A tally sheet

The good: Jack is doing some amazing new tricks.  He claps when you say, "clap, clap, clap."  He apparently recognizes the sign language motion for milk because when I did it the other day, he immediately spat out his binkie and slow-mo staggered toward my chest with arms outstretched while giggling in anticipation.  Walk while holding on to furniture ("cruising" in child development parlance) is really easy for him now, and he's starting to take risks by reaching across larger and larger divides.  And we spent half of the day today following each other through all the rooms of our flat today on all fours, which was great fun for both of us.

The bad: Jack awoke from his morning nap with a blister-like sore on the top of his lip, and I'm not quite sure where it came from or how to deal with it.  Sometime this afternoon he must have bumped his head, because he has a painful-looking bruise near his left temple.  The unnerving thing is that even though he had a few small falls today (as always with this daredevil, learning to walk baby), I don't really know how he got the bruise, because I didn't think he fell near a corner and I don't know what else could have given him such a small but intense bruise.  Oh, and Jack also now know how to stand in his highchair, so he's no longer safe alone in it for long enough for me to even cross the room--I have to be right beside him at all times.

The ugly: Last night I saw every hour of the clock except 3.  Yep, that's at least 11 wakes.  Andrea Grace is on speed dial. 

We had all settled in for a long Christmas break

So, yes, it's been forever since I've posted, but since we saw a bunch of you who read this since I've last posted, I thought it might be okay.  That is until Pops asked today whether or not I still even had a blog.  Point taken.  So tonight will be a quick update on Christmas and then I'm off to bed.

The night I last posted, Jack woke up about 

10 times in the first 4 hours of "sleep," so I brought him into bed with me.  He slept wonderfully the rest of the night, but I barely got a wink, and I was convinced that he would never be able to readjust to sleeping alone the next night.  That particular week it may have been just separation anxiety--he's at about the right age for that to happen, and he has had more than a few episodes of "only Mommy will do" in the past month.  But Jack surprised me with about a week of really amazing sleep starting the next night.  Then we disrupted his sleeping patte

rn again by traveling across six time zones, and he hasn't slept well since.

Christmas in both Houston and Warrensburg was wonderful.  Ben and I went out for a date while in Houston, and he gave me a gorgeous Christmas gift--a pair of diamond earrings that are fairly hefty, to say the least--which I haven't taken off since.  On Christmas day Jack saw several of his second cousins as about 30 of the Angelette/Ragland clan gathered at Grammy and Granddad's.  

In Missouri, we made a brief visit to Richmond and then headed back to Warrensburg where we pretended Christmas was on the 27th, which allowed us to go through our Christmas Eve ritual of opening new pajamas and to wake up all together on "Christmas" morning to open stockings and other presents.  

Jack is still the only grandchild on both sides, but our families are still noticeably growing as our siblings pair up and bring people home with them for Christmas.  Aunt Rachel and Chad are now engaged, which kind of adds a new level of meaning to having Chad around, even though he's been a fixture in our family for about five years.  We spent a little time talking wedding plans and Rachel tried her wedding dress on for the first time while we were there.  Tyler has been dating his girlfriend Rachael (yeah, she and my sister Rachel had a fun time messing with people by always sitting next to each other and constantly prompting the "which one?" question, but it's much easier in writing) for two years now, but this Christmas she was there the entire time we were, which was fantastic.  Plus she undeniably gets the award for best Christmas gift given this year.  She gave Tyler the game Rock Band, which Ben and I played with the two of them for at least six hours straight one day.  The first picture is of Ben singing along to it while holding Jack.  The other two pictures are from today, mostly because I haven't sorted through Christmas pictures yet, but also because Jack was wearing an adorable outfit that he got from Melanie and Ankur for Christmas and because he made impressively quick work of completely tearing apart a magazine this evening.  If only he had had as much enthusiasm for unwrapping presents. 

Unfortunately we missed out on seeing Uncle Stephen's new girlfriend Kelly who arrived in Houston just a few hours after we left.  But she sent along a great CD of funky nursery rhymes for Jack, and based on the stories

 Stephen told, I think I'm really going to like her.  

