cindy's world

Allie turned 10 months yesterday! I’m mashing soft foods now instead of pureeing all foods, and I’ve just gently pressed the mashed carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. into the same ice cube trays I’d used for her purees so I could control portion size. She still gets some purees, because I just find it easier to make big batches of stuff once or twice a week that lasts for a few weeks (she gets a lot of variety), and I feel like mashed foods or chopped table foods have to be prepared and served fresh(er). I’m clueless on how to get her on actual table foods and snacks later on, as I’m away from home full time. Maybe prep her sandwiches early morning or have large pre-cooked meals in a crock pot? I don’t know. She does eat more fresh stuff these days, tho. Small pieces of watermelon, chopped bits of baked beetroot, shelled peas, etc.

She is pretty healthy and hasn’t gotten sick again since her early bout with RSV, despite hanging with her daycare-attending cousins here and there. She definitely understands more than she says, and will initiate games with us. Yesterday, she discovered that she could see her daddy in the back of the room by peering over the top of the living room couch from the floor, so she would make eye contact until he acknowledged her, then she’d duck down in a squat to hide herself, and then she’d stand up, he’d say “Peek-a-boo! I see you!” and she’d laugh and squat again, doing this until she’s done something like 15 squats on her little legs and couldn’t even walk well after that. She also loves the “I’m gonna pretend to put your cell phone in my mouth, but I’ll pause with my mouth open, look at you and smile expectantly waiting for you to say ‘No,’ and when you panic and yell ‘No,’ I’m gonna laugh at you before I lower your phone” game, which she of course made up herself and is tireless about playing. Her coy smile reaches her eyes and she looks sideways at us, and that’s how I always know she’s about to do something mischievous. It’s the same look she used to have before she bit me nursing.

So yes, it’s pretty fun now, aside from the more-often-than-not (naught?) shrieking struggling fit she’d have when we lay her down to get her diaper changed. =P

(photos from Cousin Alex’s bday, below)

Me: Hey Allie, you busy?
Allie: I’m just inspecting the grass. What’s up?

Me: I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday!
Allie: It’s not my birthday…?

Me: Sure it is! Daddy over there wants to wish you a happy birthday, too, cuz now you’re a big girl of 10 mon–

Allie: I’m not going to stand for this, a lady NEVER reveals her age!
Me: All right, all right, I won’t tell anybody…today. Get back here.

On Saturday, my cousin Jennifer’s baby Alexandra turned 1 year old! Time flies! Jennifer and her hubby hosted a buffet brunch at Back Bay Bistro, a really nice place sitting right over the kayak/small craft launch area of Newport Beach. We rushed Allie there as soon as she was up from her morning nap. Okay, I had to wake her over 90 minutes in, as she took a longer nap than usual. Figures.
Jennifer had an adorable theme of owls.

In the private room, there were orange and white balloons, colorful stuffed toy owls in wicker baskets in the center of each table, owl stickers, even an owl finger puppet board book for each attending baby. I think Allie may have been the youngest, as all the other “babies” were at least walking independently. In each owl “nest” wicker basket were an assortment of differently-colored construction paper, on which the guests were asked to write a message to Alex for a time capsule, which the parents plan to give Alex when she’s about to go off to college. It was hard imagining this 1-yr-old as an 18-yr-old, but I still got all sentimental writing my note, imagining her as a young adult about to start her semi-adult life. (I chose a yellow owl and blue owl sticker to decorate my note, as together they make UCLA colors, hee hee.)

The private room opened out onto a little grassy yard, which Jennifer had set up with a bubble machine and a colorful tunnel for the kids to play with.

Crawl, baby, crawl!

Yay! Almost to mama!

Allie got to hang out with her older cousin Elle, whom I still remember as a newborn. Crazy.

I’d kept trying to find Alex so Allie can have a pic with the birthday girl, and Alex was adorably dressed that day, but some grownup or other always monopolized her. =/ At least she got a little time with her auntie Jennifer, Alex’s mom. I guess Jen will have to be Alex’s representive. 🙂

There would’ve been no photos of me as usual except that handed Mr. W the phone and made him take some of me with Allie Cat.

