jennanddave.com

Yesterday, Dave woke up bright and early, attended day three of the conference he was in California for, caught a red-eye back to Boston which landed at 7:02 this morning, took the T to my parents house, kissed Henry, jumped in the shower, checked his email and then by 10AM was sitting in the passenger seat facing a seven hour journey with his wife at the helm and a "the-worst-kind-of-poopy" kid in the backseat.

Yesterday, I woke up to face another fun-filled day of changing endlessly gross diapers, a task which was made much less sad because Henry didn't have a fever anymore and he was in a particularly good mood. We played a lot and generally had a good time except by the end of the day I had a sore throat. Henry was rudely awakened a few times during the night by me unceremoniously thrusting my finger into the back end of his diaper to see if he had pooped. I was convinced that every "oof" coming from the pack n' play was him working to expel the days solids in a decidedly un-solid form. I wish I had known then that the sound I was looking for would be more of a "squirt"; we both would have gotten a lot more sleep. Around 1:30 he woke up and did his thang, so I changed him and gave him a bottle, then five minutes later he did his thang again, so I changed him again. Over the course of the next hour we managed to keep each other up, him moving around his pack n' play just when I was dropping off, and me blowing my nose just as he was dropping off. There was much fussing on both our parts. After a crazy morning of feeding the kid, packing, and loading the car, at 10AM I was sitting behind the steering wheel facing a seven hour drive with a nose that wouldn't stop running. I devised a great system during the drive: an empty tissue box tucked away to my left and a full tissue box on my right (it was Dave's responsibility to make sure I had full access to it at all times); pluck fresh tissue from box on right, blow nose, shove used tissue into box on left. It worked great.

The drive was really nice, considering we were all really tired. Right now Henry is crashed out in bed, fast asleep, Dave is watching a martial arts movie, and I'm going to go to bed. I took a bath with a "Fairy Jasmine" bath bomb and now I'm totally relaxed and glittery, which is the only way to be after a day like today.

Posted by Jenn at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So we're in Cambridge and Henry is officially sick for the first time in his eight months of being out and about in the world. My mother, who is standing right next to me floofing my hair for some reason just told me to make sure I make it very clear that he did not get sick *because* he's in Cambridge, he's just sick because he's sick and it would have happened regardless of where we are. He didn't eat very much dinner last night, and didn't drink much of his pre-bedtime bottle. When I went to bed at 11 I heard a few "oof"'s coming from his half of the room and thought to myself "I bet he's just pooped" then had a mini-debate about whether I should check his diaper, finally deciding I probably should because really, would you want to sleep in poop all night? Good thing I checked because wow, did he have diarrhea. It managed to get everywhere, kind of like that Crazy Frog song. We cleaned him up and put him back to bed and then at 3:30, he did it all over again, only much less voluminously. He had a little breakfast, then my dad and I agreed that his lips looked a little purple, which is when I started quietly freaking out. He wasn't having any trouble breathing and was only running a minor fever. Anyway, to make a long story short, I called his pediatrician in Lewisburg who said some virus was working it's way around our area and that's probably what was going on with Henry. Since he's not throwing up, he wasn't worried about dehydration. He did say to give him soy-based formula instead of milk-based, and he should be on a rice cereal/banana/applesauce only diet until things improve. Henry's completely exhausted right now. You know he's sick when he's perfectly content to settle his head down on your shoulder to be comforted. Usually he pushes away, wanting to be left alone on the floor to do his own thing. My poor baby.

Posted by Jenn at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday at lunch, I strapped the kid into his booster seat, snapped the tray into place, stuck a bib on him, and suctioned one of his bowls onto his tray. This doesn't seem like that big a deal, but what I've left out is that there was actual food in the bowl. I've been dreading this moment somewhat because I've become a bit Type A about keeping the house reasonably clean because if I don't, then I can't chill out and relax and enjoy time with Henry or the time I have to myself because I'm thinking about all the things I could be cleaning or picking up. This new aspect of my personality confuses me a bit because it's so outside the realm of how I usually am. You can ask Dave, I'm really a messy person. Sometimes people come over and I think "Please leave before you have to use the bathroom," because it's in such a sorry state. Anyway, I've been worried that I'll become so obsessed with maintaining the new, cleaner status quo that it'll become this big hindrance to me being able to let Henry make a big mess of things because we all know that's one of the more pleasing aspects to being a kid. So, I took a deep breath and gave him a bowl of food. He got it all over his hands, the inside of his seat, the outside of his seat, his face, his ears, and after it was all said and done, nary a speck of it got in his mouth. So, even though it doesn't really do the mess justice because you can't see what he got on his carpet or the dining table, without further ado, I give you: The Aftermath...

