Last weekend, Arden got to meet a golden-globe-carrying goddess in the form of a real Emmy!

Arden’s grandfather, John Bayless, won the coveted award for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, Miniseries, Movie, or Special for his work on the HBO miniseries, John Adams (which if you haven’t seen yet, you should).

Arden seemed a little nervous in Emmy’s sparkling presence, but interested nonetheless.

Congratulations Grandpa John!

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As many of you know, we’ve had some success teaching Arden a few baby signs. The sign for “eat” and “more” came naturally to her being the bottomless pit that she is, but she also knows some other signs like “banana” and “all done.” (Are you seeing a theme?) When we first researched baby signing, we read all sorts of fun stories about babies using signs abstractly to express themselves. For example, one story we heard was of a baby using the sign for light while watching a sunrise with her father. We’re not terribly disciplined about using our baby signs, so we weren’t really expecting Arden to use them outside of their literal meaning (i.e., to ask for food). She surprised us, however.

We were walking to a restaurant the other evening and she kept pointing out into the distance and following it up with the sign for “ball,” which is a simple, overhand throwing motion. We kept looking around for the ball she was talking about, but didn’t see anything and chalked it up to the usual trial and error that goes with the baby language territory. When we left the restaurant, however, she started doing the same thing, but pointing up at a higher angle, and we finally figured out what she was pointing at. It was still quite light out when we were walking to the restaurant, so it’s understandable why we missed it the first time. But in the waning light of the evening, we finally noticed the faintly glowing, two-thirds-full moon, or as Arden likes to call it, the ball in the sky.

UPDATE:

Arden continues to use the ball sign and point out the moon in the car, on walks, etc. She often looks to the sky to point out birds, airplanes, and trees, but her favorite find is ALWAYS the moon.

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Arden, Mama and Daddy went to Walnut Creek to celebrate Halloween with some friends. We ended up strolling along Broadway Plaza, showing off Arden’s homemade costume and getting lots of laughs (the white part is a bathmat…). Here are some of our favorite photos of the night:

If you’re having trouble figuring out what she’s supposed to be, there’s a big hint in one of the photos. Sayonara!

Categories: Anecdotes, Photos, Updates
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Warning: This post contains graphic depictions of infant defecation. Reader discretion is advised.

OK, so we’ve all heard the amusing story in which some hapless father gets squirted in the eye by his newborn son during a diaper change, right? So how is it that nobody warned this hapless father about the ability of an infant to fire a stream of watery feces a good 2-3 feet?

Seriously, is this normal, or does Arden just have superhuman bowels? Every time I go to change her, I feel like I’m trying to diffuse a tiny little poop bomb that could go off at any second. I try to make sure that the old diaper is in a position to block any sudden explosions, but somehow she always seems to know to wait until the exact moment that I take the old diaper away to unleash her fecal fury.

The first time it happened was actually pretty funny. Gilly was in the kitchen while I was changing her downstairs and I must have let out quite a cry of alarm, because she came rushing into the room to make sure we were OK. The poop had shot off the pack-’n-play changing table, onto the laminate floor (luckily, easy to clean), nearly hitting one of our dining chairs. By mere chance I happened to be standing to the side of the table at the time, so only my hand got caught in the blast. Gilly and I have since been the direct target during subsequent explosions. We do a lot more laundry these days…

The latest incident, which occurred early this morning around 5:30 am, wasn’t quite so amusing. I was actually in the middle of cleaning her up and hadn’t even taken the old diaper away when she blew. She erupted with such force that the old diaper I thought was in good blocking position ended up acting as a ramp that sent the poop flying off the portable changing table (which I had set up on our bed…) in a high arching trajectory, onto the sheets of our bed, and onto the bedroom carpet. We were up for a good half hour after that, treating the stains with Nature’s Miracle (never thought I’d be using it to clean up after a human…), changing the sheets on the bed, and of course, finally getting a new diaper on Arden.

After this last experience, we’re seriously considering holding her over the toilet for several minutes at every diaper change. Or maybe we should just change her in the shower to facilitate cleanup.

Anyway, for those of you who are already parents and have experienced projectile pooping… seriously, a “heads up” would’ve been nice. And for those of you who expect to be parents in the future, consider yourselves warned.

Categories: Anecdotes
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As it’s been more than a month since our last post, we thought we’d put something up here so everyone who checks this site regularly would know we’re still alive and well. Everything is progressing normally, so for now, we’re really just cruising and waiting for Gilly to go into labor. But, in an attempt to make this post actually worth reading, here’s a (hopefully) amusing story.

Gilly had a rather difficult craving to satisfy the other day. She wanted vanilla soft serve (not ice cream, mind you, but soft serve) in a sugar cone. Well, as all of you soft serve aficionados out there know, soft serve is almost never served in a sugar cone. Most places serve it in those rather flavorless, yellow cones. So what is a dedicated husband supposed to do in this case? Improvise, of course. I went to Safeway and bought a box of sugar cones. Then I drove to McDonald’s, which was the closest place to our house that sells soft serve (couldn’t have it melt on the way home) and asked them to put the vanilla soft serve in one of the sugar cones. Voila!

It’s amazing the weird things you can ask for at restaurants when your wife is pregnant. Gilly’s latest favorite at Quizno’s is the veggie sandwich, add turkey. I definitely get puzzled looks when I ask them to put meat on what is supposed to be a vegetarian sandwich. But if I quickly shrug and say, “my wife’s pregnant,” I usually get a “say no more” type of response.

Categories: Anecdotes, Updates
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First off, let me say that Gilly’s pregnancy has been remarkably uneventful up to this point (knocking on wood…). For that we are both extremely grateful. That said, if there’s one thing so far that has been an issue for her, it’s been her transition from sleeping on her back to sleeping on her sides. For those of you who might not know, obstetricians recommend these days that a pregnant woman sleep only on her sides. When a pregnant woman sleeps on her back, the baby can put added pressure on the inferior vena cava, which is the large vein that returns blood to the heart from the feet and legs. It is thought that pressure on this vein puts added strain on the heart and can increase the severity of circulation-related pregnancy symptoms like varicose veins.

Anyway, now that Gilly is sleeping exclusively on her sides, her hips tend to get really achy as the night progresses. This past weekend, in addition to sore hips, Gilly was suffering from a nagging cough. At 4:30 am on Sunday, she just couldn’t sleep anymore and sat up in bed feeling miserable. In an effort to be supportive, I asked her what I could do to make her more comfortable. Exhausted and uncomfortable she said, “I don’t know. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Well when you say that to a man, he’s gotta come up with some solutions, right? A cough drop was an easy fix to the coughing issue, but what to do about aching hips… Being a typical male (a half-asleep male, mind you), I decided in my infinite wisdom that “walking it off” would help the achy hip issue…

So there we were at 4:30 am in pajamas and fleece pullovers, heading out the door with the dog in tow (hey, if we have to go, so does the dog, right?). As the chilly early morning air finally woke up my brain, I realized how truly bizarre my idea was. I was sure that Gilly thought I had lost it and was just complying out of sheer exhaustion. And Amber… well OK, she was actually pretty stoked. As far as she’s concerned there’s never a bad time for a walk.

Frantically trying to rationalize my decision, I remembered a scene from the movie As Good as It Gets when Jack Nicholson’s character Melvin visits Helen Hunt’s character Carol at 4 am to discuss the state of their relationship. The exchange goes like this:

Melvin: It feels a little confined here. Let’s take a walk.

Carol: See. It’s four in the morning. A walk sounds a little screwy to me, if you don’t mind.

Melvin: If you need an excuse, there’s a bakery on the corner. There’s a shot it’ll open soon — that way we’re not screwy — we’re just two people who like warm rolls.

Then it dawned on me. Just down the street there was a donut shop. There was a good chance that they’d be open, so doing my best Jack Nicholson impression, which isn’t all that good, especially at 4:30 am, I told Gilly that if we headed to the donut shop, going for a walk wouldn’t be that weird. We’d just be two people who liked warm donuts (I couldn’t really think of anything to explain away the fact that we were still in our pajamas though).

After a short hike down Amador Valley Blvd., we discovered that the donut shop was indeed open, so we each enjoyed a fresh donut (maple old-fashioned for Gilly, maple cake for me) and headed back home. Remarkably, the walk did seem to ease the aching in Gilly’s hips a bit, and we were both able to go back to sleep for another 4 hours.

In the end, the only one who took issue with my 4:30 am walk idea was Amber. She was mad that she didn’t get a donut.

Categories: Anecdotes
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