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The boys’ birthday was a few weeks ago. We’d been talking about it for a long time, and they were very excited. They had their cakes chosen months in advance. I used a technique I’d never tried before called frozen buttercream transfer. It was pretty fun to do, and although there are a few things I’d do differently if I do it again (which I probably will), I’m pretty pleased with the results, and the boys were, too! You can click on the pictures to see them bigger.
Here are the interviews I conducted with them to mark this milestone and pictures of them and their cakes. Enjoy!
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What is your name?
James Jasper.
How old are you?
I’m three years old. I’m three years old. I’m three years old.
What is your favorite color?
I like Red.
What is your favorite toy?
I lost one. I lost my Lightning McQueen. (Me: It’s upstairs in your room on the window sill.) Oh. I be right back… (JJ returns with Lightning McQueen in his hand, I repose the question.) My favorite toy is Lightning McQueen.
What do you like to do?
I like to to paint. I like to make Lightning McQueen go, and I like to play with toys, and I like to wiggle my fingers (he wiggles his fingers).
What do you like to eat?
I like to eat turkey sandwich. I like to eat strawberries. I don’t eat bUuUugs. I eat food. I like to eat leaves (i.e. salad).
Who is your best buddy?
Lincoln. (Me: Do you have any other best buddies?) Hazel and Mom and Dad and JJ and Yoshi and Claire. (Yoshi and Claire are our cats.)
What do you want to do when you grow up?
Go to work with my best friend, Daddy.
What is your favorite show?
Phineas and Ferb.
What is your favorite movie?
Cars.
Where is your favorite place to go?
Go to the potty? (Me: The potty is your favorite place to go?) Uh, I like to go to the store? The core store. (Me: The core store?) Yeah. The core store. (I have no idea.)
What makes you happy?
Cups, and I like bowls and forks and spoons. (Me: What else makes you happy?) Numbers. That’s all my questions. (I think he has about had it with this interview.)
What makes you sad?
Doors. (Me: What?) I said doors makes me sad. Pictures makes me sad. Wipes. (Yeah, he’s definitely had it. He’s just looking around naming stuff he sees.)
What makes you angry?
Doorknobs. Uh, glasses. That’s all my questions. (Me: This is the last question. Just tell me what makes you angry.) Uh, pictures. That’s all my questions. (I give up; I think this interview is starting to make him angry.)
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 What is your name?
Lincoln Chase.
How old are you?
Three years old.
What is your favorite color?
Pink!
What is your favorite toy?
Pink Pony and my balloon, Mommy.
What do you love to do?
I love to play with my Animals (Animals is the name of one of his stuffed dragonflies). I love to watch TV. I love to watch ponies and cartoons. I like to hide in my hiding place. I like to stand up and bounce (which he demonstrates next to me on the couch). I like to play with your ear, Mommy (and we get another demonstration).
What do you love to eat?
Eat cinnamon toast, Mommy, and cinnamon bagel, and drink a straw with juice, and chocolate milk, Mommy. I wanna eat cookies, Mama. Eat chocolate chip cookies. I want chocolate, Mommy.
Who is your best buddy?
JJ and Daddy. (Me: What about Mama? (Yes, I’m fishing.)) Yeah, you’re my girl, Mama, and Hazel’s my girl.
What do you want to do when you grow up?
I eat food. I wanna be a big boy. Stronger and bigger, stronger and bigger, stronger and bigger!
What is your favorite show?
Ponies and Bubble Guppies and Umizoomi.
What is your favorite movie?
Phineas and Ferb 2nd Dimension and Tangled, Mommy.
Where is your favorite place to go?
Go to the beach. I like to go in the water. I like to go to the store and get my food.
What makes you happy?
Me. (Me: You make you happy?) No. You make me happy, and Animals and Wormy (his other stuffed dragonfly) and Pink Pony and jack-o’-lanterns.
What makes you sad?
Monsters, um, and dinosaurs and JJ yells at me.
