The Fabulous World of VK: August 2004

Big party weekend for VK

What a weekend. Phew.

Saturday we went to a party at Kristin's house for pork and beans and beers and good friends. VK got all dressed up for the occasion (Dad had to iron her dress which he found much more to his liking than ironing his shirts).

Ready for a party!

Sunday the ladies of the Mom's group conspired to get the Dad's together along with the Mom's and the babies at our house. We had beautiful weather, met a bunch of very nice people, and mostly got out of the way and let the babies have fun.

VK hosts her friends.

Babies are a much more social bunch than I would have thought. They all sat and played with each others toys and each other for hours.

VK played with other peoples toys. Whee!

The whole gang got together for a group photo.

More group photos.

I personally enjoyed meeting new people, both babies and adults. VK was an excellent hostess, welcoming her friends to her home with open arms.

Also a couple of minor updates:
(Without jinxing it I hope) VK has slep reasonable well for the last couple of nights,`my suspicion is that this is driven by our difficult and heartless technique of letting her "cry it out" at 10:30ish. It seems that getting her over her first wake-up hump has the net effect of convincing her that she can sleep for 6 hours. After one night of crying it out she took excellent naps and slept in a bit in the morning. This is making her parents much more sane.

VK is now on her 6th new semi-solid food. She started with rice cereal, moved on to Oatmeal cereal, yams, carrots, squash, and now is on the pears. Imagine if you cataloged every food you had ever tried. Some people would have a very large catalog of items, and people like me would have one sheet of paper that said:
1) Macaroni and cheese
2) Captain crunch cereal
3) peanutbutter and Jelly
4) beer

Hopefully my daughter will have more diverse tastes than I.

Brrr. It is chilly in Portland!

Alright, so it is only in the low 60's, but imagine being a 6 month old child who has enjoyed a long hot summer mostly without long pants, long sleeves and shoes. Suddenly she discovers that her charmed life includes such horrors as rain, cold air, and lots of clothes and shoes. That's a bummer no matter how you slice it.

I had to do goofy Dad tricks to get her to smile for this picture. She was sitting there on the bed all forlorn, pondering her miserable future with shoes and long sleeves.

VK wears long sleeves for the first time in months.

Happy Birthday Grandpa!

Keepin' busy enjoying music!

Big plans tonight, Mississipi Pizza to see my friend/co-worker Landon's "band" play, have a beer and pizza before heading off to the Clark County Amphitheater to see Big Head Todd and the Monsters who were opening for Steve Miller.

The Mississipi Pizza place was a pleasant surprise, when we arrived the place was packed with families with kids listening to some older lady play fun kids music on guitar. All the kids had homemade racket toys (bottles with sand, cans and pencils to play like a cowbell) and were dancing and singing like kids do. She ended her set with a rousing version of Yellow Submarine. VK loved the whole thing, and it is becoming increasingly clear to me that my mission to make sure that my daughter appreciate music is working. She gets very excited and jumps and waves her arms and smiles like a total dork. It is quite a spectacle. Landon amd company played some wonderful Irish music, and even though it was raining like crazy we had to leave to make it in time to see Big Head Todd. VK loved the Irish music too!

We arrived just in time to catch most of the BHT set, and the three of us mostly just danced in the aisle (VK on my shoulders, or in her Baby Bjorn). It was well worth the price of admission just to have the three of us happily enjoying something that we love together.

An observation: I do not recall EVER seeing children at concerts before. However now that I am bringing my daughter to shows I see children everywhere. Perhaps it is a reflection of my age group, and the concerts that I go to, or perhaps it is a heightened awareness of children around me. Maybe a little of both. It makes me happy to see so many people sharing music with children.

More and more adorable every day!

New favorite toys.

I'm not sure why but the mini-basketball is fast becoming one of her favorite toys.

As is the baseball!

The SCREAMER

I am amazed by the capacity that my child has for full-on, top-of-her-lungs, "someone is killing me", middle of the night screaming. I think that perhaps she will be a B-movie actress famous for her horror screams, or perhaps a singer in some really bad, loud new band that parents just don't understand.

We have been trying to get through the night without the comfort feedings (I feel like I have written about this before, but I am just to darn tired to remember) that occur at 11:00 and 4:30ish. Plus VK has been waking up at random times (for example after just 2 hours of sleep instead of the customary 4 hours) and screaming.

We decided as a parenting team that last night was the night to commence the cold-turkey approach and let her scream it out. This approach has worked in the past and after 15 minutes or so of total gut wrenching crying, she has gone back to sleep. This can be difficult however for the following reasons:

1) It is difficult to take as a parent because listening to your child cry, or worse scream, is against all the instincts that are wired into your parent being. It makes your heart pound, you begin sweating. All you want to do is comfort the child. Exhaustion has the ability to diminish this, but it is always hard.

2) It is summer and with the windows open you are sure that the poor neighbors are suffering as well, except they care less about the well-being of your child and just want some sleep. I always expect that child services will be ringing our door in the morning after a night of screaming.

3) 15 minutes of screaming is difficult on the mind and the heart, but an hour is complete torture. After an hour Andrea and I have these odd conversations that are totally unfair to both of us, (sleep deprived and heartwrenched, and wanting to make the right parenting decisions) about what the right thing to do is, we know that when we go into her room she will open her eyes, look at us and smile. It seems as if she gets rewarded for this behavior which is no good for anyone. It is hard.

Anyway, here we are enjoying our Saturday, bleary-eyed and loving our daughter who seems to have no memory of the events of last night. She is adorable and even though we worry about summoning the energy to make it to the concert we have plans to go to tonight we love our little girl and thank all that is good that she is cute. We must remember to give our neighbors a nice bottle of wine and some earplugs soon.

