Category: Miscellaneous

Today was Henry’s appointment with the pediatric urologist at Stanford Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital. We had to take all the records and reports from his prior ultrasounds and X-ray so the specialist could check everything out. The doctor and his resident were both incredibly nice and gentle, and were very attentive to both Henry and I. They answered all my questions and gave as thorough an explanation as they could concerning Henry’s condition.

In a nutshell, Henry needs a couple more tests before the doctor will be comfortable giving a definitive diagnosis of his kidney condition. Right now it’s just known as “megaureter,” which is a general term for inexplicably enlarged kidneys and ureters. Henry will have another X-ray test, called a Mag 3, which is designed to show whether his ureters are blocked (thereby indicating a physical impediment to the flow between kidney and bladder) or unblocked (which could indicate a malfunction with the musculature of the ureters). The doc said that if they’re not blocked, the situation eventually will resolve itself without the need for surgery. If they’re blocked, at some point surgery will be needed to remove the blockages, but we’d wait until he’s older to do that. In the meantime, we keep him on the antibiotic, do the tests this coming month, and then see the doc again in March to see what the tests show.

For his part, Henry was an absolute doll the entire morning. The appointment was smack in the middle of his normal naptime, but he slept in the car both ways, and was happy and calm for the duration of the consultation. Oh, and he was in love with the adorable baby he kept glimpsing in the mirror at the end of the exam table :D. And big kudos to the Children’s medical center–the facilities are so nice, welcoming, well-lit, and kid friendly, it is very easy for everyone to be at ease while they’re visiting.

This past week marked my first week back to work, and I’m happy to report that the boys were fabulous for the nanny all week. Knowing that they were in good hands and having fun made my hours at the office, away from the boys, stress-free. They both napped well, played well, and behaved themselves on all fronts. Whew! Finny’s been having a bit of a rough time going to sleep at night, and we think it’s because he’d like to spend more time with Mom-o and Dad-o since we’re both now away a large part of the day. My singing the “Personal Penguin” song to him in his darkened room seems to put him at ease.

This coming week marks our big nanny transition. Carol (a.k.a. Coco) has recuperated from her back surgery, and is coming back full-time as of Feb. 1. This week she’ll be job-sharing with Laurie, who’s been filling in for her since October. Hopefully this will make the transition a bit smoother for the guys–they can refamiliarize themselves with Coco, and Coco can get up to speed with the day’s rhythms, playgroup schedule, etc. And we will miss Laurie, who has been so good to the boys. She is moving back to San Diego with her daughter and granddaughter at the beginning of February.

Other small things of note from this week: Henry had his first official high-chair meal when we went out for pizza yesterday. He’s now stable enough to stay upright on his own in the chair! And Finny has started referring to himself as “Big Goonie” instead of “Binny”. That little guy is as sharp as a tack. When Dad-o pointed to a vehicle in one of his books and said “What’s that?”, expecting the answer, “bulldozer,” Finny replied “That’s a bulldozer scooping sand in the desert!” Why yes, yes it was!

Sing it with me: Dah, DAH dun dah DAH, dah dah dah…

…Super Henry!!

That’s it; nothing more to report at the moment. 🙂

(Click the image for an even larger version.)

The past week has been a big one in terms of developmental leaps for both boys. It’s so fascinating to watch both of them do things that they couldn’t, or hadn’t, just days ago. In the blink of an eye, so many things have changed!

Henry: Has started supporting himself in a sitting position! He’s working so hard to keep his little back straight and his head held high. He’s also very aware of when he is being left alone, even for a few seconds. He protests quite audibly when he sees his companion(s) exiting the room, and he has his eyes trained on us when we’re moving around or talking. He’s started eating some veggies in addition to his gruel–I mean cereal. We joke with Finn that if he could talk, Henry might say “More peas, please!”. His wakeful periods between naps are lengthening out, and we’re no longer doing four shortie naps per day, we’re down to either 2 or 3 almost-decent ones! If he’s like his mom, the full tummy definitely helps with sleeping.

Finn: Instead of “Finny the Carpenter” or “Finny the Engineer” we have started calling him “Mr. Independent Play.” This is such a wonderful and sudden development. Almost literally overnight, Finn went from needing constant playtime participation and companionship by one of us, to venturing out completely on his own and having his own private adventures. We realized something significant had changed when we were able to eat brunch and chat with our friends for almost an hour while Finn kept himself completely entertained with their son’s selection of toys! And all week he has been making up stories and things to do all by himself. Sometimes he requests that one of us be in the same room that he’s in, but we don’t necessarily have to do anything. It’s very freeing for us, and also fun to observe what our little guy comes up with to entertain himself. His imagination is on fire!

