Happy Birthday Grandparents!

Meredith has a message for Grandma Gail and Grandpa Kerry for this weekend...

Dressing up cats

"Herding cats" is a great, commonly-used metaphor, which is usually apt in its usage. A similar comparison can also be made with dressing babies. They are like dressing up a cat.

Elaine in her greater movement is the squirmiest thing ever! Getting her dressed these days or just changing her diaper is an exercise in speed and coordination. She rolls. She scoots. She lunges. This is from a girl who isn't even crawling yet. Try getting her changed in the dark when sleep deprived at 5:30 AM when her diaper has leaked out for the fifth day in a row adds to the challenge.

So, dressing her is like I imagine dressing a cat would be. I don't think I'll try to put a diaper on the cat to test this theory. As I've stated before in several different contexts, at least babies don't have claws and teeth of cats. Though, Elaine seems to make due with her nails. She recently scraped off a chunk of skin from Meredith's nose.

Apparently, my mom was able to successfully dress up her childhood cat, so maybe I should get some tips from her. The only thing I can think of is growing a couple additional pairs of arms.

Seriously, why do we have only two pairs of arms and hands when we have babies to raise? And how on earth do the poor souls with twins, triplets, etc handle it all with just two arms?

On another note, Elaine turns 8 months today. She's growing up. She's on the verge of crawling. Each day she pushes herself off the ground on all fours more and more. It's at that point she doesn't know what to do. She mainly rocks back and forth before throwing herself in some direction on to her tummy. She's been also rolling her tongue a lot and clucking her tongue. It may or may not be related to teething. We're still looking forward to that first tooth to break through.

Thanksgiving pictures with the Randolph family in Iowa

Thanks to Grandpa Kerry for taking the majority of the pictures. Every event needs a prolific official photographer.

Thanksgiving travels

We traveled to Iowa to spend Thanksgiving this year with members of Jen's family. It was a fun, quick trip with the minimum of travel adventures compacted on the first hours of the journey.

We set off for the 5 1/2 hour journey after 7:00 PM, Wednesday night, having learned that traveling while the girls sleep seems to work best. We had taken a detailed look at the weather and evaluated that the waning snow activity in Iowa did not pose a threat.

Little did we know that there'd be freezing ice on the interstate in Minnesota and that the continuously professional state Department of Transportation wasn't exactly on top of things on the busiest travel day of the year. Finally around 10 PM, they began to salt the roads, an activity reportedly underway across the border for the previous six hours. Of course, by that time we had been sitting in still traffic and had lost a few hours of travel time. Once the salt trucks came through, the road immediately improved and we began to move.

It was during this standing-still period we hear the following from the backseat, where Meredith had been resisting going to sleep:

Meredith: Daddy, I peed in my diaper.
Me: [wearily] You're not wearing a diaper.

Meredith is typically very good about informing us of her bathroom needs well in advance. But the extreme tiredness from school, packing for the trip, playing with friends all evening, and excitement of the trip had its effect. We stopped at a gas station 10 minutes later and Jen ran the girl through the icy wind to get her cleaned up.

An aside: At one point of our journey Meredith informs us of a McDonalds that "That's where chicken McNuggets live." A couple days later she explains how a fisherman catches a salmon and makes it dead, gives it to the grocery store, we buy it, and then we make it "deader" when we cook it. Meredith also asked if we were there yet at the rate of about 20 times an hour. As annoying as that question is, it is pretty frustrating when asked while in stand-still traffic just 30 miles into your cross-state journey. It's also a great question when you take a wrong turn and are lost in rural Iowa after less than 4 hours of sleep.

When we hit Iowa, the roads were perfectly clear, despite the worse weather. I have just about as much pride as a native-born Minnesotan, but compared to our neighbors in Iowa and Wisconsin, our road conditions here are pretty consistently abysmal. Despite the clear roads across the border, we realized that we weren't going to make it all the way and checked into a hotel at 2:00 AM in Waterloo. Elaine awakes at 5:50 AM, and eventually we're back on the road. We make it in time for Thanksgiving dinner in Lost Nation and to witness a Thanksgiving Packer win over the Detroit Lions.

Meredith and Elaine basked in the attention from Grandpa Kerry and Grandma Gail, their great grandparents, also known as Oma and Papa, great aunts and uncles, Jody, Dan, Joylene, and Bill, and Uncle David and Aunt Olga. The next day featured going to Jody and Dan's and seeing their sheep and cats, and a dozen or so distant cousins of varying degrees. Lots of food and fun.

