Christmas Day

As I mentioned at the end of our Christmas letter we stayed home for the holidays for the first time ever this year. Luckily Steph's sister Meg was able to come down from Sacramento for the day (and the night before), so we did have some family around. Still, it was a pretty low-key Christmas. Partly because Evan didn't have any idea what was going on and partly because we wanted to stick to his normal nap schedule we didn't even start opening presents until around lunchtime -- I'm pretty sure that never would have happened in my house growing up!

Evan is not a baby in need of very much, so it was a bit of a challenge coming up with gift ideas to recommend to Santa. I don't remember if we mentioned it or not, but he (Santa) evidently knew that his (Evan's) shoe closet was a little sparse so he (Santa) got him (Evan) a stylish new pair of shoes from REI. Here he (Evan, not Santa) is modeling them:

As you can see in that picture and the next one Evan, in true baby style, was more impressed with the packaging (in this case, his stocking) than with the actual gift. At least Meg liked what Santa got her.

Here he and I are on the couch after all the presents have been opened (it couldn't have taken more than 15 minutes... like I said, low-key). Evan is playing with his new Fill & Spill Fishbowl, which I think is his favorite acquisition from the holiday:

Loopy Bear

My mom made Evan a teddy bear that we call Loopy Bear (you'll see why in the video) which he is quite fond of. He really likes their interactive play sessions, which mostly entail him shrieking at the bear and yanking on its scarf in delight. This video shows what I mean:

Those sounds in the background are the sounds my cell phone makes when I play with the settings of its video camera feature. Evan seemed quite impressed by them. I now often find myself adjusting the zoom and brightness of the camera for no apparent reason.

Christmas Letter

Because we've been maintaining this blog we didn't really feel the need (or obligation?) to write a Christmas letter this year - instead we just sent a photo card. I figured I'd go ahead and write a quick "year in review" kind of post for anyone who hasn't been reading along for the last 6 months, and that will serve as our letter to the masses. So, here we go...

We started 2007 with Steph 3 months pregnant, and each of our parents moving out of town as fast and as far as they could. Steph's parents moved to San Diego at the end of last year (more on that below), and in January my parents packed most of their house into a self-storage unit and moved to New York City. My dad started his new job as the V.P. of Finance and Administration at The City College of New York in February, so they'll be Manhattanites for the next several years, probably until he retires. For the spring semester they lived in a studio apartment on campus, but in May they bought a co-op in Washington Heights (at the far north end of the island). They've also kept their house in Hayward (renting it to a small family), with the plan being to return to California when they retire. In the meantime they're enjoying being New Yorkers.

When we moved into our house in the summer of last year we chose to make the family room, which the previous owners added on, into our master bedroom, and the previous master bedroom into Steph's studio. Since the family room also had an attached bathroom and it was bigger than a bread box this worked out pretty well. There were two things our new bedroom did not have, though: 1) any significant closet space (since it wasn't built to be a bedroom); and 2) a door. We struggled for nearly a year to come up with an idea for how to enclose the room and add closets without making it into a monstrous job and without losing some of the features of the existing room that we were very happy with, like the skylights and the extra kitchen storage space it provided. In April we finally came up with a plan to convert the family room to a fully-functioning bedroom, and hired a contractor to do the work. After a few weeks his part of the job was done (we painted and installed new cabinets in the kitchen extension area ourselves, so parts of that project are still ongoing), and we had ourselves a honest-to-goodness master bedroom.

Part of the reason we wanted to finish remodeling our house's new addition as quickly as possible is that we considered it to be part of our preparations for our family's new addition. Evan James Metz arrived right on schedule on June 16th, and it goes without saying that our lives have not been the same since. Of course you already know about that, seeing as how you're reading this blog.

Along with a new baby came a flood of visitors: my parents, Steph's parents, Steph's sisters Meg (who's close enough to visit often), Melissa, and Kim, and that's just the immediate family.

Both of my sisters got engaged, and they're both getting married in 2008. My youngest sister, Hilary, is marrying Brian Palmeiro (they actually got engaged last year I think, but for some reason it feels like it was just early this year to me) in Puerto Rico in February. The middle sister, Hallie, is marrying Mark Connell at Chouinard Winery in Castro Valley, CA in September. I tried to convince her that they should tie the knot on the 14th (Steph's and my anniversary) instead of the 13th to maintain symmetry (Hallie and I have the same birthday, only 2 years apart), but she wouldn't go for it.

