12/1/06 A fussy afternoon

Poor baby just couldn't get it together this afternoon. After hours of snoozing for max 30 minutes at a time, she was wasted. Yet, we managed to pull off going out to Spoons for dinner! Katrina responds very differently to new situations, and loves looking around at new things, and a family restaurant is full of fun things to look at. I'd forgotten that even a 2-month-old, which she almost is (already!), recognizes that something's new and reacts to it.

She also let me get away with a Ballecore class this morning at my old gym, Supreme Court. It's the first time I've done this class not pregnant. Guess what -- it's still hard! But it's a great class, and just what my extremely weak abdominal muscles need. Happily, Yolanda at the gym daycare had only Katrina to watch over that morning, and was able to keep her happy when she woke up 10 minutes before I got her. (This gym daycare is where we found Peggy.)

Dave thinks he found the reason for her fussiness though. It's in this photo, which I took to show Stacey. What's wrong with this picture?


Answer: her socks don't match. It's hard to tell, but one of the adorable ruffled flowered socks that go with this outfit got sacrificed in a pool of pee. Baby girls don't sprinkle their own faces as baby boys do during diaper changes, but they do make nice little puddles to dip their feet into. I still like the socks so much that I kept the dry one on, and put a white sock on the other foot. Clearly Katrina was distressed about this fashion don't.

I had another nice afternoon alone with Gabriel. I swear, life is so much better around here when the boys are apart. For me, anyway. Gabriel asks about Julian every time he finds Julian gone for the afternoon. Today, Gabriel said we had to go pick up Julian because Gabriel had left his beloved Teddy Bear behind at pre-K (it was Sharing Day, which is why the bear was there at all), and that Julian could show Gabriel where his Bear was.

I guess I shouldn't feel too guilty about enjoying my time with each boy alone. Kristi still uses a nanny to handle days alone with her three kids (though with twin toddlers, that's a whole different ball of wax). I feel like I should be able to handle all three kids single-handedly, but really, it's not three kids that gets me. It's two boys.

Today when the boys were reunited, they were instantly absorbed in coloring, since I got Julian a new coloring book at Target today.

I also got Gabriel a new maze book that he picked himself. It's a Kumon book, which makes me cringe because this is the company that has extremely popular tutoring schools for kids to "get ahead" and advance all their academic skills. But, Gabriel liked the illustrations even though the mazes are pretty easy. I was puzzled by that, I'd have expected more challenging ones from a Kumon book, until I saw that the book is labelled for 3-4-5 year olds. 3 sounds young to be doing mazes at all, but I guess that's the Kumon way. (Either that or I can't judge what age kids would start to do mazes...Gabriel has almost always done most things late compared to his peers, so what do I know.)

Speaking of 3, Julian's 3rd birthday is in just 3 weeks. A 3-year-old again. I'm not sure what's more shocking in my life: a 3-year-old or a 3-month-old!

12/1/06