Charlie's Baby Blessing

In Latter-day Saint churches, we like to give babies special blessings in church about a month or so after they are born. It's sort of like a christening, but we just call them "blessings." They are performed by a church member who holds the priesthood, usually the baby's father or another family member or sometimes another male member of the congregation that the family knows and loves. A circle of invited priesthood-holders stand in a circle and all help to cradle the baby in the middle. The person giving the blessing listens for inspiration from God as he speaks, so he knows what to say. It's very special. Hollie was blessed by David when she was a baby, and last Sunday Charlie got to be blessed by his Grandpa Sam (Dave's dad). 

Smiley Charlie

I love baby blessings. It's tradition to dress babies in white, and we dressed Charlie in this hysterical little white tux with short sleeves and short pants that my brother William had been blessed in when he was a baby, 21 years ago. (Hollie was blessed in the white dress that I had been blessed in as a baby. My mom is the complete opposite of a hoarder, but she does keep really good care of a few select things, and blessing outfits are one of those things.) It was really neat that Dave's dad gave Charlie his blessing, too (even though David waited until church had begun to ask his dad if he would be willing to do it! We're so grateful he said yes!). My favorite part, I think, was when Charlie was blessed that he would grow up to be "kind, obedient, and fun." It was a blessing full of love, and I am excited to see our fun little boy's personality grow in the coming year.

Charlie's Grandma and Grandpa Grover, his Aunt Liz, Mary, Sarah, and Uncle Angelo all got to come visit for the weekend, and our house was momentarily filled with way more stories, jokes, laughter, and Texas sheet cake than Dave or I could ever create with just the two of us, and, consequently, Hollie was SUPREMELY happy. Dave and I are far from boring, unless you are an almost-two-year-old, in which case I'm afraid we get to be desperately boring. So for three happy days, Hollie had a handful of people who were completely interested in everything she had to say, followed her from room to room, chased her around the backyard, and smothered her in tickles and kisses. Her Aunt Sarah gave her an enormous pink-and-white striped pig that is taller than she is, and Hollie fell immediately in love (pictures pending). It was a glorious weekend.

Hollie and her Aunt Mary having way too much fun.

Anyway, here are a million gazillion pictures of taking the family to the South Plains Fair (a last minute decision that meant leaving for the fair at 5:20 p.m., coming home at almost 8 p.m., making dinner and then eating it at 9 p.m. and putting Hollie to sleep at almost 10 p.m. AND IT WAS ALL WORTH IT!) After the fair pictures are a variety of family pictures taken outside of our church that will be interesting to nobody but our family, so feel free to skip all those if you want to! Or feel free to look closely at how my hair was clearly wet when I slept on it the night before and I'm pretty sure it didn't even get brushed out that morning. I blame 9:00 a.m. church. 

Appreciating prize-winning produce

We're so grateful for Sarah being willing to take Hollie into the petting zoo. Such a fabulous aunt!

Petting sort of sad-looking goats. We mean you no harm, little goat!

Hollie woke up Sunday morning asking to see the bunnies again.

First carousel ride! She *almost* liked it!

First carnival game! I sort of can't believe I let Holls stick her hand in that nasty butt water and touch those rubber ducks. I'm pretty sure if you looked at gonorrhea under a microscope, you would see something like these nasty old rubber ducks.

But it was worth it for this awesome PURPLE MONKEY! She looks apathetic here, but she was gaga about that monkey for the next 48 hours.

What could be better than grandparents and a fair? NOTHING! (Except maybe being old enough for the rides.)

Oh yeah, Charlie was there, too, wearing blue jeans for the first time in his life.

And now, without further ado, a selection of several family pictures in various combinations of church-clothed people:

Come back and visit soon, Grover fam!!

Thoughts at the End of September

I've tried to update this blog for months now. There's so much to record, I can't fit it all in, nor do I know if this is even the proper venue for recording all that I'd like to keep. It's been a month full of all kinds of thoughts, and they contradict each other constantly, so writing down any one thought feels sort of dishonest since I'll likely be thinking a contrary thought in the next moment.

So let me just get some stuff out there so I can move on in this blog and stop feeling like I have to play catch-up whenever I want to say something.

You can't tell here, but his eyes are steel blue.

#1—I Had a Baby

Our Bonnie Prince Charlie either came late or right on time, depending on which due date you think was accurate. Two days before I went into labor, he made a royal flip (that I felt, in the middle of the night) and decided he'd try to come feet first. The doc gave him 24 hours to change his mind and right himself, but I went into labor before this change and before we could schedule the necessary C-section.

A tender mercy: I went into labor literally one hour after my mom showed up. My sweet mom, whom we all thought bought a plane ticket way too late, that surely the baby would be three weeks old by August 8th, but who came right on time after all. 

