daddy time

beatrix and daddy like to spend time on the floor, kicking our arms and legs, gurgling, and spitting up. occasionally bebe even joins in.

daddy, i'm gonna punch you in the nose...

and then flail to safety!

give a kiss-

-get a kiss back. that's how we roll in this family...

mommy time

i swear, all these two do is lay around all day...

another weekend, another update

this weekend was a little slow and low compared to the last couple. beatrix didn't have any visitors this time around so we were all free to kick back and relax.

we were up early saturday morning- bebe's internal schedule usually has her up around five or so. during the week i have the best wife in the world. she not only drags herself out of bed for the night time feedings/changings, but also is the one to get up with beebs in the early morning. this allows me to get some sleep so i'm not dragging at work all day. i'm not sleeping through the night, by any means. i'm awake each time bebe is, so my sleep is broken at best. but thanks to super mommy, i am afforded the luxury of rolling over and going back to sleep. i sure love that lady.

so on the weekends, even though i'd like to stay up late and sleep in, i'll get up with beebs in the morning and hang out, at least until it's time for her breakfast. but when your'e almost six-weeks old and you're up at five am, you're probably going to want a nap at some point. bebe took hers mid-morning on saturday. as you can see, she takes up the whole bed, and don't even get me started on her habit of hogging all the covers:

after nap time, it's bath time! taking baths was one area where i thought we'd run into some trouble. romantically i'd think 'i love the water, my daughter will love it too!' but rationally i'd think 'she's this teeny tiny little wrinkled pink sausage-type creature who is going to really hate the cold air on her naked skin, having water poured over her head, and most of all being scrubbed in every fat fold of her body.'

seriously, daddy? always with the camera. i'm trying to take a bath...

well, she loves her baths. not in an active, splashy, playtime-but-wet way, but in a relaxing, mellow kind of way. she freaks a little when she first hits the tub, but once the water's on her, she's good. she just looks around at stuff while mommy and daddy pass her slippery little self back and forth until it's time to get wrapped in a towel and carted off to get dressed. getting dressed time does not go as well as bath time. oh well.

once she was dressed, it was time for a walk. we decided to walk up to the pond, and on the way we passed a little farmer's market where we stopped to buy some vegetables for dinner later that night.

they wanted to trade us their prize winning pumpkin for our bebe, but we declined. she's worth two prize winning pumpkins, at least.

the word is out, represent

it was a beautiful day at the pond; we even saw a dead duck floating in the water. nature is cool.

always good to get a heads up before you sit down.

and let's just look at this kid's feet one more time.

cruising past some wild flowers on our walk

sunday started great. bebe marie slept for almost the entire night, then woke up and snuggled with mommy and daddy in bed, essentially letting them each sleep from about ten o'clock saturday night until eight sunday morning. wow. this of course meant she would not sleep much during the day, but what can you do? take the gifts when you get them, and pay for them later. it's like credit cards. little, baby credit cards. with an unknown interest rate. that may be really high. scary.

after some laundry and feedings, bebe went to visit gram and grampy, and to meet auntie ashley and uncle trev for the first time!

at first she wanted out of there!

but auntie ash persisted. with an iron grip.

they got to know each other pretty quickly...

and it was l-u-v after that.

she hung out with auntie jamie, who took to calling her 'bebe mariatrix'

and she met her Great Aunt Diane(one of two that she has. there are also two Great Uncle Chucks. greatness runs in our families. nyuk, nyuk, nyuk...)

but it wasn't long before she was back in the clutches of grandma, mwahhahahahahaha!

and even great grandma! it was a full house for the road show we like to call 'fatty boobalatty's spit-up extravaganza!' events sell out, please purchase tickets in advance.

being someone who habitually checks certain websites for updates on a daily basis, only to be mildly disappointed when nothing has changed and no new stuff is there to entertain me makes me feel the need to update this blog a little more frequently. occasionally i check this blog myself- and i, too, am disappointed that it is not updated in any way. so i'll be making an effort to reward those of you(mainly my mother in law) who check here with any regularity. when i first started posting, i wanted to post when i had something to say or had an observation of some kind, and to obviously also post pictures. well, life is what happens while you're making other plans, and so the posts consist of what we did in my free time, i.e. the weekends. the rest of the time i'm either working, going to or coming from work, or playing/soothing/smooching the crap out of the adorable little girl that makes this whole blog possible. and relevant. who the hell has time for observatory remarks? i'm a parent, not an astronomer. so while it was never my intention to make this a daily thing(that's what mommy's blog is for), i am going to try to get more words and pictures up, more oftener. it is an election year, after all, and i need your support. and for those of you who have peeped in on my sort-of photo blog at 'whatever we lose,' once the road trip black and whites finish up in september i'll be updating that every day with more ocular mediocrity, so be sure to check it out...

well...

if you've already read the daily bebe, you have some idea of how bebe's first roadtrip went. in a word, not so well.

it started out promising enough. we were taking her out west to mems and teed's place. we left around 5:30 pm friday night. there was a light rain but all was calm. it took us less time than usual to get through town and to the pike. this is where our good fortune ended. what should have taken two hours at most instead took about seventeen days. or at least that's how it felt to me, sitting in front of my baby who was crying her eyes out as we sat in traffic, and sitting beside my wife who was crying her eyes out because my daughter was crying her eyes out and there was no way to comfort her. traffic, you suck.

once we got moving, beatrix was quick to settle down, but it felt like we were trapped in the parental version of the movie speed. if we dropped below fifty miles per hour, our baby would explode. well, not so much explode as screech and wail and cry and gurgle and choke and writhe and... so yes, explode. on the one hand it was cute to learn that, like her daddy, bebe wants to go fast! on the other hand- screeching. wailing. frothing.

once we got up to speed and made it past the traffic vortex of western mass, also known as the rt. 84 exit, things calmed down considerably and we were able to nervously appreciate the crazy rain storm we found ourselves driving through. it poured on us, but beyond the hills in the distance were massive cloud breaks that ran parallell to the horizon. as the sun set through level after level of clouds, we were treated to what felt like a fallout shower from an a-bomb blast, minus the radiation sickness. i think.

the landscape went from orange to red to purple as we drove through the mist. any wet surface( i.e. everything) seemed to soak up the color and reflect it back at us. even the still moist tears on my wife's cheeks were little purple rivulets draining down to the corners of her mouth. i wish beebs had been a little older so that she could understand and appreciate my threats to stop crying. oh, and also the beautiful colors all around us.

the pictures don't do it justice...

the rest of the weekend is a blur. lb and i had been talking ahead of time about how great it would be to meet up with aunt marge and uncle ben, and mems and teed, and pass our child off to their eagerly awaiting clutches. ha ha ha. ha. what we were also counting on, and what was the one contigency upon which the entire weekend hung, was our ONE MONTH OLD daughter making the adjustment from empty, quiet, dark home with set feeding and sleeping schedule to what basically amounts to, from a baby's perspective, TOTAL CHAOS. there were constant loud voices, bright lights, a dog, corn pancakes, the olympics... you can see how she might feel overwhelmed. mommy and daddy were total assholes. they did very little to preserve bebe's atmosphere or schedule, and thus they got what they deserved. which was waking hour, after waking hour, with a fussy baby who could not be consoled. they acted, in short, like a couple of rookies.

the worst part about it, and i think lb would agree with me, is that we made this trip to test the travel waters, but more importantly, to give the above mentioned family a chance to spend some time with beebs. we really thought we'd spend the weekend relaxing, watching the others pass her around from person to person, soaking up her normally good-natured baby self. what we got instead was a fussy miss mussy who wanted nothing to do with anyone or anybody. she barely slept unless mommy or daddy held her. and we could hold her and show her to the family, but she was constantly on the verge, one wrinkled, crumpled little quavering lower lip away from meltdown. and there were no pretty colors to look at this time around, unless you find phlegmy, opaque, white-gray spit-up to be awe-inspiring. which sometimes, i suppose it is.

bebe mareebee spent some quality nap time with uncle ben and aunt marge

casa burbank, nestled deep in the quiet hills of the berkshires, is easily daddy's favorite sunset viewing locale:

bebe is not impressed. kids these days.

some rare calm and awake time with aunt marge



the more often seen 'asleep on mommy's neck, aka The Vampire.' bebe, you have no teeth. you cannot drink blood until your teeth come in.

is it time to get back in the car already? i think those screams mean 'Yes!'

mommy drives home at lightspeed! it's no fun traveling with a fussy cheeseneck...