Eloise Helen

First, let me say that Jessica Walter is a good enough reason on her own to watch the new 90210. (As though you all really needed a good reason to watch the new 90210.) I’ll be tuning in each week for her, and I think Chris will join me.

Okay, so Boston was loads of fun. We got to hang out with Amber and Dave before going to Martha’s Vineyard, and April and Shannon joined us too. I was pretty tired, as you can probably tell.

Being tired was kind of a running theme for us. Here is Eloise playing with a wiffle ball bat in Martha’s Vineyard. She was very tired. Can’t you tell?

We went back to Amber and Dave’s on our way home, and Dan and Deirdre came to join us. Their sense of humor transcends age: Eloise thought they were hilarious. And doesn’t Eloise look like Uncle Dan?! They love each other, Eloise and Dan: they even held hands over dinner at a barbecue joint.

On Friday, September 5, Eloise is exactly 8 months old. I can hardly believe it! How did the time pass so quickly? How did she get so perfect? We love you, Eloise!

Our first night back in Boston after spending time on Martha’s Vineyard, we stayed with Amber and Dave who were puppysitting their friends’ new Visla puppy Rowan. I have never seen Eloise so amused and excited. Rowan had very tickly kisses, and I think Eloise enjoyed feeling them and watching her wiggle around and shake her floppy ears. Again, turn the volume down on your computer a little to watch this video: the pitch is pretty high!

Laughing at Rowan from Martha Ruttle on Vimeo.

Whooeeee! What a trip. We had a lot of fun, but boy am I glad to be home and sitting still. Eloise was basically the perfect baby this whole week. I could never have even hoped for such adaptability and charm. She was great and rolled with all the schlepping like a champ … until our plane ride last night. She was so amped up and excited to see all the friendly passengers on the plane. She would not sleep. I walked up and down the aisle. I tried to nurse her. We played. Nothin’. Eventually she just lay on my lap screaming and I just gave up for a while. I was that mom on the plane people look at and think, “Wow, I am so glad I am reading this People magazine sitting on my butt and not being her.” Ugh. One woman said, “You can say you walked all the way from Boston to Portland.” Ha ha, lady.

Miserable cross-country plane ride home, aside, we had a great time! I’ll post pictures from our Boston leg of the trip in a while. Here are some from Martha’s Vineyard and the Urban-Brown wedding, which was so beautiful. One of my top weddings ever. It was so intimate and fun and meaningful. So beautiful.

Here are some pictures of the ferry trip from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven. Aura drove us there from Boston and back: our trip would not have been possible without her help and patience. Thank you, Aura!

In their usual extravagantly generous fashion, Daniel and Jennifer rented this big, beautiful house for all their friends to stay in. It was on a hilltop with beautiful views of the bay and sea. Eloise and I went to the beach the first day, but I pulled an amateur-mom move and slathered her with baby sunscreen made for sensitive skin, to which she had a really bad reaction anyway and became totally miserable. So we chilled at the house a lot instead, which you can see was relaxed and beautiful. Here is Eloise with Jennifer, the bride, and playing on the beach and at the house.

The wedding was a lovely indoor picnic. We had perfect weather up until about 30 minutes before the ceremony, when it started to pour. So we moved the picnic inside. Here is what it would have looked like, though. Jenn made these picnic blankets herself, which amazes me. And her sister Emily did this amazing job of setting everything  up perfectly and beautifully, with some elbow grease from me, Joseph, William, and others. The indoor picnic was pretty intimate and special and romantic, though. Really lovely. There is the happy couple outside after the downpour and ceremony.

What a nice time! Thanks Daniel and Jenn for hosting us, spoiling us, and showing us such a great time! Here is Eloise in her going-home bonnet on the big passenger ferry back to Woods Hole.

And thank you, beautiful little lady for being the perfect baby and going easy on me and being so fun for everyone along the way.

Here is a nearly 2-minute video of Eloise entertaining me, Chris, and Emma. Brace yourself, and turn the volume down on your computer. She was doing this as I talked to Daniel the other day, getting some information about Martha’s Vineyard to prepare for our trip. As he said, “Oh my God, does she always do that? Wow,” I could hear his visions of a peaceful New England vacation shatter like a glass in front of a soprano. No, she doesn’t always do this: just when she’s really happy or into something.

Newsflash: Other people have gorgeous, perfect children too.

