Regression

We have regressed. We're back to negative habits we had about 6 months ago.

"How could this happen? It was all going so well!"
I really have no idea. It just....did.
"But why did this happen? What changed?"
Can't answer that one either.
"Please, make it stop! Will it end soon?"
I don't know, kids, but I sure hope so!

By we, I mean the Bean. And the habit is sleep.

The Bean is usually a dream in this department, or at least he's been a dream for about 6 months now. Before that, getting him to sleep was a nightmare. We would rock and rock and rock him to sleep only to lay him down and have him wake up. Nights were no problem, but daytime was a catastrophe.

On my birthday (please, don't ever do this on your birthday!), we decided to let him cry it out. I know that this is a loved and hated technique. I myself love and hate it. I had sworn to myself that we would not implement this technique until he was 3 months old, because I read somewhere that babies younger than 3 months should not have to cry. And we almost made it. He was 3 months minus 8 days. We were both so tired. And he was so tired. Something had to be done. So we let him cry it out. I hated the process. Marc literally had to hold me back from going in to him (we did go in every 10 minutes to give him his pacifier again). I loved the results. We only had to let him cry it out once and then we had this baby that we could put to bed awake. And this baby, well he fell asleep on his own in his own bed.

It was wonderful.

3 days ago, something changed. I lay him down when he's tired. But he doesn't fall asleep. He plays, he rocks on all fours, he cries, he babbles. But he doesn't sleep. This goes on for 2 hours. I go in, give him his pacifier, rub his back and he's almost asleep. But as soon as I leave the room, he's awake. I take him out, cuddle him, rock him and he's almost asleep. I lay him down, he's awake. Eventually, it's been 4 hours since his last feeding, so I get him up.

What is going on? He can't be dropping a nap, he's already down to 2. And he is tired.

He's regressed. Maybe it's his teeth. Maybe it's because he's working on learning something new (crawling, perhaps?). I don't know.

I do know that this momma is hoping to make some progress real soon.

A Letter to my long-lost Friend

Dear Summer,

According to my calendar, today is your official start date. And yet, I am freezing. Have you forgotten us? Please visit soon (like yesterday)!

Love,
Me (the one wearing the fleece)

Gettin' Around

Gettin' Around from Sarah Dressler on Vimeo.

Comfortable?

I doubt it......

We are liking....

BabyLegs!

So the first time I ever saw BabyLegs, I thought they were really adorable, but totally unnecessary. Why should a baby need leg warmers??

But then it started to get warmer (the weather, that is). So we started letting Noah run around without any pants on. Well, not run, since he can't do that yet. But you know what I mean. Then we had the problem: without pants on, he didn't have any traction to practice crawling. And it seemed like it was too hard for his chunky little baby knees. So that's where the BabyLegs came in. I found them at a local baby items store and bought two pairs.

Not only are they super functional, they're just adorable:
And perfect for the World Cup!!

How I broke our floor

I bought flowers for a friend of ours. Her birthday was on Saturday - the same day as Marc's PhD party (PhD completion party?). Anyways, she had forbidden me from making her a cake or singing Happy Birthday - she wanted the party to be a celebration of Marc and his friend, who had also received his PhD. But if it were my birthday, I would be sad if no one said or did anything. So I bought her flowers. The flowers were one of 10,000 last minute things I had to get on the day of the party (can you tell that I was not involved in the planning??).
Noah was napping, so it was going to be a while until I headed to the party. I grabbed a bucket, filled it with water, placed the flowers in it and set it in front of the door (along with the 10,000 other things I had to take with me).
Fast forward to Sunday afternoon. We get home from cleaning up the garden after the party. Marc notices the bucket, which is still in the hallway and still filled with water. The loosely translated version of our conversation went something like this:
Marc: "What's that?"
Me: "I filled it with water and put the flowers in that bucket until we left yesterday."
Marc: "Did you know that that bucket leaks? The floor is probably ruined."
Me: "No!" (Frantically emptying the bucket and wiping up the leaked water.)
Sure enough, the floor is all welled up.
Me: Tearfully apologizing for ruining our floor (in English, because when I am really upset, it just comes out in English).
Marc: "No big deal, I wanted to replace the floor anyway."

Good thing she liked her flowers.

I love....

this kid.
He's only allowed to have his pacifier in bed or when we're on the road. So I am trying to teach him to take it out himself and leave it in his bed when he gets up in the morning/from naps. This morning, I asked him to put his pacifier in his bed and gently guided his hand to it. As his hand dropped, I thought I would have to take it out myself. But no, what did he do? He spit the pacifier into his bed. Not the method I was expecting, but still totally compliant....

P.S. We have some forward movement going on around here! And he's definitely working on his crawling form....

I think I might have to move...

if the weather doesn't get better soon!

