mommy's secret confession

I have a confession to make: I hate the playground. On my list of activities to do with Elias, playground is on the bottom. Well, no, clipping fingernails is on the bottom, with playground a close second. Second to last. Let me demonstrate.

This is what Elias usually does when we take him to a playground:

He just stands there. Neal took this picture and I'm willing to bet Elias had to be placed on the play structure and coaxed into some actual interaction for this little piece of evidence.

To be fair, he will play in the sand/dirt a bit if we bring along his gardening toys.

Today he even ate some dirt. I don't know why I was surprised and therefore slow to react; he puts everything in his mouth these days. It was just a matter of time before he experimented with the outside world. I got most of it out but I'm guessing there will be some evidence of this little adventure tomorrow. If you know what I mean.

After he finished his snack of dirt, I tried to get him to walk with me to the bucket swings. After a few steps he stopped again and I ended up schlepping him to the swings and from there to the toddler play structure and from there to the one portion of the big kids' structure I thought he'd be mildly interested. He's clearly more interested in watching the other kids and pointing out the random airplane that flies overhead. Which is fine, but frankly, kinda boring. And when it's time to leave, despite seeming completely uninterested up to that point, he protests vigorously. Fortunately, his protests are easily quelled with a teething biscuit.

What's strange is that Elias has moved from toddling to walking to outright running at home, in our carpeted apartment, but outside he seems, not exactly cautious, but maybe a little confused. I say not cautious because he has endured several post-sprint face plants at nearby Children's Fairyland (what is it about that place?). Sometimes I worry that he'll grow up thinking the entire world is carpeted.

Otherwise, Elias has been going easy on me the past couple of weeks. After the craziness of the move, the teething, the cold - I feel like I'm missing a couple of things - Elias seemed to turn a hopefully not temporary corner and start napping again. I feel like most days he would probably fall asleep if I put him down for a morning nap but I usually try to push him until between noon and 1 pm, occasionally sneaking in a brief catnap in the car or stroller on the way back from our morning outing. And I have to say, feeling like maybe, just maybe, we've settled into a new routine is awfully nice. He has been waking up a bit on the early side, usually between 6 and 6:30 and some nights it's a challenge to get him to bed by 7:30, usually closer to 8, so I'm sure the slightly shorter nights have something to do with the occasional 3-hour afternoon siestas. I wouldn't mind sleeping in just a tiny bit some mornings but I have to say, I love the afternoon nap. It's all about the naps. When he naps I feel like I could do this indefinitely. When he doesn't nap?...well...let's just not go there.

I'm also worried that the return to some sort of order around here is at least in part due to putting him back on 100% formula for the 16-24 ounces of "milk" he gets each day. After a bout of digestive woes and some really bad diaper rash (oh yeah, that's what I left out) we decided to halt our efforts to wean him to cow's milk, but then he developed a cold a couple of days later so maybe the digestive issues were all part of whatever little bug he had. Our GI doc back in Boston suggested waiting until 15 months to try again and I plan to get in touch with our new pedi here this week. So I'm hoping it was coincidence because - and I think I speak for both parental units on this one - I'm tired of formula. He continues to do just fine with yogurt and cheese so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Otherwise, we had our first visitor last weekend. Grandma Joanne came for the weekend and we snuck in a visit to the Oakland Museum, right before they were scheduled to close for renovations that will continue into next spring.

Like the playground, the Museum's terrace proved to be a little difficult to navigate with a 14 month old and a stroller but it provided for some good photo ops.

After the Museum, Grandma Joanne and I enjoyed a couple of hours of child-free shopping while Elias napped and Neal got a bit of a break from us all, then we met back up for dinner and a boardwalk stroll.

Priceless pic, don't you think?

14 months

I think we entered some sort of time warp when we flew cross country a month and a half ago because although the first week or so was slow like molasses, the days have been flying by ever since. Things that happened two weeks ago feel like they happened yesterday. It's ridiculous. Somebody make it stop, already.

