Adventures with the Nose Frida

We're home!  Overall, the conference was AWESOME.  It was definitely a different (read: harder) experience trying to do it with the baby there, but in hindsight, I would call it a success.  I saw some excellent talks, met some new people (including some of my academic idols!), and caught up with a bunch of old friends.  Oh, and ate a lot of barbecue!  Maya probably consumed her weight in collard greens - which made for some really awesome poo, let me tell you.

Here are some photos from the plane flight home - overall, she did wonderfully on both flights.  That's my little baby-on-the-go!

Don't worry, we didn't let her actually fly like this!  Pre-boarding photo op only :)

Her cuteness overwhelms me!  And the strawberry outfit!

The only downside of the trip is that the baby and I both got a cold.  It doesn't seem too bad - and I was sicker than she was - and we seem to be on the mend now.  However, I got to have my first experiences sucking massive quantities of snot out of the baby's nose with the Nose Frida.  My verdict?  Fucking gross…yet strangely satisfying.

Baby boo at the conference child care, the probable source of our snot-inducing pathogen.  We used child care for afternoons only, which was a good balance between me getting to go to talks and Maya getting at least one solid nap. She *loved* watching the other babies crawl!

I'm saving Maya's six month update post for Monday, since that's when our pediatrician appointment will be.  Can't wait to see how big she's gotten!  Other than that, we're spending some beautiful summer evenings outside watching the soap opera of nature unfold in our back yard.  The chipmunks have taken over the rock wall and had at least one (very!) successful litter this season, so there are chipmunks everywhere, continually amusing us with their chasing/calling/general antics.  The downy woodpeckers have a daily chase-fest themselves, and we have regular evening visits from a very vocal flicker.  A red squirrel has built a nest in our neighbor Ralph's wooden deck, and it runs forays to his bird feeder like it's going out of style.  We're on our second clutch of baby robins in our own porch nest, and they should fledge any day now.  And oh, the fireflies!  I will never, ever tire of them :)

Here are some other random photos of life over the past week while I pack us up to head off to the Saturday farmer's market…yay for summer!

Maya and Abby are actually playing together now!

Don't worry, both are surprisingly gentle with each other,

This is their favorite game - "reach and play over basket" 

Second downside to traveling - baby now thinks she can nap on top of me - in bed - ALL THE TIME.  So we're back to crib training…again.  

Wearing her baby mammoth shirt from the Field Museum - thanks so much, Sushma!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Diary

I'm going to whine just a little bit here, but I am not actually looking for solutions/sympathy - I just want to vent.  On my birth club message board, we call such ramblings "Dear Diary" posts. We have had two major challenges this week, one being that Maya's nighttime sleep has gone into the shitter - not that she was sleeping that well before - but for the past three nights, she's been up every hour between 10pm and 5am, and then napped in my lap (but only  in my lap, and only if I remain very still) all morning to make up for it.  The only good part about this is that all the extra nursing has been helping me resolve bad challenge #2, which is that I'm currently battling my 5th clogged milk duct in 10 days - quite the record for me!  Clogged ducts are bad enough on their own, especially the ones that plug right at the nipple (oh lord, the stabbing pain!), but my coworker just had one turn into a raging case of mastitis and then an ABSCESS in the space of
Read more

41 Weeks

Image
A place where no woman should ever have to go!  No, there is no baby yet. We're off to see the midwife again now for more membrane stripping/non-stress test - I'll try to update afterwards. Here are some photos from this weekend: One of the many (fat) squirrels that inspired the cookies Friday's "Ugly Sweater Party" - husband won, actually! We got some snow this weekend, offering the opportunity to try to induce labor with.... ....snow shoveling!  I did our house (front and back) and all of our neighbors' houses too.  Clearly didn't work, but was fun anyway. Best part of the weekend - husband's parents came to visit, YAY!!  It was so great to see them :)  
Read more

The Two Week Wait

First, before anyone gets excited - NO, I'M NOT GETTING PREGNANT.  The "two week wait" is a common phrase for people trying to conceive to describe the stressful, intense waiting time in between ovulation and the earliest pee-on-a-stick test that you can take to figure out if you're pregnant or not.  As I have only experienced this once, and mostly I didn't expect to actually get pregnant, I had a pretty mild experience with it. However, I've also never felt anything quite like it - great excitement, mixed with great fear, mixed with a very sincere sense of impatience.  And yet!  I've found another experience that feels *exactly* the same! So my paper got editorially rejected from Science - although it was quite a kind and positive rejection - and so now we are waiting at Nature.  I wake up every single morning fervently both hoping for and dreading the decision, and feeling distinctly impatient that I can't just know now  (and praying that someone
Read more