I did it!

I chopped off all my hair. Yippie!!!! Photos to come soon, as well as updates from Grandma Fifa's visit.

Attack of the vacuum cleaner

Yesterday was a weird day. It began with an incident with the vacuum cleaner. I had summoned up the energy to vacuum, sweep and mop the whole house and somehow Roan was content to play by herself long enough to let me accomplish it, so I got out the trusty vacuum cleaner. I was suctioning away when Arwen came in and asked "What's that burning smell?" "I was planning to ignore that," I replied. Giving me a look of admonishment, Arwen turned over the vacuum cleaner to find its rotating brush had become completely paralyzed by gobs and gobs of my hair wound round and round it.

Have I mentioned that I am so over my long hair? It is time for this mop to GO. Apparently it's normal for tons and tons of hair starts to fall out of your head about 3 months after you have a baby. Every time I take a shower it looks like there's a gerbil in the drain. The drifts of hair around the house have begun to rival Sasha's ubiquitous tumbleweeds. Not to mention Roan thinks it's real fun to yank on it now. I have a appointment set next week to chop it all off. I am counting down the days.

Anyway, Arwen's discovery with the vacuum led me to have to unscrew the bottom of the machine and spend the next half hour cutting and yanking a ton of dust-encrusted hair off the brush. Disgusting. Once free to spin again, I got back after it with the vacuuming.

I thought to myself It's been a while since I managed to vacuum, and who knows when I'll get the next chance. Better make the most of it. I hooked up the attachments so I could vacuum under the bed. I was down on all fours, halfway under the bed reaching for all the hidden dustbunnies when the unthinkable happened. I didn't even realize what was transpiring at first, and then it hit me. The vacuum had sucked most of my hair up into it. I couldn't actually look at the vacuum cleaner though, because it was attached to the back of my head. That must really have been a sight. Me flailing around from half under the bed, blindly groping for the off switch.

I finally found it, turned it off, and extricated myself from the contraption. That only served to underscore: This hair has got to go!

Tooth Number Two and a Trip to the Zoo

Yesterday I stuck my finger into Roan's mouth to check out how her tooth nub is coming along, and I couldn't believe it: I found another tooth coming in! It's right next to the first one. So when they come in all the way, she'll have two cute little teeth on the bottom. I tried to take a photo but this was the best I could do. You can sort of make out the first tooth just above my finger, but the new one is way too small to see.

We took a trip to the Denver Zoo on Sunday, a first for the whole family. We went with Jen and Micah as well as Micah's step sister Angela, her husband Matt, and their 2 year old daughter Morgan. It was a lot of fun. I love this photo because it looks like Aunt Jen is dangling Roan into the Polar Bear exhibit, but don't worry. She wasn't pulling a Michael Jackson.

Roan really seemed to enjoy herself. She was mostly oblivious to the animals, except for the fish exhibits and the Siberian Tiger, who paced back and forth in front of us for a while. More so than the animals, she loved all the people watching, especially Michah's neice Morgan. She is an adorable little girl, and incredibly well behaved for a two year old. We enjoyed hanging out with Angela and Matt too, who moved here not long ago and are building a house in the Denver metroplex.

The last few days Roan's really been going easy on us, and I've been enjoying it. She's been so happy, as you can see for yourself in this picture. We've had a number of outings - whether just running every day errands or fun stuff like hanging out at the zoo all day - and she's been amazingly easygoing. She just has a good time, whatever we happen to be doing. She was a little champ at the zoo. She nursed on the go, stayed awake for a long time enjoying herself, and then sacked out for a nap in the stroller without a fuss when she got tired.

Napping in particular has been going much better lately, although she only takes 2 or maybe 3 naps a day (as opposed to 6 or so naps when she was 2-3 months old). For almost a month she was having a lot of trouble going down, really fighting it. But she's regained her composure, and once again when I see she's getting sleepy I can swaddle her up, stick a paci in her mouth and lay her down, and she goes right on to sleep.

She's still having trouble sleeping through the night. She had been a great sleeper, but at 4 months she went through a growth spurt and for weeks afterward it seemed she just couldn't get enough food. More recently we've been able to go back to sleep just by giving her a pacifier when she wakes up in the night. But we're finding that with her new ability to roll over and wiggle all around, she tends to wake herself up every night and want to play for a while before going back to sleep. Last night she was awake for an hour and a half, and both Arwen and I got up multiple times to attempt to get her to fall back to sleep.

Anyway, that's the nuts and bolts of what's been going on lately. It somehow does not convey though what a little treasure she is. She is growing and changing so much, I am eating up this baby time, enjoying it before it's gone.

4 1/2 months

Things are getting more and more fun around here. Roan has been in good spirits lately, and she's added a few more tricks to her bag. We started solid food last week. It was a messy endeavor the first time around. I'm pretty sure she spit out every bite we spooned in. All over her tummy, her face, it was on the back of her head, all over her bumbo, the table, covering her fists... Lots of fun. But since last week she's gotten to be much better at it. Now she manages to swallow three whole teaspoons of cereal once a day. I'm planning on adding some more foods soon. Maybe pureed carrots or apple.

Her cute little tooth nub is getting bigger. It's still a ways from looking like a full fledged tooth, but still so cute. This means of course that we can no longer let her use our hands as a teething ring because it feels like she's shredding your hand.

This week we met some other mommies for a potluck picinic lunch. We spread blankets out under the trees and all the babies crawled around (those that could, anyway) and checked each other out. It was neat to see how interested in each other they were, even at this young age. Roan faced off with a cute little boy named Iggy with big blue eyes like hers. He started talking to her, making weird throaty noises. Roan was transfixed. I told his mom we call that "pterodactyling" and she said "We do too!"

The picinic was nice because I got to meet some more moms from the neighborhood, including 3 that live on my street! There are so many couples we'd like to invite over for dinner or meet out for margaritas. The trick is finding the time to do it, planning enough in advance and not being too pooped to socialize. It was certainly a lot easier to make new friends last fall before a certain someone came into our lives.

One of the moms I met had been planning a home birth, but like me, after 30 odd hours of unmedicated labor ended up with an emergency C-section. It was nice to commisserate with someone. It's funny, right after Roan's birth I had no negative feelings about having had a C-section. But over time it's bummed me out a little. Mostly there's the trepidation I have about going into the next one, if there is a next one.

Last friday we took Roan to the pool for the first time. I actually thought she'd be thrilled because she loves bath time so much. But as with most things on the first time, she wasn't so sure about it. She cried a little at first, but gradually warmed up to it. And she looked so darn cute in her red & green bikini with ruffles on the butt!

Roan has been growing ever more interested in the world around her. I can no longer put her in her bumbo on the kitchen counter and not expect her to tump over the olive oil or reach for the knives. She can hold her bottle now, not through an entire feeding yet, but for 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch. The other day I had her on my lap while I was eating my lunch. She grew more animated as I was eating slices of apple, until finally she started crying when she reached out her hand and I wouldn't give her one. I figured what the heck, and handed her a slice of tart granny smith, expecting her to spit it out, but instead she gummed it enthusiastically. It was pretty cute.

We've also been doing some stuff around the house. Guys came this week and blew insulation into the attic (finally! now that the summer's almost over). Arwen spent all day yesterday putting cedar siding up on the outside of the house. In a week or so roofers are coming to put on a new roof and install new vents to further cool the attic. And then painters will come to paint the outside, including new gutters. We've also been starting to look at landscaping books.

We've also had a ton going on at work. As soon as I finished a big software rollout with an important deadline, Arwen got slammed with a different big sofware rollout. It's been a week of long work hours - I worked till 11 pm the other night helping him proofread some user manuals to go along with the software - and we are finally today putting it out there. It's a relief to have that behind us.

Even with all we've had going on, I did much better this week than the week before in terms of having "Mommy Meltdowns." Part of what helped is a long talk Arwen and I had last weekend about not letting Roan's challenging moments get to me. As he pointed out, she's a baby. It's her job to cry and it's our job to not freak out and just calmly figure out how to help her. And sometimes we may not be able to figure out how to help her. You know, there's this point you reach right before you lose it where you can either give in and blow off some steam or you can kind of go limp and let go. I've been opting for the latter this week, and to my surprise it's really helped.

Oh one last thing. I'm moving all our photos over to Flickr, a popular photo web site. I've had problems with storage limits on virtually every site I've used, so hopefully this one will do the trick for us. I'll post a link to our photo albums on Flickr soon.

Wait, one last question: Does this constitute child abuse?>> We're not actually feeding our sweet little baby processed cheese food, but just try keeping the cardboard box it came in away from her!

Lots of news to catch up on...

We have lots to report today. Last week we were blessed with a visit from Gramps and K. We did all kinds of fun things while they were here, including some sightseeing, white water rafting (Arwen, Roan and I sat that one out), visiting the farmer's market and teahouse in Boulder, and lots of eating, drinking and being merry. Roan just loves it when we have company. She digs being the center of attention.

On Tuesday Roan had her 4 month checkup and vaccinations. I'm not sure what it is about the doctor's office, but she is always in a good mood when we're there. She was making eyes at the nurse, rolling all over the exam table, cooing up a storm, and when being examined she kept grabbing the doctor's hand and shoving it in her mouth.

She now weighs 14 pounds and 14 ounces and is 24 inches long, in the 80th percentile for both height and weight. She got a clean bill of health, and Dr. Bacon was pleased to see how great she's doing developmentally. She in particular commented on Roan's upper body strength (she can completely support her head and chest on her hands) and oddly enough on one of her more recent tricks - shoving her toes in her mouth. Apparently that's a six-month skill.

So she impressed the doctor and got her shots. She was pretty grumpy about that last part, but within a few hours she'd shaken it off. Later that evening she was playing and laughing like normal.

In this last week we've also had 3 days of care with the new nanny, Lindsay. Roan really likes her and heck why not. She's very sweet, responsible and relaxed. She also goes out of her way to play, sing, count and read to her. And she manages to do that not with one baby but with two. Pretty impressive.

So as far as what Roan's been up to lately, she's added some new tricks to her bag:

• rolling tummy to back and back to tummy on both the right and left sides
• wiggligng around her crib a lot - I find her in a different weird position every morning
• reaching more for her toys
• putting both hands to her mouth
• shoving anything within arm's reach into her mouth
• passing toys from one hand to the other
• growing ever more curious about the world around her - can't leave her in reach of things she shouldn't grab
• making more cooing noises, just on the verge of starting to babble
• picking her paci off the blanket next to her and putting it in her mouth
• holding her bottle
• laughing
• putting both feet in her mouth
• being intermittently ticklish
• very interested in watching us eat and drink - we may start trying solid foods with her soon
• still the most smiley baby ever
• her first tooth coming in on the bottom front right!

Oh and lastly, all her pretty hair has fallen out on the sides so now she's left with a cute little mohawk right down the middle that curls up on top just like a kewpie doll. Not that you can really tell in this picture. I'll have to post a good mohawk photo soon.