Back from Brussels

I returned home on Friday after nearly 4 days away from Carlito and was greeted only by a quixotic gaze. I wanted to yell: DIDN'T YOU MISS ME? DID YOU EVEN NOTICE I WAS GONE?? I missed him a lot. Luckily Carlos' mom came to help out and took super good care of him. I was in London for a day and took the train to Brussels for a couple of days. While I might have hoped to actually get a good night sleep that didn't happen. I seem to be incapable of a full nights rest. Brussels is pretty nice - but, as you can see, I didn't get to walk around much in the daylight as it gets dark by 5pm.

I think he changed a lot in 4 days though I'm not exactly sure how. He just looked more like a little boy. He sits up on his own - though the big caveat to that is that he'll often start leaning and before he realizes it he has done a face plant. He still hates tummy time and he still insists on standing all the time. Here is his sitting up routine - sitting fine and then falling over - still with a smile on his face!!

He is still eating like a champ. He likes everything - he has tried peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, apples, pears and bananas. He likes is hot or cold, mixed with cereal or alone, from a spoon or my finger. Seriously this kid likes to eat. He's gotten pretty good, but this was his first time communing with the peas...

AND he got his two bottom teeth so he'll be eating steak in no time! His teeth are really cute and it means that Carlos can't call him gummy face any longer.

As for the house we are focusing on getting the basement ready to rent. Getting it to 100% done from 95% done seems nearly impossible as new things keep popping up. Here is Carlos putting the dryer vent in.

At Last

Sorry for the hiatus there....Baby and I got sick and then we had visitor after visitor culminating in 8 family members descending on 1st st for the inauguration. It was a lot of fun - at least for us. Unfortunately for them, they had to sleep on air mattresses scattered around the house including in the basement. My brother took one look at the place and decided he need to do another round of mopping before he let his 1 year old daughter loose on the floor. And my cousin refused to shower here scared by the fact that we had no shower curtains! Other than that it was great. We had the official Housewarming Ball on Monday - tickets were very hard to come by and attire was better than Jason Wu's dress - and the next morning we dragged ourselves out at 7am to brave the crowds.

In the last few weeks baby Carlito has been eating a lot of real food. He seems to like the savory - carrots & peas more than the sweet apples and pears. The good news is that he is taking to eating just fine (not a big surprise given his chunkiness). The bad news is that I changed his first real food poo and it wasn't fun.

Tomorrow I leave for my first overnight work trip away from him! I'm going to miss him so much and Carlos is so nervous about taking care of him. I think the baby is the only one who won't mind it.

Here is a recent interview with the baby:

Carlito's New Years

Happy 2009! Baby boy Vazquez had a rocking New Years. That is to say - as delinquent parents we made Carlito come out for New Years. He passed out for awhile as things got boring and then awoke promptly at 11:58pm to celebrate 2009. He was especially psyched to watch the ball drop on a 50" TV and to see Anderson Cooper in HD. Here's a shot of him enjoying some champagne.


He's been eating cereal more and finds it really funny. He starts giggling when I give it to him until he gets the hiccups and no more mush fits in. He still doesn't quite know how to get it off the spoon and not all over his face, but he is definitely better at it than a week ago.

This week we had our first visitors to house II and responses varied between 'wow - good job' and 'wow -it's still a construction zone.' It's true - it looks much better but it definitely still is a construction zone. We have been unpacking kitchen boxes - in my fruitless search for my coffee maker and corkscrew (NO COFFEE OR WINE!!) and realized that the stove top that Carlos got doesn't actually work with any of our pots. awesome. I tried to use my tea kettle and got a "Failed" sign. I can't even make tea. It turns out that the induction stove top only works with certain types of metal and we don't happen to have those types of metal pots....

Tomorrow is another big inspection. We had to put up railings but don't have the right material so we have 2x4s all over the staircases. It looks very post-modern.

Sometimes I look at "old" baby pictures to see how much he has changed. Here is a "then" (week 1) and "now" (month 5)

Two New Loves

The baby's first Christmas!! I was pretty excited about it and read him the Night Before Christmas a million times. But he just tried to tear the pages and slept through most of the morning gift exchange. oh well. He did however like the Christmas tree lights, grabbing the ornaments and hanging out with his uncles. Uncles Seth and Charlie take credit for teaching him how to roll over by dangling things just out of reach. Uncle Seth ceases to be amazed by how helpless Carlito is. It reminds me of my favorite questions from the Ralles': "Does he know any tricks yet?"

He did get to try cereal for the first time which was pretty amusing; He just moved his mouth up and down moving the mush around, but definitely not swallowing much. Actually he looked much tastier than the rice cereal mush so, tempted to eat him, we put him on a platter with some big serving spoons. Check it out:


It turns out that Carlito has two new loves - and neither of them include me. Number one is his thumb. Thumb - where were you when I needed you a couple of months ago?! and number two is his feet. It turns out that his feet ARE attached to him - this is major revelation for him. He is very taken by his feet; he plays with them and tries to eat them but his chub often gets in the way.

