So far ahead...

Viv, you're 18 months old today. It's one of those baby measuring milestones that we stop celebrating once you hit two. No one gets excited over halves ever again, but 18 months is a big one. There are special shots still, and that always signifies a big day.

You're a toddler now, although you run a lot more than you toddle. You also dance and kind of jump, you spin in circles until you fall over and you can walk backwards all while telling us you're doing so, because kid, you're really, really smart. You're the kind of smart that makes other parents of toddlers disbelieving, as they simply cannot understand that you just said, "Airplane is in the sky!" or, "Thank you and you're welcome!" But you did, and you can say a great deal more. You have a truly incredible vocabulary, but the best thing about your mad verbalosity is that you actually speak in context. You're also able to form new sentences using the words you already know, which is especially impressive. I'm awfully proud, even though I can't take credit for your genetic predilections. Still, I've read Hop on Pop to you so many times that I can take SOME credit for your development, as I think Dr. Seuss is guaranteed to improve your rhyming abilities, at least, so maybe you'll become a rapper. That would make Stephanie happy.

You know, though, butterbean, while I love that you can communicate with us so well, it's not your talking that makes you the greatest kid on Earth. It's not that or your mean dancing moves or the way you stroke my hair when you're tired. You're just so WONDERFUL. All around. You're funny and sweet and perfect and lovely. I just love to hold you so some of the overburdening love I feel for you can maybe be shared by osmosis. As clingy as this makes me sound, I just despise being away from you because I miss the way you change the air in a room just by your presence. You make it that much more worth breathing. You have brought a grace to our lives, a fulfillment, and I hope you can see this in the way we tell you we love you, which is a lot. Thank you, my sweetest monkey pants, for being our daughter.

And I'm sorry I mess with your hair so much. I know you hate it. I won't stop, but, you know, sorry.

I love you, love you, love you.

Now, WHO could have taught her that?

And, while watching this video, she commented, "booyah, baby!"

Starting Blocks

I've never, ever started anything new, be it role, hobby or lifestyle, without being utterly and implacably convinced that I was too stupid to do it properly or even at all. Knitting, singing, gardening, cooking, parenting, etc, I've always been sure that whatever I undertake will be a monumental failure. Why? No idea. Mom and Dad always believed that all of us kids could do anything, so it must be inborn. I also hate starting new things because the learning curve is so incredibly frustrating, which is why I make myself learn new things. I'm trying to cultivate patience, but I still suck at it. I hate not instantaneously understanding all related components to whatever it is I'm learning, and, even though I have yet to give up on a hobby I've started (as an adult-I mean, I only took figure skating for two weeks when I was twelve), nothing can ever convince me that the next thing I learn won't be the one that licks me.

Enter these socks. Socks, you say, incredulously? Feh. How can they be so difficult? Do you see that little window of color? That's not one yarn that is dyed to stripe or pool. That's a different strand of yarn for each single stitch. That's a bitch. I'm knitting these socks as a gift to Julie, and her PhD is almost finished, so I need to get off my dimply backside and get going. Failure is imminent, I just know it.

Geography Lessons

Viv calls every woman who looks even vaguely like my sister (and many people who absolutely do not) "Tina". She does this many, many times a day, and my usual response is, "Where's Tina?" She'll then point to whatever woman she thought looked like T at that moment, be she 80 or Asian. However, as we were leaving the house today, Viv looked over my shoulder and said the name. I asked the usual question, expecting her to point to someone walking her dog or to our crazy neighbor possibly up on her roof, but instead, she replied, "Spokane." I think she needed to prove that she really does, in fact, know who and where Tina is.

Whatever happened to Baby Vivienne Jane?

Christian has been telling me for months that Viv is a toddler now and not a baby, but I've been resisting the title change as her baby months went by too quickly, and I wanted to extend them. He's right, however, even though I'm still not able to say those words aloud.

