Jane Goodall

I think being a mom is a lot like being Jane Goodall.

What?  Huh?  What could I possibly mean by that?  Well, I don't mean that you are looking at gorillas all day long.  But I do mean that you spend a lot of time watching non-verbal creatures act out behaviors and you try to assign some sort of meaning to those behaviors.

Take this for example:

To the untrained eye this just looks like a baby trying to crawl.  But not to me.  Nope, to me this is something entirely different.

Let's look at it a little differently.

Really, the secret is all in the left foot.  See how it is bent outward? This means he is not trying to crawl since his feet always stay under him when he crawls.  It also means he is not trying to stand since he gets up on his toes when he is trying to stand. 

Another important factor is that he is playing with his blocks (or the box the blocks came in).  He prefers to play with these when he is sitting.

What, you just had an eureka moment?  Well shout it out loud for everyone to hear.  Again, and try it a little louder - we are mostly paesans reading this thing and we can get loud (yes, go ahead and throw the stereotype flag... and then shout it out).

This is a photo of my baby try to get into a sitting position from his stomach.  I know, he is a genius (see the post from earlier today). 

Well, he is almost a genius.

See that gigantic orange arrow on his forehead.  It's pointing to a goose egg that my baby received when he was trying to get into a sitting position from his stomach and he face planted directly in to his blocks.

As for the little orange arrow.  That is a random red mark on his head.  He is so fair that his head gets covered in these things.  It's the way of the jungle... I know this because I am Jane Goodall.

On another note, the highlight of my day today was changing a stinkoppotomaus diaper in the back of my Prius in the Target parking lot.  I highly recommend a hatchback for any new moms.  It really comes in handy.

Enjoy your weekend.  Next week we need to chat about my doctor's appointment (I know, I never got around to it this week) and what I'll be doing Sunday... tune in next week.

Smarty Pants (aka Mr. Monkey Pants)

Okay, I've accepted it.  Apparently my baby is smart.  I don't know how people know this since he will still chew on my dirty toes, loves wet paper towels, and freaks out over plastic bottles... but this is what people say.  At first it was my husband and I thought "Well of course he will say that, Evan is his offspring."  Then it was the grandparents and since grandparents think their grandbabies poop gold I didn't put too much stock into it.  But yesterday, at the grocery store, a complete stranger stopped to ask me Monkey's age.  I told her Monkey is 8 months (I know... 8 months old... yowsers) and she said, "Your baby is very smart." 

Again, I don't know what prompted her to say that since at that moment Monkey was leaning out of the cart trying to grab on to a bag of flour.  This moment though was better than when I parked the cart, went to grab something out of the freezer and when I turned back around Monkey was about to pull a bottle of beer out of a six pack.  Or when I turned my back in the produce department and he almost had the entire bin of apples falling on top of him. 

And all I can figure out is that smart means getting in to everything... I mean everything.  And now that he is semi-mobile (with the rolling and the army crawl) he gets in to things I never would have thought about.

For example, here is Monkey playing with a rug.

At first he rolled himself up in it. By the time I got the camera he decided he wanted to play with it differently so he wiggled his way out of it and backed off a little.  He started to grab the edge.

Then he decided it was time to go after that flipped over piece of carpet again so he got ready to crawl.

But, turns out that when he tries to crawl on concrete all he does is push himself backwards and his feet fall out underneath him.  (Look at the confused expression, he can't figure out why he doesn't go forward on the concrete... smart?)

But, the real reason he is smart is that he can wrap his mother around his little pinkie.  Because once he realized I was taking pictures of him, he did this:

And I offered to buy him a Porsche, make him homemade sauce, and cut off the crusts on his sandwiches for the rest of his life.  It's the lopsided grin, it's irresistible.

I know, you want to hug him... but remember the pain (I'll tell you a little secret... the pain is worth it).

Love Hurts

My baby has learned how to hug.  I'm never quite sure if I'm making stuff up or not until someone else verifies it for me (like how Monkey sings himself to sleep in the back seat of the car - my mom heard it too so it's real).  And the only reason I know that the hugs are for real is because I heard my husband say last night, "What the heck is that all about?," and when I looked over Monkey was hugging.

Now, before you get all gooey and you want a Monkey hug yourself, let me explain something... Monkey hugs hurt - a lot.  I'm not sure where Monkey learned to hug (maybe from Def Leppard - little pop culture for you children of the 80s... and if you weren't a child of the 80s, Def Leppard sang a song called "Love Bites" about how painful love is... fabulous power ballad) but it is not a pleasant experience.

There are basically 3 phases to the Monkey Hug.

Phase 1: He bombs his head towards your face and wherever it lands it lands.  Often this results in a bone on bone collision or a bone on your glasses/lips/nose.  I believe this is his version of the cuddle.

Phase 2: He flings his arms somewhere above your shoulders and around your neck.  This is the least painful phase, it all depends on whether or not I've cut his nails lately (and since I've made him bleed twice the likelihood is that I haven't cut his nails lately).

Phase 3: He grabs a fist of your hair and pulls... hard.  For you short-haired or straight-haired people this phase is probably not as painful as those of you with long curly hair.  Because the long curly hair he can grab, twist, and pull and his little fist stays all balled up in your hair.  For everyone else his fist will just fly off of your hair.

And that is a Monkey hug.  Incredibly adorable and incredibly painful.  I love it and fear it at the same time.

In other news, last night Monkey said "ma ma ma ma ma."  I know he was just making syllables but my heart skipped a beat anyway.

Coming and Going Home

It is so nice to visit my childhood home. And it is so nice to come back to my home I’ve created for my family.

As we were waiting in the airport last night for our plane to arrive and then waiting on the tarmac in Atlanta for a gate to open up I started thinking about how going home always brings up such conflicting emotions. To “organize” these emotions I started a mental pros and cons list. And, since I’m a blogger, I’ve decided to share this list with you (because that is what is what we bloggers do, we share with you what is in our brains whether or not it seems interesting to anyone but us).

Pros:

• Seeing family. And, more specifically, seeing Monkey with his extended family. It warms my heart when he plays with his cousins or when his Grandparents, Aunt, and Uncles swoop in for a cuddle.

• Seeing old friends and their new children. I’m so lucky to have a friend who isn’t high maintenance (mostly because I’m really bad at keeping in touch). When we see each other we pick up right where we left off. And, she has the most adorable children, one of whom is enamored with “baby Kevin.”
• To go along with the first two bullet points, there are so many people around, I get a break. There is always someone willing to hold the baby, play with the baby, feed the baby, etc. I think on the flight home was the first time I was able to snuggle with my baby.

• Being in a house. A house with lots of windows, fresh air, and rooms that separate you from other people (all of this in contrast to the loft).

Cons:

• Coming home to a house with no food but tons of laundry. The food thing I get, before I leave I always clean out my fridge and take out the garbage. But the laundry thing baffles me. I do laundry at my mom’s house, how do I have so much to do here?
• Missing my cats. Remember them? The other members of my family? My four-legged friends really get a bum deal nowadays but I do miss them when we are gone.
• Feathers all over my clothes. Really this bullet point is for my mom, she gets it. Oh, I see, you want to get it too. Well, I’ll share with you, but you will soon find it really isn’t that exciting. My mom has these fabulous pillows on her couch. They are gorgeous, but feathers pop out of them all the time and seem to really like me. I just found one on a shirt I pulled out of my suitcase.
• Travel. Monkey is really good on airplanes and in airports, but travel still stinks. The packing, the lugging, the security… and did I mention I lost my license? Don’t worry, we found it again, but a word to the wise, don’t stick your only state issued id in the back pocket of your diaper bag because it will probably fall out when you put your bag on the x-ray belt and you probably won’t notice it for a little while until you give in to your husband nagging you to put your license back in your wallet. Then you will have to listen to your husband completely panic as you try and remain calm because all the sudden your husband is supremely worried about identity theft. Finally, you will go back to security, let them know you are a complete idiot and that you are looking for a Georgia license, and a TSA agent will hand you your license while giving you the look. You know the look, the one your father used to give you about not doing something so stupid again but he didn’t want to say the word stupid out loud. Yeah, that was fun.
• Missing things in Atlanta. This past weekend we missed a HUGE Atlanta festival that had a house tour I would have loved to see. But, we will be here next year so hopefully I’ll catch it then.
• Having to leave everyone back in New Jersey. Just when you get used to seeing them every day, it is time to say goodbye. It’s tough. I love that fact that I get to live in all kinds of different places and experience tons of new things. I just wish my family and friends could come along with me. That, or that the transporter from Star Trek would become real. I’ll take either option.

  

And there it is… my brain on paper. There is no significance to this list other than the fact that it is a list. It doesn’t make decisions, it doesn’t get a vote, it doesn’t even get second look. It just is what it is.

Now, let me go get my baby that is so far off of schedule he doesn’t even have a schedule any more (I guess that would be on the “cons” list). Fun times… fun times.

By the way, this is Monkey with his harem.  He established it in New Jersey.  You have to start young with these things if you ever expect to have a lot of girls:

Phew

So, don't know if you've noticed, but it's been crazy.  I'm a little preoccupied with trying to figure out Evan's new sleep schedule (and hoping he still has one), getting my behind to the gym in between his new sleep schedule, getting ready to go to NJ for a few days, and all of this with Brian away for work.  I will say again and again, I honestly don't know how single moms do it.

The moral of the story is that you won't be getting a new or interesting post until next week.  I need to shower before he wakes up (if he really went to sleep) and then we have a bazillion things to do and at some point Evan has on his "To Do" list to get super tired but refuse to take a nap and that takes a lot of time away from our day.

But on the bright side... next Tuesday I have an appointment with a possible Atlanta gynecologist (I say possible because my first contact in Austin was a terrible disaster) and there are always fun stories that can come from that.

Enjoy your weekend and I'll be back soon.  But in case you need some eye candy:

(This is how his hair dries naturally... and that is what I look like not showered - cover your eyes from the shine off of my forehead.)