Oh My

These are just random pictures, but I thought they were hilarious.

She fell asleep like this, with her hands on her face, and I call it, "Oh my":

Getting Handsy

Cora has now discovered her hands and is obsessed with them.

She will stare at them for half and hour or more at a time - watching them, moving them, playing with them, and even talking to them. She also uses them to grab things, like hair and ears (no, I don't want to talk about how I know this...let's just say we're working on that). And when she's feeding, she has started putting her top hand up on my chest and just dancing her hand all around while she eats. I think it entertains her.

The rest of the time she has them stuffed in her mouth, but my friend Sara (a speech pathologist) says this is actually good. Apparently babies need to do this - even shoving them in so far that they kind of gag themselves - so that they can desensitize their gag reflex in preparation for eating solid foods. She's so smart.

Anyway, I got a couple of pictures of her doing this the other day.

This is one of her just talking away

Look how intently she focuses in on them

And this is her talking TO them

Look at that face! Is that stinking cute or what?!

Happy Birthday, Cora!

Today is officially Cora's three month birthday! Can you believe it has been three months??

I go back and forth between thinking that time has flown by/she's growing up so fast and then thinking that, yeah, it does feel like it has been three months. Some days it really feels like it. That was mainly true early on, though. Sarah, a friend of mind, when I mistakenly referred to the next month as September instead of August, just laughed and said, "Well you've probably gone to sleep and woken up enough times that it does seem like it ought to be September by now, doesn't it?" As a mother of a one year old son, she knows...

But these days, things are pretty wonderful (apart from last night, but we think she's hitting her three month transition right on schedule and hoping that's all it was!). She is sleeping beautifully - between eight and ten hours every night, putting herself back to sleep if she does wake up at night, and the little night owl has even allowed us to back up her bedtime to between 10:45 and 11:00pm (10:20 last night!). She's getting so long and is holding her head up very securely on her own (very little wobbling, but you still have to watch her).

As I told some of you already, we were at a faculty/student cookout last Friday. She was 12 weeks at the time and was around an 11-week old baby and a six month old baby. I'm telling you, she looked and acted far more like the six month old than the 11-week old. He was lying in his mother's arms and she was sitting straight up as people held her, talking their ear off. And speaking of talking, I am trying to get good video clips of her talking. She is a motormouth these days! She'll just be having a gabfest all by herself (or to one of us), and then as soon as I grab the camera, she shuts up. It's a riot to listen to, though. You know she's having an entire conversation, if only she had the words to make us understand!

Breastfeeding is still going well, and she's still gaining height and weight at a respectable pace. She's been in her 3 month sized clothes for awhile now, and most of her 3 to 6 mo. stuff fits perfectly. I'm going to have a beast of a child if this keeps up! Preempting her nana, who might take offense at the term, I mean "beast" with the utmost affection.

Okay, I'm going to get pictures and videos up soon, but I just wanted to do a little developmental recap in honor of the day.

Oh, and I just realized the other day that her half birthday will be Christmas!

Allow Myself to Introduce...Myself

I have now given up hope that the name Cora isn't "coming back." Cora has officially met another Cora. Luckily for us, though, it wasn't another little baby - it was an eight week old Beagle puppy!!!

Look - can you read her tag? It says "Cora Pittman."

Is she not the most adorable puppy ever?? When she howls it'll break your heart.

She belongs to the woman in charge of recruitment here at BTSR (Kristen, if you're reading, you'll be pleased to know that Coleman refers to her as "the Kristen Richardson of BTSR...well, the old Kristen anyway"), though Cora is just a nickname. She and her husband have three dogs, all named for guitars. They have a Gibson, a Taylor (I think), and now a Cordoba - hence the nickname "Cora."

Here is their first introduction:

"First we sniffs her..."

"And then we licks her head!"**

While we were all standing around talking, a really funny thing happened. Two other male staff members walked by and were introduced to the puppy Cora. One said, "What did you name that dog??? That's an old, old lady's name!" At this point, I couldn't stop myself from saying, "And you should meet our daughter, Cora."

He looked stricken. He stammered about how he had an aunt named Cora so that's why he associated it with older women, at which point I helped him out of it by laughing and saying she was named for her Great-great-great grandmother, so she was indeed named after an "old, old lady." He still looked pretty embarrassed, though.

Tiffany (the Kristen Richardson of BTSR) also mentioned that someone else on staff had told her not to tell us their dog's nickname for fear we might be offended. I assured her that we were a little harder to offend than that, and as long as she let me play with her Cora on occasion, we'd be even.

Now don't worry, Max - she'll never take your place in my affections! She's merely a placeholder until we meet again.

**Andy and Jen may recognize this as my Gollum voice, which is terribly applicable here since I want to have a Beagle and name him or her Smeagol. Coleman says only a boy puppy can be na,ed that, but that's another argument for another post...

