Christmas in October

The coffee this morning was amazingly successful. About a dozen mommies showed up with their babies, ranging in age from 6 weeks to "25 months." I found the latter to be a strange categorization (hence the quotes), as I would have just described her as "2," but this mommy has other issues about which I would sooner complain. Naming her daughter Sparkle, for instance. Seriously, I'm not kidding on that one. But I digress unnecessarily, namely about something other than Jack's antics. Point is, it was a great event, with some people sticking around from 10:30 until after 1:30. Fantastic. Jack seemed to enjoy looking at the other babies and amused himself very well playing with a few teethers while only making 3-4 grabs that threatened to send my plate or glass careening to the floor. He also managed to eat one whole banana cube and one whole squash cube without getting any food on his clothes (sans bib, nonetheless) and without spitting up any of it!

For those of you who don't know, I make all of Jack's baby food from scratch with only organic ingredients. Interestingly enough I've become kind of militant about organic, homemade stuff, which is especially weird because after the KCWC nutrition seminar where I was first introduced to the idea of homemade baby food, I came home crying because it all sounded too impossibly difficult. Of course, it's probably not all that difficult when, like most of the KCWC women, you don't work AND have a housekeeper AND have a nanny, which explains why none of the other moms there were freaking out at the idea. But actually I found out that it's not really all that difficult for me, either. It just takes a couple of weekend days (when Ben can watch Jack while I cook) to make enough food for a month or two, when made in big batches and frozen in individual portions. That method does carry risks, however, hence the two dozen cubes of pureed parsnips and two dozen cubes of pureed plums that may well go uneaten. So when I say "cubes," I'm talking about those individual portions, which are about the size of ice cubes.

Again with the digressions. Jack and I both had a great time, so I decided we should celebrate, and I bought him a stuffed flower toy that plays musical scales in the tones of several different instruments.

When we got home, Jack had even more goodies waiting for him. Since Royal Mail, the national postal service, is on and off of strikes right now (annoying, but still less disruptive and less pointless than the terrible tube worker strike of last month), I paid a few extra pounds to have the JoJoMamanBebe order delivered through Parcel Force, which is like a UK-only Fed-Ex. I had no idea it would arrive so quickly, though; I only placed the order on Sunday morning! Lots of cute things from that order to show you tomorrow.

No pictures today, though, because I had to spend the better part of the evening 1) chasing after Jack to prevent him from trying to crawl through spit up, which he had in copious amounts tonight, despite his reflux medicine, and 2) moving his crib mattress to a lower level. Therefore I had few free moments while Jack was awake. I'll make up for it tomorrow.

When he woke at 3 a.m. last night, I noticed that Jack was up on all fours with his head level with the top of the crib. Scared me to death, so there was no way I was going to let him take even one more nap with his mattress at the highest level. But I underestimated how long and complex changing it would be. After struggling with it for about 20 minutes, I started to vaguely recall that while 8 1/2 months pregnant I had a horrible time putting the crib together. Forty-five minutes after that I remembered why I had such a hard time. You see, the British like to make things difficult to put together. Jack's crib has this terrible screw lock feature that requires the assembler to get underneath the crib while simultaneously hold a nut in place with a flat head screwdriver and turn a bolt with a hex key--not an easy task period, but especially difficult when you're carrying 50 extra pounds of baby weight or trying to keep your 6 month old from following you underneath the crib. Give me an Ikea assembly line piece over that hassle any day; Swedes may make freaky-looking furniture, but they sure do make the design user-(or at least assembler-) friendly.