No Standards Whatsoever

As many of you may know, Tori is an extremely clean person. Her mom has always worried that she'll be so busy cleaning that she won't take enough time to do the fun stuff (apparently Linda wishes that she had let things go a bit more and hadn't spent so much time worrying about having a clean house when she had kids). Well, Linda, this photo is to ASSURE you that you need not worry. Tori has become quite adept at dealing with mass chaos, as you can see in this photo.

I'm not nearly as neat as Tori, but I'm still pretty clean and I have to fess up and say that I really used to judge people who had kids and whose houses and cars were messy. Now I look at this photo and I am humbled. I never would have thought that our house would look like this -- of course we clean it up at the end of the day or when people come over, but there's a certain sense of surrender that I think you can detect here. In this case I am surrendering so that I can read the Sunday paper.

Can you believe this photo?! The little culprit is not even pictured, either.

Skip in D.C.

I've been feeling badly about the fact that I have many more great photos of Zadie than I do of Skip -- I don't want this blog to seem like I have more to say about Zadie than Skip. But let's face it, it's much easier to get great photos of a 20-month-old than a 3-month-old. Also, Tori didn't take any photos from her trip in D.C. (blame it on the wife!).

But today Tori's friend sent along this cute photo of Skip. And I want to take this opportunity to say that I think that Skip is really the best baby I've ever known of. I'm sure that you think I'm biased, but I don't really think I am. Zadie was good, but Skip is even better. What do I mean specifically? Well, he only cries if he is (1) hungry, (2) tired, or (3) in pain (like if Zadie drops a book on him). But all of these situations are quickly resolved. When he wants to go to sleep, I just cradle him in my arms and maybe give him a pacifier and then he's out. Tori has her own method, but either way it's really easy.

Some babies might be really easy because they have zero personality and aren't interactive. But Skip is full of smiles and loves to interact with people. It's so easy to make him smile!

The only thing dear Skip needs to work on is sleeping through the night, but I think that's right around the corner. He's been getting much better -- lately he just wakes up once around 4am and then we give him a pacifier and pat him a little and he falls back asleep until around 6am.

So, in my humble opinion, Skip is the best baby ever!

31 Words

Me and Zadie playing in the mud at low tide this past weekend...

Zadie and Skip are both wiped out after a recent walk down to the beach. I love that Zadie could fall asleep in this position -- I'm very envious. Thanks, Connie, for the double stroller!

Zadie is almost 20 months now and we keep wondering when she's going to start talking. But then I decided to make a list of all the words she says and I came up with 40! Now if she could only string a few together. But no rush...I'm sure there will be plenty of times that I'm tired of hearing her talk! Here is Zadie's current vocabulary, although the caveat is that she doesn't pronounce these all correctly -- but she pronounces them well enough that I know what she means. The asterisk means that they are her TOP, very favorite words.

no*, whoa, mama*, towel* (strangely obsessed with towels!), hat, helmet, dog, wawa*, nice, Skip* ("Ship"), that*, fruit/food (sounds the same), home, book, share, yes, shoe, sock, foot, bath, fun, arf, meow, help, up, down, on*, more*, ball, bye, hi.

I'm curious to see whether Zadie will be more mechanical or verbal. So far, Tori and I are always amazed by how much Zadie loves taking things apart and putting them back together. I'm not just being a biased parent when I say that she is ahead of the curve in that respect. And she's definitely not ahead of the curve in terms of talking, so it will be very interesting if she grows up to be a little engineer kid. I'm so completely useless at anything mechanical that it will be nice to have the extra help (Tori's sort of good at both).

Skip's First Bike Ride

Skip had his first bike ride yesterday, a few days shy of three months. Tori hooked up the trailer thing and pulled him behind her bike (Zadie was in her seat behind me). I wish I could say that Skip loved every minute of it, but at first he hated it. We didn't make it very far before we had to pull over, but once we got him out of there he loved being outside at the beach.

Yesterday was the best day at the beach! The water was warm, the temperature was perfect, we all got to ride bikes instead of deal with parking AND I found a boogie board in the trash. The foam was broken in three pieces, but it was still somewhat rideable. Boogie boarding is so fun -- I should do it more often.

Skip was a bit happier on the ride home, but he's just not a huge fan of either his car seat or his bike trailer. Hopefully that will change soon.

Wish I had a photo of all of us in our bike contraptions...

Skip @ 3 months

Skip will be three months old in just a few months. We're making really good progress with the adoption and feel very positive about it and thankful that everything is proceeding quickly and smoothly. As I've said before, Skip is an exceptionally good baby. We thought Zadie was really good baby, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Skip is better. When he cries it's directly related to either being hungry or wanting to go to sleep. The only thing he really isn't good at is riding in the car.

The big news with Skip is that he has just started a rigorous sleep training program. I decided it was time to start this program a few days ago when he woke at 1:30am. He had been waking up earlier and earlier and the cumulative effect of three months without sleep was really getting to be too much. Plus, he's got plenty of food and he's old enough to sleep through the night! So things are getting better and he's typically been sleeping until 4 or 5am now. I can't tell you what a big difference this makes!

Oh, the other thing Tori and I wanted to be sure to mention is that Skip is extraordinarily full of smiles and coos. I captured one of his smiles on this video, but I wasn't talented enough to video him and make him smile at the same time (sorry for the poor camera work).

Skip still has a great head of hair and really hasn't lost any. The roots are blonde, but they still haven't overtaken his dark hair. He's a handsome kid!

$40 Hat and Two-Tone Lip

Zadie and I went on a bike ride to Manhattan Beach on one of my days off and I really wanted to get her a hat. I made the mistake of going into one of the fancy shops there and two salespeople swarmed me with all kinds of adorable hats. Some of them were more than $60, but I felt too embarrassed to leave without buying something and I figured I could just make Tori return it later. Anyway, I picked this hat and we ended up not returning it because it's so cute. It actually looks enormous in this photo, so you'll just have to trust me. And now Zadie has a $40 hat, which is typically how we refer to it, e.g. "Where's Zadie's $40 hat?"

I don't think I've ever written about Zadie's two-tone lip. It's very unique! People often think that she has lipstick on one half of her upper lip because half of her lip is much redder than the other side. It's been that way since she was born. The doctor told us some long story about blood vessels and said that it would eventually go away, but it certainly hasn't yet. We are quite partial to it, but I don't know how Zadie would feel if she was an insecure teenager dealing with make-up and kids' stupid questions. When she was little, Tori used to always call her "Two-tone."

Labor Day Catch-up

So much has happened since my last post! Once you fall behind it starts feeling insurmountable to post something and it just gets worse and worse.

To recap, Tori and I had separate family vacations over Labor Day weekend. Tori took Skip and spent a week in D.C. with her very good friend who just had a baby. She called me often to tell me what an amazing time she was having and how much she loves her circle of friends in D.C. I was having a good time of my own, though. Zadie and I drove to my parents' house and met up with Kim's family. While my dad, brother, and brother-in-law and I went dove hunting in Arizona for 36 hours, my mom, Kim, and nephew took fabulous care of Zadie and her twin cousins.

It makes me so happy to see Zadie playing with Sophie and Izzy. This was the first time that I think they were all fully engaged with each other. They did lots of swimming, went to the park, and had activities like decorating sugar cookies (my mom insists they didn't give them the cookies afterwards).

I would love to share more about Skip's experience in D.C., but unfortunately Tori didn't take a single photo (despite insisting that she needed to take the camera with her). But she did say that he slept the entire plane ride to D.C. and was a superstar baby all around. Hooray, Skip!

I will post more photos later of the amazing ones that Kim took of Zadie, but first here are some of Zadie and her cousins.

Skip at 2 months

I neglected to blog about my mom's visit last week. She spent lots of quality time with Skip and, apparently, also had time to read the paper at the same time. Check out Skip's monster pose -- he often sleeps like that.

This is Skip snoozing through one of the many fine cultural events he has attended in his short life. I think this was either a Neil Diamond cover band or a swing band.

I haven't posted nearly enough photos of Tori and Skip, so here's one of Tori with her signature Moby wrap. Tori is very passionate about the importance of babies being held, so she always tries to strap Skip on her even when she's multitasking.

Skip had has two-month checkup today and he's doing great. One doctor had told us we were overfeeding him a bit, so we cut back on the formula slightly. Skip now weighs 13 lbs exactly (76th percentile) and measures 23 inches (51st percentile). These are huge jumps from his 2-week appointment, when he was in the 15th percentile for weight. His head circumference remained in the 10th percentile, but the doctor said it's good for them to stay at the same rate and not to grow (or shrink) too rapidly.

So all is well with Skip. We had a busy weekend and hung out with Tori's friend Nika, her kids, and her parents. They were all amazed at how mellow Skip is. It's true -- I think he's even more mellow than Zadie was. He has a few things he cries about: he cries at the three-hour mark when he's ready to eat, and he cries when he's having trouble falling asleep and needs some bouncing or a pacifier. But that's really about it. He's a very content baby and he's really become so handsome!