Our Type of Eventful Week

It might be a sad indication of our lives that I think this was an eventful week. It started with a Sunday trip to Pittsburgh for a newel post and a monday morning trip to small claims court by Carlos with us (Carlito and I) waiting to be called to provide the necessary I-have-a-baby-so-I-can't-be-that-bad support. Luckily we just got updates by text and didn't have to make an appearance. After sitting and waiting for hours they entered mediation which is required prior to going to court in DC. I have to give Carlos credit for being a naturally skilled negotiator - as opposed to me: the easy push-over. Somehow he got the mediator on his side, managed to look like the good guy and get yet another continuance from the judge. I'm not sure that even Carlito's smile would have been that effective.

We scrambled yet again to get ready for the final electrical inspection. How many inspections can you possibly have??! And that's not the last. Another one on monday! I am opening a bottle of wine and will drink the whole thing myself when and if we make it to that last inspection. That is if I can find our wine glasses... Everything is still in boxes. I found some plates but have been using plastic utensils as I can't find the silverware. The thing that is killing me is the coffee maker. Where are you coffee maker???!!! We're not really unpacking until the last inspection so I've been making daily runs to Starbucks - usually in a slightly disguised pajama outfit.

On to baby news: In our preparation for the inspection Carlito spit up on the electrician and the framing guy!! The electrician was holding "Junior" (as he calls him) as I wrote down all the things we needed to finish before Thursday. Clearly Carlito wasn't happy about the prospect of all that work either so he let the electrician know by a good spit up load. The really bad one was on the framer. Carlos was holding Carlito and leaned over the stairwell to peer at the progress below and...well I guess Carlito wasn't happy about the progress. He spit up and had 15 ft of gravity to intensify the experience. Poor framer - as if we haven't put him through enough!

Carlito has been kindof grumpy this week and his schedule seems to be changing. He used to like 3 short naps, but this week he has had one or two longer naps (like 1 or 2 hours). He did have a fever this weekend and still has a cough. I thought that those symptoms combined with his unstoppable drooling might mean that he was getting teeth, but I guess it's normal to get them around 7 months.

Check out this picture of Carlos when he was little - I guess I can't deny that Carlito looks like his father...Also - I couldn't resist kissing his bald spot. I also kissed his rear, but am saving you and him from that picture.

Back in DC

Carlito is back on his non-schedule schedule after returning from Hawaii which is 5 hours behind. It was actually much easier heading east than west in terms of baby jetlag, but harder on us...though it may have just been that we didn't want to leave Hawaii and return to our dust bowl house. I got sick, then Carlos got sick, then Carlito got a temperature, now I have a sore throat...

I told myself that I was going to start sleep training after we got back from Thanksgiving, but I haven't been very consistent - which I think means automatic failure. Of course I want him to come out and be social with mom and dad when we want to go out and go to sleep at a reasonable hour when we aren't going out. What a selfish mother. He likes to socialize too - look at him hanging out with his buddies during happy hour this week:


I did however try letting him cry when he wakes up in the night. He cried for 10 minutes and went back to sleep! I can't believe that I've been putting myself through this every night - jumping up to get him when all he needed was 10 minutes to put himself back to sleep. We'll see about tonight....

On the house front we had the bank appraiser come out in our seemingly never-ending quest to refinance the house. It was classic us as we had everyone -including my mom and the painters on their hands and knees cleaning in the minutes leading up to his arrival. Unfortunately he came a few minutes early and caught us on all fours. It was slightly embarrassing. It looks good, but we're holding our breath until the closing is set, come and gone.

We are also heading to small claims court tomorrow to face the stink eye of our neighbor. Should be a fun face off. I wonder if Baby Carlito will smile at her....or maybe he'll spit up on her....:)

Baby on Board

Baby Carlito logged almost 10,000 miles since our last entry!! We flew to Lihue, Hawaii to spend Thanksgiving with Carlos' family in Hanalei Bay. Unfortunately after making a 14 hour journey it turns out that he doesn't like the ocean much! At least not yet. Hanalei Bay is infested with dedicated surfers and one woman who was 55 and still surfing everyday said that she took her baby boogie boarding at 6 months! what?! yep, she put those little arm floaties on and rode waves. Carlito isn't even eating cereal yet, let alone riding waves!

We had fun, but the plane ride was L-O-N-G and short of beating me up before getting on the plane there wasn't much more the airline could do to make our trip more uncomfortable. Besides charging for every service beyond the pressurized cabin air they felt that it was a good idea to seat Carlos and I in middle seats apart from each other even though we had a "lap child." On the 4.5 hours back from Phoenix to DCA I sat in a crappy middle seat between two big guys with the baby on my lap the whole time. He did amazingly well - in fact I think he did better than I did...

Since being back we went for the 4 month doctor appt and shots and the big news is that he is slipping in the rankings! He is now only in the 97th percentile for weight and height at 18lbs 6 oz and 27 inches.