Noah has a hum

This morning we took Noah to his appointment with the Pediatric Cardiology department based on the referral from our regular pediatrician. If you remember back, at his 15 month appointment a "louder than normal" heart murmur was found and after a double-check on it by the senior doctor, they decided to take the wait and see approach. If it was still around at his 18 month check up, then they would decide what steps to take next. It was still there at 18 months, and still "louder than normal" and so we left the office with a referral and an appointment with the Pediatric Cardiology department downtown. The thought was that it was better to get it checked out and diagnosed early as nothing to worry about than to ignore a potential health hazard. We waited 2 months for this appointment and while it created some anxiety thinking of all of the worst case scenarios that might come about, we ended up with a happy ending. Noah was diagnosed with a Venous Hum. This is technically not a heart murmur at all, but is classified as one because it makes sounds through the stethoscope that are very similar. I found a really nice summary article on it here. Feel free to check it out for a more articulate summary. Basically, because small people are inherently small, there is sometimes narrowing of the jugular vein as it heads from the heart to the brain region. Some children have either more narrowing than others or greater blood flow volumes than others, either of which can cause a vibration in the vein, which is heard as this murmur. Noah may have both the narrowing and the increased blood flow, which might cause the murmur to be "louder than normal." Long story short, as he grows bigger, the vein will also grow and the venous hum should disappear. If it is still around by the time he hits 3 years old, then we are supposed to go back to see the pediatric cardiologist again for and ultrasound of his heart to make sure that there isn't anything else associated with it. Given that this is her specialty and how impressed she was of his development and activity level, she said to mention it at his appointments just to keep an ear open for it, but to otherwise enjoy the little man and have fun! So after a bit of stressing out on my part hoping there wouldn't be any surprises, it appears that will all continue to live happily ever after just as we planned!

Sync my new car?

With the two old cars paid off recently and Tim's VW becoming smaller and smaller by the month, we decided it was finally time to invest in a new ride. We had done a lot of Internet research and narrowed the field down to just a few models that we were interested in looking at. We had a budget, a couple of key features, but most importantly, we were looking for cargo room. The criteria was if we could fit the jogging stroller in...if not, the car is not for us. On Friday after work, we headed over to the Nissan dealership to check out a couple of models, but clearly the dealer was not looking to sell us anything as they tried to low ball us on the trade and offered us a test drive in the very base model smallest SUV/crossover vehicle they sell. We hated the car from the moment we opened the doors, and left utterly discouraged and vowed to visit one more dealership before giving up for a few months to save more for a down payment.

Enter the Ford dealership a couple towns over. We rented an Escape a couple years ago on a trip and really enjoyed it. It had one of the largest amounts of cargo room for vehicles in that category and they were offering a couple of great deals. Originally, we were looking for a 2009 model, figuring they would be a bit cheaper, but because of all of the people turning in their clunkers for cash, all of the 2009 models in the state had apparently been sold over the course of the last week or so. We ended up picking up a 2010 blue Escape that we have already fallen in love with and we only picked it up this afternoon!

We drove off the lot with 4.9 miles on the odometer. By the time we got home from the dealership and a couple of errands, we are over 16 miles now, still not to shabby. This would be the first time I have ever seen an odometer that low on a car I can call my own! What a nice feeling knowing that everything is under warranty and there are no one else's potential problems lurking under the hood.

While technically this is going to be my car to drive back and forth to work, Tim will be getting plenty of time behind the wheel since I don't drive any where unless I can help it. And now that both of the cars are automatics, he can leave me with "my old car" for the day and head to work with the new one occasionally.

And in case you were wondering, Noah already approves of the new car and got a chance to play with all of the buttons and knobs in the front seat while Tim and I organized the cargo area. All we have to do now is figure out how to work all of the new fangled technology. I tried to tell the car to dial Tim and it yelled at me that I was using illogical commands, apparently I should have said "Call Tim." Can you just see it now, Noah in the back seat interrupting my random voice commands and the car getting all confused and yelling at me!?!? Yep, its coming...any day now!

Blissful silence

no longer resides with us. Noah is chatting up a storm lately. He has expanded his vocabulary exponentially and is starting to string a couple of words together occasionally. I am trying to keep track of all of the words he is using, so I have been working on a running list for a few days now. Unfortunately, each day the little man learns a new word or five and so I'll never have a perfect set I guess. Here is a sampling of what Noah is heard to say lately:

No (or NoNoNo)
Yes (uh-huh while nodding)
out (as in get me out of this highchair!)
lion
that (dat)
this (dis)
eat
button (butt)
remote (mote; as in the TV remote)
ice
nuh-night
brush (as in brush teeth)
ribbit
ball
more
down
mine
Moose ( MUHsss)
cheese
broccoli (sounds hilariously like BrrrOC, with the ending completely missing)
car
truck (guck)
bus (BUSSSSSSSSS)
bike
snack (nack)
water (wawa)
house
blankie (abits abits abits????; Strange yes, but also accurate)
monkey (when asked what they say, he smiles and says E E E)
moo
neigh
duck (when asked what they say... Gack Gack!)
kitty (when asked what they say... MEEE OWWWWW)
Ruff Ruff
Hunt (Uncle Tim's dog Hunter)
Nannie (Nana Lou)
Nick (Nana Lou's grandson)
Dante (friend at Nana Lou's)
Mia (Nana Lou's dog)
Memere
Pepere
Mommy, Mama, Momma
Daddee
Pooja (Pooge, a good friend of ours)
juice
milk
cereal (real-real-real)
ravioli (olee-olee-olee)
trash (tash)
arm
eye
nose
belly
bits (as in his bum and bits)
shorts
shirt
shoes
bed
bottle
pool
play
outside (owside)
boo boo (scraped knees or the band-aid on them)
ride (in the car more specifically)
walk
park
Bob (as in Bob the builder)
choo choo
boat
chair
help (hep)
book
buh bye
Hi
all done
all gone
light
thank you (morphed into tank-two)
uppie (still signifies, pick me up)
uh oh
oops
George (his stuffed monkey)
door
glasses (gasses, as in sunglasses)
hat
socks
coat
puzzle (puzz)
bag
off (but not on...off refers to both on and off)
keys
cookie (which refers to a great diversity of desserts as well as Cookie Monster)
Elmo (elm-o)

He also understand possession, he knows which cup is Mommy's or Daddy's or Noah's. If you ask him to bring you Mommy's book, he'll bring over the right one. Of course there is also the occasional belief that everything is "MINE," but what toddler doesn't go through that phase?

A forgotten milestone

I completely forgot to post and record for posterity one of Noah's milestones. He got his first haircut right after we arrived home from vacation. Since rat tails aren't really my thing, I decided it was about time to even out the back of his hair a bit. I forgot to post about it since I trimmed it myself with about 3 snips of the scissors: two clips at the very bottom of the neck to nix the rat tail (curly cuteness or not, it was getting out of hand!), and one snip to trim up the top (which had a few excessively long hairs that were starting to hint at a comb-over). I think perhaps it took all of 90 seconds, with about 80 of those seconds spent trying to keep Noah sitting still so that I could line the snips up. I of course kept the clippings for memories and have stashed them away in a keepsake box. I will wait until we bring him to get his first official hair cut for before and after pictures. For now, you'll just have to believe me when I say, you really can hardly tell it was cut at all (that didn't prevent Nana Lou from whining about the missing curl when I brought him back last week though!!).

Experiment Update

Remember back a few weeks ago when I mentioned that I was going to try a new experiment. The whole G-diapers thing?? An update is due I suppose on the progress on that front. I would like to declare it an EPIC FAILURE! In the scientific field, our results are unpublishable and will be stashed in a file cabinet drawer some where, only to be unearthed a decade from now and tacked onto an only mildly related manuscript as a Experiment 1 or worse, a pilot study. All of my hard work and research was blown out of the window by a certain small statured person that resides in our home and suddenly has opinions. Including strong negative opinions regarding diapers that are less offensive to the environment. In more practical terms, the child screamed like I was dismembering him every time I pulled out one of the cloth wraps. He would cry and say no and physically fight me as I attempted to put one on him. In sum, he was not having these non-disposable diapers and its all my fault. I hesitated and waited too long and as a result, I missed the window of "I don't care what you put on me mommy as long as you feed me and love me." Darn it all, now I am going to have to wait for child #2 to experiment, which will lead to an indeterminate number of additional diapers in a landfill somewhere and a healthy portion of environmental guilt inflicted upon myself. Oh well, better luck next time I guess!

Random Catch-up

We were busy last week, lots to do being back from vacation and all. There was house cleaning and laundry and the start of the new job search that is now beginning to brew. I have lots of thoughts to get out so they don't disappear into the depths of the forgotten, but since I am running a bit behind on posts lately, I am summarizing so as not to get behind on the excitement that is to come this week.

Tuesday was my first day back to work after vacation and Noah's first day back with Nana Lou. He said Nana Lou's name ("Nannie") about 65,000 times over the course of Monday and Tuesday morning during the hour period between when he wakes up and when we arrive at her doorstep. He was visibly excited to see her and gave her lots of love. He practically shoved my behind out the door and was off for a day of fun. I was a little worried that he would take a bit to readjust after being doted on by 5 adults all week, but nope, he was off and running with "Nannie" as if he had missed her desperately all week on vacation. It really is nice to see such a strong bond between them, it lets me know that he truly likes being there with her as much as we like him being there.

Tuesday we enjoyed the bottle of wine pictured below courtesy of one of the VERY nice manager's where Tim works. As they are preparing for inventory (which is now tomorrow!!), they have been cleaning out their back stock. In doing so, they have been unearthing a number of bottles of wine that are no longer sold as part of the regular inventory. This one here is a 1996 bottle of red table wine that was originally listed at $80. They decided to have a fire sale to try and get rid of all of the extra stock and marked it down to $15. Tim claimed one of the bottles and as he was checking out, one of the assistant managers grabbed the 3 bottles paid and told him to enjoy. A free, really nice bottle of wine...why thank you very much, we will ENJOY it! And we did!


Wednesday we were supposed to have a picnic in Boston Common with members of my lab (they were going to stay afterward for the annual Shakespeare in the Common production). Instead, there were threatening weather forecasts, so we moved the picnic to my advisor's house. If it would have been outside, it would have been perfect. But no restraints during dinner made Mommy crazy trying to keep the mess to a minimum inside their gorgeous (and very breakable/non-childproofed house). There was some epic screaming and a couple of impressive hissy fits that resulted in the first ever time I have ever been slightly embarrassed by my own offspring, but eventually his own cup of grapes and a couple of referees to ensure that the hot over and knife drawers remained off limits and we survived the ordeal. I was assured that people were too busy enjoying the food and their own conversations to notice the shrieking that was my child, but I think they were just being polite...the volume and intensity of it all was a bit too much to ignore people!

In coming back from vacation, one of our major chores was to clean up the backyard to make it suitable to play in. The grass got out of hand and the garden needed some serious attention. Thankfully, it seems to have fared quite well while we were away. Here is just a tiny portion of what we picked. The cherry tomatoes filled an entire gallon size zipper bag and were distributed to some of the tomato lovers in lab. The basil and larger tomatoes have been making their ways into some grilled fresh mozzarella sandwiches, and the cucumbers have been sliced and enjoyed fresh from the garden. I guess all of the horrible rain we were complaining about earlier in the year has really helped make this a banner crop after all!

This weekend was finally a hot one...and HOT it was. I know its not the south, but when it hits 92 degrees with high humidity, we just aren't used to it. So I did the best I could, filled up the kiddie pool and let Noah run amok in the backyard with the hose on trickle. He had a blast all afternoon! To top of the day, Daddy came home from work bearing gifts, chocolaty fudge pop-type gifts! Noah didn't quite know how to hold the stick at first, but that didn't stop him from enjoying every last bite. Towards the beginning of the popsicle, things weren't too bad, but after the heat started to melt it, Noah just couldn't keep up with the drips..


An this is why we eat fudge pops outside and preferably in a bathing suit. I just told him to go back and play with the hose and he cleaned himself off for me!


Sunday was another scorcher, so we did something that I have been itching to do since I found out we would be moving back to Boston, we played in the Frog Pond! I know, we are pathetic, we should have done this such a long time ago, but we never had a good time or excuse to head into the city for an afternoon to play. With Noah along for the ride now, we certainly make the time for afternoons of play! Noah seemed to have a great time splashing around and checking things out.


We spent a little over an hour playing in the water and then we dried off and checked out the Tadpole playground as well. It was an adorable area, but a bit too advanced for the little man, he kind of looked lost.

After grabbing some dinner, we headed home for the day and collapsed collectively on the living room floor soaking in the sweet air conditioning. I caught wind of a peach festival taking place in Andover next weekend, so perhaps we'll have a chance for another afternoon of fun!

Vacation

Its taken me a while to get around to posting about our vacation, life gets in the way sometimes. We had a wonderful week of gorgeous sunny weather, which is something to be very grateful for after the obscene amounts of rain and cooler-than-average weather for June and July. We drove up to Maine on Friday evening through more of the torrential rain, but made the drive safely and started off the vacation. After finding last year's cottage a bit too small, we tested out a place on Hogan Pond in Oxford this year. It was a decent place, with a ton of room and it was really well set up for the whole family. Noah had a ball checking out all of the toys they left to share with guests and a couple of evenings, we sat down and watched some of their Sesame Street videos (which were a lifesaver to wind down a very wired little dude).

We spent the mornings hanging out on the porch in sweatshirts and pants while the lake chill was burned off by the sun. And by late morning, it was time for a walk (with generously applied bug spray). After a nap and lunch, we spent the remainder of the day playing in the lake. There was a nice beach, which kept the water at a perfect depth for Noah to run around in. He had a ball splashing and running through the water and checking out all of his beach toys from Easter (they were well worth the wait).

Of course, its always entertaining to play with Daddy's toys too. Here he is trying on (upside down of course) Daddy's swim mask.

The cottage provided a canoe, so we took the opportunity to go out for a few rides over the course of the week. The two Tims took the little man out for his first canoe ride early in the week and later in the week, I went on a short ride with the boys as well. My ride was shortened a bit due to a small person demanding a snack, but hey...food is where it is at for him I guess!

Here are the boys getting ready to head out for their ride...how adorable it the little man in his life vest and fisherman's hat?

And here they are on the way back into shore. Tim said he was a really good boy during the ride and spent the whole time out pointing out the water ("WaWa"), the boat, and a random house on the shore they passed. He spent the week very excited about the "wawa," and made sure everyone knew about his excitement! :)

Here are a couple of pictures of Noah playing in the lake. He found these little person-sized masks and became very attached to them. He even bothered to drag this one down the hill and into the water. He called them hats instead of masks, and that probably explains why he insisted on wearing them on his head all the time. He is crazy, but so entertaining, no?

This is what happened when I told him to put them on his eyes. I guess they are technically on his eyes, too bad he can't see anything interesting now.

Since we knew there were possibilities for bad weather, we brought some indoor toys along with us as well, just to be safe. With the chill in the air in the mornings, it was a good thing we did. We also had an afternoon of rain for a couple of hours, which were easy to pass watching Noah play with my old train. I remember my brother and I playing with this at my memere's apartment when we were kids. My mom found it in the basement right before we left for the cottage and decided the little dude was right about a good age to play with it. Noah had a ball tugging the thing around and playing with the animals. It is definitely showing its age, but it is still in great shape and just as much fun as I remember it!

Of course, what fun is playing at the lake for a week without taking a turn playing on the inflatable floats in the cottage. Its becoming a family tradition and it just doesn't seem right without a picture of Noah joining in on the fun. We have a picture of him on the same float last year, just barely sitting up by himself. This year, we were lucky to get a picture of him on it since he hardly sat still long enough to catch him. Notice the leg up, he was in mid-escape when we got the picture!

Towards the end of the week, the sun remained, but the temperature dropped a little. Its not as much fun hanging in the lake when it is 73 and breezy. We were sad about it, but we survived. Hey, there is always next year right?!?

Noah is the only person that found a way to thoroughly enjoy the packing process. He found Daddy's sneakers, stepped in them backwards, and the fun started. If only we could bottle that joy for a rainy day when you need a smile!

MOOOOOSSSSE!

A week in a cottage by a lake sounds lovely doesn't it? Yep, it was nice, right up until the part where it turned 71 degrees and breezy, which is weather not so much suited for splashing and playing in the lake. I spent the better part of Friday morning bundled up in a windbreaker and yoga pants and I was still cold! Instead of slowly going insane from constantly telling Noah "Don't touch the outlets buddy", or "Please don't pull off the buttons of that radio", or "Quit picking things from the trash dude...we are not a family of trash pickers!" we decided to take an afternoon trip to the Maine Wildlife Park. I had never been myself and didn't know it was located about 15 miles from the lake we were staying on until desperation hit Friday morning and we started searching the local yellow pages (yes, that is what you do when you are in the middle of no where and don't have the Internet at your fingertips!). Its a super cute park where they care for orphaned, injured, or human-dependent animals that are indigenous to the great state of Maine. We got to see quite a few creatures, but unfortunately the pictures of many of them came out terribly. We did get a great picture of a woodchuck, who Noah called "Keety" since I guess they look a bit like a cat in his head??? :)



And of course there were moose. Noah spoke enthusiastically about the moose the whole way there (since I made the mistake of telling him we where going to see a moose...note to self, immediately adopt Beth's principle of providing information on a Need to Know Basis), all throughout the park, and the entire ride back. He even woke us up the next morning by sticking his head up over the side of the pack and play and exclaiming "Moooosssse?" as if asking to go visit them again. (you can just barely see the moose through the fencing, but trust us, it was HUGE!)


We then took a little trail through the "forest" to check out the trees and get back to the deer area. Noah found a sign that was just his height and it was love at first sight. It took us about 10 minutes of prodding and a bribe of taking a pine cone with us (and my acceptance of the sap removal that would ensue from the presence of the pine cone) to get him away from the thing.


See Momma, those trees up there, they make the pine cones on this sign here...MY SIGN!


We had a great day trip, stopped for some ice cream frappes on the way back to the cottage and we managed to save our collective sanity for another day. Mission Accomplished!

I helping!

Sweet little dude is loving to help in the kitchen.  Unfortunately his idea of helping is not quite the same as mine!  But we love him just the same, and willingly pull up the dining room chair to let him join in on the fun.  He certainly needs to work on his awareness of where the edge of the chair is and where his feet are in relation, but hey what toddler doesn't need a bit of safety training?  While he is up on the chair, he can be found terrorizing the contents of the counter, playing in the sink, and throwing things on the floor...awesome fun for everyone I tell you!  I can just hear him now announcing "Mama, I HEPPING!!!!"  Yep, he is a big hepper people!

Notice the two beer bottles strategically placed on top of the coffee maker that is conveniently out of a certain small person's reach.  Geez, how did that happen?

Still HEPPING!

What the heck was I thinking.....

So Tim (Christina's sister) and I had talked a while ago about going on a hike while we were on vacation in Maine this past week. He brought his Maine Mountain hiking guide to camp and we perused through it to find a mountain relatively close to where we were staying for our day of adventure. We settled on Pleasant Mountain, with an elevation of 2006 ft. Not a large mountain by any standards, especially for Tim, who lived in Salt Lake City for 5 years, however it is the tallest mountain in southern Maine. For those of you familiar with Maine, Pleasant Mountain is none other then the same mountain that Shawnee Peak Ski Resort is at (I wasn't aware of this until that morning I think). It was about 45 minutes or so from where we were staying, so it was a perfect location. Here is a picture of the mountain from the road leading up to it.











We started at about 400 ft elevation, and in the first 1/2 mile gained about 500 ft of elevation. Now that may not sound like much, however it was brutal. We are talking about someone who has only ever hiked up 1 mountain in his life (short of the tiny little mountain I lived on in Korea, but that was minor in comparison), and that was roughly 20 years ago (how scary is that ?!?) After that first 1/2 mile I was sucking some serious wind, and my legs were screaming in agony. All macho, I was thinking before the hike, "hey, I can handle this, what's a little walk through the woods?" The total distance up and down was about 6 miles, and after the first mile, I started to loosen up a little bit and feel drastically better. Along the way, there was an insane amount of wild blueberries growing on the side of the mountain....















After a short detour, were we where both convinced that we had missed the trail somewhere (it made a switchback that didn't make sense, and we lost a lot of hard earned elevation!!) we did eventually make it to the top, and it afforded us a spectacular view. It's hard to see in the panoramic below, however, if you look directly above the two trees in the foreground, that is Mt. Washington, which was only about 29 miles away.






As proof that we actually did make it to the top, here is a picture of Tim and I, along with Hunter (Tim's chocolate lab). There were some very nice people at the top of the mountain that took our picture.











All told I was very glad that I made the hike. All told we gained about 1600 ft in elevation, and for some that may not sound like a lot, but lets not forget that I am not in the best of shape (a toddler will do that to you!). I felt rather proud that I was able to just jump right in and handle it. The mosquito's were atrocious, and I certainly was sucking wind for the first mile, however once my body stopped screaming it's protest, I started to feel pretty good, and the views were certainly spectacular!