Into the woods pics!!

Here are the pictures!!

Into the woods...

Long before Genevieve was born Patrick and I decided that we should spend the last two weeks of my maternity leave (and Patrick’s last two weeks of freedom before he is sacrificed to the study-nonstop-for-the-bar gods) up at my folks cabin on the Blue River. I am happy to say that we stuck to our guns and have been hanging out doing close to nothing up here in the woods since last Thursday. The place is super remote but even so as of a month ago we have internet… how crazy is that?

Little Evie, who for the first few days up here was better known as Fuss Bucket, is doing well. Last Tuesday I weighed her in at 9 pounds 8 ounces. Patrick is very concerned with weight percentiles and was pleased to research and discover that this puts her exactly at the 50th percentile for weight. Now for those of you who do not spend your days obsessing over a baby’s weight and height, these percentiles are not like the SATs, a 95th percentile versus a 25th does not mean your babe is extra good or extra bad… it is simply a range of acceptable. For example a 95th percentile baby only has 5% of kiddos that are heavier and a 25th has 75% that are heavier etc. But average (or heavier) n this case matters most to Evie’s daddy so both the food machine (aka me) and the babe are happy to comply.

I guess changes in altitude can wreak havoc on little bellies (or so grandma pediatrician informed us) because man was she an unhappy camper (or cabiner to be more exact) our first day or two here (thus the alias of Fuss Bucket). Fortunately for our sanity she has calmed down considerably and is back to her usual happy calm baby self.

The most eventful occurrence so far has nothing to do with babies, but with lost dogs and close encounters with bears… seeing how Evie and I just held down the fort during that whole adventure I will let you ask Patrick, who survived to tell the tale, fill you in on that one! Evie went on her second hike (what a lucky gal) on Monday. She is quite the hiker I tell ya, spent most of the hike awake and looking out the side of her little pack, nice and quiet and I imagine happy.

I am taking tons of pictures but have no easy way to post them here so y’all will have to wait until we return to the land of the hot and sweaty next week ☺

Nicole comes to town!

Last Wednesday Genevieve got to meet her Grandma Nicole for the first time!! Nicole came all the way out from Baltimore to see Genevieve and to see Patrick graduate from law school. We have had a wonderful past few days…. Mostly involving sitting around the house and playing with little Evie, who is very fond of her Grandma and has given her the number one place to sleep award ☺

We have been having a lot of fun recently because Evie is smiling more and more and is really starting to interact with the world around her. She loves to stare into the little mirror on top of her vibrating chair and actually started grasping at the toys on the sides. The chair turned out to be a fabulous investment… and to think that to get the adult version of one of these bad boys (i.e., massage chairs) we would pay a fortune and still not have the music and “toys” associated with it that she has. Ahh the privileged life of a baby!

Unfortunately for Nicole it has been pretty darn hot here. We tried to give her a reprieve from the heat and on Friday went up to Mt. Lemmon for Evie’s first official hike. I carried her so it was not a long excursion but an important milestone nonetheless. (Some people keep track of head lifting etc but being the hippies we are we are most concerned with important events like hikes and trips to the mountains )

Of course the highlight of the past week was Patrick’s hard earned graduation from law school. Being the cheesy lady I am I made a onesie for Evie that said “Proud Daughter of a J.D.” for her to wear to the graduation. I guess Patrick and I are well matched because he seemed to really appreciate the little get up I put her in. The ceremony was really nice and Genevieve was perfectly behaved (may those days last for as long as possible… I won’t say forever because not even I am that naïve). It will definitely take some adjustment for all of us to think of Patrick as an attorney instead of a law student…

Mall madness

Genevieve reached the one-month marker this Sunday… but was four weeks old last Friday, yet another confusing aspect of parenthood, four weeks does not equal one month. So when they say your child should be able to balance one toe (or some other equally important milestone) at three months do they mean 12 weeks or the 6th of July which is more like 13 or 14 weeks?

In any case the most exciting aspect of the whole month marker is that we can now safely take Evie out into the wide world. Her first foray into the urban forest was a much-needed bra run to the Tucson Mall, not the most thrilling of outdoor adventures but hey you have got to start somewhere. So I figured my best baby-outing bet would be to stuff her full of food and then make a b-line to the car to maximize the amount of time I had before she was hungry and fussy again. Ohh the folly of young motherhood….

