How is it February already?

It's been several weeks now since "it was the Christmas season" ceased to be a plausible excuse for my failure to post an update, so it seems my only option, at this point, is really just to post an update.

It is 5pm; it has just got dark; it is -2 degrees outside and the garden is still covered with the remnants of this past month's snow, melting bit by bit during the day and replenishing itself at night, but with the majority of the molehills now exposed. Munchkin is slowly working her way bottom-first off the head of the bed while practicing her gurgling and simultaneously trying to fit the bedside table into her mouth. In fact perhaps I should go rescue her before she gets wedged between the bars of the headboard...

Often to be found in this position

...all better. She is safely placed on a blanket on the floor, with a careful trail of toys extending backwards toward her feet. This is because, at the moment, she is only able to crawl backwards, and whatever toys she is playing with now will soon be just out of her reach.

While the days of the past two months have all run into each other with their general sameness, they are all characterized by an ever larger repertoire of actions of which Munchkin is becoming master. These include:

Backing into furniture is sport of the month

Crawling backwards

This started sometime near the beginning of January, when she suddenly started to push herself backward across the kitchen floor.

It has developed into a sequence which can roughly be described as: Sphinx Pose > Child's Pose > attempt at either squat or leap frog > modified Downward Dog > sudden, unexpected propulsion backward onto tummy. 

Since she is completely incapable of moving even a millimeter forward, if she wants to reach a toy in front of her she will push herself backward in a full circle until she comes level with it.

A variation on kneeling side angle pose

Kneeling Side Angle Pose 

A frequent modification to the above backwards-crawling sequence 

(she bends one knee and extends the other leg, pushing herself up almost onto her bottom)

Removing my glasses

She seems to be fascinated by the fact that you can see through them, sometimes running her hand behind he lens while I'm wearing them, and giggling. 

She now is very adept - and fast - at whisking them off my nose (and trying to cram them into her mouth). She giggles a lot when I take them off myself and she can see my eyes.

These two cups need to be banged together, and someone's got to do it

Holding a toy in each hand and banging them together

Sticking one finger up each of my nostrils, as high as she can reach. 

Grabbing the hairs at the nape of my neck and tugging my head in different directions. 

Rearranging the little hairs round my forehead, then giggling profusely.

This is what happens if I dare tidy up

Saying long strings of sounds like "Neh-ba-wa-wa" and "Da-ta-da-da-ta-ta-da-ta". ("Ma-ma" has gone in and out of favor for several months.) 

Looking at things with her head tilted to one side, then upright, then tilted. 

Pulling her toys out of their basket, or tipping the basket over to reach them better.

This is a place for playing, not eating

Licking and chewing on furniture

In particular chair backs, bed posts, table legs. She has also recently become fond of chewing on my exercise mat.

Removing my slippers from my foot and chewing them, in the mistaken belief that she is a dog.


Sitting in a high chair (though not quite yet sitting by herself). 

We do not like food

Signalling extreme disapproval at the taste of solid food. 

While Munchkin is busy turning herself round in circles, banging toys together and perambulating backwards into table legs, I spend much of my time very busy trying to decide whether it's worth trying to take a nap (Munchkin often only sleeps for half an hour at a time), or whether I should sit down and read a book, or whether I really do feel like cleaning after all. 

I spend so much time trying to decide, I usually don't get to any of these things. I go and cuddle Munchkin instead. 

Christmas Kickoff

No holiday season can officially start in our household until the annual viewing of Love, Actually is complete. This is a sacred ritual which requires some preparation (freshly-baked cookies and a bottle of wine) as well as a bit of pre-gaming (pulling out the tree, finding the ornaments, debating what should go where over a cup of hot chocolate.)

As I was massacring the butter and sugar in a plastic bowl, with the mini fake tree already positioned on its little Ikea end table, the boxes of ornaments lying open nearby, and the Narada Nutcracker playing on my computer, I suddenly succumbed to a walloping wave of nostalgia for the wonderful Christmas seasons we had back home, in the snow-less, piney Pacific Northwest.

There are certain things without which it cannot really be Christmas - that very particular scent of the Christmas candles that stood in the little wreaths on the living room tables; trying to balance the fake pine garlands along the mantle-piece; the cloth nativity scene that went under the tree that we would spend hours playing with; the very 80s New Age Christmas albums blaring from the stereo; a million different versions of The Nutcracker; bowls of nuts on the table; making cream cheese cookies; hiding away in my bedroom working on Top Secret Christmas Present projects, usually involving dolls; the handmade cloth advent calendars; that elated feeling of coming home after school to play in your holiday-decorated house, knowing the winter break was starting soon.

The Christmas baking tradition

I was trying to impart the vital importance of this season and these memories to Piotrek over my efforts with the cookie dough and the electric mixer, which kept drowning out the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album that had popped up on YouTube. I had suddenly felt that we could not possibly inaugurate Christmas in our new house without not just a tree, but stockings, garlands, wreaths, the smell of baking cookies and the appropriately Christmasy (English) carols. And then the holiday itself - it should be noisy, joyful, with lots of people, children playing games, family from far and wide all coming together.

It should be joyful, children

A New Age Christmas with early 90s pizzaz

Did he get this excited about Christmas when he was little? He furrowed his brow and looked off into the middle distance. No, he decided. Not really. He remembered cleaning the house very thoroughly (a Polish tradition I have not yet adopted), waxing the floors, beating the carpets, etc, etc. He remembered the house being far too full, with all the aunts and cousins squeezing in and creating noisy chaos.

And by the way, he asked, what exactly is this we're listening to? The disco version of Christmas carols?

So, upon careful listening, maybe Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas album is a bit corny, silly and, well, rubbish. But it's the nostalgia that counts.

Now, part of the great holiday tradition was always having Polish wigilia on Christmas Eve. It was our special family thing and we stuck to it, even though it took me years to start liking some of the food (yes, there was a time in my life when I didn't even like pierogi ruskie, if it can be believed!)

Sitting down to eat Polish food - it's tradition!

But some of the magic of Christmas was wrapped up in that nauseating boiled-beet smell that heralded the real start of Christmas Eve. Even growing up mostly non-Polish in the US, I could never quite grasp that same feeling of Christmas in any of the other traditions - the plum pudding and paper hats and Christmas crackers and roast Turkey, the Santa and snowflakes and carrots for the reindeer, were all just charming accoutrements to the whole wigilia thing.

From my first Christmas in Poland - the market!

Which is why spending Christmases in Poland seemed like such a lovely idea when I first moved over here. This, I heard repeated over and over all around me, and felt in the prickly cold air, was a country that really did Christmas well. There's a great big Christmas market that takes over the old town square, with handmade crafts and sugared nuts and grilled meats and people sipping spiced wine from plastic cups. There are skating rinks and glittering Christmas trees, and folk troupes and pageants acted out on little stages. There are lights on all the lampposts and huge glistening angels at all the intersections. Sometimes there's even snow.

And it's one of the biggest yearly celebrations in a very Catholic country's very Catholic calendar. There's an air of solemnity which is only tinged with the mildest hint of commercialism, even in the shops and the decorations and the colourful stands and the great big barrels of mulled wine.

Polish Christmas in action

But despite all of this, I've found the "real" wigilia to be a bit of a let-down. Even if I had not come to rather like barszcz by the time I'd lived here for some years, I should have been excited to discover that it was not, in fact, the staple Christmas soup, giving way to the more palatable mushroom. But, in fact, I found that mushroom soup did not quite manage to taste like Christmas; that the absence of pickled herring on little mini rye squares was a glaring one; that carp will never be anything but disgusting, no matter how it's prepared, and could never equal our family's traditional Christmas salmon; and that nothing, NOTHING, can make up for the replacement of pierogi ruskie with the pathetic, unsatisfying cabbage-and-mushroom variety that is normally served at the wigilia table.

Making pierogi ruskie - a yearly ceremony

(It was one of my more exciting discoveries, on my first trip to Poland, that pierogi ruskie are, in fact, not a special Christmas dish that is painstakingly handmade once a year with great pomp and fuss, but in fact a staple of your standard weekly diet, which can be ordered in any restaurant on any day of the year. It was one of the most magical discoveries of my life.)

After trying to convince myself for the past several years that the holidays were lovely and I always looked forward to them, I eventually admitted that I found them to be kind of a drag. (I know - oh woe is me.) After a childhood of overly noisy gatherings, it seems Piotrek and his family have gone in the opposite direction, and spend every year on their little lonesome, with the immediate family and no more - the same five people who normally see each other over the same dining table each week, dressed slightly more elegantly and eating slightly more food than normal while talking of the same old things in a slightly more formal, self-conscious manner. After a while, I became an all-out grinch and started disliking holidays altogether. (I do not, for the record, dislike birthdays, name days or ordinary Sunday lunches with these same people. Just holidays.)

Happy and silly and in a jolly mood

I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise - nothing adds magic like taking something out of context. Our family's wigilia was a creation all its own, a tradition we created ourselves year by year. Ultimately, what made our wigilia so special was probably just the fact that it was ours. We hung out with family, we ate too much good (albeit somewhat unusual) food, we listened to festive (albeit somewhat cheesy) Christmas music, we played with the cousins and the uncles and the aunts, and everyone was happy and silly and in an unusually jolly mood. That's what I miss about Christmas.

So the gist of this rambling post and the rambling thoughts that created it is: the essence of the Christmas spirit is making up your own traditions and sticking to them, so that as the years pass, your festive glow will be awakened with Pavlovian regularity as the various Christmas stimuli are presented.

Doing Christmas as best I can

So for us that will be disco carols, chocolate chip cookies, proper Galician mulled wine (or any wine will do, really) and Love, Actually on the laptop.

Stringing up lights, hanging garlands, butchering attempts at handmade gifts, patting cream cheese cookies into questionable shapes sans cookie press, dancing to The Nutcracker, and listening to those classic English carols, with wonderfully atmospheric medieval-sounding instruments, while reading Polar Express or A Christmas Carol or The Night Before Christmas, will be the next family traditions to introduce.

And mini trees. We've been rocking the mini trees. 

On the Cold Front

The cold weather has come at last. It's below freezing and the wind is high - feels like -15C, they say. Munchkin and I are ensconced in the bedroom upstairs, with the electric heater nearby and the wood fire burning in the living room for good measure. The water is like ice and the bathroom will soon double as a second fridge.

Both Munchkin and I have come down with colds. For Munchkin that's a real first, and for us, a fun new adventure in baby cold treatments. We have come to master the nasal aspirator and the great strength of lung required to operate it. Even Munckin has stopped trying to escape by tunneling backward into the mattress whenever we pull it out, and simply stares at us with pained resignation. 

We put droplets in her nose and position her upright in her bouncy seat, despite her best attempts to backflip herself off with the leverage of two very determined feet. And we have invested in a nebulizer, which we use to coax saline mist up her nostrils and rescue her from the awful torture of trying to breathe through her mouth. 

Munchkin's torture device

Our nebulizer is shaped like a cow with a tube coming out the side of its head. It comes with cheerfully teal-coloured gas mask attachments in two sizes, as well as an infant attachment with the mist-dispensing opening built into a pacifier. As I write, Munchkin is busy pulling the pacifier attachment out of her mouth, waving it around, and putting it back in again. 

Besides putting everything in her mouth - mostly different parts of my face - another new habit of Munchkin is to hold gentle, murmuring conversations with different pieces of furniture. Just now, post-nebulization, she is telling a long, slow story to the lamp, with one thumb in her mouth. At any rate, it's distracting her from trying to catapult herself out of the bouncy seat. 

And as of about two weeks ago, she is officially a roller, although we've only seen her in action two or three times. She has successfully got herself from her tummy onto her back with great surprise and perplonkiness. She is also now no longer quite so terrified of being on her tummy, and has hung out there quite contentedly many times. 

And her new favourite word is "ma-ma-maaaaaaaa". She says this while tugging on my sleeve, grabbing my hand or pulling my hair to get my attention. She also says it while tugging on the blanket, grabbing her rattle or pulling on her mobile - but hey, it counts. She also says "a-woom", "lahh", "beeeh" and "neee", and several other sounds that are somewhat glottal and resemble the consonants of an exotic language I can't quite place. 

And she has learned sharing, since she gave me her cold without even being prompted. Very advanced indeed. 

On the cold front, we've had the yellow gas box installed in front of our property - some digging machines dropped by last week to set it up with minimal noise and fuss. A guy came on Saturday to survey our indoor pipes, and it looks like they'll be coming back tomorrow to do some work in the bathroom, where the boiler will be installed. 

So it may not be too long after all before we stop spending our days camping out in the bedroom, watching movies and reading books and playing on the play mat, and start paying real grown-up gas bills in return for a moderately warm house. It will be the end of an era, almost a way of life, for us to have a warm home, where we don't need to scuttle from frigid room to frigid room in layers of fleece and woolly hats, or to perform all household activities under blankets.

It's cold out there!

However, for as long as Munckin and I are recovering from our cold, movies and books and snuggles and lots of naps will be the ongoing game plan. 

Getting Your Body Back After Baby

As I sit here in bed at 13:06 on a Sunday afternoon, eating three or four dark chocolate truffles (they have expired – mustn’t let them go to waste), I’ve opened up previous blog drafts I considered finishing and posting during the months after Baby K was born – and I’ve come across my post-partum advice on how to lose the baby weight.

Now, you may not think that someone who spends Sunday afternoon sitting in bed in her pyjamas eating chocolate truffles is the ideal person to give advice on losing weight after having a baby. But despite being told again and again that I would “never get my body back” (by well-meaning friends and relatives probably wanting to, as we say in corpo-speak, “set my expectations”), I seem to have bounced back fairly quickly. In fact, it took me exactly two weeks to lose the last baby kilo.

So for anyone out there struggling with postpartum weight loss and wanting to know the secret to success, I have compiled below my various sure-fire action steps. 

7 Things That Will Guarantee You Get Your Body Back After Baby:

1.  Have a really big baby. Then once it’s born, half the weight is already gone. Easy-peasy.

She was sort of on the, you know, large side (this is about one week after birth)

Remain pinioned under your baby as much as possible

2.  Develop a mortal fear of your baby’s cries, so that you are essentially pinioned under your baby in the same position for most hours of the day. That way, you will be unable to eat unless your food is brought to you in a receptacle that can balance on your pile of pillows and burp rags and be eaten with one hand without crumbling or slopping onto the baby’s head – so, crackers and tea biscuits. (Note: this is enhanced by living in a house with stairs, and additionally developing a mortal fear of carrying your baby up and down them. Once you master the sling-over-your-shoulder-with-one-hand-while-frying-an-egg, your diet is doomed.)

3.  Breastfeed. Then make sure you invite over guests, especially older relatives, who are made visibly uncomfortable by seeing you breastfeed in front of them (you will identify this when they turn away/begin to pace in unnecessary circles/leave the room/offer to cover up you and your baby’s head “to protect from draughts”.) By doing this, you will make sure you end up leaving the room to breastfeed in private every time the yummy unhealthy food one normally serves to guests (grilled meats, cake) are placed on the table and devoured in your absence. You will then subsist for the rest of the visit on the slightly brown banana no one wants from the decorative fruit plate.

Think you'll get any of this food? Not when you're sent off to the back room to feed your hungry baby!

Make sure the only clothes you can find are loose and stretchy

4.  Pack all your non-maternity-wear-appropriate clothes into boxes. Do this early in your pregnancy, so you forget how small they are before you stop fitting into them. As an added bonus, have your husband come up with the ingenious idea of putting a heavy set of dressers right in front of them. This way, you will only have access to stretchy, oversized tank tops and leggings for several weeks after giving birth, and will be able to prance in front of your mirror thinking, “I look great!”

The larger your child gets, the more striking will be the results

5.  Pick up your baby every time they cry/don’t cry/look at you/breathe noisily. This is a very efficient arm workout and will get you ripped within two weeks, especially if you follow recommendation #1 (see above).

One of the many positions that gives baby access to your sore abs

6.  Get your child to kick you in the stomach while breastfeeding. (This is especially effective if you have had a cesarean.) You will be inclined to spend these precious half-hour stints of cuddle time pulling your abs in at varying and sometimes improbable angles. Your baby belly will be transformed into a six-pack within a matter of days. 

7.  Exercise, but be wary of yoga. If you practice too much, you will be able to do things like breastfeed while getting dressed/burp your baby while making coffee/swing your baby vigorously back and forth while cutting vegetables with your toes – in which case, your diet will be doomed (see #2). On the other hand, if you can breastfeed/burp/swing your baby while practicing yoga, you’re good to go.

If you catch your five-day-old baby in Downward Dog, it's a sign you've done too much prenatal yoga

Other weight-loss tips:

Always carry baby in a sling. The extra 5kg or so will do your back the world of good. 

Be creative with your use of baby furniture

Buy a really cool pram so you feel compelled to show it off. Cobblestones add an extra bonus.

Buy baby cargo pants. You will be forced to go hiking just to use them.

Use your baby as an exercise coach by propping up in a bouncy seat while you work out. You will notice baby begin to wail any time you stop moving. 

Independence Day (not observed)

11 November, Independence Day - speeches, song, marching about with flags, parades on horseback, an air of ceremony - every year I think, how lovely to experience Polish Independence Day and see what it's all about! And every year, we miss it. (I've missed nine Independence Days now.) It's too cold, or I'm sick, or someone has a birthday party, or I'm working, or we're all set to go out and it starts to rain... well, it is November, after all.

But this year I suppose we could say we had something of the Independence Day spirit. There was marching (we went on a walk in the woods with Munchkin) and parades on horseback (the path we go on through the woods is a horse path, although we didn't technically see any horses) and song (one habitually sings things to a baby), and a flag propped up against a tree in our front garden.

Patriotic marches

You want me to do WHAT?

Other festivities included forcing Madame to try out her new toys. We've borrowed a play mat and a swing from some friends, and with great excitement set her up in each of them (the excitement was ours, not hers.)



She lasted a good half hour on the play mat - provided one of us sat with her, with our heads wedged under the little arcs, in between the dangling toys, so she could reach her hand past the dangling butterflies and dingly birds and stick her fingers up our noses.

OK, I'll bat at the birdie if you do it first

They say it will be fun

And she lasted about twenty minutes in the swing - provided I kept coming to stand in front of her, dangling different toys in front of her hands, which she quickly bypassed, reaching up to my face and sticking her fingers in my nose. So, the takeaway lesson is, as long as you have a nose, you don't need to buy any other toys for your kids.

OK, it's growing on me

Other than that, another Independence Day came and went. Just like every other year. Maybe next year, tenth time lucky?

No time like the present - to start blogging again :D

It's the end of another beautiful, warm November day, and Madame has finally fallen asleep... snuggled up to a teddy bear. (Every night it's a new technique, but hey, it's the result that counts. Although getting the teddy bear out of the crib without waking her up might be a challenge...)

We spent most of the day playing in our garden - Mother-in-law and Sister-in-law came over to help us "clean up" for the winter. Piotrek did one final round of mowing (I was going to let him get away with leaving the shaggy look, but his mom insisted), Mother-in-law burned brambles behind the pond, and Sister-in-law took a pair of clippers to the now-expired flower beds. As for me, I put Munchkin in the wrap and walked her up and down until she finally fell asleep, practicing my squats every now and then while clipping at some bushes or gathering some leaves.

Later on we went to visit some friends and their two-year-old daughter. They have a lovely flat near Bielany (the big white monastery towers on the hill, for those who have glimpsed it), all done up in dark blue and white (obviously, the Best Colours). Madame was not at her happiest perhaps, but managed to sit in my lap and calmly drool over everything for quite some time before her wide-eyed bewilderment turned to crankiness and then to despair. But no worries - once we got home, I bribed her with food, then stuck her in her bed and tried all my tricks (ok - I only have one trick, which is running my hand over her eyebrows and nose), until I settled on the idea of replacing myself with the giant teddy bear. Worked a charm.

Since Madame is now three months old, all our guests Baby-Help Teams are long gone, and we've settled into a sort of daily rhythm ordered chaos, it's probably a good time to re-start the blog. With slightly less panache and shorter posts, but quite possibly hundreds of photos. Here's another one:

We're, like, total BFFs

Corpus Christi funtivities

Happy Corpus Christi!

...says Baby K who, according to the Internets, is now the size of a small watermelon. It's fortunate we had a small watermelon on hand to check.


In the world of planning-for-a-child-filled-future, we are busy little bees. (Almost as busy as the actual bees that are currently in an absolute frenzy in our garden, painstakingly vacuuming Every Single Flower.)

As of about now, I am "full term". I thought this would mean, when I went to my last doctor's appointment on Monday, that we'd do an ultrasound and I'd get the answers to all those burning questions, like, is there actually a watermelon inside me? And, if it keeps growing, won't I explode?

No such luck. There is to be yet another appointment, a week from now, to do all the measurements and assessments. (I still have no very clear idea of what is being assessed; we never really discuss these in depth, as several months of scrutiny have failed to turn up anything remotely interesting or suspicious in any of my bodily systems. Not for the first time in my life, I wonder if there's really any point in going to a doctor at all.)

Just in case, I did ask if there's a chance Baby K might appear before we manage to measure her next week. Oh, no! Not a chance! I'm assured. There's absolutely no sign whatsoever of anything happening in the near future.

The doctor did mention that she's moved quite low down, but doesn't seem to have entirely dropped yet. My personal opinion is that she's riding very low and very high at the same time - but I think this may have more to do with my size than with hers. She is also now very adept at both splits and handstands.

As they informed us in Baby School, which we graduated from a couple weeks ago, you may notice certain signs of approaching labour, such as going into a cleaning frenzy. So every morning, when I drag myself and my two very separate and unresponsive hip sockets into a reluctanct sitting position after long hours of intermittent abdominal-wall-punching, wandering about the house, snacking and blowing my nose, I look over my jumbled miscellaneous piles of Stuff all over the bedroom floor and test to see if I am inspired by any unquenchable desire to straighten them out. So far, the answer is consistently "no".

The same can be said for Baby K's room. As I imagine she won't be sleeping there for the first several months, we haven't made it that much of a priority to finish, beyond painting and setting up the two meagre articles of furniture - a dresser and a crib. And despite all the list-making and online information-seeking, it's taken us a while to get down to the actual buying-and-setting-up stage of the baby prep activities.

But this week, there has been progress. I put in a huge order to Allegro (our eBay, if you didn't know) for all those intensely fascinating items you have, I'm sure, always dreamed of owning but never had the opportunity to - freezer milk bags and wet wipes and dry wipes and gels and creams and sterile swabs and all sorts of hospital gear, and a little pacifier container with a hippo on it. Yesterday, we went on a spur-of-the-moment excursion to Ikea and came home, a little unexpectedly, with three new sets of shelves (all those wipes need to be put somewhere) and armfuls of bins of different shapes and sizes.

Add to that my recent, miraculous discovery of the true glory of Roban - our local chain of used clothing stores where, it turns out, you can buy baby-sized H&M jeans and baby cargo pants and onesies and sundresses and all sorts of things for 3PLN a piece - and I am even finally stocked up on the previously evasive supply of nightshirts that the hospital advises you to bring. (I cannot remember the last time I wore anything called a "nightshirt". It was a long hunt.)

Wearing one of my miraculous finds from Roban. Also, it was Emmeline's goodbye party last week.

Today was spent putting together furniture and puttering around the garden. I pulled up buckets of weeds from our sadly neglected carrot patch, while Piotrek whipped up three sets of shelves, a small desk and a diaper bin. Also, there was a minor tragedy when a sparrow flew head-first into our back door and, apparently, broke its neck. We laid it out in a paper-towel-shroud for some time in case it came to (this is not the first time a sparrow has collided with our back door), but this one was most definitely expired, so we held a small funeral and buried it in a patch near the compost heap. (I was for digging the grave under the trees near our deck, but Piotrek encouraged me to note how many of the late sparrow's friends like to flock about the compost heap, and how it would be much happier down there.) We have also unpacked the entire pantry in preparation for tomorrow's delivery of a full grown-up-sized fridge, including a freezer where, we imagine, we will soon be storing all those freezer bags of milk, along with all those carefully-prepared frozen meals in Tupperwares that you're supposed to stock up on before a baby arrives (say the Internets). Another of those things I plan to suddenly find myself desperate to do, once the promised hormones kick in. Whenever that is.

 

In addition to these exciting preparations, the contents of my hospital bag are now finally splayed in thematic piles all over Baby K's bedroom floor. Considering I've even taken the vital step of deciding which clothes to pack - for both of us - we're obviously ready to go. I mean, I will put the stuff into the bag and all. One of these days. When those aforementioned hormones kick into gear.

 

The truth is, I'm mostly just too tired to do much of anything these days. Since my muscles are more sore every day than if I'd been working out at the gym for twenty-four hours non-stop, my limited energy is generally devoted to an hour or two of extremely relaxing yoga, and my long lists of ambitious house-cleaning projects stops short after the first round of dish-washing. So while Baby K evolves into ever more of a watermelon, I devolve ever more into a Lump Extraordinaire, and resign myself to an early summer of reading mom blogs, reading spy novels, and watching youtube tutorials on cloth diapering, swaddling, baby slings and hypnobirthing.

 

And that's really all that's been going on, these past few weeks.

Can you tell which is which?