Transitions

This week, we learned that Kate will no longer be able to take Mia while Brian and I are at work. When I first went back to the office, Mia was a mere 7 weeks old. Now, she's a strong and active 3 month old, and she's starting to need more attention and activity. She doesn't like to just sit in her chair or lay in her crib between her naps. She likes to be held, walked around, airplaned and played with.

Now that she's growing out of the infant stage, I am much more comfortable putting her in a more traditional daycare setting, but we're not quite ready for the pre-school like environment (and pricetag) of a big daycare. So, we're looking into a licensed, in-home daycare. Tonight, we are visiting one that is just north of our apartment, so just slightly out of the way for me to get to work. Tomorrow, we'll visit another more conveniently located in-home daycare. The pricing is about the same as we were paying Kate, but they are requiring us to be consistent with our schedules. Since we can't commit to the same 3 days every week, we are only comfortable committing to 2. We'll do something like Mondays and Thursdays, or Mondays and Fridays, since those are the days that Brian gets off the least often. Brian will keep her on his day off, and that leaves 2 take your daughter to work days for me.

I want us to take our time making a decision, but we would like to have something set up by September 12th. I have to be in court on September 16th, and would rather not take her to work to be watched by my co-workers, who have their own work to do (although I am sure they would be happy to pass the baby between them.).

In ancitipation of Mia's new 2-days a week work schedule, I spent a good chunk of my morning setting up her "new room". I brought the pack-n-play into my office, set up the mobile, and the changing station. Having it here has already made a huge difference. She naps much more easily when she's not in her bouncy chair, and I don't have to clear off my desk every time she needs to be changed. We were even able to do tummy time, since the crib surface is hard and stable enough. I'm really glad with the set up, and since I don't see any clients in my office, this shouldn't cause too many problems. I even put on the lullaby pandora station on my laptop!

Mia's first sniffles

This weekend, Mia put on her party dress (or party ruffled jumper) and attended her first birthday party. Tybalt, our babysitter and friend Kate's son turned one and had a jungled-themed birthday. Although not fitting with the theme, Mia brought a nice turtle for her best (and only) friend:

Patchwork turtle, probably the most complicated thing I've made so far.

Mia was minimally fussy at the birthday, despite the larger crowd than she's used to. There were a couple of other babies there, one 4 month old and one 5 month old. She definitely looked smaller than those two, but was infinitely more alert than either one of those, which leads Brian and I to think that our daughter is probably a genius.

Unfortunately, Mia now has what appears to be her first cold. She's got a bit of sniffles going on, and fusses every 3-4 hours, which makes me think that she's got a sore throat similar to the one I have. We're lucky to have avoided any sicknesses to date by shying away from traditional daycare, but I guess we couldn't keep her locked up forever. I brought her to the office yesterday, and she wouldn't let me put her down, or sit down while holding her, so I had to stand up at my computer and type like this:

Moby wrapping it up!

Funnily enough, it felt oddly similar to when I was walking around the office like this:



I recently decided to embrace being a Las Vegan and a Mom, so I joined a Meetup group. On saturday morning, I went to a farmer's market a Tivoli Village, which is a mall that was constructed right before the economic downturn, so it's basically a really nice looking outdoor mall with only a scaterring of shops. The farmer's market had about half of the vendors of the one we attended in L.A., but it is certainly better than nothing. I had some freshly made mini donuts (mini means less calories, right? even if I ate 6 mini donuts? hmm...). We also got a very nice and delicious loaf of multigrain bread for Brian's lunch sandwiches, and some wax beans and fingerling potatoes from a farm in California. I met up with another Vegas Mom and her friend, who were very nice and I'm happy I met them. This mommy group has quite a few outines per week, and I'm looking forward to attending more of them, even though it is dominated by stay-at-home-moms and half of their activities are during work hours. This saturday, there's a storytime that we are going to at a nearby Barnes and Noble. I'll just keep telling myself that Mia will totally be into what's going on at B&N, just like I tell myself that she's paying attention to the stories that we read before her beditme.

Lastly, here's the most adorable Mia pic of the week:

I'll be 3 months old tomorrow!

Baptisms

Mia is almost 3 months old and is still not baptized. I think my grace period is starting to come to an end, so I am going to seriously start planning this thing now.

In making a few preliminary phone calls, we've realized that getting baptized in Las Vegas is infinitely more complicated than getting married here. The first step is become a registered parishoner. I've never been a registered parishoner anywhere, so I never realized that this would be a requirement. If I have to commit to one parish, I want to make sure I like it. Without making it all sound too trite, I will make my decisions based on:

1) Content and length of Homilies
2) Boringness/Animation of the priest
3) Number of attendees/Size of the church
4) Quality of the musicians at various masses

I am going to try to convince Brian to go to Christ the King parish, which is just West of us on Tropicana this sunday. Next sunday, we'll try St. Joseph husband of Mary parish. We've only been to one church here in Vegas, and that was in Henderson. Henderson is pretty far away from us, plus, we don't think we're going to end up living in Henderson once we buy a house anyway. Plus, I definitely did not like it. It was the size of a Sam's Club, and we were ushered to a reject room to the side, where we had to watch the mass from a flat screen. So, that'll be a big consideration.

