Peas

He likes them! That brings the list of foods he likes to three: rice cereal, oatmeal, and peas. We're making progress!

It's soooo hot in Portland today - upper 80s. We're hanging out in the relative cool of our house. Poor Sacha is home from work with no voice at all! She got to come to our baby and me group today but was mostly a silent participant. She's drinking lots of water and trying to encourage her vocal cords to get better soon!

Field trip to the farm

Today I took my students to the farm with my partner teacher. It started out very smoothly .Every single parent volunteer showed up. I placed the students into groups of 3 to 4 and was waiting to hear from my partner teacher that we should go out to the bus. Ten minutes passed, and I decided to look next door . . . and noticed that there were no students next door. Ahh. They must have been waiting for us on the bus.

So, I get everyone, quickly, lined up and take them outside. . . but there is NO bus! Did they go without us? They wouldn't do that. No, we just crossed paths, and the bus wasn't there. Actually, the office forgot the order a bus for the field trip! Slight detail.

So, me and the five parent volunteers head back into the classroom. I don't want to tell the students we are not going, because maybe we will be able to go, but then again, maybe we won't. It is now 10 am, and we were going to drive 30 minutes, be at the farm for 2 hours, and then drive back. If the bus were to arrive at that moment, we would have 1.5 hours at the farm, but a bus hasn't even been called.

Not knowing how long this is going to last, I have all the students sit on the floor and we practice all the songs they need to know for their Thursday performance: Inch by Inch, Are you Sleeping?, Angels watching over me, Take me out to the ball game and three or four more songs. We learned how to sing "Are You Sleeping"? as a round. Then we sing old Mac Donald had a farm. (with over 7 different animals) We all went to the bathroom again. Still, no bus.

Finally, sometime just before 11, the bus arrives. (The kids are complaining about being hungry and we normally have already eaten.) The driver gives a bunch of instructions in English and I stand up to translate, but my voice is 50% gone. Hmmmm.

The farm itself was great. They got to pet goats, rabbits, plant some pumpkin seeds. They went on a fun hay ride, got to look at honey bees and go down a very big slide. It was a very short trip, because of the 30 minute drive there and back, but it was quite fun. We had to get back, because the students had a dress rehearsal for the music performance in the afternoon. (That was great for me, because by the afternoon my voice was gone.)

For the last five minutes I had them in my class, I held up geometric shapes, and the students general got the idea that they should say whichever shape I was holding up, and then we got ready to go. I think I won't be in much of a state to teach tomorrow:( I will enjoy extra time with Mateo and Alayna!

Attempts at crawling, parts 1 and 2

Ok, this is one of those we-think-our-kid-is-so-fascinating-that-we-have-to-post-two-videos-of-him-in-one-post type of posts. He is working SO hard on crawling! He's getting pretty good at getting up on all fours and sometimes get his legs going like he wants to move forward...but his arms haven't quite gotten that memo yet. We're sure that one of these days, he'll just take off.

Also, we tried washing his comfort object, now named Friendly the Frog, today and it was a disaster. Poor Friendly still smelled like some kind of something from whatever factory made him in China (I swear it smelled like fire retardant) and finally I just couldn't take it anymore, so I threw him in the wash, even though I knew it would take Sacha's and my smells off him. I actually washed him twice, if we're being honest here. Bad move! Mateo went down with him tonight just like every night, except that tonight Friendly had lost his mojo. Mateo was inconsolable until Sacha went in and gave him a t-shirt I had been wearing earlier, at which point he conked out almost instantly. Poor little guy! We're planning to sleep with Friendly tonight and hope he can work his way back into favored status in the next few days :)

Here, without further ado, is our working-on-crawling son:

El bebe y los gatos

I was just in nursing Mateo back to sleep (after he woke up with a start) and I noticed that our kitty Rio was snoozing on the bed, which is next to M's co-sleeper. As I was sitting there pondering things, I realized that one of our kitties is almost always in there when the baby's asleep, especially at night. Things have definitely been warming up between him and them generally - particularly with Beso. Mateo just lights up when he sees him and Beso frequently consents to be "petted" (grabbed with great force, really) by the little guy.

However, I hadn't realized that the sleeping-near-him phenonmenon was quite so consistent until tonight. I think maybe they want to keep him company! It is so cute and sweet. I wonder if the cats will follow him into his own room when we transition him to sleeping in there.