Posted by Jenn at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's been an exhausting week thus far. Dave is madly preparing for a conference and has been working until 1 or 2AM the last three nights. Poor guy. Add on top of that a kid who's teething and waking up at both midnight and 3 or 4, a wife who can't sleep until you're home (probably good practice for when Henry's a teenager and out on the town), and what you've got is a household full of somewhat cranky people. So, every time I put Henry down for his naps I'm faced with the choice of crawling into bed and catching a few z's, or trying to get something done, like weeding the flower bed or updating the website or taking a shower. Naturally, I've been crawling into bed. I haven't been able to nap, but it's nice to just zone out for a while and daydream.

We're going to be going to Boston next week. Henry and I are going to check out an apartment in Salem that we're trying to rent while we're there for Dave's sabbatical next semester. I'm looking forward to kicking around town for a day, checking out everything in bloom, eating some cookies from the local cookie place, and generally reveling in the good old days from when we lived there. It's probably going to rain all day, meaning Henry and I will run from the commuter rail to the apartment complex, then run back to the train station, not having seen a thing. That's generally how it works out. I guess I'm feeling a bit doomsdayish today.

Posted by Jenn at 09:34 AM | Permalink

Yes this is another post about Henry. This afternoon while I was on the phone with my mom, he scooted around on his tummy for a bit, then sat himself up. Then, he scooted around on his tummy and then sat himself up. Lather, rinse, repeat. He's doing it like it's no big shakes, like he's been doing it since before he was born, which wouldn't surprise me all that much because for about four months it did feel like he was most likely sitting directly on my bladder. Anyway, this is more proof that my kid's a genius.

There's something that I've been quietly nervous about since before I ever even thought about having kids, even when I was going through the whole "Please, I'm never having kids" stage, a stage which probably caused great consternation in my mom, although she outwardly handled it very well. Now that I've had a kid, the nervousness has hit a fever pitch, particularly since Henry is starting to show signs that he will soon be proudly displaying four new teeth, all of which will be lined up front and center in his upper gum. When I was eight or nine my dad and I were goofing around in the Watertown Mall and I accidentally smacked my tooth against an ATM machine. My dad was 300 feet away from me when it happened and had absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever. That's a lie. I was brought to a dentist, who then said I needed to go to an orthodontist, and thus I embarked on a six or seven year journey that involved tons of metal being inserted around and on top of every tooth in my mouth. Also, it involved lots of little balls of wax, which your supposed to put on the metal braces to keep them from scraping the inside of your mouth to little bits (it doesn't work by the way), falling out of my mouth and ending up crushed into the carpet, much to my mom's consternation (she spent lots of time being consternated during my youth, "consternated" being a word I'm pretty sure I just made up, and which sounds an awful lot like constipated so I bet she's going to make me change it to "dismayed" or "annoyed"). Anyway, my hope is that somehow Henry will inherit his dad's teeth, his dad who spent nary a second in the post-braces-tightening agony that I had to endure during my youth. Now that his four upper teeth are coming in, I'm afraid we're at the moment of truth. So please, for Henry's sake, hope that his teeth are like this:

and not like this:

Posted by Jenn at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just created a photoset on flickr featuring yours truly and Henry. We took these pictures partly because we don't have lots of pics with me and Henry and partly because my mom expressed concern over the phone the other night that he's not going to be chubby anymore by the time she sees him in two weeks. There's a rumor going around that he's really thinning out, which he may be, but not at the rate that's being insinuated, and these pictures prove that.

