26 July 2012

Last week Rose Pink went to vacation bible school at the Lutheran church downtown, and Nut Brown stayed home by preference with Mr. Brown and Bobo.  After one late night, Mr. Brown was dozing with Bobo on our bed and trying to convince Nut Brown to doze with them.  After awhile, Nut Brown got out of bed and went out.  Mr. Brown vaguely heard him knocking around the house but didn't get out of bed (it had been a very long night) and eventually Nut Brown came back in the room and said, "Wake up, Papa, it's time for our picnic!"  A picnic?  In bed?  Nut Brown brought in a bowl of peanut butter and a bowl of prunes and a bottle of water, and they had a very nice picnic.  Bread is not necessary for true peanut butter lovers.

24 July 2012

Getting ready for church on Sunday morning, Bobo was laying on the kitchen floor while I made lunches for everyone and got dressed.  He started to fuss while I was in my bedroom, and Rose Pink hollered, "Bobo's crying!  He's in distress!  He's a RAM-sel in distress!  Ha ha!  Get it, Mom?  A RAM-sel in distress?"

22 July 2012

Mr. Brown moved the kitchen table out to the porch so he could mop but we liked it so much better out there that we've been eating on the porch ever since.

Here is what the baby does while the rest of us eat:

He lays there kicking his legs and looking cute.  He actually likes to lay on the floor for certain periods every day, just looking around, which is different from our other two children.

20 July 2012

Monday night, after dinner:
Nut Brown: What's for dessseeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrt?  I want a cream pop!
Me: I think we're having ice cream cones for dessert and family home evening treat.
Nut Brown: (with a very suspicious look) WITH ice cream?

Yesterday, no air conditioning, it was 95 degrees in the house.  Check out our fat naked baby and mostly naked boy.  We're sleeping in the basement, where it's only 80 degrees.

18 July 2012

An updated family portrait, courtesy of Nut Brown.  Bobo is the purple and gold figure carefully balanced on my arm.  Nut Brown says that this is a sketch of the morning that we walked up to a donut shop for breakfast together.

17 July 2012

Yep, definitely keeping this one.

Mmm-hmm, this one, too.

And this one!

2 July 2012

Bobo's two month checkup revealed that he weighs 10 pounds, 2 oz, and is in the 10th percentile for head size, 25th percentile for weight, and 75th percentile for length.  Long and skinny, that's our Bobo!

He stole the show in Mr. Brown's Sunday School class by waking up and smiling at the class while Mr. Brown was teaching.  In one second, no one was paying attention to Mr. Brown any more!

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.

31 May 2012

Last week on a day we were feeling pretty put together, we managed to get the family out of the house and down to one of the older kids' favorite parks.  There were a couple of other moms with the kids mostly in the 18 month to 3 year old range and one mother with her six year old son.  Seeing that we had similarly aged children, this mother struck up a conversation with us.  Over the course of the conversation, we discovered that she also had three kids and her husband had briefly done the stay at home dad thing like Mr. Brown. Struck by the similarities, she asked, "You guys must have waited to have kids too, right?"  I wasn't sure what to say, but Mr Brown (being agreeable) says, "Yes, we did," which kind of surprised me because we didn't really wait to have kids. This friendly mom then tells us how she had her first at 36, second at 41 and third at 46.   She thought we were 50 - I guess feeling put together with a newborn must include looking 20 years older.

30 May 2012

Tonight Nut Brown got a haircut.

We went from this:

to this:

to this:

to this!

(He said he wanted it really short)

A couple gratuitous shots of Ozzy, who is now one month old:

He had his first formula today.  I'm not sure how I feel about this. 

23 May 2012

Mr. Brown has just been called to be executive secretary in our ward.  Sunday was his first day with early meetings: he left at 7 am, and we have church usually at 10 am.  I have never felt more Mormon than I did that morning getting three kids ready for church by myself.  (We arrived early, by the way.)

Ozzy goes to church

Isn't he darling?

18 May 2012

We have discovered that Nut Brown can wiggle his ears.

Yesterday I watched Rose Pink change Ozzy's diaper and change his clothes after he'd soaked both.  She is amazing.

15 May 2012

Nut Brown in the shower yesterday called out that he was ready to be scrubbed RIGHT NOW.  Mr. Brown went to help him and discovered that the shower was cold, and that's why he was ready to scrub so immediately.  He turned the water warmer, and Nut Brown exclaimed, Oh, that's better!  It's washing away my goosebumps!