The Week in Review

What’s new? Lately Fiona’s favorite new game is to take one of my shoes or one of John’s shoes and wear it around the house. She thinks it is hilarious. Her favorite shoes are either my flip flops or a pair of slippers. She also started doing little summer salts in her crib.

A few days ago I took Fiona to the Gull Wings Children’s Museum. We had a blast! It’s really neat, with various aquariums (sometimes you can touch the sea life) and all sorts of different rooms. They have a shuttle simulation with a “moon” room, a car you can sit in, an ambulance and fire fighter simulation room, a room with microscopes that you can use to look at stuff or your own hand if you want, a desert room with a tent, a doctor’s office room, and our favorite, a room where you can dig for fossils.

We started in the boat. I am sorry the photos are so fuzzy. The camera is broken and my phone takes terrible pictures.

We were joined by Lyla and her mom Jenny.

Thinking about going to the moon:

The soil room:

My mom bought Fi a chair for the back patio:

She loves climbing in and out of chairs.

I put her hair in a ponytail, but you cannot tell from the photos. Here she is, right after coloring with some crayons:

She learned how to get into one of her drawers that was previously inaccessible (and today I discovered that she likes to climb into the drawer). Of course she must empty the drawer entirely. She decided to roll around in the towels and cloths that were in it and play peek-a-boo:

You can see the slippers she likes. She has become obsessed with shoes lately, pulling them all out of their cubbies and moving them around.

Then, she decided to climb into one of the toy cubes:

Playing with rocks on a recent walk, and stopping to smell the flowers:

Sweeping in the backyard after the rain last Monday:

 

We spent the weekend in Anaheim. We stayed at the family friendly Best Western across the street from Disneyland. We were not there to visit Mickey Mouse, but so that I could participate in the inaugural Tinkerbell Half Marathon, a race geared toward women. 11,000 women signed up as well as 1000 men. I didn’t really train for this race because of time, weather, and sheer exhaustion, but I was happy with my time. My goal was to finish in 2 1/2 hours and I did just that. My time was 2:31:01. Perfect. I ran the whole thing and didn’t start feeling my non-training until mile 10.

Fiona did great in the hotel room. She had a little trouble going to sleep, but after some nursing and some cuddling, she went to sleep and so did we. I realized that one good thing about being so tired all the time is that I have no problems going to sleep early, so I felt pretty well rested when my alarm went off at 4:15am. She handled being in a hotel room, walking around Downtown Disney, and going to a restaurant for both lunch and dinner. I started the race with my friend Cindy but I finished a little ahead of her.

All in all it was a great experience.

Here we are at lunch (holy cow are things expensive and lines long!) and after the race:

I have no idea who the person in the tutu is.

I got a shiny medal and these lovely blisters for my trouble:

 

That’s our week in review. I hope this week is a good one for everyone!

Twirling, Twirling, Twirling

Witness Exhibit A:

Please excuse the mess she is making of my mother’s kitchen.

In other news, here she is climbing into the stroller:

   

She also figured out how to climb into and out of the planter:

Looking at airplanes:

And she is starting to talk now. She says “mama” and “dada” when referring to me or John. If you ask her where mama is, she’ll either find me, or if I am in the room, she will point at me. She says “do-do” for dog, “ba-ba” for ball, bird, and bye-bye (she waves and says bye-bye at the same time), and “caw-caw” for the crows in one of her books. In some ways, I am excited for her to talk, in other ways, I love her funny babbling and will miss it when she stops. She also started stacking blocks and in a move opposite most of her baby friends, tries to climb into her bed. She can go up stairs without crawling but by standing up and holding onto a railing, can get onto a tricycle and in and out of small chairs. She is still a hug monster, chasing down babies and hugging them. She is using her fork more and more. She points out all the birds in “Down by the Bay” and the dogs in “Wheels on the Bus”.

Here she is at the supermarket, pushing a little cart (photos are from my phone and so therefore fuzzy):

John had to steer. Otherwise, Fiona runs into things and people.

On someone else’s “quad”-cycle?

It had four wheels, so not a bicycle or a tricycle.

She climbed on this at a park recently:

 

This mommy is starting to stress a little when we go to the park. Fiona is getting faster and bolder. I’m trying not to hover. She’s pretty tough anyway, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch her climb things.

Speaking of which, here she is climbing into or out of her friend Caz’s bed:

It’s a lot easier and closer to the ground than her bed.

Making a mess of things and also “cooking” at my parents’ house:

She is so fun right now! I love playing with her. We run around and make noise. She’s growing up so fast! Our NICU follow up is in a few weeks and I can’t wait for them to see how far she’s come since she was a tiny and tubey baby in an isolette.

Happy Birthday Matan!

My mom started a facebook event for Matan’s birthday. Some of his friends have commented, as have some of my friends and some of my mom’s friends. For some reason, I cannot bring myself to post on it. I’m not sure why. I think it is because I feel like he’s my special person. He’s my brother and I don’t want to share him with anyone else, especially not on facebook. I don’t want to air to everyone how much I miss him, how I think about him every day, how whenever Fiona does something new or funny, I want to call him. How sad I am that she will never know him and he will never get to hold her or see how funny and silly she is becoming.

Today he would have been 29. If I could call him, I would tease him about it, how he is in the last year of his 20’s and about to cross over in real adulthood, also known as your 30’s. I wonder where he would be right now and what he would be doing. Would we go out to dinner at a nice restaurant like old times, or would he choose to do something else with someone other than his parents and sister? Would he be married and/or have kids of his own? So many “I wonders” and not enough time.

I still have his number programmed into my phone. Sometimes I toy with calling it to see who would pick it up, and to tell them that their phone number used to belong to someone I love and lost.

I saw a movie recently (Fast Five, go ahead, mock me) and I was so disappointed in it. I’ve seen every movie in the Fast and Furious franchise. Sometimes they make me feel closer to him because he worked on those same types of cars, enabling them to do what the cars in the movies do. I wonder what he thought of/would think of the movies. Would he like them? Which would be his favorite? Would he yell at the screen about any inaccuracies or that some car can’t really do that, or some other car is actually better?

Well, if you can read this, Happy Birthday Bro! I miss you! This is the last year of your 20’s. Next year, you will be a real adult, and people in their early 20’s will think that you are old. But this year, you get to enjoy being young still. I hope you are having fun where ever you are, and that you are driving a tricked out, manual transmission, blue Toyota Supra.

Peace out!

Grandparents

The other day, Fiona and I paid a visit to my mom at her house. While Fiona busied herself emptying the spice cabinet:

and taking all the mixing bowls out and pretending to cook with them:

 

I wandered around the house (as I always do) looking for any changes or anything new, and I realized that there are pictures of Fiona in practically every room. In the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, next to the TV, the bedroom, I think there are some in the “office”. I think the only rooms with no photos are the bathrooms.

 

There are more pictures of Fiona than there are of me. It’s not that I mind that. I think it is cute. It’s touching. It shows the love my parents have for Fiona.

Sometimes it makes me a little sad. I think about Grandpa Don and how far away he is. Grandparents are so important in the life of a young child. I have extremely fond memories of my grandparents. I still have dolls that my Safta Genia made for me and I remember my favorite thing to do was go to her house to play (and to eat whatever she was cooking). She always had time for me, told me stories, and just loved me. In the US, my Grandpa took me to yard sales and libraries. Fiona’s toy box and some of her toys were yard sale treasures that my Grandpa got me. And my Grandma Rose spent hours chatting with me about how unfair life was with little brothers, let me eat Lucky Charms, and took me to luncheons with her old lady friends, always bragging about how much better I was than their granddaughters (I am not sure her opinion was not biased, but I digress).

I am so eternally grateful that Fiona has a chance to grow up with grandparents close by. I hope she develops the same special bond with them as I did with my grandparents, and that she has her own happy memories of times spent with them. I also hope she is able to grow to know Grandpa Don because I know he can tell her some interesting stories from his youth, and probably a few about John too. Again, I am always a little sad that we are so far away from him. I wish someone would hurry up and invent the transporter so trips to Canada were not so expensive and it didn’t take so long to get there and back.

On another note, here is a video of Fiona “cleaning”. She really likes wiping up spills. I don’t know what she was doing to her sippy toward the end of the video. I think she was biting it. She is so silly, you really can never tell what her intentions are.

Yup, definitely my child.