In September we spent a long weekend in Palm Springs for the last Goetsch family gathering before Jim & Sheilagh retired and sailed away into the sunset. This was also Evan's first chance to meet his cousins Delaney, Riley, and Paige, which he greatly enjoyed.

Speaking of Jim & Sheilagh retiring, for those who don't know, Steph's parents retired to a 42' sailboat! They sold their house in Auburn and bought a condo in San Diego last year, and at the end of October they headed out for points south as part of the Baja Ha-Ha, a flotilla of like-minded cruisers who sail from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas. The plan is to sail around the tropics for the foreseeable future (they're just north of Puerto Vallarta as of this writing), so we're not sure when we'll see them again, at least in person. We talk with them via video phone through Skype every few weeks, and they're maintaining their own blog to keep all their family and friends apprised of their adventures. They're both pretty good writers (anyone on the Goetsch Christmas card list will undoubtedly remember the inspired canine-penned letter of '02), and they're having some intriguing experiences, so if you're at all interested I highly recommend checking out their blog.

For Thanksgiving we made our annual trek eastward, although this year we were headed to Columbus, OH instead of Detroit, MI. We stayed there for 3 days with all the extended family on my dad's side, and then drove with my parents to New York to stay with them for another week.

And now, for the first time since Steph and I met... heck, for the first time since either of us called home someplace other than where our parents lived... we're spending the holidays at home with our little family. It's been quite a year.

Pampers Stages Review

A month or two ago I was contacted by an online marketing company that works with Pampers to see if I'd be interested in reviewing some of their diapers. Evidently someone thinks I have some sway as a taste-maker in the dealing-with-poop crowd... I'm not sure where they got that idea. Participating in this project involved getting a free package of diapers and wipes, though, which was enough for me to sign up. Besides, they're the same diapers we would be using anyway, so what did we have to lose?

When our free diapers arrived I was a little surprised to find they were Pampers Baby Dry, not Cruisers -- the review program was focused on the Pampers Stages product line, and I don't think Baby Dry diapers are technically in that group. Besides the cartoon characters on the outside I can't really tell the different models apart, though, so pretty much all of my review applies to either.

First, the good. They work... all the time. We went through the whole jumbo pack without a single leak, which is pretty normal for us for the last several months. And they seem very comfy. I haven't worn them myself, but they look like they fit well and we've never had any chafing problems or anything like that. When he wears them Evan stays dry and happy... I don't know how much more I can say.

Now, the bad. Really, there isn't any bad, we'll just say the less than good. As I mentioned before, the only difference we could discern between the two diaper models is the patterns on the outside. The reason this is remarkable is because the Baby Dry diapers have little yellow spots in the design, and one of those spots always falls along the leg gathers where it looks like poop that has started to escape. It's just annoying that every time you change the diaper you think you're on the verge of an accident. Also, the wipes don't feel very substantial, and we often had to use three or four of them in a single change if things got at all messy (which things are want to do when you're dealing with diapers). Maybe a super soft wipe is important for some babies, but Evan has a pretty durable bottom so we like something with a little more heft and commensurate cleaning power.

My final grade for Pampers Stages? I'll give Pampers Baby Dry an "A", and Pampers Cruisers an "A+". As I've said before, you can't go wrong with Pampers.

Future Farmers of America

Evan really likes animal sounds, particularly frogs, cows, and chickens. Or at least, he likes it when people imitate these sounds -- I don't believe he has heard an actual frog, cow, or chicken yet. Here he is reacting to Steph making chicken sounds:

As soon as he hears the real thing I'll report back.

Baby Heffner

Sometimes either before or after the morning dog walk Evan likes to kick back and relax a bit:

As you can see, Evan is a big fan of the idea of the leisure suit, if not the actual form of one.

Solid Food

We started Evan on "solid" food today -- rice cereal mixed with breast milk at first, and later with mushed up carrots added in as well. It is a rather drastic understatement to say that he liked it. Most of these mealtimes his countenance alternates between hungry baby bird intensity:

and "Where have you guys been keeping this stuff all my life?" ecstasy:

This video shows what I'm talking about, at least his baby bird impression:

We Are Family

Since we took a new family portrait for our Christmas cards, I thought it might be interesting to compile all the pictures we've used (or in some cases, could have used) for the main picture on our website.

