The Small Family   

Wow, what a week it has been! Monday was our only “normal” day, so it’s been quite a whirlwind. Theo and I started out our crazy week by meeting my favorite prof from grad school (Dr. Bell) and our friend Rachel and her daughter, Lizzy, for lunch at El Torito. That was a slightly hectic but fun lunch. Theo is getting a bit tough to control in restaurants because he very much wants to be down and crawling, not sitting in a high chair. But because I don’t want to bother other diners in the restaurant, I rarely let him get down. Which means I spend the meal dealing with an antsy one-year-old who alternately fusses and throws things off his high chair to express his boredom. Ugh. Eating at home is definitely getting more appealing the older he gets. But still, it was nice to catch up with Rachel and Dr. B. and to see Lizzy, who just gets cuter all the time. She is such a sweet, happy little girl! At the end of the meal I stood Theo up on the floor next to her, and they examined each other with some interest. Lizzy is 17 months old now, but about the same size as Gigantor Theo. (Ha ha—actually, he’s quite average. He just always looks huge to us! But his one-year appointment is on Tuesday, so we’ll see how he measures up. My guess is he’ll come in right at average weight, as he has in the past, and probably on the tall side for height. We shall see...tune in Tuesday for a midweek blog update if you’re curious how he stacks up.)

On Wednesday afternoon, Bill and Sarah (cousin and cousin-in-law who get the honorary “Auntie” and “Uncle” titles ‘cuz they’re so cool!) arrived for a visit. We all went to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant that Chris and I like...and again, what an adventure. Actually, Theo was quite good considering it was near his bedtime, but Theo being Theo, he was into everything. The busboy obviously wasn’t too familiar with small children, because he set the salsa bowl down within Theo’s grasp. He had barely set it down when lightning-fast Theo grabbed the bowl and dumped salsa all over the table. Yikes! We cleaned that up and started to look at the menus...and Theo grabbed hold of my menu and shook it, causing it to hit my water glass and knock it over, spilling ice water all over the table and my pants. COLD!!! We managed the rest of the meal with little fuss, but Theo got bored just as we were finishing up, and the toys I brought to appease him were no longer doing the trick (after being thrown on the ground several times). So, since it was late and the restaurant was pretty much empty (other than one other table of people), I let Theo out of his high chair. He was delighted with his freedom and proceeded to crawl everywhere in glee...and thus I spent the rest of the time until we left chasing after him. Ack.

Bill and Sarah stayed with us for two nights, so we wised up the second night and took my Mom up on her very generous offer to babysit Theo if we wanted to get out with slightly less chaos. While we went to a barbeque restaurant for dinner and then played arcade games (bowling was the goal, but it turned out to be league night, so we settled for the arcade instead), Theo took his Grandma Diane on a walk over to Starbucks and bought her a mocha and a lemon tart. So, we arrived home to find a contented Theo and a contented Grandma Diane. After the monkey went to bed, Bill, Sarah, Chris, and I played an old ‘80s edition of Trivial Pursuit. Sarah hustled us, claiming she had never before done well at Trivial Pursuit and then proceeding to beat us all! I decided the advantage must’ve come because she has an extra little brain helping her right now, in the form of their wee baby she’s carrying, expected for early November-ish! Clearly, their first-trimester fetus is already quite smart in trivia from the ’80s....

Friday morning I decided I’d better get on baking Theo’s birthday cake, since Saturday was sure to be hectic. And alas, said cake looked lovely, but tasted like a nasty, dry bran muffin. That’s what I get for choosing a “healthy” baby cake. So I tossed it and baked another one—this time using our old family recipe for Depression cake, which is much tastier (and actually, probably healthy as well—it has no milk or eggs, so at the very least, we avoided dairy for Mr. Theo). A picture of the cake is in this week’s gallery. You’ll see that it was lumpy and ugly, but made with lots and lots of love.

Auntie Lynnie and Uncle Charles had invited us over for dinner Friday night so they could see Theo around his birthday and give him his present. So Friday afternoon, we went out to our car to go have lunch with Bill and Sarah...only there was no car to be seen. Let me back up for a moment.... You may recall that I mentioned (last week, I think) that Chris was building Theo’s toddler play table, since we discovered that such tables are ridiculously expensive in the stores (anywhere from $175 to $450). Obviously, Chris needed a place to build the table, so he was using half the garage. And thus, my car was parked on the street for one night. In a designated, marked parking place. But apparently, residents of our community are never, ever allowed to park on the street—those designated spots are for guests, who are allowed to park overnight for up to three nights. (This was news to Chris and me, who really should’ve read our CC&Rs more closely, evidently.) And because our community requires residents to register their license-plate numbers with the HOA (a policy that I will not be adhering to someday when we trade in our car(s)), the HOA knew that the car parked on the street was a resident’s...and thus they towed it with no warning. At 2am, apparently—when it had been parked there for a mere five hours at that point. And so, instead of having a nice lunch with Bill and Sarah, we got to drive to the lovely suburb (read: icky, nasty neighborhood in some parts) of North Highlands and pay $250 to get our car out of impound. And thus, the table that cost us $90 in materials now effectively cost $340...a mere $10 less than its inspiration at Pottery Barn Kids. But, as we keep reminding ourselves, it was made with love.

After springing the car, we headed down to Auntie Lynnie and Uncle Charles’ house, where we got to see Theo’s cousins, too (Sam, Tyler, Noelle, and Stevie). And we got to have a yummy lasagna dinner, and Theo even decided he would eat a tiny piece of green bean and a couple tiny bites of garlic bread. Auntie Lynnie and family got him the cutest little “I’m teething” outfit, complete with adorable hat and socks. I can’t wait to have him wear it all! The hat came in very handy at the zoo on Sunday—pictures in this week’s gallery.

As a side note, Theo has his one-year doctor appointment on Tuesday, and I swear the kid decided to do a big turnaround just so we wouldn’t rat him out to his pediatrician. Two things I had planned to talk to Dr. G. about were his lack of naps and his distaste for finger foods/solids. And in the past week and a half, he has suddenly started pretty regularly napping at least once a day, and often twice...and not spitting out every finger food we try to feed him. He still won’t self-feed, but the fact that he’s no longer gagging and spitting out everything we put in his mouth says huge progress to me. Ha ha, I think he didn’t want us to tattle on him to his pediatrician! And the naps are just lovely, lovely, lovely, as they allow his mama to get 30 minutes or an hour (or sometimes 90 minutes!) of work done, and then she isn’t so stressed at the end of the day!

We celebrated Theo’s birthday with his grandparents on Saturday—all three living grandparents came over for dinner and cake. Chris’ parents arrived around noon, and we went to Babies ’R Us so we could help them pick out Theo’s present. They wanted to get him a toy box, and we found an adorable safari-animal one for him. Then Grandpa Tom and Chris put the finishing touches on Theo’s toddler table and built his toy box, while Grandma Kathy and I took Theo for a walk. Later, Grandma Diane arrived, and we all visited and had dinner and cake and watched Theo open his two presents from Chris and me—a set of wooden blocks that he is fascinated with and a little Magna-Doodle drawing pad for babies that I think is a bit too old for him just yet. He stood and played with the blocks on his new play table for a good half hour, though. So neat! And he had fun playing with his piece of cake and even ate a few bites that we fed him. He wouldn’t self-feed any of it, but he did eat a few bites we gave him, so it’s progress.

Because Theo sometimes gets rather agitated in large-group situations, we decided against a party for him, and I think that was probably a wise decision. He appears to be cutting another tooth this weekend, so he has been on and off rather crabby, and I think dinner with his grandparents was just the perfect-sized gathering for him. He seemed to have a really good day overall.

Sunday, his actual birthday, we kept it small (Small—ha!!) and low-key. Chris and I took Theo down to Land Park (huge, beautiful multi-use park in downtown Sacramento) and had a picnic lunch of bread, salami, cheese, and lemonade. Theo crawled around on the grass and explored, and then sat on the picnic blanket with us and gnawed on a piece of bread (more progress!!) and ate some cake. I took a bunch of pictures of him having fun. After a nice, relaxing lunch, we headed over to the zoo (which is in Land Park) to see the animals (more “dits!”), and then headed home. And so ended our son’s very lovely first birthday.

So, I thought I’d sum up the week by detailing some thoughts I had about numbers from the past 365 days:

• Anniversaries celebrated: 1 (first year!)
• Weddings attended: 1
• Family lost: 2 human, 1 canine. May they all rest in peace and know we love them!
• Babies welcomed: 1 (almost 2—Nik was just a bit earlier than 365 days!)
• Stitches received: 30 (no, I still haven’t gotten over that! I’ll probably be whining about it for the rest of my days, so just get used to it. ;-)
• Diapers changed: Roughly 3,650
• Hours of sleep: Not nearly enough
• Trips (long-distance) taken: 3
• Master’s theses completed: 1 (don’t ask me how!)
• Graduations: 1
• Book projects completed: 25 (don’t ask me how on this, either!)
• Money paid out in taxes: Don’t ask!
• Money lost on our house: Really don’t ask!
• Amount of love showered on one super-special little boy: Immeasurable

Happy Birthday, Theo! And thank you for the most exhausting and wonderful 365 days of our life!