The complete gallery of pictures is located here: http://ruark.smugmug.com/Family/2011-Siena-Birthday/18986396_9fT24g

Or you can see a slide show at: http://ruark.smugmug.com/photos/swfpopup.mg?AlbumID=18986396&AlbumKey=9fT24g

Some of my favorites are:

First, Uncle Marcus was giving me a hard time when we had been asking both sets of grandparents to help look after the kids for the weekend. He and Aunt Ashlen have on many instances taken care of their kids on their own for multiple days at a time. He seems to think it’s not that hard. I must be doing something wrong, then, because I found it pretty challenging. Not impossible, obviously, but incredibly tiring and frequently stressful.

Once again I am in complete awe and amazement at what my mom had to do when Marcus and I were kids, when my dad was traveling and working for the Air Force (I’m in awe of that, too). Mo had to take care of two boys, no less, for weeks, let alone when Granddad went to Vietnam/Korea. I think I would go crazy after a week on my own with two kids this age; how she managed so many times I can’t really fathom.

On the other hand, I got an unexpected sense of satisfaction and accomplishment after making it to Monday morning without the kids suffering any real injuries, melt-downs, or other incidents of note. It felt good to know that I could get through the weekend. Sure it was only two days, but it was something I’d never done before, and it was reassuring to know I could get through it successfully, if not particularly interestingly.

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Dinner over the weekend always involved Siena having a “picnic” in front of the TV watching videos, this weekend mostly the first two episodes from the first season of The Muppet Show, and me either eating standing up in the kitchen while holding Thalia or sitting down feeding her and trying to get quick bites myself. When it’s just me and kids for dinner, I try to have a big lunch so I can skip dinner if time doesn’t allow. We ordered pizza Sunday night (navigating baby, Siena, two pizza boxes, a drink, and a bag of rolls through the mall parking lot was a challenge). I was surprised to discover two things about myself: (1) just how fast I can eat a piece of pizza when the situation demands, and (2) when anxious and in a hurry, I forget that the pucillo pizza contains mushrooms that need to be picked off.

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This was true more a few months ago but is still true now: Siena thinks that when you ask her to do something more quickly (like getting dressed or cleaning up her room), if she flails her limbs about fast she is doing her task “quick quick” even if the actual rate of task completion decreases. Sure she looks busy, but less is getting done. I try to tell her to focus, be more efficient, etc. Maybe I should tell her to work smarter, not faster or something.

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Friday night was pretty rough; Thalia was up from 1 AM for an hour screaming. I tried to console her by sitting with her but she just couldn’t get comfortable and kept on crying. With the weekend ahead of me, I said enough is enough and I just put her back in bed and let her scream it out. 45 minutes later she was asleep. Then half an hour later Siena got me up needing to use the bathroom and then some company in order to get settled back down again.

Going into Saturday night, Thalia had not napped from 4:30 on, so by 7:30 she was exhausted. Sure three hours doesn’t sound like much, but remember she was sick still. With Siena needing to get her evening routine finished up and me being tired from the day itself and worried about another night of aborted sleep, I figuratively threw up my hands and put Thalia down at 7:40 and decided to let her scream it out again. Interestingly, when I put her in her crib, she started by just looking around and touching the little embroidered animals on her crib bumper. She actually calmed down a little to be in the crib compared to being in my arms. So I turned off the light and left, at which point she started screaming.

Fortunately and amazingly, that lasted only about 10 minutes, during which time I was reading to Siena. Siena went to bed by 8 PM, and before I knew it, I had both girls asleep and it was only a quarter after 8. Wait, what? That never happens.

Sunday morning, Siena got up surprisingly late (around 6:30). And then to add miracle to mystery, Thalia slept past 7 AM; when I looked in on her at 7:30 she was still (or again) asleep! Siena and I didn’t go in until 8 o’clock to get her out of bed. This was Thalia’s first (perhaps only ever) 12+ hour night of sleep. Incredible!

