Christmas at the LemonDrop

It's been a nicely quiet holiday here at the LD. Christmas Eve we went over to Tina & Ryan's for dinner, bringing along Parie's awesome salmon/sweet potato pie and a flourless hazelnut cake that I baked. Here's Ryan and his two boys, Grant and Orlando, showing Sofian how to play with the wacky abacus.

Ryan and the Boyz Show Sofian How It's Done

Here's the three of us after our massive feast (which also included mushroom bread pudding from Tina):



This morning, the boy must have known Santa had made the rounds as he decided to wake us up at quarter to 6, after nearly a week of lying in between 7 and 8am. We didn't have a whole lot to open, but here's the obligatory baby-with-the-wrapping-paper video:

Christmas Morning with Sofian

He got some new blocks from Santa and was quite pleased with them:



But then got a little tuckered out since he was up rather early:



Aunti Kerri came over at lunchtime and we hung out with her while it snowed for about an hour outside. But, this being Seattle, it didn't stick for very long, and the roads were fine enough for us to drive over to the GO-Team house (Anne Gienapp and Eric Olson) for their holiday open house. Then back home for more blocks and finally to sleep.

Got some work to do tomorrow, and Parie has a final half day at DNDA on Thursday before she becomes a full-time Mom. Then Tutu and Tomtom come up from Portland on Thursday to continue the Christmas celebration (there are 12 days of Christmas, you know).

 

PEPS Holiday Party

Sadly, we did not bring our broken camera to the holiday party over at Ellis' swinging pad this last Thursday, but luckily Sammy's parents were able to capture a great video slice of the proceedings (it's a private video, so you'll have to traipse over to SammyWammerville to view it). Had we brought our camera, though, we could have captured Sammy actually trying to climb over the back of the mellow, sitting Sofian. Ellis and Henry were also covering a lot of ground (with Henry quite the lil' lobster, trying to grab everything within reach). Meanwhile, Sofian and Ayana (who's 2 months younger) were content to watch the cacophony of movement.

It was quite a contrast to our first meetings back in June, when all the babies were lying on the floor like a bunch of grubs.

 

O Baby

Sofian had his 9-month checkup this week, and happily there was only a second flu shot that had to be administered. The official height recorded was 29 inches (2', 5"), but Parie says that Val, Dr. G's med assistant was being stingy with the measuring tape and that he's really 30 inches. His weight is 22 pounds, 6 ounces. So his exponential growth has definitely slowed down. Still, he's a big guy.

Also this week, after I was chatting with our PEPS pal Charlie (who I met for coffee with his son Sammy), I decided to try to introduce some Cheerio-like cereal to Sofian. Both Parie and I were a little nervous, since Sofian just has four teeth, but Charlie said that the Os that they use (the organic Purely Os) and even Cheerios break down pretty easily with saliva. We've been giving Sofian some food to play with -- pieces of rice, some steamed carrot bits -- but while he loves to put everything in his mouth, he just didn't seem interested in putting actual food in there.

After an initial play period yesterday with the Os, though, Sofian was able to start getting them into his mouth pretty consistently. Here's some video documentation:

 

My New Year's Resolution: Regular Posting

Yes, it's been awhile. And this seems to be a continuing refrain. The last couple of weeks have been focused on getting out from under The House of Sick, and happily everyone's doing a lot better. And then last weekend we received a pre-Christmas visit from Sofian's North Carolinian grandparent contingent: Mamalama and Papalapa. So things have been busy. Here are a couple of pics and vids from that visit:

And in the midst of this (after the Barack Obama rally), the LCD on our camera fritzed out, and seeing that's the only way to see what you're taking a picture of, we haven't been recording too much of Sofian. But we have a replacement jetting its way here soon. And for 2008, I resolve to be much more regular in my posting to the blog (something that certainly cheers Parie - though I'd love to get her posting here as well).

 

Goodbye Poop Pail, Hello Biodiesel

As you know, we do cloth diapers here at the LemonDrop, and the soiled ones are stored in a "wet bucket" (water that's been treated with Borax) that we lovingly refer to as the Poop Pail. But future generations of Uptight Seattleites like ourselves might be able to content themselves with disposable diapers, happy with the knowledge that they'll be turned into fuel. Well, at least it's a possibility according to this story in the Toronto Star:

If a Quebec company has its way, dirty diapers normally destined for landfills will soon be transformed into a cost-effective, synthetic diesel fuel.

It's not such a stretch, says engineering and project management company AMEC, which is working on behalf of an as yet unnamed client to build a facility in the Montreal area that would use a process known as pyrolysis to convert diapers to diesel.
[...]
The initial plan is to convert about 30,000 diapers, about one-quarter of the diapers that end up in landfills in Quebec yearly. Piciacchia says that number of diapers will translate into about 11,000 tonnes of diesel fuel. The preliminary economic analysis pegs the cost of the fuel at 50 cents per litre.

Pyrolysis, also known as thermal cracking, involves heating up the diapers up in a closed, controlled environment at temperatures of up to 600C without air, essentially breaking them down thermally.

 

Sofian's First Christmas Tree Ornament

Thought we'd start a tradition of getting a new ornament each year for the boy. Here's the first:



Looks good next to our Obama '08 ornament:

 

House of the Descending Sick (plus Bonus Vasectomy)

It's been slow and creeping, but it's finally got its grasp on all of us: The Sick. Parie got it first coming home from our Thanksgiving travels. Then Sofian last week picked up a pretty heavy cough and fever, for which he as prescribed some antibiotics and prednisone. And finally, this weekend, I finally succumbed, and was completely useless and napped out today.

Oh, and I got a vasectomy on Thursday. From Dr. Snip (aka, Dr. Charlie Wilson). It was amazingly easy and quick -- took about 10 minutes, during which Dr. Snip and I had a pretty good conversation about 3G cell phone networks. In the days since, I've not had any complications or pain, so all's well. And Sofian gets to be a pampered only child.

Aside from illin', the big problem has been Sofian's sleep, largely due to the steroids in the prednisone. The first day (Thursday) we gave it to him late in the afternoon, which was a big mistake. I was out driving Sofian around at 2:30am trying to get him to sleep. He got about 6 hours of sleep the entire night. And each night since it's been a battle to get him to sleep, even though we've been giving him the prednisone dosage first thing in the morning. Tonight, I drove him around 7:30 and that didn't work. We let him hang out on the bed and play for awhile. Then Parie went out and tried driving him at 10. That didn't work either -- he fell asleep in the car, but as soon as he was being laid down in his crib, he woke wide awake and started screaming.

When he's feeling better, we're planning on getting much more draconian on his schedule and letting him cry things out. I'm looking forward to that, cos this is not sustainable.

 

Pingu!

These 5-minute episodes of claymation magic might just be the thing to introduce Sofian to the telly (when we're ready for that). Check out more about Pingu at Wikipedia.

 

Light On for Lights Out

The week following our return from our travels, Sofian has gone a few steps back in his sleeping habits. He's waking up once a couple hours after he goes to bed (between 9 and 10) and then once or more in the middle of the night (typically around 4am, though last night it was 2am). It's been playing havoc with our sleep (I've been comatose today after several nights of not getting enough REM), and we're hoping we can chalk it up to him feeling a little feverish this week.

But we also worry that his completely dark room has been playing a part in it, so we got the boy a Tykelight from Mobi. Resembling something out of Ghostbusters, it's actually a portable nightlight that charges on its a magnetic charging base (you have to take it off the base for it to light up, and it holds an approximate 10-hour charge).



We'll see if this makes any difference with his sleeping (so far tonight, he's been up and crying right on schedule). But it does make a big difference when I go in to try and soothe him. Before I had to guess if he was getting sleepy in the black-out conditions, but now I can actually see his face in the glowing blue light (we went with that color as we could get it quicker than the others - thus no orange as you might expect).