To being this other baby who likes to play with EVERYTHING!

A lot of other things have happened too.  We took Eli on his first roadtrip, back to Ithaca, NY, where he got to see his first waterfalls:

I also took my first airplane ride since having Eli, to go to a MINERvA collaboration meeting in Austin, TX.  It was hard to be away from Eli, but Austin was fun (although really, really, overwhelmingly hot!), and we got to Skype:

There was also Father’s Day, involving matching Bill’s Jerseys:

(Did you know: when I purchased these jerseys, it was not possible to get a jersey for anyone who is on the Bills current roster of players.  Anybody good enough to merit a jersey leaves the team, apparently.)  Eli’s Grandma B. also came to see us:

And last week, for the 4th of July, Eli took his first trip to Arkansas, where he was spoiled rotten by his many relatives there.  He also got to go swimming for the first time — he wasn’t sure what to think of the concept at first, but he warmed up to it and had fun:

And finally, we started a garden:

Eli finds gardening very tiring:

Happy Summer, Everyone!

Personally, I was really excited about contributing to the downfall of Mike Huckabee’s America by being an ‘unwed’ mother.  I wanted no part of the historical definition of marriage — I am nobody’s property, and the modern definition has been so contorted that it is basically meaningless.  But I am a practical person, pregnancy is expensive (even with insurance), and Howard had a HSA account beefed up from years of being a healthy single guy, so off to the court house we went.

It was an annoying courthouse.  The judge asked Howard if he really wanted to go through with it, but didn’t ask me anything.  When I complained about this, he said he knew I wanted to go through with it since Howard is a handsome guy.  Which implies all sorts of bad things about me.  But we managed to get over that hump and he married us.  I’m still not sure exactly what I agreed to — the judge slurred his words a lot.  But luckily there is no record, in case I did in fact promise to wash Howard’s socks for the rest of my life.

I figured it was a good time to get married.  We could say “we’re having a baby… and by the way we are married.”  And people would be too excited about the first half of that sentence to make much of a big deal about the second.  After all, we’d lived together for many years, moved across the country together and were having a child together.  Surely people don’t need a piece of paper to view us as a committed couple, right?  Wrong.  A lot people were so caught up on the “marriage” part, they kind of glossed over the “baby” part.

It’s sweet that people were happy for us.  It is sweet that his family has welcomed me in spite of my shiksa-ness.  But it just feels really weird that a signature from a drunk misogynist should give our relationship any sort of significance or legitimacy.

But anyway.  One year on, our marriage is still a happy one.  One of the best things about Eli is that I got to give Howard a gift he has always wanted.  And Eli couldn’t  have asked for a better dad.

Okay, since I’ve been talking about physics so much, here’s a completely Eli-centric post for all you baby junkies.  He had his four-month well-baby checkup this week with a new pediatrician — “Dr. Tony”.  I always liked the idea of having a family doctor that all of us can go to, but I eventually realized that our family doctor wasn’t doing anything other than referring us to specialists.   So now Eli is going to a pediatrician.  Anywho, he is in excellent health and is developing in all the right ways.  One of his latest new skills is screaming (not as in crying but as in hey look, I have vocal cords!).  Fun for mommy and daddy!

Last weekend, my friend and coworker Leah came over and took some more pictures of Eli, including the one above.  There are more at http://leahc.smugmug.com/Children/Eli/ .  We also got to meet Leah’s husband Jason and their really adorable daughter Lucy.  Lucy is 15 months so it was like getting a preview of what Eli will be like once he is walking and talking.  Lucy also knows a bit of sign language.  When I was pregnant, I thought the concept of teaching babies sign language was a little nutty, but I can now see that it would be quite useful for Eli to be able to tell me if he’s full or hungry or what have you.

Let’s see … other Eli news of late?  The nice ladies at the daycare are convinced that his skin problems are because he’s allergic to milk.  I’m dubious, but they are very nice ladies, and I’m willing to try anything that might make Eli less itchy, so we are doing a soy formula this week.  We also have the go ahead from the doctor to try solid foods, but I’m going to wait until after the soy experiment to start that.  Any advice on first baby foods?  I think I’m going to start with the standard rice cereal, but then try some strained fruits.

That is pretty much all my physics-addled (or really, meeting-addled) brain can come up with this Friday evening.  Did I mention that he is about as cute as it’s possible to be?  I dunno how Howard and I ended up with such a cute and sweet kid, but we did!

