We officially have a Toddler.

A toddler who adores making messes and harassing kittens.

*blinks*

When did that happen?????

I was looking at JJ's newborn pictures the other day.  

You know...

These.

 

*sniffle*

Yup.  Looking at those and others and remembering how teeny itty bitty he was... and looking at the twenty-one pound, 28" tall marauder cruising around my living room and wondering how in the heck???

I mean, it's awesome.  Mind-boggling.  But seriously awesome. 

And so, as promised, here is the birthday cuteness.  (Yes, I know it's 8 days later.  Sue me, we were busy!)  And these are just the ones I grabbed with my webcam, folks, there are better pics on the actual camera, but I figured somebody might track me down and strangle me if I made you wait for those!

 The traditional heart-shaped Birthday Cake Pan, here shown 

with evidence that the cake was indeed baked within its confines. 

(No, seriously, my mother has used that pan for birthday cakes 

my ENTIRE LIFE.  I was quite certain that lightning would fall 

from on high if I dared make a plain old rectangle cake.)

"Okay.  I've got a fork.  And a biscuit.  Woopie."

 "Wait just a second... what's that?"

 "Yeah.  I knew Mom wouldn't let me down!"

The traditional singing of the traditional song 

was followed by the traditional destruction of the cake.

"Mmph... Mom... you weren't kidding about this chocolate stuff."

 (Honest, I have pictures on the actual camera while the cake was still 
intact, but I wasn't quick enough to get any with the webcam as well.)

 

 "Yuuuuuuum.  SUGAR!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 The traditional sugar-crazies ensued, and a few hours later...

 

"One..."

 

 "Two..."

"Three... he is DOWN for the COUNT."

He's growing so fast, learning so fast it's almost frightening.  I've always been one who swore up & down that babies are far more intelligent and aware than most grown ups give them credit for, but it takes on a whole new dimension when the baby in question is **yours**.  And it seems to hit a sort of critical mass sometimes where it all balls together, picks up speed, and suddenly every time I turn around he's doing something I've never seen him do before.  Climbing onto a footstool.  Gently petting a kitten (as opposed to whacking it).  Reaching for my hairbrush and using it to awkwardly brush his own hair.  (That one really made my jaw drop!)

The most recent pièce de résistance happened last Friday, just five days after his birthday.  Parents, you know that moment, the times your baby does something that tells you without any shred of doubt that there is a person in there, and that said individual is aware of the stuff you're trying to teach them?  The moment that gives you hope you might have a prayer of raising a civilized, well-mannered little person?  Well, this was a good one.

He signed "milk".  Mind, I have been using "milk" and roughly two dozen other signs with him since birth, mostly as a means to answer that all-important question, "Why are you crying?"  By the time he was three months old, I could run through about a dozen signs, and when I hit the right one, he would stop fussing.  But of course, the goal is to eventually have baby sign back to you, and JJ finally did it!!!!  Independently, without being asked, without my hand over his, and BEFORE he communicated his desire to nurse by yanking down my shirt.  He did this several times over the next hour, very politely coming up to me and signing for "milk", but that first one...

I tell ya, people, I squeee'd like a tween at a Twilight marathon. 

That's my boy... my little explorer... my JJ.

Too Hot to Walk

It finally happened.  It got too hot outdoors to take my daily walks.

*pouts*

The universe is out to sabotage me, I swear.

"Yeah, always with the excuses."

No, seriously.  It's too hot.  I walk with JJ, it's been too warm for the Moby since mid-March, and with the canopy up on the stroller to protect him from the sun, he gets too warm, goes to sleep, and it throws the whole afternoon's routine off-kilter.  Off-kilter afternoon = late bedtime = CRANKY baby.

So for exercise, I am forced to resort to my stationary bike in the basement while JJ naps.

For outside time... *grins*

PHOTO BOMB!!!

Not even six months old,

and he thinks he's a CK model.

I mean, LOOK at that sprawl!

He thinks the laptop is fascinating.

Keeping those little fingers off my keyboard 

and trackpad is interesting, y'all.

He's watching his own image on the screen, lol.

Check out my little DUDE!!!

A "spinner" off the maple entertained him 

for a good fifteen minutes. 

Then he tried to eat it.

Nursing outdoors is SO relaxing.

Oh, chill, Mom, you can't see anything.

Heehee... it's cute now, but I can already see

that look coming at me dripping with teenage disdain.

"Mom... what are you doing???  Yeah, I'm cute.  So what?"

