baby sausages

this afternoon, angela and ocean came up from providence to visit. we hung out at home for a while and then strapped the girls into their babyhawks and went out for a walk. it was great to get some exercise (for the moms) and some sleep (for the babies), but it sure was cold out there. we had to bundle bebe and ocean up in their snowsuits, and when we came back inside and put them down, we decided that they looked like a couple of baby sausages. tasty and delicious.

they thought this was pretty funny,



until we said that we were going to cook them up for dinner.

oh silly babies, don't look so scared. we were just kidding!

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mmmmm, plastic

we missed uncle seth when we were up at grammy and grampy's house to exchange gifts last weekend, so he came down to visit today. he brought gift cards for each of us and bebe agreed that gift cards make the best gifts!

she doesn't seem to get how they work, though. to her, it was just another fun thing to chew on.

thanks, uncle seth!

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happy new year!

saying goodbye to 2008 is bittersweet. i don't think there will ever be a year that could top this one. i feel sure that at the end of my life, when i look back and take stock of everything that happened to me and to the world in which i lived, the birth of beatrix marie and the election of barack obama will stand out as the two most important events -- one personally, the other globally.

at the same time, so much of 2008 cannot be left behind soon enough. many more thousands killed in a meaningless war, the triumph of hatred and bigotry in the passage of Prop. 8, and the ever-deepening economic crisis, in which the middle and working classes are now paying for eight years of deregulation and tax cuts that benefitted the rich.

but 2009 may give us all the chance to begin to set things aright, and it will have its own gifts, too. we will say goodbye and good riddance to george w. bush, and witness the inauguration of the nation's first african american president. and on a much smaller scale, it promises to be a year of firsts. i look forward to sharing them with you!

front to back: ACTION SEQUENCE

this afternoon, as i was trying to get stuff done around the house, bebe kept rolling over. i'd put her on her belly in front of her little piano, turn my back or leave the room, and the next time i looked at her there she'd be, lying on her back. she adamantly refused to roll while i was watching, though. i finally got it on video, which was also the very first time i witnessed this feat of strength and agility. you'll notice that she's none too happy about being flipped over onto her belly for the seven thousandth time in a row. too bad, beebs -- we gotta preserve this for posterity.

front to back

this time, i missed the action, but i do have before and after shots.

bebe was having some naked bottom time. she was laying on her belly and playing with the top to an activity table that she got for christmas. it plays music and she really, really loves things that play music.


i went over to my computer to check my email and when i looked back at her a minute later, this is what i saw:

what a strong, talented little lady she is! and very proud of herself, too.

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sitting!

just a few days ago, if we put bebe down in a sitting position, she's stay there for maybe two or three seconds before tipping over -- to the front, to the back, to the right or left, she was an equal-opportunity tipper. but now, suddenly, she sits up! after a few minutes she begins to list to the side, and i certainly wouldn't leave her like this out of my reach. but look at what a big girl she is!

and take a closer look at two of her many great christmas gifts: new babylegs and stripey smartwool socks:

mayan shirt

today we spent the afternoon with my extended family. my grandfather and his lifelong best friend married sisters, and their two families spent lots of time together growing up. so my dad has always been very close with his first cousins, and all of our families have spent a lot of time together too. there are now seven kids in the newest generation; the oldest (sophia) is four, and the youngest (thea) is ten days younger than beebs. almost all of us were there today and it was really, really fun to catch up with everyone and watch all the little cousins running around together. bebe and thea are excited for next year, when they'll be able to tag along.

bebe's cousin chely, who is almost three (and is going to be a big sister in june! yay!!!), had some presents for her. chely is the daughter of my cousin ali and her husband edwin, who is k'iche' mayan. ali and edwin and chely live in guatemala, and chely brought bebe a shirt like the ones she and other girls and women at home wear. i tried to get some pictures of bebe in it but they didn't come out very well, because she was intently chewing on the other gift chely had for her, a mix cd of some of her favorite songs.

bebe has just, in the past few days, gotten to the point where she gets MAD when you take something away from her when she wants it. here's the look she gave me when i tried to get the cd out of her mouth for one decent picture.

so i gave up. but josh took a bunch of other pics of our afternoon, so stay tuned for those!

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where's face?

we've played "peekaboo" (or, in bebe's case, "where's face?") with beatrix before, and she's found it funny, but tonight was the first time she actually participated, pulling her dress down off her face over and over again.

slam dunk!

here is beebs playing with one of her favorite xmas gifts, a baby basketball hoop from nana.

please stand by -- EDITED

we came home from my parents' house last night and i realized that somehow in the chaos of christmas i had left the usb cable that connects my camera to my computer behind. so, i'm afraid the daily bebe will have to go on hiatus for a few days, until i can get it back.

stay tuned for news of bebe's first christmas, complete with a toboggan, her first golf club, and a power outage.

i am an idiot. i just looked down at the floor under the table where i'm sitting and found the cable! i had bebe in one arm when i was unpacking my computer last night and it must have fallen out while i was grabbing the power cord. oops. anyway, i am backdating the christmas post to yesterday and we are moving on now, and i will thank you all not to rub this in my face as josh is sure to do when he gets home...

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first christmas!

bebe's first christmas was really great -- but it wasn't without its moments of drama. on christmas eve, as we all ("we all" = mems, teed, aunt marge, uncle ben, great nana and great aunt diane, and josh and me -- beebs was already in bed) sat around the table after a tasty meal of takeout chinese food (a new xmas eve tradition) and a great new addition to our christmas memory books written and read by teed, the power went out. and it didn't come back on until 5 pm on christmas day, after countless phone calls to the power company, who gave teed the runaround like you wouldn't believe.

mems' and teed's house sits way up on a hill, and the crazy wind knocked a tree into the power lines that service their house and two of their neighbors. since only three homes were affected, we were at the bottom of the electric company's list. not only did we have no lights and no heat -- which is serious business when you've got both a 5-month-old infant and an 81-year-old grandmother in the house -- but the water pump runs off electricity too. so, it was a real "old-fashioned" christmas, we all kept saying, wondering if the pioneers on the oregon trail had had similar christmases, trying to figure out how to cook the christmas morning strata in a gas grill and getting buckets of water from a friend's house to flush the toilets.

luckily, we all were able to remain in good spirits, enjoy the time we had to spend together, and exchange lots of thoughtfully picked out and really fun gifts. as usual, josh took most of the photos, but i did capture a couple of my favorite moments of the day.

mems and teed got bebe a really cool sled that will stay at their house for us to use every time we come visit. she's too little to really use it this year, but she sure did like sitting in it and trying it out! (she is wearing an adorable "my first christmas" outfit that jack, katie, will, and their mom gina gave her, but unfortunately it's mostly covered up by the jacket she had to wear to stay warm.)

and although i didn't take any pictures of it, i can't forget to mention that teed, the golf fanatic, got bebe her very first golf club and a box of lady golf balls! since he couldn't get his daughters interested in the game he holds so dear, he has transferred his hopes to the next generation.

since it wasn't clear when the power was going to come back on, josh and beebs and i left in the late afternoon to head back to boston, rather than risk another night of no heat. (bebe was in bed with us on christmas eve to stay warm, which meant that none of us got much sleep. co-sleeping is great if you do it on a regular basis, but if it's not the way you usually sleep it's a hard adjustment for everyone!) we got home in time to watch the second half of the celtics-lakers game. beebs and daddy suited up and settled in.


bebe was excited. could the celtics extend their winning streak (already a franchise record) to 20 games???

daddy teaches her how to high five.

bebe and daddy can both see where this one is going.

the celtics may have lost, but we still had a great first christmas with our baby girl!

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very special visit X 4

last night bebe met some very special friends. alena, jess, alex, and elyse are the daughters of some close friends of my parents, and we've known them most of their lives. they are much younger than us (maggie babysat for them when they were little), but as they have grown up we have become friends with them as well. they are all faithful readers of the daily bebe and beebs was excited to meet them for the first time. oh, and they're quadruplets!

bebe greets her adoring public.

bebe got passed around and with each new friend, she instantly burrowed into her neck for a snuggle. it really looked like she was trying them all out and deciding who was the best for snuggling. i don't think she could pick, though -- they were all good! josh took a bunch of pictures which he will post at some point (although, given the pace that things move over at a little wave, i wouldn't be holding your breath for them).

right before they left he took a bunch of the six of us ladies. i think it's pretty much impossible to get one shot of six people where everyone is in focus and looking at the camera, so here are a few. from left: elyse, jess, alex, and alena.

we love you guys!!!!

and we love their parents mary and steve, who also came over, too. we just didn't end up with any pictures of them. next time!

