General life update coming soon (all is well; we're approaching 39 weeks with no sign of baby yet). In the meantime, I wanted to show you this super-fast apron I made for Arlo, using this tutorial.

Arlo continues to enjoy helping out in the kitchen, so I thought he might like having an apron of his own. I bought both the tea towel and the twill tape at Bolt. I used 2 yards of the twill tape, but if I did this again, I'd go for 2.25 yards, to make the ties a little longer. The only problem I had was that the front of the apron is a little low, because I had to make the neck strap big to fit over Arlo's head. I think it should fit better once he gets a little bigger (assuming his head doesn't keep growing too!).

The pockets are about 5 inches deep; I like Megan's idea of unpicking the pocket seams and adjusting them as the wearer gets bigger.

Yay for a fun and easy weekend sewing project!

We hit the 37-week mark on Tuesday, I got a haircut, we've got kind-of-healthy oatmeal cookies in the freezer (I substituted half whole wheat flour and added chopped walnuts, and they're still very good), and my mom and stepdad get here tomorrow. I'm hoping the baby stays put long enough for me to get a pre-baby pedicure next week (I hardly ever get pedicures, but I liked having pretty toenails when I gave birth to Arlo--the doctor who did my C-section even complimented me on them while I was being prepped!), but otherwise I think we're just about ready to meet this little guy whenever he decides to join us!

I had my last routine ultrasound (because of the two-vessel cord and low PAPP-A levels) this morning, and the baby is still growing well--he's approx. 6lb, 11oz (58th percentile). We didn't get to see a good profile of his face today (space is pretty tight in there--his foot was right on top of his head!), but the ultrasound tech did note that this baby has hair, like Arlo did. Fun! He's also head down, with his back on my left side, which is the position we want him to be in, so hopefully he'll decide he likes it over there.

The weather is supposed to be beautiful this weekend. I'm excited!

Here are a couple of Arlo's 22-month orange chair pictures, as promised in my last post. He was in kind of a grumpy mood, having just gotten up from his nap, but the tape measure cheered him up.

April is just flying by (March did too!). We had a low-key Easter. No egg dyeing, but the Easter Bunny brought Arlo a small basket containing Chester the bunny and some Arlo-sized cloth napkins (so exciting, I know--we'll have to up the ante next year). We also hid some treat-filled plastic eggs around the house, and Arlo enjoyed hunting for those. The thing he has enjoyed most, though, is repeatedly sorting all of his Easter chocolates. He'll ask "how many chocolates?," and then we'll help him count them. He has enjoyed eating them too, of course, but he's happy to share them with us. Next year may be a different story.

(I made the cloth napkins using the same approach I did originally. I made three more adult-sized napkins, and six Arlo-sized napkins, starting with 8-inch squares and doing the inner stitching 2 inches from the edge)

We continued our Easter food traditions of hot cross buns (no candied citrus this year; the store didn't have any pre-made, and I didn't feel like candying my own) and deep-dish pizza. We have no particular reason for eating deep-dish pizza on Easter, apart from the fact that it's yummy and somewhat labor-intensive, so it seems holiday-appropriate.

We've been having more sunny and warm days lately, which is awesome. We still haven't gotten around to hanging blinds on our downstairs windows, so we've had to improvise when the sun shines in Arlo's eyes at breakfast :)

With nice weather last weekend, Patrick was able to finish building the new fence next to our rose bush, and I think it looks great!

Arlo has been spending a lot of time with Patrick in the backyard recently, and he has finally gotten to use his garden tools (a first-birthday gift from Susan and family!). I've also been trying to get outside when possible. We had a bunch of sproingers (hairy bittercress, if you want to get fancy) pop up in the past few weeks, and my nesting instincts have forced me to get down on the ground and pull them up whenever I see them, even though it's getting increasingly hard to do so. The good news is that our yard is almost sproinger-free at this point, so my job is done (I'll just try to ignore the dandelions that are taking their place).

I love spending time in the yard with these two. It's still a little hard to believe that in a couple weeks we'll be a family of four instead of a family of three!

This is actually our last weekend with just the three of us, so we're trying to spend as much of it as possible just relaxing together. Next week, my mom and Alan are coming to visit on the train, and my mom will be staying with us until the baby is born. I'm so glad my mom will be here to help out! It'll be a relief not worrying about who will take care of Arlo while we're in the hospital (we have some contingency plans in case the baby decides to be born before Friday, but here's hoping he decides to stay put until his Nana gets here!).

I'm currently 36.5 weeks pregnant and feeling pretty good. I feel like I have a little more energy than I did last month, and more patience with Arlo, which is great. I've reached the point where I can count on having to get up at least once a night to pee (typically followed by an hour of laying awake worrying about baby names, or whatever is on my mind that night), but I still feel pretty well rested.

I took the group B strep test at my last midwife appointment, and the results came back negative--yay! (and for the record, I didn't eat any pickles or sauerkraut this time around) The midwives also checked out the baby's position, and they said the same thing that our doulas said--he's head down, with his back on my right side, which tends to lead to posterior positioning in labor. Ideally, we'd like him to have his back on my left side, so I've been continuing the Spinning Babies exercises my doulas recommended, along with a few new ones that the midwife recommended. He seems to change position pretty often--I've tried feeling for his back a few times this week, and one night he was on my left, but the next night he was back on the right. Who knows--I'll just keep doing the exercises and hope for the best.

I don't know if I've mentioned that I've been way less strict about what I eat during this pregnancy. With Arlo, I spent a good couple of months avoiding virtually all processed sugar and white flour, but this time around, I'm eating sweet stuff when I feel like it. I've rationalized it by telling myself that this baby appears to be smaller than Arlo was, so I can afford to fatten him up on sugar a little. I know, not the most convincing argument, but it's hard to resist sneaking a little treat when Arlo goes down for his nap in the afternoon. I've especially been wanting chocolate recently. My mom mentioned chocolate milk during our last Skype conversation, so of course I went out and bought some the next day. Yum! I also made a batch of fudgesicles today, and I'm considering making chocolate pudding tomorrow. At least it has some protein in it!

As of this morning, I think we've agree upon a first name for the baby. It could, of course, be replaced by a new favorite in the next few weeks, but it's nice to have something ready, in case the baby comes early. We still need to come up with a middle name to go with it, but that shouldn't be too bad.

About a week ago, we bought a chest freezer for our basement (I like our new fridge, but its freezer isn't big enough to hold a bunch of new-baby meals), and I've been working on filling it up (and Alan is planning on adding even more to it while he's here, which is an awesome present!). So far, we've got spaghetti and meatballs, black bean chili, corn muffins (our go-to recipe from Whole Grains, Every Day Every Way), and multigrain waffles. We're going to add a few bricks of unbaked zucchini and eggplant lasagna (double recipe, divided between an 8x8 and two 9x9 pans), and maybe a batch of oatmeal cookies, and then we'll call it good.

And in other food news, this double coconut chicken breast recipe yielded perfectly cooked, moist chicken breasts--impressive! We ate it with plain white rice, and it was kind of a boring meal, but I'd definitely like to revisit this technique for cooking boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I just need to add more exciting side dishes next time.

What a crazy week! My sister Lianna came to visit at the beginning of the week, and unfortunately, Patrick and I came down with a cold almost as soon as she got here. Luckily, she was still able to get out and enjoy Portland while we stayed home and convalesced. She was also able to fit in some good auntie/nephew time with Arlo, who didn't start getting sick until yesterday.

For me, the cold started with a bad cough and then progressed to the normal runny nose and congestion (strangely, it was the reverse for Patrick). I was worried that I had bronchitis early on, because I was wheezing and having trouble breathing, but I visited a doctor on Tuesday, and she thought it was just a normal cold, so that's a relief. Despite dealing with cold symptoms of his own, Patrick has been doing as much as possible to take care of Arlo so I can rest. I'm so grateful for him! The congestion seems to be on its way out, but the cough is sticking around and making me pretty uncomfortable at the moment. Luckily, the baby doesn't seem bothered by it, but I'm ready to be healthy again!

Before we got sick, we went on our second-annual winter/spring cabin trip, to the same Mt. Hood cabin as last year. It was a different experience with a 22-month-old instead of a 10-month-old, but still very nice. I stayed inside most of the time and knitted, while Patrick and Arlo got out and played in the snow (there wasn't a ton of snow, but enough to keep Arlo happy). Patrick went snowshoeing at Trillium Lake one afternoon, which sounded nice. Maybe we can try it as a family on one of our future trips.

Arlo's favorite thing about the cabin was a basket of handmade wooden trucks--they kept him entertained for our whole visit. Sweet!

I didn't try using all of the fun kitchen appliances like I did last year, but we did have waffles shaped like farm animals, much to Arlo's excitement. Otherwise, we kept it pretty low key, which was perfect. We might try going again this summer, since we ended up canceling our plans to visit Glacier again this year (a Montana road trip with a 2-month-old baby did not sound like fun, so we postponed it until 2013). Yay for having a nice, relaxing vacation spot only an hour away!

Arlo turned 22 months old today (orange chair picture forthcoming). I forgot to mention in my last post--lately, he has been really interested in watching us when we prepare meals in the kitchen. He'll drag my chair over to the counter, climb up, and provide running commentary on what we're doing, while asking for samples of all the food (he learned about free samples at the grocery store bread counter, and he thinks it's a fantastic idea!).

Arlo has also recently developed an interest in stickers, mostly because our grocery store offers free stickers to kids at checkout. We've had a few tearful moments when he's wanted to take more than one sticker from the basket, but he has handled it pretty well so far. He and Patrick also encountered a fire truck on a recent walk, and a firefighter gave Arlo a Junior Firefighter sticker. It was a very exciting day!

Arlo has also recently become familiar with the hokey pokey. He's not entirely clear on all the steps, but he's good at turning himself around. He's still figuring out the connection between spinning around in circles, getting dizzy, and bumping into things, but I'm sure it'll become clear soon.

When Patrick works from home, Arlo likes to sit on his lap and do work too, which consists of typing on the keyboard and putting the computer mouse to his ear as if it's a phone. I know I'm biased, but this kid is just so awesome!

On the less awesome side of things, Arlo is currently going through a phase where he throws things on the floor when he gets frustrated. We try to respond calmly, but it can be hard. It's especially frustrating when he accidentally drops a piece of food during a meal and then feels compelled to sweep the rest of his food off the table while shouting. Argh.

Things are going well with baby #2. I went back and read my posts from when I was 8 months pregnant with Arlo, and the same kinds of things are happening this time around--tingling thigh syndrome, more stretch marks (that one was kind of a surprise. I figured since this baby is smaller than Arlo was, my skin wouldn't need to stretch anymore, but boy was I wrong!). One thing that has surprised me about this pregnancy is that I have much less patience than I did when I was pregnant with Arlo. I guess it's not a huge surprise, since this time around, I'm interacting with a willful toddler all day.

