Maya & Anna - week four

[click the picture above for more pictures]

Things remained lovely through week 4. Every once in a while exhaustion creeps in (I've fallen asleep a few times now while putting Maya to sleep, and I can't quite imagine how Molly's doing it while taking the brunt of the nonsleeping), but the girls are getting into a rhythm & life is good.

Maya is still mostly very pro-Anna, which is good to see. We haven't heard any requests to send Anna back, or any of the like. It's important to make the distinction between big kid & baby though... I was talking to Maya tonight about possibly wearing a diaper to sleep (she hasn't for a few months), selling it as a convenience since she's woken up in a wet bed several nights this week & what an annoyance that is for her... she responded she didn't want to be twins. I could figure what she was thinking but pressed her for it just to be clear.. twins with Anna she meant. Loud & clear - diapers are for babies, not for this big girl. [Bummer for her parents, who wake up nightly at 2am to do a load of big girl laundry, in addition to mom's 1am & 4am & ... more wakeups for the baby]. Molly also reports that Maya is still beaming proud of Anna every time Anna's around for a school pick-up or dropoff, lots of showing off of her baby sister.

Nevertheless, a few times each evening, there'll be a sisterly hug that's suspiciously hard, a bother Anna while she's sleeping, or some other sign that the big sister just doesn't quite have all the vocabulary to process the ambivalence of sharing the roost with an interloper. A cute interloper, but an interloper nonetheless.

Anna at ten and twenty days

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Lots of milestones to report belatedly. Anna continuing to leave her birth weight in the dust & having qualified for a bottle, allowed us to involve Maya in the fun.

We got visits out here from Anna's Mimi & Nuni, Mimi able to get 5 days off in the midst of perennially busy fall term to come out & leave us well fed & stocked with good leftovers, as well as to shower love on Maya & Anna & spring us for a few terrific lunch dates during the 2nd of my two weeks off. For his part, Nuni was able to time the trip perfectly with a rare race of German Folkboats in the San Francisco Bay, where he was able to get himself assigned as crew & have a week of sailing to complement meeting Anna & treating Maya to a tour of the boat he raced with.

In the meantime, life for Maya continues apace - her dentist gave us the kibosh on pacifiers, so we had a weeklong goodbye, complete with a sticker on the calendar each day to count it down like a perverse advent calendar counting down toward a pacifier hannukah. On the 7th day, we put the pacifiers out in the front porch, & they disappeared overnight, replaced with a brand new toy -- another toy appeared each day for the week. This was overdone, as Maya was fairly on-board after day two, but a deal's a deal, & we had said it was the dentist who'd be doing the presents (actually they did come up with the idea --- get rid of the pacifier & call them & they'll send a box of presents, but we figured instead to get her things we'd actually want around the house).

We're back to a 1 working person family, after a lovely stint at 0 for two weeks. Molly does most of the waking up, I do most of the going to work; life'll get more complex of course when we're both up & out in the a.m., but for now, things remain easy & blissful out here. As before, click the photo above for more pictures.