Today, while standing dripping in the bathtub after all the water had been drained out, she adamantly refused to put her final toy back in the net hanging from the side of the tub after she had put away all of its mates. If I tried to hand her the toy, a little green car, she would hit it and back away. If I tried to put it in front of her, she'd turn around. She would rather have frozen to death (in the 80 degree bathroom) than put that toy away. It was our first true battle of wills. I mean, we've crossed spoons over certain foods, but she'd always eventually eat enough to satisfy us both. However, I have never asked her to do something that she then utterly refused to do, and she's never thrown a tantrum to prove to me how steadfastly she holds her opinion of my request. She's usually so good about bringing me whatever object she's illicitly purloined, like as tissues from the trash or the remote. I merely have to ask her for the object and then look at anything other than her and she'll bring it right over. In the tub, though, she discovered that she has a say in what she does. Or she THINKS she has a say. I finally resorted, after 10 eternal minutes, to putting the toy in her hand, holding her hand shut and putting her hand and the toy in the net. I even dried her off and put on her lotion and diaper, all while she was standing irritably on the rubber mat on the bottom of the tub, with suds swirling around her toes.

We knew the tantrums would be coming, though, as she's started doing a little ritual of annoyance, usually when she's in a car seat, shopping cart or high chair, that will escalate to a tiny eruption. First, she'll whine loudly. Then, she'll ask for a cracker,which we'll refuse to provide. She'll then clench her fists, stiffen her body, stick out her legs, grimace and howl through clenched gums. It's actually a pretty funny little display, but laughter annoys her even further. We're trying to respond to these moments with calm and rational conversations about using words and being patient, but I think we're forgetting that, despite her ability to speak in complete sentences, she might not actually understand the request to breathe deeply.

I miss my baby already.

Interesting Sartorial Observations

I started cleaning out Mom's closet today, just the one in the bedroom, as the clothes are getting dusty and seeing them hang there makes it impossible to not burst into tears every time I go into the master bedroom to answer the phone. I noticed something interesting. Well, interesting to me, anyway. Mom had conservative and practical fashion tastes, which I knew already, but what I didn't know what that she had started to purchase attractive, stylistically appropriate designer clothing. She had always shopped at Penny's and The Bon (nee Macy's), but everything she purchased was on the 70% off sale rack and usually the house brand or something similar (read slightly sad). However, I found a Kors jacket, a brand new pair of DKNY jeans and a whole panoply of highly colored button up shirts in jaunty hues from Ralph Lauren. Mom was making an effort. I guess the years I spent mocking her love of pleats finally wore her down, as I did find her two virtually identical pairs of boot cut jeans that I know she wore every day, because once, after she had returned home from a visit, she called to ask me if she had left the first pair at my house, as she couldn't find them and they were her "good" jeans. Hence the second pair.

Maybe in a few years' time, she would have flown to Vegas twice a year to shop exclusively at Versace. Well, if she could part stand to live without her 17 silk shells in an array of fetching beiges, purchased in bulk from the Macy's outlet.

The Battle vs. The War

I should count my blessings and not complain, but that would defeat the purpose of having a blog. Viv really hates to nap. I've said it before, but I thought things were going better. It's not that she's napping any longer than she did before, but putting her in her own room made a huge difference in merely getting her to go to sleep. Her naps are still brief, 20-45 minutes at most, and maybe twice a day, but at least they were reliable. I could shower during the first nap and put in laundry or check email without having her press the power button on the laptop or slam it shut on my fingers. She really dislikes the laptop. Anyway, she napped a little. Now, she doesn't seem to want to nap at all. For the past week, I've been fighting with her at least twice a day in an attempt to get her to nap even a little. She will lie down with her binky and behave just as before the battle began. Five minutes later, when I'm downstairs cleaning or making calls or checking email, I'll hear the first howl. I'll let it go for the next ten minutes and then she'll escalate. So, I'll go upstairs, put her binky back in, lay her back down and leave. She'll be silent and then the wailing will turn into shrieking and then hysterical tears. So, after a half hour of all of this, I'll get her up, feed her and play with her for another two hours or so until she is fairly dropping to the floor with exhaustion. I'll put her down again, and, if I'm lucky, she'll sleep. However, I haven't been very lucky lately.

I know she's probably adjusting her own schedule to do away with one or both naps, but I don't deal with change as well as she apparently does. I don't want to war with my child over sleep, but I need a few minutes each day to myself. I think I'll get a treadmill with Elmo taped to the handlebars.

As Viv stands wailing in her crib upstairs...

...as I unsuccessfully try to get her to nap, I'm remembering her last year at this time, chubby and serious, still sleeping in the bassinet next to the bed, and finally ours. And now she's so tall and independent that I swear she's going to ask to take driver's ed so she can drive herself to work. I mean, look at the difference one year makes:

The day of her final adoption court hearing:



















And now, at fifteen months:














Does every passing year bring changes this dramatic? I hope so.

