Bugging Out

It's been a month since Dave recorded this, and I still find it as funny as the first time I watched it. The story is, Dave was fly-catching with a tissue when he realized that Will started to giggle wildly every time Dave made an attempt. It looks like Will thought his dad was just trying to amuse him...which is exactly what Dave ended up doing. And it certainly worked.

Current Events

1. THE TALKING

Will is pointing to things and trying to say them. He has a good approximation of DOOR ("doh"), BALL, ("bah"), WINDOW ("do-do"), CAR ("cah" or more likely "go-go-cah!") and HI...he also broke out the NIGHT-NIGHT yesterday at bedtime, which came out as "Nigh-niaahhh" or some bizarre vowel sound trailing off at the end, but it was accompanied by him waving as I said "Night-night, paintings!" making the meaning somewhat clearer.

(I'm under no illusions that Will is going to bee adding more and more words until he is a Shakespeare in diapers; often he conquers a skill and then drops it for weeks. Which brings me to...)

2. THE WALKING

Will took his first steps on Monday morning. One step was from walker to standing, and the next was a fully independent step...until his confidence (and knees) failed him and he sank to the floor after a ten-second pose. Although this doesn't exactly add up to walking, it is definitely a milestone that elicited a revelatory "Ohhhhhh" from me. Suddenly, the sleep disruption I had been blaming on teething for the last month or so made a bit more sense. I mean, it probably had something to do with teething as well, and certainly the whole coughing-on-drool-until-he-spits-up routine was all about the aching gums, but as the Genius Mother of the Century I apparently missed the signs of a developmental touchpoint. The completely textbook signs. Bravo, me!

3. THE GESTATING

How am I feeling? Pretty fabulous, actually. I'm not sure if the ugliness of the first trimester this time around makes the second feel like a heavenly oasis of physical functionality or if this pregnancy simply continues to be different from the last. While pregnant with Will, I basically exploded between weeks 20 and 24 and became quite abruptly uncomfortable--things mellowed again in the third trimester. With this baby, I suffered some "typical" nausea and fatigue early on and now am enjoying the "typical" second-trimester respite--I'm over the icky symptoms and not yet to the point of enormity.

Also, I'm exercising regularly and drinking a bit of coffee (caffeinated!) every day. That helps.

4. THE READING

Dave had a million airline miles left on Delta, but somehow not enough to actually HELP US FLY ANYWHERE. (Um, isn't that the point of miles?) So we ended up having to order some free magazine subscriptions just to get them to stop mailing us warning letters about how time was running out. Annoying.

Anyway, that means we have a plethora of magazine options around here, but no good books. I keep seeing a recommendation here or there and then forgetting all about it, so could people please tell me what you've been reading? I want a list so long it lasts through the newborn days with Baby Boy, so please throw anything good my way. (Yes, I'm a member of Goodreads thanks to Maria, but most of YOU are not.)

5. THE DRESS

I bought a gorgeous dress at a Gap Baby outlet a while back, before Bee had her baby and when neither Aimee nor I knew what we were having. "Of the three of us, SOMEONE will have a girl," I thought as I made my purchase. Here's what happened next:

End of July: Bee had her son, Connor.
Early August: Aimee found out she was having a boy in December.
Present day: I discover that this dress, or any dress for that matter, would be an inappropriate item in which to dress our baby as well, for the obvious gender-identification-related reasons.

The dress is definitely for a NEW baby girl, so I can't give it to any little ones who already exist in my orbit.

So the moral of this story is that somebody close to me needs to conceive a girl, ASAP. Otherwise I will be, as I lamented to Dave, "that sad old lady with ten boys who hangs on to a dress hoping that one day she'll have a girl to give it to."

To which he replied: "TEN boys?" Not the point of my story, Dave. Not the point.

Oh (Big) Brother!

Four months from the outside:

And from the inside:

Now to review the poll stats. There was an overwhelming majority predicting "girl"--78% to be exact. I was on the side of this heavy majority--the first trimester was different this time, and just like I could NEVER picture Will as a girl, I could never picture this baby as a boy.

Except...HE IS.

He's a healthy boy who really likes to stare at his skeletal fists as he opens and closes his fingers. He's been poking me for a month now, but only in the last week has he become a truly active soccer star, leading Dave to secretly start wondering if this baby was in fact the proud owner of a Y chromosome. He's perfect, and we can't wait to see how he manages to be as handsome and cheerful as his older brother!

