Conversations

Heard around the house this week:

Anja: Daddy, you haff a baby Maija in your belly?

Daddy: No, no baby Maija in there.

Anja: Blue haff a baby Maija in her belly?

Daddy: No, Blue doesn't have a baby Maija, just Mommy. Daddy doesn't have a baby Maija, and Debbie doesn't have a baby Maija, only Mommy.

Anja: (thinking) But Dillon has a baby Maija!

(Dillon is her friend at daycare)

(Anja stands up and stretches her arms really high)

"I'm growing!"

(later that day)

Anja: I'm not growing anymore. It's hard.

"To infinity and beyond!"

Jay: Anja, it's time for bed.

Anja: No, it's time for jumping!

Anja is two!

Zero years old:

One year old:

Two years old:



We haven't looked at Anja's height and weight percentiles in a while, mostly because she is obviously a healthy weight and height. But here are some interesting stats:
At birth:
weight = 5lbs 15oz, 7th percentile
Now:
weight = 27.5lbs, 57th percentile

At birth:
height = 20in, 77th percentile
Now:
height= 37.75in, 83rd percentile

At birth:
head circumference: 13", less than 3rd percentile
Now:
head circumference: 19.5", 97th percentile

So, she started out long and thin with a small head and has remained long but normal weight with a gigantic head. She always outgrows her shirts at the neck opening first , and no wonder at 97th percentile for head circumference! At least she wasn't born with a 97th percentile head.

Anja's birthday was Sunday, and we had a little mini party with the three of us. She had a great time opening presents, and even blew out her own candles. She has been busy playing with her playdoh hair-growing kits and molds. She also puts her froggies and other little animals in her new (handmade felted) purse from Auntie Heather and walks around the house with them.

We also went to the zoo and it was a hot day, pretty unusual for around here. I was pretty tired and the heat didn't help, so we didn't make it very far into the zoo. I think her favorite part of the zoo is the petting zoo, where the kids can brush the goats with soft rubber brushes. Anja loves it. And we did wait for about 20 or 30 minutes in line to ride the little train (a fairly mediocre 5-10 minute ride but we did get to see wallaroos), and Anja thought it was pretty good. Then we paid a ridiculous amount of money to eat some probably pretty scary hotdogs and some "juice" that tasted like extra sweet koolaid. Anja also rode on the carousel twice, the second time by request on the panda (a fierce running panda baring sharp teeth and with big exposed claws!). Anja liked it all.

Trips like that are getting really hard for me to do. Any amount of walking or standing longer than about 5 minutes leave me really out of breath. And heat makes everything twice as hard.

She really likes to make jokes and laugh about them. She gets particularly goofy after being given a sugar bomb like birthday cake. I love this one: "I'm looking for something... I'm looking for...my foot! I found it! I'm looking for something... other foot!"

She continues to be pretty fearless for her age. She loves to go exploring in our backyard, in "the woods" with Blue. In the dark with just a flashlight she follows Blue through all the trees and vines that surround our house. Sometimes she roots around in the leaves looking for insects. She will do this for quite some time on her own.

Her language skills are increasing dramatically daily. I'm sure a large part of this comes from daycare, where she is the youngest toddler. Yesterday when Jay was trying to get her to eat her sandwich, she said, "Don't worry Daddy! I will take a bite!" And to me yesterday when I was trying to read her a book and she wanted to play instead she said, "Stop talking Mommy! Pay attention!" Or when she leaves to get another book: "Mommy, stay right there, I'll be right back!" And yes, most of her sentences end with exclamation points.

The funniest thing these days is when she plays Simon Says. She LOVES this game. I think she really likes that she can tell us to do something silly and we do it. Some day soon I'll take a video of it.

Head down, now stay!

Nothing new at my latest prenatal appointment. The baby (or rather, my uterus) continues to measure exactly the right size. I have gained 19 pounds so far. Yay? But the good news is that the baby is positioned head down right now. We still have eight weeks to go, so she could definitely flip back up, but head down is still good news for now.

It's hard to imagine how much noisier it's going to get around here soon. And how much more chaos there will be. Two things to notice in this video are the energy that Anja has and the (now typical) state of our living room during her waking hours. And it's all about to get crazier.


And also, here is an example of mealtime with our almost two-year-old. She's really become a picky eater lately. She likes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which means she pulls the bread apart and eats the jelly with her fingers. Then she asks for more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.



And here's a video that's just funny. I don't even know why she was so tired here. I had just picked her up from daycare and we were on our way to the playground. By the time we got there (5 minutes later) she was nodding off. I couldn't make a successful transfer from carseat to crib, but I was able to get her into the high chair.