The Proof is in the Piggies

As more and more (read: all) people point out to me that they think my daughter looks a great deal like her father and nothing at all like me, I keep reminding them that she has my toes. This is my one consolation and the only thing I claim on her on which I get no argument. Sidenote: when we were in Georgia and all of Diane's friends said she looked like Coleman, she said, "Isn't it funny how all the people who know Coleman thinks she looks like him. I bet when you are around your family, they think she looks like you." I had to tell her that, no, my family also thinks that. Where's the loyalty, huh?

At any rate, here is the proof for my claim. Check out these piggies:

Check out how long they are!! And they're talented, too. One night, just a few weeks after we were home from the hospital, I heard Coleman yelp. He yelled to me, "She just pinched me with her toes** - she IS your kid!"

** something I'm terribly good at

And while I was taking shots of her toes, I couldn't resist the opportunity to document another prominent feature of her anatomy: her rolls! She's not pudgy, but she does have some serious thighs and even some creases on her arms. Her pediatrician, as I have mentioned, refers to her as "solid."

When I was at the OB/GYN for my six week checkup, Cora was with me and an elderly woman who was leaving at the same time we were looked into her stroller and said, "You need to stop putting rubber bands around that child's arms and legs." Don't call CPS, she was only joking, but this was clearly her referent:

Look at her ankles - they've even got creases. She looks like a baby elephant! An adorable elephant, my adorable elephant, but elephant-ankled nonetheless.

I'm Losing It

My hair, that is - although Coleman might say it is an apt description of my mental state as well.

I had read somewhere (probably What to Expect) that during pregnancy, your body doesn't shed hair at its usual rate. It preserves it, keeping your body better protected and insulated, etc. It did result in some good hair days, I must say. For this same reason, it can also grow extra body hair, but thankfully I didn't have the good fortune to experience that one!

At any rate, at a certain point, it realizes that it no longer needs this extra protective layer and it sheds all that conserved hair.

I'm terribly glad I read that; otherwise, I would be out purchasing Propecia.

Coleman, having observed the alarming amounts of hair I am losing, asked me if I were getting my "summer coat." Oh, how I love being compared to a canine. The other day, he came out of the bathroom, where I had just cleaned out my brush, and he walked over to where I was sitting and began to rifle through my hair, inspecting my scalp. As I shooed him away he looked at me and said, "I promise I'll still love you when you're bald."

He's a keeper, isn't he? I tell you what: I may be losing hair, but if he keeps this up, he's going to be losing limbs!

Three Major Accomplishments

Okay, two major accomplishments and a stroke of good fortune.

First, the monkey ma’am is a champion sleeper. Almost overnight she went from sleeping seven hours at night to sleeping nine (or more) hours at night! A couple of nights she has slept for ten!! Even better, we have now moved her start time back to midnight, which is a vast improvement over her past bedtime. Before we left for Richmond, we’d gotten it moved from 2 am (which she had stubbornly stuck to for-ev-er) to about 1 am, but all of a sudden, she was getting to sleep around 12 – a couple of times even 11:45. It’s a miracle! I fully realize that this may just be a phase, so I’m keeping my expectations low, but it is a beautiful phase and I am not taking a single night for granted.

The second accomplishment is mine. While we were in St. Simons, I wore a complete pre-pregnancy outfit. We’re talking top and bottom. Not maternity clothes, not a ‘transition’ size. Yay! It felt so great. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that these shorts were one of my looser pairs, but I think the feat stands. It marks a milestone and gives me great encouragement to fit into all the rest of my clothes!

The third thing has nothing at all to do with the baby or with pregnancy, but it made me very, very happy. When we were unpacking last night, I found two pair of underwear that I thought were lost forever. This may seem an odd attachment to undergarments, but they’re my favorite kind and the store I bought them from doesn’t make them anymore, so they were essentially irreplaceable. They’ve been missing for months, but apparently I had just packed them the last time we used this suitcase and didn’t get them out with the rest of my clothes. Funnily enough, I had even checked all the suitcases when I was hunting for them, but I guess I didn’t look hard enough. So yay for finding much beloved things that you thought were gone forever.

I have a bunch of pictures and video from the beach – I’ll post those soon!

We get by with a little help from our friends

I would be exceedingly remiss if I mentioned the move without telling you all how thankful we are for our friends and their help with it.

Many people went out of their way to ask if we needed help or offer to do whatever we needed.

Friends brought us boxes from their offices, a professor who just moved to town - and didn't even know us - gave us some of their recently empty boxes, and our friend Liza even checked at Trader Joe's to see when they were getting a shipment so that we could get their boxes before they crushed them. Just imagine how proud I was to pack my things in TJ's boxes!

Liza and Jennifer came over one Sunday afternoon and took Cora to the park so that I could get some packing accomplished. I didn't ask them to - they offered.

And, as always (and they can attest that I do mean "always"), Andy and Jen were the superstars of our move. Without them, we wouldn't have left town until this Monday at noon! Andy again (as in again...again...again) negotiated our small doorways and pokey halls with our large couch. He lifted and carried and brought bungees and straps and strategized how to keep everything from flying out of the back of the truck on the way to the storage place. Hmmm, perhaps we should have consulted him about the placement of that trash can...

And Jen was awesome. She came over several times and either helped me pack or did the packing herself while I was immobile during a feeding or had to hold Cora to keep her from fussing. She figured out how to pack oddly shaped items like my gigantic serving tray or the blender. She wrapped and wrapped and taped and taped so that my dishes and glassware will still be in one piece when I retrieve them from storage in 10 months! I'd be feeding and just pointing at stuff while she did all the work. And she would happily do my bidding, then reemerge every so often to repeat the refrain, "What else?"

They also let us stay with them the night before we left, since our bed was stored across town. We showed up late, even though they had work the next day, and they had breakfast waiting on us when we woke.

I hope all of you have an Andy and Jen. I suspect not, since I'm not sure there are too many people out there like them, but I hope you can find them wherever they are.

We are so grateful for all our friends who recognized that this was a more complicated process now that we have an infant and stepped in to help whenever and however they could. We couldn't have done it without them - and I don't mean that rhetorically!

P.S. - Andy, I forgot to mention on the other post: I only got through one and a half Van Morrison songs (Brown Eyed Girl was on the radio, so we started with that one, and then I made it halfway through These are the Days, but was a little rusty on the lyrics). You'll have to teach her the rest!

On the Road Again (Again)

Whew.

We made it to Richmond…mostly in one piece. It was quite an adventure, though, making such a long trip with two cars packed to the gills, plus an infant and two tranquilized cats. Actually, the tranqs only partially worked on Felicity and they didn’t work at all on Perpetua (I suspect that body mass had something to do with it…Coleman compared it to that great big grizzly that you just can’t take down no matter how many darts you shoot at it), so they spent the whole drive meowing back and forth to each other and with Perpetua roaming around the truck, across Coleman’s lap, and up and down on the dashboard. I could hear them in the background every time I called him.

I, on the other hand, was traveling in the car with Cora. We had planned on waking up with her for her first feeding (anywhere from 7 to 9 am), loading the last few things into the truck bed, and heading out so that we could drive through the rest of her late-morning napping. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

We were still packing and cleaning the apartment all morning (which she did, thankfully, sleep through), and didn’t make it on to the highway until just past noon. I was certain we were in big trouble since we were just starting out when she should have just been waking up for the day. I couldn’t believe it, though, but she slept and slept and slept. It was downright miraculous.

We only stopped three times the whole way from Dayton to Richmond, which made what is normally an eight-plus hour trip into a ten and a half hour trip, but considering we were traveling like the Joads, I call that excellent timing!

It wasn’t all peaceful naptime, but I really can’t complain. Of those ten and a half hours, she only cried for about a total of two hours, in aggregate. Of those two hours, I probably spent half an hour driving with one hand and reaching into the back seat, over the car seat to hold a pacifier in her mouth with the other hand (and yes, that IS about as awkward a position as you are imagining it to be – but I was safe!). I estimate that I spent another two plus hours singing to her to calm her down or keep her calm until we could stop or to attempt to put off a stop if we could help it. And for a lot of the time that really worked. I was terribly pleased; however, when she’s crying, you have to sing louder than her crying in order to get her attention, so I had a bit of a scratchy throat after all was said and done.

And it’s actually harder than you might think to be able to string verses together and blend songs back to back with no possible down time or silences (the silences beget more tears). As such, I resorted to some odd choices, but I went with whatever popped into my head.

And when I came across words or phrases or verses that I couldn’t remember, I would make up totally random lyrics just to keep the singing going and avoid any pauses. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of that mountaineer…with me driving down I-64, singing wildly and ceaselessly at top volumes, caterwauling absolute nonsense. Strange how such insanity was the key to preserving sanity…

As for Miss Cora’s musical tastes, they are quite varied. Most effective for getting her attention were selections from The Messiah, a medley of Peter, Paul, and Mary tunes, and even a Van Morrison song. Also popular were hymns and the majority of the soundtrack from The Sound of Music. She is SO my daughter!

So we all arrived safely (and from that statement I exclude the bathroom trash can and 5 rolls of toilet paper that were lost when the tarp came up – they flew off the back of the truck and now reside along highway 35, somewhere outside of Dayton) and with our sanity intact (but just barely).

We’re settling in and trying to unpack and organize during naps and in between feedings. I hope to get some more pics up soon, and I even have a new video, so stay tuned…