We made it to the mall fine but of course I parked on the absolute wrong side of the mall for the store I wanted to go to and had to hike it at least a mall mile to my goal. I am pretty anti clunky stroller these days (while she still light enough to carry I can afford to be) so I had her in the baby sling. For whatever reason this was a curiosity and well-meaning people kept stopping me to ask about her not realizing that my baby-so-cute-not-fussy-clock was ticking.

We made it to the store without incident but man did I have a heck of a time getting things down off of high racks and doing my darndest not to turn my baby into a defacto clothes hanger. So I get ¾ of the way though trying on clothes when the fussy alarm sounds and she starts to cry and I, who am in between trying on bras look down to see my boobs starting to leak (little did I realize I too had a timer) So I fumble my own bra back on and then proceed to feed her in the dressing room hoping that no well meaning worker comes to check on me because I am certainly not comfortable with the public feeding thing yet. Fortunately the babe was fed without incident and I purchased a few items and we headed to the car.

At the car I realized that in my rush to get a well-fed baby into the car I forgot to change her diaper as well. I decided to change it in the car before we left the mall… lets just say she was very productive and I count myself lucky to not have had a great yellow-green disaster to add to our first trip out…

Good news and great irony

An update on the general state of babydom.... Genevieve and I went down to the Birth Center yesterday because I thought it was my pregnancy class reunion (turns out it wasn't but that is another story, chalk it up to lack of sleep... gotta love it I now have an excuse for every dopey thing I do :) Well regardless I had a chance to weigh her (remember I am still concerned about the whole birth weight thing...) and she is a whopping 8 pounds 10 ounces!!! Hurrah that means I can finally lay to rest the whole "I must be starving my baby" thing!

We also finally got a breast pump, I ended up just buying one online for conveniece sake. Evie has been sleeping really well and I am ready to cautiously declare the whole reverse the night to day endeavor a success. In fact, last night she slept for 4.5 hours in one stretch! The great irony is that I had to use that hard found pump after about 3.5 hours of sleep because I was so full as to be in pain... nothing is ever simple is it?

Adventures in Rural Diapering

On Thursday of last week we decided to pack it in and head up to the woods… rumors of a 90+ degree weekend were certainly a consideration in the exodus. The drive up to the cabin emphasized the whole everything-takes-longer-when-you-have-kids mantra. The drive is usually about 5.5 hours but took us closer to 7 because we periodically had to stop to feed Genevieve. The upshot of this was most of the places we stopped were very pretty and at I think just about every stop Patrick ran into someone and started talking to them about something random and interesting.

My folks were up at the cabin with us which was great. Genevieve and I mostly took it easy, and we discovered just how great breastfeeding on a hammock in the cool sunny air can be for ones state of mind. Patrick spent most of his time either helping to clean up the cabin and prepare it for the fire season or noodling around on his guitar. Ahhh the life.

The big experiment of the trip was to see if we could stick to our cloth diapering guns while away from the “modern washing machine convenience”. To that end Patrick and Dad fixed the aged (and I mean really aged) washing machine in the upper shed so that we could give it a whirl… so to speak. The fix proved to be an exercise in creativity, the hose used to plug and drain the washer was so old that in trying to see how much “flex” it had left it just cracked in two. Having no extra circa 1950s hose at the cabin improvisation was a necessity. They dinked around with it for awhile and in the end Patrick used a whittled down champagne cork to stop up the washer and keep it from draining. The amazing thing is this actually worked!

So Mom and I set about washing the diapers which entailed cold soaking them in one of the rinse bins, washing them in the machine, sending them through the finger crunching wringer, rinsing them, sending them through the wringer, rinsing them, sending them through the wringer and then onto the line to dry. The wringer was the most interesting part of the whole endeavor, it took two of us to safely feed the diapers through it…. I have no idea how a solo washer would manage quite frankly.

So washed and ready we hung the diapers to dry on the clothes line inside the shed because it looked like it might just rain…. And rain it most certainly did. About 4 hours later I checked on the diapers (supply was getting low and I was getting a bit anxious) and they were still as sopping wet as the moment they were wrung. A plan B had to be enacted. So we started a fire in the fireplace and set up a baby diaper drying rack out of the holder for the fireplace accessories… all very high tech. This certainly did the job but it was a pretty labor intense operation… all that diaper monitoring and flipping like burgers. We did a few diapers this way with the hope that the next day would be sunny and bright and we could use solar power as our dryer.

As luck would have it the next day we had about 4 hours of morning sunshine (not potent enough to dry a single diaper) and then 6 hours of rain. So back to the fireplace those darn diapers went. In the end they were all nice and toasty dry and we can call ourselves hardcore… or maybe just cheap…..