Mom played with Hollie for a few glorious days, just the two of them: Grandma Hollie and Little Hollie. It couldn't have been more perfect; they couldn't have more cute together. She was a million times better behaved for Grandma than she ever is for us.

Dave and I went to the hospital at midnight on August 8, and I had a C-section at 3:00 a.m. on August 9. My water broke as they wheeled me into the operating room. It was maybe the most uncomfortable and freaked out I've ever been. The spinal block calmed me down, even though it made my arms spasm uncontrollably (I hear that some women have their arms restrained with belts—I'm glad I didn't, even though it was unnerving to see my hands flopping about like fish out of water).

David loved wearing surgical garb. He looked like Jack Shephard from Lost and kept making Jack faces and saying Jack lines to keep me calm and entertained ("I don't believe in miracles, John!" "I need to bury my dad!" "I'm a surgeon, not an anesthesiologist!").

Dave reading Ryan North's Choose-Your-Own-Adventure version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, To Be or Not To Be. It came in the mail the day I went into labor. It is brilliant and funny and made the sleepless nights more manageable. Note how properly disheveled we look. And note the bright sunflowers my doctor brought for me from her own garden.

Finding out I would need to have a C-Section was hard to swallow. It felt a little bit accusatory, like, "You aren't a real woman with a body who can handle having a baby. We need to help you. Also, if this were the medieval times, you would be a dead woman. Thanks and here's your bill." But fortunately my doctor is lovely and I also had lovely friends and family shower me with support and advice. It was all worth it when they finally pulled Charlie out (feet first, after all, just upside-down) and announced his boy-ness. (Also, David saw my uterus outside of my body. He probably doesn't want me publicly announcing this, but I can't help myself. It's too weird. It deserves utterance. Also, he said he wasn't going to look but then he did anyway.)

#2—I Love Being a Mom

Charles Roscoe has been a pleasure and a joy. The boy sleeps in his cradle at night! He still wakes up for feedings, but it is nothing like the 24-hour trade-off schedule that Hollie had us on. David and I took turns for six months taking turns holding her all day and all night, watching obscene amounts of Netflix (and way too many episodes of How It's Made and My Name is Earl). 

Chaz eats like a speed demon and then falls right back to sleep. I'm less anxious this time around, so I feel like I am enjoying his babyhood more than I did with Hollie. I loved Hollie as a baby, but I was so scared and panicky, especially at nighttime. Now I just feel sleepy-drowsy and hungry at night. I feel a lot more relaxed, and he really is such a good baby. He's easy to pacify, he rarely cries. He smiles at me every morning. It's lovely.

And Hollie is hilarious. I can't believe she's almost two, and I promise to devote a whole post to her on her birthday. Suffice it to say that she keeps us entertained and on our toes. She hasn't tried to kill Charlie yet, either, which is nice. She has such a big personality that I spend the day thinking of her as a fellow adult, a child, and a baby all at once. I love 'em. I love these crazy kids.

#3—I Wish I Were a Better Mom

I found myself wondering these past two days whether I am a stay-at-home mom or not. Our kids don't go to daycare. David and I split the work 50/50 or 50/50ish. We both spend some time on campus and some time at home during the days. So are we both SAHMs? Are neither of us?

Dave's been sick for two days, so I've been the sole baby-wrangler except for when he swooped in this morning to change Hollie's poopy diaper and swooped in again tonight to put her to bed (David doesn't really know how to be sick). It's been hard. I can't believe how often I take for granted putting Charlie in Dave's hands while I go for a run (or even go to the bathroom). I suddenly feel guilty for realizing how hard it is to do a thing that many of my girlfriends do full-time everyday.

So I wonder...am I not so great of a SAHM?

There's more I could say here about a lot of things. I consider myself a feminist, but this has been a pretty loaded word, especially in my church of late. I look at Hollie, who is picking up on the stuff of life like some kind of psychological kleptomaniac, and I wonder how to instill in her both the values of a feminist and the values of a stay-at-home mom (again...am I a SAHM? Isn't there some kind of online quiz or something I can take that will tell me?). Or if not a SAHM, then something close. 

I want Holls to feel both limitless and reasonable. I want her to feel free but to also recognize the ideologies we all subscribe to in order to function in American society. I want her to rebel and concede, to socialize and be independent, to question and to believe. I want her to be faithful and skeptical all at once, even though these traits often bring my own heart and soul into anxious turmoil. 

I don't want her to feel anxious turmoil. I don't want her to worry. 

I want her to be all confidence and all humility. I want her to know herself but to never be so cocky or self-assured to admit it.

I also don't want to hold her to any of these expectations, because I never want her to feel that I'm disappointed in her.

So that's where I'm at. 

