Father's Day and Family Visits!

Hey Folks!

Quick post to give you the heads up on everything new here. Check out our two new vids, and the post below with all the new pics. There are even more new pics in the slideshow on the sidebar, so eat it up, people!

Father's Day was cool! It was awesome getting to experience the whole thing from the Daddy perspective -- even my friend John called to wish me a Happy Father's Day! Thanks John! Carrie was so great, as usual. We had a special breakfast and dinner and also managed a fishing trip! I didn't catch anything, but it was great being on the water...

Grandpa Paul and Grandma Sylvia are visiting right now, and we're soooooo happy to see them. We're the second stop on their whirlwind tour, don't know how they find the energy! It's tough for Max, being the younger grandkid; he has fewer tricks than his cousin! Guess he has to rely on being naturally cute and hope for the best!

We're considering giving up the blog and signing off with a link to photobucket and youtube, (with regular updates, of course!) so if you're out there and following updates -- LET US KNOW, and we'll keep it going. We enjoy doing it, but want to know that there are actual living, breathing people who read this!!

Hope you're all well out there, and enjoyed your own Fathers' Days!

David, Carrie and Max

Pictures

This and That

This week, Mr. Max made some new friends, had some quality time with his grandma Donna, and visited the nice lady that delivered him into this world!

On Tuesday, Mr. Max went with mommy and daddy to visit Dr. Kirsch for mommy's five week postpartum checkup. Mommy got a clean bill of health, her blood pressure is back to normal (YAY!!!) and she's now 'allowed' to do the things she'd previously been restricted from doing. Naturally, mommy celebrated by doing the dishes, cleaning the floor, doing laundry, scrubbing the counters....etc. etc. (She said to me last night, "Gee...my tummy muscles feel a little sore." Ya think?) Mommy has been going a little stir crazy, and daddy is quite happy to let her test the boundaries of her newfound freedom...perhaps just not all at once, though.

Also on Tuesday, Max finally met all of his friends in the Arts office at IUSB! Mostly he slept for Marvin, though he did manage to toot in poor Marvin's hand while he was holding Max....Our bad, we forgot to tell Max that it isn't polite to toot in the Deans hand!

Then Blanqui, Michelle, Tamea and David Barton all got to meet him. We have nice pictures from all of this, but we conveniently forgot our camera at grandma's house the next day!

Not to be deterred, grandma Donna posted a few for us that will be the first several pictures you'll see in the slideshow to the right. Kudos to grandma Donna for her ingenuity!

Wednesday saw a flurry of errands, including a run to Babie's 'r' Us, before stopping in to visit Grandma Donna, where the Beems all took naps. (Mommy and daddy in the other room, Max on Grandma Donna. Go figure.) Carrie had the foresight to bring the bouncer for Max while we had supper at grandma's. If Max starts to get a little fussy during mealtimes, we can usually bounce him in that for a bit to hold off a feeding while mommy gets fed.

Max is growing! We measured him at over 22 inches long. He's starting to, er..."max out" some of his 0-3 month clothes in length, but not width....

Looking forward to visits from Grandpa Paul, Grandma Sylvia, Nanna and Gramps and Aunt Becky!

Some Exclusive Baby Paparazzi Pics!

One Month Birthday and Five Year Anniversary!

Can you believe that Maxwell is already one month old?? Where does the time go? He is definitely bigger, and he seems so much less fragile to us than he did on the day that we brought him home. It is amazing how one's perspective changes...by comparison, cousin Sophia seems ready for college to us!

Yesterday was also our five year wedding anniversary! That also seems quite reliant on perspective; if we think about how much our lives have changed since we've been together, five years seems too little, but if we think about how fast time has passed since we've known each other, well, five years seems too long. From that perspective, it seems like the wedding just happened!

I wonder what the next five years will bring?

We celebrated with a steak dinner on the grill, Carrie made a wonderful orzo salad and steamed broccoli! (Which some people say makes your baby tooty, but our baby is already tooty so we weren't too worried!) We also made a trip to Ritters, where Carrie got her favorite: Lemon Italian Ice layered with vanilla custard!

After supper, little Max gave us the most wonderful present ever and slept long stretches through the night!

We are just having the best time with our little dude and every now and then have to pinch ourselves to prove that we aren't dreaming. Carrie let me sleep some this morning, and I returned the favor in the afternoon. Max just sacked out on his daddy for about an hour, every now and then burrowing his little head and body a little closer, making sighs and "coos"...

Too bad he isn't more cute.

I added a video, but for some reason my sidebar appears to be scrambling old videos. If you can't wait for me to figure out what the problem is, visit chubbycello on youtube and you'll find the latest there.

More photos are a-comin'.

Has This Happened to You?

Apparently, we're keeping our kid up.

It is 2am, and you hear your baby fussing in the baby monitor. You roll over thinking, "maybe he'll hold out another hour until his next scheduled feeding."

But no, your kid is up and he/she wants you to be also. So, being the loving, conscientious parent you are, you go to your kid.

Then your baby feeds for five minutes, and he has an attack of narcolepsy. You unswaddle and rouse him a bit, to same effect.

You change his diapers. Kid sleeps through it...his butt didn't, of course...but kid does.

He feeds for 10 minutes, perhaps in his sleep, and he's out again.

At some point, you're like..."Hey, kid! Are we keepin' you up??"

Then you try to put him back in his crib, and guess what? Baby is hungry again. Eyes are WIDE OPEN, his arms are doing the cute little Superman thing (one arm extended and ending in a fist, the other pulled in close to his body, gathering super-baby powers...I guess).

Ahhhhh. We love our baby Max.

Wait, I think mommy has found success!

Good night, people...I hope!

David

Crazy Milk

Our kid's been drinkin' the "Crazy Milk"! (Or somethin'!)

Last night started off right on schedule, or what we hoped would become our newly minted 'optimum' schedule, but quickly degenerated into "crazy-time" for Mad Max...

Carrie and I started yesterday with the breast...er, sorry...BEST of intentions. We are trying to get him to bed between 8:30 and 9 so that we can stockpile our sleep a little earlier, rather than end up exhausted and snoring away half the day on the other side of the "night" and into the morning hours.

We think the problem started because yesterday ended up being quite busy. We ran poor little Max all over the place: We dropped by IUSB to get Max all set up on my insurance and used the opportunity to make first introductions to Ilene Sheffer, Nancy Michelle and Alfred Guillaume.

Naturally, he was a hit. He gets that from his mother.

Nancy was great, as always, and led us by the hand through everything, and we have a nice picture of the two of them (her and Max, of course!) together that we'll post today. We also got some great news from Standard at the same time we were in Nancy's office, so that was cool.

After that, we tried to get by the Arts office to introduce him to all the "cougars" that work there, but Max let us know that he needed a short detour by my office for a diaper change and a feeding...

Trouble!

The diaper change started normally, except we forgot one critical part of the routine: His peepee towel was not in its proper place on his free-range--peepee. The result was the fountain of youth spray all over baby, and baby's daddy's left hand. (Well, it was the only thing available, folks.)

Well, wouldn't you know it, we forgot to pack an extra outfit. Thus, our little Max found himself wearing his Snuggle-a-sauras shorts and no T-shirt until we got home, hours later. On the other hand, he was sporting a pretty cool Jedi-style wrap around his upper body with a soft receiving blanket that we happened to have on had on hand.

So, when we didn't get to the Arts office before 5, we did what anyone would do as a solid plan B: we went to Bonnie Doons! I got the Peppermint Flake, and Carrie got the Mint Chip and then we went down to the Mishawaka River Walk and marveled once again at what a remarkable town Mishawaka is.

They've done such a nice job with that area!

Well, by the time we got home we had one tuckered little kid. Perhaps too tuckered. We thought that he was going to be right on schedule for an 8-8:30 feeding, which would get us to bed before 10, but Max had other plans...

He went absolutely NUTS! Crying, whining, grunting, squirming, flailing, peeing, pooping...you get the idea. He was like that for close to three hours, with little breaks of sleep. You know, just enough to give you false confidence that we could get the kid in bed...only to have the whole routine repeat itself like some horrible Andrew Lloyd Weber tune...

Well, a kid like that made us think to leave his first bath for the next day and all we could do was feed him, rock him and try to put him to bed.

Press repeat...press repeat...press repeat...

This morning we're all a little worse for the wear, but the morale of the story is: BEWARE THE CRAZY MILK....

David

Our Growing Boy

Little Max started his life in the outside world at 7 pounds, 3 ounces. He came home at 6 pounds 7 ounces (the usual 10 percent weight loss). Three days later, he was 6 pounds 8 ounces and the very next day he hit 6 pounds 13 ounces.

A week later, he gained a full pound, reaching 7 pounds 14 ounces. Believe it or not, two days later he weighed in at 8 pounds 7 ounces. It's been over a week since he was last weighed, but he's just about out grown his newborn clothes; too bad he hasn't had much use for the short sleeved outfits, as the weather has been so cool! Thanks to Nanny and Gramps for picking up a few extra long sleeved sleep 'n' plays since we've really used them alot!! We continue to fold over the sleeves of the newborn outfits to keep him from scratching his face and irritating his poor infant acne...but his index finger regularly finds its way out so he has a "pointer" to direct mommy and daddy to what he needs. It's so cute!

Today we will give him his first full bath since it has been several days since he finally lost his cord stump! (We'll document as we can...)

His neck is getting even stronger. He has been able to lift his head up since birth, but now he can lift it, turn it, and put it back down! He can also roll from side to back and to his other side! He continues to scooch around in his sleep, so he's a little rover and we never know where he's going to turn up in the crib...he keeps us hopping!

He is proving to be a very noisy sleeper. There are times that we could swear by the noises that he is awake and entertaining himself in his crib only to find that he's sleeping after all. We just never know unless we check whether he is asleep or awake.

It is a gorgeous day so we are hoping to get a walk in at the Mishawaka River Walk. It'll be his first trip to the water...

Carrie

We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This...

This is the first blog post by mommy as dictated to daddy, as it is 1:15 in the morning and Max is eating like there is no tomorrow...wait, it is tomorrow...or is it yesterday?

What day is it? What week is it? What month is it? Alas, they all seem to run together, in a state of baby-filled bliss.

Our little Max amazes us more and more every day. From his ever changing features to his seemingly constant growth to his evolving personality, he loves looking outside and his daddy has discovered that bouncing in his "Woodland Friends" bouncer is a great way to appease him when we are trying to eat dinner...or any other meal.

We look forward to the day when Max learns to roll over on his own since he clearly loves his tummy time and we suspect that he will love sleeping on his tummy! He already refuses to stay on his back; he spends most of his sleeping hours on one side or the other.

Diaper change time continues to be a challenge as he is either incredibly unhappy with the whole idea or else is trying to win an Olympic Medal for being the wiggliest baby in the universe! His little legs seem to be bent just when you need them to be straight and inexplicabley get kicked out straight just when you need them to be bent. It is really quite uncanny. Usually we try to tag team him with one of us using the brightly colored rattling caterpillar named, "Mr. Katz" as a distraction. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

(Yes, Paul, the caterpillar is named in your honor, but it was named by David, not be me, so direct complaints in that direction!)

Diaper rash continues to be an issue, but seems to be improving. We should buy stock in the Desitin company!

Max is looking forward to having his first full bath in the next day or two since his cord finally fell off last weekend. It will be fun to see his reaction since having his hair washed is one of his favorite activities!

Well, that's it for now! Max seems to be sacking out again and we need to get some shut eye when we can. Thanks for checking in!

Carrie