We drove back at night and arrived in Minneapolis at 1:30 AM. The next day involved lots of sleep.

Bon mots from Meredith

Sometimes we forget how truly funny Meredith is. Here are some recent gems Derek has been 'reminding' me to write here:

Meredith asked me one night, "Winnie the Pooh isn't real, is he?" "No," I said. "Why do you think that?" "Because he's never been to our house." (Now you know: our house is the arbiter of all things real! Visit soon!)

We're really into Winnie the Pooh right now, so much so that one night when I was folding laundry, Mer offered to help me "because it would be much more cheerful together." What a sweetie!

On the song "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who (a great rock song), which includes the line, "No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be the sad man, behind blue eyes": Meredith confided to me, out of the blue, that "he's saying that no one knows what it's like to be Batman, which makes sense since Batman isn't real." "That's a good point," I said.

-JRR

Trust me

Those with toddlers know that young kids aren't really able to lie. Sometimes they might tell you something wrong because they hope it's true, rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive. As they get older, preschoolers may become more intentional about telling you something they know is not true, but they are so bad at lying, that it doesn't take a trained parent to identify the lie. ("Did you just push your sister?" "ahhhh... no... she just fell down by herself... I was only hugging her... uh um, she needed to be moved...")

We're now entering new territory with Meredith. I had the following potty-related discussion [warning: potty talk ahead] with her this evening:

Meredith steps out of the bathroom and says hi to Elaine while I'm changing her diaper.

ME: Meredith, did you wipe after you went potty?

MER: [with only the slightest hint of a mere possibility of hesitation] Yes. I did.

ME: Really? It doesn't seem you were in their long enough?

MER: No I did. I did wipe.

ME: It's okay if you didn't wipe. All you have to do is go back in there. It's not a big deal. Just please be sure to tell me the truth.

MER: [slightly agitated] No, I did. [pause] Trust me.

ME: [speechless] hmmm...

MER: Daddy, you have to trust me. I did wipe.

ME: Really?

MER: [more agitated] Yes... [but] don't look in the bathroom.

All the way up to this point I wasn't sure if she was telling the truth. This is a new level of sophistication, although the plea not to look shows she doesn't quite have the skill down.

ME: You can't tell me not to look. I'm wondering if you're telling me the truth. It's okay if you didn't wipe, but I need you to be truthful with Daddy.

MER: No! Don't look! Trust me Daddy.

I look.

ME: Okay, it looks like you didn't use toilet paper. I need you to wipe right now. We'll talk more about telling the truth after Elaine goes to bed.

Mer: [She complies, but protests.] Why didn't you trust me? You should trust me when I ask you to!

I of course explain that's not really how trust works, that trust has to be earned with honesty. That if she tells me the truth instead of lies, it will be easier for me to trust her. We put off the rest of the discussion until later.

Her attempts to deceive by telling us not to look or come upstairs has been going on for many months. "Daddy, you shouldn't check on me after I go to bed" very clearly means she's planning to get out of bed and play the moment I'm gone.

The "TRUST ME" thing is brand new and the source is clearly none other than a television show. It's PBS's fault. There's a show that is now her favorite. She's probably watched it 5 total times. It's called "Super Why!" They had a variation of the story of the boy who cried wolf, but with a different lesson. In this version the boy is actually being honest the whole time about seeing the wolf, but the adults don't believe him because they don't see the wolf right away and accuse him of lying. In the end, he pulls out that word like a weapon: "I'm asking you to TRUST me. I'm telling the truth." The adults agree that they should trust him and not dismiss him out of hand, and then they see the wolf. (The wolf, for what it's worth says hello and apologies for disappearing before.)

Even at the time of viewing, Jen and I were concerned that it wasn't the lesson we wanted Meredith to receive. I think the original boy-who-cried-wolf fable does an excellent job of teaching the importance of being trustworthy. You are trusted because you are trustworthy, not simply because you assert that you should be trusted. For Meredith's age, you can leave out the wolf eating all the sheep; but the idea that if you don't tell the truth, people will stop believing or even listening to you. Anyone who has known a social 4 year-old knows that that message would resonate. Nothing seems to upset Meredith more than the feeling she is not being listened to.