We had fun, but it was a short event for us. We got there half an hour late (altho there were plenty of people with kids who were an hour or more late), and then were one of the first to leave to make it back for Allie’s afternoon nap. In the hour+ we were there (plus half an hour of drive time each way), I barely had time to eat and definitely didn’t want to stand idly in the long buffet line when I could be hanging with Allie feeding her so that Mr. W can eat (and he did eat), so that’s what I did. Mr. W pestered me the entire time to go get food, but I was too busy to care. My uncle, Alex’s grandfather, sat across from us and watched admiringly as Allie obediently ate all her chicken w/zucchini, carrots, and blueberries w/multigrain cereal, then fed herself her puffs and drank from her sippy cup. “She eats very well!” he said, impressed. I got a flashback of Alex’s mom Jennifer at age 4, sitting at the family table for each meal crying, as my uncle stood over her with a ruler in his hand, rapping at her hand and loudly on the table as he demanded in Mandarin, “EAT! EAT EAT EAT! CHEW CHEW CHEW!” Yeah, Jennifer did not enjoy her mealtimes. =P
Knowing the stress and planning involved with getting this brunch together, and knowing that Alex had to be there on time and stay until the last guest left, I’m feeling even less inclined to do a 1-yr party for Allie. They say the 1st bday party is for the parents instead of for the kid, anyway. I keep thinking things will be easier time-wise once she’s on 1 nap a day, which should be sometime in her 2nd year (next year). Maybe I’ll start with the public bday shindigs with a lake event for her 2nd bday. But then there’s the other issue — Allie’s bday is always gonna fall on/around Thanksgiving weekend. Potential guests would most likely have plans to be with family, or be out of town. This will be interesting.

I’m starting to think there’s no way to say exactly what/when baby’s first word is. Do we say it’s “mama” because of the “mamamamamama” playing of sounds she did when she was practicing her “m”s months ago? Is it “baba” (“daddy” in Mandarin) that she started doing a couple of months after that as she’s now working on the “b” sounds? Is it the not-quite-full-word sounds like “boon” when she pointed at the balloons floating in a corner of the ceiling when she got her first balloons at the beginning of last month? Or maybe it’s the “buh-buh” she did last night and this morning, accompanied by her waving, as she said good night to the stepkidlet before going upstairs to bed, and to me as we said our goodbyes and I walked out the door to go to work.

I guess I’d thought it would be clearer than that. I figured there’d be a first “meaningless” word, such as “mama” or “dada” (she’s still not doing her “d” sounds, yet) that has meaning to us, but not to her, and then later, there’d be a first “real” word that she says deliberately with intent to communicate. But there’s all this gray area. Do I count the sounds that I know mean something to her (such as the high-pitched moose shriek imitation she does, almost perfectly emulating her small furry stuffed moose toy that my parents got her as a souvenir from Yosemite, whenever we say “moose” or when she sees the toy) but that aren’t truly formed words, like “boon?” But then she didn’t do “boon” after the first two times, since the balloons deflated and Mr. W threw them away. We went on a walk and bought her a cute mylar balloon the other day after she saw a picture of balloons and then pointed to the empty corner of the ceiling where the balloons had been last month, so now she’s batting around the new balloon and saying “bah-bah” which isn’t quite “boon” but isn’t quite “bah-loon,” either.

I think “first words” are arbitrary to whatever the parents want to deem a first word, just like “first walk” is pretty arbitrary, too. Allie now takes up to 6-7 steps pretty quickly to get from one end of the couch to the middle of the room to one of us, or to a toy she wants to play with. This is only when she’s not tired and therefore doesn’t have the balancing skills of a drunk. Some would say this is not truly “walking” because it’s not consistent and she can’t keep taking these steps in a controlled way perpetually, as it seems like the last step of the series is the one where she knows she’s at her goal so she gives up and sort of lunges herself at the target, sometimes falling or sitting down with a plop.

So when people ask me what Allie’s doing these days, is she talking? Is she walking? I just say, “Sorta.”

