sweater from Aunt Liz!

Aunt Liz bought this sweater in Peru before Beanie was born:



Finally caught the full smile on camera!

Ice Cream Dance, and Beanie Eating

A few weeks ago, when Sam was asking about dessert, J. suggested they do a special dance for ice cream. J. demonstrated, with the corresponding Ice Cream Song. Sam gamely went along with it, but he was pretty skeptical when J. opened the freezer... until he spied the ice cream that definitely hadn't been there the previous night. As he was having some ice cream, Sam opined that we needed to try again (replication, you see). And so he's tried many times, and it works often, but not always. Remember the superstitious pigeon? Sam now suggests the Ice Cream Dance at every opportunity. At his parent-teacher conference last week, his teachers informed us that Sam was teaching it to a friend (and, laughing, told us that as she watched the demonstration she could just imagine J. doing the dance). So, we don't do Santa Claus in our house, but we have the Ice Cream Dance:




Those noises in the background of Sam's singing? J. making zoopy noises to get Bean more excited about her oatmeal and peas:



She didn't need any encouragement tonight-- combo of chicken, rice cereal, and applesauce. Mm, mm, good. We have recently added regular doses of fruit to her diet to, you know, keep things moving.

Also: Beanie is convinced that naps are for weenies. Stephanie (our nanny) was reading her The Napping House the other day (while I was working at home for a couple of hours in between appointments) and you could just see Frida listening to the list of sleeping people and animals and thinking, SUCKAZZZZ.


In other news, we were very glad to hear that our Chilean relatives are all safe after the massive earthquake there. But the country is in pretty bad shape-- better infrastructure than Haiti, thank goodness, but a lot of devastation nonetheless.

Here's a bonus video to end, from Valentine's Day:

couch jumping

J: So Sam, if you were going to be in the Olympics, what sport you would want to do?

S: I think... couch jumping.

J: I don’t think that’s a sport in the Olympics yet.

S (deadpan): I think it’s in the summer.

we love our nanny!

Sam had a school vacation last week, so he spent a lot of time at home with our nanny. They worked on this elaborate "sity":



There's a park in the middle with lots of trees and benches. And also, there are no roads, only train tracks.



One day I came home to this:



(home made soft pretzels dipped in chocolate with crushed faux-M&Ms on top)

and also this (took the pic the next morning because it was too dark):



Have I mentioned how much our nanny rocks?

Sam also had two playdates, both of which went well, and was in an experiment in our department. He was in a control group in a study on kids who have been through traumatic events. One of the questionnaires was a list of potentially stressful events that kids can experience, and one of the items on that list was "Has either of your parents even been in trouble with the law?" Sam: "Yeah. Sometimes." (Also: "Have your parents been divorced?" Sam: "What's divorced?" Experimenter: "It's when one of your parents has to go away and live somewhere else." Sam: "Yeah. My dad has to go away all the time. He has meetings in different countries and stuff.")

Frida, for her part, was so excited to have her favorite source of entertainment around ALL DAY LONG that she barely napped. And once her schedule is firmly established again it'll be just about time for us to go to FL...

She's been eating a lot more (solids, that is), having recently tried, and liked, avocado. This week's new foods: chicken (poached then pureed) and millet (ground then boiled). I'm also going to have to buy some jarred food, because when we're out to eat and she doesn't get anything, she gets notably upset. Packing cubes of frozen pureed food is a bit too involved for me, and she's not quite ready to just eat mashed versions of whatever we're having.

We've been watching the Olympics most evenings, and a couple of times Sam has fallen asleep on the couch watching. This pic, though, was after we'd just gotten home from visiting friends in their brand-new house (well, brand-new to them, and newly-renovated, and absolutely gorgeous). It wasn't very late, but it had been a long day:

happy love

Frida is 13 lbs, 12 oz. And just over 25 inches long. For comparison: Sam was 15 lbs, 9 oz. at TWO MONTHS. The load of fuzzibunz (cloth diapers) I bought from Craig's List before she was born, which is supposed to fit from ca. 15 through 30 lbs, which I figured would be most of her diaper-wearing life? Still too big. Nobody's worried: she is happy and energetic and rolling and smiling and doing everything six-month-olds are supposed to do. She's just little. Maybe she takes after her Grandma (she certainly has her startle reflex (-: ).

But she's been cleared for just about all solid foods-- veggies, fruits, cereals, meat, salmon-- and as much as she will eat. So, twice a day or thereabouts, this is what Bean looks like:





(This was peas, with rice cereal.) Isn't that a beautiful sweater? Somebody knitted it for my brother or for me, and my mother saved it. Sam didn't wear it because he was allergic to wool-- and it probably would have been small for him-- but Beanie wears it all the time.

Yesterday I tried to take some better pics of Frida, and to capture her thousand-watt but tough-to-photograph smile. This came closest:



Mostly though she wanted to roll around and play:





(Sometimes I think she looks a little like Uncle Markus did when he was a baby-- slightly Asian-shaped eyes, but fair and with fuzzy blond hair-- which is kind of funny because his baby Emma looks a little like I did as a baby.)


As usual, Sam wanted in on the action:




I made heart-shaped pancakes this morning, in a stab at mom-geekery. With raspberry syrup (i.e. raspberry jam microwaved with a bit of orange juice). So cute:




Felt balls! The blue one with the orange-red heart has "XOXO" going around it, and Sam's has a heart on the back and another spiral on the bottom:

miscellaneous

Because I said I would: The rest of the Las Vegas trip was fine. We went to a children's museum that was raved about online, but getting there was an adventure... parts of Las Vegas are pretty sketchy, let's leave it at that. Upon arriving, figuring we'd at least take a cab back, we were informed by the nice folks at the desk that when they've tried calling cabs for people in the past, they never show up. So we had about 20 minutes at the (small, underwhelming) museum before we had to hoof it back to the bus depot. Friends of ours came from LA to see us (yay Brett and Val!) so we had a very nice time hanging out with them, generally one of us while the other was presenting/schmoozing at the conference. On the last night, we went out to one of the fabled casino buffets with J's lab and both kids... Sam had only adjusted a little bit to the 3-hour time difference, so as we stood in line at 7:45PM he was fading fast. At one point as he was eating I glanced at him to see him nodding off, eyes closed, while still chewing. I made sure he stayed awake to finish the mouthful, then hefted him onto my lap, where he sprawled, sound asleep, through the rest of dinner. Meanwhile, Bean jumped and socialized enthusiastically in the laps of various people around the table, being traded off while folks went back for seconds (and thirds) of ok-but-why-do-people-rave-about-this food. I never thought I'd say this, but I feel like I'd go back to Vegas again, given the chance (i.e. another conference there), just to have the grown-up version of the experience for a night or two... Cirque du Soleil show, nice dinner out, Bellagio fountains viewed not just from the cab window while driving by, etc. Eh, maybe someday.

Kid update: Bean is in full-on stranger-charming thousand-watt smile mode-- when I took her for a passport photo recently (upcoming conference in Montreal) she lay calmly on the white piece of cardstock they lay on the carpet for baby photos and beamed, until the Passport Photo Dude said she could come back any time. Her 6-month ped. appointment is this week, so we'll have an update on her stats. Sam, meanwhile, is full of clever, creative word usages, and is still notably sweet and affectionate. For the past couple of weeks, he has told me occasionally to guess how much he loves me, and then he'll answer extravagantly. Recently: "I love you as much as all the love in the world, AND all the love in your imagination, AND a truck full, AND a container full."

In the car, he'll announce, "An idea just flew into my head!" (And then expound at length on said idea.)

He asks about the meanings of words a lot. Recent curiousities: marvelous (from Big Bird's singing of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz), and convenient. When I explained the meaning of convenient, Sam thought for a moment, then wanted to know why it existed when we already have the word handy.

He's also very sweet with Frida... he loves to entertain her, as shown in the previous post, but he also tries to help her out if she's unhappy (unless she's doing her patented Car Freak Out, in which case he zones out... there really is no other way to deal). A few days ago, he held out his hand to her, saying apologetically, "All I have for you is a handful of love!" Here he is entertaining her in a monster get-up. (Completed mid-way through with a John Deere cap.)




Sam's also loving his eurhythmics class, which seems much better suited to his temperament than the group piano lesson he was taking in the fall/winter... more movement and creativity, less sitting and attending.

I put together the crib this weekend (J. was gone, and I got tired of looking at the parts, brought up from the basement two weeks ago... and was pretty pleased with my solo Ikea-assembly prowess, I have to admit, aided only by Sam helping find the right hardware bits from the plastic baggy). So now Bean can turn over in her sleep-- that is, when she's not in our bed.

videos

More re. Vegas later. For now, two little videos. First: Bean thinks her brother is the coolest thing ever. Also the most entertaining:

And then, the bookstore Sam made with Stephanie (our nanny) today, complete with signs:


Hope you are all well and warm.