule. That's okay though. After confirmation classes and new member classes at three different churches, I think I'm pretty much set when it comes to the history of the UCC and the rights and responsibilities of a member of a UCC church(basically, we vote. A lot, on pretty much everything). I suppose it's a little quick to be joining, but after almost three years, it's time to transfer my membership from our Indiana church, and I really like this church. Alec is getting baptized November 15, and my mother and brother are coming out. I haven't seen much of them in the past year, so I'm really looking forward to it even though they're not staying long.

We just got back from spending the weekend in California, attending longstrider's sister's wedding and trying to shoehorn seeing everyone we know in the Bay Area in one day. Is there no end to our crazy cosmopolitan jetset lifestyle?

Well, I would feel more cosmopolitan and jetset if longstrider's parents hadn't had to pay for our entire trip, since we couldn't have afforded to send even just one of us. Heck, just the baggage fees represent a staggering blow to our current budget. So we are incredibly grateful to them.

Anyway, we are now very very very tired. So this is the "I aten't dead" post that will be elaborated upon later.

My baby has reached the ripe old age of three months, the official end of the newborn stage. His skin has gone from mottled and translucent to smooth and creamy. He's lost his werewolf pelt of dark hair on his ears and shoulders. His eyes are alert and fixate on objects and faces, no longer gazing into the mysterious world only newborns can see. He's eating larger and larger amounts at a time, which gives him the ability to go longer between feedings. His skinny little chicken legs have been replace with meaty drumsticks. He can stay awake happily for two hours at a time now, and happily entertains himself under his activity arch, grabbing at the dangling toys on his bouncy seat and investigating the myriad wonders of his new Jumperoo.

He's a very social little thing, doing his best to flirt with and charm whomever he meets. He spent Sunday at church developing a devoted fan following by smiling indiscriminately at anyone who talked to him. He demands interaction from us by cooing at us like an insistent little owl and then flashing a full-face smile when we look at him. He loves being sung to, with favorites including Alouette, Lydia the Tattooed Lady (I'm not sure why this is a favorite of my babies, but they've both loved it), Alice's Restaurant (which turns easily into Alec's Restaurant), and Union Maid (which I would turn into Union Lad, but "There once was a union lad, who never was afrad" doesn't quite work*). What do these songs have in common? They're upbeat and I can remember the lyrics. It shows exactly what sort of library geek I am that I have been known to sing to my children with an open copy of Rise Up Singing in front of me, but when it comes down to it, the things I remember are the things I've listened to all of my life, which is mostly folk music and assorted oddities like Tom Lehrer. Thus, I have a wide repertoire of union songs and gospel songs which leads to my frequently singing to my children about the death and the coming apocalypse, along with populist rabble-rousing.

Physically, he is getting quite good at reaching out and grasping, as well as starting to manipulate the toys on his Jumperoo. He has excellent head control and when held up can stiffen his legs enough to hold himself in a standing position. On his stomach, he can lift his head for a little while and he's practicing frog-like swimming motions by lifting his arms and legs and flailing.

I'm a little afraid to speak of sleep, but it's perpetually surprising to me that we just swaddle him up or pop him in the sling and he's usually asleep within a couple minutes with no fuss. He's starting to be able to sleep without being held as well, and has even started falling asleep in the car seat. In fact, he's starting to not be too bad when it comes to the car seat. If he's awake and cheerful, he'll happily sit and entertain himself in the car, and when he's tired, he can now be convinced to go to sleep. Today, he even fell asleep entirely on his own. This can't possibly be a baby of mine.

Three months is one of my favorite baby ages. They're old enough to be social but too young to fear strangers. Old enough to start developing a routine but are usually still flexible enough to be able to sleep anywhere. Able to play and entertain themselves for a while, but not in any danger of moving on their own. Quite possibly the cutest things on the face of the Earth.



More pictures here.





*Oh, the words don't have to be clever,
And it doesn't matter if you stick a couple extra syllables into a line,
It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English,
And it don't even got to rhyme...Excuse me, rhyne.

One of the few advantages of pumping full time is that you know exactly how much milk your baby is getting. I typically pumped about 22-25 ounces a day with K, but she nursed over night so I never knew precisely how much she was eating.

With Alec though, I'm pumping it all, so I know precisely how much I make. I'm currently producing 28-30 ounces a day, which is almost a quart of milk a day. Moo indeed.

1. Our driveway slopes downward, which has its disadvantages when it rains and our garage floods yet again. As you can imagine, it gets rather tropical in there in the summer, and mold is the very expected result.

(The much less expected result is the opossum that moved into the garage recently. We have to leave the door open periodically so things will dry out. Meanwhile, we saw Olwen recently, so we baited our live trap. We didn't get her, but we did find a very full opossum, who apparently decided to stick around and see if we felt like leaving out more food and hey look, here's a lovely semi-dry place to hide. We're like the best opossum hotel ever. I discovered it recently when I went out to dig out some of the baby toys and saw a pointy little face peeking at me from the corner. Since it was wearing neither a hat nor stripy shirt, and definitely wasn't speaking in a folksy humorous manner, I think we will be deploying the live trap again and relocating our guest)

Anyway, one of the casualties of the mold was our older Graco stroller. I had taken it in the house so I could try to wash the moldy fabric, but it was sufficiently inconvenient to remove that I hadn't gotten around to it. We have a much better stroller, a Baby Jogger City that I got at a shocking discount and love with an indecent passion, but it would be nice to have a stroller we could clip the baby's car seat to. And for preference, not so teeming with microbial life that it could possibly walk away on its own.

