Figures...

There is no doubt that Kai is his father's son. Not only does he look like Yo, he loves the same things-- namely chocolate, cars, and me.  For the last couple of months, Kai's favorite pass time has become staring out the window as cars drive by.

He will sit like this for hours, head moving from left to right, right to left, as the cars zoom by in either direction. When he hears the sound of a motor humming in the distance, he will stop everything that he is doing and toddle his way to the window. He is obsessed.

On Friday I was out running errands with Kai. We were walking through a parking lot and Kai was pointing excitedly at all of the parked vehicles. I pointed at a vehicle and said "car" and without missing a beat, Kai said "cah". So I said "car" again, and Kai repeated "cah".

Ever since then, Kai has been saying "cah, cah, cah" all day long whenever a car passes and sometimes even when one doesn't.

While Kai has been saying "mamama" for a few months now, it's never been consistently directed at me and when we ask him, "Where's mommy, Kai?" he looks at us blankly and then points at something randomly in the room. I personally think that he's bluffing and that he obviously knows who his mommy is, but pretends he doesn't to toy with my heart. Nonetheless, wouldn't you just know that his first word, consistently used in context, would be "car" instead of "mama" like most babies?

Yo couldn't have been more pleased. When I told him about Kai's first word he got this proud look on his face and said something like, "That's my boy!"

He certainly is. So I'm still waiting to find what qualities I can claim in Kai, but in the meantime, I am just happy that I'm Kai's favorite person in the world and his Pappa's, too!

Lions and Tigers and Bears....Oh Kai!

One small step for a baby...

For the last several weeks Kai has been obsessed with this:

At first he was just pulling himself up behind it, but soon he figured out how to walk in a straight line. Until he hit some obstacle, that is, which more often than not led to one very frustrated baby:

But Kai stuck with it and eventually learned how to navigate corners, get past door thresholds and avoid most obstacles. I even caught him several times lifting the push toy up and swinging it around while standing independently when he got stuck. Soon he went from toddling behind the toy to doing this:

Nonchalantly carrying things with one hand and barely holding the handle with the other. For 30-40 minutes at a time he would circle every accessible inch of our house, doing lap after lap at a pace somewhere between a walk and a jog.

So we've assumed that it is only a matter of time before he ditches the aid all together and begins taking a few steps on his own. Our friends have been warning us that Kai will be walking "any day now" for months (basically as soon as he first pulled himself up to a standing position). But they don't know how cautious Kai can be. While his balance is good enough to not only stand by himself, but to stand by himself while lifting a toy in the air that is almost as big as he is, the second you take that toy out of his hand and he realizes he's standing alone, he instantly drops to the ground as if the floor might disappear beneath him.

But in the last week Kai began to stand on his own on purpose (How did we know it was on purpose, you ask? Because every time he does it, he looks at us expectantly until he gets a proper applause. That's Kai for you!) So we figured that his first steps would be soon to follow.

Today Kai stood up in the center of our living room and kind of reached out for me so I did what any loving mother would do and backed up a couple of steps until I was just out of reach. Kai just stood there reaching so I held out my arms and encouraged him to come to me. He got a huge smile on his face, took two little stutter steps in my direction and then flung himself into my arms.

I was thrilled! My response was sufficiently enthusiastic to motivate Kai to pull off this stunt 2 more times (going 4 steps at the farthest) before he got fed up with the "game" or ran out of courage and ended up sitting in protest on the floor despite all of my coaxing to do it again! Again!

When Yo got home I, of course, tried to show off Kai's new skills, but Kai still was not in a cooperative mood and refused to even stand up for us. Hopefully Kai will do an encore performance for his Pappa tomorrow and will have mastered his new trick by the time we see my family at Thanksgiving. I guess this means it's time for round two of baby proofing!

Playing catch-up

While there is no way that I will be able to go back and properly flesh out all of the weeks that have gone "un-blogged" recently, I am determined to share some details and pictures of Hilde's recent visit from Norway.

The last time that Hilde visited us Kai was only 3.5 months old. He has grown and changed so much since then, that it was kind of like meeting him for the first time. So a big goal of the trip was to let Hilde spend lots of quality time with Kai and Kai to spend lots of quality time with Bestemor. I took full advantage of this request and let Hilde substitute for our regular babysitter for two days during her trip while Yo and I were working.

This proved to be a win/win....win situation. Kai was happy. Hilde was happy. I was ecstatic (it didn't hurt that the services came free). It only made me wish that this was a permanent arrangement! (One of these days....)

Other than hanging out with Kai, we kept Hilde busy with shopping, going on long walks, touring Yo's work place, going out to eat, getting our family portraits done, and making a trip into the city for Fleet Week.

Here are a few pictures:

As I drove Hilde to the airport last Monday, I found myself thinking that the end to her trip had come too soon and that I am so blessed to have such a wonderful mother-in-law. Luckily, we will be seeing Hilde and the rest of Yo's family again in just two more months as we are planning on going to Norway for Christmas! We are already counting down the days.

Long time, no blog

Since I last posted (almost a month ago!) our lives have been more hectic than ever, which means that I should have more to blog about than ever, but just can't find the time. And what little time I would normally have has been swallowed up by my favorite fall pass time, watching college football (go Gators!).

What's been keeping us so busy, you ask? Two new jobs, Yo's business trip to Chicago, a visit from Yo's mom, and an increasingly mobile and curious child to keep up with (who turned 11 months last week, by the way). I am determined to at least go back and elaborate on Hilde's visit from Norway and to post some of the pictures that we took during the course of her stay, but tonight I am excited to share a sneak preview of the family pictures that we had taken over the weekend.

The last time I had "real" pictures taken was my wedding. Which would explain why I'm wearing the same white dress in every framed picture in my house. Needless to say, after 5 years I am tired of our wedding pictures so I proposed to Yo that in lieu of exchanging gifts for our 5 year anniversary that we celebrated this summer, that we instead get pictures taken.


I figure that it might be another 5 years before we get our pictures taken again so I did not want to waste this opportunity. In fact, I've been obsessing for weeks about what we're going to wear, where we're going to take the pictures, what the whole tone of the pictures should be.

So when the day of the shoot came, I had everything figured out right down to the last accessory, and even insisted that we each bring a change of clothing (I mean, why not create the illusion that we've gotten our pictures taken twice?), but what I did not figure out was how to get our 11 month old to cooperate with our very patient photographer during the shoot. Kai was staring at everything around him, except the camera (which I guess is the downside of not getting your pictures taken in a studio because there were a lot of things to distract him). 

Nonetheless, I'm hoping that in the 100s of pictures that Jen took, there are at least a handful of keepers. While we won't get copies of all of the pics for a few weeks, Jen posted a few of her favorites on her blog today. So I, of course, copied them to share them here.

Enjoy!

Vacation's Over...

Last week marked my start with my new job, a start I was looking forward to with equal parts of enthusiasm and dread. After getting back into the routine of working over the summer, it took me some time to transition into the role of stay-at-home mom. And it seems like just when I was getting the hang of that role and taking it in stride, I had to come to peace with the idea of going back to work again.

My first day was on Wednesday. Tuesday night I went to bed feeling more dread than anything else. I hated the idea of leaving Kai with someone else...and for 3 full days in a row. While I worked 5 days/week during the summer, I was only working half days so I was never gone from Kai for more than 4 or 5 hours at a time.

But as I sat through a few hours of orientation at my new job and then got rolling with the job itself, I felt that same rush of excitement and enthusiasm that I have felt about every day of work since landing in health care (a field that I truly love and am passionate about). So the day went faster and more smoothly than expected. But as I drove home at the end of the day, all I could think about was Kai and how much I missed him and how I couldn't wait to squeeze him.

Kai's first day without Mommy seems like it went pretty smooth as well--minus the fact that he refused to nap for his babysitter and was a fussy wreck by the time I made it home. Thursday I got the same report, but on Friday I came home to a napping Kai so I am optimistic that he is adjusting to me being back at work as well.

The biggest perk of my job is that it is flexible and affords me the opportunity to work out of my home part of the time, with the goal of being able to work from home all of the time down the road. What is it that I'm doing, you might ask? In the simplest of terms I am the interim Director of Operations for a relatively new home health agency, Healthy Living at Home, Inc.

For those of you who don't know what home health entails, basically my company coordinates skilled nursing and rehab services for patients who are residing in their own homes or an assisted living setting. And it happens to be a rapidly growing business. Which makes sense, because who wouldn't rather be at home (than in a hospital or nursing home) given the choice?

Initially I will be a consultant to the company (thus the "interim" in my title) with the hopes that this job will be a good fit for me and will turn into a long term position. In an ideal world, I will eventually get to focus more on operations and less on business development and, therefore, work almost entirely from home....and get to kiss Kai anytime I want. I find myself daydreaming about that day already--when I can prove to myself and the world that it really is possible to have the best of both worlds.

If that isn't motivation enough to work my butt off for the next few months, I don't know what is.

Happy 10 Months, Kai!

It's hard to believe that Kai is already 10-months-old (and just 2 months away from his first birthday). I love my wannabe toddler, but am already starting to miss my baby especially when I look back through his pictures and realize just how much he has changed.

November 7, 2009

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