Odds & Ends

Growing…

This Sabbath Elisa was back in the yellow dress she wore her first Sabbath at church…and she has definitely grown!  The first time, her feet were basically under the dress and now, even the panties to the dress show a bit! (The new tights are quite big, though!)

Also, Elisa has shown signs the last few days of actually supporting herself with her arms a bit.  In the past, she has always held her head up almost entirely using her abdominal muscles.  However, this morning she calmly supported herself and looked around (until she saw the TV and was fixated – football!) for 3-4 minutes.

Elisa continues to grasp things with both hands, including starting to grab at toys hanging above her.  She has also shown signs of trying to pull these toys to her mouth, a portent of much to come!!

And more than anything else, our little girl is enjoying smiling and laughing, though the camera is too distracting to get a full-wattage smile so far.  But Elisa is usually a happy baby and we will do many silly things to make her laugh – whether it is her laugh that sounds almost like a cough or the one when she almost spits in our face!

Duelling Grandparents

First of all, let’s be clear: there were no swords involved and neither was there any competition.  However, the last week Elisa has seen Grandma Camenga and Grandpa Rood at different times in a somewhat intricate and harmonious duet that we liken to the cooperation of banjos in Duelling Banjos (and yes, banjos are one of Andrew’s favorite instruments)!

Grandma Camenga was up from Florida for five days to meet Elisa and helped Kristin immensely by babysitting while she went to multiple meetings Tuesday and Thursday.  Also, Grandma’s fun playing with Elisa at home meant that Kristin was finally able to focus on starting to plan next semester’s classes.  Grandma sang, played and slept with Elisa and enjoyed every minute of it!

Grandpa Rood had to make a trip to northern NY this past week and so he stopped for two nights on his way to and fro.  He enjoyed seeing Elisa as she is more interactive and enjoying other people and even led her in some cheers for her mommy and daddy. He also prayed for her one night as she went to bed.

Great-Mama and Great-Papa

Last week, Elisa got to meet most of her maternal grandmother’s side of the family: Great-mama and Great-papa Greene, her great aunt Gerri and great uncle Paul, and many cousins.  Kristin and Elisa traveled to Berlin, NY to visit for a few days while Grandma Rood was also going to be visiting on her school break.

Elisa had a great time meeting her Great-mama and Great-papa and playing on their floor.  She also did a very good job sitting in her infant seat during meals (and her hand eye coordination continued to improve as she hit the dangling frog) and making it just long enough for mommy to eat – but not long enough for her to help clean up!

This opportunity also allowed us to get pictures of four generations of mothers and daughters: Irene Greene, Althea Rood, Kristin Camenga and Elisa.

Chicago

On Sunday October 12, Elisa experienced her first airplane flight.  Kristin had to go to Chicago for a training for some educational research and Elisa went along.  Thankfully, the group doing the research was paying for two people from each institution and since no one else from Houghton could go, they also funded the travel and hotel stay of Pastor Pat Bancroft to take care of Elisa while Kristin was in meetings!

As suggested by the airlines, Elisa ate as we took off and ascended to help her ears pop and she never showed any discomfort from the change in pressure.  She stayed awake for almost the whole flight from Buffalo to Chicago, falling asleep almost soundlessly just before the descent.  In the airports she did well in the Snugli, even though she hadn’t had too much prior experience.

In Chicago, she had a wonderful time playing with Pastor Pat Bancroft, who was much more willing to get down on the floor and play with Elisa than Mommy is: since Elisa can go for 45 minutes of wiggling, waving arms and legs, it takes commitment to stay on the floor!  Pat also got to experience one of Elisa’s firsts as she grasped the rattle from the baby gym and swung it around (these pictures were captured later with Mommy’s conniving).

The flight back was also fine, with Elisa eating on takeoff, falling asleep just after takeoff and sleeping all the way home – that is, through the flight, the baggage claim, and other than 2 minutes of fussing when put in the car seat, through the 1.75 hour drive home.  (But it was night, so this wasn’t too strange.)  We are thankful that Elisa is proving to be such a good traveler – it will certainly make the rest of the fall’s baby tour easier!

Woodchucks

Okay, this post isn’t about Elisa. Instead, I thought you’d like to hear about our nearest neighbors, the Woodchuck families.