I had another baby. I love my babies. I don't know what's best for them or how to be what's best for them.

And those are my thoughts here at the end of September.

All About Holls

Hollie as a flower girl at her Auntie Pan-Pan's wedding.

Mowgli ought to be showing up here any day now, so I wanted to put up a post tonight that is all about Hollie, since she'll be having to share the limelight soon. I've been meaning to post an update about our little sprite for a long time now, so I am somewhat dismayed that it's taken so long to record these details. In any case, we love our little Baboo, and she is growing like a brilliant little weed. She is learning so much everyday, and we are learning so much from her. I know that sounds cliché—maybe it is cliché—but the feeling is very genuine. She's a comedian and a rascal and a sweetheart.

Interesting facts about Hollie (with random pictures interspersed):

• She is nearly 21 months old, and we recently had to prove at every airport that she wasn't two years old yet (our last trip in which we won't have to purchase her own seat).
• Since she was 18 months old she's been able to count to ten (to our immense surprise, considering neither one of us tried to teach her this). However, like the Looney Tunes frog who will only perform when no one is watching, she has refused to count to ten on video (she gets too silly). 
• She knows lots of colors, and her favorite colors seem to be blue (because it's the easiest for her to identify), pink (because she gets really smiley and silly when she says it), and white (because it's still the crayon and sidewalk chalk color she chooses to draw with the most. It makes no sense to me, either). She gets a little confused sometimes between black and brown, purple and pink, and blue and green, but in Japan green is just another shade of blue anyway, so she's probably right after all.

Blowing bubbles on the fourth of July.

• I'm pretty sure Hollie's cousin Miriam could sing the national anthem by herself at this age. Hollie can sing the Yo Gabba Gabba! theme song. You can't win 'em all, folks.

Eating chips and Dave's homemade salsa on her first backyard picnic. She couldn't get enough of that salsa.

• Every time a cardboard box comes to our door (whether it is child-mattress-sized or book-sized), Hollie thinks it's a pizza. Two things we are sort of ashamed of: (1) pizza is definitely Hollie's favorite food, and (2) we have ordered enough pizza in the past few months that Hollie assumes if someone brings a cardboard box to our front door, it must be pizza. On the plus side, she'll eat anything on a pizza, even onions, green peppers, and mushrooms (which is more than I can say for David, the shroom-snubber).

Eating fruit salad with Mom. Yes, I am very pregnant.

Blowing bubbles with Dad. Yes, he is wearing red-white-and-blue pom-poms.

• I've heard that some toddlers start to regress a little bit when a new baby is born. We've been talking to Holls a lot about big sisters and new babies, and we think she is catching on. I don't know if this is related to that or not, but Hollie has started wanting to sleep on us for her naps instead of in her crib—something she did for the first several months of her life. She'll sleep for about 30 minutes in her crib, but then she'll fall back asleep on us and stay that way for another hour, sometimes longer. We can't help but cuddle and sleep with her—it's just too much fun being so close while she's so little.

Napping with Dad.

Putting Dad to sleep just before bedtime.

• Hollie loves to "shing shongs" ["sing songs"], and these are some of her recent favorites: "Popcorn Popping," "The Eensy-Weensy Spider," "The Wheels on the Bus" (she can do the actions to those last three), "My Favorite Things," "Do-re-mi" (from the Sound of Music), "I'm So Glad When Daddy Comes Home," any song about dogs, and this ridiculous song her toy teapot sings to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." She can sing every third word/letter of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and the ABCs.

This was after she had dragged a frying pan from the kitchen cupboards into the living room for a chair. I found her deep in thought like this with a baby toy hanging out of her mouth. 

• Hollie is learning to say a lot of things, almost over night. She likes to repeat anything Dave or I say. Some recent Hollie-isms and favorite sayings include:
• "So much!" for "I love you!"
• "Gamma" for "Grandma" and "Gmpa" for "Grandpa"
• "Peep-eye!" for "Peek-a-boo!" (courtesy of her Mississippi Great-Grandma)
• "I need help?"—a sentence she says perfectly and all of the time. Always in the form of a question.
• "Upside-down?"—again, always in the form of a question, and always when she is standing on her head and looking at us from between her legs.
• "run in circle?" when she wants us to sing songs while she, well, runs in circles.
• "Bee-tee" for "Blankie" (which sounds a lot like "E.T." which she says for "E.T.")
• "Ee-Em" for "Amen" after prayers.
• "Tight squeeze!" for when she wants a hug.

Holls has always been very independent, but it's getting worse with age. If she can't eat it by herself, she is likely to shun food. Her first popsicle was lime-flavored, so now she calls all popsicles "sour."

• She still hates swimming pools and getting her feet wet, unless it's bath time.

She has recently mastered the fishy-face.

• She has been known to eat something like thirty grapes in one sitting alone, and she'll eat ketchup with her fingers.

Hollie's Drew-Barrymore-from-E.T. moment. She was really upset when we pulled all of these toys off of her.

• Hollie loves to baby her animals. She likes us to swaddle them so she can hold them and softly sing, "Baby, baby, baby" to them. Then, she sets them on the glider ottoman and tells them "night-night" while she rocks them to sleep by pushing on the ottoman. After that, she usually pushes them off the ottoman and body-slams them. So, you know. 

We put together a big girl bed for Holls today. She is ecstatic about it, but only likes to pretend-sleep in it right now. Mowgli will sleep in our room for the first several weeks anyway, so Holls can take her time. I can't believe how grown she up looks, or how breathtakingly small that little toddler bed looks. So big and so little all at once.

• Hollie loves cuddling lately, and kissing and hugging. When she gets mad, she hits things, but very rarely David or me. Whenever she hits something, she looks at me and says, "Be nice," because she knows that is what I am going to say to her.

And that's our lovely lioness of a pixie daughter! Here's a quick video for the grandmas. Hollie was counting to ten in the bathtub, so I ran for the camera only for her to stop immediately (see the Looney Tune frog comment above). So all I got was "1-2-3-Bounce!" We've been trying to capture her singing songs, but, again, we've been pretty horrible at it. I slaughter some of the lyrics, but keep in mind that I had just woken up from a nap myself. 

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #31—The Grand Finale!

No cake this year—just a weird looking S'more on a homemade chocolate chip cookie.

Well, we did it! We really did finish 31 Awesome Things in 31 Days (or thereabouts....in any case, we did it all between my birthday and Dave's, when we were both still 31), but it always takes us longer to blog the last Awesome Thing as it turns out. Dave writes up the big day here.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #30—Celebrate Donut Day (belatedly)

The book David checked out from the library from which we took our donut-making recipe. These two dudes are definitely way skinnier than I would expect them to be after reading their little narrative blurbs about how much they love to eat everything in this book (and for breakfast). Their shirts are untucked, but still. (Furthermore, doesn't the guy on the left look like a poor man's Ben Affleck undercover with a Magnum PI stache?)

We originally planned to make homemade donuts for Donut Day last Friday, but that day suddenly got super booked with other Awesome Things (see Thing #28). Instead, we celebrated the day belatedly on a Sunday late afternoon (and continued celebrating well into today with delicious day-olders).

We were also excited to have an excuse to use the biscuit cutter that Dave's mom sent us home with two Houston trips ago. (The donut holes were made using a sanitized lid from our dry-erase board cleaner.)

Deep fryin' some good ole' Texas donuts. David got me a candy thermometer for the occasion (which is nice, because I'm always having to guess temperatures when I fry tonkatsu, so now I can tackle that Japanese dish with more confidence). 

The three dippin' sauces: vanilla frosting (turned into more of a glaze), chocolate frosting, and sugar-cinnamon mix.

Naked freshly baked donuts.

One chocolate and one vanilla glaze. Yes, ma'am.

Can you taste it, folks? Can you? Because it was DELICIOUS. 

A poorly taken picture of some delightful little donut holes.

Uh...the donuts might have been for dinner, so I tried to balance ourselves out by making Dave and Hollie drink a smoothie composed literally 70% of straight pureed frozen strawberries. I think we drank a whole carton of strawberries. Donut day comes but once a year, doo-dah! Doo-dah!

And that's how we ate way too many donuts in two days and why someone should probably come lecture us about feeding donuts to a 19-month-old for dinner. Next time we'll have to have some jimmies on hand to make our donuts more festive. We decided it might be a fun Grover family tradition to make homemade donuts after the first snow each year, so we can dip them in hot chocolate. Nice, right?

I should also mention that David has been avidly reading Michael Moss's Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which is a terrifying book about how America has gotten duped into eating sheer garbage cleverly designed to look like foods we should feed ourselves and our children. Every time we go to the supermarket together, I hear Dave muttering under his breath as we walk through the aisles of canned and boxed goods, "Sugar....salt....fat....sugar....salt....fat...bliss point...sugar....salt...." It reminds me of when he read Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'ubervilles when all he would do was walk around house sighing, "Tess......oh, Tess......poor Tess......."

The only plus we have for the above concoctions of sugar and fat is that at least it was all homemade. Still, we're back on our flexitarian diet this week (two vegetarian meals a day and one omnivorous dish if we feel like it). And we've been pretty good with our anti-processed-food diet, save for Hollie's goldfish fixation. Hey, what am I justifying myself to you for? Quit judging me and be jealous of our donuts!

And that's how we did Thing #30: Celebrating a belated donut day with homemade donuts, baby. ACCOMPLISHED.