Man oh man, has Finn’s imagination taken flight upon reading Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (“Beast Book!”). Today he decided that he wanted to wear a crown just like Max’s “Beast King” crown in the book. He remembered that he had the blue fuzzy crown from his first birthday, and was very specifically asking me to look for it so he could wear it. I found it, and he proceeded to wear the “Beast Crown” all morning, including our outing to “big playgroup”. He wore it until I suggested he take it off for nap time. It was kinda fun explaining the crown to the other moms.

Later this afternoon, he donned the crown again and decided to set sail on the ottoman and climbed aboard: “This is the boat! Sailing to the island! Island over there! (pointing at the kitchen) Have a rumpus!”

When he arrived at the rumpus, I asked him if he was going to swing from the trees like Max does in the book. He walked to the baby gate on the kitchen doorway and started grabbing onto the bars: “This is the tree! Swinging! Bursting!”  When he later heard me telling Dad-O about it, he said, “Mom-O opened the tree!” (Mom-O needed to get to the kitchen to get the Beast King some dinner.)

Faaaaaaantastic.

Do not attempt to adjust your computer monitors! 🙂

We’re making some adjustments to the appearance of the blog–formerly “Finnegan Wakes,” with the new official title to be determined; we want our man Henry to feel welcome, too!  The new blog address is http://www.jnack.com/micronaxx in case you want to update your bookmarks, though we’ve set up an automatic forward from http://www.jnack.com/finnegan.  It may take a little time for things to settle down, but hopefully you won’t run into any problems.  If you have any trouble or see things that look wrong, please let us know.

We’re having big fun with Finno’s imagination these days:

• Lately he’s taken a shine to Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? At one point in the book, Farmer Alfalfa (a goat) deposits his money at the bank (run by a pig, naturally). Up in our bathroom last night, Finn spied some coins on top of the little dresser & started forcing them into a slot. “Finny goin’ to the bank!” he said. “Givin’ money to the pig!”
• Several months ago he accompanied Margot on a visit to her dentist, Dr. Vandi, where he was entertained by the kind Mrs. Vandi. In the basement today he spied a manilla office and said, “Dr. Vandi’s office!” From there we were off to the races, with Finn trucking back and forth: “Finny goin’ to see Dr. Vandi and Mrs. Vandi!” I’m pleased to report that Leo’s teeth got very clean. 🙂 “Thank you Dr. Vandi!”

Last year, Grandpa & Grandma Liggett gave us a great Advent calendar. It’s a large box containing numerous drawers, each containing a tiny ornament, a bit of story, and instructions to sing and/or a figure to the crèche. Finn’s really been enjoying the process this year, though he’s gotten a couple of wires crossed. This morning he was looking at a cast of Margot’s belly when it contained him:
“Mom-O tummy!” he declared.
“That’s right, Finny,” I said. “And who was in her tummy?”
“Baby!”
“Right–and who was the baby?”
“Goonie.”
“Uh-huh. And what other baby was in there?”
“Jesus!”
Oh my. 🙂 We sorted out the confusion, and now Finn’s back to talking about how he went “POP!” out of the tummy. Meanwhile, no word on whether he’s connected the dots in determining that the same Mary who appears atop the Golden Dome in his Notre Dame picture book is the same one that appears in the Nativity scene.

In the immortal words of John Lennon, “Strange days indeed…most peculiar mama, whoa!”
4: number of 35 minute naps Henry had today
3: number of fullblown nuclear shrieking freakouts Henry had today between naps
2: number of times Mom-o cried because she couldn’t figure out what else to do for him after nursing, dosing with baby Tylenol, changing dipe, rocking, and pacifying him
1: number of emerging teeth contributing to Henry’s wrecked state
So uncharacteristic for our little guy. As a wise parent once said, “bedtime always comes.” Well it came, and Henry’s asleep. For now.

When Henry was born, we had to have his kidneys checked out due to possible hydronephrosis (too much fluid swelling the kidney). His ultrasound (at the ripe old age of 2 days old) showed that his left kidney was indeed swollen, and we have been keeping him on a daily antibiotic to prevent kidney or bladder infections.
At Henry’s 4-month check up, Dr. S ordered another renal ultrasound for our boy, which we did last week at the hospital. Dr. S called us yesterday and said that the swelling is still present, and so she wants us to do further testing to determine if it has gotten worse, and also how serious the condition is on a 1-10 scale. She thinks he is “mild to moderate”, but needs more info. We are scheduled for the VCUG (X-ray test) next Wednesday.
Regardless of the severity of his condition, we will continue to give him the antibiotic and meet with a pediatric urologist to set up a plan to monitor the situation. If it is bad enough to require surgery on his renal valve, we would still wait until he is older to do the operation because he is just still too little right now. And there is still a decent chance that he will simply outgrow the problem, which is what happens in most cases. We’ll just keep checking it every 6 months or so.
Please think good thoughts for us on Wednesday, because the test won’t be any fun for Henry, who has to get catheterized. Hopefully the test itself won’t last longer than an hour. I do hope we confirm that his case is mild or moderate, and not severe.