I repeated the process Sunday night, though I didn’t put her down until after 8 o’clock since she had napped later in the day. And this time, she only screamed for about two minutes before getting quiet and eventually falling asleep. And then both Monday and Tuesday nights it worked again.

I think I heard the clarion call of angels at some point during the evening.

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I tend to let the dishes and the messes pile up all day and then clean them all up in one big batch after the girls go to bed. I like to think I’m relying on my operations research background and employing an optimal policy of batching tasks together in order to reduce the “setup cost” of starting and stopping clean-up activities (washing hands, etc.).This is also the Alice’s Restaurant philosophy that rather than having two little piles of garbage it’s better to have one large one.

I suspect instead I’m just taking the easier approach of not trying to keep clean while Thalia is screaming or Siena is asking for help or wanting to read a book.

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More to come…

Clicking on a thumbnail will open the full image in a “lightbox.” You can click on the image to move to the next photo, hover the mouse over left or right edge to move to the previous or next one, or use the left and right arrow keys to do the same. Click outside the image to close it.

A link to the full gallery is at the bottom; if you are interested you should be able to order photos for printing there.

Here are Siena and Nonna making their way out to the dock:

And here they are sitting on the edge of the dock:

And finally they are joined by Izzie and her mom:

Hmm, that last one isn’t so good.

Thanks Mo!

The above alone would’ve required just over four tweets, and I’d have probably given up after the third. In fact, maybe that would have been the better course of action. Nonetheless, here I sit at the end of day one in our transition from DIOK (dual income, one kid) to DIDK while Mama snoozes in the versatile Stryker bed behind me, Thalia presumably sleeps in the nursery for a bit (though who knows what havoc she causes the nursery staff before they cheerfully bring her down to our room for her next feeding), and Siena, also presumably, sleeps at home with Mo keeping a watchful ear out for her nighttime stirrings.

Mo arrived Saturday night after a lengthy drive from her home base in Virginia. Animals, including the pooch and the new chickens, remained at home under care of Granddad. Siena slept poorly Saturday night because of a cold attempting to settle into her system, but she seemed to beat it back Sunday while having a great time with Mo and Mama. I painted yellow three walls of the room that was formerly my office and will eventually be Thalia’s bedroom; the fourth will be an accent green color, similar to what we have done with Siena’s room, which is a medium blue with an orange accent. I wonder if green will be Thalia’s favorite color. Orange has become Siena’s favorite, and she loves pointing out the Schneider trucks on the highway. “Oh there’s an orange truck! That’s my favorite.”

Sunday night we went out to a park and then to a Not Your Average Joe’s for dinner. Siena had her usual chicken fingers, I had the tasty Chipotle Chicken Salad (yummy sugared pecans), Mo had a breaded haddock, and Mama picked up two appetizers for her dinner. Neither proved spicy enough to kick-start herself into labor, though Thalia did do a final bit of jumping and tumbling at the end of the day (“till night by arriving has finished our play”).

After a late bath and a day in which she never peed in her pull-up once, Siena proceeded to give us an even better gift: Sleep, blessed sleep. Siena got up only as we were getting ready to leave in the morning at 5:20. In the first sign of trouble, Siena had some separation anxiety as Mama explained to her she had to go to the hospital. They managed to calm her down a bit, and Siena was satisfied to see our car no longer in the drive way and anticipate that she’d be going to school and then seeing us in the afternoon.

As we got onto the highway, Mama commented that it felt like we should be going on a vacation, not going to the hospital. She explained, “We left Siena with a grandparent, we’re up early, we packed the car, we’re out on the highway, we’re going away for four days. We should be on our way to the airport.” However, we were headed north on the highway, not south towards the Pike and on to catch a flight. It did have that feel, though, of heading out on a new adventure. And probably that’s what it is. On one hand, we’ve done this before: the surgery, the first few days of settling in with the nurses to help, the panicky first night at home still to come. But on the other hand, it’s new all over again, augmented by a new dimension of having a big sister around. Each day at a time, I suppose, and we’ll see how everyone fares tomorrow. But I get ahead of myself; I will still need to write about Thalia’s Birthday (with a capital B).

