Bottle Up and Explode

Last Christmas our friends Alison and Daniel gave us this awesome book of projects to make with your kids. Lorne pulled it out on Saturday morning and he and Will looked through it to figure out what they could work on this weekend. Will's choice? Water bottle rockets. Awesome! They got the materials (wood for the launchpad, bike pump, wine bottle cork, soda bottles) on Saturday and built the launchpad.

On Sunday morning Will and I painted the bottles. They were dry when Evie got up from her nap, so we headed outside to set up mission control.

Our three rockets, the wood launchpad, and the bike pump.

Lorne attaches the first rocket.

This was our first flight. Lorne did a good job of preparing Will for the fact that sometimes, when you make things at home like this, they don't always work right away, but then you get to have more fun figuring out how to fix it.

Lorne pumps up the first rocket.

We didn't have to worry about fixing anything with the rocket launcher though.

Covered in rocket fuel.

Undeterred by the fact that he'd just been sprayed from head to toe by the first rocket, Will helped set up and pump our second rocket.

More success!

This handy tree doubles as a landing pad.

Rocket number three was a full two liter bottle, so Lorne and Will worked together to launch it.

We spent the afternoon refilling the rockets with water and launching them up until they all got stuck in trees or on the roof. Though after the first launch Evie wanted nothing to do with the launcher. She was happy sitting off to the side, where she wasn't going to get sprayed in the face with water, thank you very much, which is kind of surprising, given how much this child loves water.

She was happy to go retrieve the bottles after they landed though.

Next time we use our launcher we'll have to plan a little better and go to an area with less trees and roofs. There are some open fields at nearby parks that would make an excellent spot for our new mission control.

Beach Baby

Will started at a new preschool. Five days a week, three hours a day. So far he's loving it. But Evie? So far Evie has not been loving it. She misses her partner in crime. As we drive away she starts shouting, "BUDDY! BUDDY! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" So that's been fun. At Will's old preschool, which was only two hours long and twice a week, Evie and I took long jog/walks and went to a nearby playground, then often picked things up at Target or the grocery store. But Evie will not be contained for such a long period of time for so many days a week, so I'm coming up with new things for us to do.

Yesterday we went to the beach.

Evie loves the ocean. My original plan was to go for a walk on the paved, non-sandy path, then to the playground. Evie saw the ocean and immediately started jumping up and down, screaming, "Ocean! Ocean! It's the ocean, Mommy!" I attempted to say, "Let's just walk to the playground today," but Evie would have none of it. She bolted to the sand. I took our shoes off and we headed to the water.

Do you want to have an awesome Evie-style experience at the ocean? This is what you need to do. 1) Go to the waterline. 2) Pick up a handful of glumpy sand in each fist. 3) Scream the following words at the ocean: "Come here ocean! I'm gonna get you!" 4) When a wave touches your feet, fling the sand at it in anger.

There was a nice covering of marine layer clouds when we got there, so I wasn't as concerned about not having sunblock with us at first. But then the marine layer burned off. Evie and I have the same very British skin - we get some freckles, but mostly we burn. No tanning here. We left after the sun had been out for about ten minutes (though we'd been at the beach for an hour). Evie only cried a little bit when I carried her away from the water and only tried to escape me to run back to the ocean twice on our walk back to the car. (This is significantly better than her reaction when we tried to leave the ocean on a visit to Newport, OR. That involved a tantrum and Lorne carrying her all the way up over the sand dunes to the parking lot. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! VEEVEE OCEAN! NOOOOOOOOOOO!")

Today when we got in the car after dropping Will off she said, "Okay, Veevee ocean now?" We had some errands to run, so I told her not today, but we would again soon. Then she started shouting, "BUDDY! BUDDY! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Evelyn V. Pants

I wrote this in August and then I didn't ever publish it because I'm bad at blogging. Anyway, August 1 was Evie's first birthday. She was born on August 1, 2010 around 1 AM. We were watching The Three Amigos in the hospital when the nurse came in to check on me and I told her I felt like I had to go to the bathroom, and she was all, "HA HA YOU IDIOT, I'll get the doctor," and like five seconds later we had Evie. I suggested naming her El Guapo, but Lorne shot me down.



She was a skinny little newborn with pencil legs and a little puff of hair, a little blob that liked to eat and snuggle and was vaguely interested in her big brother. And now she looks like this:


Evie on her first birthday.

She's a little redhead. Wikipedia tells me that redheads have two copies of a recessive gene on chromosome 16, and as far as we can tell, those recessive genes came from a great aunt on my side and a great aunt on Lorne's side. Evie is, for the most part, a very sweet little girl. She likes looking at books (and throwing all the books on the floor), climbing anything and everything, shoes (oh, how she loves shoes), playing with Will's Mickey Mouse fire truck, chasing Gracie, and doing anything and everything that Will is doing.

She has shown flashes of having the "fiery" temprament that's stereotypically associated with a redhead. One of her favorite activities is turning the sound off when the TV is on. When I lift her up and say, "No no, Evie," she throws an all-out fit. Screaming, kicking, waving her little fists in the air. Evie mastered the look of contempt at an early age.



Anyway, on her first birthday, the kids and I took a walk. Somehow we ended up at the cupcake shop. After dinner, Evie had her first cupcake. It was a banana one.


The awesome birthday smock my friend's mom made Evie.



Apparently Evie started shoving it in her eye?



She also shared.



I cannot believe she's over a year old now. I feel like with Will we were constantly wondering what he would do next, and with Evie she kept doing things and we'd be surprised because it seemed like she should still be the little blob with stick legs, not the little toddler chasing her brother and the cat.



She's a smart, sweet, funny little girl and we love her to pieces. Happy first birthday, Evie.

shame, humiliation, and flying alone with kids

I spent ten days in Seattle with the kids so I could go to a wedding and a wedding reception. My mom had been visiting us in San Diego and flew up with me and the kids, which was nice, because dude, kids come with a lot of crap. Lorne was stuck in San Diego on his surgery rotation, which sucked a lot. I missed him, he missed us and didn't get to do fun things. Suck.

Anyway, on Monday, I flew back with the kids by myself. Monday morning, my mom came into the room where Evie and I were sleeping and told me that Will had thrown up everywhere in his cousin's room (where he'd been sleeping). Evie had been sick a few days earlier, so we figured he must have caught it from her. I cleaned him up and gave him a bath, then my mom took Evie and I spent the morning alternately laying down with Will and cleaning up his vomit, and worrying the entire time about whether he'd be able to get on an airplane that night. As the day wore on, and I had to decide whether we'd be able to go, Will started to seem better, but I was still really worried. I mean, if I'd been as sick as he was, the last thing I'd want to do is get on a plane and be sick on the plane. But then, if we didn't go, we faced $150 in change fees, plus the difference in cost between our original tickets and the cost of the new flight, which was looking to come to a total of around $500. He hadn't thrown up for several hours.

So we went home.

At the airport, something on our stroller set off some detector, so TSA searched our bags. They wiped down all the things in our bags with special wipe things, then put the wipes in a fancy machine, and then the machine beeped. Then a woman gave me a pat down. They made it very clear that my kids would not be separated from me at any time (probably because of this nutjob who made the whole thing up), and the woman doing the pat down kept calling it a "massage" or a "silly tickle." I guess this was to make Will feel better or something, but he wasn't overly concerned that some woman was touching his mom, but I don't know, maybe some kids are. The use of "massage" and "tickle" actually struck me as a little bit odd, but I wasn't super bothered, and she wasn't super invasive, so I said nothing.

But we made it through in time for our flight. Hooray! So we walked (well, I walked, the kids rode on our stroller tank) to our gate just in time to board early on the flight. When Lorne and I went to Ireland, we waited till the last minute to get on flights so the kids would have to sit still for as little time as possible, but with three bags, two kids, one stroller, and two arms, I figured I'd probably need extra time. So we boarded early, I folded the stroller up and left it for gate check, and the kids settled down pretty quickly. Will curled up in his seat, I got all our stuff we'd need for the flight out and put it in the pouches, Evie put her head on my shoulder. Success!

But no. I noticed that the airplane wasn't boarding very quickly. Then the flight attendant said, "So, we're having a mechanical issue with this plane. It's something that would take four hours to fix, but another plane just came in, so we can use that one. So everyone needs to deplane." So I put all our crap back in the three bags, strapped the bags to me, picked Evie up, took Will's hand, and we headed off the plane.

"Excuse me," I said to the gate agent, "But we gate-checked our stroller. Will it be moved over to the new gate, or do I need to do that?"

"It'd be really helpful if you'd just do that yourself, okay?" the woman said. "We've got a lot of other things to do."

My face? It went like this:



Then I took the folded up stroller in my one free hand and dragged it behind me while I tried to herd Will through crowds of people to the new gate. While we waited for the passengers to leave the new plane, Will curled up on the ground and tried to go to sleep. This is unusual behavior for him, so I began to get concerned about the sickness again. Then we got on the new plane.

Both kids squirmed for about 20 minutes, then when we could use electronic devices, Will watched five minutes of Winnie the Pooh, then went to sleep. Evie, however, continued to squirm. And continued to squirm. And continued to squirm. She tried to climb the seat in front of her, climb on the man next to us, pull Will's hair, pull my hair, eat my shirt, eat the shirt of the man next to us. All toys and food in my bag of tricks were useless. Then the drink cart came by and I had a brilliant idea. "I'll give her some apple juice. She almost never has juice, and that will occupy her for a little bit. Maybe getting some liquid in her stomach will help her settle down." So I got Evie apple juice.

Two minutes after Evie drank a few sips of juice, she began projectile vomiting. I don't just mean, "Oh, that was a lot of vomit." I mean, that vomit came out with force. She managed completely cover herself, me, the back of the seat in front of me, the leg of the man next to us, and the shoulders of the two people that were unfortunate enough to be sharing the crack between the seat in front of us.

My face? It went like this:



I had no idea what to do. She started and I literally froze. I guess if I'd tried to move her in the middle of the barfing and lost the shield of the seatback in front of me, she'd have just hit more people with her disgustingness, so maybe my inability act served as a good way to minimize casualties. In between bouts of barfing, the man next to me magically produced a giant pile of napkins. He just kept producing them as she puked and I attempted, first, to wipe down the seatback in front of me, then I offered some to the people whose shoulders were grossened. While he was handing them to me, while Evie was throwing up, I saw the amazed, excited, disgusted face of one man across the aisle, who was watching the entire mess unfold.

His face? It looked like this (but more adult-like):



I stuffed all the gross napkins in a barf bag, also offered to me by the man next to me, as my seat ironically didn't have one (not that I'd have thought to use it anyway, in my frozen-by-barfing-baby state).

Then I told the man next to me to tell Will I'd be right back if he woke up, and Evie and I went to the bathroom. We went to the front of the plane, even though they usually tell you that that bathroom is reserved for first class passengers and that coach losers using the first class bathroom are bad for airplane safety or whatever. But the flight attendants didn't say a word to me. They must have seen my vomit-covered pants and splattered shirt, and the vomit-covered baby, and just said to themselves, "I'm not touching that mess with a ten foot pole."

Once in the bathroom, I cleaned Evie up and dressed her in clean clothes I had the foresight to pack in the diaper bag. Our diaper bag is not big enough for a clean set of clothes for me as well, however, so I had to settle for putting the screaming baby on the closed toilet seat and hoping she didn't fall off while I spent 20 minutes and used approximately 300 paper towels to attempt to clean off my pants. (Sorry, trees.) It was a bit better, but I still reeked.

Evie was kind enough to go to sleep after she was all cleaned up, but the stench of stale vomit hung around our seat in a cloud of shame and humiliation for the remaining hour and a half of the flight. I concentrated very, very hard on looking out of the window over Will's sleeping head, so I wouldn't have to make eye contact with anybody on the plane. When the drink cart came around for a second time, the flight attendant said to me, "You and the baby don't want anything else, do you." It wasn't a question.

My face? It felt like this:



But I just said, "No, thank you." The bag of vomit napkins and the gross seat she'd have to deal with after we got off the flight was probably fuck you enough.

Evie + solid foods

= LOVE.

We started solids with Will when he was ~5 months, but held off with Evie for a little bit longer, mainly because she had a variety of mild colds from Thanksgiving until she turned 6-months-old at the beginning of February. We wanted to make sure that she wasn't reacting badly to anything we tried her on, so we wanted the sneezing and runny noses to go away first.


Mmm. Cardboard.

Her first food was brown rice cereal. It tastes kind of like cardboard. (We tried its white rice cereal counterpart when Will was starting solids, and it tasted kind of like paper.) Evie loved it though. The following week she tried bananas. She loved them too.


This food is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

Two nights ago, Evie tried peas for the first time. Plain old steamed peas that were then pureed with breastmilk. We were a little concerned that we'd given her banana too early, that she would then reject the less sweet vegetables. But she did not. She ate. And ate. When Lorne stopped feeding her to take a bite of his own dinner, she stared at him with her little furrowed brow, as if to say, "Dad, there are peas in front of you. Why are they not in my mouth?"



After I made the peas I put them in a bowl with a lid so we could refrigerate them and feed them to her over a couple nights. When she'd eaten about half, Lorne put the lid on the bowl. Her little brow furrowed further. Then, when he stood to get some more water for himself, he grabbed the bowl and put it in the fridge.



Evie's eyes widened in horror and opened her mouth to emit a shriek. A very loud, very shrill shriek. The sort of noise you would expect to hear after someone had been told they would never see their family again. The sort of noise I might emit upon being told Gretchen beat Mondo on Project Runway. Then her little face crumpled and she cried.

So I guess we didn't need to worry about the bananas ruining vegetables.


You won't take my peas away from me if you know what's good for you.