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citrus

today we decided it was time to introduce bebe to food. we started out easy, with a clementine.

that went well, so we moved on to lemons.

just kidding, we didn't really let our baby eat citrus fruit! she's only five months old -- we're not starting solids for another month. and when we do, we're starting with a nice piece of steak.

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eleven weeks/five months

shoot, i'm a day late with this one. last year, on december 21, josh and i went to the ultrasound lab at the hospital for our "first look" ultrasound, a diagnostic test that is offered to women between weeks 11 and 13 of pregnancy to assess the chances that the fetus has down's syndrome or a few other chromosomal abnormalities. the ultrasound measures the thickness of the nuchal fold, the skin on the back of the neck, which is corrolated to the occurence of down's, and a test of the mother's blood measures the levels of various... um, ok, i don't really remember exactly how the test works. the point is, this was a big ultrasound. it had been five weeks since i had seen the embryo's heartbeat, and it was early enough in my pregnancy that i couldn't feel the fetus moving, so we had no way of knowing if everything was going the way it should. we were planning to tell our families the exciting news at christmas, and i was luckily able to schedule this ultrasound for the morning of the day we planned to head out to my parents'. we were hoping that everything would look good, so we could stun the grandparents-to-be with our news (that story coming up soon).

everything looked good. we couldn't believe that only nine weeks after conception (for reasons not worth going into, the pregnancy counter starts two weeks before sperm meets egg, so i was 11 weeks pregnant but the fetus was only 9 weeks old), the little passenger hitching a ride in my belly already looked so human. we could see its fingers and toes. when the ultrasound tech left to get the radiologist to confirm her measurements, she put up a loop of video of the baby moving around on the screen, which i then recorded with my camera.

i kept this video on my camera for weeks and watched it many, many times a day. it made the whole thing real in a way it hadn't been before. oh my god, we were going to have a baby!

i put up the still photos from this ultrasound, and those from the anatomy scan that was done at 18 weeks, on the refrigerator. they have stayed there all this time (i'm not good at taking stuff off the fridge -- we still have friends' christmas cards from 2 years ago up there) and recently, josh and i have noticed that bebe likes to roll over there in her walker and stare at them, seemingly fascinated. the other day i caught her reaching out to touch them. i'm sure, of course, that she has no idea what they are. but it was still a pretty amazing sight.

hiiiii-ya!, or, getting her butt kicked by her first cold

poor beebs has her first cold. she had a little bit of a runny nose on friday night, was pretty sniffly and cough-y yesterday, and today is full-on miserable.

in this picture, if you look closely, you can see that both her nose and her eye are running.

we dressed her in her really cool bruce lee tshirt (thanks auntie kate!) in the hopes that it would give her the fighting spirit to combat her cold.

no luck.

no, bebe, eating cake mix will not help you feel better. don't you know that sugar suppresses your immune system?

oh phooey. i give up then.

being a sick baby is no fun! (and being a sick baby's parents isn't all that fun either.)

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loving the back carry

bebe is finally big enough for the back carry in our babyhawk. i wore her this way for the first time yesterday and it was GREAT. she seemed to like it, it was waaaay more comfortable for me, and without her right in the front i was able to get lots of stuff done.

a whole pound bigger!

this morning, bebe had a doctor's appointment. she goes more often than some babies because we are doing a delayed vaccination schedule, and today she needed the two shots we didn't do at her 4-month visit. she weighed in at 15 pounds, 9 ounces, which is an entire pound bigger than she was last month! she is 27 inches long, and dr. bastian pronounced her, as he always does, "super duper."

breaking news!

if i'd had my camera handy, i might have a "before" picture to show you, if not an actual action shot. unfortunately, all i can offer is this "after" picture, and my assurances that mere seconds before i took it, miss beatrix marie had been lying happily on her back.

my baby rolled over!!!

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