Eddie and Michelle had a kids’ birthday party to attend in local city Irvine this past Saturday, so they contacted me and asked if they could swing by afterwards so that our daughters can finally meet. The last time I saw their daughter Scarlett was through Michelle’s belly at her baby shower. Allie was 3.5 months old at the time. Now Allie is 9.5 months and little Scarlett is 4.5 months. They didn’t interact much, but I can see them running around together in another year or so. 🙂

It was a triple-digit weekend and Allie was wearing a cool pinafore-style top with matching ruffled diaper-cover shorts, white with red needlepoint embroidery, very Bohemian looking (a gift from Rebecca). But as soon as I brought the babies face-to-face, I realized that I’d forgotten who Scarlett’s parents are. In the past, when the four of us hung out, I’d be in UCLA gear and Eddie would be in USC gear. So of course Allie had to be changed into something more appropriate.

Scarlett: Fight on!
Allie: *discreetly* Gag!
This is actually the only UCLA item Allie owns, and only because Christi (flip flop girl) had the foresight to buy this for her the time we visited them up north. The shirt is for girls 12 months, so I’d put it away into the “future wear” drawer. On Saturday when I finally took all the tags off and pulled it on my 9-month-old, it was a PERFECT fit. She would’ve outgrown it without my knowing had Eddie and Michelle not come over! And I would not have been happy about the missed opportunity for Bruinwear.
Scarlett, on the other hand, had spit up on her pretty ‘SC dress and had to be changed out of it, and her parents were prepared with another USC onesie, which she wore after the dress. 😛

On Sunday, my parents came over and took a ton of video footage of Allie, since she’s toddling around on her own and is now up to 5-6 steps walking without assistance. She did most of her continous walking on Saturday and may have gone more steps than 5-6, but she had already gotten to where she’d wanted to go so she’d stopped (we need a bigger house). It’s usually one end or another of the L-shaped couch, where we place her toys for incentive. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t get any footage of a long walk. I think Allie was just distracted because of all the people around her, and of all the dancing she had to do, of course, since we put some music on.
Here’s Allie rocking and doing the head-bang to rock:

And here’s Allie doing body rolls and hippy movements to R&B/hip-hop.


That last toothy smile? She was just hamming it up for the camera for my mom (who was video-ing). She does a lot of stuff to deliberately “play” with grownups. What a clown. Rebecca did say very early on that Allie would have a wonderful personality, a great sense of humor which she would develop very young, and would deliberately do things for a reaction, to make people laugh.

Jayne brought up yesterday after we got back home from work that she would like to take two weeks in October off to fly back east to visit her aging father, who appears to be at the early stages of either elderly depression or dementia. She’s concerned about him, and she normally flies back to visit once a year, and had been planning to skip this year to care for Allie, but had recently heard from her mother that her father wasn’t doing too well. She was in tears.

We told her of course she should take the time. She had already planned a Plan B for us in her absence. There was a lady from her church, a pastor’s mother, who cares for her own grandchildren (the pastor’s kids) regularly and loves babies and children. Jayne had approached Missy before Jayne realized she was able to nanny for us, to ask if Missy would be interested in this position. Missy couldn’t do it permanently, but did want to help us out a few days a week, which we couldn’t do as we worked daily. Anyhow, Jayne said she’d already talked to Missy and Missy was happy to come for the two weeks Jayne would be gone, and to be Jayne’s back-up for any other unforeseen situations such as ailment. Jayne proposed having Missy start visiting to aquaint her with Allie and Allie’s routine, and then having Missy here with more and frequency until she’s here daily the week of Jayne’s departure. We told her this is fine, and of course she needs to go east to visit her father because Allie will always be here and Allie will be fine, but she may regret it if she doesn’t go see her father and something happens.

And Jayne burst into tears again and said she’s so scared that Allie’s going to forget her in 2 weeks, and that she never thought she would love someone else’s child so much. Aww.

(Sorry, men…this may be TMI for you as it’s all about breast milk. You’re welcome to read, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Pumping is going so well — now that I know how to induce subsequence let-downs and thus have stopped stressing about it — that the family freezer is now overrun with gallon Ziploc bags containing bags of frozen breast milk. I guess I was never less than 3 Ziploc bags, or about 2 weeks, ahead of Allie’s usage, but Allie had a jump in consumption a couple of months ago that coincided with a milk decrease on my end, which ate away at my stockpile cushion so swiftly that I got really stressed, which just added to the whole problem. Now, the freezer has 7 Ziploc bags full of the filled Lasinoh storage bags, and I’m halfway into filling the 8th Ziploc, and I’m about 5 weeks ahead (meaning the milk she’s drinking today was pumped out 5 weeks ago). This past week, since we started meat (just chicken, which we are still “hiding” in kale and/or carrot), Allie’s milk consumption dropped predictably. Instead of two 8-oz bottles a day after each nap, she’s down to two 7-oz bottles. She’s still nursing after she wakes up in the morning and before she goes down for the night, but I don’t know how much she’s taking in at those times.