We’ve been a tad light on picture & video-taking lately, but there’ve been no end of little developments with our big(ger) guy. Random news from the Finn front:

• Language fun: Finn’s learning to conjugate verbs, adding “-ing” to the end of many (for example, “Finny achoo-ing!”). I’m especially fond of his onomatopoeia. He says, “Turn on the vaporizer. More ‘hwwwoo‘-ing!”
• In a similar vein, he’s learning to make things plural, adding “s” to the end. Unintentionally funny stuff often results as he lays it on a little thick–“Gobots-es,” “green beans-es,” etc.
• Birdman Sings The Hits: The little guy gleefully recites the bits of popular songs I sometimes warble to him. Current fun includes Usher’s “Yeah!” (Finny: “Yeah, yeah!… Rea-dy to go!”), Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” (“(S)’poonman… save me!”), Rick James’s “Cold Blooded” (“Dad-O cold blooded!”), and Fatboy Slim’s “Rockafella Skank” (“Funk soul brutha!!”).
• With a chill now in the air, our breath condenses visibly. Pointing to my mouth during yesterday’s AM garbage can run, Finn said, “(S)’moke! ‘Moke coming out!” He was a little too psyched out to try making his own.
• It seems that despite all our blogging, we’ve somehow neglected to talk about “The Meedgit House,” an innovation my dad used to apply to me–trapping a little kid by crossing one’s legs, then holding the kid prisoner while he delightedly tries to wriggle free. Finn took a shine to the idea right away, often trapping things in his own meedgit house (“Leo meedgit house! Squash!!”). Now Margot has added some Aztec flair, making “Meedgit Tacos.” The recipe consists of one (1) giant floor pillow and one (1) fast-moving lad. Delicious! 🙂
• Speaking of Mexican chow, Finn greeted me last night saying, “Horchata, horchata!” He’s kind of a sweet rice milk junkie, so we trundled off to grab drinks & tacos. En route, we talked about different animals and the noises they make. “Who makes bubbles, Finny?” I asked. “Fish,” he replied, then added, “Goonie!”

This morning, Laurie was talking about her young granddaughter Chloe learning to speak, saying that Chloe likes to say “Dog.” And just as Laurie finished saying “Dog…,” Finn jumped in with “…Goneit!!“ Rad. 🙂
Later, Margot and the big guy were eating some popcorn. “Mmm,” she said. Finn shouted, “Delicious corn!!” He’s up to eight cylinders–er, syllables–in a row. Right on, big guy.
In other news, Henry’s new leg-locking technology affords us the chance to do a little “Danger Management,” as we did with Finny. Videos and, I’m sure, chuckling hilarity to follow!

Heh–I got a kick out of this article from the satirical paper The Onion:

ATLANTA–A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as “very” to “extremely” talented by 1,542 of the respondents. “Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use,” pollster Tom Waterton said… Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone.

🙂

Finn is talking up a storm, but even we struggle to understand him some of the time. This plus his increasing grasp on useful little phrases led to a funny exchange the other day:

“Boo* book,” he said–possibly gesturing at a coloring pad–“Boo book!”
“Uh, boo book?” I asked with some hesitation.
“Uh Huuh” he chirped. But reading my hesitation, he added, “Might be.”
“Might be?,” I repeated.
“Uh huh,” he said. And then after a beat, “Maybe not…”
* Halloween has gotten him hooked on ghosts, and he loves his “Boo shirt,” saying boo (“Scare Mom-O!”), and even calling himself “BooMan.”

Finn gets to be a funnier, wackier dude as the days go by:

• Lately he’s started pointing at (seemingly) random things and excitedly declaring, “Imp! Imp!” Presumably he’s not seeing lots of lesser demons running around, so we’re kind of puzzled and charmed. In particular he identifies the little thermometer strip in Henry’s tub as “Imp.”
• Speaking of that tub, Finn and I (and now Mom-O) like to play a game with the little valve in the bottom. We’ll unplug it, and I’ll reach through with two fingers that make a little biting motion. Finn yells “Coyote!!” and braves its maw with his fingers. The coyote celebrates success by howling (despite its mouthful of finger), much to Finn’s delight.
• In an old episode of Star Trek, the human captain yells “KeeBLAH!” (“Goodbye”) at his Klingon crewman, who gruffly replies, “Goodbye, sir.” Well, you can guess what exchange Finny and I have been having lately, especially on his changing table. Audio file to follow. 🙂