What makes you angry?
JJ. ‘Cause he’s angry at monsters, and he looked at me. And Daddy. (Me: What does Daddy do that makes you angry?) ‘Cause he’s goin’ crazy.
You may have noticed that I updated the look of my blog (or you may not have, if you’ve only seen my posts in your RSS feed for the last week-ish). I’m not really in a place in my life where I feel like I have time to be fussy about aesthetics — the change was not for that purpose, and you can see that I didn’t get real fancy — but I’ve been wanting some features that just weren’t possible with my old template.
I thought about moving the blog in the process — I was a little short-sighted when I chose the name, and now it’s obsolete in a certain sense — but 1. I didn’t want to lose anyone who reads here in the process, and 2. the TTC, in its infertility context, doesn’t really apply anymore, but it is still what inspired the creation of this blog, and I think I am still at least ten times crazier than I used to be, albeit for different reasons now, so I am okay with sticking with it.
Back to the features I’d been wanting to add, I now have THREADED COMMENTS! and COMMENT REPLY NOTIFICATION! so I can properly engage with those of you lovely readers that take the time to leave me comments. I am very excited about it, so comment away! (But not on this post because it’s boring.)
My psyche, once riddled by the travails of infertility, can barely process where I am right now, reproductively speaking. When we first started seriously talking about having kids, we had always said we’d like to have four kids and get them in while we still had a little bit of youthful energy in us — the loose goal was four by thirty-four — but when we went years of trying with no luck, I emotionally let go of that aim.
Even after we finally had twins, getting in two more in four years seemed ambitious, especially because I expected to still have trouble getting and possibly even staying pregnant. But then Hazel came after just a few months of trying (which months I had intended to be purely perfunctory so I’d have some ammo behind my eventual request to the OB for some Clomid — I didn’t ovulate until around CD40 on the cycle Hazel was conceived, so I definitely had reason to expect to need help). And this one… well, lets just say it was offensively easy.
Lately Jeff and I have both found ourselves musing that there’ll now be time to get in a whole other kid after this one before I hit thirty-five. Crazy. It didn’t surprise me that I’d had the thought — five was always the number I’d imagined when I was growing up — but I thought we were really pushing Jeff’s comfort zone with four. Apparently, he thinks the buggers we’ve got are just so darn awesome that he can’t quite come to terms with being done.
I agree. I guess we’ll see.
With two boys and a girl, Jeff and I were hoping for this next one to be a girl to even things out — you know, make room-sharing simple, make sure Hazel didn’t get too spoiled being daddy’s only little girl, things like that — but we both felt like it was going to be a boy. I wasn’t sure whether to attribute this to some kind of parental intuition or just to the fact that we expected to get the opposite of what we wanted. Not that a boy would be disappointing, just less… symmetrical. The boys both said pretty consistently that it was a baby girl. I wasn’t sure whether to attribute this to some kind of fraternal intuition or just to the fact that, in the context of our family, girl babies (i.e. Hazel) are the only kind of babies they know.
We all descended upon the OB’s office yesterday (18w2d) for an ultrasound. It was only to check my cervix (since I have a tendency to dilate early), but I figured the ultrasound tech wouldn’t mind having a peek at the baby’s private parts to tell us whether parental or fraternal intuition reigned supreme at our house. She gladly obliged. The boys were very excited to see a “picture of the baby in Mama’s tummy on the TEEvee.” So was I.
The baby cooperated nicely by practically doing the splits for the camera. When the crotch came up on the screen, Jeff and I both let out a we-were-right, “Ope!” and I declared, “It’s a boy!”
“Actually,” the tech corrected me, “those three lines are girl parts.”
Click here to see the ultrasonic evidence!
Well. I guess I’m not real good at reading ultrasounds, then. Let’s hear it for symmetry!
Before we had kids, I had been around my fair share of child-bearers. Most of our friends at that point had multiple kids. I heard a lot of stories about most of the less than pleasant parts of pregnancy and childbirth from swelling feet to emergency c-sections performed before the anesthesia had a chance to kick in. I know some people hate to hear about all that stuff, but I liked it. I can know the horrible stuff without freaking out that it’s going to happen to me, and I like to be mentally/emotionally prepared in the event that it should happen to me. So when people would get going about the crap parts of the process, I was all ears.
How is it with all the stories and lists of side effects I’d heard before I had kids that no one ever seemed to mention postpartum hair loss? Is it embarrassing or forgettable to most people? Or do they just forget to mention it because it happens a while after the baby is born? Or does it not happen to most people?
Aaaaanyway, it happens to me somethin’ fierce.
 This was after the boys were born. See that giant patch of no hair above my temple? When it grows back in, the hair around my face is a big ol’ fuzzy mess for a while. I now understand the middle-aged woman short haircut that my mom and so many of her peers had when I was a kid. I’m not saying I condone it, and I definitely wouldn’t go there myself, but now I understand the motivations behind it.
This go-’round it had gotten to the point where all I could do with it was pony tail plus headband. I did that hairdo a lot (Linky was admiring a woman’s bracelets recently, and I told her that his fascination came partially from the fact that I pretty much never wear jewelry at which point Lincoln chimed in, “My mama wears headbands.”) Then it finally got long enough that the chunks by my temples would sort of mostly almost lie down instead of just sticking-straight-out-no-matter-how-much-product-I-put-in-them-or-bangs-I-put-on-top-of-them, so I decided to treat myself to a proper haircut.
It’s a lot shorter, and the stylist styled it wavy (not to mention that it was, you know, styled at all), so it looked very different than usual when I came home from the salon. Link got one look at me, cocked his head and asked, “How your hair grow big like that, Mama? How your hair turn like a oval?”
I’m pretty sure he was referring to the curliness, not the overall shape, of my hair, but regardless of the unconventionality of his comment, it was obvious he liked it, and it made me feel pretty.
I love this boy!
Hey! If you can’t make it to the end of this lengthy post, at least skip to the end. There’s important information down there.
So I’m just going to jump right into this like I haven’t been seriously neglecting this blog. Here’s what’s up lately:
During July/August we went on a four-week, 5,000+ mile road trip out to the west coast which included a week of camping. Like, tent camping. With two two-year-olds and an eleven-month-old.
The short version: We survived, which was better than I was expecting.
The long version in bullets:
- The driving was actually the easy part of the trip (save one factor, which I’ll get to later). The kids were champs (thanks, in no small part, to the DVD player).
 my good little travelers
- Camping went mostly better than I expected except that the boys were so wound up by the novelty of the whole situation that we couldn’t get them to eat or sleep as well as usual (actually, that was true of the whole trip), so there were more than a few meltdowns, and by the end of the week both boys were sick to the point that we made a trip to urgent care where we found out they both had pneumonia.
 a rare nap during camping week
- In spite of getting sick, the boys LOVED camping on the beach due in part to the intrinsic joys of the beach (playing chicken with the waves, sandcastles, throwing rocks in the water, seagulls and pigeons walking around right! by! us!, etc.) and also to the fact that it was a family reunion, so, between my siblings’ kids, my cousins’ kids, and my cousins who still are kids, there were upwards of 40 minors running around like, well, like 40 kids turned loose on a beach/campsite (they were supervised, of course, so there were no pig heads on sticks or anything), so the boys had an endless supply of exciting friends.
 I think the everybody-in-white-shirts-and-jeans thing is cheesy and cliche, but whatever  See that wall of sand behind them? My dad and siblings built it. It stood for days, and every time a wave washed around it, the space behind it filled with water. It was the perfect little pool for the bitty kids.
