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.