3.7 or, Sad Tummy Blues

Dear Corbin,

We were having a lovely month, and then there was the vomiting.

We went to Madison for Labor Day weekend, and the Thornes and Spencers met us there for a visit.  We spent an afternoon playing on the playground at my old elementary school, and that evening having dinner at Grandma and Grandpa Lam's house.  The next day, we all went swimming at the hotel.  And by all, I mean people other than you and me.  I had forgotten my swimming suit (after reminding Dad to bring his) and you decided you didn't really want to go into the pool.  You really liked standing on the edge and shooting squirt guns at people.  It was fun watching you play with your cousin Charlotte, at the playground and at the house.  You managed to share your toys with only a few moments of disagreement.  I'm always happy when we can get you some cousin time, even when it's only for a short visit.

Your regular preschool classes started.  It doesn't seem to be totally smooth yet.  There are some kids who haven't quite settled into the groove yet, and you've had some frustrating moments with them.  I spoke with your teacher about it, and she had been encouraging you to play with some of the other students who are better behaved.  It's another month until parent conferences, so hopefully by then the class will have calmed down and become more enjoyable.

We had gotten back into a pretty good routine, but this week you got sick.  It's our first experience with you having a stomach bug, and all of us are a little traumatized.  It started Tuesday morning at 3am, which meant I didn't really get any sleep the rest of the night.  Dad cleaned up you and your crib while I nursed Miriam back to sleep.  Then I laid in your room on the twin bed.  You woke up every so often to be sick again, which was awful.  I came home early from work that afternoon, and we managed to get a good nap in during the late afternoon.  Then you felt better, and I let you eat way too much for dinner.  It didn't all stay down, but then you weren't sick the rest of the night, so we all actually got some sleep that night.

It's hard watching you be sick.  There isn't a lot that we can do for you, in terms of medication, and you're not able to really think logically about how to make yourself feel better.  So we end up just trying to steer you into activities like reading new library books and sitting on the couch watching things on TV.  I had brought home some books about planets and asteroids, and then we watched National Geographic's Asteroid: Deadly Impact, which has some pretty amusing footage from the 1990's.  I hope that eventually you are a person who is good at taking care of yourself, and not just when you're sick.  I hope you value your body and your health, and that you're able to enjoy both.  At least, until you start taking kung fu lessons with your Dad.  Don't worry; we've got lots of ice packs.

Love,
Mom


In the pool with Dad:

 Cousins who can't sit still:

 Fancy hair:

Cleaning fish stuff with Dad:

Month 5 or, You're Longer Than This Post

Dear Miriam,

You are five months old already.  It's hard to believe until I try to pick you up and realize how much bigger you are now.  You're good at rolling over, and you're working hard to get your legs in the right places to start crawling.  I'm guessing it won't be very long until you're really moving yourself around.  It's been a while since we played the game Chase the Baby, and this time we'll have a toddler playing, too.  Ready, set, where'd she go?

This month, we gave you rice cereal for the first time.  You had been looking interested in our food for a while, but your staring had gotten downright accusatory.  You even started making angry noises at us, so we figured we'd better see if you were interested in the solids.  You're very enthusiastic about it, but still terribly messy, of course.  You don't really know what to do with your tongue yet and it doesn't really help that you try to suck on your toes at the same time.

You're gaining a bedroom this month!  Dad decided a while ago that we should move the office down to the basement so that you can have your own room.  This is good on many levels.  It means that Dad got rid of a bunch of stuff in the basement.  It means we'll get rid of a bunch of stuff in the office.  It means the office got a good cleaning.  And hopefully it'll mean that you'll start having a better bedtime routine and sleeping better.  At least, it will mean that I can ignore you more.  Which is my goal, really, to ignore my kids as much as possible.  So far, it's not going so well.

You still have blue eyes.

Love,
Mom

Month 3.6 or, Lazy Hazy Crazy Days

Dear Corbin,

We've had a fun month, but you'll just have to take my word for it, because we can't seem to take our camera with us anywhere.

We went to a birthday party for our friend Adrian.  You spent a long time playing with his Matchbox cars, until you found out that there was cake going around.  It was the first party that we've been at where there was a pinata, which you managed to smack a couple of times with the stick.  It was a good sturdy pinata, which is great until you actually want the thing to break.  Cindy ended up beating it to death on the ground, and then a couple of other adults had to help get all of the candy and toys out of it.  You came away with a little plastic pirate guy (it was a pirate themed pinata), a sheet of stickers and a Tigger Pez dispenser.  Every couple of days since then you'll ask for, "some of that Tigger candy," and I let you  put one or two candies in and then eat them.

Speaking of pirates, we went to the Science Museum to see the Pirates exhibit.  It was based on a true story of a ship that was taken by pirates and then sunk in a storm off of Cape Cod.  They had a lot of artifacts, including lots of treasure.  They also had several exhibits about how they recovered artifacts.  Your favorite part seemed to be a video of watching the ship go down in a storm, followed by the model of part of the ship that we could walk through.  You were disappointed that there weren't real pirates, though.

We also went to the Firefighter's Hall and Museum.  My friend Jody met us there with her two kids.  The three of you had fun playing with their train table and sliding down a fire pole.  We all went for a ride on their firetruck, which was very loud and very bouncy.  The most popular thing, though, was being able to squirt water at a board painted to be a house on fire.  You're always happy to be squirting water at something.  Your version of playing in the sprinkler is holding on to it and making it spray on a dirt patch in the yard so you can play in the mud.

Summer session of pre-school ended.  You haven't seemed to miss it when you've had time off.  I'm not sure if that's because you're not socially invested in other kids yet or if you actually don't care.  You do talk about other kids, but not in a very meaningful way.  I wonder if that will change over the course of the next year.

Your accomplishment this month is that you can sing the whole alphabet song.  So now I need to start teaching you to sign along with it.  Then, eventually, you and I can say things to each other and your Dad won't know what we're talking about. 

Love,
Mom


A study in Corbin:

Month 4, or The Long and Short of It

Dear Miriam,

You are four months old, which I totally forgot when I packed for our camping trip.  I was very good about packing pants and socks for you, in case it was colder up north.  And it was, so I thought we were doing fine.  Until I actually tried to dress you in pants and socks and realized that they were all too small for you.  So you spent a couple of days in your pajamas until we got back to the Cottage and it was warm enough for just a shirt again.  The only reason you minded was because you couldn't suck on your toes.

Everyone loved holding you and talking to you, and if I wasn't careful it was easy to lose track of who had wandered off with you.  Aunt Alice tried to use you as reason why her son and his wife should have a baby sooner rather than later; it's not your fault that it didn't work.  We were all speculating on who might be the next baby to come camping, but I think you'll likely be the youngest kid for at least another year.

You are talking a lot now, and starting to get the hang of conversational pauses.  You still do funny little yells sometimes, which always make me laugh.  You complain especially loud when I lay you down and the move out of your line of sight.  These are the sweet days when you actually want your parents to be around you.  We have to savor this time, the time before the teenage years when you'll have those days that you wish you were an orphan.

You're starting on some teething pain, I think, since you spend most of your time now chewing on whatever you can get into your mouth.  It was my finger, most of the time that we were driving to and from the UP, and your little gums felt pretty hard.  So we've got orajel back in the house, and I've got to spend some time finding the teething rings before you chew my finger off.

On a more serious note, I've been feeling intimidated by you lately.  Or rather, not by you, but by raising a girl.  I have been hearing a lot lately about women being treated badly--in video game culture, and in comic book culture, and at various conventions.  There's been controversy around the appearance of a Black female athlete in the Olympics, which is so discouraging when we should simply be celebrating her talent and hard work.  The political arena is still full of people who think that they should be able to tell you what you can and cannot do with your body and your career and your life.  It's hard to think that you'll have to face that in your life, and that I can only prepare you and not shield you forever.  I hope that you will not live your life according to someone else and their ideas of how you should be.  I hope that you are smart enough to believe in yourself, and to protect yourself from that trap.  Gather those people around you who help you see yourself clearly, in all of your beauty and all of your flaws.  A friend who sees both and loves you for both is a true friend.  Or a parent, one of the two.

Love,
Mom

 Waiting for the new tire on the camper:

With Grandpa Lam at the Cottage:

 Fun with Alligator in the car:

3.5, or Free Range Child

Dear Corbin,

I am very late writing your letter this month.  I delayed in order to include our family camping trip, because other than that, we've had an uneventful month.  It's been crazy hot.  We didn't do much except fantasize about moving somewhere with nice weather, like Siberia.

Your last set of molars are finally coming in.  They were late enough that I asked the dentist about it at my last appointment, and of course that night was the night I noticed them appearing.  They aren't giving you any trouble, but they are giving rise to conversations about what will happen when your baby teeth are replaced by your adult teeth.  I tried to convince you that other parts of your body would fall off and be replaced, too, but you weren't buying it.

You're able to write the first two letters of your name, which is kind of exciting.  So far, your penmanship is the opposite of your Uncle Alex's.  His is small and cramped and hard to read.  Yours is huge and sprawling.  Also backwards.  We'll work on that.

You began the month with a trip to Madison, over the 4th of July.  I took a couple of days off to hang out with Miriam so that you could go to, "Grandma and Grandpa's big house."  You've started playing with the Lego sets there, kicked off by the battery-powered train set, of course. You brought a little forklift home with you but I hope you'll wait to get really obsessed until after we buy a bigger house.