I've had a couple of pre-dinner meltdowns where I snapped angrily at Arlo and/or Patrick and then cried and cried because I felt so bad about it. And in general, I just have a hard time staying sweet and patient with Arlo. Even though my rational side knows that he's just being a normal almost-2-year-old, sometimes I can't stop myself from snapping at him when he makes a mess or knowingly breaks a rule, especially when it's almost dinnertime and we're both tired and hungry. Poor guy :( His encounters with Grumpy Mama don't seem to bother him too much, but they sure make me feel awful! I'm hoping that much of it is due to pregnancy hormones and that I'll be more patient with him after the baby is born, but I guess there will be other hormones to deal with then, plus sleep deprivation. Oh well, I'm doing my best, and he knows I love him.

A few weeks ago, we went through Arlo's old clothes and got all of the size 0-6 month stuff ready for the new baby. Arlo especially enjoyed looking at all of the tiny baby socks when we were folding the laundry (have I mentioned how much he enjoys sorting laundry with us? It's one of his favorite things!). Everything is folded neatly in the nursery dresser now, all ready to go.

I had another ultrasound to check on the baby's growth last week (33 weeks), and things continue to look good. The baby measured 52nd percentile, and he was head down, which is good. The only thing that made me a little nervous was that the doctor said that his head was tucked kind of crookedly, which reminded me of the positioning problems we had during Arlo's labor, where his head was crooked and couldn't fully engage my cervix to finish dilation. I'm not sure if it's worth worrying about at this point, since the baby is still moving around a lot, but at our doula's recommendation, I've been doing a couple Spinning Babies exercises to try and ensure he's in a good position. (Yep, we decided to hire a doula again, and we decided to stick with Gracie and her new co-doula Corinne, since Gracie was so great at Arlo's birth!)

When I was looking back through my old entries, I came across these pictures from when I was 33 weeks pregnant with Arlo, and I thought it would be fun to take a similar set of family portraits, this time with Arlo on the outside and baby #2 in the tummy (34 weeks along). Here are a couple of my favorites from this time around:

I mentioned some of our ambitious pre-baby house projects in my last post, and the good news is that Patrick has managed to replace both our upstairs and downstairs toilets as planned (how cool is it that he is willing to tackle this kind of project? I can't even imagine doing that kind of work myself). There were some unanticipated complications with the downstairs toilet installation (it involved leveling a flange and making multiple trips to George Morlan), but he still finished it up pretty quickly. The upstairs toilet replacement went faster. Patrick had been worried that there might be some water damage to the floor underneath the upstairs toilet, but when he took away the old toilet, everything looked fine, which was a big relief.

The new fence I mentioned in the last post is still a work in progress, thanks to lots of rain, but Patrick was able to put together a nice new trellis for our front porch roses (the old trellis rotted and then blew off in a wind storm a while ago).

As far as our living room rearrangement goes, we bought new (used) end tables and moved our bookshelf, as planned, and our new couch arrived last night, three weeks early (better to have the couch arrive early than the baby!). Arlo was super excited about the couch delivery truck and delivery guys!

The couch was made in Vancouver by Stylus (it's their Metro design), and we bought it through Portico. I'm really happy with it so far--lots of room to stretch out. Our downstairs is currently in a state of disarray while we figure out where everything will go. We listed our old IKEA couch on Craigslist (goodbye, first real couch!), but while we wait for it to sell, it's sitting in the middle of our dining room, taking up lots of space. My pregnant lady nesting instincts don't like it one bit! Hopefully it will sell quickly so we can get everything back in order.

I finished two more knitting projects recently--a sweater that turned out too big for Arlo (Ravelry link) and a stripy bunny for his Easter basket (Ravelry link). I'm hoping the sweater will fit him in the fall; for now we'll just keep squeezing him into his original yellow and white sweater.

And a quick recipe roundup:

• Skillet chicken with broccoli and ziti - tasty, try adding mushrooms next time
• Creamy Asiago polenta with broccoli rabe and sun-dried tomato topping - this was really good and pretty easy to make
• Classic spaghetti and meatballs - ready in about an hour, yummy
• Shrimp in coconut milk, served over brown rice. To save money, I cut back the amount of shrimp to 1lb and added 10oz baby spinach. It was easy to make and tasty.
• Orange pan-glazed tofu over soba noodles - the tofu was really nice; next time I would toss the noodles with sesame oil and/or fish sauce, since the glaze reduced so much that it wasn't very saucy.
• To celebrate Pi Day, I made the apple custard pie from Rustic Fruit Desserts, but the custard didn't quite set up, and the apples were too crunchy for my tastes. Next time, I'd stick with normal apple pie.
• I made Patrick a fancy birthday cake this year--I got ambitious and made the devil's food cake with marshmallow frosting from the cover of Baking. I was excited about the marshmallow frosting, but it turned out to be too sugary for us; I prefer frosting with some fat in it. But the devil's food cake itself was really nice! Also, as Patrick gently reminded me, he actually prefers simple cakes instead of big frosting-festooned layer cakes (although he certainly appreciated the work that went into this cake). I'll have to save the fancy cake-making for children's birthdays!
  

Wow, it's March already! Arlo turned 21 months old last week.

As you can see in the pictures, his hair has been getting pretty crazy, so a few days ago, I decided to try cutting it myself, rather than dealing with another hair salon struggle. I watched a bunch of how-to videos online and rounded up a spray bottle, some nice barber shears, a little cape (which he refused to wear, of course), and a big comb. I set him up in his booster seat in front of our brand new Raffi DVD, to try and distract him (he became a big Raffi fan after watching a few clips from this video online, so I decided to order the DVD. He isn't watching videos for more than a few minutes at a time yet, but it'll probably come in handy when the baby gets here). I quickly realized that things wouldn't go as smoothly as they do in the videos I'd watched--he kept turning his head and putting his hands up, and I'm not coordinated enough to hold the scissors and comb at the same time. So I ended up just combing up big pieces of hair and cutting off approximately the same length all over his head, and trimming the hair at the back of his neck and over his ears (as much as he'd allow). If you look closely, you can tell he has some uneven spots, but the curls hide most of the flaws. Good enough for me! Maybe next time I'll try a milkshake + Raffi combo, for even more distraction!

Arlo is really into lining things up lately--he especially likes gathering all of our shoes and lining them up in a row. Here he is lining up our cookie cutters (I think it's just coincidence that they're sorted by size--he's not that advanced yet).

He has also gotten really good at identifying colors lately, and he's picking up new words every day (at least it seems that way). It's so much fun watching him learn new things!

Sometime over the last month or two, Arlo transitioned completely to walking--he hardly ever crawls now. His latest thing is running--he'll run around the house in circles, then shout "more yunning!" (still working on his R's). He tries to get me to run, but at 8 months pregnant, I don't get far. The big treat is when Patrick takes him to the park and they can run around in the grass. He loves it! Good thing the weather is getting nicer (though we're still getting some raincoat opportunities too).

I've pretty much stopped trying to put him in undies lately; it's just too much work when I'm tired and trying to make dinner. One thing I forgot to mention in my last post is that the way Arlo used to let us know that he needed to poop was that he'd say "cat poop" (this originated from our discussing how Patches uses the litter box to go potty, and we use the toilet). This evolved into "Arlo cat poop" (as opposed to "kitty cat poop" when talking about Patches), and now he just asks for a potty sit, which is useful, but less adorable. Of course, most of the time, after he says "potty sit," he changes his mind immediately and says adamantly, "No, no, no. No potty sit!" Oh, silly boy!

As of my 30-week checkup last week, baby #2 is doing well (yay!). Here's a 29-week belly picture.

I'm feeling good, apart from tiring out easily. I think it's all the Arlo-lifting that does me in--lifting him onto and off of the changing table, the potty, and the high chair all day long. At least he's able to walk and get up and down the stairs on his own. I'm so glad that he still takes a 2-hour-long nap in the afternoons--I use that time to relax and put my feet up and gather enough energy for the afternoon and dinner-making. Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not taking Arlo out and about more often, but it feels like such a big effort to get him bundled up and into his stroller that we usually just stick around the house. I think as the weather gets nicer, I'll be more inclined to get him out of the house, even if it's just for a walk to look at daffodils.

Last week, we finished our Inner Work of Birth class at OHSU. I'm really glad I took it--discussing my C-section experience with other moms who had also had C-sections helped me work through it and prepare for this upcoming birth. The midwives who facilitated the class also had a lot of good suggestions for getting into the right mindset and preparing for whatever comes our way. I have a more positive perspective on my first birth experience now, and I feel ready to give birth to baby #2, however it ends up happening.

I also had my last diastasis recti checkup with Kelly last week. My diastasis is still at 3 fingers, and it will probably stay like that until the baby is born. I'm going to keep doing the exercises until the baby is born, and then we have a plan for closing the gap the rest of the way postpartum. Even though my diastasis won't be fully closed before the baby comes, I'm glad I went to see Kelly; I think my core is stronger than it was 6 weeks ago, and doing the exercises now will help me push more effectively during labor and heal faster once the baby is here.

Lately, I have been spending too much time thinking about names for this baby and reading baby naming websites. I have some top contenders, but they're all too popular, too similar to (or different from) Arlo's name, don't appeal to Patrick, don't sound quite right, etc. I shouldn't worry too much; I think we went through the same thing at around the same point in my pregnancy with Arlo, and it all worked out just fine.

We've also been working on some home improvement projects in advance of the baby's arrival. We had Mission Craft Furniture (out in Linnton) build us a great new platform bed, for much less than a bed from Pottery Barn or someplace similar would cost. It took them about 2 weeks to build. We had a few false starts, where they said they would deliver the bed and then didn't show up (and didn't call until the next day), but the bed was finished and delivered a few days later, and we love it! I think we might have them build us a nice dining room table at some point too--back in October, we talked about buying or building a table as our joint sixth anniversary present (wood!), but we still haven't gotten around to doing it. I suppose we could also just say that this bed is our sixth anniversary present. Yeah! (Also, that is not a giant snake in our bed--it's my Snoogle!)

We also recently ordered a new couch from Portico (a sectional, upholstered in microfiber--makes me feel like a grown-up). Since it's custom-built, it should be delivered when I'm about 37 weeks pregnant (don't come early, baby, we need to get our living room in order first!). I've asked Patrick to build a console to go behind it, like this one, which would mean we could get rid of our coffee table. And we want to move our bookshelves, buy some more end tables, build a new fence next to our yellow rose bush, and replace both our toilets, all in the next six weeks. Spring nesting craziness! I think it will all work out though--Patrick has those last two projects underway already, and the rest of them aren't that essential and can wait until after the baby gets here, if needed.

