Good sliding!

Let's go skiing!!

On the lift at mammoth

Wink wink

Baby butts

Chubby tree

Watching the other kids

Queen of the slide

Staying warm at the playground

Peaceful

Nothing makes my child as peaceful and calm as making a huge mess.

A proud day for a mom

Geneva putting her own toys away


Rough weekend here since G has been very sick and I wasn't so hot myself. I'm on the mend... G is still quite feverish.

Santa baby

Blurry, but we couldn't get her to leave the hat on longer than about
2 seconds.

Josh's baby

Things I've been wrong about

It seems like the more emphatically I express an opinion, the more forcefully the universe gives me a hard time about it. One of these days I'll learn to never say never. Some examples:

Quite a few years back I went to a friend's wedding and made note of the location and told my mom "this is the last possible place I would ever want to have a wedding reception." Turns out, it was the only reasonable option for my own wedding. And actually I thought it worked out very well.

Another time I went to see a friend's new house and said some emphatic and mean things about it behind her back (sorry Steph!). Now I live there. And again, quite like it actually and even offered to buy it at one point. (Although I still think the kitchen could use a remodel.)

More recent examples? I used to have some very strong ideas on how long one should breast feed a child. Definitely if they're old enough to ask for it then they're too old for it. Now... I don't have any opinion about how long. I've seen how healthy and happy G is and I really like doing it, so I don't want to time limit it. On the other hand, I think women still might want to not feed their older kids where other people will see, but I won't judge them even if they do.

Drive through windows? How lazy can you be to not want to just get out of your car for 2 minutes and walk the 20 feet to the store? Well, if you have a kid in a car seat, it has nothing to do with laziness. I sure do wish there was a drive through Starbucks and drive through pharmacy near me....

I'm sure there's more, but those were the ones I had on my mind today.

New baby tricks of the week: Pressing buttons really well with one finger, dancing, singing (in her own, tone deaf way), says ball and cat (unreliably), pets cats gently, gets really sad when daddy leaves the room.

Fly me!!

High baby

Uncle Matt and Aunt Carrie

Playing with my baby

Daddy cuddles

A rare photo with me in it

Thanks for all the photos cece!

Opening presents

Headed to the park

Happy Birthday Baby

A day late, but here's my cutie at her birthday party:

Looks like she's enjoying that cake, huh? Unfortunately when we washed it off of her she had hives everywhere it had touched(!!). The pediatrician says it was probably the egg whites... we'll have to run some experiments to see for sure. In other unfortunate birthday news for my baby, we took her to the doctor for her check up on Tuesday and they gave her four shots. Good thing she didn't realize it was supposed to be the day we're extra nice to her. On the fun size, she's 70th percentile for weight, and above the highest line (>97th percentile) for height. We shall call her Stretch.

You saw the photos in a previous entry from our adventure in vaccination. The county of Santa Clara was having a vaccination clinic for swine flu. We waited in line for an hour and 45 minutes (well, actually, I waited in line while Chris ran around with the baby getting coffee and such) but finally got a shot for her. Chris and I were ineligible due to our advanced age. Anyway, Geneva was very brave and only cried a little when she got her shot, but was quickly distracted. But it really got to me how all the little kids were crying so hard in that big room while all getting their shots. In particular there was a woman next to us with two little girls, and one got her shot and was screaming and wanting mommy to hold her, while mommy was trying to hold girl #2, who was screaming because she had a good idea what was coming. It just seemed so sad to me. Whew... mommy hormones are something else.

On Sunday we actually did something kinda fun for her. We went to Hidden Villa and took a little hike and looked at all the farm animals. Makes me want to move to the country. Or at least Los Altos Hills.

From OctNov2009

She doesn't know a shot is in her future

The line for swine flu shots

Sleeping

About a week ago, I had reached the end of my rope regarding the baby's sleeping habits. She was waking up several times in the middle of the night and we'd have to feed her and she didn't want to go back to sleep in her crib and it hadn't been getting any better and I was exhausted... so last Monday night? Tuesday night? I made Chris help me make a plan. We had this extensive plan for how we were going to gradually wean the baby off of night bottles, then night feedings, then night wakings. It was going to take awhile, but I was committed because I sure was tired. So tired in fact, that I couldn't bear to implement the plan that very night, so it would wait for the next night. And by the way, it sure had been getting cold at night, maybe we better turn the heat on?

That night, and every night since, she's slept like the proverbial baby. Maybe it was just time. Maybe it was finally warm enough that she could sleep well. Who knows. Last night she slept straight through from 8:30 until 6:15. Woo hoo! Of course I'm still tired because I stayed up too late reading, but there's no one to blame but myself for that one.

