The Baby Sitter

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 9:09 am (The Higher Nest)
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(I didn’t have to hold him or prop him up at all for this one!)

It dawned on me some time last week that it was probably time to get Wes some toys to promote his sitting up more often. Plus Wes had been quite difficult to please what with his teething at all, so I was “this” close to running out one day in an act of desperation to buy some sort of activity table in the hopes of killing two birds with one stone when Craig reminded me that we have made the decision to really *try* to avoid plastic battery-operated toys if at all possible. We have not accomplished this entirely, but we’re trying to make an effort (and I still managed to break down at this weekend’s Toys R Us Fisher-Price sale and bought this phone to keep Wes from playing with our cell phones!).

Except, do you know how hard it is to find a wooden activity table? I got all excited when I saw this Ohdeedoh post — until I realized it was from March 2008 and that this Little Tikes table is nowhere to be found today. :(

We do own this train table, purchased at Target quite some time ago because it was on sale for a ridiculously looooooooow price, but for starters it happens to be in storage at the moment, plus it would probably be better once Wes is standing (not just sitting up) and I’m not even sure we have the room for it in this apartment.

So the best I could do was this new Imaginarium Wooden Activity Triangle. And it may have just been coincidence, but on the very day I broke it out Wes started sitting up more beautifully than ever before!

It’s really meant for babies 18 months and up, but Wes seems to enjoy swatting at the tiles either way!

Silly boy though! He’s just as happy flat on the floor as he is sitting up:

If you have any recommendations for beautiful wooden toys (or softies even), please share! So far we have waiting in the wings a couple of Haba grasping toys, a Plan Toys shape sorter and their drum,  but I’m always on the lookout for others to add to our wish list.

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Month 5 Newsletter

Friday, September 18, 2009 at 9:12 am (The Higher Nest)
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My dearest Wesley:

Yesterday we took you to the park for the very first time to snap your 5 month pictures, and mainly we got a lot this:

and this:

And who could  blame you? Later that very same day we spied the tell-tale white little bud on your bottom gum, which brought your Mama both much relief (because it meant I wasn’t imagining things) and much sadness. How did we go from this…

…to this in less than 6 short months, what may very well be the last photograph of your almost toothless smile?

It has certainly been a monumental, albeit often trying, month. But your daddy, who is very wise, always reminds me at those frustrating times how difficult the world must sometimes seem to you. And speaking of your daddy, my goodness, do you light up like a Christmas tree when he walks in through the door! You two are undeniably, madly, unequivocally in love. All three of us are, I believe, more fiercely the next day than the one that came before.

On your very 5th monthday you mastered rolling back to tummy so expertly, you roll clear across a room now, especially when you think no one is watching. I’ve heard you make “g” sounds and “d” sounds and what was either a “th” or a “z” sound depending on whether my sometimes speaking Spanish has made an impression. You bang your fists, drop toys, pretend to cough. You did a bit of tripoding, and just four days ago showed us you could sit for longer without the need of your own arms — or ours. We sat you in your high chair, presented you with cereal and you opened up your mouth so big at the mere sight of a spoon, it was as if you had been eating food your whole short life. Since then, you’ve loved every last bite of everything we’ve offered. And in a single night, your father taught you how to drink from a straw cup. What haven’t you discovered in these past 30 days?

At the park, I held you on my lap and swung. We slid down the slide — so fast, I thought, having forgotten what sliding felt like. I skinned my elbow. I was the child again. And you were the one showing me the world: The funny sounds our throats can make. The delicious taste of winter squash. The simple joy of sucking on a straw. Everything is anew, brighter, more in color just by sharing it with you. Show me more.

All my love, forever,

Mama

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75

Monday, September 14, 2009 at 8:06 am (The Higher Nest)
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Our #1 blog fan, my dad, turned 75 this past September 10th! Feliz Cumpleaños Papi!

Saturday night we went out for some Cuban food to celebrate, and though by the time dinner ended Wes was two hours past his bath, bottle and bedtime, I’m glad he got to spend some time with abuelo and that I got this picture, even if Wes is looking worse for wear:

Grandpa is flying out today and by the time he returns his 7th grandchild will be almost a year old, more likely to be trying out his sea legs than wanting to be held by daddy.

Cousin Matthew, I didn’t forget about you. But by the end of the night, your titi was about as worn as her son, so forgive the blurry picture!

Abuelo, Craig, Matthew and Wes

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Teething Blows

Friday, September 11, 2009 at 3:17 pm (The Higher Nest)
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These have been some rough days at the Higher Nest. For the past four days Wes has been super cranky and extra extra clingy. I’ll even go as far as saying that these have been some of the most challenging dates together to date.

