Bevin Jean: 13 Months

At 13 months - she deserves an update post.

FOOD
Eating is Bevin's favorite thing to do. When she's finished whatever you've given her, she pounds on the high chair tray with both hands as if to say, "Give me more!!" When she was in the womb, I had absolutely no pregnancy aversions, so it's no surprise that Bevin eats almost everything we do. I'm sure going with the BLW method of weaning helped also, but I have to wonder if she would have been this good of an eater regardless of the weaning method used. Regardless,  I'm glad we went the BLW route. The reason I'm satisfied with this method is because she knows how to use a spoon correctly, she's familiar with and loves all of the spices Keith cooks with on a regular basis (she loves curried food - big WIN!) and she can chew her food even though she has no molars. I don't think that would have been the case if we had gone with the traditional weaning method.

As far as what she eats - she eats most of what we eat, though she may refrain if she's too tired, not that hungry, or just wanting some Mama milk. Her absolute favorite foods are: apples, bananas, cottage cheese, chicken, turkey, and oatmeal. She also recently discovered cannoli cream (thanks to a bakery shoot Keith did this week) and she balks every time one of us opens up the container and doesn't share with her.

MOBILITY
Bevin is a power crawler. She can get anywhere she wants VERY quickly and up until this weekend, she seemed very content to just keep on moving that way. She cruises around from furniture piece to furniture piece, but didn't seem to want to even consider taking steps without help. On Saturday though, she took a step or two on her own (with my encouragement) from the cabinets to my arms.
And she was so proud of herself.

TEETH
She has 5 teeth in and three more teeth cutting through as I write this. Therefore, she's been fussy and needy: READ: we can't put her down or hold her without some sort of fuss fit.  She's also waking up a lot. We bought the Baltic Amber teething necklace for her, but she started to pull it and chew on it.  The other way to keep it on is to put wrap it around her ankle and cover it with a sock. This works sometimes, but not all of the time - especially when she makes it her mission to pull her sock off. As Grandma Fern would she, "She ain't no fool!"

LANGUAGE
This kid is trying desperately to form words and converse with us. She's got Dada and Lala and Nana (for banana) and Aaahcel (apple), but she'll save Mama for only those you-better-come-over-here-right-now-and-hold-me moments. I think that sometimes when she wakes up in the middle of the night and refuses to go back to sleep she just wants to talk to me. She's got lots of other sounds like "Gggggeeeee" or "KKKKkkk" or "Blllllllleeewwww" (sounds more like a raspberry), but nothing that's really intelligable besides the above words. I did, however, feel like I had a conversation with her in which I could have sworn she said the word "Really" and another one in which she said her own version of "I love you" right before kissing me, but it's hard to know for sure. In terms of body language:  she has started this month nod her head vigorously for "yes" and also vigorously pointing her head and body to an item she wants (such as the toothbrush in the bathroom). She also says hello and goodbye by saying "Haaaaaaa" for both greetings and waving her hand and arm vigorously, even after the person has long gone. It is just about the sweetest gesture to watch. 

INTERESTS
Anything Cole is doing.
Books (her favorite is Peek a Who? by Nina Laden)
Hugging the cats.
Rolling balls.
Throwing balls.
Night lights and cords (can you say, SCARY?!)
Chewing on everything to alleviate her teething pain
Laying her head on the floor or a soft blanket or a stuffed animal.
Knocking over blocks (Cole doesn't think this is a fun interest).
Vacuuming (she has been known to talk to the vacuum and gets very upset if she's not being held or worn by the person doing this chore)
Filling up and emptying the dishwasher
Sweeping (same as vacuuming)

SLEEP
She spent 11-12 months sleeping fairly well in her new digs. However, she started teething more and waking more. Combine that with the fact that Cole has started to wake at night from nightmares so this has also disrupted her sleep as well. My friend, Andreea, says this is because of his growing imagination, so it's actually a good thing, but it's still a tough pill to swallow.  Keith and I are incredibly cranky from sleep deprivation, and it's hard to lift ourselves from the fog when we're sometimes only getting a few hours of sleep each night. These past few weeks have been reminiscent of Cole's first year of sleep, and we are struggling to stay positive. I have to keep telling myself that This Too Shall Pass, but it is awfully hard to remain optimistic in the face of such fatigue.

These two

Each day that passes these two fall in love with each other a little more. Cole's jealousy has waned (crossing my fingers!!) and we can see his heart really opening up to her. He has always loved her but it was a tortured kind of love, mostly because he didn't like that she took so much of me away from him. At the same time she was his baby sister- what's not to love about that?

 And now, she crawls around the house, follows him from room to  room, plays with him ( and his toys) more and more every day. Consequently, he's relishing her attention and finding new ways to connect with her. 

What's amazing is watching her personality shine through just by her interactions with him. When he is sad, she wants immediately to be close to him, to comfort him. She is moved by his tears. 

I see that this is even the case with other people too. When we were at a friends birthday party last weekend, the birthday girl started to cry and Bevin reached over and stroked the birthday girl's head and tried to look her in the eye, perhaps to give her a comforting look. It was so loving. It made me so proud.

Then the other night when Cole was sobbing on the floor because his treasured balloon broke, Bevin crawled over to him and laid her head on his to comfort him. She had tried to actually hug and kiss him as they both squatted on the floor a few minutes prior, but that had ended badly when Cole moved and she wound up gripping onto his face with her tiny, squeezing hands. 

Coming from a family in which I was the only child, watching these two grow together brings me such joy. 

The pictures below are by no means of the best quality (crappy light + iPhone = this is what you're gonna get) but the subjects are what led me to publish these pictures. The gestures, the looks, the body language. It all speaks to this post. 

