Sunday, January 31, 2010

And now, for something completely different

Like... a list!

I looked at the archives sidebar and realized that the number of posts I write annually has been going down steadily, by a few dozen each year. Okay, not surprising; every year I've been busier. But I don't want to taper off too much so I'm going to open this window in Blogger, go start working on a speech, and come back to do a new entry in my list every time I get stuck. Okay? Here goes:

1. Avtalyon has a Melissa and Doug firetruck puzzle that Yehudis found at a thrift store for $2. To say that he loves it is an understatement; he adores it. He sees it on the shelf and gasps: "Puzzle!" I bring it down for him and he wrinkles his brow and gets to work, with all seemly haste, busily dumping out the pieces, putting them together, moving them around. The best part? Every time he puts two pieces together, he has to stop to applaud. Just quickly, you understand, because he needs to keep going. So he'll put the pieces together, look up, gasp a little in pleasure, clap a few times to be sure I get the message, and move on to the next piece. When he gets to the doggie piece, he likes to point that out to me to. "Doddie!" He can put the whole thing together now, almost all by himself.

2. I have been insanely thirsty lately. It started in the ER when I couldn't stop refilling my water bottle and draining it, again and again; one time one of the nurses filled it for me and then saw me down the whole thing at a gulp. I didn't think twice about it but she stared. The whole time I was in the hospital I kept filling it and drinking it, probably drinking at least four liters a day; yes, the air was dry and I am nursing, but holy cow! I didn't even want Diet Coke (yes, you read that correctly)--I just wanted to drink water. I think Marika must be growing at a faster-than-usual clip; the ankle nametag they put on her when we arrived was digging into her leg when we were discharged, and she's out of all of her newborn stretchies already.

3. When Asnat is here, she often feeds Avtalyon oranges and grapes, and I like this because she has more time to cut fruit into little pieces than I do. Not surprisingly, he refers to almost all fruit in Hebrew, and every time he gets into his high chair, he asks for it: "Ahpooz! Anavim! Ahpooz! Bee!" That last, by the way, means, "please!" Asnat, being a true Israeli, does not insist on b'vakasha.

4. Avtalyon's second birthday is on Tuesday. I know he should get his own post. I KNOW. I'll try.

5. Both Avtalyon and Iyyar have seriously runny noses. Avtalyon does not appear at all bothered; Iyyar has a red rashy face and every time his nose starts to run, he informs me. "Imma! I have boogers!"

6. I went to my six-week checkup, a little late, the week before last, and found that I've lost more weight than I thought I had. In terms of X, where X is what I weighed when I got pregnant with Barak (the top end of the healthy weight range for my height), I was at X + 22, which was down 20 lb from right before Marika was born. I checked at home yesterday and am down to X + 17 (on my home scale, not a doctor's scale, but still). While absolutely bad, it is relatively great, and quite encouraging; the lowest I've been since Iyyar was born was X + 11, and that was when Avtalyon was nine months old and we'd just come back from Israel. Now, I'm only two months postpartum.

I really, really want to get back to X, and the idea of losing 17 lb somehow seems a lot less daunting than the idea of losing 21. Especially if we can manage to, you know, go to Israel, where I was able to lose a pound a week without even trying (granted, I was nursing exclusively, and I'm sure that helped, but I wasn't losing a pound a week after Avtalyon was born here--more like a pound a month.)

7. I'm sorry, I can't quite bring myself to blog the whole hospital experience. I sat down to do it a couple of times and I just... can't. An hour or so ago I picked up the backpack I had with me at the hospital, looking for something, and put my hand unexpectedly on a pack of hospital-issue baby wipes. And had a fear reaction that was so intense it was physical. I didn't really start shaking until I got home from the hospital, but I haven't really stopped since--and I still can't quite feel my knees. Tomorrow she's scheduled for a followup appointment with her pediatrician. We are hoping for no surprises or unexpected detours to the ER this time.

8. Barak has not had a new sweater for a long time--more than a year I think. I asked him what he wanted and he requested a "bright shiny red" sweater. I had the body of it in my backpack, and got a few inches of it done at the hospital and managed to join body and sleeves without holders or stitch markers OR the right length of needle; I'm about a third of the way up the yoke now.

9. Even though we don't really know what we're doing, I've started clearing out and packing; this morning I went down to the storage space (Marika has just started letting me put her down to nap again, as of 10:30 am) and went through baby boy clothes in sizes 0-12 and the 3T/boys' small stuff, which will be for Avtalyon and Iyyar respectively, next year. Barak is going to need a bunch of new shirts; he has pants and Shabbos shirts but no weekday shirts. I need to get those, 3T Shabbos pants, and a couple of size 4 shirts for Iyyar--there are of course hand-me-downs from Barak but not everything makes it long enough to move down the line. Marika, of course, has lots of cute new things (hooray post-holiday sales! I got 11 shirts/pairs of pants for her in various sizes for $36 at Children's Place earlier this week) and also got two shopping bags' worth of hand-me-downs from a local friend today, to add to the enormous box of hand-me-downs we got a couple of weeks ago from out-of-town friend with toddler twin girls. Both of them have excellent taste in clothes and Marika is now very well supplied with pink.

10. I realized today that it's entirely possible that we could be out of this apartment and in Israel in six months. MHH's contract is up mid-July. If we rent out the apartment I imagine we would hope to do so by August first. That's six months from today.

The mind reels.

2 comments:

Deborah said...

Six months! Yikes!

Jasmijn said...

I think this "listing while speeching" idea is a good one. Look how much you've told us in one burst!

1. that is SO adorable. Meltingly so.
2. are you still thirsty? And how much has she grown?
5. eeeeuw, boogers. BOY boogers!
6. congrats
7. then don't: you don't owe us. How'd the checkup go?
8. ooooo, red.
9. coincidentally, I just bought Robert a new pair of school pants. The ones he was wearing were floods. The new ones are 32x30s... from the adult men's section. Yes, they're a little loose and long: I want some growing room as they have to last till summer if at all possible. But they're not obviously too big for him. Yikes.
10. yes, it reels indeed. Gulp.