20 Week Ultrasound: We're having a...

It wasn't that long ago that I posted about the newest addition to our family unit, but we've been living with the reality of our expanding brood for quite a bit longer. Which means we've waited almost five months to learn whether we were going to have a boy or a girl.

Yesterday morning, we found out. And now I share with you the ultrasound that revealed it to us.

Apparently we're having a Mr. Burns.

Okay, so I don't have an actual ultrasound to show you. Chances are good you've seen a million of them already, and they all look the same anyway. There's a very good reason that I've got nothing of substance to show for the two hours we spent at South Jersey Radiology this morning (and no, it's not because of the ultrasound tech who-will-not-be-named, although she did make a brief appearance).

Despite the very best efforts of a very nice tech, Little Geek 2.0 squirmed, kicked, bobbed, weaved and swam (yes, swam) out from under the wand at every opportunity. Through some quirk of biology, Hollie is pregnant with Aquaman's newest sidekick. This was not entirely unexpected, since at her last OB/GYN appointment, you could literally hear the baby "swoosh" out of the way of the doppler device they use to hear the heartbeat.

"But Matt," you may be asking, "Isn't it possible this tech (however nice) was just as incompetent as the  one you encountered last time?" I might've been inclined to agree, if I didn't watch the little bugger juke and pivot for several minutes at the end of the exam.

And the tech, whatever her skill level, actually managed to get the important information like heartbeat, face, limb and organ development, and all the rest.

And although the squirming caused her initially to express skepticism about her ability to tell us whether we were having a boy or a girl, halfway through the exam she shouted, "Ha! I know what you're having!" The excitement of pinning down a shot of the organ in question evidently was too much for her to hold in.

But she did hold it in until I got into the room. Upon which time she didn't have to say anything, because no sooner did I enter the room than our son somersaulted and flashed a spread eagle in front of the wand before kicking off one side of the womb and out of the way.

With form like that, the boy parts were kind of hard to miss.

So there you have it. Little Geek 2.0 is a boy! The rummage sale for two-years-worth of pink clothes will begin momentarily.

P.S. For the record, they suggest his weight is currently 13 oz. Given our previous experience, I estimate this places his actual weight somewhere between 2 oz and 30 lbs.

Hurricanes and Slow-cooked Pork (only one of these tried to kill me this week)

Let me first say that my family was extremely lucky this week before, during and after the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Friends of ours from Pennsylvania to Connecticut are still without power five days after Sandy made landfall. I was able to provision the household without difficulty, we never lost power, and the damage to our property was nearly non-existent (several dead tree branches and a toppled scarecrow notwithstanding). In fact, the worst thing that happened to me had nothing whatsoever to do with a weather event. So first things first, I'm extremely grateful for the easy hand I was dealt this past week.

That said, you learn a lot about yourself during times of crisis, and this week was no exception. In no particular order, here's are some lessons learned from the past seven days.

There is no better motivator than an impending crisis. At the time Sandy was forecast, it was the end of October. There's no reason I shouldn't have had the yard cleaned up and prepared for winter. And yet, the deck chairs were still out, the canopy still up, grill still uncovered, gutters remained uncleaned and various other end-of-summer chores had not been completed. When Hollie and I woke up Sunday to discover that it had not yet started raining, the first thing we did (around 7:45 AM) was head outside get our property squared away. You know how long it took to do all of that? About 90 minutes. There's no reason I should've put all that off until Sandy forced my hand.

Hurricane preparedness is all about the right outfit. 

'Nuff said.

Taking down all of the Halloween decorations before a storm means taking down ALL the decorations, not just the large flat ones. We put the Peanuts characters in the shed on Sunday, but I didn't move the scarecrow or sidewalk stakes. 

That'll teach me.

When you know you're going to be stuck in a small house with a toddler for 2-3 days, take your outside time when you can get it. You know when we took LG outside to play as Sandy was bearing down? The same time I was cleaning up the backyard. We bundled her up and chased her around the back and front yard while we straightened up, then Hollie took her to the park while I prepped food in case we lost power. All in all, the only day we weren't able to leave the house for at least a little bit was Monday.

When you know you're going to be stuck in a small house with a toddler for 2-3 days, you better plan some activities ahead of time. Thankfully, we took this lesson to heart before the storm hit. We managed to come up with a list on Saturday and bought anything we needed early on. A partial list of activities LG took part in:

• Made corn muffins
• Made cookies
• Made pancakes
• Made apple sauce
• Painted pumpkins
• Glued stuff to pumpkins
• Started homemade Christmas presents
• Played in Birthday tent (made by my aunt Kathy, and packed away for just such an occasion)
• Hide and seek (which Hollie and I took turns doing. There are maybe three decent hiding places in the house)
• There were many more planned activities, but several days out, and I'm already starting to forget.

Yes, I said glued stuff to pumpkins. This might've been the biggest hit of the week.

If you don't know if/when power is going to go, get your laundry/dishes/cleaning/showering done as quick as you can. I'm not sure we've ever picked up after ourselves as rapidly as we did Saturday and Sunday. We did not want to lose power in the middle of a laundry/dish cycle or some other activity requiring hot water. It all started to fall apart some time on Monday as the continued threat of the storm coupled with the growing exhaustion of chasing LG around led to toys staying wherever they landed when we were done playing.

The dog doesn't care that there's a hurricane, she just doesn't want to go outside by herself when there's that much wind and rain. Few things are more frustrating than knowing that if your dog would just run outside quickly and pee in the yard, you'd both get a lot less wet than you will when you take her for a walk during a hurricane. But just try to explain that to the dog.

Making barbecued spare ribs before power goes out seems like a good idea, but when you least expect it, the food will try to kill you. I shared this on Facebook late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, but after the storm was over, I ended up in the Emergency Room to get a chunk of pork dislodged from my throat. I was never in any real danger, but it's worth noting that you can prepare all you want for a particular calamity; it's the one you don't see coming that'll get you.

The ER is no respecter of persons. It doesn't matter who you are or how many kids you've brought with you to the hospital; if you don't appear to be in tremendous pain or have a life-threatening injury, you will wait at least four hours before being seen. I was never happier that Hollie's parents live close by than when I watched three different families with small children come to the ER and just wait... and wait... and wait.

The last thing you want to hear before you go under general anesthesia is an OR nurse asking "Has anyone seen my glasses?" I hope this requires no further explanation.

When you're really, really tired, 40 minutes of general anesthesia makes for a great power nap. I don't think I've ever woken up more refreshed than I did at 11:50 PM on Tuesday night when the drugs wore off.

Being in the ER for 10+ hours really makes you miss your kid. I knew I was going to be okay, but somewhere around the point I had gone 14 hours without food (except the bit trying to kill me), nearly 10 of which were spent waiting in some form at a hospital, I was told I'd be put under for an emergency endoscopy. The waiting, the lack of food, the weariness, and the prospect of something else mixed into my IV drip all combined to make me really sad. At that moment, I wanted more than anything to see LG. But I had to wait 'til morning.

So that's it. I know many people had a more eventful couple of days, and some are still dealing with the aftermath of the storm. Did any of you learn anything this week, whether it involved slow-cooked pork or a horrifying effect of climate change?

Status Update: 2 Years, 1 Month

Another year, another doctor's visit. In the interest of continuity, here are the vitals:

Weight: ~27 pounds - 47.5%

Her exact measured weight was 27.8 lbs, but they weighed her with clothes on. I need my data accurate, people!

This represents a 5-pound gain from her 15-month weigh-in, and brings her within spitting distance of average, up to almost 48% from 35% at 15 months, and 26% at 12 months.

Height: 34 inches - 45.2%

As ever, she's wiggly. I rate the margin of error at about .25 inches.

That's 4 inches of growth in nine months, which sounds kind of crazy when you write it out. And it actually drops her percentile by a few points, from 50% to 45%, but well within the margin of error. It should also be noted that I checked these figures against three different sets of weight/height charts, and the percentile scores ranged from 42% to 52%. Clearly, it depends on the data sets you use as your baseline. 

I still contend that the numbers are open to interpretation. Since these charts compare your kid to the aggregate of all other kids, and since the obesity epidemic in the U.S. pushes younger kids' weights higher, it's not clear to me whether I'm comparing her weight against an ideal weight distribution for her age, or a modern, super-fat distribution. Help me, science! You're my only hope!

One finger prick and two shots, and this visit finished pretty quickly, according to Hollie. As I understand it, the doctor used the words "perfect" and "impressive" more than once. When the doctor first arrived in the exam room, she did so to LG pointing at one of her books saying, "It's a blue heron, Mama!" That'll do, LG. That'll do.

The trauma of the shots didn't last long, either, but then, I suppose that's the purpose of the lollipop bucket at the receptionist's desk.

Lemon? Really? Gross.

On the Mysteries of Sleep

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Strange that I've covered more than two years of my daughter's life, and I don't think I've talked about sleep. Like most parents, we didn't get enough of it early on, and we appreciated it dearly when we did.

