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It’s the day after Labor Day, so summer is now “officially” over here in Minnesota.  While Labor Day is considered to be the last fling of summer in many places, it is even more that way here.  The State Fair always ends on Labor Day, the pools close their gates one last time, and the kids go back to school the next morning.

Summer always seems short here in Minnesota.  I don’t think it really feels like summer until the neighborhood kids are done with school for the year, and here in Minneapolis it was about mid-June when schools let out for summer break. The pools don’t open until around June 15th, and this year it wouldn’t have been warm enough to go swimming until then anyway.

We did “Mission to the City” with Urban Refuge at the end of June.  Looking back on it, it kind of feels like this was the beginning of our summer, because it was only really warm and summer-like outside for maybe a week prior to this.  I participated in almost all the Mission to the City activities, while Tony did the night and weekend events.  We even brought the kids along for some of the events (they liked helping out at the BBQs).  I really enjoyed having the time dedicated to serving in my community and learning more about the city I’m living in.

Fourth of July followed quickly after Mission to the City, which was followed by Tony having back-to-back deadlines at work, during which time he slept very little…  …And Tony also had the misfortune of getting sick while not getting much sleep, which resulted in him developing Pneumonia.  Tony spent the rest of July recovering and trying to get lots of sleep.  During the month of July, the kids and I spent a few days at the lake cabin with my mom, and also tried to get out and enjoy summer with trips to local parks and pools.

We made it to Ames for two weddings in less than a month in late July/mid August and also made a family trip to the lake cabin the first weekend in August.  The kids and I crammed in more and more trips to the pools as the month of August wore on, knowing that our outdoor swimming days would soon be over for another long 9+ months.  We all went to the Minnesota State Fair a little over a week ago and spent a day enjoying plentiful farm animals, 4-H projects, and, of course, cheese curds and various foods-on-a-stick. We enjoyed our final summer weekend this Labor Day weekend by doing projects around the house, going out for a picnic and concert at Lake Harriet, and having a special Labor Day dinner on our back patio.

We also tried to have a garden this summer, with a only small amount of success. (And by “We” I mostly mean Tony with a bit of help from Madeline.) Our back “yard” is really a big patio with raised garden beds surrounding it.  And a huge old Catalpa tree shading the whole thing.  We started tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, carrots, sweet corn and beans in small seed trays inside the house this spring.  We only wanted to make a minimal financial investment in our vegetable garden, since we knew that our conditions were not ideal for garden success.   So far, we have harvested a couple dozen cherry tomatoes (mostly picked and eaten one or two at a time by the kids), about 3 regular-size tomatoes, and one very tiny carrot. Only one stubby corn plant survived, and something ate it’s one ear of corn.  The peppers didn’t flower until recently, so won’t have time to develop before the frost.  The eggplants never did much.  We might still get some beans and a few more carrots.  And we’ll still get a few more tomatoes before it gets too cold.  At least we can have hope that maybe next summer we can have a better spot for a garden — we’ve already decided not to stay in our current house when our lease expires in 2009, whether that means moving to another house here in Minneapolis or moving back to Iowa or elsewhere if God so leads after Tony’s current job is finished.

The weather today is appropriate for the first day of “fall” — though it was approaching 90 degrees yesterday, today it’s raining and below 70 degrees during the mid-afternoon. I was originally planning on beginning our family’s fall schedule today and starting Madeline’s first day of home preschool for this year.  But, my mom asked if Madeline could come and spend a couple more days at her house (Madeline’s third trip to stay at Grandma’s house since the beginning of the summer).  So, our “fall” and our preschool year at home will wait until next week.

Our camera suddenly stopped working two days before Christmas, so in order to have a camera to take pictures of our kids opening gifts on Christmas morning, we made a quick craisglist purchase on Christmas eve. I really wanted a camera that could take videos, and the camera we purchased has that capability. I was surprised to find out that the new camera does not record sound with the videos. So, I have three videos to post today, but none of them have the sound of what was going on at the time. We added music to two of them, which should make them a little more enjoyable to watch.

Erik Learns to Crawl!

Erik turned 10 months old on Friday, and he celebrated by crawling. He had made a few good attempts in the days leading up to Friday, but he had his first repeated successes on that day. He is crawling more and more each day and learning to explore. In the last few days he has also perfected the art of pulling himself up to standing, and has made a few attempts to “cruise” (take steps while holding on to furniture). At the rate he is moving through these motion milestones, maybe we can expect him to be walking before his birthday rolls around!

Ice Skating at the Park

Madeline is learning to ice skate, and we took a family ice skating trip to nearby Powderhorn Park on Sunday afternoon. I ice skated too, but I had the camera the whole time, so my skating does not appear in the video, unfortunately. Erik got to ride along in the stroller!

