Under the Weather September 29, 2008

Poor little Hayden has been a little under the weather since I got back from San Fran.  He’s been ok during the day but after his afternoon nap he gets pretty quiet, also he’s been picky about his food and milk, which never happens! (this boy likes to eat anything he can lay his hands on.)  Last night he running a fever, and today he is very somber.   I think he is fighting something (sure that is the price to pay with day care) but he is trying very hard to let it not affect him too much.

He is still really enjoying his walking though, but is just wanting us to be patient with it.  Also he is giving out lots of cuddles at the moment, which help him feel better, and I don’t think his parents mind giving them out 🙂

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Hayden The Traveller

Hayden clocked up his third trip that involved plane trips last weekend and again he did very well.  We went out to San Francisco which is five hours in the air and longer in terms of journey because of having to change flights. Out journey out got messed up with a broken plane so it was even longer but he was a real trooper.  Took a couple of naps on the planes, and didn’t scream down the place too much!! People tended to comment on how well he did!.  He also has this funny habit of doing big poops on planes!! (I say funny because Kara had to change him……)

Nobody told Hayden about the time difference!!  No matter what time we put him to bed, he woke up in the 4am hour (the 7am hour Indy time!!)  That’s going to be a challenge for us when we come to the UK next month!!

I’m not sure he really enjoyed his trip.  It’s a long way to go for a couple of days, and then all he wants is to play with his toys (most of which aren’t there).  We did find a playground though and he really enjoyed going down the slides!!  Also he got to eat some new grown up food like Pizza so maybe things aren’t so bad!!!

Day care September 16, 2008

Hayden had to go back to day care last week.  It’s been an adjustment for him, but he is soldiering on.  On top of having to get used to not being home all day, he has gone from the infant room into the toddler room.  It’s a whole other room, and of course there is a new schedule, new teachers, new friends (although a couple of the kids are previous friends from the infant room who moved up before him).  They go outside for 1/2 hour twice a day.  The first time is at 9 so that works out really well because it motivates me to take him there before my daily 9:00 meeting.  When he was still in the infant room I would have him take his first nap at home at 9 while I had my teleconference and would take him in when he woke up.   Another adjustment is that for snacks and lunch they sit at little tables and eat.  He had only eaten in highchairs before.  But apparently he is doing well with that.  I figured he would be constantly getting up, but they said he hasn’t done that.  And the final big change is that they sleep on these little cots (like thin travel beds that are slightly elevated and have no sides).  I thought it would be really hard for him to stay put, but again they are reporting that he stays put pretty well.  He’s not been sleeping a terribly long time, particularly as there is only one nap time and he is not entirely ready for one nap yet.  He has some days where that is all he needs, but at least just as many days where he needs 2.  Now that he is having such big days with typically less than an hour sleep, the days when he is home he is really needing to catch up on sleep and gets a couple of good naps per day.  Last week was such an adjustment, and that compounded with little nap time meant that we had a pretty tired and grumpy baby Mon, Tues, and Wed nights.  So we are trying to make sure he gets to bed even earlier on day care nights, which is a shame because it means less playing time with him, but we have to do what is best for him.

Steps!!!

Hayden had his first steps a week ago last Saturday!  John was actually the only one who saw him walk for about 5 days, because he took his first steps two to him and then didn’t take any more until Wednesday!  Then he took a couple to me, and he looked very surprised the whole time and then cried for pretty much the rest of the night until he went to bed.  (He went back to day care last week and was very tired, more on that later.)  Tonight in the time between when he came home from day care and had dinner was when he really seemed to be trying the walking thing out on purpose.  He must have taken two steps from the coffee table to me half a dozen times.  He also is starting to realize that it’s a fun and good thing because he started smiling and clapping after he would get to me.  It’s a lot of fun watching him learn.  He’s definitely in the learning stages still, and crawling is his preferred method of travel.

We miss Nanny!

Nanny left a couple of weeks ago.  I miss her.  She was so fun and took such good care of me.  She took me on walks every day that it wasn’t raining.  We did lots of fun things while she was here.  We went to the zoo, had my birthday party, went down to Grandpaman and Grandma G’s lake and went boating, went down to the artsy little village of Nashville, IN with Grandma, went to Conner Prairie to see what it was like in pioneer times, went to a couple of baseball games and a football game, went to farmer’s markets, Mommy’s family reunion, and things I can’t even remember right now!  I was hoping that I would have my first steps while she was here, but I saved them for three days after she left (I’m a little devil sometimes).  I love you Nanny, and I’ll see you in a few weeks!!

Moto GP

Hayden is one lucky boy.  Just after his first Colts game, now it was time to watch the big fast motorbikes at the Speedway track on Moto GP practice day.  He seemed to enjoy it (much to his mother’s displeasure, I think Hayden with a motorbike is her worse nightmare) although he wasn’t sure about his ear protectors!

Go Colts

Hayden got to go to his first Colts game a couple of weeks ago!  He was definitely the youngest attendee but he was a bit hit in the crowd and made lots of friends (despite trying to knock over everyone’s beer cups).

He did a fair amount of clapping, did some freestyle dancing when they were showing the cheerleaders on the big screen (I kid you not, he just started dancing).  Unfortunately they charge us a full ticket for him so he won’t be coming again for a while.

Emily and Sadie September 3, 2008

So another fun thing about Reena’s wedding is that Emily was in town!  She brought her 6 month old, Sadie, to play with Hayden and me one day.  It was so fun.  I think they were pretty smitten with each other. 🙂  And I don’t know why this happens, but it seems like whenever Emily and I are taking a photo together with our babies, we happen to be holding the other’s baby!

Dolphins!

Another thing we have done recently is I finally got my birthday present from Hayden booked – a dolphin encounter at the zoo!  It was so great (you can see some pictures in the photos section).  It wasn’t really ‘swimming’ with the dolphins, but I was able to get in waist-deep with them, stroke them, and give them various commands to make them do things like give a high five (they must have learned that from Hayden), do flips, make noises, and so on.  It was so much fun and rekindled my childhood dream of being a marine biologist.  I wonder if there are any children out there right now thinking, ‘when I grow up I want to be a systems analyst focusing on human capital management using enterprise resource planning tools.’  Probably.  Hundreds.

Reena’s wedding

We have had a very busy summer, and I really haven’t written about much that we have done here – it’s been mostly about Hayden and his development.  One of the big events of the summer was my dear friend Reena’s wedding.  She got married a couple of weeks ago in traditional Indian fashion, and it was an event unlike any I had seen before!  I was honored to be a bridesmaid in her wedding, which meant I got to attend all five events over the three days.

The first event was just for family and close friends on Reena’s side, girls only.  It was a henna party, and we all got our hands tattooed with henna.  It was at Reena’s parent’s house which was beautifully decorated.  My friend Emily was also a bridesmaid and came in from San Francisco.  Very funny story: we got there before a lot of people arrived and decided we should go ahead and get the henna while there was no wait, and we each insisted the other go first but I insisted the most so she did go first.  She asks the henna artist if she should get it on her palms or top of hands and the artist says the top is better because it looks nice and doesn’t get in the way as it dries.  So Emily gets it done on the top, and Reena comes out and says why’d you get it done on the top? Emily explains, then Reena’s mom comes out and says how pretty Emily’s henna is but why did she do it on the top?  Then several cousins come out and also comment that it is on the top.  So Emily is feeling pretty self-conscious at this point and decides to get it done on the palms as well (several people did it on both sides).  When the artist is finished with her palms, Emily gets out of the chair by pushing down on the arms of the chair – of course using her palms!  It takes a while for the Henna to dry so it messed it up pretty good.  Then she comes back to where she is sitting and tells us how she just messed up her palms by using them to get up from her seat, and in exhasperation she puts the pack of her hand on her forehead.  Of course, the back of her hand is also waiting to dry!  Luckily that just looked like it was part of the comedy of errors, but it didn’t actually transfer onto her forehead or mess up the back of her hand.

The next day was a religious Hindu ceremony for Reena’s side, again at her parents house, in the morning and ‘garba’ which is dancing in the evening.  The dancing was traditional dances done as a big group in a circle that moves counter-clockwise.  We were told that a true sign of a good Indian party is when the white people dance, and we weren’t going to let Reena not have a good party!  So we joined in and looked incredibly uncoordinated and ungraceful – the complete opposite of Reena and Such and their families!  When I was wearing my bridesmaid outfit the next day I realized that the skirt flowed so beautifully when I swished it around, and it dawned on me that the long skirts they were all wearing would have really helped make the dancing look much more elegant than it did when I danced with my knee-length fitted skirt.   Reena’s family was sooo welcoming throughout all the events, and when I went out to dance her cousins would come to either side of me and help me learn the steps.  They were like that with everything – if there was a ritual going on they would go out of their way to explain what was happening and what it meant, or when they were dancing as a group (‘free style’ I would call it – when it wasn’t in a big circle with set steps) they would wave me over to come join them.  I was joking with Reena yesterday that I am slowly stealing her family because John and I are already quite good friends with one of her cousins, Sunil, who we hang out with often, and now another of her cousins lives in Germany and works for IBM and we hit it off throughout that weekend and were just IMing this morning.  Look out – your cousins are next!!!

The next morning was the actual wedding ceremony.  Reena was absolutely gorgeous.  At each event she looked so beautiful, but the wedding was my favorite ‘look.’  The ceremony was very cool.  I could spend days describing it and am not really sure where I would even start and don’t have loads of time at the moment so I will just say that John took some pictures which are posted on this site so maybe they can tell the story a little.  That night was the evening reception and that was simply gorgeous.  There was food at each event which was fantastic Indian food (although truth be told it took me a while to be ready for any more Asian food after that weekend since I had eaten so much Indian food!).  Oh, and at the wedding and reception there were, oh, about 500 – 600 people.  It was truly a weekend I will never forget!

We were lucky that the wedding fell during the time Madeline was staying with us so we had a built-in babysitter as I came and went from one event to another.  A college friend of Reena’s (and mine) and her husband stayed with us the first night.  It was funny because on Friday Cyndi (the friend) and I had one of the events to go to which the husbands weren’t invited to.  John was at work, and Madeline was a bit like, ‘what is Mark going to do?’  I said I thought he had some work to do so she could show him where our office is, but other than that they were a bit on their own.  Even I had never met Mark before, so I felt badly leaving him, Madeline and Hayden alone for a few hours to make friends.  Well, I needn’t have worried as they ended up being kindred spirits! Mark is also British but has lived in the US for 16 years, so I’m sure that gave them some common ground to start with.  They had a grand time with big chats, a nice walk down to starbucks, and playing in the backyard with Hayden.   Madeline also made him a sandwich for lunch, and he commented on how great the cucumbers tasted so he was in my good books as well because she hadn’t told him they were from our garden – John and I grew them from seeds!  They do taste amazing, I must admit, but for him to randomly comment on them without knowing they were fresh was really nice!

Here is a link to Cyndi’s pictures, which have some of the events where I did not have a camera – plus a picture of the famous Mark! 🙂