We would've killed someone to get her to sleep this soundly at 6 weeks old.

Sleep has been relatively easy for a while now, and LG normally gets 10-11 hours each night, depending on a number of factors. It used to be a glorious 12-hour stretch, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., every single day. Then, a few months ago, she started talking to herself after we put her down. Bedtime stayed at 7, but she would babble for a while before falling asleep. At first, it was just a few minutes, but eventually these monologues for an audience of no one stretched an hour, sometimes more. There have been nights when she'd keep it up for two hours, passing out around 9.

(There was a brief respite from this behavior. For about two weeks in the summer, she went back to falling asleep immediately after we put her down. It was glorious.)

Most of the time, she sleeps just fine in the car. Most of the time.

I need to make it clear that 95% of the time, she's just talking to herself. She's not crying, not upset, doesn't have a dirty diaper. So we've been content to let her go. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating when you're cleaning the kitchen or watching TV, and you hear your daughter's hi-pitched squeal informing her stuffed mouse that she rode a pony, and the pony was white, and the pony was named Honey, and the pony went in a circle, and she likes ponies, and she likes rides, and...

In your head, or under your breath, you just keep saying "Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep!" And the whole while she just keeps going.

All the pre-sleep talking goes out the window when we're away. Travel seems to take all the vigor right out of her.

We've got no particular solutions in mind, although we did push her bedtime to 7:30 p.m. We figured we'd tire her out for another 30 minutes at best, and at worst, we spent another half hour playing together, which is just fine by us.

There have been a few days, however, that have tested how much babbling we can endure. A couple of nights of talking 'til 9:30, one 'til 10, and we start to worry that she's not getting enough sleep.

At first, I didn't think it was travel, but rather the Pack-n-Play. An ill-fated experiment involving setting the portable crib in her room proved that the Pack-n-Play has nothing to do with it.

So now, every night that she stays up talking until 9 p.m., I go into her room and give what Hollie has taken to calling a "sleep pep talk." More specifically, I suppose it should be an "anti-pep talk" since we want her to just calm down already.

Here's a sample conversation.

Me: Hey there. Why aren't you sleeping?
LG: I go to bed. I want to sleep.
Me: Do you? Cuz it doesn't seem like you're sleeping.
LG: (Some rundown of the events of her day, or, more likely, a listing of songs she's been singing to herself for an hour.)
Me: Okay. Do you know how we go to sleep?
LG: Nooo....
Me: First, you stop talking. No more talking, just stay quiet. Then you close your eyes. When you close your eyes, then you can start dreaming. And when you're dreaming, you're asleep. Do you want to dream?
LG: Yes!
Me: Do you want to sleep?
LG: Yes!
Me: Okay, then let's do that.

Just last night, she decided she would tell me how to go to sleep. So she ran through my part of the above conversation on her own. "I sleep! I be quiet! I close my eyes! I dream! I sleeeeeeep!"

The weird thing is, it seems to work. Nine times out of 10, she's asleep (or at least blessedly quiet) within about 5 minutes of the talk. The caveat: It doesn't work if I try to do it before 9 p.m.

Work hard. Play hard. Sleep harder.

The Power of 2

Given that we've just celebrated LG's second birthday, it's probably not surprising that '2' has been on my mind a lot lately. There's significance to '2'. I see '2's everywhere.

I should not have had two pieces of cake.

It's hard to fathom that I've been a parent for two years. I can now call LG a 2-year-old, rather than refer to her age in months. Since her first birthday, there have been two gallons of milk in our fridge: a gallon of whole and a gallon of skim. For various reasons, we have two strollers, two highchairs, and two copies of Green Eggs and Ham (I'm a little unclear on how the last one happened). As we get closer to sending her to daycare, it's become more obvious that we need to have two cars, just to handle the logistics of it all.

And it brings me back to the original two, me and Hollie. We were the beginning, the dynamic duo that started this whole thing. Two was comfortable, happy and stable. Think of us as 2: the first prime integer. 2 is made of the factors 1 and 2. We were made up of two factors: we could be 2, but we could also be 1. She could exist as Hollie, and I could be Matt, or we could be Hollie and Matt. We were a single unit divisible only by ourselves and each other.

Then we chose to expand our unit to become something more, 3. Technically, still prime, but an odd prime. Rarely do we consider ourselves individuals now. I am no longer just Matt; I am Matt, father of LG. Previously, neither Hollie, nor I, expressed ourselves in terms of each other. But now, we cannot be expressed in terms apart from LG. The same isn't necessarily true for our daughter, though. As she grows, as she becomes more independent, she has begun to express herself as individual. She defines us, but we don't define her.

