A Post with 17 Topics, at least

Long time, no post, I know. It’s been a very busy 7 days, coupled with hot weather, which makes sitting in my upstairs bedroom with skylights really HOT, and not very comfortable for blogging. Add to it the WALKING WONDER that is my daughter, meaning that she is in constant motion, and there’s no time to sit. Enough already. Onto the good stuff.

Right now, at 6pm, the Walking Wonder is fast asleep already. She’s done with taking two naps, so now she’s only sleeping once a day, and at the moment, she’s so jazzed about life in general that one nap has been very short. Like 90 minutes. When you go from sleeping 4 hours during the day down to 90 minutes, you have to make it up somewhere. Since she can’t sleep in, she’s hitting the hay at about 6pm. It makes for a very quiet evening, although very condensed.

Daycare Ramblings
The past two week’s I’ve been the one struggling with this, besides for the obvious reason that I have a very cranky girl on my hands, it also works out that she’s at Rainbow a little longer everyday. She’s transisitioned into the 1’s room, which is all sorts of exciting, but there is more of a schedule there. And the napping shedule is that everyone goes down between 12:00-12:30 and gets up between 2:30-3pm. That’s all well and good, but most days I’d like to pick her up smack dab in the middle of that time. Of course, that’s stupid because I’d be interupting her nap, so I had to accept either I’d have to FLY out of work every day and take her directly home to sleep OR accept that I’d have to delay seeing her until after 2:30 most days. I really wanted to be the mom to fly out of work so that my baby girl can nap her own bed, but I’m not. So after rationalizing this with everyone from Ms. L at Rainbow to my husband to my best friend to my librarian (seriously), the deal is that she’ll go down for nap every day there unless I need to pick her up no later than 12:45, in which case they won’t put her down for a nap. Now if you’re doing the math, you can see that if she goes down at 12 and sleeps for 90minutes, then she’s up by 1:30pm. That happens some days, other days it happens that she goes down later and gets up later. Right now the goal is to get her to go down at a consistent time (in a consistent way), and the idea is that her nap will lengthen as she gets used to it. The other children in the room all sleep just fine, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, right?!?!

The Walking Wonder
As for the walking–it’s what she does now. As of last Wednesday when we went to the pool, she was still bear-crawling around the pool deck, unable to push herself up to stand without a prop, yet smart enough not to scrape her knees on the concrete. Yesterday at the pool she stood up all by herself no problem and had ball just walking laps around the pool. Her actual water fun was a ball too, but I think she liked the walking better–she didn’t have to hold onto me for that! Seven Days. That’s how much she changed in Seven Days.

Stroller Shopping: ML pt 4
I mentioned in a previous post that my mom and I went stroller shopping before she headed back home after our vacation together. On our way to Babies R Us, our mission seemed simple enough–find an infant seat/stroller travel system. I had lots of friends with them, I knew that was what I wanted. I thought we’d pick a size (Metro-Lite or Larger), pick a pattern (plaid or print) and be done. Ha! And double Ha! I think one of the reasons why you are pregnant for 9 months must be so that you can change your mind 20 times and still have everything you need before you actually give birth. With the paper pregnancy we experienced, we really weren’t waiting long enough to get antsy about baby stuff. Seriously, other than tossing around a few names and agreeing not to repaint the baby’s room in our current house, we seriously hadn’t given baby gear a second thought. It seems stupid now, but I think it was a defense mechanism of sorts.

Anyway, my mom and I head over to BRU to get our shop-on, and 3 hours later emerged with a Graco Travel System. 3 hours, you say? Obviously I must have decided to get a few other things that day, right? Wrong. That was all we got that day, except for 3 very gender neutral onesies and 2 sleepers. 3 hours of basically just their infant seats and strollers. All the indecision one might experience in 9 months of preparing for a baby was rolled into 3 hours, in two aisles of a thankfully not-very-busy store.

My mom? She was the best. She humored me, agreed with me, let me take my time. She pointed out that we didn’t have control over much, so that we could take all damn day if we wanted to to pick out the perfect set. L? He was the best. He was in the area that afternoon, so he swung by. He tried a few of the strollers (folding down), made a few comments but let me decide. Me? I couldn’t decide. There was a nice one, moderately priced, very well rated–but it was orange and green plaid. It was awful, but practical. There were other off-brands with cute prints, but some didn’t have 5-pt harnesses. There were the bohemith Eddie Bauer and Laura Ashley editions that had more upholstery than most living rooms. There were your standard blue plaid ones. The sleeker grey and black ones. The strollers that weighed 15lbs, the strollers that weighed 45lbs and everything inbetween. We folded each one down, we tested all the bells and whistles. We tested the ease of the under-carraige basket. We tested the turning radius of each one and steering in general. You named it, we tested it.

In the end, we got the best stroller/carrier combo in the world. It has several compartments, 2 cup holders for me, a snack tray for the babe, under seat basket, TIME/TEMP readings, a snazzy pattern and just to be safe, a “cold weather boot” for the infant carrier. The infant carrier had 2 headrests that coordinated with the pattern-small and smaller. Most only had one. What if our baby had a really small head? Then we’d have to get a headrest for him/her, and it wouldn’t match and more importantly, we wouldn’t have it for the car ride home. Oh and it had matching strap pads for her shoulders, and well, it had EVERYTHING. So we got it. It was rather exhilirating, but also petrifying–we now owned a car seat. What if something happened and we didn’t end up bringing this baby home? Yikes. Then we’d have the perfect baby contraptions and no baby. Thankfully, that fear was unfounded, and 2 short weeks later, Baby Kahuna was home with us to stay.

As you can see from the picture, the “smaller” head rest turned out not to be needed! This was M’s maiden voyage in the infant carrier I had so seriously stressed over. As it turned out, she only used it for 5 months, and then she was too tall. And that cold weather boot? Never needed it. But those little shoulder strap pads? Awesome!

The Rest of that Vacation: ML pt 2

So this is the second installment of my life last year.

Afte the crying and hugging and so forth, Aunt Janet asked the important question,”do you need to fly home now??”

“No, she’s due August 8th, and we’ll set up a meeting once I get home next week.”

So with that, we went to get some lunch. I called my dad, who got a bit choked up, and throughout the week, I called good friends to tell them what I knew. At that point, it wasn’t much. Just that “she” (J) was due 8/8/05, she had 1 other child, and she liked us because we had a big family and looked nice. We knew the “he” (G) was still in the picture. I think that’s it.

So for the next week, I enjoyed my vacation to the fullest. I didn’t buy a single baby item, or magazine, or anything like that. I slept in. I exercised. I hung out at the poolside bar with my cousin. As much as I wanted to be with L, I was really glad that I had some time to process this development on my own for awhile–to let it sink in without the rest of my life distracting me. And, it was nice that the first week of our “wait” was taken care of-once I got home, I only had 2 weeks of work to get through, 2 weeks of nesting, etc. That was a bonus.

Of course, L and I talked at least once a day, and most of the conversations revolved around the potential adoption. We remained guarded–always reminding each other that nothing was final, that things could change, etc. At the same time, we were looking at our calendars and rescheduling things, looking at vacation time and so forth, trying to put together a plan.

While I was gone, my friends and family were busy gathering things for us. My two best friends filled my garage with things like bottles, bouncy seats and the like. When we got back from FL, my mom and I went to Babies R Us for the carseat and stroller. That trip is seperate installment for when I’m feeling really nostalgic.

Suffice it to say, I’m glad our match happened when it did and the way it did. Who else but an adoptive mom can celebrate at an ocean-front bar with cosmos 3 weeks before her baby arrives?!?!?

A Year Ago Today…ML pt 1

(I’m a huge fan of Memory Lane (ML)…this will be the first of many such installments–check out the monkey’s ticker!)

A year ago today my mom and I left for a girls vacation to Florida. L went to work as usual, after dropping us off at the airport. Our flight was smooth, we met up with my aunts and cousin in Orlando with no problems. As we loaded our rental SUV and started through the swampland-highways to Disney, I noticed that there was crappy cellphone reception. When we pulled into the POP! resort, I realized I had several TM’s from L, along with a few missed calls. WTF? “He’s knows we’re in transit now….” There was also an “unknown” number that looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why.

As I was stepping out of the car, the phone rang–it was L.

“Where are you right now?”

“Getting ready to check in–we’re walking into the resort”

“Walk away from your family”

“OK, what’s going on?

“Renee just called, we’ve been picked”

“Picked for what??”

“There’s someone who’s due August 8th and she picked us”

“OMG! Tell me what happened!!!!!”

Meanwhile, my family has gotten in line to check in, and I am on a bench outside the resort trying to keep my composure, asking questions, and trying to get as much info as possible. Since it would have been IMPOSSIBLE to keep such a secret from my traveling companions, L said he’d hang on the line until they were done checking in.

My cousin came out to say that they needed my signature inside, so I had to do what I hate to do–stay on the phone while doing something else. So I signed everything that Big Brother needed, and once we got room keys, I told my posse that we needed to step outside.

“What’s going on?”

“Who’s on the phone?”

“Just get outside–L and I have some news.”

Once we were outside, I looked at my mom and she said, “it’s not about the house is it?” (it was on the market at the time)

“No, it’s not about the house! The agency called L today–we’ve been picked!”

Then the hugging, crying and screaming began. And they understood why I wanted to take them oustide!!!