In which we have a baby.

This Father's Day was extra special because our son was born on it. Calvin Nikolai Jewell joined us at just a little past midnight. 8 lbs, 7 oz, 21 inches he is absolutely perfect and fills our hearts with love. Every time we lay him on our chests and he struggles to lift his little head to stare blearily at our faces, it feels like our hearts might burst. How is it possible to love such a little body so very much?

Today is his first Saturday. Every day this week has been a First weekday for him. He will have many Saturdays to come, filled with adventures, but today is the first.
Happy Saturday, Calvin.

In which we do our final preparations for Grasshopper's arrival

I have reached the "Waddling" stage of pregnancy. I have about three things that fit me, and my wedding rings are not included in that short list. I am very grateful that the swelling that plagues most pregnant women waited until the last weeks for me.

After taking our childbirth class last month, we have been particularly paranoid about every twinge and tickle. Could this be a sign of oncoming labor? How about this? While I may rationally know that hiccups are not an indication of labor, it doesn't stop me from having to take a moment to remind myself that there is a specific list of symptoms to look for, and hiccups are not included on that list.

The crib is set up (thanks, Mark)! Also, Liam's work threw him a baby shower, which was incredibly sweet. Their generosity completely blindsided us, and we can safely say that our nursery and baby preparations are complete now. Car seat installed? Check. Bassinet set up? Check (and tears, I cry a lot these days). Hospital bag packed? Check. Panic and excitement? Check.

The only thing left uncertain are our cats' reactions to bringing Grasshopper home. Thus far we anticipate:

• Tomoe will completely ignore the baby, and pretend that there is nothing new going on.
• Butterscotch will go one of two ways. 1) complete and utter panic at this loud, noisy, sticky thing that has invaded her home. 2) deciding that the loud, noisy, sticky thing is a hairless kitten that needs a nursemaid, or at least to be guarded from a secure distance, like underneath the crib.
• Sirius will decide that the baby is fascinating, and will become his best bud. They will get in lots of adventures together.

However, despite the kitties' good intentions, we have purchased cat nets to keep the kitties out of the crib and bassinet while we are not watching, because Sirius is 15 pounds of solid muscle, and Butterscotch is 13 pounds, and even if they would never intentionally hurt the baby, the baby's lungs will not be strong enough to lift a heavy cat off of his ribs, and Sirius has the disconcerting habit of affectionately lying across people's faces (Sirius is sweet, but hasn't got an awful lot going on in the brains department). No unsupervised kitties with the baby, thank you very much. At least not until the baby is at least as big as the cats, and is capable of turning his own head.

In which Spring has sprung, and Grasshopper is revealed to have a 'Y' chromosome.

One of these cats is bigger than the other.

What happened in April? Is it really almost gone? April was a month of snow, more snow, more cold, everyone wondering when the snow would finally leave us and let us get on with spring, and then it happened and the snow was gone and the birds are chirping (and the cats are jostling for position in the open windows, because BIRDS).

My mother-in-law threw a baby shower for me, which was duck-tastically delightful! We revealed the sex of our baby: it's a boy! Liam's Aunt Sharon proved to be deviously clever at baby shower games and trounced us all.

Quack!

Baby things are so soft!

Quack quack!

Liam continues to excel in his job a Training Coordinator at the credit union. This month he coordinated an entire financial literacy fair (comprised of dozens of volunteers from several NH credit unions) at which hundreds of local high school students learned about financial planning and budgeting and why it is important. We all remember those days when we naively thought we were going to be millionaires early in our 20's because we were going to make it big... He gets most of them to pay attention right off by pointing out the statistics of the NFL (in that the average NFL career lasts 2 years, and that the average former-NFL player is bankrupt within 3 years, due to poor financial planning). This really drives home that their get-rich-quick schemes only really matter if they can stay rich.

Grasshopper is obviously the reincarnation of Emperor Palpatine. Oops.

That's better! Look at his little face!

In which we get our rear in gear and paint Grasshopper's nursery.

A little while back Liam and I sat down and looked at what we still needed to do to prepare for Grasshopper's arrival. "Okay," we said, "that's a lot, but it's doable." Then we looked at a calendar and did some counting and realized "Holy baby bump, Batman, we've only got 13 weekends left in which to fit in all of these projects. And that's if Grasshopper abides by the schedule!"

A fire appropriately lit underneath our behinds, we've set to work. We've filled in the rest of our baby registry, we rearranged our bedroom and moved book cases and piles and piles of books (where did they all come from? Why are there so many cookbooks?!), we repaired the attic pull-down stairs (Mike at Avery Construction is delightful, by the way, if you're looking for a handyman. He even vacuumed up his construction debris afterwards.) and started stuffing yet more stuff up there, and finally, this past weekend, we painted Grasshopper's nursery.

By "we" I mean "Liam", because I was chased out of the room by paint fumes. I was able, however, to scrub the walls down and help prepare them for painting.

The previous homeowner's dubious choice of overall wall paint color was revealed. Combined with their "handyman" inclinations which we keep discovering around the house, I have a very low opinion of their decision-making abilities.

Ew. No. Mustard/institutional school bus/No. 2 Pencil yellow. Incidentally, does anyone know if you can just lop a (TV) cable off and cover it with a solid wall plate?

The Internet revealed to us that the method of painting that professionals use is not the "W" or "M" path that most people are taught. Instead, one is supposed to paint overlapping vertical sections with a long handled roller. Scrubbing/prepping the walls took an hour. Taping the details took another hour (there were a lot of edges). Painting the edges and the details took the longest at about an hour and a half. The actual painting of walls (using the method of the professionals) took about one hour in total.

Grasshopper Green for Grasshopper!

The paint shows up a little brighter than we expected, but we suspect that most of that stems from the bright blue Circus Tent effect of the painter's tape still up. It will be a much more soothing room once the blue comes down, and once we put in some dark green accents like a grass decal border on the bottom.

I'm trying to find a wall decal like this for the bottom edge of the wall. We could hide ferocious animals in the grass! Rawr!

Painting: check! Now to choose a crib.

In which Nashua proved too studly to be a stud dog, and we rearrange the bedroom because of REASONS (nesting)

Liam and I have felt very grown up lately, in ways which we did not before, because we do Grown Up Things like go to school board meetings and vote on budgets. It struck us, as we left the meeting last week at 12:15 (we were all very tired, and all very cranky with a small group of cantankerous residents who felt the need to argue every warrant article and who started getting belligerent when the votes weren't going their way. It was a shame, really, because they were bringing up some good points for discussion, but nobody wants to side with the Jerks when they start name-calling, and I think they shot themselves and their causes in the foot, so to speak.) that while neither of us particularly enjoyed going out to bars to socialize, or going to late night parties, or going out to see live music (note: Elisabeth finds live music particularly boring, except for classical concerts, or anything with violins), we were willing to stay out late to perform our civic duties.
Then we went home and ate some chocolate chips right from the bag, so I think that our adulthood is still a work in progress.
(In other news, in case you haven't been following the subject, Merrimack Valley School District will soon start offering full-day kindergarten, which is tremendous and fantastic.)

Liam's shoulder started a backwards slide in to pain again. We are grateful that spring is approaching, because that means no more snow to shovel. We're fairly certain that the 18" of snow that we got overnight in February was the cause of his shoulder reinjury. Spring can't come fast enough! We can barely see safely out of our driveway as we leave for work in the morning, and I've taken to throwing a few shovelfuls of softened snow from the tops of our snow banks (which were about 7'+ for a while there) out in to the road to melt every day, just hoping to help our line of sight clear better. I am forbidden by Liam to do anything more, anything heavier, although my doctor hasn't given me any technical restrictions beyond "What your body thinks it can handle". My abdomen muscles tell me when to quit, and Grasshopper makes many things quite uncomfortable. Grasshopper's newest trick is showing me how it can almost reach my ribs, and then jabbing me in two directions at once. Kicks and jabs are strong enough now that I am actually surprised and jump when I feel them. Two days ago I felt an elbow (or a knee, or a heel, I couldn't tell) drag across my belly. That was disconcerting.

Nesting has reached an all time high. We're still getting rid of multiple trash bags of Things each week, and even more gets donated constantly. We still haven't painted the nursery, but we've cleared the large bookshelves that live in that room in preparation for moving them out, and then yesterday I decided that we needed to rearrange our bedroom right now Because Reasons. Liam was very obliging, but I wonder how much of that is just his ability to recognize Crazy Eyes, and how much of it was actually the way he wanted it rearranged. It was his idea to lower the mattress in our bed such that I can actually easily get in and out of bed instead of heaving myself on to it ("tossing and turning" is more like "a slowly capsizing barge, with lots of grunting and huffing").



Nashua-the-dog was pulled from the Guiding Eyes stud service program because, after evaluation, they decided that he was too, uh, studly to be a stud (meaningful look). Fortunately, the ATF wants him, and he went happily off this past week to his new training where he gets to sniff things as his job! I always suspected that he would be happiest in a sniffing position, as his love of sniffing and scents surmounted even his love of food. For a dog, this translates in to a whole awful lot. Liam is happy that he is going on to be useful, and saddened that his beloved puppy won't be doing what we spent a year preparing him for. The ATF's training requirements will mean that Nashua will need to learn a new skill set that his Guiding Eyes for the Blind training did not include, but he has a good basic skill set down already that makes him valuable.

Wherein we redub the baby "Grasshopper", and Liam finally wins on my sugar habit.

We bought paint for the baby's nursery. The paint color was called "Grasshopper" (a really light spring-y green), which made us laugh and now we are calling Player 3 "Grasshopper", especially because it likes to kick. The kicks are actually kicks now, instead of the swish-swish-thumps of two weeks ago. They're still gentle and cute (for now) but it's very disconcerting and uncomfortable to have your internal organs jabbed from internal directions.

There is new research out that is linking excessive sugar consumption to heart disease (excessive defined as more than 8 teaspoons a day for women, more than 10/day for men. There are about 4 grams of sugar per teaspoon. For reference, a cup of vanilla Greek yogurt has 26 grams of sugar, or 6.5 teaspoons of sugar) and Liam has finally backed me in to a research corner for my sweet tooth. He's been trying to get me to cut back on sugar for my health for years now, trying to link it to diabetes, but all of the research out there had only linked poor lifestyle and fat consumption/body weight to to diabetes and heart disease. Well he's got me now, the *@&#$*, and I've been trying really hard to cut back on sugar. It makes me very unhappy because I love sugar very very much, but, you know, science.

Liam's shoulder is getting better. His MRI in December found nothing. The good news is that it meant there was no need for surgery. The bad news is that the doctors had no idea what was causing him so much pain. They wanted to do a cortisone shot as a we-don't-know-what's-wrong-with-you treatment, but it would have been a painful procedure involving inserting a long needle into a delicate spot, x-raying it to check the placement (with the needle still in there), adjusting the needle, x-raying again, and then pushing the plunger on the needle. He chose instead to go to a chiropractor as a last-ditch effort before the needle, and it has been great. This chiropractor examined him and noticed the same displaced rib that the Physical Therapist noted but the doctors dismissed. Basically what she thinks is wrong with him is that something is out of alignment way over here on the other side of his body and it's pulling on this which is yanking on that and the end result is that the end of the line (his shoulder and bicep) have such pressure and pulling on them that they're under tremendous stress. She works on him for maybe 5 minutes a week and he's been seeing marked improvement. Nice lady. Walk-in-only practice, 3 days a week, doesn't even need to advertise and her waiting room is always full from returning clients and word of mouth advertising.

Nashua-the-dog has news: he's being removed from the program. His training is flawless and his intelligence is unmatched, but he likes to steal things off of counters for attention which is a big problem for a guide dog because you can't move things around on a blind person. It is not unexpected for a retriever breed to want to bring you things, but it is an automatic failure if he can't be broken of it. Even the top trainers in the organization can't break him of the habit, and they've progressed to outright punishment to try to deter him. The good news is that he is such a perfect specimen that they are 95% certain that he will be used as a Stud Dog, which is a huge honor since only about 2 male dogs every 4-5 years get chosen for breeding service.

I practiced making fondant (that smooth cake frosting edible sugar clay stuff that they use to make wedding cakes look fancy) for the baby shower cake. It was a delicious disaster. Candy-making is apparently very different from baking. I used way too much sugar, accidentally, and the stuff was too stiff and thick and unusable. Liam thought it tasted like fresh Circus Peanuts and ate quite a lot of it. You know it's too sweet when even I recoil when you offer me another piece.

Player 3 has entered the game

After three happy years of marriage, Liam and I have decided it is time to add to our little family. In June of 2014 our family will be growing by two feet, as we welcome Baby Jewell!

We've taken to calling the baby "Player 3", since we both enjoy video games.

This was the announcement picture that I wanted to take, but the extra game controllers were packed away in the attic.

We're currently in a frenzy of decluttering as we seek to make room for Player 3 in our house. The lack of a proper basement in our house makes storage particularly difficult, and we're making some hard choices about what we keep and what gets tossed. We're ignoring the problem of where we'll store the stroller when we're not using it.

My belly grows larger every day. We kept my pregnancy a secret for a long time as we were enjoying the privacy that it afforded us (unsolicited advice! overly personal questions!), and I'm sure my co-workers were quietly assuming that I was enjoying the holiday season's food a little too much. But my bump has finally popped out and it is a secret no longer. It's already so large, I feel like a whale when I try to get comfortable in bed! We're only halfway there, it's only going to get larger.

It's hard to stay fashionable in maternity clothes when it looks like you're accessorizing a beer belly.

Player 3 has been actively kicking for a few weeks now. The kicks are still in the soft and cute phase, and I've noticed that the favorite time for acrobatics is at about 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. Liam has been able to feel the kicks only twice, each purely by chance. Every time I call him over to feel the kicks, they stop as soon as his hand is on my stomach. Player 3 is either shy, or quite the prankster.