9 weeks to go

The rainy season is ending here, so we've been able to revisit all our favorite places again. A few weeks ago we went to Limantour Beach at Point Reyes. It wasn't really that cold, but Anja wanted to wear her hat and gloves anyway.


We had family visiting the week before last, Anja's aunt and two cousins. We visited many of our local highlights, like this spot in Bolinas for tidepooling:


...and Chimney Rock for seal watching:


With just nine weeks to go, prenatal visits continue to be uneventful. I am slightly anemic, like most pregnant women in the third trimester, but my glucose screen came back great, so no gestational diabetes to worry about. The baby measures right on for size, and I've gained exactly the average recommended amount of weight. Heartburn is back full force, and this time is actually worse than before. It was so bad last Friday night that I woke up in the morning with a badly burned esophagus from all the bile that kept coming up. It's like having a sore throat, except along your entire esophagus! It recovered after a few days of minimal, careful eating. So from now on I have to eat even smaller meals and nothing after 8:00 every night.

We finally made it to the hospital tour. It seems like an okay place. The labor/delivery room is nice enough, with a shower you can use during labor, and birthing balls and stools and they seem to encourage moving around a lot during labor. The recovery rooms are very small, and shared, which I'm not very excited about. But hopefully we won't have to be there for very long after delivery, so that's okay. Getting there will be pretty easy, takes about half an hour, and we can park right outside the door. Our other option was to drive to San Francisco, but with traffic it could easily be an hour and it is a massive hospital in the middle of the city. The place we're going to instead has a much more personal feel to it.

Anja continues to show me where her baby is, when I show her where mine is. But just recently she has been really interested in a book we were given about becoming a big sister and what the new baby will be like. I'm sure she still doesn't understand, but at least the baby is part of our regular dialogue.


Anja had a great Easter weekend. Saturday was the local Easter Egg Hunt, which was at the park near us so we just walked over. Anja was surprisingly not scared by the Easter Bunny, and thought he was really funny. It's the first time we've subjected her to an Easter Bunny or Santa type experience and she loved it. She even gave him a high five.


Easter morning at our house below. Anja had fun finding the plastic eggs that were hidden. Some contained little chocolate eggs and some had stickers. She also got a couple of crocheted bunnies that I made, a kite, and some little matchbox trucks.


Don't forget to follow Laura's blog each week to see what vegetable we are now: the baby is a cabbage this week, which doesn't sound very cute until you see the picture: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5w6CkeimjSYQsX6NRicEE9pTMa1JecIbUehCNlCtZJYGNBmShQMnlDpbsdgPAIs1vA0ddQsnWcoCw-zLULLLQCDESZmqel-ardvOmwvHOUJ-uHQiYk9roTaPQa1hB74AwdRnr9QkOXI4/s1600/cabbage.JPG

Third trimester and the aquarium!

As a reminder, my due date is June 8th. Here is the actual fortune Jay got at Lily Kai this week:


Those people who say they enjoy being pregnant are lying. We are now in the third trimester, otherwise known as the longest 13 weeks ever. I'm tired, and have heartburn most of the time, I waddle when I walk and my hips and back are sore all the time. I have very little space for my lungs to expand so I'm always out of breath. Picking up Anja is really difficult and a little painful for me now. Until the last few weeks I was still wearing a few non-maternity shirts that were just really stretchy, but that's not possible anymore. I've gained 15lbs so far but it feels like much more. Interestingly, it is exactly the same amount I had gained at this point last time, within .5lbs. Yesterday I picked up some decidedly tent-like shirts that should fit me until June. I'm supposed to start keeping a "kick count card" of daily baby activity. I wish there was just a box to check for "moves around constantly like a bag full of kittens". Luckily, sleeping has been pretty good lately, so I'm feeling much better than I could. And although the sleep deprivation will be hard, I'm looking forward to feeling physically better once the baby is here. I want my lungs and stomach back!

Jay has started planning some races he will run in the near future. It's exciting to me, because these are races I can potentially run next year! I have a few in mind I would really like to train for, but I'm going to be much more conservative in my approach this time, since my recovery was very slow last time, and I just ended up disappointed when I couldn't meet my goals. I'm trying to remember that I have many years of running ahead of me, as long as I'm smart about training, and there's no need to rush.