It's raining. Again. Nothing new, I know. But it is the last day of May! And yet it is 53 degrees and raining. It makes me want to stay in my pajamas all day and never leave the house.

But that's what I did yesterday while it rained - stayed in my PJs all morning and read Stieg Larsson. So I would like to do something a bit more original today. Actually, I really want to go downtown - I need craft supplies to make decorations for Marc's PhD completion party (or whatever it should be called). But I have so little desire to pack up the Bean and then go out in the rain.

Ahhh, I need some sunshine and a good dose of motivation.

P.S. The LOST finale was such a major disappointment.

P.P.S. But the finale of Grey's Anatomy - now that was DRAMA! It had me bawling and really nervous. So nervous, in fact, I locked the door to the apartment, which we never do. It could have had something to do with the fact that Marc wasn't home.

P.P.P.S. Happy Memorial Day!!

I think I have mentioned before that lunch is our main meal of the day. Dinner usually consists of bread and cold cuts or a salad. So, lunch is the time to get my "warm" meal in. But I really hate cooking elaborately just for me. I'm always on the lookout for good, healthy ideas. Or at least good, not totally unhealthy ideas.

Marc often does our grocery shopping and he brought home tortellini recently. So I cooked that up, defrosted a little spinach (a staple in our freezer) with a little margarine and mixed it in with the tortellini. Then I sprinkled parmesan cheese over it and VOILA - easy and tasty! This is one dish that I will definitely make again.

The Saga of He Who Did Not Sleep (and his mother)...

I have an amazing sleeper. Not a sofa, not a mattress and definitely not Marc (he sleeps, but not long enough for my taste!). No, this amazing sleeper is the Bean. The Bean is 7 months old and still takes 3 naps a day. These naps are usually at least one hour long, if not longer. Then he goes to bed around 8 p.m. and doesn't get up until 7 a.m. the next morning.

This amazingness is a gift unto me. Because I very much enjoy sleeping. I (unlike my husband) need at least 8 hours of sleep a night to be fully functional the next day. And since I don't generally make it to bed until 11 p.m., a waking time of 7 a.m. suits me just fine. (Bean, if you read this, I would totally be up for not getting up until 8. :o)

But YESTERDAY....oh the horror that was YESTERDAY....

There were NO naps. Not a one. Well, there was that snooze in the car. But that was it.

I saw it coming, but I couldn't have imagined the extent of it's horribleness. You see, when the Bean misses his first nap, it kinda makes the whole day go south. But if he gets a short nap in, then things will generally be ok. So I put him in the car, as we had a church thing to go to. I fully expected that he would sleep for those 20 minutes in the car. And it was very, very silent in the car (no raspberries, no sonar noises, etc.). So imagine my surprise as I opened the door to find a smiling, very awake little man. Uh oh.....

He did, in fact, fall asleep on the way home. But we all know that a 10 minute nap is not sufficient. So, even though he woke up as I was getting him out of the car, I put him in bed. I was certain that he would fall asleep. Oh, how wrong I was.

He cried for the next 90 minutes (not solid - I did pick him up several times and I fed him). But when I wasn't entertaining him, he was crying.

Who's kid was this?? Not mine - he almost never cries, almost always goes to sleep cheerfully.

A trip to Ikea was on the agenda for the afternoon. I thought about canceling, but if I had stayed home, I might have begun to go crazy from the crying. So we went. And he was awake. The WHOLE time.

Seriously? Seriously!!

He fell asleep on the way home (do you see a pattern here?) and stayed asleep as I brought him into the house. I rejoiced, but my joy came too soon. About 10 minutes later, he was awake. So I fed him and as he almost fell asleep drinking his bottle and since he had only slept a total of about 30 minutes the whole day, I laid him down.

He didn't cry.

He also didn't sleep.

Then he started to cry.

So his papa took him on a walk. This goes against all of our sleeping principles --> We do not take extreme measures to make him sleep. He will go to sleep on his own and in his own bed. So we don't and he does.

Why the exception? Well, his mama was sooooo tired. She just couldn't take any more. So this was his papa's gift to his mama.

It took almost a full hour of strolling to get him to fall asleep.

But then he slept the whole night.

And now? My friends, he's sleeping again! And has been for almost an hour.

The Bean is back!

Little Rays of Sunshine

You know that song you used to sing as a kid as you stared out the window at the falling raindrops and wished as hard as you could for the sun to come out: "Rain, rain, go away; come again another day."

It doesn't work.

I know, I'm sorry to burst your childhood bubble. But I have concrete proof that it doesn't work. Because I sang it almost every day for two solid weeks. (Just to entertain Noah, of course.)

And it just kept on raining.

