Standing tall

About a month ago, I turned my back while Liam was just waking up from a nap. When I turned around, he was standing up and laughing at his new accomplishment. He still doesn't pull himself up very often. He seems to have a smarter way to approach such things--Find a person who is mobile, say "Ba" and point until they bring you to the item you want. He has also found his own method of communication: "Da" is "this is fun", "Ma" is "I don't like this" and "Ba" is "I want." What more could a baby need?

Sweetness

Liam had a really tough time falling asleep tonight, so I went up to his room to try to help. At first, I tried holding him in the rocking chair, but he just struggled. So, I turned on the lights and got on the floor with him to play. We quietly played for about 20 minutes and then I gradually dimmed the lights and started to pretend I was going to sleep on the floor. Over the next 20 minutes, the room got darker and Liam played and crawled less and less. Eventually, he crawled over to me and put his head on my arms to fall asleep :) While falling asleep, he kept reaching back to hold my hand or grab my finger :) That was a highlight of my life so far.
After he seemed to be asleep for about a minute, I got up (he popped his head up too) and put him in his crib. He feel right back to sleep and we haven't heard him since.

Nach Vorne, Nach Hinten

During my freshman year of highschool, my German teacher, Frau Luchini, taught us a German song: Nach Vorne, Nach Hinten. Translated, this song reads "To the front, To the back, To the left, to the Right, to the Up, To the Down, To the Left, To the Right." During this song, we were required to actually make the directional movements. Little did I know then that over 15 years later I would use this German song to bring laughter to my first born. You have to excuse the singing and the camera work, but you will get a glimpse of a Liam laugh.
As a parent, it is very rewarding to be able to make your child smile and laugh. For a long time, I was convinced that Liam would be identifying with Oscar the Grouch.

And we're back

Its been too long since we posted anything here. Liam is still growing and staying awake longer during the day. His bedtime ritual is pretty established and we're getting into the eat-activity-sleep cycle on a fairly regular basis. We can now put him in the crib awake and he can fall asleep on his own. However, he usually needs to be picked up and walked around a few times before that happens. We're slowly phasing him out of the full swaddles and into sleep sacks (though he still gets a full swaddle for night-time sleeping). He tends to nap for about an hour each time except for one long nap usually in the mid afternoon. He's been getting to sleep by around 9 each night and still wakes up around 7am. Don't get me wrong, he still wakes up during the night for nursing, but 6-7am is his real wake up time - he usually sleeps through the midnight nursings. We take him on two walks a day and he loves those. He generally sleeps through them and it gives us a chance to just talk to each other. To protect his little bald head from the sun, we sometimes put a hat on him. Sometimes, the hat makes him look like he's a woman going for a swim in the 1920s like the one in this picture :)

We've read quite a few books to Liam already during his many activity times. He loves to lie on his "activity mat" and look up at the dangling toys and mirrors. This is a picture of Liam on one of those mats. He likes to bat the toys around with his hands and legs and look in the mirrors. We also still do the Elmo chicken dance every time (thanks again Beth!). Sometimes, we hold his feet so he can push himself along the ground by straightening his legs. He enjoys being able to move himself around like that.

He also loves to stand up (with us making sure he doesn't fall over). He's got strong legs. The main thing he's lacking is balance. A close second to standing is sitting up like he is in this picture. He looks so much older to us when he's upright and he looks much taller when he's standing up.

Nurser(y)

I took some time off to watch Liam while Annika went back to her office today. Liam slept for two hours and then woke up hungry, so I put him in the Moby and gave him a bottle, which he chugged like a frat boy chugs beer. Now, he only drank about 3-4 ounces, not a pint (or yard), but still, he was hungry. After some activity time, he got tired and eventually fell asleep in the swing. It went very well and is the longest Annika has been away from Liam so far. He's got enough of a routine that we were confident that he'd sleep for most of the time she was at the office and only need one or two feedings (which we had enough milk for). I'm sure that once we get a routine down, he'll change it on us though.

Liam's activity times are still getting more interactive by the day. He "smiles" more each time and is more fun to interact with. Chicken Dance Elmo is still a favorite of his (thanks Beth) and, of course, he loves to stare at lights (and don't we all... we just switch from bulbs to LCDs and Plasma).

