>Sometimes when I am taking pictures of Jack, I try to recreate poses that I took of Luke. I feel very proud of myself for remembering those old pictures so well. Then after I have taken the pictures I go back and compare. Hmm, not exactly the same. It’s funny to see that chubby little face and all that drool though.
Jack:
Luke:
>
>Don’t feel bad, he is just practicing his fake cry. It’s pretty cute and effective, right? I’m onto you. Jack!
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5241172949990251936&hl=en
>Dave had a biketastic Fathers Day today. It started off with my delicious banana pancakes (if I do say so myself.) Then he was off to mountain bike White Ranch. When he came home for Fathers Day Family Time, he wanted to bike, hike and fish, so we tried to come up with a plan that combined all three. (Over achiever.) The way we did this was to immediately cross fishing off the list, even though that is my favorite thing to do. (By fishing, I mean reading a magazine on a blanket.) Then we got Jack all outfitted in the backpack, and he was fussing up a storm, but seemed prepared to nap in there when he got the chance. Once the backpack was all adjusted we got ready to leave. Dave attached the tagalong to his road bike and the trailer to the tagalong. Then the backpack got attached to the trailer. This took about an hour.
All the while I was trying to figure out the best route to our hiking destination. I googled and googled and finally found a bike map to use, and Dave and I studied it and we both memorized the first few turns and then forgot the rest. Before we knew it, we had biked 2 miles to get half a mile from our house. Things like this used to happen to us a lot when we would go hiking and we’d stop paying attention and just start following the dog. Anywho, we got back on track and on our way we ran across the coolest park ever! Dave said, “Luke do you want to stop at this park and check it out?” I think he was running before he even hopped off the bike. It was really fun and I think we could probably find it again. Dave and Luke and I all played while Jack napped.
Sadly, Dave was paged while we were there and we had to go home so he could work. Boo! But we still had a nice dinner, went out for ice cream and got everyone to bed on time.
Happy Fathers Day!
>
This was about the 17th take of this picture. I have a bunch of sound effects on my camera, and every time I would focus, Jack would hear the camera, look up, and smile. It’s impossible to get candid photos of him! But finally the allure of the cheerio won out, and I was able to capture the intense concentration required to match a forefinger to a thumb to pick up something small.
>
Today our good friends and neighbors returned from their first of many summer vacations and called to say, “Are you going to the park today? We’ll meet you there.” But what I heard was, “Please come over and let me cook dinner for you and your family while you break things and bleed everywhere.” I said, “I’ll bring the french fries!”
My knife is dull, which may have caused it to skid off the potato and cut my finger. Or maybe the dullness prevented the tip of my finger from being chopped off. Who knows?
We almost reached a new milestone: Meat for the baby! From a jar! (Organic of course.) But instead of opening the jar of baby food, I picked it up and then dropped it on the floor where it shattered. Sorry, it’s sweet potatoes again for you, little baby!
Then as we discussed how plastic is slowly killing us, and how we are slowly getting rid of our plastic plates in favor of plates that could kill us with lead, (or other unknown ways) Little M dropped her ceramic plate on the floor and it shattered and cut a gash in Luke’s toe. I was right there, so I probably caused that to happen as well.
That may have been a graceful time to just leave and hope to be invited back again someday, but we decided to wait until Luke had been bitten by the puppy twice. Just nips, no blood.
Yea! Welcome back from vacation! I hope we (and by this I mean you) got all the glass cleaned up!
(The picture is just another example, in case I wasn’t clear, of how messy Jack gets when I feed him. Of course the rice cereal is hard to see in the picture, but it covers 87% of his exposed skin.)
>
Monday night I was live blogging our first attempt at crying it out while simultaneously googling “crying it out”. Who knew that allowing your baby to cry causes most of the problems in our society today? Probably lots of people. Of course it wasn’t as easy as letting Jack cry for 10 minutes, as I reported, and the next day I sighed, and rubbed my eyes, and commiserated at work with my fellow mommies about how I was up until 12:45, when I finally gave in and nursed my little baby to sleep. And then we were up again at 6am. Poor me. And then I was banished from the club, stripped of my complaining rights, and that was that.
Since other people have it worse, I did not volunteer the fact that Tuesday night, Jack slept from 8pm to 6am. So it seems that our evening of crying it out was totally effective, just what the doctor ordered, and the answer to everything! (Probably not.) Or maybe Jack was just having a hard time adjusting to the crib after sleeping so close to his mom and dad and brother all weekend on our camping trip. (Oh, the guilt.) Regardless, the damage has been done and Jack is now as ruined as his older brother.
In other sleep related news, I will now begin getting a lot more of it because we watched the last episode of Deadwood this evening. That makes 36 episodes in about 6 weeks. I will now go into withdrawal, and to get through it I think I’ll try to get to sleep before midnight a few time a week.
Now to sleep – last night I dreamed of a skunk eating all the vegetables in my garden. Possibly as it was actually happening. Darn that skunk and it’s zucchini, melon, and pumpkin leaf eating!
>
I wish I was in the middle of writing a wildly creative post right now, but Jack and I are crying it out. Well, Jack is. I am just madly searching google for reassurance that I am doing the right thing. And feeling like I should be crying, but eh, I am ready for this baby to start sleeping more. Dave is acting blasé . Luke is sleeping. I hear Bean checking in on Jack and can feel him silently reproaching me from upstairs. So are you deaf or what Bean? I’m on to you.
I put Jack on notice last week that he had 7 days in which to get it together and start sleeping through the night. He did it once. OK, I am sure we messed up his schedule with our camping trip, but seriously! So after the 17th time that Dave and or I went in to soothe him this evening, it was time to get down to business.
I went in and said, “Jack, I love you. It’s time to go to sleep.” And I turned on his aquarium and hoped that would do the trick. I set the timer for 10 minutes and went downstairs.
After 10 long, agonizing, google searching, ferber reading minutes the timer went off. Dave said, “That was 10 minutes?” No, it was an eternity.
I went back in to his room and put my hand on his tummy. I put the pacifier in his mouth, and I said, “I love you Jack. It’s time to sleep.” Then I wiped the little tears from his tiny, furrowed brow. I left his room and I set the timer for another 10 minutes. But I guess that was unnecessary because he stopped crying right away and went to sleep! Time for a Pear of Panties! And then straight to bed because I haven’t yet figured out exactly what I am going to do in half an hour when he starts crying again.
>
I haven’t posted Jack’s stats from his 6 month appointment because I lost track of the sheet of paper from the Dr’s office. They said 10% for weight (15 something pounds?) and 50% for height (some amount of unknown inches).
But as you can see, he is sitting up like a big boy these days! I have to do a lot of hovering and propping, but he is doing well. All this new sitting up and growing interest in the world around him have made nursing quite a challenge. I can see why 6 months is a common time to give up on the whole process. Hmm, is it possible that Jack now prefers to nurse a lot in the middle of the night because he is too distracted during the day? Hopefully his 11 hours of sleep on Wednesday night will become more common then the 2 hour stretches we got last night. ZZZZzzzz. Can’t keep typing… falling asssllllleeeeeep.
P.S. Luke got his summer haircut
>
I have been working on installing a new piece of software for about a month now, on and off. I finally gave up and put in a ticket with the vendor. We went through three rounds of “actually that documentation is wrong, try this” until the issue was escalated up to the next level. A conference call was planned between Level 1 guy, Level 2 gal, and me. It started at 1 p.m. and first, Level 2 gal validated everything I had done so far. She found one error and we fixed it. Still didn’t work. Then she started instant messaging Level 3 guy and got one more suggestion. We got one step farther, but it still didn’t work. Then Level 2 gal got two co-workers to look over her shoulder and we went through the whole thing again. No good. So by the end of the 2.5 hour call, it was me, Level 1 guy, Level 2 gal, Level 3 guy on IM, and Level 2 gal’s co-worker 1, and co-worker 2 on the call. (And I could hear some of them looking for answers on google.) Oh, and Jack. Did I mention I was working from home and that Jack was also participating in the call? During this call I nursed Jack, burped him, put him down to play, where he screamed happily and then unhappily, then I put him in the sling and set my laptop on the counter so I could stand, sway, and work. Then I put him down for a nap. When he woke up, I changed his diaper and fed him again. He played with books in my lap. All the while I was troubleshooting this problem, and if Jack had been silent I don’t think anyone would have even known. Of course, we was very vocal. And there was one point where I had to put him down so I could type with two hands and he screamed. SCREAMED. Level 2 gal begged me to pick him back up. I am a fast one-handed typer, but sometimes I need to be twice as fast. I picked him up and he was fine.
I wish the problem was solved, but this was just a necessary step on the way to solving the problem. A long, 2.5 hour, headset-less, one handed, baby-holding phone call. And usually I don’t get anything done when Jack is being fussy!
MetaMegan 
