Weekend

On Saturday we had a big party and Milo & Nora did pretty well, sort of dancing around and showing off for people. Nora likes to prance around on her tiptoes when she is excited. Milo got everybody to play ball with him. The kids went to sleep without a problem despite the loud talking and music of the party. I wandered around with the monitor attached to my belt so that I could see it light up if they made any noise. I looked like my father with his blackberry permanently attached to his belt. The only thing missing was a fanny pack.

Milo has taken to waking sometimes in the middle the night and crying for daddy, and then crying stormily if Jake tries to stop holding him or put him back in his crib. Saturday night was one of those nights, and it was a long one.

Today we went to the zoo but didn't take the stroller since it is nearly impossible to get the kids to stay in the stroller for any length of time. I do not understand how all of these other families go around with their kids in strollers like they do, even kids who are 2, 3, and 4 years old. How do they get those children to stay in the stroller? Ours struggle mightily to break free of their constraints, like the Hulk, rending their shirts in rage. Anyway, Milo was totally fascinated by all of the animals. He could have spent an hour just looking at any one animal. He had to be dragged away each time, crying to see "giraffe again" or "seal again", placated only by the promise that next up he gets to see a bear, or an ostrich. 

So Milo just stood there at each fence, mesmerized by the animals. In contrast Nora didn't really care a whole lot about the animals. She looked at each one for about 10 seconds and then would say "down please?" and just wanted to wander aimlessly, running directly into people's paths, looking at the grass or the bark or the rocks, just endlessly walking, walking, walking. Taking a walk with Nora is like observing a particle in brownian motion. 

Later when Milo woke from his nap he talked about how he saw goats and the ostrich and the brown bear and sheep (there were no sheep, so who knows where he got that). Clearly the zoo made a big impression on him. Tonight at dinner Milo ate several of my creative efforts including herbed leek tarts, crackers with pesto cheese spread, barbecued honey chicken, and pasta salad with tomatoes and avocados. What a champ! Nora ate...none of those things. If Milo were our only kid I would probably be an insufferable parent prattling on about how all you have to do to get kids to eat good food is make sure that you fill the house with good food.  HAH.

Trying to keep them from crashing to the ground

School starts back up next week!  I'm looking forward to it.  I have a ridiculously small methods class this year -- only 8 students (our typical cohort is 15-17). I don't know why we have such a small cohort this year, and it'll be interesting to see what that is like in a class setting. I hope they are 8 talkative people.

We really need to find some back-up childcare, and quick. And yet I am strangely paralyzed about this and don't really know how to go about doing it. Which is silly, because all I need to do is send a few emails.

Milo & Nora like to put on the horrible, horrible kid music these days and "dance" to it. Why is it that the music they like is so grating to the adult ear?

A former student who once took a doctoral seminar I taught is now running a program on campus for high-achieving students of color and 1st generation college students. The students have scholarships and participate in a number of activities throughout their college years to support their success in college. She has convinced me to participate in a mentoring program in which I get matched up with an incoming freshman and mentor her/him for the next 4 years. It's like academic big brothers and sisters.  I wonder what this will like, as I don't really know how to be a mentor in this capacity. But my own graduate students seem to like the way I mentor them, so hopefully I can do a decent job with a freshman. I have had (and continue to have) a number of really really awesome mentors of my own, both formally and informally, so it's time to turn the tables a bit.

I have 8 advisees right now, in various stages of thinking about / starting / collecting data / analyzing / finishing their theses. It feels like I've got 8 plates spinning on 8 sticks. With some of them, I just have to give them a fresh spin every now and then and they keep going and going and going on their own. With others, I have to constantly keep spinning them to keep them going. So far I have graduated one doctoral student, and my second one is set to graduate this year (fingers crossed).  It is an exciting and time-consuming aspect of the job. 

Nora's latest thing is that she wants me to kiss her finger/head/tummy or whatever hurts her. Sometimes she'll intentionally bang her hand on the floor so that she can then come over and have me kiss it. Milo's latest thing is to hand something to somebody and then say "here you go, Nora!" He's also saying "thank you, Nora" or "thank you, Milo" and half the time he gets the direction wrong. It is very cute.

