big brother/little brother

how did my first baby get to be this big?

you might have seen our "announcement" earlier -- that this baby i'm baking right now is another little boy! we've actually known for a little while. when we got the blood tests back that told us about the blood type, the dna also said it was a boy. but we sort of just wanted a visual confirmation before we made it public ... and this morning, we got that confirmation at the specialist's office.

a boy! a little brother for john. two boy puppies chasing us around the house in not to many years.

i'll be outnumbered, for sure. even our dog is a boy.

but you know what? i couldn't be happier. a house full of boys just makes my day. (not to mention the relief i know my husband feels -- he was sweating the possibility of a daughter to protect!)

so my mom-in-law will have two pair: two sweet little girls from my husband's brother and his wife, and two dirty stinky boys from our family.

and we'll have to let my grandmother know that apparently, her predisposition to birth boys (besides the baby of her family, of course!) has been passed on to her grand-daughters: this baby will make the fourth boy great-grandchild. that's a lot of boy cousins running in circles around the house in a couple of years!

i will leave you with this little anecdote. for weeks, john has insisted that the baby in mommy's belly was his "little sister." but he was totally ok when we told him it was going to be a little brother instead. last weekend, though, as we drove around town, my husband and i were discussing possible names. john was listening and playing in the backseat, until he suddenly interrupted us.

"no!" he yelled. "his NAME is JENNIFER!"

don't worry, we won't be taking that name suggestion to heart.

Comments

on lullabies

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

i'm furberizing my baby

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean

home

annapolis rock 1988 thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions. yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year. i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child. 199

john's mom works

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