Just for fun: Madeline dancing

This is a common sight at our house — Madeline dressing up in her “princess clothes” or “fancy gowns” and putting on dance shows. She was singing too — this video really would have been a lot better with sound!

(For anyone who cares, Tony put together the Ice Skating video using a trial version of some video editing software. I made the crawling video using the video editing tools on eyespot.com. I tried to do it on the youtube remixer so that all our videos could be there, but I couldn’t get it to work for me. If you have just a little bit of video editing you want to do, eyespot is a good bet — it is pretty easy to use!)

Here’s a quick catch-up on some happenings at the Hill house:

I’ve finally caught up on posting pictures to our photo gallery.  I haven’t added captions yet, but I hope to go back and do that soon.  Most of it should be pretty self-explanatory, anyway. So, for your viewing pleasure we now have albums for August, Early September (including a trip to the zoo), and Mid-September (including recent trips to an apple orchard and the Children’s Museum).

As Erik nears six months old, he now has one tooth on the way in! He has been gnawing away at anything he can get his hands on for several weeks, and finally the sharp little point of a tooth appeared on his lower gums yesterday! Luckily, he hasn’t been too crabby so far from the teething process.

Madeline has finally entered the dreaded “why” phase.  For several weeks she has been asking a lot of other recurring questions including,  “What’s ______ for?”, “What kind of _____ ?”, “Where did _____ go?” (asked about anywhere we are going or about any place we have left).   I thought those were slightly annoying at times, but at least there was a bit of variety.  Then out of the blue, she started asking “Why?” yesterday.  She asked the other questions a couple of times today, but otherwise her response was “Why?” to pretty much anything I had to say.  I had no idea how quickly that could really grate on me, and now I know exactly why parents are known for saying “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”  I came up with some good coping strategies (like giving overly complex answers) to get her to stop asking some of the other questions when it was getting old, so I am sure I will find some good coping strategies for this phase too. I know it is great that she is curious, but I also know that some of it is just to get on my nerves, because I have already seen the sly little smile as she continually asks the question.

This fall I have started doing some home preschool activities with Madeline.  I’m sure she could learn through whatever we did, whether it was something organized or something informal, but having a curriculum to follow and a daily plan of action really helps me from just falling back on the same few activities all the time.  I’m just not very creative at thinking on my feet to come up with new games, crafts, and so on for her to do…and she is often asking me for new things to do! We’re using a free curriculum for three-year-olds I found on the web called “Bible and Rhyme“.  A lot of the curriculum activities are the general type of thing we’d be doing anyway — reading books, singing songs, playing games, doing art, etc…but the writer of this curriculum has way better ideas and better ways of grouping them together than I would ever come up with!

We’re just finishing our third week, and we’ve had some ups and downs already.  The first two weeks Madeline asked to do it every day (even though the curriculum is only planned for 3x per week), and then today she didn’t want to do it at all after getting frustrated with one of the games yesterday.  :-(   But it is great to get started after spending nearly a year and a half researching and considering what to do.  We haven’t been doing every activity and we may modify it further to suit our needs as I better understand how Madeline likes to learn.  But I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to work with a preschooler at home.  I’m sure I’ll have more blog posts in the future about our preschool activities.

As many of you may remember, Panda was Madeline’s favorite stuffed animal for a long time (she has a lot of favorites now, and doesn’t usually prefer Panda these days). Now we think Erik may be learning to love Panda too. This video is very characteristic of life at the Hill house — Erik doing something cute with Madeline yelling “look at me” and “that’s silly” in the background.

Erik turned six weeks old this past Sunday.  He celebrated by sleeping for six hours at one stretch that night! He hasn’t done six hours any other nights yet, but has done 4 or 5 hours several times now — which is still a great improvement for me over only three hours from the start of one feeding to the beginning of the next! He is nearly 12 lbs now — we weighed him last Friday and he came in at 11.75 lbs, so 12 lbs is coming very soon.  The 3-6 month onesies are starting to fit well and the 0-3 month sleepers will be packed away soon. He will still be able to wear his 0-3 month pants/shorts for a while yet — his legs are very short compared to his torso.

He’s also filling up his little bassinet pretty well.  I wouldn’t be so concerned about this except for the fact that it has thick fabric sides, and although he can’t roll over yet, he can scoot to the edge somehow and also kind of “flip up” onto his side.  I’ve found him with his face rather close to the side too many times for comfort.   Our original plan was to keep Erik in our room until he could mostly sleep through the night if possible, since he will be sharing a room with Madeline and we don’t want to keep her up with his screams when he wakes up to eat.  It’s also a lot further to have to go to the other bedroom to get him as opposed to just picking him up from the bassinet at the side or end of our bed.

