Dear Norah, Month One

Dear Norah,
Deciding you didn't want to wait until October 23 to make your entrance into the world, you surprised us all with coming two and a half weeks early and being born on October 6. And if your birth is any sign of what's to come, you're going to be quick, adventurous, do things your own way, and will keep us on our toes. 

I've spent the last nine (well, eight and a half) months wondering what you would look like and what your personality would entail. It turns out I could have saved some time on your looks...you came out a spitting image of your brother at birth. You have a head full of dark hair, with a button nose and a full bottom lip, just like Graham. You were 7 lbs 6 oz and while your brother had you beat by two ounces, side by side, it would have been hard to tell the two of you apart.

Your personality (or as much personality as one can have in the first month) can best be summed up as cuddly. You are our little snuggle monster. You're most content in someone's arms, and you love to sleep on our chests with your legs drawn up. Because you were a breech baby, your flexibility during your first month was nothing short of circus-like, and having your legs as high as you could get them was quite normal.

The fact that you're such a sweet cuddler could fool you into thinking that you don't have a fiery side to you. And that would be oh, so wrong. In true Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style, one minute you will be sound asleep and the next you will be screaming because "didn't we know you wanted to eat five minutes ago???"

You lost your umbilical cord at a week old and I found myself being sad that the newborn milestone was over so quickly. Perhaps it's postnatal hormones or perhaps it's knowing that you are likely our last baby, but I've found myself being incredibly sentimental during these early weeks. This second time around, I know now how fleeting they are.

While time has a way of making days (and some nights!) long, months and years fly by in the blink of an eye and I want to soak up every part of your newborn-ness. Like the sighs you make while sleeping. Your eyelids. The soft hair that covers your little body for such a little time. The way your arms and legs flail because you have no control of them. The fact that you are dependent upon me to sustain your sweet life.

Even though you've only been here a month, somehow it seems as if you were always meant to complete our family of four.

Love,
Mommy

Dear Graham, Months 31, 32, 33, 34 and 35 (Part 2)

Dear Graham,

Month 33

Just as much a tradition as the Houston rodeo, bluebonnet flowers make their appearance each spring and each spring, mommies and daddies from around the area drag their dressed-up kids out to pose in the fields of flowers. Early one weekend morning, you and I set off toward the Texas Hill Country in search of wide open pastures of bluebonnets.

Thankfully you’re too young to know that posing in flowers isn’t exactly the coolest thing for a boy to do, but you’re not too young to have developed a cheesy smile that you would flash every time I asked for a smile. While this year’s photos definitely beat last year’s photos (not that this was hard, given you wouldn’t even sit for a photo this time a year ago), it still proved to be challenging because each time we would pick a patch of bluebonnets to pose in, you would find another that you would like better and we’d be on the move again. (Maybe you’re not too young for a “grass isn’t always greener on the other side” lesson.)

While you are potty trained during the day, we still put pull-ups or diapers on your for the night. And this month you developed the really fun trait of taking them off. This was usually more disastrous during your nap, because you would choose to take it off at the start of the nap as a stall tactic to sleeping. And then if you happened to fall asleep and then have an accident, you would wake up upset at being all wet. For nighttime, you would take off your diaper by yourself in the morning, not wanting to be in a wet diaper any longer. While I clearly don’t blame you, it took many mornings of me explaining why you needed to keep your diaper on before you finally caught on. Thankfully this worked, as I was about to reach for the duct tape to provide extra reinforcement.

As we prepared to list our home on the market and move to Florida, it became evident that we would need to pack the overflowing chaos of our house some of your toys away to help the house show well for potential buyers. So while you were napping or sleeping at night, we would slowly pack away the toys you were least likely to miss. Soon enough though, you caught onto our scheme and I would had to explain that some of your toys were “in storage” until we moved to Florida. It wasn’t long before you would look for something and, when unable to locate it, proclaim that it must be “in storage.”

We continued to talk to you about being a big brother, and would often ask if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. You changed your answer almost every time the question was asked. Except instead of being a baby girl, you pronounce it baby GRIL. Which makes us smile every time. We also asked what you thought we should name the baby. After hesitating for a short second, you replied “Mickey Mouse.”  I think Mickey Mouse Akin has a nice ring to it.

While you don’t always enjoy sweets and candy, this month you discovered something you loved: push pops. While out at a local Tex Mex restaurant (mommy and daddy ate a lot of Tex Mex in our final months in Texas, realizing it would be a long time before we got it again), they offered push pops as the dessert on the children’s menu. After eating your quesadilla (along with your weight in chips), the waiter asked if you could have the push pop. We said sure, thinking you would be indifferent to it, as you are most sweets. Boy, did we guess wrong. You couldn’t eat it fast enough, with melted orange sherbet running down your chin.

You clearly didn’t forget your first push pop experience. Every subsequent restaurant we went to during our time in Houston, you would ask if you were going to get a push pop there.

Month 34

While I know you don’t understand this now, maybe one day you will have an appreciation for the work it takes to sell a house. Especially selling a house with a 2-year-old. In the weeks leading up to putting our home on the market, we had many house projects that we wanted to get done. While you could be a big helper (or at least actively participate) in some of the activities like landscaping, the majority of items had to be done while you slept at night or napped on weekends. (Because things like wall paint and a 2-year-old don’t especially mix well.) Your daddy and I had what seemed to be a never ending “to do” list, but somehow it came to an end (or our perfectionist ways finally realized that the house was in good enough condition to sell).

This brought a whole new challenge: keeping the house spotless with a 2-year-old and finding activities to keep us out of the house while it was being shown. Fortunately, we were blessed with an amazingly quick sale (we only had two days and one evening of showings, one of which was a Friday when we were at work and you were at school). The one area of our house that I quickly realized got dirtiest the fastest was the kitchen. Between cooking, clean up, and your general eating habits (which always led to food on the floor and sometimes led to food appearing in other mysterious places), I quickly decided we would be eating out during the period that our home was actively being shown.

The first night we went to IHOP. (Hey, I said we were eating out, I didn’t say it in glamorous restaurants.) For the amount of times we ate at an IHOP when I was pregnant with you, I think you had only been once before for breakfast. (And strangely enough, with baby #2, I had no IHOP cravings.) The best part about our entire experience was how “silly” you thought it was that we were eating breakfast for dinner. I let you pick which item you wanted from the kids menu and you selected French toast. Not only did you eat all of your “dinner,” but you also ate some of my pancakes, eggs and bacon too. Apparently you liked this concept.

On the Saturday that our house was on the market we knew we had to be gone for the bulk of the day. We decided to go to the zoo, since you hadn’t been to that zoo in over a year. When we told you we were going (which was on the way there…we’ve learned lately that telling you about something too early leads to you wanting to go “Right!Now!” and not understanding how far in the future the occasion may be), you thought we were going to the zoo that you went to with Auntie Shann when we visited Florida in October. We had to explain it was a different zoo, so you took to calling it the “new zoo” for the entire visit.

Let’s just say this experience was completely different than the last time we visited the “new zoo.” Instead of mommy and daddy determining where to go next, you knew exactly what you wanted to see.  First we went to the lions. Then the elephants. Then the monkeys. Then the giraffes. Then the bears. And so on and so on. While your determination for knowing what you want can be appreciated, we thought you might actually like to see some of the animals that we were there to visit instead of just crossing them off your list. (Maybe you’re also not too young for a “stop and smell the roses” lesson.)

Once our house sold so quickly, we realized that we needed to find a new place to live ASAP in Tampa. So that very next weekend, we extended the time we were already going to be in Florida for your Uncle Sean’s wedding and visited Tampa on the front end of the trip. The trip involved five days, four flights, two cities, two hotels and whole lot of time spent out of your routine. Despite it all, you did amazingly well. You got lots of family time in as your Auntie Shann graciously agreed to watch you during the day that your mommy and daddy spent house hunting and then you got to see most of your extended family at the wedding.

Little did we know, the very next weekend we would be flying right back to Tampa again for a less-than-24-hour visit to see a house that your daddy put a contract on for us during the week. We didn’t make it on the first flight (the joys of standby flying), so you and I ventured around the airport in the 3 hours we had to kill. After getting lunch and still having two more hours to go, I took you up to the train that runs between terminals. We got on board and spent the next hour riding the train from terminal to terminal. We would arrive at the last stop and helpful travelers would tell me that we had arrived and I would explain that we were just riding the train because you loved it so much. Even after an hour, you didn’t want to get off to go catch the flight.

While you kept your diaper on this month at bedtime, you became an expert in inventing stall tactics to delay actually going to bed. So after we had read books, said prayers, given kisses and yelled “LOVE YOU” through the closed door, you would all of the sudden yell, “Momma, I need something.” Not anything in particular, just something. And when I didn’t first realize this was just a ploy to delay the bedtime process, I went back in to find out what you “needed.” (Rookie mistake on my part.) You replied with a, “Uh, uh, uh…” and I realized I had been had.

Month 35

The biggest news of your 35^th month was the move to Florida. Like all moms who don’t have enough to worry about so we find new things, I was worried about how your transition would go. After all, we were moving from the only place you had ever known, the only school you had ever been to, the only friends you had made to a brand new house in a brand new state with a totally different everyday routine.

Because we aren’t totally insane, your daddy and I recognized that driving moving vans across country with you along for the ride would be a recipe for disaster. (And that’s probably putting it nicely.) So you and I boarded an airplane the Tuesday ahead of our move and I flew you to Florida to stay with your grandparents and Auntie Shann for a few days. Then I got right back on the same airplane and flew back to Houston to accompany your daddy for the move.

Three incredibly long days later, we were reunited at our new house in Tampa. In addition to the general worries I described above, I was also worried about your reaction to Florida, because you have been told that “Mickey Mouse lives in Florida” and “The beach is in Florida” so I was concerned you had visions of our new house being a beach where Mickey lived. Fortunately, you were enthralled by the new pool we had in our backyard and by the fact that so many of your toys that had been packed away for months were now back, that you weren’t at all disappointed about Mickey and the beach. You would ask questions about our “old house” or see pictures and say something about our “old house”, but all in all, you seemed to grasp the move remarkably well.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment came in your transition from the crib to a big boy bed. While we could have moved you earlier, you weren’t climbing out and we knew we had this transition ahead of us, so we decided to time it together. You got to pick out the sheets you wanted (rocket sheets) and we had many conversations about what a big boy you were going to be sleeping in your own bed. Overall, the transition went pretty well. You shed some tears at bedtime, but you don’t get out in the middle of the night and you still stay in your bed until your sun comes on each morning and mommy or daddy come to get you.

In addition to all of the many changes described above, another big change that we have had to adapt to has been the weather. While it’s generally been 8-10 degrees cooler than Houston (a godsend for your pregnant mommy), it has rained nearly every single day that we have been here. While the storms have kept our pool full and our grass green, they have often been accompanied by a side effect: lightning and thunder. Although we had storms in Texas, they were nothing like Florida thunderstorms and certainly didn’t happen with this frequency. You quickly decided you didn’t like lightning and thunder, but to make sure I was clear on the distinction, you told me, “I like lightning the car, not lightning in the sky,” referring to Lightning McQueen, your favorite character in the movie Cars.

On one of the first weekends that your daddy had off, we packed his truck and headed out to the beach for our first beach day back as Florida residents. We went to Honeymoon Island, which is a state park that was very calm—great for you to play. You adored the beach. You wanted to be in the water most of the time, which is why it was great for you to be able to stand and not threatened by waves knocking you down. You loved looking for shells, little fish, and building in the sand. After staying for around three hours, we had decided it was enough sun for you for the day and started to pack up. You wanted no part in leaving…I think you would have stayed and played all day if given the option.

While these five months were incredibly busy, the joy, laughter and enthusiasm that you have brought to transition made it so incredibly fun. And seeing how “at home” you are in our new home brings a smile to your mommy and daddy’s faces.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Graham, Months 31, 32, 33, 34 and 35 (Part 1)

(After finishing this entire post, I realized it was way too long to hold anyone’s attention. So just consider this first of a two part series.)

Dear Graham,

Yes, I am aware that this is five months of letters. And yes, I am aware that this will likely be a long post.

But, I have two really good reasons for both.

1.       You are going to be a big brother.

2.       We now live in Florida.

It’s amazing how 13 words can summarize an inordinate amount of change, work, excitement, exhaustion, worry, and hopefulness. And did I mention exhaustion?

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s get started where we stopped off in your last monthly letters.

Month 31

For being a short month, February was a full one for us. For starters, I had to teach you the words, “I’m going to be a big brother.” Which is exactly how you told your daddy the news that our family would be expanding by one.

Other (huge! incredible! exciting!) news for the month is that you officially were potty trained. While you certainly are proud of each time you “pee pee in the potty”, your mommy and daddy are so, so much more so. You sport a cute collection of underwear featuring Lightening McQueen, Elmo and the characters from Toy Story, although you ask to wear your Lightening ones almost every day.

Valentine’s Day this year was even more fun as you now know more and more of the characters that adorn the various valentines you received. You also discovered that some valentines are accompanied by candy, which you had a good time enjoying.

You didn’t get the memo that Christmas isn’t celebrated year-round, so your movie of choice continued to be The Polar Express and one morning when I was getting ready for work and you were waking up in your crib I heard you singing Jingle Bells to yourself over the monitor. Speaking of Polar Express, there are a few scenes in the movie that you don’t necessarily appreciate, but instead of asking me to turn it off or fast forward, you cover your eyes with your little hands and every once in a while you’ll spread your fingers wide enough to see if that part is over. It’s precious and endearing all at the same time.

Also in February, we went to a “Touch the Truck” event in The Woodlands. It essentially was a gathering of all your favorite things: buses, garbage trucks, a helicopter, a fire truck, ambulance, a monster truck and more. We spent lots of time walking from vehicle to vehicle and getting on each, until you found the ICE Truck. You see, the ICE Truck had lots of computers onboard, with a small little holding cell in the back. You could care less for everything about this truck, except for the fact that the ICE agents had put cartoons on one of the computers. So you wanted to sit right there in front of the computer and watch the cartoons, despite the many other kids and parents who were walking through the truck to get the tour. I finally distracted you enough to get off the truck, and we made sure to stay far away from that truck during the rest of our time there.

In what is seemingly a routine thing to do, we also got your hair cut this month. We take you to a place that has videos to watch and where you sit in an airplane during your actual haircut. While that makes you sit still during the haircut, what really drives you to want to go there is the fact that they have a train table. And you get to play it before and after your haircut. This apparently made such an impression on you that you now know where the hair salon is located (which unfortunately for me is right by the Target we frequent) and you ask to go to it anytime we pass it. When I tell you that you don’t need another haircut yet,  you respond with saying, “But I do need one, momma. My hair is long.”

Month 32

March brings some of the nicest weather we experience in Houston during the year, so we spent much of the month outside. You continue to love to play with your water table, but you’ve now turned it into a ramp for your matchbox cars to slide down on in the water.  You also spent a lot of time in your jump house this month, and you continue to want to have mommy or daddy jump with you. This would ordinarily not be a problem for your mom, but seeing as how my morning sickness peaked at its worst in March, about the last thing I wanted to be doing was jumping up and down.

So, we compensated with lots of other fun activities, like play-dough, St. Patrick’s Day crafts and helping mommy make green smoothies, which is something you love to drink without realizing the health benefits simply because they are your favorite color.

With March in Houston comes the rodeo, a tradition that’s unlike any other. Normally we mark the rodeo by actually going to the rodeo and watching one of the many country music concerts, but this year we took the kid-friendly route and took you to the rodeo for the first time. We knew you would love the many animals, and we were a bit unsure about how you would do on the rides. Spoiler alert: you loved them all.

We started the day off early before the crowds hit and you got to see all of the animals you cared to see. They also had a petting zoo area and you were a bit shy with the very boisterous goats, who apparently are very used to being fed. Once you realized that you could hold your hand out for them to eat right out of, you got the hang of it very quickly. When we were leaving the goats you saw what you called a “carousel” but in all actuality was the pony rides. We went to go wait in line for you to ride the pony and you asked about 1 million times to get on one right now. You had ridden a pony at Charlie’s birthday party about six months earlier and still were talking of the experience, so it was definitely something you were excited to do again. When it was finally your turn, you rode like such a big boy and had a smile on your face the entire time.

Next came the rides. You were tall enough for many of them, and you walked from ride to ride picking out which one you wanted to go on next. We would pay, buckle you in, and wave good-bye as we watched from the approved distance behind the gates. And once the ride would start, you would have a smile on your face the entire time.  Apparently though, you had too much of a good time and didn’t want to leave when it was time to go. So we went from being that family with an adorable 2-year-old who loved the animals and rides to that family with a screaming 2-year-old as we pushed you in your stroller out of the parks. Good times in the life of a toddler.

At the end of the month, we flew to Chicago for a quick Easter weekend trip to meet your cousin Nikolas for the first time and to participate in his baptism. It had been awhile since you had seen all of your cousins and you were excited to play with Emelie and Christopher.

As always, you loved the airplane ride and everything associated with going to the airport. Your schedule, however, was pretty thrown off with flying during naps and late evenings. On Saturday, the baptism was performed at an Easter vigil service that evening, which meant we didn’t get home until after 10:00 that night. Once we got you in bed, we thought you would sleep well, but instead you were up at 4:00 a.m. (yes, that ugly hour does exist) and ready to celebrate the Easter bunny coming. No amount of coaxing could get you to go back to sleep.

Once we finally got to a decent hour where the rest of the house awoke, we went downstairs in search of what the Easter bunny had left overnight. You liked combing through your basket, although you really cared less for hunting for Easter eggs or eating any of the candy contained inside those eggs. Your cousins (minus Nikolas) made up for your lack of excitement by helping you find the eggs.

Thankfully you (and mommy and daddy) took a long nap before it was time to pack up and fly home the evening of Easter. Despite being tired, you were great on the plane watching Polar Express (on Easter).

Stay tuned for part 2…