Snowballs!

Snowballs were the ultimate summertime treat for my brother and me when we visited our grandparents in New Orleans – the West Texas kids didn’t adapt well to the Louisiana humidity, and snowballs were just the thing the wilting flowers needed to perk up. Texas’ closest approximation of these airy, icy, sugary, super-artificially-colored Styrofoam cups of coolness is at Mam’s in Houston’s Heights. They recently started hauling their little trailer out and opened for the year, and a couple of weeks ago, Alisa invited us out for BBQ at Hickory Hollow (fried zucchini, yum!) and Mam’s snowballs afterwards. Alisa’s always on top of the happenings in town, and she not-so-secretly wanted to find out if my favorite flavor, spearmint, would turn my breastmilk and then William’s poo green – yes, we are in our 30s, I promise! Inquiring minds want to know, and the answer is…NO CHANGE!


DISCLAIMER: No babies were licked in the making of this blog post.

Nang ordered a flavor that was purple (to match the color of the shirt he was wearing, no doubt), took a couple of bites, dropped a little on William in his baby carrier, and abandoned the snowball as too sweet.

I finished all of my spearmint (duh!), and enjoyed watching Maddy and Emmie polish off their matching yellow flavor (ice cream, wedding cake, lemon?).

Kim shared her red snowball with Drew-Drew, and he busted out his sign language to ask Kim for “more” when she didn’t feed him quickly enough.

Rock-a-bye Baby

At my friend Kim’s suggestion, we started William on a bedtime routine. This was around the time Baby started enjoying his bath time, and we used his nightly bath as the jumping-off point for the routine. I thought it would be too early to introduce nightly rituals to establish a routine, and he wouldn’t catch on and submit to the schedule, but Kim was right…never doubt a mother of two! The ideal schedule starts around eight. I feed William, and then we play. He gets fussy at 8:45ish, but we forge ahead with the playing and hold him off until from his bath until 9. We take William the Fussy upstairs, and he calms a little when we turn on the bathroom lights, and he completely stops crying when the bathwater starts flowing. Magic. We play and wash him for about thirty minutes, dry him off (and blow-dry his hiney if needed), and head to our room to read. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the only book we’ve tried with him, and it seems to be the perfect length. Some nights I can get all the way through it, and some nights he fusses at page two, so we skip to the last page with the butterfly. Once he has enough of story time, I swaddle him, feed him, and walk him to sleep. He likes to be walked around our room and have his butt thumped. Once he loses his grip on the pacifier, into the bassinet and SLEEP! Thanks, Kim for the suggestion to start this early – it has drastically reduced the nighttime battle with Baby Will, and last night marked his third night of a stretch of SEVEN HOURS OF SLEEP WITHOUT WAKING UP!!

Two-month doctor's visit

William had his two-month checkup on Friday, and the doctor was happy with his growth and health. One side of his head is a little flatter than the other and one of his ears is pushed a little further forward on his head than the other which the doctor attributes to spending more time sleeping on the right side of his head. He showed us how to stretch out Will's neck muscles by hugging him in a certain way which will make it more comfortable for him to turn to the other side when he sleeps and remedy the slight asymmetry. We sorted out his weepy left eye - a blocked tear duct that we will massage daily and keep clean and should resolve itself by 6-9 months. William got immunizations for Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Hepatitis B, Polio, Hib, Pneumococcal, and Rotavirus (whew!). Rotavirus was an oral vaccine, and the nurse had him suck it from a little plastic dispenser. DTaP, Polio, and Hib were in a combined shot, Hep B was another shot, and Pneumococcal was another shot. Poor William took the shots like a champ, and got three bandaids on his chubby thighs...he cried as soon as the nurse stuck him and then stopped once Nang picked him up from the table.

I thought we were homefree after the doctor's visit, but after a long nap, William woke up crying and then screaming until he ran out of breath as soon as we picked him up. His thigh was red and swollen where he got two shots. Dr. Hogan instructed us to give Infants' Tylenol if the baby seemed to be in pain or get a fever. We'd never heard William screaming/cry like he was, so I hightailed it to Randall's for the drug, and Nang stayed with the baby. The grocery store shelf where the Infants' Tylenol would be was completely cleaned out. I didn't know what was going on, so I headed over to Walgreens and ran into a similar situation. I didn't remember that there was a recall on all of the Infants'/Children's Tylenol products, so I picked up the last box of the generic Walgreen's version, got the dosing information from the pharmacist for a 14 pound two-month old, and rushed back home. After the medicine, a feeding, and a long nap, William woke up as his old happy self. Nang and I concurred that this was one of the roughest things we've been through with him, and it just broke our hearts to see him hurting so badly. We talked about how hard it is going to be to watch him suffer through things as he gets older, and what will happen when he breaks up with his first girlfriend. Nang thinks that we'll sit around with him and listen to sad songs - I don't think that he'll want anything to do with his dorky, old parents!

Growth milestones

5/7/2010: 2 month checkup

14 pounds, 1 ounce (95^th percentile)

24” long (75^th percentile)

16” head circumference (70^th percentile)

3/22/2010: 2 week checkup

8 pounds, 8 ounces (50^th percentile)

21-1/2” long (75^th percentile)

14-3/4” head circumference (50^th percentile)

3/7/2010: 1^st day checkup

7 pounds 9 ounces (25^th percentile)

20-3/4” long(75^th percentile)

13-3/4” head circumference (25^th percentile)