First, here's a picture of Steph and I from 2000. Someone (I think her sister Melissa) commented that these looked like engagement photos, although we'd been dating less than a year at the time... maybe she knew something:

This was the first picture we used on the front page of our website. I think Peekay was only a couple of months old at the time:

This was our family portrait on the website until today when I finally replaced it with a picture of the whole family. We're sailing in San Diego Bay on Steph's parents' boat last Christmas:

This is obviously the picture of us about to leave the hospital with our brand new bundle of joy. I considered making this the website image, but none of us find it phenomenally flattering, and I love the picture of us on the boat so I just stuck with it for a while longer:


This is the picture we took with my parents on one of their visits with the express purpose of replacing the website family portrait. I don't know how many times we had people over to the house or brought the camera with us places thinking "This will be the time we ask someone to take a nice picture of our little family" and then forgot about it. Then we finally remembered at a restaurant before taking my parents to the airport, and I never got around to actually putting it on the website:

And finally, here's the picture we included in our Christmas card, which is the new public face of the Metzes:

I think it's the best one yet.

Christmas Flip Book

For our Christmas gifts to our immediate family this year we had flip books made of a short video of Evan and Peekay hanging out together. You may not get to see the actual flip book, but I can show you the video it was based on:

In case you're interested, the music in the background is a version of "O Holy Night" that appeared on the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Christmas episode, performed by a small brass band from New Orleans. The music doesn't really go with the video very well, but as soon as I heard it this particular rendition became my favorite holiday song. It was also the only Christmas song I had on my computer.

Tower of Babel

I'm sure you all remember those stackable ring tower baby toys, right? Evan got one as a hand-me-down from a friend of a friend, and it usually works to keep him occupied for at least a few minutes at a time. He doesn't necessarily play with it exactly the way it was intended to be played with, though. Oh sure, he can take the rings off the tower, and sometimes he can put them back on, but that's so conventional. What he really likes to do is take a couple of rings and smack them against each other:

Obviously the dog it not sure what to make of this behavior, but I'm pretty sure she understands the spirit of whacking things around just for the fun of it.

Also, notice how well Evan is sitting up on his own, and holding stuff in his hands. In just the last few weeks he's made significant progress in both of these areas.

All Good Things...

Even though Evan's sleeping, or more accurately his lack thereof, drove us nuts during our whole trip back East, we still had a pretty great time. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, though, so Saturday morning we packed up our things (including a few more than we started our trip with, of course) and headed back to California. My mom especially seemed sad at our departure (I think she really likes being a Grandma), so I took one last photo with my cell phone to send to her:

We had a rather taxing trip home -- as if a planned 2 hour layover wasn't bad enough, we ended up being stuck in Chicago for 6 hours due to the weather, the last hour and a half of that sitting on the plane waiting to be cleared for departure. At least the flight was relatively empty, so we were able to bring along Evan's car seat and have a whole row to ourselves. And maybe as a bit of compensation for being kind of a pill during much of the trip, Evan was pretty much perfect during the journey home. He even slept the whole flight from Chicago to Oakland!

Polar Bear in a Snow Storm

I took this picture with my cell phone when Evan was sitting against the pillows on my parent's guest bed:

Given the amazing lack of contrast I was surprised with how not-awful it looks when viewed on a screen bigger than 2".

Rockefeller Center

After our tour of Radio City Music Hall we walked around the block to Rockefeller Center to catch the subway home, but we figured we might as well stop and see the big Christmas tree while we were there. Here are Steph, Hilary, Evan (or at least his stroller), and my mom in front of the tree:

We took this picture a little farther from the tree than most people so we wouldn't have to deal with those same people walking through our photo. When we got up closer, though, Evan seemed to be pretty impressed by all the twinkling lights:

Backstage Tour

Kim's boyfriend Bill is a theater stagehand in New York. He mostly works on Broadway shows, plus the occasional concert or special event, and for the last couple of years he has worked on the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall over the holidays. During its run between early November and New Years this show maintains a pretty insane schedule, with six or more performances a day at times. When you work the same show over and over again, day after day, eventually you get pretty sick of it. Bill says this happens on every job, but it's worse than normal on the Christmas Spectacular because there are so many shows in a relatively short amount of time. To break up the hectic monotony, if there is such a thing (and to show off a bit), he's always eager to give special all-access backstage tours of the theater between performances, and we were more than willing to take him up on his offer. You can get tickets for a guided tour of Radio City, and they probably tell you more historical tidbits and such, but you won't get to see nearly as much cool stuff. Ha ha!

