Turks and Caicos (Part II)

Here are some pics from our recent trip to Beaches in Turks and Caicos.

Pony Ride

Violet riding a pony at the Staten Island Zoo.  She couldn't contain her excitement... 

21 Weeks!

Girl #2

Violet

Can I get any bigger????

Blue

For the last few weeks they have been teaching colors at day care.  Each day was associated with a certain color and Violet's clothes and food had to be of that particular color.   Monday started off easy with the color red. I dressed Violet in a red shirt and gave her some strawberries for snack time.   I briefly considered making a tomato and strawberry salad but luckily Gene advised me against that.  Later came Orange, which seemed easy enough until Gene and I were holding three different shirts of the color: peach, salmon and coral.  A fun exercise that resulted in the conclusion that one of us is probably color blind.  Her snack that day was (you guessed it) an orange.  Once we got through all the primary colors, we were given colors like brown.  Luckily, I was able to dig up some brown tights, but the food part wasn't as easy.  There really aren't too many brown foods and the ones that do exist aren't very appetizing, especially for a toddler.  I thought about buying a coconut, but that would have been weird, right?
It was quite a relief when the colors fiasco finally drew to an end.   Although, all that work made it worth it when I pointed to a banana and asked Violet what color it was.  She thought about it for a moment and proudly proclaimed: BLUE!

IT'S A GIRL!!!!!

Husband 2.0

I like to think of myself as a minimalist when it comes to buying pregnancy stuff.  Last time around, I managed to stay away from buying things like stretch mark creams, pregnancy belts, Bellybuds (yes that's an actual product) and/or a Doppler fetal heart rate monitor.  However, I did invest in a BellaBand, which ended up being pretty useful for most of my pregnancy (especially in the first trimester).  This time around, my one pregnancy investment was a Snoozer or as I like to call it: Husband 2.0 (the new and improved version).

I have to say that I REALLY like this product.  While it does help alleviate some of my back pain, mostly it just fulfills all my cuddle needs.  Gene is jealous of husband 2.0 and says there isn't enough room for the three of us, but I suspect he might be homophobic.  My one complaint is that when you switch sides, the turning process becomes pretty difficult as you drag husband 2.0 to the other side (especially mid-sleep).   If you don't have a king size bed, you will probably find it tough to find space for the additional husband, but Snoozer doesn't twist and turn and complain about how hot it is when you're on top of him, so I would say he's a keeper.  Don't feel bad for Gene just yet, because he has wife 2.0 (PS3) to keep him busy.

Plagiarism

I don't normally post other people's content but I laughed so hard at this article (mostly because it's so true) that I just had to share. So enjoy!

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Babies Are Stupid

This is the baby's idea of a game: He keeps trying to throw himself off the couch, headfirst. It's completely intentional. I sit him upright, and he looks me in the eye, holds my gaze, grins—and then pitches over sideways. I grab him, reel him back in, and straighten him up, and he grins again and takes another dive.

He has already hit the floor once. I was in the kitchen, and he was next to his mother on the couch, and he suddenly decided to lunge toward his older brother, who was over at the dining table. What I heard was my wife's scream and a sickening hollow crunch. The crunch, we eventually figured out, was him clipping a half-empty Kleenex box as he tumbled onto a heap of stray couch pillows, from which he rolled harmlessly to the rug. After his surprise wore off, he apparently decided this all hadn't been so bad.

Why am I encouraging him to dive off the couch? This is a bad idea. But it's thrilling to be able to play any sort of game with this baby at all. Before he learned to do this, he was punching me in the face. At the time, that counted as amazing progress. Two or three weeks before that, he was punching himself in the face. That was amazing progress, too. He had been in a long—and suddenly victorious—struggle with his arms. We would click the wire arc of toys into the frame of his bouncy chair and he would stare at them, one arm half-lifted, concentrating as if he were an aspiring telepath trying to flip the little plastic zebra around with pure mind power. As far as he knew, he was. That what really moved the zebra was when he sent the brainwaves down his arm was a distinction far off over his horizons.

I had forgotten how incredibly stupid babies are, over the four years since we'd last had one. The previous baby had become a child, a wholly recognizable human being, someone you could have a conversation with. ("I gotta pee," he says. "So go pee," I say. And he goes to the bathroom and pees.) This ability to communicate seemed, when we didn't think very hard about it, to have been there all along. We had always understood each other, child and parents. We'd gotten more fluent about it over time, was all. His infancy, in retrospect, was a puzzle we had all solved, working together.

Not at all. As the due date for the second baby drew near, there had been signs that maybe I wasn't remembering things completely accurately. I began noticing the 9-month-old or 1-year-old babies around me, with their bulbous heads and vapid gazes, gabbling and staggering and pointing inarticulately at things. Oh, yes, we would need to go through that again, wouldn't we?

But then this baby arrived, and he was much, much stupider than that. His brother was born weeks early, tiny and puny, and so it had made sense that it took him a while to be able to do anything. But this one was a full-term baby, a sturdy eight-pounder, and he was unbelievably ignorant and helpless. He knew nothing, understood nothing. He was soft and warm, he had that going for him. His eyes were big and bright; his head was a handsome shape. And yet behind those eyes, or inside that head—a roaring void. For weeks, his mind consisted of one thought: "NIPPLE...? NIPPLE...? NIPPLE...?" I would hold him and he would nuzzle at me, blindly, trying to drink from my collarbone. He would bang his face against my chest over and over, with as much affection as a moth has for a windowpane.

A newborn baby has two moods: rage and satiation. It is a howling mass of appetites, and nothing more. There are no better parts inside it, waiting to be discovered. The humanity of the baby is a retroactive fiction, like the stories we tell ourselves about what happened while we went from possessing a disorderly 17-year-old brain to possessing a more well-structured 22-year-old brain. I learned things, I had illuminating experiences, I got wisdom and an education. It was all very intentional.

You can make the newborn baby angry, or you can appease it, if you can figure out how to appease it. That's all. Our baby would scream because its diaper was wet, wake up screaming because of that. He would scream when the diaper came off. I would give him a fresh diaper, and he would be screaming again a minute later, implacably. What now? Why? He had wet the new diaper already. (I had also forgotten how often babies pee.) Another change, more screaming, and then finally, lifted up, he would fall quiet, press his weight into my neck, relax. His bowels would empty, audibly.

Another fact about new babies: Thanks to their legs having been doubled back so tightly in the womb, when the diaper comes off, they flex their knees and their heels go right to their unwiped poopholes. (This was news to me. The preemie, who never got big enough to be crowded, didn't have this feature.)

Gradually—very, very gradually—as the baby ate and defecated and grew over the past five months, human aspects began showing up. He looked at people. He smiled. He made sounds that weren't screaming. He gained control of his limbs. Those formerly useless hands dart out now and mangle a magazine cover. Or rip the tab key off the computer. Or grab a fistful of adult food off a plate. He understands, clearly, what food is about, and he believes he has as much right to eat it as anyone else. At dinnertime, he's ready to join the human race.

19 Weeks (Part Deux)!

With Violet

With Shrimp

How is it that my phone camera two years ago had such better quality?  

Remember the Orchid Show...

Four years ago today, the smartest man I know made the best decision of his life ;)

All kidding aside, I am the luckiest gal in the world to have a husband that is smart, caring, genuine, honest, loving and a hottie to add!

here is a pic from that day....

Happy Engagement Anniversary!!!

Winter 2011-2012

First Manicure

 Jane's Carousel (Dumbo)

 Dinner and a Brewski at Lobo

Helping Mommy do the Laundry

Watching Masha i Medved

The One Time it Snowed this Season

Shrimp (12 Weeks)

Brooklyn Children's Museum 

New Year's Eve

 Cousins Eating Chocolate Bars after Seeing the Rockefeller Tree

Our PineTree

Ringing the Bell at Pier 6