Less than Twelve Parsecs

We found out about it around 4am this past Sunday morning, reading a casual email note from a friend. She forgot to include details like timing and exact location, but mommy spent the next hour trying to figure those out. Tip: Best way to find similar baby/toddler-friendly outdoors events in the Bay Area: strollerhikes.com It was the Jenny's Light 5k/10k/stroller/kids Run. It was to happen at the absolutely gorgeous Vasona Lake Park , a few minutes drive from our house.  It was a good way to get some fresh air, exercise, plus watch tons of parents and kids give their best. And it was awesome!! We got there late and managed to get the second-to-last registration. Yay! Really, they let one man sign up after us and then refused a couple with their child right as I was filling the form :-( As a positive note, we got a sweet number: 345 The race was starting in 2 minutes, and Mara was all ready to participate. Well, most likely she was confused why we're

Mara had a bit too much cider (Taken on 12/20/2013)

We finally managed to write up our very first Christmas open letter, here's what's been happening in our lives over the past year. Last Christmas we received the best gift from Santa that we could have imagined: we found out on Christmas morning of 2012 that we were going to have a baby! Everything after that was just filled with happiness, and the entire year of 2013 was marked with many life changing experiences. The second wedding - the one in Romania happened in May when I was 6 months pregnant with Mara. We brought Gene and Tammy over the ocean to see my home country, we hiked to Babele (pronounced bah-bay-leh , The Old Women) and the Sphinx in the Bucegi ( boo-chaydj ) Mountains. We ran into a bear at the ethereal lake St. Ana, stopped for a night in the idyllic Bucovina and visited family. The second family-honeymoon happened in Paris with Greg's parents, just like we had our first family-honeymoon after our Florida wedding with my family in S

We thought it wouldn't get much worse than hourly wake-ups at night. Here comes month 4.5, after the FL trip with the airplane and 3h time shift, plus all the excitement over the holidays. Mara has been waking up erratically at roughly 20min intervals throughout the past three nights. That, of course, on top of the hourly wakeups that by now mommy has started accepting as normal nighttime behavior. Mommy and Daddy are trying to figure out why, some of the ideas so far are: She's too cold/hot cause we have a room heater that's inconsistent (it runs till it's 3 degrees over the temperature, then stops till 3 degrees under! that's 6 degrees of variation!!) Does anyone have a recommendation for a room heater that would be better?  She's bothered by the random status lights in the room - baby monitor, room heater, clock, fire alarm. Everything else we had already ducktape-covered. Late last night a tired daddy was covering the heater and monitor lights.

Babies need the freedom to carry water spray bottles, just in case the authorities decide to put them to nap time too early. That's a clear violation of baby rights!

This is not the blanket you are looking for... (Thanks for kitting this Rochelle!) I'm supposed to sit up? But I'm not even 3.5 months yet! (Just a few seconds ago there was an Elephant near my face!) She'll never see it coming (This quilt was brought over by Tammy and used to be Eric's given by his grandma) Mara impersonating the elephant. Fun fact: the day Dean brought us this quilt that Amanda designed herself - Thank you!! - mommy felt the very first kick from Mara. It was so new and exciting, but we weren't yet ready to share it so we never told Dean. We just emailed Amanda in secret instead. This blanket? too small for me? Nah It's perfect for the side daddy's not warming up. ... I was driving my car on the street, and holding my blanket like so... It's a cape! Lavender camouflage quilt when stalking the kitty. The kitty will never find me under here. (Thanks Kathleen for sewing this! She&#

Two days ago, right after our pediatrician visit for four months, Mara stated rubbing her right hand erratically on her head when I was nursing. It happened every time, and was starting to get me worried. Her hand was not gentle at all, but flailing and grazing the side of her head. I wondered why she would be doing that. Was it a weird way to cope with early teething? Could her cradle cap be getting weird - it's supposedly something completely innocuous. Or could it be something more worrisome and should I call the doctor? I talked about it with Greg and we decided to just wait and see how it develops, cause generally babies do weird things. Two days go by, and last night around 3am Mara is doing it again while drowsily trying to nurse to sleep. I was quite awake because I had just tried rocking her instead of nursing. It almost worked! except that she smelled mommy and knew the bar is open any time. So we ended up nursing. Once again, she was intensely grazing her head

Mara is getting more and more attached to me which is heart warming on my side, but I fear a little tough on hers. During our holiday trip we had several episodes of her getting upset and crying when she felt that someone was taking her away from mommy. These happen mostly in the evening, when she gets afraid that she'll get sleepy and I won't be next to her on time to help her go to bed for the night. This started happening after we have been trying to help her sleep on her own, and to give mommy a break, which involved other people trying to rock her to sleep away from mommy. Here's a commentary on how our sleep troubleshooting has been going. What we were trying to do: help Mara sleep on her own by putting her down when drowsy, not fully asleep What Mara learned: When daddy or mommy or anyone else rocks baby to sleep, they are planning to put her down, so Mara needs to stay awake as long as she can to prevent that. So she does, from a usual 10 min rocking t