Pops has a birthday

This past weekend was my dad's birthday party in LJ. We made the drive down (phew, second time!) with N and had a good time visiting. We're pooped, but glad we made the trip. We ended up seeing almost everyone on both sides of the family, so it was well worth the effort. Here are some highlights...

Grammy got to meet both of her great-grandsons for the first time. C is on the left, and N is on the right. N looks like a giant next to C, but I'm sure they'll be the same size and crazy in no time.

E caught N smiling at me while we were playing at my dad's birthday party. N was in a terrific mood all weekend, so it was fun to have him around family.

N and C together... Sometime very soon they're going to be out of control. For now they're fairly passive.

Four generations... My mom, me, N, and my grandma. It's amazing that we all got in the same picture at the same time. We're lucky to have such a close family.

Finally - here's a video of N... He was a little fussy after the long drive back to the big D, so E and I were playing with him in his tummy time mat. He smiled at us in the video, so I felt like I had to post it. Unfortunately we don't have any fancy video editing software, so you're going to get the initial fussiness as well as the glimpse of me checking out the red light. (And E saying that he's talking crazy talk.) Regardless, the image of N doing one of his big smiles is worth sharing. (And to prove to my brother that he actually does it...)

Baseball season

Go Rangers!

We're trying to cultivate N's love for all sporty things, given that E and I really love sports. (Not as much as some, but we quite enjoy a good amount of sporting...) To get him in the spirit, we're dressing him in sporty gear. This is his mini-Rangers uniform. Way to root for the home team little man!

Summer in Texas

Summer is officially here. Out of the last 20 days, 19 have had temperatures over 100. It's ridiculous. I can't even imagine what the electric bill will look like. Ugh. Temperatures this high mean that E and I spend a good amount of time indoors. Our newborn can't handle being outside in weather like that. Our chocolate lab would melt. We would melt.

To pass the time, N likes to nap during the heat of the day, regardless of where he is. Here he's using E as a pillow. Apparently he's really comfortable. There are some good things to be said for summer in Texas. Check out a small sampling of the produce we picked up at Costco. I do mean small sampling. This is Costco after all.

This is Zoee spending time inside. She doesn't much care for the heat unless it involves swimming. She spends the day chewing on this cow knee bone. Seems gross to me, but she enjoys it.

Something else Zoee can do to pass time in the summer? Shed. Think we ought to make a sweater with all this? I think we've got enough for something for N to wear. E threw his running shoe down there for some perspective.

That's just gross. We're not going to do that.

Your mom

My hubby E is my absolute hero. He loves and takes care of me and the little man. He worries about how to best handle all of the things around the house, deal with things at work, and making sure our little family is happy and healthy. He is all around the best husband I could ever hope for and my best friend.

What he is not good at, however, is being tired.

Both of us are exhausted. A new baby, despite enriching your life beyond what you could ever imagine, makes you tired. There's just really no way around it. Because I know that E just doesn't do tired, I've been trying to handle all the late night baby dealings. With me starting back to work this week, E started to notice a marked difference in my ability to do things. Because of this, he volunteered to take the midnight (ish) feeding and let me do the four am shift. It was all working great, because each of us got to have at least six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Until last night. I heared the monitor at about twelve thirty and tapped E on the shoulder. I say to him, "Bud, the baby is crying. He's hungry." To this E says, "So go feed him!" Taken aback, as this is not how he typically talks to me, I say, "But it's midnight, you were going to feed him now." To this he says, and I am not kidding...

"Your mom!"

Even in my half-asleep state my eyebrows rose. What? My mom? Was he kidding?

I take one more stab at getting him up, but it becomes very clear that he's not moving. So I am thoroughly upset. I mean, MAD. We don't argue often, so the fact that we were doing it in the middle of the night and that I was the only one who seemed irritated was really getting to me. Feeling full of the dramatic, I turn off the baby monitor, stand up and say with a flourish "Fine, I'll just sleep in the living room and do EVERYTHING! You just sleep!" and storm (as best as you can after being woken from a deep sleep) out of the room. (I realize this is ridiculous and unreasonable. However, in the dark of the night in a half asleep state it was hard to be reasonable.)

