(A quick technical note: Google seems to be experiencing a hiccup, or a ploy, involving blog video and Firefox. If you use Firefox and have trouble seeing the video below, try using Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer. -ed.)Ezra turns two in three weeks, and in five weeks (maybe fewer) we'll be the parents of TWO children! All of this is kind of hard to comprehend. But ready or not, here we come... into a new reality. I (mom) have no idea what Ezra understands, but I do worry what it will be like for him having to share our attention. I'm getting ready for him to ask us when we're going to take the baby back to the hospital... or catch him trying to dump the baby in the garbage can, or something. Judging from his disdain for the baby doll Eliot (Spitzer) that we got for him, I'm not really anticipating a huge surge of fraternal
love, at least not at first. Any ideas on how to smooth the way?
Sorry for the utter neglect of this blog. We've been busy with our non-blogging life. Visits from both sets of grandparents, and then our friends Lea, Jack and baby Zoe from Alaska... wet, watery runs through the fountain at Millennium Park to escape the 90-degree heat... and then a week-long trip to Martha's Vineyard for a big Gross-Hughes family powwow. One lesson learned - if you bring lots of tiny trucks on the airplane when you're very pregnant and flying
with a toddler, tie strings on them or something so you don't have to keep bending over, squashing the one in utero and defying physics, to pick them up when the kid drops them.
We were sad Gabe couldn't make the trip with us. He stayed home to keep toiling away and hoarding vacation days for a paternity leave. But we had a really fun time - Ezra had his first AND second ice cream cones, went to the beach ("go in the water! look for whales!"), hunted bugs and discovered my uncle Thru's collection of toy trucks that are half a century old but somehow still work - unlike the plastic pieces of you know what that break the instant you get them nowadays.
And sorry to break it to Gabe, but the thing Ezra seems to have missed most in Chicago while we were away is his older friend Oscar's house. Until last week, three-and-a-half-year-old Oscar lived downstairs in our building. He has a train set that's out of this world, plus a truck set that rivals Thru's. At random intervals pretty much every day we were away, Ezra would cry out plaintively, "Oscar's house! Oscar's house! Play with trains there! Play with trucks!" Gabe would call on the phone and I'd say, "Ezra, want to talk to Daddy?" and the first thing out of his mouth was, "Oscar's house!" By the end of the trip he was saying, "Back in Chicago? Oscar's house?" Meanwhile Oscar and his parents have moved to another place in the neighborhood. He doesn't really get this when we explain it to him. He just says, "Oscar's house? Maybe later?" We're planning to expand Ezra's own train set in time for the baby's arrival, but I fear it still won't have the allure of O.H.
Well, it's getting late and this is long enough! I'll have to post a Picasa album because there's way too many good pictures than can fit in a blog post.
Love,
Ash, Gabe, Ez and Moose
ancy, when she did an ultrasound a week before Ezra was born and pronounced that he weighed 6 lbs 8 oz. A week later, when he arrived on the scene, he was 5 lbs 4 oz. This time when we saw her, she said, "Oops. I sure got that one wrong."