So now that Elias is over a week into his fifteenth month, let me at least leave you with a little then and now video coverage, demonstrating that Elias is still a fan of his parents' music, first at about ten months old:



And last weekend:



A proper update this weekend, I promise!

trying to practice what I preach

Where to begin? I'm having a hard time believing Elias will be 14 months old tomorrow, another month having passed me by with a pathetic amount of documentation to show for it. In short, the past month has been rough. When it rains, it pours around here and in addition to continuing to settle in after our cross-country move, teething (all four of the first set of molars and possibly a canine or two), and both naps and nighttime sleep getting wonky, Elias experienced a bout of digestive woes last week that may have been brought on by our attempts to wean him from formula to cow's milk and resulted in the worst diaper rash he's ever had. Oh, and he developed a cold over the weekend that he promptly gave to me. I think that just about covers it as far as what's been going on around here the past couple of weeks. Somebody write me a country song already.

Don't get me wrong; Elias is a delightful baby when he's otherwise healthy and so long as you're not trying to get him to stay in one place for too long (usually required for sleep), but even a happy baby is a handful eight or nine hours straight. In short, I feel like these past few weeks have brought on a second wave of baby blues, not unrelated to the stress of the move, of course, and also because my status as full-time stay-at-home mom, as much as I enjoy many aspects of this job, is not completely by choice at this point (hmm, I wonder if I can give my art career a rest for awhile and fall back on my French degree? d'oh!). It's hard to put so much of your life on hold for an indefinite amount of time, but I suppose the theme of sacrifice won't exactly disappear if and when I do go back to work full-time. And, obviously, at the end of the day, I feel extremely fortunate for Elias and everything else that's good in my life. But around 1 o'clock, I just want him to nap.

And that he has finally done the past few days, giving me a chance to finally get caught up on a few things (although he's woken up for the day around 5 a.m. each of the past two days so I'm sure that's key). Admittedly, some of the exhaustion I'm feeling is my own fault. I've been spending a lot of time promoting my more entrepreneurial efforts, hoping that side project might turn into some supplemental income in place of or until I find a more legitimate job. When I don't get much done during the day, I spend longer than I should in the evening trying to make up for it. Gee, I wonder where Elias gets his bad sleep habits from?

Needless to say, Elias and I have had lots of time to continue to explore our old/new neighborhood, which, I'm happy to report, I'm continuing to love, almost to the point of feeling like I'm still on vacation some days. The best part is being able to reconnect with old neighbors who factored into our decision to return and some new neighbors we actually met back in Beantown. What will I do when my friend Meredith, who had her second and officially went on maternity leave just days before we arrived (good timing, huh?), goes back to work?

So, just what have we been up to? I haven't been taking nearly enough pictures, but we've managed to get a shot here and there, like this one from our stroll down to the Oakland Lake Fest a couple of weeks ago. The kids' area was a little out of Elias's range, but we did brave a ride down the bouncy slide (and no, I won't be doing that again anytime soon), and borrowed our friends' Ergo carrier for the walk home.


While the adults enjoyed a pre-bedtime weeknight dinner together, Elias tried out friend Ivan's music instruments.


The boy loves listening to music and dancing. Good thing I've finally added some structure back to our week with a fall music class that'll take us just about to Thanksgiving.

Last week we checked out Play Cafe here in Oakland, which is basically a coffee shop with a central sitting area surrounded by young childrens' activity rooms - kitchen, ball pit, elevated train track. Elias couldn't quite navigate the ball pit but enjoyed being in it (and possibly caught the cold he later gave to me from one of the many balls I failed to keep him from putting in his mouth).


He spent most of his time when he wasn't snacking checking out the train track that you can see behind him in this image:


I could go on but I've run out of images and it's past my bedtime (see what I mean about being partly to blame for the exhaustion?). More this weekend with Elias's official 14 month update...

molars

Need I write more to explain the latest lapse in blogging? At least after months of "teething" Elias seems to finally be getting not one, not two, but all four of his first molars, which is pretty much how the first eight teeth came in, in batches of four at a time. Poor guy. Poor mama, since the transition from two naps to one continues and even that one nap has become a challenge. He slept for about an hour today and what a difference it made in my overall mood.

