benefits of two children: outsourcing the swing-pushing

Ahoy, matey

status updates

I will go first:

1) I have succeeded in making a passable recreation of the ma po tofu at my favorite chinese restaurant. I win! Come over for dinner and I'll make it for you. If you can stand the heat.

2) I am pretty sure the way we scheduled my current rotation was actually a psych experiment. It was 14 med students sitting around a table taking turns choosing 14 shifts each with lots of constraints about when the shifts can be. It got a little dicey there, for a while. Nice of them to give us the illusion of control.

Ollie:

1) Gives kisses now. They involve a lot of tongue and leave a thick layer of slime.

2) Signs milk. We did not teach him this. The sign is a bit too close to home for my taste. And I am lazy. They must have done it at daycare. I had wondered why he's been doing that funny wave at himself. Then at dinner tonight when he combined it with an angry yell and a steady glare at me Aaron figured it out. He must think we're quite dense.

Snuffy:

Has been sort of antsy. I have been trying to give him lots of extra attention, training, and exercise. It's worked really well and he's a lot calmer. The only training I could think to do was agility kinds of stuff, so we now have a de facto doggy parcours loop we do around the neighborhood. I should make a video.

Dylan:

1) Is adjusting to her new class. It wears her out and she misses her old teachers, but I really think it's good for her. Her best buddy is still with her, but their other friend is in the other class, which I think it nice because with three of them things were a little intense. This class has a bunch of older boys, so there's much more parrying and talking about spiderman now, which is disconcerting because every class prior to this has had a pretty intense girly socialization bent to it. But I actually think she's less bored and learning a lot.

2) Is usually pretty hard to read, Aaron-style, when I'm trying to figure out exactly what she understands. I am very hoard-y with the breast milk (this relates, I promise), and at this point I can only keep up with the pumping if Ollie takes one bottle during the day, but not two (countdown to turning one and no more pumping: eight weeks). I usually report to Aaron about this at the end of the day (often in the form of a gleeful exclamation when I'm up for the day), but I have never talked to Dylan about it. Today when she and I went to pick Ollie up he had just started his second bottle. Dylan asks the teacher, "is that his second bottle?" Then she turns to me and goes, "Mommy, you did not score today. You never do."

Aaron:

Is down 40+ pounds since January, exercises religiously, and leaps up every evening to wash the dishes. I feel a little bad about the brainwashing, but I think it's working for him. Also! He is patient! Not something I understand, but it means he can sit still long enough to play board games with Dylan.

chatty

Let's see...what else have we been up to? I took everyone pediatric in the household to the pediatrician the other day. Dylan is old enough to do actual old people stuff, like hearing and vision screening and blood pressure. She is right along the 50th percentile for everything, which is what I always did. Ollie is 50th for height and 25th for weight, so he's creeping up there. He certainly looks like a chub, but I guess most of the other little fatties have him beat, fat-wise. He had always been all nonchalant about shots and mostly just gave the nurse a dirty look this time. Aaron is like that too. The man's not even ticklish on the bottom of his feet, if that tells you anything. It tells me something: he is a soulless robot. But! A soulless robot who now routinely takes Snuffy on four-mile runs. Sometimes we both do it in one day (at different times). THAT wears even a tireless dog out.

Dylan is more like me as far as the zero pain tolerance and general neuroses go. She's starting to get a sense of "fair" and "NOT FAIR" although luckily she doesn't know those words yet. It really worked for her when Ollie got the shot for flu and she just got the nasal spray. It also means every time Ollie wants a high five she also wants one. It's like I'm constantly running down the field getting psyched up for the big game around here, with all the high fiving.

What else...Dylan's in swimming lessons again. I think by next summer she'll be a functional swimmer. She's finally stopped being really worried about it, so that only took two years. As long as we were at the Y for swimming I made a structure:


We're also letting her start dance since it's at school and we don't have to be involved and being and dancer is the other half of her career plan, to complement the waitressing. So really it's like an internship. They also have a music class at school that she would love but it's an extra $60 a month and since daycare is now well over double our mortgage FORGET IT.

We put Ollie down to frolic amongst the produce to encourage healthy eating.


I start a new rotation Monday. Stay tuned to see if we can get enough of a grip on our lives to buy me time to post. I now have six interviews scheduled (three in one week!) and am waiting to hear from four more places. I'll probably cancel some at the end though.

It's all fun and games until the child psychologist gets involved

First, I will tell you where we've been. In Rochester. Doing our normal thing. I have no idea what happened, but it was seriously all we could do to scrape the top layer of grime off the dishes before using them again, let alone do extra things like "responding to e-mail" or "bathing."

I was on a dermatology rotation. I will tell you what, they have a good gig going. Not my favorite thing, but it's no end of useful. Yet not my favorite. No. Although it's good to know that the residents also come out of the room shaking their heads and muttering about having no idea what's going on with that person's rash.

Okay, down to the business of baby pictures.

First, we have the first recorded evidence of Ollie's current occupation as: hippo.



Now. This looks like a good time, right?

