Sunday, September 29, 2013

Oh, the humanity.

Lately Jim's naps have more often just been 'quiet time' during which he can sleep or read his books or play with blocks or what have you. So Noah and I didn't think much of it today when he spent the noon hour clapping his hands and chortling to himself instead of sleeping quietly. Until, that is, I came back down the hall from a bathroom visit (damn my shrinking bladder).


Five points to anyone who can guess what's on his hands without reading the rest of this post.

So, anyway, I came wandering down the hall while Jim carefully put the finishing touches on a particularly impressive tower. The second he heard me coming, he rushed to the gate across his doorway and started waving at me. "Poop," he yells. "Poop! Poop! Poop!"

Fool that I am, I didn't stop immediately. I waved back and gave him a half-hearted "Yes, Jim, poo-" but before I could finish, the smell hit me. Then I noticed his hands. And his face. And the walls. And the glue holding his spectacular tower together.

Naturally, I yelled for Noah immediately. He stripped and popped into the shower with Jim while I assembled all the supplies I could muster and started wiping down Jim's room. We haven't sorted through everything yet, but I think we only have two or three victims of Jim's experimentation to throw away, so it could be worse.

Still, I'm using this as an excuse to zip Jim into a full-length onesie before naptime every day. Backwards, if need be.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

V-day!

How far along? 24 weeks.
Total weight gain/loss: Up eight pounds. Weight gain is finally starting now that the morning sickness has tapered off.
Maternity clothes? Need more. I have one pair of jeans, two dresses, and about five shirts that I can wear.
Stretch marks? No new ones.
Sleep: Awful! Horrible, wretched, miserable, etc. At least 3 pee breaks per night and a sore back in the morning. Sigh.
Best moment this week: NOT peeing my pants when Jim and Lottie pounced on my bladder simultaneously from opposite sides. Major victory, I say.
Movement: Tons of it, and very vigorous. I swear this girl is trying to claw her way out through my cervix right now.
Food cravings: Sweet things of all sorts. Anything from oranges to cheesecake.
Gender: Girl! Checked and double-checked. :)
Labor Signs: A couple Braxton-Hicks contractions every day.
Belly Button in or out? In.
What I miss: Having a bladder somewhat larger than an eyedropper.
What I am looking forward to: Finally getting that fetal echo done (scheduled for October 9th now - we'll see if they change it).
Milestones: Viability! At 24 weeks, Lottie would have a decent chance of survival if she decided to come out early. Mildly reassuring.

Jjim's 24-week update, for the sake of comparison.

Friday, September 13, 2013

Much-needed updates.

Sigh. It looks like I'm not going to be able to post any pictures any time soon, since our main computer is on the fritz and the camera adapter has gone mysteriously missing. So it seems we're all going to have to make do with a giant wall o' text. Enjoy.

Jim
Jim is awesome. He is talking SO well lately. He's putting two and sometimes three words together, and his vocabulary is now huge and more-or-less understandable (to us, anyway). His funniest mispronunciation is 'geesh da!' which means 'I love you.' I have no idea why, but it does. I'm also fond of 'seggy,' which means 'scary.' In addition to his immense store of words, he also now knows all his colors and shapes, and he can count accurately to three (he can identify if there are one, two, or three dinosaurs in a picture, for example, but anything more than three reverts back to two as a default).

One of his favorite activities at the moment is telling stories. A couple nights ago he insisted on 'reading' The Cat in the Hat to me. His story went more or less as follows (with page-turning as needed): Babies! Cat! Hat! Rake and cake and fish and book and milk and boat! CRASH! Uh oh! Thing two and thing two! Uh oh! MESS! Uh oh, mama, SCARY! Mess! Clean up clean up clean up! Good job!

Yeah, Jim speaks exclusively in exclamation marks.

In other news, Jim continues to be the most stereotypical boy that ever lived. His favorite things are dinosaurs ("Dinos! RAAAAAAAAAAR! Seggy!") and rocket ships ("Rocka sip! One two three two five BOOOOOOM!"). He has more or less stopped building houses with his blocks and now exclusively makes rocket ships, which are just like houses only more vertical. He gets very annoyed when they don't actually lift off when he yells BOOOOM.

Alas, the poor kid is also pretty accident prone. He bashes some part or other practically every day. On Sunday he took the worst fall I think he's ever had. I was upstairs sleeping in (hurray for Noah!), so all I heard was the CRASH and the WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH, but upon going downstairs I heart all about it. Apparently the poor kid decided to just jump off the couch and land forehead-first on the edge of the coffee table. His entire forehead was one hugely swollen goose egg, with a horizontal line running the width of it. He still has about two inches of line left on his forehead. As you might expect, he actually quite enjoys telling that story, too. It goes: CRASH table! Hurt! Ice coooold! Hurt!

On a less pleasant note, he's also decided that hitting/kicking/headbutting/tackling/etc are all enjoyable activities. He's a pretty painful kid at the moment. Noah usually gets it all out of his system with some controlled games of tackle, but he still gets into the occasional hitting fit. We've started doing time outs in his room (just two minutes or so), and that works pretty well. Hopefully he grows out of it soon.

The Baaaaaaaby
As you all probably know by now, Baby No-no is a girl! We've decided to call her Charlotte Mae, and we'll be using Lottie as a nickname. We just had an ultrasound Wednesday, during which we got many adorably creepy 3-D pictures that I can't show you because of computer issues. She's apparently around a pound and four ounces, which puts her at roughly 50th percentile across the board. I'm kind of curious how accurate the ultrasound estimates will be this time, since they had Jim at around 70th percentile right before birth but he turned out to be a teeny tiny baby.

The Wednesday ultrasound was actually supposed to be an echo with a real live doctor to check on Lottie's heart, since the tech found a murmur at her 20 week ultrasound. Alas, the doctor had some kind of emergency elsewhere this time, so we didn't get the full work-up, but the tech looked at it and said that as far as she could tell, everything looks normal and there is no murmur to be seen. So hopefully she's outgrown it already! We're going back in another two weeks to get the full echo done, though, just to be sure.

I tend to think she's okay, though. She's the most vigorous little thing in the world, and already hurts my poor bladder/cervix/ribcage/etc more than you'd think any 1-pound creature possibly could. My biggest struggle at the moment is convincing Noah that she needs cute girl things. He's convinced that she can just wear Jim's old camo and tractor gear until she's a teenager. I've managed to get him to consent to a few cute girly things from the thrift store, so I think we're on the right track.

The Rest of Us
Noah and I have been completely consumed with working on the house lately. So far we've painted both upstairs bathrooms (which included spending a full week stripping wallpaper, yeuch - I will never ever ever again buy a house with wallpaper in it), finally finished the dining room ceiling (almost - still have to sand and paint it), redid the stinky closet downstairs, patched and painted all the duct-tape-covered holes above the stove, and thoroughly sorted out the fireplace room. We've got a huge long list of projects still to be done yet. Other than that, we have been pretty boring. This weekend we're going up to Charlotte with grand plans of apple-picking with Emmy and Ilya. I'll take a lot of pictures, of course, but it looks like nobody will be able to see them for a few weeks yet. Such is life, ja?