Here's Beso cuddling up to a younger (and much less grabby) baby M and his mommy. I think Mateo is significantly bigger than Beso now!

Photos and a trip to the park

Here are some photos from the last couple of days...

Mateo with his new friend, rice cereal, lovingly smeared all over his face (I know you love that smile, Auntie E):

Hanging out with the Very Hungry Caterpillar (La Oruga Muy Hambrienta) yesterday morning:


A trip to the playground! On the swing with Mommy:


Seriously checking things out:


This is FUN!:


Mama gets in on the action:



And one picture of the gorgeous climbing rose in our backyard:

Book worm

The mystery of the bread (or, we just can't stop posting!)

Sacha just made some delicious-smelling bread from some dough leftover from our cooking project. It smells so good and it reminds me of my favorite children's book of all time: Zeek Silver Moon. It's about this little boy named Zeek and it follows him as he grows up. One night when Zeek is about three, he sneaks out into the kitchen and finds his mom making bread for the next morning. They always have freshly baked bread in the mornings and he's excited to find out where it comes from! When Sacha went to go check on the bread in the oven, it made me think of that. I love that book so much that I almost wanted to name Mateo Zeek, but in the end, he was definitely a Mateo all the way. It's a really hard book to find - it's out of print - but it's worth a read if you can get it. And our house smells sooooo good right now!

17 meals and counting

It looks like Alayna and I are suddenly writing a lot these past few days! Not only are we writing a lot, we've been cooking up quite the feast. Before Mateo was born we did a big time freezer cooking trip. I think we ended up with over 50 meals, only I don't totally remember the number. We had never cooked that much before! We have one or two left from that original time, and a few things left from very small freezer cooking batches of cooking one thing with leftovers. And so, we decided that today, being a rainy day, would be a beautiful day for freezer cooking.

So far, we have made:
21 chimichangas. They are the yummiest things on the face of this earth, and oh so easy to make. (10 meals for us)
Chili verde - a favorite from when I was teaching in Oakland (4 meals)
Sopa de Maiz - another Oakland favorite that is served steaming hot over tortillas, avocado and tomato (3 meals)

That makes 17 meals.

Things that are still in progress:

Pizza on a bun (I think we will be making close to 10 meals)
Ginger chicken (a 3-4 meal recipe)
Chard, Lentil soup (3-4 meals)

I was going to make pizza roll ups, which I make the dough for. I made the dough, and it is still solid as a rock. The yeast is ancient and, apparently, not very alive. So, instead we will try the Pizza on a bun meal.

Where do we get the recipes? From Freezer cooking at 30 Day Gourmet. Another favorite book of mine, that has my Oakland recipes is Once a Month Cooking.

Working on crawling...

Here's the little guy yesterday, working on his new moves. He starts out in the crawling position and then makes a lunge for Beso, our cat, which then leads him into a rather sudden barrel roll. The clip is a bit jiggly because... well, I don't know why, but it is. I sometimes forget that staying still is better when one is operating a video camera!

Free sleeping

Just a quick note to say that in the past few days, at six months, Mateo appears to have kicked his swaddling habit! Up until last week, he wouldn't sleep for longer than half an hour without having his arms swaddled (we gave up on the legs when he outgrew our biggest swaddling blanket). We felt conflicted about this, as we thought he was really getting too old and big for swaddling...but we wanted him and us to sleep. The need for zzzs pretty much trumped everything else. We figured he would get to lead the way on this one.

Last week sometime, he went back to sleep in the middle of the night as a free man and slept all the way through until morning! Since then, he's started to be able to sleep on his own for naps, too. It's great. I wish I could go back and tell the Sacha and me of three months ago that the sleeping really does get better before you know it. Seemed impossible not too long ago. Of course, he also got up three times last night to eat, so we still have some things to work on :)

Oh, and new pictures are coming soon!

Rocking in the crawling position

Mateo started something new and exciting yesterday! I was working in his room removing the old, rusty nails from the potentially beautiful hardwood floor while he was hanging out in his crib. Why was I doing that? Well, both Alayna and I noticed that when he would lay on the carpet, Mateo would immediately get stuffed up. Not a great thing. After some thought, we decided that before we wanted him to sleep in his own room, we would like him to be able to be in his room without getting all stuffed up. (High expectations, I know)

After reading about regular carpet off-gassing, we eliminated that from the potential options and thought maybe wool carpet would be better. It is better environmentally, but not for the pocketbook. We ended up finding some really fun carpet squares that were on clearance and look great, but to put those in we had to rip out the old carpet, and it turned out two layers of linoleum. Stinky! Let me tell you, Mateo was no where near the room as we were working on this and I am just shocked by how smelly those under layers were. No wonder he kept on getting stuffed up. It makes us want to rip out all of the old carpet, but I think we'll work on this one project at a time.

Continuing to work on the project, I had tons of rusty nails to work on extracting from the carpet. After bleaching the floor twice, it no longer smells, but it needed to be nail free. Mateo was playing in the crib, not making much noise, when I stood up to check in on him . . . and he was in the crawling position!!!! At the back of the crib! WOW. He was rocking back and forth, staying in the position for 30 seconds or so a time, flopping down, fussing and getting right back up!

I guess we better get serious about baby proofing!

Six month check-up

Mateo is such an amazing little guy. We just got from his six-month check-up and shots, at which he was again very brave. He played on the exam table, showed the doctor how he can sit up and push himself up on his tummy and grab things, etc, and how he is completely not interested in rolling over. She didn't seem to care too much about that. He got weighed and measured and is doing great.

Just for the record, here are his stats: 17 pounds, 9 ounces, which is just about average for his age. According to our bathroom scale, he's been at this weight for awhile...but the doc said he's probably just in a bit of a lull for the moment. He's 28.25 inches long, which is the 95th percentile for length! I could have sworn I saw him scootch down on the table in the midst of being measured, so I don't think we should envision a future basketball player just yet :) And, his head is 17 inches, which is back to the 25th percentile. Of course, I am imagining that he will have a tiny head all his life, but really, he's been tracking that curve at every visit except for one, which was the one where the nurse got all his percentiles screwed up anyway, so it seems that his head is growing fine.

And, he took his shots very bravely. He cried until they were over and then actually managed to smile at the nurse a few seconds later. She was very impressed and so was I! Here's a photo of him after we got home, showing off his length as well as his bandaids of bravery (he was in the middle of telling me exactly what he thought about getting taken to the doctor when I took the picture):


And, just looking cute:


** Edited to add: I caved to curiosity and measured the little guy myself this afternoon. He's 27 inches at most - so not quite as tall as the nurse thought, but still turning into a big boy!

Really this time

So I was wrong a few days ago when I said that our little hombre had another tooth...but now he really does! He was really fussy last night, which led to teething tablets and then Tylenol again when those didn't really work...and today, a little tooth was poking through right next to the first one. I don't know what happened to that upper tooth we thought was coming through, but I guess it has opted to hide out in the warm comfort of Mateo's gums for awhile. Still, two teeth in the course of a couple of weeks seems like a lot to us. Maybe we will nickname him Mr. Overachieving Teether for the time being :)

Also, today he actually took some rice cereal from Sacha without crying! In fact, he seemed to sort of enjoy it. He took the whole (very tiny) bowl of it and actually acted kind of happy about it. Maybe he just needed a little more time or to be in the right mood? In any case, today was a day of mouth-related milestones!

Mother's Day

We had a great first Mother's Day. We had breakfast with both sets of parents this morning and exchanged cards and gifts and such. It was still a bit surreal, but fun! Sacha and Mateo gave me a set of the softest sheets - they're blue jersey knit and I loooove them. Mateo and I gave Sacha a plate with his foot and hand prints and a little message on it. Plus, there were sweet cards given and received all around, and delicious breakfast treats. We're so lucky to have such caring and loving moms (and dads!). It was a wonderful way to start off the day.

Then, this afternoon, we had a fabulous family nap. Mateo fell asleep nursing and I took him to bed and we all slept for over two hours. It was great. Great, great, great. I don't know what better gift two new moms could get than a long afternoon nap. Mateo clearly knew exactly what to get us :)

In other news, I have (yet another) plugged milk duct. Yuck. I thought I was done with them, but I guess my body had other ideas. I've been drinking lots of water and resting and putting heat on it and massaging and doing all the things you're supposed to do, so hopefully it will resolve soon. Every time this happens, I'm afraid it will turn into mastitis...but so far, I've avoided that. I hope my body will realize that free-flowing milk would be a perfect final Mother's Day gift and unclog my poor mammary gland before the end of the day.

It's my brother's birthday today and Sacha and Mateo and I are sending him lots of happy birthday wishes. Happy birthday, Galen!!

Visits and parties and weekends, oh my!

(I started writing this on Tuesday night, but the week sort of got away from me...)

We had a great weekend. Zenaido flew in on Friday night and the weekend started off with a bang the next day. Mateo, ever prepared for things relating to awakeness, got up at the crack of dawn. He and his Apa spent the day getting reacquainted, which they both seemed to enjoy.



In the afternoon, Sacha and Mateo and I went down to Pistils, our neighborhood garden store, and bought some plants to put in our new square-foot garden. I will let Sacha tell you all about it, but suffice it to say that it is very cool and hopefully we will be growing some yummy food for the summer. (By the way, Sacha renewed her membership in the lesbian nation by building the raised planter for the garden all by herself!) While we were getting plants, Zenaido and our friend Joaquin were shopping till they dropped for all kinds of food.



On Sunday, Zenaido, Joaquin and Rachel made some amazing things for the party. To name a few: handmade chicken and beef mini-tamales, a Spanish tortilla dish with eggs and potatoes, little appetizers with dates and cheese, a Mexican chocolate and coffee drink that was wildly successful, a hibiscus-infused tea....and on and on. We couldn't believe how much they cooked and how good it was! And, the party was really fun. A good time was had by all. We seem to know quite a few babies and kids these days and many of them came, so we had lots of fun catching up. We were especially happy that my grandmother and her caregiver could come and join in the festivities. After everyone left, we spent several hours cleaning up and then ordered pizza and collapsed!



Zenaido took some absolutely amazing photos while he was here. I won't post all of them, as it would probably crash our blogger account, but I wanted to show off a few of them. Hope you enjoy!



After Z left, we had a little time on our own and then Sacha's parents came to town, followed closely by my parents. We're going to have a fun family brunch on Mother's Day all together. It still seems a little surreal that we're actually moms and going to be celebrating Mother's Day. Last year at this time, I was just into the second trimester and I had just felt the baby move for the first time the week before Mother's Day. It felt like a little alka-seltzer tablet fizzing in my belly. Our family kept wishing us a happy M's day and I kept hoping they wouldn't jinx us. Ah, me and my ever-present superstition :)



At the same time, our cat, Beso, had a massive chest infection and was hovering on the verge of needing to be put down. He did eventually pull through after getting a chest tube, but it was very sad and stressful. Anyway, that was a long way to saying we're thrilled to be here with our six-month-old little guy (and a healthy and thriving Beso, too) this year.


I feel like this was long and random and rambling. I'm gonna chalk it up to Mateo's recent decision to start getting up every three hours at night again. Hopefully he's growing and we'll be sleeping more again soon!

If one is good...

It appears that what several people told us about teeth coming in pairs must be true! Mateo seems to be getting another tooth. Randomly, it is the right one of his upper front two. The first one was the left of the bottom two. I guess that sort of balances out? He's being very brave about it all, with the help of some teething tablets and (when those didn't really work) some baby Tylenol.

Also, he's started doing all kinds of stuff. He's almost totally stable with sitting and has started to get into the crawling position more frequently. Today in his crib, he looked over his shoulder, saw something he wanted, and sort of hauled himself around with his arms to get it. He's even done the thing of seeing something in front of him and trying to get it while pushing himself backwards and looking very confused. It's so cool to see him learning new things! Seems like these things happen in spurts just as much as physical growth does.

We had a great weekend and a wonderful party and are still having fun with Mateo's Apa. He leaves tomorrow night and is going to give us lots of fabulous digital photos from his camera before he goes. I'll write a post about the weekend's events sometime soon here.

**Edited to add**
I may have to take back this second tooth thing. It seemed to be emerging, then disappeared. Weird! I've heard that they can go in and out for awhile, but never really believed it until I saw it with my own eyes. What will happen next in this crazy tooth drama?

Tooth!

Our little dude got his first tooth today! I put my finger into his mouth this afternoon and felt something hard under his bottom gum and realized I knew why he had been sooo cranky for the past day or so. He had just woken up from a nap, which in turn had been brought on by lots of crying and finally nursing off to sleep...so I gave him some baby Tylenol and pretty soon he was smiling and happy and babbling again.

By the time Sacha got home, the tooth had actually emerged. Just to emphasize: in the course of a few hours, it went from a lump to a tooth. Amazing. He was such a trooper. After the morning crankiness, he had a pretty mellow afternoon as the tooth was coming through his gums. I think I would have been complaining a lot more than that. I mean, those things are sharp!

Let's all cross our fingers now and collectively visualize him never, ever biting me while nursing. Or, really, anytime. He did it once with his gums and that was certainly more than enough.

********************

Mateo's Apa is coming to visit this weekend and we are all very excited. They haven't seen each other since February and Mateo has grown a lot since then. He's looking forward to showing his Apa all the new things he's learned. Also, Zenaido's throwing Mateo a fun spring party in honor of his six-month birthday and we're all looking forward to that.

It's sunny and beautiful in Portland right now and it's supposed to be nice this weekend and we are loving the lushness of the northwest in the springtime.

Go Oregon!!

Yesterday, the Oregon Senate approved a bill (already approved by the House) which will create domestic partnership for same-sex couples in this state! This comes on the heels of recent legislation creating an anti-discrimination law for LGBT Oregonians. We're so excited!

As you might recall, Mateo and I went down to Salem a couple of months ago for a rally for these two bills. It's pretty neat to have followed them all the way through and now have them become law. It has been a looooong time coming.

Now Sacha and I can be domestic partners again! We've been there before, in California, and also been married twice - once in a wonderful ceremony in 2003 with our family and friends present, and once at San Francisco City Hall in 2004, when San Francisco decided to start marrying same-sex couples. We've decided that our third (and final) marriage will happen when it's federally legalized.

However, since moving to Oregon, we've noticed the dramatic decrease in (well, disappearance of, actually) our rights as a couple, and then as a family. Sometimes we ask ourselves why we moved, because we had it so good in California! CA's domestic partnership system currently gives all rights and responsibilities of marriage on the state level, so that covers a lot of things. For example, if Mateo had been born to us in California, Sacha would have been automatically listed as his parent on his birth certificate. The state of Oregon, until this coming January, has given no protection for couples and families like ours whatsoever. So, we are thrilled that this has come to pass (pun intended).

Thank you to all the Oregon legislators who worked so hard to finally get these bills through, and to Basic Rights Oregon, which seems to have made sudden and dramatic progress towards achieving its mission!

Parenthood

Rebecca Walker just wrote a new book on becoming a mother. After helping raise a son with her female ex-partner, she had a baby boy with her new (male) partner. She then wrote a book in which she says some fairly controversial things about the difference between adoptive/step-parent and biological relationships between parents and children. This, plus the fact that we just got Confessions of the Other Mother out of the library, has got us both thinking about different ways to be a parent and the various journeys one can take to get there.

I don't know about a lot of things, but I know that Mateo has always been Sacha's baby, from the very moment she inseminated me with the sperm would help conceive him. She visualized him with me through the two weeks of waiting to find out if this month would, finally, get us pregnant. She talked to him through the inch or so of skin, fat and muscle separating them. She sang to him. She felt him kick when he got big enough to be felt, and she sometimes had time with him in the middle of the night when she would cuddle my belly and he would be awake and ready to go in there.


Sacha got me through my pregnant time with my sanity intact. I had a lot of anxiety (suffering from an entirely too vivid imagination) from the positive pregnancy test all the way through to Mateo's birth and Sacha got me through it day by day. And, that's not to mention all the doctor's appointments we went to together, and the ultrasound in which she suddenly knew before we went in that we were having a boy.

To me, one of the single most joyful parts of Mateo's birth was the moment when he and Sacha met for the first time. It was so beautiful. The connection between them was clear from that first minute and has only strengthened since then.


From the beginning, she has been the one who can calm him down when he seems inconsolable. Mateo even has a difficult time concentrating on eating when his mommy is in the room, because he just wants to look for her. Right now, she is cuddling him in bed because he has a cold and needed her to be able to fall asleep. The love between them is palpable.


The Other Mother book is full of essays by women who have had to deal with all sorts of adversity to be recognized as parents of their children. I know Sacha has gone through some of that at least mentally - wondering if her relationship with Mateo would be any different if she had given birth to him and what it would be like to carry and give birth to another child. But I also know that Sacha is Mateo's mommy in a deeply true and unshakable way. It gives me so much joy to see them together and to know that the three of us are a family. I can't imagine it being any other way.