A Mighty Big Difference

I think I finally understand the difference between my abilities as a musician and other singers' abilities. I have no master's degree and I've never attended a YAP. Before, these things really didn't matter, and I would get easily irritated with those singers who could only talk about which programs they attended. What does it matter, I thought? Where are you singing next, as that's what matters. Well, now I know why it matters. It matters because of Mozart.

You can't hide in Mozart. Everything is incredibly exposed. The quantity of recitative in Figaro alone would make up the duration of another composer's entire composition. Because I didn't study Mozartean recitative as an undergrad or in graduate school and I didn't have a chance to work out its difficulties in a YAP, I utterly suck at it. Apparently, my Italian isn't good and I have no musical flow. I am missing some key skill, consequently, that makes learning and rehearsing Mozart excruciating for me and annoying to those around me.

Since Mom died, I've been hugely struggling with focus. I simply don't seem to be able to concentrate for long periods and I have very little desire to do anything other than spend time with my family. While preparing for this role, I did something I've never done before: I missed four pages of music I should have learned. I didn't realize my mistake until our first music rehearsal, where my sightreading attempts when it came to those pages was disastrous, and I may as well have been unprepared for the entire show for how it made me look, even though the rest of the opera was off book. I'm ashamed of my unpreparedness, but I'm more alarmed at my response to it. I, of course, came home and immediately started learning, coached the missed music the next day and worked very hard to get it memorized, but I still felt out of sorts and incapable of setting my mistake aside and moving forward. I got sick, probably from the stress, and I lost my voice, and I would have far rather quit than keep going at that point. Now, every time I sing the music, I feel thick and unresponsive. I can't seem to get my brain completely around it and I just want to move on and come back to it later, but it doesn't work that way, so my incompetence inconveniences the other singers around me as we have to repeat my scenes. Now I'm tired and depressed and the plumbers are coming first thing tomorrow morning to redo our entire house, so I'm anxious about water in addition to everything else.

I have come to a realization about all of this from the last week. I wonder how much longer I will keep singing. My joy in it is fading greatly, but what I can't tell is if it's from grief or a true desire to move on. I'm hoping that will become clear as time goes on, so now all I can do is work harder than I have the energy to do and hope it all works out.

You're not my mother...er, contractor.

We're going to remodel our kitchen. Yes, we really are. I mean it this time. After seven years, we finally have the money to address the cracked tile and expand the lone countertop. We also need to replace all of our plumbing, as, of course, we couldn't possibly have one catastrophic system failure at a time, oh no. I wanted to do all of the repairs and renovations at the same time as I thought it would save money (since we'll be adding a washer/dryer hookup in the kitchen for the remodel, may as well do all the pipes), but we may need to address them singly, as it turns out.

Of course, all of the proposed work is dependent upon finding a contractor who will work with us within our budget and allow us to do as much work ourselves as we are able, which is quite a bit. Now, you'd think that that would be no problem, wouldn't you, especially in a recession? Well, you'd be WRONG. At least, you'd be wrong according to the contractor I spoke to yesterday who, without having even seen our house told me, after whistling condescendingly at my budget, that I should consider refinancing to be able to afford a real remodel. Because he was also a banker? And, you know, loans are so easy to get these days. He told me that framing a 4x10 bump out of the back wall will take all of our budget, but he, of course, wouldn't be able to give us a REAL estimate until he spent $2,000 of said budget to draw up plans. Oh, and he also let me know that, again, not even having seen my house, I would need to address my deferred maintenance issues sooner or later. I asked him politely what he meant, which, really, I shouldn't have even answered as he had already told me that I was too poor to remodel, and he said that, since the plumbing was old, chances are there were many other problems we'd need to address. Because his magic 8 ball told him that our roof had moss. Oh, OH! and, when I told him that we were planning on doing all of our own tiling, cabinet hanging, painting, etc, and that we had a friend who was an excellent carpenter, he asked me why I needed a contractor if I had a carpenter friend. Um, because he's not an electrician/plumber/foundation pourer, etc and he's not magically able to complete all of our remodeling needs in a weekend, damn him. It was patently obvious that the contractor had absolutely no interest in working with us, as our budget was, apparently, thousands less than his strip club spendings every month.

Since that degrading call, which reminded me of the first realtor we worked with when buying our house (all problems, no solutions), several friends have come forward with names and number of recommended contractors, all of whom are said to aid homeowners in completing some work themselves. I am hoping that none of them will recommend hooking or selling a kidney to support my kitchen and plumbing habit.

The cheese stands alone.

When I was in junior high, I had a friend. She was a Mormon and had many brothers and sisters. Five, if I remember correctly, which I probably don't. Her father was a local newscaster. He was robust and cheerful and excessively smiley while reading the reports.

This friend invited me over after school one day, and from her description, they lived the fancy life in a big house. Made sense, her dad was famous. When we got there, though, imagine my surprise when I met her large, braless, angry, shouty, sweaty mother, who laid on the couch for the duration of my visit, screaming at her grubby brood to bring her more diet coke while she watched Wheel of Fortune and bellowed incorrect answers at the screen.

When we went into the kitchen to get a snack before returning to the friend's room (which we had to enter by climbing over every toy owned by the sibling who had the lower bunk), we found nothing in the fridge, possibly because all of the cheese in the house had been grated onto the linoleum. A whole block of mild cheddar in a huge, greasy, crunchy, glistening pile, lying in a defeated heap on the curling floor.

I've never been able to escape that image. I can still see the one working bulb dimly casting its meager light over the filthy countertops and sink filled with cold, scummy water and rusting pans. So, whenever, while making dinner, shredded cheese escapes the grater to lay on the floor, wormlike and shiny, I must vacuum. To leave it there would be the first step down a road which can only end with Pat Sajak.

The best baby, empirically speaking.

I'm an extremely competitive person. I really have to be, as a singer, as there are too many of us who all want the same thing, and competition forces me to improve myself or fail, pretty much. I now find that I'm also incredibly competitive about Viv. What is there to be competitive about, you may wonder, if you have no children of your own. Oh, so very much.

It starts simply, early on. "Is your child letting you sleep?", other parents ask. It seems innocent enough, but what this question really means is, "Does your baby sleep through the night, like mine does/did from the time she emerged, composed and transcendent, from my womb?" Every question is from a mental checklist being ticked off by a parent wondering if her child is ahead or behind. Is another baby still not able to sit up at three months? The parent of the child who sat at 2.5 months knows that her child is better, more special than the slug who still can only lie there and drool.

It gets worse, though, as the baby gets older. Crawling is a huge indicator of a child's ability to win one for the parents. If you chance to meet a parent of a child who is the same age as yours and, by seven or so months, one child can crawl and the other can't, the crawler's parent leaves the room (field, mall, playground, etc) victorious, smug in her knowledge that the other baby, poor thing, will cost his parents thousands in physical therapy but that her child will continue to excel in such a dramatic manner as to leave other parents agape and despairing when they witness the genius of the early crawler's future accomplishments.

I have two friends with children who walked at nine or so months. This troubled me. Viv could pull herself up and cruise (move from furniture to furniture) without our help by about then, but she couldn't walk, dammit. When she finally did take her first solo steps at about ten and a half months, I was jubilant, but also a little disappointed. I mean, yes, how exciting, she took her first steps, and yes, I told everyone and was genuinely happy, but what did this mean? Was she muscularly challenged? Was she not very smart? Was she merely...average? God forbid.

At her one year appointment, I filled out one of the usual developmental questionnaires, but this was the first one where I couldn't answer yes to every question. No, Viv hadn't taken off an article of clothing (other than socks, shoes and hats), she couldn't eat independently with a spoon very well and she couldn't scribble. When the pediatrician reviewed the form, I asked her if it was a problem if Viv couldn't do everything on the checklist. She gave me that look, you know the one. The one that says, "Oh shit, you're going to ask me if there are any flash cards you should be using, aren't you?" I said that Viv couldn't scribble, to which she replied, "I wouldn't give a one year old anything to scribble with, much less expect her to scribble." I asked why it was on the questionnaire, then, and she said that the questions pertained to children up to two. She turned over the paper to read our replies to the questions on the second page, the ones geared towards developmental milestones of two year olds, and she asked me, disbelievingly, if Viv actually had more than four intelligible words she could use in context. I thought about it, and came up with about a dozen words Viv uses on a daily basis. When we (Christian was there, too) started telling the doctor which words Viv could use, she was surprised. She looked at Viv who was looking back at her, and said that she was considerably ahead of the curve.

It was better than any trophy.

How is it possible?

You cannot be one year old today. You cannot. I remember so very little of the day to day happenings of the last year and I want a do over so I can etch every day in my brain. I've heard from other parents that the first year of their child's life was an equal blur. Too little sleep, too many diapers.

You have no idea how much you have made my life worthwhile, and kept me from going crazy when things became too difficult. After Mom died, you were my little rock, and I'm hoping that you have no recollection of all of the times I held you while I cried.

When I think of last year at this time, and how we were in the hospital with you, staring at you, stunned and in awe, I had no idea if you'd be ours, and even less did I know that you would grow into this astonishing little person who exceeds my expectations every day. You're such a funny girl, you love to laugh, you're so social and you read to yourself. You READ to yourself. God, that's my favorite thing you do right now. You pick up a book and you turn the pages while speaking your own language that sounds like a combination of Turkish and Klingon. And when you get to pages that we read with emphasis or a particular voice, you try to imitate it as closely as you can. ALL THE HIPPOS GO BERSERK! I think that's your favorite, behind Binky.

My sweet, sweet baby girl, I love you so much it frightens me sometimes. I had no idea I could love anyone this intensely, and I hope that you know it, that you know that I would do absolutely anything to make your life happy. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to give you everything you could want, because that might make you a brat, but you will have everything you need.

We're talking lately about how to tell you that you're adopted, and we need to start reading about these things, as you're growing up so fast we'll be telling you all about your birth story soon.

I hope you're happy with us. You seem happy, we work so hard to make you happy, as does everyone else around us, because everyone loves you. We will always love you.

One more time.

How many times can you say that you miss your mother and wish more than anything in the world that the last five months were a dream and that you hoped you would soon wake up to one of her patented phone calls where she reminds you that it is, in fact, your mother calling, without everyone completely losing patience and telling you to just get the hell over it?

I have one of her infamous calls on my voicemail still. I apparently can go to Comcast's website and access my messages, and hopefully make an audio capture, but I'm terrified that I'll accidentally delete the message, and I really need to keep it as it's her voice and it's an incredibly long and completely typical Mom monologue about how our Costco membership (in my dad's business' name) is going to expire and that we need to send money if we want to keep it going. It's one of those messages that, if I were in an espionage movie and needed to make a recording of Mom's voice to get me past a security terminal that was coded to her speaking a specific phrase, would win the affections of the leading man, as I think she actually says every word the nuns ever taught her merely to let me know that I could either pay her back the $40 or write a check directly to Costco.

The Smell of Evil

So, I know what my kid eats. I know that she eats vegetables and oatmeal and fruit and a little cheese and, occasionally, small amounts of meat. There's nothing mysterious about her food, she's not consuming steak tartare or sashimi, so why does her poop smell like 1,000 festering corpses? Sweet zombie Jesus, I have never smelled a stench like her poop stench. And when her diaper disposal unit is full and has to be emptied? If I could ralph up everything I've ever eaten because of the pervading aroma issuing from that pit of evil, I would. No amount of washing, bleaching or deodorizing makes even a modicum of difference. Post-cleaning, the thing just smells like bleach or soap or lavender and the breath of the Sarlaac.

Would you think that someone so adorable could produce such a smell?


















Nor would I.

"Lessons learned from surgery" or "Wow, that really sucked."

Mom's memorial was this last weekend, and I had been dreading it since Dad mentioned that he wanted to have it. It was just so soon, so painful, so immediate. Tina likened the emotions rolling with it to the water held back by the little boy with his finger in the dam. I have my finger in the tragedy dam, and I can let out as much grief as I can handle, and then I can plug the dam back up. This service was the dam breaking for me, and, coupled with Dad's insistence that we understand why he wanted to have the service whether or not we wanted to understand, I was flooded. I had also been in charge of editing and timing the slideshow with appropriate music, so I had repeatedly watched Mom grow up, marry and have kids to the point where I couldn't bear it any more. So, I wasn't surprised when I started to feel unwell on Friday, before the drive to Spokane. By Saturday I was mildly nauseated, achy, sneezy and congested. The service itself was actually much better than anticipated and I came out of it feeling slightly improved. No one told me that Mom was in a better place, and the conversations revolved heavily around the babies in the family.

Sunday we drove home and were much delayed by a dust storm and consequent road closure on I-90, necessitating our taking the 2 most of the way. It was a seven and a half hour trip from beginning to end, and was exhausting. I still felt poorly on Monday and thought I had a sinus infection, but meds coupled with food from Shelly made me feel better, and rehearsal was surprisingly enjoyable, so, at the end of it, I felt well enough to go for a drink and some food.

I had one drink with lemonade and vodka and three little cheeseburger sliders, and started to feel abysmal about a half hour later. By the time I got home, I was intensely nauseated and desperately needed to vomit. I tried and tried and tried, but was utterly confounded, as the surgery I had in May to repair my hiatal hernia restructured the lower sphincter in my esophagus as to allow nothing but small amounts of gas to reverse course. Because nothing was moving in either direction, the nausea wouldn't pass and my abdomen became distended with the air I was gasping in. I continued to retch horribly for an hour before allowing Christian to take me to the ER. Thank God they were quick and got me in as soon as I made it out of their bathroom. They immediately gave me Zofran and dilaudid and within moments I stopped trying to barf out my intestines, which I would have welcomed, actually.

We stayed at the hospital for nearly five hours as I was hydrated and medicated and my lab results were returned. Chris was home with the baby, who woke at an uncharacteristically early hour and refused to sleep again until Chris met her unreasonable demands. We relieved him at 5:30 am and slept until she woke again at 9, when Shelly came over to watch her while we slept some more.

While I'm grateful that the surgery has prevented most of the reflux that has dogged my the entirety of my life, I'm not sure that I would recommend the procedure to someone in my situation. Maybe last night is too recent, but Jesus Christ, that was truly horrific. At least I know it worked.

All right, that's it.

I have absolutely had it with the airline industry. First, we're being charged for meals, then to check bags, and now, to receive a credit on an already booked flight that has seen a $30 per ticket fare reduction, we'll be charged between $50 and $75 for each price adjustment. It is utterly absurd to think that issuing a credit would require $50-75 worth of employee time. I don't know how to address this issue other than let the offending airline, VIRGIN AMERICA, know that I am furious.

In this time of enormous economic hardship, those who can fly are usually doing it at the expense of something else in their lives as travel is a luxury. That $60 Virgin could easily give us would go a long way in encouraging us to use them to travel in the future, but I will not use them again. At least the nameless, faceless giant wholesalers online offer credits.

Note to self...

or, I should be smarter than this by now. Don't read other singer's websites, don't read interviews with them, don't read reviews, don't read bios, don't have anything to do with the industry except when it directly pertains to me. When skinny singers start calling fat singers "elephants" and say that audiences will be rendered unable to dream when said fatties are on stage, that's when I know this business is a crock of crap.

Happy ninth month, poodle!

Oh my heavens, poodle, it's your ninth month birthday today!

It is unfathomable to me how so much time could have passed already. We were looking at pictures of you as a newborn the other day, and you were unimaginably tiny, so skinny and light, we could carry you around constantly without getting at all tired. You're so big now, so incredibly tall. Everyone who meets you asks how old you are and then marvels at your length, but you're still so lanky! All of your pants bag at the waist, but you have the greatest chubby, ham hock thighs in the world.

You still don't have any teeth, however, which makes your smile all the more adorable, drooly and gummy. And you talk now, constantly, sometimes even using real words, although whether or not they're in context is up for debate. You have met all of your milestones early, you've been sitting on your own since April, you've been crawling for six weeks, you're now using furniture to pull yourself up, and you can move from chair to chair in the dining room while standing. EVERYTHING goes in your mouth, thankfully including the things you're supposed to have in there, like food. You love finger food, especially Cheerios. You even are ambidextrous when picking up things to shove in your pie hole.

You're such a smiley baby, too, good-natured and possessed of great equanimity. You love other people and are extremely social, thank God, as I'm constantly passing you off to friends and relatives, all of whom adore you.

I love your crazy Kid n' Play hair, and I'm a little sad that it's filling in on the sides. We bought you your first hair product, which is pretty hilarious. We can't wait, though, until we can put it up in little elastics, making pom-poms all over your wee heid.

Viv, we love you so much. I hope that we show it enough. I'm trying to get in all the kisses and ear noms and squeezes I can, as you'll soon enough not want any of that stuff. You are the greatest thing that has ever happened to us, and we're happier every day than the last that you're our baby.

Giggle Pants McGee