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...