All Hallow's Eve

Emmett is in bed after his first real Halloween. He was dressed in a hand-me-down dragon costume from his cousin which he loved. Andrea had him try it on yesterday (Oct. 30) at around four, took it off of him, and he begged to have it put back on pre-trip to the park for the afternoon. The outfit got two full day's use. Tonight the neighborhood shut down a couple of blocks and tons of kids made their way up and down the street getting candy from some elaborately dressed people and elaborately decorated houses. We felt a little bit like pimps, and were essentially called such in nicer terms, as it was pretty obvious that Emmett was getting the candy for us. He learned to say "trick-or-treat" and roar like a dragon, so there were lessons learned this evening.

I would really love to know what was going on in Emmett's head as he saw everything. There were some pretty scary looking people and some strange costumes. Hopefully he doesn't end up with nightmares. Things couldn't get much worse in the sleep situation, I suppose.


Yes, so the sleep. We had a meeting with our downstairs neighbor who is upset about EVERY sound, not just Emmett, and have come to the conclusion (basically agreed to by her) that she is hyper-sensitive to noise. Hopefully things get better, but she makes it sound like she is going to move out in a month or so time. That would be a relief. Anyway, after our meeting last night, we were getting ready for bed at 10ish and Emmett started screaming. We let him cry for a bit, but he wasn't stopping so we ended up bringing him to bed with us. He slept but in all kinds of crazy positions. At least twice I had to stop him continuously kicking my face. Andrea and I are both exhausted right now and are going to be in bed as soon as I am done typing.
Big news today is that Emmett peed in the toilet (I know, he used to do this a long time ago, but we dropped the EC thing when we took on a nanny and never picked it up very well again). He is communicating that he needs to have or has had action in his diaper, so I feel like we are getting closer to being out of the diapers. The other exciting news is that he was able to pass gas by choice at the dinner table for the first time tonight. He was pretty excited. I think he is figuring out things south of his belly button.

A boring video of him in his outfit in action:

An oft forgotten teaching of Confucius

Don't have a child and live directly above someone who is hyper-sensitive to noise and responds to a child's cries by banging on your floor (their ceiling) and/or blaring their stereo.

Bitter-sweet

I just got home from teaching and Emmett has just passed his third hour napping for the third day in a row. Pretty exciting. Today's is not surprising, though, as Emmett woke up screaming just before midnight and it took about 45 minutes to get him back in bed. What finally worked was to stay in the room with him and put my hand on his back while he fell asleep. I would stand there for a while, semi-bent over, finally tire, and pull my hand from his back, but he would then stand up, grab my hand, and pull me down so that my hand had returned to his back. I finally came up with a compromise solution whereby I would sit outside his crib and have my hand either on his cheek or his neck. After what felt like 20 minutes, I would pull my hand away and he would immediately wake, grab it, and return it where he felt it belonged. It would have been sweet and nice had it not been well after 1 at this point, had I not still had work to do for today's lecture, and had it not been uncomfortable on the floor with my arm snaked into the crib between the slats in the side. Finally I was able to sit on the floor with my hands in my lap and he would stand every few minutes to check that I was still there and then lay back down. This went on for some time with him checking on me and I finally left the room at 2:30ish. I would have left earlier if we lived in the country or in a separated house, but every time we tried to put him back to bed last night he would let out the worst screams which would lead to the downstairs neighbor banging on the walls. Ah, the joys of city living!

Emmett did wake again at about 2:45 and yell because I wasn't there (I assume), but he put himself back to sleep and made it to morning. 5:30ish. Hooray! Andrea was nice enough to get up with him since I didn't finish my work until 3:30ish. Sleep can't come too early tonight.

I am convinced that the way for one to make a billion dollars today would be to invent a device that would let a parent or caregiver know if the cry that is being let out is due to poop in the diaper or not. I changed Emmett when I went in last night, but am now wondering if he had pooped over the next couple of hours. His lack of settling was very unlike him, but I didn't check again and Andrea found a messy diaper when she got him. Very unlike him to do that so quickly in the morning.

Speaking of the topic, Emmett has been getting better and better about communicating that he has or is going to poop. We are still trying to push the potty seat, but he will only sit on it and hasn't taken care of business for some time.

We have returned to cloth diapers after our ~5 day hiatus. The blisters on his skin cleared and I boiled all of the diapers, and in our ~4 day return to cloth we have yet to find a new spot (knock on wood). Good news!

The list

Words that Emmett says as best we can think of and in no particular order:

bath, pasta, pizza, milk, shoe, on, off, bike, heart, pancake, cat, water, crayon, book, Elmo, Big Bird, purple, jellyfish, airplane, jet, helicopter, blimp, cup, Blah Blah, dad, mom, Belinda, park, John, Luisa, Hannah, Lesley, Laura, Jeff, Sal, up, in, please, Malcolm, duck, squirrel, hat, sweatshirt, grandma, grandpa, cup, clock, train, bowl, poop, flush, all done, light, grass, juice, apple, nose, alligator, turtle, grape, berries, banana, cheese, hi, bye bye, carousel, high, cloud, moon, grass, Augie, Anne, purple, flower, walk, owl, fish, shovel, bucket, swing, slide, fire truck, garbage truck, truck, bus, tractor, cat, eye, ear, horse, mouth, arm, elbow, diaper, and kiss.

There are probably others, but this was what we could think of. A couple of note: water and Malcolm, surprisingly are heterographs (I was going to use the word homonym here, but just learned that that homonyms are spelled the same and sound the same whereas heterographs just sound the same...you learn something everyday) and are pronounced "AYE-yah". Though this seems confusing, when used the situation makes it clear which is meant. In compiling this list, Andrea and I tried to get Emmett to say the two after one another (e.g. Malcolm's water...he can say things like dad's shoes or mom's hat, so this shouldn't be a stretch), but couldn't distinguish a difference between the two.

Andrea just walked by and said Emmett should have 200 words at this point. This post has turned into one about Emmett's shortcomings.

We met Anne, Augie, and Alex at the Academy today (I just wore out my shift-A with that line). It is pretty neat how Augie and Emmett get excited to see one another now and actually play together. I think we are inching away from parallel play.

We are struggling through the hassles of raising a child in a shared building. Emmett continues to wake at 5am each day and the woman who sleeps directly below him is not happy about it one bit. We let him whine for a while this morning hoping he would go back to sleep, but no luck. It is not comforting to think that if this isn't corrected, in a week's time when we go to Daylight Savings, Emmett will be waking at 4. I hope we cure this soon.

Good news is that we went back to cloth diapers again and everything seems to be fine. I am pretty convinced now that it was some sort of bacteria or yeast that got into the thicker diapers that he uses at night. I sanitized them all by boiling and am hoping we are past all of that. Emmett has taken to telling me that he has to poop, pooping, and then telling me he has pooped. I am hoping that we can get the potty thing down pretty soon. We offer the potty but he hasn't gone for it with full gusto yet although he will sit on it and read books for a while.

Surviving

It looks like we might be reaching the end of Emmett's illness, but the unfortunate part is that I think that the parents' version is about to start. Andrea and I have both been feeling pretty icky and I feel worse today than before. No fun. Emmett has been sub-100 temps all day fever-wise, so things are looking up. Two nights ago he woke at 2am and was basically up until 6am. We tried all kinds of tricks to get him back to sleep but nothing was seeming to work. Finally Andrea got him to snooze a bit with her and I got a couple of hours of sleep (I had been up working on lesson plans until midnight before his waking so was a little beat). Andrea spent the day with him at home while I went to work, and then that night the whole house was in bed before 9pm. Oh yeah, that was our first night on the new 4"-thick mattress cover that Emmett and I had picked up earlier in the day via bike. It was pretty funny getting everything loaded up and hauling the both of them back up the hills toward home, but Emmett was a good sport about it all even though he wasn't feeling tip-top. I took a picture:
The good thing about going to bed so early is that when your kid wakes up at 5 it doesn't seem to be such a big deal. He did it again this morning and we hadn't gone to bed early and aren't feeling well, so today is dragging a bit. I am not happy that this illness had to hit this weekend as Emmett and I had plans to go up to Oregon to see family, but now are not going to make the trip, I think, so as to save everyone else getting sick.

The days this week have been different as we have to stay away from our usual haunts (playgrounds, the Academy of Science, etc.) to avoid spreading the plague. Twice we have gone to the botanical gardens in Golden Gate Park which was nice. The first day Emmett basically stayed in my arms the whole time and we sat on a bridge to watch the ducks. The second day (yesterday) he was feeling much better and was walking around and excited to see the squirrels, ducks, etc. We had a deep conversation while seated under a tree about the pine needles and pine cones that were on the ground and how they fell from the tree above. I illustrated this by holding them up high then dropping them to the ground, which he would have me repeat while he tried to mimic my tale about them coming from high above. I think he got it.

I will just add some other photos without much explanation. First, from yesterday at the botanical gardens where we were watching turtles climb on a rock (in background).
A moment later when Emmett decided he didn't want his picture taken.
Later in the day when Emmett was showing me that he had figured out how his pockets work.
From about a week ago when I was watching Emmett and Augie at the same time and gave them a family-style lunch by stacking everything in the middle of the table and having them go for it.
From a few weeks ago at the park. Emmett loves to hang and swing pre-slide. (poor photo quality for this and the last as they are from my cell phone).

Oink oink

Emmett woke up this morning with a slight fever (99ish) and was a little whiny. I went to the lab for the morning and when I got back things had gotten a bit worse. He was ultra-clingy to me and was only happy if I was sitting down and he was in my lap. I knew he wasn't feeling too well and could tell he was warm, so tried combinations of taking him outside, stripping him down, etc. to cool him down and to keep his mind off of his not feeling well. Finally it reached the point where he was taking very short, quick breaths and looked really out of it, so I took his temperature again and found it was 104.1. I felt like the worst parent for letting it progress to this point, but quickly called the doctor to check if there was anything I should be doing besides giving him tylenol. I gave him the tylenol and it took about 10 minutes for things to improve, but suddenly he was happy and moving around much better. Magical pharmaceuticals! The doctor finally called back and upon hearing the symptoms thought there might be a chance it is swine flu (or H1N1 for those that want to make sure the pork industry doesn't take a hit from this one). It is horrible timing as Emmett and I were going to take a road trip tomorrow up to Oregon to see family, but now we are in a holding pattern to see if he is on the road to recovery. It is very sad to see him so ill, but there is part of me that likes it as it is the only time he will really sit still in our arms. I do hope he is better tomorrow, though. Andrea is going to stay home with him while I go teach. Hopefully she is a more nurturing and attentive parent than I was today.

Rough times for the little one

I really wish I would have taken a video of Emmett doing this thing that he has done a few times where he stands in front of the couch and suddenly starts slamming his head down into the cushion repeatedly---almost seeming like he is punishing himself. He would be smiling and laughing the whole time he did it, too. Well, last night I think that the fun was brought to an end as he tried a repeat performance on the kitchen table. This got him his first real bloody nose and left him with many, many tears. I think the game is over.

Emmett is also having a crazy rash on his inner thighs and now on his testicles. Actually, I don't think that rash is the right word as it really looks like blisters. We are trying to figure out what is going on with our first thought being friction from running with wet diapers causing the spots, but they seem to be appearing at night, too. I don't get it. I have just finished boiling his cloth diapers to make sure they are sterile in case there was some bacteria or something that got into them. We have been forced to use disposables for a few days to try to get this under control.

I didn't take pictures of the blisters...sorry.

Trying again

I have been meaning to get back to the blog for some time, but always seem to find something I would rather do. Part of the reason is that as time passes I feel there is so much to talk about that I would have to write and write and I never feel like sitting down and writing and writing these days. So I am going to try to get caught up by posting a series of shorter posts and then ease back into what is happening now (for those keeping score at home, Emmett is now 19.5 months old, is saying a bunch of words with some two-word combinations coming out, and is a ton of fun to be around).

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words (so moving pictures must be worth millions). In order to make up some lost time, I will just post some pictures and movies and then try to catch up on things in later posts. First, start with the obligatory eating picture. Emmett loves green mush, and especially loves green mush then pictures. If you look closely, there is food in his hair too. This, actually, is very rare and I would say that though it appears we lost, I would say that it was probably a tie.

I went to a birthday party, actually two of them, last weekend and they involved dancing. There was a moment, mid-party when I had a realization that I dance like Emmett and it pretty much killed the party for me as I thought to myself that it is cute for a baby, not cute for an adult. The video is a good example of what happens each time we turn on music for him: especially AC/DC. There have been a number of very funny times with dancing with Emmett as we can be anywhere and if he hears a song playing (dance-able or not) he will break into dance---on the sidewalk, in the seat on his bike, etc.


I hate to post two dancing videos, but this is a good example of the way he works. He will be completely into something but feeling the music in his soul, then eventually a small dance breakout has to happen. I promise...no more dancing videos (in this post).


Alright, just a couple more pictures before I go.