No poopy diapers!

Warning: poop story ahead

I don't know if we have shared this information or not. I know Grandpa Bruce and Grandma Bridget know, but just in case the information didn't make it into the grape vine...

Peregrine has a very distinctive sound he makes when he needs to poop. He started making it months ago. One day when Sky was at home with him, he started grunting and his face turned red and his eyes crossed a little, and she thought 'hmm...maybe he's pooping?' She quickly moved him to the bathroom, took off his pants, unbuttoned his onesie, took off his diaper, and plopped him over the toilet bowl. A few minutes later, her hard work was rewarded by his hard work and (almost) all of the poop in the toilet. Very little clean up!

That kind of started a trend. We have been keeping a close eye on the boy during the day trying to pick up on his pooping cues. He seems to have an especially generous portion of lower bowel; he typically goes three or even four days between poops. He has one good poop every few days and seems just right as rain.

We had a few misfires and have had a bit of negotiation in figuring out how to perch him on the toilet for pooping, but except for one catastrophic failure (I came home to Sky bleaching the bathroom and running all the towels and shower curtain through the laundry) it has generally gone pretty well. He has a little donut insert for the toilet, now, that he can sit on (and has a built in "deflector" for the pee that inevitably happens when he's 'pushin hard'), which is better than trying to keep him suspended over the bowl. He even gives us 'warning' grunts before he really needs to poop and we're convinced he 'holds it' until we get him over the toilet.

The upside? Neither of us has had to change a poopy diaper in over three months. Note, in this time we also have put him on a good portion of solid food, so his poop is no longer baby-fresh. His sleep schedule is back to strange. He's even getting a little fussy perhaps from teething.

But we have not had to deal with even a single poopy diaper in that whole time. Amazing.

Singalong with Peregrine

Peregrine and Poppa have been playing some guitar and singing some songs. We've been trying to do lots of singing to the little guy, and most recently Poppa has been doing quite of a bit of guitar + singing with him. A variety of songs - classic songs, newfangled songs, thematically inappropriate songs - but lots of singing nonetheless (we figure he doesn't care too much about lyrical value, just tone, so...).
He shows a distinct preference for songs that are fast and upbeat (much akin to his taste of 'soothing' music, as it were), and also seems to particularly like it when Poppa sings "The Birthday Party" by Peter Mayer. Special thanks to Uncle Niall for teaching Poppa the chord progression.
As it turns out, Peregrine likes to sing, too! Quite often, he will "singalong with Poppa". Sometimes this lasts for one song, sometimes more. Occasionally he won't bother singing along at all, but that's increasingly rare.
Anyway, Poppa got home from work the other day and was doing some singing with the little guy, and Momma got some of it on video!

He does his singalong sort of a-syllabically, but since his general command of syllables is pretty low at this point, I figure that's OK. Even if Poppa sings words, he just kind of 'ahhhhh's'. But he can do it for a 20 minutes of singing or more. Cute!

lots of fun this week

With the Thanksgiving break, we had a bit of extra time to do some things. This was a blessed break from the norm of feeling panicked and that there were too many things we couldn't get to, so it was extra-nice.
Thanksgiving week started pretty exciting for Seattle, in that we had snow and cold (see previous post). Thanksgiving itself was pretty OK. Sky had to work a call shift and spent that 24 hours working, so that meant Taj and Peregrine were on their own for the day. Thankfully (heh heh), Uncle Loren was hosting a Thanksgiving Extravaganza at his place so we headed down there to enjoy some turkey and various pot-lucked goodies.
The following day we both had off, and we had Erica, our "Mom's Helper/Nanny" come by for most of the day. Sky got to get some sleep. I was feeling bad having just gotten through two consecutive major holidays without any sort of fanfare at home, so I busted out the Christmas decorations and got to work putting lights up on the house. Would you believe we were the first house in the neighborhood to have lights up, the very day after Thanksgiving? Yeah, I thought so.
Then, since we wanted an opportunity to enjoy it, we went ahead and got our christmas tree up! I'll be in DC next week and two weeks from now we go to MN, so we felt we should seize the moment and just get one. It's a very nice noble fir. A little on the small side from the norm, but we're trying to scale back a bit - we always end up with one way too large! Peregrine helped decorate it and just loves to look at it with its lights on.
Then on Sunday we took advantage of the recent snowfall in the mountains and headed out for our first cross country ski. Unlike our last ski (in New Mexico), this one didn't start 9,000 feet up so it felt easy as pie. It didn't hurt that the snow conditions were just about perfect - enough stick to get good kick but cold and compact enough for very nice glide. We skied for about 1.5 hours on a railroad grade and it was really very nice. Peregrine slept most of the time in one of his carriers (we tried both the Ergo and the Bjorn to see which was better). Passing a few folks out with their babies in trailers, we have briefly entertained the idea of picking something like that up. Sounds like they're pricey, though. If anyone knows of a good low-priced version we're all ears.
Anyway, a very nice ski wrapped up a very nice holiday weekend. We were thrilled to both get some stuff done around the house AND have a chance to do something fun and outdoors. If only there were four-day weekends every week!

Pictures!

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