A Day in the Park

I LOVE Spring! I know it's not technically spring yet, but Sunday made me think it was. It even smelled like spring outside. It was sunny and 64 degrees. So we just had to take a family outing to the park. This was the first time Keziah got to spend extended time outdoors. She seemed to love it. Who says an eight-week old can't enjoy a playground? Well, Daddy insisted she "play" on everything so we went on the swings:

and we went down the slide.

Yeah - she actually enjoyed this and even let out a few smiles. Michael Paul put her at the top of the slide and actually let go and then caught her at the bottom. I, being the overprotective one, protested at first, but when she didn't seem to mind, I let him have his fun. He is anxious for her to grow up because he just can't wait to play with her! I on the other hand am already missing the way she looked at 2 weeks. She is growing up way too fast! The last eight weeks have flown by!

Wave Bye-Bye Keziah!

This and That

Here are a few random thoughts and happenings of the last week:

-I went back to teaching one class and will add my other classes in March. Keziah sleeps peacefully in my moby wrap while I teach and I am really praying she continues to do so.

This week I got to teach 'completing the square' and 'the quadratic formula' both of which are lessons I love to teach because we get to sing a little song to help us remember them. My kids always think I am insane and I like this.

-We have gotten more snow this weekend and although it is not sticking, it is very beautiful coming down. I LOVE snow!

-Keziah weighed 10 pounds, 3 ounces at her 6-week checkup!

-I have a new favorite beer: Southern Pecan from the Lazy Magnolia brewery in Mississippi

-I started reading a new book this week: An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender. It is a somewhat dark story about a neurotic OCD woman who loves numbers and becomes a math teacher. I identify with her character in scary ways. But the most surprising thing here is that I am reading a fiction book. I hate fiction and exclusively read nonfiction. In fact, I thought about it and I can honestly say the last fiction novel I read was for American Lit in college the fall of 2000. Of course I am not counting children's books. If I count children's fiction then the last fiction book I read was an Angelina Balarina book that I read to my neice a few weeks ago.

-Two things that Keziah loves are bath time:

and riding in the car:

and I love that she loves these two things as it makes two of life's neccessities very easy on her.

-Michael Paul got a fabulous night's sleep on Wednesday night. He never sleeps well and admits he can count on two hands the number of good night's sleep he has gotten in his entire life. Why he slept so well that night, we have no idea. Unfortunately he came down with a cold on Friday. My theory is that his body thought he must be on vacation to get that kind of sleep and it was therefor safe to get sick. Michael Paul always gets sick on vacations. Of course he is not on vacation and has to work his clinicals and study for a test even though he feels horrible!

-My parents visited us this weekend for the first time in a month. They really missed Keziah. Here is Keziah with her CiCi:

Keziah was on exceptional behavior. She slept 4-5 hours straight, nursed and went right back to sleep, then slept another 5 hours straight ALL three nights that they were here! She never spit up, or fussed, or cried. Now they don't believe me when I talk about her reflux and how she doesn't sleep at night. She soooooo pulled one over on them. As soon as they left this afternoon, she spit up massive amounts all over me and proceeded to fuss. I'm anxious to see how she sleeps tonight. If she starts whailing at 2AM, I am calling my parents and holding the phone to her mouth in order to prove I am not a liar.

-Michael Paul affectionately calls Keziah "muppet" because she flails her arms around and looks just like Kermit the frog looked when he would introduce a music group performing on The Muppet Show and then shout Yaaaaaaayyyyyy as he waved his arms and head about. So it is fitting that for her first Valentine's Day, he got her a stuffed Kermit.

-I got the idea for this post from my friend Valerie who writes a weekly "This and That Thursday" post. I love this idea and might copy it. (Thanks Val)

-My latest obsession is blog-stalking. This is when you click 'next blog' at the top of the page and blogger sends you to a random blog. It's basically high-tech people-watching. I have learned a lot by doing this. And I am amazed at how many Christian women are out there sharing their struggles and testimonies on blogs. I almost always stumble on a blog that encourages me greatly.

-Keziah has been full of surprises this week. She is smiling now and starting to coo a bit. Her first big smile was Thursday morning when Daddy (in a good mood from actually sleeping well) came in to kiss us goodbye before work. We were both still in bed but awake. Keziah looked straight at him when he walked in and smiled real big. I am so glad we were both there to see it. As another surprise, yesterday during "bare booty time" (this is when we do tummy time with a bare booty to air out and keep the diaper rash at bay), she lifted not only her head but her whole chest off the ground.

-I love watching winter olympics and I was super excited that Sarah Mclaughlin performed at the opening ceremonies. But right now I am sick of the Biathalon and am ready to see some down hill skiing.

-I miss Colorado and skiing (I haven't been in 10 years).

-I have a new quote to add to my list of favorite math quotes. This is the quote that is on the page before the title page in my new book.

Numbers are friends for me, more or less.

It doesn't mean the same to you, does it-3,844?

For you it is just a three and an eight

and a four and a four.

But I say, "Hi! 62 squared."

-Wim Klein

Time and Baby Legs

Being the wanna-be-suzy-homemaker that I am, I had grand intentions of making all sorts of neat things for my baby ... crocheted hats and booties, clothes etc. Yeah I was naive. I didn't count on having a baby who insisted on being held 23 hours a day and therefore limiting anything else I do to one-handed tasks. On the upside, I've gotten more reading done, I follow a lot of blogs now, and I am getting good at typing one-handed. These are the things I do while nursing. But I was still on the search for a fun craft project that would only take 15 minutes start to finish.

Another issue I have been looking for a solution to is cold baby legs. I Love legless onesies for the ability to change a diaper without having to undo and refasten 10 leg snaps. It is not uncommon for baby K to need a diaper change every hour so the snaps were getting old. The problem with the onesies was cold baby legs, So you can imagine how thrilled I was to stumble on these directions for making baby leg warmers. I made 5 pairs in the last two days. I got a 5-pack of socks for $5. (so it is a cheap project as well) and whipped these out in about 10 minutes each.

Check out Keziah sporting the purple ones today.

You can check out the directions here if you want to try this project yourself.

SNOW!

We got about 4 inches of snow today (so far - it's still coming down). So we just had to bundle up Keziah and let her experience her first snow. Amazingly enough, someone gave us pink baby snow pants as a shower gift. I remember thinking - what are the chances I will use these? (we didn't know we were having a girl and it never snows here!) I am excited that she actually got to wear them. She was very cute. This was also the first day she wore shoes. We didn't stay out long and she is probably too young to really enjoy snow. But mom and dad sure had fun playing in the snow with her!

Now that we are warm and inside, we are enjoying looking at pictures and gazing out the window laughing at the poor souls struggling to get home in this. We live on a really steep hill and there is no way a vehicle without 4-wheel drive can make it up the hill right now. An hour ago I watched a buick struggle up the hill. It kept sliding back a foot for every 2 feet it gained. But it finally made it. But just now we saw people walking up the hill. They had to leave their cars at the bottom of the hill and walk home. Southerners just aren't prepared for this kind of thing! Michael Paul did go out and offer to drive them home in the 4-runner. What a fun day we have had. Going to go enjoy it some more now before it gets dark!

Birthday Math Part II (and other cool math stuff)

As promised in my original "birthday math" post, I am now going to analyze Keziah's birthday (12-28). I have to admit I was at first disappointed in this birthday from a mathematical standpoint. Of course I was super happy about when she came for a dozen other reasons so I did not complain. But looking at 12 and 28 the only cool thing I could really come up with was that they were both divisible by 4 leaving 3 and 7 which are Biblical numbers symbolizing completeness. And this is symbolic for us too as I feel our family is somewhat "complete" now that we have a child (that's not to say we are "one and done" or anything - but just feel more complete now than before is all). So that was kinda cool. But other than that, I really struggled for anything more. 12 and 28 - they weren't perfect squares or cubes. And they didn't make a palindrome or nice equation. Then I stopped looking at the numbers 12 and 28 and looked at the individual digits 1, 2 and 8. The first thing I thought of was obviously that 1 doubled is 2 and 2 cubed is 8. I liked that. But then it hit me that 1, 2 and 8 are all Fibonacci numbers. Now I was finally satisfied. This I like. It ties perfectly into my obsession with the golden mean. Here is a picture of Keziah's nursery wall:

I constructed the golden rectangle with the golden spiral a while back but since we didn't know what we were having, the name hanging in the spiral is a recent addition. Since most of you reading this probably don't care about the math behind the golden mean as much as I do, I'll spare you the long lecture (although the teacher in me would really like to get into it). If you want to learn more click here. I'll sum up how this ties into her birthday. The golden mean is a wonderful ratio that happens to be (1 + squareroot of 5) : 2. The golden rectangle is simply a rectangle whose length and width are in this ratio. (You can construct one with just a compass and straight edge which is how I got it on the wall.) Any time you cut off a square in the rectangle, the resulting rectangle is another golden one. So you can do this ad-infinitum. And if you construct the arcs in all these squares you get the logarithmic spiral known as the golden spiral. So how does this tie into Fibonacci numbers? The Fibonacci Sequence is the sequence of numbers you get by starting with 1 and 1 and then always adding the two previous numbers to get the next one (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34......) Now here is a cool fact: The limit as n approaches infinity of F sub n+1 divided by F sub n is equal to the golden mean. Or to put it in non-mathy language, the ratio of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches the golden ratio the further you get along in the sequence. (There are other connections but that is the simplest one.) Voila! Is that not just the coolest thing ever? So my little one has a "golden" birthday! I'll conclude this post with a picture of my sleeping Keziah with her "bibonacci" bib on that Aunt Julie gave her. (Yes there are enough of us math dorks out there having kids that some company thought to make this.) Do you get the humor?

Adventures in Sleep

Sleep.....ahhhh what is that again? Yes we are all officially sleep deprived. Keziah hates her cradle. As soon as I put her in it she screams in protest. Even if I wait 30 minutes with her asleep in my arms and then lay her very gently in her cradle, she immediately wakes up and screams. So throughout the course of a night we all change positions several times. Last night, for example, I started on the couch with the baby and Michael Paul went to sleep on the living room floor. Then she started crying so baby and I went to the bedroom hoping to let daddy get some sleep in the living room. Last night I felt brave and tried the "cry it out" thing with her in the cradle. One hour later (yes she cried for an hour straight) I gave up on the cradle once again and put her in the bed with me. Ahhhhh sleep finally found us. At some point Michael Paul came to bed but we were all kinda cramped and a little later he moved to the couch. Then after the 5 AM feeding she decided she wanted to be awake so I came to the couch with her and sent Michael Paul to the bed. But he missed me so eventually he joined us on the couch. And throughout all this, our cat, who insists on sleeping with us, followed us back and forth. By morning somehow all 4 of us managed to get some sleep in this position on the couch.

When I woke up and saw how we all looked, I nudged Michael Paul and told him to hold the camera up and snap a picture.

Thanks to my sis-in-law's recent post about babies and sleep, I have a long list of things to try. But as of today, my only successes are baby and me in the bed and send poor daddy to the couch, or wait until 7AM and then everyone is so tired we will sleep no matter where we are - even all of us cramped on the couch.

I Love Faces

Keziah Rain is 3 weeks old today!