Less than Twelve Parsecs

I you live in the US you are likely quite aware of what this past week was all about. If you don't, you probably have had some tangential contact with a spooky decoration. Yup, it's Halloween! Therefore today's post contains Mara/Willow costumes, a scary front lawn addition and an ancient Romanian rite that would be the correspondent of the Night of the Hallows.

Elena just wrote a blog post about how awesome is our first wedding anniversary gift: the Nest thermostat . This is the follow-up of the simple installation process.

Last week we had our very first wedding anniversary! Just like everything else in our lives since the end of August, we celebrated it in a daze of happiness, grateful for the amazing people in our lives and the little miracle in our arms. Greg's gift for us was a baby/house gadget that has definitely improved our lives in the past week! He learned of it from our friends Jason and Lindsey when they came to visit us two weeks ago, did the research, bought it and installed it just in time to make our first anniversary. That, plus he cooked us an exquisitely delicious dinner: Chanterelle mushrooms  (which are harvested in the wild and really hard to cultivate ) and Alfredo sauce pasta.

Yesterday Mara reached her 8 week mark, which we decided to make memorable while getting something that each of us needed. Mara had her two month appointment at a Googleween event, I got my first real social outing since Mara's birth, and kitty had a checkup visit at the vet to try to win her dignity back after healing well from her recent fierce battles. Willow fought some wild animal in our backyard and got some severe bite marks on her back and tail. She now looks ridiculous and is trying to cover it up by taking cute stances in her plastic cone.

This was a magical week. Mara started to consistently give us the most genuine smiles we could have ever imagined. Her whole face lights up, she smiles with her mouth, cheeks, eyes, nose and eyebrows all at once and instantly fills you with joy. It is such a precious moment that I don't even dare fetch the camera, I just sit with her and bask in the happiness she bestows upon me. So today we're going with a sleepy baby photo instead, wearing the awesome onesie +Carolyn Au  got us from her trip through London - thank you!!

We had another fun tummy time session two days ago and took more photos - I wonder when this will get old, I understand now how people become so spammy about their kids! We can just hope we're not too annoying :-D I happen to be posting them now because I got a notification from Google+ Photos that they had "magicked" my snapshots. It has this fun new-ish feature that automatically grabs some close-frame photos and mixes then into a multi-portrait.

It's been a few days now that Mara has been looking curiously at the underside of the Lamaze Flutterbug (thank you, +Alexandru Erbiceanu  and  +Natalia Grib !)  we had hung on top of the changing table. She focuses on it so intently, you can see her "serious face" here:

Today we are saying bye to our favorite wardrobe item so far, the owls footie from Zutano that +Kelly Poon  recommended us getting. Such wonderful times! We wore this as much as we could in the first 5 weeks, Mara loved it, mommy&daddy loved her in it. It was the smoothest, softest and most comfortable and pretty outfit! Last night we tried to put it on and it does not fit comfortably any more :-( so we have to finally put it away. Here's one last look back to the good times:

Back in May we received a Dutailler glider chair from +Kelly Poon  and  +Bartholomew Furrow  (Thank you again!!), and we've been using all through the last few months of pregnancy, both me and Greg plus the cat. The idea was to rock the baby in-utero, that way maybe she'll like it when she comes out!

Mara's Grandma is here visiting again for 4 days, and we all went on a walk around the block. I got to wear the Moby Wrap for the very first time, Greg had been doing that until now and he's already a veteran. I'll have to admit, the wrap with its humongous tails of cloth is quite daunting when you first start out. We had to watch both our pre- and post-partum doulas doing it to Mara, and then also watch a ton of videos online.

There were two woodpeckers knocking in the pine tree in our backyard today, it looked like a couple but the male (he had a pretty red mark on his head) got shy when I brought the camera out. I didn't want to disturb them too much, in case they feel like making a home here, so I used the telephoto lens and didn't insist too much, but here's the female!

Mara sneezes like donald duck, and we recorded it! She usually sneezes twice, and afterwards makes a really cute sound. She does it pretty often when doing a diaper change. We've recorded a bunch of other cute sounds too, but we're unsure how to utilize them. whole sneeze: after sneeze only:

Here's the first round of cute little milestones! These were gathered with the Baby Connect app which I reviewed in a previous post . We only started adding them after the first two weeks of complete panic and confusion :-P hopefully we'll be doing more and more of these.   Aug 29, 2013: Mara is born at 05:40 PM by Elena

We're starting a new series of posts that track Mara's development milestones. This is made possible by the coolest baby app we've found, Baby Connect . We have it installed on both our phones and the tablet and it syncs across devices!

Greg pointed out in a previous post that Mara is not a Turtle. It's time to officially end the controversy and set the story straight with a no-makeup, no-airbrush, 100%  real Mara rocker chair photo.

We've been married for almost a year already, and I still haven't changed my name to match Greg's last name. That's mainly because it feels like I would be losing a big part of my identity, which I guess every new wife has felt before me. This spawned plenty of more or less casual chats on the matter this past year.

Just trying to increase Mara's range of motion.