Mom-o’s sister Laura is visiting while Dad-o is off with the boys on a trip to Death Valley (an annual pilgrimage to partake in all things macho and dusty). We are having a good time with the boys, cramming in some girl-time after the guys go to sleep.
Auntie Laura is a big hit with Mr. Finn. She has been showering him with gifts–Thomas-related toys handed down from cousin Charlie, Halloween costumes from Charlie and Patrick, and some fun Spider Man plates, utensils, and a placemat to make eating even more of an adventure :D. Finn’s favorite toy so far is the “Jungle Blocks!”–some jungle-themed plastic blocks that come with their own plastic waterfall, and most importantly, their own CAVE! (“Kinda Dark!” exclaims Finny, while putting the lion and monkey in the cave.) He has dubbed some of the cylindrical blocks “smokestacks” based on his recently acquired knowledge of steam engines.
We are finally catching a break with Mr. Henry when it comes to naps. Yesterday he had 2 really long naps, after over a week of 30- or 40-minute ones. Whew. So he’s better rested, and Mom-o is a little more relaxed as well.
Laura and Finny are in the backyard “fixing” the Cozy Coupe with Finny’s ever-present toy pliers while I catch up on some domestic stuff–like dishes and blog entries!

I can’t believe I’m writing this because it seems impossible for it to be true, but get this: Henry has two teeth breaking on through to the other side! He’s not even three months old! He’s been working so hard at grabbing things and aiming them towards his mouth, and he’s really been chewing on his fingers (and ours) a lot the past few days. Both John and I thought we might’ve felt something sharp in his mouth over the weekend, and today I confirmed our suspicions. I took a peek at his lower gumline, and lo and behold, his two front center teeth have started to emerge!
So, no wonder he’s been having trouble sleeping and has been more enthusiastic about getting things into his mouth. Teething in addition to a growth spurt has gotta throw a little guy for quite a loop. Once I discovered the teeth, I gave him some Baby T (Tylenol) before his nap, and it seemed to work–he actually slept for about an hour and a half, by far the longest nap he’s had in several days.
[For those playing along at home, note that Henry has beaten Finn to the tooth-punch by a full month. Of course, I’m acutely aware of how ridiculous it is to suggest that this is a contest of any sort, or that the timing of these developments means anything. On the other hand, well played, Goonie. 🙂 –J.]

Henry has embarked upon his 12-week growth spurt with a vengeance, and he is taking me along as prisoner…figuratively shackled to his hungry mouth and growing little pot belly, slave to his wakefulness. We are on day 2 of innumerable and frequent feedings, and (I kid you not) exactly 37-minute naps. About four 37-minute naps per day so far. Ugh.
I’ve abandoned trying to do anything productive until we’re through this phase since I only get short breaks every couple hours. So far the good news is that his night sleep is still good so I do get a break then. And I happily admit that he is becoming much more animated and alert when he’s awake. His little hands are busy swatting at nearby objects, and his eyes sparkle when he starts cooing and making conversation with us.
I’m glad he’s a healthy little guy and is interested in being a more participative member of the family. I’ll just be glad when we’re back to decent napping so Mom-o can regain her grip on things!

We’ve been starting to settle into a little “bedtime” routine with Henry, even though bedtime ranges anywhere from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. depending on our little guy’s internal clock. Part of the routine is bathtime. We do Henry’s bath in the kitchen, using a little infant tub–he hasn’t yet graduated to the sink or real bathtub. That will come when he’s able to sit up. In the meantime, here is a little gallery (HTML) of pics from one of his recent baths. He seems to like them, as his post-suds smiles attest.
Oh–and there are a couple of pics of Henry and Dad-O enjoying Notre Dame’s victory over Michigan State yesterday afternoon.

Margot and Finn were chatting at lunch the other day (“a real conversation as he’s now starting to master verbs,” she says) when the subject of Hoot (Hughes) came up. She writes:

We were talking about Hoot, and pickles (of course), and then Finn launches into his standard routine of “is the buckle poopy?” Anyway, the “buckle poopy?” bit morphed into my asking, “Who wears dipes?”
M: “Does Finny wear dipes?”
F: “Uh huh”
M: “Does Goonie wear dipes?”
F: “Uh huh”
M: “Does Dad-O wear dipes?”
F: “No!” (smiling) “Grown-up!”
M: “Does Milos wear dipes?”
F: “Uh huh”
and then
F: “Hoot…dipe!!!”
M: “Does Hoot wear dipes?”
F: “Uh huh!!” (big smile)
Sorry Hoot…the cat’s outta the bag 😀

In other dipe-related news (you were dying for more, weren’t you?), Finn has now dubbed Henry’s new little Op-Art waste-catchers “PolkaDIPE!”