Cute Baby Pics and more . . .

Let's be honest: this is what the six or seven readers of this blog really come here to see:

Now that your appetite for cuteness has been sated, we'll move on to the other stuff.

My sister Margo and her family came to visit us the week before Christmas.  She brought along my brother Daniel who is attending law school at Duke and had just finished his first semester of law school exams.  I'm sure that Jaime was enthralled as Daniel and I spent most of the first evening together reviewing how he had approached his Torts and Contracts exam questions ("Absolutely, you needed to just assume the existence of the contract, although without traditional consideration I hope you listed the elements of detrimental reliance . . . ").

While Margo's family and Daniel were visiting, our kids learned that their cousins were going to Disneyland later that week, and Kate used some advanced interrogation techniques to break Jaime down and find out that they, too, were headed to the Happiest Place on Earth (that's quite an audacious claim, when you think about it).  We managed to spend nearly the entire day there while only making it onto about half of the rides we had planned to ride - but at least the kids got to ride between rides in comfort:

Kate Kardashian hitches a ride on the Double Bob chariot

We did learn that Disney's interpretation of height does NOT include the height of one's hair.  Davis's faux hawk easily touched the bottom of the 40" height sign on both Star Tours and Big Thunder Mountain, but on both rides an eagle-eyed worker was able to jam a finger between Davis's skull and the sign and declared him too small.  I later learned that an easy fix for this is to head into the restroom and get a large stack of paper towels that you fold over once or twice and stuff into your kid's shoes.  He might not walk very well while he's in line, but apparently the Disney folk are much more accommodating to kids who walk with a limp than to kids who are just a bit too short.

"Happiest Place on Earth, says who?"

The kids were exhausted when we got to the car around 9:00.  I can't imagine trying to do two consecutive days of Disney fun.

Just a few photos to document that we did, in fact, celebrate Christmas this year.  The kids celebrated it by upwrapping presents, and not so much by cleaning up after themselves (as you can see by the photos below):

No, we don't let the kids ride bikes on the hardwood floors - at this point they didn't even know how to pedal

To try to combat the chaos, we issued a decree: if you want to play with one of your toys, you have to first put away the one you just finished using.  Only THEN can you move on to the next one.  Kate's solution to that decree was to tell us that she had not "finished" using the first toy but had only "paused" it.  Since we had made the rule about toys that the kids were finished using, she informed us, this rule didn't apply to her.  My response: she is now going to spend next semester with Uncle Daniel.

As you can probably deduce from the pictures, both Kate and Davis got bikes for Christmas.  I should have had Santa bring me a bike maintenance kit so I could follow them around tightening and loosening the things that need tightening and loosening.  Good thing that Kate only uses the coaster brakes on her pedals to stop herself (which, by the way, she immediately does whenever her rate of speed approaches that of a brisk walk), as I'm not entirely convinced that I assembled her front handbrake correctly.  We don't have to worry about Davis's bike going too fast; his wheels rub in about 7 spots, which has turned out to be a rather effective way of limiting his ability to kill himself.  The new house is perfectly positioned on a cul-de-sac that has only one other house, so we're not just mad at the kids when we tell them to "go play in the street."

We had a great Christmas dinner with friends who, like us, were not traveling to see extended family and had no extended family nearby.  Our friend John is an accomplished lobster diver: he actually caught enough Pacific lobsters off the coast near where we live for his wife Tracy to make lobster bisque for their church Christmas dinner party.  So we feasted like kings and queens on grilled lobster and on this little beauty that I cooked up:

We fell into our beds on Christmas night fat, happy and not at all ready to tackle taking down the tree and putting away all of the holiday decorations.  Those can wait until after I go back to work next week . . . 

Halloween I, II and III

With apologies to Michael Myers, this post has nothing to do with knife wielding maniacs.  It has everything to do with the fact that Halloween now gives kids even more opportunities to start on the path to Type 2 diabetes than we had as kids.

This year my kids had at least three opportunities to don their Halloween costumes and carouse for candy.  Jaime had been proactive this year with costumes, asking the kids weeks in advance what they wanted to be for Halloween.  Kate had decided to be a princess (shocker!) and Davis had become fascinated by a S.W.A.T. team costume that he had seen (also not a surprise).  While his costume didn't actually have a toy gun, he was convinced that the nightstick it came with could actually fire bullets.  

Halloween I was our church's Trunk-or-Treat, which happened the Friday before Halloween.  This tradition  arose either because Halloween occasionally falls on a Sunday (and walking around the neighborhood dressed as a goblin or a vampire seemed, well, un-Sabbath-like), or out of the fear that somewhere, someone was going to put poison or razor blades in candy.  Everyone brings their cars to the church parking lot and, as the name suggests, opens their trunks; the kids then walk car to car and gather candy.  This means that instead of walking a few hundred feet between houses, the kids can take approximately four steps before reaching the next sugar dispensary.  And if they hurry, they can make it through the entire circuit two or three times.  When it came time to don their costumes, Davis wasn't interested in wearing his police hat, belt, cuffs, nightstick and radio - he opted instead for just his black shirt and pants. Who could argue with the low maintenance approach?  Kate dressed as a tennis player, and seemed to be a bit perplexed all night about how to carry both her racquet and her plastic pumpkin and still have a free hand to grab candy from the bowls that were thrust in front of her.  She was also disappointed to miss the kids' Halloween parade, because she was certain that she would have won the award for "sportiest girl costume" since no one else had a sports-themed outfit.

Halloween II was less about candy than costumes.  Our good friend and local photographer Julie Campbell had organized a fundraiser for Jamie Tingey, a local young woman who has been battling the flesh eating bacteria (go here to help Jamie) and was doing studio sittings of kids in Halloween costumes. We were glad to make a donation to help Jamie, and took the kids to get their pictures taken.  But earlier that morning I had made good on a promise to take the kids to the dollar store (it was payoff for some bribe I had offered earlier in the week).  My car's GPS didn't locate a Dollar Store, but did have a 99 Cent Store.  Same thing, right?  This is what I found when I arrived at the destination:

While it wasn't exactly what I had in mind, it did have plenty of things that cost less than one dollar, and the fact that I could almost touch the walls on both sides of the store simultaneously meant the kids didn't have to agonize over too many choices.  (I particularly liked that it was a 99 cent PLUS store - the proprietors apparently wanted to avoid the lawsuits that otherwise would have been almost sure to follow due to the few items that cost $2 or $3.)  Kate chose some angel wings, a wand and fluffy halo, and Davis got a suction cup bow and arrow set that also came with a very sinister looking plastic knife (see any patterns here?).  When we arrived home to get dressed for the photo sitting, neither Kate nor Davis was satisfied with their earlier costume choice, and both wanted to use their new 99 Cent Store gear.  So we supplemented their new purchases with some stuff from the dress-up bin, and headed to Julie's studio.  The kids looked great:

There were plenty of Halloween treats for the kids (and for dad!) at the studio, and we had a great time and were glad to be helping Jamie.  Of course, by the end of the day, Davis's bow and most of the arrows were broken, as was Kate's wand.  I guess you get what you pay for.

On October 31 (Halloween III), Kate had a party at school (where she got more candy) and then that night the kids again dressed up for the old-fashioned house-to-house trick-or-treating:

Kate wore her Cinderella outfit and her Nonna Anderson helped her with her makeup - she was in heaven.  Davis again said no to his cop outfit, and said that he was a ninja in his black clothes.  I tied a white headband around his head and we were off.  Our new neighborhood doesn't get many trick-or-treaters -- probably because there are only a few houses on the cul de sac, which is on a rather steep hill that makes the reward not worth the climb -- but all of the neighbors had told us that they were excited to have little kids on the street again, and would make sure they had candy.  Kate made it to the first house but heard their barking dog, and immediately retreated back home.  She is absolutely terrified of nearly all animals, even teacup-sized purse dogs, and didn't want to go to any house that she even suspected had a pet.  Davis followed her lead at first, until he saw that he would miss out on a lot of candy if he didn't buck up and get himself to the doors.  He quickly lost any fear of pets and went to work filling his bucket.  Kate was a bit more cautious but did go to doors once she was assured that the house either had no pets, or that all pets were safely secured in other rooms.  We visited our new neighbors, who were thrilled to see the kids, and then took the kids back to our old neighborhood, which looked like Halloween from my childhood: kids everywhere.

When the kids got home, they examined their candy haul.  While I persuaded them to part with a few Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, I had not yet learned about the Candy Tax, which some other parents have since taught me.  Next year, we'll use Halloween as an economic object lesson:  the kids will learn that the harder they work to gather candy, the more that we'll take from them.

Everything is New Again

In retrospect, we must have concluded that Brett's arrival in June was a yawner, and not enough to really get our blood pumping.  Because the day after we brought her home from the hospital, we started down a path that really took our stress index to a new level.

One morning during my week off (paternity leave, baby) I was holding Lady Brett when I heard Jaime say "Hey, you should check out this house I've been looking at."  She handed me the laptop, where I saw the MLS listing for a home not too far from where we were living.  But it was larger, had a pool and a larger yard, a dedicated office (we'd been using a converted bedroom) and a newer kitchen, all things that I saw as improvements over the current house.  While we hadn't been looking to move, we had been stuck on the question of how much more money we were willing to put into it to update the kitchen and a few other things.  We'd done quite a bit with that house, but a kitchen remodel was a much more major commitment, and I wasn't sure that I saw us in that house for the LONG term.

So I surprised Jaime by saying "OK, let's try to go see it this week."  I put a call in to a realtor friend, who had us in to see it the next day.  By the weekend we had written an offer, and within one more day we had bought the house!  We moved on it with a level of speed and decisiveness that I think is rather uncharacteristic of us.

After momentarily celebrating the fact that we got the house, we realized that meant that we now had to get ready to list and sell our house. We had made our offer contingent upon selling our house -- but in order to keep our offer competitive with the other offers they already had received, we had only asked for two weeks to sell ours before the seller of our new house could walk away.  That meant we needed to get our house on the market ASAP.  And we didn't tell the kids about the new house yet, because we knew that a lot of things had to fall into place to make this a reality.

While we had been through the home buying process before as a buyer we had never sold a home, and we quickly found out that its a lot more fun being the buyer than the seller.  Our realtor was great and had photos of our house taken with 48 hours, and we were able to put it on the market the day after that.  I spent about three nights doing a list of fix-up projects longer than my arm (and made too many trips to Home Depot to count), but at least the house was in pretty good condition already.  Once the house was listed, the real fun began -- during breakfast we'd get a text or a call from our realtor or her assistant saying something like "we have showings at 10 and 2:30 today" and Jaime would have to scramble to get the house cleaned up and the kids out the door.  Little Brett, at the ripe old age of 2 1/2 weeks, became a frequent user of the parks around our house.  And as much as we love our realtor and her assistant, when we received one of the first texts informing us of an upcoming showing and asking us to "have the house in fantastic condition," I thought Jaime was going to murder someone.  And every time the kids touched anything on the house I was convinced that they were going to break or permanently stain something.  The kids did NOT think that this stage was very much fun.

But we were blessed to receive a full price offer on only the third day or so it was on the market, and within the next week we had accepted that offer and were now under contract on both houses.  There were some wrinkles as we got nearer to closing, and at various points we thought the whole thing might fall apart, but ultimately by late August we had moved out of the old house and into the new one.  As stressful as everything was, things just seemed to fall together in a way that convinced us that this was just meant to be.

Kate started pre-Kindergarten three days after we moved into the new house, and she's loving her teacher and going to school every day.  Davis is enjoying the the twice-a-week pre-school where Jaime stays with him the whole time. (This gives us nearly two years to prepare him for the fact that we will be leaving him at school without a parent when he starts kindergarten, and I think we're going to need the entire two years to prepare him for that.)

The kids seem less impressed with the new house than we are, except for the pool . . . they LOVE it.  They are in it nearly every day (and sometimes they even change into bathing suits first).  Right after we moved in we had a pool fence installed, but Davis had that figured out almost immediately:

Both Kate and Davis made great progress in their swimming lessons this summer, and since moving into the new house their swimming has improved even more.  But even then, we still lock the gate whenever we're not using the pool.  And Davis (with his near zero body fat) apparently only likes to swim when we turn on the pool heater -- otherwise, he prefers to hang out in the hot tub.  He's a lot like his mom ;)

We're even OK with sharing the house and yard with some of the local residents, like this very young rattlesnake we found yesterday in the enclosure around our pool heater and filter:

Look away if you have a problem with man-on-snake violence

That's the second one we found in the yard in just over a week.  Something about the weather must be making them come down from the hills.  Our street is the first one below the foothills, and there is plenty of wildlife up there.  I hear the coyotes relatively frequently at night, and in the past several years a cougar and a black bear have come down into the neighborhoods right around where we live.

We love the house, and its great to just be able to stay at home on a Saturday and swim and play in the yard.  Davis and Kate and I play football out there quite a bit, now that football season is upon us.  The other night they were showing me their stuff:

Impressive, I know.

Life is good.

Lady Brett

Miss Brett Louise Benson

For the past few weeks, we were aware that our baby's original due date (July 4, 2012) might need some adjustment.  Despite the fact that Kate and Davis were both born a week or so after their due dates, the nurses had told Jaime that this baby was measuring a bit ahead of schedule.  And Jaime's doctor had told her that if the baby didn't flip over into a vertex position with her head down and instead remained breech, that the baby would need to be delivered via C-section.