I'll try to get back on track one of these days and maybe include an image or two. In the meantime, it might be another early night for me.

settling in and sleep

I've been such a bad mommy blogger on this side of the move so far but I've been trying to give myself a break by reminding myself that we've only had our stuff for about a week and a half now and are technically still unpacking. We hit a bit of a plateau last week when I think we both became anxious to work on other things, things that generally do not involve cardboard or packing paper, but my lack of progress on those other things seems to be overshadowing the progress we've made on project move. We're feeling fairly settled in, despite some additional things to do in the way of unpacking (books, mostly...lots and lots of books), babyproofing (finally tethering things to the wall, something we never did in the earthquake-prone Bay Area, but which is now, of course, doubly important), and decorating (for someone who's spent the majority of her adult life invested in the arts, I'm not so good with interior design). That said, the place is pretty livable and Elias definitely seems to be enjoying the more open living plan of this apartment compared to our Boston digs. Backing up a bit, though, here are a few images documenting our week without stuff.

Thanks to Grandma Joanne's belated birthday gifts upon our arrival, Elias was not without toys those first few days in our new place.


Sadly, no airplanes to be seen out these windows.


Our cat Xander (who, along with Sophie, we were reunited with the first weekend after we arrived) approves of the pint-sized furniture.


I've since had to break down the table and store it with the chairs in Elias's closet, after he took a spill and got his first real "boo-boo" a little too close to his eye.

Here Elias gets his first taste of strawberry aguas frescas at Cactus Tacqueria, which was and, as it turns out, still is our favorite place to go for burritos.


While the moving crate was being unloaded a couple of Fridays ago, I took Elias to the San Leandro marina, just south of the Oakland airport, for a stroll and to watch the planes land. On the way back to the car we stopped at two different playgrounds - Elias's obvious enjoyment is a bit unusual as he seems to be pretty bored with the swings these days.


Later that weekend, while I unpacked Elias's room and the kitchen, Neal took him to Children's Fairyland near Oakland's Lake Merritt, our old/new neighborhood.


We worked pretty quickly to get Elias's room, the kitchen, and most of the bedroom done by the end of that first weekend and have made slow but steady progress on the rest of the apartment since.

Otherwise, the highlight of the past couple of weeks with Elias has been sporadic teething (I'm guessing he's getting his first set of molars) and the continued transition from two naps to one. For the most part, I've been able to keep him up until about 11 or noon before putting him down for one mid-day or early afternoon nap and a few times that one nap has lasted quite long (three hours to be exact...I don't really know what to do with myself after the typical max of an hour and a half). But for the most part, whether he takes one nap or two, he rarely sleeps more than an hour and a half or two and the transition continues to wreak havoc on any kind of predictability in terms of scheduling activities around his sleep needs. After almost a week of the one, mid-day nap, yesterday he was back to the morning nap from 9:30 until about 11 and another from about 2:30 until 4. Today, on the other hand, thanks to a restorative ten or fifteen minute snooze in the car on the way home from our morning activities and not one, but two poopy diaper interruptions during an attempt at a later afternoon nap, he basically didn't really nap at all.

As far as night sleep, it took him about 4 or 5 nights until he seemed more or less adjusted to west coast time, waking up sometimes as early as 3:30, groggy and confused but seemingly ready for the day. We could usually coax him back to sleep until 5 or 5:30. And while he's still waking up in the middle of the night every now and then (I'm not sure if it's night terrors or if he wakes up briefly and freaks out because it takes him awhile to recognize where he is or what), for the most part, we're back to a 7:30 bedtime with minimal protesting/babbling and waking up around 6:30, on average. It's funny how in hindsight, writing about it a week later, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. A friend told me that it takes about a day per hour of time change for them to adjust and I'd say that's fairly accurate - those first three nights being the worst. But like any difficult stretch with a child, when you're in the thick of it, it's like there's a part of you that just doesn't believe that things will ever get better. Like in the midst of all that there was a little part of me that thought, oh great, Elias is going to wake up at 3:30 every morning for the rest of his childhood. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. For now, at least.