And good to my word, I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, but given I was so exhausted anyway I just zonked out. I think I could have fallen asleep on the tile in our entryway at that point. It didn't really matter where I was, so much that I was just horizontal.

At about six fifteen I was feeding N when heard E and Zoee emerge from the bedroom. I was primed. I mean, I was still a little steamed up about the whole thing. My mom? What? And why didn't E come and get me and insist that I not sleep on the couch? (Yes, I realize that this was passive-agressive thinking, but give me a break. We're exhausted.)

E comes in and says, "Feeding the baby?" Then he looks all happy and cheerful and asks me how long I had been up. I was like, "What do you mean?" And he was like, well, your alarm went off at five and you weren't there. Suddenly it occurs to me that E may have slept through the whole thing. Was that even possible? I tell him, "I was sleeping on the couch... Remember?" He looks at me quizzically and then says simply, "No. Why would you be doing that?"

Right. Turns out I had an arguement and stormed out on a man who was still fully asleep. He didn't remember anything from the night before. The whole "Your Mom" thing? Yeah, that's kind of hilarious now. E spent the entire morning trying to make up to me for a fight we had that he doesn't even remember. He feels terrible. He's done baby duty all morning and has insisted that he and N run some errands this afternoon while I take a nap. In the light of day the whole thing is pretty funny.

Your mom indeed.

Our little man

Here's our little man playing in his new tummy time mat. He REALLY likes it - especially the mirror. I know he's on his back, but we do spend some time on his tummy too. It's just harder to see his face in those pictures.

Here's my guys getting ready for N's first day of school. At school this week he learned how to socialize with other little kiddos and how to interact and trust adults other than his parents. And his parents learned to trust that someone else would take care of him. (That was the hardest lesson to learn.)

Our neighbors brought N an outfit that included a super fun sailor hat. We dressed him up to take him over and show him off. Unfortunately they weren't home and we'll have to repeat the process sometime later this weekend.

N, meet your cousin C

This past Monday, our nephew C made his appearance into the world. (Read more about C here.) My brother and sister-in-law are super proud and excited. C is very cute. E and I can't decide who we think he looks like more.
Because N and C are super close in age, we figured we should try to start their friendship early on. We headed down to Houston for a visit this past weekend. (Five hour drive with an almost eight week old? Yeah, that's really a much longer drive.) Anyway, we made it down without too many issues, and N and C got to meet. They started with a friendly cousin hug.

My mom is so excited to have two grandsons now. Here they are together. N was only an ounce bigger than C when he was born, but look at him now!

Amazingly enough, their feet are almost the same size. N's are much chubbier, but they match in size pretty well. I can't wait to see what Christmas looks like.

Baby wagon - without racing stripes

For about the past nine months or so, E has been making noises about getting a newer, safer, bigger car for our baby. He really liked the idea of a minivan (or at least he made me believe that he did) and tried to sell me on it by promising something with racing stripes - as seen below.
I guess he felt that since Peyton Manning argued that racing stripes could make a minivan cool, it would be okay with it. I don't know why - don't ask me, I can't explain it - but I really didn't want a minivan. I've ridden in them. They're super comfortable. They're super practical. It made all the sense in the world. But something visceral in me rebelled against the whole notion. Even with racing stripes.

Lately, my Jeep has been making noises as if the transmission was going to give out at any moment. Given that I was driving around with a seven week old baby in 100 plus degree heat, it just really didn't make sense. It wasn't safe. What if the transmission actually gave out on 635 or something? I'd be trapped in the heat on a highway with a tiny baby. Not safe. We decided to make a preemptive strike and purchase our safer-better-newer car while the Jeep still possessed some trade-in value. After many hours of research and two exceptional test drives later, we're now happy owners or a Mazda CX-9. It's got all the great features of a minivan that E wanted - such as the third row of seats and comfy sitting arrangements. The only thing we're missing is sliding doors, but E figures that since I'm driving this one around, I ought to be happy. It's nice, and I'm pretty excited about it!
* This one isn't ours. I have no idea who those people are. Ours is sitting happily in the garage, waiting for me and N to take it out to see our friends E and co. + L later today. But this is a pretty good representation. Ours is black with tan leather interior - just like the one above.