There just isn’t room for anything bigger in our room than his bassinet, so my first solution was to buy a cheap replacement  to use until he is sleeping longer — one with mesh sides so that if he scooted up against the side he could still breathe.  I found something on craigslist for 10 bucks that I thought might work, but Tony objected to the idea of us cramming yet another baby item into our small house with its limited storage space.  So, Tony thought we should “hack” our current bassinet to make it more breathable.

We went to wal-mart last night and purchased some mesh-type fabric.  With this, we can make a “window” on both sides of the bassinet for breathing. And by “we” I  mean Tony, because I don’t trust my sewing ability enough to undertake such a project. There are bars on the sides of the bassinet, so the fabric/seams don’t have to be structurally supportive.  But the design of the bassinet’s removable fabric cover is a bit tricky, so it’s not a simple project.

We didn’t get very far on the actual sewing last night, but I am sure we’ll have some proud pictures of Tony’s bassinet hacking to post soon.  I can see it now– the next hit show on one of those home channels will be “pimp my bassinet.”

Today Erik is four weeks old! People seeing him for the first time often comment about how small he is — and compared to older babies, he is still pretty little.  But, he is growing fast and I am often amazed at how much heavier he feels each week.

We weighed Erik on a scale at home yesterday, and he is already about 11lbs, 1oz (give or take an ounce or so)! He started out at 8lbs, 7oz so that’s quite a gain in just a few weeks.  Madeline didn’t make it up to this weight until she was close to 2 months old (she weighed 11lbs, 7oz at her 2 month check up).

Not surprisingly, Erik is already growing out of some of his smaller clothes, like the tiny Gerber 0-3month onesies that supposedly go up to 12 lbs.  This small size of onesie has gotten even smaller since Madeline was a baby. (I’ve compared older ones and newer ones and they really have changed size a little bit!) Part of the fit issue with the clothes may be his long torso — while the 0-3 onesies are nearly outgrown in some cases, the 0-3 pants are just starting to fit correctly and up until this week he could still wear the “newborn” size of pants which supposedly only go up to 8lbs!

I’ve added new pictures to our photo gallery, so you can see for yourself how big he is getting: Erik (and the rest of us) — April 6th thru 22nd, 2007.

I also caught up on adding some pictures of Madeline from earlier this year: Madeline — February and March 2007.

I think I had ideas of things to blog about every day this past week — some days multiple topic ideas. It’s really too bad that I kept coming up with other things to do during the times I could have spent typing blog entries, because they would have been great posts about a family sushi-eating adventure (we learned that Madeline likes sushi too!), celebrating Easter, celebrating my birthday, getting out for my first “extended time” alone with God since Erik was born, attending Urban Refuge’s new family night for the first time, surviving my first trip to Target alone with both kids, the fun of spending a bunch of birthday money on a dozen items from my amazon.com wishlist, the amazing generosity of everyone who has been supplying us meals since Erik’s birth, the ongoing challenge of trying to keep Madeline from getting completely bored and driving me crazy while I am occupied with feeding and otherwise taking care of Erik, and all the ways Erik has been growing and changing during his third week of life.

Who knows — I may come back and revisit some of these topics…but at least now I feel like I’ve gotten them off my chest and I have a clean slate with which to start the new week. I hope you enjoyed that very condensed version of the highlights of my week.

(Also — I did post some new pictures in the photo gallery about a week ago, and I never mentioned that on the blog either. So, if you haven’t been looking at our pictures regularly, you might want to check out this album.)

Last night was a really long night. Or maybe a really short night, depending on how you look at it. Madeline went to bed around her usual time of 9pm, or maybe it was a few minutes later. Erik was asleep at that point, but soon woke up to eat. I was thinking to myself that I was happy his next feeding was going to be relatively early, so I could start my night of sleeping early as well.

It didn’t quite work out that way — While the feeding started around maybe 9:30 or so, he was taking lots of breaks to just stare at me or fall asleep briefly but wake up again a few minutes later…so it was taking a long time to accomplish the task of Erik getting full. The situation was aggravated by him peeing all over himself during a mid-feeding diaper change — prompting us to give him a much-needed quick bath. Around 11pm he and I were both finally going to sleep.

He was up again a little before 2am, and again wanted to take lots of breaks during eating. Around 2:45 am I started attempting to put him back to sleep, but it took until 3:30am before he really went back to sleep. He wasn’t screaming or anything like Madeline did at this age, but he was just having trouble falling asleep and needed some comfort and a few more quick “snacks” of milk before he could really drift off.

