Happy 10 Months Kai!

Ready to face Oregon's 'liquid sunshine'

"Whassup??" Strutting her stuff in the 'Death Star'

The Blog: Behind the Scenes

Here at the Blog we specialize in the posting of cute pictures, especially of the little girl variety.

As an example, here's Kai modeling the new hat that Mom just knit for her.


However, it's not as easy as it seems. Kai in particular has started to make it a bit of a challenge so we thought we'd give you a little peek behind the curtain.

At first the only challenge was the fact that she LOVES posing for the camera. It's almost impossible to take a candid shot catching her in the middle of some action, because the second she sees a camera she'll stop whatever she is doing and just look at the lens and smile.

However recently we've encountered another issue. Because we currently are using a digital point and shoot instead of an SLR, the camera doesn't do well with low light indoors and pretty much uses a flash all the time. Not surprisingly, Kai doesn't appreciate the light being flashed in her face. She has now learned to associate the little orange light sensor light with the flash and squints or closes her eyes whenever she sees that light, even if (like with this series) I've got the flash turned off, leading to pictures like this:


and this:


And when she really wants to make her point, we get this:


Still, it's all worthwhile when we end up with one of these:


Come back later for the director's cut and more DVD commentary extras.

:-)

Our Gangster Baby

"Whassup??"

Grandkid Therapy

One of the best things about moving back to Portland has been being close to family, especially given the health challenges we've been dealing with.

We firmly believe that frequent doses of Kai and Dash therapy have played a role in Mom's success in beating back her cancer



And as Red moves towards his last days, it's been wonderful to watch his face light up when he spends time with Kai. Since the very beginning she has shared special smiles with him and this weekend when we went down to visit, she was particularly expressive with him.



Baby therapy. You can't beat it.

Becca

New Year's Eve Adventures

We knew that our New Year's Eve activities would likely change as parents, though to be fair we weren't exactly known for hitting the clubs drenched in bubbly even before Kai came along. However we weren't quite expecting Kai to make such an impact on our plans.

Caroline and Luigi had come up from Philomath mid-afternoon and Kai and Gino were having fun cooing at and reaching for each other. Kai was also enjoying the fact that unlike her cousins Dash and Finn, Gino isn't able to steal toys from her yet or protest as much when she steals them from him. So she was able to maximize her evil machinations on the play mat.


Though I think she may have been a little intimidated by the fact that he already outweighs her.


All was looking good for an afternoon/evening of baby play and then nice dinner and drinks and board games for the adults, when Kai decided to throw a wrench in things. She woke up crying and distressed from her nap about 4 pm, and when Brian went in to get her she was wheezing and struggling a little to breathe. When this didn't improve right away we got in touch with her pediatrician's office, where a nurse let us know that it sounded like croup, that we needed to get her looked at, but that there weren't any doctors left in the office so we'd have to head to the ER. Luckily we live about 15 minutes from a great children's hospital.

After a bit of a Keystone Kops routine (the high school students who had pulled the New Year's Eve volunteer shift at the info desk didn't know what 'urgent care' was or how to get to the ER), we were able to quickly confirm that yes, Kai was coming down with croup, but she seemed to have a just a mild case of it. They gave her some steroids to hopefully lessen the impact on her over the next two days and watched her for a couple of hours before sending us home a little after 7. For a holiday ER trip, it was about as painless as can be. While we were there Kai modeled the latest in peds hospital gown fashion and had a great time playing with the remote control (even if she did somehow turn the TV on to Twilight, the Movie) and (when we weren't looking) the nurse call button...ooops!

I never get to play with this at home.....

And a terrific volunteer came by to blow bubbles with her for awhile and to entertain her with a whirrly light wand thingy. She thought it was pretty cool.

Sadly...the camera in the cell phone seems unable to capture a bubble...

They must have been super slow that night, because not only did he stay for awhile, but he left her with the magic wand and came back and gave her a stuffed dog and a knit cap to take home with her. Score!

Meanwhile, our house guests had been not only been amusing themselves in our absence, they had actually gone through our kitchen and pantry and whipped us all up a delicious - and fairly gourmet - dinner. Not only that, but when we opened our fridge, we saw that we were minus a shelf but plus a death cake of goodness.


Caroline had baked up an amazing treat to welcome in the new year: a 6-layered chocolate cake, with raspberry and a marscapone/nut/whipped cream fillings. It was pretty much Death by Cake. But worth it.

Chocolate cake, raspberry filling, marscapone/cream/nut filling
Rinse and repeat.

Don't mess with the cake lady...

So despite it all, in the end we were able to celebrate the new year in our preferred fashion after all: with two relatively healthy babies, good food, fun games, and some of our best friends. If that's an omen for 2010, I'll take it.

9 Months Old!

Yes, we realize that means it's been 3 months since our last post. Yikes. Not good. But as we got more active on Facebook, we've ended up posting our updates and pictures there, and not getting around to putting them up here too. We've realized though that a) some of you aren't on FB and b) this is a better way for us to look back and remember what's been going on in our lives. So one of our new year's resolution was to become much more disciplined and regular about posting here.

That means we've got a backlog of pics and stories. But for now, enjoy a couple of pics of the 9 months old. We can't believe how quickly time has flown!

(thanks to our friend Marlynn for the amazing pics she took during lunch this weekend)

Daddy's little girl...sportin' the colors early on

Still a little rosy cheeked/glassy-eyed from her cold/croup

yeah, she's going to be trouble. :-)