Elizabeth and I are starting to wrap our minds around what it will mean to have a big boy. At Howard’s two month check-up, he was over 90th percentile in height and 97th in weight. His next check-up isn’t for another month, but when he turned 3 months old the other day, we tried weighing him on the scale — he was about 18 lbs!

“Big baby” is a phrase that is playfully tossed around when talking about lots of babies. But it takes on a different feeling when we realized that he is going to outgrow the baby carseat before he’s 5 months old. We may run into the problem of not being able to find a carseat appropriate (i.e., rear-facing) for a baby that will last until he’s one year old (the age at which we’re nominally allowed to turn him around to front-facing).

Once we had a second child, I knew I’d have to get used to baby clothes not being worn very many times before being outgrown, but that schedule has been accelerated even further with our boy. Clothes-wise, Howard is well past the 0-3 month clothes, and the 3-6 month clothes are getting snug. 6-9 month clothes still have a little room on him.

It’s amusing to be in public with Howard and see the reactions of other parents when they see how big he is and then learn how young he is. I suspect we’ll run into the same problem we’ve heard from other parents of big kids: people may assume he’s older than he really is and will get confused when he doesn’t act as mature as they expect.

We’re certainly not the first parents to experience these issues. In fact, I’m told that I was almost as big during my first few months, and was tearing 2T clothes when I was one year old. And there are other members of our extended family who are very tall. But holy moley is it a bit crazy to think about where Howard will be in another couple of years!

Dorothy had her 6-month dental check-up on Wednesday, and I’d forgotten about it until the night before. Which means that we hadn’t spent the week in advance preparing her and reminding her about the dentist looking in her mouth. I’m not sure if that lack of preparation or something else caused her to flip out, but this time she was in total contrast to earlier dental visits, where she was a model of good behavior, letting the hygienist look all around her mouth, clean her teeth, etc. This time was ugly.

At the end, they painted on a fluoride gel, and I was told to not give her any hard food for the rest of the day, and to not brush her teeth until the next morning, all to help keep that fluoride on to strengthen her teeth.

She was mad about the whole thing, and for hours afterward kept letting me know just how yucky that fluoride paint tasted. She asked about brushing her teeth a couple of times through the afternoon.

That night, she was making her mad face and I asked her what was up.

Dorothy: I’m mad!
Daddy: Why?
Dorothy: Because I want to brush my teeth, and the dentist said I couldn’t!

There’s a couple of layers of amusement in that sentence. We can only hope that her relative love of toothbrushing will continue on for the rest of her life.

Sometimes, Dorothy will answer a yes/no question by saying “watch my hands” and then spelling the word in the air in front of her. It’s good that she’s that comfortable with spelling some words, but it’s annoying that it takes so relatively long to get a simple answer out of her (and it’s not the only way she extends the duration of her replies…).

Photos from the first week or so of August are now online. Enjoy!

Tom and I were talking at the dinner table, and when he told me he had remembered something, I told him he was cool. He and Dorothy then had this conversation:

Tom: Did you know that your Daddy was cool, Dorothy?
Dorothy: Why?
Tom: Because I’m your Daddy!
Dorothy: That doesn’t make you cool!
Dorothy: That just makes you silly…

Howard has been pretty awesome as far as sleep is concerned. He averages around 15 hours per day, and the best part is that he sleeps great at night. As you can see in this snippet from the baby data tracker, he is very reliably asleep from about 9pm or 10pm until almost 7am (i.e., the dark gray and black areas in the top-most horizontal bar). He does wake up every few hours to eat, but he very quickly goes back to sleep.

It’ll be nicer, of course, once he sleeps for even longer periods of time at night, and once he can get a more regular, long nap during the day. But we’d be so much more miserable if he was staying awake in the middle of the night (like his sister did when she was a baby).

Tom is spending more and more time at LaserMotive getting ready for the fall competition, so I’m spending more time in charge of both kids at once. This can be stressful, especially when they both melt down at once, but there are also some very fun and funny bits. A couple of weeks ago, when I was getting Dorothy ready for bed, she was deciding whether to wear the pants or the shorts that go with her pajamas. After she chose the shorts and put them on, she decided to put the pants on her head and pretend they were bunny ears. Then she got part of her costume from Springfest and put that on too, and she became:

Alien Bunny

This video shows only a portion of the extended dance, but it’s enough to get a flavor. She did an encore for Daddy the next day when he was home.