My mom bought a crib bumper and bed skirt from the Pottery Barn collection we used to decorate the nursery and worked with my dad to create a window valence and curtains for the nursery window. The valence is a section of the bumper pad that shows scenes from the Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme. They look quite professional and custom-made to fit our window and the decorations of the room. They also got us a diaper stacker and sewed a section of the bumper on it to tie it in with the theme as well. Thanks mom and dad!

A note from Mom

Up until now, Steve has really been the only author to this blog and it is time the new mom contributed some thoughts and feelings:
To tell everyone the truth, I was concerned about how I would feel about my new role as mama. Steve has been such wonderful anticipating father that I thought there was no way I could match his love and devotion. I was worried about me being too selfish and wouldn't want to do all the typical mom duties. Boy, was I wrong. I can't say it was the instant I laid eyes on him (I was pretty doped up at the time), but shortly after holding him to my chest, I knew I would love this guy for a lifetime and would sacrifice anything for him. (I tear up just thinking about it). I am surprised at how much I like nursing him: I feel like I can provide for him and make him happy. I am surprised at how protective I am of him: I couldn't let him go to nursery at night even though I could get some better sleep if I did. I am surprised that I can stare at him for hours while he sleeps in my arms.
So far, being a mom is great and I already want to keep him this small and hold him forever.

Furnishing the Nursery

After carefully painting the nursery to match our Pottery Barn Kids "Hey Diddle Diddle" rug, we discovered that the awful stench issuing from the rug was not going away. At first, we thought it was just "new rug smell" and let it air out by opening the window and door to the room. We also vacuumed it a few times. After a month, it still stank just as badly, so we bought a fancy new Dyson vacuum cleaner and I vacuumed it four times, filling the Dyson canister all four times with fuzz. We continued to let it "air out" for another week, all to no avail. Some internet research (why didn't we do that to begin with?) found that this style of rug had some kind of manufacturing defect that caused the smell (theories ranged from insecticide to glue). So now we had to find a rug to match the paint because I certainly didn't want to repaint that room! We ended up finding another rug at Pottery Barn Kids made by a different manufacturer with no smell and that matched the paint well.

Then we just had to wait for the furniture. We picked out and ordered the furniture in mid December but, (due to being hand-carried from Taiwan no doubt) it would not arrive until February 29th! When Leap Day rolled around, the Buy Buy Baby crew brought the furniture out and assembled it for us. Once it was set up, we both felt that this was getting more "real." We could now visualize a baby in the crib, changing him on the table, and pacing up and down the room trying to get him to stop crying :)

We're getting really close now and we're excited to get started.

Painting the Nursery

When we lived in our townhouse, we painted squares of color on a wall in our living room. Each square had a color that matched a different element in the house (chair, couch, rug, etc.). Before painting, I considered putting a coded message in the wall using the colored squares as letters or words, but decided against it. The next time my friend Alex came to the house, he looked at the wall and immediately asked if there was a coded message in it. I should have said 'yes' and then watched as he tried to conjure a message out of random squares, but I admitted that there was no message.

Flash forward a couple of years and its time to paint the nursery. Annika found a picture in a catalog online that had cool stripes painted on the wall of varying widths and colors and asked if I would paint our nursery that way. After missing the opportunity at the townhouse, I determined to put some coded message in the nursery stripes. After carefully matching colors of the room with paint, days of preparation, and then days of careful measuring, taping and painting, this is what I ended up with:

Can you read it?

If the resolution isn't good enough, here's a transcription:
There are five colors: brOwn (O), Green (G), wHite (H) and two shades of bLue (L and D) (Light and really Dark). There are six distinct widths of stripe - half (h), single (s), double (d), triple (t), quadruple (q) and partial (p). I ran out of room on the wall despite careful planning and measuring so the partial width should have been a quintuple width.

Any stripe can thus be described as:
Oh, Os, Od, Ot, Oq, Op
Gh, Gs, Gd, Gt, Gq, Gp
Wh, Ws, Wd, Wt, Wq, Wp
Lh, Ls, Ld, Lt, Lq, Lp
Dh, Ds, Dd, Dt, Dq, Dp

Using that shorthand, the wall can be transcribed into this:
Ot Ls Od Ws Dh Ld Os Lt Dh Ws Gs Dh Wd Os Gt Ls Dh Lt Gs Wt Gd Dh Oq Gd Ls Os Wd Od Dh Lq Gs Wd Ls Dh Ws Gd Wt Ls Dh Gq Od Dh Ws Gs Dh Ld Os Gt Ls Dh Wt Gp