Thanks to Patrick being proactive, we've also been doing some of the not-fun grown-up stuff that we meant to do before Arlo was born--buying more life insurance and getting our wills written. Both are in progress, though I have to wait to submit my life insurance application until I'm no longer pregnant--apparently if I did it now, we'd have to pay more because I weigh 20 pounds more than usual, even though it's because there's a baby inside of me! Silly. The life insurance agent we talked to asked where we see ourselves in 10 years, which was a hard question to answer. Assuming all goes well, we'll have kids in 5th and 7th grade, but will we still live in Portland, in the same house? Will I be working (probably yes, but doing what?)? Tough questions. Ten years ago, we were about to graduate from college, and we were trying to figure out where to go to grad school (and I was knitting lots of i-cord, apparently). It doesn't seem that long ago.

Hey, speaking of i-cord, here's a baby hat I knit recently (Ravelry link). I made it for friends of ours who are expecting their first baby in June. Yay!

I also made another Jane hat for myself, this one a little bigger than the first (Ravelry link). I'm not sure if this style is the most flattering on me, but I've been wearing it a lot, because the doubled brim is nice and cozy, and I like the cables.

And here's a food list!

• I made another batch of Early Bird granola, this time to give to Lee for her birthday. Yum!

  

• I made bagels! Kettleman, our favorite local bagel place, was recently sold to a chain, and they are going to stop boiling their bagels. I figured this might be a good time for me to try making bagels at home (good to get this kind of craziness out of the way before the baby comes). The only hard-to-find ingredient in the Cook's Illustrated recipe was the high-gluten flour, but New Seasons just started carrying it in their bulk section, fortuitously (or maybe in response to the Kettleman announcement). Arlo and I made the dough rings one afternoon, and then I boiled and baked them the following day. They turned out very well--nice and chewy, and not too much work. I don't think I'll be making these every week, but this is definitely a recipe to return to if we can't find a new favorite bagel place in town.

  
  
  

• Last summer, I froze strawberries, raspberries, and sour cherries from the farmers' market and red currants from our garden to make a batch of four red fruit jam from The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving. Six months later, I finally got out my canning supplies, thawed my fruit, and made jam during one of Arlo's naps. Hooray!

  

• Steak fajitas - very good, and not too hard to put together.

• Roasted vegetable and ricotta pizza - I made this with store-bought pizza dough (from New Seasons), and it turned out really well. I'll definitely be buying pizza dough from them again (in fact, there's some in our fridge right now!). It had a nice sourdough flavor, and it was so easy to use.

• Simple lasagna with hearty tomato-meat sauce - very nice, took about 90 minutes to put together.

• Pork tenderloin with apples and mashed sweet potatoes - tasty! Arlo seems to be warming up to sweet potatoes again after rejecting them for many months.

• I finally tried making a batch of NYT chocolate chip cookies, inspired by my recent purchase of a cookie dough scoop (I bought it to get free Amazon shipping on a much less exciting item, and then I figured I should make cookies with it right away, to convince Patrick that it was a worthwhile purchase). I made some changes to the recipe--I used a mix of chocolate chips and chopped bittersweet chocolate instead of the feves, I didn't put sea salt on top, and I made the cookies smaller than specified. So really, it's an entirely different recipe :) The cookies were good, but a little crunchier around the edges than I prefer (this may be related to my making them smaller than the recipe called for). Still, yum!

  

Hmm, somehow it's already the middle of February. We've just finished getting over a nasty stomach bug. Luckily, it only seemed to affect Arlo for a couple hours, and it didn't hit Patrick too hard, but it took me out for most of the weekend (oh, pregnancy-impaired immune system). Patrick felt good while I was sick over the weekend, so we were hoping it had passed him by, but it hit him on Monday. The timing was good, at least--if we had all been sick at the same time, who would have gone to the store to buy coconut water and applesauce?

Here's Arlo's 20-month orange chair picture from two weeks ago. He needs another haircut, but I'm procrastinating since he didn't like his first haircutting experience that much.

Twenty months is such a great age--I think it's our favorite so far. Arlo's vocabulary has been growing really quickly. He's picking up new words every day, and he's really good at mimicking what we say. He has started identifying colors--mostly blue and yellow (any color that he doesn't know is also "blue").

Earlier, I mentioned that we were going to try putting Arlo in training pants. We haven't made much progress on that front so far. He's very excited about his new undies, but he doesn't seem to understand that they're different from cloth diapers. He'll happily walk around in wet training pants until I notice they're wet and change him into a new pair. So we can only use them when we'll be at home and I have the energy to check to see if he's wet every 20 minutes. I try to remind him that he can pee on the potty and keep his undies dry, but he's not interested. Oh well, there's no hurry to get him potty trained.

A few weeks back, Patrick took Arlo to visit our friends Nat and Sara (and their daughter Rose!) in Chicago. Initially, I was going to go too, but since we had to pay for a separate seat for Arlo (no way he'd sit patiently on our laps for such a long flight), it would have been expensive to have all three of us go. Instead, I stayed home and spent a long weekend all by myself (well, except for my easygoing in-utero friend)--the first time since Arlo was born. It was nice, but I was happy when Patrick and Arlo got home!

Arlo got to hang out with Rose, watch a Packers game, and play in the snow multiple times. It sounds like a good time :)

I don't think I posted this 24-week belly picture for baby #2.

I took it on day 1 of my Tummy Team program. I'd intended to take pictures once a week for the duration of the program, but it's Week 4, and I haven't taken any more pictures, so I guess that plan's not happening. Not that it really matters--I don't think there have been any dramatic changes in my belly's appearance. I went in for my Week 3 check last week, and my diastasis was still 3 fingers wide (it was 4 when we started). It sounds like people normally make faster progress than this, but since I started pretty late in my pregnancy, I shouldn't expect to be able to heal it completely before the baby comes. But I still feel good about the progress I'm making, and I think that these exercises will be valuable when it's time to deliver the baby. And hopefully I'll be able to heal any remaining separation pretty easily once he's born.

We're halfway through our birth preparation class (Inner Work of Birth at OHSU). The class is very different from the hypnobirthing class we took with Arlo--Inner Work of Birth is (so far) much more about talking about our feelings, rather than practicing specific techniques to use in labor (although it sounds like we'll be getting a booklet with more technique-specific advice in a later class). I think this is good for second-time moms like me, who have a previous birth experience that they want to work through (about half the women in the class are trying for VBACs, and the other half are first-time moms). I'm already feeling better about my previous labor and less apprehensive about delivering baby #2. It just helps to talk about it with people who have had a similar experience. The ultimate goal of the class is that we feel good about our birth experience, whether it ends up being a VBAC or another C-section.

I had my 27-week ultrasound and glucose screening test last week. Everything looks good (yay!)--I passed the screening test, the baby is growing well (57th percentile), and my placenta has moved away from my cervix. Can't ask for better results than that!

We just started the third trimester today. I still tend to get tired in the afternoons, and I've had a few days of back pain (probably related to carrying Arlo up and down our stairs too many times), but otherwise I'm doing well. Since we kept all of Arlo's baby stuff, our to-do list is much shorter this time around, which is awesome. The biggest thing left to do is pick out a name. We haven't made much progress on that front; we've both revisited our name lists from when I was pregnant with Arlo and have added some new names, but nothing is jumping out at us. We still have a few months. It took time for Arlo's name to feel like the right fit too, so I'm not too worried.

This baby is going to be getting a lot of hand-me-downs, but one thing Arlo won't part with (understandably) is his blankie. So a few weeks ago, I sewed up a set of blankies for baby #2 using some Japanese elephant fabric and butter yellow minky (both from Etsy). Hopefully having two will allow us to wash them on a more leisurely schedule when needed (rather than having to get them washed and dried in between naps, like we do with Arlo's blankie). They're about 12 inches on each side, and although they're not as professionally sewn as Arlo's blankie, I think this baby will like them just fine (or he'll decide that he doesn't' want to be like his big brother and will choose something else as his attachment object). Arlo took them for a test run, and he approved.

I'm not sure if it's spring cleaning or nesting (or lack of a job?), but I've been motivated to tidy up our house lately. I recycled, sold, and donated a big pile of stuff that had been collecting in our basement, and I've been working on reducing my yarn stash (I want to dig into my fabric stash too, but I'm just not feeling motivated to sew right now). Some recent projects (details on ravelry, as usual):

• Bright lights cowl and hat, made using some pretty handspun that Lee gave me for my birthday (I've been saving all of her handspun because it's so special, but I've decided that I should use it!). The cowl pattern is Lee's parallel lines pattern, and the hat is Stephen West's botanic hat.

  
  
  

• Tulip Fields Pullover - I've had this pink variegated yarn for seven years now (!). I read about the afghans for Afghans youth sweater campaign, and I decided to make a sweater to donate, using the pink yarn and some dark blue yarn that matched surprisingly well. I hope it goes to a good home!

  

• I crocheted this super fast choker to wear to a goth/industrial night with friends last week, but then the stomach bug hit, and I didn't get to go. Too bad! (Long-time readers may recall that I spent a summer at Cornell in college, and a group of us went to the local goth night a bunch of times--I totally didn't fit in, but it was fun!) Anyway, I'm not sure how much I'll wear this in my normal life, but it was easy to make, and it's pretty.

  

And finally, a roundup of meals we've had recently that were worth making again:

• Early bird granola - This was super good--it seems like a special occasion granola, since it's pretty sweet. I cut the maple syrup down to 1/2c, and it was still plenty sweet.

• Pastitsio with roasted cauliflower - This was reminiscent of Hamburger Helper, but in a good way.

• Chicken parmesan - Fast and tasty. Yay for having a working broiler!

• Roasted broccoli with shrimp - Quick, healthy, and tasty; the only drawback is that shrimp is expensive. We ate this over rice, next time I might try quinoa.

• Indonesian coconut rice with chicken and zucchini - Very nice. Next time I would shred the chicken before serving.

• Buttermilk roast chicken, green bean salad with pickled red onions and almonds, and roasted potatoes - The chicken tasted good, but the texture made it seem a little undercooked, which was off-putting to me (Patrick didn't seem to mind). The green bean salad was yummy (and Arlo loved the pickled onions--what a surprise!).

• Pulled pork sandwiches with coleslaw - You have to be around the house much of the day to make this recipe, but it's not too much work. Still, I bet there's a crockpot recipe out there that would give similar results with a smaller time investment.

• Not a recipe exactly, but we had some friends over to play board games on Superbowl Sunday, and Patrick made a big batch of nachos with refried beans and cheese (with an array of optional toppings) for dinner. Yum! Maybe we should make this a Superbowl tradition.

• Easy egg custard - I made this for Arlo and me to eat at snacktime, but he refused to try it. I loved it though, especially as a dip for apple slices. I might reduce the sugar a little next time, since I've got the same heightened sensitivity to sugar that I had when I was pregnant with Arlo, and eating two servings of custard (I couldn't let Arlo's go to waste!) made me feel yucky.

• I made this hazelnut brown butter cake again, and it was just as good as I remembered. Yum!

My first meeting with Kelly about my diastasis recti went well. She gave me lots of information about the anatomy of the abdominal muscles, what causes diastasis recti, and how to fix it. She confirmed that I have a diastasis (about four fingers wide, which is significant but not the worst ever), but she is confident that we can fix it. Yay!

It's not entirely clear what caused my diastasis, since I didn't have any of the normal pre-pregnancy contributing factors (doing lots of situps, being a gymnast or a swimmer, etc.). It seems like the diastasis developed at some point during my pregnancy with Arlo. The torpedo shape of my belly in this picture is indicative of a diastasis (the separation allows the uterus to stick way out). The diastasis may have contributed to my positioning troubles with Arlo during labor; when the uterus isn't held in by the abdominal muscles, the baby can go all sorts of weird directions, rather than just heading down and out. Hopefully we can fix that this time around.

We're using a three-pronged approach to heal the diastasis: (1) daily exercises, (2) wearing a splint, and (3) avoiding activities and positions that can worsen the separation. The exercises are easy and only take about 3 minutes at a time. I have to do them five times a day, but I've set reminders on my phone to help me remember to do them. When I have my next appointment in three weeks, Kelly will check my progress, and we'll talk about the optimal approach to pushing during labor. Hopefully I'll actually make it to the pushing stage of labor this time (I did push during my labor with Arlo, but we now know that I wasn't fully dilated and shouldn't have been pushing--I'm sure that didn't help my diastasis either).

In related news, I realized that it's been a while since I posted a belly picture (I hope baby #2 doesn't mind that his gestation is being so poorly documented compared to Arlo's!). I'll try to take a less artsy picture in the mirror tomorrow--I'm curious to see if my belly will look any different six weeks from now, when the rehab program ends (apart from being bigger because the baby has grown).

We had our monthly midwife appointment today. We've seen a new midwife from the group at each appointment so far, and today's midwife told me that I have a pretty significant diastasis recti. She said that I should address it now, or else it may affect the baby's positioning or my pushing efficiency during labor. Ugh. (On the bright side, everything else looks normal, and the baby still seems to be growing well)

After Arlo was born, I wondered if I had diastasis recti, but I never followed up on it. My lack of core strength bothered me, but yoga seemed to be helping that before I got pregnant. I'd bought a book about how to heal diastasis, and I'd started doing the exercises in August, but I found out I was pregnant a few weeks later, so I stopped doing them.

It's discouraging to think that my body might not be able to handle labor well. Up to this point, I'd assumed that as long as I could deal with my emotional issues relating to my first birth experience, my body would be able to handle the physical part of giving birth. Now I don't feel so confident about that. There's hope, though--my midwife recommended a physical therapist in Vancouver, WA, who is trained in the Tupler Technique, who can (hopefully) teach me pregnancy-appropriate exercises to heal my diastasis recti. I had read about the Tupler Technique after Arlo was born, but it looked kind of gimmicky, so I hadn't pursued it. But I'm going to give it a try now, since this seems important. I've got my first appointment scheduled for Thursday. I hope it helps!

I guess I shouldn't worry too much; this baby will come out one way or another. It would just be nice to have my abs stop feeling like a limp noodle at some point, whether it's pre- or post-delivery.

I've finally made it through my backlog of Arlo video footage! It went back to when he was 15 months old, and it's crazy to see how much he's grown just in that amount of time. I've included the 15- and 19-month videos below; if you click through to Vimeo, you can see the 16- through 18-month videos too.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep making these (you can tell the 18- and 19-month videos are already pretty short), but it sure is nice to be able to go back and see Arlo growing up!

As I mentioned earlier, we recently bought Arlo a toddler bed from IKEA, and I sewed a few fitted sheets using the same general approach I used when sewing sheets for his crib.

I made three sheets: (1) a combination of Michael Miller Ta Dot flannel and some white flannel from a thrifted crib sheet, (2) In the Clearing flannel from the Loulouthi line by Anna Maria Horner, (3) Lost and Found by Jen Allyson for My Mind's Eye.

I made a quick drawing to show how I made the sheets, in case it might help somebody.

For each sheet, I bought 2.25 yards of fabric (45 inches wide). I pre-washed it, then cut out squares from the corners to give the dimensions shown in the picture (IKEA toddler mattresses are 63 x 27.5 x 4.75 inches). I sewed up the corners, added a casing for elastic around the bottom, and threaded 2.25 yards elastic through. I sewed the ends of the elastic together and closed the casing. Quick and easy! The sheets aren't perfect--the flannel especially shrunk quite a bit, so the sheet pockets aren't very deep, but it stays on well enough.

Another recently finished Arlo-related project: a toddler cowl. I wanted something to keep his neck warm, and a cowl seemed like it might stay on better than a scarf. I used the bandana cowl pattern from Purl Bee with a couple modifications (details on Ravelry), and I love how it turned out! I might need to make one for myself too--I love my cabled cowl, but it would be nice to have a little more cowl coverage in front for when I wear v-neck tops.

We spent the holidays in Portland this year--our first time since we moved here. I missed seeing my family, but it was nice being able to relax at home instead of traveling with a toddler. We got a living Christmas tree, which worked out well. Arlo and Patches were interested in the low-hanging ornaments on the tree, but we had enough non-breakable ones that we made it through Christmas without any ornament casualties.

Arlo was still a little too young to understand what was going on, but he seemed to enjoy himself. A few weeks before Christmas, we made a batch of gingerbread cookies (good recipe!), and Arlo helped cut out the cookies (his favorite part was eating the cookie dough). I frosted them with a little royal icing while he was napping (I used an icing mix from the Decorette Shop, since I didn't want to worry about egg whites).

We also did a cookie swap with some of the other families that we met at our new parents' group when Arlo was a little baby. I chose to make buckeyes, since those are a favorite of mine. The recipe I used was a little non-traditional, but it tasted good. If I made it again, I'd crush my graham crackers more finely, and I'd buy a little more chocolate, since I ran out about 3/4 of the way through dipping.

Patrick's family (minus Jay and Heather) came to visit for a few days starting on Christmas Eve, which was nice. Arlo was a little overwhelmed by all the visitors at first, but he warmed up to them.

We're still figuring out how to combine our family holiday traditions; this year we did our big dinner on Christmas Eve, which is Patrick's family tradition (I like it; it means I can be lazier on Christmas Day). We had glazed ham (using a Beeler's cooked uncured half ham), mashed sweet potatoes, flaky buttermilk biscuits, fast buttery peas, and kale and ricotta salata salad. For dessert, I made gingerbread with apple compote. Everything was tasty and not too much work, with Patrick and I working together. The only thing I wouldn't bother making again was the apple compote. It didn't add much to the gingerbread.

I mostly followed my family's Christmas breakfast tradition, but instead of sour cream coffee cake, I made a holiday breakfast wreath (along with scrambled eggs, sausage, grapefruit, and orange juice). The wreath was very good (and it's nice to be able to make it the night before and let it rise in the fridge overnight), but so is our traditional sour cream coffee cake. I think we might go back to coffee cake next year.

Arlo's big present from us this year was a play kitchen, which we bought used at Village Merchants last summer, on a tip from Susan. We bought a pots and pans starter kit from Spielwerk, and Arlo's Aunt Meg gave him a wooden food set, so his pantry is well stocked. I want to make him some felt food too--I'm thinking I'll try making a ham first, since that's what he's into these days :)

The first present Arlo opened on Christmas was a wooden peg puzzle, and he just wanted to sit down and play with that instead of opening more presents. I can't blame him--it's a fun puzzle, and it has a school bus on it!

We had a quiet New Year's Eve. We invited a few friends over for a game night and had hors d'oeuvres for dinner, plus chocolate fondue. If we do the same thing next year, I'll opt for more make-ahead dishes, so I can spend more time with our friends instead of in the kitchen! It was a tasty meal though.

• Hummus with carrots, celery, broccoli, and homemade pita chips (cut into wedges, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and bake at 350F for 8 min. per side)
• Dates stuffed with parmesan and walnuts
• Potato pancakes with creme fraiche and caviar - These were good, but not as good as I remembered
• Pigs in blankets (half made with Yves veggie dogs and half made with Beeler's Lil' Bites) - Yum!
• Mexican chocolate fondue (recipe from Fondue) with mini churros and rice krispie treat balls (there was supposed to be fruit to dip too, but none of it was ripe in time) - The churros were tasty but required too much standing at the stove when I was supposed to be enjoying the company of my friends! If I made them again, I'd use a larger star tip (I used my largest tip, which was only about 3/8 inch), which would also reduce the amount of time it took to make them, since the churros would be bigger. On the bright side, this was my first time deep frying anything, and it went smoothly. I was kind of afraid I'd start 2012 with a hot oil burn, but I avoided that, so yay!

For New Year's breakfast, we did our traditional Dutch babies, sausage, and fruit, with orange juice spritzers. And for dinner, we had braised ribs with black-eyed peas and collard greens on rice. It's a good recipe, but next time I'd probably make it without the ribs, since they didn't add much.

A few weeks ago, I got some unexpected news from the company I've been working for (in varying capacities) for the past seven years. They're having trouble raising enough money to continue 2012 fully staffed, so they're planning wide-ranging layoffs in mid-February. To save money in the meantime, they decided not to renew my contract for 2012, so I won't be working for the next month and a half. I'll find out in mid-February if they'll be renewing my contract for the rest of the year (well, until I go on maternity leave in mid-April). Since I've only been working part-time (~10 hours a week) since Arlo was born, losing my job wouldn't have a huge impact on me, but I'd be sad to lose that part of my identity. It's a good job, and I appreciated being able to maintain my career a tiny bit while staying home with Arlo. I'm hoping for good news in mid-February (but even more, I'm hoping for good news for all my coworkers, who work full-time and have Bay Area mortgages to pay!).

Although my career might be in limbo for much of this year, I think the family side of things will more than make up for it. I can't wait to see how Arlo grows and changes this year, and we're excited to meet baby #2 in May! It's shaping up to be a crazy, wonderful year!

Arlo turned 19 months old a little over a week ago.

He is turning into such a big kid! He took to the BabyBjorn toilet trainer potty ring within a day or two, and we've now retired his little potty in favor of using the big potty all the time. It's so great that he's willing to use it--it's nice not to have to rinse out the little potty anymore.

Since it's getting to be a struggle to put diapers on Arlo, I've decided to try switching him to training pants--mostly because they're easier to take on and off, not out of any interest in starting potty training. I've ordered a couple different kinds of cloth training pants from Etsy, and we're going to start trying them out next week, just around the house during the day. I have no idea if it will work. Apart from the occasional miscommunication, he's got the pooping in the potty thing down already (yay!), but he still pees in his diaper whenever he feels like it. We'll see what happens. I'm not particularly motivated to start potty training in earnest, but it seems like we might as well try switching to training pants now. If they don't work, we'll go back to diapers for a while (Antsy Pants look like a good pull-up-style cloth diaper, if we choose to go that route; I just don't want to spend that extra money unless we have to).

