Tempus fugit

Joshua is nine months old today. Wow. Where does the time go? It seems like only yesterday that he was three months old, then six months, then seven. Now it's nine, and before you know it he'll be a year old, then walking, then talking. And Samantha will be starting Kindergarten this fall. Tick tock, tick tock ...

More new pictures

Samamtha at her dance recital at the Y a month or so ago. They were doing "Flight of the Bumblebee" and were all dressed in black and yellow with antennae on their heads. It was too cute for words:

Joshua looking contemplative:

Samantha and Joshua being just too cute for words:

Feed me Seymour, feed me all night long

Joshua has decided that it's time to eat things he can pick up with his hands. He's very enthusiastic about feeding himself -- strawberries, blueberries, pieces of bread, graham crackers, slices of avocado, wedges of apple or pear, bananas, and this morning it was one and a half spelt pancakes (along with several of the afore-mentioned kinds of fruit). Oh, and mango. And corn on the cob this evening. He's remarkably good at getting bite size pieces of things off even without teeth, and grins a very self-satisfied grin every time he manages to get food into his own mouth.

What he doesn't do during the day is drink. He's almost completely uninterested in liquids until bedtime, then he drinks like a maniac all night long, every three hours or so. We really need to get him on more of a diurnal schedule.

Fallen

Samantha has a thing for Sarah McLachlan. Ever since she heard some of the "Afterglow" album in my car she asks me to play it when we're driving. The other day she said she'd like to have a Sarah McLachlan cd to listen to, so I burned one for her with iTunes tonight before bedtime. She went to bed listening to it and singing along to the song "Fallen", to which she evidently knows all of the words. Weird. I wonder how many other five year old girls are Sarah McLachlan fans.

Upstairs, downstairs

Josh has become fascinated with the two steps down from the foyer into the living room. Amy says that he's climbed down them a couple of times without falling or hurting himself, and climbed back up again. Good thing I finally got that baby gate installed at the top of the stairs today!

Late breaking news

Amy tells me the orthopedist's office called. The MRI was not useful diagnostically. There's no sign of anything that would explain Samantha's knee pain -- no osteoma, no soft tissue damage, no developmental irregularities, nothing.

On one hand this is good news, since it means she is, technically speaking, perfectly healthy. On the other hand, we've now run out of diagnostic options and explanations for what she's going through, so all we can do now is manage the pain and hope that she grows out of it. Damn.

He likes me! He really likes me!

I think tonight was the first time Joshua ever expressed a preference about who put him down for bed. Usually Amy nurses him, feeds him a bottle if he's still thirsty, lets him fall asleep in her arms, and puts him in his crib and he's happy with that. Not tonight.

Tonight he fussed and squirmed and cried and was generally restless while she tried to get him to relax and go to sleep. When I walked into the room to see if she needed anything, Josh twisted around to look at me and held out both his arms. So I picked him up, and he cooed a bit and put his head down on my shoulder. Amy and I swapped places. I sat down in the chair in his room and he went completely limp in my arms and fell asleep as peacefully as could be.

Maybe he was just finally tired enough to fall asleep, but I prefer to think that he actually wanted me to put him to bed tonight.

Creepy flashbacks but with a happy ending

Samantha went for the MRI on her pelvis and her knee yesterday. We're still trying to get to the bottom of the knee pain that's plagued her for more than three months.

Because she's only 5 the procedure is done under a general sedative administered intravenously. Sam was a real trooper about the needles, even though she was scared. She got through the insertion of the I/V really well, and fell asleep in just a few minutes. I accompanied her into the room where the MRI was done and stayed by her side the whole time.

The procedure was probably more nerve-wracking for me than for her. There's something inexpressibly creepy about seeing your child lying motionless, effectively unconscious, hooked up to wires and monitors and surrounded by doctors and nurses. I was having some nasty flashbacks to Emily, even though of course the situations weren't at all similar. I must have been showing some reaction, because the anesthesiologist asked if I was okay.

The MRI lasted about an hour and a half, after which we went to the recovery room where Amy joined us. Sam woke up right on schedule, 15 minutes after the sedative was discontinued. She was groggy and tired for the next few hours, as they told us she would be, but by 8 or 9 at night she was a rollicking bundle of energy, practically bouncing off the walls, and she went to school today as if nothing at all happened yesterday.

I just hope the MRI reveals the cause of the pain. But we probably won't get any results back until early next week, so it's still just a waiting game.

Mother's Day 2007

We went to New Hampshire to visit Amy's family and for her high school reunion this mother's day weekend. Samantha and Joshua were the hit of the reunion. Surprisingly few people brought kids -- maybe most of the people who come to reunions are all old enough that their kids are grown. Sam and Joshua were big hits with everything there. The young woman who planned the event kept wanting to "borrow" Joshua and carry him around the dinner event last night, and everyone commented on how cute he was and on how intelligent and well-spoken Samantha was.

Joshua has progressed to pulling himself upright and trying to stand. That means he's gone from nothing to sitting up to scooting along the floor to crawling to trying to stand in the space of about three weeks. I suspect he'll be walking before much longer.

At the hotel pool this morning Samantha swam for the first time without some kind of floatation device. She just dogpaddled back and forth across the width of the pool, never putting her feet down on the bottom. Then she laid on her back with my hands under her while I taught her the basics of the back crawl. This from the girl who used to be afraid to get her hair wet! She's quite a marvel, Sam is.

This afternoon we visited Amy's sister and her family, and went to lunch with Amy's and brother in law and Amy's mom. After that we went back to Amy's sister's house, where Sam wanted to go fishing in the little stream that runs behind the house. Damned if she didn't catch a baby trout -- just a tiny little thing about 5 inches long. Sam wants to have it for breakfast tomorrow. Ick.

Her reading is progressing by leaps and bounds too. This evening at dinner I was writing down new words for her to try to read. Words like octopus and napkin and elephant and brook trout. She doesn't really even have to sound most of them out anymore -- she just looks at them and reads them, at least if they're phonetically regular.

Parents are dinosaurs

This happened a while ago, but I haven't gotten around to writing about it until now.

Samantha was taking a dance class at the Y a few months back, and at their last session the kids were going to do a mini-recital for all of the parents. Their instructor asked the kids to wear as much black as possible to make their costumes look better (they were bees, I think), and Sam informed me in the car on the way home that she would need black tights, a black ballet tutu, black ballet slippers, etc.

I told her I wasn't sure we'd be able to get all of those things, because I wasn't sure where to find some of them. She looked at, rolled her eyes, and in a tone of great exasperation said: "But dad, can't you just look it up on Google?"

She's five.

My five year old knows about Google. She's never known a world without cell phones, voice dialing, dvd's, TiVo, the net, and digital cameras.

Parents are such dinosaurs.