Monkey See, Monkey Do

I wonder at what age children realize the purpose of their mimicry. For example, I remember the first time G grabbed a kitchen towel out of the dirty laundry and proceeded to "wipe" everything within her reach. This was when we were living in DC and I remember it being warm out so spring or early summer when she had just turned a year. It was terribly cute as you can well imagine. Next thing you know she was playing with the broom and dustpan and suddenly she was my little Cinderella. :)

Well so it's begun again, this time with BB. It's a little earlier this time, but maybe it has to do with the sibling learning curve: they say subsequent children catch onto things, like "better" ways to get into trouble, that much faster. So the other day BB had a wet wipe in her hand and she was "cleaning" little spots on the wall and carpet. She's since used other objects like a sock or a wad of paper. Cute, but today... I had a pile of laundry laying on the floor and had gotten up to do something else – and following after me was BB trying to throw the laundry into the basket! Granted, she sometimes pulls out just as many pieces, but for the moment, it was ridiculously sweet.

My other reflection regarding this matter is whether or not boys mimic cleaning. Or is it just a girl thing, since they see their mother at it continually.

Buzzwinkle

I couldn't resist this article from the local newspaper. It's got a distinctively Northern Exposure feel to it, doesn't it? Man, I love it here.

Tipsy moose beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Bull moose strung with lights and tipsy on crab apples

What do you call a bull moose tangled in Christmas lights and drunk on fermented crab apples, standing glassy-eyed and dizzy in the front yard of a downtown bar?

Buzzwinkle?

But seriously, the juiced moose had certainly seen better days than Tuesday, when he became a bewildered tourist attraction, parked in the courtyard of Bernie's Bungalow Lounge as shoppers clicked by with their Nordstrom bags.

"He just has this goofy look on his face," said Rick Sinnott, a Fish and Game biologist who came to check on him and guessed he'd probably eaten too many crab apples from an old tree in Bernie's yard.

"He's either drunk or in gastric distress."

Even before his crab-apple bender, the downtown moose was something of a seasonal celebrity, making the television news after he spent the weekend clumping along the avenues with his big rack, thrilling the holiday shopping throngs.

But Tuesday was a banner day for moose hijinks. It started when he stopped to nibble the trees in Town Square Park, which had recently been strung with expensive LED Christmas lights. They snagged in his antlers, and he seemed roped to a tree for a while, generating numerous calls to Sinnott's office from passers-by. After some effort, the moose freed himself, but took the light string with him, dragging it through traffic.

Sinnott sees snagged moose all the time -- Christmas lights, hammocks, swing sets. Usually the animal will pull itself free, though occasionally, for bad snarls, it will have to be drugged and untangled by biologists. Those tangled moose get tagged.

Buzzwinkle has one such tag, which means he's a repeat offender.

After Town Square Park, the moose squeezed into the courtyard at Bernie's, where he settled in a pile of crab apples and eventually assumed a disoriented stance, staring into space, snorting steam. What was on his moose mind? Was he dreaming of chewing spring buds or sleeping in the tall summer grass? Was he filled with crab-appletini regret? Hard to say.

"He's just been in the same spot since I got here," said Gina Senior, a bartender at Bernie's. "He's not really doing much except standing there."

You can't do much for a drunk moose except wait for him to sober up, Sinnott said. And he's in a pretty good place -- among Bernie's fountains and yard sculptures, behind a hedge, safe from passing traffic.

Even Sinnott couldn't resist the pull of a bad moose one-liner.

"These country moose can't always hold their liquor," he said.

The Adventure of the Unknown Due Date

I've been reading Sherlock Holmes of late – I borrowed the "collection": all four novels, all fifty-six adventures – and since I'm in mystery mode, I wanted to cast our recent "adventure" in the Holmesian style. Unfortunately, I lack an essential element which would allow me to get the dorky-wittiness out of my head and into writing (i.e. I never was a very good joke teller).

For those of you who haven't heard, we're presently expecting our third bundle of baby. Up until this afternoon we had no idea how far along we were/are. I'm still breastfeeding BB so I haven't had a period since before I got pregnant with her. Of course, I know that breastfeeding doesn't prevent pregnancy, but we weren't trying to prevent anything! So it's been at least six weeks since we first suspected; and at least four weeks since we've known (via those convenient little home pregnancy pee sticks). Some of our friends, who are the kind of people who know the second that they're pregnant and can give a better estimate of their due date than their doc, have had a hearty laugh at our expense. I, for one, say, what's a few weeks here and there for the first visit – they're just going to poke and prod you anyway. The real fun begins at 20-weeks when you get the sonogram. (The doppler's pretty cool too though.)

Yesterday was my poke-and-prod appt. After my full physical (and all those tiresome questions about family medical history), I got to hear the baby's heartbeat. (The first appt usually takes upwards of two hours and we didn't think the girls could handle waiting so Drew took them to run errands.) In obstetric terms that means the baby's at least 10-weeks; otherwise, the uterus is still nestled in the pelvis and the doc can't hear or feel anything. We also did a brief internal sonogram, but the nurse practitioner didn't quite know how to work the machine to get the proper measurements. So for a better estimate (of the due date), they decided to refer me over to a professional ultrasound office – and that appt was this afternoon.

I'm forever in awe of the Doppler Effect and how it relates to obstetric ultrasounds. I mean what did people do before they had such things? Guess? :) The technician expertly looked at everything in about 20 minutes: my uterus and ovaries, the placenta, and different parts of the baby. For those of you dying to know, it's still too early to determine the sex of the baby – and we're *not* finding out this time anyway. But, probably most importantly, we're calculated as being 13 weeks and 2 days. That puts us at a due date of about 2 June 2008.

Sorry about the quality. We don't have a scanner here so I took a picture of the picture. Lighting was a problem and the paper was wavy (because they print the picture using heat?) so you get all those strange shadows. One of them might even be my head.

These Baby Legs are Made for Walking (video)

Per my earlier post of the same title...

TOPh: First Haircut

Last week I had another set of pictures all picked out for this installment of That Old Photo, but I can't remember what they were. These are just as cute and there's a great after-story behind them too.

This is a picture of Drew, back in the day, with his grandpa, out to get his first haircut (in Nebraska). Didn't he have nice golden hair? A little curly too.

Afterwards. Notice in particular the name of the barber shop: Kerk's. Fast forward twenty some odd years. As seniors in college (in S.Dakota), Drew and I took an economics class from a Dr Kerk. One day after class, Drew asks Dr Kerk where he's from and he replies that he's originally from Nebraska, from this little town where his dad still owns a barber shop. As it happens, it's the same little town where Drew's mom grew up – and where Drew got his first haircut.

So Drew forwarded these pictures to Dr Kerk and he in turn forwarded them to his father, who was interested in seeing them. If you can believe it, Mr Kerk said he remembered Drew and his grandpa. Well for some reason, Drew happened to be passing through Nebraska some months later, and even though Mr Kerk was semi-retired at the time, he gave Drew another haircut.

These Baby Legs are Made for Walking

My BB is a walker – after a fashion. Earlier in the week Drew said he saw her take a couple of steps, but it's not bonafide until Mommy's seen it. So both yesterday and today, I saw her on several occasions take a few shuffling steps. In terms of distance they don't amount to much: maybe less than 2 or 3 inches. I think the trouble is she hasn't quite mastered the knee bend. When she's motoring around on two feet holding my hand, she tends to keep rather stiff knees so that she walks more with a side-to-side rocking motion like the movie-mummies. But that will come in time. She's got to get a little braver first in trying more than just a few steps.

New Feature: That Old Photo

For those of you who own digi cams, you know how easy it is to accumulate pictures. Our own library includes just over 7000 of them. Our very first "camera" was a digi camcorder that took grainy still photos. We made some great videos in its time – we even edited and burned them to DVD. The second was a digi cam that eventually met with a terrible end on a marble floor in Istanbul. About that time, we owned a scanner so we went on a scanning binge and scanned in all the paper pictures that we could get our hands on. (That takes a while, if you know anything about it, and gets old quick.) We also acquired a large number of those old school slides with the cardboard, sometimes plastic, border, which we gratefully paid someone to scan for us. And if the title on our latest pictures are correct, our third and current camera has done nearly 4000 pictures all by itself.

Anyway my musing for tonight is this: how often do I actually look at those old photos? For that matter, how often does anyone look into their library? In honor of the old photos, I'm going to try and post one or two on a weekly (?) basis. I'll keep to anything from the last millennium from either side of the family, and maybe you'll get an amusing (but hopefully not too embarrassing) story to go along with it. I thought I'd start off with some of my childhood. Those are always good for a laugh, right?

I believe I'm modeling the latest in earmuff fashion here (circa 1990). Or maybe it's my inane sense of style. As to the face, I have no idea. Maybe I was trying to evoke the cool-dorkiness that I embodied at that time?

This here is one of Drew's favorite photos of me (c. 1988) – with my parents and grandparents (on my dad's side), YieYie and NaiNai. Note the brilliant sense of color? (In my defense, at least they're all pastels.) Pay close attention to the knee-high socks with pumps. Yup, I don't think anyone cared that I went out in public like that. Though I care (a little more) now, I don't think I've learned anything in the last 20 years so, sadly, you'll probably see my kids looking like this. Maybe their survival instincts will kick in and they'll know a thing or two, or find someone who does.

Was I Really Like That?

I don't know what you call it, but sometimes I want to (and sometimes I do) laugh out loud at my oldest's behavior...because it reminds me so much of how I remember I behaved. (First borns and onlys have a lot in common you know.) Case in point, when G gets up from a particularly late nap, she's, shall we say, very moody, a bad moody. (Maybe most little kids go through this.) The littlest things will set her off. Today it was a set of books that she insists on toting from room-to-room, whether she actually reads them in each new location or not. (At night they have to be next to her, just like her stuffed dog, or she refuses to go to sleep.) She was having trouble carrying them all at once and so she was doing that weepy bit that I find annoying and at the same time amusing. She happen to set the books on a slight incline and she was so mad that they wouldn't stay in their proper order! But when BB decided to reach for one of the books, I knew it was going to get ugly because G would push her. I told her, "It looks like your books are giving you a lot of grief. Maybe it's time I put them away because you're going to get in trouble for pushing your sister – over your books." The barely contained frustration and anger and injustice and full emotion in her voice as she told me she didn't want to go sit in time-out is what really did it for me. I can remember very clearly when emotion would choke me like that. Even now, as an adult, a smaller version of it can well up in the back of my throat and I'll have to swallow hard in order to get it to go away, before I can speak normally. Maybe it's a kind of compassion that I feel for G. After all, she is my oldest and this is the time when she's feeling all her emotions and just learning how to control them. As they say, it's tough being two.

I'm Sure I Don't Know What All the Fuss is About

Someone tell me: are siblings always so argumentative? We have four almost identical bar stools in our kitchen and this morning the girls were interested in the same one! Mostly, it was G who didn't want to give up her stool, and then of course she wanted the new one that BB was using. Thankfully BB is still at the blissful age when getting certain things aren't that high on her priority list. Not to say, though, that she doesn't care about her older sister snatching (certain) toys away from her. In fact, BB's learned to hold on and scream. Next thing you know she'll be pushing back... :sigh:

Our Fascinating Skin

I don't know if it's something that all babies do – both of mine have – at one time or another: pinching. It's been downright annoying both times, but this second time, you could say I've had more time to analyze it. The pincer grasp is one of the first things they "learn" and maybe one thought is that they're perfecting the technique – on my skin. They grab at your neck, or part of your exposed torso. Not only are they relentless but they can pinch to the point of cruelty. BB's currently working on her pinch-and-roll, and that's some of the most painful. Maybe skin just pinches so delightfully beneath the fingers. Maybe it's the texture and elasticity of pinched skin. (Try the stuff on your elbow.) One thing that finally got G to stop was when she realized that pinching hurts. Or maybe she just grew out of the fascination. I can't wait until BB does.