Arlo hit another big-boy milestone a little earlier than I'd envisioned this past month--we switched him to a toddler bed in mid-December. With my growing belly, I was having trouble getting him in and out of his crib (and we wanted to try to move him out of it by August, so that baby #2 could use it), so we decided to see if he'd go for a big-boy bed. Since his room is pretty small (and he'll be sharing it with his little brother), we decided to get a Sniglar toddler bed from IKEA, rather than getting a twin bed right away. Patrick and Arlo assembled it, and I sewed a cozy fitted flannel sheet for it (more details to come in a future post).

We let him get used to having it in his room for a few days before we started offering it as an option for sleeping. He chose to sleep in it after a day or so, first for naps, and then for bedtime too. Despite my worrying, he took to it without any problems and now sleeps in it all the time. So far, he hasn't tried getting out of it when he's supposed to be sleeping, and he seems to be really happy with it. The only problem we've encountered is that it's easier for him to drop his blankie off the side, so we normally have to get up once or twice a night to retrieve his blankie for him. Not awesome, but at least he goes right back to sleep once it's returned. I'm willing to deal with that minor inconvenience, given how well the switch has gone otherwise. Oh, my big kid!

Patches has joined Arlo in his new bed a few times, which is super sweet. She normally keeps her distance from him when he's awake (unless he's got treats), so it's nice to see them together.

Arlo is starting to recognize a few letters and numbers, which is exciting. In addition to the letter O, which I mentioned last time, he can identify D, I, and sometimes Q. He can also identify the numbers 2 and 4 most of the time. Little kids are amazing!

It seems like he has been picking up new words a lot faster in the past few weeks, which is so fun! His favorite words around Christmas were, appropriately, "cookie" and "ham." Around the same time, he learned "more," "yeah," and "no," which made it a lot easier to figure out what he wants. He's also picked up "bye bye" in the past few weeks, and he now tearfully says bye bye to everything he's been playing with before he goes upstairs for his nap/bedtime--bye bye book, school bus, puzzle, shoes, etc. He does the same thing when he's been playing with a fun toy at a store and it's time to leave. The nice thing is that even though he's sad about having to stop playing, he still goes with us without resisting. We'll see how long that lasts. I feel really lucky that he has been such an easygoing little boy so far.

I actually feel like he may be starting to make the switch to headstrong toddler, though we still have it pretty easy. Ever since he learned to say "no" and "yeah," he's been much more assertive and gets upset if we don't comply with his requests. He has also gotten really hard to deal with during diaper changes, as I mentioned above. But I think we still have it pretty good. It makes me a little nervous about how his little brother will turn out, since it seems unlikely that we'll get two mild-mannered babies. We'll just have to wait and see...

Speaking of baby #2, everything is going well so far. I'm 23 weeks pregnant today (time to take another belly picture!). I felt the baby kick for the first time around 17 weeks, and Patrick was able to feel him kicking for the first time right before we went to bed on Christmas (when I was 20 weeks along). I think this is just about the same timing that we had with Arlo. The kicking definitely makes it seem more real, though I think I'm still coming to terms with the fact that we'll be doing the whole newborn thing all over again this summer. Really?

We went in for a follow-up ultrasound last week, to make sure the baby is growing well and to check the location of my placenta. The baby's size looked good (yay!), but my placenta is still low, so we're going to have another ultrasound in 6 weeks to check on it. I'm not too worried, since the same thing happened with Arlo, and my placenta moved eventually.

We've signed up for a birth preparation class offered by one of the midwives I'm seeing (Inner Work of Birth, for those of you in Portland). It's supposed to be good for women who have emotional issues to deal with, such as a difficult previous labor. I feel like I'm getting closer to resolving my issues regarding Arlo's birth, but I think it's worth taking this class. I've also read a couple birth preparation books, my favorite of which was Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way. It's a little dated in parts (I may not have the most recent version), but it contains lots of useful information. I don't think we'll use the Bradley method, but some of the techniques could still come in handy.

Here's a quick craft and food roundup post while Arlo naps…

I've been knitting a lot lately, what with the cold weather and pregnancy tiredness. Here's what I've made, with Ravelry links for more info:

1. Fluffy fishy mitts - so named because I used some beautiful Leethal handspun named Twisting Fishies.

2. Mittens for Arlo and Everett - I used yarn with a very slow color change, so I had to make two pairs in order to get the colors to match. Plus I like Everett and want his hands to be warm too!

3. Bulky pink mitts - made for my coworker as part of the Pay It Forward meme that went around Facebook at the beginning of the year.

4. Toddler sophisticate sweater for Arlo - I love this sweater! The only problem is that the buttons are a little small, so the front tends to pop open. He still wears it a lot though; it makes me happy :)

5. Star ornaments - continuing my new tradition of making matching ornaments for our tree and Arlo's ornament box.

As for food, I don't think I ever wrote about our Thanksgiving meal this year. We almost made it all vegetarian (since the majority of our guests were vegetarians), but we ended up buying a small turkey roast (essentially a bag of white meat; not that appetizing, but easy to cut) so that we'd be able to have turkey sandwiches the next day. We also had lentil salad, golden crusted brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and rolls from Little T. For dessert, we had apple pie (my standard Damn Fine Apple Pie recipe from In the Sweet Kitchen) and pumpkin pie. The pumpkin pie tasted good, but it was a little runny in the middle even after reaching 175F. I think I had the same problem last year. Next year I need to remember to bake it a little longer.

And a list of recent meals worth making again:

• 30-minute shrimp and sausage gumbo - This was fast and tasty
• Pan-roasted flank steak with garlic, potato and blue cheese gratin, and steamed broccoli
• Pasta with hashed brussels sprouts and pine nuts - Mmm, brussels sprouts! This dish came together quickly and was yummy
• Chicken tikka masala - Next time I might try using okra in place of the chicken (I'm still trying to recreate the bhindi masala I used to get at Darbar in Palo Alto)
• Sopa seca with black beans - This was my first time making fideos, and they were good!

We got our final amnio results today, and everything looks normal (also, we have official, 99.999% confirmation that it's a boy). Phew! I'm so glad we can put that behind us and worry about more normal things, like baby names.

Also, here's a crooked belly picture from about a week ago, since I didn't include one in my last post.

We're doing well--settling in for our first Christmas in Portland, trying to keep Patches and Arlo from taking all the ornaments off of the lower half of the Christmas tree. More soon, with pictures!

Arlo is 18 months old--what a big kid!

He continues to comprehend more and more about the world around him. When he's about to do something he knows he's not supposed to do, he'll stop, look at us, and say "uh uh." It's nice to know that he knows the rules, even if he doesn't always follow them.

As I posted earlier, he started walking a few weeks after his 17-month birthday, much to our excitement. He still prefers crawling or cruising when he wants to get somewhere, but he'll walk if we ask him to or if he wants to get a reaction out of us. I kind of figured that once he started walking, he'd be walking and running all over the place, but that hasn't happened yet. He's developing at his own pace, which is fine.

The same week that he started walking, Arlo started saying "mama," and now he says it all the time. Yay! It makes me happy :)

He has a shape sorter and has gotten really good at sorting shapes and can identify the oval shape by name (he likes words that contain the "o" sound). He can also identify the letter "O" and will point to it excitedly and say its name when we're looking at a book or a cereal box or junk mail. He also thinks that "D" and "Q" are the same as "O," but that's understandable. It's so cool seeing him learn new things!

On Thanksgiving night, Arlo came down with his first big fever (102.6F) and had trouble sleeping. We ended up taking him to urgent care the next day, feeling pretty confident that it was an ear infection, but the doctor said his ears looked fine, and by then the fever was gone, and he was just fine the next day. It's a mystery!

Shortly after he recovered from his Thanksgiving illness, we decided to cut out Arlo's morning nap for good, since it was starting to affect his afternoon nap and nighttime sleeping. He has handled the transition just fine and now happily takes a single 2-hour-long nap in the afternoon. I think I miss the morning nap more than he does. On the plus side, he now has more time to do fun activities with Patrick on weekend mornings while I'm at my prenatal yoga class.

Arlo's cup drinking skills have improved a lot in the past month, though he still gets absentminded at times and spills his drinks (and then says "uh oh" and asks for a towel to mop up the spill--what a kid!). We ended up skipping sippy cups all together, so Arlo drinks from little plastic IKEA tumblers at mealtimes. It's working out pretty well.

He's still trying to figure out how to use utensils. He can usually get food onto a fork or spoon, but it tends to fall into his lap when he's trying to maneuver it into his mouth. At this point, he usually gives up on his utensils pretty quickly and relies on his hands instead.

He has recently discovered pomegranate seeds, and is super into them right now (I wish I could eat them too, but there's mixed research about whether pomegranates are safe during pregnancy, so I'm choosing to avoid them for now). Not surprisingly, he's pretty picky about new foods (and he nervously waves away any liquids offered to him on a spoon or in a bowl, which is a little frustrating when we're having soup for dinner). Based on the advice in Ellyn Satter's Child of Mine, our approach has been to offer him whatever we're eating, and he can eat or not eat it as he desires. We have snacks in the morning and afternoon, and I try to make these more appealing to him (cheese, dried fruit, toast!, and crackers), and then meals are more adventurous. He'll usually find at least one part of the meal that he's willing to eat, and he drinks a lot of milk to make up the difference. It seems to be working fine--he's still growing.

A little over a week ago, I decided Arlo might be interested in trying out the big potty instead of his little free-standing potty, so I bought two BabyBjorn toilet trainers from Milagros. They work great, and Arlo took to them immediately. Most of the time, he now insists on using the big potty instead of his little potty. Works for me--less cleanup!

He has recently become more communicative about when he needs to use the potty (with lots of false alarms and misses, but some successes too), and I've been thinking it might be time to try switching to training pants during awake times. But I'm not sure I have the energy to deal with the extra cleanup that would entail. He's pretty good about pooping in the potty (yay!), but he still pees in his diaper most of the time, so we'll definitely have some messes to clean up when we switch. It would help if he could walk to the potty and pull down his pants himself, but he's not quite to that point yet. Hmm, I don't know.

In baby #2 news, the past week was kind of rough for us but had a happy ending. We got some worrisome genetic screening results last Friday and ended up doing an amnio on Tuesday. The good news is that the preliminary amnio results are normal (with 98-99% certainty; we'll get the 99.999% certain results in a few weeks). I wrote a couple private entries at the time that are now public, in case you want to read all about it: screening results, amniocentesis, and preliminary amnio results. In case you don't want to read all about my amnio, the short version is that I have low PAPP-A levels (which led to an elevated trisomy 18 risk in the screening), we're having another boy (!), he has a single umbilical artery, and he probably has normal chromosomes (phew!).

There are risks associated with my low PAPP-A levels and the baby's single umbilical artery (most notably low birth weight and miscarriage, ugh), but I'm trying not to worry about that right now. The doctor I talked to during the amnio didn't seem too worried about either of those things, and this pregnancy will proceed however it wants to whether I spend my time worrying or being excited, so I might as well enjoy myself (this attitude was inspired by an email from my mom, and I'm trying very hard to keep it in mind when I start thinking about things that could go wrong).