At this point I thought to myself that I could still get an okay night of sleep if he could just stay asleep for a 3 hours, which he often does after a nice long feeding. No such luck. He was awake again at 5:30am for the third slow feeding in a row, which is some kind of record for him. Normally he might have one “slow” or long feeding per night. To top it off, at 6:30 when he was done eating he decided to start his typical morning awake time a few hours early and looked bright-eyed and ready to start the day. Most mornings Tony probably would have taken over at this point, but he had left the house a little before 6am for his twice-monthly GCLI theology discussion group.

Madeline joined me in bed around 7:20am and was practically pushing me out of the bed by 7:30am. I was really wondering how I was going to survive the day considering how groggy I was at this point having gotten less than 5 hours of total sleep. Lucky for me, Tony came home between GCLI and work and made me a wonderful homemade latte.

While drinking large amounts of caffeine is not recommended for women who are breastfeeding, a little bit isn’t harmful, and I think is what has made today survivable! I expected to crash again after a few hours, but amazingly enough it’s almost 3:30 in the afternoon and I still feel great. Okay, so maybe some of God’s graciousness is involved too. Yesterday Madeline had one of her first real “meltdowns” where things all went wrong at once right while I was feeding Erik. We were both crying at the end of that one. But, no meltdowns today and Madeline is getting a little better at being patient while I feed Erik.

I was even ambitious enough today to head out with just me and the two kids. I absolutely had to at least get to the bank drive-thru to deposit a couple of checks into our account before the end of the business day, but I felt good enough to try taking a quick trip to the thrift store. That tested the patience of both me and Madeline (Erik slept through the whole thing), but it was good practice for harder things like going to the grocery store together.

Here’s hoping for shorter and better-timed feedings tonight!

We’ve posted lots of pictures of Erik in the photo gallery:

Erik’s first 24 hours

Erik on Days Two Through Five of Life

If you looked at the “First 24 hours” album prior to late Wednesday night, you might want to look at it again — there are about twice as many pictures in that one now!

We’ve spent the past three days or so getting adjusted to life at home with a baby and a toddler. Erik continues to be a pretty content little guy. Unlike Madeline, who spent a lot of time crying for no apparent reason when she was a newborn, Erik seems to mostly only cry when he is hungry, cold, or upset over having his diaper changed. Erik and I are getting into the rhythm of feedings, though we’re still working out the kinks of being able to feed efficiently. Overall though, nursing a baby the second time around is a lot easier.

Madeline appears to be adjusting fairly well. She is learning how now that she is a big sister, she needs to be more helpful and do things for herself that she can do. Sometimes it has been genuinely helpful to have her around. Like two nights ago during a diaper changing session where Erik pooped into about four clean diapers in a row and Tony was in the middle of something else, Madeline was very helpful in getting me more diapers and helping clean up.

Prior to today my mom has been here to help out, so that made things a lot easier during the day. With adults outnumbering kids by one, there was one person to tend to Erik, one person to play with Madeline, and one person to cook, clean or get other things done (or one person to tend to each of the kids so I could rest!). Now we get to try an equal ratio of kids to adults…then sometime next week I’ll get to see how I fare on my own with the two kids while Tony is working. Should be an interesting challenge! Tony’s parents will be visiting for a couple days next week, so that will give us another break of having more people here to help out.

We took our first “family outing” with Erik on Wednesday night. Feeling the need to get out the house and be like normal people again, we packed everyone up and went to a nearby coffee shop that has a kids play area. Madeline played with toys and other kids for most of the time, Erik slept, and Tony and I almost felt like we were out on a date for part of the time.

Today we’re going to give Erik his first “at home” bath and he also has his first pediatrician appointment…so those should be great adventures to keep us busy.

We’re happy to announce that our son Erik Andrew Hill was born yesterday (Sunday, March 25th) at 8am. He weighed in at 8lbs, 7oz. and is 21 inches long. He is a very healthy baby boy, and I feel like I am recovering pretty well so far too.

Internet access has been somewhat limited so we didn’t accomplish the goal of getting our blog updated within “hours” of his birth, but since Tony got out an email to pretty much everyone we know…I figured that it was less critical to get our website updated right away. We’ve been taking lots of pictures, and we’ll get those posted fairly soon too (hopefully tonight, since we are actually planning on going home in a few hours).

The labor and delivery was amazingly short — 2 hours from the first sign of anything happening to his birth. I know some of you want to know all the details and some of you would probably like to run in the opposite direction at the mention of labor pains. So, if you want to know how it all happened, you can read the rest of the story by clicking the link below if you are looking at this from the front page of our blog.

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