Henry sat himself up on Tuesday. I watched him do it, but because I was thinking about my flower garden, it didn't register until after he was sitting there staring at me from an upright position. I completely freaked out. He couldn't decide if he was pleased with his accomplishment or confused and upset. He decided he was pleased because he started laughing, but then again, he might have been laughing at me and all the freaking out I was doing. He hasn't done it since, naturally. What he does do a lot of though is pull himself along the floor to get to things he wants. There's much chattering and grunting and furious leg kicking, but it is consistent forward mobility. The kid's growing up.

Posted by Jenn at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I went over to Megan's house to help her watch a fifteen-month old she was babysitting for friends of hers. This kid was really, really cute. I mean, wow. He has no teeth, but his mom and dad think he's working on getting a whole bunch in all at once, so he still has the big gummy smile. He's toddling around, which means he falls over occasionally, but when he does, it's no big deal, he gets right back up again. Plus, he's doing the conversational babbling, sometimes into his toy phone, and sometimes without it. At one point while Megan and I were talking, he rolled over onto his back, looked at the ceiling, perfunctorily waved both his hands at it, babbled something, and then rolled back over. It's like he was telling us to stop with the chattering already. He was really mellow, especially considering he was being babysat by two people he wasn't completely familiar with. He'd sit in our laps and let us tickle him or bounce him or play peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo was great because he doesn't cover his eyes, he covers his mouth, stares at you, and then drops his hands and says "boo!". To add a little spice to the evening, his parents evidently fed him broccoli for dinner, the end result of which was lots of crazy smelling toots, all evening long. To make matters worse they would just sort of hang in the air for a while so you could truly appreciate their potency, and then slowly dissipate. He'd give you a little warning as to what was coming if he was sitting in your lap because he'd lift up one tuckus cheek and strain before getting anything out. It was almost better if you didn't know it was coming. He knows how to say a few words, one of which was "bye" and hearing that word come out in such a sweet, tiny voice made me feel bad for future Henry, because if he thinks he gets lots of squeezes now, it's nothing compared to when he starts talking.

Posted by Jenn at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before heading to bed, I decided to stick my head into Henry's room to make sure he was still alive and healthy and all of that. Yes, I still do that, and yes, I still presume the worst, but since I tend do that with respect to everything in my life, it's not that big a deal. Anyway, since I hadn't heard a peep from him since 8:30, I expected to find him happily snoozing away in his usual position: on his stomach, arms by his sides, butt in the air. Instead what I was greeted with was Henry on his hands and knees with his hat in his mouth, looking at me slightly surprised. Ha! Caught in the act. No wonder he's always ready for his nap an hour after getting up in the morning. He's probably been up since 11PM smoking, drinking whiskey, and working on his latest collection of poetry which will be all about how I ruined his life before the age of six months but which I won't understand because I never understand poetry.

Posted by Jenn at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This morning Dave asked if I could take over with the kid because he had to finish his lecture for today's class. He said "It's really nice out. It's already 60 degrees." So I haul myself out of bed, and this is what I see:

which is ironic, because yesterday, after the procurement of one more pair of totally cute flip-flops, I considered my summer shoe collection complete:

I'm drowning my sorrows in this:

Posted by Jenn at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave was in Indiana from Wednesday to Saturday of this past week. He gave a talk at Notre Dame, caught up with some friends, spent some quality time with his Aunt, and generally had a rollicking good time. While he was doing that, I was alone with The Kid and The Dog. There were two things that got us through those two days: the weather was nice, so we took lots of walks; Megan told me she had Friday off of work and when I asked her what she was going to do, she said "Spend the day with you." Good answer. We sat out in her backyard all afternoon and passed Henry back and forth between us, taking turns entertaining him. If I didn't have Friday to look forward to, I don't think I would have made it through Thursday. Melodramatic? Me? Nah... When I picked up Dave at the airport, he looked thoroughly exhausted. He brought me back my favorite sweet in the whole universe, a Cookies and Creme pie from Bakers Square. You know why he got it for me? Because he loves me so much. And because I threatened him with bodily harm if he didn't. Mostly the first reason though, I'm sure.

Posted by Jenn at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)