"Bored now."

(Tell me someone gets that and I'm not just a big nerd.)

The spray of dried up maple leaves he found next.

LOADS of fun!

And yes, the onesie reads "my way or the highway".

My friends all told me...

So, every pregnant woman has had this experience... your friends and family (and random total strangers) feel inexplicably compelled to regale you with a combination of warm fuzzies and horror stories until you're not sure whether to hide in a corner with a blankie or blow your nose with a pancake. This morning one of those little tidbits occurred to me, and I thought ... what a great post that would make! All the stuff my friends said, and whether or not it turned out to be true!


"You'll fall more in love than you ever have in your life."

Yeah, got it in one.  He drives me a little bit nuts with the meltdowns, but then he finally falls asleep and all I can do is stare at that perfect little face, and I go right back to day one.


"You're having heartburn?  Oh, he must have lots of hair!  But he'll rub it off in the crib and be bald for a while too!"

As you've seen, JJ was indeed born with a mop.  Still waiting on the baldness, thus far there is no indication of hair loss.  No Baby Rogaine on the horizon.  (Yes, I'm kidding.)

Four days.                          Almost four months.

"Childbirth is the most painful/beautiful/horrifying/magical thing you will ever experience."


Intense?  Yes.  Beautiful?  The reward was, the process, not hardly, things were far too chaotic.  Agonizing... no, not really.  The last 15 minutes scared the hell out of me, and that's what made it bad.  Now I know.   Magical?  That one I gotta give ya... five minutes after he was out, I was already saying, "Yeah, that was intense... but I could do it again."

"You'll be completely paranoid about germs and bugs and air and (insert potential life-threatening danger)."

Surprisingly not.  Yes, I throw the cats out of the bedroom when we're all asleep, or if the baby is napping and I'm not in there to watch.  Yes, I make sure his harness is snug in his car seat.  Yes, I have smiled sweetly at idiotic fellow motorists while cussing them in my soul.  No, I don't insist that people use hand sanitizer before they touch the baby, or worry that the extra gentle shampoo I buy for me will somehow turn toxic and burn his scalp because it doesn't say "Baby Shampoo" on the front.  Soap is soap.

"Cloth diapers?  You're crazy!  I know you, you hate doing laundry, you'll give up in a week and go back to disposables!!!"


I'll admit it, this one had me worried, but JJ's almost four months old and I'm adding to our stash of dipes every time I can scrape $20 to spare.  His butt hasn't seen a disposable diaper since he was three weeks old.  The laundry?  At first, John did it all.  And I confess, he still deals with the poopy ones.  But diaper laundry has turned out to be the easiest, least complicated, and most easily maintained laundry ever. And we have yet to make the acquaintance of the infamous blow-out.


"You'll sleep again... someday." (Maniacal chuckling and that "It's your turn" grin.)

Half & half.  We've hit the four month sleep regression with a vengeance, so NOW I've experienced the three to four wake ups a night to feed the baby.  I'm hurting, I tell ya, folks.  I am one sleep deprived momma.  Up until two weeks ago, I swear to you we hit the baby lottery on night sleep.  But last night and the night before, we got it down to one middle of the night wake up, and honestly he was never really awake, just fussed enough to get my attention, ate, and was back in the cosleeper in twenty minutes.  So it's (I hope) a growth spurt thing, and we can go back to sleeping through the night here soon.

Sweet Jesus, let it be so.

"You'll get used to noises while the baby is sleeping and stop chewing people out for breathing."

Not so much.  Four months next week, and I still flinch every time something hits the floor while JJ is napping.  Answering one's cell phone will get you shooed into the kitchen, and a belly laugh?  If looks could kill, my husband would be very very crispy several times over by now.  People who ruin half an hour's work and wake JJ right as he's almost asleep are considered to be volunteering to fix the situation.

"Breastfed babies tend to be smaller, so don't worry when he doesn't chunk up right away."

Thanks all for the warning.  Keeping this in mind helped me not completely panic when JJ didn't start really filling out until he was closing on two months old.  Y'all have seen the pictures, he was a very slender guy, and even though he's chubbed out nicely, I don't think he's ever going to be the roly poly sumo baby.

Two Weeks                      Two Months 

Three days ago... and yes, folks, that's the same type diaper in all three pictures.

"Any pacifier will do, sometimes they just want to suck."


The second part is absolutely true.  The first part is a load of bovine excrement.  The cheap binkies we got at first just to have a few were barely tolerated.  When he was about 10 weeks old, I bought a couple of Soothies, and he now flatly refuses to take any other pacifier.  As evidenced by his literally spitting one of the old ones at my nose and screaming at me today when I couldn't find the Soothie and tried an old Nuk in desperation.  Yeah, bad call, Mom.

And my absolute all time favorite:

"Don't worry, breast-milk poops don't stink."


Every single one of my friends who has ever breast-fed a baby has said this to me.

I have just one thing to say.

You are, every last one of you,

Dirty.  Rotten.  Liars.

World, take notice...

 On Monday, February 20th, 2012... JJ laughed for the first time.

A real laugh.  Complete with giggling sounds.  Two separate times over about 10 minutes.

Cute.  As.  H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.

*coos helplessly*

My world is forever changed...

Nineteen days ago, John and I welcomed our son, John Junior, into the world.  Eighteen days ago we brought him home.  In the seventeen days since then, John has found a job, we've gotten familiar with the process of changing a cloth diaper, and discovered the joys of co-sleeping.  (No, seriously, I cannot for the life of me imagine how new moms get ANY sleep with baby in another room... but that's a whole separate post...)

I've also realized that nobody can possibly be as excited and obsessed with our perfect baby boy as we are (nor should they be), and rather than continuing to drive everybody on Facebook nuts with constant status updates every time JJ does something adorable, I decided to roll with the bug a friend put in my ear and start a mommy blog.  Took me a few days to find the time and the energy, but here we are!

As the title suggests, I am by no stretch of the imagination the Fount of Wisdom for All Things Baby.  I did a lot (and I mean a LOT) of babysitting growing up, which prepared me in some small measure, I'm sure, but the last (almost) three weeks have thrown into stark relief how little I actually know.  I fell into "Mommy-mode" with barely a pause, and much of it is instinctive... burping the baby came without a second thought, for example... but this is the easy time.  Yes, I'm tired because I'm suddenly running on six hours of sleep a night (and I count myself blessed to get that much, he's a WONDERFUL baby), and yes, I get frustrated when I can't figure out why he's screaming (which, thank God, has only happened once so far), but at this point his needs and what to do about them are extremely simple.  Full stomach + well-burped + clean diaper + Mommy = happy baby. Generally speaking, anyway.  It gets complicated later, and believe you me I am ENJOYING this simple time... despite my aching back and all mutterings to the contrary.

That picture up there?  He was just about 90 minutes old when that was taken, they had just brought him back from the nursery.  I have to say, I don't look half bad, which kind of surprises me, because I got maybe an hour of sleep the night before, and the delivery was pretty insane.  The picture makes me laugh because I look completely stunned, and I was.  I kept looking at him, trying to wrap my head around the idea that he was inside me, that John and I together had made this beautiful, tiny, precious little creature that was now clutching my finger and sleeping with his ear to my heart-beat.  I couldn't seem to grasp it, and spent the better part of my conscious moments that day alternately grinning, crying, and staring at him in total astonishment.

In the last couple of weeks, I find myself looking at the world and everything in it with a completely new frame of reference.  EVERYTHING is being passed through the "we have a baby" filter, with some interesting results.  Shows I liked (or at least was willing to tolerate) before now have me asking John to change the channel because I don't want the baby hearing that crap, even if he is too young to understand.  I find baby-talk addressed to adults more obnoxiously irritating than ever.  The zoo scene in Happy Feet made me suddenly burst into tears... and not because it was sad.  It's supposed to be this tragic, gut-wrenching scene detailing Mumble's slide into depression and madness, and all I could think was "I get to take JJ to the zoo!"

We get to take him to the zoo, and the aquarium.  We get to watch his face when he tastes chocolate for the first time.  We get to teach him how to ride a bike and climb a tree and make snow angels.  John will be showing him how to clean a fish, and I'll be teaching him to sing harmony the way my mother did... by singing "Come, Follow, Follow" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in rounds with him at bedtime.  We get to tell him how flowers grow and why the sky is blue, and all about that big round white thing in the night sky and why it sometimes looks like a coin and other times like the clipped-off piece of a fingernail.


All the neat things we get to do with him thrill me.

All the scary things we have to protect him from terrify me.

And somewhere in the middle is this squishy little bean who wrapped his tiny hand around my finger and melted my heart into a pile of warm fuzzies.

Welcome to the world, son.  It's gonna be a crazy trip!