The details of this plot are beyond the scope of this blog, so I’ll just tell you that the pink part of the graph above is what I’m trying to measure, and this plot is really exciting for a lot of reasons.  It is the first plot like this we’ve presented publicly and is an indication that MINERvA is going to make some really, really nice measurements of neutrino interactions. Also, on a much sillier note, I picked out the color scheme and am really happy with it.  The last time we presented stuff publicly, we used a very masculine red-and-black color theme.  I’m glad I got to feminize our work a little bit.  The experiment is named after a greek goddess after all!

And okay, okay, most people are not here for the physics.  So here’s your baby picture fix:

Also, Lucy has been registering her dissatisfaction that Eli has supplanted her on this blog:

This week, I’m a single mom while Howard is away in Ithaca.  It is fun to have Eli all to myself, but I’m really glad I don’t have to be a single parent all the time — it’s a lot of hard work!

I’ve somehow managed not to mention the details of my work much at all here.  I never told you about my work as a postdoc on CMS (one of the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland), and I’ve never told you about MINERvA, the experiment I work on now.  But this week I wrote a blog post for Fermilab’s blog on Quantum Diaries, which you can read here.  It was altered slightly from my original text by the Fermilab communications office, but you can read about MINERvA there if you are interested.

But I suspect most of the readers of this blog are not interested in physics.  They are looking for this:

This was Eli yesterday — he’s about 3.5 months old and growing so fast!

Before Eli was born, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from motherhood, but I was pretty sure it was going to be bad — there would be the horrible childbirth and there would be this little goo-filled thing screaming all the time that would totally ruin my career.  But really, it has been great.  I was totally numb during childbirth, Eli laughs way, way more than he screams, and my career is just fine.  There is a lot of goo though.

What I did not expect was how much having a baby would force me to deal with the medical establishment.  Until the day I had a C-Section, absolutely nothing went wrong with my pregnancy, but various doctors still found reason to drag me in for inspection at least twenty-five times.  So then Eli was born and I was all “Yes! No more doctors.”  Ha.  Eli has already had five doctor’s appointments in his young life.  Most recently, our regular doctor decided his baby acne/eczema is beyond her skill level and sent us to a dermatologist.  But the dermatology practice she sent us to:  A COSMETIC SURGERY CLINIC.  While we were waiting, Eli got to learn about a procedure where he could stick his head in a box, get flashed with bright lights, and voila, increase his collagen level.  That particular doctor wants him to come back in a week.  I think not.  My super mommy senses tell me Eli is just fine.  And that it’s probably best to minimize his exposure to cosmetic surgery propaganda.

Anywho, on a totally unrelated note, the photo above was taken by my super-awesome photographer friend Leah.  You can see the rest of them at: http://leahc.smugmug.com/Children/Eli/.

Eli has been battling baby acne for a couple months now.  Or at least the doctor thinks it’s baby acne.  I’m a little dubious, since her advice was to baste him in olive oil daily.  No other oil will do – has to be olive oil.  So there’s my baby up there, all covered in olive oil.  It’s a week later and he’s not much better.  Just very moisturized.

Anywho, other news of late:

• We all survived Eli’s first cold.  Howard got it; I didn’t.  That’s really tempting fate, huh?
• Howard and I get to go out for an early Valentine’s dinner on Friday, because the Fermi daycare is continuing their awesomeness by offering a parent’s night out.  How awesome is that?
• We also survived the “Blizzard of 2011″.  Howard has been talking trash about Chicago’s definition of a blizzard.  I kinda have to agree with him.
• Howard and I are going to buy a car.  It took us 4 years to decide on a sofa, so maybe we can agree on a car by the time Eli is old enough to drive.
• I fulfilled my January resolution to run at least a mile every day.  This month I’m going to aim to run at least 8 miles every week.  At this rate, I’ll also be ready to run that half-marathon about the time Eli is ready to drive, but at least it’s something.

I am off to bed.  Happy weekend, everybody!

Heh, so I guess that blogging once a week thing is not going to happen.  But most of my other resolutions are happening, so that’s good.

The big Eli news lately is that he started going to daycare Tu/Thu last week, so that I can go back to work half time.  Several people have insinuated that I’m doing my baby irreparable harm by sending him to daycare so early.  Have you ever noticed that parenting philosophies are sort of like religion?  A lot of people have very strong beliefs, and they really like to force them on other people.  And like religion, I’m all for you doing whatever you want in the privacy of your own life, but if you want to start telling me that yours is better than mine, I’m going to start thinking you’re a weirdo.

Anyway, Eli gets to go to the very excellent Children’s Center at Fermilab, where he gets to hang out with other physicist babies and awesome ladies who care for him at least as well (if not better, since they seem to actually know what they’re doing) than I do.  So Eli is happy, and mommy is happy.

Eli also got to see his grandma last week, when she came to help me with Eli while Howard took his first post-baby business trip.  We all miss her!

This blog has been kind of quiet, partly because I didn’t want it to devolve into all-baby-all-the-time, like the rest of my life has.  But my cousin Amanda’s blog made me realize that an Eli-centered blog would be a nice record of his babyhood and interesting for him someday.  So I am resolving to post at least once a week this year.  And with that, I begin a totally non-Eli related post!

Last year about this time, I read The Happiness Project, a memoir by a woman who spent a year trying to increase her personal happiness.  One of her main themes was resolutions — each month she would attempt a list of resolutions designed to (maybe) make her happier.  I liked the idea, but then I got pregnant, and the only happiness-related resolution I had the energy for was trying to make it through the day without puking.

But now life is feeling more normal, and it’s the start of a new year, so what better time for resolutions.  A year is an awfully long time though, so I’m going to stick with monthly resolutions, and start small in January:

1. Run at least a mile every day
2. Stretch after running every day
3. Floss my teeth!
4. At the start of every work day, take time to organize my thoughts and decide what needs to get done that day (rather than always addressing whatever emergency someone is standing next to my desk asking me to deal with!)
5. Listen to music every day, preferably with Eli

And maybe I’ll also try to make my bed.  Anyway, I know the few people who still come to this blog are looking for Eli news, so here you go:

He is doing fabulously.  He inherited his father’s gastro-intestinal system, unfortunately, so he has a lot of gas and it is ridiculous how obsessed my whole household has become with burps, and how happy we are when they happen.  but for the most part, he is a very easy baby.  And he is telling me he’s hungry now, so Happy New Year everybody!!

So here is the story of Eli.  I didn’t make it to see Harry Potter before he was born.  When he was five days late, we went for a “biophysical profile” ultrasound.  While she was working, the ultrasound tech asked “did you put a suitcase in the car”?  Eli’s amniotic fluid levels were low, so the doctors wanted to induce right away.  They didn’t even want me to go home first, but I talked them into letting me.  So Howard and I went home to get a suitcase, stopping on the way for my final pregnancy mocha, which seemed *really* important at the time.

Howard took the dog to the boarders, then we checked into the hospital.  My first nurse was named Betty, and we shall say no more about Betty except that the entire nursing staff at Delnor hospital was fabulous, except Betty, who was really NOT COOL.  It is a good thing that Eli is a boy, because if we had a girl, I wanted to call her Betty, but I would have had to come up with a new name fast.

We hung out in the hospital for many hours before my new and much nicer nurse came in around 7:30 pm to give me Pitocin to induce labor.  I had regular contractions all night, but she also gave me an Ambien, which meant I was able to sleep through most of the night (and have some crazy, crazy dreams).  By early morning, the contractions were strong enough that I couldn’t sleep anymore.  At 7 am, my doctors came back and announced that all those contractions had accomplished exactly nothing.  The baby hadn’t even “dropped” yet, something he was supposed to do weeks before.  At that point I had experienced enough contractions to know I didn’t want to experience any more, and what with the whole Betty affair, I was ready for the whole experience to be over, so I told them I wanted a c-section.  The doctors said they thought that was the right decision given Eli’s apparent reluctance to be born.

After that, everything went kind of haywire, with doctors and nurses rushing in and out to get us ready.  Also, they started giving me drugs which make my memory really hazy.  But we signed forms, Howard changed clothes and then we walked to the operating room, where they numbed me up.  Nothing about the c-section ever hurt, but it was probably the weirdest experience I’ve ever had.  You don’t really realize until your legs are completely numb what a luxury it is to be able to wiggle your toes.  Eli was born just a few minutes later, at 8:37 am.  He started screaming right away.  They brought him to me and I kissed him and then they whisked him and Howard away.  Then the anesthesiologist asked if I wanted something to help me relax.  I remember saying “um, okay” but not much after that.  I think I fell asleep while they were sewing me back up, then I met Howard and Eli in the recovery room.

And that was that.  Now we are parents.  I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but so far, it’s a lot easier than expected. I recovered really fast, and Eli is a happy and peaceful baby.