Birthday girl

Last night I had ambitious plans--Gretchen was going out for drinks and dinner with her moms group, so after putting Baby to bed I was going to whip up a batch of cupcakes. I was foiled, however, when I looked in the refrigerator and could only find one egg. I left the ingredients out with a note saying there weren't enough eggs, thinking she would at least be impressed that I had good intentions. Instead, when Gretchen got home she asked why I didn't use the new carton of eggs in the refrigerator door that she'd picked up that morning. DOH! Sure enough, I looked past them and instead focused on the mostly empty carton that was right in front of me. That is reason #3,479 why I should never be allowed to have any cooking responsibilities.

The real question, though, is why would I want to make cupcakes in the first place? Because today is Gretchen's birthday, of course, and she loves cupcakes! It would be impolite to say how old she is, so I'll just say that she's not as old as either me, the San Diego Padres, or her not-so-secret crush, Brett Favre, but she is older than Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album and the Watergate scandal.

I'd like to say we have big plans for a romantic night out, but since she came down with a cold and Baby is in a phase of waking up multiple times during the night (teeth, we suspect) and leaving Gretchen sleepless, it'll instead be a night of carry-out Chinese food, maybe an episode of The Wire if we're feeling really crazy, and sleeping by 10:00pm. For all Gretchen does with Baby (who, despite normally being quite affectionate with me, wouldn't let me come near her when she woke in the middle of the night if I tried), she deserves a night of rest more than anything else!

And maybe, just maybe, I'll find some eggs and make my beautiful wife some cupcakes...



(I realize this picture is a few years old now, but I don't have any newer ones with me at the moment...)

All about Baby

Every so often, in an attempt to keep all my good memories from our time in Basel fresh in my mind, I look back at the archives of this blog to see what I was doing one year ago today, or two years ago today, etc. As I was doing that the other day, I realized how much the content of this blog has changed over the past several months. We originally set up the blog when we moved to Basel as a way to keep our friends and family informed about our travel and Swiss expat experiences. It became something somewhat different over time as we got wrapped up in the expat blogging world. Then we moved back to the US, and we wondered if we would keep it going. It's still here, and while we sometimes write about our reentry into the US, more than anything we find ourselves posting about Baby. That's to be expected, I suppose. As much as I would love to still be writing about our daytrips into the Alsace, or a quick weekend trip we took to the mountains, or our beach vacation in Thailand, our lives have changed drastically over the past year. Kirk's life is primarily about work and Baby, and my life is all about Baby (because that's also my work).

So for those of you who are still reading our blog despite it no longer being about life as an expat, here's what's going on in my world these days. Let me tell you about a few of Baby's current likes:

Books. A few months ago, at her 15 month check-up, Baby's pediatrician asked if I read to her every day. My reply was something like this: "I probably read about 100 books to her a day". Of course, she thought I was kidding, but I wasn't. She can't get enough of books. I can't tell you how many hours I spend each day sitting with her in my lap of the glider chair reading to her. If she wakes in the middle of the night, she asks for books. She wants a book at the dinner table with her while she eats. We go to the library at least once a week, not to mention a weekly visit (at least) to a book store. She LOVES books!

The letter "B". She's just starting to show an interest in learning her letters. For some reason, she has taken a real liking to "B". She finds it everywhere. It also happens to be true that many of her favorite words begin with B... baby, book, ball, bye-bye, bink, blanket, buckle, button...

Sheep and bink. These two travel in tandem. Sheep is her adopted security animal. She chose it as her favorite "crib guy" (a bunch of small stuff toys that I leave in her crib) several months ago and hasn't let go since. Of course she chose the expensive German one that I had to order online from a company that imports German toys so that I could have a spare hidden in my dresser drawer in case of emergency. Originally, Baby was only allowed to have sheep and bink when in bed, while getting ready for bed, and just after having woken up (while reading books in my lap). Then she discovered how to pull them out of the crib herself, so now she may also have them while playing upstairs. But that's it! As a side note, this Baby decided only at 10 or 11 months that she would like pacifier. I tried desperately when she was younger to get her to take one-- ANYTHING to soothe her other than me-- but she always refused. Now she doesn't want to let it out of her mouth.

The Wiggles. This is bordering on an obsession. She asks to watch the Wiggles constantly. Good thing I like it too, otherwise I'd be losing my mind. Then again, I love all things Aussie so of course I chose to introduce her to this program.

Football. Don't ask me how it started, but every morning during breakfast, Baby insists that I show her all the pictures in the sports page of the newspaper. She especially loves football, and claps when she sees it (in pictures or on TV). We've been trying to present other sports to her (eg. basketball) in preparation for the day in the very near future when football will no longer appear daily in the paper.

PetSmart. Somedays we don't have an activity or playdate planned, but I always know I can count on PetSmart for a fun outing. For her, it's like going to the zoo. She sees birds, hamsters/gerbils/guinea pigs, cats, fish, and sometimes even some dogs, and then talks about it for days. She especially likes imitating the gerbils running on their spinning wheels.

Hambugers. This girl takes after her mother and likes the meat. Everytime we drive past a McDonald's (and that's quite often), she points and says: "hamburger" (in her own way). How sad is that?! It's not that we go that often, but if I'm totally desperate to get her to eat something I know I can swing through the drive through, order a plain (boring) hamburger and it's all good.

Thai food. Thankfully, McDonald's is not Baby's favorite restaurant. She loves to go out for Thai food and eat noodles and rice and chicken. We're glad about that because we also love Thai food and go out to our favorite neighborhood Thai place almost every weekend. Maybe she loves it so much because we went to Thailand twice while she was a baby in my tummy!

Googled

Every now and then we used to post about the searches people used to find our blog. I'm not sure anyone actually finds us anymore, but our Google autofill shows what we've been searching for. Here is a sample:

"arosa": Sigh...what we wouldn't give to visit there again.

"arrested development": The (brilliantly funny) TV show, not the hip-hop group (although "Tennessee" was a fantastic song).

"babies and melon allergies", "baby and teething", "baby constipation", "baby vaccinations and side effects", "antihistmines and babies and eczema", "dairy allergy and babies", "nightshade vegetables and allergies and babies": Welcome to our world.

"babies and internal injuries", "babies vomiting blood after fall": Several months ago, good friends with a daughter just a little older than Baby were over at our house visiting Gretchen while I was at work. Their daughter snuck upstairs while no one was looking, slipped, and came tumbling down the stairs. As if that wasn't terrifying enough, she went limp and vomited blood. Gretchen called an ambulance and she was rushed to the hospital. Thank God, she only had a broken nose but was otherwise fine--evidently babies tumble down stairs with surprising frequency, so the doctors at the emergency room weren't even that concerned. A few days later she looked and acted as if nothing had ever happened. Even though it wasn't Baby, I'd say it was probably our scariest moment as parents. (For the longest time after that, every time Baby heard a fire engine she would point to her nose or her head and make a fake cry for her friend.)

"fat cream": The Swiss answer to any skin-related malady.

"germany shopping sunday": Don't even think about it.

"haka": I generally could care less about rugby, but the Maori/Pacific Island war dance done by the New Zealand All Blacks (and evidently by Tonga...who knew?) is one of the great rituals in sports.

"hema": A Dutch store, and our favorite source of inexpensive, colorful, European baby clothes whenever we were able to get up to Amsterdam.

"kaffee und kuchen": What Gretchen misses dearly every afternoon.

"lutheran and godparents": One of the first things we were going to do when we got back to the States was have Baby baptized. It's not that this is urgent; there's no fear of limbo or anything like that (although this has evidently changed in the Catholic church as well). Through a combination of procrastination on our part and intense fussiness in church on Baby's part, we still haven't gotten around to it. Oh well, one of these days...

"maldives": When we were planning our "babymoon" before Baby was born, the Maldives were one of those once-in-a-lifetime destinations we seriously considered. In the end Thailand was much more affordable and had better access to health care in the event of an emergency.

"rancho bernardo instant replay": The Instant Replay was a sports bar (before sports bars were a dime a dozen) in a strip mall a block from the house I grew up in. I only went once that I can remember, but it was an institution that was popular with most of the Dads in town. I hadn't really thought about it for years, but looked it up after the big fires in San Diego this fall to try and find more info about my old neighborhood. I couldn't actually find much from my search, but later pieced together that the fire evidently burned as close as across the street.

"roger sanchez and another chance and video": First saw the video for "Another Chance" on a work trip to Europe before we moved there and both the video and song really stuck with me.

"tila tequila and wikipedia": I'm sure Gretchen has a good story for this.

"tim cahill grace": A beautiful essay about Grace (both the dog and the spiritual concept) that I've read countless times and never gets old.