Bill works on the fly floor, which in the case of the Radio City Music Hall is essentially a huge catwalk in the wings a couple of stories above the stage floor. From there they operate all the ropes that bring the different pieces of scenery on and off the stage for the various acts of the show, as well as work some of the lighting. Here are Steph, Bill, and Evan standing in front of a few of those ropes:

I'm going to guess there was at least 5 if not 10 times as much rigging in total as you can see in this picture... hundreds of lines in all, each of them attached to a piece of scenery on one end and a counterweight (a really big counterweight in some cases) on the other.

As a quick aside, you can see in the picture that Bill was carrying Evan. I don't mean that Bill was carrying Evan when that picture was taken, I mean that Bill was carrying Evan during the entire 1-hour tour. We brought the BabyBjörn with us since the stroller had to be stashed just inside the stage door - too bulky to be easily maneuvered around back stage, and too many stairs. After walking around wearing an empty baby carrier for the first few minutes of the tour and feeling like an idiot doing it (trust me, wearing an empty BabyBjörn does not make you look like Super Dad - "Now where did I put my baby, again?") I decided to take it off and stow it in the stroller when we walked by its parking spot. It was quite evident that I wouldn't be needing it, anway. We went over to Kim & Bill's apartment for dinner Tuesday night, and by the time Bill got home from work Evan was well into the meltdown phase of the evening. When they were out visiting us a few months ago you could walk him around when he got fussy and he would calm down. Those halcyon days are long gone now, but that didn't stop Bill from trying. Unfortunately all he got for his trouble was a loudly crying baby. Anyway, Bill was... I think "in need" is overstating the situation, but we'll say "in want"... of some non-crying time with Evan, and it still being daytime Evan was more than happy to oblige.

All right, back to the tour. Another thing we saw that's well off the path of the public tour was where the camels and sheep that are part of the show live. There are a bunch of animal "actors" that are part of the nativity scene who live in one of the basements of Radio City during the run of the show (they live on a farm somewhere upstate the rest of the year), including several sheep, a donkey, and two camels! My picture of the camels didn't come out too well, but this shot of the sheep is pretty good, and very representative of how they live (this isn't the animal Hilton we're talking about):

One last neat thing we got to see, which isn't even a part of Bill's normal backstage tour (they're technically not "backstage"), was the old school spotlights they use. We got a bit lost rambling around the front of the theater since Bill doesn't normally go there, but luckily we ran into a friend of his who works the spotlights and was kind enough to give us a demonstration. They were made back in the 30's, and they're still pretty much the same now as the were 80 years ago - they have to make their own parts for them when they break! Here is Hilary being shown one of the color filters they use:

At this point it was getting pretty close to when the crew has to start getting ready for the next show - some of the early arrivers were already starting to filter into the theater and take their seats - so we had to hustle backstage again and end our tour. We had a great time, though - if you happen to know a stage hand at Radio City Music Hall I highly recommend it!

The Last Auntie

As I've mentioned before, by now Evan had met almost all of his aunts and uncles except one pair, my youngest sister Hilary and her fiancé Brian. When we arrived back at my parents' co-op on Wednesday evening after our day's adventures we were finally able to make the circle complete. Here are the happy couple with our bemused little guy:

Unfortunately Brian could only stay for the night before taking the train back to Philadelphia (stupid work) but Hilary was able to hang around in New York for the next two days (you'll see her popping in and out of the next few posts). And we'll get to see the whole family again in February at Hil and Brian's wedding in Puerto Rico! We're already getting excited about that trip.

Oh, and my sister does not normally have a blinding white spot on her neck. I don't know what the heck reflected the camera flash so completely, but someday I'll get around to Photoshopping that out.

Art School Confidential

Our friend Mary just started working on her M.F.A. at Columbia this fall, so on Wednesday we met her at her studio to catch up and get some lunch together. Mary had been living in Seattle before moving to New York, and we hadn't seen her in a while (I did some searching in my Palm and I think it's been 4 years! Can that really be right?), so we were both pretty excited. As it turns out neither Steph or I were the most excited members of the family, though.

Evan definitely made a new friend during this visit. Right from the get go he and Mary hit it off. Here they are sharing a moment:

Evan really had a good time playing with Mary's hair while she was holding him (fortunately he never found her earrings), and maybe that was what charged him up. Or maybe there were some funky chemicals in the air (art studios are usually full of interesting chemicals, after all). Whatever it was, while we were looking at some of the studios of Mary's fellow students Evan went into extended supersqueak mode:

This is just a short snippet -- I swear he was doing this for at least 5 minutes! We're going to assume that this is a good thing.

American Museum of Natural History

Our first day in New York (Sunday) we spent recovering from the drive of the day and night (and a bit of the next morning) before, and then having dinner with Steph's sister Kim. On Monday Steph and I left Evan with my mom and went to the MoMA for the afternoon. That meant that after two days in New York, Evan had not seen much more of the city than the front of my parent's co-op.

That obviously had to change, and on Tuesday it did. Part of the reason we wanted to come to New York when we did was that the American Museum of Natural History was featuring an exhibit called Mythic Creatures that Steph read about in the New Yorker several months ago. The exhibition focuses on how the stories behind creatures of legend (dragons and mermaids, for example) arise in various cultures, often encouraged by misinterpretation of evidence from the natural world. This is a topic Steph has been very interested in for a long time, and it dovetails rather nicely with some of her work, so this exhibit was one of our "must sees" on this trip.

So late Tuesday morning (we didn't get much done before lunch this entire trip, primarily due to sleep deprivation) we bundled the boy up and headed out for his first day on the town in New York. Here we are during Evan's first ever subway ride:

This wasn't really his first subway ride, seeing as how he's been on BART back home a couple of times, but BART is not the New York MTA! The hard plastic seats, utterly unintelligible station announcements, and perpetually dirty track beds lend The Subway some type of gravitas that the BART system just can't muster. Unfortunately he didn't get to see his first subway rat on this trip (the final score of our traditional "Find the Rat" game this year was 0-0, in fact), but there's always next year.

As it turns out, the Mythic Creatures exhibition was a little disappointing, although still interesting. What we all liked the most was the Butterfly Conservatory. Every year the museum cordons off one small wing and re-creates a tropical forest environment filled with butterflies that you can walk through. Check out the huge pink and black butterfly in the foreground of this picture:

That butterfly seemed to like to sit on his leaf and slowly flex his wings, but a lot of the other ones were more mobile, fluttering around the room and alighting wherever they chose. Steph, in fact, made a new friend while we were there:

After a few minutes we had to have one of the staff escort this butterfly to a more suitable perch (they prefer you not touch the butterflies yourself) so we could leave. We tried moving slowly towards the door, but some insects just can't take a hint.

It was hard to tell how much Evan was taking in, but at one point when a big blue butterfly took off from a leaf in front of us he really noticed it (his head whipped right around) and tracked it through its zigzags around the room. He followed it for maybe 10 seconds until it went over my head and disappeared in the foliage behind me (I was too busy watching him to track the butterfly as well). I don't know if he liked it quite as much as the adults, but I think he had a pretty good time.

A Little More Stage Debut

I just got these pictures from my aunt and uncle that I felt had to be added to the Stage Debut entry:

That's my cousin Dan with his niece Lauren (and Steph with Evan, obviously) before the big show. Awfully cute....

This one shows Steph and I getting Evan into costume:

Isn't he a little young to already have the "My parents are such dorks" face down?

Stage Debut

Part of the Metz family Thanksgiving tradition is for the kids to put on a play (at least some years that's part of the tradition -- these plays don't happen every year). It turns out 2007 was an on year, and the play was a stage adaptation of Skippyjon Jones, a book several of the little cousins read repeatedly. I'd give you a quick synopsis of the story, but I clearly missed some key plot elements during the performance -- I don't have the foggiest idea where all the Mexican imagery and language came from. You'd think that with a lead character named Skippyjon Jones there would be pirates involved, not banditos.

Banditos it was, though, along with chihuahuas and jalapeños. Evan's role was that of the Chili Pepper, which is one of the more important vegetable roles in the play. Here he is vamping for the cameras in his costume before the curtain goes up:

He looks a bit worried there, possibly because he'd seen the script. This picture shows Evan's big scene, in which he has to lie on the ground next to the other flora (his cousin Lauren, the pea pod) and not get trampled. He didn't have any lines, so he had to do all of his acting using just his hands. It was a very challenging role for such a young performer, but I think he did quite well:

I don't remember exactly how the plot played out, but the conclusion of this scene involved all the non-vegetable characters hopping like Mexican jumping beans around the vegetable characters, who stay rooted to the floor paralyzed with fear. Evan and Lauren played their roles to perfection, but the tension was a little too much for some of the adults, so Steph and my cousin Amy swooped to the vegetables' rescue.

Here he is backstage with his Grandma after the show, unwinding after a taxing and harrowing performance:

Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving visiting with my dad's side of the family, as always. This year we went to Columbus, OH instead of Detroit, though -- just like the rest of humanity, my family has evacuated Detroit.

We were faced with a dilemma when planning for our trip back east -- what was going to pass for warm clothes for Evan when we went outside? We live in California, and it was in the 70's the week before Thanksgiving... we weren't prepared for potentially snowy weather, and our little guy would be at risk for freezing his tiny buns off. Fortunately, as has happened before with pretty much all of our baby clothing issues, a friend came to the rescue and let us borrow a blue bear suit (similar to his Halloween costume, only bigger and warmer). Here he is in his cold weather gear with my mom, getting ready to brave a chilly Columbus afternoon walk:

Our other main concerns heading into the trip were how Evan's new sleep schedule was going to be affected and how he was going to deal with the longer flights, especially since a few days before we left he started to cut his first tooth (at only 5 months old - we weren't supposed to have to deal with this for another few months!). Just like with our 1-hour flights to and from Palm Springs a few months ago, Evan did pretty well on the plane - a little fussier than last time, but we'll chalk that up to teething. Sleeping was a different story. For a variety of reasons (the tooth not being the biggest, although not the smallest either) Evan's sleep habits were just plain awful. Even worse than the beginning our our sleep training a week or two ago. At least we had family around to help.

I don't want to dwell on the negative, though, because overall we had a wonderful time. We did all the normal Thanksgiving things: ate lots of good food, played stupid games (including Wii Sports), didn't leave the house for three days, and hung out with family. Maybe most important, Evan finally got to meet an aunt (and almost-uncle) on the Metz side! Here's Steph and Evan with my sister Hallie and my cousin Kim:

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures with almost-uncle Mark that didn't involve a bunch of us playing Wii Tennis (which really don't do the experience justice, so I'm not going to include them) but he did get to meet him, too. That just leaves my sister Hilary and her fiancé Brian, who we'll see next week in New York, to round out Evan's Auntie and Uncle Tour 2007.

Actually, I didn't get pictures of a whole lot -- I guess I was expecting other people to use their cameras, but I haven't seen all of their pictures yet. I did get this shot of Hallie feeding my brand new cousin Lauren (our hosts', my cousins Kelly & Josh, 2-month old daughter), though:

Just look at Hallie multitask! She's not even a mom yet, although she is a doctor... maybe they teach multitasking in med school.

Exersaucing

Part of Evan's evolving relationship with the world involves using his hands with some actual intent. He's not quite playing the piano yet, but he is really starting to enjoy his Exersaucer, and whereas he used to just stand there and look mystified by the array of options before him he now plays with the different toys the way they're supposed to be played with:

See the orange thing Evan's got in his left hand? That's a rattle filled with little plastic balls on the end of a flexible stick. You're supposed to grab it and shake it around, and chew on it, and maybe shove it into your eye socket every once in a while -- Evan does all of that! And see the two people with crowns on a yellow pedestal just in front of Evan's right hand? That's a king and queen standing on top of a music box. You're supposed to beat the snot out of them until they play music, and then whack them a few more times for good measure -- Evan does that too!

Bedtime

Putting Evan to bed can be a real pain in the butt sometimes, because he'd rather stay up and hang out. He often really turns on the cute at bed time in an attempt to get you to stay in there with him a little longer:

This picture is unfortunately too dark to be any good, but it does illustrate the problem:

How is one supposed to just walk away from that face? We haven't figured it out yet....

Dan's Birthday

We went to our friend Dan's 35th birthday party this weekend. The weather was pretty nice so everyone gathered at the park across the street from their house, but it was still a little bit chilly (and windy) for Evan. We forgot to bring one of his warm hats, but fortunately his jacket had a hood. I tried convincing him later that this was his "sleepin' hood", but my ploy didn't work:

Evan started getting fussy when his nap time rolled around (part of being on a schedule is having a set nap time), so we put him in his car seat to get ready to leave. We'd only been there an hour, though, so we were dragging our feet a bit in our preparations. It turns out we should have gotten ready to go sooner -- as soon as we put Evan in his car seat he became quite cordial again, so we got to stay another hour.