(And maybe he'll also manage to be one of those laid-back babies I'm always hearing about? Maybe?!?)

Going to the Chapel

She walked in with one last name...

and walked out with another.

Congratulations, Amy and Dave!

Confessions of a Shopaphobic

We've had a crazy couple of weeks around here, and it'll only get more hectic before things settle down. Zero free time on the weekends means grocery shopping on the weekdays...with the ten-month-old in tow.

I've shopped with Will before, but always with him in the Bjorn, which he's long since outgrown, or the stroller, in which case I have to limit my purchases to "whatever will fit in the basket beneath his seat." Read: one package of cheese, one loaf of bread. So last week I finally put Will in the shopping cart, after lots of hand-wringing about how he would surely get antsy after five or ten minutes and I'd have to dart out of there with only a gallon of milk in my free hand.

I was only worried because nobody had told me that shopping carts were designed specifically to entertain active children and are, in fact, MADE OF MAGIC.

Whenever Will got restless, I'd put my face up to his and race the cart down the aisle to elicit some gleeful giggles. And when he realized that all the fun noisemakers (cereal, pretzels, plastic packaging of any kind) were actually behind him, he simply swiveled around and played until it was checkout time.

It was worth the wait.

Great Beginnings

Connor Joseph Power was born on July 28 to two wonderful parents, and Will has already told us (in so many words) that he couldn't have asked for a more adorable godcousin. (Connor's dad Mark is Will's godfather, so technically that makes him Will's godbrother...but that's a little weird, so godcousin it is!) I'll send you to Bee's post for the details of his birth, but for our part we are counting down the days until we travel to Florida to meet this perfect little guy.

Since great beginnings is the theme here...when Will and I started taking classes at Isis, he was maybe four weeks old, and that first class was appropriately called--you guessed it--Great Beginnings. I can't remember most of what we talked about; a lot of the conversation was just welcome-to-motherhood venting, the kind that spews from your mouth when you find yourself in a room full of other new moms and recognize the wild-eyed look on their faces.

Two of the women I met in that first class have continued to be Isis regulars with me, more or less, while we've collected other kindred spirits along the way. (Pictures of those babies and moms will show up here soon, but this post is about the very beginning.)

At the end of June, one of the moms from our first cohort took pictures of the most recent Isis group.

Ryan (son of Mo, also pictured above) has been Will's best bud since the newborn days. When we get together, I look on wistfully as Ryan is completely content to play with his toys...you know, play with, not climb on top of.

Kate is the only Great Beginnings girl to continue on with Will through most subsequent classes, and she definitely knows how to challenge him. I credit Kate with encouraging Will's early crawling and pulling up skills...she has ALWAYS been ahead of the curve.

See what I mean about challenging him? The best part is, Will is totally unfazed by this when it comes from Kate. They look like puppies when they play together, always climbing over each other.

And this was then:

Will's in the center on the bottom,

Ryan's to the right of him in the blue stripes,

Kate's the second pink shirt going clockwise from the boys.

Fly Boy

Things we learned this past weekend:
1. Will was teething before, but he wasn't TEETHING. Now, he is TEETHING. Note the distance from mouth to hands; it is a new rule that his chewable fingers can never be more than three inches from his inflamed gums. Just in case.

2. Will loves the pool. He wants to be in the pool, and he wants a kickboard, and he wants to stay there FOREVER. (Look how serious he is about his kickboard.) He also wants to dunk his face into the water repeatedly, nevermind the lack of oxygen, because that's what Daddy does.

3. For the past ten months, every time we got him into the Bjorn or our arms and Will began to run in place, Dave and I always figured he was a) dancing, b) rejoicing, c) escaping or d) purposely kicking us in the stomach. Now we know he was swimming, and he was determined to do it with or without the water. But preferably with.

4. Will puts the "friendly" in "flying the friendly skies." He particularly likes playing with the window shades, although he's also happy to flirt with fellow passengers, laugh at pictures of their pets when they share their Blackberrys with him, fall asleep promptly at takeoff and stay that way until the final descent, and rack up compliments like "What a good baby!" and "He must fly a lot!"

I know it's obnoxious to dwell on what a great traveler he was, but after Will had his first ever "I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed right smack in the middle of the night" episode last week (did I mention the TEETHING?), I think we're entitled to a little accentuating of the positive.

The flight out was his favorite because he got to sit on his Nan's lap, which brings us to #5...

...Will really loves his whole Ohio family, but he especially loves his Nan.