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:

However, as much as I sometimes miss those days,  at this point in my life I wouldn’t trade it for the kind of weekend we just had.

It started Friday night. Weekends normally do, I suppose, but this was a special Friday night. We moved Thalia’s crib into Siena’s bedroom and had them sleep together for the first time. It was a rough first night: Thalia was shrieking with joy, jumping up and down, taking off her sleep sack, and generally annoying Siena, who just wanted to get to sleep. We eventually pulled Siena out for a half hour to let Thalia get to sleep, and then sent Siena back in. That didn’t happen until about 10 PM. Saturday night was better. They chatted to each other until around 9 PM, but never required any intervention. Tonight, they got quiet by 8:50, so a little better each night so far! It’s great to see how excited they are at this early stage of this process, but all this conspiratorial chatter may be foreshadowing the challenges we’ll have ahead with two daughters.

Saturday the girls slept in, thankfully after their late night on Friday.Mama took the girls to get their hair cut and shoe shopping at the mall, while I did a variety of outdoor tasks, like pulling bad and rotten apples from some of our apple trees. Once they returned, we all went swimming before and then again after lunch.

Once Thalia went down for nap, we gave Siena an early birthday present: Her first bike! She immediately started trying to balance on it with Mama’s help.

Of course, she did try to do a little too much, so we caught her first fall-resulting-in-screaming on video:

Barley spent most of the day outside. Can you spot her in this shot of the front our house? She loves the shade:

The afternoon activities also included:

• A trip with Siena to Donelan’s to get supplies for Sunday, including a(nother) birthday cake for Thalia
• Swimming
• A visit to an old friend’s house for a brief stop in at a BBQ she was hosting; Siena got to see her parrot

For dinner we went to, you guessed it, Not Your Average Joe’s, and the girls at their usual pizza and ice cream. Given that it was a Saturday instead of our normal Sunday, I was very confused about whether the next day was a weekend or a work day.

Sunday morning, Mama made corn pancakes for breakfast, Siena decorated Thalia’s gift wrapping, and then we gave Thalia her big birthday present, a small sandbox!

Around 11, Siena’s friend Zoya and her family showed up for a visit, and we all went swimming again. This was a weekend of firsts for Siena; she started on her bike, she jumped into the pool with no one holding on to her for the first time, and she went all the way underwater for the first time (this immediately followed the unassisted jump into the pool, and was not in Siena’s plan).

We had a delightful lunch, and then served Thalia her cake (this being a surprise to Zoya’s family).

After they left, Thalia went down for nap, and Siena did more bike riding and swimming. Once Thalia woke up, she got to open her presents:

We loved how excited she was to get a book. She’s her mother’s daughter!

We also watched the bulk of the Women’s World Cup Final (the good parts, up to when the US went up 2-1), and then did the usual dinner, bath, and bed thing.

The girls were exhausted, and just like with dogs, a tired girl is a good girl.

I’m reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes book, which I look forward to introducing to the girls someday:

It’s hard to imagine she’s already two. As for her stats:

• Height (she’s moved from length to height now!): 34.25″ (75%)
• Weight: 29 lb (75%)
• Head: 48.5 cm

Her doctor said she hadn’t technically grown since her 18-month visit since they measure length (flat on the back) at 18 months and height (standing) at 24 months, but we all know she’s gained at least an inch since then. But nonetheless, at 75% she could be destined to be the shorter sister.

Here’s her having her first bite of cake. Notice, she goes for what she knows first (strawberries), but really really likes the cake. We caught on camera basically her longest giggle ever.

Finally she really gets into it and makes a royal mess.

Thalia got some presents, too, though to be honest she was neither that interested in opening them (Siena was more than happy to help her out) or playing with them at the time. Here she is with a couple of books:

Here she is sitting on top of one of the presents:

Getting a look at her first cake:

Enjoying her cake:

Caught mid-giggle! I count three chins here:

Look at me! Cake!

Did I get cake in my hair?

to this in one year:

That, by the way, is one of Thalia’s birthday presents, and she loves it!

Thalia clocked in at 30 inches (75%) and 22.5 pounds (also 75%), so she’s a little better than the median range she was at before, but not close to Siena, who measured in at 30 inches (and a mere 20 pounds) when she was 9 months. That being said, Mama and I are happy that Thalia continues to grow longer and not just wider, or denser as we were starting to suspect. Mama hypothesized that Thalia would just turn into a white dwarf star and eventually become a baby black hole, sucking in all food and light.

Siena, in the past year, has gone from this:

To this:

So she’s growing really well too!

At the first party, a large affair with tens of kids, a pool, a bouncy castle, lego tossing, lego gift bags, a tent, and two cakes, one of the activities was a pair of pinatas that the kids got to bust open. Sadly there was no whacking with a bat. Perhaps that’s a good thing, though. Instead, the kids grabbed strings hanging down from the pinata bellies and pulled open a rift out of which candy, in the case of one pinata, and legos, in the cast of the other, showered.

