26 June 2012

In the car going to church on Sunday:

CD player: I want my life to be as clean as earth right after rain....

Nut Brown: Earth right after rain is mud.  Mud is dirty.  You want to be muddy?

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Lately the kids have wanted to sing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" for bedtime songs.

25 June 2012

I left a note for Rose Pink in her dresser drawer before she woke up one morning, and she returned the favor and left this reply on top of my dresser.  (complete with M&Ms taped on)  I love her!

22 June 2012

Is he not so charming?

Sorry it's blurry- but see that cute smile?

This is a very common expression: furrowed eyebrows.

We finished up the second week of me back at work full time today.  This one left Mr. Brown much less exhausted than last week.  It looks like we're going to make a go of this three kids thing after all.

At the moment at home we call Ozzy a couple different things.  My preferred form of address is 'Bobo' and Mr. Brown calls him 'little king'.  I think I'm going to switch to Bobo for the blog.  So make a mental note.

Bobo woke up to the world this week and now spends time every day awake and looking around, checking things out.  He's awake on walks and spends more time looking at us and talking to us and smiling at us.  He's so cute.  He likes it best when Nut Brown or Rose Pink engages with him during his floor time because they are such spazzes and do much more interesting things than his mother does.  Nut Brown and I spent twenty minutes the other day balancing dice on Bobo's tummy to see how long it took him to wiggle them off.

We are just coming out of a miserable three day hot spell that had temps in the mid 90s every day.  We have no air conditioning so by the third day everyone was pretty grumpy.  Fortunately the temperature broke yesterday evening, and the temp inside the house went from 90 degrees to 78 degrees this morning.  (We find 78 degrees very nice in general, not just in comparison.)  This summer is kind of a trial run: if we don't mind it too much, we will continue without air conditioning; otherwise we'll get it installed this fall for next summer.  We still have July and August to go, and they're usually hotter than June.

Bobo fills his diaper very very noisily - he'll probably never have trouble with diaper rash.  The other kids think this is completely wonderfully amusing.  Also he will poop, fuss to have his diaper changed, and then immediately poop again because he didn't want to finish pooping in a dirty diaper.  Go figure.  The other interesting thing we've noticed is that he will sometimes want a pacifier to help him calm down when he's tired, but once he's settled and ready to actually go to sleep, he spits it out.  Even if he looks like he's asleep, if he's still sucking on the pacifier, he's not actually asleep enough to lay down yet.

Today we went as a family to my work picnic and Bobo, Mr. Brown and I all got a little sunburned.  My coworkers commented on the red in Bobo's hair - he seems to have hair that's a mix of Rose Pink's and Nut Brown's shades.

In spite of how I was dreading having a baby around, I am completely in love with and so happy to have Bobo.  Even in the middle of the night.

back to iowa (again)

Over Memorial Day, we went back to Iowa to visit family.  It was my birthday gift!  The trip went very very well, even with a new baby.  He mostly slept, cried some, but we had a good trip and it didn't take much longer than usual.  We listened to 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' on the way down, and a Ramona Quimby book on the way back.  Nut Brown and I are not as enthusiastic about audiobooks as Mr. Brown and Rose Pink, but they do make the time pass.  Rose Pink produced the above drawing of cars on the highway.

It was lovely.  The older kids had a great time with their cousins, I got to sleep in and take naps, we met our new cousin Georgia, who is four weeks older than Ozzy, we ate fabulous barbecue and we got to hang out and talk with Mr. Brown's brother, sister and brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who are all some of my favorite people.  We invited them all to move to Michigan.

Visiting away from home also gave us a chance to kind of reset ourselves, so that when we got home, we were ready to take on our own life again.  Thank you thank you to Hugh and Jess for having us.  Our friendship is one of the best things about having lived in Iowa.

9 June 2012

Ozzy has a little mummy key chain with a bell on it (thanks, Aunt Amri!) that we hung on his crib.  Mr. Brown made the bell ring the other day while Ozzy was laying in bed and Ozzy stared and stared at it... and then reached out with his hand and batted at it to make it ring again!  Lest you think this was happenstance, he's repeated this behavior over and over, and he did it again this morning while I was watching.  How extraordinary.

5 June 2012

Some more gratuitous photos of Ozzy. I also want to note here how he smacks his lips even after I take him off the breast/bottle as if he wasn't quite done. It's so cute. He's starting to be more alert during the day. We started him on soy formula, and I think it's making a difference. I started back to work yesterday, working half days this week, and he celebrated by spitting up on Mr. Brown, pooping on Mr. Brown, and then spitting up on me: all things he had not yet done. His hair is red and brown- a nice mix of our other two children. And it looks like, at five weeks old, that he is finally going to outgrow his newborn clothes and diapers!

Rose Pink is so good with him.  Yesterday we were outside in the yard, and she came out of the house holding him and said, he's awake and I changed his diaper but I think he's hungry.  If you'll make me a bottle, I'll feed him.  So I made her a bottle and she did!  She said it was her shift with him.  

Last Saturday Rose Pink, Nut Brown and I rode our bikes around to some garage sales in our neighborhood.  When we started out, Rose Pink was sulky because Nut Brown was coming with us, and then Nut Brown banged his knee and was tearful about that, and I was ready to call the whole thing off and go home.  I'm so tired that I'm not the best at coping with things at the moment.  Fortunately, I didn't.  We went to the first garage sale, and the lady there gave Rose Pink her purchase in a fabulous leopard print paper bag with handles, which pleased Rose Pink very much.  We went to a few other sales, and I knew that all was right with the world when she began to sing as we were riding along, a song about a copper-haired girl with a leopard bag who brought joy to the whole world, so that all the wars were stopped.

When Mr. Brown got home after I cut Nut Brown's hair, he said to me, I'm never leaving you alone with the hair clippers again!

2 June 2012

This morning Rose Pink was holding Ozzy and he was yelling and yelling so Mr. Brown told her to bring him to me in bed because he was mopping up the leak under the kitchen sink (what a lovely thing to wake up to on Saturday morning) and when she brought him in and laid him beside me in the bed he stopped yelling and smiled at me.  I swear it was on purpose.  I forgot how wonderful it is to be a baby's favorite person.  He was content just to lay next to me and look at me in bed.  Sweet boy.