The last thing about young kids is how amazing their brains are. Most of the time they seem to not be paying attention to anything. And yet, their brains soak up so much. This five minute segment of a show gave her a whole new (negative) communication approach she was able to use several days later.

Blue moon

This morning a very rare event occurred in our household. It's possible it hasn't happened before and may never happen again. The development I'm talking about is that both Meredith and Elaine slept in!

Yessirree! Elaine woke up for her regular 4:00 AM feeding and went back down after playing in her crib. The whole family sleeps in until about 8:00 AM. What a glorious Saturday! Sleep, sweet sleep! I was so unaccustomed to the experience, I was groggy for the first hour. But groggy in a good mood!

To celebrate the event, we had waffles for breakfast--after 9:00 AM!

The stars must have been aligned. I don't know when this will happen next. We'll just have to await for a terrific surprise one morning. Maybe we can make this day a family holiday and try to repeat it as early as November 10, 2008.

Checkin' in with Elaine

So, what's that Elaine up to these days? She just passed the seven month mark last week and is a thriving, content baby. Her favorite activity is to sit on the floor and play with her toys. She also lunges and twists and turns on the floor to get at things too.

She's crawling towards crawling. She's been in the crawl mode and has scooted herself backwards a couple times. For the first time yesterday, Elaine lifted her body off the ground in the crawl position. In the past, her stomach on the ground has gotten in the way of forward movement. She has now figured out that problem.

Elaine is much more interactive and commutative. She'll try to get your attention and make eye contact and laugh at silly faces. In her room, there is a chime we sometimes ring to distract her. She LOVES it. Recently, we started noticing that she would stare at it, waiting for us to chime it. This week she also stared at it while giving a very specific grunt that I hadn't heard before. I eventually realized it was a command and I rang the chime. Elaine laughed and had an expression of the deepest satisfaction.

The other non-interesting development with implications for me, is that Elaine seems to have transitioned from a 3 to 2 nap day. My whole daily schedule it took weeks to establish is now out the window. Her new schedule isn't all that predictable yet either. Today she slept an uncharacteristic 3 hours in the morning, and maybe a total of 30 minutes over 3 occasions the rest of the day. At least she sleeps well at night. I feel incredibly fortunate every night when she goes to sleep at a reasonable and consistent time. She sleeps until she's hungry (between 4:00 and 6:30am). Usually if it's before 6 am she'll go back to sleep after eating 5 or so ounces. On a couple occasions the last few days, she didn't really go back to sleep and was up for the day at 4:30 am. Those were weary days.

Secret, varied understandings of A Land Before Time

Elly is sick. Poor baby. She is snotty and her eyes are red, has no energy, is easily frustrated, and can't sleep. And she has the most pathetic little sneezes.

Mer and I are a little sick - no energy, low-grade fever, but no cold as such of yet. So between all of that, we took it easy today, and while Derek drove Elly around and around trying to help her sleep, Mer and I watched The Land Before Time.

Mer loves dinosaurs, so Derek thought this would be a good choice. He was unaware of the truly heartwrenching mother-dies-in-an-earthquake scene and the fairly terrifying being-chased-through-a-dark-swamp-by-a-T-Rex scene. Mer and I cuddled and looked away when it got too sad or scary. But after those scenes, when the kid dinos form their own little herd and set off against the big world together, Mer leaned into me and told me matter-of-factly, "They will die soon, too." Why?" I asked, surprised. "Because the dinosaurs all died, Mom," she reminded me. "They're extinct."

They didn't, though; they made it to the one valley that still had green foliage - not to spoil the plot for anyone out there. I'm now wondering if the six sequels to Land Before Time begin to address the issues of overpopulation and overcrowding in the one little valley, with all the dinosaurs in the whole world going there. Or perhaps there is a mass extinction scene, theories about meteors, etc. Somehow I think not.

-JRR

Jen's work bio

Now that Jen has been a licensed attorney for a week, her firm has put up her impressive professional bio on their website here. She just wants you to know that even though her bio has her full name "Jennifer Randolph Reise," she still prefers to be called "Jen." Call her "Jennifer" or "Jenny" and you're liable not to get a response.
There is a PDF link on the page to her "Extended Biography." If I may say so, it's very impressive.

They will soon put her professional headshot on the page, but are still awaiting that from the photographer. She also got her business cards finally this week and I think is starting to feel like a real professional.

So, you've seen it here first!

• Jennifer Randolph Reise, Briggs Associate, Biography

Blog updates and features

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