Once an Iowan, Always an Iowan

And finally introducing Maggie! (Though I doubt there are many people who read this blog who haven’t found out about her already.)

She’s a month old today. We’re having a great time–she is a very sweet, easy baby. She is well loved by her big brother (not to mention everybody else who meets her). I have been trying to figure out who she looks like and how much she looked like Thomas when he was a new baby, so I thought it would fun to do some side-by side comparisons.

Here are the two of them (Maggie is first in each set) on their birthdays.

Here they are when they’re about 1.5 weeks old:

And here are shots when they’re both two weeks old.

So, what do you think? Aside from the obvious difference in amount of hair, do you think they look alike? I’m leaning towards no, but I’m not good at discerning resemblances. And here’s the even bigger question: Who does Maggie look like? Me? Will? One of her grandparents? Any ideas? At some moments I think she looks like my dad, but like I said, I’m no good at this.

We do have photos from the last few weeks, but they’re not uploaded to my computer yet. I’ll post them when I’ve got them.

wanna see what we’ve been up to in her room?

Now, at this point in Thomas’s pregnancy, we had spent (I am not kidding) probably close to 7 entire days stenciling yellow rubber duckies on the wall. Sorry, Maggie, no such luck this time. It’s the plight of the second child. But we (okay, Will’s mom) did repaint the room in a very lovely neutral shade, and here’s what we’ve added to it so far:

In July, I fell in love with the geometrical flower fabric at IKEA and bought several yards. I decided to stretch them on canvases to make wall hangings, and was originally planning only to make the two square pieces. Then I ran across this rug online, and couldn’t believe how well it went with the fabric.

I finally got around to actually stretching the fabric on the square canvases this past weekend, and I loved the result so much I decided I had to make something else as well, so I went and got another canvas, added some quilt batting and some ribbon, and made the memory board this afternoon during Thomas’s nap. I think the squares will hang on the wall they’re leaning on right now, and the memory board will hang (horizontally, not vertically as seen here) over the dresser/changing table. Then I’ll probably get some letters to spell Maggie’s name above the crib.

The color of the rug is slightly ambiguous in this photo. Here it looks kind of taupish, but the background is actually a very pretty light green. It’s a little easier to see in this close-up:

I have some more fabric, and I’m thinking I’ll make a throw pillow or two to put on the room’s Poang lounge chair. Or, let’s face it. Time is running short. I might have to beg Will’s mom to do it.

Thomas: [racing out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel] Mommy! I pooped in the shower, and then I had a really great idea. I wanted the poop to go down the drain, but it was too tall, so I smashed it with the shampoo bottle and broke the poop into two pieces. Then the poop could go under the construction grapple arm [a sand toy that has in our home become a bath toy] and then with the help of the water, it could go down the drain! Wasn’t that a great idea?”

Me: Hm, yeah, I guess so. How big was this poop?

Thomas: It was a very tiny poop.

Me: Oh, good.

I asked Will, who was supervising the shower, how exactly this happened without his knowledge, and he said he was sitting on the floor of the bathroom, watching Thomas through the clear shower curtain. Thomas was crouching under the shower and playing with his toys, as he is wont to do, and so while WIll could see his head and see that he was busily engaged with his toys, the walls of the tub kept him from seeing exactly what the clever young man was doing. Thomas, for his part, was very quiet about the whole business until all traces of his, um, business, were washed down the drain.

Thomas doesn’t watch a lot of TV, but what he does watch is almost exclusively on PBS or on Sprout, which is PBS’s 24-hour cable children’s programming bonanza. On both of those channels, the programs often include random bits of Spanish language, which I think is great. In theory. A chipper young woman, usually talking to some kind of puppet, will say something like, ” ‘Zapato’ is how you say ’shoe’ in Spanish.” Then the puppet will say, “Zapato!” End of lesson.

Here’s the problem: The group of phonemes that make up the word “zapato” have no meaning for Thomas, and the chipper young woman might as well be saying “klibbott.” Thomas is constantly shouting out nonsense syllables such as “pochal!” and “chobit!” When we ask him what the word means, he says some variation of “that’s how you say ‘monster truck’ in Spanish.” (Except he actually says “Panish,” because he has trouble with the initial “s” sound.)

Dang.

All of this is to give you some background to the hilarious bedtime conversation Thomas, Will, and I had tonight.

Thomas: Can I say something to the baby?

Me: Sure.

Thomas: Where is your belly button? [We were cuddling in his bed with the lights already off, so he couldn't see. Thomas seems to think that my belly-button is some sort of rudimentary telephonic device. He thinks the baby can't hear him if his mouth is anywhere besides right on top of my belly button.]

Me: It’s right here.

Thomas: I want to tell the baby a joke.

Me: Okay.

Thomas: [to my belly button] What did the boy octopus say to the girl octopus?

Will: What?

Thomas: No, I was talking to the baby.

Will: But what did the boy octopus say?

Thomas: [to my belly button:] Skag! Nemn!

Will: What does that mean?

Thomas: It means “no!” in Spanish.

Will: No, it doesn’t.

Me: What did the octopus say in English?

Thomas: I don’t know.

Me: Why don’t you say something to the baby in English.

Thomas: What’s English?

Me: [I paused a minute to think about how to answer this.] It’s words that mean something.* [Obviously, I didn't think hard enough.]

Will: [to me, with mock contempt] Imperialist.

Thomas: [to my belly button] Imperialist! . . . Imperialist. . . . Imperialist! . . . IMPERIALIST!

[Will and I are dying of laughter at this point. Thomas thinks it's funny too, but I'm guessing not for the same reason.]

Thomas: Now I will say something to the baby in Pirate. [to my belly button] Aaargh! Scurvy dog! Walk the plank!

——
*I realize, of course, that this statement does make me sound like I am many different kinds of -ist. Obviously I have a more sophisticated understanding of language than simply to say that non-English languages contain no meaning. Enough said. But how does one explain foreign languages to a three-year old? They don’t contain any meaning for him, not yet at least, no matter how hard PBS is trying. Sigh.

Thomas: I have an idea.

Me: What’s your idea?

Thomas: We can get a small conveyor belt, and it can spit out pennies, and the pennies can go up the conveyor belt, and I will be at the end and I will take the pennies and put them in my piggy bank. And then we can get the dragon hotrod [some sort of hotwheels contraption he saw at target].

Me: Hm. Maybe. Where will the pennies come from?

Thomas: Inside the conveyor belt.

Me: How did they get in there?

Thomas: They were there when they built the conveyor belt.

Me: Oh.

Thomas: The conveyor belt is sort of, sort of like a bowling conveyor belt.

Me: Oh, I see.

Thomas: So can we get one of those?

Me: We’ll have to see if we can find a conveyor belt like that.

Thomas: Okay.