It is currently 8:27 p.m., the kids' bedtime was 7:30, and yet just this minute I just heard somebody singing in their crib "ashes, ashes, we all fall down!"

Scenes

Jake took Milo up to his parents' house for a few days.  The weather was already starting to turn cool, which isn't unusual that far north. Milo still had fun, though.

Jake got a couple of afternoons of sailing in, despite the cool weather. Here's his boat after they took down the sails. Jake has had this boat for a long, long time.

Even though we're in the midwest, Jake's parents live so far north that it sort of reminds me of where I grew up in Washington state. There are pine trees all over the place up where his parents are, unlike where we live. It's rarely humid up there. His folks are in the woods and everything is green and quiet.

I like it for holidays, but I don't like that climate enough to live there. Instead, everything I like reminds me of college. Here is an old picture I had on my computer of my college campus. It must have been early fall when I took this. I know exactly where on campus this scene is located, and can immediately conjure up what it was like to walk down that path on my way to the math building. I adore that campus. I love the enormous trees and the gorgeous architecture, the old buildings with the tile floors and the bizarre gargoyles sitting on top of doorways. I simply love everything about it. I wish that I had taken more pictures when I lived there. Pictures of the campus, of my apartment, my neighborhood with the brick streets and the old stone buildings and the corner store. Pictures of my walk to school, under towering trees. I must still miss it, since I can remember it like it was yesterday.

Here is one of only two pictures I have on my computer of my old neighborhood when I lived in San Diego for grad school. It's so different:

That scene is a park near my old student housing apartment. I liked my apartment complex and used to take daily walks or runs to this park. Everything is pretty because it is green and manicured and watered, the way stuff was around there. My student housing was nestled into condos in what was a pretty nice neighborhood.  I could walk to three different grocery stores, lots of restaurants, and a movie theater.  The weather in this picture is how the weather always is there. The sky is always blue. There are never any clouds. It is always 75 degrees. It is kind of nice, and it is especially nice in January, but it doesn't thrill my heart.

This next picture of the other side of the park reveals why I never liked California vegetation:

See, it's just a desert. You can see the brown in that hill in the distance. That brown ground is the natural part. All of the green is the unnatural, watered stuff. San Diego is a desert that people turned into a paradise by important trees and watering things. But it's still deserty and scrubby and that natural scrubby vegetation always has been and always will be ugly to me. As wonderful as my time in San Diego was, and it was great in lots of ways, it was never...right.

This is right:

That is home. Give me the midwest, or the east, or parts of the south. Give me the big trees that change colors in the fall and the sound of cicadas in August (I can hear them right now). Give me languid, humid summers and big fat snowflakes at Christmas. This is home.

Parenting Doubts

Honestly, sometimes I wonder about our parenting skills. Especially after this weekend, when the children were frankly incorrigible, especially a certain girl child.

I have been slain by Nora's illness and have been up sick all night, miserable all day, in a cold sweat all weekend. Nothing a little rest and maybe some 7-up with crushed ice wouldn't cure (where the hell is my mother?). But I don't get to rest in bed with 7-up and crushed ice, because if Nora knows I am in the house but not playing with her, picking her up, and doing all of that sheer physical stuff involved in parenting, she goes ballistic. Seriously, we're talking standing at the bottom of the stairs, banging on the gate, screaming and crying "Mama, Mama, Mama" over and over again.  Which is not very restful for any of us.

Poor Jake.

Nora's histrionics get Milo going, and the next thing you know it's a weekend of two kids yelling and screaming and crying nonstop.  Are other people's kids like this? Do our kids yell and cry an unusual amount? I just don't have the energy to deal with it this weekend. 

Today when Nora woke from her afternoon nap I could hear her crying (unusual) and saying "Mama, where'd Mama go? Mama, Mama." So I went in there, and Nora just proceeded to lose it. For an entire hour. Seriously, she spent an entire hour screaming and crying, sometimes outright tantruming, kicking and flailing. She wanted me to hold her that whole time and damn it, I did because I had this weird suspicion that Nora was freaking out over me being unavailable most of the weekend. Like she'd reached the end of her rope and she just couldn't handle it anymore, she hated that I wouldn't walk around holding her, she hated it every time I wanted to sit down or lie down, she hated not having me be normal like she wanted me to be, and I feel like maybe she was testing me by being as horrible as she could possibly be to see if I would stick around or not. So I held her but every second I was second-guessing myself, wondering if I was doing the wrong thing by indulging this behavior, teaching her to be an absolute pill. Like maybe I should have put her in her room and told her that I would hold her when she was done crying?

I had this flashback to this one time when I was in the car with my dad and stepmom and my younger sister was about Nora's age, and my dad was going on about how the reason a child cries is not the first thing to attend to. The first thing to do is correct the inappropriate behavior (stop the screaming), the reason doesn't matter, what matters is that the child is screaming, which is inappropriate. Only when the child has calmed down is it then okay to deal with the reason behind the screaming. At the time this struck me as cruel but now I think, well, that sister is now all grown up and is a perfectly lovely person. So maybe he was right -- what if I am doing it the wrong way and Nora is going to turn out to be a giant jerk because I am overly permissive?

20 Months

Milo & Nora are 20 months old and I'm going to dispense with the introductory comments because I just have to write about the crazy thing that happened with Nora tonight. It was so weird. 

So the kids recently got a puzzle (on loan from the twin whisperer) that has fruits: apple, banana, pear, cherries, and grapes. The kids are familiar with a number of different fruits because many of their books introduce pictures of fruits (i.e. "baby colors", "happy baby colors", and "baby words"). Each of those books, by the way, Nora identifies by name. So she knows about bananas from these puzzles and books even though she would scream and arch her back and writhe in agony if you suggested that she actually, you know, eat a banana. (Pureed is okay.) 

So this evening I got a package with some clothes. One of the items was a blue dress with a tag on it. The kids love tags so Nora came up and held the tag in her hand and then said "banana!". And I was all, oh silly Nora, that's not a banana. The tag isn't even yellow. This is frankly very unlike you because you've never before in your life incorrectly called anything a banana, and now you're called this decidedly non banana-like tag a banana? And then I looked at the tag. There were 2 words on the tag: "banana republic". 

!!!

I kid you not. We had not been discussing bananas. I looked at the tag, just those 2 words. No pictures. I looked at the box. No pictures anywhere. It was totally a Little Man Tate kind of moment. It was so strange. The kids' books do have the word "banana" below the picture sometimes, so maybe she recognized the word somehow? Or maybe it was just an incredible, incredible coincidence. Jake and I both witnessed this so I know I'm not crazy.

Phew.  I feel better for getting that out.  I just had to share it, that's how weird it was. Later Jake was holding the Neosporin tube, which we are using for lubing up Nora's hugely scraped knee, and Nora identified the N, the E, the O, and the R from the tube. Jake was about to ask her about the other letters and then Milo came up and grabbed the thing and ran as Nora yelled and gnashed her teeth in mighty agony.

Nora has more or less recovered from her feverish puking illness.  It was rough going for a few days. She whimpered or cried constantly, would not let me put her down, and discussed everything in what Jake calls her late-years Katherine Hepburn voice. Think wobbly and frail. We have done a lot of laundry, and I am tired of being puked on. On the up side, due to this illness 3 out of our 4 sofa cushions ended up in the wash and I've definitely been meaning to wash them, so that's a chore to check off the list!

Check out how fashionable Nora is in her glasses:

Nora is starting to turn a corner with the separation anxiety stuff. I can sometimes leave the house and she'll say "bye bye, Mama" more or less happily without screaming, crying, or clinging to me. This isn't always the case but it is more and more. She's also okay with the twin whisperer leaving. Nora does seem more interested in Milo's whereabouts these days. When I take her on an outing she repeatedly asks where Milo is. When all four of us are out together Nora will keep a running tally on where we all are, marching around pointing at each of us saying "Daddy, Mama, Milo, Nora! Nora, Milo, Nora, Milo!"

The kids now know what it means to pose for a camera which is kind of nice. They will even smile, and when Nora gets her picture taken she'll say "More please? More please?" Here is Nora posing on the chair, and the second photo shows her fake camera smile.

When it is humid Nora's hair springs into curls. Sorry about that, kid. 

Nora still doesn't eat worth crap, and it's gotten worse since the illness. According to our scale she hasn't gained any weight in the last 2 months either, but we still have 4 months before the dreaded check-up so hah! Who cares. Tonight she ate a meatball piece, said she liked it, and then spit it out because she couldn't handle its texture. But the point is that she tried it and that's progress. 

Nora has a favorite shape, which is circle. Her second favorite used to be triangle but these days it is trapezoid. She is okay with squares and rectangles, and will identify them but won't typically ask me to draw them. With Nora it's all circles and trapezoids. We have some sidewalk chalk and after adhering to Nora's frequent shape requests our driveway looks like a mad geometer's. Who knew a kid would have favorites when it comes to shapes.

Milo hasn't done any super freaky things lately, other than avoiding the family illness which I found quite impressive. Nora was busy puking her guts up right and left and Milo learned how to say "Nora threw up! Nora threw up!" Milo was fine. He's still eating things like lentils and rice and pancakes and smoked salmon and bell peppers. He still throws stuff at dinner though, usually while saying "No throwing food!".

Milo still loves balls more than ever. He can now catch a ball, so we can play catch back and forth. I can get him to catch it by saying "one, two, three, catch!" and then throwing the ball. That little extra delay is all he needs to react to catch it. Milo now wants to play catch with Nora, which she will sort of do (although she can't exactly catch a ball, and has no interest in throwing either, but she humors him). When Milo does anything, like catching the ball, stabbing a piece of meatball with his fork, or getting up on the sofa by himself, he triumphantly announces, "I did it!"

Look at that earnestness! The kid is so earnest. He is also sensitive. He will start to cry if I yell at the cat to get off the counter. Recently we went to a party at a bouncy castle place and the kid's dad said hello to Milo, which caused him to burst into tears. So Milo still has some shyness. However, he is very interested in men now, who he calls "guys", and he'll look for the "guy" in every book and magazine we have. The other day I took him to the store and every time Milo saw a man or a woman he'd say "Hi guy! Hi lady!" 

The twin whisperer brought the kids a book by Richard Scarry, called the best little word book ever. I am pretty sure I had this book as a kid. It is very familiar to me and I loved it. Milo also loves this book. It has a house scene, a grocery store scene, a farm scene, a vehicles scene, and so on and so forth with tons of different words to identify. Milo can seriously look at this book for half an hour. He loves Lowly Worm and will find him on every page. He likes to do things like find the grocer on the commerce page and then turn the page and say "Where's grocer? Where'd grocer go?" and then turn back and triumphantly say, "Here he is!"

Here's Milo looking cool in his glasses:

Milo can also smile for the camera but the next two pictures are weird ones because he insisted on sitting on my lap for picture taking time:

Milo has an amazing sense of hearing. He can hear an airplane or a dog barking seconds before I can. He always announces these things. Milo also loves music, especially the really awful kind with little kids singing in high-pitched voices and whatnot. I hate that crap but Milo truly loves it, so we play it. He can sing just about all of the words now to Twinkle Twinkle, Baa baa black sheep, the ABC song, and that song about the duck with the feather on his back.  Speaking of Baa baa black sheep, I didn't want to use the word "slave" in there so I was struggling for another word. I came up with "one for my master, one for the train", which I thought was pretty good because it rhymes with "lane". But Jake insists on singing "one for my master, one for the thane". What is a thane, anyway? It sounds like a made up word. Huh -- I just looked it up, and apparently it is a real word for a man who held land granted by a king. So I suppose thane is pretty appropriate after all. Which is good, because that's what Milo sings.

Milo can slide down the slide all by himself now. He can also go up stairs on his feet, instead of on his hands and knees, as long as he holds onto the railing. He's really turning into a kid. I think that I often see Milo and Nora as younger or more toddler-like than kid-like because they just look a lot younger than their peers. I think this is mostly due to their size and in Milo's case, his general baldness. His hair is definitely growing but it's a very different look from a kid who has a full head of thick hair.

Here is a shot of Milo smiling nicely for the camera. What a cutie! His head has rounded out quite nicely:

It's interesting to me how generally similar Milo and Nora are. I see all of their differences, in eating, sleeping, aggression, shyness, etc but as soon as we get around another kid I see how much more similar they are than different. Both kids are so verbal. They're also developing some sort of creepy twin language. They make up words, repeat them back and forth, and laugh uproariously. It's kind of disconcerting, but at least they're amusing themselves.