- Staying with generous friends whose home is very only-adults-live-here with two kids with pneumonia, no matter how hospitable and understanding the friends are, is very stressful (for me, anyway). To put it into perspective, I felt relieved to move on from there to my MIL‘s house. At least there I don’t have to worry that someone’s going to be exhausted for work the next day because the kids were up all night coughing.
 the boys with their new buddy, Batman (note the juice spill on the probably rather expensive pillow)
- We got to see a lot of friends from the days when we lived in L.A. We’ve missed them. I am horrible at keeping in touch with friends once I move away from a place (a side effect of being a military brat and moving a lot), but Jeff is great at it, so I’m starting to find out what it’s like having people who can actually be classified as “old friends.” I likes it.
- We also got to visit many of Jeff’s friends from high school when we were in northern California (he seriously keeps in touch with, like, everybody) including his best man with whom he went to high school, undergrad at UCLA, and grad school at UT, Austin (not purposefully, but geez, get your own lives, guys). One of his friends invited us to her new letterpress studio, and she did a little project with Linky and JJ. It was soooooo cute!
 she let them pick the colors and everything
- We also went to Jeff’s cousin’s wedding. The boys referred to Jeff’s cousin, the bride, as “the princess.” She loved it. I got to meet the estranged cousins. One of them was totally awesome with the kids; he let Jeff and me relax a little. I loved it.
- We brought Jeff’s sister back with us on the drive home for a short visit. Our van was packed full.
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Hazel now has 20 or so words that we can identify and one sentence to her vocabulary. Of course, almost none of them are well enunciated, but they’re identifiable. (Heck, a lot of Lincoln’s vocabulary still fits into the poorly-enunciated-but-identifiable category.) One of her latest and most stinkingly cute words is “blastoff” (which actually sounds more like da-tah, or, more accurately, DAAA-TAAAHH!!!).
She had been able to walk about six feet at a time since before she was ten months old but always opted to crawl when given the choice. Then two days before her birthday she just decided she was a big girl and has thence been walking everywhere. Now, at thirteen and a half months, she’s an old pro. It makes her immensely happy because now she can keep up with her brothers better, and they’re, you know, totally rad.
About three weeks ago I started potty training the boys. I meant to do it in the spring but kept finding excuses not to (I think my desire for them to stopgrowingupsofastalready may have played a small or large part in the delay) until we got close enough to our trip that I abandoned the idea entirely until we got back. Thinking about things that could be awful on a road trip with three wee bairns was bad enough without having two of said bairns being freshly potty trained; frequent stops (at what would most frequently be scary public restrooms) and accidents were not things I wanted to add to the list of possible complications. So we just got around to it.
Aside from urine stream issues — despite positional modifications Link has an uncanny ability to pee precisely through the crack between the bowl and the seat about half of the time — I declare them well-trained. I still wipe butts post-poop, occasionally I find JJ wrapped up in an activity clutching his crotch and have to remind him to take care of business, Lincoln hasn’t mastered the art of re-pantsing himself and frequently emerges from the bathroom shuffling ’cause his drawers are still around his ankles (or he takes them off completely and announces his emergence by throwing his underwear in my face; it’s my favorite), and when they’re tired they insist on a parental potty escort, but besides that, they do it all on their own. I’m very proud of us all for this accomplishment.
As for the one factor I mentioned forever ago that made the vacation driving more difficult, it was pregnancy nausea. I spent our four-week road trip vacation with three tiny kids deeply immersed in the exhaustion and vomitousness of early pregnancy. I had moments — like while puking into a campsite toilet in the wee hours of the morning — where I regretted going forward with the trip after I found out I was pregnant (which was just days before we left), but overall I’m glad we still did it.
Baby number four is due to arrive in mid-March at which time, God willing, we will have four kids under four.
Guess who just had her first 28-day cycle ever. AAANND I’m pretty certain I ovulated. I remember a couple weeks ago having some pretty clear signs of ovulation, and I pooh-poohed myself for thinking I could be ovulating because it was right around CD 14, and I NEVER ovulate that early in a cycle if I do at all, but then two weeks later… It’s all very weird to me.
I’m going to start charting my temps again. We’re not TTC, but we will be probably by the end of the year (?! How is that already on the radar again?), and it would be nice to know what’s going on with my ovaries ‘n’ stuff when that time comes. Plus, if I ovulate, we can dispense with the contraception for a little while once I know an egg has come and gone (we’ve been using physical contraception since any BCP but the low-dose kind causes me to puke my guts out for the first few days of every cycle, and our insurance doesn’t cover much on the low-dose kind because it doesn’t come in generic form, so BCP=$$$), which would be nice.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I mean, it’ll be nice if my girl parts finally start behaving properly in time for an impregnation to go as planned, but I’m kind of annoyed at my body. I had three or four periods/year with ovulation even less frequent than that when I needed it, and now when I’m about to not need it anymore, my body’s finally getting into gear? I’d much rather go back to having three periods a year once I have no use for them anymore. Lame.
But then, maybe I’m speaking too soon. Maybe my reproductive organs are still on the fritz, and this seemingly normal cycle was just a fluke. I guess we’ll see.
I am really enjoying Two (years old, that is). The guys demonstrate new skillz pretty much every day. Their language is growing in leaps and bounds, and it is so fun to have them start communicating well enough that I get bigger and bigger glimpses of what is going on in their adorable, disproportionately huge heads (seriously, at their two-year checkup, they were both at or below average for height and weight and around the 90th percentile for head circumference). The game we play of Mama trying to figure out what the heck JJ and Linky are talking about is almost always a blast and quite satisfying. Admittedly, it is occasionally frustrating on both my end and theirs — especially when I ask for clarification and they just affirm heartily (e.g. JJ says, “More, pwease, Mama. Pwease, pwease, pwease,” and I have neither given him anything nor done anything for him in recent moments, so I ask, “More what, JJ?” In answer, JJ nods exuberantly and says, “Yeah!” Gyaaaargh!) — but I think we are pretty good at being patient with each other.
Anyway, occasionally they bust out with things that amaze me (I am willing to admit that, perhaps, I am too readily impressed) because I have no idea where they learned them. For example, when the mail comes in and gets set on the table, if we give them the opportunity (which means not standing over them every single blasted second — so basically every time), the boys will swipe the pile off the table and shuffle through it looking for something interesting (them boys love a catalog — if I try to talk to JJ while he’s perusing one, all I get is a curt, “I busy!” (sadly, I know exactly where he got that one)). Around Thanksgiving JJ came running up to me with one of his finds — a card advertising some store’s Christmas sale — and pointed excitedly at a row of lit pine trees. “Yook, mama! Chwristmass twree!”
I was then just as excited as he was because 1. Yeah! Christmas tree! (although I couldn’t wait to get ours up, I failed to make Jeff see the merits of getting our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and that event was relegated to the next weekend and 2. Where the heck did he learn that? I mean, Jeff and I didn’t teach him that, and we hadn’t watched any Christmas shows yet or anything (I tried my darnedest to not get too excited and let Thanksgiving have its day without being mowed over by carols and tinsel and Rudolph and such), and there’s no way he remembers those words together like that from last year (when he was 14 months old and not doing much talking at all), right?
One of Link’s latest where-did-that-come-froms is the way he searches for things. He wanders around aimlessly with his hand shielding his brow while alternately calling out for the missing item — for example, “Pooooom, w’aaaaah eeeyooooooou?” (for those of you not fluent in 2-year-old mush-mouth, that’s “Spoon, where are you?”) — and tapping his chin with his index finger while going, “Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm.” As far as I can remember, I had nothing to do with his acquisition of this behavior, and, while it is pretty stinkin’ cute, I wish that whoever it was that taught it to him had also taught him how to do the actual searching more effectively because the objects invariably do not answer his calls, and the chin tapping is equally useless, so I always end up having to find them for him.
I can’t wait to see what other things Two will bring that I didn’t teach them.
WARNING: Potty talk abounds in this entry. Read at your own risk.
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While the boys were napping today, I made a batch of m&m cookies (don’t worry, this is not the potty talk part). We had a half a big bag of m&m’s left from decorating cupcakes at the boys’ birthday party, a few bags the boys got trick-or-treating, and a bunch of fun size bags left from the Halloween candy we’d handed out. I looked at all those m&m’s then down at my post-baby belly then back at the m&m’s and decided it would be a pretty bad idea to just eat them, so I decided to use them to make cookies. Seriously, that was my train of thought. You can’t just eat all of those sugary treats. But what shall I do with them? Why, just bind them together with more sugar and some carbs and lots of butter and THEN eat them! Yes, that will be good. I did catch myself on it just seconds later, but still. Sheesh. And once the cookie train gets rolling in my brain, there is no stopping it, so make cookies I did. They are tasty.
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We have done exactly nothing in the way of potty training (besides hanging the boys over the toilet a few times many months ago when they tried to poop in the tub during bath time (which they hated, so I’m sure that set all things potty back, if anything)). I figured we’d hang out outside next spring/summer while they got the hang of it so’s I wouldn’t have to clean pee out of the furniture and carpets.
Well. It turns out Lincoln may have different plans.
He came up to Jeff and me this evening saying, “Poo poo potty.” Surprised and sure I must’ve misunderstood, I asked, “You want to go poo poo in the potty?” He nodded fervently and grabbed at his butt. Still unconvinced, I shrugged at Jeff to indicate that I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let him sit on the potty. After checking him to make sure he wasn’t telling us he’d already gone, we plopped him down on the toilet.
Like I said before, we have done nothing in the potty training way, so we have no equipment of any sort. He was just teetering on the front of the big boy seat and looked quite uncertain about it, so I sat down behind him and held him up (sometimes moms just have to do undignified things — it’s the nature of the job). I figured we’d sit for a bit, he’d get bored, and I’d put the diaper back on, and that would be that. But I’ll be danged if that little dude didn’t start grunting like he meant it, and before I knew it, “Plop!” he’d laid a little log.
Then there was much cheering and rejoicing, and Linky proudly bid his dump adieu as he flushed it away. I was so thrilled that, despite our temporal proximity to dinner, I proclaimed that he should have one of the cookies I’d so fortuitously made earlier in the day.
In an attempt to maintain at least a semblance of parental responsibility, I gave him just half a cookie. It made no difference to Lincoln. He savored that half-of-a-cookie quite seriously. He literally sat with it cradled in his hands and just sniffed it for a good ten minutes before taking a bite, and then he blissfully nibbled it out of existence. Well, not exactly out of existence. It is, as I type, traversing his digestive tract becoming the very substance that won it.
I don’t know if this was an isolated incident or if he’ll also start wanting to number one in the potty or what, but for now I am just so pleased, and I wanted to let everyone know:
LINKY POOPED IN THE POTTY!!!
Today, just two days shy of their second birthday, JJ and Link decided they needed no nap. It was quite out-of-the-blue — they haven’t been taking shorter naps lately or anything like that — and who knows what will happen tomorrow, but today they just flopped around in their cribs and talked to each other for two hours occasionally calling for Mama or Dada. Just before I went to get them, I heard this exchange over the monitor:
JJ: Punkin. Punkin. Punkin.
Link: No. No puh-kin.
JJ: Punkin.
Link: NO puh-kin!
JJ: Pump. Kin. Biiiiiiiig pumpkin. (He can say it right if he concentrates.)
Link: NOOOOO! NO PUH-KIN!
JJ: PUMPKIN! BIG PUMPKIIIIIN!
Link: NO NO PUH-KIN!
JJ: No! No way! (I’m sure this was accompanied by some shaking of his cute little finger in Link’s direction.)
Link: No PUH-KIIIIIIIIIIIIN!
JJ (simultaneously): NO WAAAAAAAAAAY!
It kind of died off after that. I couldn’t tell whether they settled on pumpkin or no pumpkin or if they just agreed to disagree.
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What is your name?