I’d called the lactation nurse last month to ask if I should be reducing my pumping to match with Allie’s reduced nursing sessions (she nurses/drinks milk 4 times a day), and the nurse told me to hold off for another month to prevent a sudden decrease in milk production that may drop off too early, since I would ideally like to reach the one-year mark in giving Allie breast milk. For now, the nurse said, just reduce the pumping times to 15 minutes a session, instead of 20. Mr. W complains about the loss of freezer space, saying his freezer is overteeming with breast milk, so I think I’m good on my stockpile and can drop off a pump session now, even tho I don’t think it’s been quite a month, yet. After a month, the lactation nurse advised, I can spread the pump sessions to every 4 hours instead of every 3, and thereby eliminate a pump session in the day.

I probably can’t drop the 4:30am pumping session (darn), since that one yields the most milk (I did drop the time spent pumping so now I get 6 oz instead of 7-8), but dropping one of the 3 that I do at work would probably be helpful and give me half an hour back of worktime. All I have to do is match my pumping with the times that Allie actually would nurse when we’re together. That means delaying my morning pumping from 9:30a to 10:30a, eliminating the 1pm pumping, and bringing the 3:30p down to 2:30p. I get my lunches back, could MAYBE hit the gym again (the lactation nurse warned that if I start strenuous exercise too suddenly, that it could also adversely affect my milk supply), and it gives me more time to “refuel” before Allie’s bedtime feeding.

I think I’ll start this today. Hopefully it doesn’t wane my milk supply too dramatically, but I guess I can always add the eliminated pump session back in.

I realized recently I don’t know anyone who had to wean themselves off the pumps. My friends’ babies either weaned themselves early from the breast, causing my friends to dry up on the pumps and switch to formula; or my friends quit breastfeeding for whatever reason before the year-mark (when baby could take dairy) and didn’t pump as they intentionally switched their babies to formula; or my friends are able to be around their babies enough to breastfeed regularly and let the babies’ own supply/demand control weaning naturally. I’m kind of amazed that it looks like I’m going to be able to give Allie breast milk all the way through her first year, which is what the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends, and then put her straight on cow’s milk when she’s ready for dairy at 1 year without having to bridge any gap with baby formula. I was just hoping to get through my personal minimum of 3 months for her health benefits initially, and when that passed, I set my goal for 6 months with some trepidation, and then when that went well, was crossing my fingers and aiming for a year, without daring to hope too much. I still have 2.5 months to go, but it’s looking good. *still crossing fingers*

A day before Allie’s 3-month birthday, she found her thumb and ever since then has rejected the pacifier. She doesn’t suck her thumb much, only when she used to suck on the pacifier, which is to self-soothe as she falls asleep.

Today, I thought it would be interesting to reintroduce the pacifier to see what she would do with it. Obviously, if she showed too much interest, I’d take it away again so I don’t have to wean her of something later that she’s already weaned herself of. So while daddy was changing her diaper and she needed a distraction, I popped her old pacifier in her mouth. She looked surprised and smiled playfully, and then started chewing on the nipple. She then pulled it out, looked at it, giggled, turned it around and around and observed it from different angles, then put it back in her mouth for more tentative chews. She laughed, pulled it back out, turned it to its side, then tentatively gave the rim a few chews. She thought that was funny, also, and pulled it out again. She test-chewed various corners of the pacifier before deciding that the slightly thicker and harder rim between the nipple and the handle was the best for her teething needs.

So now we have a new bath-safe chew toy. She isn’t interested in sucking it, so I think she may be around the corner from self-weaning off the bottle, as well. Soon she’ll be eating what the big people eat.

When the stepkidlet returned after 9 weeks in Europe this summer, she was full of stories of cultural differences in child-rearing. Her relatives in Spain, according to her, don’t have any bedtime for their toddler, and allows the little girl to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning with the adults. The girl is hyper, fussy, and doesn’t nap well or at all. When mealtimes come, the girl is placed in her high chair, and then one adult immediately clasps the girl’s forehead and chin, forcing her mouth open, and the other adult shovels food in the girl’s mouth. The girl isn’t even given a chance to decide whether she will resist the food. It’s all force-fed immediately. This toddler is also fed soda in her bottle and eats junk food all the time. In telling us these Spanish habits she’s observed, the stepkidlet mentioned that Allie’s nanny Jayne had said that she doesn’t know how she would care for other babies if she decides to nanny professionally after Allie, because if the parents don’t have a healthy napping/eating/playing routine established for the kid, she isn’t sure she could handle it. Jayne calls Allie the exemplar baby, and considers herself spoiled by the regular, predictable breaks she gets when Allie takes her hour+ naps twice a day. (I’m pretty sure I’ve warned her that Allie will naturally drop the morning nap sometime in her first year.) The stepkidlet said thoughtfully that when she has kids of her own, she wants to raise them the way I’m raising Allie, which unfortunately means that her kids can’t be around her own mother, who raises children in the Spanish-culture way. I’d thought she was being facetious.

Today, the stepkidlet joined Mr. W, Allie, and me at the Lake. During Allie’s lunchtime there, the stepkidlet helped hold Allie and hand her the sippy cup while I fed a chicken and carrot puree, a purple yam puree, and red Bartlett pear puree for dessert. The stepkidlet was full of questions about the steps it took to make each vegetable item, and then she said she definitely wanted to follow my parenting style for her own future kids. I laughed and told her I’d be here, she doesn’t have to memorize everything now. She said again that she wants to learn this because she won’t be able to bring her kids around to her mom if she wants them to be raised healthily. We chatted about nutrition and early established healthy eating habits.

It didn’t hit me until earlier, while I was reading a parenting book about infant nutrition and having dinner on my own (Mr. W was playing Diablo III), that the stepkidlet paid me a HUGE compliment. They say that emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when that emulation is of one’s parenting style, I don’t think it gets bigger than that. Everything I put into raising Allie is the largest amount of effort I’d put into anything, with what feels like the most significant consequences. I’ve had many people roll their eyes at me and tell me I’m making things too hard on myself, I should stop breastfeeding and pumping and let her go on formula; I should make her adapt to my social routine and just let her crash in the car or in strollers for a few minutes here and there if she’s tired enough to do it; I should feed her commercial jarred babyfood to free up time for myself to do my own things. Yeah, a lot of what I’m doing is less than perfectly convenient, but I’ve known since pregnancy that if 100 hours of pain and effort yields even a smear of advantage in health, development, disease-prevention, etc. for Allie, those 100 hours are happily worthwhile spent for me, disproportionate to the advantage gained or not. I’ve had 35 years of doing whatever I wanted to pamper myself, I can give the next few to Allie to make sure she starts off on the right foot. I know this doesn’t guarantee that she won’t eat fast food here and there on her own, or loooove full-fat cupcakes, but I hope that she’ll also be healthy enough to eat fresh fruits and veggies and whole-grain superfoods and learn to surf with me from a young age. 🙂 And hike with her dad, and bike-ride with both her parents, without crying too much about the TV show she’s missing at home.

So yeah, when the stepkidlet observes my parenting, Allie’s behavior and habits, and observes the way other relatives raise their kids (her own mother included), and then on her own asks me to teach her what I’m doing so that she could pass that on to her own future kids, I think it’s worth a blog post. 😀

Stepkidlet: “I spy…an Allie Cat!”
Allie: “I wanna see an Allie Cat!”

One feature of working full time away from a quickly-developing baby is that we don’t always know when she’s on to the “next” stage of something. Like how one day, we had to bottlefeed her at home in our care (normally I nurse every meal when I’m not at work) and Mr. W realizes that Allie was holding her bottle on her own. Apparently this was nothing new to Jayne, but because Jayne’s with Allie daily for more hours than we are, she isn’t always aware that something that isn’t new to her is new to us.

Last week, we discovered that Allie is able to feed herself and this weekend, suddenly she’s able to use the sippy cup. The feeding herself came with a little practice. First, she was quickly putting little specks of random stuff she finds on the floor or furniture into her mouth before an adult could stop her. (Lint, mostly, sometimes scraps of paper or napkin she’d torn, and we’re usually able to stop her or at least catch her early enough to snap, “No!” and make her freeze.) Then, Mr. W tried feeding her some organic baby puffs. She would open her mouth and take it, and he’d hand it to her and she’d finger it, unsure of whether we’d actually allow her to put something into her mouth for once. When we guided her hand toward her mouth, she’d hesitantly look at us in confusion, then open her mouth just a tiny bit, and do a dainty test bite with her front teeth. Now she knows anything we put in front of her while she’s still in her high chair after a meal, shelled peas or puffs, are fair game. She feeds herself these fingerfoods with confidence.
The sippy cup was a little bit of a revelation. In our initial introduction of the sippy cup, Allie would bite at the extended mouthpiece, unsure of what to do with it. If you’d tried to describe the instruction for “suck” to an infant, you’ll know it’s pretty much a lost cause, so we’d put the sippy cup lid away, but did feed her water with the cup portion of the sippy cup with her solid meals so she’d be familiar with the cup and the water. When we were at a restaurant feeding her her purees, we’d do the same with a glass of water. We started with a straw, plugging up the top with our thumbs and bringing the bottom of the straw to her mouth, feeding her like a little birdie. She soon learned to suck the water out the bottom of the straw and not just leave it to gravity. Then, last week, we tried leaving the straw in the cup and letting her sip from the top. That didn’t work before, but after being “trained” to suck the straw from the bottom for a few weeks, the top was a small change and she did it. We thought, “This is great! Now we can skip the sippy cup altogether.” Then my cousin Jennifer told us that her daycare won’t let her 11-month-old graduate to the next class unless her kid could use a sippy cup. Darn it, back to the drawing board. So yesterday, we tried the sippy cup with the suction lid again. Allie suddenly took to it with no problem. I guess the trick was converting her from the top of the straw to the top of the sippy cup lid, because that’s a gradual change from what she already knows to do. So today, when my parents came to visit, they got to enjoy Allie’s new skills and they took this little 42-second video (among 23 other videos):

BTW, while I was downloading the video from my mom’s camera into our PC, I found this never-before-seen photo.

WHAT the…?! I’ve never seen my little baby look like that!
Allie: “Whatever doesn’t kill me…had BETTER START RUNNING!!”

I’m behind, so this is gonna be mostly pix, with just a few of my usual lengthy descriptive paragraphs.

Last Friday, I did my very first outing alone after Allie went to bed (despite the fact that I’m still doing 4:30a wake-ups daily without fail to pump). Rebecca was in town, doing her daily radio show with her co-host Garrett broadcasting from a local-ish Laguna Beach restaurant called The Cottage as a special event, so I drove out to see her and to meet Garrett for the first time. Here they are at The Cottage office during their live broadcast.

Yes, that is THE Rebecca, our favorite clairvoyant! If you’re interested in giving her internet radio show a listen, or feel like calling in for a free mini-reading, she’ll answer questions live on the air! The Garrett & Rebecca Show is on 7:30p-8:30p Pacific time Mondays through Fridays, and you can listen to their podcasts RIGHT NOW for any of their past shows:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/garrettmillerradio
Now you can see what I was talking about on here about Rebecca. 🙂

So ANYWAY, Rebecca and I basically just hung out and caught up over chocolate mousse cake dessert at the restaurant after their broadcast, and Garrett joined us briefly before skidaddling off to his busy life by the beach. The Cottage Restaurant is awesome, BTW. I’ve seen it driving by but never went in. It used to be an old house, and now serves amazing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Rebecca and I stayed until after closing and they were so nice about it, still coming by to offer us refreshments and service.

Last Saturday, Edgar & Ruby got married! We had to miss the ceremony because it was far away at 5pm, and no way we could be there and get Allie back in time for bed by 6pm, so we skipped the ceremony, put Allie down like normal, then Jayne came over and they babysat (not much to do but be here and get her out of the house in case of flood or fire) while Mr. W and I went to the reception. They had two photobooths with tons of props, and we had fun with THAT. After all, it was the first time we’d gone out together after Allie’s gone to bed. He’d been out with his friends here and there before, but I hadn’t been out past 6:30p since…Allie’s birth.
Here’s Eddie, Michelle, and us not quite knowing what to do with the props — our ourselves — on our first photobooth session.

Mr. W and I celebrated in style, as you can see.

We soon found that the problem with photobooths at weddings is that people can just come in and crash your photoshoot session. And then the camera bears witness to all the fighting that ensues.

I’m just kidding; Eddie’s always welcome where we are. Wait, that’s too blanket of a statement…
We did attempt to get some normal shots in…but the camera was messed up at the time because someone had turned off the light in the booth (as was explained to us later by the boothmaker, Edgar’s younger brother) so the camera went on totally slow shutter speed, causing the blurring. Oh, well.

The day after that, which was last Sunday, my Canadian cousin Mark being in town for the first time in 16 years (by his calculation, but I thought it was longer) gave cause for a family reunion of the relatives on my dad’s side. This is all us cousins with our kids (those of us who made it to the reunion):

Doesn’t my cousin Diana’s little todder Elle on the top make you want to giggle, or at least wave back? That’s what happens when you tell a little kid, “Elle, look here at the camera! Hi! Elle!” She says “hi” back.
My cousin Jennifer with Allie:

Allie never looks so hairless as when she’s with babies close in age (Jennifer’s daughter Alexandra is 2 months older), and the lack of dark hair makes her look whiter than she looks when she’s alone.

Don’t the 2 grandmas look so happy to be holding their respective granddaughters? Aww.

Last Thursday, the cousins had agreed and planned months in advance to all take the day off, leave our respective tots with their regular daycare situations, and have a child-free day to spend showing cousin Mark around. Mark drove out from Diamond Bar where he had spent the week at my parents’ house and spent Wednesday night at cousin Jennifer’s in Irvine so that we had all day in Orange County. Cousin Diana ended up with a work emergency so she spent the day (that she did have off) putting out fires at work (figuratively); cousin Olivia decided she didn’t want to be in Orange County where we’d made a day packed with plans, so after her attempts to snag Mark away back to Diamond Bar for lunch had been met with avid refusals (my refusal caused me to drop the f-bomb in front of 3-year-old Elle…oops), she settled for after-dinner dessert plans with Mark after he returned to Diamond Bar Thursday night. So it was just Mark, Jennifer, and myself for Cousin Day Thursday and it was A BLAST.
We started in Downtown Disney…

…went to Slater’s 50/50 for lunch so that Mark could do some more of his burger reviews…

(we ordered and split the Slater’s 50/50 burger which has a patty made from half beef, half BACON; the vegetarian burger; and the “peanut butter and jellousy” burger which has for its condiments PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY…blech)
…intended to hit up our lake for kayaking but ran out of time so we just went straight to Yama Sushi on the lake for omakase, and enjoyed the view of the lake from their patio before sitting down at the sushi bar.

Mark claimed that we were “sizing up” the sailboat on the lake here.

The omakase was amazing and Jen missed half of it cuz she had to run out mid-dinner when she realized she’d missed 15 calls from her husband, who was stuck in traffic on his way to pick up their daughter from daycare and couldn’t get there in time. Life sure has changed. She and I made tentative plans to have her return for sushi and lake activities in the near future with her husband and baby, and Mark vowed to not wait another 16 years before visiting again.

It was sure nice having a social life again, even if for a few days and in bits and pieces. For future reference, I was able to do a full day because I left after nursing Allie as usual in the morning after she woke up, handing her off to Jayne shortly before her nap, then I drove to Jennifer’s, pumped there, then did Downtown Disney and Slater’s, then we went back to Jennifer’s, I pumped again, and we got into our respective cars and drove to the lake, then we all split up from there and I went immediately home to catch Allie right before bedtime and nursed her to bed like normal. Oh yeah — after that post about a month ago when I said she’d stopped falling asleep after a nursing, that only lasted 2 nights and she’s now back to nursing to sleep, which makes life easier on me.