…Caroline’s comin’ to get you!!

In other news, I broke my right wrist in 2 places on Wednesday, which makes blogging more challenging.  Will do my best to post occasional photos, etc.  Prayers and healing thoughts appreciated.

Caroline is an awesome sleeper.  She generally sleeps 11-12 hours at night and then still takes 2 or 3 naps during the day.  But the best part is that we have absolutely zero drama around getting to sleep or waking up.  She can easily put herself to sleep, both at nap time and at night; and if she wakes up during the night, she can find her pacifier and her blankie, wherever they are in her crib, and get herself settled back down to sleep without waking her parents.

Often when she wakes up, she just plays for a little while.  She is totally content to hang out in her crib until we’re ready to come get her, so we leave a couple of small stuffed animals in the corners of her crib to keep her entertained when she wakes up early.  We can hear her over the baby monitor playing with her toys, but she’s happy so we can roll over and get a few more minutes of sleep!

Since we use the crib as a changing table, these little stuffed animals also make a great distraction during diaper changing.  But last night we had a small accident with one.  It isn’t highly unusual that Caroline would have a little accident without her diaper on – apparently she likes the freedom of no diaper, so we always change her on a waterproof pad.  That’s not an issue.  But somehow last night, she had that little accident on her stuffed penguin.

My back was turned, so I’m not entirely sure how she did it, but I do know that Mr. Floppy Penguin’s little beak was wet and stinky by the time I got to him.  So after Caroline went to bed, I was in the bathroom gently scrubbing his surface-washable-only little face with baby shampoo.  And I suddenly felt like I was part of the cleanup team after a big oil tanker spill: scrubbing the faces of the innocent.

That left me wondering: is this a wonderful metaphor for parenthood?  That even the smallest gesture/task takes on more profound significance when done for the love of your child?  Or is it that I just watch too much TV?  Jury’s still out.  But I’m proud to say Mr. Penguin is smelling fresh and clean this morning, if his face feathers are a little stiffer than before.

More to come..

Here’s some stuff from the last month.  We have been a little crazy busy, but Baby C has still been growing and doing new things and being incredibly cute.

Video of Baby Girl working on rocking and scooting backward (in preparation for crawling) on Christmas Day:

And Caroline got to go to Mom’s office the week after Christmas.  Neither of us got much done.

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

(That one wasn’t at the office, but getting ready to go…)

A little blurry, but still looking cute at Mom's office

Hanging out with Benji on the quilt at home.

Another big milestone: Caroline outgrew her infant carseat, so we moved her to the “big girl” convertible seat.  I did a TON of research and really stressed over which seat to get, especially since one of our front seats has basically been out of commission since we’ve had the infant seat behind it (our car’s not too big, if you didn’t know…).  We went with a less popular (read: not a Britax) seat, and we are thrilled with it.  It’s a Maxi Cosi Priori.  It fits perfectly in the middle of our back seat and we can still both sit in the front – hooray!  And apparently Caroline likes it!

Snoozing in the big girl seat

Another big first: first ride in a grocery cart.  She LOVED it.  Looked like a big kid on a roller coaster.  So fun.

Whole Foods shopping cart = baby thrill ride

We also got to have our first family meal in a restaurant.  We went to Blue C Sushi on New Year’s Eve, and it was great!  Caroline was entertained by the sushi going by on the conveyor belt and eating her sweet potatoes and pears (or whatever purees were in her bowl), and her parents got to enjoy a nice dinner with her.

You might have to turn your head sideways to see this one, but here it is:

And then we had a fantastic New Year’s Eve celebration with some friends, including their little boy who’s just as cute as can be:

Caroline's New Year's Eve date

Okay, there’s more, but I’ll have to catch up the rest later.  Caroline learned to crawl last night, and it’s ADORABLE.  She’s not graceful or smooth at all, so it’s like the incredible hulk crawling.  She kind of high steps and kicks her leg out behind her.  Tough to explain – you really must see it.  I’ll post more soon.

The twelve days of Christmas are almost over – can you believe it?  We still have our tinsel tree up in our living room and our nativity set (with wise men who apparently came a bit early) in the dining room, but they will come down tomorrow (if I remember to take them down).  It’s been a good holiday season, though I must say my heart is heavy for friends who are grieving as we begin 2010.

But there are still cute photos to share from Christmas!  We had a gorgeous Christmas Eve service at church, complete with circling outside with candles in the cold to sing Silent Night and Joy to the World.  It was so neat to be able to share such an amazing moment of hope and joy with our tiny girl.  Of course, Christmas Eve service started at about the time that we normally start the bedtime routine, so Caroline ended up staying up a LOT later than usual.  We hoped this would translate to a lot later wake-up time, and for our Christmas gift Caroline offered us an extra 30 minutes of sleep!  It was the best gift a mom could have asked for, especially since in years to follow I imagine we’ll be getting up much earlier on Christmas mornings…

We waited for my sister to arrive before opening gifts, so we went through our regular morning routine when we got up, and we didn’t actually do the Christmas gifts opening until after Caroline’s morning nap.  It was a nice way to ease into the holiday.

Did someone say there were gifts?!

Sweet girl working on her crawling skills (not quite there)

Who needs gifts when you have wrapping paper?

Nanny Stephanie gave Caroline these hairbows. They are ADORABLE.

Caroline hasn't quite mastered the self-portrait yet...

Sitting amongst the loot

Love. This. Face.

I soooo wish this was clearer.

"Uh, yes? Can I help you?"

More to come: videos from Christmas, photos from the week after and New Year’s Eve, and hopefully soon a video of Caroline’s latest trick: going from sitting to hands-and-knees and back to sitting.  Sure to be followed by crawling, no?

So, I failed at the blog-on-the-best-of-2009-every-day challenge.  But I didn’t have much to say on the last ones, anyway.  So here’s a catch-up:

25. Best Gift:What’s a gift you gave yourself this year that has kept on giving? This is a tough one.  Obviously the best gift in my life in 2009 was Baby Caroline.  Hands down.  But did I give that gift to myself?  Not so much.  That was as much Steven as me (which is clear if you look at the kid’s face!).  What did I give to myself?  Maybe permission to be less than perfect.  It’s a gift that must be given repeatedly.  But a gift nonetheless.

26.  Best insight or aha! moment: What was your epiphany of the year? No matter how fantastic my parenting skills, I cannot make my child turn out in any particular way.  There’s a huge chunk of genetics and outside-my-control cultural influences and all kinds of other things playing a role.  So I best chill out and enjoy the ride and just love her the best I can.  Chances are, she’s going to turn out okay.

27.  Best social web moment: Did you meet someone you used to only know from her blog? Did you discover Twitter? Uh, no.  I did START blogging regularly, which has been wonderful.  And I’ve started reading lots of other blogs, which has been great.  And I have started twittering.  You can even follow me on twitter by clicking a link on this blog.

28.  Best stationery: When you touch the paper, your heart melts. The ink flows from the pen. What was your stationery find of the year? Custom notecards from shutterfly.com with Baby C’s photo on them. 

29.  Best laugh: What was your biggest belly laugh of the year? Is it lame if I say it was while watching The Office?

30.  Best Ad: What advertisement made you think this year? I don’t remember.

31.  Best resolution from 2009: Resolution you wish you’d stuck with. I don’t really remember these, either.  I’m sure I resolved to work out more and eat better.  And I probably didn’t.  So maybe I’ll do that this year.  But yearly resolutions are really too big for me to handle, anyway.  It seems like a much better idea to me to set some goals at the beginning of each month.  Or each week.  Or heck, each day.

Okay.  Maybe one of my first 2010 resolutions will be to keep up with the blog.  There’s a lot of baby stuff to post from the last few weeks: first Christmas, first New Year’s, first ride in a shopping cart, first time in a restaurant high chair, and the move to the big-girl carseat.  Plus grandparents are coming in a few short days, so there will likely be lots more blog-worthy adventures coming up.

Be well.

I have the privilege of leading prayers at our church most Sundays, and will do so tonight, as well. So I thought I’d post my Christmas Eve prayer here for you all to pray with me. It’s inspired (and sometimes copied…) by a bunch of others, so if parts sound familiar you probably have the same books I have. But I hope it speaks to you regardless.

Peace to you.

 

We have been busy, God. Busy building, busy buying, busy making plans, busy striving, busy hoping, busy praying you will come. Stop us in our busyness this night, O God. Quiet down the noise that fills our lives so that in this hour we can hear the simple angel song once again: “Do not be afraid. He is born. Go and see.” Take us to that humble stable, that most unexpected place for heaven and earth to meet, so that we can experience the joy of your love once again.

But before we go to the manger ourselves, let us pray for the needs of the world you created and came to save:

We pray this night for those who are poor, who are cold, who are hungry, who are afraid.

We pray for those who are lonely, and those who mourn.

We pray for those whose lives are ravaged by war.

We pray for those whose bodies or minds have failed them, whose spirits are downcast.

We pray for those all around us who are in such deep need of some Good News.

We pray for our leaders, those who celebrate with us and those who continue to work this night.

We pray for your church, and we join in the worldwide rejoicing which is taking place even now in many lands and in many languages.

And we pray for all those who rejoice with us this night, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude of saints that no one can number, with whom, in Christ, we are one body.

Hear our prayers, O God. And speak to us again this night. Help us to hear the old old story as if for the first time. Light our way, direct our steps, stir our hearts, that we may be transformed by the birth of one who came to love and to save, one whose likeness, we pray, may be formed even in us. Abide with us, O God, this night and always, with the peace that only you can bring. Come into this troubled world and bring your great light to dawn on our darkness. Shine in us, that we may go forth from this place singing the song of the angels ourselves: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace.

We offer these prayers humbly to you, O Christ, who taught us to pray, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

24. Best Learning Experience: What was a lesson you learned this year that changed you? This is another gimme for a new mom.  Parenting is the best learning experience ever.  And it goes on and on!  Seriously if I had to narrow it down to one lesson, though, I’d probably say Caroline has helped me learn that I don’t have to be perfect (and that’s good ’cause I never will be!): I just have to try my best to love her (and others) and to show that love.  And if it doesn’t go great today, it’s not the end of the world, because she’ll need love tomorrow, too, and I can try again.

I didn’t get a chance to post last night because I didn’t get home from church until after 10:00.  We had a looong meeting of a task force that I called together to discern the worship times for when we get to our new building next month.  Crazy, huh?  We have a proposal to present to the ad council in a couple of weeks, but it’s a secret until then!

Anyway, here are my “bests” from yesterday and today:

22. Best Startup: What’s a business that you found this year that you love? Who thought it up? What makes it special? The Yellow Leaf Cupcake Company on 4th Avenue.

Pure yummy goodness

I don’t know who thought this place up, but I LOVE it.  I started loving cupcakes when I was pregnant after a lifetime of not really caring too much for cake and hating icing.  [Perhaps this love for cupcakes is part of what made me gain an obscene amount of weight while my tiny girl was in utero, but that's beside the point...] Anyway, I know cupcakes are all the rage and there are cupcake boutiques popping up all over, and in Seattle there are a couple of main camps: Cupcake Royale and Trophy Cupcakes.  And if I had to choose between those two, I’d probably go Royale because there’s one in walking distance of our apartment and frankly I don’t think the two are all that different.  But seriously, y’all, Yellow Leaf makes these others look like amateurs, like grocery store cupcakes, like the slightly smushed sweaty number you had at your end-of-the-year party in fifth grade.  I don’t know what kind of crack they use, but the cupcakes are THAT GOOD.  It’s about 12 blocks from my office and hardly a day goes by that I don’t ask myself if I could burn enough calories on the walk to and from the store to rationalize eating one of these delicious little gifts.  Okay I have to stop talking about it now.

23.  Web Tool: It came into your work flow this year and now you couldn’t live without it. It has simplified or improved your online experience. I have a tendency to get a little distracted at times.  I know, I know, you’re totally surprised.  But one way this distraction is evidenced in my work is by the number of tabs I have open at one time in my internet browser.  I start with just two: my email and my google calendar.  Then maybe I open a third for Pandora radio.  Then I might check my blogs on Google Reader, and we’re off to the races.  The problem is there are so many articles and blogs that I want to read that I could just spend all day reading stuff on my computer and never get any actual work done.  So I have a habit of opening all of these webpages and just leaving them in the Firefox tabs until I finally have time to read the articles, which may be days or weeks or even months down the road – and inevitably my computer will automatically install some kind of update during the night one night and I’ll lose all those tabs eventually, anyway.

But lately, instead of just opening a tab and leaving it open indefinitely, I’ve been tagging things in Evernote.  You can put all kinds of things in there: web pages, text clips, voice memos, PDFs, whatever you want.  And you tag all of your “clips” with a subject, like “parenting” or “leadership” or “theology,” and then when you DO have time to do a little reading, it’s all in the same place.  I primarily use this as a sort of on-the-go bookmarks depository, which is not really using even half of its capability (and I could use a service like Delicious if I just wanted to keep bookmarks), but I prefer the look of the Evernote program and I find it easy to use and appealing.  It helps that I’ve got the AddThis button in my FireFox toolbar so I can just click that button on any webpage on the internet and get a copy of it in my evernote file.  Pretty awesome.

I’m feeling kind of nerdy with all this internet talk.  Time to go help Steven bake some cookies for his office, then I’m off to bed.  Tomorrow’s a big day: playing with Caroline in the morning (and we may be so bold as to venture to Target for a few last-minute things for the Christmas Eve service), work in the afternoon, then a fantastic Christmas Eve service tomorrow evening.  If you’re looking for a family-friendly, non-intimidating, inspiring and fun worship service to attend tomorrow night, join us at 7:00 p.m. at the Seattle Children’s Theatre.  Parking is free in the Seattle Center garage between Warren, John, 1st N, and Thomas.  Coffee and cookies from 6:15, music starts at 6:30, service at 7:00.  Professional childcare provided.

Can you believe tomorrow is Christmas Eve?  Astounding.

My tiny girl is seven months old today.  Seven months.  Wow.  She is so amazing: bright, curious, stubborn, sensitive, happy, loving.  She gets so frustrated that she can’t do more things,  like her body has betrayed her because she’s not coordinated enough to do all her mind can imagine.  I hope she never loses that sense that more is possible or that drive to work to make it reality.

Quick photo I snapped this morning while she was watching Sesame Street (yes, we let our baby watch TV while we get ready sometimes):

Looking so much like a big kid!

The photo I really wish I had happened about 20 minutes after this.  I was finishing up getting ready in our bathroom and Caroline wanted to participate.  So imagine her sitting on the bathroom counter, one foot in the sink, a big comb in one hand and a small clock in the other, pacifier in her mouth, banging the two objects together while she watched me lean over her (so she couldn’t fall off the counter) to put mascara on in the mirror.  Too bad I can’t take snapshots with my mind!  It would’ve been a cute picture.

Tonight is the longest night of the year.  We celebrate this at our church with a “longest night” service, which is sometimes called “Blue Christmas.”  It’s a more meditative (still joyful, but in a more subdued way) service especially for those who are grieving, anxious, doubtful, or afraid.  It was really a great service.  I got to celebrate communion, which I totally love.  It never loses its power for me, no matter how many times I participate.

In case you’re wondering, the longest night of the year in Seattle lasts for 15 hours and 35 minutes.  The sun officially set this afternoon at 4:20 p.m. and it will rise tomorrow morning at 7:55 a.m.  It’s a lot of darkness, I admit, but it really hasn’t bothered me so much this year.  Maybe I’m getting used to it in our third Seattle winter.  Or maybe the rhythm or our life has just changed so completely this year I haven’t really noticed the official length of the days getting shorter.  Either way, there’s great hope in the days getting longer, and that starts tomorrow.  Hooray!

And now, the “best of 2009″ for today:

21. Best Project: What did you start this year that you’re proud of? You’re lookin’ at it.  It’s this blog.  Where I can post cute photos like this:

Reading with Daddy

19.  Best Car Ride: What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with? Best car ride of 2009 just might have been on Chuckanut Drive just south of Bellingham, WA.  The three of us went up to Bellingham for a little mini-break as a last hoorah of parental leave, just before we both started back full time and Caroline started full time with her nanny.  It was a wonderful little trip.  Caroline did great in her first hotel stay, the weather was beautiful (at least the first day), and we had a really good time.  On the way home, we took a beautiful trip down Chuckanut Drive instead of going down the interstate.  We saw gorgeous vistas of water, people harvesting shellfish, pretty trees and homes, etc.  Nothing to eat.  With my two favorite people.  Caroline slept most of the way…   More photos here.

20.  Best New Person: She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009? I don’t know about unsung hero or incredible customer service, but she definitely came into my life and turned it upside down.  Clearly my best new person of 2009 is Miss Caroline Alivia Schindler.  All the runners-up are related to her in some way: Nanny Stephanie, the family with whom we share Nanny Stephanie, and all of our friends from PEPS.

In other news, it seems that Caroline has learned how to throw a temper tantrum (I know, right?  Who could she have gotten a temper from?).  When I was trying to wrap some gifts this weekend, she kept taking the gifts or the boxes or the wrapping paper or the ribbon and trying to eat them, and when I took them away from her, even if I offered her a really fun toy in exchange, she threw a little fit: screaming, crying (“Mama, mama, mamaaaa…”), kicking feet, waving arms…  sheesh.  And I thought we wouldn’t have to deal with that for a few years!

Oh, and thanks to Steven’s help, we got all the gifts purchased and wrapped, boxes mailed to those out of town, and Holiday Cards in the mail with 6 days to spare.  That’s gotta be a record.  Hooray!  Now today we just have to remember to get out the decorations.