All the kids rushed in to start grabbing up candy and lego pieces. All except Siena. The poor girl just stood on the ring of kids and hovered around. I was going to say she was like the last puppy to the milk dish, with nowhere to squeeze in to get milk, but she wasn’t even trying to squeeze in. She looked pretty forlorn and pitiful. Eventually, a space opened up on the side opposite her, and we directed her over to it. By this point all the candy was gone and only a few dozen lego pieces were left. She very carefully squatted down and very deliberately analyzed and claimed a handful of lego pieces.

I thought to myself that perhaps with this lack of assertiveness she really won’t be ready for kindergarten when we’ve been thinking she could be. She was just so tentative. It was a little disconcerting.

A few days later, I asked her about it. I asked if she remembered when they opened the pinatas and the lego’s fell out, and how she didn’t go in to grab any until most of the kids had left. I asked her why she hadn’t just gone in and starting grabbing pieces like the other kids did.

Siena replied, “There wasn’t any room” to get in there.

I asked her why she didn’t nudge any other kids aside. She answered, “I was waiting my turn.”

Both Mama and I had an “awwww” moment when she said this. Such a polite girl!

I explained to Siena that it’s OK if she asks the other kids to move and make room for her, and next time she should feel free to go right in there and have the other kids make room for her. I don’t want her shoving kids aside (not like she would), but I also don’t want her to always be so considerate (manifesting as tentative) that she doesn’t get what she wants for herself.

We’ll have to see how she evolves in this area. Right now, she’s a very good team player. We want her to keep that up while also being assertive when she needs to be.

I’ve told several people that I’m getting a very warped sense of time, or at least how my days are filled by the time available. In something of an inversion of Parkinson’s Law, in the end there has been just enough time in the day to do what needs doing, at least at a very macro level.

Before Siena was born, we understood that our lives would become radically different, but naturally we couldn’t comprehend the manner or structure of the change. After a year, I would look back and think that given how much time taking care of Siena consumed, we must have had so much free time in our lives. But it had never felt that way. We weren’t exactly sitting around the house wondering what to do with all this extra time.

Then, with Thalia on the way, I wondered, how do people have two kids. We can barely manage one, and with both parents working and not having any time to ourselves, where would we find time for another kid? I looked at a bunch of other parents with two (or more) kids, and marveled at how they did the impossible. Even the prospect of mundane activities like getting both kids food or ready for school or ready for bed seemed overwhelming. (And to be frank, the prospect of getting them both ready for bed at the same time, which we don’t yet do, seems a frightening step to do by myself, so I’m not exactly looking forward to it.) When one kid occupies you fully from the time you get home until they go to bed, how do you make time for another?

Those four days in the hospital after Thalia was born, when Siena was at home and we could hand Thalia off to the nurses at night, felt like the last opportunity to catch our breaths before jumping into the even deeper end of the pool this time.

Now, six months later, I look at how we are getting by with both, Siena and Thalia generally seem happy and are doing well, and I think back at when it was just us and Siena, before we had the new huge time sink with the round cheeks and big smile, and I think, wow, we must have had so much free time when it was just the three of us.

But the hours and days march inexorably forward, and you grow and change. When I put you to bed, I no longer get to sing my favorite night-time songs to you, and I miss the sweet, soft way you used to whisper for them in turn (and usually get the titles amusingly wrong, but that’s another story) as I snuggled next to you when you were younger. Now, some nights we chat briefly about the day, we rub noses, or you instruct me to go take care of Mama and Thalia. Sometimes you flat-out ask me to leave. There is no singing.

Yet while you change, and our relationship changes–in small, subtle ways now but eventually bigger, irreversible ways in the future–I still find each day a treasure, each night a night where I don’t want you to get any older. Sure, life isn’t fair, but it at times seems especially unfair that time is unidirectional: You and I will age, and we will constantly have to find new moments to cherish and celebrate, new moments that I would extend forever, to have you always there. My hope is that doing so will remain the easiest of tasks I have as a father for many years to come.

And in postscript reflection, I realize that I too often allow my own daily chores and challenges to mask the reality that I participate at the other end of this relationship, too. Have my parents had such similar revelations of wanting to freeze my moments in amber, to stop time with me? Have your mother’s parents, too, with her? I assume they must, and I believe if I spent the time to look, I would find the ways in which they express it.

Siena, you have the curse of a parent with the technological savvy but perhaps not the grace or discretion required, who writes for all to see some few secrets of what it means to be a parent, secrets that are probably best left unspoken rather than broadcast, discovered rather than revealed. Your grandparents have operated with more deftness and subtlety, but surely with no less love. Hopefully they will know that as I look back on my own life, there are moments too numerable to count where I would freeze time with them, had I the power.