What happens at Grammy and Goppy's....

So much is changing so quickly. Micah had his first overnight at Grammy and Goppy's house Saturday night! Saturday was a good day - I went to meet a friend for lunch while Elliot took Micah out to services, and then we all went to a birthday party for Merrick at the Germantown Water Park later that afternoon. Micah got wet, crawled around and had a great time.

We then went to my parents' house, dropped Micah off, and took off for dinner. We had reservations at The Melting Pot, and it was delicious! We ordered a cheese course (spinach artichoke cheese), we shared the vegetarian entree, and we split a chocolate course (we ordered the Chocolate Cookies & Cream Dream). On our way home from dinner, we stopped at Target - we needed to pick up a few things for the house. We bought these "paper rope" baskets for under the coffee table two weeks ago, but, unfortunately, we only picked up 2. We've been searching for a third one ever since. Well, as we were perusing the aisles, we noticed that they had a new shipment of the paper rope baskets in a different color - a dark chocolate brown (the ones we had were a "natural" color - kind of a light wood look). We decided we'd rather have three baskets, so we bought 3 new ones in dark brown and decided we would return the other two. Perfect! We got home late (almost midnight) and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and groaning from eating too much food.

This morning, I still woke up at 7:00 am, but I was able to lounge in bed for a bit before I got started on my day. I took the dog on a leisurely walk around 8:00 am, then started cleaning the house because Elliot's brother Steve, Jodi and their youngest daughter Stephanie are coming down to visit today. Elliot finally got up around 10:00 (it took a cattle prod to get him awake), and we spent the next 1 1/2 hours sorting stuff and putting things away. I feel like we finally made some progress on the basement!

We then headed up to my condo - we needed to drop off a few things there for donation and make a list of all the things we need to finish so that we can put it on the market after Labor Day. We were there about 20 minutes or so, then drove over to my parents' house. Micah was wide awake, dressed and playing upstairs with my mother. He was SOOO happy to see me - he lit up with a huge smile, started waving and wiggling - so hard that he knocked himself over! It was SOOO cute. I took him in my arms, gave him a huge hug and a kiss, then finished giving him his bottle. We fed him lunch and started to head home. We stopped by Target on the way back to return the other baskets, and arrived home just in time for Micah to take his afternoon nap. Hopefully, he'll sleep until our company arrives.

Diaper Acrobatics

We have a new sport now - we call it "Diaper Acrobatics." Changing Micah's diaper is really an acrobatics routine now - he rolls, flips, grabs, sits, stands, and climbs - it is amazing we ever manage to GET the diaper on him at all! He also spends most of it shrieking if you try to pin him down. I'm SOOO ready for potty training - I'm just not ready for Micah to be that grown up. Tell me this diaper acrobatics is a phase - that he'll get more cooperative once he settles into this moving thing, right?

Everybody loves to share

Micah and Nugget are becoming great friends - they love to share things like food and toys. Really, neither one of them seems to understand that they each have different toys and food. Micah is always stealing Nugget's alligator and frog, Nugget is always trying to steal Micah's food, and today she made off with Elmo. She growled and shook him as Elmo cried out "Hahahaha!" and "Elmo loves it!" Micah found this too funny and laughed and laughed. When he finally regained possession of Elmo, he, too, put Elmo in his mouth. I have a feeling the dog and Micah will be swapping spit many times in the next few years. Does it make me a bad mom that I just don't have the energy to be disgusted by this anymore?

Yes, baby, I'm here!

There are some moments I wish I could freeze in time - or somehow take a snapshot to forever hold on to the memory. Do you ever have those moments - ones that just tug at your heart strings, but yet are so simple and impossible to truly capture with a picture. There are times when I wish I was an artist - perhaps I would sketch the images when they are fresh in my head. Bedtime tonight was one of those moments - well, three of those moments.

The evening was a typical night - we gave him his bath, he played with his ducky and only attempted to climb out of the bath tub two times. We really do need to start bathing him in the upstairs bath tub! Elliot took Micah upstairs after bath time. He put on Micah's pajamas, read him a story and gave him his bottle. Micah was sleepy, so Elliot put Micah in his crib...and the crying began. Usually, Micah either rolls right over and falls asleep, or he rolls around the crib a bit restless (but trying to sleep), or he is happy and chats with his toys until he falls asleep. We waited a minute to see what would happen, but it was obvious that Micah needed a bit more cuddling before bed time.

I walked in, picked him up and sat with him on the glider. As we rocked together, Micah sucked his thumb and nestled in close to my chest. I held him with one hand on his head, gently stroking his hair, and the other arm wrapped around his body with my hand fanned out rubbing his back and tush. This was moment number one. I just love those moments when Micah snuggles. Within minutes, Micah was sound asleep, gently snoring.

I carefully stood up, slowly moved to the crib and gently lay Micah on the mattress. I slowly inched my way towards the door...and the wailing began again! I walked back to the crib and reached in to touch Micah. He immediately quieted down, took my hand and started smiling. Micah just wanted me to be close - moment number two. I rubbed his back and he slowly relaxed and put his head down. I gently worked my way back to the chair and sat down again, hoping that just having my presence in the room would be sufficient. Micah fussed for a moment until he realized he could play peak-a-boo with me through the crib.

After several rounds of peek-a-boo, I decided that it was time to try and sing Micah to sleep. I started with You Are My Sunshine and then I moved on to The Rose. Within moments, Micah was quiet, lying still and sucking his thumb. (As an aside - is anyone else picky about grammar? It drives me crazy when people misuse the words "lay" and "lie" or "then" and "than" or "accept" and "except." Not to mention when people misspell definitely - there is no "a" people! I admit it - if you blog and I'm reading it, I am noticing your grammatical and spelling errors. When I review my OWN blog posts, typos, missing words and failure to use parallel grammatical structure drive me bonkers. I even try to avoid ending sentences in prepositions, and it drives me crazy that I have allowed contractions to sneak into my blog posts. And yes, Dad, you did actually catch a typo once before I had a chance to correct it! But I digress.)

This time, once Micah was quietly nestled in, I decided to be smart - I thought I would wait a bit longer to ensure he was fast asleep. Micah's room is quite small - the glider is in the back corner of Micah's room and runs perpendicular to his crib (forming an "L" shape). The ottoman sits in front of the glider just next to his crib. While I waited for Micah to fall asleep, I sat back in the glider, closed my eyes and slowly started to drift off myself. And then, it happened - moment number three. I noticed this very faint whisper of a tickle by my feet, and when I opened my eyes, there was Micah's little arm sticking out through the slats of his crib reaching out to touch my toe. He just needed to know that I was still there. I pointed my toes towards him so that his hand could brush up against my foot, as if to say "yes, baby, I'm here." He slowly started to fall asleep, intermittently checking for me. It took another fifteen minutes, but he finally fell into that deep sleep that allowed me to quietly creep out of his room.

What I want to remember tonight is that there is a little boy upstairs who is just comforted by my mere presence - reaching out of a crib to brush my toe brings him a world of comfort. How incredible is that? I hope he knows how full my heart is with love for him, and that I am filled with joy just knowing he is there, too.

I don't know why he swallowed the spoon

Do you remember that children's song "There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die." Looking back at the lyrics (and so many lyrics to children's songs), it is rather inappropriate for young children. Nevertheless, I could not get the song out of my head at dinner on Tuesday night.

We took my parents out for a dinner at Zaytinya (one of our favorite Middle Eastern restaurants) for Restaurant Week. The restaurant serves only "Mezze" portions (small tasting/appetizer sized portions) and they had a 5 course special for Restaurant Week. We each ordered a different option on the menu for each course, and we had 20 dishes to share between the four of us! The food was delicious.

During the meal, I fed Micah his dinner. When he was all finished, I let him have the spoon - I figured it would keep him busy and entertained. What I did not expect was to spend the remainder of the night trying to confiscate the spoon back from him. Every time he had the spoon, he shoved it all the way back into his throat and tried to swallow it! Needless to say, it kept making him choke - not that he stopped doing it over and over again or allowed me to take it away from him.

I guess the low point of the meal was picking up my car from the valet. Apparently, he decided to park it on the street (and we payed $11 for that courtesy) and he got a ticket. He handed it to me and told me it was my problem. We contacted the restaurant and they offered us a free meal and offered to cover the ticket. We are appealing it first, but we'll see about whether we take them up on their offer to cover the ticket.

Micah is officially a crawling MACHINE these days. Army style, on all fours - it really doesn't matter much to him. He pushes back to a sit, he chases the dog, he follows me around the house - he is just adorable. He gets into everything now, and he is constantly wanting to stand (and he keeps trying to walk, which worries me). We are working on childproofing the house, but we still have a way to go.