I also had some interesting hair high jinks over Christmas.  Unwisely, in retrospect, I scheduled an appointment for highlights at an Aveda salon in Houston that I found online and had no recommendation for.  Never again.  I said subtle beige highlights and a few lowlights; I ended up with fat gold chunks and no lowlights.  Although I've never done that before, I went back and asked for someone else to redo it.  I came out with tons of little platinum streaks added on to the gold chunks and still no noticeable lowlights.  We're talking seriously blonde here, and I'm not exactly a blonde.  Ben was convinced that if I did anything else to my hair, it would all fall out, and actually I was a little concerned myself, especially given that I'm already operating on less than my normal hair volume.  (One of the things no one ever tells you is that about 4 months after giving birth, hormone drops start causing most women to start losing massive amounts of hair.  As in clog the drain several times amounts of hair.  I was no exception and am now sporting a huge amount of 1 inch long baby hairs and significantly less volume in the rest of my hair.)  So I suffered through all our Christmas pictures without doing anything else to fix my bad dye job, but when we got back to London I just couldn't take it anymore.  An 8 GBP (Great British Pound) bottle of semi-permanent L'Oreal and I'm now sans stripes and with a color a few shades darker than natural and only slightly off what I wanted.  Much better.  And so far my hair hasn't all fallen out yet.  Now if only I could fix all those Christmas pictures.

Preview of the week to come: I'm pretty sure Jack will be standing on his own for significant chunks of time by the end of the week, as today alone he did several 3-4 second stands.  We'll be trying out a few new foods including more meat and a little dairy as I'm starting to worry that Jack might not be getting enough protein.  And on Wednesday we're going to the NHS health clinic to have Jack weighed.  I expect a significant increase over his last weigh-in of 15 pounds, as on the way to church this morning I could barely carry our little chubbler baby!  Along those lines, also hopefully more workouts for me.

Two videos of Jack laughing that should appease the restless natives

Last night after his dinner I thought Jack may have had a dirty diaper, so I leaned in and gave a little sniff. Jack seemed to think that this was a playful move on my part and that sniffling was hilarious. Hence these two adorable videos were born. They showcase very nicely how instantaneous and brightening his smile is. I went through the video frame by frame on my camera (I think it takes something like 30 frames a second), and it's literally a one-frame conversion from boredom to massive grin. It looks scripted! The videos also do a good job of demonstrating how his laugh has already evolved into a more toddler-like one from the tiny baby giggles that I posted back in October. And the second one shows how Jack's speech is developing--this week he's all about making "g" sounds, as you can tell by the "hu-guuu" he makes during a break in laughing. The less attractive part of them is that at the end of the second one I start our kissing pig game and thus a few snorts are included.

From the messy background (laundry everywhere) you may think you have an inkling that this has been a rough week, but let me assure you, you have no idea. Sunday night Jack woke up about 5-6 times. Monday night it was up to 7 or 8, including a particularly bad screaming wake from 4 until 4:30 that also involved a disastrous diaper change. Tuesday night was sheer torture as our little angel baby woke up at least 20 times.

I am sooooo not exaggerating. Literally every 20 minutes from 11 until 2 and then at least every hour from 4 until 7. Oh, and there were at least two wake ups between his 9 o'clock bedtime and 11 when I laid down. I worked really hard (and succeeded pretty darn well) at doing the responsible mommy thing of gently trying to teach Jack to self-soothe. That is to say I attempted to distinguish between "I'm having trouble getting back to sleep" fusses (2-3 individual short and sporadic vocalizations in a waking episode that lasts up to maybe a minute total) and "I'm scared/I need you" wails (crying that lasts longer than that and gets louder with decreasing time between each cry). The problem is mainly that the desire to give Jack the opportunity to learn to put himself back to sleep and the desire to stop a full blown tantrum often conflict--go in to help too soon when it's only a fussing and he's deprived of any easy learning opportunity, but go in a few seconds too late when it's a genuine cry and it turns into a true wake up that takes 20 minutes rather than 2 minutes to put him back to sleep. It sounds fairly easy when I put it in writing that way, but it is not all that easy at 1:30 in the morning when you've already been up 5 times and just want the baby to go back to sleep NOW!

But Jack's 7 a.m. wakeup was different in that it was followed by a massive throwing up episode that happened just as I walked up to his crib. I made it in time for the frightening full-body convulsions that precede baby vomiting. Scared me to death, in part because it was completely unexpected. So I left a message for Dr. Hay requesting an appointment and slept on the guest bed with Jack on my chest for a few more hours while Ben went back to sleep and then got ready for work (the benefit of working for a New York-based company in London is that because of the 5 hour time zone difference Ben doesn't usually have to be at work until 9:30 or 10--the detriments, well, there are many). All morning Jack was really lethargic and looked kind of shaky and tired, which I'm sure he was.

Dr. Hay squeezed us in over his lunch break--dear, dear man--and said Jack might have the beginnings of a stomach virus that has been going around so he gave me some tips about handling that possibility. But by that time Jack was already looking and acting much more like himself. We took it easy the rest of the day, and last night was slightly better with only 8 or so wakes.

Today when I called Dr. Hay's secretary to give him an update on how Jack was doing (as Dr. Hay requested), I asked if he could recommend a sleep specialist, because Jack's sleeping is still slightly out of control. It's gone downhill since Mom and Dad left, despite the fact that I've continued putting him to sleep in his crib rather than in my arms and that we've implemented a great bedtime routine. Even with a break at Christmas, I just can't deal with teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown (more on that in a post to come about postpartum depression, possibly going up this weekend) based on whether or not I'm able to sleep each night. So I figured I'd just ask whether there's some sort of equivalent of a sleep clinic for babies.

I got something better than that. I got Andrea Grace. I called and talked to her briefly before realizing who I was dealing with, and she sounded nice enough on the phone when she was apologizing and saying that she was already on Christmas vacation and couldn't see us until January. But it was when I read the first line of her website that she became the new hope on which I've pinned all my dreams of sleep. It reads, "My approach to sleep problems is designed for those loving parents who want their children to sleep well but cannot bear to leave them alone to cry." Ah, heavenly, the benefit of a sleeping baby and no crying it out. Then I started noticing that she has a book (I've already ordered it from Amazon) and interviews with big time news organizations mentioned. Then I saw among the recommendations that not only was a quote in from Dr. Hay (nice to have that extra little bit of endorsement), but also a few from minor British celebrities (who I'm sure Brits would consider major celebs) and one from Nick Hornby! As in Nick Hornby the author of such masterpieces as High Fidelity (one of my top five all time favorite movies--well, not really, but it's good), Fever Pitch, and About a Boy. Anyone who has written books that have been turned into movies starring such diverse and famous actors as John Cusack, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jimmy Fallon, and Hugh Grant is amazing in my opinion.

At any rate, what I was getting to before being interrupted by a flood of praise for a somewhat minor contemporary author is that apparently Andrea Grace is the newer, gentler Baby Whisperer, complete with celebrity clients. We'll see, but my hopes and expectations are now stellar.

Silly me, I should have realized that a pediatrician associated with The Portland, a five star hotel that also happens to be one of the premier birthing hospitals in the world (if you go to the website, I highly recommend clicking on the Web Babies section--guaranteed to brighten your day even more), wouldn't refer me to just anyone. But wow. Sometimes I forget that in London we're moving in a different sphere than we did growing up. That realization usually hits me when I remember that my best friend is going back to work as a top executive for the European branch of a major world back after her year long maternity leave ends in January or that my husband's salary puts us in one of the top US-income brackets or that Ben and I are at least five years younger than our next-oldest friends. It's just a very different experience, and I got another reminder of that today.

Tomorrow I hope I get the chance to post about our Christmas preparations and put up pictures of Jack at Ben's office's family Christmas party, which is tomorrow afternoon, but no promises.

Tonight is already not looking so good--in the first three hours of his sleep (usually the most calm) I've already had to resettle Jack four times.

Overtime overload

I'm urging Ben to quit his job immediately after seeing a horrible story on CNN yesterday afternoon. A Japanese widow was describing how her husband died from being overworked, complaining that some months he worked up to 100 hours of overtime in his job as a middle manager at Toyota. Ironically, after sending this story to Ben, he then didn't get home from work yesterday until 6 a.m. this morning. If things continue the way they have the past few days, Ben will come dangerously close to working 100 hours of overtime this week.

This afternoon I called Ben and reminded him about 1) the incident with Ernesta's brother and 2) the time I almost got fired from campaign work for calling my boss several expletives and asked him why he was going to make us lose all our campaigns (long story that basically boils down to him not listening when I said he shouldn't do something that would and did hurt Dad's campaign). I then told Ben that if he wasn't home by 10:30 tonight, I would call and yell at the partner who has been making him work so late. My wonderful husband walked through the front door at 10:25 this evening.

Football opinions and puzzlements from the birthday girl

This weekend was great. We went on the Eye, which turned out to be absolutely amazing and not that scary. The view from up there (the highest observation wheel in the world) made London look small. Really, really small. And Ben and Jack gave me one of my birthday presents, a beautiful silver necklace. I'll post a picture sometime later this week. The card said Jack got the idea from Nonna's visit--Jack was fascinated by her necklaces.

Today was nice enough, with lots of birthday calls, most of them missed somewhere between Jack's naptimes (I turn off the ringer then) and diaper changes and bath time. I also realized how much I love facebook. Amazing that you can now go without seeing or talking to a friend for months or years, and then because of a little reminder service, they wish you happy birthday right on time. Great tool for the nostalgic. The day could have been a little better though if, for instance, I had gotten to see my husband for more than 15 minutes all day. I'm really starting to resent S&C.

But enough of that--let's talk football. Our morning (Jack's and mine) started with a bit of a surprise. It turns out that Jack's Uncle Tyler, my little brother, was pictured in the KC Star! And on the front page of the sports section, no less. I haven't heard the whole story directly from him, but through Mom and Dad I gather that on Friday night at 11 p.m. someone showed up at his door with tickets to the Big 12 Championship game and asked if he wanted to drive to San Antonio with them. Tyler, a junior at my alma mater, jumped in the car and told Mom and Dad to watch for him because he'd be "noticeable"--something about tiger paint and a Mizzou flag worn as a cape. Well, now we know what he was talking about. Tyler is the painted one on the left in the picture. His roommate Rob is the one in front pumping his fists.

I had refrained from saying anything gloating about Mizzou out of deference to Melanie, a KU grad and die-hard fan, God bless her, and frankly it's a bit hard to say much that's gloating now, since the BCS just dealt us the worst blow in recent memory. Last week number one and now, after losing to a top ten team, we're eliminated from a BCS bowl. That's just wrong.

I mean, seriously, "The" Ohio State is going to the championship? The most overrated school from the most overrated state ever!? The school whose conference giants include the once great but now rather lackluster Notre Dame and Michigan? Many of you have heard my rants about Ohio being the worst state in the country, a view heavily influenced by the 2004 elections and multiple horrible experiences with the Cincinnati airport. Honestly, is it possible for a single state to have a greater abundance of miserable, mid-sized, lukewarm Republican-leaning cities (think Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, Canton, Dayton, etc.), all of which lost their lustre (if they ever had any) long ago? But this strongly held belief of mine also depends in part on the annoyingness of people who claim that Ohio State and/or the Cincinnati Bengals are or ever have been or ever will be decent, respectable teams. Even if Angelette extended-family loyalty did not already demand it, on January 7 I'd still be cheering for LSU.

Things might get a little interesting in Houston this Christmas, though, given Mizzou's bowl opponent. We're playing Arkansas, where Jack's Uncle Stephen went to school. Which leads to an interesting question--if (when) Missouri beats Arkansas, since Arkansas beat LSU and LSU will win the national championship (barring uncalled penalties on the order of the neck-standing junk Ohio pulled against Miami to steal the 2002 championship), does that mean Missouri should actually have stayed #1?

And now to Jack. He was very happy all day after a fussy weekend. But I've had to stop typing this twice already to put him back to sleep, and both times it took a lot more effort than normal to calm his louder than normal cries. The first time he had been asleep less than three hours, and something was hurting him. I didn't completely determine what it was, but I think he has a tummy ache. It seemed more like an achy tummy pain type cry than an acute teething pain type cry; a few months ago I never would have imagined that the two were discernable.

The rough thing about this age is that 1) Jack's needs are starting to be more complex than just needing to eat, sleep, and be changed, 2) he's getting more able to tell me and I'm more able to recognize when something is wrong, but 3) it's now much harder to tell exactly what is wrong. For example, when he's eating, sometimes Jack will cry because he wants food more quickly and sometimes because he wants it more slowly--at different times he wants it to flow at different speeds, and it's not always how you would expect. I would think he would want food really fast at the beginning of meals because he's hungrier then, and sometimes he does, but other times he doesn't. I've tried and failed to discern patterns for it. And it's hard to tell what food he wants when and when he wants a drink. It's easy to tell when I guess wrong, but eliminating the wrong choices takes a while and leads to more frustration for both of us. I'll be really, really glad when he can at least finally use sign language.

Another new thing that's just started in the past few days is that Jack will wake up crying at odd hours, and I'll go in to find him standing or sitting up in his crib. That I don't find the least bit odd--he's still getting used to going from laying to standing and standing to sitting, so he's practicing even in his sleep, which is common for babies to do with new skills. The thing I do find oddly funny is that when I put his binky in again, he immediately goes limp. As in completely limp and fast asleep again. It's as if he's hypnotized and I've touched his head and said "sleep!" The first few times he did this, he almost fell over because I was so surprised by his reaction that I wasn't prepared to support him. Normally he relaxes a little when I put his binky back in, but this is like comatose-relaxing. Bizarre.

But the best thing Jack has started doing recently is giving me kisses. It's really sweet. He had started giving random kisses/drool deposits on our cheeks while Mom and Dad were here, but now he's gotten more targeted and will do it on cue. I ask, "Can I have a kiss, please?" and make puckered kissing noises, and he leans in and plants a big, open-mouthed slobber right on my lips. Messy, but adorable. I'll try to get Ben to capture us on video this week, but Jack is rarely one for demonstrating party tricks on demand, so no promises.