Milo and Nora actually interact with each other quite a lot these days, which I love. They fight, of course, but they also pretty much get the concept of taking turns. If I say "it's Milo's turn" Nora immediately gets that and will stop trying to grab the item. She'll wait and then say "Nora's turn!" The most interesting thing is that when I give the object to Nora, she'll then pretty quickly say "Milo's turn!" Each kid takes a "turn" that lasts about 2-3 seconds. They're quite good at passing an object back and forth, though. Tonight Nora passed something to Milo and he said, spontaneously, "thank you Nora!".

Next week Jake is taking Milo to the lake again, and it'll be interesting to see what that separation is like for them this time, 2 months down the road. I think they will ask after each other much more than they did last time. Honestly I'd enjoy having some Milo time to myself, but I don't think Nora could do the trip without me without freaking out, so once again Jake gets Milo and I get Nora. I'll definitely enjoy my one-on-one time with my girl, and will be anxious to give my boy some giant hugs when he gets back.

Jake has slowly crawled his way back from death's door. I feel kind of bad making fun of him since he got so sick in the end. This morning as I put Nora down for her nap, I thought she was quite hot. It seemed like she had a fever. I went to work and Jake gave her medicine when she woke up. However, she didn't want to eat anything for dinner yesterday, and neither kid wanted to eat much at any meal today. Nora had about a third of her normal meal at dinner tonight and I could tell she was sick.

Nora kept walking around for the hour before dinner telling me that her mouth hurt. This is entirely possible since she still only has 4.5 teeth so at any given time she could be going through some serious teething, but I wonder if saying her mouth hurt was really her way of saying that her tummy hurt, or she felt sick or something. About an hour and a half after she went to bed she suddenly woke up and immediately threw up. Poor kid.  

As we were changing the sheets, mattress pad, crib bumpers, and washing the wall Milo cried and cried over the strangeness of it all.  And...I hear her crying again.  Better go.

Jake seems even sicker today. He has no energy and is super weak. I don't understand how the same virus could have affected us so differently -- I might make him go to the doctor tomorrow, that's how sick he is. Maybe he will need some help to get his fluids back up. Our doctor's offices have a special room with an IV and an easy chair for those dehydration situations. I've been in that room many times.

Meanwhile, because Jake was in no shape to leave the house today, I took just Milo to the splash park. Today is a hot day and I knew Milo would like the fountains. So we went and I found it really interesting and kind of strange how...different he is from all of the other kids. Every single other kid there immediately took off running and shrieking through the water. Milo, however, spent a lot of time just assessing everything very seriously. He just stood there, watching all of the fountains and the people, and then he would cautiously go up to a stream of water and gingerly reach out to touch it. Meanwhile big kids and the 1-year old babies alike are busy running circles around him and throwing their heads into the water with abandon. Next to all of the other kids Milo almost seemed, I don't know, like an old person with his calm deliberate assessment of everything. It was almost eerie. 

He did have fun, though, and as we left he said "bye bye splash park" about 30 times in a row.  Milo is still pretty much willing to roll with the punches, which is cool.

Just another cruel 4 a.m. It never changes around here.

The other night I had dinner with a friend who gets up every night with her 7-year old. He has nightmares and night terrors. His older sister is 9. My friend hasn't slept through the night in 9 years.

Milo and Nora are so different. When Nora wakes, she starts crying almost before she is fully awake. It's just her standard mechanism. Wake, cry. Wake, cry. When Milo wakes, he almost never cries unless there's a problem. In fact, I can hear him right now. He has apparently woken up, no doubt thanks to his dramatic and angst-plagued sister, and is quietly humming a little bit to himself.

This is just a blog about how my kids don't sleep. It's an "I never sleep" blog. First it was a "holy crap it's hard to never sleep" blog, and then it became a "I can't believe I'm still not sleeping" blog, and then it morphed into a "it looks like I might start to get some sleep soon" blog, only to quickly devolve back into a "I thought by this point I'd be getting some sleep" blog. Now it has become an "It's been so long since I've slept that I don't even remember what sleep is, in fact if I met sleep on the street I doubt I'd even recognize it and we would probably pass by one another without even stopping or saying hi or chatting about the weather, that's how long it's been" blog.

Fortunately Jake is the one member of the household who hasn't woken tonight. The poor guy is really quite sick and needs his rest.

Hopefully the lesson here will be that a person can survive without any of the major parts of her life completely falling apart even if she never gets enough sleep. 

Man Virus

A little virus seems to have visited our house that caused me a bit of intestinal upset yesterday. Come to think of it, I had a headache for a couple of days too, and felt kind of crummy, but chalked it up to the never-ending sleep deprivation. I thought that was the end of it until...

(Cue ominous music)

It attacked Jake. He was fine this morning but this afternoon he called me at work to inform me of his ailments. He wanted to know if I'd been sick too, because I think he was on the brink of throwing everything out of the fridge on suspicion of food poisoning. I confirmed that I'd had the same symptoms the day before. I hung up the phone and thought that was the end of it. But no! When I got home poor Jake was really, really sick. What had been a minor inconvenience for me was a major illness for him. At some point he even mentioned the possibility of dying. I am not making this up. I told him to take a nap and I would watch the kids for the rest of the afternoon, which I did. Later he got up and drank some vegetable broth and seemed to feel a little better.

Tonight after the kids were asleep I sat down at my computer, in my office. Jake sought me out, sprawled out on the futon, and proceeded to moan, grunt, and sigh in agony. I realized the error of my ways. I figured Jake had the same thing I had, a little virus. But no, I underestimated the gravity of the situation -- Jake has a MAN virus:

It's Sad Because It's True

Scene: Amy drags herself out of bed early, even though it was Jake's morning to get up with the kids, because said kids are screaming and yelling nonstop, and it is impossible to sleep through that shit. Amy walks downstairs where the kids are going at each other nonstop, fighting like a couple of savages.

Amy: Dealing with these kids is like reining in a couple of wild animals. Seriously, I'm worried that we're going to end up with a couple of uncontrolled, spoiled jerks here if we're not careful.

Jake: It's like Lord of the Flies here. And I'm Piggy. And they're going to drop a rock on my head.

It Doesn't Matter Anymore

Dooce has an incredible series of posts up about her natural labor and childbirth with her second daughter. She writes a good story and this story is amazing indeed. It makes me wonder when I am ever going to get over my non-birth of a birth with the twins, and how much ambivalence and sadness I still feel about it. I spent most of my pregnancy seriously preparing for a natural birth only to get sidelined at the end by a stubbornly breech Milo. It felt deeply wrong to go into the hospital without a single labor pain and get gutted like a fish so quickly that I was suddenly a mother before I even knew what happened. I am grateful for the c-section because of the outcome. I am grateful that Nora & Milo were born healthy and alive. Of course I am grateful for that, of course. But I am also sad about the way it happened, even as I recognize how lucky we all were that everything turned out fine.

It gets better and better as the kids get older and I no longer have to rely on my body to do stuff. My body is now irrelevant, and my crappy pregnancy and my crappy milk production skills don't matter anymore. I can use my brain now to parent, and slowly forget how my body kept letting us all down. 

Today was a nice day. After the kids went down for their morning nap I walked to work, and finished the methods section of a paper I'm writing. On to results on Thursday.  This is the first of my two "signature pieces" for tenure.  I have to write those papers this year and get them accepted. Before that happens, I won't be ready to go up for tenure.  (So it might take a while). I came home early, getting home at around 4. It was hot today, finally, and we decided to turn on a mini sprinkler and let the kids play with the water. Milo and Nora had a blast playing with the water. Milo especially loved it, putting his face in the water, trying to drink it, getting his belly wet, and then shivering and shivering but not wanting to come away from the sprinkler. I got a towel and wrapped him up and held him, and the kid was icy!

Then we noticed that our neighbors with a toddler close to M & N's age have now returned from their year in Japan! They were in the park with their daughter, so Nora and I walked over to talk to them and catch up. We all wandered back to our house and their daughter took off her clothes and ran through the sprinkler with Nora and Milo while we chatted about Japan and tenure stuff (they are also professors). Then another neighbor I know came by with her 2 kids, and they started running through the sprinkler as we all sat around and talked. The next thing I knew it was dinner time and we had magically avoided the typical late afternoon crankiness that often plagues our house. Instead the kids had had a great time running around outside with their friends and I thought once again how terrific this neighborhood is.

Sunday Afternoon at the Arboretum

Picky Eaters

Yesterday I made some grilled vegetables with korma sauce, and rice, and Milo lapped it up. The kid ate potatoes, tomatoes, grilled peppers, onions, zucchini, and asked for more. There is something that is just so satisfying about being able to feed Milo the same food that we eat! It's like, I don't know, I only have to make one dinner instead of two!

Except, of course, for Nora.

So I'm kind of wondering about Nora and her refusal (absolute) to try any food that is not crackers or toast or cheese. I mean, seriously. She won't try anything. In fact she has started refusing to eat foods that she used to eat, like pancakes and meatballs. She won't eat any fruit. She won't eat any vegetables. She won't eat pasta. She won't eat rice. She won't eat mashed potatoes. She won't even eat, my God, ice cream, cake, or brownies. She won't even try it. Honestly, here is the non-baby food that Nora will eat: Toast (we can put peanut butter, honey, and cream cheese on it), french toast, cheese, and crackers. That's it. 4 things.

A person cannot live off of 4 things, especially as those things don't actually contain any fruits or vegetables, so we're still giving her pureed baby food. But I'm starting to wonder how long this is going to last. Today the twin whisperer said that she could imagine us sending Nora off to kindergarten with her pureed lunch. Is it going to come to that? The kid is remarkably stubborn. Every single meal, I offer stuff, she says no and turns her head so far away from the offending food that she looks like one of those owls who can rotate its head 360 degrees, and I say "okay" and drop it. I don't push the issue or try to make her eat stuff. I'm just wondering...how do you get a kid to try things? Is she doomed to a toast and cheese diet for the foreseeable future?

Hiding

The kids are like our cats -- they think that if they can't see us, then we can't see them. So they try to "hide" behind the flap on the front of the sofa. It reminds me of when our cat Sam will hide her massive bulk behind a tiny wrinkle in a rug. 

It's a Milostone!

I'm so proud. Today, for the first time ever, Milo at a full dinner of actual people food and no baby food at all.  He ate almost an entire meatball, 1/3 of a banana nut muffin, corn on the cob (well, sliced off the cobb by me), grilled red peppers with bits of quinoa stuck to them (and he asked for more and more red peppers and ate them until we ran out), 1/2 of a banana (off a fork), and a small bowl of ice cream.  Hooray!

(Out of all of that stuff, the only thing Nora would try was muffin, and she did eat 3 or 4 bites of muffin).

Even if I can just downsize to buying baby food for only 1 baby instead of 2, it'll be a nice change.  Milo is now to the point where he takes an interest in what we eat, hence the red peppers with quinoa and the corn on the cob, which is awesome. After dinner the kids ran around playing peek-a-boo with each other (Nora calls it "peek to you") and didn't even need us to play with them. Awesome. 

Manners

This evening I handed a piece of cheese to Milo and out of nowhere he said "Thank you, Mama!" Awwww!

Guy and Glasses

This morning we had the chimney people come to do some work, and at one point they had to get into our attic. So this guy came into the living room and Milo started crying a little bit. As I came down the stairs he ran up to me, pointed at the chimney dude, and said "Guy!" I didn't even know he knew that word, although lately Nora has been referring to a tiny police officer figurine as a "guy".

Both Milo and Nora have a weird fixation on glasses. They love glasses and want to point it out when anybody is wearing glasses. When the twin whisperer has her reading glasses on the top of her head, they'll say "Glasses on? Glasses on?" until she puts them on her face. When it's time to draw, Nora will ask me to draw a circle and then half the time she'll then say "Eyes and nose? Eyes and nose?" As soon as I make the circle into a face both kids will demand that I draw glasses. Then they are happy as a clam to look at the face with glasses.

Comparison

Today I was cleaning off my desk and came across doctor's records from my babyhood. The last one I have access to is at 18 months when I was 18 lbs 5 oz, and 31.5". At 18 months Nora was 18 lbs 11 oz and 30.5". So she weighed more than I did, and I was also skinnier when you look at the height to weight ratio. But I don't think anybody was worried about me back then, so it seems like Nora is just expressing her genetics.

Yawn

Yesterday I took some time off work and Jake and I took the kids to the home improvement store after lunch. We had a 10% off coupon that we needed to use by the end of the weekend so we went ahead and bought all of our tile for the basement bathroom while both kids sat in the shopping carts and plaintively asked "Down please? Down please?" about 100 times a row. Home improvement stores aren't great places for running around -- they're full of hammers and saws and giant forklifts and things.

Today we decided to go to the zoo after lunch. I figured it would be a good day because it was cold and cloudy. (Seriously, like 65 degrees out. This has been the coldest summer ever!) But the zoo was so packed that we couldn't even get a parking spot and had to bail. Apparently in the recession the zoo's attendance has doubled. So instead we went to the arboretum, which was quite empty, and the kids had a blast running through prairie fields and gardens. They smelled flowers, watched some planes going by, ran on the grass, and got attacked by mosquitoes. 

I think Milo and I might be fighting off a cold or something. I wake up and feel like I have chronic fatigue syndrome, or maybe acute fatigue syndrome, because I'm just so tired and only want to sleep all the time. I've felt that way for about 2 years now, though, so maybe it's not a cold. Maybe it's just parenthood. Anyway, Milo's been feeling the same way and has been sleeping a ton over the past 2 days. 

Tonight at dinner Milo ate some sushi (the rice part). Both kids ate french fries which I actually deep fried in order to pack in the calories, and then pureed turkey with rice, and sweet potatoes. Nora's favorite thing right now is pureed sweet potatoes, which she will ask for by name incessantly. Then Milo was eating some left over toast with peanut butter from lunch, and Nora asked for some, so I gave her a piece. But it was stale and she gagged on it, and then she threw up her ENTIRE dinner. And then wouldn't eat or drink a thing.

I HATE sending her to bed on an empty stomach. Hate it. I went to the local frozen custard place and got a banana milkshake, hoping she might drink some and banking on the likelihood that it would be packed with calories and fat. Nora had a little, but not enough to make up for dinner. And so it goes. On the bright side she hasn't done any night vomiting since we resumed the "stay upright for at least half an hour after eating or drinking" rule. 

Today we've been dreaming about our future kitchen remodel that is on our "someday when Amy gets tenure and Jake graduates and gets a job" list (also inludes: iPhone, back patio remodel/landscaping, new sofas). My dream remodel includes getting rid of the chimney that runs through our kitchen, eliminating the bar, and turning it into an island. But even just getting rid of the yellow linoleum and tiles would be a nice improvement. The more we put into this house, the less I see us ever leaving. It is an imperfect house but really, what is perfect anyway?  Its location is 100% perfect, and that's a thing you can't improve in a remodel.

Jake taught Milo to say awesome. Now the kids have this conversation:

Nora: Totally radical!

Milo: Awesome.

Done

Uploaded and submitted this morning!

-- Project description, 15 pages
-- Project summary, 1 page
-- Project references, 5 pages
-- Cover sheets and certifications, 5 pages
-- PI biosketch, 2 pages
-- PI current and pending support
-- Project budget (big, but not as big as I originally wanted it to be)
-- Project budget justification
-- Department chair's letter of support
-- School district's letter of support
-- External evaluator's letter of support
-- 5 advisory panel members letters of support

All in all, 50 pages, all done and accounted for. I have no intentions of submitting any more grants in the next couple of years, other than a re-tooled version of this grant next year if I don't get it the first time around. Submitting NSF grants is a bit of a pain and I'm glad to put it behind me for a little while!

Over the last 5 years I have submitted 8 national grants (NSF or IES), one independent consortium grant, and 2 small internal grants. Out of those 11 grants 6 have been funded, 2 are pending (don't know yet), and 3 have been rejected (actually it was the same grant 3 times in a row, and then we finally gave up). Preparing national grant proposals is a lot of work, work that is time down the drain if it doesn't get funded, but having grants get funded is really nice! It definitely changes the tenor of my work in positive ways. Fingers crossed for this one: I'll probably know by Jan or Feb.

Now onto AERA proposal, signature paper #1, signature paper #2, and collaborative paper! I hope to get 2 of those 4 tasks done by the end of the summer, in between all of my committee meetings, student advising meetings, thesis defenses, etc. going on in the next couple of months.