From most parish websites, it seems that if I make a decision on which parish to go with by the end of this month, we should be able to aim for a November baptism! Pencil in your calendars.

And now, your obligatory photo:

Here's Mia showing off her skills and holding herself up on the nursing pillow!

Mia's Smiley Video

Honeymoon is Over

The take your daughter to work honeymoon, that is.

Mia came to work on Wednesday instead of Friday this week, because Kate had some scheduling conflicts. Mia was a total delight in the morning, smiling at all my coworkers and generally being adorable.

She sat in her little bouncer chair patiently and took a nap full of sleep smiles for about 45 minutes:

This picture is actually from a different day, but you get the idea.

Then, around 12:30, she decided she was going to stop being the perfect angel, because that would be more interesting for her. She cried if she wasn't being held, leading to this:

Mom, you should be grateful that you are getting to practice your one-handed typing skills!

If you'll notice, she's wearing a different outfit in the desk picture as she is in her adorable full of smiles picture. Yeah, that's because we had 3 poopy diaper blowouts. 3!!!! We've never even had 3 blowouts in one week, and she decides that Wednesday is the day to take 3 giant poopies in a row, at my office of all places. We went through every single spare outfit that I keep in the diaper bag, every single spare diaper, and all but one baby whipe. Around 4 o'clock, she started fussing again, acting like she was going to poopy again... and I decided it was time to take her home. Since we had no more supplies, and is not acceptable to put a naked baby in your work kitchen sink to wash off her poop, it was time to end that take your daughter to work day. Hopefully next thursday goes a bit better!

Lastly, Mia and I are sleep twins.

TGIF

Fridays is my weekly take your daughter to work day! So, after Mia gave us ANOTHER full night's rest (that's three in a row, for those of you who are counting!!), we both woke up at a lazy 8 am, ate breakfast (both of us), took showers (just me), and packed our diaper bags and purses and went into work.

Mia finished up a complaint that the Illinois lawyer is going to file on Monday, outlined a response to a USCIS inquiry that she'll write out next week, and sent off an H-1B petition. She's so talented for a 10 week old.

Actually, I really was pretty proud of us today. Mia slept in the morning, and then at lunch, and only stayed awake after luch. Even while she as awake, she was perfectly happy:

Yes, my office is messy.

Next week, she comes in on wednesday and friday because Brian has another saturday off!

Random Updates

Tomorrow will mark Mia's 10th week. As if to show everyone that she is inching closer and closer to college, Mia started sitting in the Bumbo chair without needing a pillow to support her neck. This is excellent for my morning routine, since I did not have to hold her and juggle my blowdryer in order to keep her upright for the few minutes following her feeding. She just hung out in her chair watching me do my hair. Behold, our non-newborn baby:

She's still just a little squirt, but we officially switched from 0-3 month Gerber onesies to 3-6 month size. Everything else still fits quite well, so we're not freaking out about needing to buy more clothes just yet.

In other news, Brian had Saturday off, so we spent the weekend in L.A., visiting our friends Katie and Christo who also just recently made the move West from Chicago. They are getting married next spring, so I spent the majority of Saturday at Bridal salons, while Brian was at Santa Monica. We did good work, and it was so much fun doing wedding things again. We went to Nicole Miller and Jenny Yoo, and if anyone out there is getting married, I definitely recommend checking out Nicole Miller. It is somekind of hidden Bridal gem, because all of the dresses were gorgeous and reasonably priced. All the dresses being gorgeous may have something to do with Katie being tall and perfectly proportioned, but still.  Mia came along to two salons and was a perfect angel, and Brian took his turn and took Mia for the second half of the afternoon and visited the Sunset Strip. Surprisingly, Mia did not get stopped by any casting agents, but maybe next time. :)

Mia, looking French at the French Creperie

Brian and I really enjoyed L.A.. It was nice to be a in real "city" again, with nice restaurants and shops all around, and being able to walk places. We definitely miss the neighborhood feeling that you get from living in a big city, and especially the excellent FOOD! We had lunch at a neighborhood Mexican restaurant on Saturdaty, complete with a lunchtime pitcher of Margaritas. On Sunday, we went to a farmer's market in the morning and had breakfast at a creperie on Santa Monica Blvd. We really have to make more of an effort to take advantage of the non-touristy things Vegas has to offer.

Mia slept the whole ride to L.A., but cried for about 2 hours of our ride back. Nothing was wrong with her, she had a clean diaper and had a full belly, but she was tired of being strapped down in her carseat. She would scream for about 10 minutes, then calm down, and after about 10 minutes of calm, she would remember how mad she was and start screaming again. She did this from Barstow to Primm, and of course calmed down once we could see Las Vegas' casinos.

I did a terrible job of taking pictures of things other than wedding dresses while we were in L.A., so you'll have to settle for other pictures.

All in all, it was a great weekend, but Mia's fussiness of the car ride extended into the evening and next day, getting me a bit worried that she might be sick, but she turned out to be just fine after getting hours and hours (and hours) of sleep and a nice warm bath.