Yay, Ollie!

cop out

Sorry...we're in Just Barely Taking Care of Critical Responsibilities mode over here. Hope to resume sharing inane stories with the internet shortly.

creatures: a kate's eye view

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let us show you how it's done

When it was determined that dessert was urgently needed last night, I was the one who stepped up and got the job done. I was three-quarters of the way home when I received a text indicating that I should purchase candles. There had been a loud noise and power was out in the entire neighborhood. People were wandering around outside, as they are like moths and were apparently lost without a bright light to lure them back in. Ollie was also lost on the floor for a spell, although his unhappy squeaks were an effective tracking mechanism. See, here he is, found:
Our emergency lighting stash consists of: a tiny LED headlamp, two small candles, our phones, and three hanukkah candles. Aaron also got out Dylan's wooden menorah just to be thorough, but it does not actually provide any light. Dylan was already asleep and this morning wanted to know why the harmonica (= hanukkah + menorah) was out, and if presents had been exchanged. They had not. Also of note: the hanukkah candles do not last for multiple days. When the lights came back on a couple hours later a large cheer went up throughout the neighborhood. Go moths!

***

It came about yesterday morning that Aaron had both kids and the snuff out on a walk in the woods by himself. Dylan, who has a bladder the size of a watermelon, has taken to announcing her need to use the facilities at the most inopportune of moments. When they were as far as possible from any actual facilities she indicated her intentions. That was fine, she's pretty good at peeing in the woods, but Aaron declined to return her underwear on the walk home for hygienic purposes. We have also been working on having her get better at calming herself down when she gets all het up instead of requiring Aaron to talk her through it, so when she protested about the underwear he let her go on about it while they walked home. Thus, to the homeowners along the norhternmost section of the lehigh valley trail, that is why there was a little girl wailing about getting her underwear back from a grown man for a good twenty minutes. Okay? Okay. Good. Moving on.

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Dylan is persistently frustrated that she can't actually fly. She's working on it though.

point of view

Ollie and I took a moment to admire Dylan for transforming this dress from "littlest cult participant" to "preschool mod."
My mistake. Ollie just wanted the ball. I guess it was just me. Happens so often.

In the headlines

I liked the New York Times article about effective study habits. I've always liked to do a bunch of the stuff they say is supported by research--a lot of variety in material, different study spaces, revisiting things, but not right away. And yet, somehow with all that studying here I am, still in school. Stay in school, kids! Until you're 30! (On the not-staying-in-school-forever front, I'm now at two interviews)

There was also a New York Times article about the evidence for harm from BPA. On one hand it sounds like the science is all over the place. On the other hand it sounds like that is because all the industry studies are somehow confusing and contradict the rest of the evidence. Hm.

Here is a headline from today's paper: "Zoo celebrates Grandparents Day and Elephant Awareness Day." I'm sure they didn't mean anything by it.

I've been sitting in front of Fox News at the gym the last couple days. It's like once you get sucked in you can't turn it off. Literally. The TVs are up really high there. Actually I really enjoyed watching it because they don't run any stories without a reason and it's fun to see how sophisticated they can be about manipulating everything. That is, manipulating everything in the service of this Great Nation of ours. I ended up pledging allegiance by the end.

notes

Ollie has been possessed by the devil. The constipation devil. Better the devil you know, right?

***

Why do I now have a Newsweek subscription? Anyone?

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Oh my god we have been married five years. Aaron says I make it feel much longer though.

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What do you think, is he more of a football or a bowling ball?

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Dylan thinks he is a snack best served cold. She goes around muttering about Ollie tartar.

***

Inexplicably, she got a spare.

***

Good lord, her room. We have put our heads down and pretended all the do-it-yourself kinds of home maintenance (=anything fancier than mowing the lawn) didn't exist since we bought this house 7 years ago. It was in great shape and we don't know anything about such things so it was reasonable to assume anything we did to it would make things worse. We're probably going to move one way or the other next year so we're starting to fix things up for that purpose. I guess starting simple would have been too straightforward, so I started on Dylan's room, which required wallpaper removal and lots of repair to the walls underneath. After booting her out for a bunch of nights and endless prep I am now ready to put actual paint on the walls. I'm basically a professional at this point. Come over and I will talk joint compound with you. Good times, over here.

***

I got an interview! Am potentially employable. In several more years.

home. but still sort of disoriented. and only 1 for 2 for getting the kids to bed before 10.

We were in Lake Placid. We Eisenbergs all think of it as an icy nemesis back from our ski racing days. In summer it hits less of an "icy evil" note. More "tourist trap" I would say. Ollie took the Adirondack decor to heart and required a wooden high chair.

Last time I played tennis was last summer when I was pregnant with Ollie.
Looking at these pictures it's hard to shake that "I can't possibly be doing this right" feeling, along with that "I'm dressed like a christmas tree feeling."

I'm also having trouble shaking that "long run of scattered and unpolished blog posts" feeling, but as we keep working on acquiring house creatures and degrees I seem to have less time to devote to lovingly perfecting my snark. So. That's an apology for just throwing up a ton of pictures recently. Perhaps an improvement, but if so please refrain from telling me. Thank you.

Aaron looks pretty badass in this picture, but let the record show that the ball was just short of clearing the fence. Not the stated goal of this particular sport.

And now for a little Tubing With Indy.


I can't get enough of pictures of Ollie in this life jacket. He didn't exactly like it but he can take one for the team in this instance.



I'm not sure if this picture reveals just how grumpy Dylan was at that moment. I will tell you: extremely.



This was fun. We are tired. I plan to spend the week trying to upgrade Dylan's room from "construction site disaster" status to "painted" and upgrade one of my papers from "jumbled mishmash" to "submitted to reputable journal." Time will tell how all that goes.