We keep trying to arrange time to go for a hospital tour of the place we'll have to go for delivery. We can't bring Anja, since kids are banned from visiting hospitals right now (H1N1 season), and that makes it difficult for us. After many many weeks of trying to arrange for a babysitter, a friend volunteered to watch her today. But we decided to go out to a movie during that time instead, since that sounds much more rewarding than a hospital tour. It will only be the second time we've gone out on our own since we moved here over a year ago.

I'm much less concerned about the details this time around, having already been through this once before. We never went on a tour of Sparrow Hospital before we ended up having Anja there, and we had a wonderful experience. We don't really have a choice in hospitals due to our HMO anyway, so it isn't totally necessary to check it out ahead of time. It seems like an okay place. They are completing a brand new labor/delivery wing of the hospital sometime around June, so we may even get to be there for that. The one bad part is the distance from where we live. At best, we will have about a 30 min drive to the hospital. If it's rush hour, the drive could be much longer. I sometimes have fantasies that we can use the freestanding birth center in Santa Rosa that looks wonderful, but at over $6500 (not covered by insurance), it's not going to happen. Maybe we will "forget" to go to the hospital until it is too late and end up with a homebirth. Just kidding, Mom!

Yesterday we went to San Francisco's Aquarium on the Bay then downtown to meet a friend for her birthday lunch. Anja loved the aquarium and did pretty well at the Indonesian restaurant, considering how tired she was. Here she is at one of the touch tanks, petting a live starfish!


We have a yearly pass to this aquarium now, so we can go whenever we want. The bay area is expensive, if you want to go to any museums/zoos/aquariums, but the yearly passes are pretty reasonable. We are really lucky to have so many great places to visit that are so close. The aquarium has some amazing tanks of sea jellies. These guys are actually sea nettles. The still photo doesn't really do them justice, since they are in constant motion. Amazing.


Here are a couple of bat rays overhead in one of the underwater tunnels. Anja really likes the tunnels. Actually, she likes all of the exhibits.


The tunnels are always popular. There is one for primarily predatory fish and one with schooling fish and other less dominant creatures.


Anja and Jay in the tunnel.

wording

I'm not sure why, but most of the time this works:

Me: Anja, do you have poop in your diaper?
Anja: No
Me: Is there any poop in your diaper?
Anja: No
Me: Did you poop in your diaper Anja?
Anja: No
Me: (pause)
Who has poop in their diaper? Does anybody here have poop in their diaper?
Anja: Yeah

Tahoe and Petaluma and 26 weeks

Well, we've all been transferring colds around here for the past three weeks or so. First Anja, who had the worst of it, and then me for the last two weeks, and Jay was a little sick off and on during that time. I'm just now beginning to catch up on everything and today is the first day I would say I'm not actually sick. Unfortunately I still had a really bad cough over the past weekend, sometimes uncontrollable, when we went away with my coworkers to Lake Tahoe. It was a fun trip, but I was pretty physically miserable. I slept a lot, or tried to through all the coughing. Having the depressed immune system of a pregnant woman is not fun at all. It's very frustrating to have to spend weeks fighting off a cold in addition to all the other pregnancy discomforts.

Otherwise, the pregnancy is going well. All measurements are right on target, and the baby is very active, just like Anja was. I just finished 26 weeks, so I have another 14 to go. Still seems like forever, but at least it's getting closer.

Even though the trip was tough for me, I'm glad we went. It's about a 3 hour drive from Petaluma and we left Thursday after work. Anja fell asleep in the car Thursday night and woke up Friday morning to this view out the window. The first thing she said was, "Snowmen!" when she saw some in the yard. She hadn't seen snow since she was 9 months old!


This is the back yard of the lodge we rented. Stunning. And with a great little sledding hill! That's Lover's Leap rising up in the background. We stayed for three days and even had some new snow while we were there, maybe a foot or so. We also lost power for about 12 hours the second day (overnight). It was just like being back in Michigan.


Here are Anja and I on our way out to the sauna. She was very excited to have her own towel like mommy.


She thought the snow was pretty cool. She threw a few snowballs, and we built her a little snow fort. She wasn't very impressed with how difficult it was to walk in fresh snow, though.


Meanwhile, spring has been here in Petaluma for about a month now. The hills are bright green and all the trees are blooming. We've had quite a bit of rain lately, but most days the sun still comes out for a bit. We had a few weeks of weather in the 50's, but now we're solidly in the 60's every day. Flowers are out in all the yards in town, beautiful.


We've been talking to Anja about the baby coming. Since my belly is huge now, I've been telling here there is a baby inside. She just thinks it's a joke, and shows me where her baby is: