Gangi's Visit

Lucie is one month old now, so I jammed her into the corner of the sofa to try for another "couch series" like I did with her big brother. I hadn't really factored in two things: the floppiness of newborns and the curiosity of toddlers. Once Brennan saw the camera pointed at the baby, he had to get involved.

After spending the better part of December in hibernation, what with the rain and being big as house and then giving birth and all, it's nice to get out and do stuff, no matter how small. I try to do something on New Year's Day to get me going on resolutions and fresh starts, now that I don't spend it wallowing in Advil and promising to never drink again. It's to "set my intention", as the yoga teachers like to say, on how the year will proceed. So I set aside half an hour to get out of the house, left Daddy in charge, and took Roux for a walk up Tank Hill:

We're also trying hard to make sure Brennan still gets to go out to his favorite spots & have fun. It helps with the guilt when you can't play trains with him because you're trapped under a sleeping baby, trying to soothe a screaming baby, etc. He won the little boy lottery last Sunday, when the neighborhood fire station had the doors open, and a real live fireman invited him in to sit in the fire engine:

It took some heavy bribery to get him out of there.

More adventures in the "sorry we brought this little loud person home" department:

One of the best consolations of no longer being the first household priority was the visit from his Gangi. For a whole two weeks, he had a buddy who could play trains anytime, could be talked into extra bedtime stories, AND made him chicken noodle soup from scratch. Here she is, buried in grandchildren, a place she probably despaired of ever being...

We completed our tour of historic San Francisco merry-go-rounds with this trip to the Yerba Buena Center.
And we went to see the trains again, since Gangi had never been to the Conservatory of Flowers. Bren managed to restrain himself from knocking Thomas off the tracks this time.

So what has Lucie Baby been doing? ("Lucie Baby" is her full title, according to Brennan - never just "Lucie" or "Baby") Well, mostly crying and eating, but here she is enjoying a bath. I'm enjoying it, too - her little foam tub (it's called the "Puj") is genius. I don't have to try to hold a slippery wet boneless little baby with one hand and wash her with the other.

She's also really ace at sleeping during the day, ideally on top of someone, but sometimes she'll settle for next to you, or in her car seat swing. So glad I went to the bother of wrestling the bassinet together a week before she was due.

She doesn't think much of the vibrating baby lounge chair, either - just like her brother when he was an infant. However, he quite likes it now - just crawls right in, turns on the switch at the base, listens to some tinny lullabies while enjoying the magic fingers. If that gets dull, he tears the dangling bunny off and hands it to the nearest adult, claiming it's "broken".

Bren misses his Gangi - particularly when his parents tell him no - and wants her to come back soon and watch "Sponge Bob Pants" with him.

Finally, getting a few decent pictures of Lucie awake was my goal last week - kind of a challenging subject, between the crying, the sleeping, the weird crabby alien faces she makes, and my tendency to overexpose her pale little nearly hairless head. But these will do -