Nope. This smile defines her.

That's about to change, however. As the title above suggests, this post is about the power of 2. The power of two to become more.

Two to the power of 2.

2²

In other words, the two that became three are about to become four. And LG will have the chance to define herself as a big sister.

If she's half as nice to a younger sibling as she is to the dog, we'll be fine.

Year 2 in Review: The Pictures

The 2nd Annual Solving for G Year in Review focuses less on how different LG looks, and more on the ways in which she has developed. At 12 months, she could stand, take a few steps unassisted, pass a baby doll several dozen yards, and say a small pile of words (most of which were animal noises). Now, she runs practically everywhere she goes, has a vertical leap of an inch or two, and her vocabulary has increased beyond my ability to count accurately (several hundred words at least, a few of which are still animal noises, and some of which are Muppets).

Without further ado, here's the 2nd Year in Review, with commentary as necessary. As with last year, each of these photos was taken on or near the 12th of each month.

September 12, 2011

Here's where we left off last year, the morning of her 1st birthday in Ocean City. As happy as my daughter is most of the time, this pensive look is pretty typical, even a year later. You can always see the wheels turning, like she is going to figure out whatever is in front of her.

October 14, 2011

Favorite pastime at 13 months: piling rocks on things. Sometimes benches, sometimes the rear bumper of the car. One day I pulled into the driveway after running a bunch of errands and when I went to open the rear hatch of the Cruiser, I realized there were three rocks on the bumper. This is either a testament to the stickiness of the rocks in my driveway, or the smoothness and stability of my driving.

November 14, 2011

At 14 months, she didn't like couscous. She still doesn't, although I've never been able to figure out why. It's so good! However, she had discovered how to look at me with eyes that said, "Seriously Dad. Not gonna eat this couscous."

December 16, 2011

It feels like she's been holding markers, brushes and pencils her entire life, but maybe it's just me. She will grab any writing implement and scribble on any available surface. You may remember how that turned out with paint around this time in December.

January 12, 2012

It's also kind of amazing how many places she's found to hide in our small house. Behind the rocking chair in the living room was one of the first.

February 12, 2012

On her second trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, LG got up close and personal with a baby orangutan. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was awesome, and she still talks about the orangutan. Side note: How awesome is that she knows how to say "orangutan"? She also know what an aye-aye is. Just sayin'.

March 11, 2012

We bought this sand and water table before LG was born. Cuz we're those people, and it was on sale. I don't remember if this was the first day we had it out, but she liked it from Day 1.

April 8, 2012

On Easter this year, we could've hid just three eggs over and over again. She was primarily interested in breaking the plastic eggs open before dumping them in the basket.

May 14, 2012

By 20 months, we definitely had her helping in the kitchen, although I can't remember what the heck she's eating here. Sweet potato? Squash? Tomato sauce? She's pleased with herself, whatever it is.

June 13, 2012

In Hollie's ever-expanding attempt to make the most absurd kind of mess possible, she bought a can of Barbasol and some food coloring gel and let LG go to town. And there you go.

July 7, 2012

This was our first visit to the Please Touch Museum. It can be fun, but man it crowds up fast. This was in the blessed first 15 minutes of relative quiet.

August 13, 2012

Another favorite game of the last year: running around the front yard like a crazy person, making the neighbors look at us funny. Specifically, she says she is "a lion in the jungle," and "daddy is a dinosaur." Let it never be said she doesn't have a healthy sense of imagination.

And because the more things change, the more they stay the same, here's a shot of her on the beach this year, compared with the trip last year.

September 11, 2011 - September 12, 2012

It's been a year, but she still really wants that umbrella.

But for the honest-to-god, real-deal, Year-1-to-Year-2 comparison, here are shots from her birthday, 2011 and 2012.

September 12, 2011 - September 12, 2012

Oh man. Where did the baby fat go?

Kids' Music: The Good, The Bad & The Danceable

Turns out, it's pretty much all danceable when you're a toddler.

Those are some serious jazz hands in the lower left.
And in the lower right she practices her rhythmic gymnastics routine.

Let's back up.

There's been a suspicious lack of discussion in this blog regarding my efforts to expose LG to a wide range of music. There are two very good reasons for this.

1. Once you have a kid who is running around doing things, it's hard to spend considerable effort on something like the "perfect playlist."

2. It turns out that once kids age to a certain point, they start to have preferences about stuff.

Back when I wrote about making playlists to dance to when LG was a few months old, she couldn't tell me what she didn't like. She didn't try to steal my phone out of my pocket so she could play with it. She also couldn't tell me to play The Wiggles, Hi-5, or Wee Sing, over and over and over and over again. In general, though, I think we've been through these stages.

Stage 1 - We Sing
If I had to guess, I'd say her conscious relationship with music began sometime around 6 months old. Around that time, she was awful in the car. She cried for most trips longer than 5 minutes or so, and we were at a loss for what to do about it. We sang a lot in those months. Mary Had a Little Lamb, The ABCs, B-I-N-G-O, whatever we could remember. It's sort of weird how hard it is to remember kids' songs and nursery rhymes when there's a screaming kid in the back seat. My inability to remember the words led me to sing bizarrely long versions of Old MacDonald where I would name animals according to the alphabet, then start over again with a different set. You don't know the line separately sanity from insanity until you've tried to come up with multiple animal names and sounds for the letter 'Q.'

Stage 2 - Wee Sing
At 10 months or so, we we started playing Wee Sing for her. Something about those awful, off key children's voices really did it for her, and she'd calm down. But then a funny thing happened.

She learned the word "No."

When a song came on that she didn't like, she'd say "No." And if we didn't change it, she'd say it again. And again. And again. So we did. This process went on for a while, until there were only about 4 songs she'd tolerate for any length of time. Then I discovered more children's music. The slightly more on key Countdown Kids, for example. At first, she liked most of that music, too. Then "No"reared its ugly head once more, and we whittled those songs down to about 4 that she liked. For those keeping score, we now had about 8 songs that were played on an infinite loop in the car. And woe unto me if I somehow deleted that playlist from my phone and had to skip through 20 songs to find the ones she wanted.

Stage 3 - The Muppets Sing
This process repeated for a while, but the very best thing that happened is our discovery of the vast library of music produced by The Muppets. At first, not surprisingly, she only like Elmo songs (Specifically, "Elmo's Song"). Then, gradually, she started to like Grover* ("Fuzzy & Blue" is awesome).

(*While I fully recognize that none of us are immune to commerce and the ever-present nature of licensed characters, I get a ridiculous amount of satisfaction out of the fact that my daughter's first exposure to Sesame Street was aural. It's sort of funny to me that she knew who Grover was, what he sounds like, and that he was blue well before she had ever actually seen him.)

After that, it was only a matter of time before Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie worked their way into circulation. I cannot express how happy and relieved I am that I can now listen to the soundtrack to The Muppets or The Muppet Movie rather than the umpteenth version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider."

And there is nothing better than a toddler singing "Mahna Mahna."

Still, I couldn't help but think there was a way to get her to listen to non-kids music, at least some of the time. Like many things, an answer came accidentally.

Stage 4 - BJ, Dionne and Dusty Sing*
Hollie and I needed to go shopping for something or another, and whatever the need, we had to go together, which meant taking LG with us. At some point on this trip, it started to rain, and on the walk back to the car, I started absentmindedly singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."

To put it bluntly, LG thought this was amazing.

I make up a lot of songs on the fly, and I think she may have thought that's what I was doing; the big difference being that this was actually a good song. Every time it has rained since then, she goes "Raindrops keep falling on my head, Daddy!", which is occasionally just a statement and occasionally a singsongy request. Either way, it finally occurred to me to play BJ Thomas' version of the song for her.

Breakthrough!

That was just the beginning. On the album of Bacharach songs I have on my phone, "Raindrops" is followed by "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", the high-pitched "whoa whoa whoa" chorus for which seems tailor made for little kids. And despite the regressive gender stereotypes implicit in the song, "Wishin' & Hopin'" also seems to push all the right buttons for LG.

In case you think I'm making this up, get a load of a recent dance she did to some Bacharach.


You'd think it was a remix based on these sweet moves.

*Much credit to Burt Bacharach and the recently departed Hal Davis. You don't realize how many of their songs you like, let alone how many of them were sung by Dionne Warwick, until you start looking at their output online.

Stage 5 - ???
It's ongoing process, for sure. Hopefully, I'll be able to sneak even more music into the rotation. Current plan of attack: Show tunes, followed by punk covers of show tunes. All the hours I've wasted on Me First & The Gimme Gimmes albums are finally going to pay off, I can feel it.

Bonus:
Sometimes just singing isn't enough. You need an instrument to express yourself fully.