Gross

Baby led weaning?  Where's my baby led CLEANING?

Amiright?

For the record, avocado is best served squished up in a tiny hand and then thrown onto the kitchen floor.

Sigh.

Absent

Cucumbers are best savored

I'm currently away on my first business trip since Edie was born.  Hello from sunny San Diego.  If you're a crook watching my house, don't bother robbing us tonight.  Tango & Cash, the cats, will scratch the #$@% out of you before peeing on you and pooping in your shoes.  Seriously.

Now that that's settled...

One of the things that I realized as I was booking this trip was that the longest that either Kitty or I had previously been forced to single parent both of these children was 6-hours, which I did while Kitty was out drinking bon-bons and talking about corsets, or whatever it is that women do these days.  Of course, we made my mom watch our kids completely unattended for roughly 50+ hours, but that was for Phish.  So this was a big deal.

If there ever was a "right" time to run away, it is now, since we've decided to take a different approach with Edie than we took with Finn when it comes to feeding.  This time around, we're jumping on the "baby led weaning" bandwagon.  It's a thing.  Look it up.

So far, we've let Edie lead on cucumbers and salmon.  Turns out that baby-led-weaning actually means, baby-puts-food-in-mouth-then-throws-behind-seat/couch/table.

I have to admit that as a neat freak, this terrifies me.  I'm not sure I'm strong enough to let the baby lead the weaning.  Then again, the mess from making all of those artisinal baby purees that we made for Finn was pretty extensive.  Maybe it's a wash?  Until you get to blueberries.  Word on the street is that blueberries are the worst.  I'll just need to accept that for the next several months, it's going to be messy.

Hopefully in the end, this is going to result in a child that will eat more than just peanut butter & honey sandwiches and doesn't end every bite asking whether he's now eaten enough to have dessert.

I think I need to go ruminate over these things at a Padres game.  With beer.

Absentee parenting is hard.

Slacker

Remember when I said that I was going to build a fort for Finn? Boy, was that a dumb thing to say. Once I walked away from the graph paper mock-ups that we had created and actually thought about it, realizing that anything I would build would most likely collapse on his head and/or significantly decrease not just my own property value, but also the property values of the entire city of Seattle, I panicked. That's a lot of pressure.

To buy myself some time, I've been creating construction delays like a good little general contractor.  Initially it was going to be a treehouse, so I explained that I'd need to contact the city to discuss permitting for a treehouse in the city limits. Rather than call or stop by the permitting office, I really tried to screw myself by emailing them. I thought that would save me the rest of the summer, but the stupid over-performing city permit office got back to me immediately and said that a treehouse was fine.

Dang.

But then they mentioned that there were some trees that I couldn't build in and lo and behold, the tree in our backyard was one of them. Thank you, "Exceptional Tree" status!

This didn't dissuade Finn, however. Perhaps we shouldn't have had such a successful brainstorming session when planning his fort, because he decided he was fine if the fort was on the ground and only  wanted to know when his fort - complete with refrigerator, rocket launcher, fireplace and race car garage - was going to be completed. 

This has been a very quick, and likely expensive, lesson in child-expectation-management.

Fixing this the only way I know how, with money, I recommended that we head down to the Rainbow Playsets outlet and pick out an awesome playset with a slide, swings and a fine cedar finish that would weather the Seattle winter well and not require any additional maintenance that I'm unlikely to perform. Finn jumped at the opportunity, so I excitedly loaded the family in the car and headed down south to the land of the magical playsets. When we got there, the friendly gentleman instructed us that Finn could play on anything on the lot while he explained to me how many mortgages we would need to take out for just a basic sandbox. And I was fine with that. Finn immediately took off running, swinging & sliding.

After scoping out which ridiculously colorful monstrosity would fit in our yard, I hunkered down in one of the luxury-sedan-priced models with a little fort in the base to ask him which one he wanted most for home.

"I don't want any of these. I want the fort that we talked about."
"What?  Why? These are AWESOME! Check out the slides! Check out the swings! Our fort won't be able to have those things. Don't you want those things?  And it's even got this cool fort in the bottom!"
"No. I want my refrigerator. This fort is too small for my refrigerator."

Double dang.

I'm pretty sure Zillow is going to devalue my house just based on this blog post, but it looks like we're building a fort. If anyone has a line on a good fort refrigerator, let me know. Looks like I'm in the market.

Milestones

Each developmental milestone in a child's life is met with mixed feelings.  For example, as of this weekend, Edie is no longer wearing her three-month clothes, is now sitting in a high chair at the table with us, and has jumped up to a #2 bottle nipple.  It's an amazing experience, watching your baby grow, learn and adapt to her environment, but there's a little bit of mourning thrown in as you watch the time slip away, knowing that you'll never have those early days back again.

Of course, none of that sappy crap applies to sleeping habits.  The sooner that this little bag of cry learns to sleep through the night, the better.  And so it was that we moved her out of our room this weekend and into her nursery and her crib.

And lo and behold, it happened!  On Tuesday night, she slept through the night, for nine straight hours. Kitty and I were still up every two hours elbowing each other in the sleeping ribs to see if either had fed her and then struggling to fall back to sleep wondering if she was dead, but whatever.  Sleeping through the night is a big freaking deal.  If we had known that all it was going to take was moving her out of our room and away from my snoring, we would have done this weeks ago.

Alas, it wasn't to last, since she woke up twice last night.  But now that we know it's possible for her to make it through the duration, the door is opened back up to that elusive benefit of having children that sleep through the night:  the ability to get really drunk again!

Just kidding.  We've been doing that anyway.

So as not to leave out our older superstar, Finn also had a big weekend/week.  He finally figured out how to pucker up his lips and gave me a real kiss for the first time in his life instead of haphazardly smashing his lower face up against mine like a disinterested fish.  He also had a huge breakthrough in the pool and is now willingly putting his face underwater over and over again.

While those are nice developmental steps, neither one improves my drinking, so we'll still give Edie first billing.

Priorities, yo.