Yesterday we had a rather unsuccessful yard sale with Julianne, Travis, Dylan, Travis’s sister Maryanne, and her new baby Macie. Tim and Caitlin stopped by with their son Lowen too. We didn’t make much money, but I had fun hanging out with everyone and getting my hands on some other perfect babies. We also ate doughnuts and drank beer. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Dylan only looked that peaceful until he woke up enough to realize it was time smear himself with dirt. I love that. It’s not enough to just crawl in the dirt: he has to rub it all over himself. He tackles life with gusto, that Dylan. I predict that he is going to be a lot of fun (he already is) and a lot of trouble, in a good way!

I love these pictures of the moms with their babies. Look how loved and beautiful these children are! I already feel like I’m twenty years in the future, looking back and feeling nostalgic.

I took these pictures while Eloise was sleeping. She took two marathon naps yesterday and missed most of the yard sale as a result: hence her absence in all the pictures. She also stayed up pretty late as a result too. Eventually I just put her down in her crib, awake but quite tired, and she went to sleep. This is a major success, because she didn’t nurse to sleep.

Eloise and I leave super, super early on Tuesday for Boston/Martha’s Vineyard. I’ll try to post a few pictures from Amber and Dave’s place in about a week, before we fly back home. But it may be more than a week before the blog is updated. Just wanted to give you a heads up, because I know you blog-junkies start to get antsy after a week without a new post!

I went shopping for some new clothes for Eloise the other day, to prepare for our trip to Martha’s Vineyard and just because she is getting so darned big. One of the outfits came with this funny hat: it has polka dots all over it and a little tiny bow on top. I thought I would hate pink, but my goodness she looks cute in this girly stuff. Even though she was clearly very busy with her Exersaucer friends, like the horse and sheep, she obliged me and wore the hat pretty happily.

I think she looks a lot like me in these pictures. When she is grouchy or concentrating or looking goofy, I see more of me in her. When she is happy, she looks more like Chris.

This post is dedicated to the two Jenny’s (Jenny V, formerly C, and Jenny T), who are both new moms and who I’ve known my whole life.

Oh my goodness. I babysat for nextdoor neighbor and good friend Dylan tonight and it was a blast. I chilled with him for like 10 minutes while Travis and Julianne went to drop off their car for servicing. He is my buddy! We spent the first minute solid sitting on the floor looking at each other and laughing. I was just laughing hysterically at him and then that made him laugh harder, which made me laugh harder, and so on and so forth. Someone spying on us would have thought we were lunatics. But we’re not: we just really like each other.

Maybe Dylan likes me because I don’t want to play with his toys. Eloise may be territorial about the Exersaucer, but Dylan has also discovered the idea of “mine.” We were over there earlier today, Eloise and I, and Dylan took any toy she was trying to play with out of her hands. She seemed kind of perplexed, but not too upset. I shudder to think of the confrontations though, Jen, when they can both get their hands on the shopping cart! Here is Dylan pushing it around our basement while Eloise slept. Thank goodness she didn’t see this!

I believe that Dylan is a superhero. He’s walking and talking. He says Mama, Dada, cat, dog, duck, stop, and probably some other words I don’t know about. And there’s still a whole month to go before he turns 1!

On Sunday Grandma and Papa Dan came over. Despite the fact that she was in the process of missing her afternoon nap and that it was like 100 degrees outside, Eloise was happy as a clam, basking in grandparent adoration. They are adorable together. Behold:

I was reading some older blog posts earlier today, trying to remember when I started to feel out of the woods so I could relay it to Jen T, who is just 18 days into motherhood. It looks like Eloise was sleeping for 5-hour stretches (or maybe it was 5 hours between feedings) even before we were back for the wedding in March. So that would be at about 5 weeks or so. By 3 months, we were doing pretty well at night, maybe two wake-ups before getting up for the day. Then it tapered to one night feeding, and just this week she has gone a few days in a row without waking up at all in the middle of the night. And I am shocked to say that I kind of miss it. Once you get more sleep, the time does seem to pass more quickly. But in the beginning, it’s just terrible, and when people tell you it gets better by 3 months (12 weeks), you just want to weep, because you’re funtioning on half as much sleep as usual, which means you’re awake and exhausted for most of those 12 weeks (or 5 weeks or 8 weeks or whatever), making them pass oh-so-slowly. Today I was shopping for a sun hat for Eloise (for our trip) and this very tired new mom walked into Gymboree and her baby started wailing and she looked really defeated and turned around and walked out and I wanted to run out and tell her it was going to get a heck of a lot better. It really does.

Things are hectic around here lately. I’m chasing a deadline for work before we leave and we’re getting ready (or, rather, we should be doing more to get ready) for a yard sale with the neighbors on Saturday. Eloise and I leave for Martha’s Vineyard a week from today. So it’s kind of frantic, but a vacation seems like just the way to culminate this crazy summer. I just wish Chris were coming. We are going to miss him!!!!!

Aura is here for a Pacific Northwest visit. She met Eloise yesterday and spent time with us again today. Eloise loooves her. It warms my heart to watch her take to people I love. Today Aura cheered Eloise on as she further developed her scooting skills. She’s not crawling exactly, but we’re getting there.

It is unacceptably hot today. It’s 90 inside our house and well over 100 outside. It’s horrible, just horrible. Thank goodness for Eloise that she has her own air conditioner. I am miserable to be around when it’s this hot. I love this picture of Chris and Eloise: he looks so silly and she looks like a little girl, less like a baby somehow.

Postscript: I forgot to mention when I first posted this that Eloise is a genius. Today she sat through 10 books in a row and has come to accept books that don’t rhyme, including Daddy Kisses, Mommy Hugs, and even The Little Fur Family, which she rejected vehemently for a long time, perhaps because it is pretty much the weirdest children’s book ever (except for maybe The Little Cat Baby, which we also have). Ten books in a row … and that’s just because we ran out of books to read at that spot on the rug. Surely an attention span like that at seven months is a sign of genius! As is sucking her toes and pooping so much, I’m sure. Actually, I’m not sure what she does that isn’t a sign of extreme genius. She is the best.

Emma is gone, on her way back to Chicago, and we are sad. The house always feels so empty when our family leaves! We had such a nice time. Emma is so fun, and Eloise adored her. I actually felt really sad for Eloise that Emma was leaving: all she had to do was look at Emma and she would crack up! Emma did a good job feeding Eloise sweet potatoes.

Emma has magical powers. She helped me see fourteen years into the future with perfect clarity. And folks, it’s not pretty. I am destined to ruin Eloise’s life in many ways: restrictions on makeup and clothes and no Facebook page (or whatever the equivalent will be in fourteen years). Poor, poor Eloise. You can all start feeling very sorry for her now. Maybe someone out there will tell her that her mom was once fun (albeit cautiously so).

Emma now has also seen into her future, and it involves waiting for a napping baby to wake up. I don’t think she minded, but we spent a lot of time waiting for Eloise to wake up from her naps (which she takes reliably and happily now). Yesterday we went to the Rose Garden. The flowers were beautiful, there was a harpist, and the symphony was getting ready to play a free concert: I love it here!

I also got confirmation twice over that my baby is as a beautiful as I think she is. Today a stewardess at the airport couldn’t stop admiring her and called to her friend, “Susie, Susie, come here, you have to see this baby’s eyes! She’s like a beautiful doll!” And yesterday at the Rose Garden another lady did that too, called to her mom, “Mom, come see this baby and her beautiful eyes!” And we got a lot of compliments at the aiport about how happy and good she is. She really has turned into the perfect baby, except that she still wails in the car, right, Emma?

Emma has been here with us for more than a day and we are having so much fun! Yesterday Eloise and Emma got reacquainted: it didn’t take long until they were totally in sync! Eloise took a nap. Then we went shopping for baby Owen (brace your little self for some cuteness, Owen) and got a video. Fun, fun! The video was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and I totally loved it.

We are all girls who love to read, so today we went to Powell’s, the big one on Burnside. I think it’s safe to say that we all had fun. Before we left for the store, we dressed Eloise in this darling outfit from Aunt Laura. So cute! Pink really is her color.

But then when we were at Powell’s, Eloise had a huge blowout. I had her in her carrier and all of a sudden it felt hot and wet on my shirt. And then there was a trickle down my leg and a puddle on the floor. Oh dear. So there was a lot of cleanup involved all around. We got some good books and just generally enjoyed browsing. We capped off our trip with some gelato and a somewhat nightmarish car ride with a lot of screaming from poor Eloise. I think Emma still likes her anyway. They are so cute together!

Here is Emma’s first blog post, I assume:

I’m not exactly sure what to say, but I will start with I’m having soooooooo much fun!!! Eloise is really cute and makes me laugh.  I’ve also had a great time hanging out with Martha and Chris at Powell’s and at home.

Emma