This morning started out a little better, and he was gracious enough to enjoy being somewhere other than his parents’ arms or laps for more than just a ridiculous amount of time:

Still, I can tell he’s not himself. I’m not sure what to blame it on other than teething. Though he seemed a bit less crabby today, he spent a good chunk of time just laying against me with his head on my lap, sucking away at his paci, looking tired. I keep taking his temperature: no fever. But there’s a whole lot of cheek scratching and ear pulling, along with some voracious chewing and drooling:

So what else could it be? Craig’s first two teeth erupted when he was 5 and half months old (thank you trusty baby book!), and supposedly, teething follows a hereditary pattern, which makes this prime time for Wes’. But the gums themselves don’t look any more pink or purple, and I am not feeling anything on them out of the ordinary. So frustrating! I think a little Tylenol went a long way today, but I hate drugging him up without even really knowing what the matter is. I just hate seeing my little chunker so sad!

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Lightroom Cheats

Friday, September 4, 2009 at 7:25 am (The Higher Nest)
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I’ll begin this post with the disclaimer that this is far from a Lighroom tutorial. I’m sure an actual photographer will come across my blog, read this post, and laugh his or her face off. Believe me, I know I don’t really know what I’m doing. But an old friend on Facebook asked me yesterday how I post-process my photos and Carla responded to yesterday’s post wanting to see before and after shots, so I’m happy to oblige and maybe just name some of the little cheats I and any other mama can use to get their chunky monkey’s photos looking a bit more interesting.

Lighroom is capable of doing about a million wonderful things. Just don’t ask me about most of them. But the software is user friendly enough that on my own I’ve been able to stumble upon a handful of tools to get me to an end result I like.

Though I don’t use a point & shoot, my equipment is otherwise pretty basic: I shoot with a Canon Rebel XT, sometimes using its kit lens but more often than not using the 50mm lens that my best friend Tony gifted me for my birthday this time last year (especially once it was repaired by Canon). I shoot in aperture priority (Av) because I simply cannot wrap my head around shutter speed. I also shoot in RAW format because I’ve been told I can manipulate the image in post-processing more efficiently in RAW than I could as a JPEG. I don’t use flash because I feel like it makes everything look harsh and unflattering. Which means I leave my aperture pretty open indoors (on this lens, I set it to f/stop 2.2) so that I can let in as much natural light as possible (and through all west-facing windows, during the day, there ain’t much). My biggest nemesis, for sure, is light: or lack thereof.

So a photograph SOOC (straight out of camera) for me usually looks like this:

I bet a real photographer would know how to properly set his or her camera from the go to avoid all the problems I encounter, but as I am not a “real” photographer, thank goodness I have Lightroom to help me with my many errors. There are usually about four things I consistently do to my photographs. I usually start by correcting my white balance, either by having Lightroom automatically do it for me or by playing around with the temperature tool bar.

For instance, I’m sure I was anxious to start taking pictures and didn’t take the time to properly white balance. Afterward, I didn’t like how warm the photograph looked, so I (1.) made it just a tad cooler:

Next, (2.) I play around with the exposure, because that shot is just way too dark for my taste:

This helps, but it turns out that I happen to like my photographs often overexposed and really bright. Really really bright. This is solely a matter of taste. For what it’s worth, Craig does not like how much I brighten our photographs. But there it is.  So I use the Brightness toolbar (3.) to make the photograph brighter:

And finally, I play around with the clarity (4.) to give the photos what I can only, for lack of a better term, call a soft glow:

Sometimes I’ll also play around with saturation & vibrance or with contrast or sharpness, but I don’t feel nearly as comfortable with those tools as I do with the previous four. At this point, I would do well to invest in a good Lightroom class or at the very least a book, lol.

Here is this photograph again then, before & after:

vs

So you see, I thank you for the compliments, but my photographs are not all that great on their own after all! If you really want to see some amazing baby photos, you should check out Anne Marie’s blog, especially since any work I do is just a shameless attempt to get my photographs to look as much like hers as possible, a feat which still alludes me. Or my e-friend Ariana’s. She’s the real deal. And unlike me, she can actually write a tutorial!

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Them There Eyes

Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 8:03 am (The Higher Nest)
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I already had this post in mind when just last night my friend Barbara commented, upon seeing some of Wes’ photographs, how his coloring takes after his daddy’s. Certainly he has lighter hair than mine and he has lighter eyes than mine, but what color exactly ARE his eyes? We’re still not sure!

In this latest photo his eyes are still looking kinda bluish, but maybe that’s due to the added brightness from post-processing. They don’t look blue in real life, I don’t think. But they are certainly not brown, at least not yet (though in some other recent photos they do appear darker). Craig’s eyes now are most definitely green, but goodness, Wesley’s are not green either, not exactly. The best way I can describe them is hazel-ish. Craig believes his birth certificate listed his eye color as hazel. I must remember to check with Mimi. Perhaps their green has intensified with time and so will Wes’?

But here’s a better question: how delicious is my son’s fat bottom lip?

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Awake and Laughing

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 7:09 am (The Higher Nest)
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I’m here to tell you the four month wakeful is real. It is alive and kicking and it has taken up residence in our little home. And mostly we would prefer it wouldn’t really because we like our home sleepy and we liked it better when a certain little boy would soothe himself to sleep and took proper naps and swings weren’t required and you didn’t have to sit by its side with your own eyes closed to trick a baby into thinking the world wasn’t going on without him.

For now,  we really try to not let Wes “cry it out”, day or night. This probably has less to do with philosophy and more to do with the fact that we just can’t stand the negative sounds Wes is capable of producing. So yes, of late right as we ourselves are drifting off to sleep, we’re getting out of bed and hanging out with Wes for an hour near midnight, and waking some time in the middle of the night to pacify, and up at 5 am because somebody thinks that’s a perfectly acceptable time at which to begin the day.

And we’re parading all over the house, moving quickly from playmat to blanket to chair to arms, from the nursery to the living room to the kitchen to the office.  There’s so much to see, he must think, so much to discover.  This, if we can find it in ourselves to see it as he sees it, must be the upside of the wakeful.

I tried to keep that in my heart so that when last night I returned from my first real day back at work to discover Wes awake a mere half hour after falling asleep, supposedly, for the night and his daddy thoroughly cooked from the experience of the evening, I would still have it in me to entertain him for a while — with the happiest of results — and later, after an hour of trying to get him back to sleep, to whisper in his ear: “you are right; it is a wonderful world but you must sleep now and rest so that we can laugh again tomorrow and the day after that and all the days of our lives.”

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4 Month Photos, of a Sort

Monday, August 24, 2009 at 3:10 am (The Higher Nest)
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These are the pictures that almost didn’t happen, seeing as how Wes is barely 4 months anymore! But I didn’t want to look back and regret not having something commemorating that month of his life. And technically, he’s not 5 months yet, is he?

I think I’ll be pushing the 5 month photo shoot by a couple of weeks, and then trying to get back on track somehow, so that there’s some room for comparison between the monthly photographs.

Sadly, there isn’t much to show for the endeavor, for about a million reasons. I think Wes smiled, oh, maybe twice the whole time? And those pictures are either too dark or out of focus. Mainly I just got a lot of this:

And I’m getting really bored with all my photos: I must apologize for how monotonous they must seem. We don’t have many interesting backgrounds (or the ones we have we’ve already abused). And I’ve run out of ideas/new perspectives. For one there just isn’t too much room to play with in the bedroom where I take the shots (because it has the best natural light). I’m hoping once Wes can sit up unassisted, we’ll get more interesting shots.

I wish we’d found one solid spot where we could have taken the same photograph month after month, like Nicole Balch of Pink Loves Brown did. Of course, I don’t have anything as lovely as her Eames rocker or a home nearly as charming.

Next month, I am determined to 1. use Craig as a baby wrangler to get at least one decent smiley photograph of my son, 2. take Wes outdoors for a change of venue and 3. be absolutely sure to get a full body shot: otherwise we completely miss out on the point of seeing his growth!

Nevertheless, serious face or pouty face, my Wesito still looks delicious, no? I especially love how now that his hair has gotten longer, it looks all fluffy — like a little chick’s — at the very tippy top of his head!

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Week 19

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 7:53 pm (The Higher Nest)
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Sorry for the fuzzy photo.  Not much good light this morning again, courtesy of another partially cloudy South Florida day.

But I digress. Don’t let that smile above fool you.  A short lived happy period in the AM before many subsequent hours of fussy MacFussington.  And poor Craig, he bore the brunt of it as I spent the day finalizing details on my upcoming fall semester courses.

As I mentioned in my last post before I went off on an playard/high chair tangent, it has been impossible to keep Wesley happy for any real amount of time in the last week or so (or what feels like months).  I wasn’t sure what to chalk it up to.  His drool has increased ten-fold in past days: is a tooth finally ready to make its appearance?  He is fighting a losing battle (as are we) with his bottle at almost each and every feeding: would he prefer the challenge of solid food?  Mysteries, mysteries.

Then I remembered a book my e-friend Ariana recommended on her blog once, The Wonder Weeks, and sure enough, we’re coming to the end of Week 19 (how wonderful — just in time for us to go back to work and school), an apparently “predictable…leap” in our baby’s “mental development, characterized by the three C’s [Crying, Cranky, Clingy)."  And since I couldn't wait two days in the mail to read all about it, I was able to find some of the pages online in the meantime, and boy, did they hit the nail on the head.

"A very demanding little one, in particular, will cry, whine, and grumble noticeably more often than she did in the past."  No joke.  It's been quite the whine fest over at The Higher Nest.

He "may not only want to be carried around constantly but also expect to be amused through [his] waking hours.” Check.  He “may even start to cry the moment you walk away.” And another check.

The book even mentions how much more head support little one requires.  And sure enough, just this very week Wes started to do that thing where babies rest their little noggings on your shoulder and nuzzle up against you.  (Which would be sweet, if you weren’t already so frustrated you wanted to rip your own head off).  Guess he’d been so proud of holding his own head up, he’d never bothered to do this until now.

The chapter encourages me to keep at it with his usual eating practices, as this is just a phase, so we’ll hold out a bit longer on starting solids in earnest (even though our pediatrician told us we could start already.  But this is fodder for a future post).

Thankfully, if this book is the word of baby gods, I can expect my child’s “sunny side” to shine through again at 21 weeks (give or take) once the little egghead completely undergoes this developmental milestone.  So we’re talking another week of hell here.  I pray the universe gives us the strength to hold out that long without Craig or I losing our minds first.

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The Side Eye…and Asking for a Couple of Suggestions

Friday, August 14, 2009 at 7:26 pm (The Higher Nest)
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Even Wesley is giving me the side eye over the poor state of this blog of late.  And at the rate we’re going, this may be the only photograph of the little buddy at 4 months.  Sad, sad, sad.

But who has the time?  Round these parts it’s all been grading or studying, burping or cleaning after spit (as you can see, our battle with drool continues, and yet we have no teeth to show for it).

Wes has become particularly clingy all of a sudden, making it so that he cannot be put down for even one second without fussing or fretting.  I thought it was an issue of location — he’s outgrown his bouncer seat, for one — but you can’t put him anywhere or in anything even if it’s just to pee or grab the phone or whatever without setting off an incessant chain of whimpers.  Is this part of that whole 4 month wakeful thing?  Because I don’t think it’s that he hates, say, his floor blanket.  It’s just that he doesn’t want you to walk away from said floor blanket.  Or the super seat.  Or the high chair.  Or _______, just fill in the blank.

Actually, maybe the problem is also location.  We try putting him in the high chair when we sit for lunch and dinner to prepare him for days to come (and to keep him nearby!), but he doesn’t seem to like it.  For that matter, I’m not sure I do either (the straps in particular drive me crazy).  I’m considering exchanging it…but for what? Of course we happen to own this ridiculous table with an abnormally large lip, making it difficult for little baby legs to tuck under and close to the table, so though I’ve considered this, I think it will be problematic.  I like this one in principle too, but I think we’d encounter the same problem. I love love love the Tripp Trapp, but seeing as how it doesn’t have a tray, the problem of not being able to pull up to the table becomes even more serious.  The Svan DOES have a tray, so it might could work…but it doesn’t come in black.  And I have to read up on its safety on carpet.  And it’s a $100 more expensive!!!  Thoughts?  Suggestions?  I think we only have two weeks left to return/exchange it, so I better move quickly.  And Craig is going to kill me either way for having to disassemble the old one and pack it back up.  Oops!

Then there’s the issue, now that we can’t rely on our dear Hippy Dippy seat, of a playard.  We do have a Pack ‘n Play, but we’ve set it up in the office or we pack it up when we go over to Tio Juanqui’s/Titi Arleen’s house for babysitting services (hugs!).  And it’s not exactly large, now is it?  Wes is longer than its width and even lengthwise he still doesn’t have enough room to roll over.  Perhaps that will become less of an issue when he’s sitting up, but once he starts crawling, that thing will become obsolete anyway, me thinks.  But we do need something in the living area for when I need to attend to the dryer or make dinner.  The way I see it we have three (or four) choices.  1. The Joovy Room 2 Playard (which one of my dear friends owns).  Its square shape seems to make it a bit more practical than the traditional Pack ‘n Play; 2. a gated superyard like this one or this one, which a different dear friend owns.  But I’m not sure we have the room for it in our sad little apartment :( (Or do we?  Measurements are in order); Or 3. I can do as Rahima Baldwin suggests in this book and baby-proof so outstandingly that I don’t even have the need for a playard.  I like this idea, I really do.   But I also have my other son to consider, Niles the Miniature Schnauzer, whom I cannot just stash behind a cabinet lock or cover with an outlet plug.

Do you see one of these choices as superior to the other?  What to do, what to do?

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