Franklin Park Zoo

Chris and I took the kids to the zoo today. V had a great time checking out all the animals. We got caught in a torrential thunderstorm while in the barn. Cordy LOVED the horses, and V played with the puddles. They’ve got some construction going on near the tropical house, and the only entrance was clearly marked ‘Exit Only’, even though they’ve got all routes to the real entrance blocked off. Didn’t get to see the apes or snakes, which was a bummer, but we saw peacocks, condors, keas, flamingos, kangaroos, emus, zebras, giraffes, ostriches, lions and tigers (sadly no bears – V really wanted to see Baloo). Goats, sheep, horses, owls, and chickens and things. We had an awesome time! Home again for naps (after a bit of a fuss), freeze pops and burgers for dinner. Yay!

Before I forget

Cordelia’s growth:

12/29/08: 16 lbs 7 oz, 27.5 inches
3/30/09: 18 lbs 10 oz, 28 inches long (2.7 oz gained per week average for this 3 month period)
4/14/09: 19 lbs 4.5 oz. That’s 5 oz/week! Poor thing has an ear infection now, so who knows how long it’ll last.

She’s getting really close to walking. Pulling up on everything, cruising the furniture, walking behind the little push cart toy, JUMPING! in her crib. Oh how she loves to jump. She started clapping at the end of March (real clapping, not hitting her legs clapping), and has started waving this week. I’m working on blowing kisses too. She loves to take my glasses off and chew on them.

Veronica potty trained in January – hooray! We’re still working on the night training, but taking our time about it. How we did it: I prepped her Thursday night or Friday am saying that when she came home on Friday, we were going to put big girl undies on, and she was going to start using the potty. She could still wear a diaper for bedtime. Saturday, we woke up to a dead furnace. Put her in the undies anyway, and took off to Wiley & Jenn’s with little potty in tow. She did great! Bribes worked well too: m&ms for a pee, lollipop for a poop. Boy does this kid love lollipops. Once the heat was back on at the house, we came home she fought the potty for a bit (I think I held her on it at one point), but once she gave in, she again did great. Sunday was also awesome. No accidents (or maybe one?) all weekend. Monday came, and I sent her to school in undies (with tons of changes of clothes), and she didn’t have a single accident. From then on, she’s had a few – usually right in front of the potty because she spends so much time dancing around getting there.

Cheep cheep!

This is what I see every time I open my fridge:

They have lots of personality.

Like this guy:

He cracks me up.

And I love this one:

Do they get any fresher?

Chick cake pops, from Bakerella.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Been a long time

Call it a New Year’s Resolution, but I’m going to try to post at least weekly from now on.

I just cleaned out 500 spam registrations and installed new anti-spam protection to the blog, so hopefully my in-box will be a little happier.

Back later with updates on the kids, after this headcold cuts me a little break!

Time to make the donuts…

I went back to work on September 22 – I know, nice timing the day before my birthday. Oh well! It’s been okay – pretty much like I never left (a good thing and a bad thing, I think).

Veronica is finally starting to get back to being her happy self – I’ve missed her! Now that Daddy is doing pick-up after school again, I think she’s finally feeling life is back to normal. I think she’s grown another inch since July, and has apparently been eating very well at her new daycare (although not always at home, but we’ve seen some improvements). She LOVES her baby sister, and wants to do everything with/for/around/to/on her. I’m so happy she hasn’t shown any jealousy toward her. It’s such a relief! She likes to ‘be a baby’ a lot, but she’s also really into mermaids and ballerinas. You can usually catch her singing the tune from the Little Mermaid and flipping her hair around. She is such a good big sister, and ’shares’ food with Cordelia, puts blankets on her, gives her a binky when she fusses, buckles up her seatbelt, and soothes her just like I do. It’s so cute! Now if she’d only use the potty and sleep in the big-girl bed…

Cordelia, meanwhile, is getting much better at tummy time, and can push up pretty far (when she feels like it). She spits up every time I put her in the Bumbo (diaper pressing on her belly?), so she’s not in it as much as V was. She’s almost reaching for things, and will bat at the toys in the play gym and sometimes even grasps them. She has almost discovered her feet, too (I caught her contemplating them last night). She loves songs being sung to her, especially by Veronica. A quick alphabet song will keep her happy in place of a binky. Kissing noises will always make her smile, and I got her to “laugh” on Saturday by tickling her. She still has a ton of hair, and must be close to (if not more than) 14 pounds by now. I can’t believe how much bigger she is than Veronica was at that age (I’m also pumping twice as much milk this time around, which is a huge accomplishment for me! Yay!). Cordy sleeps really well, and has gone as many as 7 hours between feedings at night. She’s only done it once or twice, but boy was it nice! Except for me waking up every 3 hours anyway…

Alrighty. Time to get back to work. Pictures to be uploaded later!

Cordelia at 2 months and V’s new school

Cordy had her 2 month check-up today. She weighed in at 11 lbs 12 oz (70th percentile), had a head circumference of 37 cm (50th percentile), and was 24.5 inches long (95th percentile!). For comparison, V at the same age was 9 pounds, 8.8 ounces, 23.25 inches long, and has a head circumference of 38 cm. So it’s possible Cordelia will be the ‘bigger’ sister at some point. Cordelia also got her first round of shots (and wailed!). Hopefully she’ll remain fever and side-effect free tonight.

Other milestones for Cordelia include smiling spontaneously at her toys, and having decent head control when held upright (we’re still working on this – she usually slumps over in her car seat, which looks terribly uncomfortable). I’ll probably break out the bumbo seat this week, too. She sleeps 5-6 hours at night before needing to nurse again, and feeds very well in general. Her hair is so long in the front, I have to keep a barette in it to keep it out of her eyes.

Last Friday was V’s last day at the Bright Horizons she’s been at for the past 25 months. Time flies! We were sad to leave her old school, but we’re just as excited about her new one. It’s a family daycare in Quincy (unfortunately we keep our crappy commute…) run by a former Montessori school teacher. She’s got 10 kids total, varying in ages from a few months to about 5 years. Veronica started on Tuesday, and is settling in nicely. Bonuses with her new daycare include lunches (yay!) and messy diapers dumped into the potty, instead of being wrapped up for us to deal with (WOOHOO!). The final advantage is it is the same price for both Veronica and Cordelia as it was for just Veronica at the old place. Part of me is kicking myself for not getting on the family daycare train a year (or two) ago, but we really did like her Bright Horizons. Cordelia will be starting daycare on the 18th, to give us all a couple of days transition before I return to work on the 22nd (the day before my birthday…boo!).

Constantinople (Not Istanbul)

We’ve been reading some of the Dr Seuss books to V since Christmastime, including Hop on Pop. The end of the story has a little girl saying her Daddy reads big word too, like ‘Constantinople’ and ‘Timbuktu’.

This morning, V was sitting on the couch with one of Chris’ library books open in her lap. She looked up at me and said ‘Constanople’ [sic].

Too cute.

Introducing Cordelia Anne!

Born Friday, June 27, 2008 at 6:09 pm. She weighed 8lbs 13 oz, 21 inches long. Labor was induced Friday am at 7:00, and she popped out after only 5 pushes!

What timing

So…four weeks (or less) to go and counting until the new baby arrives, and V decided that last night was when she wanted to start potty training. We were reading her stories for bedtime, and she got all wiggly and insisted on “diaper off”. I said if you want to take your diaper off, you need to do pee-pees on the potty. She said “onna floor?” (I put her in a defective diaper earlier this week and she leaked on the floor) and I said “No, we don’t do pee-pees on the floor”. Then she said “Onna changie table?” and I said “No, we don’t do pee-pees on the changing table. We do pee-pees in the diaper or in the potty.” She became increasingly insistent that I take the diaper off, and after saying it’s okay for her to pee in her diaper, I obliged her. We went to the bathroom, she sat on the potty, held my hand, and did a pee! She was so excited she demanded Daddy come up and check it out. We got her back into her diaper (which was completely dry), and she went to sleep.

This afternoon during lunch (after throwing half of it on the floor and being pushed back from the table until she could behave herself), she got all wiggly again and cheerfully announced “pee-pee coming!”. A few minutes later she started squirming again, and started asking for “diaper off”. So we raced for the bathroom, whipped off her diaper, and after a little fit about the small red potty we have in the downstairs bathroom, she held my hand, relaxed and did another pee! That’s two in a row of her identifying the feeling, insisting on having her diaper off, and peeing on the potty!

She’s been waking up relatively dry for the past few days (instead of rather soggy), so I’m hoping this will be an easy task. With any luck, she won’t regress too much once the baby arrives – and it may even reinforce the “babies wear diapers” concept. I’m just concerned that all the transitions (new baby, new yet-to-be-determined daycare, potty training, and eventually a new big girl bed) will stress her too much. We’ll mitigate what we can as it happens (and she’s such a easy-going kid for the most part), so hopefully it won’t be that bad.

Genes

So how exactly am I supposed to get a two-year-old to sit still long enough to do not one but TWO nebulizer treatments (albuterol and pulmicort) for her wheezing that may (or may not) be asthma?

Ugh.

The backstory: Three weeks ago she had hand, foot, and mouth. A week after that she had impetigo (a nasty staph diaper rash). The next week, she started with the phlegmy cough and had a fever of 102.5 on Saturday night. Fever broke, but cough and snotty nose persisted. My diaper disinfecting routine included a new detergent (Charlie’s) that we’re BOTH allergic to – poor thing had nasty red burns on her little bits and I wasn’t too comfortable myself. (Which means another round of stripping all the soap off the diapers tomorrow before she can wear them again).

She woke up singing this morning (the happiest she’s been in a couple of weeks), we went grocery shopping and came home. After a short romp around the backyard she started to get fussy, and then crashed on my lap around noon. By 12:30 she was sound asleep after not having any lunch. Slept for an hour, and woke up with a fever of 103.9. We called the doc’s and got there for 2:15. Fever was down, her oxygen level was registering a 94 (and the nurse tried two meters and wasn’t happy with either one of them). The NP we saw prescribed amoxicillin for what may or may not be a chest infection, pulmicort (a corticosteroid) for long-term, and albuterol for the next week or so (until the wheezing stops). We’ll follow up with her regular doc next week.

She puked about 20 minutes after finishing the treatments. An hour later, she was wired and literally bouncing off the walls. An hour after that, she crashed hard and her fever had returned. She didn’t even make it to a story before bed – she was out for the count. I’m half expecting her to puke again – she’s been swallowing so much snot it isn’t funny. Her appetite was better today than it has been, which is encouraging.

On the bright side, at least we got a spiffy new nebulizer out of it. Mine is (no joke) 20 years old, noisy as hell, and on its last legs.