Before we took our little genetic screening detour, I had been spending some time reading about different birth preparation methods. I still don't know which (if any) I should pursue. Hypnobabies is billed as a more comprehensive program than hypnobirthing, but I would feel like a chump if I invested my time and money in another hypnosis program only to have it not work again. There's also the Bradley method, but that becomes a pretty expensive proposition when you factor in 12 evenings of babysitting. For now, I've requested a Bradley method book from the library to see if I can glean some useful information from it.

I also found a free online e-book of Ina May's Guide to Childbirth through my library system (thanks, Multnomah County Library!). I enjoyed reading it, and I'd like to revisit the second half of the book as we get closer to the baby's due date, to remind myself of Ina's pain relief and birthing tips. The birth stories in the first half of the book were a fun read too, though some of them were easier for me to relate to than others. This book made me think that maybe I don't need a birth preparation class this time around, as long as we have a doula and supportive midwives. Hmm.

Good news--we just got our preliminary amnio (FISH) results back, and they're normal. That means that with 98-99% certainty, the baby doesn't have trisomy 13, trisomy 18, or Down's Syndrome (check back in two weeks for the 99.999% certain results, which will hopefully be the same). Hooray! It's such a relief to get good news after the past week of roller coaster emotions. Time to go back to excitedly anticipating baby #2's arrival and trying to choose another boy's name.

The amniocentesis this morning went well. I spent the prior 24 hours getting more and more freaked out about the baby potentially having trisomy 18, reading stories from other parents online (not a good idea), and thinking about worst-case scenarios over and over again, no matter how hard I tried to stop. Ugh. So I was feeling pretty apprehensive going into the appointment, afraid of what they might see on the ultrasound. Luckily, they said that the anatomy looked normal (which would be unusual if the baby had trisomy 18; normally they would see some soft markers or defects), and we'll have the preliminary FISH results from the amnio either tomorrow or Thursday. The FISH results are 98% accurate, and then the official 99.999% results take about 2 weeks.

We ended up taking Arlo with us to the appointment, and he did a great job hanging out for the whole two and a half hours (we had a long wait at the beginning, but luckily there were fun toys in the waiting area). We started the appointment by talking to a genetic counselor, who was very reassuring and calming. I was impressed by how much she knew about my labor history with Arlo, plus she had a big basket of toys that kept Arlo busy while Patrick and I talked to her.

She said that the main thing that led to me having such a high risk rating for trisomy 18 was the very low level of a protein called PAPP-A in my blood (the reading was 0.15 MoM, which puts me in the first percentile). This could mean my placenta isn't doing its job well, and it can be associated with small babies and preeclampsia, so that's something to keep an eye on, assuming the amnio results come back normal. But she said that in 90% of women with my level of PAPP-A, the pregnancy goes just fine, so there's no need to freak out about it (a common theme in our conversation).

Next, we had an in-depth ultrasound, looking for any defects. It was hard to know what to feel during the ultrasound, because the tech, though very friendly and chatty, gave no indication of whether what we were seeing was normal or not. So we were in suspense until the doctor came in to talk to us at the end. I wanted to get excited about seeing the baby moving around (and finding out it's a boy!), but I didn't want to get any more emotionally attached if we'd just be hearing bad news at the end of the ultrasound. Luckily, it didn't end up like that--the doctor came in and said that everything looked normal, and then proceeded to talk about what she would be doing for the amnio (we decided to still do the amnio, even though the ultrasound looked good, since trisomy 18 is such a serious condition).

Although the baby's anatomy looked normal, the ultrasound showed two notable things: (1) My placenta is currently low and close to my cervix. Hopefully it will move in a few weeks, like it did with Arlo. This was actually a little bit of a relief, since I'd recently read about placenta percreta, where the placenta grows into the scar from a previous C-section, so I was glad that we don't have to worry about that. (2) The baby has a single umbilical artery, instead of the normal two arteries. The doctor didn't seem super concerned about this, but it can be associated with reduced fetal growth, so they want to have me come in for a few more ultrasounds over the course of the pregnancy, to make sure the baby is growing well.

Next, Arlo and Patrick left the room (to avoid any toddler needle grabbing) and the doctor did the amnio. They used the ultrasound to find an area away from the baby, and then the doctor inserted a really thin needle into my belly. After it was in, she removed the needle part and left a skinny tube in its place, so that the baby wouldn't get poked if it moved. She removed a couple tablespoons of amniotic fluid, and it wasn't totally painless, but it wasn't bad--no acute pain, more of a deep, crampy feeling. I felt a little shaky afterwards, but that may have just been from bracing myself for the needle.

I'm on orders to take it really easy for the rest of the day (no Arlo-lifting, if possible), so I'm hanging out in bed while Patrick takes care of everything (he's so great!). I haven't taken it this easy since Arlo was a tiny, tiny baby.

I was telling Patrick that I'm feeling much better after the ultrasound today, but I'm not quite ready to switch from emotionally distancing myself from the pregnancy (the mode I've been in for the past five days, since I got the call about my screening results) back to being excited again. Maybe once we get the FISH results, I'll be able to relax. I just don't want to let down my guard too soon and then get some horrible news. But I also don't want to distance myself from this pregnancy for 2 more weeks while we wait for the final amnio results. Anyway, today was a step in the right direction, and I think I'll sleep much better tonight than I did last night.

We got some worrisome screening results for baby #2 on Friday. I did the final blood draw for the sequential screen on Tuesday, and based on the results, the baby is at an elevated risk of having trisomy 18 (a 1:21 chance, instead of the standard 1:2200 for a woman my age). I hadn't read much about it before, but trisomy 18 is bad news--babies with it typically have heart or kidney defects, and most die within a week of birth. Those that survive have a lot of health and developmental problems. Not good.

I keep reminding myself that there's a 95% chance that the baby is fine, but it's hard not to think about worst-case scenarios. After some deliberation, we've decided to get an amniocentesis so we can know for sure what's going on. The amnio comes with a small risk of miscarriage (1:500 for OHSU), but we've decided that risk is worth it to have peace of mind for the rest of the pregnancy, instead of spending the next 20 weeks worrying about this. So, amnio on Tuesday, and then we wait a couple of weeks for the results. Hopefully holiday preparations will help distract me while we're waiting (it's our first Christmas in Portland!).

This has made me extra appreciative that Arlo is healthy. He is so special to us. Hopefully his baby brother or sister will turn out to be equally healthy, and I'll look back on this and feel silly for stressing out about it.

So we have some good news to share--I'm pregnant again! The baby is due May 8, a few weeks before Arlo's second birthday. Here's a scan from our 11-week ultrasound. I think it looks like the baby is wearing a toupee, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case :)

As of tomorrow, I'll be 16 weeks pregnant. I'm feeling pretty good. My experience with morning sickness this time around was a lot like it was with Arlo--no vomiting (phew), just food aversions, general feelings of yuckiness, and fatigue. Patrick has been amazing and has done so much to cover for me for the past few months while I've been laid low by morning sickness. Most of my symptoms subsided a few weeks ago, but I still get tired a lot--probably due to having a toddler to take care of this time around. Here I am at 14 weeks, looking as big as I did at 20 weeks with Arlo. I started showing around 9 weeks. I guess my uterus and abdominal muscles were all too happy to stretch out this time around.

So far our checkups have gone well, and our ultrasound at 11 weeks went smoothly. Yay! This still doesn't seem quite real, but I think it'll become more real once I start feeling the baby kicking (any day now!). I think part of it is that we weren't planning on getting pregnant again quite so soon. We definitely wanted to have another baby, but we were thinking the spacing would be closer to 3 years than 2. But we'll make it work. Plenty of families do this!

I've decided to try for a VBAC this time, mostly because I don't want to go through another long, painful C-section recovery like I did with Arlo. We're planning on having my mom come stay with us when the baby's born, so at least we won't be totally flailing if I do have another C-section and am stuck in bed for a month, but I'd really prefer to be mobile for that first month of new baby amazingness.

In the meantime, I've got some emotional baggage to work through from Arlo's birth. I tried to portray it as positively as I could when I wrote about it after he was born, but it was a really hard experience for me, and I feel some bitterness and regret about how it turned out. Obviously, I also feel immense gratitude that Arlo and I both came out of it healthy, and I feel joy that we have such an amazing little boy, but that doesn't change the fact that there are negative feelings wrapped up in my memories of Arlo's birth and first few months of life (breastfeeding problems, ugh). I wish it wasn't that way. Hopefully someday I'll be able to get past the negative stuff and just remember the good parts.

I'm doing a few things to improve my odds of having a successful VBAC. Instead of the OB/GYN I saw with Arlo (who I like as a gynecologist but was not a good match for me as an OB, in retrospect), I am seeing the midwives at OHSU. We have had a couple of visits with them, and I am really happy with my choice so far. I feel like I have as much time as I want to talk at each visit, and they are sympathetic about my past birth experience and seem genuinely interested in helping me achieve a VBAC. They have an 80% VBAC success rate, which I believe is the highest in Portland.

I've also started going to yoga classes once a week again, after a little morning-sickness-induced hiatus. I didn't exercise regularly when I was pregnant with Arlo, and it seems like being in better shape could only help with labor and delivery this time around. I just switched from a normal yoga class to a pre-natal yoga class at Zenana, and I think it will be a good fit for me. The instructor talks a lot about how the different positions can be used during labor, which I think will be really useful information to have. I definitely want to have a wider range of tools to draw on this time around, rather than just trusting that hypnobirthing will work for me like I did with Arlo (I might incorporate some of the hypnobirthing techniques this time around, but it definitely won't be the only thing I do).

The midwives have recommended a childbirth preparation class that is intended for people who may have some issues to work through regarding birth, so I'm going to try to take that in the spring.

I want to strike a balance between feeling prepared for birth and not stressing out about everything. I especially don't want to spend time worrying about how the baby is positioned this time around, since I did all sorts of things to optimally position Arlo in the weeks leading up to his birth, and he ended up sunny side up anyway. At least now I've had a C-section, and I know it won't be the end of the world if I have to have another one. Hopefully that will make me approach things a little more sanely this time around, so I won't go through 80+ hours of on-again, off-again labor and horrible ineffectual pitocin contractions before deciding it's time for a C-section.

The same thing goes for breastfeeding--hopefully it will go smoothly this time, but if it doesn't, there's no way we can expend the same amount of effort we did getting Arlo to breastfeed. We'll have a 2-year-old to take care of this time around--I won't be able to pump around the clock and go to lactation consultant appointments and support groups. We'll do the best we can, but I need to remember to be flexible and be prepared to let go of any notions I might have of how things will be. It's okay to have goals, but it's not good to cling to them so doggedly that you make yourself miserable in the process. This time around, I want to do a better job of enjoying the amazing experience of meeting our brand new baby!

