Long day

The girls and I spent the day shopping in Virginia. Too tired to blog about it. In part because of the above purchase.

Livin' for the weekend

Georgie looks a lot like Nikki (especially Nikki's baby pics) here.

Just had to post this

New Laundry Soap

Of all the stupid things I've ever been really excited about, this has to be pretty high on the list. My new laundry soap has arrived. It makes me want to re-wash every single piece of fabric in the house. It's called Charlie's Soap. It's made by a small company in N. Carolina. People who use cloth diapers swear by it and end up using it for everything.

When we first decided to cloth diaper, I thought for sure we'd use it. But Trader Joe's store brand (Next to Godliness) laundry powder seemed like it it would be fine. It only had one no-no ingredient (soy-based optical brighteners) so I figured it'd be ok.

And it has been for the most part. The problem with cloth diapers is that any junk that is in your soap stays in your diapers. And almost all commercial soap has junk (fragrance, softeners) in it. It's fine for big people but can cause problems for babies' sensitive skin and gunk up the diapers.

Most of our diapers (and our baby) seem unaffected by this but our Kissaluvs fitted feel practically brittle. So I decided to ditch the TJ's brand and spend 15 bucks (but free shipping!) on a bag of Charlie's. When it got here yesterday I laughed. It was about as big as a pound of coffee. It's pictured here with a can of Rotel for perspective. But as it turns out you only use a tablespoon per load so it will last you 80 loads.

The package says to do an empty load or two with just Charlie's so it can get all the stuff out of your machine. It's supposed to get all of your clothes so clean that they will naturally be softer. I'm excited to find out. It works out to just under 19 cents per load. Based on Amazon bulk pricing, that's still cheaper than Tide and nearly twice as cheap as Seventh Generation Baby, neither of which are good for diapers anyway.

Zoo!

Aaron woke up at around 12 or 1 yesterday (thanks to me looking for something in the bedroom...) and then couldn't go back to sleep. So then he joined Georgie and me on our visit to the zoo. We had a great time.

First, we saw these little guys:



We also saw orangutans, elephants (in cages that were way too small), a panda (only the back, he wouldn't face us), a hippo (under the water; he emerged only long enough for us to see the top of his face for a minute), and 2 cows. Oh, and this lady:



Aaron went to the zoo before I moved to DC and told me about the gorillas; I was happy to see them .... after living here for a year and a half.

And finally, the zoo pictures you want to see.



Georgie's getting really good at holding her head up -- it's not really wobbly any more. She can bear her weight on her legs for quite a while, too. These little things are so exciting. Every day, it seems like she's slowly figuring things out. Like .... "If they hold me facing outward, I can look around better, so that is the only way I want to be held!" "If I arch my back and move my legs a little, I can scooch back." "Is that Papa talking?" "Are those my feet?" We're hoping she figures out ... "My car seat isn't so bad, because I see new things when the ride is over."

Things I vowed to never do: Brag about what cool music I'm exposing my baby to (see previous post) and use first person to talk about what she thinks. Ah, well. I'm sure more will be added to this list.

Oh, and when we got home, Aaron made a delicious crab and asparagus pasta dish.

In closing ... Two of her expressions:

Sleep Training

This is Aaron's method: Dancing her to sleep. It's the sweetest thing. Favorite music includes Willie Nelson, Eliza Gilkyson, Leonard Cohen, Smog, Cat Power, Will Oldham, and Van Morrison.

Memorial Day

Today we decided to go to the National Arboretum for a little holiday outing. The weather was beautiful and there was almost no one there. We ended up walking in a loop about a mile and a half long. Georgie was asleep when we got there so we kept her in her stroller and about halfway through our walk she woke up and we carried her the rest of the way. Because of the stroller we stayed mainly on the paved path but Georgie and did take a detour up a forest hill. Her eyes got very big up there. There were a lot of birds to listen to and the whole area smelled like honeysuckle. I posted a lot of pictures of it here.

Tired girl

We took Georgie to IKEA and Potomac Mills mall yesterday. I guess we are trying to teach that the meaning of Memorial Day is bargains. Anyway, I think we were there a bit too long and looked at a bit too much because she has been exhausted all day. She slept well last night but has been napping off and on all day.

We were going to do something less commercial today but actually all three of us were pretty tired so we just hung out around the house.

Diaper update

After 10 1/2 weeks of using cloth diapers I thought it was time for an update/evaluation.

• First of all, both Nikki and I have found cloth diapers to be easy and pretty care-free.
• We had a lot of prefolds in newborn sizes but as Georgie has gotten bigger we've really moved more in the all-in-one/pocket diaper direction.
• We also started out with cloth wipes but quickly abandoned that, as they seemed to harsh for G's skin. They still come in handy for burp cloths and other utility purposes. We've been instead ordering Seventh Generation wipes from amazon.com in bulk. We also splurged and got a wipes warmer, something I thought was ridiculous before I met Georgie.
• Auntie Elizabeth just unloaded a huge stash of cloth diapers on us. Thanks to her generosity, we are pretty much set for life, and will be able to pass them on to the next family member who has a baby.
  
• We have been experimenting with a wool cover at night. It's supposed to be great at absorbing liquid, have natural antibacterial properties, and generally be soft and nice. It's all those things but so far we haven't figured out how to keep it from eventually soaking through to her clothes.
• Laundry has been generally very easy but I have been sometimes dissatisfied with how clean things get. I have been using Trader Joe's Next to Godliness laundry powder, Oxo-brite, and the occasional splash of Bac-Out. That seems to do the trick 90% of the time but I decided to go ahead and switch to the detergent cloth diaperers all rave about - Charlie's Soap. I ordered some yesterday. We'll see.

Chair sitter

Our big little girl already knows how to sit in chairs.

Smiles

Georgie has started smiling a lot and even laughing a little. We are still trying to capture the classic Georgie smile on film. This is as close as we've come so far.

5-21

Nothing really new but I thought everyone deserved some new pictures of Georgie.

Go Spurs Go!

NMAI

Nikki has been working on some proofreading work she took so this weekend we sought out places where she could work and Georgie and I could go look around. Saturday that ended up meaning two hours at the big Whole Foods in Fairfax. Nikki worked in the cafe while Georgie and I did laps around the store.

Sunday we opted for something a little more exciting - the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. We entered and found that they were having a large native Hawaiian celebration with a live band and dancing. We made for the cafe to get Nikki situated and were amazed at the offerings. They have a large variety of native foods representing every region of the continent. More on that later.

Georgie and I ditched mama and went to the top floor. I decided to start with the section called Our Peoples and the very first exhibit I came to was on the Blackfeet. In the first corner of that section the Blackfeet have their own large section. Each tribe's history is told by its members and Nikki had met with and interviewed one of these 'community curators' (Darrell Kipp) in her initial fieldwork.

There were two videos being shown on screens. One was an animated Blackfeet creation story and the other was an interview with some tribe members on the place of lodges in Blackfeet culture.

It was really strange to see people walking by and looking at pictures of Browning and probably just thinking it was a completely different world, when I've been there and we are going to be living there. And it's interesting to see what a culture presents of itself and compare it with what you know of it.

We looked at a few more exhibits but Georgie quickly got hungry. While Nikki was feeding her I went to the gift shop. I toyed with the idea of getting one of the two Blackfeet ethnographies they had but ended up buying a book about girls' basketball on the Crow reservation.

Then I went back to pick us out some food to eat. There were a lot of good things to choose from. In "our" area (Plains), they had bison burgers, bison chili, fry bread and something called an Indian Taco. Then I noticed that the Pacific Northwest had a 5 region sampler so I got that. It had salmon with a wild berry glaze, a bison rib-eye, a jicama and pineapple salad, some wild greens that were similar to collard greens, and a salad with several kinds of beans. The rib-eye was amazing! I think I just found my new favorite lunch place in town.

After eating I took Nikki to see the Blackfeet stuff and then we left. Next time we'll spend a little more time there and some of the other exhibits.

It's (more or less) official!

We're going to Montana! Nikki, Georgie, and I will be spending the fall months (late August-early December) in Heart Butte, Montana on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

Nikki will be doing her fieldwork for her dissertation. I will be watching Georgie and working 20 hours a week. Actually the work part for me is what's still up in the air a little. I've talked to my boos about it and he's really supportive of the whole thing. We just have to work out the administrative details.

We'll be in the town of Heart Butte, which is about 25 miles southwest of the reservation's main town of Browning. It's little more than a school, a post office, and some housing.

We're hoping to live in the town in some teacher housing that Nikki was told might be available. If not we'll either rent a house somewhere close or stay with her parents near Valier.

Nikki will be at the school all day and Georgie and I will just hang out. We'll probably meet up with Grandma fairly often on her days off for hikes and sightseeing and otherwise just get to know the locals. I'll most likely be working for 4 hours in the evenings.

In October the kids have a few extra days off school and Nikki and I are planning to use that as an opportunity to take a few days and go to Portland.

We are also going on a (Hobbins) family cruise in November -- 7 days in the western Caribbean.

So it's going to be a real fall adventure. I think it will be a great time for Georgie to get exposed to all of those things. And I'll have a really nice time to bond with her.

And did I mention that Flathead Lake Brewing Co. will be only 135 miles away?

The Evolution of Georgie's Evening Mood

First Ride on the Subway!

Georgine and I had a big adventure today: We took the Metro to the National Museum of American Art. Here she is on the subway.


And at the museum ... (I took some pictures without looking; this one turned out the best ... besides, we haven't yet posted pictures of the back of her cute head...). This is her favorite painting, the one I posted about before. It's her favorite because of the contrasting colors, not (as far as I know), because it represents similarities between art, science, and nature (as the plaque next to it described). But you never know.



I went back to this museum because I knew it had a nice area that was outdoors and covered with a giant skylight. She seemed to like being out there, most of the time.



And a tired girl, on the way home on the Metro.

Buddies

The playoff game is on tonight, so that means that Aaron is wearing a Spurs shirt, and he's dressed Georgie in kind. He also put a pair of her cow babylegs on her, which I think look excellent with the Spurs onesie.

Pink and Green

Also from Sunday.

2 months old

Georgie is 2 months old today! And she got her first vaccinations. Boo. We think her legs are probably a little sore today (shots in legs); she's been a little fussy. I was a little fussy, too, when they were giving her the shots. We were going to do a delayed vaccination schedule, so that she'd get almost all of the shots on the CDC schedule by one year old, just on a different timeline. We still partially are (for instance, splitting some shots rather than getting several at once), but because of travels this fall, we had to start some vaccinations now. Our ped. office is very delayed-vacc friendly, even told us to do the vaccines as slowly and as spread out as possible, and the nurse practitioner is aware of our concerns about (and knowledgable herself about) aluminum and etc. in vaccines. This was very different from the first ped. we visited, who treated us like uninformed extremists for even bringing up not giving Georgie a Hep B shot in the hospital. It's nice to be going to an office we trust, and who we feel respects our wishes and understands that we've researched vacc. issues and are making informed decisions. Not only that, they seem to share our concerns.

Today at the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner declared her "Queen Georgine." Georgie was very particular in the office -- didn't want to do tummy time, looked at the NP's face, made a sour face, and then turned to the wall so she didn't have to look at her. The NP said usually babies can't recognize faces at that age, but Georgie seemed to, and didn't like what she saw!

I don't know whether I'll be able to post a picture today, except maybe of a sleeping 2-month-old Georgie.

She's been giving us lots of eye contact, followed by lots of smiles. It's so heartwarming. This morning when we got her ready, she was all smiles on the changing table.

Mother's Day Weekend

I'm having a really nice weekend. Friday night Aaron cooked dinner (hamburger for him, bison burger for me) and we watched more of "Alias," our latest TV on DVD. Yesterday, we went out for tapas (thanks, Elizabeth!). Georgie was a great companion at lunch -- quiet and calmly watching the goings on of the restaurant for 2 hours. The food was great ... we had a plate of cheeses (including one of our favorites, idiazabal, and a favorite we discovered with that plate: garrotxa) black bean and sausage soup, anchovy and caper salad, a shrimp dish, calamari, beef steak in red wine sauce, and rice pudding with lemon marmalade for dessert. A picture of me and Georgie from the restaurant:



Today we're trying to have a luxurious day of sleeping. I'm going for a walk with Georgie sometime soon. Tonight Aaron's making orange chicken. It's a very wonderful mother's day weekend.

Video

Here's a little video of Georgie watching her mobile. There will be more to follow soon of our fun Mother's Day celebrations.

Rock Creek Park

Some photos from today's outing, to Rock Creek Park. Today was the first time we put her facing outward in the carrier.




She liked facing outward ok for a while, then preferred to just be carried by us.






We liked all the below close ups of her so much, we're posting all of them. We think we're starting to see her personality in her face, whatever that personality will end up being! Right now I'd say she's generally a calm baby ... who is developing some definite likes and dislikes!













Darla and our neighbor have said that she's starting to look like both of us. She's looked only like Aaron until now, and I still can't really see myself in her.


Before leaving the park, Aaron sat with her by the creek; we think she liked the sound of the running water.





Finally, although we don't have photos documenting all of this ... she seems to be changing so much, and so fast. Last week, for instance, she seemed to be actually happy (as opposed to simply being content) when she woke up and was sitting in her bouncy seat. Also, when Darla was here, I was noticing that she (Georgie) became more interested in looking at some of her toys and stuffed animals, and she looks at the pictures in her books. Sometimes. A few nights ago, she became more fascinated with the mirror -- first looking at me a lot, and then starting to look at herself. She seems to be more curious and focusing when she looks at Aaron and me. It's really fun, and I feel like it's only going to get better.