We needed this

Our little family has been through a rough few weeks. From Bevin's sickness to Cole's sickness and the perpetual fear that one of us would succumb to one of their sicknesses, Keith and I had to cancel a few nights and days that were meant to be just for us.

We were so burned out from working and taking care of the kids all hours of the night for a week that we needed time alone. 

After Thursday's epic snowstorm (READ: at least 2 feet of snow on TOP of a foot that had fallen last week) we were dying to get out and snowshoe. But, for obvious reasons (waiting for kids to get better, terrible road conditions, etc) we had to wait.

On Saturday, we made our way to Minnewaska State Park (after intense deliberations as to where was the BEST spot to go). The Peter's Kill is a stream that runs along the Shawngunk Ridge and is alongside some awesomely diverse trails with some equally awesome views. At first we shared the privilege of blazing trails with another couple who went out with their pitbull, but they turned back early on when their dog started to get too cold. Off we went to do a loop on three different trails all by ourselves. 

We ended up blazing the entire trail together, sharing the privilege of stepping first into fluffy (and sometimes crusty) snow that at some points got as high as 3-4 feet. It was so much fun because we got to work as a team  enjoying the burn, appreciating the quiet and relishing the views. 

There was one point where, on a poorly laid out WHITE BLAZE trail (who paints white blazes on a trail also used in the winter?), I thought we were lost. We were literally walking on top of blueberry patches and couldn't spy a white square on any nearby tree. Fortunately, Keith had the handheld GPS, which he used to determine that we were on trail and, sure enough, a little ways down the blueberry patch, we found the white blaze. 

With a lot of team work and love we proudly finished the loop, knowing we blazed the trail for all those who followed.

You can tell what an amazing adventure we had by the wattage of our smiles in the pictures below...

Parenting of two. Volume 5: Embrace the crazy

This is the fifth post in a series about the struggles we as a couple face parenting two children. The issues and topics can also be applied to parents of one child, but the struggles just become amplified when you have two. (We compare parenting one child to the calm before the storm. Because parenting two children often feels chaotic and scary. ) As parents we have so many struggles both internally and externally, and we thought it valuable to share them. Each post in the series will revolve around a single issue or topic, which I will talk about in the various contexts of our family life. First topic was on Time. The second topic was on Space. Third topic was on Sleep.  Last topic was on Routines. 

About a month ago, on a Friday afternoon, I was strapping the kids into their car seats after retrieving them from day care. Cole's friend had just been picked up by his dad. Cole's friend also has a new baby sister (born in September). I was doing the usual negotiating with Cole to stay in his seat, while trying to keep Bevin calm since she still HATES the car, while simultaneously trying to buckle her in in the most difficult car seat ever made by BabyTrend. Finally, I finished and looked up and Cole's friend's father was also just finishing getting his kids strapped in, one of whom was cranky. He said to me pleadingly and full of exasperation, "Why didn't you tell us???" And I laughed. Because I had tried to tell him. When his wife was pregnant and our boys were at a Strider practice at the BMX track during the summer, I did try to tell him how hard it was. But it's hard to accept that when you are already expecting your second. There's no going back. And honestly, you can't really know what having two kids is like until you have two kids and no amount of advice or sharing of experience is going to help you fully understand. It's the same way with having the first kid. Everyone tells you to "get all the sleep now" and all that wonderful "advice" but you have no idea what you are in for. You just take the plunge and hope you can swim.

Having just come out of the fog of the first year, I was not going to tell him it gets better or easier or different, because as a parent already, he knows that things change. He knows they don't stay the same and that eventually his son won't scream whenever someone holds the baby for too long or have a fit when the baby wakes up from her nap. It's just hard when you're in the thick of it. You just want someone to commiserate with. So I told him my best advice. And it was not advice I had come up with myself. It comes from a co-worker with two kids of her own.

She says this: You have to embrace the crazy. Do this by accepting that your children have ruined your lives. We all know they are wonderful human beings and that our lives would be so different without them. We know we love them more than life itself. But, let's face it - they have ruined our lives. Okay maybe the term "ruined" is a bit harsh and perhaps too brutally honest and maybe one day my kids will read this and think I'm a mean mother for writing it for all the world to see, but hear me out -Their mere existence has altered our independence, our freedom, our sleep, our ability to completely eat a hot meal. Our lives were easier in lots of ways before they existed.

We can't just leave the house on a moment's notice. In fact, we have to plan to leave the house a half hour before we know we need to leave because then we'll actually get somewhere on time. We can't leave for work without giving 50 hugs, 27 high fives, and 36 kisses. We can't go to the ski mountain every weekend.  We can't ever have a peaceful car ride to far away places. We can't drink all night and sleep all the next day. We can't even drink part of the night and sleep even part of the next day. But guess what? I'm okay with this. I'm okay with this because Keith and I had a ball during our 20s and early 30s. We got to party it up, sleep late, go on spontaneous road trips, and planned vacations. We did it. Now life is different because we wanted it that way. We changed it. We got married. We brought these little people into our lives because we knew on some level that however many headaches and heartaches they brought us, they'd bring that much more love into our lives.

To say that she looks up to him is the understatement of the year

Hallway shenanigans

This has nothing to do with having two kids, but this was today. We got 2 feet of snow on top of a foot of snow. The fact that Keith was literally able to look up at the roof without stepping on a ladder is pure craziness. 

Keith is lucky Cole was too tired from snowshoeing around our and getting stuck in snow that was taller than him to copy this most awesome Daddy move.

He has so much love and excitement inside of him that he just doesn't know what to do with that energy. So he squeezes. And, most of the time, this is her reaction.