Just like his mama.

What's that you say? It's a holiday?




O, Reeally.





So friends, that means Caaaaaandy?




I know it means candy! Gimme candy!





Candy! Candy! Candy! Gimme Candy!




More pictures tomorrow on (er, the actual) halloween - with a totally different costume!

My legs aren't broken. So why don't I walk?

I live really close to where I work. No, let me emphasize that: REALLY close. In fact, this morning I realized that it takes approximately the same amount of time to walk to work as it does to drive, inclusive of dropping Owen off at his daycare, which is between my house and my work. This is mainly because there is one stoplight (offset, so it's green longer for the crosstraffic than it would be for me) and a couple one way streets (that I can't drive up but can obviously walk wherever I want) between there and here. So duh, you're thinking: of course, I walk to work every day, dropping off Owen on the way. It's good exercise, good for the environment, and just, you know, good. Because only a jerk would drive a mile, when she could walk HALF a mile, and get to the same places, in the same amount of time. right?

Er. So. Hi, my name is Jenny, and I'm a jerk.

The PROBLEM with the walking to work plan has red hair, weighs about 22 lbs, and has a disarming smile. He's charming, but don't let him fool you! Behind that goofy grin hides miles of INCONVENIENT. It's a pain in the butt for us to coordinate me walking to work. First of all, there's just all this..STUFF that has to be dragged around on his account. I'm still nursing, so every day I have to bring my pump bag (http://www.medela.com/ISBD/breastfeeding/products/advanced.php. Can't live without it) and that pump bag is heavy! Plus, we've already covered in earlier posts the comprehensive packing event that is Owen's daycare bag. Then there's Owen himself, and my work shoes - half a mile or no, I'm not wearing heels while pushing a stroller loaded down like a sherpa - my purse, my lunch, and sometimes my workout clothes.

Once I actually get Owen to daycare, the problems multiply. We have an awesome stroller - a big stroller. So, what to do with it once it's divested of baby? We could leave it in Ms. debbie's backyard, but that causes a bit of a problem, because the stroller is too big to comfortably fit in either car. That means when Andy comes to pick Owen up, he has to completely dissasemble the stroller so he can put it in the car. This makes Andy cranky, which is not a harmonious state of affairs. Andy doesn't get home early enough that he can park his car at home, walk to daycare, and then walk Owen home. He usually shows up with barely any time to spare before daycare closes. I don't even get out of work until daycare closes. So I could take the stroller with me to work....but then, where do I keep it? do I park it in the parking lot? I can't bring it up to my office.

More often than not, it's just easier to drive. I drive the baby to daycare, drop him off, and continue driving to work. Andy picks him up, and I drive the rest of the way home. But this is seriously hurting my green mama street cred.

I have to figure out a way to make walking work. Any suggestions are appreciated!

Cute overload

Blogger appears to be working again. Here are the aforementioned cute pics from earlier today. Enjoy!

Fall

Today we went to the fall foliage festival. Actually, it's more accurate to say we tried to go to the fall foliage festival - we actually never found the festival part, and it's probably just as well because as it turns out, Owen is not a big fan of foliage.



He's all: you can PUT ME IN A TREE BUT I'M NOT GOING TO APPRECIATE IT. SO THERE.

Anyway, so that was today. I have a bunch more cute pictures, but for some reason blogger isn't letting me post them. oh well, I'll try again later.

Oh, Canada.

Anyone who's known me for more than 10 minutes knows that I'm really unlucky. I'm grateful that in a truly big-picture sense - I have my health, and a loving family - I am doing fine, but I endure far more than my share of ironic indignities. I know people for whom things almost always go smoothly. I am not one of them. I just sort of expect bad things to happen to me.

I'm not sure why I thought buying a house would be any different. We THOUGHT that we were buying near the bottom of a garden variety real-estate cycle. In fact, we thought that not only were we buying low, we managed to benefit from some lucky timing: two days before we closed, the government announced that they were going to guarantee Fannie and Freddie, which resulted in a sudden, sharp dip in mortgage rates (we locked in at 5.85. Today, a 30 year fixed is hovering around 7). For once, I thought I had actually had a stroke of serendipity.

Ha. Of course not.

What that means, for those of you who have been following the news over the last month, is that we literally bought this house the day before the economy imploded. I'm not exaggerating. The very, ever loving day. One month and about 2 trillion in bailouts later, with no end in sight to the economic destruction, it turns out that once again, the universe takes particular delight in hating on me. We bought a house we could juuust barely afford. It was a bit of a stretch. But hey! we bought when the market was down! our salaries will only go up! the house will appreciate! And we'll be in great shape in five years!

Please, let me share with you some of the the high points of today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/business/economy/16housing.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?scp=1&sq=salary&st=cse

In particular, that first article is really worrisome. The house that we can barely afford right now (the two bedroom! house! that we can barely afford right now! but that's a rant for another day) - it looks like, with the coming recession, that we'll be barely able to afford it, if we can afford it at all, for the forseeable future.

the kid to-be-named-later I was planning on delivering in March 2010? Forget him/her. A second kid is a financial impossibility if neither of our salaries rise. Selling this house and moving to a lower cost of living area? Forget about it, if housing prices really have another 30% to fall. We'll be stuck here for the rest of our lives, unable to move.

I'm angry about a lot of things. But mostly, I'm angry about the brother(s) or sister(s) that I planned on giving Owen that I really think he won't get now. I'm angry that we have a government that let us get this far down the road to destruction. I'm angry because I think Obama will win the election, and the economy will continue to implode, because no one could stop this ship from sinking - and we'll end up with a facist, xenophobic dictator in four years because people will have an excuse to blame Obama and by extension poor people and minorities for problems caused by the rich and greedy, so they'll vote for the next Sarah Palin that comes along and tells them that the scary, evil, terrorists posing as Mexicans and gays are destroying the American dream.

I'm angry about a lot of things. And right now, I'm taking it out on having bought this house. Because when I was 8 months pregnant, I took a book out from the library titled "A guide for Americans wishing to relocate to Canada."

I'm really sorry I returned that book.

Babysitting

A friend of mine found herself unexpectedly without a babysitter today. So I offered to watch her daughter, Ava, since I was home from work anyway. We had a fun day!

To get ready to have our friend over, the first step was to charm her by trying on part of our halloween costume. A prize if you can figure out what we're going to be:





Then, Ava came over! she played with us & gave us hugs!



She also rocked out to our baby Einstein music player. The girl's a rock star.



I'm totally ready for number two. here's Owen impressing Ava with his snappy pumpkin hat:


Finally, speaking of cosleeping: this is what mornings look like around here.





heh heh heh, sleeping like...a baby.

FINE. We co-sleep. And that's ok.

Every night, the following occurs chez Cox: It's approximately 7 pm, and the baby is starting his cranky, tired, I've-had-enough-of-this-day fussing. Getting him down for the night is embarrassingly easy: five minutes invested in the glider, nursing, and he's out like a light. And every night, I come out of the baby's room swearing up, down and sideways that THIS TIME, for REAL, I'm SERIOUS, the baby is going to stay in his crib until the morning. I MEAN IT.

And every morning, without fail, the baby is snuggled and snoozing sweetly between Andy and I, with his little cold feet warming themselves on my tummy and his little face nestled on my chest.

I'm not claiming I don't know how he got there. Every night I get up and bring him into our bed. The problem is, he won't sleep more than four hours in a row unless he's in bed with me. It's terrible, because it sets up this catch-22 every night: I either listen to him wail, and neither of us get any sleep, or just go in and get him, put him in the bed with me, and we both sleep until morning. But every time I go get him, I'm teaching him that continuing to wail is the way to get what he wants, which is to get in bed with us. It's a lose-lose.

So the conventional wisdom is, I have to let him cry it out. But here's the thing: He doesn't cry it out. He just cries. Everyone tells me that I should just let him cry, and eventually he will go back to sleep. But he doesn't! One night I steeled myself and said that no matter what, come hell or high water, I would not go in. I would let him "self-soothe". I would wait until he went back to sleep on his own. Except he never did! He cried from midnight until 4:45, on and off, until I couldn't stand it any longer. I went and got him, put him in bed beside me, and he slept like a log until I woke him up at 9. Maybe, eventually, what people tell me is true. Maybe, if I had the willpower to listen to him cry, he'd eventually exhaust himself and give up and learn to sleep by himself.

The thing is, I'm just not all that invested in letting him cry. Perhaps I'm setting him up for a lifetime of failure and psychological problems by giving in, but it seems so much easier to me to just let him sleep next to me. He's not going to do it forever. In fact, when he's busy keeping a log of all the reasons that he can't stand me, I'll probably miss the days when he couldn't sleep unless he was in my bed. For now, the current system works really well. I put him in his crib around 7. He wakes up between 11 and 12, and cries until I pick him up. this is convenient, since I tend to go to bed around then anyway. I take him to bed, he nurses himself back to sleep, and we both sleep until we get up, around 6. Sometimes he wakes up and nurses himself back to sleep between 11 and 6, but he doesn't really wake me up to do so.

I have been stressing for months about how to end this arrangement. I keep telling myself that I HAVE TO PUT A STOP TO THIS! But the truth is, why monkey with a system that works just fine for everyone? Owen will organically transition himself out of our bed, and I can wait for that. I'm in no hurry to wish his babyhood away, anyhow. There's no guarantee I'll get another baby, and I'm determined to enjoy the one I have. Even if he pees in my bed once in awhile.

Patience, Grasshopper.

I know, I know, I KNOW. Where are the pictures of the new house? They're coming - but things are coming together slowly down here, and I don't want to post pictures until things are (reasonably)) put together. we're still working on curtains and unpacking the last dozen or so boxes, and we're at that stage where there's a whole bunch of random stuff unpacked but just...out, because we're not sure where we want to put it yet. We did go to Lowe's today (and spent $500, I nearly had a heart attack) and that was a big help. So things are moving in the right direction. I will put pictures up this week. In the meantime, some new pictures of his cuteness will simply have to do.

Happy Baby:




Drunk Baby:



Scowling Baby:



So Big!