I'm not sure who had more fun during that hour, us or Evan. He was smiling and making sounds pretty much the whole time, and he proved to be quite a hit with all the little girls that were there. I don't know what it was exactly, but they all wanted to crawl into his car seat with him:

Not only is Evan's cuteness irresistible to adults - apparently his fellow infants and toddlers are also powerless against his magnetism!

E.A.S.Y.

I know, this isn't a very good picture. You can hardly even tell that it's Steph sleeping on the floor of Evan's room. Posting it is really just an excuse to talk about how the process of readjusting his sleeping and eating schedule has been going.

"Readjusting his schedule" is really being a bit generous to Steph and I... he didn't have much of a schedule. Evan had been eating every two or three hours throughout the day (when a baby his age should really be able to go four hours between feedings), and he was waking Steph up twice at night to eat (when he should be able to sleep through the night, and certainly shouldn't need the extra meals). He would usually take a nap in the early afternoon, but not always, and it was anyone's guess for how long (sometimes three hours, sometimes only half an hour). Maybe most annoying, we couldn't get him to go to bed until 10 o'clock on most nights, even though we could tell he was tired much earlier than that, and we had to walk him around to get him to sleep at all.

This was obviously tough on both of us, especially on Steph given that she's the one who had to feed him all the time, but the straw that broke the camel's back (Steph would be the camel in this scenario) was when he stopped going back to sleep promptly after these wee hours feedings. Having to get up every 3 hours is bad enough, but having to stay up for an hour or more each time quickly became unbearable. As a short term fix we let him sleep with us for a week or two, but that was only marginally better, and it had its own set of problems.

So, Steph started looking around on the internets and talking to friends to try and find a strategy for dealing with Evan's sleep habits that would work for us. She pretty quickly happened upon a book by the Baby Whisperer (as I mentioned before, we're suckers for all things whisperer) called "The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems". That sounded pretty good to us, so we high-tailed it over to the library, checked it out, and decided that was the way we were going to go. With a newfound sense of resolve (born out of desperation and exhaustion, as so many of the actions of first-time parents are) we girded ourselves for battle against our ever-hungry, fitfully-somnolent infant.

I won't go into too many details of the E.A.S.Y. Method (you can read her book if you're interested), but it all comes down to establishing a predictable routine (Eat, Activity, Sleep, Your time, repeat), and really tuning in to your baby's cues so you can tell when they're getting sleepy and put them to bed before they have a chance to melt down. There are obviously more details to it than that, but that's the gist of it. She also has her own way of dealing with the "cry it out" question that is essentially letting the baby cry but staying with them while they do it.

And now, the question that is undoubtedly on your mind at this point: "Does it work?" For us at least, the answer is fortunately "Yes." The first three days and nights were a challenge - I got a total of five hours of sleep the first two and Steph had to deal with several minimally-sleepy naps. By the fourth day, though, Evan started to get with the program, and ever since things have been going much better. Not perfect, but better. Some nights he sleeps all the way through, and some nights he wakes up crying once or twice, but he's always in his bed, and he never needs a 2 A.M. snack anymore. In fact he's taken to only eating every four hours splendidly.

Of course, the early appearance of his first tooth is threatening all of our gains, but I'll deal with that some other time.

So Hard to Choose

I couldn't decide which of these pictures I liked better, so I decided to include them both:


There's no real story here or anything, I just liked the pictures.

Halloween

When it came time to choose what costume Evan was going to wear for Halloween, we had a ridiculously easy "decision" to make. Our friends Dan & Michelle gave us the costume that their son Max wore last year a few weeks after Evan was born. The fact that we happen to have tubs full of teddy bears that Steph bought as source material for her teddy skull pieces is just a happy coincidence:

Because the neighborhood kids didn't start trick-or-treating until right around his bed time Evan didn't get to go around and collect candy this year, which is probably for the best -- Steph and I really don't need an excuse or opportunity to eat more candy. He did get to help greet people for a little bit, though, and he was ready to get out there if needed:

Of course Evan eventually had to get out of his costume so he could get ready for bed:

Steph wanted to make sure I mentioned this was a picture of Evan's "bear bottom" (I didn't think it was that funny, but she was quite tickled by the homophone).

My First Earthquake®

As a native Californian, it was important Evan get his first earthquake under his belt as soon as possible. Luckily providence provided for him tonight. Steph and I had just finished putting him to bed and were finally about to sit down for dinner when a series of large trucks ran into the house. Or at least that's kinda what it felt like. It turns out we'd been hit by a magnitude 5.6 earthquake, with an epicenter only 4½ miles away.

When the house started shaking, our first reaction was, "Huh, I wonder how long this is going to last," followed almost immediately thereafter by "Baby!" Evan was just fine, although he was a little startled by all the bright lights, noise, and parents grabbing him when he was supposed to be sleeping:

I can't speak to whether he thought the house moving around him was anything out of the ordinary. When almost all the motion you experience is your world acting upon you, who's to say that your house pushing you around is any different than a parent doing the same?

I can, however, speak to this mirror's opinion on the issue. I'm quite confident it would have preferred to have been moved by Steph or I instead of the house:

We were trying to figure out how to throw this mirror away, which is why it was resting against the wall in the soon-to-be-completed wine bar area of the kitchen instead of mounted somewhere. Past experience tells us that these thick glass mirrors are a royal pain in the butt to break into smaller pieces for disposal (we fractured a hammer trying to shatter one at our old condo). It turns out an earthquake does the job just fine, though. The next time I need to break up an old mirror I'm going to lean it just slightly against a wall and wait. Maybe I'll wrap it in a sheet or something first.

Fortunately that was the extent of the damage. Between chitchatting with the neighbors about the temblor, putting Evan to bed again, and cleaning up the mirror bits our dinner was delayed by an hour or so. You only get to experience this kind of geological excitement once every decade or two, though.

Chillin'

We started sleep training Evan today with the E.A.S.Y. method espoused by the Baby Whisperer (we seem to be suckers for professional Whisperers). We're expecting a painful couple of days ahead, but Evan at least is very relaxed, presumably expecting business as usual:

I'll report back on how it's going in a week or two.

Happy Baby

Evan is continually becoming more interactive. He's starting to reach for and pick up toys around him, he likes to look at whoever in the room is talking, and if he's in the mood he'll talk back. Best of all, the right combination of sounds and faces can make him just light up.

He's normally a pretty happy baby to begin with (as long as it's not around his bed time):

But if you make the right sounds (he really loves this kind of croaking sound Steph makes -- which is just imitating him in the first place -- that sounds like an old door opening slowly) he flashes his biggest would-be-toothy-if-he-had-teeth grin:

Now if we could just get him to laugh more consistently...

Collective Soul

I got an email Monday morning informing me that I'd won two passes to a KFOG Private Concert with Collective Soul. Even better, the show was in the PlaySpace, KFOG's little performance venue/recording studio, so there would only be 20 or 30 people there! After some exculpatory emailing to determine if babies were welcome (they were, mostly), we headed up to the city Wednesday for a long lunch and Evan's first studio show.

Here's the picture we got with the band after the show was over:

From left to right, that's me, Joel Kosche (lead guitarist), Evan, Steph, and Ed Roland (lead singer/guitarist).

It was just the two guys, their acoustic guitars, and 20 or so Fogheads (KFOG listeners), and that's it! It was a really neat experience. Unfortunately, since they record the shows for possible later release they didn't want Evan to be in the actual studio (that's what I meant when I said babies were "mostly" welcome), but he and Steph got to sit in the control room adjoining the studio and watch the show from there. As you can see in the photo, Evan liked the show so much that he fell asleep (which is really about the highest compliment a baby can pay -- the music was so harmonious he drifted off). Both Ed and Joel were very friendly (in addition to the photo we talked with Ed and his wife for a few minutes about kids and baby carriers), as was everyone involved... we had a great time.

== May 3rd, 2008 ==

KFOG posted videos of two of the songs Collective Soul performed on YouTube, "Hollywood" and "Shine".

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

We think Evan and Peekay are both starting to show signs of actually liking each other. Or at least, Peekay seems to care that we attend to Evan when he sounds upset, and Evan seems to want to be like Peekay:

We've always been mindful of the dog's behavior around the baby, especially since we've heard our share of horror stories about family dogs not adjusting to new additions very well. We've been very pleased with how well they've gotten along so far, but this caught us by surprise a bit. Is this the price of infant-canine harmony... infant-canine synergy? I'm not sure we're ready to deal with that.

Camouflage

With all that blue, it's almost as if Evan is floating in mid-air next to Steph's disembodied head, huh?