Hmm, I guess that was a lot of heavy stuff to tack onto a happy pregnancy announcement post. It was good to write it all down though. And now that I don't have to keep my pregnancy a secret anymore, hopefully I'll get back to posting more regularly. Or I'll just keep sitting on the couch, knitting and watching TV shows online. That's about all I'm good for at night after Arlo goes to bed. I hope I'll get some of that magic second trimester energy soon!

Arlo had his first haircut this morning. Here he is before and after:

He did not like having some strange lady mess with his hair, and he was crying and flailing his arms around after only a few minutes, so we took the haircutter's suggestion and gave him a lollipop (another first) to calm him down. Luckily, it worked. He left Rudy's with a blue tongue and a big boy haircut.

Arlo started walking today. Yay!

Hmm, apparently it has been a month since I posted. Arlo is seventeen months old now. He's so great; he just gets more and more awesome every month!

In the past month, he has gotten really interested in sorting things and taking small objects in and out of larger objects--for instance, he'll open the spice drawer (he can open our kitchen drawers now--yikes!), take out every jar he can reach, and then put them all back in the drawer. When he started doing this, I tried to get him to smell the different spices, but he was adamantly opposed to that game, waving the jars away and wrinkling his nose. He can also locate the jar of paprika in the spice drawer and bring it to me when asked. Not super useful, since I hardly ever cook with paprika, but it's a fun trick.

He enjoys sorting bags of apples and potatoes, occasionally stopping to lick each one. Luckily, the potatoes were pretty clean to start with, and they were very clean when Arlo was done with them!

He has recently figured out that when food is hot, you're supposed to blow on it, and now he'll blow on his food (and ours) at all meals, whether it's hot or not. When he sees a pot steaming on the stovetop, he'll blow at it. I may be biased, but I think it's super cute :)

He has gotten very sensitive about certain parts of books--we have a Richard Scarry book where a pig trips and falls down, and every time we read it, Arlo makes a concerned noise and points at the pig and keeps wanting to go back to that part and look at it again, even though it clearly bothers him. He feels the same way about a book in which children go sledding, even though we assure him that they're having fun.

He continues to be pretty shy around strangers. Sometimes he'll smile when somebody talks to him, but most of the time he furrows his brow and looks at them suspiciously. Or if he's feeling really shy, he'll bury his face in my shoulder, which I love :)

At the beginning of the month, we thought his morning nap was going away, because there was a week or so where he was skipping his nap every other day. In retrospect, this may have been due to teething--another molar came in this month (he now has 2 of 4 first molars). At this point, he's back to napping pretty much every morning, though he can handle skipping the nap when needed. I have a feeling that if we just stopped putting him down for his morning nap, he'd do fine with only the afternoon nap, but I'm hesitant to give it up, because it gives me a few extra hours to get work done on our non-nanny days. Since Arlo seems fine with or without his morning nap, I figure it's okay to keep the nap for selfish reasons for now.

His vocabulary continues to grow. He especially seems to like words with an "o" sounds--"toe" and "two" are some new favorites from this month. His newest phrase, as of a few days ago, is "school bus" (we saw one out the car window on a drive up to Seattle). He says it very wistfully, apparently wishing that he could see one out the window at home, but it never happens. Maybe we need to take a field trip to a school to see some in person. He's pretty fixated on it at the moment--we even heard him wake up one night around midnight, whimper "school bus" once, and then go back to sleep. Poor child.

He has said "mama" or "ma" a couple times in the past few weeks, but he'll normally refuse to identify me when Patrick asks what my name is. Meanwhile, he says "dada" all the time. Many times throughout the day, he'll look out our front window and ask for "dada" and then say "bike." "Yes," I'll say for the fifth time that morning, "Dada rode his bike to work. We'll see him at dinnertime." It gets a little old, but it's nice to know that he loves and misses Patrick. Between watching for dada and garbage trucks (and now school buses), there are a lot of little baby handprints on that front window. I suppose we should wash it sometime…

In addition to his ongoing obsession with garbage trucks, Arlo is now very interested in garbage cans and recycling and composting bins. Portland just instituted a new composting program (yay!), and we got a few pieces of promotional mail that included bright pictures of compost bins, which Arlo loved looking at. Now, whenever we walk around the neighborhood, he points out every single bin.

He's still not walking, but in the past week he has done a lot of unsupported standing, so I think walking will happen soon. I'm not really worried about his late walking from a developmental standpoint (he's cruising and standing, so he's clearly on the right path); it's just kind of frustrating because so many younger babies have been doing it for so long, and now whenever people hear that he's 17 months old, the default response is "Oh, so he's walking then?" On the plus side, I've had a few people tell me that they or their kids didn't walk until 17 or 18 months, so I know Arlo's not the only one. If we make it to 18 months without any walking, then I'll talk to the pediatrician.

We had a couple fun visits from family in the past month. Patrick's sister Meg visited, and we went apple picking at Kiyokawa Orchards. It was everybody's first time visiting an apple orchard, and we had a good time. Arlo was all business--as soon as he picked an apple, he'd want to put it in the bag and pick another one. Arlo was a little unsure about his Aunt Meg, but they got in some good auntie-nephew time together. We got out the easel that I had picked up at Piccolina a while back, and Arlo enjoyed drawing with chalk (with a little help from Meg).

A little later in the month, my mom and Alan had a nice long visit and got in some good grandparental activities, like reading books with Arlo and going to the park. It made me wish we lived closer to our families so we could share the more mundane parts of life with them. Everybody should have a chance to push Arlo on the swings at the park!

We also went on a family pumpkin patch outing to Sauvie Island, along with some of the families that we met in our new parents group when Arlo was first born. All of the babies have grown up so much! Arlo enjoyed rolling the pumpkins around and pointing at the hayride tractor as it drove by. We picked one pumpkin, which served as our lone Halloween decoration this year (we'll have to do better once Arlo is old enough to get excited about Halloween).

For Halloween this year, I decided to dress Arlo as Huckle Cat, from the Richard Scarry books. I sewed a pair of Oliver + S sketchbook shorts out of a thrifted pair of men's corduroy pants and then turned them into lederhosen (kind of) by adding suspenders and felt embellishments. I also knit Arlo a kitty hat, which he didn't really enjoy wearing but kept on his head for a reasonable amount of time. My first try at the kitty hat turned out too big, so I ended up wearing it.

I also sewed a last-minute Lowly Worm doll (based on this post), which I think helped make the costume more recognizable. Plus it made Patrick happy, since he had a Lowly Worm doll when he was a little boy.

Now that the weather has cooled down, I've been getting more excited about knitting. After finishing the kitty hats for Halloween, I made a quick striped hat for Arlo's buddy Everett, who turned one today! It's made of a super soft alpaca-wool blend, and I added a pom pom, using the Clover pom pom maker that Star gave me. Here it is, modeled by Arlo (details are on Ravelry).

I'll end with a little roundup of recipes that we've enjoyed recently (I need to remember to start taking pictures of food again!).

• Indian-style curry with sweet potatoes, green beans, and chickpeas - A tasty way to eat lots of vegetables
• Buttermilk drop biscuits - Easy, fast, and a good way to use up buttermilk
• Sweet potato muffins - Yummy and healthy. I should really buy Good to the Grain, especially since we have a big collection of specialty flours sitting in the fridge, unused
• Millet muffins - These were tasty. I'm not totally sold on the little millet nonpareils (some of them were more chalky than crunchy), but I'd make this recipe again

Arlo turned 16 months old a little over a week ago. He's getting so big!

In the past month, he's gotten really good at climbing down from things on his tummy, feet first. He can climb down from chairs, the couch, and even our bed. He tried to climb down from his changing table, but luckily I stopped him before he let go. He has also mastered going up and down the stairs. When it's time for a nap or bedtime, he'll happily crawl up the stairs to his bedroom (with a few detours into the guest room and bathroom). It's so nice!

He's figured out how to give close-mouthed kisses, and he'll give me a kiss every night before bed, upon request. He also knows how to hug, but he usually reserves those for his stuffed animals.

He has been picking up all sorts of words. He can say "koala," "kangaroo," and "carrier," but he still doesn't say "mama." What's up with that? Most of the time he uses "dada" to refer to both me and Patrick (though he definitely thinks of Patrick as the primary "dada." I just get called "dada" because he doesn't have another name to call me). With some prompting from Patrick, Arlo will sometimes call me "ba" or "baba," and when asked where mama is, he'll point to me. He's capable of making the "m" sound, so I'm not sure what the holdup is. He'll figure it out eventually.

He's getting good at animal sounds, especially his dog and monkey impressions. Sometimes when he wakes up in the morning, he'll lay in his crib making monkey sounds until we come get him. It's pretty awesome :)

Arlo also loves listening to music on the record player, especially the Go-Go's Beauty and the Beat. He'll say "gogo" repeatedly until I cave in and put on a record. He'll usually settle for other music (thank goodness!), but the Go-Go's are definitely his favorite.

Without any intentional encouragement from us, Arlo has developed a strong interest in things with wheels--trucks, cars, bikes. We have a couple Richard Scarry books, and he'll always turn to the pages with cars, construction equipment, and fire trucks. The highlight of his week is garbage day. Every time he hears a garbage truck outside, he'll perk up and rush to the window or crawl over to me and beg to be picked up so he can watch the trucks go by.

He's still not walking, but crawling serves him just fine. He used to sit on my lap during his entire nap routine, but now he'll climb down from my lap almost immediately and crawl around his room while I read him a book and sing him a song. He loves to explore--opening cupboards, wiggling doorknobs (can't quite open them yet, phew!). But he'll still happily go in his crib when it's time, grabbing for his blankie and sticking his thumb in his mouth.

His first molar came in a few weeks ago--on the lower right. I assume the others are on their way. He handled it without too much fuss, thankfully.

He continues to be a pretty picky eater. Anything mushy gets flung on the floor, including his once-beloved sweet potatoes. I'm sure he'll change his tune eventually. We had our first grape harvest this year, and Arlo quickly mastered the art of eating grapes off the stem. Our homegrown grapes were small, so I didn't have to cut them in half, which was nice. We could just hand him a bunch of grapes and let him entertain himself.

Arlo loves reading books with us. He especially enjoys poring over our Richard Scarry books, pointing at everything. Patrick has taken him to the library a couple times, and they've come home with a stack of library books, which has added some nice variety to reading time.

Arlo loves going down the slide at the park, and once he's at the bottom, he'll turn around and try to clamber back up (somewhat successfully) so he can slide down again. Patrick took him to the swimming pool for the first time this weekend, and it sounds like Arlo enjoyed it, though he clung to Patrick like a monkey the whole time.

In non-Arlo news, we've enjoyed some home improvements lately. Patrick hired Carl of Vintage Wood Works to fix a few things before winter descended. He de-squeakified our main stairs, rebuilt our basement stairs, installed a new basement window and door, and replaced our front porch railing. It's so nice having the house spruced up. If you're looking for a contractor in Portland, Carl is a good choice. He worked quickly and thoroughly, and he always had a smile for Arlo. Here is our basement with no stairs (luckily, it has a side door, so we were still able to get down there to do laundry).

We also finally bought a new oven and fridge, after living with the old, duct-taped models that came with the house for three years. Our old appliances weren't so bad once we got used to them, but it sure is nice to have a range with a working broiler (and an induction cooktop and convection oven--ooh la la!).

As an inaugural meal for our new range, I made steak au poivre, roasted potatoes, and buttered peas. It was very good, though next time I'd do the potatoes at 450F, since they didn't get quite as browned as I would have liked.

Other recent dinners haven't been as remarkable, but we have had two good snacky cakes recently. The first was an Italian almond cake, which wasn't too sweet and was nice for afternoon snacks. Second, I made a plum torte, which was yummy and a good use for the pretty Italian plums at the farmers' market.

This weekend, I took a fun papercutting class from Nikki McClure at PNCA. (Big thanks to Patrick for hanging out with Arlo all weekend while I was off on my fun crafty adventure!) This was my first time trying papercutting, and I enjoyed it. The materials are pretty affordable, and it's so cool seeing the finished piece emerge from the paper.

I based my first piece on a picture of Arlo and me, from Jon and Katie's wedding. First, I traced the photo and decided which parts would be black and which would be white (all of the black pieces have to be connected, so it takes a little thinking). Then I used graphite tracing paper to transfer the image onto black paper, and I cut out the picture with an Exacto knife. I wasn't going to include the flower pattern on the dress originally, but I'm glad I did--I like the texture and definition it adds to the picture.

I might do something in the top right corner, and I want to make a companion piece based on a picture of Arlo and Patrick, but I thought I'd post these pictures before too much time elapsed, rather than waiting until I'd completely finished the project.

During the class, we took a field trip to the Museum of Contemporary Craft, where Nikki is currently showing a retrospective of her work. She walked us through the show and talked about the techniques she used and the history of the pieces. Understanding more about the papercutting process makes me appreciate her work a lot more--it takes time and skill to create such intricate pieces! I'd definitely recommend checking out her show if you're in Portland. It's really beautiful.

In other crafty news, I finished sewing a summery sundress just in time for our rainy autumn weather (oops!). Luckily, summer briefly returned this week, and I got to wear my new dress for a little while.

This was my first try at making the Colette Chantilly dress. It was a practice dress, so I used a $3 thrifted sheet for the shell and muslin for the lining. I cut the yoke and midriff front on the bias, to add some visual interest. I cut the midriff front a couple sizes bigger than the rest of the dress, to accommodate my post-Arlo waist (I've started doing some exercises to remedy that, but no progress yet). This was my first time installing an invisible zipper, though it turned out that I could pull it over my head without using the zipper--go figure! This was also my first project on my new (used) Bernina 730, and I loved sewing with it!

The dress turned out wearable, but I think it would look nicer (and be less heavy) in lighter weight fabrics, as the pattern recommends. I'm planning on making this dress again (next year, I guess), since it's cute and it has pockets. It uses a lot of fabric, but I think it's worth it. The pattern and instructions were awesome, of course. I love Colette Patterns :)

I also finished knitting a shawl right before our trip to Montana. It's the Stripe Study shawl, made in two beautiful Madelinetosh yarns (more information on Ravelry). Although I love the graphic nature of the finished shawl and the process used to knit the shawl, I'm not 100% sold on the final product. I'm not a big shawl person, and I'm having a hard time finding a flattering way to wear it given its asymmetry and size.

I'm also unhappy with how the blocking turned out, but that could be fixed pretty easily. Maybe I'll give this shawl another chance now that fall is here. Or it might get turned into a new sweater for Arlo--I want to make sure that yarn gets put to good use!

Arlo turned 15 months old on Tuesday and obliged us by smiling for his orange chair pictures.

His 15-month checkup went well--he's continues to be long and lean with a big head. Every time we go in for a checkup, I have to remind myself that it's okay that he's only 25th percentile in weight. All that stress about him not getting enough milk in those first few months left its mark on me, I guess. But now that he is totally weaned to solid foods, I'm much less worried that he isn't getting enough to eat. (I think I forgot to mention that he stopped nursing 2 months ago. It happened shortly after this post. He just wasn't interested anymore, and I was ready to be done too, so we stopped)

He's still not walking; I guess crawling serves him just fine. I don't feel like he has changed that much in the past month, apart from becoming more expressive and opinionated and learning more words. His latest trick is that he'll lift his arms up on request (potentially useful for removing tight sweaters this winter). It's so cool that he understands us and will usually do what we ask him to. What a little person he is!

As I mentioned before, we've been going on all sorts of fun summer adventures. We took a road trip to Montana (the first time any of us had been there) to see Glacier National Park. It was beautiful! The only downside of the trip was that Arlo doesn't like being stuck in his carseat for very long, so there was a lot of this on the drive there and back:

Although vacationing with a 15-month-old isn't very relaxing, I'm glad we got to enjoy the trip as a family. We had plenty of good moments too.

We broke the drive up into two days each way, spending the night in Coeur d'Alene both times. It seemed like a nice town. The bed and breakfast we stayed at, The Roosevelt Inn was great, and it was walking distance to the lake and downtown. We stayed in the Noble Suite, which was perfect for us--we put Arlo to bed in his Peapod in the smaller room, and then we were free to talk at normal volume and watch movies (on our laptop--they don't have TVs, but they do have a big DVD collection) in our room.

We rented this cabin in Hungry Horse, MT, which was pretty close to Glacier's west entrance. It was right on the Flathead River, which was nice--we took the little path down to the river a couple times, and it was relaxing to sit there and watch the river go by (a little less relaxing when accompanied by a toddler who wanted to crawl around and stick his hand in the water). There was even a nest of baby eagles right across the river!

This cabin's kitchen wasn't quite as well stocked as the Mt. Hood cabin, but otherwise we were really happy with it! There was no high chair, so Arlo got to use a grown-up chair for meals, which worked out okay, except he had to stand up to reach his food, which then inspired him to try to climb onto the table. Not ideal, but it all worked out.

We got into town on a Saturday afternoon, and since check-in time for the cabin wasn't until 5pm, we killed time in Whitefish. We bought bear spray at a local sporting goods store (and didn't have to use it; phew!) and then walked around downtown Whitefish. We got huckleberry frozen yogurt at Red Caboose, and Patrick bought a cowboy hat but was afraid to wear it in public, for fear the locals would ridicule him for not being a real cowboy. Authentic or not, I think it looks good on him!

We got some tasty takeout from The Shak and ate it at the cabin, then put Arlo to bed and watched DVDs (we made it through the second season of Party Down while we were there, as well as Michael Clayton and The Devil Wears Prada--I can't believe Patrick agreed to watch that last one with me!).

The next day was our big day for exploring Glacier. We started out by hiking to Avalanche Lake, by way of Trail of the Cedars. We'd packed a picnic lunch to eat at the lake, and the hike was twice as long as I was expecting (2 miles each way; not roundtrip), so I was pretty hungry and grumpy by the time we got there. But I got over it quickly when we got to the lake, since it was so beautiful. And boy, did those sandwiches taste good after all that hiking! We had picked up a used Kelty TC 2.1 backpack at Piccolina before the trip, and it worked well for Patrick (I didn't try it; it's tiring enough for me to hike unencumbered).

Next, we drove along Going to the Sun Highway, which was amazing. I hear it was closed through mid-July because of snow, so I'm really grateful that we were able to see it. Arlo slept through the whole thing, which was okay, since he probably wouldn't have been able to see much from his car seat.

Arlo woke up just as we exited the east end of the park, and we stopped at the Park Cafe in St. Mary for pie (chocolate cream, strawberry rhubarb, and a piece of coconut cream for later). Yum! We also bought Arlo a little mountain goat at the gift shop--couldn't resist.

It was getting late, but we stopped at Logan Pass to squeeze in the Hidden Lake hike before dinnertime. Another absolutely beautiful hike, and this one was pretty easy--it was a boardwalk path most of the way. The path was snowy beyond the boardwalk, and the sun was going to set soon, so we decided to head back without seeing Hidden Lake itself. It was still a beautiful hike!

When we got back to the Logan Pass visitor center, we stopped for a snack, and we spotted a deer right off the path. Pretty cool!

The next day, Patrick hiked the Highline Trail by himself (too hard for Arlo and me). I walked around downtown Hungry Horse with Arlo (it's a very small downtown, as far as I could tell), had a huckleberry shake, and hung out at the cabin. I would have liked to spend another day in the park, but we're going to go back next year, so we should have more time then.

After another overnight in Coeur d'Alene, we headed back to Portland, stopping in Hood River for ice cream. We drove home by way of the beautiful Columbia Gorge Highway and stopped to feel the mist at Horsetail Falls. Arlo wasn't sure what to make of it.

The next day, we repacked our bags and went to Edgefield for the night, to see The Decemberists! Their concert at Edgefield two years ago was wonderful, so we were excited to see them again at the same venue, this time with Arlo. This was his first concert, and he managed to stay awake through the whole thing, including two encores (they played The Tain in its entirety, along with the Mariner's Revenge Song!). I had been worried that he'd have an overtired meltdown around 8:30 (and that one of us would have to take him back to our room and listen to the concert from there), but he sat quietly on Patrick's lap the whole time, sucking his thumb. What a champ. I'm so glad we went--it was a beautiful night!

Also, I totally recommend getting a room at the hotel when you go to see a concert at Edgefield, if you can swing it. It was so awesome to be able to walk back to our room and put Arlo to bed right away, instead of waiting in the parking lot for hours.

We had a block party on our street last Sunday (organized by Patrick and our neighbor Stacy), and it went really well! We don't talk to our neighbors very often, but we should. It's always fun getting the whole street together. A couple of our neighbors have lived on this street for 50+ years, and they said that back then, kids would play softball at the intersection outside our house, and at least one of our windows was broken by a softball during a game. I guess I'm glad they don't do that anymore, otherwise I'd have to be the mean mom who yells at the neighbor kids.

We also got to meet the couple who bought the scary house last year. They're avid gardeners, and it's so exciting see what they're doing with the house and yard. I think they've gotten a very enthusiastic welcome from the whole neighborhood :)

On Tuesday, I biked to the Bagdad Theater to see Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis talk about their new book, Wildwood (quite a Decemberists-heavy week!). It was a fun event--I loved hearing about the process of writing and illustrating the book. I haven't read many books for fun since Arlo was born, so I've enjoyed getting wrapped up in Wildwood for the past few days. I'm excited to read it with Arlo when he's older!

Yesterday afternoon, we drove out to Cannon Beach for a quick beach trip before fall arrives. This was our first visit to Cannon Beach, and I can see why people like it. The beach was windy but sunny (so not too cold), and the sand was really soft. Arlo had a great time crawling all over the beach and getting super sandy, and he only ate a little beach debris :)