Finally, finally it stopped on Sunday. It's still cool and the sun often disappears behind the clouds. These, however, are conditions I am willing to accept, in order to receive brief glimpses of the sun. And the clouds are of the "must photograph" variety:

(photos taken from the living room window)



I'm certain that you are now asking yourself how I survived these traumatic two weeks of rain.

Well, I'm glad you asked! Flowers, my friend, flowers! Blooming plants and cut flowers in the house....

and blooming flowers in the garden.







































These are my little rays of sunshine.

And here is my big 7 month old ray of sunshine:

FB

I will admit it: I love Facebook. I thought I would hate it and so I avoided joining for some time. Some time ago, I had tried My Space and thought it was horrible, so I was expecting something similar. But I love it! Why do I love it? Well, I am really far away from lots of people that I love. And the time difference makes telephone calls kind of complicated. So I love getting up every morning and checking to see what my friends were up to the day before. I love that I get to see when my brother puts a new cabinet in his kitchen, how my niece changes month for month, what my silly little nephew is up to, how my friends' kids are growing in leaps and bounds. And at the same time, I can share photos of the Bean, ask questions like "who is using cloth diapers?" and "do you give your baby a pacifier?" or just plan a trip to Ikea with my friend. For these reasons, I have come to love Facebook.
At the same time, I find Facebook difficult. Often, I wrestle with whether or not to comment on a post. When there are already 10 comments on a photo saying "cute!" should I make it 11? Is it meaningful to that person that I comment?
Or my most current struggle - when someone makes a statement that you just can't agree with or writes something that you personally find to be offensive, is it necessary to comment? Or could it just be damaging to the relationship, especially because that person can't hear the tone in your voice as you're commenting and might misinterpret your words? Or what if you do comment and then they respond to your comment in such a way that you feel offended and the relationship suffers? Is it worth it? But what if you don't comment, because of said doubts and then just have this feeling like you missed a chance to tell them something that's important to you. That not commenting leaves an elephant in the room that you just can't get past. That your relationship with that person is affected by your not commenting and they will never even know what happened.
What do you think?

Stripes

Marc and I finally finished painting the toilet. Well, not the toilet itself, but the room that the toilet is in. It took an entire week and here's why (well, here's why plus we have a 5 month old who wants to play and doesn't take very long naps...).
The initial plan was to paint the wall behind the toilet and the wall across from it the blue color. The side walls were going to be solid yellow. But as I was painting the side walls, I decided that the contrast was too extreme. Plus, I couldn't get clean edges on the walls, so the transitions looked bad. After looking around online for ideas (faux paint treatments, etc....), I decided that stripes were in order.
Oh my goodness was it a lot of work! Measuring, taping, painting over the tape to get clean lines and then doing the actual painting. But I am happy with the result.

The tiles on the wall were painted at some point and the paint has begun chipping away. Plus, the tiles are nice. So the next project is to remove the paint from the tile.

Oh and I really, really want a new toilet.....

Zwergensprache

Zwergensprache is the name of Noah's sign language class. The literal translation is midget language. In German, it's not uncommon to refer to kids as midgets (Zwerg), without intending to offend any vertically challenged individuals.
No worries, Noah passed the hearing test they administered in the hospital. We're taking a sign language course because babies who learn sign language can communicate long before they can speak. And, babies who learn sign language can generally speak earlier and have a larger vocabulary than their peers.
Of course, we're not intending to learn fluent sign language. Sign language is an independent language with as many words as we have in the English or German language. I took American Sign Lanuage for one semester in college and I have to honestly say that it was much more complicated than I expected it to be. And on top of that, every country has their own sign language. And then there are even regional differences, just as there are in the spoken language. Noah is learning signs from German Sign Language. If he did encounter a deaf person, they would understand his signs.
The intention is that Noah learns a few basic signs, such as "eat", "more", "drink" and "milk." This will help him to communicate his needs and hopefully spare him some frustration of us not understanding what he wants. And the course is a lot of fun, using songs and finger games to teach the babies the signs.
The course teacher has 2 daughters who are 4 years and nine months old. She told us yesterday that she first thought that sign language was unnecessary for babies, that it was some American fad. When her first daughter was 9 months old, she would point at objects as if she wanted them. Her mom would offer her the object that she thought the little girl wanted. But somehow, she always grabbed the wrong thing. And this was very frustrating to the little girl, who would then throw herself on the floor and bang her fists on the ground. That was when she decided to start with sign language, which made communicating with her daughter much easier.
We hope that it will have the same effect for Noah. It will probably take 2-3 months before he starts using signs and his usage of signs will definitely be dependent on our discipline in using the signs with him.
We shall see......