Back when Dorothy was about 4 months old, we posted a list of nicknames we’d been using with her. Howard isn’t quite that old yet, but he’s accumulated his own list of nicknames:

• Mr. Man
• Mr. Big Cheeks
• Han
• Little Man
• Big guy
• Little guy
• Buster
• Buster Brown
• Mister
• Buddha baby
• Froggy-butt (from one of his outfits)

UPDATE 8/25/08: We forgot to list pre-natal nicknames:

• Bruiser
• Bluto
• Brutus
• Squirmy McSquirmerson
• Godzilla
• King Kong
• Baby Brother

(I forgot to post this a month ago!!! I’d started writing it, then never finished it. My apologies!)

There are quite a few posts that I’ve wanted to do over the last couple of months, but between parenting and working, I haven’t had the energy. But this is one I really want to do. The photo above is the view of our “second” driveway, the one intended to hold RVs, and which was seen in some photos this spring because my parents had parked their RV there for over 3 months. It’s been empty since just before July 4th, because they had to head back home to Chicago.

I can’t thank my parents enough for all their help this spring. When Elizabeth was put in the hospital on bed rest, they adjusted their travel plans and got here a week after she was in. They helped us move houses (we’d signed a new lease the week before she was unexpectedly put in the hospital), which was a relatively huge undertaking with Elizabeth out of commission, and Dorothy around to “help” out. Along with Elizabeth’s parents, they all helped take care of Dorothy (and their escapades deserve a post or two of their own) while Elizabeth and I were staying at the hospital watching Howard in his first week.

Now that I’m a parent (twice over!), I understand a lot more about parent/child relationships from both sides. I know that I don’t thank my parents enough for everything they do for me (I do try to say “thank you” in person as much as possible, but that’s only one level of thanking). And in a way, there’s no way I could possibly give them proper thanks. Doing stuff for your children and having it received non-chalantly (even if there is a polite “thank you”) without full acknowledgment of the size of the “favor” one is doing is, it seems, part of being a parent.

Yes, I’m getting horribly behind on photos again. But here are some family photos from the end of July. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago, Dorothy, Elizabeth & I went to the Science Center on a Wednesday. They have a butterfly exhibit you can walk through. You’re not allowed to grab the butterflies, but it’s OK if they land on you.

As I was carrying Dorothy around so she could see the butterflies up high, one landed on her:

I never got to see it until we downloaded these cellphone pics.

Dorothy usually stays home from school/daycare on Wednesdays to spend the day with me. We’ve kept her out of school usually one day a week since she first started back in Boston. Sometimes work things come up and we pick up the Wednesday at school so that I can work that day, but most of the time she stays home on Wednesday.

When she was a baby and couldn’t really do much, those days were at times very difficult for me because of my brain leaking out my ears by the end of the day. When she was older, we could sometimes go out to the park, or to a children’s museum or some such. Especially over the last year, however, Wednesdays were frequently devoted almost exclusively to household chores and errands. It was good to spend time with Dorothy, even if we were in the grocery store (which in itself can be educational), but I felt a bit guilty about not spending as much time on things she wanted to do.

Recently, we’ve had a few good Wednesdays. A couple of weeks ago, at the end of Elizabeth’s maternity leave (but right after Howard had started at daycare), the three of us went to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, which was fun. Today was another good day.

The first thing Dorothy and I did this morning was to make paper from scrap, shredded paper using a kit we got a few months ago that teaches about trash and recycling. She didn’t want to touch the wet, goopy pulp, but she enjoyed rolling the paper between two sheets of felt.

Next I had to do a load of dishes, and then we headed out on a couple of errands. At the pet store, we took time to watch the birds and the dogs in the pet ‘hotel’ they run there. I was pointing out how I thought one dog out of the group was pretty smart because she would back up when the employee was getting ready to throw a toy, and that dog always got to the toy first.

We went to Costco and got lunch there before heading in to grab some fruit and whatnot, then headed home for nap. When she woke up, she wanted to go to a park, so we put on the sunscreen and headed to the big park a couple of miles away. We had lots of fun at the playground, and then playing tag and running around a lot.

In addition to getting to spend a large part of the day doing fun stuff with Dorothy, it was also a good day where I could sit at the park and enjoy the sunshine and not focus 100% of the time on my jobs and responsibilities. I’ve been a bit too much of a workaholic lately, and while I’m enjoying both my work at IV and LaserMotive, I need to spend time on my family and household too.