Time to put up the baby gates

As I predicted, Joshua started crawling while I was traveling for work last week. He doesn't quiet get up on his hands and knees, but he pulls himself along the floor at a startling pace, and looks quite pleased with himself for doing so.

He practices all the time, including in his crib at night, and is particularly focused on crawling over to the the dogs whenever they're lying on the floor so he can grab their fur and chew on them. Fortunately for everyone involved, the dogs are extremely patient with small children. It's a boxer thing.

But it's definitely time to get the baby gate back up at the top of the stairs, to add drawer locks to all of the lower drawers that he can get into, and figure out how to protect the home theater equipment from little hands.

He's crawling!

High chair

Oh, and at dinner tonight Joshua sat up in a high chair in the restaurant for the first time, instead of being strapped in his car seat. He was so completely thrilled to be able to sit up, look around, grab things off the table and play with them ...

He is very interested in exploring new objects and textures right now. He spent a long time this evening just running his hands over a paper napkin, squeezing it into a ball and then letting it go, pulling at it, rubbing it, etc. Then he spent another long time tearing it into a million tiny bits. Yup, he's a boy.

Sam and I were reading excerpts from her weblog this morning at breakfast, going over particularly cute incidents that had happened when she was between 1 and 2 years old. She loves hearing about herself when she was younger, and hearing about things that she did. It's funny -- I remember very few of the incidents that we wrote about, even though they made such an impression on us at the time. All the more reason to get back to making regular entries here.

One and two and one and two

Samantha started physical therapy last week. Interestingly, the physical therapist thinks she may just have suffered a pulled muscle, based on her movement and the fact that her hurt leg is much weaker than her unhurt one. It's a bit strange that the problem would have lasted this long since children usually recover from muscular strains more quickly, but she may just keep reinjuring it since she's not doing anything to keep weight off it or avoid impact.

Regardless, I think we're going to have to go ahead with the MRI if it doesn't improve on its own. In addition to identifying osteomas, the MRI should help reveal whether or not there's really a pulled muscle or other soft tissue injury.

On other notes, Joshua continues to try to crawl and to pull himself up onto things. He also sits upright for long periods of time if you put him into a sitting position. But he still doesn't get there on his own. And he still doesn't like to let us out of his sight.

Zzzzzzzzzz

Joshua is in that phase where he gets unhappy if he can't see me or Amy or, better still, both of us. He'll play very happily in the jumper seat or the exersaucer or on the floor as long as we're within line of sight. Leave the room for 30 seconds to get something from the kitchen, however, and it's a different story. Nap time is the same way -- he really hates being left alone in his room these days.

This morning the only way he'd take a nap was lying in bed curled up against my side with his head on my arm. That was okay, since I was tired enough that I was glad for the excuse to lie down myself for a while. Both Sam and Joshua were up a lot last night. This late night knee pain stuff with Samantha is wearing on all of us. Everyone is a little sleep-deprived and a little on-edge because of it.

Napping next to me today, Joshua slept like the proverbial baby. Everyone once in a while he'd startle a bit in his sleep and open his eyes. But as soon as he saw that I was lying next to him he'd give a little smile, close his eyes, and go right back to sleep. Yeah, okay, so he has his adorable baby moments.

Of course when Samantha came into the bedroom and he opened his eyes and saw her, he gave a huge ear-to-ear grin, craned his neck backwards to see her better, and went back to sleep in that ridiculously uncomfortable looking position. Sam is far and away his favorite person in the whole world. I hope that continues when they're both older.

Locomotion

Joshua regularly gets up on his hands and knees now. He's probably just days away from crawling. He looks so pleased with himself when he manages to get himself up off the ground! I suppose it's time to haul out the baby gate for the top of the stairs, think about reinstalling the fireplace gate (although I can probably put that off until next winter), and figure out how to keep little fingers away from the front of the A/V equipment in the living room. Now I remember why we put all of that stuff in a glass-fronted cabinet and velcro'ed the doors shut when Samantha was a baby!

Pictures, pictures, pictures

Blogger has some new features since I last looked at it. The ability to easily post pictures is one of them, so herewith, some pictures.

This is Joshua, in all his glory:



And this is Samantha, in all her glory, wearing her Birthday Crown on the day she turned five years old:



And this is Samantha in her native element, the rock climbing wall at the local Y. She's been taking classes as well as climbing for fun. It's quite impressive to see her more or less scamper 20 feet up the wall...

Back in a different saddle

I've been planning to create a blog for Joshua but decided that it was pretty silly to run two separate blogs and that it made much more sense to have a single combined blog for both kids. At the same time, I got tired of fighting with occasional publishing problems getting this blog published to my ISP, so I'm going to bite the bullet and move the whole thing over to blogspot on the theory that publishing will be more reliable that way.

Welcome to the reincarnation of "A Day In The Life".

Back in the saddle again

It's been far too long since I've posted anything regularly here. I'm going to try to get back into the habit, as well as getting into the habit of posting about Joshua, Samantha's new brother.

Yes, Samantha has a brother. He's seven months old now, and she is so into being a big sister. None of that sibling rivalry stuff (yet), and little or no resentment toward him for consuming a lot of Amy's and my attention. She loves to help care for him, to play with him, to make funny faces and make him giggle when he's crying, and to tell him all the things he'll be able to do when he's older. It's really quite sweet to see her with him.

Meanwhile, we're wrestling with a baffling medical issue with Samantha. She's been complaining of severe knee pain for weeks. It's bad enough that she's been waking up every night in the middle of the night, and unless we keep her on Motrin 24 hours a day it pains her during the daytime too. It's bad enough that we've been called by her preschool because she was crying from the pain :-(

She's been through blood tests, x-rays, and a full body radionucleotide bone scan to try to pinpoint the cause, so far without success. But at least the tests have ruled out a lot of things ranging from Lyme disease to leukemia to bone cancers to LCPD. Unfortunately, that means we're still without a diagnosis, and she's still in pain. She has a good pediatric orthopedist and will be going to physical therapy to see if that helps. If there's no resolution over the next few weeks she'll need to undergo an MRI to look for soft tissue damage and to look for signs of an osteoid osteoma.

I'd hate for her to have to undergo the MRI, which invoves sedation for pediatric patients, and hate even more for her to have to undergo the treatment for osteoma. On the other hand, it would be better to know and successfully treat the cause of her pain than to continue to just manage the symptoms.

At today's doctor appointment we learned that Samantha weights 44.4 pounds and stands 44 inches tall. I thought that was an interesting enough coincidence to write about.

And despite being in pain a lot of the time, she's still an adorable, frighteningly intelligent and verbal, generally outgoing, mostly empathic five year old.