We be Parents

Last weekend my mom, Meemaw (!), came to visit us for 4 days.  It had been about 4 months since she’d seen Hazel so many many things had changed.  Hazel has been fairly weary of strangers, so my mom was worried that it would take a while for her to get used to her…luckily Hazel only gave her an abbreviated hour of probationary time before she started giggling and smiling and letting my mom hold her.

We had a fairly action packed start to our weekend with Meemaw with a trip to see Cirque du Soleil’s OVO in San Francisco.  Hazel handled it extremely well and actually seemed to enjoy it for maybe the first hour or so.  She managed to drop a bomb of a poop which we had a heck of a time with – no bathrooms except for porta-pottys, so we had to change her right in the middle of a big pavilion on a concrete floor.  After that we went to one of Yenari’s favorite Italian restaurants in SF where the duration of our trip started to take its toll on Hazel and we didn’t have the easiest time eating…nonetheless, a great trip into San Francisco with my mom and Hazel.

My mom’s visit also allowed Yenari and I to go to our first movie together since the night before Hazel was born when we saw Up!  This time we went to see Avatar and both enjoyed the movie and actual ability to do something without Hazel.  My mom fared well in Hazel watching – she went through three trials in feeding Hazel…her bottle, a sippy cup, and finally the winner: a shot glass!  On returning home Hazel didn’t even seem to care that we were back – Meemaw did a good job!

The night before my mom left my friend Sarah, who I’ve known since high school, came over for dinner.  Hazel was the total center of attention of the evening with cameras in her face, puppies, and lots of faces – here she is handling it fairly gracefully:

It was great to have my mom visit for a few days, though the days went too fast.  Luckily we’re going to see my mom (and others) again soon when Yenari and Hazel accompany me on a business trip to NYC at the end of this month.  Yenari had a tough time deciding on whether she should come along or stay at home with Hazel…both would be very tiring, but in the end travel won out so that my mom and my grandmother could spend more time with Hazel.  It’ll be difficult though…both ways we have 6am flights and Yenari even has to work on the day we travel home…eeek!

The biggest downside of the weekend my mom visited was that Yenari got sick – what started as just a sore throat and cough in the mornings turned into full-on bronchitis.  While that was nasty enough, Yenari added to the fun by getting a stomach virus which brought its fair share of nausea, vomiting, delusional thoughts (thinking of cutting out her stomach), and other pleasantries.  The past week has seen three trips to the doctor, a week and a half of sick leave from work, and a very sick mommy.  The whole family suffers when a mom is sick and this was certainly no exception.  She’s getting better now, but her cough is still pretty nasty and she’s not up to eating spicy Korean food yet!

At the height of Yenari’s sickness I brought Hazel into the eye doctor for her first checkup.  Every parent should take advantage of the InfantSEE program – thousands of doctors participate in this program that provides free eye screenings for babies older than six months.  Yenari had some eye problems as a child that could have been much easier on her had they been discovered earlier, so she was very eager to have Hazel checked out.  Luckily everything looked great and Hazel cooperated just about as well as a baby could be expected with the lights, lenses, eye drops, and all the other fun things that come along with an eye doctors visit.

Finally, a couple photos we took yesterday:

Closeup where you can see her teeth coming in:

Hazel's chompers

I’m a couple days late, but Hazel is now 7 months old.  Its hard to pinpoint individual things, but it seems like Hazel has made some major transformations in the last month.  Physically the smallest little changes are two teeth that are making their way up in the bottom middle of her mouth.  She’s seems to be somewhat annoyed by it, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering her too much – just a little extra drooling and gnawing on anything she can get her hands on.

She hasn’t started crawling yet, but she can spin around, roll, and scoot backwards.  She can also sit up now without support…though we keeping our hands close by to catch her from falling when she sees something interesting that she wants to lean out for.  She has a lot more fun playing now – studying all the little gadgets on her exersaucer, throwing toys onto the ground and waiting for us to pick them up, and playing peek-a-boo.  More noises and laughing and baby gibberish has come as well and is pretty fun to listen to – Yenari responds to just about any noise Hazel makes with the response ‘did she just say mommy?’.  No mommy yet, but I’m sure its on the way sometime soon.

She’s been doing a better job eating both solids and from the bottle…though she’s still a far way from eating full meals while I’m watching her.  Her favorite solids are carrots, squash, and prunes.  mmmm.  Luckily her digestive system has somewhat caught on to the solid foods, though she’s not quite regular yet.  The other funny thing is that she’s become obsessed with trying to drink water from a cup – she doesn’t quite know what the goal is, but she starts chewing at the edge of the cup and tilting it back.  When the water actually makes it to her mouth it surprises her and either rolls down her chin, causes her to cough, or miraculously gets swallowed properly.  We’ll have to get a video of it, it’s pretty funny.  Here is a photo of her messily eating some food, totally zoned out (she doesn’t normally look this ridiculous while eating):

We had a good and relaxed Christmas.  Yenari had to work Christmas Eve but had a remarkable 4 days off in a row starting on Christmas.  Here’s Hazel with some of her Christmas stash:

We think she enjoyed playing with the wrapping paper and ribbons more than the actual toys, but she’s grown to like them too.  She’s very entertained by her ‘Pal Violet’ (no not that Violet)…the first baby toy that has a USB jack to plug into a computer.  We got to pick her name, favorite food, color, and animal….we are endlessly entertained by doggie Violet mispronouncing bibimbap as her favorite food.  She liked the other presents we got too – here she is trying to eat a bacon wallet my mom got for me:

I think we’ll end it on that note, because what can really top eating a wallet made of (fake) bacon.  Well, maybe a couple more photos: