9 months!

Here are some photos of Daphne during her 9 month photo shoot a couple of weeks ago:

 

 

Most months I try to capture in the images what she's up to - you know, sitting, crawling, pulling to standing, playing the guitar with her teeth...Typical infant stuff. Anyway, I know I've said this every month but phew, was October a busy one! In addition to continuing to work on all the new moves she acquired in month 8 and Halloween shenanigans, Daphne and I took our first mother-daughter trip and her first airplane flight! The occasion? To visit Uncle Brian and family as part of his surprise 40th birthday festivities (we couldn't swing flying the entire family out and didn't necessarily want Elias to miss school, and hey, the baby flies for free! It was almost like flying solo. Almost.). Here we are at the beginning of the day:

And here we at the end of the day, after a 6 am flight from Oakland to Vegas, an hour and a half layover there, and another 4 1/2 hour flight from Vegas to Connecticut:

We both look pretty tired, don't you think? Daphne did well in that she didn't scream the entire flight. At the end of the Vegas-Hartford leg several other passengers told me very approvingly how well she did which I think can be translated to, "she didn't bother me nearly as much as I feared she might." While she slept most of the short flight from Oakland to Vegas, she only slept the first half-hour or so of the second flight, leaving me just four hours or so to entertain a squirmy worm of an increasingly mobile baby in one seat, with two people sitting next to me on our very full flight. 

We did this for FOUR HOURS. And I had to change her diaper THREE TIMES. Here she is finally conked out on the drive from the airport to my brother's house:

Of course. And the party hadn't even started! (By the way, that's "bear lovey" in her mouth. We discovered a month or so ago when we tried to wash "bear lovey" one night - she basically sucks on the blanket so it gets a little ripe after a few days - that it's actually a pretty essential element of her bedtime routine and ability to fall asleep. I couldn't figure out why she was suddenly inconsolable until I fished it out of the laundry and gave it back to her. Immediately quieted down and fell asleep. So much for washing it while she sleeps. Duh.)

Anyway, pro tip: if a flight attendant tells you to "take an extra seat" when you get on the plane, do everything in your power to take that second seat and keep it, whether you've paid for that extra seat or not (I was flying on Southwest where you're not assigned seating - I guess this might not apply in cases of assigned seating). What a difference a little extra elbow room made on the flights home.

The weekend itself was very enjoyable, Daphne was pretty manageable, and of course it was wonderful to see my brother, his family, and my Dad, who flew in from Oregon (we coordinated flights somewhat and shared a rental car...not sure I could have managed this trip without his help!). We enjoyed a pretty mellow couple of days of apple-picking, soccer game-watching...

...getting to know extended family members...

...and marveling at the wonders of modern domestic life, much like her brother several years before her.

Oh yeah, and then we got home, had some In 'n' Out for lunch, picked up Elias from school, played there for a bit, and then took big brother to martial arts practice.

What can I say, we like a good challenge. And, clearly, I produce children who can function remarkably well on very little sleep.

Not surprisingly, while it was kind of nice to only have one kid to worry about for a few days, especially after three weeks of solo parenting both of them, I missed Elias like crazy as that was the longest I've ever been away from him. It was good to go, and it was good to come home. The best trips are like that.

baby girl's first princess costume

So, for the record, now that I have a daughter, I will confess that I'm not a huge fan of the princess craze (girly stuff and dolls and all that I'm fine with). I won't forbid it or anything but I certainly won't encourage it until she's old enough to express an opinion on the matter and request princessy stuff herself. And this is no double-standard. We didn't overtly encourage stereotypically boyish things for Elias (or forbid them) and in fact welcomed the times when he picked out a Dora the Explorer potty training seat, for example, just as we encouraged his love of all things with wheels. And it doesn't bother me when people now tell me what a "boy's boy" he is. He is who he is, whether that's stereotypically boyish or not, and we look forward to seeing who Daphne grows up to be as well. That said, it turns out we have already embraced the princess culture with our Halloween costumes this year (but c'mon, if you're gonna go as a princess, what better princess to be, amirite?).

Yep, Daphne was Princess Leia to Elias's Luke Skywalker:

He's posing there with his classmate and good buddy, Kingston, after their Halloween parade at school.

I can't remember the exact context but Elias asked me what the word crush meant recently and when I asked him after explaining if there was anyone at school he had a crush on he at first replied everyone, that he had a crush on everyone at his school, and then clarified to explain that most of all he had a crush on Kingston. Aw.

We kept Halloween shenanigans to a delightful minimum this year and I have no regrets. Well, almost no regrets. We never got a really good picture of both Daphne and Elias together in their costumes, brandishing light saber to boot. But Elias is again talking about a Star Wars themed birthday party next year so perhaps we'll have another chance - their costumes are certainly big enough!

And while we went to our usual pumpkin patch early in the month, we never got around to carving the one big pumpkin we brought home.

We did supplement with some other pumpkins we picked up at Trader Joe's and decorated the front porch with them, but Elias was a little bummed on Halloween day that we never got around to the carving part (even though he seems to enjoy very little about the actual process; Neal ends up being the one to do most of the scooping out of pumpkin innards and actual carving). As I have done with so much stuff over the past nine months, I kept saying "we'll do it next year" or "this will be more fun next year". Because carving pumpkins with a six-year-old and a 21 month old running around will be a piece of cake, right?

Anyway, aside from those minor regrets, it was nice to not overdo it. One pumpkin patch, one Halloween parade, one session of trick-or-treating in costume. For the latter, Elias got to walk around a few blocks in our neighborhood with his daycare days best buddy Hazel who moved back to town about a month ago. Yipee!

Stay tuned for Daphne's 9 month update later this week...