If all the world were Elmo's World

We've been going to the park as a family quite a bit, much to our delight. Hudson and the husband fly kites and kick a soccer ball, while Harper, Helena and I stroll around the perimeter and stop to play briefly between laps until Helena decides she needs to move again. Last weekend Harper was watching a seven year old boy go across these little wobbly lilypad things with poles through the middle (no idea what the technical name of this playground fun might be) and she walked right over and started chatting. "Be careful now! You don't want to fall!" Seven year old boy cut his eyes at his dad who was sitting a few feet away, as if to say, "Is this little girl talking TO me? What should I do?" Harper, undeterred, continued to chat at him. "Wow, I like baseball! How about you?" He decided he might as well answer. "Um, I like baseball." Harper enthused a little more about exactly why she is such a fan (I missed some of this because Helena started crying but it had something to do with the fact that "now that it's summer Daddy lets me watch baseball with him and stay up late before bed") and then I told her we needed to keep walking, much to the boy's relief. I wondered where she had acquired the baseball ice-breaker and a few days later I found out. It seems that not only is "Sesame Street" teaching my son to count, it is also teaching my daughter her social skills. On "Elmo's World" there was a catchy little tune about how to be a friend and one of the verses instructed that a good friend would ask a new friend if he liked baseball. Harper was sitting on the couch humming along, her puppy was dancing in her lap. For some reason I started crying and had to go to the kitchen so she wouldn't notice. It just made me sad, wanting her to always be this simple and this happy. Wanting her to always think that making friends was as easy as remembering a little song.

Here is Helena, showing off. All of the tummy time is making her really strong. She even flipped herself over on Tuesday, much to her displeasure.

If I had a pony..

We took Harper and Hudson to the rodeo Saturday. We parked, walked a really long way, rode ponies, looked at some animals, looked at some tractors, walked a really long way back to the car, and came home. It was enough to satisfy everyone. Maybe next year we'll ride the bumper cars or something. It is impossible to take decent pictures of a pony ride. They all looked like this:
I have tentatively re-entered society this week with my many small children. Helena would prefer to stay home and take a 3 hour morning nap but she has done pretty well. We are having spring here in Houston. It generally lasts around a week, at which point the temperatures rocket and it's summer for around 9 months.

I watched a really affecting movie on HBO called "Taking Chance." It stars Kevin Bacon as a Marine colonel who, feeling far removed from the war in Iraq, volunteers to escort the body of a fallen soldier home. I pretty much cried through the whole thing. Not because it is overtly sentimental or manipulative, but because it is so quiet and spare and stunning in its presentation of the process. I was particularly touched by the scenes showing the soldiers whose job it is to prepare the bodies when they get stateside. They were so reverent in their solemn duty and each dead soldier is put in the coffin impeccably dressed in his uniform even if he will never be viewed by anyone else. I'm not one for ceremony in general, and my highly unusual opinions on funerals deserve a post of their own, but I absolutely love it when a movie can make me ponder the deep things the way this one did.

On a lighter note, we have been enjoying ourselves some of the jazzy vocal and guitar stylings of Jason Mraz. I think he would probably enjoy the fact that every time we listen to him in the car Harper asks, "Mommy is this a lady?" I enjoy the fact that Mr. A to Z looks an awful lot like my very own husband, who has also been known to entertain us with his own jazzy vocal and guitar stylings.

It's funny how with your first child you spend lots of time deliberately teaching them stuff. Like, for example, teaching them to count to 10 in four different languages by their first birthday (not that WE did that. Ok, yes we did. You should've heard how cute Harper sounded counting in Hungarian). But with the subsequent kids there is all of this accidental learning. I heard Hudson count to 20 today when he was sorting his cars and I had NO idea he knew how to count that high. I'm sad to report that "Sesame Street" probably gets the credit.

Helena has slept an EIGHT hour stretch at night three times this week. This is an awesome feat not achieved by the other two until they were many, many months old. I am thankful. Here are she and Hudson having another, slightly more conventional, conversation:
And here they are today enjoying watching little animals sway to and fro to the tune of "Old McDonald". Right after I took this picture, Hudson got up and started swaying and doing a little karate dance. Helena was duly impressed.

Use words when necessary

Hudson and Helena had their first conversation yesterday. He was playing with Lightning McQueen, Sally, and a small Caterpillar backhoe. She was in her swing nearby. It went a little something like this:

Hudson: Hi, I'm fast! Beep, beep, beep. DIRT!

Helena's bottom: SQUIRT!!

Hudson: (with mouth agape, squatting to make eye contact) Oh NO! WHAT is THAT?

He stayed there for another minute or so, patiently waiting for an explanation for her, um, outburst, got none, and went back to his cars. Helena continued to gaze adoringly at nothing in particular, until I could stop my convulsive laughing long enough to get her and clean up the effects of said interaction.

This boy I love

Is 33 today. He deserves an epic tome of a post rhapsodizing about his wonderfulness. And I will write one. Soon. For now I'll tell you this: he loves me, his children, and dogs. He enjoys teaching, reading J.D. Salinger, Boethius, and Augustine, and smoking a pipe. He is a vegetarian who likes guns and wears a bow-tie. He is a flier of kites. Happy birthday, dear husband, happy birthday to you. (I wish I could get you that Triumph motorcycle. Maybe next year.)

One month

And three days, but you'll forgive me the delay. Helena has changed her mind about a few things: she now likes the swing and the pacifier, and tolerates the sling. She has mixed feelings about the Miracle Blanket. She starts off with a quizzical expression which quickly leads to one of extreme indignation when she discovers that her arms are tightly swaddled to her sides which means her hands are down there somewhere too. Now, the faint of heart might unswaddle her at this point, but I have discovered that the loud protest only lasts 5 minutes and then leads to 5 and sometimes 6 HOURS of uninterrupted night sleep for Helena. And, perhaps more importantly, me. She really prefers, as you see from the photo, to be on her stomach, which is, of course, a big no-no. With Harper, I adhered to the Back-to-Sleep mantra so strictly that she got a flat head. I am pretty much mantra-free at this point. Harper (her head did round out nicely once she could roll over on her own) held Helena for the first time this week.We are all about ready to re-enter the world. We have pretty much been wearing our pajamas for 34 days. We do change them occasionally. Harper has grown so weary of being inside that she has taken to dressing up her stuffed animals to "take them places." Yesterday I was surprised to find out that there is something of a familial structure to her menagerie. "Just the kids are going to the dinosaur museum today," she announced as she put a lovely frock on her brontosaurus and gave him a good brushing, "and the grown ups are staying home." I asked who the grown ups were, and she said Wolfie (who is actually a lamb) and Brown Bear, who are the largest of her animals. I thought that made good sense. She has been keen on this idea of going places by herself for a few months now. At one point she had a grand plan that at some undisclosed point in the near future I would drop her off at a bus stop and she would get on the bus and go to karate school. All by herself. On this she was emphatic. She would also be wearing a gi. She had not yet decided what color her belt would be.

Hudson has, for some mysterious reason, decided that when Daddy goes to work, there are horses involved. As soon as the husband walks out the door, Hudson launches into a dramatic monologue that sounds a little like this, "Daddy work gerbuhhhgaghdkifin gububb HORSES!! alllajoutuchudrim lackshimi!! Daddy, ababidododjerrubuduh and the HORSES!!!...." Is Daddy a cowboy? A rodeo clown in a really nice suit? A jockey? We don't know, but I'm sure it does not involve any motions for summary judgements or depositions.

All of my children just pooped within 3 minutes of one another. So.

Abstaining from complaining

The other title choice was "Content for Lent." I couldn't decide which was cheesier. They are both pretty awful. A Lenten fast is supposed to involve the abstention from something we enjoy. I decided that I must really enjoy whining and complaining because I do it on a daily, hourly, and sometimes minute to minute basis. So, here is what will happen if a person (for example, me) decides to give up whining and complaining for Lent:

On Thursday night, I filled up the bathtub to give Harper and Hudson their bath and noticed the water looked rusty. So rusty that I decided not to give them a bath. How dirty can they be, really, when we've been home all day? I also decided that I would wait until morning to take a shower myself, because I noticed the rusty water also had a Smell, and it was decidedly not pleasant. A little later, during her night feedings, Helena rather uncharacteristically spit up. All over me and herself. Twice. We smelled good. Friday morning as I'm changing her on the changing table, she spits up again and it goes all over her hair. And as I am washing my hands I realize the rusty water has slowed to a trickle. That's right.
We.
Have.
No.
Water.
Not even rusty water.

I desperately need a bath. Helena desperately needs a bath. Hudson, after enjoying his bowl of oatmeal, desperately needs a bath. So does his high chair. Now, this is the THIRD time since Helena was born (4 weeks ago tomorrow) that our water has been turned off, but the apartment complex had given us fair warning the other two times. I called the office and they claimed this outage was the fault of a water main break a block or so away, and that the city had NO IDEA when the water would be back on. You know, with three small children, there is an immediate need for water. Lots of water. Toilets to be flushed, faces and bottoms to be wiped, and hands to be washed, and washed and washed again. Hudson, inexplicably, had three monstrous Bad Diapers by early afternoon. Helena continued to spit up and poo at intervals of approximately 8.6 minutes. The internet was down, which had nothing to do with the water, but meant that even when I got a minute I couldn't blog or check email to get everyone to feel sorry for me. Hudson only napped 45 minutes (it's usually 2-3 hours). Harper didn't nap. When the husband got home at 5:45 bearing the wondrous gift of 9 gallons of water, you can imagine the Mood that Welcomed Him Home. More Roseanne than Mrs. Cleaver, I'm sorry to say. He was very sympathetic and took over so I could take a very, very cold "shower" with a gallon jug of water. As soon as I finished my invigorating splash off, the water came back on. That's funny, huh?

Speaking of funny, my use of quotes around "shower" reminded me that Jamie linked to a blog dedicated to the misuse of quotation marks. It is hilarious. I wonder if she could leave the link in the comments so we can all enjoy it?

And a couple of photos to show some of the many things in which I should find great contentment. The second one is the ONLY shot I have of all three kids together. Great, huh? Christmas card worthy. But instead of whining about my lack of photography skills, I'm going to read the manual that came with my camera, as my friend Robin, Master Photographer, suggested in her recent blog series on taking a good photograph. If only I knew where to find it.

In which Helena finds her voice, Harper suggests a little natural family planning, and Hudson vacuums

Helena is extremely pleasant for approximately 23 hours a day. Mostly still just sleeping and eating and then, more sleeping. Around 5 days ago she decided that she needed to do a little crying. It is loud. So loud, in fact, that when she tried it out at 3:30 am she actually managed to summon a feral cat who crouched outside our bedroom window and joined Helena in her lament. When they get worked up, it's uncanny how much cat can sound like a baby. In fact I was so groggy I got a little confused and was concerned at one point that Helena was actually out in the shrubbery. A few other details I'll chronicle here in case this ends up becoming her baby book. So far she isn't crazy about the sling, the swing, the pacifier, the Miracle Blanket, or sleeping on her back. She likes being held, sleeping on her tummy, eating her hands, being swaddled NOT in the Miracle Blanket (I am not giving up on it because it cost $30--it looks like a baby straight jacket), and Daddy rubbing her back while she reclines in the Boppy.

Two days ago at breakfast, Harper said this: "If we took one baby away, we would only have two children in our family." She then cut her eyes to the right where her brother sat happily eating his oatmeal, oblivious that in this little equation, he had just been canceled out. I commended her on her math skills, but assured her that none of our babies were going anywhere. Then she segued into this:
Harper: Mommy, WHAT is making you have a baby so much?
me: (panic, panic, is she asking what I think she is asking??! I won't answer her and she will forget the question!)
Harper: (not bothered at all by my silent panic, eyeing my English muffin with Great Suspicion) You need to stop eating so much. So you will STOP having so many babies.

And we moved on.