An excellent result of all this good sleeping is that when she wakes up in the morning, she and I are both in great moods. (This was not at all the case on both counts when she wasn't sleeping well.... Chris and I learned about ourselves that we are neither patient, nor nice to each other when we're exhausted and its the middle of the night.) Now she wakes up in the morning and starts giggling and exploring and running (yes running!) all over the house and it's just incredibly fun. On the other hand, something to do with all this spurt of growth and activity, she's become very anxious about separation from mommy. Which is kind of cute for now because she's super cuddly and I love to feel so needed. I'm sure it'll get tiring at some point. Her daycare has no problem with it of course. They grab her from me and have her distracted almost before she can draw breath to get a good wail in...

In our limited free time (that is, on the weekends) we continue to go to the farmers' market and playgrounds. I've been cooking more because it's just so much easier to not try to deal with the baby in a restaurant. Chris took an extreme driving clinic last weekend and learned to drive our car like an auto-crosser, which he said was extremely fun. We went to a 1st birthday party for one of the other kids in Geneva's daycare class and this party was a notable exception to her usual separation anxiety. We walked in the door, she took one look at all the kids running around, and she squirmed to get down and we spent the next hours struggling to keep her in our sight. She just loves to play with other kids.

Cheerio bandit

*This caption stolen from She Who Is A Genius And Took The Photo In The First Place a.k.a. Anne.

Overalls

Accent game

I thought this accent game was kind of fun. I got a 33, which I thought was pretty good, but I'm just dreadful at identifying non-north-american but native english speaking accents.

Walking Video

I'm loving my iPhone video camera. That's why there's an increasing number of videos on this site, like the one above!

Chris and I have been off on our last bit of maternity/paternity leave for the last two weeks. Gonna be sad to have to go back to work tomorrow!

Sweet bug

Buzz buzz

Walking

Today is the day when Geneva decided that crawling is kinda stupid, and walking is really the thing to do. This happened some time at daycare because in the morning she was a crawler, and this evening she was walking everywhere. Still kind of spazzy and falling down, but clearly preferring it to crawling. It's crazy how it's really like a switch. So many baby development things were.

Also, I have some nice photos from our visit to Lynchburg for everyone. Click below to see them.

Lynchburg

Squeaky shoes and sliding

Here's a couple of videos.

First, Geneva in her squeaky shoes. This video just cracks me up. Make sure you have the audio on your computer turned up.


Second, Geneva sliding by herself! This is hot off the presses since I just took the video last night and before that we had to hold her on the slide.

Which way to the ski hill?

Ski bunny

Early highlights

Hello from Virginia. We went yesterday to an apple farm and picked so many apples - you wouldn't even believe. More photos of that later. Today we just hung out, the cousins played, and I played with my brother-in-law's nice camera. Enjoy!

Family resemblance

Bound for Atlanta

Baby loves brussel sprouts

After a hard day of school

Toy bath

Sunday morning

Garden and hobbies

So, believe it or not I've actually had some time to pursue hobbies in the past months, I just haven't made much time to write about them.

I've restarted taking Middle Eastern dance classes, which is really fun. There's a teacher in Sunnyvale who is the best I've ever taken from (and I've had maybe 6 instructors?). Whoever you are, if you come visit me, you should have me take you to the restaurant where she dances and we'll eat amazing food on the floor and watch some really fun dancing. Anyway, I had taken from her for about a year when I got pregnant and barely had energy to get out of bed, much less dance after work, so now I'm getting back to it, but unfortunately there are no public performances for another year, so Chris has still never seen me dance. And I'm sort of good (not absolutely, but just relative to what you would probably expect given that I'm some nerdy engineer).

My work has been sponsoring a yoga class during lunch once a week and I've really been enjoying that. I've had a lot of instructors mock me for my lack of flexibility (!), but this one is really good at instructing for lots of different levels. Her way of breaking things down in terms of what is most important for each pose is really helpful - so if I can't touch my toes and keep my knees straight she'll say "touching toes is most important, do that and then work towards making your knees straight at the same time." The end result is that I feel like I'm really improving. Also I'm starting to notice that I think I'm not really inflexible (as I previously thought) rather I'm just average flexible and have really long legs. So if there's something that requires me to touch my toes, for example, I'll have a hard time because they're so far away. But if there's something that is easier with long legs (like plow pose!) then I'll seem really good at it. This is all very reassuring and makes me like yoga more, now that I know I'm not destined to be horrible.

I've still been knitting, although on a very time consuming secret project for a reader of this blog (! who! is it you??), so I can't post anything about it here. I finished the socks in the picture below ages ago, but am just getting around to showing them. These were sent to Australia as a sort of wedding present for a knitterly friend of mine from way back in junior high.

These socks were assembled from the wreckage of the crazy knee socks, which were never to be. The socks above are actually called the "hidden passion" socks and are an example of illusion knitting. From one angle they just look like stripes, from another, XOXO! This was an interesting (and very simple) technique to learn, and it has a neat result. Anyway, I'm almost done the secret project, and once it reaches its owner, I'll post some lovely photos.