On Tuesday (6/19), Jaime saw her doctor for her 37 week check-up.  The doctor confirmed that the baby was still breech and that it was very unlikely for the baby to flip at this point.  So he scheduled the C-section for Friday, June 28, as he didn't want to wait for the due date and risk Jaime going into labor.  So Jaime started to try to get used to the idea that despite having two relatively simple vaginal deliveries that she now had to have a C-section. The prospect of major surgery wasn't something she was looking forward to.

That night Jaime and I were watching t.v. (and I believe Jaime was enjoying her evening ritual of a bowl of Rite Aid's Chocolate Malted Crunch ice cream) when she suddenly got a strange look on her face and said "Oh my . . . my water just broke!"  We realized that meant we were going to have the baby THAT NIGHT.  I called her doctor and he told her to come on into the hospital and that he'd meet us there.

Unlike the previous two pregnancies where we had a "go bag" packed and our plan of attack for who would watch the kids, etc., we were totally unprepared for this.  I grabbed a duffel bag, threw some of Jaime's clothes into it and we jumped in the car.  A good friend came to sit with the kids until Jaime's mother could get to our house from Pasadena.  As we drove to the hospital, I attempted to run a few red lights (come on, a baby delivery is one of the few free red-light passes you get in life) and nearly got t-boned by a pickup truck in the process.  Jaime calmly asked if I could try to make sure that we didn't have to arrive at the hospital in the back of an ambulance.

We didn't have to wait long at all when we got to the hospital, where they prepped Jaime and I was told to gown up.  I knew I'd only be watching but I still scrubbed my arms up to my elbows.  I'd seen ER plenty of times so I knew the drill.

Meanwhile, they took Jaime in to administer her spinal block.  While I waited, I texted family members and let them know that the baby would be arriving that night.  Once they got her anesthesia settled, they brought me in and had me sit behind the "privacy curtain", up toward Jaime's head, where I couldn't see a thing they were doing (I have a feeling the privacy curtain was designed by the hospital's lawyers, not the modesty patrol).  But when her doctor came in to start the procedure, he brushed against the curtain and it partially fell back, allowing me to view the entire procedure.  Every time I see surgery I'm struck by how not gentle it is.  But the doctors did great - I soon saw baby's feet and legs, then I could see her hips and trunk, then her arms, and finally her head popped out, with a bit of extra tugging.  The entire thing took just a few minutes.

The nurses got her cleaned off and I was struck by the position she naturally assumed - hips splayed out wide.  I'm sure that was the position she'd been sitting in for weeks, and she wasn't about to stop now.

 She was officially born at 12:21, June 20, 2012, weighing 7 lbs. 9 oz. and measuring 20" long (which is not a bad size for a largemouth bass either).  Being two weeks early didn't seem to affect her size or development, and not having to have her head squeezed during delivery meant that her head was perfectly round.  The doctors and nurses were wonderful and soon our little one was cleaned up and warming up in the baby oven (that may not be the technical term for it).

It was a few hours until Jaime had recovered enough that she could be moved into her recovery room and they brought the baby to her.  We were incredibly grateful that everything had turned out fine.  Ultimately, Jaime feels that it was a blessing for the baby to be born that night so she didn't have to think about the C-section for 9 more days; we just got everything over and done with.

One other effect of the early arrival was that we hadn't really been able to settle on a name yet, thinking we still had a week or two to make the final decision.  Like a Hollywood feature, we'd been using a "working title" -- Jaime had recently read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and really fell in love with the name Brett. While Hemingway's heroine Lady Brett Ashley is certainly not a woman you'd tell your daughter to pattern her life after, Mr. Hemingway's story reminded us that Brett was originally a woman's name.  While I think the name is strong and simple (something I loved about the name Kate) and has the added appeal of referring to someone from Brittany or Britain (a place special to me), once she had arrived I wasn't really sure how I felt about actually naming her Brett; I'm not sure the Hemingway point will make much difference to third-grade boys looking to find something to tease about.  But ultimately we both really loved the name, and with Davis as her older brother, I have a feeling she won't have too much trouble with third grade boys anyway.  The girls may be a different story.

We are naming her Brett Louise Benson, with her middle name being a tribute to two very important Louises, my mother and Jaime's grandmother.  The kids love Baby Brett and can't get enough of her.

   

Coming attractions

New arrival on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at 12:21 a.m.:

Details to come . . .