Randomness

Noah is teething. For several weeks now, I thought he might be, but just wasn't sure. He drools buckets and chews on anything he can get in his mouth. Recently, he was so tired and almost asleep, when he started crying again. Then he seemed to settle down to sleep, but then started crying again. This happened every 30 seconds or so and is not typical behavior for him. So I put some teething gel on his gums and suddenly he was out. This has happened a couple of times now. I can't feel any teeth, so it will be interesting to see how long this continues and which tooth/teeth actually come(s) in.

I want to make these cookies. We have some friends coming over on Saturday and if I can find molasses tomorrow, then I will make them for this weekend. Why is molasses hard to find in Germany? My brother-in-law, the Baker, said "that stuff is gross, only Americans would use it." Hmmmph. We'll see if he gets any of my cookies.....

I'm thinking about making one of these Brain Boxes for myself. Only I can't find the pretty index cards and dividers like she used. But I really do think it would help to keep me on track with housework. And maybe give me a little extra motivation.

I'm in the process of painting the toilet. But I don't think I like the color combination. *sigh* I'm going to try stripes on one wall and hope this will help me to feel like the two colors do mesh....the potential of a repaint is looming.....

We started a 6 month Wii challenge with friends of ours. She's so little, her challenge is to gain weight (seems like it'd be a nice problem to have....). For the rest of us or people-who-recently-had-a-baby (when does that stop counting as an excuse??), we have to LOSE. Our goal is to lose 22 pounds in the 6 months. I'm down about 2.5 pounds. So far, so good.

And finally, will winter EVER end? Spring provided a glimpse of it's sunshiny self, but now it's snowing cats and dogs! Tomorrow is supposed to be 40 and partly sunny, but then it's back to snow/rain on Saturday and Sunday. I have had ENOUGH!

Where did the time go?

The Bean went from looking like this
at the beginning of October...















...to this at the end of October.















In December he looked like this

And today, at 4.5 months, he looks like this.






















How did that happen?

He's rolling over (stomach to back), passing toys from one hand to the other, drinking 6-8 ounces of formula every 3-4 hours, sleeping through the night, giving open-mouth kisses, is fascinated by the cat and LOVES his papa. He wants to sit up, not lay down, is incredibly curious and enjoys listening to music. He watches us very carefully when we eat, puts everything in his mouth and might just be teething. He has had a cold for almost a month and a half, but that doesn't change his sunny personality. He loves taking baths, hates having his nails trimmed and has the most unruly hair you've ever seen in your life. He'll only smile for the camera when I don't use the view finder, but instead make funny faces at him. He has more nicknames than one kid probably should. He's growing into size 68 (4-6 months) and out of 62 (2-4 months). He finds blond-haired people fascinating (there just aren't that many in his life) and likes a pacifier when he's tired.

He's simply the best bean ever.

Olympics and other thoughts

I haven't posted since October 2008. Wow. I have taken breaks before and every time I start blogging again, I promise that I'll keep it up. But given my history of not keeping it up, I'm am not going to make any promises. I do, however, generally have more time on my hands these days, so it might just work out this time.

So I intensely dislike the fact that the Olympics are taking place in Vancouver. The time difference with Vancouver is 9 hours. Which means that a hockey game at noon in Vancouver is on at 9 p.m. in Germany. And the ones that we really want to watch are on at 2 a.m. Not to mention that I have seen 0 ice skating, because it's on so stinking late. The Germans seem to be in love with all things skiing, so we get a lot of that in the prime time.

Being the nuts that we are, we decided to actually get up at 2 a.m. in order to watch the Canada vs. US hockey game. It was a good game, worth getting up for. Thank goodness for the Swiss, who televised it. If it were up to the Germans, we wouldn't have been able to see it at all. (As much as I like hockey, I'm not willing to pay for it on iTunes.)

But I was a bit horrified at the end of the game, when the moderator mentioned that the schedule of further games is not yet available, because the American TV station broadcasting the Olympics has to talk with their advertisers before they can determine who will play whom when.

Now, my Swiss German is not as fluent as my German and it was 4 in the morning, so I thought that I might have misunderstood. So I asked Marc if he had heard the same thing that I did (his Swiss German is better AND he needs less sleep than I do). He had indeed heard the exact same thing.

Why did I find that so disturbing? I think it's because I personally think that the Olympics should be about, well, the sports and the Olympians and not about if the cornflakes folks would prefer to have their advertising during the US or during the Canadian game. Maybe I'm being too naive?

In other news, it's 50 and partly sunny here and I am LOVING this preview of spring!

I made these cookies last week. They are YUMMY! But dangerous to have in the house, because you cannot possibly eat just one....To help with this problem of not eating just one and the excess post-baby weight that's still hanging around, I bought a Wii on Ebay this week, including Wii Fit Plus and the Balance Board. I'm very interested to see what kind of a workout I can have with Wii Fit.