We moved into our current house in August of 2006. As that summer ended and fall began we noticed that two woodchucks (aka ground hogs — but don’t fall into my mistake of calling them “ground chucks,” apparently that sounds too much like an alternative name for hamburger) would wander around around yard eating grass and occassionaly playing in the sun. As neighbors, though, they weren’t all that friendly — any time that we would go out to say “HI,” they’d take off and disappear into their home.

They weren’t any more friendly in 2007. It did seem as though they felt the welcoming nature of our presence — there were a few more of the critters hanging around. They didn’t add any tunnels that we noticed and they didn’t eat any of things we planted outside.

The relationship changed in 2008. It went from, “Oh, aren’t they cute” to “What will they do next?!?” It seems the Woodchurcks either invited all their friends into our lawn or told their kids, “You’ve got to leave our burrows and make your own.” Either way, we ended up with new holes in the lawn — and they moved in under our new shed. They also felt free to eat all of the flowers from my one-plant garden (my lima plant never had a chance). I think we have three different families living in our yard now.

They should all be going to sleep for the winter very soon. I think that as 2009 thaws and they wake up, I’ll encourage them to find new neighbors — while the Woodchucks aren’t horrible neighbors, they’ve shown a willingness to pillage and multiply that keeps them from being good neighbors.

Two months old!

Tuesday, Elisa turned two months old!  (She celebrated with a 6 hour playdate at the babysitter’s and a series of photos taken by daddy!)  Thursday we went to the doctor for exciting 2-month shots…thankfully they had just gotten in a combination vaccine which gave 3 vaccines in one shot, so Elisa and her parents only had to endure 3 shots rather than 5!  She didn’t quite figure out what was happening until the plunger of the first shot was down and then realized there was pain and started to cry.  However, after a couple minutes of holding she had calmed down and just was crying about the nap that had been interrupted and was quickly resumed.  After 24 hours there is apparently no reaction to the shots.

With this doctor’s visit she weighed in at 10 lbs. 1 oz. and measured 22 inches long, so we are happy to report she is growing well - and mostly unsupplemented.  We’ve had definite opportunity to watch recent growth in weight since this was the third trip to the doctor in a week.  We’ve watched her weight carefully given the slow start and were weighing her at home by subtracting our weight.  When the weight went up and then back down to where it was three weeks earlier and she had started seeming more fruatrated with nursing again and was taking extra formula, mommy just wanted to double-check with a more accurate scale.  So last Thursday we went in and got weighed and she weighed in at 9 lbs. 11 oz – half a pound higher than the scale at home.  Monday, the first feeding of the day was accompanied by spitting up specks of blood which was a little scary…of course the heat also kicked in this week and she has been pretty stuffed up.  The doctor verified that as long as she wasn’t spitting up blood itself that what we were seeing was blood that had been swallowed – probably from dried out sinuses.  So we quickly installed a humidifier!  We’ve continued to see flecks of blood every once and a while, but not as much as that first time.

By the way, she is fully awake in the opening picture- she frequently has her eyes as slits and sometimes opens her eyes more than halfway while sleeping.  This makes it a little tricky to determine if she is sleeping when she switches sleep states and occasionally cries out!

Babysitter!

This last week and a half, Elisa has had her first experiences with a babysitter.  As Kristin has done her first round of student teacher observations, Elisa has stayed with Queena and Dorie, a baby just a few hours younger than she is!  Queena graduated from Houghton last year and her husband is still finishing and they had their first baby this summer – in the same hospital and at the same time as Elisa, even though we didn’t see each other in the hospital!

Kristin was very happy when the first 3 hour babysitting went well – because that meant Queena was willing to keep Elisa again for 6 and 3 hours the next week!  For Kristin, watching two two-month-old babies makes Queena her hero!!  She also appreciates that Queena and her husband Ethan seem to really enjoy Elisa and knows that Elisa is being well-taken care of.

For the long babysitting, Kristin brought Elisa’s new baby gym for the two babies to play with.  Elisa plays on it a couple times a day, frequently happy for 20-30 minutes.  She’ll look at the mirror and smile and laught and bats at the rattle.  We’re not entirely sure that she is always intentional in the batting since she’ll frequently look the other way!  But she is certainly more aware of objects around her!  (Eventually we’ll get some video posted with lots of cute coos, giggles and guffaws – it’s almost an explosive laugh!)  Queena says when the two babies played together they got way too excited…but at least they enjoyed it!