Gastronomy 101

The Doctor cleared VK to start her gastronomic adventures and begin eating more solids besides cereal. The trick is to only introduce new stuff every 3 days or so as to easily isolate allergies or digestive issues related to particular foods. We started with sweet potatoes. Andrea whipped up an interesting yam concoction using the blender, but VK wasn't particularly fond of it, then we tried some sweet potatoes from a jar, which she didn't mind too much. The thing is, as you can tell from the pictures, it is hard to tell how much she is consuming since much of it goes in, then comes out or never quite makes it in in the first place.

Sweet Potato

More sweet Potato
Also it turns out that this initial phase of eating (while still breastfeeding) is more for the development of the mouth/tongue than for caloric value. Some study somewhere suggests that babies who eat solids earlier develop better speech skills (or something like that).

I say gimme the spoon cuz it is just plain old fun to feed a baby!

More sweet Potato

Lots to update!

Wow. 3 whole days without a post. Doesn't seem like a lot, but when your living with a 6 month old things move pretty quickly.

Friday was VK's 6 month 1/2 birthday which we celebrated with Kristin, Mario, Rachel and Daisy (the lab). Instead of a cake VK got a glob of oatmeal frozen to a spoon (she is teething). She very much enjoyed mauling the frozen oatmeal. She also got a new jumper (the old one was returned because the mat that she jumped on to make sounds didn't seem to have a working off switch. Imagine random jungle noises at all hours) which she is warming up to.

Sunday brought our first real cold. The poor little girl had tearing red eyes, coughing, snot like no ones business, and was generally out of sorts. She would sneeze occasionally and it would look like her brain was coming out of her nose. We had tickets to see Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray at the zoo that night but couldn't go with our baby in such bad shape. We tried to give them away to no avail. So if either Buddy or Robert are reading this . . . I hope that you understand that we are sad that we missed your show and that the extra $50.00 buys a lot of beers for you and your band.

Monday marked VK's 6th month well baby checkup as well as her 3rd round of immunizations. 1st the good news. . . VK weighed in at 15 lbs., and 26". Cruising right up the growth chart! Even though she was mortally ill on Sunday she was fine (seriously Fine. No snot, no coughing, no red eyes, no spaciness. . . just fine!!) on Monday. In fact Dr. Wolfe found it amusing that we skipped the concert because the baby didn't seem very sick (ha ha). VK is the picture of health. . . now for the shots. She received 3 shots again this time right in the (BRACE YOURSELVES) thighs. She took them like a trooper and most of the rest of the day went smoothly. She played, laughed, and danced. After putting her to bed she woke up in obvious pain, and we looked at her leg only to find it red and swollen. Poor baby. Shots suck, thank goodness they keep us from getting sick and dying or I would prefer that we skip them. Life here goes on.

VK also received gifts from Grammy Sonja, particularly nice is the little swim suit modeled here by our very own VK. If you look closely you might see a little red mark on her thigh. That's the one that caused her all the grief tonight. Enough of my rambling . . . Enjoy the pictures!

VK's new swimsuit - pretty much fits her now.

When she sleeps she whispers "zoom zoom"

Instead of a 1/2 birthday cake VK got a frozen lump of oatmeal ceral stuck to a spoon. She seemed to enjoy it.

VK's 1/2 Birthday present. A new Jumper!

Looking silly after her bath

VK standing

Look what I can do!

Aunt Hillary

Aunt Hillary stopped to say goodbye on her way back to the Palouse. I wish Hillary was around more, she loves VK very much.

VK and Hillary model their shades

VK likes Hillary's shades better than her sport goggles.

Because sunglasses are good food.

A little girl about town

Tonight the family went to dinner at the Laurelwood Pub & Brewery with Matthew, Tenley and Jacob (Jacob is 7.5 months). VK is quite the girl about town now, having visited baby friends 2 nights in a row. We had fun, but sadly no pictures. Quite frankly it was to hot out to worry about the camera.

It is interesting hanging out with other families who are near our same age (children, not adults) because although children generally go through the same development at close to the same times, peoples experiences and styles vary widely.

Very interesting evening, nice people, good beer, and lots of talking about children.

I am a parent for sure (not that I ever had any doubt).

An evening with the Borders

Dinner with Nick, Sonja and Ana. There were lots of new toys for VK to play with

VK jamming on Ana's Piano

And plenty of opportunities to marvel at Ana (who at almost a year is walking around like it is no big deal).

VK and her friend Ana.

Friends are good food.

A visit from Auntie Hillary

Although she loves here evening meal of rice or oatmeal, we are still working on mastering where the food is supposed to go.

I arrived home on Friday to VK wearing this.

Sharing with your child

One of the great hidden pleasures of parenting that I have recently discovered (although I wonder if it islost on VK at 6 months) is sharing things that you remember from your child hood. My Uncle Rob and family sent a gift recently that included a cool Seattle Mariners cheerleader outfit, and "The Real Mother Goose" Board Book. For the un-initiated a board book is a book that instead of having pages printed on paper (easily destroyed), it has pages printed on heavy board stock. This makes the book more durable for children who are still learning that books are better to look at and read than eat, throw, tear, etc.

The Real Mother Goose board book

When I was a child I had the larger version of this book (not a board book because I appreciated books and knew better than to eat, throw, tear, etc.). I loved mine, and although the nursery rhymes bring back memories, it is the art that I enjoyed so much.

Wonderful Mother Goose Art.

It brings me great pleasure to flip through this book (between pulling it out of VK's grasp and/or her mouth) and telling her about the pictures and reading the rhymes. I love that in the 30 some odd years since I called it my own that it remains completely unchanged.

I am sure that someday she will roll her eyes and say that her Dad is a dork, and that the book is stupid and antique, but for now it brings me joy. Who knows, perhaps she will appreciate it as well.