And you ended your month with the camping trip to the UP.  We were at Bodi Lake, by Whitefish Point, and we had a fabulous time.  The weather was great, with only one rainy day, and the beach by the lake was perfect for you and the other kids.  It was a little hard for you to play with the other kids this year.  They were all old enough to ride their bikes around the campground, which isn't a skill that you've got yet.  So there were times that you got frustrated and felt left-out.  I think you'll probably have your own bike next summer, and then we'll have to worry about you riding it off of a cliff or into a tree.  We borrowed the Ross's tent camper, which was great.  They had just bought a new 5th wheel-er and offered to loan us the pop-up.  It did manage to get a flat tire on the drive up, but other than that it worked out really well.  It was far more comfortable than a tent, and gave us lots of room to spread out our stuff.  You slept with Dad one night and with me the rest of the nights.  You are a terrible person to share a bed with right now.  You actually crawled on top of Dad in your sleep, and there was one night that I had to pick you up and move you off of my pillows.  Twice.

You had fun playing on the beach with all of your diggers and with a bunch of trucks.  You didn't swim with the other kids, but you had fun watching them jumping in and splashing.  We did s'mores around the campfire one night and omelets in a bag one morning.  Your favorite thing, though, was going fishing with my cousin Brian.  He had a little plastic container of worms, which you loved playing with, and we did actually manage to catch some fish.  It was the first fish I had caught in about 25 years.  Funny enough, the last time I caught a fish was with Brian's dad, my Uncle Steve.  So I felt very accomplished as a mom, being able to meet your expectations that of course we would catch fish.  Between us and the kids in Uncle Steve's boat, we caught enough fish for a fish fry dinner.  You got to witness the fish cleaning, and my uncles and cousins made fun of me when I was showing you all of the internal organs on one of the gutted fish.  You ate two helpings of fish for dinner that night, proving that you are a good fisherman, according to Aunt Karen.  So it was a successful camping trip, which made it really hard to come back to hot, humid weather, and to go back to work the next Monday.

You drove to Madison with Grandma and Grandpa Lam to clean up their camper and leave it in their garage.  When you drove past Oshkosh, the EAA was having their annual air show.  You saw a blimp and a bunch of helicopters.  You were very excited.  You told me on the phone later, "Someday I'm going to ride in a blimp, Mom!"  I hope you do, sweetheart.  I hope you do.

Love,
Mom


Too hot for shirts:

 

Building a mini Cornhole game:

Lego train!

Changing the flat tire on the camper:

 Kayaking with Dad on Bodi Lake:

 At the Lower Falls at Tahquamenon Falls:

Fishing with cousin Brian:

  Watching Uncle Mark gut the fish that we caught:

Playing on the beach:

Squished into Grandma and Grandpa's camper in the rain.  Why is Dad making that face?

Helping clean up Grandma and Grandpa's camper in Madison:

Month 3, or A hat trick of tricks

Dear Miriam,

You are three months old, and you've got three new achievements.  First, you have figured out how to roll over, and now you do it almost every time I lay you down.  Sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it means you end up with a mouthful of dog hair before I can move you back onto a blanket.  I've even seen you start to move your legs like you're going to crawl.  You're good at holding your head up, but you haven't figured out how to roll back over on to your back, so eventually you get tired and start complaining until we help you.

The second trick you've started doing is reaching for things.  When I hold my hand up you grab for my fingers.  You haven't grabbed any toys yet.  I'm not sure if that's because you're suspicious of them, or because you just didn't grab them when I held them out.  Your third trick is related to this one: you found your toes.  You haven't quite stuffed them all in your mouth yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

Selfishly, I was hoping your achievement for the month would be sleeping through the night, but you clearly had other plans.  You're getting bigger, of course, sometimes noticeably day by day.  Your features are becoming more defined, although you still make funny squishy expressions with your mouth.  Your eyes are still blue.  I wonder how many months I'll write something like that because I'll still be surprised that they haven't changed to brown.

You make a lot more sounds, now.  You laugh and coo and talk to us.  You get annoyed when we leave you alone for too long, and instead of crying you'll make these annoyed sounding conversation noises.  When you're tired, you make a noise kind of like a cross between a monkey and a harmonica.  It makes me laugh.

This month you managed to develop one part of your schedule.  You are napping pretty consistently between 9am and 10am.  You usually nap in the late afternoon, but that's not quite as predictable as the morning yet.  You are still waking me up around 2am and around 5am, but you're getting better at being asleep by 10pm, so that's been nice.

You have had a couple of episodes of upset tummy.  It's always hard because you can't tell us what you're feeling, and there's only so much we can do for you anyway.  Mostly, we try to keep you upright, but sometimes that has dubious results.  The other night, Dad had just finished giving me a haircut when we heard you crying.  So he went to comfort you while I jumped in the shower.  I came downstairs just in time to watch you spit up all over him.  It was a good thing he was getting in the shower next.

It's become more natural now to think that I have two kids.  It may not make sense to you, because you won't have known anything other than our family as it is now.  But for Dad and I, our family changed drastically when Corbin was born, and again now that you're here.  It takes the brain a little while to catch up with the reality of the situation some times.  But a couple of times this month I've just been overwhelmed by how glad I am that you're part of our family.

Love,
Mom



Happy Father's Day!

 You found your toes:

 You rolled over:

 Super Baby pose: