A few more

Here are a few more, mostly from my phone while we were in Portland.


Erin loves the monkey bars, but mostly just to hang on and then drop down.


Erin watering Gramma Beth's plants.

Naked water play.

Sleeping in the front pack.


Baby in the front carrier... yes, she's wearing some no pants.


Erin and Nora playing.
Mama and Nora at the zoo. Looks bad, but she was so comfortable like this she fell asleep.


Erin watching the raptor show at the zoo.


Erin sitting on the lion at the zoo.

Erin playing dinosaur at Gramma Beth's. She was dinosaur Bobo and Nora was dinosaur Lesper.

Erin at the wadding pool at Green Lake.


Nora trying to roll.



Erin at the fountains at Ballard Commons.


Happy summer girl.

The pictures

Somehow we haven't managed to take all that many pictures recently, but here are a few:


Erin loves to play with Nora in her bouncy seat and Nora loves to give Erin her biggest smiles.

Nora is getting great at tummy time and has rolled from her tummy to back many times. Yesterday she rolled from her front to back a few times!

Nora is a drool monster. She is always wet from chin to navel. The diaper burp rag is a constant companion to mop her up.
Serious baby.
This is more like what we usually see. She's a very happy, smiley baby.

Erin playing with her "puppy."

Our dining room.
Our playroom.
Our kitchen.
Our living room.

Pictures of upstairs are coming, but somehow it's always a mess up there with a sleeping baby to tiptoe around.

We are alive!

I've been looking at the computer this week each day feeling guilty about our lack of posting. Not only are we away from family and friends with a rapidly changing baby, but this is also the only "baby book" that we have. Will Nora think that we didn't pay any attention to her from weeks 5-14?

I suppose we have plenty of excuses, but I still feel bad and also overwhelmed with the idea of trying to chronicle all that has happened since we left for the lake on July 1. So, I'm going to start fresh and catch up as I can.

Nora is 3 months old now and a fantastic baby. She continues to have a nice even temperament and each day gets more and more entertaining. About 2 weeks ago, she discovered that she could blow raspberries and spit. Now she spends so much time blowing bubbles and spitting that her shirt is usually wet from her neck down to her belly button. She doesn't seem to mind and gets so much joy from it. She also discovered her feet 2 days ago. She's now working on trying to grab them (those legs have a mind of their own) and get them into her mouth.

Right before we left Portland last week, she had an evening when she rolled over about 5 times in a row. Mom was there, so I know that I wasn't making it up. However, since then she hasn't come close. It's like the idea hasn't crossed her mind again. She is getting really strong with tummy time and tolerates it way better then Erin ever did. She actually seems so strong all over- she never wants to sit these days and is much happier standing. To get her to sit on your lap, you have to bend her in half, which she actively resists. Silly baby.

She continues to coo a lot and is very smiley and we've even heard her laugh out loud a few times. Erin is very good at getting her to smile and Nora loves to watch her big sister flit around the room. What great entertainment. Generally our only issue with Erin and Nora is that Erin loves Nora TOO much and wants to always be right there in her face kissing and hugging. I suppose there are worse problems to have.

Although Nora is a very easy going baby, she is not quite the sleeper that Erin was at this age. I suppose that I can't complain too much, but Erin ruined my expectations! Nora is now up 2-3 times at night. And this week, I finally convinced her to go to bed before 9! She's now been asleep by 8:00 for the last 3 nights and getting up around 8am. Not too bad. Nora does have Erin beat in the nap department though. If we are home all day without big disturbances, Nora takes a 2-3 hour morning nap and a 1-2 hour afternoon nap and then a variable late afternoon snooze. Erin was way older before she got on any kind of nap schedule, so this is great. If I'm lucky, I get the afternoon naps for Erin and Nora all lined up and get an hour or two to myself in the afternoon which is amazing.

Nora is still a great nurser and has no trouble taking a bottle. She's quite a chunk and is working on multiple forearm rolls and a forth chin. I'm not sure if it's because she's eating more volume lately, but Nora has become a champion at covering everyone and everything in spit up. My shirts are all covered in spit up by the end of the day and I've experienced the horrid spit up down the cleavage a few too many times to count. Ugh. I'm just holding my breath that she starts to outgrow this soon. We started Erin on rice cereal at about 4.5 months mostly out of curiosity, but I think that we'll hold off for Nora. No reason to make even more of a mess.

We're still not sure who Nora looks like, but seems to be keeping her own look. I went back and looked at pictures from her first month and she looks just the same, only bigger. She is getting more hair and sometimes it looks a little reddish. Her eyes are still very blue and she may actually keep them so we'll have a blue eyed and a brown eyed girl. Where's my green eyed baby?

Erin is doing well too, just not changing as quickly. She's still full of questions and non-stop chatter during the days (and nights too). Overall she's doing well adjusting to life in Seattle, but I think that she's a little bored and eager to have more kids to play with. Since we've bounced back and forth between MN, Portland and Seattle this summer, we haven't met as many kids here as we'd like to and so it's a lot of Mommy and Erin time and man is Mommy boring. We are planning to have her in a community preschool 2 days a week and also sign her up for a few classes to keep her busy.

As I mentioned, Erin is a great big sister and her only downfall is over exuberance over Nora. It's been hard to keep her as gentle as needed with both Nora and Duncan when they are both just so exciting! Erin seems to love her role as the big sister and a few weeks ago asked that we refer to her as "the big sis." She also loves to talk about herself as "the big girl," and will ask, "what is the big girl doing now,'" and "what is the little girl doing now?" Erin also nicknamed Nora "the squawker" when I told her that Nora was just squawking as she cried in her car seat.

Erin has more interest lately about taking care of her baby dolls. When I asked her the other day what she was going ask for from Santa this year, she told me she wanted a pump (a real one, not a pretend one Mommy!) so she could feed her babies. Today she was pretending to pump for her babies, but told me "my pumpers don't work today... maybe tomorrow."

We have an elementary school 2 blocks from our house and it has a great play structure. Erin has gotten more and more adventurous playing there almost daily. It amazes me to see her climbing around like a monkey and flip over the bars by herself. She is also working on riding a scooter and a bike with training wheels. We've got a ways to go, but she is certainly making huge progress this summer.

Our house in Seattle is working out great. It's a great central location that is close to lots of stuff. We've been walking to the library, the wading pool, the zoo, the farmers market and the grocery store. I've been getting spoiled with the great weather here this month and it's going to be hard to give it up when the summer ends soon. But, I'm hoping that we can still get our rain gear out and continue to enjoy the neighborhood when the weather turns.

Matt has been working a lot and usually is leaving the house by 6:30am, but luckily he's been able to make it home for dinner most nights and has always been able to be home to get the girls to bed. I'm still not sure how he's able to survive on minimal sleep, but he keeps ticking day after day. He's been biking to work and it's been great to incorporate his exercise into the daily routine (something I need to do ASAP). So far fellowship feels (to me) a like residency- like we're doing the same thing just in a different location.

I guess that while there are some fantastic things about Seattle, it still doesn't feel like home and it's hard to imagine it feeling like home. I miss Minneapolis and I miss Portland. The first few days here were some of my worst and it felt hopeless trying to figure out how I was going to make it another 3 years here. The hopeless feeling is gone, but it is still very lonely here. I think part of it is the shock of being home full time with the kids, but a lot of it is that we still don't know many people here and we're not hooked into the community yet. Making new friends has never been a strength and now I'm trying to do it as a (mostly) stay at home mom. Not going so well so far.

Just to add some more to the mix, I'm starting my new job soon. My official first day is September 1, but I won't actually work my first solo shift until September 11. I'm still slogging through paperwork and hoops to jump through. Turns out that being affiliated with the UW, CUMG, Seattle Children's, Providence and Evergreen is more than a little complicated.

I did my first orientation at Providence last Monday. I guess that it went well, but man this is going to be tough. It occurred to me how challenging this is going to be to relearn medicine, practice solo and try to be efficient while learning a whole new system. On top of that, things are done a little different out here and so I'm going to have to spend a bunch of time trying to sort out the way I've learned things vs how things are done here... like the evidence behind giving everyone 1/4 NS!

We're also trying to figure out how to make child care work. Mostly I'll be working ~4 24 hour shifts/month. We're going to have Gramma Beth come up for most of them, but still need to work out a back up plan. Yet another thing for the "to do" list.

The back drop of this whole summer has been Papa Joe. I'm not sure that I've ever mentioned on here before, but Dad has early onset Alzheimer's. He was diagnosed 3 and a half years ago, just before his 60th birthday and has had a very rapid decline. Just after I came up to Seattle for the first time this summer, he got sick and stopped walking and started needing even more personal care. It became obvious that he was no longer safe at home and we (Jeannette and the kids) couldn't continue the round the clock schedule that we were working through, so we needed to move him to a care home. He went in and out of the hospital a few times and is now settling into his adult care home, which is great. However, he rarely knows who I am anymore and we all know that the next crisis is coming soon... It's funny that these weeks can all be distilled down to a few sentences, but it's been a stressful, miserable and heart-wrenching time.

Ok, I've rambled on for long enough. More to come soon.

8 weeks

I realize that I've got 3 weeks to catch up on, but it's looking like a very busy week as I get us ready to leave on Thursday, so here's a sneak peak at Nora this week. She has turned into a smiley baby who loves to coo and "talk."

6 weeks and bye bye Matt

Matt and Dean left last Friday to drive out to Seattle with both dogs and the cars. Luckily things were uneventful and they got into Seattle on Sunday afternoon. Matt has now laid eyes on the house that we rented sight unseen and assured me that it's really nice. I'm having a hard time not being there.

We've ramped up the activities now for Erin that I'm really winding down with work and we're not frantically trying to get Matt ready to leave. We went to breakfast both Saturday and Sunday mornings, got out on a nice long walk the last few days and spent some quality time outside playing. We're trying to ignore the reluctant summer weather and make the most of our time left here.

Erin has been having a tough time falling asleep at night. We tried moving back bedtime gradually, but really think that she's starting to outgrow her naps. She plays at nap time for a long time and finally falls asleep, only to sleep soundly late into the afternoon and then have trouble falling asleep at bed time. Today we had "quiet" time for an hour or so, but got her up before she slept in the afternoon. Late afternoon and bedtime were a little bit hairy, but she fell asleep much easier. If the naps are really on their way out, I'm really going to miss them.

Nora is growing by leaps and bounds. She goes in this week for a check up and shots and I'm excited to see how much she weighs. She is quickly outgrowing her clothes and really seems to be thriving. She has long periods of content wakefullness most days and is really starting to smile and coo. She watches people more intently and watches them as they move around the room. She seems to like to watch Erin and give her plenty of smiles. She still seems to hate her carseat, but is content most of the rest of the time. However, today she's very unsettled and has spent most of the afternoon and evening restless and unhappy which is very unusual for her as her ususal evening fussies last only an hour or two right before bedtime. I hope this doesn't last.

Nora's sleep is generally improving. She had about 5 nights in a row of sleeping for ~6 hours, but then decided that she liked her 2am meal, so she added it back. I'd prefer it go away, but who listens to me? She's getting easier to put back down again and spend most nights entirely in her crib (I'm a sucker for taking her back to bed with me after the 4:30 feeding cause she's hard to get to sleep otherwise).

Her baby acne and hair loss is in full effect so she's not looking quite her best, but I still think that she's pretty cute.

5 weeks

I talked to Gramma Beth yesterday and she's reminding me that I'm behind on posting. Nora is getting bigger every day and Gramma wants to see pictures!


We've had a good week. Nora is finally settling into a sleep routine (am I tempting fate by calling it that?) that doesn't leave me feeling like a zombie all day. For the last few nights, she's stretched out to 5-6 hours of solid sleep overnight. How delightful. We've been out late with her for a few nights at graduation parties for Matt so she's been settling down for good around midnight and then sleeping ~6am. I love it! She's also finally in her crib we're not having to hold her quite as long to get her to stay sleeping when we put her down. I'm optimistic that we're heading in the right direction.



Like I said, we've been doing a lot of graduation parties lately. We had the Peds graduation last week, a surprise dinner for Matt with the EM/IM folks, the EM graduation party Friday and the IM graduation Saturday night. Luckily we've only got on more party (the EM/IM barbecue) on Wednesday then we'll be done... phew. For a cranky hermit like me, I need the break.

Once we're finished with the parties though, Matt's going to be leaving MN. Dean and Matt will be hitting the road this Friday morning driving both cars and dogs out West. Even though we've known about this day for the last year, it's still hard to believe that it's actually here. Part of me is excited about this adventure and this new chapter in our life, but it's hard not to feel sentimental and sad as we look at leaving MN. We've lived here for 10 years, lived in our home for 9 years... this is where we've lived almost our whole adult life. We started our family and our careers here and have friends and family that we will miss deeply. I know that we'll be back for visits, but we will be walking away from the life that we had and things will never be the same. Sigh.



Erin's still doing great with Nora. She wants to hold her and loves to snuggle with her and talk to her. She is constantly telling me that "Nora is smiling at me!" I've yet to see more than a few half-hearted smiles from Nora, but it's nice that Erin is so optimistic. Erin also loves to talk about "my baby sister" and seems proud of everything that Nora does. Erin also seems unfazed by Nora's crying which is good. Nora hates her car seat and is usually screaming in the car (strange because she is otherwise so mellow). Erin often wants to try to make Nora feel better, so says "It's okay Nora, don't cry, it's ok." Unfortunately, Erin can't be heard over Nora's cries, so she turns up the volume until she's yelling "it's okay Nora!" repeatedly at the top of her lungs. Needless to say, by the time we arrive at our destination, my nerves are a little frayed.



Erin has gotten more and more into pretend play over the last few months and it's great to see what she comes up with. Today she made a tent on the porch and played with Grandpa and her babies in there. Most days we play "Birchwood" and "school" at least a few dozen times and Erin still loves to pack and go on trips. She made a reading fort yesterday and insisted that we all come in for story time. She also loves to try role reversal and will often tell Grandpa that she is the Grandpa and he is the baby. She's certainly continues to have a strong sense of how things should be and can get downright bossy if we let her.


Erin also is still having fun with word games. When she "reads" books to her babies and when she sings to herself at bedtime, she makes up her own language which she finds hilarious. She also loves to try saying words with odd accents and with intonation that is off and again, she cracks herself up.

We also seem to have finally won the keeping poop out of the pull-up battles that raged for so long. We made a potty chart and have her earning prizes and she's finally decided that the prizes are better than driving us crazy, so she's been good for about 2 weeks now. I think that I'm going to phase out the chart over the next few weeks. I am getting a little tired of scouring the target dollar bin, but this is way better than changing a poopy pull-up every night.


We had a low key Father's Day yesterday, but did enjoy spending time with Matt and Dean. Erin especially liked the "bessert" portion of the day and seemed to like rootbeer floats just as much as Daddy.

4 weeks

What a difference 4 weeks makes. It's hard to remember how much they change in the first few weeks, but obviously Nora has fulled out a bit and is becoming quite the chub. She's working on the elbow dimples and wrist rolls. Cute. Below is a picture from her birthday for comparison.

Matt's trying to enjoy his last days on elective before starting fellowship and has been running most days. After his runs, Erin like to stretch with him and join in with the push-ups. She prefers hardcore decline push-ups... what a stud. After doing her push-ups, we can usually get her to show us her strong muscles complete with sound effects.


Erin is now only in school 3 days a week (Monday, Wednesday and Thursday). We thought about nixing it altogether, but she loves school and it seems to be great for her to have her own thing. It's also been great for us to have a chance to get some of our work done. Erin was home today and it was beautiful weather. We went to the park and Erin surprised me with her climbing skills. She scurried up the kiddie climbing wall without any help a dozen times.

We also played with sidewalk chalk, although she was more interested in talking about the neighbors dog rolling in bunny poop. Charming.



Nora is having a tough time with sleep. It's gotten worse and worse over the last 2 weeks and several nights she is up almost every hour and it's impossible to set her down and have her stay asleep. Last night we moved her out of our room (she's almost as noisy a sleeper as Erin was and it keeps me up) and things went a little better. She went to sleep at 11:15, was up at 2:00 and 4:00 and up at 7:00 which is the best night in a long time. We're up with her for about 45 minutes for each feeding and rocking. Luckily she's really not unhappy at night, just restless and awake. I'm hoping this phase doesn't last too long. I always try to remember what my mom says about babies and kids: no matter what the kids are doing, good or bad, it's always a phase and doesn't last too long.