Signing off for now

We are moving tomorrow! So I'm shutting down my computer in three minutes and then won't have internet again until Wednesday. How we're going to do or find anything in our new town, I have idea. I've heard of these old-fashioned things called phone books, which we might have to rely on. No, that's silly. Verizon is bringing us both phone service and internet on Wednesday, so we won't have a phone book until then probably, and at that point we might as well just use the internet.

Well, anyway, don't expect any web activity until at least Wednesday.

Uh-oh!

Tonight during his bath Will dropped a cup onto the floor, looked down at it, and said, "Uh-oh!" Matt and I were amazed. I guess I do always say that when he drops something. I think he liked our reaction so much that he started intentionally dropping stuff so that he could say it again. It was really funny.

Tomorrow is Will's last day at daycare and my and Matt's last days at work.

Holy crap

Today Will locked himself in our bedroom. I don't have any pictures of the event because I was too busy hyperventilating to grab the camera and take pictures from the outside of the closed and locked door. We never close our bedroom door because the cats like to come and go, so we had no idea that the doorknob was locked. Will discovered recently that he can close doors, and we like to encourage his explorations when they seem harmless, which this did because we did not know the door was locked. In fact, as he was closing the door Matt and I even discussed that there was no way that the door was locked, so you can imagine our surprise when we tried to open the door back up and could not. Matt knew how to pick the lock, so he did, but not nearly quickly enough, in my opinion. Will was pretty freaked out and I could hear him crying from the other side of the door. He doesn't understand locked doors, but he knew that all of a sudden he was in a closed room by himself, and he didn't like it. He was probably locked in there for a total of 45 seconds, but it felt like an hour to me.

Today Will and I also went to our last play session with Charlene and Carter, who we met at our first ever moms and babies' group meeting last December. They live just down the street from us and we've gotten together with them a bunch of times over the last six months. Carter has a little pool in front of their house, so we went over so that Charlene and I could sit in lawn chairs and enjoy the beautiful weather and eat cookies while the boys hung out in the pool. Carter was pretty happy with that, and so was Will. For about two minutes. Will is not a guy who likes to sit still, even in a pool full of water and toys, so he squirmed his way onto my lap, where we sat while Carter enjoyed the pool. In any case, it was a nice time and we stayed for a couple of hours. Charlene is my kind of casual mom, and I'll miss hanging out with her, even though I never got to know her all that well.

I'm frankly kind of freaking out that we're moving for real a week from tomorrow. Today I joined a Yahoo group of Delware moms, and I already got a nice welcome email from one of the members, inviting me to a bunch of stuff, so that is very nice. I admit that I haven't been impressed with a lot of what Delaware has to offer in terms of grocery stores and the like, but the people do seem very nice. I suspect Will and I will get to know the lay of the land relatively quickly going to various people's homes for playgroups and activities.

And today we did some packing. Here's a picture of Will helping.

Stealth post

Matt and Will went to pick up takeout for dinner and left me home alone with this!

Matt's worried that I'm going to start reading it while he's gone and then he won't get to read it right away, but truthfully I care much less than he does, though I do think it's cool. We were afraid that Matt wouldn't get his copy today because we didn't pay for shipping, but not to worry. It was waiting for us when we got home from Delaware, for our last trip before the big move. I was surprised that it was the only one sitting in the mail area, but Matt's sure that everybody else in our condo just already picked theirs up. I'm not so sure about that. I think we may have been one of the few here who ordered it.

Will drinks from a sippy cup and looks cute

Will knows how to drink out of a regular cup, but he gets so excited doing it that he tosses the cup and smacks it against things, which makes quite a mess. So we've decided that the sippy cup is the way to go. I suspect we're not the first parents to arrive at that decision for the same reason.

Will had another ear infection this week, but after a couple of days on antibiotics I think he's feeling a lot better. Well, he looks a lot better. You'd never, ever know from his behavior that he ever had an ear infection, so that's not an accurate gauge, but he no longer has mucus seeping forth from his eyeballs. A good sign.

Will only has six days left at daycare, which makes me sad. I know some people think daycare is not good and no mother should leave her child for any period of time, but the people at Will's daycare love him and he loves them. It's so obvious. And he has a great time there. He plays with toys and other kids and the women there take them for walks and read to them and feed them and rub their heads to get them to take naps. And they carry them around and hug them and kiss them. It's really a very nice place, and I think Will will miss it. I still don't have a job lined up in Delaware so he won't go to daycare again until I do. In the meantime, I'm going to try to join some playgroups to keep both of us sane. I'm sure Will will find a whole new assortment of things to get into in the new house, but for now his favorite is picking at the carpet fuzz at the frayed end of the carpet by the sliding door. He's getting very crafty and now makes sure he turns away from me before quickly and sneakily putting the carpet fuzz in his mouth. He does not like to have carpet fuzz in his mouth and he knows that I don't want him to have carpet fuzz in his mouth, but apparently he loves the act of putting it there so much that he's willing to sacrifice his own discomfort for the experience. And then he laughs maniacally and crawls away from me as fast as he can so that I can't pull it out. I'm pretty much ready to just start letting him eat the stuff.

Weekend visit with Aunt Kate

This weekend Will's Aunt Kate visited from Florida. In the picture above Will is wearing the shirt that his Aunt Meagan got him for the occasion, since it features a picture of a dog that looks just like Kate's baby Bosco. And yes, I am wearing my Massless Winos t-shirt!

We had a barbecue on Saturday and on Sunday Matt, Will, and I drove to the house in Delaware to do some lawn upkeep. Will and I took a nice walk around our new neighborhood while Matt took the car to buy a lawnmower and a hose. During our walk we met some of the neighborhood kids, who were manning a lemonade stand across the street from our house. The kids were funny and gave us the scoop on some of our neighbors (apparently one of our neighbors breeds and sells rabbits and the other has a pool that he never opens, so frogs collect inside and make quite a ruckus later in the summer). They also told us that although they advertised lemonade at 25 cents a cup, for us it was free because were were new. I thought that was a good sign that the neighborhood kids were so nice, and of course we paid for our lemonade anyway.

And yesterday we went out for a lovely lunch with Kate and Meagan, and then drove Kate to Dulles for her flight home. It was a nice day, and I got a lot of packing done.

This morning I am at home because Will has a doctor's appointment. He has an eternal cold, and this time it seems worse than usual. I thought it was better toward the end of last week, but he has once again developed the goopy eyes that he had in April, though this time it is not as bad. Still, if he has an ear or sinus infection I don't want to wait until next Monday, when he already has another appointment scheduled as a follow up to last week's appointment. We really want to get our money's worth from Aetna while we're still in Virginia, after all.

P.S.

In honor of his ten-month birthday, Will now eats greenbeans and chicken. I'm pretty glad of that. He's kind of a picky guy (or was, anyway), so his diet has been boring and limited. Now we have more options, though they report at daycare that he spits out chicken nuggets. Weird. He loves tater tots.

Like he's from outer space

This guy is ten months old today! You want to see his teeth? Here they are.



Will is feeling much better about life this week than he did last week, I think. He's given me very little trouble about riding in the stroller or getting into the highchair. He's still not a big fan of car rides or getting his diaper changed, but I don't blame him. This afternoon on our walk home from work and daycare, an elderly man stopped to admire Will, apparently not remembering that he's seen us and talked to us about five other times since Will was born. And every time he says the same thing--that kid's going to break hearts some day. Only this time he added, "Look at those big blue eyes. It's like he's from outer space." Uh, what? He said it like it was a compliment, so I took it that way, puzzling though it was.

Will feeds himself and makes a big mess

It is Friday and I am tired. Will has been sick this week, and I think I got some of what he had, which I guess stands to reason considering that we shared an ice-cream cone on Sunday.

To update you all, here is a list of things that Will now refuses to do without being forced:

-- sit in his carseat
-- sit in a stroller
-- sit in his highchair
-- not eat cat food
-- eat anything besides cat food that does not involve fruit or carrots

I like this kid very, very much, but I tell you. It's a pain to live with someone who refuses to cooperate with anything that makes it possible for us to leave the apartment or eat.

On the other hand, Will is talking these days, and uses the following words (or phrases) appropriately and in context:

-- mama
-- dada
-- more
-- kitty cat

He also points now to what he wants. In the case below, he wants the camera.



Also, he is an eating maniac (as long as the food involves fruit or carrots). At his nine-month appointment he was in the tenth weight percentile, at 18 lbs even. We started to try to bulk him up, since he downgraded from the twenty-fifth to the tenth. I guess we were successful because he's getting to be quite the chunkybutt and when we took him to the doctor on Monday he was, ahem, 19 lbs, 12 ounces. That was three weeks later. Now, the second time they weighed him with his clothes and diaper on and he also shortly thereafter vomited what I'm seriously sure was half a pound of puke (all over the front and back of my shirt and in my hair). But regardless, he gained at least a pound in those three weeks.

More details

This is the outfit that my parents bought Will and clothed him in during the twenty-five minutes that it took me and Matt to sign all of the settlement papers and collect the keys to our new house. My parents work quickly when they're on a mission. I think they're excited that Will is moving two hours closer to them.

The good news is that we still like our house. I was a little bit afraid that I was playing it up in my memory during the last six weeks or so and making it seem cuter than it really was, but I don't think so. Now that we've spent almost a day there (we slept there Thursday night after the closing) we have found lots of things that we want to do with the place and little changes that we want to make, but we also discovered some nice things that we didn't notice when we were checking the place out, like the pretty little cabinet in the downstairs bathroom that I think I assumed the former owners would take with them. They also very thoughtfully left post-it notes on some of the light switches to let us know what they were for. And they left toilet paper in both bathrooms and some handsoap in the kitchen. We met the sellers at the closing, and they seemed awfully nice. I know not everybody has such a favorable interaction with their sellers, so we were lucky.

On Thursday we also bought a refrigerator. We had all these Consumer Reports lists for various types of refrigerators, so we took those with us to the Sears Outlet, where you can buy appliances at significant discounts due to mostly inconsequential blemishes. We couldn't even find the problem with the one that we bought. And we didn't end up using the Consumer Reports list because we didn't have one for the bottom-freezer style, which is what we ended up going with. We mostly chose it because of all the cool compartments inside the refrigerator door. I'm not sure how I feel about having the freezer down so low, but I'm sure we'll get used to that. And it will probably be nice to have the refrigerator stuff up high. Now we have to buy a washer and dryer, and that will take care of the major shopping. Oh, and a lawnmower.

Here's a picture of Matt in the kitchen and Will in the dining area.