If I were tweeting, it would be “tired, off to bed l8r.” Instead, let me say thanks to family for all their support (more of which to come) and friends for all their kindness and well wishes to Mama and me today and over the past weeks, months, and years.

Siena, in a last-moment bid to keep the spotlight focused on her with the impending arrival of #2, decided that on the day before her baby sister is due to arrive, she would, for the first time, make it through the entire day keeping her pull-up dry. This even included a trip to the park and going out for dinner! Mo was there to celebrate the success, and we all cheered for Siena. Go girl!

We realize that she probably won’t repeat this again anytime soon, and there are plenty of wet pull-ups in our future; we also know that other kids Siena’s age are already pretty much done with their potty-training, including her cousin who seems to have cleared that hurdle just after she turned two. But for us, this was a big day. It was quite the (simple) gift of progression for Siena to give us on her guaranteed last day as only child.

Siena had a great time napping with Mo in the glider. Dad tried to get Siena to nap on Friday afternoon and failed (much wailing was to be heard), but an hour later, Mo parked Siena in the chair and down she went for ninety minutes.

Meanwhile, Mo, Granddad, and Dad spent time in the backyard clearing out a wooded area that is designed for the dogs to run around in. Nalia just loved it, and spent a good chunk of the afternoon there eating sticks. Dad had much fun pushing around the DR Field and Brush Mower (and yes it does have the power to take down whole trees).

For Thanksgiving dinner we had the usual stuff, including turkey (a 10-pounder), corn-bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, string beans, homemade cranberry sauce, apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, rolls, and probably other stuff I can’t remember.

The grandparents stayed at a local hotel so as not to overload our bathroom, so we had the joy of having the aforementioned woebegone pup all to ourselves at night. Unfortunately, we completely forgot to snap a photo of her with Nalia this year. Alas!

Siena finally warmed up to Granddad a little and even had a fun time hanging out with him while reading A Splendid Friend Indeed.

All in all it was a great visit, and while we missed the usual trip to New York to see the other side of the fam, being able to share our first Thanksgiving in over a decade with Mo and Granddad at our house was a very special treat, and makes up for the fact we won’t see them at Christmas since they’ll be helping take care of Siena’s aunt, uncle, cousin, and soon-to-be other cousin.

We hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, too!

This discipline has paid off! Over the weekend, Siena was performing a number of feats that frankly don’t bode well for life at home upon her return, and hence mark the end of the earliest phase of life, where Siena could be counted upon to stay where put.

Namely, various family members observed her doing the following:

• Pulling herself from sitting into standing position by holding onto a chair, with no assistance or balancing support from anyone else;
• Cruising from this chair several feet across a hutch that has a set of drawers with nice pull handles that serve essentially as a climbing wall;
• Crawling (in her own special way, see below) six or more feet across a floor to get to a toy or person (this one is especially exciting and worrisome, as she finally seems to have crossed the mental hurdle from “I can’t get to what I want sitting here so I’m just going to flap my arms and be fussy” to “I can’t get to what I want sitting here so I’m going to go to it and get it”); and
• Getting into a sitting position from a completely prone position, which in the past meant she was like a fish out of water or a turtle on its back; this time she actually managed to get up on her hands, then push her knees up under her waist, and shove herself backwards to get sitting up. Mom and dad were so excited we pumped our fists and cheered.

Siena’s crawling technique is awkward, to say the least. From a sitting position with legs tucked in the middle, she throws her arms forward and then sticks out one leg and gets up on the foot of that leg. The other leg she keeps tucked under, so it’s like she actually drags that leg along as she propels herself forward with her arms and her foot. It looks like it must hurt, but she seems to prefer it to using her knees.

While I don’t have a picture of this, as a reward for getting this far in the text, I offer you this photo of Siena swimming with mom: