I guess at this point it doesn't really make sense to write down so much of what Ezra says. It's amazing to me, but really objectively pretty boring. His language has just exploded, though. He is talking in incredibly complex sentences, paragraphs really. He has really focused on grammar, and it's just been remarkable listening to his brain develop. He likes to use the word "because", and he draws it out, like: "I not happy..becaaauuuse...I need dump truck." (The reason he doesn't have his dump truck is, invariably, because he's been chasing the dog with it.) He's also very particular about saying, "it's" when appropriate, and really emphasizes that s. Tonight for Chanukah he got a wooden snake, and when my father walked in Ezra said, "Look, Mama buy a nake fo Ezza. It's a pesent fo Chanka." Yeah, nake=snake, fo=for, pesent=present...really it's not hard for most people to understand most of what he says, which is a big difference from just a month ago. His articulation has improved a lot, and he doesn't say many words wrong anymore. With some absolutely adorable exceptions: helicopter is "helitractor", refrigerator is "refrigadozer", and octopus is still "ah-pus-pus" (tonight he told me, "Mama, E-Z-P-R-O spell ah-pus-pus! I be a ah-pus-pus, a dancing ah-pus-pus!" and then danced around his bed. I think he started to spell Ezra, which he had been doing, and changed his mind lol).

He's also amazingly good at understanding his own feelings. He will tell us that he is hitting the dog because he's upset, for example. Today I took him to bed for a nap and he really didn't want to be there, and he said, "I no sleep! I be very upset! I hit train track, that feel good." It was like he understood that the reason he wanted to hit the train was because he was upset about the nap...which I love because it tells me that he's understanding some of his own feelings and learning to handle them. Instead of tantrums, usually these days if he gets mad because we tell him he can't have something or take something away, he pretends to be sleeping (he even pretend snores lol) and says he's tired. Or he'll cover his ears and say "I close my ears!" like he can't hear us.

Anyway...I'm just really enjoying observing him grow and mature and get smarter by the minute. It's so darn cool. Of course he's also been incredibly difficult lately, especially when it comes to the dog (he's so cruel to her sometimes), but mostly he's just my adorable little boy and I can't even begin to describe how much I adore the child.

Oh, Ezra

He's been impossible lately, but he's also adorable. Some things he has said just today:

I asked him if he'd seen the other binky [pacifier] that was in the room. He said, "Might be...misappeared!" Then my mother was leaving and he said, "Don't go, Grandma! Don't go! Ezza crying, that mean I upset!" She left, and he stood on the coffee table and yelled "GRANDMA!!!" at the top of his voice, like she might still be able to hear him somewhere. Then he yelled to me, "Look at me! Look at me!" to get my attention that he was doing something he's not supposed to (standing on the glass coffee table).

Then later I was feeding him lunch and he said, "I love Babba more than cheese."

He adores the train set he got for Chanukah. I should try to get some pictures of him playing with it. I like it a lot, too. I really had a lot of fun building tracks with him and pushing all the trains around.

He's been trying to figure out how to use the word "my". He'll say something like, "Look at me...I...me...I...me shoes." He's trying to decide which word to use, when it should be my. Once in a while he gets it right. It's really cute. (Just after I wrote this he came to me and said, "Look, my toe hurts." So maybe he gets it now.)

photos from today

I took a whole bunch and I don't really have time to go through them all, but here are a few. The lighting wasn't great, but I couldn't pass up the moment. Talk about perfect December weather! According to my mother's car it was 84 degrees.

This and That

While I'm on a roll with posting, I may as well mention that we had a pediatrician's appointment this morning for the babies. They had venous blood draws for hemoglobin levels, which I should find out in the morning. I won't be surprised if they are still very low. It was not so much fun having to sit there while the doctor drew blood from their little arms, but she is so good at it that it didn't take long at all (even on Ari, who is so chubby she thought she might have a hard time with finding a vein). They also got their second dose of the HiB vaccine.

I decided to go ahead and have them get Synagis shots for the rest of the winter. I went back and forth with it, but after talking to the pediatrician about it, and hearing about her conversation with a pediatric infectious disease specialist, and finding out that the copays aren't too steep, I decided to go ahead with it. The risks are minimal, and it could potentially help us avoid another hospitalization. The babies could still catch RSV, but it should be a much milder case.

Tonight Ezra bit his hand really hard and then told me I needed to get a paper towel to fix it. I totally didn't get it until I got the paper towel and put it on his hand and then he saw it and said, "where Ezza blood?" Apparently he wanted to see his blood. I guess because the babies had their blood drawn today, and I had told him about needing to check their iron levels because people need iron in their blood to have energy (at which point he insisted that he did not want to eat iron :p). So I tried to explain a little bit about blood on a level he would understand. He was really interested. So cute.

Bedtime

By the end of the day I'm usually low on patience and feeling very over-touched (of course I still have a night full of touching with the babies). I was having to lay down with Ezra every night to get him to sleep, and it was driving me bonkers. I adore the child, but it was just making me grit my teeth and hold back bad thoughts. So we (my parents helped) basically taught him to go to sleep on his own. It took one night of him crying and upset that we kept taking him back to his bed, and then he got the picture. I felt bad doing it, but he didn't seem traumatized after the fact, and I absolutely had to for my sanity. So now the routine is I read to him for a bit, let him read to himself for a while if he wants and it's early enough, and then tuck him in with his "race car cup", which is his "lovey" that he sleeps hugging (lol), kiss him, and tell him I'll come back to check on him in a bit. Usually he goes right to sleep, or I check on him a few times and then he goes to sleep. It's a huge improvement.

Tonight it was late and he just wasn't going to sleep. I was about to leave the room and he said to me in this sad, sad voice (again verbatim): "Mama, don't leave! Mama, come back Ezza bed. Ezza miss Mama. Ezza miss Mama long, long time."

So of course I laid down with him. (It would be a cuter story if he then went to sleep and we all lived happily ever after. Instead he kept fighting sleep desperately, and finally I just couldn't lay there anymore so I went downstairs and Ezra called out "Mama, Mama" for less than a minute before going to sleep. Really I think at this point he just wants me there, he doesn't need me, and when I am there it takes him a lot longer to fall asleep than when I'm not. I have to respect my own needs as well as his, and I just have to keep reminding myself of that.)

Overheard from Ezra

These are verbatim. I'm trying to write some of what he says down because I just love hearing his speech progress!

in his car seat, passing a car dealership: "Mama, look! Lots of balloons on cars!"

Having a tantrum over food :p: "I throw this clementime on the floor!" (he calls them clementiMes)

singing: "Twinkle twinkle little starses, how I wonder what you areses"
that cracked me up
He's been practicing his plurals a lot lately lol

If he thinks I seem upset, he pats me and says, "I know, Mama, I know," in a really soothing voice.

I wish I had recorded more things recently. I don't even remember what it was, but he responded, "ohhh, that awesome!"

And the cutest thing from yesterday: My parents got Ezra a wooden train set for Chanukah. It came in the mail, a big box, yesterday. My father and I were here, and we were standing near the front door as I opened the outer box, and I said, "I want to get this in a closet or something before Ezra sees it." And right on cue, Ezra says from the balcony overhead, "Oh trains! I love trains!" It was hysterical. I just said, "Okay but this has to go away until Chanukah," and he was fine with that. Then yesterday evening my mother was cutting Ezra's hair and he went into their closet and saw the box again and covered his eyes! Somehow he gets that it's supposed to be a secret and he should pretend it is.

Chaos and Insanity

My life is generally low-grade chaos spiced with short periods of acute insanity. That's about right.

There's often at least one person crying or screaming. Somebody generally has a poopy diaper. Somebody is usually hungry. But it's background noise. It's chaos, but manageable chaos.

Then things just fall apart for a while. And the pieces always come back together in the end, so at this point I'm pretty good at staying fairly calm. But I can't say it's not stressful.

Some examples: two days ago in the late afternoon, the babies were fussy and Ezra was hungry. I got Ezra a snack and was changing the babies' diapers when Ezra dropped his glass on the floor and it shattered. So I cleaned up the broken glass while the babies *screamed*. Then I nursed Ari while entertaining Toby to keep him quiet*, and Ari fell asleep. I went to put Ari down but he woke up as soon as I tried, so I left him there screaming and went back to screaming Toby and picked him up to nurse him. At which point I found out that Ezra had just pooped in his diaper. So I nursed Toby, and he fell asleep. I went to put Toby down (Ari was still screaming), and he woke up as soon as I tried. So I left both Ari and Toby screaming and went and changed Ezra's diaper. Then I picked up both babies and calmed them down and everything was fine. I played with them for a while and put them to bed early because they hadn't napped. The insanity probably lasted 30 minutes.

And then yesterday: we have an odd stomach virus going around here. The kids haven't gotten sick, but my mother was up one night throwing up and then was in bed all day sleeping. Yesterday morning as I was getting everybody ready to go to Target (my mother wanted blue "Chanukah" lights to decorate the tree outside!) I started to feel queasy. Great. I got everybody in the car and we went to Target. When I got there, one of the van doors wouldn't open. It took a while of trying random things to get it open before it finally worked. Ezra was not too happy about having to sit in the car and wait. I got it open and got Ari in his carseat into the cart, then put Ezra in the cart seat, and then put Toby on my back (I usually put the baby on my front but I felt too sick). I started to walk towards Target, but I was on the periphery of their parking lot space in the mall parking lot, and when I got to a certain point near the sidewalk the wheels on the cart locked. You know how they do that automatic locking so you can't steal the cart? Yeah. So I was stuck. I waited around until a woman carrying some toys came by and asked for her help, and she helped me get the kids to a new cart. And then things were fine. But during that hour or so it seemed like one thing after another was going wrong. It was ridiculous.

So that's how things go around here. Today we have gym class and I'm still sick. My father also got sick. Nobody has been really sick, just nauseated, maybe throwing up once or twice, and really tired. Things might go smoothly with gym class, or they might become insane. I'm prepared for either. I figure if I expect insanity I'll just be pleasantly surprised when things go well.

*I can nurse them together, but not if I expect them to fall asleep, unless we're in bed already. It gets complicated lol

Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s ‘Secretary of Food’?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: December 11, 2008
When Barack Obama chooses his agriculture secretary, we need a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”

My Letter to NPR

I'm deleting this because I don't want to offend anybody. Suffice it to say that it was about vaccines. If you're really interested (and unlikely to be offended :p), email me.

Tofurky Sausage

For some reason since I stopped eating dairy I've been craving meat-like things, which I hadn't in a while. So I got some Tofurky sausage. I offered Ezra a bite, and he looked at it, took a bite, and then threw it on the floor and immediately started weeping. "That VERY ucky!!!"

Photos My Father Took

Photos

I Don't Like Winter

First off, winter is cold. I don't like cold. And cold to me is anything less than 70 degrees (laugh all you want, I stand firm in that conviction). It's been in the 50s here, and I don't like it. Oddly, it's supposed to be in the 70s for the next two days before dropping back down to the 50s again.

But the bigger reason I don't like winter is because it gets dark early. And it's stupid and ridiculous. We basically invented our time system (yeah sure, circadian rhythm and all that, but we put the numbers on it), so in my (so humble) opinion we ought to have it stay light later in the day all year round.

As it is, in the morning we hang out and do breakfast and morning baby naps and such, and then if we have to go out, like we went to the grocery store today, we do that, and then we eat lunch, and then it's time for Ezra's nap, and then by the time he's awake and had a snack it's already getting colder outside because the freaking SUN is GOING DOWN before 4 PM and it's just ridicuous and we should change it.

The Look Out Song

Ezra loves music in the car. He always asks for it, and always says, "Louder, Mama! Louder!"

It took a few days of Ezra requesting "look out song" every time we got in the car to figure out he meant Box of Rain.

Look out of any window
any morning, any evening, any day
Maybe the sun is shining,
birds are winging or
rain is falling from a heavy sky -
What do you want me to do,
to do for you to see you through?
This is all a dream we dreamed
one afternoon long ago

One More Thing

that I know as of this afternoon (yes, another visit to the pediatrician):

Out of my 3 kids, Ezra and Toby screamed the second the nebulizer mask got close to their faces. Ari smiled and tried to lick it. After a minute or two he started screaming, too.

That's Ari's general approach to the world: eat first, look later.

Things I Now Know

Things I now know:

- A baby in respiratory distress is not a happy creature.

- It is not too difficult to nurse with an oxygen cannula in ones' nose, once you get the hang of it. But it will result in a wonky latch.

- Ari will suck down formula from a bottle and never notice the difference.

- Ari will not spit up when drinking soy formula, but will spit up quite a bit after nursing. (I just stopped eating all dairy.)

- My parents are amazing and I am incredibly indebted to them for their help.

- I can get a lot more sleep with a baby in the hospital than I could ever get with three kids at home. A lot more.

- Azithromycin will, in fact, give Toby diarrhea. And a stomach ache.

- Toby does not like albuterol, saline via nebulizer, or suctioning. I don't blame him.

- The worst part about having a kid in the hospital is having to just stand there while people do things that make him scream.

- I didn't really comprehend how sick my kid was until he started smiling and playing and I thought, "Oh, he hasn't done this in days!"

- After taking care of one baby in the hospital, coming home to 3 kids at once is overwhelming.

- Iam incredibly lucky that my kids are all, on the whole, very healthy.