abc family

Lifestyles of the Unusually Named

That was lame, wasn't it? Like one of you was really going to guess that we're so strangely uptight about gendered clothing that we would refuse to put our son in slightly feminine pajamas? Ludicrous.

Here's the proof that we are not uptight:

I know I'm biased and everything, but that kid is really ridiculously cute, isn't he? I'm afraid he may be prettier than his sister. (Prettier than she was as a baby, not prettier than she is now, of course.)

Bryan's out of town for the night (his fourth trip to DC in nine weeks, by my count) so it's just me and the children and my sister. After the kids are in bed I think that Tirienne and I are going to make the prune cake from Pioneer Woman's new cookbook, except we're going to try it with dried apricots instead of prunes because we're rebels that way. We also have not yet watched last week's episode of The Office, so that is the plan for when the cake is in the oven.

Are you not just dying with jealousy because our lifestyle is so fabulous?

Anyway, I wanted to make sure to mention that my mom, lovely lady that she is, has posted on her own blog all about my name and my siblings' names. If you're curious about what all our names are and where in the heck my parents got them, you don't want to miss this one.

(And if you do hop over there, be the wonderful kind readers I know you are and leave my mom a comment, will you? She's doing NaBloPoMo and she's plugging along in spite of the fact that my parents are in the midst of buying a new house and preparing to move this month. I'm sure she could use some encouragement!)

Hypothetical Digital Dolls

Let's say you have a little girl, and then you have a baby boy. And the boy is - for no apparent reason - disproportionately large for his age, such that when he is nine months old and you dress him in one of his 12-month-sized blanket sleepers, when you do his midnight diaper change you practically break his leg trying to get the thing zipped back up without waking him.

So the next evening you decide that the 12-month-sized sleepers are out of the question, obviously, but there is only one 18-month-sized one that has been handed down to you so far, and it's dirty. The long-term solution is to go out and buy 24-month sleepers so the poor over-sized child has some growing room, but it's 7pm on a Sunday. So plan B must be his sister's old clothes.

Now fortunately, when you go downstairs and find the correct bin, you remember that you dressed your toddler-aged daughter (who actually wore 18-month size when she was eighteen months old) in a couple of sleepers that were blue, and a couple more that, while clearly intended for girls, aren't too insanely frou-frou or pink-saturated.

You, being a sensible type, figure that your best option for nightwear for your son is the following (pictured on his sister, December 2007):

However, you're being kindly assisted in the process by the three-year-old girl who originally wore the sleepers in question, and her selection for her younger brother's nightwear is a slightly less gender-neutral one (pictured here on her in January 2008):

So here is the question: What do you do? Put your baby son (who, it should be noted, could not care less himself) in the more gender-appropriate sleeper, or make his sister happy by dressing him [a little like] a girl?

And what do you think I did?

Read Good Stuff Elsewhere!

I told my mom today that doing NaBloPoMo is low-pressure because it's my own blog and no one cares what I write, so I "can open up a window and just start typing."

But a few hours later I'm sitting here with nothing to talk about and it turns out that while you technically CAN "just start typing" when you've got nothing to say, it feels sort of... pointless.

So tonight, in lieu of boring you with my stream of consciousness, I hopped over to my Google Reader to grab some links, and am sharing a random sampling of some of my favorites tonight.

seeking Solomon... - I know I have told you before that you should be reading my sister's blog, but it bears repeating. You should be reading Miriel's blog! If you like my blog you will like hers, because she is like a way more awesome version of me. (I'm not saying this so that you'll tell me I'm awesome. I'm saying this because YOU SHOULD READ HER BLOG.)

dashoff - Diane is a long-time reader and commenter here, and she has a daughter two months older than Camilla and a daughter two months older than Blaise. (Cool!) I knew she was hilarious from her comments and her Twitter feed, but then she started a blog of her own a few months ago and I am totally hooked. She can't stop blogging ever now, or I'll go through severe withdrawal. (Diane, did you hear that?) If you're not reading dashoff, you are missing out.

Momopoly - Kate Wicker is smart and eloquent and kind and loving and a wonderful mother. (Yes, you can tell all this from her blog. Or I can, anyway.) Reading her makes me want to be a better person, not in a down-on-myself way but in a very uplifted way. If you read it maybe you'll feel the same.

are things complicated yet? - A'Dell is hilarious, y'all. I found her blog by complete random chance about a year ago, right before she gave birth to her daughter, and I loved her attitude toward the whole birth thing so I was hooked. I've been loving reading along, laughing at her stories and cooing over her daughter's cuteness all through A'Dell's first year as a mother, and it's been so much fun. Plus her little girl's first name is Camilla's middle name and her middle name is my middle name, so I think that's pretty cool. Read!

That's a good start, right? For more excellent reads check out the links to your left.

Seven Sleepy Takes

-1-

The last time I did NaBloPoMo, I was not also blogging at Faith & Family. Writing five posts a week there plus posting daily here keeps me busy! Twelve blog posts a week is a considerable number, especially since I've been trying to write something substantial(ish) every time instead of just posting links or pictures or whatnot. That's because this is week one. We'll see how things are going by week three.

-2-

One downside of being a co-sleeping family is how difficult it is to recreate our home sleeping situation when we're on the road. It's usually not too bad in hotel rooms, where we can get a room with two queen beds and each share one with a kid. But traveling to people's homes is much more challenging.

This weekend we're back in our hometown staying with Bryan's parents.  They have a room with two twin beds and a room with a double bed, plus a crib which we can move from one room to the other. This weekend I'm sleeping in a twin bed next to Blaise in the crib while Bryan and Camilla share the double. Previously I've slept in the double with Blaise while Bryan and Camilla slept on the floor, but we're hoping this will work better. I miss having them in the same room with me, though!

Co-sleeping families: do you have creative ways to handle sleep while you travel? Especially if you've got an older kid who will not sleep alone?

-3-

Camilla has recently been talking about how she wants to live "with Mama and Daddy forever and ever." When questioned, she also says that she wants to sleep in our room forever, not have her own room. We think this is pretty cute and we kind of treasure it, because it'll be no time at all before she's moving away to go to college. (Sob.) (Not really - that seems impossibly far away, currently my main thought when I consider my children going to college is that by then, I'll definitely be sleeping through the night every night.)

-4-

Speaking of sleep, Blaise has responded to the end of Daylight Saving Time by choosing to rise daily at 5:15am. What is this kid thinking? And how in heaven's name do we fix it? Anyone have any brilliant ideas?

-5-

You know, I write five posts a week for Faith & Family and sometimes I have trouble coming up with topics, so I do this thing where I sort of mentally cast around the pond of my daily life looking for material. I figure if I've been spending energy thinking about it, then it has potential to be a post. But a rather ridiculous amount of the time, the topics that I come up with are related to sleep.

Sleep used to be such a non-topic in my life. It was sort of like.. protein. I needed it to survive, and I made getting it a decently high priority, but other than that I never thought about it.

And now I think about sleep ALL THE TIME. I think about how much I love it, how I used to underappreciate it so much. I think about how to get more of it. I dream wistfully of the days when I will be able to obtain it with ease once more.

Having children makes you crazy.

-6-

My poor boy's pathetic little post-flu cough is breaking my heart. It sounds so sad. I'm surprised he's not more grumpy than he is. (He's mostly not grumpy during the day, and only about 30% more than usual at night.)

Last January's RSV bout was probably the hardest thing I've had to go through as a parent, but I will say this: now I feel more confident dealing with respiratory illnesses. When the doctor says, "watch for trouble breathing" I can nod firmly because I know exactly what "trouble breathing" looks like. Hooray for that.

I mean, hooray, I guess. Can you tell I'm a glass-half-full type of girl?

-7-

Blaisey just woke up and as I nursed him back to sleep I was thinking about how so far, we've got a rate of 100% on Unexpected Nicknames for our children. If you'd told me before we had Camilla that we'd end up calling her Billa for more than two years, I would have said, "Huh, really? Maybe we should think of a different first name so that doesn't happen." Yet "Billa" just sort of happened organically, and now that we've pretty much stopped calling Camilla "Billa," I really miss it.

The same with Blaise. We call him Blaisey all the time. It was Camilla's invention (anyone could have come up with it, but an adult probably would have stopped himself) and we're all hooked on it. It's kind of lame as a nickname, but we use it anyway, and weirdly, it fits.

And now if God (as we hope he does) blesses us with more children, I'm going to wonder as we brainstorm names for each one what the unexpected nickname will be. But I'm not going to worry about it. It's turned out pretty well so far.

(more quick takes at Conversion Diary)

Small Successes Thursday

1. Bryan was home for three days last week because of our illness, but on Monday he went back to the office. And despite not being back to 100% myself, I've done pretty well being Sole Parent In Charge this week. Considering that it hasn't been so many days since I could barely get out of bed, I think making it through this week with both children fed, clean, and rested counts as a success.

2. Even better, I've managed to cook dinner every night this week. Yes, it's been mostly casseroles, but I've gotten a hot meal on the table daily. Hooray!

3. We've successfully implemented a new bedtime routine. Bryan and I've switched roles. He puts the baby down and I get Camilla ready for bed, and we both feel like we're getting a break. We'd been considering this change for a while, but Blaise's recent refusal to nurse to sleep (gaaaaah) push me to the edge and we decided to take the plunge. Three nights in, it's going beautifully so far, thank heavens.

(We need a break in the sleep arena because thanks to the time change Blaise now thinks 5am is the proper time for rising, the little stinker.)

Share your small successes over at Faith & Family LIVE!

Velcroing that one right up

If this blog were a book instead of something I pay Typepad $8.95/month to self-publish, it would be a really awful book. My editor would want to smack me.

Big pieces of the narrative missing. Let's not even go there with the grammar. And all the unresolved plot points, oh my.

It's day four of NaBloPoMo and I'm already grasping for topics, so I've had the brilliant idea of using this month to wrap up any loose ends I've left hanging in the past. This'll be so fun! All the things that were mildly-to-un-interesting the first time around will be even less so this time! We party hard at my blog, friends!

So today, just to prove how boring this posting-every-day thing can get, the topic is cloth diapers.

Remember back in March we started using cloth diapers? Because Blaise had been projectile-pooping out of his Huggies Supremes and of all the disposables we'd tried Huggies were the best at containing leaks, and they were not cutting it so we decided to switch to cloth. If you're interested you can read about it here.

(Digression: the topic of poop is so much more interesting and non-gross to me now that I've become a parent. I can discuss with Bryan issues like consistency, volume, and frequency of our children's bowel movements without batting an eye and often without even realizing that not everyone in the room might find this as fascinating as we do. Has anyone else had this same transformation with the advent of parenting, or are we just freaks?)

A week later I think I mentioned that the cloth diapers were working out well, and in the eight months since then? Nothing.

This isn't necessarily bad, since I have no interest in becoming an All Diapers All the Time blog. I do like the informative-style cloth diaper blogs but oh dear, don't you think a personal blog that was all about diapers would be incredibly boring and/or horrifying, depending on the writing style/focus? Yikes.

But I do want to talk about cloth diapers briefly, just to say that we are never going back.

Disposable diapers are dead to me.

Not because I don't think they have their uses, but because cloth is just so awesome.

Here's the thing that surprises me about cloth diaper usage, though, so much so that I only realized it just the other day, and was actually shocked (shocked!) even though we've been a cloth diaper family for well over half a year:

Cloth diapers are not a big deal.

No seriously. Now that we've only got one child in diapers, I'd say that our life is at the very most about 10% more complicated on the diaper front since we use cloth. And that 10% is in my opinion far outweighed by the savings in cost and the awesome quality of the cloth in comparison to paper diapers.

We have to wash the diapers, but we don't have to remember to buy diapers. I call this one even.

We have to put dirty diapers in the pail, but we don't have to put them in the trash. This one maybe goes a little in favor of disposables since we do have to deal with the poop if there is any, but I've never found that to be a big deal.

We don't have to worry about leakage, while our little guy in a disposable diaper is basically a 25-lb time bomb. For us, this one goes WAY in favor of cloth. (On our trip to DC in October, Blaise wore disposable diapers and I swear I jumped every time I heard the slightest rumbling noise. That's how catastrophic it can be.)

We have to tote home used diapers from outings, instead of just throwing them away while we're out. This one goes in favor of the disposables. But toting the diapers home is a way smaller deal than I'd expected.

We save so much money! Our cloth diapers were a fairly big investment but they've now paid for themselves, and Blaise almost certainly has at least two more years in diapers. Look at us! We're so frugal!

But seriously, the thing that I never would have predicted is how using cloth diapers has become SO NOT A BIG DEAL to us. Some people gasp in horror when you mention cloth diapers as if you're deliberately choosing to make your life difficult in a manner akin to choosing not to own a refrigerator. But it is nothing like that. If you kind of think you'd like to do cloth to save money or the planet but are afraid of the inconvenience, don't be! Once you get used to it, it's so worth it.

Plus babies in cloth diapers are really unbelieveably cute.

Moving on and getting off my soapbox, here is my attempt at getting you to do my NaBloPoMo work for me:

If you can think of a loose end I've failed to tie up in my blogging here, please mention it and this month I promise I will answer it. I'm dying for topics! No detail too small!

Sleep well and leak-free, dear readers.

Name Anachronisms

So I am somewhat of a baby name geek (not as much as Swistle, but I'm up there) and I'm also one of those people who notices grammar and spelling errors and other things like when you're watching a movie and someone tosses her scarf over her shoulder and they clearly edited badly because half a second later there the scarf is, untossed.

Along the twin themes of Baby Names and Stuff I'm Picky About, today we have a very special topic to discuss:

Name Anachronisms

The first time I thought hard about this topic was when I was watching the movie The Notebook. I know I'm lonely in this opinion, but I really didn't enjoy that movie. I needed to distract myself.

So I did so by thinking about this: how unlikely is that heroine's name?

I'm assuming that her name, Allie, is supposed to be short for Alison or Allison. The movie is set in the mid-1940s, which means the character would have been born before 1930.

Of the two, the one-L spelling of Alison was more popular back then, but it was still really unpopular. According to the Social Security statistics, it didn't even enter the top 1000 until 1934. There were 50 baby girls named Alison that year.

Now, this is not to say that it was completely ridiculous for Nicholas Sparks to name his character Alison. Perhaps his own grandmother was named Alison. But it annoyed me because I felt like Sparks just chose a name that was popular for teenagers when he wrote the book. Total cop-out lack of research, in my opinion.

(In 1982, sixteen years before The Notebook was published, the name was #111 on the charts with 2723 girls named Alison that year. And Allison - which wasn't even on the charts until 1946 - was #58 in 1982, with 5171 girls given the name.)

And oh! Recently I watched the movie Bride Wars. Why do I keep choosing to waste my time on these cinematic excresences? I couldn't tell you. Perhaps motherhood really is causing my brain to atrophy.

But anyway, the main characters of Bride Wars are named Olivia and Emma.

It seems like they're supposed to be about my age, mid- to late-twenties. And let me tell you what: during my whole childhood, I knew one girl named Olivia, and none named Emma.

In 2008, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you if you're the least bit interested in baby names, Olivia and Emma were hugely popular. Olivia was #6, with 16,845 baby girls given the name, and Emma was #1. 18,587 brand-new female infants were named Emma in 2008.

In 1982, on the other hand (I'm going with 1982 because it's the year I was born, and I like it) Olivia was name #228 (1,122 babies) and Emma was #410 (558 babies).

Now, far be it from me to assume anything about the writers of Bride Wars, so I'll grant that it's possible that they were trying to go with names that were unusual twenty-five years ago, and accidentally happened to choose two that have grown hugely in popularity since then. Maybe it was just random chance that they didn't choose Melody and Marisol, two names roughly equivalent in popularity to Olivia and Emma in 1982.

I seriously doubt it, though. The girls in Bride Wars wear designer shoes and carry designer handbags and buy designer wedding dresses. It was necessary that they also have designer names. They just happen to have designer names from the wrong decade.

If I'd been in charge I would have made them name the characters Tiffany and Amy for accuracy's sake.

(This is probably why I will never be in charge.)

Have you noticed Name Anachronisms anywhere?  Please share!

Buttercowfly

So like I mentioned yesterday, even though my flu symptoms showed up almost a week ago, Bryan and Camilla so far appear to have escaped the virus.

I've been following Camilla around with the thermometer - for someone who screams bloody murder at the prospect of having her hair washed, she's remarkably cooperative about having her temperature taken - but so far she has had not the slightest hint of a fever.

On Saturday we'd had plans to go over to my sister's house for dinner and trick-or-treating with friends. Obviously we had to cancel those, but we decided that if Camilla was still well by evening we'd dress her up and take her out in our neighborhood. We figured it would be fine for Blaise and me to go too as long as he stayed in the stroller/Ergo and we kept away from people.

Camilla spent the day bouncing around in her cute little Halloween jumper, unaware that her candy-collecting fate depended on that little number on the thermometer's screen.

Fortunately it stayed well below 98.6 (my basal body temperature is 96.8, and Camilla appears to have inherited the chilliness from me). So after dinner we suited up and headed out.

We've planned that next weekend we'll celebrate Halloween again with my family when we're up visiting them, so that is my excuse for the following pictures: I knew we'd have a chance to get better ones later.

 

More than a month ago I asked Camilla what she wanted to be for Halloween and she answered promptly, "A butterfly!" I asked again and again and she never changed her tune, so I bought a costume for $5 on eBay and called it good.

I've mentioned before that Blaise receives all his clothes from the son of a co-worker of Bryan's, and this includes things like Halloween costumes. Ergo his costume for this year was pre-decided. He was a cow. (Next year he's going to be a pumpkin. Fortunately the mother of the other child and I agree on what is a cute/appropriate costume for a small person.)

 

It took a while to convince him that he really wanted to wear the hat. But once he had it on, well...

 

I do believe that is the world's cutest crawling cow.

Despite the windiness and the relative dearth of houses handing out candy (this is why we normally go to my sister's neighborhood; it's like a block party over there), Camilla had a blast trick-or-treating. Just like last year, it took a couple tries before she figured out that "trick-or-treat" were the magic words, but once she caught on she said them loudly and clearly every time. She was also good with the "thank you."

We push the thank-yous hard - I want people to admire my kid because she's well-mannered, not because her little blond curls are so cute peeking out of her pink hood.

 

But it's okay if they admire both, I guess.

There were so few kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood that people were VERY generous with the candy. One woman filled both her hands and dropped probably a dozen pieces of sugary goodness into Camilla's bucket.

It's way too much for a three-year-old, really. Camilla's lucky she has her parents to help her eat it.

A three-year-old would never be discerning enough to notice something like this:

 

Hope you had a happy Halloween!

If you posted pictures on your own blog, leave a link in the comments. I can never get enough of cute kids in costumes.

I like to pronounce it "huh-won-nuh-won"

All right, here I go. Grabbing the laptop by the proverbial shift keys and heading into National Blog Posting Month at full speed. I know I can do it, because I've done it before.

And hey, unlike back in November 2007, I'm a professional blogger now. Over at Faith & Family I do about twenty posts a month anyway. Another thirty on top of that is nothing! Especially here in my own space where I can write about whatever I want!

So to begin this auspicious month I'm taking a cue from the major news networks and talking about swine flu. What is it? Where is it? Will we get it? Will we all die? Should we rush out and inoculate ourselves immediately even though there is not an H1N1 vaccine to be had for love or money anywhere within a hundred miles?

PANIC PANIC PANIC.

Okay, I'll spare you that.

I really try to live fear-free (it is such a good way to live, you guys) so I hadn't been lying awake at night fretting about the flu, but in the name of caution we had decided to go ahead and get vaccinated once the vaccine actually reaches these parts.

So of course what happened is that we appear to have picked up H1N1 in the airport last weekend.

Or - more accurately - I appear to have picked it up, since my symptoms showed up Tuesday and the next sickie, Blaise, didn't spike a fever until Friday night. He probably caught it from me. Tirienne's fever showed up this morning. Bryan and Camilla have had runny noses but there has been no sign of a fever in either of them yet. The doctors have said that no fever means it's not the flu, so we're hoping they might escape this bout.

Blaise and I are both on Tamiflu. I know that stuff has mixed reviews but for us it has been side-effect free and appears to be working beautifully. I felt better after just two days on it; the baby's fever was gone by this morning and his cough also seems to be improving.

For those of you who are getting freaked out by all the news network reports on H1N1, I should share that my doctor said that in our area at least, they're finding that a lot of this fall's swine flu cases are surprisingly mild. Swine flu certainly is killing some people (just like any flu) but for many people it's turning out that the symptoms are less severe than a normal seasonal flu. Since that seems to be the case with us, I thought I'd pass on that info so that if you haven't been able to get the vax and are losing sleep over it, you might be able to rest a little more easily.

As a writer and drama queen I'm not big on the anti-climax, but We Had the Swine Flu and It Was No Big Deal? That's an anti-climactic ending I will happily take.

I Looked Like a Raccoon Afterward

How was your weekend? Mine was awesome. Read why here.