"wiggles caterina": We swore we would try to limit Baby's television, and to a large extent we've been able to do that. One notable exception: The Wiggles. Baby loves the music and dancing, Gretchen loves the Aussie accents, and I've developed small crushes on some of the dancers--Caterina in particular (although, for the record, I had nothing to do with this fan site). And it turns out we just missed them here in DC! I really never would have guessed that one of the things that comes with fatherhood is finding yourself assessing the cuteness and/or hotness of characters on your daughter's favorite shows...

Dark night of the soul

As of this afternoon, there was a chance that this year's Super Bowl could feature my hometown San Diego Chargers against Gretchen's home-state Green Bay Packers. Granted, it was a big longshot (especially for the Chargers, who were playing on the road against the undefeated Patriots), but the dream was still alive. Baby even went and got the cheesehead in anticipation of victory:



Alas, first the Chargers lost despite a valiant effort. Our hopes were high tonight for the Packers, though, who were favored and were playing at home with a wind chill of -24 degrees--but who nevertheless just lost in overtime.

Oh well, at least since we now officially don't care about the Super Bowl, we can start making other plans for that day...

Don't all kids like snow?

This picture was taken on December 5, the last time it snowed in Washington. We had a repeat performance of these tears earlier today when I attempted to take Baby outside while the snow was still falling. Apparently, she loves snow only as a concept. She talks about it, she loves snowmen (she has a stuffed snowman toy), she likes looking at pictures of it, but when it comes to being up close and personal with it, FORGET IT! She screamed hysterically the entire car ride home today (we were out with friends) and pointed at the windshield screaming "NO!" (which is also her word for snow). The last time she cried like that was when she had to give a bunch of blood for her allergy tests last year. I've never seen anything like it.

Good thing we don't live in Wisconsin!

Day out

Despite being just 15 minutes or so from downtown DC, it's sort of sad how rare it is that we venture in to take advantage of the offerings there (actually, it's mostly a function of the hassles of dealing with parking, but it's still sort of pathetic). Yesterday morning when we were trying to decide what to do, I suggested going downtown because the National Gallery of Art has an Edward Hopper exhibit I'd been wanting to see that closes soon. After finally finding parking, we got into the museum to discover...total mayhem. Evidently half of the metro DC area woke up and had the same idea we did. Anyway, we quickly realized there was no way in the world we were going to make it through the crowds with a stroller, so Gretchen and Baby waited while I went through...it was interesting, at least on those rare occasions when I could actually see a painting through the 50 people already standing around it.



From there, we walked over to the neighboring sculpture garden to watch the ice skating. Baby is still much too young to skate--and her Southern California-native daddy is in no position to teach her anyway (that will be a job for Wisconsin-native mommy someday)--but she still had fun watching the crowds enjoy the sunny winter day.



NOTE TO SELVES: We really should get out and enjoy our nation's capital city more often.

Wired

For years I've been hearing how great a show The Wire is. Plus, The Wire was created by David Simon, one of whose books was the basis of one of my all-time favorite TV series, Homicide: Life on the Street, and another of whose books, The Corner, is one of my all-time favorite books (if you, too, are a fan, this interview with Nick Hornby is worth a read). So when we got back to the States, I picked up the first season to see what it was all about (the fifth and final season just started). It took us until this week to finally getting around to watching it, and after just three episodes the verdict is already in: freakin' brilliant. We're fully sucked in, and can already envision spending many nights over the next few months getting caught up...

Walking

While it definitely makes our lives more complicated because we have to be even more watchful than before, there are few things more charming than watching Baby walk because she's still in the phase of teetering and lurching from place to place...unless, that is, she has Grandma to hold her hand and help keep her steady.

Sheepish

Baby seems to love animals, and has a special fond spot for sheep (her favorite stuffed animal that she will not sleep without is a little sheep). So we got a laugh the other day when she was looking through a little book we have about labrador retrievers. Her reaction when she saw this picture?



"BAAAA!"

Book 'em

For Christmas, Gretchen got me a book I'd never heard of: You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons by Mo Willems (which was recommended to her by, of all people, a librarian in Orange Beach, Alabama). The author, an artist, took a round-the-world trip after college and drew one sketch every day to capture that day's experience. If you're looking for a fun gift for someone who loves to travel, especially to exotic locales, you might want to add this to your list...