A coworker of mine is the owner of a couple of alpacas, and brought in a couple of fleeces for me to see if I can do anything with them. So I washed them, took a carding class, and now I've been taking a spinning class. I'm not sure why, but my mom wanted to see a video of me spinning, so here it is.

Once I get a little more practice I'm going to spin up the alpaca and hopefully make the Yarn Harlot Pretty Little Thing cowl. I had wanted to make a hat but my spinning instructor said the alpaca would spin up thin and therefore lend itself better to lace. And then Yarn Harlot published her pattern and it seemed like a too perfect alignment of the stars.

Lastly, the garden is still going strong. I planted all indeterminate varieties of tomatoes this year, which I hadn't really thought anything about at the time, but it means that they just keep producing until it frosts (elsewhere in the world) or you get sick of their ugly ways and rip them out (California). The nice thing is that I've actually managed to eat most of the tomatoes this year. The cherry tomatoes have almost all become "fire slaw", a.k.a. Lime & Peanut Coleslaw. The larger tomatoes have become pasta fresca (which is nice because it uses a huge number of tomatoes in a pasta sauce that you don't have to peel the tomatoes first because you just stick the whole thing in the blender), tomato toast, caprese salad, or just plain tomatoes with salt. I also planted sunflowers - the kind where you eat the seeds. I planted them too close together though so they were spindly and fell over in the first big wind. Then I saved the seed heads but it was so much work to get the seeds out that I decided I'd just let the squirrels have them since I don't really eat too many sunflower seeds anyway. I planted green beans but I'm not sure what the deal was with those - they just didn't taste very good. I got lots of beans, but didn't eat them for that reason. I'm not even inspired to save the seeds because why would I want to plant those again? I planted lemon cucumbers because they looked interesting in the catalog, but actually they're not that tasty either, so I haven't been too worried about the fact that the plants don't make many fruits. I think I may plant more cucumbers next year and make bread and butter pickles. We'll see.

Ready for cold weather

Geneva's balloon

I just got a new iPhone and it's amazingly easy to take video with it. It even lets you trim the videos - why hasn't this been easier before?? Enjoy my test video.

Feeding mommy

Ok, I'm very biased, but I think this video is especially cute even for my cute kid.

The previous post was a reference to the fact that G seems to have decided to eschew sleeping. I was up with her last night from 12-1:30ish, then Chris was up with her at 5:30am. But then she was taking a nap in daycare when I came to get her.

At last she sleeps

"Fall" Fiberfest

Chris, Geneva and I drove up today to Petaluma and picked Jen up along the way. There was a Fiberfest going on at Windrush farm and we had to go see it. It was pretty small and crazy hot, but kinda fun anyway. We met a bunch of animals and Geneva ate a lot of ice and then we went and saw downtown Petaluma. Which is pretty cute, and according to Chris has some of the best milkshakes he's ever had.

Anyway. Here's what you really come here for.






And, all the rest of the album is here.

Things my baby learned this week

It's been an explosion of development around here!

Walking when you hold her hands

Making a specific noise for cats. It's a high pitched screeching noise, but she only says it when she sees the cats.

Kissing. Or at least making kissing noises.

Putting things in. We believe she may have learned this due to her apparent need to have as many things in her mouth as possible. And guess what! If you stack things, you can sometimes fit more in there!

Repeating after us when we say "yay!"

Clapping

And one more bonus video.

Little terror

Geneva is always terrorizing some poor boy. I usually see her attacking Sinjin (grabbing his ankles while he's walking, trying to bite his head) but apparently she terrorizes the boys at her daycare too.

Three weekends of adventures

Here's what was up in photos. The full album is here.
Three weekends ago Chris's dad came to visit and brought G a onesie from his favorite school. (I think he hoped to irritate the many Stanford members of his family, but as only a Stanford grad student I couldn't bite...)

We did some really awesome napping in the coolest place we could find that whole weekend: Jen's basement bedroom.


Two weekends ago we went to the zoo with Anne & Sinjin

The Palo Alto zoo is tiny but has a couple of awesome bobcats

We also played with our cute baby at the playground that weekend

and took her hiking in Calero Reservoir Park where we saw some more scary wildlife


Last weekend we went to Tilden Park in Berkeley and Geneva rode the Merry-go-round with her daddy

Isn't that cute? She sat on the tiny horse and Chris sat on the bench behind her to hold her on. Apparently she was extremely serious about the whole thing.
We also rode the tiny steam trains there

And the strangest part about last weekend was that it actually rained. Quite a bit. It almost never rains in the bay area from May through October. Here's what the sky over San Francisco looked like from Tilden park.