Enter Babies R Us, which decided to run a sale where you could bring in your old baby equipment in exchange for 20% off of new baby equipment. So we unloaded Biohazard Stroller on the suckers them, and were even allowed to use a 15% off coupon on top of that to acquire a double stroller, for about the price I see for lightly used ones on Craigslist. And now we can take both children for long walks without either having to flog K into walking the entire way or wind up both carrying a 15 pound baby and pushing a 40 pound child, a recipe for hot back death if there ever was one.

2. I did a bit more research on the tax incentive for buying a car this year and discovered that 1) it was for new cars and 2) it wasn't really that good. So since my brother is going to have a lot of trouble coming up with enough money to pay off our ten-months-left-on-it car loan before paying the rest in installments, we decided to wait a while on the new car. The longer we wait, the more he'll be able to collect, and the less will be owed on the loan. I don't want to wait until next August to do this, but certainly we could wait until spring.

I've still been doing car research. A phrase I never thought I would utter when car buying is "I think we should seriously look at this Kia." And yet, the Rondo has that right combination of more space but not too big, decent gas mileage and a good reliability record. Apparently Kia has been improving a lot in recent years. And while I've never thought I would be the type of person to be changing cars so often, my goal for this car is really to last long enough that someone comes out with a good station wagon or minivan as a hybrid or other alternative fuel vehicle. What I would really prefer is to own something like a Prius for driving around town and a minivan that longstrider could drive the mile and a half to work and we could take on trips, but we can't afford insurance for two cars living here.

Another phrase I really really never thought I would utter is "I think we should look at these SUVs." And yet, apparently the Toyota RAV4 and the Honda CR-V are both relatively small and have comparable gas mileage to the other cars I've been looking at. The main drawbacks are that 1), they cost considerably more than the other cars I've been looking at and 2), I saw a couple up close in a parking lot the other day and found myself thinking that even though I know they have decent mileage, they're still so large that I would feel like an asshole driving around in them. Part of my problem I'm sure is having to accept that if I want a larger car, I'm going to have to deal with a car that's, well, large, but there are larger cars with less aggressive profiles than an SUV.

So currently the state of the car project is still unexpectedly leaning towards a Kia and waiting for spring.

3. My mother's birthday gift to me this year is money for a new dress for longstrider's sister's wedding, since nothing in my wardrobe fits over my breastfeeding rack. Surprisingly, I have no tales of agony and woe, stumbling through store after store full of clothes that have been beaten liberally with the ugly stick. Instead, I found a dress from Lands End almost immediately and ordered it without hesitation. It's a flattering cut, has easy access for exposing myself and has a belt to compensate for the fact that my milk-enhanced bust is a full size larger than my waist. The fact that Lands End currently has a coupon code available that give both 25% off and free shipping was just gravy.

I read a lot of sewing and crafting blogs, which have been giving me a lot of treacherous thoughts lately about converting t-shirts and button-down shirts into dresses. But I keep feeling hesitant about possibly ruining perfectly good clothes so I can produce something that looks amateurish. But then I walked into Target and saw a rack full of dresses that looked like they had been badly adapted from thrift store rejects and then sat upon by a team of elephants for the extra wrinkly look, and realized that if people are walking out in public wearing those, I have nothing to worry about.

The budget crisis has been averted! The Senate approved the bill, and all it needs is the governor's signature, which I can't imagine he wouldn't give. We will both remained employed for now.

I can't express how relieved we are, although I feel a bit at sea tonight. All of our thinking in the past few weeks hasn't gone beyond the beginning of October, so now I actually have to do things like figure out my work schedule for next month and contemplate scheduling volunteer hours at K's preschool. We had also been putting off proceeding on buying a new car. We certainly could have survived fine without doing it, but it would be nice to have something a bit bigger, and between the fact that there's a nice tax credit for people who buy cars this year and that my brother's car is falling apart and he would happily buy ours for considerably more than we could get in trade-in, it would actually be financially advantageous to do it now. I've been researching both the Mazda5 and Kia Rondo, which are very small mini-vans that are small enough to have good gas mileage, but have more cargo room than we have now and optional third rows of seating so we will have enough room for everyone to travel in one car if grandparents are visiting.

longstrider is going to continue sending out resumes even if he still has his job for now. His job has been under threat for a year now, and after surviving two rounds of layoffs we're not counting on anything. There's also the small matter of the fact that his contract expired June 30 and negotiations are going about as amicably as two rabid badgers tied in a sack and poked with sticks.

But for the moment, yay!

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K started Big Girl Preschool this week, which is what we've been calling the public school preschool program to distinguish it from the daycare she had been attending. We went in last week to meet her teacher and see her new classroom, and acquire approximately 35 forms to fill out that all wanted exactly the same information.

It still blows my mind to be dropping my baby off at the elementary school every morning, to a classroom filled with four-year-olds, complete with all of the trappings of elementary school like hot lunch and Scholastic book flyers. So far she seems to be having a good time, although when asked, she tends to give answers like "I took a nap," which doesn't exactly give me a... lively picture of her school day.

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After hearing an interview with the creator on Fresh Air last week, we sat down and watched the first two episodes of Glee. Oh my, how fantastic.

I enjoy the music, of course and the demented depiction of high school society. I had expected it to be funny. But it surprises me a bit how much the tone and style remind me of the largely underrated movie Election. This is definitely on the dvr, and is providing some consolation for Leverage being gone until January.